We are Wormwood Page 4

  I imagined the demon, luring the cats of the neighborhood into the woods, one by one. It was she who tore their eyes out and asked, “Do you know a girl named Lily?” until she met the one who mewed a soft, “Yes.” My black Pluto.

  At night Charlie chased the demon through the streets as she taunted him with his teddy bear, laughing, always a step ahead. She lured him onto my lawn and ran circles around him in the grass, the teddy bear held over her head. Charlie ran after her with the soles of his bare feet blackened from walking across burning coals until his legs gave out. He collapsed in the grass outside, panting up froth, clutching at the sky. He cried for Little B. Always Little B.

  I threw off my blankets and ran toward the door to go save him, but the demon slammed her hands against my window. The force reverberated through my house. I fell backwards into bed, clutching at the sheets.

  She pressed her mouth against the window. She wore the funereal veil, and bit down on the top of the teddy bear’s head.

  I dreamt, sometimes, that she opened the latch and came into my room, pale skin wrecking the light, wormwood about to collapse. But instead of screaming, I opened my arms to welcome her into my bed. And instead of destroying me with fang teeth, she curled up against me, shivering, trying to warm herself underneath the sheets.

  Pluto jumped into my arms. The window rattled and I held tight to her. Charlie continued to foam and writhe in the grass, but I couldn’t hear him over the hiss in my ears. A swelling noise, louder than the blood in my throat, louder and louder.

  She whispered. Let me in, baby girl. Let me

  In.

  Chapter Seven

  CHARLIE PROGRESSED FROM walking across hot coals to self-flagellation. While muttering incantations, he beat himself with a cat-o-nine-tails crafted in shop class of bits of leather and shards of glass. The kids at school called him “suicide boy” while giving him wristbands to hide his cuts. To Charlie, they were mute, because his brain was frying from sleep without rest. The teachers referred him to a counselor; he fell asleep on the counselor’s desk when asked if he had a “safe home environment.” Her recommendation to the teachers was to move him to a desk in the back and let him sleep. Hidden in the back row, he scratched at his wrists with a broken piece of glass. As his appetite waned, he lay in my lap, underneath the bleachers, whispering of mythology.

  “After Persephone ate the pomegranate, she could never go home again,” Charlie said. “Well, except to visit her mother.”

  “Why would she want to do that?” I asked, only half-listening.

  Thinking: I want to build a time machine. I want to climb inside and go back before they set your teddy bear on fire. I’ll bring it to you unsinged so you can sleep again.

  “The god Zeus was in love with a beautiful woman, named Leda, so he turned into a swan and raped her.”

  He pressed his chin into my knee and coughed. I kept expecting him to choke out glass. It was only spring, but we were already well on our way to becoming insane that year. I still hoarded matchsticks and firecrackers. Charlie kept hitting himself in an attempt to transcend the pain. Phaedra started tending to carnivorous plants. As for Momma? Well, she was the same as she’d always been. The last time I’d seen her, she told me held a sword underneath her tongue. When The Nightcatcher came around again all she’d have to do was open her mouth and cut off The Nightcatcher’s head. With it, she’d grow a tree, and from that tree, feed the entire world. Nobody would ever go hungry again.

  “Once, a god of poison came out of the hush place, and poisoned an entire town,” Charlie said.

  “That isn’t in your mythology books,” I whispered.

  He coughed again. There it was, a chunk of glass from his cat-o-nine tails, spit and saliva in my palm.

  Phaedra told me to leave him. That I was addicted to the pain that broken people caused. She said all fourteen-year-olds were, but I don’t think she paid much attention. She smuggled Venus flytraps in her backpack and whispered Bukowski poetry to them. She whispered to me with her nose in the mouth of Venus’ prickly hairs.

  “And besides,” she said, “he kills cats.”

  “No he doesn’t,” I said.

  She didn’t hear me as she started a whispering frenzy under her breath again, rubbing the Venus’s hairs with the tip of her finger:

  she got up and lit a cigarette, she was trembling all

  over. She paced up and down, wild and crazy. She had

  a small body. Her arms were thin, very thin and when

  she screamed and started beating me I held her

  wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred,

  centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and

  sick. All the things I had learned had been wasted.

  there was no creature living as foul as I

  and all my poems were

  false.(1)

  (1) “I’m in Love” by Charles Bukowski

  Summer came and school let out. Charlie took me to the river outside of town. His scars flushed red in the heat. His thin cotton t-shirt and swim shorts couldn’t hide the whip burns and scars webbing his skin.

  We stood on the bridge and looked down into the water. Even in summer’s sunshine, the water below lay dark and churning.

  “I used to come here alone,” he said. “I held my hands over the water until I didn’t know where I began and the water ended.”

  When I stared down at the murk, I knew Charlie didn’t take me here to swim. I crossed my arms over my chest and felt my Momma’s two sizes too big bikini underneath my clothes.

  “I used to think it didn’t have a bottom,” he said, and then nodded off in the middle of the sentence, his head dipping against his chin.

  Nobody would think of swimming in that murky blackness. Nobody except someone who’d been there before.

  Sleep deprivation could cause dizziness, hallucinations, aching, paranoia, stunted growth, self-flagellation with a cat-o-nine tails, and sleep chasing a demon across your girlfriend’s yard. Maybe it could cause you to kiss her by the side of the river, like you’ll never kiss her again, pushing grit and sand into her mouth with your tongue. Maybe you’d stand up, knees shaking, point to the highest tree and say, “Think I can jump from all the way up there?”

  I watched Charlie climb the tree above the river until it arched like an arthritic spine, until he couldn’t climb any higher without breaking branches. I should have told him to stop, but I guess I wanted to know if he’d actually do it. If he’d really jump.

  I sat down on the edge of the bridge where the concrete scraped against the bottom of my legs.

  “Think I can touch the bottom?” he asked.

  He could’ve been a pale animal snarled in the branches. Maybe another year of sleepwalking and he’d forget human speech and speak only in hisses. He grasped a thick branch in one hand and leaned out over the water.

  He held his hand out, light swelling between his fingers.

  She snuck up behind me and whispered in my ear.

  “Ke-ke-ke-ke-ke.”

  “Charlie!” I called out.

  He jumped from the tree. For a moment he seemed to hang suspended in midair. He outstretched his hands like wings and his fingers scraped the underside of the sun. His wounds were no longer wounds, but sparks of light, gold and glittering. The light suffused him in magic that replaced his pale, flabby skin and insomniac eyes with a heavenly glow, a falling star, chariot fire, a single shining image of a god before he plunged downwards.

  He disappeared into the turbid water.

  I rushed to the edge of the bridge, calling his name though I knew he couldn’t hear me.

  Though I knew he wouldn’t resurface.

  He wanted to jump. He’d wanted to jump since his parents set fire to Little B, long before he made his first cat-o-nine tails or took his first walk across burning coals. Every moment led up to this; his moment to wear the sun like a crown.

  I couldn’t feel my fingers, my throat. My head throbbed
. I opened my mouth but I couldn’t breathe.

  The demon behind me held the folds of her white dress out like wings. She tossed her head back, thick black hair, her mouth open in a rictus.

  “Ke-ke-ke-ke.”

  I stood before her, vulnerable and shivering.

  “You can still jump in and save him,” she said.

  But I saw the dark waters below. Heavy, so heavy, the thick blackness enough to crush me. The river whispered, “Hush, hush, suffocating is so easy.” I held my hand over the water. I couldn’t tell where my hand ended and the river began.

  The demon lifted up the bottom of her dress, her pale thighs so white I thought her bones must be on the outside. She revealed her jutting hips, her small black panties, her skinny, scratched ribcage.

  She discarded her dress on the bridge and jumped into the river.

  Sometimes I imagine the two of them, Charlie and the demon, sinking downward through miles and miles of water. His hair in her hands like a leash, his head between her palms, his scars kissed by blind fish.

  They never found his body.

  Chapter Eight

  AT SCHOOL THE BOYS called me black widow and baby killer. Terrance Fleur said I pushed Charlie into the river because there was no loyalty among weirdoes. He knew I kept a stash of matches in my coat pocket; I lit them and threw them at the teacher’s back when I got bored. According to Terrance, with his buckteeth and dirty, ginger-colored face, this meant I was capable of anything.

  Some nameless jock pushed me against the lockers and lifted up my skirt. He asked me with his fat, bruised mouth dripping tobacco spit, my hair pulled taut, if I liked to fuck corpses.

  “Do you want to find out?” I asked, my voice soft, cheek against the cool metal lockers.

  He let me go, but that didn’t keep him from tongue-lashing me in the hallways, leaning over to whisper, “Suck my dick?” in math class.

  My English professor made me stay late after class. I assumed to lecture me about not reading the Great Gatsby, or to send me to the principal because I’d burned a hole through his favorite leather jacket. Instead, he suggested counseling.

  “I’m over it,” I said.

  “We’re not talking about Charlie.”

  “Then what are we talking about?”

  “I’m talking about you.”

  “I try to avoid that.”

  “Exactly what I’m talking about. This kind of unacceptable behavior,” he said, “your antisocial tendencies.”

  If only I had a goddamn cigarette. I’d blow smoke into his mouth until his lungs burst.

  “I don’t want you coming back to class until your behavior improves.”

  His face was like a horse’s face, lean and panicked, with eyes too big for his head. I took a step towards him. He reached for the phone on his desk, ready to call for help. A teacher like him never had an adolescent daughter.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  I blew him a kiss and left.

  I knew that, instead of helping me, he wanted to bind me in chains, take me to the bridge of the river, and command the river to give Charlie back and take me in his place.

  Charlie’s parents didn’t invite me to the funeral. Behavioral scientists, so inconsiderate. The morning of his funeral service, I sat on the church steps in a velvet-black dress stolen from my mother. In my arms I held a bouquet of tiny blue flowers I picked in the woods for Charlie.

  I leaned my head against the thick church walls and listened to the preacher speak. I couldn’t make out any his words behind the door, but they were probably something like:

  “She could have saved him, but she didn’t. She’ll burn in hell for this. There’s no special place for daughters of schizophrenics, God didn’t account for that one. But don’t you worry, my little lambs, we can throw her in with the fornicators.”

  The organ music started to play and the pallbearers, holding an empty casket, dragged themselves out of the double doors of the church. The rest of the mourners followed behind, including Charlie’s frazzle-haired parents who pretended not to see me. Charlie’s six-year-old cousin picked up a rock and threw it at me. It narrowly missed my head.

  “Go away!” he said, and threw another rock.

  It struck me in the stomach. I dropped the flowers and ran.

  I searched for her in the woods. Around me insects buzzed and fireflies lit up in the damp gray morning. I tore my hands trying to climb into the skins of trees. I expected to find her in the hollow of a trunk, like an unborn fetus. Or hiding with a child that resembled me, while crystallized bugs squirmed in her lap.

  “Where are you?” I called out.

  I beat my fists against the trees. I sat down in the dirt in Momma’s good velvet, tore at the grass, and tore at my skin. The trees were unimpressed and too old to shudder at my tantrum. The noise of the woods noise continued, clicking and clacking.

  Laughing.

  I often stayed at Phaedra’s house after Charlie’s death. She let me throw knives at her old boy-band posters; I got to be a pretty good shot. I could drink her mother’s vodka as long as I filled the empty space with water afterwards.

  On her bed she clutched a book between her knees called “Beautiful Killers: Carnivorous Plants of the World.” She cradled a Venus Flytrap in her arms.

  Phaedra was somewhat of a legend in town. She ran from the cops by crossing a muddy creek, in Valentino heels, branches in her hair, and weed in her purse. She looked the epitome of a gothic Americana princess; her eyes like Oklahoma Dust Bowls, her cheeks Great Depression sharp. And she ran faster than any boy, even in Valentino heels and a torn dress.

  I always knew her as the girl who grew up faster than the rest of us. She sat with boys in the back of her mother’s Volkswagen in her muddy heels, naked from the waist up, smoking a cigarette that turned her teeth the color of spit. She made the boys dress up in her skirts and lipstick before she went down on them. She whispered grim and romantically cliché things in between their legs. Things like, “Each heartbeat brings us closer to death,” or “This is the last chance we’ll ever have to be truly alive.”

  From a young age, Phaedra’s mother, like mine, had done a disappearing act. Whereas my mother was insane and refused to believe it, Phaedra’s mother couldn't get enough of being crazy. For the majority of her adult life, she lounged in doctor’s waiting rooms and therapists’ couches. For years she lay upside down in bed, high on codeine and clonazepam, watching foreign films.

  “Dear, bring me a headache pill,” Phaedra said, mocking her mother. “Bring me that ‘Singing in the Rain’ DVD. Bring me a hit of acid.”

  Phaedra’s mom used to be a fashion designer in Paris. Or maybe she once had a dream that she was a fashion designer in Paris, I couldn’t quite remember. Phaedra insisted she remembered being backstage during Fashion Week as a child, while her mother fitted sixteen-year-old anemic girls with dresses made from razor blades.

  “The sicker the better, that’s what she used to say,” said Phaedra. “Real beauty is a reptile. My momma used to nurse me while they snorted cocaine. The designers and the hairstylists and the models, they all did blow together. Momma turned into a monster on cocaine. Her hair stood up on end. Put the models in dresses two sizes too small and bloodied their backs.”

  Phaedra snorted.

  “And now she thinks she’s so righteous. She’s grown up. Matured, right? Whatever. She just can’t afford blow anymore. She caught me once in my room with some Russian exchange student. She wanted me to go to therapy, just because I made him wear a dress before we fucked. You know, the shiny silver one? He looked good in it. Anyways, can you believe her? Go to therapy? Like Hell!”

  “They always want you to go to therapy,” I said.

  Shortly after the Russian exchange student ordeal, Phaedra met her true love: a Venus flytrap with moist little mouths, planted in a red glazed pot and purchased for a dollar at a farmer’s market. She shut the boys out of her room. She stopped smoking in the backse
at of cars and reciting gothic faux philosophy to devote more time to tending to the carnivorous plants she kept in her room. They were monstrous plants with unhinged jaws that waited for insects to land on their velvet lips. They lined her desk and windowsill. She slept with them in her bed.

  “Why the plants” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “they’re pretty.”

  Of course, I thought, the gothic Americana princess would think of the moist, carnal, wet innards of a carnivorous plant as pretty.

  Soon the common Venus Flytrap wasn’t good enough for her. She wanted the big leafy demons of plants that ate deer and jaguar; the roped, sweet smelling bellflowers that housed stomachfulls of half-digested children. She dreamed of owning the legendary Madagascar Man-Eating Tree, a roped veiny myth of a tree with serpents for limbs that tore off people’s heads and digested them whole. One of these days I would find her being eaten alive.

  But seeing that would be better than going to school to have children throw rocks at me, or having my teachers tell me that Schizophrenia was like the modern Greek cannibal’s curse. In five years time, they said, I’d be eating my mother like Tantalus ate his son. I’d butcher her, cook her in a stew, and then try to feed her to Zeus.

  That myth, of course, I’d learned about from Charlie and his books.

  I dreamed of him sometimes, shivering wet on the edge of my bed. His chubby pale skin turned blue. Not dead, but trapped in Hades with a silent, lipless mouth. A sleepwalker on the ground and a sleepwalker underneath the water.

  I dreamed of the pomegranate he fed to me, and sometimes when I awoke in the middle of the night, I thought he came back from the river and slipped it underneath my sheets.

  “Ke-ke-ke-ke-ke.”

  “Phaedra, something’s after me.”

  She turned the glossy page of Beautiful Killers.

  “There’s this girl,” I said, and then paused, “well, I’ve never told anyone this. I don’t really know where to begin.”

  I scratched at my knees, but I didn’t feel it.