In a little alcove by the washer and dryer downstairs, in what my dad called his “hobby corner” (even though I mostly tried to be sensitive with him I did sometimes make fun of him for calling it that), was where my dad kept his suits of armour. They were, of course, just reproductions, but impressive, even though you could tell just from a glance that they weren’t authentic. When I was five or six he spent most of his evenings in front of the TV, on the couch, looping together a chain-mail chest protector that was one of his most treasured pieces, even though he rarely wore it out. That was due to a tear in the back, near the left shoulder, where some of the loops had started to come undone. He’d made it too heavy on that side, was how he explained it to me, and one of these days he’d find the time to fix it, but he hadn’t yet. I think it was more work than he was ready for; probably when he thought back to how long it took him to assemble in the first place, the task seemed humongous and deflating. There was a lot that was like that around the house, a lot that went unnoticed or undone.
There was a tension working between our walls that I didn’t quite understand.
Mom was always on his case about how he screwed up around the house, folding towels and sheets improperly, leaving marks on dishes and huge dust bunnies in rooms he was supposed to have swept. Neglecting the lawn, like he was doing now.
I guess that would be annoying if he were my husband, but I’d probably be like him, too. Confused and absent-minded. Feeling a little like a failure in my own house. Sometimes I wondered what accident had caused my mom and dad to get together, to stick it out, to have me, to build a home and last in it. I was grateful, I guess, for that. To be alive. But I didn’t get it. Their tastes were the complete opposites of each other, and they both seemed to want different things from life and from a partner. For instance, Mom’s dad died before I was born, but from the photos of him — even as an old man — I could see that he was tall and well-built, and that there was an edge or hardness to him. Something in his eyes that seemed veiled or angry. He had fought in the war and he was silent and authoritative and worked as a foreman at the Ford plant. None of which seemed like my dad, who was slim, just barely taller than my mom, quiet, nerdy, and soft. Who wore that ponytail that I knew my mom hated. (She sometimes walked up behind him wearing a mad grin and her hands miming scissors.)
The home that they had built was on shaky ground. They fought a lot and never seemed to resolve anything. I was frustrated with both of them. Mom always seemed like the more aggressive one, but she also seemed to have more of a point. I sometimes hated to admit it. Dad must have thought so, too, because he rarely fought back, though I wanted him to. He could say snippy little things back to Mom, or under his breath, but mostly he just took it. Tried to make it up to her even before she was finished. Made promises we all knew he wouldn’t keep, but which sometimes placated Mom, anyway. Later I’d find him lying almost comatose on the couch in the basement, or staring up at the ceiling in their bedroom. It was never pretty. It was like all of the untruth in the world that he had created was running through him, incapacitating him like it was the flu.
It was worse, though, when I found him doing something that he deemed productive — like polishing one of his replica swords, pretending like nothing was wrong. Maybe going to the vacuum and giving it a half-hearted spin around the house. I tried to keep out of his way when he was like that. I didn’t want to see it. It felt wrong. Maybe it was exactly what Mom was complaining about (the vacuuming — never unpolished swords), but it still didn’t sit right. It always felt like he was somewhere weird — like he was standing on the ceiling where everything was perfect and spotless and I was on the ground where the floor needed to be swept and the trash taken out.
He did sometimes get angry. But then he’d get on his motorcycle and roar out of the house. It was like it was the only way he knew how to focus his rage. Which was maybe weird, because his motorcycle was so rooted in the present time, in contrast to all of his other methods of distraction. Sometimes, uncharitably, I wondered if when he was doing turns on his Honda he referred to it as his “steed” in his head.
I wish I was more kind to him. Even just in my head.
Anyway, it made me worried when he went riding like that because I knew it was dangerous enough riding a motorcycle when you feel okay, and I didn’t like the thought of him taking unnecessary risks just because he’d fucked up a load of Mom’s shirts. Or dropped a bottle of fish sauce on the kitchen floor. Or whatever. I wished the consequences weren’t as high as they were and I thought maybe there was a way in which they didn’t have to be, but I couldn’t see my way to there. No one could.
When Dad left during a fight, Mom would become wild with rage, practically nuclear, knocking things off tables, yelling at me to get back to my room or to shut the fuck up and leave her alone, even if I wasn’t saying anything. Even if I was making a point of keeping quiet. Even if I was clearly already in my room, trying to concentrate on anything else. But she always calmed down before he got back. Usually she even managed to clean things up a little before then.
I think Mom wanted Dad to fight back, too. It doesn’t really excuse her anger. But it sometimes felt to me like she was trying to raise him out of his grave. I don’t think she was happy with things as they were, like she thought there was a way she could get them both back on even footing, but that the only way to do that was to stand him up in front of her and shake him until he broke out of it. Then, I don’t know, I guess they’d trade blows in an empty room, like they were kung fu masters in The Matrix, go back and forth until they were blocking each other blow for blow and finally an even match. But that’s not how it worked.
That’s not how it worked, but it was the only thing she seemed to know how to do.
I don’t know what Dad was thinking. I know he wanted to make things better for all of us. I know he tried hard to do that. I know he was frustrated. But I think the pattern, the back and forth, the rise and fall, made more of a kind of sense to him. Like one day he would figure it out and change it all, but until then he could sit in it, almost comfortable. Or maybe not — maybe the pattern itself was a kind of comfort, to feel mixed up, maybe even oppressed, by the one that you loved.
Sometimes I thought Mom was lonely. And that her anger came from loneliness. I understood that because I was lonely, too. Sometimes I thought that Llor was that feeling — of loneliness. But she was other things, as well, like the feeling you have when you’ve messed up, when you get angry and say something you don’t mean, but you’ve gone too far to take it back. And there’s no way to retrace your steps, or to pretend that it didn’t happen. You’re just broken, and in your heart you wish things were different and that you didn’t have to be evil, but you can’t see the way to change. So you’re forced to work evil over and over, over and over, until something breaks, and you either find redemption or lose your power.
Llor was going to lose her power. Evie was going to find redemption. I was going to be like Evie, or I hoped so.
I didn’t know what was going to happen to my parents.
* * *
It was more than just my relationship with my mom and dad that made me worry that like Evie I would need to be redeemed.
One day I stayed late after school, talking with my teacher about an English assignment that I had mysteriously bombed on. Like, really, really bombed. I’d put a lot of effort into it, and I think Ms. Browe could see that, but I hadn’t really done much to satisfy the requirements of the assignment. I could see that in retrospect, looking at the evaluation criteria alongside the finished product. I didn’t use the right number of paragraphs. I quoted from secondary sources, but not in the way that they wanted. I used primary sources, I don’t know why I did that, because that’s not what Ms. Browe had asked for. It wasn’t what we were supposed to be focusing on and I didn’t get any credit for it. My critical-analysis-to-explanatory-or-positioning-sentence ratio was way off. It wasn’t a bad essay — Ms. Browe said that she’d enjoyed reading it, and after I went to see her and told her how confused I was she bumped the mark up to a seventy, which I still wasn’t totally happy with, but which was better than nothing. Anyway, it wasn’t the essay that had me worried about the state of my soul, but something that happened afterward.
As I was walking down the hallway to leave school, two guys came rushing past me, yelling back and forth for reasons I couldn’t quite make out. The guy in front — Ross, from my grade — was laughing. It looked like he had something that belonged to the guy who was following behind. A hat or something equally stupid. I don’t know who the other guy was, I’d seen him before and thought he might have been in my grade but I’d never learned his name. Maybe “Sean.” Maybe “Steve.” It all happened so fast. They brushed past me, close enough that they almost knocked me over. I’d had my headphones on and I was listening to my CD player and I was in my own little world, and so I was still spinning when I saw Ross make a turn to the front doors and put his arm right through the little pane of glass right by the metal panel you’re supposed to push. There was a huge crashing sound and he staggered back from the door with the skin hanging off his arm like a tattered flag. His friend had somehow managed to stop himself before the puddle of dark red blood that was now forming at Ross’s feet.
“Holy shit,” Ross said, over and over, looking down at himself.
There was a hush and a silence that was deeper than any I’d ever experienced before.
Someone ran to get a teacher or a janitor or to maybe call an ambulance.
The glass had cut Ross deep. I thought I could see the white of bone peeking out from underneath the pile of mangled flesh hanging off of him. I am pretty sure it was bone because it was the whitest thing I’d ever seen. The whiteness of something normally wrapped in flesh.
It seemed strange to me that things could change so quickly.
Ross had his other hand cupped around his wrist, even though most of the damage was to his forearm, as if that could have stopped or slowed the flow of blood. But it was the only part of his arm down from the elbow that was coherent enough to touch. The only part that was still fully recognizable as an arm, even though the underlying structure held. Eventually a teacher came and took Ross with her somewhere — to the office, I guess, where there was a nurse’s station but probably no nurse on duty. To wrap him up with something more substantial while they waited for the ambulance to arrive.
I was struck dumb by the slow puddle of blood spreading out on the floor.
Part of me felt sick to my stomach and wished I’d never seen the accident. Felt rude to stare. The other part wished I could have looked for longer. The vision was so strange and fleeting. That same part of me was happy even to have seen and taken pleasure from it.
That’s what messed me up.
Ross was an asshole. There’s no other way to put it. I had been in a couple classes with him and he had never been kind to me. Not even a little bit. The best he treated me was with ambivalence. I was an easy target, especially last year when my acne was really bad.
So, in one way, even though it’s terrible to wish anyone harm, if what I had seen had to happen to anyone I was glad that it had happened to him.
But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t just it.
That same part of me that was not only happy to see his injury … it wanted to see him injured. Because it wasn’t just pleasure from the injury in the abstract — which I can’t deny, that was it, too, to see harm, period — it was pleasure seeing the pain and shock and violence done to him.
I stood there in the front hallway, for a long time, by myself, until a janitor came and started mopping up the blood. Then I snapped myself out of it and put my headphones back on and adjusted the straps of my backpack and walked home.
On the walk home I kept thinking about the four or five seconds immediately after the accident, Ross looking down at his dripping arm, glass and blood puddling on the floor. I guess I wasn’t really thinking about it. It just kept replaying in my head, over and over. His look of shock. The ripped flesh. I imagined I could see glass sticking out of his arm, and probably there had been some, but I’m not sure that was something I had time to notice.
Halfway home I realized that I was savouring the tableau. And that started to scare me. I thought I was a kind of monster. That only a monster could want to see another human being hurt in that way. I didn’t even know then if he was going to be okay. All I knew was that he’d wrecked his arm and lost a lot of blood.
A lot of blood.
Really wrecked his arm.
That was more of a confirmation that something was wrecked in me than throwing a basket against a wall or fighting with my mom or dad. That was more than just feeling aloof from my friends.
I was pretty sure I was a monster.
That night I dreamed I was in school and that I had murdered someone. I couldn’t remember doing it. I only knew that I had, and I knew that at any minute my crime was going to be discovered. There was a dead body somewhere and I tried frantically to remember where, so I could conceal my crime, but with a feeling of resignation, like I knew it didn’t matter what I did, because I was going to be found out. I don’t remember how I’d killed them. Maybe strangulation. Maybe a knife. Whatever it was, it was a deeply personal manner of violence. In other words it wasn’t an accident, even though it might have happened accidentally. Or in an unguarded moment, I guess. When I woke up the next morning — a Saturday — it was only as I was eating breakfast that it gradually dawned on me that I was innocent.
A kind of innocent.
Then I sat out on the back porch with an old fantasy novel that my dad had given me when I was twelve. It was about eight hundred pages long and I’d tried to get through it multiple times, but something always stopped me before I even hit page one hundred. The characters seemed flat. Even at twelve I could see that. I wanted to read about their triumphs, I wanted to get involved in the world, but there was a perfection, a sheen to the male and female protagonists that made me feel almost sick to my stomach. You were meant to put yourself in their place and become them, I think. And live without flaws. An unearned perfection. It wasn’t what I read fantasy for. I wanted to make my dad happy and read it one day and talk to him about it. But I couldn’t. No matter how many times I tried.
Eventually I gave up on that and called Jess, under the pretext of telling her what had happened to Ross. I told her about how they’d raced past me and almost knocked me over and how everything had seemed normal — shitty, but normal — and then a second later Ross had put his arm through the window and time had stopped. I told her about seeing the bone and the blood and how I didn’t know if he was okay or not but I didn’t tell her about the pleasure that I felt when I saw him get hurt.
Then I took a bunch of deep breaths and crossed my eyes and stared into the sun.
“I bet you liked it,” she said, when I had finished.
My heart beat faster, up into my throat.
“What?” I said.
“You didn’t like it?”
“No,” I said. Hesitant. “Why would I?”
“Don’t you remember? In civics? Last year?”
I did remember but I didn’t want to say it. Of course I remembered.
“When he said that — you know. About your face?”
“Oh, right,” I said, trying to keep her from going any further. “Yeah, that sucked.”
It was one of the first times anyone had ever said anything. I mean, directly. I mean, the way that he’d said it. In a mean way.
“So it must have felt good. To see him like that,” she said.
I thought again about him standing there holding his wrist in shock. The pool of blood left after him. I thought about my dream and the murder I’d committed in it.
“I guess,” I said. My eyes unfocused. Taking in the heat of the backyard. Staring into the sky or the sun.
I made an excuse and got off the phone.
* * *
Thanks to the medication I’ve been prescribed, my acne is getting slightly better now. But it’s strange because it still seems like it’s there, almost like it’s sinking, like it’s happening farther from the surface rather than disappearing altogether. Like it’s being held closer to the bone rather than being totally expelled. My skin is smoother than it was before but there are red and pink continents lurking underneath. I’m told even these will go away with time.
That seems impossible to me. But even this improvement seemed impossible before I went on the medication.
I still get some on the surface, more than most people, but it’s nothing like it was before. It was over the summer before last year when I really started to break out, when I went from one or two occasional pimples to glaciers, moving in slow unison across my skin. They were so sensitive that it hurt to touch my face. There were so many that it sometimes hurt to smile, all of them backed up and cracking together in the creak of my muscles. But the worst part was, of course, the way it changed the way others looked at me. That hurt, too, but in a different way. I hated to turn the corner at school, to show my face in the cafeteria, to reintroduce myself to Jess and Tiff at the lunch table in September. To see my new self in their eyes.
But even though over the summer I had received unsolicited advice or sympathy more than a few times, most people made a point of not acknowledging it, or at least referring to it in only the most oblique ways. They could tell I didn’t want them to address it. I wished no one would. It wasn’t like I hadn’t noticed it myself. I’d tried every kind of anti-pimple cream on the market. I washed my face twice as hard, three times as often, as anyone else I knew. I tried to cut out fried foods and sugar, for long stretches of time. But it didn’t matter. Nothing did.
Once when I was waiting in line at a convenience store a middle-aged stranger told me to immerse my face in nettle tea, to do this nightly. That they would go away thereafter. He said this, clear-faced, standing with his wife, who looked I think as horrified as I felt. He said it had worked for him. That it had been as bad as mine was when he was my age. I thanked him without getting a good look, nodding with my eyes on the ground, then after a few seconds I put back the chocolate bar or bag of chips or magazine or toilet paper or whatever it was that I was going to buy, pretending like I had changed my mind.
And ran home, as soon as I left the store. About as fast as I ever did.
That was about the only thing, the nettle tea, that I hadn’t tried.
I doubted sincerely that it would work.
I didn’t know you could see a doctor for acne until after the summer when it flared up. Civics class, maybe the first week. Mrs. Baker put us into groups. I was with Ross. Jess was in my group, too. A couple others I don’t remember. I didn’t know what to say. He asked me why I didn’t go get it checked out, like it was the most obvious question in the world. I didn’t know you could. I just looked at him, I think, or tried not to look at him, or tried to look at him, because after all we were all supposed to do the assignment together, as a group.
But it was hard because no one, up to that point, had ever called me disgusting.
Eventually I managed to detach myself and I asked for permission to go to the bathroom. There I didn’t want to look in the mirror, because I knew I’d see what I’d gotten used to not seeing, even though I could never forget it was there. The blight and pain.
Every morning when I woke up I thought to myself, “This can’t last until I’m twenty-five, can it?” But I knew that it would. That my whole life would be like that, oozing and painful, totally out of my control. I still feel that way, even though my acne’s getting treated now. It’s hard sometimes to realize that anything has changed. In the bathroom I felt angry, angry and embarrassed that no one had told me I could get help for it, that I had to find out from Ross.
Probably it was from about that point that I started hating him. But even so I’m not sure that means he deserved what happened to him, or that I should feel as good as I did when he got hurt. No one should get hurt. Why should I want anyone to get hurt?
What was wrong with me?
Why did I like it?
* * *
After my phone call with Jess I went back upstairs and got back in bed. I’d gotten sort of weird on the phone and said a quick goodbye. It was two or three o’clock in the afternoon. I closed the curtains and buried my head in the pillows. I thought it would be easier not to live than to be the kind of person I imagined that I was. A bad person. A violent person. A broken person. Someone who’d never figure anything out.
I wanted to die and I couldn’t see any other future for myself. I mean, if I didn’t die. I thought I would be fucked up and mean for the rest of my life, angry and unloved. Creaking into bitter and lonely adulthood. I imagined that my bones were corrupted, that they were filled with acid and poison, and that if I lay still long enough they would crack and consume my flesh. I imagined lying in a field, on the ground outside, lying down until the poison did its work and I was a shrivelled and blackened nothing.
And it felt sort of good to imagine all of that, to imagine a way out, I mean, even if that way out was about the worst one I could think of. I thought I shouldn’t even imagine it, or that I should try not to, but it felt good and it was about the only thing I knew how to do.