Lullabies for Suffering Read online

  Perhaps because Andrea and the past had been on my mind, once Calvin and I finally turned in, I dreamt of my mother, and of that horrid wallpaper, and of blood pattering my shoes. Jazz music drifted down from upstairs where my father had sequestered himself in his study with a bottle of bourbon and his own cowardice. I began to turn my head in the feeble hope that if she saw the terror on my face it might wake her up, and my mother grabbed a fistful of my hair.

  “Do you know what you are, you little cunt?” she shrieked at me. She was weaving on her feet so badly it was like we were engaged in a peculiar waltz. The medication did not make her this monster. The as-yet undiagnosed degenerative brain disorder did that. But really, to my nine-year-old self, the reasons mattered little. I just didn’t want to be afraid and in pain.

  I heard the tiniest little sob from the living room, almost lost beneath the Nickelodeon soundtrack of some cartoon. It didn’t come again.

  “You’re a horrible, ugly, soulless leech,” my mother shrieked at me, and shoved my face into the wall. The pattern filled my vision, became a world lit by disintegrating stars. I felt an explosion of pain and heard an awful dull crunch inside my skull as my nose broke.

  All because I burned the eggs.

  7.

  When I woke, I could still smell them and for a moment, I thought of screaming, until the red neon flashed into the motel room and brought me back to myself. I was covered in sweat, my default state those days, the sodden blankets like plaster of Paris setting around my legs. In the process of freeing myself, I realized Calvin was not beside me.

  “Hey,” I said to the red-veined dark. “Where’d you go?”

  When he didn’t answer, I figured he was either in the bathroom, or had stepped outside for a cigarette. I slid out of bed, my head filled with sand, mouth with glue, and my stomach lurched as the night inside me looked for a way out. I hurried to the bathroom. It was dark. As I flicked on the dim light, I wondered if Calvin was outside, or maybe had gone to score. This last would have suited me fine because one of us needed to. In my experience, nothing halts the onset of the dreaded morning after better than a chemical extension. It’s why alcoholics always keep a few beers in the fridge and vampires sleep in coffins. It’s a protective measure against unwanted intrusion.

  Eyes shut, I let the stream of urine loose. I was weaving on the seat, in danger of falling back asleep right there, but then a sound from the other side of the bathroom wall permeated the fog and I opened one eye, squinting against the fluorescent light. When I cocked my head slightly to better hear the sound, my gaze fell upon the sink, which was close enough for me to hit with my elbow in the confines of the squalid room.

  The basin was spattered with blood.

  And now, despite the still developing hangover and exhaustion, I was awake. I finished peeing, dabbed myself dry, and pulled up my panties. “Calvin?”

  No answer.

  Worried now, I splashed some cold water on my face, which washed away the Rorschach pattern of blood in the basin. The iciness of it shocked air into my lungs but brought with it the level of alertness required for an impromptu nocturnal investigation.

  “Calvin? You up?”

  I did not look at myself in the mirror. I try to avoid that as much as possible. Reflections are inveterate liars.

  I left the light on and the door open so I could see the bed. It was still empty but for a cumulonimbus of wrinkled sheets, but now I could hear a swishing, scratching sound from the living room-cum-kitchen, or whatever the fuck you call those claustrophobic areas in motel rooms that aren’t the bed.

  The room was lit only by the intermittent hazy red light from the neon sign. Backlit by the light from the bathroom, I saw a distorted version of myself in the cheap television screen and thought of Andrea trying hard not to be aware of the horror. Beyond it, just beside the door to the room, Calvin was a hazy, agitated and indistinct shape.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Working.”

  “Are you okay? There was blood in the sink.”

  “It’s not blood. It’s paint. I needed red.”

  His hands were pale smudges in the gloom, moving like spiders over the painting of the rustic barn.

  “It’s late. Come back to bed.”

  “Do you know where this is?”

  I folded my arms. Now that I knew he wasn’t bleeding to death, I just wanted to go back to bed. “Where what is?”

  “This barn. Do you know where the barn in this painting is?”

  “No. How would I know that?”

  “Have you never stepped into the painting to see for yourself?”

  “Can’t say that I have, no.”

  “I’ve painted a door in it for you if you’d like to see.”

  “I’m going back to bed.”

  “It’s in a place called Rowan County in North Carolina. The man who owned the barn shot his wife and daughter six months after painting this picture.”

  “Calvin, come on. Come back to bed. Whatever you’re doing, you can finish it in the morning. Let’s get some sleep.”

  A great sadness fell over me at the thought of losing him. I’d known it was coming. I’d just hoped it would take longer.

  The scratching and swishing continued. The cheap frame of the painting clattered against the wall. And then his voice, lower and slower than I’d ever heard it, the kind of voice a man gets when he’s smoked too much and drunk too little, crept its way across the room.

  “He swore in court he didn’t do it, and he meant it too. He couldn’t remember doing any of it. Couldn’t remember staking their bodies up in the cornfield either, which was how he got caught. Guy next door came by to see how his neighbor had managed to make those scarecrows look so damn lifelike and yurked up his breakfast right then and there. Ran screaming back to his house and called the police. When they took John McAllister away, he said somebody with a grudge must have framed him. Get it? Somebody framed the artist.”

  The swishing scratching sound stopped.

  Thank God for small mercies.

  “They executed him. Framed and hanged like fine art.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  He turned and his eyes were black holes. “You’ve been keeping things from me.”

  So here we were, our moment come. I’d wanted it to be so much different, but now I realize there’s no way it ever could have been. From the very beginning, this was its natural end.

  “I would have told you, if you’d asked, but you never did,” I said.

  I watched him limp toward me. One of his feet was broken and hanging at an odd angle, but he expressed no pain.

  “You poor thing.”

  “What is this?” he asked me. “What have you done to me?”

  It wasn’t darkness that hid his eyes from me. He had either painted them black or they had been removed. Through his pale skin, his veins were black as winter trees and appeared to be moving, as if wrenched by the force of a subcutaneous storm. The shape of his body made no visual sense anymore. His bones, his joints, had come out of true and his skin rippled and bulged and twisted as if he were made of plastic. When he stepped into the light from the bathroom, I saw that his wrists were broken, too, which explained why he’d stopped defacing the barn. His hands hung like dead flowers from the withered stalks of his arms.

  “Tell me,” he said, sounding as if he was gargling blood. “Tell me what you’ve done.”

  “I will, love,” I told him. “But first please understand that I have done nothing to you. I’m only here to make the end a little better.”

  8.

  On the day my mother first slammed me into the wall, I detached from myself, went through the wall, and it was real. I was there, trapped in the narrow space between the walls. I could see the wooden framework, the wires, the cobwebs, the mice, and when I looked up, I could see through the floor to where my father sat weeping at his desk. I could see inside him and it was all gray, like a sky considering rain.
r />   I am, or at least for a time I was, reasonable and sane enough to believe that what I experienced as a child, being able to see the mechanics behind the skin of things, was most likely delusional, a reaction to sudden trauma, or a psychological escape tactic. I told myself this for ten years before going to court-ordered rehab for alcohol after my first DUI. There, a sponsor named Stephen Carver became my guru. He encouraged me to allow myself to believe in the spiritual benefit of healing, to be open to other realms and possibilities. One of the possibilities I didn’t predict was him trying to stick his hand down my pants on the one and only night I let him drive me home. I broke his nose, blackened his eye, cut off his dick and rammed it up his ass, all in my mind on the walk home after he threw me out of his car. But as I raged, ashamed at what he had almost done to me, shaking in fear of where that might have led, I saw him as if he had appeared right back in front of me. I saw inside him, from the liquor boiling in his stomach to the splintering of his bones, the perforation of organs, the collapsing of his skull, as his car collided with a snowplow. That didn’t happen, of course.

  Not that night.

  It happened the winter of the next year.

  So, wow, you can see the future, huh? How come you’re not a TV celebrity? How many books have you written off the back of this amazing superpower? When is the world tour? The short answer is that it isn’t a power at all. It’s a lens, and one that only works when I’m high, just like I was the night I failed to miss all the creepy vibes Carver was giving me. It was the reason I’d called him in the first place. I’m fucked up and I need help. I don’t feel real and I keep thinking my mother is coming for me. And anything that only happens when you’re high only makes sense to fellow addicts. Should I have donned a cape and told Stephen Carver he might die by snowplow sometime in the future? He’d have laughed and tried to finish what he started.

  I let whatever this ability or hex is fade into insignificance as time went on, and if sometimes I knew little things about people they might not have wanted me to know: from their sexual proclivities and secrets to the fate awaiting them years hence, I put it down to the heightened perception any addict can claim because it’s hard to disprove. If I told you you were going to die in a plane crash somewhere and then it happened in eight years’ time, would you think to credit the source? Of course not. You’d be deader than hammered shit. Anyone else who might have heard such a pronouncement surely wouldn’t remember the one night some homeless-looking heroin addict spouted wisdom from the stoop while you were walking by. When asked, I can’t predict jack. When it could be most useful, it doesn’t come. Why not parlay it into a means of the perfect score, you ask? Why didn’t I rob a bank, buy myself a mansion, pull one over on a dealer and keep myself high for life? For the same reason I gave before. I couldn’t summon it. It was random, and when it did manifest itself, it rarely gave me anything that could be useful in the moment. So, incredible as it may seem, I forgot about it.

  Until the night I decided I had served my sentence on this earth and it was time to be done with it all. The night I met Calvin. But what I saw in him changed everything. It was true confirmation of other realms and the wonder of the unknown, and it instilled in me a reason to delay the end, for a little while at least.

  Because Calvin wasn’t even real. Not that version of him, anyway.

  9.

  “Picture your mother,” I told him. “Really picture your clearest memory of her and tell me what you see.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  “It’s the one I told you about. Her in bed, dying. Me trying to paint her.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Eloise.”

  “Her last name?”

  “I—”

  “You don’t remember it?”

  “No.”

  “If I gave you a week, or a month, you still wouldn’t recall it because you never knew it. What about your father?”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Can you picture his face?”

  “No, why are you asking me all these questions?”

  “The reason you say you can walk through paintings is because you came from one of them. I knew it when I saw you at the bridge, because I saw the bridge before, in a painting. It was called “End of Night” by Eloise Brunner. It depicts a haunted figure tossing scraps of paper into the river. I looked it up when we were at the library, and all the others she did. Among them is the self-portrait she painted when she had terminal cancer. She painted a figure at the foot of the bed of the son she’d lost in Afghanistan. His name was Calvin. He’s depicted as the artist in the painting. It’s called “The Release.” I don’t understand the how or the why of it no more than I understand it of my own ability, but I see you, Calvin. Just like she did. I see you, only you’re just a figure from her painting. You’re not the son she lost. You’re fragments, a fractured, malformed thing, crammed full of confused emotions and the yearning of a dying mother.”

  He was silent but for the drip-drip-dripping of paint from his hands.

  “You are all the sketches that didn’t work. Your mother painted this version of you into life. Until then, you didn’t exist, and when she died, she left you behind, unable to function, an unfinished thing driven half-mad by the need to be complete. Getting high is too loose a fix for such a rigid problem, Calvin. You can’t chemically force yourself into reality, so you use it to forget that you’re not real.”

  He might have shaken his head, or perhaps it was neon’s dance with the dark.

  “Do you know why we’re together, what attracted you to me on that bridge the night we went there to die? It wasn’t just our common goal, it was that you saw in me what I am. I’m like you. I’ve seen the inner workings of things invisible to most. Unlike you, I can’t step inside art, but I can see inside you, Calvin, and there are so many colors desperate to get out. You tried to paint them out, but that’s not your destiny. That’s not why you want to die. You want to open yourself up and let the paint run free, because you are the art, and you will forever suffer until you let yourself become it.”

  He didn’t argue because I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already, on some level, know to be true. I watched him weep and the tears were thin rivers of sky-blue paint.

  I wanted to touch him, to comfort him a little, but it was not yet time.

  “Do you trust me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you?”

  He nodded.

  “I love you, Calvin. I love everything that you are and are not. I love your innocence and your grief. I love your confusion, your soul, and yes, I believe you have one. I love that you’re lost and alone and unknown. I love that you’re here and must leave. I love that I got to taste and feel and fuck and love you. I love that I got to see you and be seen by you.”

  “It was the only thing that was real,” he said, and when he smiled, his mouth began to run until the lower half of his face looked like a puddle of petroleum.

  “Your memories: the boardwalk, your parents, the bridge. She painted a life for you and all those paintings hang in homes and galleries around the world. Everything you remember is preserved and endless. You will live on through those, so this is not an ending, because art, and therefore you, cannot die, no matter what. I will see you again.”

  Gently, I put a hand to his cheek. It caved beneath my touch, and I closed my eyes as, with the softest of sighs, he collapsed in a waterfall of color to the floor.

  I did not open them again until I had walked to the door. There, I looked up at the painting of the barn.

  It was much the same as before, only he had darkened the sky, and a figure, one must assume was himself, was standing in the door to the barn, one hand raised in greeting.

  10.

  I drank myself into a messy stupor, and once it passed and I could walk and the manager was hammering at the door, I s
howered and dressed and took a cab home. I don’t like it here.

  In the brief time I knew Calvin, I never invited him to my house. Part of that is good sense. Until I knew his true nature (as much as one ever can), I preferred to go on his journey with him and not fully invite him into mine. Another reason is that there are things the adventurous might uncover that I am not yet ready to explain. Things like the human eyeball in Lucite atop my nightstand, taken from the man who bit my arm and tasted oil, and the gilt-framed paintings in my living room.

  My life is on that wall, and I don’t know how to return to it.

  My sister is there, reflected in the TV.

  My father is crying in his office.

  My mother is baring her teeth, clenching a fistful of hair.