The son lay with his cell phone between his pillow and his head, the way the mother had made him swear he would. She’d bought the phone in case of relapse—but relapse into what? The son could not remember. He had to wear the phone on him at all times. What if he could not find her? The mother could not stop thinking. Sometimes in her thoughts the mother would explode as balls of heat and crud and light.
The son’s phone was purple by most opinions, though sometimes it might appear blood red or translucent.
The son had set up a mirror at the foot of the bed that he could look in and see himself, as well as what might be in the room around him. So much of most rooms were never watched. Many people had used this room before the son, the son knew. Sometimes he felt they were still there. Some mornings he would wake up and the mirror would have turned slightly, rotated to one side, which the son attributed to his sleep-kicking, learned from his mother, held inside her. Some mornings the mirror would be turned around entirely, so that the son woke to the mirror’s flat brown back. Sometimes he’d find the mirror in other rooms inside the house.
There were sometimes other copies of the mirror.
The son also tended to talk in his sleep quite a bit, though neither he nor any other had heard anything he’d said while sleeping, ever. The sleeping son knew when to shut up. Most nights the son could not sleep at all.
The son concentrated on one body part and then another, approaching nowhere. The phone rang against the son’s face. The son rummaged, found the ringing, and took it open. Inside the phone there someone spoke—someone not the mother. The son said something back. His voice felt chalky, caught inside him. Inside the house the house stood still. The someone took what the son had said and said it back just slightly different, sounding almost like the son himself.
The room was dripping. A string of stinking lights. The phone against his head, a squeeze of wires, warm as fire among day.
The someone went on saying the same thing over and over, warbled and rushing, in a loop. Within the loop, by slips in repetition, the voice took the tone of something else: a buzzing, beeping. It raised abrasions on the son’s chest, the patchy pale skin puffing up with shapes like words. In the room downstairs, just below the son, the pucker in the wall grew slightly bigger. In the mirror the son saw nothing. The silver surface had a little curdle.
The son could not get the phone off of his face.
The windows sweating. The skin along the son’s wrists and forearms firming, fitted as with gloves. His cells, in sound, becoming ordered, torn up—the house inside the son so calm.
The son’s arms felt deboned—fuzzy, how they’d felt in those sick months—months during which each night the man had appeared above his bed. The son had not mentioned the man to anyone, not his mother, even during all those weeks she’d never left him, never let go of his hand—not even when the man appeared right there beside her. The man had been there on the first day the son started feeling sick. He’d walked right up to the son in the cafeteria. A hairy man, with covered head. He’d come to the table and stood above the son and reached and touched the son across his face—his lips—his jaw. The man had slid his thumb into the son’s mouth, just like that. He’d spoken through the finger, in a voice. The man with the yellow shirt neck pulled so loose. The man who’d stood and stood and stood, looking at the son until the son closed his eyes and he felt the fat crooked thumb expanding and when he’d looked again he wasn’t there—just the whole long school room full of children eating lunches, silent—the adults against the school walls watching with their heads cocked—no one said anything about it, even after the man was gone. The next day the son could not sit up.
The son was certain this person on the phone now was not the same man as that man then, but he knew they knew each other. He didn’t know why he knew that. He sensed something at the window but he refused to look. The man inside the cell phone had been talking all this time.