What follows is a story I originally wrote many years ago. I’ve been trying to publish it in various venues for a long time. Perhaps too long. In a different form, it won second prize in a fiction contest with Indiana Review. But in this incarnation, no one wanted to take it. I guess I can see why. It’s a bit Spielbergian. Young protagonists. Dark. Awkward. Slightly not un-tropy enough. Yet maybe too tropy. In any case, I decided to post this on here for free since it’s at the end of its professional life. Enjoy.Â
Will Nalin’s mother went to the bottom of the world. She never returned. Her company bought tiny handmade crafts from Chilean artists and sold them to distributing companies in the States. She was stabbed in the Aysen region while trying to negotiate for some baskets. Will Nalin was in preschool when she died.
At ten, Will had rings around his eyes. Dark sleepless circles. Baggy shirts. Ill-fitting pants.
The first thing he'd asked me after we introduced ourselves in science class was: “What do your parents do?”
“My mom works second shift in Recovery,” I said.
“Oh,” Will Nalin said. “My mom lives at the bottom of the world.” I didn’t understand what that meant until a little later. Â
I did find out that Will learned backgammon at six and idly pried open old VCRs. He separated out parts in Tupperware.
The first time we hung out, Will and I found a discarded canister of mace in the lot behind his house.
Our parents saw no need to punish us. We’d found punishment in the canister.
I often fell homesick. I never spent the night when Will asked. But when I finally did, it made me wonder what Mrs. Nalin's presence would've been like. Mr. Nalin was tall, lithe, and stern; a less-than-big-time guy in a scientific research firm. He had long curly silver hair, pulled back when he worked on stained glass projects in the basement. He wasn’t old, but he'd gone prematurely gray in this robotic way, and he had a thick mustache to match. He wore linen pants with monochrome oxford shirts.
One late November night, after Mr. Nalin said good night to us and turned out the light, Will and I stayed up to watch the Junior Miss USA beauty pageant. The television in his room was a privilege. We reeled at the sight of sixteen-year-old girls pivoting on high heels, their thighs greased up in copper tones. Will told me to look between the legs, where they met. I was oblivious. He began to explain. Â
Then Mr. Nalin burst in. Will and I huddled together on his bed, knees to chests in anticipation of young swimsuited girls. Mr. Nalin hauled us out. He’d handled me roughly a time or two, no more than a friend’s father was allowed. But this was adult anger on a level I’d never seen, nor ever wanted to again. Â
He had us both under the armpits, his fingers digging in where flesh is most tender. It seemed like the natural way to manipulate small children: where the arm meets the body, like a lever or a latch. As if we would offer up the truth if he rattled it out of us by violent making.
We stood against the hallway wall in pajamas. Mr. Nalin asked what we were doing. He smelled like linseed and breath mints. Instinctively, I knew I was not supposed to answer. Answering wasn’t allowed for visitors, the irony not lost on me, considering Will had sort of a stutter and shy. He had pissed his corduroys during a classroom spelling bee a month back. I posed, silent, my hands folded. Will's chest heaved and wheezed. Mr. Nalin told him to shut up.
“Yes, sir,” Will said. His lips bent into an odd shape while his body was deciding whether to cry or not. He was never in control. Mr. Nalin yelled, Why had we boldly defied him? The man was speaking as if we'd caused bodily harm. Then I heard a word I didn’t know or understand the implications of. Flecks of spit gathered at the corners of his mouth.
“Were you two masturbating?” he asked.
Will Nalin couldn’t speak. His shoulders slumped. They answered for him.
“Were you masturbating together?” Mr. Nalin repeated. He seemed disappointed when he said it. I thought he might cry as well. His mustache faltered. I had no idea what he was asking. Will knew. Mr. Nalin was assumed much. Two boys, barely pre-teen, sleeping in bunk beds watching a teenage beauty pageant?
Mr. Nalin started the horrible question again when Will interrupted with a mumbled defense. But before he could say anything, Mr. Nalin reached back and slapped him full across the face with the palm of his hand. As if expecting it, Will’s face released everything. Water from eyes. Thick saliva from mouth. Snot from nose. The face was a sieve. The impact of Mr. Nalin’s harvesting shame deep from Will’s body.
My muscles locked. Mr. Nalin, too, worried the situation. Then he said, in a curt tone, that I needed to pack my things and go home.
It was a ten minute bike ride home. At night, the suburbs terrified. Elaborate, two-storied monstrosities, prefabs, all largely looming, with trimmed lawns, unlit houses lurking over the curbs. The road hummed under the tires. My hands, loose and rickety. I swerved, nervous-crying. When I got home, my mother let me in and put my bike away. She pulled me aside and brushed the hair from my eyes. She put my backpack on her back. I loved that.
“What happened, hun?” she asked.
“Nothing, nothing,” I said. How to form the past fifteen minutes into coherency? I knew her, though. She’d let me simmer.
Dad was cocktailing and futzing in the kitchen with the ice cube maker when he nosed in, asking what happened. Mr. Nalin had called in the interim and said that Will had been abusing privileges. I was sent home as punishment.
Why parents won’t believe their own children when they most should continues to baffle.
I told them outright that Mr. Nalin had hit Will in the face. Hard. They didn’t listen correctly. “What?” my father said. He was incredulous, partly from the drink. He was pouring corn syrup into a bowl of peanut butter for dessert. “I don’t think he would do something so stupid in front of another child.” My mom deferred to dad. I insisted. They thought I was defending Will’s bad behavior. They sent me to bed.
I’d realized hanging out with Will Nalin was a privilege to me, not the other way around. He was cleverer than other sixth graders and had a morose quality about him, which was brought out especially when he showed me how to play chess. I could never comprehend a knight's move. All the other pieces were intuitive in their possibilities, whereas the knight had this shifty L-shape to it that was out of line with the elegance of the game. We puppetted the pieces. He’d have the bishop tell me in a wizened English voice which move was admirable and which was abominable. He used those words exactly.
Unlike other kids our age who reveled in curse words like they’d been given an unwieldy gun or knife, Will used fuck and shit like tiny scalpels, making incisions in sentences that made them sound adept and grown-up. We were going to bypass adolescence and tunnel into the heavy light of foreign novels, wearing ties for no reason, and staying home nights to play chess. Will Nalin was teaching me to be an adult. Although, a version of adulthood I never met with.
I fretted for him; alone with a father. There was an iron business waiting for him. Was I guilty that I was safe and warm with two parents who loved me in excess?
I never spent another night at Will’s. Â
Over Christmas, I didn’t phone him, scared to call and get Mr. Nalin instead. When school snagged us back in January, Will was missing. I asked our teacher where he was. She said she'd try to find out. Two days. No word from my teacher. Eventually, she realyed, in reluctance, that Will Nalin was now home-schooled.
Later, I biked to Will’s unannounced. That was the only way I could get him to see me. He needed to know he wasn’t alone.
I dumped the bike and knocked on the door. Heavy footfalls from inside. I steadied myself. Mr. Nalin answered with the blankest look, as if he’d never dragged me down a hallway by my ball and joint socket.
He held a purple piece of stained glass in his hand like a shiv. Seeing his face, stone-colored and sagging, I wondered what he was getting out of all this. I wondered if he felt remorseful.
“Can I help you,” he said.
I asked to speak with Will, please. He kept looking at me after I asked, like I would disappear if he willed it. There was a picture on a side wall of Mrs. Nalin. She was in the forefront of the photo with a green mountain behind her. Maybe it was Chile? Peru? She had brown hair and a round face. Sunglasses, colorful kerchief around the neck, sandals. Pictures of her populated the whole wall. Mr. Nalin called for Will and he ran from the back of the house.
He wasn’t enthused. Probably because now he would suffer the consequences of an uninvited friend. Because I’d reminded him, just by standing on his doorstep, of how isolated and terrible life was. An eleven year old boy, itching for company, adventure, activity. He had no outlet; he had no change of scenery. He was stuck.
Mr. Nalin stood back, giving us the semblance of privacy.
I learned then there was no privacy for children. That property had to be stolen.
Will asked what I wanted. He still ate animal crackers. He bit the head off a lion, chewing, listening.
“I know you’re not at school anymore and wanted to see how you were.”
Will turned to his father who leaned on the staircase, perusing mail. He continued in a whisper, “I’m home-schooled now. It’s okay. I watch television during lunch, if I finish on time. Dad teaches me how to make stained glass stuff. That’s kinda cool.”
He looked and sounded placid. It was all I had to go on.
“Want to hang out?” I asked.
“Depends how much work I get done. We may go fishing. Write down your phone number again. I’ll call you this weekend, if I can. I’ve got something to show you.”
He handed me graph paper and a pencil, and I wrote my number. Before he shut the door, I asked him if he was okay. He nodded his head; then the finality of the door’s bolt clicking. Their lawn lay fulsome and immaculate. I pictured Mr. Nalin an obsessive who made Will cut it with the push-mower, even though I knew they had a rider. I picked up the bike and ticked it along next to me.
Halfway home, I passed a woman in jeans with no shoes. Her feet were cut up. Shirt untucked. She had long black hair and dragged a leash and collar with no animal. I heard her crying softly. Then crying turned to static. The leather leash scraggled around, popping on the cracks. Her face was hard to discern. I remember thick hair, the solidest part of her. I didn’t intervene. Adolescent diplomacy skills were nascent at best. Â
January snow fell. I read a hundred page book on Albert Einstein. I wrote a report. February melted. Hot coffee smells stained my clothes.
Weeks went by with no contact from Will Nalin. The personal hazy enclave we shared together receded.
Came a Saturday morning early in March. I was talking with my dad on the couch when Will Nalin called and asked to meet him in the undeveloped lot behind his house. Dad was slouched deep in the cushions with a mug, wiping milkfoam from his upper lip.
“When can we meet this Will?” he asked. I fabricated lies about Will navigating a busy Boy Scout schedule. He shrugged. “Put a coat on,” he said.
I met Will in the unruly lot. Their house was on the edge of this burgeoning subdivision. A small creek snuck through the field. For a moment, the dark haired woman in jeans from weeks before was stationed next to him with her hair crawling around. I edged my palms over the wessel grass that grew abundantly in the lot. The smell tinged with a sharp, sweet odor. Dry grass cracked underfoot.
It wasn’t the woman. Just a sapling bending toward him. Will’s house was almost out of sight.
Antsy to display the surprise, we hopped the creek where wooden pallets spread out and a large brown tarpaulin covered it all, lumpy underneath. We shucked it off. Cardboard boxes duct-taped to one another. Simple moving boxes. Nine of them. The shape was analogous to a crossword from above. Behind the boxes were sycamores and aspens that went on till the light died and your eyesight quit. It was a perfect setting.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Did you tell your parents?” he asked.
“Good. Cause if my dad ever found out then I would be...If he finds out about this,” he said, pointing to the boxes, “Then I’ll really get it.” I pictured Will, his arms and chest the color of a black apple. “There’s a box downstairs next to the workbench that's full of pictures. My dad's glued tons of them to the wall. There’re letters she wrote and some clothes are in another box. A little say his father was only the way he was because Will’s mom died. And it was getting worse. He was calm the whole time he told me this. Will looked gaunt.
“I’m going to make a new mom,” Will said. I didn’t understand. “The machine,” he said, pointing. “I’ve got the plans. I drew them.” Labyrinthine and unintelligible schematics and numbers scattering pages and pages of his father’s graph paper. The handwriting fussed around. I handed them back. I thought I heard someone coming through the grass and sticks behind us. No one. Will Nalin’s eyes were sunk and hard-looking since I’d last seen him. The skin jaundiced over months. His hair faded into blonde. Strands were going white. “Can you help me finish it?” he asked. The pallets were from a loading dock. He’d stolen them. Dragged them through the woods. Wasn’t like him to do that.
“The boxes are from the basement,” he said. They smelled like basement. The whole structure was growing soft in the corners from damp. The whole scene had the scent of a beast just dead, decaying rapidly in a small space. We stood there. I asked if he felt like we were being watched. Will cleared stray leaves off the machine.
“Probably,” he said. I felt the tender area in my armpits ache. Will Nalin wasn’t crazy. He was my friend. I knew if I were him, I would need someone on the outside to keep me in check. I would help, knowing the end of that endeavor wouldn’t be tidy, that one or both of us would end up hurt, broken, bleeding.
Machines weren’t solely made of metal, I learned. Will had researched all that next week when he wasn’t busy laboring over history tests his father poured onto him. The Nalins had a collection of anatomy books. One was called The Human Machinery. The cover depicted an unsexed human with an engine in the chest and belts spinning. We thought that was great. A machine could be flesh, bone, blood.
The whole plan ran like this: Will would sneak out when he could. On the days that he worked on the machine, he would put a stuffed owl on his window sill. I would ride by after school and check the status. We’d meet in the lot, and I’d help Will build the machine.
The first order of business was to decide what made mother. We needed essence. How did you distill motherhood? Will said the biggest problem would be that he couldn’t exactly recreate his mom. What we’d create would be a version of the original. Mrs. Nalin as interpreted second-hand. Since Mr. Nalin worked downstairs all the time, he was sure to notice the box with her stuff had been riffled. Will had already taken the lock of hair.
“The starting point,” he said.
Will said I needed to collect. “Anyone with a mom will do,” he said.
I stared at him. “That’s everyone.”
“Then we have a lot to choose from.” Â
He appeared hale when he mused about the machine. He spoke with confidence, and we would often take small breaks to play a game of chess on a travel board with magnetic pieces. Work consisted of Will inside the machine, odd clicking noises and abrasive sounds emitting from the boxes; and myself keeping a watch out for his father, clearing more plantlife—ferns, piles of fallen lumber, piles of stone—for the ever-growing machine.
He’d be in there for long periods of time. I talked to the boxes, told stories, because there was no one to communicate with while Will was inside; and when Will exited, he hadn’t heard a word. He never let me inside the machine. He said only he could enter the machine. Of course, I was curious. I never dared enter in case he caught me.
Heading home one evening, I noticed long dark threads in the gutters between my house and Will’s. Long strands, like wires in a computer or a Halloween wig. The threads easily distanced whole blocks. Some went longer, down into the thin sewer drains.
Complaining, my father groaned, saying it was algae.
Leslie Singer lived two houses down. She showed me her mom’s compact one afternoon on the bus.
“Isn’t it great?” she asked.
I had no idea what the circular thing was, until I saw her use it. She kept it in her tiny purse, a small patent leather square with a metal clasp. Her mom was letting her borrow all of it. She was so proud.
I saw it as perfect item for the machine. Nothing, at the time seemed more motherly than a compact. When Leslie wasn’t paying attention, I slid the compact into my bookbag. Â
Outside the Nalin's house, in the rain, I saw the owl and trudged through waist-high weeds and marshy mud where Will waited. I handed him the compact.
The plan now had definition. “Eye,” he said. His smile disappeared. “Thank you,” he said. I awaited the next order. Will’s face was ready to dispense bad news. “You should go now,” he said. “This part is hard and I can’t have anyone around.”
I was affronted. I asked why I couldn’t stay.
“Because this is the work, my work. This is my part. You did yours.”
“If this is going to be like this, then…”
“This is how it will be,” he said. “Are you going to help?”
Will Nalin held the compact down at his side as if it had always been his. His eyes still sunken and hard, but when he looked at me they were different. They were grateful.
“Shit,” I said. “Yes, I’ll help.”
Much later, we sat on the creek bed, the machine in front of us, gaining ground, telescoping back into the woods, into undeveloped plots. There was a large rock maybe one hundred yards deep from where we sat. In the past two weeks, the machine slunk almost halfway to that rock.
I asked Will what he’d done with Leslie Singer’s mother’s compact. He said it was hidden somewhere safe; I shouldn’t worry. He said he’d let me know when he fed it to the machine.
I turned to see it again. The machine had changed.
Did Will spray Pledge on it or laquer it?
Because it looked shiny. Did he add boxes?
He was lying. It was larger, I was sure.
The behemoth intertangling of boxy limbs, winding in and out of tree shoots and saplings, dead leaves and moss and plant matter, and squinting from far away it resembled a creature lying in wait. If I spent a lot of time near it, I began to hear a croaking sound like old ropes and boards on a seafaring ship. Often when Will was inside.
That month, Will began lying to his father about where he was spending the tiny amount of free time he had. Mr. Nalin spent his time at home, working on projects and teaching Will. To justify his absences, Will told his father he’d joined a junior college’s chess club, impressing them with preternatural talent. Mr. Nalin allowed few things. One was chess or backgammon-related activities.
Will contacted kids using my name. Small numbers of listless middle schoolers brought him items every afternoon for a week while late winter-early spring trickled on. The donaters claimed the articles reminded them of their moms.
A framed picture of a beach with a pastel sunset, dusty. Electric bills, overdue. Bag of peanuts. Sweatpants. Unsmoked cigarettes. Hairbrush. Yarn, never used. Reading glasses, scratch on right lens. Dictionary, certain words marked in red ink. Coffee mug, chipped.
Will, the posturer, told these kids that he was filming a movie and needed props. They would be returned promptly. He offered some kids money.
He revealed his own personal additions to me: gloves with soft lining; a broken bottle; a brick from a nearby construction site; a hunting knife; oversized ceramic and jade chess pieces; a heating blanket; a 1920s Art Deco cigarette lighter; poems cut from periodicals; shavings of balsa wood.
My parents were over at the Singers’ house for a barbecue one balmy night in early April. It was late. I was supposed to be asleep, but I was reading The Human Machinery. I hid it under my bed. Will had marked the pertinent pages. Â
Maybe I wasn’t adult yet. I studied the diagrams—I didn’t even know which way parts fit inside a girl’s body—then moved onto other, more intelligible pictures. A baby in a womb. To think I had been that small dodged logic. I wondered if my mother was amazed at seeing something that had once been inside of her walking around her house, much larger, and hungry.
I read about pregnancy and motherhood. Breast-feeding and infancy. I read that children can die if they aren’t touched by human hands. I read we are born with reflexes that save our lives.
The woman with the dark hair I’d seen in the middle of the street four months before appeared to me in my mind. Her feet were slit open from heel to toe. Dirt and sand gritty in the wound. Then I heard the back door to our house swing open. My mother was crying. I switched off the desk lamp and shut my door to a crack, listening. My mother’s sobbing was muffled.
I went to hug my mom who had stopped crying by now. She wasn’t the one that needed help. My father sat at the kitchen table. His head in his hands, foot tapping. I asked what happened. My mother looked at me for the first time in my life with direct trust, as if, with the information she was about to hand over, I would be vaulted into the next level of maturation.
Could she trust me with something hard?
“Valeria,” my dad said, pleadingly. “He’s old enough.”
Sirens moaned up the street. My mother told me that Leslie’s mom had been enucleated.
“He’s not a nurse, Val.” I didn’t need to know the word.
My mother nodded and began crying all over again. My father began grinding lots of coffee beans.
They never found Mrs. Singer’s eye. She’d complained of migraines all that week to her family. Blurred vision occasionally. She missed a day of work. She laid on the couch, took Excedrin. Nothing worked. She figured it’d pass. And the night of the barbecue, it did.
A group of neighborhood adults sat around a patio table, eating. Mrs. Singer didn’t have much of an appetite. There were cocktails, cigarettes, maybe a joint. Leslie’s mom excused herself and returned clammy. She complained of pains in her skull. She drank water and listened to the conversation. She got up again to use the restroom.
No one knew how long she’d been passed out on the tub, head jerked back, with blood funneling into her mouth and down her neck from the hole in her head. My mother went in to check on her and screamed.
Quiet hissing escaped the hole. Mr. Singer rushed in, picked her up and took her to the couch. Red was everywhere, dripping into the tub drain, on the bottom of neighbors' sandals.
I’ve learned the body doesn’t wait around for you to make decisions or approvals. It takes what it wants, when it wants. The eye was gone. My mother kept asking my father where the eye went. As if it was capable of growing legs and leaving Ms. Singer’s head of its own accord from boredom or spite. Â
Will Nalin shut me out. I let it happen because he’d cultivated a sense of power over me. My pity for him soured into ignorant compliance. I pleaded to know how the machine worked and he hushed me and started talking about how great the machine would be when it was finished.
There was no we. It was all him. What was I doing to help out?
“If it wasn’t for you, I never would’ve had the idea to create the machine or to have the bravery to continue,” he said.
“How did I help create the idea? I never came up with this. This is nothing I would ever think up.”
“Isn’t it?” he asked.
He told me to watch the machine while he went to the house. He held me in a gaze for a beat, as if sizing me up.
I decided I was going to crawl inside the machine.
It was now a stretching mass like a multi-fingered hand. It was moldering and collapsed from the outside. What was so terrible about this heap of shit? There was nothing particularly magical about anything we were doing. I'd sussed out the fakery of Santa and the Easter Bunny early on. How was my rational mind being lured into believing what was occurring here? Â
I approached the machine and there was a slit like an orifice cut into one box facing Will's house. It was an entrance. I parted the cardboard which didn’t fall away. It was dark and smelled like the underside of a pile of leaves. Inside, there were long tunnels of boxes where there appeared little seepages of light where seams weren’t fully connected. The sound of a motor churned on and on inside. Coming near and then far. There was no sign of Mrs. Singer’s compact. I crawled until I noticed I could sit up straight without hitting my head. There were sections where I stood up, fully extending my legs. I jumped up to touch the ceiling but it was too high.
I don’t know how long I was in there. Time outpaced me. It lagged behind or hurtled forward. I crawled back out the machine mouth and heard the rustling of feet in the field and a woman’s voice mixed in with Will’s. He said my name. Parting through the tall grass, he was alone.
I’d never been afraid of Will Nalin, but in that moment he was up there with his father, who I hadn’t seen since the day I rode over to make sure he was alright. I stood up. I wiped off the crumbs of the earth. A fleeting image of the woman was walking away toward the house. She had the long dark hair, jeans. Will said hello to me as if we were meeting for the first time. He was holding a flashlight and a leather bag.
“I told you not to go in there,” he said. He looked disappointed, like his father on that first awful night. “What did you see?” I told him a lie, I told him I saw the compact. I told him something happened to Mrs. Singer that he needed to know. I hated confrontation.
He said he knew about Mrs. Singer and wasn’t it great? It meant the machine worked. He was expressionless. As if the muscles needed to emote had been severed deep inside. I wanted to ask about him and his father, if things had gotten worse.
“Is your father still…” I let it hang there. At this, he cocked his head.
“My father?” he asked. “What makes you think I have a father?”
He set the items in his hands down, and interlaced his fingers. He sighed. He was more grown up now than I had ever seen him. It wasn’t a place I wanted to get to. I didn’t feel a clamoring to be so old anymore. I could wait my turn.
“I’m sorry. You’re going to have to go and never come back. I have a lot to do and little time to do it.”
I stepped forward and asked where the stuff from the store was. And the kids who’d helped. He bit his lip and nodded. Will Nalin walked over to the machine and put a hand on it as if to sooth it or check for a pulse. “I like machines,” he said. “We’re all machines. Moms are machines. Dads. Wonderful.” He started to scratch his fingernails into the top of the machine. The material came off under his nail like dead skin. He put a clutch of fingers in his mouth.
I ran out of the field. When I got home, I immediately burnt the borrowed anatomy book page by page with fireplace matches. I didn’t want any part of Will Nalin around me.
My parents grounded me for messing with fire. Â
The flu moved into my body the next day like a heavy atmosphere. April was for illness. I shivered and sweat or vomited into a plastic bucket used to wash the car. My parents fought about taking me to the ER. I was dehydrated. Every time I cramped into terrible shapes, and they were on the verge of starting the car, I recovered enough for them to give up the idea.
What I remember about that span of time was that Will, in some form, visited me. He came late at night and sat on the end of my bed. The twin bed mattress would depress with a boy’s weight, but there would be no one there. Will talked to the wall, spinning stories about his mother. How she and Mr. Nalin met while they were both in Ireland on Fulbright scholarships.
He did the voices of his father and mother. Mr. Nalin met Will’s mom in a pub on the island of Inishmore during a day trip. He was so taken with her, he bought her a purple Aran sweater. She gave him her bag of salt and vinegar crisps as a joke. They fell in love.
I would try to call out for my parents when Will came, but my throat would close up. My voice evaporated. If my mom or dad checked on me, Will disappeared and carried on with his anecdote as soon as they closed the door.
In the middle of that week, at the nadir of illness, I heard my mom talking to another woman out in the living room. I shouldn’t have, but I got out of bed to spy with weak legs. It was the long-haired woman. This time she wore a gray dress, a white belt, her hair pulled into a pony tail. She was holding a mug of something hot between her hands. I could see the steam rising to meet her face. Her hair was black as the corners of my room at night and just as depthless. She put her hand in it once to shake out the tail and it was deep. You could lose a hand in there. The two laughed and carried on, and then she turned, slowly. Where she sat, she had a direct view down the hall to my door. I collapsed when she saw me and my mother came rushing at the sound. She asked me to wake up. Say your name. Do you know where you are? She carried me back to bed and tucked me in even though I was burning like a car parked in the summer sun.
“Who were you talking to?” I asked.
“No one,” she said, surprised. “I’ve been balancing the checkbook, honey. Now hush. Get some sleep. I’ll be back with Tylenol and some water. Don’t get up.”
I told her I heard and saw a woman with her. They were drinking hot chocolate. My mother, a sweet woman with strong hands, who’d probably seen so much hallucinating in her time that she was well past the point of finding it amusing, told me that I was dreaming and that I needed rest or I would get worse and have to go to the ER. Her necklace glinted. She had a mole on her collarbone.
And that would be bad, she added. She stood in the doorway. I could only see her silhouette. She began to cry and her voice took on that strained quality. I was too exhausted to argue with her. I slept.
In the morning, I thought of Will and what he was doing. What else had he collected and what had he put into the machine? I was over my previous unbelief. If I could, I would’ve gotten out of bed and biked to the creek and burnt down that collection of boxes, with Will inside.
All over town parts of moms were vanishing. Middle-aged women were popping up in hospitals with perfectly cauterized wounds, limbs missing, vital functions dropping, organs absent, as if they'd never been in the body in the first place. My father was reading the newspaper the night before I returned to school, the week before spring break. He was eating a grilled cheese sandwich and his fingerprints stained the paper, making it transparent in places.
“It’s a virus,” he said. He was trying not to startle my mother, but I'd heard him on the phone with a friend admitting he was scared shitless. He didn't want his wife to end up dead.
“Not a virus,” my mom said from the couch. She was under a blanket staring at the TV, which was turned off. The screen had a vapid quality to it when it was off, horribly brown-grey. It reflected your outline in shadow. “If anyone should be alarmed, Carlos, it should be me, right?”
“The news just wants to scare you,” my dad said. “Don’t listen to that crap.”
“Only affecting women, mostly between mid-twenties to forties. They’re all mothers, they say.”
“They, they, they,” my dad mimicked. “You need to relax, Valeria.”
My mom turned to me when he finished saying this. Her eyes were red-rimmed and raw. In the week while I was sick, ten of her close friends had lost body parts in mysterious circumstances. She waved me over and hugged me. As I held her, I wanted to tell her everything about Will and the machine. But part of me knew how freakish and improbable it sounded, and yet here it was a month and a half since Will started on the machine and people were fatally wounded and some women were dying.
How could this be happening?
Admission should’ve been a simple act. It wasn’t. I didn't want the reality of facing my actions.
“Maybe I won’t go to work tomorrow,” Mom said. “I’ll call in sick or take a personal day.”
“Good idea,” Dad said. He put the paper down and wiped his fingers on his pajama pants. “While he’s at school, we can go rent a boat and spend time on the lake. Get away from everyone.” My mom was lifted slightly by the plan. While I returned to subtracting fractions and diagramming sentences for predicates, they would be enjoying the first real pleasant day of spring.
The first day back to school after the flu was tense but uneventful. I kept seeing bony and haggard kids like Will Nalin. I excused myself mid-morning to use the bathroom and was in the hallway, alone. I kept waiting for Will to walk up next to me at the urinal or in the adjacent stall, just his cordovan loafers visible. I smelled wood shavings and hot solder from his father’s workshop on everything that morning: my coat, my notebooks, the fountain water.
A glassy female voice rang down the hall. Returning to the classroom, I saw the long-haired woman that’d been in my house talking to my geography teacher at her desk. I couldn’t walk in there with that woman standing there. With her slim face, her sharp nose, long mouth. Her ears were hid; I’d never seen them. And her eyes had usually been shut. I stepped back into the hall and thought about it.
The walk home was thirty minutes. I fumbled with the key and lock, made a bowl of instant oatmeal for lunch. No one administrative was looking for me. The microwave dinged and I set the bowl on the table. I stared out the back window onto the street. Up it came a growing dot. It was Will Nalin furiously pedaling a small girl’s bike. His knees hit the bike frame. Streamers came off the handlebars. He was heading to my house. He had a courier bag over his shoulder and he was sobbing up the walkway.
“Please, let me in! I know you’re in there.”
“Why should I?” I yelled back.
“My dad found the machine.”
Through a window by the door, I saw he had a bloody nose. Was part of his ear torn off? He was heaving and pathetic like a dog thrown from a speeding truck. This was insane. I couldn’t let Will stand out there. I unlocked the door and let him in.
Blood spattered all over him. He asked for a glass of water and thanked me ten times for it. He drank it in one go, soaking the front of his shirt. It had chess pieces in descending order of size screen-printed on the front. I told him I liked his shirt. He nodded. He was different, his eyes unsunk, his face and demeanor yielding. He smelled like sweat and candy.
“You’ve got to reverse what’s happened,” I said.
“Can I use your phone?” he cut in. “I’m going to call my uncle. I can’t live with my dad anymore,” he said. “I’m done. The machine is through. I disassembled it, trashed it.”
“What about all the stuff that you put inside? Are you going to give it back to the people who gave it to you?”
Will laughed in a tired way.
“Can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry. Serious. I can’t get that stuff back anymore. It’s gone, disappeared.” He opened his hands like a magician after a trick.
“What about your plan? Your mother? You’re not going to be able to have one now.” I realized this was the last thing I should’ve been worried about when so many other kids were in danger of losing theirs. Even then, Will had me in some secret pocket. His eyes became excited.
“You didn’t believe what I was doing anyway,” he said.
“No, but I could tell you thought I was stupid.”
“Maybe at first…” I said.
“Hmm,” was all he said. Again, there was a weight he had over me. “How about the phone?” he asked after a moment.
“Of course.” I pointed to the one hanging on the kitchen wall.
“I’d kind of like some privacy,” he said.
I remembered how we used to steal what privacy we could. I wouldn’t make him do that.
“Yeah,” I said, “The other one’s in the bedroom. Last door on the right.”
He walked off and I wondered what would become of all the women who were maimed. One woman’s liver disappeared. Another, her kidneys. She would have to be on dialysis at thirty-one. And what about Mr. Nalin? Didn’t someone need to suffer the consequence for all that had happened? Why not him?
I heard Will talking to someone in back, then a click. He returned. He looked relieved. He said his uncle was going to pick him up.
“Oh, well you can wait here, then,” I said.
“No, he’s going to pick me up at my place.”
I assumed his father was in the city; I was glad to hear it. But I was still worried about him returning to that horrible house. I considered asking about our friendship, but knew that in this moment, I was as guilty as Will for what had happened. I saw him out and he biked away as fast as he'd arrived. With some sort of weary resolution, I realized how hungry I was.
I put Will's water glass in the sink and bit my thumbnail. The taste was sweet like sugar. I pulled my hand back and saw it was covered in red. There was blood all on my hand, in my mouth. Spitting up, I saw Will's glass was wrapped in a bloody handprint. The blood must have come off the glass into my hand like spun sugar. But I knew blood was not sweet, it was iron-like and dried quickly. Will rode over here in the wind and his blood was still wet? The blood was sticky, like corn syrup, and it took me a minute to thread it all together.
I thought about the last fifteen minutes. Why had Will needed to use my phone if his dad was in the city? I ran to my parents bedroom. My mom’s side of the closet was open and hangers were in a pile, fiddled with; blouses and pants were wadded. Her dresser drawers were all yanked open. Her undergarments strewn over the floor.
I went to the phone and hit redial. Time and temperature. I felt a noxious gas filling my body. I couldn’t call my mom or dad.
They were in the middle of a lake somewhere.
I rode my bike to Will’s, hoping to catch him. I pounded the door to try and get Mr. Nalin. There was such a mess inside, I had to shoulder my way past the door. A bird flew out by my head. No one had cleaned in weeks, maybe months. I hadn’t stepped foot in that house since Mr. Nalin hit Will.
The air reeked of rotten food, feces, like the inside of a wild animal’s den. Potted plants browned and crumpled. The sofa was flipped over. Doors hung on their hinges. I couldn’t see the floor through layers of trash and debris. I called Will’s name, but knew he would be with the machine.
Running through the vacant lot, I crushed small sprung up wildflowers. I felt light, my feet strong. Black-eyed susan, bersia, and thigh-high wessel grass. Soon I wasn’t running, wasn’t even flying. Everything was wet from rain, and in the distance that pale, sharp woman with the dark hair that didn’t want to end, that kept falling down all around you till you couldn’t see, didn’t want to see, didn’t care.
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