Black Rabbit and Other Stories Page 7

  They wrapped his feet with iodine-soaked bandages and suppressed his screams. He watched the sky outside, indigo through the tinted glass, the mist from the cataract whirling like a cyclone. Be cool, they said. Be cool. He tried to hide but where? Every corner held a camera. A camera over his bed had been filming him from the beginning. He could hear it swivelling as someone with a remote made adjustments.

  We believe what we want to believe, that’s what Francois believed. The concrete of reality had nothing to do with it. If you drove your head hard enough into the wall, it would come out the other side or be crushed. In the lavatory a man with a very long neck was shaving his creamed face. He scraped a razor along his bristles and shook it over the sink. Scrape, scrape. Blood flowed from his nostrils in two red stripes that carved into the foam covering his upper lip. Francois frowned and entered a stall. He squatted but maintained separation between his cheeks and the toilet seat. When he finished, he noted the long green banana jutting out of the bowl.

  The shaving man now toweled his head. He stood there waiting for something to happen or something to end. Francois wanted to tell him to fuck off but reconsidered. He padded back to his room. On his bed he spread the down-filled comforter, smoothing out the corners. As night fell, Francois felt bizarre. He glanced out the window and noted the moon, almost full but not quite. He could see the face of it, cheerful, serene, and smiled.

  At dawn dark blotches whirled around the room. Francois blinked his eyes hard but the phenomenon continued. It frightened him. He huddled under the comforter. He heard water rushing, and voices, We’re lost! We’re lost! Then a siren started wailing. Was there a fire? Francois sniffed for smoke. A man down the hall had set fire to his hair. He ran out of his room screaming, turning and turning in circles.

  The House

  They were sitting at a kitchen table doing cocaine. It was evening. Eric struck a match and lit a candle even though Jack said no fucking way, not yet. But a flame beautified the moment; later, Jack would agree. Eric watched the flame as Jack cut the cocaine with a razor blade. He had scored an ounce of it that afternoon, for a box of jewellery they found under the bed in the master bedroom. Neither the jewellery nor the house belonged to anyone they knew. The owners were vacationing in Florida.

  Eric fancied the vintage silver pocket watch in the box for himself, but Jack balked at the idea, reckoning they’d get a couple of ounces for the stuff, but not without the watch. Eric said nothing when Jack returned with only one ounce of cocaine, but it bothered him. It would have made no difference had he kept the watch. Jack would have scored an ounce with or without it. But after Eric snorted a few lines, his bitterness abated. What would he have done with a watch like that anyway? he thought.

  The house felt cold to him. The people who lived in it were cold, he imagined: the gruff, moody father; the mother, stiff as a board; the bland children, underachieving and overfed. The candle-flame flickered. They would never understand. It would hit them down there, in sunny Florida. They’d be on beach blankets, reeking of coconut oil, bronzing their doughy skin, sipping fruity drinks, and the news would hit them like a tidal wave. Who would do that to us, to our house? Who wishes our family harm? But no one wishes them harm, Eric thought.

  Jack was bent at the table snorting a thick line of coke with a rolled up twenty-dollar bill. Half the line went in one nostril, half in the other. Wiping tears from his eyes, he rose from the table, his low-crotch jeans sliding under his hipbones. He peeled off his T-shirt, exposing a hairless, sallow torso and an abdomen bearing the scars of DMT-induced self-immolation. He claimed he had come face to face with the fabled little people of DMT hallucinations, and they were not friendly. A tattooed skeleton in top hat grimaced from his left pectoral—a cartoon, the needlework slipshod. Jack moved his mouth and Eric heard his voice, but it seemed to come from elsewhere, from another part of the room.

  Eric lit a match and stared at it, but Jack continued talking, scrolling his tongue between his teeth. Eric heard only the hissing of sibilants, and intermittent sighing. He let the match burn down to his fingertips, savoured the sulphurous smoke, then looked at the sunburst clock above the sink. Time was passing. The candle lessened by the moment, though the flame burned as lovely as ever. It spoke to him, languid, feminine. He understood the language of the flame. Jack walked over to the china cabinet against the wall and slammed it with his forearm, shattering its glass panes and delicate contents. Plates and glasses chimed and crackled, glinting shards sprayed across the floor. Jack stepped back, bent his knees and planted his feet. He sprang out of the stance and rammed his left shoulder into the side of the china cabinet, knocking it over with a dreadful crash. He sustained a shoulder gash that bled profusely. He smeared his tattoo with the blood then licked the palm of his hand. His mouth moved: more words. Eric snorted a line of coke into his right nostril. It went in roughly. His eye started blinking and his sinus cavity burned. He could taste the cut and it so numbed the right side of his face, his eye sagged and his cheek slackened. He slapped his cheek but felt nothing, as though a dentist had shot it with Novocain.

  Jack, meanwhile, opened the refrigerator and removed a bottle of ginger ale. He uncapped it, drank some down, and scowled. Then, gripping the bottleneck, he whacked it against the refrigerator with little effect, the bottle still intact. This enraged him; he whipped open the refrigerator door and kicked it off its hinges. Then he switched on the burners of the stainless steel gas stove and waved his hand over the leaping blue flames. This gesture made Eric euphoric. The warmth, the light, the destruction, all equal parts of the pleasure. He banged a spoon on the tabletop. Bravo! Bravo! But if Jack only knew. If Jack only knew how beautiful the fire could be, how beautiful it could be. And what was this? Eric’s eyes widened. Gritting his teeth, Jack held his hand over one of the burners until it started smoking. Eric’s nostrils flared as the smell of burnt flesh filled the kitchen, and he hoped for more, more, but Jack awoke to the pain and the stench and began whirling around like a dervish.

  Eric studied his reflection in the spoon: convex, concave, monstrous. Monstrous, perhaps, to occupy the house, given his intentions. But for now it was a place to rest, a place to reflect. And something could change by Saturday morning, no one knew for certain, conscience could get the better of him for instance, though it didn’t look good. Jack recommenced his task, dashing a porcelain figurine against the cupboards. Then he opened the cupboards and started on the plates, the mugs, the cups and saucers. Irked by the noise, Eric retreated to the stodgy living room. The ornamental fireplace—faux-brick finished and copper-screened—offended him. No fire there. If these people deserved everything they had, then they deserved everything coming to them. But it was confusing too. These people. Who were they? He didn’t care. And yet he thought about them. He flopped on the green chenille chesterfield, lit a match and stared at the orange flame while Jack took apart the kitchen.

  A friend had told Jack about the house, said the owners went south for a month. A lady came on Saturdays to check things out but otherwise the house sat empty. On Tuesday, Jack pleaded with Eric to break into it with him. Eric refused at first but when Jack promised him total freedom, he gave in. Total freedom. Eric knew what that meant. He could barely contain his excitement. And just when things had gotten stale. It was a chance for a real stroke, a statement. This is who I am, it would say. Accepting who you are is half the battle; proclaiming yourself is victory. So on Tuesday evening they rode bicycles to the house. It sat in an isolated enclave by the canal, the property landscaped for privacy and comfort. These people had coin. Jack’s Uncle Tommy, a professional thief, had taught him how to disable conventional alarm systems. It took just a snip of a wire. Then they jimmied a side door and entered.

  It was weird at first, being in there, walking around, admiring, detesting. Eric had entered strange houses before, to rob them, or to set them on fire, but that meant hurried exits with little time for reflection. This was different. He had time to get close
to his subject, to gather it up from inside. While he walked around the house, mentally noting his observations, Jack attacked the liquor cabinet, downing whisky and rum, and soon passed out on the living room rug in a gurgling stupor. Eric puffed a joint and chilled on the chesterfield, resting his feet on a glass coffee table. The moment was good. He found a candle and lit it. He gazed at the flame. Lovely. He switched on the television and watched a nature show, some cheetahs chasing down a gazelle. Cheetahs couldn’t help themselves. They did what they did very well. As long as you did what you did very well, nothing could touch you. That wasn’t necessarily true, but he wanted to believe it.

  In the master bedroom Eric found some photographs on a chest of drawers. People. Old, young. A nice-looking blonde framed in gold. Something glittered in her hair, a tiara; festively dressed people posed in the background. Eric picked out a candle-lit cake, ribbons, and balloons: oh, a birthday party. He glanced at the other photographs. Family memories. Eric thought about his own memories, how he tried to forget them but couldn’t. He blew some dust off the photograph and returned it to the chest. These weren’t people he’d ever want to know. They looked dry, annoying. A real family. He had never belonged to a real family. His fourteen-year-old mother, pregnant by rape, gave birth to him in a basement. The rapist later died in prison from shiv wounds. Eric never met the man, knew nothing about him except what he’d read in a newspaper clipping, and that wasn’t flattering. His mother gave him up for adoption right after he was born, committing suicide a year later.

  Eric spent most of his youth being moved from foster home to foster home, absorbing his share of mental and physical abuse along the way, and learning how things really were in the world. If you weren’t fucking somebody up then somebody was probably fucking you up. He lived with the Macleans now, Mary and Bill, both of them like milk, except Mary was earnest, and Bill liked little boys. Eric hated the Macleans. He kept breaching his curfews, but they never called the cops on him. They disapproved of his friendship with Jack, but never openly complained, reasoning that at least they knew the company he kept. When their double-garage went up in flames, they suspected Eric but never said a word to him. They were so lame they made him want to weep. He wondered why people like them were alive, why they bothered to keep living. What was waiting for them at the end of their journey? Flowers and cherubs and harp music? He knew what he would do to them in time, and not just because he hated them. It was necessary. Balance had to be restored.

  Jack often ribbed him about his parentage. You into raping girls and shit like your old man? he asked him one day on the telephone. He said he had a thirteen-year-old virgin in his bedroom if Eric wanted to come over and try his luck. He was getting her drunk and stoned and planned to fuck the shit out of her. Come on, she’s yummy, he said. Eric almost went to Jack’s on that day. Turned out the little girl got so wasted she puked on his duvet and then shit her pants. She actually shit her pants.

  Something flew out of the kitchen and crashed against an antique armchair. Eric looked up and saw a microwave oven in the middle of the floor with its broken door dangling open, wires popping out of it, and a chair leg jutting from its chassis. Jack swaggered in, brandishing a giant knife, thrusting it to and fro like a fencer. He attacked the velvet curtains and the furniture fervently, bright-eyed. But how misplaced, all that energy. Eric had tried to convince him to focus his fury. People reacted when you broke them up. The cringing, the crying, the writhing brought a body chill. A chair did nothing.

  Tomorrow was Saturday and if that lady came by to check the house she was in for a surprise. They planned to exit by morning. Eric tingled with anticipation. Jack would let him do his thing. He promised. Jack looked unapproachable now, plunging the knife into a green silk pillow and stabbing it until the stuffing sprang out. Then, smeared with sweat and blood, the muscles of his scrawny back striating, he thrust the knife into an embroidered ottoman, striking something hard, the knife stopping cold. He angrily pulled the knife free and returned to the kitchen. After a moment he screamed for Eric to join him. Eric sat for a time with his head back and his eyes closed, swirling in the vortex that was his mind, before he went to the kitchen.

  Jack hunched over the table, snorting directly from a pile of cocaine. He gestured to Eric and flipped him the rolled-up twenty. Eric stooped to the table and took a hoot from the bluish pile, but it caked in his nostril. He tried to catch the spilling crumbs with his fingers, sniffing up what he could, but much of it fell to the floor. For a moment he considered getting on his knees, but just then Jack jingled a key-chain in front of his eyes. Buddy, he said, keys to the family car, a big-ass Buick. He wanted to go for a cruise. Eric didn’t think it wise for them to be out driving in their condition: they were a heat score. Jack picked up the knife and waved it at Eric’s head. You’re afraid to go out, he said. You’re fucking afraid. You’d rather just stay here, wouldn’t you? You love this stinking place. What the fuck are we doing here, anyway? What are you doing, Eric? Answer me. What’s going on in that head of yours? Jack leaned in to him. Eric, he said, I need to get out of here for a while. I need to get out of here before I kill you. I’ll kill you, Eric. You creep me out. Are you listening? Are you listening, you fucking psycho?

  Eric dipped his head and flattened his hands on the kitchen table, his shoulders shaking with laughter. The table belonged to someone, he thought. It belonged to a family. They had eaten hundreds, no, thousands of meals on it. A heavy, sturdy table, something passed on from generation to generation. It smelled of them, bore their grease, their human stain. It would burn so beautifully. Fire would relieve the table of its memories and chase away the ghosts of all those happy moments around it, fire would. And this saddened Eric. Yes, it did. His eyes welled up with tears. He wanted to weep. He wanted to hurt himself, to stop himself. But he did not want to stop himself. He wanted to see the flames engulf the house; he wanted to warm his hands in that fire.

  To some extent, Jack understood Eric’s state of mind, he had listened to his stories and knew him insofar as someone like him could be known; still, Jack saw destruction as sport, as gymnastics, not as redemption or fulfillment, and certainly not as achievement. He did what he did without forethought, without blueprint or map. He acted on impulse. He was stupid, primal, easily angered, easily pleased, and easily distracted from the truth.

  What is it? Jack said. You wanna drive, Eric? Is that what this is about? Be honest. I’ll let you drive, man. But Eric didn’t want to drive, he didn’t know how, and he didn’t want to go out in his condition, vulnerable, choked, and black inside, so black—something would alter his course, something would obstruct or delay him. Jack didn’t care, thrusting the steel of the blade to Eric’s throat and gently pressing. If you’re gonna do it, Eric said, get it over with, and he imagined the blade breaking skin and sinking into his oblivion. It made him smile; it warmed him, the thought of hot blood spraying from his throat and drenching Jack and the room, painting everything red, bringing everything to life. Fucking do it, Eric said.

  Breathing heavily, Jack withdrew the knife and let it fall to the floor. Okay, you sick bastard, he said, okay. We’ll chill for now, we’ll stay put, but later we’re going out. We’ll score more blow and maybe get some pussy over here tonight. What a waste of a house. We’ll have a fucking party. That’s it, a party. I’ll make some calls. He continued talking. Eric nodded but stopped listening. Nothing Jack said mattered anymore. But Jack needed dialogue to pass the time. Without it he suffered. Without it he lost his sense of reality, he floundered. He snorted another line, the only remedy for his affliction. Meanwhile, Eric slipped off into the house with his matchbook, the only remedy for his.

  Country Road

  Presley Banyan climbed into the black pickup truck and nodded to the driver, a heavy, bearded man with gold hoops in his ears and tattooed forearms. He said nothing to Presley, didn’t gesture, didn’t even blink. He adjusted his rearview mirror, put the truck in gear, and roared out of the parki
ng lot. They were on their way to score a sizeable quantity of hydroponic marijuana at a local grow house. Presley’s old man had made the arrangements, but he was on the road with his rig, probably in California by now, or some place like that, so he wanted Presley to handle the introductions. He didn’t mind doing things for his old man. He saw him so rarely these days it offered a way of maintaining a connection with him, of gaining his approval. Besides, if everything went well there was a hundred bucks in it for Presley.

  The driver of the pickup truck, an old biker buddy of his dad’s, planned to buy the weed off the Dacunhas, three Portuguese brothers who owned a farm just outside of town. They too had biker connections, but different ones. Presley’s old man used to run weed south for them before crossing the border got too hairy. The money for the weed must have been stuffed in the bulging manila envelope resting between Presley and the driver. His name was Bart or Bert, Presley wasn’t sure, and he wanted to say something to him, just to be sociable, but held his tongue. He had learned long ago to keep his mouth shut around these biker dudes unless they asked you a question, and then you answered with the fewest words possible.

  Stars glinted in the asphalt-black sky like specks of pelletized glass, and the moon resembled a huge white dinner plate. Trees flanked the road, spectral and black, their lost leaves swirling in the headlamps. The pumpkin fields lay bare and black except for grotesque swollen stragglers, rotting remnants of an overabundant harvest, abandoned to crows, voles, and whatever else could stomach their foul, stringy flesh. Winter loomed; Presley dreaded it. He hated the cold. He wished he could join his mother in Jamaica. She wintered there these days with her boyfriend, Trevor, a dreadlocked Rastafarian. But she laughed when Presley suggested it. Said she didn’t want him smoking all that evil Jamaican weed and fucking up his brain. Like it wasn’t fucked up already.