CHAPTER 28

Michael’s Journal:

I go to the same coffeehouse everyday to make a show of my normality. The fact that I sit by myself, never talk to anyone, and do this habitually, may be far from most people’s definition of normal.

It is easy for me to make a habit, and hard for me to break one. Even when they are nonessential I have an urge to perform my routines and rituals the same way at relatively the same time everyday, and sometimes experience stress when they are disrupted. It is reasonable to want to avoid this outcome, but when left to my own company it is all I can do to keep from being swallowed whole by a monotony that makes me unfit for anything else. I may live life on my own terms, but I would be hard-pressed to describe in what sense it resembles freedom, or sanity.

Going to the same coffeehouse everyday is admittedly only another unbending habit, although it is my one heroic attempt to meet the world halfway. I open wide my cell door and look out, and project through my still and quiet exhibit a myth not unlike that of others. It is a myth of a man who is free to reinvent himself: a man who could be loved and befriended: a man who could be redeemed from the worst in himself by one chance encounter with destiny.

THE BLACK BOX

Michael opened his eyes in an afterthought—believing himself long dead. Noises from the tumbling crash were still somewhere back on the dark highway chiming in the trees. The injured man adapted to his predicament by sprints and sputters of detail. A flashing twelve indicated the car’s clock survived the impact, whereas the rearview mirror had broken free of the windshield to lay in some orientation to his head. It was either up or down, yet angled in such a way to capture a piece of the road outside the busted window. Squeaking gradually emerged over the din of crickets. One of his car’s wheels was spinning, and this located the crash not too far behind him in time. A plopping noise (perhaps brake fluid dripping into the same wheel well) wound around an axle and tightened into a corded thought: Something was clomping on hard heels down the cheek-flushed highway toward him. He floated in and out of it until it took the form of a woman’s urgent plea.

“It’s not enough I tell you I love you, but I want to show you!” The interior of the car darkened from a shadow at the window. The unnatural voice was not coming from the radio but from the misplaced cell phone. “You must let me show you how much I love you!”

Michael was certain the blurry image was in the dislodged mirror and not in his head. Someone or something towered over the wreck. White smoke billowed out of the entrails of the car to cloak her in the tattered plume of a dress.

The woman exclaimed, “You must let me show you!”

Fingers congealed out of the shards of hanging glass in the driver’s window, becoming ribbons of hot taffy dragging back and forth over his exposed lap. He tried to make sense of it—to see how it was connected to him. Everything crystallized under a hail of falling glass. His briefs had been yanked down to his hipbones by gouging fingernails, and he heard more than felt his flaccid penis slapping numbly against his thigh. Skulking metal rumbled overhead.

“You must let me show you!”

Ceiling upholstery covered his face like loose foreskin; it was impossible to breathe. He struggled to free an arm, but managed only a hand that sent a chunk of glass clinking to find which way was down.

His voice jabbed at her. “I can’t! I c…!”

The creature was abruptly a pestle pressing down hard on him, making the sticky blackness ink half-dried on his body. Marrow squirmed in her pliable bones with each contraction and attempt to couple. A sliver of moonlight escaped her smothering to illuminate punching knees at his sides and a snarling hare-lipped face rolling over his genitals. The rest of his arm tore away and struck the suitcase lodged behind his seat. It was sent banging into the car roof to empty its contents of ashes and schematics; he gagged on the kicked-up cloud. Saliva, streaked with soot, ran up into his nasal cavities and burned. His freed fingers lifted to cover his stinging eyes, and grazed her flesh covered in the fine cinders: The texture was somewhere between peeled grape and fine-gauge sandpaper. Michael pushed against the slippery slope, but with no place to retreat. Her hand cupped the still supple member as it burst against her stomach. His body stiffened to dispossess it, but then wanted only to coil around her forearm with the agony of a bludgeoned snake. It felt as if a dull-edged knife were being used to scrape out his insides, and what had been impassable was now oozing freely down along firmer bones in her fingers. After a smarting tweak, his underwear was pulled up in the fashion of a convenient blotter. His bones were little more than crushed powder, which left nothing to blunt the ripple sent mumbling up through his body.

She knelt down to kiss the cool chaff of his cheek, whispering, “I love you.”

He was sinking back into the jaws of the car when she rose to eclipse the clock on the dashboard; it betrayed her certain female form in the haze. She stirred the loose pages at her feet, and appeared to pick up something of them. Gravel popped when the vehicle pitched to one side with her shifting weight, leaving the creature to slither off with a crinkle over the blown-out window; bits of silica and leaves were drawn up into her gelatinous veil. He watched her shrink in the mirror to become something small and inanimate along the roadside, but what he faintly perceived was surely an afterimage, as when an object falls into a black hole and appears to never completely vanish. Cinders too small to be crushed into stars hung in the moonlight, but they inevitably succumbed to the same gravity that claimed him. They sifted down to form a shallow grave, yet perversely offered no sleep. His hand, seized with something, ran over the dusty pages at his head with a late thought.

His journal was missing.

A few drowsy thoughts dangled from the end of his hide. One took the form of a sweat droplet, which caught on his eyelashes and set them fluttering. For a man who could not tolerate tight-fitting clothes, the feel of jewelry, or five of the six settings on a typical shower nozzle, he was acclimating to the sensory stimulation in his confinement. A snippet of twilight glowed in the rearview mirror: an indanthrone blue stippled low, aureolin clouds. The jeweled hues drooped in the branches, darkening before sloping down to fill the car. A welcomed breeze marked the transition to night, and shadows further softened the sharp, protruding edges of what distraction that remained. From there, he crossed back and forth over a line with only a waning crescent Moon and the flashing clock marking time. When these remaining beacons were lost, his eyelids were left to transverse an abyss.

The school building filled with children after recess, though few had faces he recalled. The hall was unusually dark for a cloudless day, yet he easily saw her. In fact, no one but him was paying attention to the naked woman pushing against the stream of humanity rushing in from outside.

“Who is she?”

“Probably a substitute teacher,” Omar commented.

Michael was distracted.

“I know a place where we can find dragonflies,” the friend announced.

The ghostly trespasser disappeared behind a door decorated with black drawings. Michael approached the artwork, and seeing they were crayon rubbings brushed with ink, scratched one to uncover a sliver of flesh color tint.

“Are you listening?” his friend grunted.

“What about dragonflies?” the boy replied.

Omar already passed through the doorway with the other children, leaving his skittish friend to peek around the corner before setting a foot in; other black drawings hung on the walls. The classmates were being herded to their desks for naptime, though Michael, who could never sleep sitting up, was slow joining them. He scanned the room for something familiar.

Suzanne was staring at him.

The windows reflected in her eyes, as he remembered, though Mrs. Wahl was busily closing the blinds to make the classroom darker, clearly wanting to mask other details of the girl that did not match to memory.

Michael set aside any pretense to the masquerade. “You came back.”

“I never went away,” she answered.

Omar nudged his shoulder from behind. “Spiders, too…” he whispered. “And crickets…”

“Spiders aren’t insects,” Michael reminded him.

“You can’t even spell your own name and you’re telling me spiders aren’t insects?”

“Mrs. Wahl hasn’t made the insect assignment, yet, “ Michael muttered. “This is all wrong.”

“Different,” Omar interjected.

The friend sighed. “Wrong…? Different…? Does it matter if it's not the same?”

“After school, around four-thirty,” the heartier boy ventured. “I know a really good place.”

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “Not anymore.” His eyes were quickly adapting, but not fast enough. He sensed her readiness to leave, and asked, “Who are you?”

“The one you drew...”

The boy searched his lap for a memory of the drawing, but it was like gazing up into a cavern of perilous shards. He listened for her footfall in the broken glass, which should have faded incrementally in his ear. But it only grew so faint before ceasing, as though she simply stopped in mid-stride, somewhere short of oblivion.

With his thoughts whittled down in the long hours, and his acclimation to his environment complete, it was with surprise he detected the new odor amid the fumes of motor oil and gasoline. He raised a trembling hand to feel the supple, ruffled edge of a lily lying on the torn roof upholstery.

She had returned to the car, but did not awake him.