At Home in the Dark Read online

  Driving the sleepy children. The little girl in the back, the little boy in the front seat. No child-seat shit. No time to take the child-seats from her car and into the pickup. Lucas could sit in the front seat like an adult. Esther was asleep anyway, let her lie down on the back seat. Lucas was saying Daddy where are we going?—worried and confused and didn’t know if he liked it. Until Daddy put out his hand to thump the little shoulder to explain.

  Anywhere you go with Daddy, you are meant to go.

  Daddy will take care of you and your sister. Already, Daddy is doing this.

  Driving faster. The woman’s voice in his head haranguing. Bitch nagging. Hail striking the windshield pounding against his head.

  Lucas is whimpering. Daddy! Daddy . . .

  The skid. The truck goes into a skid on black ice. Slams into the guard rail and the guard rail crumples like plastic. And now the truck has overturned, the children’s screams abruptly cease.

  He is crawling out of the truck. All his strength is required. Yelling at the children—Come on! C’mon! Follow Daddy!

  Yelling for them but can’t get back into the fucking truck. Tries, but can’t get back. Tugs at the door handle. Thumps the (cracked) window with a fist. A part of him knows it is hopeless.

  It’s over. No hope. You are fucked.

  • • •

  She’d been the one who’d wanted them. Sober saying, Kids will change us, Earle. Wait and see. Give us something to live for not just us.

  She’d begged. She’d pleaded. Licking him up and down with her cool wet tongue he would recall as hot, scalding.

  Kids will be like heaven to us, Earle. People like us, we won’t get into heaven, they will shut the door on us. But we can peek inside and watch them, see? That’s the kids.

  He’d never forgiven her for saying such things.

  Like the two of them were not enough. The kind of feeling he had for her which was unique in his life, like a river rushing through a desert making the dead land come alive again—that meant nothing to her.

  Calling after him. Stumbling in the dark. Half-drunk, or high on pills. Laid down and couldn’t lift her head. Ten, twelve hours. Through the morning and into the afternoon and into early evening. How she’d self-medicate, when a migraine came piercing her skull.

  Saying, I can’t do it any more, Earle. The way you look at me.

  There’s no oxygen for me to breathe. It’s just—I tried—but . . .

  The way he’d followed her around when he was supposed to be at work. Checked on her—if her car was parked in the driveway. Called her a dozen times a day on her cell phone. Calling their mutual friends. Guy she’d worked for, he’d suspected her of fucking before they were married and, more he thought about it, possibly after as well.

  Sick, he’d felt. Fever in the blood. Infection like hepatitis-C he couldn’t shake.

  Yet incredulous hearing the woman’s words it was sounding like she’d prepared. Or someone had prepared for her. Asking her, what’re you saying? Because it had to be a joke. Hadn’t he just made a down payment on a Dodge SUV for her? Wanting to see her smile again. Smile at him. And the kids, taking pride in Daddy.

  Driving them to school. Picking them up from school. Silver-green vehicle, classy. He’d gotten a bargain on it, pre-used, good as new, joked with the dealer he’d be making payments on it until he was fucking retired or dead.

  Important to make the kids proud. Give them something to be proud of in their Daddy.

  And then, the woman undermining him. Betraying him. Injunction—that was what pushed him over the edge.

  Forbidden to approach within one hundred yards of the house and forbidden to approach within one hundred yards of the children and forbidden to approach within one hundred yards of the woman who has requested the restraining order.

  Wife, she was. Former wife it would be written.

  Daddy’s secret, he’d never wanted kids. Your kids judge you. Your kid are too close-up. Then, they outlive you. They cry because of you, or they disappoint you. In the boy’s face a look like shrinking, drawing back from his dad, Christ!—all Earle could do to keep from grabbing the little bastard and shaking him so hard his brains rattled like marbles.

  But no. No. He didn’t mean it, Christ.

  How he’d leaned down and shouted into the kid’s (scared-white) face. Opening his mouth wide, feeling his face turn ugly, shouting. Don’t you try to get away from me, you little shit.

  • • •

  Hadn’t meant it. Any of it. Therapists sympathized. Everyone loses his temper. Parents lose their tempers. Nobody is perfect. A perfect dad does not exist.

  Crucial to forgive yourself, the Catholic chaplain said. Between love and hate we may choose hate out of fear of choosing love.

  Saying to him, how we don’t want forgiveness for our sins when it is our sins we love.

  He’d come close to crying, being told such a thing. For it was true, it’s his sins he loves, nothing else has meaning to him.

  No one but her. But fuck her.

  Driving fast on Strouts Mill Road, and then faster. Eyes steady in their sockets. He was gripping the wheel correctly. He was gripping the wheel as you would grip it if it was alive and trying to get away from you.

  He prayed with his eyes open. He had nothing to hide. His eyes took in all things. He did not spare himself. He’d loved his kids more than his own life but he’d hated their mother more than he’d loved them or himself and that was the truth he had to live with.

  He was fearful of Jesus. The love in Jesus. The love of Jesus was a pool that could overflow and drown a man.

  He could understand meanness. He could see why people were cruel to one another. But forgiveness and love he could not understand.

  He was sorry for the crimes he had committed. He believed that Jesus would forgive him but Jesus would not forgive the crimes his (ex)wife had perpetrated against him and the children.

  She’d told him he would have to leave. They would all be happier if he left she said. He’d said, Happy! We are not on this God-damned earth to be happy.

  He had not struck her. He had never struck her. Not head-on, not deliberately. He had struck the air beside her head. He had struck the wall, maimed the wall beside her head but he had never struck her.

  Better for us all if we end it now. You, and me, and them. Now.

  Shrinking from him, recoiling from the fist swung in the air beside her head the woman had lost her balance, stumbled and fell—how was that his fault? Not his fault. Everyone knew she was a drunk. Junkie. Gained weight since the first pregnancy, thick ankles, aching veins, none of it his fault. Not the good-looking girl he’d fallen in love with and married. She had tricked him. The children were not hers to take from him. He was praying with his eyes open. He prayed to them, Lucas and Esther who art in heaven. Innocent children are in heaven looking down upon the rest of us. Our earth is actually Hell—you look down upon it from heaven. In a dream this came to him.

  Holy Saturday is the day of liberation. Whipping his back raw with the clumsy rod he has fashioned. Blood streaming, itching, like ants streaming in open wounds.

  Thank you, Jesus!—forgive me.

  • • •

  Another time it happens, skidding tires on black ice, the crash.

  Another time, there is no way to stop it.

  The truck is flung over like a children’s toy, tires spinning. Rolling downhill into the creek, and into the litter sunk into the creek, and the children’s screams and his own screams mixed together in the stink of oil, gasoline, urine.

  Another time, the screams and then the silence.

  Well—the children never stopped loving their Daddy, he is sure of that. They have never blamed him. They are in Heaven now, and would not cast the first stone. No child would cast the first stone. The woman, she has cast the first stone. She has cast many stones. She will go to Hell. They will meet in Hell. They will clutch hands in Hell. They will throw their wounded bodies together in Hell. Th
eir eyes will burn dry, sightless, in Hell. Their souls will shrivel like leaves in a pitiless sun and these leaves blown together across a broken pavement.

  At the crossing-over time such thoughts come to him. Between daytime and night.

  For at this time he is not incarcerated in a filthy cell but free to make his way along Strouts Mill Road. He is not driving the pickup. He is on his belly in the wet grass. He has eluded his captors, he is not what they think. The cunning of the snake which has been the female cunning but has now become his.

  Strength will come to him, the promise is he will soon stand upright as a man is meant to stand.

  Sure he’d heard the term lifer. Hadn’t known exactly what it meant until it was applied to him in the way he wouldn’t have known what cancer meant exactly until it was applied to him.

  Even then it wasn’t an exact knowledge. The charge had not been homicide but manslaughter: vehicular manslaughter. Driving while impaired. Violation of a court-ordered injunction. Breaking-and-entering a residence. The bastards had tried to charge him with abduction of under-age children as well but that charge had been dropped.

  To these he’d pleaded guilty. Not in his heart but in the courtroom before the judge gazing down upon him in scarcely concealed repugnance as a man might gaze down upon a creature subhuman though standing upright.

  Then, his mouth twisted. Furious grin baring ape-teeth, he’d liked to sink into the fucker’s neck.

  And so he was given the sentence twenty-five years to life. Which meant you could not say I will be out of here in ___ years. You could not say This will end for me, I will be released in ___ years. None of this you could say with certainty. For even dignity is denied you in the orange jump-suit with shackled legs.

  He has not seen the young lawyer in a long time. Last time, their exchange had been brief and their consultation had ended abruptly.

  Raising his voice, threatening the lawyer provided him by the court.

  Fuck the lawyer, what the fuck did he need that asshole for. He did not need him or any lawyer.

  Not probation this time but incarceration. One of the other inmates explained to him that when he applied for parole, which would not be for many years, the ex-wife could exert her influence if she wished for she would always be consulted as the ex-wife and the mother of the child-victims. If there had been threats to her, these would be duly recorded in the computer and never deleted.

  He foresaw: always the woman would poison them against her.

  In this way, always they would be married.

  • • •

  Problem is, remorse.

  Heartily sorry for my sins. Now and at the hour of my death Amen.

  He did not lack remorse. But he did not exude a remorseful air.

  And so, in the courtroom this was perceived. The judge had perceived. Even the asshole lawyer had perceived. If it was remorse it was remorse for not having taken the woman instead of the children and murdering the woman when he’d had the chance. The two of them together in the truck hurtling along Strouts Mill Road.

  In her bed upstairs. In her bed that had been his bed. His bed from which she’d exiled him. In this way dooming him and the children and he had not even known it at the time.

  Waking in this squalid place and not knowing if the woman was still alive, and if he was still alive. Or both of them dead already.

  You are forgiven for the harm you have done yourself. But for the harm you have done the others, you will never be forgiven. Know that, forever you are of the damned.

  In the words of Christ this was explained to him. Bloodied face and body of Christ and eyes resembling his own.

  In Hell they are together. Grinding against each other’s bodies once so beautiful and now no longer but in their memories, in Hell their beautiful smooth young bodies are restored to them. As in a dream in which the most intense yearning is suffused with cold sick horror they are tearing at each other with their teeth, their bodies writhe together like the bodies of coiled snakes. Never will they come to the end of their desire for each other, never will they be freed of each other.

  In this, there is a feeling beyond happiness. In this, there is the flagellant’s penance.

  By now the flagellant has whipped his back raw. He is panting, exhausted.

  Bliss of Holy Saturday. And the promise to him, it will never not be Holy Saturday.

  The Things I’d Do

  Ed Park

  1.

  When I moved to the city, half a lifetime ago, I was excited, scared, confused—everything anyone is when they get here from somewhere else. Still, nothing else would do. What did I know, out in the sticks? My parents hated that I had to move so far away from them to become a cartoonist—at least that was their line. Every day I would sit in their basement, read the sleepy local paper, drive down the same dumb streets, thinking: Get me out of here. I made it into the police blotter, my claim to fame, though no one fingered me as the artist sketching wieners on dirty windshields in the drugstore parking lot.

  My dreams were about escape. I was trapped on a submarine, deep under the Atlantic. I was in a library, afterhours. I was in a library in a submarine in the belly of a whale.

  I craved the city, or my idea of the city, which turned out to be the same thing: the dense mobs and vertical insanities, skins and tongues unlike my own, mountains of riches and canyons of depravity, the only place where you might be fêted and fetid in the course of a few hours. You can always count on a doodler for a fancy prose style.

  2.

  The day after I dreamt of a boulder sliding over the mouth of a cave, I called my buddy, Sal, who had moved to the city the winter before. We had known each other basically from birth.

  “It’s great out here, man,” Sal drawled. “Gray skies, broken windows, the works.”

  “I was thinking of coming out.”

  “You totally should.”

  “Can I stay with you?”

  “I’d like nothing more.” Sal paused. “But the situation has its complexities. Seven living, breathing complexities.”

  Sal meant roommates. “I thought you lived in a one bedroom.”

  “Here’s an idea. We kind of look alike, right?”

  “So it has been said.”

  “All we need to do is not be in the same part of the apartment at the same time.”

  “How would that work?”

  “Improvisation.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I owe you one.”

  “That’s the other thing. I’m a little short lately.”

  “Aren’t we the same height?”

  “I mean that you’d have to cover my rent. Playwrights don’t tend to rake it in until they’re in the game for a while.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “I’ve been workshopping it with a bunch of longshoremen. That’s not a euphemism.” Sal had a gig at the maritime museum. “Are we good on the rental front?”

  What did I have to lose, except money I didn’t have? So I made a move. I stuffed a small suitcase, borrowed my father’s flask. There was a shoebox behind the safe, where the bulk of the cash was actually kept. The emergency fund, my mother called it. Wasn’t this an emergency, a crisis of the soul? I put the big bills in the lining of my hat, and stuck smaller denominations at random between the pages of the book I was bringing, Hypnos Wakens, a manual of mind control. I took some other things as well.

  When the house was quiet, I slipped out and caught a bus to the city. I tossed and turned. Was there a patron saint of cartoonists? Would he or she accept my prayer? The fumes were getting to me. There in the darkness I pledged myself to Nyx, goddess of night, mother of Nemesis, Hypnos, and a slew of other deities. I scrawled a manifesto on a flyleaf.

  Twelve hours, a million stops, and I was there.

  3.

  Chez Sal was industrial space divided by bedsheets tacked to walls, with narrow “corridors” and a huge water stain on the ceiling like a map of ancient China. Light crept in at weird angle
s, in different colors. It was the middle of summer, and we were on the top floor, but the place stayed weirdly cool. A breeze off the water? We were so far west we could probably jump from the roof into the river if we had to. There was an arcade game, a ripoff of Centipede called Crawlspace. There was a parrot named Crackerjack that belonged to nobody. Maybe it held the lease on the place.

  Living in a state of indifference, hostility, and occasional outright anarchy were the seven complexities: Rodney (French but from Montana), Epp (East Texas), Cora (Florida), Yash (from Germany, of Turkish ancestry), Vince (California via Canada), and Lol the Intolerable (Hong Kong, Lima, Pest). It was like a little United Nations in that room. Sal made seven. I was the phantom eighth, the one who wasn’t officially there. Put another way: I was Sal.

  Sal and I didn’t look as similar as we did when we were kids, but close enough. I trimmed my hair in the same style, distorted my gait in imitation. Fortunately, Sal had a girlfriend, and spent weeks at a stretch with her. We didn’t see much of Sal.

  No one really talked to me, except Crackerjack.

  “The things I’d do to that ass,” it said, sounding like Groucho Marx.

  It was funny, coming from a parrot. “What things? Whose ass?”

  “The things I’d do to that ass.”

  Later I wondered what kind of trauma the bird had been through. Crackerjack slept with its eyes open, claws gripping the fire escape. Now and then it would belt out “Copacabana.” Yash thought it was the devil incarnate and suggested we poison its food, except there was no food. Nobody fed it, as far as I could tell.

  4.

  Cora was an aspiring photojournalist who toiled in pornography. Vince was a stand-up comedian, who sat down during the day to book cruises at a boutique travel agency. Lol made video art, spent his nights waiting tables at a diner called The Aeneid. Yash, who’d published “unusual” mystery stories in her native Germany, worked the register at a high-end bakery. Epp, mime and aspiring juggler, was a willing subject for psychological studies, while Rodney was a choreographer who bounced at Bulky’s, a strip club for those who liked a little excess poundage.