Back at our house that day, way after everyone had retired for the evening and indulgently scrunched between their sheets, I got up at the dead wee hours of the night blindly fumbling my way to the bathroom.
I must’ve been really beat-out with lethargy that I mistakenly opened the door to a lighted room with already someone standing in the middle of it and apparently wasn’t the dear old bathroom I had for so long been prowling for.
The stranger in the middle of the room looked at me. And I looked at him, very drowsy and all.
“Wrong door…” I grumbled at the stranger less than apologetically, slammed the door shut, yawned luxuriously, and turned my back on it.
And then I caught sight of the bathroom.
And I looked back at the door.
Then at the bathroom.
Then at the door.
“Hey! Who the hell do you think you are setting your foot in Charles’s room and just standing there like it’s your very own right to be there in the first place!” I burst into the room and started hollering my head off at the stranger, “What the hell do you think you’re doing breaking into private property like…” Then I looked at the stranger again. And he looked at me. And boy was there a thunderclap of hasty clarity.
It was Syd in the room, the testy, sleepy-headed, bagged-eyed witchy brother of Nathe’s, crouching low on his knees by the bed, pulling a long face at the sight of me as if having been given an imperial pain in the ass.
“What do you want?” he drawled, his eyes were those so characteristic of insomniac vagrants sleepwalking the urban jungles of a modern world, “Girls’ restroom’s out there in the gents, the kitchen in the slaughterhouse, the TV in the fridge, your own room down in hell. Nothing’s in this room. What do you want from here?”
“What do you mean what I want?!” I was grisly horror-stricken and had broken into staccato shrieks of irascibility so that I wouldn’t look to be as scared as I really was, “This is Charles’s room and you witches have no right to just charge inside and…!”
“This ain’t nobody’s room but my graveyard,” his eyes were swollen, bulging masses of sleeplessness that somehow oddly reminded me of the eyes of Charles the winter he picked up playing Asphalt 8 with Tob every day till four o’clock in the morning eating nothing for the whole night but their spastic knuckles and frostbitten lips. “…Now where’s that nutters old man of yours…”
I was so fiercely contending for our inviolable rights to private housing that I had completely lost track of the existence of Charles. Just then there was a tremorous, whinnying cry from within the wardrobe and along with it a stealthy, tentative sliver of its opening door along the groove.
“Get—out—from—there—” Syd droned, the way a tried-out tabby would to a dismal mouse at bay at his own hole.
There was a short, crackling shriek of utmost mania, and the wardrobe shut its timorous mouth with a stifled crack. Syd looked even more pissed-off, if possible, than when we first met him the other day before and started for the wardrobe with horrendous vices salivating from his voice that would’ve made all human genocides seem pale in comparison. Intimidated, a sudden motile explosion rocketed out of the wardrobe, the clothe-hangers swirling jumpily like calamities, and flashing before our eyes the sight of Charles shooting back under his desolate bed quilt howling “Witch! Witch!!!” with the emaciated obsession of a straying animal.
Syd, whose temper it seemed had been tested to its extreme, cussed out loud for the sake and veneration of both their moms and sprang out without further ado, and a scuffle erupted between the two, the quilt a palpitating avalanche of incessant cries of fresh murder and piercing obscenities, the sheet a great white havoc of violent undertakings against the motionless murk.
There was something like the sound of hawking spit, a distinct gargle of the throat, of things coming up from below and the clang of an unknown metal swarming out of the sluicing depth and the ramming of a fist upon the back of another all hidden in shades.
“Stop it!” I cried, real cross now after certain futile attempts to lend a ready hand but had come to the devastating realization that I could be of no substantial help, “Stop it! You’re both acting like kids! Kids fight for murder, but you grown-ups fight for a bloody place on a five-cent bed that you can’t even play trampoline with! That ain’t righteous at all!”
The bulk of the quilt was now a droll parody of the late and declining Roman amphitheater, of a shrieking, epileptic hero of shuddering physique and populous perspiration, a blood-eyed, yawning beast without sleep for full years of coarse maneuverings and assaultive language, and a spectator yelling louder than the vulgar racket made, trying to lunge in and save the abysmal hero who was her dad, but then and again receiving a bloody nose or a near laceration of the skin from the one she was rather ineffectively attempting to save.
But all of a sudden, the quilt stopped moving.
And there was silence upon the room, a stolid, pilfered silence.
And out of this silence crawled Syd with a limping leg, the embers of fury and heated motion upon his heavy breath, glaring with an intolerable hate and rancor at the scrunched-up mass on the bed as if it were the pain and dread of all his sufferings.
The quilt, now neatly stacked and piled in bed, white and tall and immobile against the darkness like a miniature Washington monument serenely masoned, suddenly lit up with a blazing, blinding, eye-squinting light that flooded the whole room with its radiance and the dark, dark sky outside with its echoing promise of day.
“What… The… Hell,” Syd muttered, “just get out of there old man.”
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Slowly, gradually, and with ease, the quilt fell back onto the bed.
And there was Charles—standing on top of it, all intact and erect. Out of nowhere in his right hand was a flashlight the incandescent beams of an Olympic torch. Looking down at us from the high ground he’d positioned himself. Looking. Staring. Studying.
He had an expression that I had never before seen on his face, his chummy, endearing, and killingly fun-poking face that had for so long been the vivid emojis of my life that I could read and laugh and cry with like a face of my own. And now this face had harbored a new expression, a swimming expression that I’d never known of and could not seem to interpret and it was oddly scary and made me feel terribly alone at the same time.
And suddenly there also arose this other feeling, the feeling that he now seemed rather taller than usual standing on the bed, and it, too, felt strange and unfamiliar and disconcerting, the way you’d look at a stuffed teddy you’ve played with since you were extremely little and then one day you started looking at it really hard and found that it looked just like it did as you could remember but now it just felt so so very different that it’d all of sudden give you the creeps.
And without any decent warning whatsoever, I started crying.
Really pathetically hard did I cry and the whole time pointing a finger like a soundless gun to the man standing on the bed, the man that looked like, smelt like, sounded like, and was supposed to be my dad.
“What did you do to him?” I asked Syd I cried out loud at him, “What did you do to him?” I was ready to kill my future boyfriend’s brother in ruthless cold blood and then gladly and contentedly commit suicide whilst staring into the sorry, tragic eyes of Nathe as he watched me die like a hero in his arms.
But Syd ignored me, as if being vengefully strangled and then murdered by me one day in his sleep was the least of his concerns. Which of course got under my skin like hell, and I was ready to tell him that, when he instead looked to the stranger on Charles’s bed, a crazed expression on his worn, fagged face severely deprived of all sleep.
“See?” his voice rose half a despotic octave, his eyes two bloodshot horror movies, “Say as ya like that I have a life or ya gimme a life I want, look at ya look at ya-self just look at ya-self!” his tipsy voice moistened and cremated itself in a way not so humane. “Giving me advice! What about you? What about you, eh? Beautiful life ain’t ya got there ya wife dead in a plane crash ya son a downright captive and now ya daughter sees ya and cries like hell like a bloody three-year-old…”
“What?” I was suddenly befuddled and failed entirely to remember anything about my steadfast resolution a minute ago to assassinate Syd in his sleep by design. “I thought my brother was killed in Philly! In a plane crash! Not being held hostage by anybody!”
“Who says he ain’t ever killed in Philadelphia?” Syd looked like my English teacher the class she tried for the millionth time trying to teach me how to spell Mississippi out loud without blatantly eating any of its syllables, “He died well and hard a gosh-darn excitement for life I tell ya just watching the Liberty Bell clonk right into his forehead from below, they all did I tell ya and all that kick and the thrill of having all the Philly cheesesteaks they can eat for their whole wretched afterlife for hell’s sake…”
“But… but… I thought he was killed in a plane crash!” I protested. Boy did this guy make utterly no sense at all to any of the human race. He was even worse than Lil.
“Who says he ain’t ever killed in a plane crash?” he asked, annoyed, eyes hard and cracked and smoky like a Boeing 737 reduced to ash, “The glorious moment of his life getting himself whatever it was he’d been dreaming of free-falling full tilt with all that meteoric momentum and cussing himself and scared shitless for having ever wasted all those deuced fifteen years and darned time on a frigging delusion of grandeur of wanting to be a bloody pilot…”
I had no idea what he was talking about whatsoever and was really steadily regaining the conviction and the surety to murder him in his sleep again, when there was suddenly a quiet, soggy, and rather inward noise dripping in the darkness.
We both turned. And there was Charles again, still standing on the bed, never moving, never speaking, never seeming to breathe, but with steamy tears streaming down his cheeks in the brilliant white beam of his flashlight, looking at Syd and then at me and crying, silently crying, in a scary way I’d never seen him cry before that I thought I couldn’t take it any longer before I’d start crying too myself.
But this only seemed to make Syd a whole lot madder because he turned to the man with a face that was as sympathetic as a conflagrated building of bleeding screams. “Gimme the flashlight,” he ordered arbitrarily, and when the man that was supposed to be Charles didn’t budge, “Give me the flashlight goddam ya”, and brutally snatched from the man’s trembling hands the torch of beautiful plasma, sacred-white, and turned it off just as savagely. There was a bold and primary decidedness to his movement that made me realize for a crazy moment that this, this turning off of the flashlight, was ridiculously what he had come here for in the first place.
And then Syd approached the man on the bed, an eerie volition in his ghostly eyes that fueled the next few terrible moments before he said to him under his breath, real bored and agitated, “Just eat the flashlight.”
My eyes smarted and started crawling like pop rocks. “Are—You— CRAZY?!” I exclaimed, ten times more shellshocked than the poor Japanese people after the bombing and nuclear fallout of Hiroshima.
But on Charles’s face was no semblance of fright or despair, just a deep, slow, and melancholy sadness like the swelling waters before a risen moon.
And he did not move. Not once. Not a bit.
Syd sprang to his feet so enraged was he by the immobility of his incompliant victim. “Oh yeah?” his eyes were of every color and shape and kind, all sirens and alarms of the imploding furnace that was his heart, “You want me to feed this to ya? Oh I’ll feed it to ya awright this is how I’ll feed it to ya!”
And before I could stop him from harming anybody the quilt was up again the sheet a dead white amphitheater agonizingly renewed and there was sound and tumult and screams again of the hero the beast and an anguished audience crying out loud though pointlessly the name of her dad long unanswered.
As suddenly as it had happened there was no motion again, and out of the stomach of this twisted and gnarled mess puked Syd, empty-handed, no flashlight in sight, spurting past the bedroom door and diving into the dark dark night outside.
“You bastard!” I bolted after him, thinking that I’d cry, so torn and battered was I if I didn’t take the witch alive all alone by myself, “You big, yellow, cowardly, motherless bastard!”
But he was nowhere to be seen. Not a sound. Not a bit. Only our front door stirring, stirring in the cold night breeze like an old man’s cough shivering weakly in mid-air.
I returned, glumly, back to the room where I had left it. The bed was as silent as a churchyard. Scared of the unknown as I was, I looked to the lump on the bed, and didn’t know whether to scream or stay or cringe or cry. Suddenly the stranger on the bed tossed around, moaning slightly in his sleep.
“Phil…” it was Charles’s voice. I had no idea I would be this ecstatic to hear my dad talking gibberish into his pillow while he drooled, “That gum you gave me this afternoon… it tasted weird…”
That night I just couldn’t seem to fall asleep. I kept on thinking about the man standing on the bed, the man with the flashlight whose blaze it was had been an anguishing white, a stabbing, horrible white like an echo alive amongst all that had been dead for so long a time.
Phil… Ghastly as it’d been, it was now calling my name, over and over again like a deathless song upon the ear. I am so sorry… so so terribly sorry…a horrible father I am to you…
I screamed so loud that night that the very next day I woke up to find my bedsheet artfully painted in the contours of a yellowed and hazily malodorous little city of Philadelphia.