Ghouljaw and Other Stories (15 page)

“Why did Paul call tonight?”

Deacon answered after uncleaving his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “He asked when I was coming home.”

“Yes, he did,” the thing croaked. “But there is more.” Somewhere down on the street, a car alarm began wailing. “What did he say about your mother?”

Deacon lifted the bottle from the sill and poured another drink. “He said she wasn’t doing well—that he was having a hard time taking care of her. He said nobody blamed me, but he always says that.”

“Do you believe him, your little brother?”

Deacon took a deep breath. His head swirled from the whiskey. “No.”

“You lied to him tonight.”

Deacon said nothing. He pressed his index finger against the cold window, and watched a foggy corona slowly blossom around his fingertip.

“You lied to yourself tonight,” the thing began again. “And you are lying now.”

Deacon raised his chin, dropping his finger from the window. The hazy halo faded. “You don’t understand the things I see.” He paused, his words echoing uncomfortably. “The things I see about people.” He gestured toward the window, out at the city. “These goddamn people treat each other like animals.”

“The best definition of man,” the thing said, “is a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful. Would you agree with that?”

Deacon hesitated, frowning slightly. “Yes.”

“Does it sound familiar?”

“No.”

“Those are the words of one of your beloved writers—from Dostoevsky: one of the many authors you often quote but to whom you rarely devote study. You murmur their phrases, from time to time, when they suit your mood. But do you know exactly the context with which you’re employing these convenient little epigrams?” Silence hung for several seconds. “Deacon: you have been misusing your mother’s money and you were wrong convincing her to allow you to come here. Your brother is correct: you have no business at the university. You have no business here in this city.”

To hell with this fucking thing
. Deacon bit his lip, began to turn and froze.

The thing calmly rested its hand on Deacon’s shoulder. “You still answer questions like a child.” Deacon angled his gaze to the pale hand, which was covered with some sort of black streaks. The fingers were out of proportion, several inches too long. Its nails were filthy and appeared to have been crudely chewed. “Let’s put on some Christmas music.”

“No,” Deacon whispered.

“We’re almost there, Deacon. But you need to gather your faculty. Let’s think about the day we first made each other’s acquaintance, yes?”

Deacon said nothing, closed his eyes and shivered.

Deacon Stilwell raised his fingers, bending down the brittle mini-blinds, and stared out a window overlooking a pothole-eaten parking lot. It was an early Saturday morning in late August. It would be humid and overcast; but the sun, still hunched along the horizon, sent pastel scarves—peach and mauvy—against gray, low-lying clouds. He panned down to the dusty window sill, where bluebottle flies lay dried-up and dead, their eyelash-thin legs turned upward, as if appealing something in the throes of their tiny death.

Withdrawing his fingers from between the blinds, Deacon dug into his pocket, retrieved a pack of cigarettes and his lighter. And just as he inserted a cigarette between his lips, he was startled by a voice.

“We only allow smoking outside on the veranda,” a woman said, not unpleasantly. She was carrying a Styrofoam cup in one hand, a clipboard and a thick stack of almond-colored file folders in the other. “Besides we’re going to get started here in a few minutes.” She wore brilliantly white tennis shoes, which exaggerated each dutiful step as she buzzed around the small meeting room.

Deacon immediately poked the cigarette back into the pack, and the pack back into his pocket.

The white-sneaker woman—who Deacon recognized from his previous visits as the program coordinator—was now arranging folding chairs into a large circle. He thought the fluorescently-ill light and muted colors made the room feel more institutional, more nauseating.

People get sicker here, it occurred to him suddenly. The haphazard botanical pattern on the carpet looked like a garden designed by a disturbed person.

Feeling useless, Deacon asked, “Do you need some help?”

“Yes,” the woman smiled but continued unhindered, “that’d be nice.”

Deacon pulled a couple of beige chairs from the wall. The two worked quietly. When the circle was complete the woman exhaled and glanced around, as if in approval.

“Okay,” she said, retrieving her Styrofoam cup. “There’s coffee and refreshments across the hall. Help yourself before the meeting.” She didn’t wait for Deacon to respond as she walked out of the room. He sat down in a folding chair and fiddled with his lighter.

Nearly every chair in the circle was occupied.

Nearly every rehab program, at one point or another, utilizes a similar therapy exercise where group members in outpatient therapy—whether drug addicts, alcoholics, or both; whether here voluntarily or by court sentence—spend hours dwelling on and describing the circumstances for bringing them here. Very little time is devoted to exploring what will happen next.

The stories were, of course, varied—
diverse,
one counselor said brightly—but each tale was similar in that they contained pain, usually at the expense of others, and were narrated by unreliable speakers. Deacon recognized some of the members from previous sessions, but most were new. He sat upright, arms folded, and listened to the stories of the people forming this sad wreath. He was easily the youngest person here.

He listened to Tom, a high school swimming coach. “My son,” the big gray man said, “told me if I didn’t quit drinking that he’d move in with his mother.” Tom’s wife, apparently, had left him several months before. She now lived in a different state with a different man.

He listened to Kenny, whose nickname was
Fancy,
discuss crack. Kenny was HIV-positive and at the clinic because a judge said so. He spoke frankly and eloquently about his affection for the drug, and delineated ratios and reactions between cocaine and baking soda with the precision of a chemist.

He listened to a booze-weepy widow named Gloria, who dabbed incessantly at her heavily mascara-lined eyes. She cried about everyone else’s story as much as she did her own.

These stories—these people, Deacon thought, couldn’t be more different from me. The rotation eventually made its way around to the young man.

“Please,” the program coordinator said. “It’s your turn to share.”

Deacon told his story—a vague patchwork of half-truths intended to evoke sympathy. He talked a little about his parents’ divorce, about his younger brother Paul moving away to pursue medical school. “I got into trouble a while ago,” he said when he sensed the people around him were growing uninterested in his bullshit. “There was an accident. My family suggested I come here, that I complete this program.”

“Do you think you need to be here, Deacon?” asked the woman with the white sneakers.

Deacon frowned, refolded his arms and scanned the room. “Drinking, for me, is . . . recreational. I admit, it’s bad to medicate yourself; but I think if I had my own place—”

Deacon’s eyes widened and his upper body stiffened. “What?” He began to scowl after no one responded. “Who said that?”

I did
. Deacon saw, sitting directly opposite him, an ill-looking young man who presented a small mocking smile when Deacon leveled his gaze at him.
Your mother is nearly a cripple, now. Why is she that way?

Deacon blinked a few times and leaned forward, trying to rein in focus, preparing to mentally square-off with this asshole.

After the sickly ashen young man lowered his hand he sat perfectly still. He had slick black hair, parted on one side. Bangs clung together in clumpy strands and hung over his brow. His skull was shaped funny. His skin was pale—white like a cadaver, Deacon thought, readying himself for some sort of hateful exchange. The guy was wearing a baby-blue flannel, an ink pen stuck out of the breast pocket of his shirt; his long thin fingers clutched his knobby kneecaps. Deacon inhaled, as if to say something, but was cut off.

Deacon’s heart wound up, but his anger was slowly replaced with fear. He realized that the person speaking to him was growing perceptibly paler, second by second. And that he was not a young man at all, nor a teenager; and he was not older. He was, somehow, no age.

Deacon’s chest rose and fell rapidly with his breathing. “This . . .” he managed, “is a fucking waste of time.”

Some people in the circle glared or frowned. A few slid forward in their chairs.

The pale person, the sick thing, across from Deacon gave up a chuckle that quickly turned into a harsh, muddy sounding cough. Deacon watched him, it, regain some composure before smiling again—a botched incision framing two rows of uneven teeth, which, to Deacon, resembled jagged shards of tea-stained porcelain.

Shifting in his chair, Deacon remained silent.

Deacon wanted to say something ugly. But just then he caught sight of the pen sticking out of the thing’s breast pocket. The pen started bleeding, pooling along the pockets stitching. Black ink bloomed and spread down his shirt like tendrils of black ivy.

The ink was still spreading. Deacon was no longer listening, just watching the black liquid spill across the flannel material. Its skin continued to grow paler and was now nearly translucent—dark purple veins were visible under its diaphanous flesh. Deacon’s gaze panned up, to the thing’s livid face. Its nose began to bleed.

Frozen, choking back tears, Deacon stared at the thing—its upper lip was covered with blood, which continued to trickle from its nose, drip down its chin, and soak into the front of its shirt—and took a deep breath. Deacon watched its smile contort into an insane rictus grin.