Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

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About the Author

The Hidden

By

Andrew Michael Schwarz

Episode One

“Jack’s Disease”

Copyright © 2015 Andrew Michael Schwarz. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without he permission in writing from Andrew Michael Schwarz. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Book Layout by Andrew Michael Schwarz. Cover art by Andrew Michael Schwarz.

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1

Four simple words and six syllables of terror changed Jack Fuller’s life forever: “You have a parasite.”

Jack Fuller had no concept of the horror that lurked just behind the combination of vowels and consonants. “You have a parasite” were words that men in other places and at other times had heard before. Many befores. They were nothing new.

Men had been hearing them said by their doctors, their medicine men, and each other for hundreds, perhaps, thousands of years. “You have a parasite.”

And yet never before had Jack Fuller heard them. Never before had Jack Fuller been faced with the terror such a sentence can bring when spoken to you—at you—about you.

Perhaps, “You have a demon” had been said to the ancestors of the race—his ancestors—when they could no longer raise a spear to impale a gazelle, or retain sufficient body mass to fight the giant reptiles. Perhaps, “You have a demon” was the first diagnosis, after which, the words had changed, but the intent had stayed the same. Perhaps, “You have a demon” morphed into “You have a vampire,” which in turn became “You have a deadly disease,” all the way down the line to, “You have a parasite, Mr. Fuller.”

Which parasite had not been answered yet. Were there so very many? Which strand of microbial life was swimming in his blood, his internal organs, his brain, had not even been touched upon. Yet.

Doctor Gromwell was not Jack Fuller’s doctor, either. He was simply the specialist that the hospital had called in to diagnose him, and Jack was not impressed at all. This Doctor Gromwell seemed to have nothing of substance to say about it, and Jack was just beginning to despise him.

“A parasite?” Jack repeated, swallowing something stuck and dry in his throat. “What kind?”

Gromwell shrugged. The care lines in his face could betray any emotion he might be apt to express—something a doctor, no doubt, worked hard to effect over the years when in the business of giving folks grim details—but now, the elder shook his head and his thick eye brows knitted together.

“I don’t know,” he said flatly.

Jack bit down on his lower lip. What kind of answer was that? What breed of incompetence said that particular sentence to a man inquiring about his health?

“You don’t know? Well, can you tell me anything at all?” Jack asked, trying to remain calm and polite.

“I can’t,” the modern shaman replied, “with any confidence.”

Here appeared the beginnings of a game that Jack did not want to play. Ask and Not Answer, Ask and Get No Where.

“Well, sure you can,” Jack insisted, verging on a mad giggle. “Sure you can, Doc. Like how do you even know it’s a parasite in the first place? Let’s start there, shall we?”

Jack did not think of himself as an angry man, but he admitted to developing a certain soreness toward that segment of the population that seemed to espouse a philosophy of customer non-service, such as the brand received when calling the phone company or the internet service provider, or God forbid, the bank.

Here was that non-service, showing up in the doctor’s office, rearing its bland head, filled with scripted messages and canned responses. Here was a doctor playing it cool while the patient was heating up. Here was Jack getting pissed and a teleprompter of man not responding properly to the situation.

Gromwell walked to the other side of the room, crossed his arms in his stiff, over starched lab coat and looked down hard at the floor. It was the first sign of emotion.

“You’ve lost weight,” he began. “You’ve got muscle loss as well as fat, but your muscle is very clearly defined in your physique. That would seem to indicate testosterone levels are up, while nutrition is lacking.”

Gromwell blinked his eyes, as if to comment on the unlikelihood of such a scenario. He took a deep breath and continued.

“Your lipids panel would also seem to confirm that your digestive system is struggling for nutrients, and you mentioned the fatigue and the fevers. You’ve got a variety of symptoms that point to nothing clear cut, but obviously, you are in state of pathology, to some degree. Nothing is wrong on the one hand, but many things are wrong on the other. So”—he shrugged—“a parasite.”

Jack laughed without humor. “What are we talking about then, a tape worm? Let’s put this into categories. I am sure there are many. Aren’t you the specialist?”

Gromwell ignored Jack’s veiled insult and abruptly said: “This is no tape worm.”

“Well what then?” Jack implored.

The “buttoned lip” approach used by this doctor was quickly getting under his skin. Aside from the usual colds and flus, Jack had never been sick a day in his life. The man sitting with his shirt off in this small room had enjoyed the steadfast certainty, day in and day out, that his body was solidly healthy, reliable, free to operate without concern.

Because that is how it had been for forty-five years.

“Mr. Fuller, I know how hard this can be.”

“No, goddamn it, don’t give me that! Now, come on, I want answers and you can’t honestly stand there and say you don’t have a clue about what I might have, can you? This is the United States, for Christ sakes, we got it all figured it out.”

The doctor didn’t respond to that.

“For the love of goddamn Christ,” Jack said. “Help me out, what the hell am I supposed to do here?” He was now seeing Gromwell as something less than human.

Gromwell took a deep breath. “Are you on a diet, particularly one of these fad diets?”

“No.”

“Have you been out of the country?”

Jack shook his head.

“Do you own a cat?”

“What? No.”

“Have you noticed your testicles enlarging?”

“Doc, what kind of questions are these?”

Gromwell shrugged and put his hands up.

“There is a parasite that affects about twenty-two percent of the population. It infects the brain. Your testosterone levels are quite high. Normally this wouldn’t concern me much, except that you also have a preponderance of a hormone called HCG in your blood. It’s the pregnancy hormone.”

He lifted a hand as if to ward of premature questions. “Men and women have this hormone in their bodies at all times, but when a women is pregnant, the hormone spikes off the charts, as it should, to signal the body to prepare for pregnancy and create the placenta.

“In men, too much of this hormone can convert into testosterone. That is what I think is happening with you. This could result in an enlargement of the testes. Have you felt agitated, more so, more recently?”

Jack shrugged. “Yeah, I guess, a little.” In truth: very much. He’d been a ticking time bomb most days.

Gromwell nodded. “Well,” he said, his voice tinged with triumph. “This parasite I told you of infects the brain, it is called T. gondii, it is—it breeds in cats. Comes out in their feces. That is why I asked you if you owned a cat.

“In humans they are not too sure what it does, but it can affect personality. And, being in the brain, the hormonal changes brought about could explain why. Anger, agitation, even an increase in outgoing behavior can be indicators.”

Jack was nodding his head. It all seemed rather elaborate.

“So, you think this—what did you say, T. gondii—?”

“Toxoplasma gondii,” Gromwell replied, casually.

Jack nodded. “This T. gondii is making me aggressive, or flooding my system with, testosterone?”

“HCG that becomes testosterone, yes. Either way.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Is that the only thing it could be?”

“Well,” Gromwell said, smug in his certainty. “Sometimes Candida can do it, too, meaning cause mood swings, elevate certain hormonal levels, this kind of thing. But it seems less likely.”

“Okay.”

Jack had at least heard of Candida. He didn’t know how much he agreed with it as an actual disease, but it was less a foreign word than this T. gondii.

“Anything else, doctor? Any other theories?”

Gromwell licked his lips and considered his words.

“Have you been sexually active more than—or with different partners—than at other times?”

Jack eyed the aging man sternly, unsure whether this doctor knew the answer to that last question or not.

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, sure.” He sighed, not knowing how much of his personal life he wanted to divulge here. “I’ve been seeing a few people. But, I’m not out there, you know, bingeing or anything.”

The truth was that Jack himself felt very close to a binge. He had done it before, and would do it again. It wasn’t something he planned for, it just happened. A certain pressure built up, fomenting inside, day after day, week after week, until he needed an outlet. Or several.

He never could reckon that one partner could sate all of that hunger. And well, he would binge, that’s all. Three, maybe four different women in a month. That was his binge, nothing too ribald or lecherous, nothing so devious as he had heard about sex maniacs, or what they call satyrs, men who can’t help themselves from taking a different woman to bed every chance they get, forgetting not only the women’s names, but their faces, too.

He wasn’t uncontrollable, he was just a man. Three or four and he could neutralize, discharge all that pressure out of his head, out his body, so that he could think clearly again. And then months would go by where he wouldn’t touch a blessed one—well, more than one.

“Are you telling me I have an STD, doc?”

Gromwell shook his head. “No. I am not telling you that. I am merely exploring all possibilities.”

“Well,” Jack said. “I don’t have … anything, you know, down there or whatever. No rashes, or whatever.”

“That’s good,” his doctor said. “Look, Mr. Fuller, I’m going to send all these tests and all of your samples to the lab and they’re going to go through it all again and we’ll see what they say, okay? I will have it expedited so we can get to the bottom of what’s going on with you as quickly as possible, you understand? In the meanwhile, I need you to get plenty of rest, eat healthy, no raw meat”—he waved a finger in the air—“T. Godnii loves raw meat. Drink plenty of water and if you can, abstain. If you can’t, then you can’t.

“I don’t think you have an STD, but while we rule things out, it would be best. But for the record I believe you have a parasite, but not a tapeworm.” He smiled softly. “Okay? I don’t want you getting all worked up. I need you calm, Jack, calm. Your body will thank you for it. Can you do that?”

Jack nodded, chewing on his lip. The fight had gone out of him.

Outside Jack tried to enjoy the sun, the clear sky, the radio. He tried not to think about it, not to dwell or obsess over the problem. He went to the supermarket and purchased two grocery bags of vegetables and a case of water. He also picked up some probiotics and a bottle of whiskey. When he got home he sat on the couch and took three probiotics with his whiskey and sulked.

The light of day waned and slowly turned to twilight and already he was drunk, but wouldn’t admit to it. He went online and surfed pornography. Sometimes it could calm him down. Right now, he found it tedious and clicked off.

He ate a celery stick with peanut butter when he got hungry and when he was feeling good and drunk and sorry for himself, he pulled out the photo album and paged through the leaflets. It was the only thing he had kept from his marriage. Most of the photos were black and whites because his ex-wife, Kate, loved that kind of photography. In a world where everyone was storing gobs of digital photos Kate had been taking black and white pictures with a 35mm camera, developing them in home-made darkroom and stuffing them into photo albums for posterity.

He leafed to somewhere in the middle of the book, to the photos of Bones.

That wasn’t her real name, of course. Her name was Amalia, Amy for short. Her willowy frame had been little more than skin and bones before she’d hit puberty and became the beauty that she was today.

The nickname had come out as a joke on a Saturday morning many years ago when she had either refused to or couldn’t eat more than a single egg. That’s when he had called her “Bones” for the first time and after that, there was no going back.

She’d never seemed to mind and when she’d grown older, answered to little else. It was funny, if he called her by name, she seemed to tune him out, but when he used that disparaging moniker of a less than savory nature, she gave him her undivided attention.

She was pretty like her mom with a body type and sense of humor like her dad and she was his last link to his former self. She was a daddy’s girl, but he was a girl’s daddy, too. He loved her more than anything else on this earth.

When she had gone off to college, after he had gotten her settled in her apartment and spent the afternoon with her on campus, and once he had gotten back into his car and driven to a Denny’s parking lot, he had cried like a baby. It wasn’t even as though she had gone far, staying in Los Angeles near UCLA, like she was. Yet, even though less than an hour away, the event had taken on a symbolic meaning. His little baby girl was gone and despite the particular nest she had departed technically belonging to his ex-wife’s, she had left it all the same.

That had been over two years ago, after he and Kate had split. He had never experienced that deep a feeling of loneliness before. It was as if Bones had been the last hold he’d had on his original life. When she had moved out, the death of the old self had come crashing in on him like falling glass, and he’d mourned both.

He closed the photo album, stood up and disrobed, throwing his clothes into a pile on the living room floor. He was thin, now, more than he’d been in ten years.

Around the age of thirty-five, his belly, like so many men of that age, had developed a slight bulge. He had not been “fat” per se and had always passed the See Your Dick test, his business partner’s terrible system for determining if you were truly overweight. “If you can’t see your dick when you pee, you’re too fat.” Bill Rasthorpe would say that whenever Jack would pose the issue. Nevertheless, despite passing the “test” with flying colors, his belly bulge had bothered him.

At some point, the question “How do I flatten my belly?” became an ever-present nag.

Now, he was achieving that previously impossible task. He should jump for joy.

He inspected his upper body in the living room. Then went into the bathroom where he could see himself in the mirror. He did look pretty good, he had to admit.

Isn’t this what everyone wants: effortless weight loss?

His muscles were defined under his skin and he guessed that he was running somewhere between twenty-two and eighteen percent body fat.

Yet he hadn’t been working out or dieting.

How much muscle had he really lost? Not that much, he thought.

He decided to shave and ran the faucet to hot, waiting for the steam to curl up and fog the mirror. He lathered up the gel into a thick cream and slathered it under his nose and shaved his face and neck cleanly and close.

When he finished, he got an idea. It sent a little zing through his nerves. There was something he hadn’t done since college, since he’d wooed his ex-wife into marriage. Why not do it again now?

He rubbed up a new lather of shaving cream and spread it over his belly. The hair came off easily and he hadn’t lost the knack of not scoring the less hardy skin surrounding the navel.

Oh, youth, he thought. What foolishness. Yet, he had loved the smoothness of his skin back then, and now, wiping the area clean, remembered why.

He was not a hairy man and all things being equal, he didn’t want to be. The line of belly hair came off clean and neat and he toweled away the cream.

He was not an “old man” either and being in his mid forties, he still looked young in many respects. That combined with financial stability and confident paternal demeanor seemed to give younger women the security they craved. He had, both since the divorce and just prior to it, bedded down with several younger women. It had surprised him to learn that not all younger women wanted a younger man. He understood that now in ways his younger self would never have been able to. Women of all ages, but particularly the less experienced, needed certainty and confidence that were sometimes commodities very difficult to find in a man under thirty.

His liaisons did not come without some level of shame, however. A fair amount of the woman he had wooed over the last year had been quite young; several the same age as his daughter.

He rubbed steam off the mirror, only half aware that the faucet was still chugging out hot water.

He looked at his reflection and ran a finger along his cleanly shaven cheek. Then opened his mouth and inspected his teeth.

“Have I become a satyr?” he asked, open-mouthed.

He sighed and shook his head, wiping a crescent moon onto the mirror with side of his palm. He was tired and the booze hadn’t helped. A pair of droopy-bagged eyes stared back at him through the opening he’d made in the condensation. The only real evidence of pathology, he thought.

He stared into his reflection for a good long while and before he looked away, he saw another image.

It wasn’t a true reflection, but some trick of the light. A pair of insubstantial eyes hovered somewhere between a wisp of vapor and his right shoulder. They were rheumy and pale and ethereal, staring almost hungrily. A light profile framed them, nearly invisible in the optical illusion.

He wiped the mirror and turned off the faucet. Remember the doctor’s orders, he thought. No mind games.

“First thing,” he said to the open air, “is you gotta stop being such a lecher.” He turned off the bathroom light, stepped into his bedroom and crawled, exhausted, into bed.

2

“You hear of any kind of parasite going around?” Jack asked his business partner, Bill Rasthorpe, over lunch the following day.

Jack and Bill had been friends since college. They had both taken the bar exam on the same day. A little over fifteen years ago, they decided to go into business together, and the law firm of Fuller and Rasthorpe, LLC was born. They made their living on insurance defense work. It wasn’t the most lucrative law to practice, but it was steady and “fighting on the right side of the Mason-Dixon line” as Bill liked to say.

“Parasite? What kind of parasite?”

“Any,” Jack said. “I just wanted to know if you had heard anything, that’s all.”

“Well,” Bill said. “Odd that you ask, but yes, I have. Candida, you know about it?”

“Yeah, that’s the, ah, yeast or fungus or whatever, right?

“Yeah, well, it lives in our intestines. Everybody has it you know, but when it gets out of hand, then that’s when all the trouble begins. See it feeds off sugar and starches and shit that we eat all the time. They say a lot of people are sick from it nowadays. I used to not believe in it. The kicker is, in order to get rid of it, you have to cut the main ingredients of a doughnut out of your diet and then, I don’t know, eat pickles and plain yogurt, I guess.”

Jack was relieved that Bill had not said “T. gondii” because T. gondii scared the shit out of him.

Well,” Jack admitted. “I like pickles. Plain yogurt not so much. Speaking of sugar, can you pass it to me?”

Bill tossed him a packet, which Jack emptied into his coffee. They were having lunch in Bella’s Trattoria where Candida, no doubt, enjoyed a flourishing campaign.

Bill continued. “Brenda’s mother says she has it and says everyone has it and that if we don’t start eating right, we’re all gonna die from it. As in, the whole human race. Why you asking, anyway?”

“One of my daughter’s friends was diagnosed with a parasite and they said it wasn’t a tape worm or whatever and so, I was just curious.”

“Yep,” said Bill satisfied. “Candida, man. Everybody’s got it. It’s just a matter of time before it gets you.” He smiled gleefully. “Anyway, you about done, or do you want to get dessert?”

“No, I’m done.”

“Hey,” he said after they stood up. “You lose weight?”

Jack spent the rest of the afternoon perked up with coffee and nose-deep in case files. One of his current cases included an obese woman who had apparently fallen off a porch with a six inch drop because the railing gave way. She wanted upwards of two million dollars in insurance settlements. The problem with this particular case was not that she had fallen, for no one really believed that she had, but that the railing itself had fallen off earlier that day, and there were two witnesses who had taken photos of it lying in the grass a few hours before Caroline Farnsdale alleged to have bruised her buttocks, to say nothing of the immeasurable and ridiculously over the top emotional trauma she had suffered so terribly from.

It was going to be a “smoking gun” because even if Caroline Farsndale hadn’t fallen on account of the failed railing, how could you prove it?

He closed the file and wished he had a cigarette, despite having “quit” last year. He used to have a saying, “Once a smoker, always a smoker.” It wasn’t helpful.

By the time he began packing up for the night, Bill had already gone home. He envied his partner sometimes. Somehow, Bill managed to keep his household together. Jack had not known him to ever have cheated on his wife, nor had he heard of her cheating on him. They were a regular “Jello and fruit roll up” family who took the kids to soccer practice in between making sandwiches and picking up dog poop. In other words, happily middle-class.

He wished sometimes that he hadn’t had the affairs. They were the last straw for Kate. Perhaps, if he had not given into his … “Oh hell, say it for what it was, Jack,” he whined to himself as he pushed through city traffic. “Good old revenge sex.”

But for what? Everything and nothing. For the fights and the upsets and the clenched jaw when he asked to make love. For all that shit, he thought. All that endless shit. Unhappy middle-class, that’s what we were.

It hadn’t always been like that, though. In the beginning it had been a dream come true. Kate, the beautiful Kate with her long, dark hair and that lithe figure that he couldn’t seem to tear his eyes from. Oh, but she was gorgeous and so young when they had met, so pretty, the delicate lines of her face so finely etched and rendered as if Michaelangelo had sculpted her into being.

Oh, he’d thought that sometimes. In the beginning, when he would just look at her in passing, when he’d witness some perfectly mundane act, he’d see the perfect lines of her face and wonder how she could be.

But life, he found, wasn’t built solely on romantic notions, or beauty, or dreams. Eventually, the rubber had to meet the old worn and potholed road, where “real life” took over and if you didn’t have what it took deep down, you just wouldn’t last.

Well, they didn’t have what it took, deep down.

He pulled up to the 7-Eleven on his way home and bought a pack of cigarettes and a pack of gum. He leaned against the hood of his car, enjoying the heat of the engine, listening to the sounds of the metal cooling. It was a balmy Los Angeles night, late in the summer season.

He smoked his first cigarette in three months. It tasted terrible and gave him a stomach ache half way through. That was the problem with quitting. It ruined your taste for them.

He knew that once he smoked about half a pack, he would love it all over again. He intended to smoke the whole pack, but slowly over the next week or so. Maybe a month. He didn’t want to “start smoking” again, but he didn’t want to fight the urge either. Not now, anyway, in his weakened mental state because whether he wanted to admit it or not, this parasite business was getting him down.

He felt okay tonight, though. Better than the previous night when all he could think of was Gromwell shaking his snowy white head saying, “I don’t know.”

“Yeah, you don’t fuckin’ know, you sonovabitch. You don’t fucking know anything.”

He smashed out his cigarette on the heel of his shoe, then got into the car and turned the AC on.

It was illegal in some cities in California to smoke outside like that. Can you believe it? he thought. Illegal to smoke a goddamned cigarette outdoors? Sunland, the suburb where he was now, was not one of them. Too many rednecks out here for that kind of bullshit.

He put the car into drive, but he had nowhere to go. It was Friday night, and he simply did not want to be alone. If he went home he would just watch TV or maybe masturbate, he knew that, and he wasn’t interested. He did not have a girlfriend, really, but he did have someone he’d been seeing. They’d spent a weekend together last month in Tahoe and had both really enjoyed themselves, but she was still married and despite all their “activity” she talked about her husband too much of the time.

She still lived with this husband, in fact. The story went that he stayed out in the guest house and supposedly made a point of never coming into the main house. Yeah right, Jack thought, and little kids never pee in the pool either. He had no interest in inter-marital tangles. Christ, a guy could get killed that way.

But now, he phoned her despite himself. His heart beat quickened as the phone rang and that annoyed him. Why should he be nervous to talk to—“Hi Beth, it’s Jack.”

“Oh, hey! How are you, I was just thinking about you, if you can believe it!” She laughed. “Sounds like a line doesn’t it? No, but really I was. Do you believe me?”

He laughed. Couldn’t help it. He remembered suddenly why he had enjoyed her company so much. “Hey, use any line you want.”

“Oooh, well. We’ll see,” she giggled. Her voice captured a sexy kind of resonance when she teased. “So, what are you up to, Jack Be Nimble?”

She used that nickname for him, for some silly reason.

“Nothing,” he said and then reconsidered. He didn’t want to appear desperate. “I mean, a lot. Actually I got a really interesting case, one that’s been keeping me up at night.” A lie.

“Oh, yeah, that’s always good. Nothing like being interested in what you do for a living, huh?”

“So, how are you? How’s, ah, you know, your …”

“Oh,” she groaned. “Well, he still lives out there. I mean, I hardly ever see him, but it still makes for awkward scenarios, well, you know. I’m really sorry about what happened by the way.”

“Oh,” he laughed it off casually. “Don’t be.”

The one time Jack had gone over to Beth’s house, her Soon To Be Ex had decided that on this occasion he would come into the main house and then proceeded to bully Jack into leaving with comments like “Shyster lawyer” and “The brothel is closed.” It had worked, but only because Jack hadn’t wanted to make things more uncomfortable for Beth. Given his own devices he would have gone fist to cuffs with the jealous idiot. Then again, the man was her legal husband. When Jack had asked Beth why she didn’t just get a restraining order, she’d said she didn’t have the heart.

“Anyway,” he said. “I don’t know if you’re free tonight, but I could sure use the company. If you don’t mind, that is.”

“Mind? Oh come on. I really was thinking about you, Jack Be Nimble. I would love to.”

“Aren’t you getting ready for a hot date or something?”

“Yeah; you!”

They met in Glendale for dinner at a four-star steak house with uncomfortable seats. She looked very pretty and he was once again amazed what she could do for a pair of jeans and a blouse. She was not super thin or super anything, she was pretty in her own way and with the right clothes she bordered on “eye candy.” More than all that, though, he actually liked her personality. He chided himself in jest. Falling for a girl because of her personality, what’s wrong with you?

“I don’t normally eat steak,” she admitted. “I like it, but I just don’t, I don’t know, let myself have it.”

“Well, that’s probably a good thing. Too much red meat, you know.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I’m just not worthy of it.”

He laughed and wondered if she were serious. She said a lot of things that he wondered about the validity of. After stuffing themselves on rib eye—his doctor had said to eat cooked meat, hadn’t he?—and garlic mashed potatoes they opted for desert and pigged out on double chocolate cake and ice cream and only felt slightly guilty. Jack was thinking about his Candida or whatever, and wondered what a chocolate lava cake would do for it. Probably eat me alive, he thought. But he had been hungry—really hungry—and she was so much fun and at the moment it seemed as though the world had paused and that they could do whatever they wanted and get away with it.

He realized he felt that way a lot around her. Was such a feeling brought on by too much testosterone? he wondered. The feeling that you could, what, do anything? Get away with anything? Like what, murders?

No dummy, affairs.

After dinner she followed him back to his place. She remarked on his housekeeping and he was glad that he had thought to pick up before he left. His condo was relatively small, being a little over a thousand square feet. That meant a little clutter showed up in a big way. When you entered through the front door, you stepped into the living room and there with the smooth hardwood floors, you got a sense that the place ought to be tidy, and Jack tried to deliver on that promise most times when he was planning on bringing a woman home. Because “women didn’t like to fuck in a pig sty” was his never-spoken-out-loud rationale.

On the left, as you walked in, sat the kitchen, which meant you had to keep the dishes from piling up or else you’d get hit with a waft of rotting sewer the moment you opened the front door. Another no-no for potentially horny females.

On some level Jack felt terrible for planning his house cleaning around promiscuous sexual encounters, but he was very good at not over-thinking it.

He pulled his date by the hand through the narrow hallway that led from the living room, past the home office or den, to his bedroom at the far end. Beth didn’t resist. She was easy with her body, not too concerned about nudity with the lights on and none too modest about opening her legs for him.

“You lost weight,” she said, sitting up in bed after the fact, lighting her cigarette. Jack preferred no smoking inside, but when a woman needed to after they’d been intimate, he had no qualms.

“Yup.”

“Some diet you’re on?”

“Not exactly,” he said, rolling over on his side and propping his head up with the palm of his hand.

“Well, I would say, don’t lose any more, you’re right about at the perfect level. You wouldn’t want to go less than that or you’ll look like a runway model.”

“Right,” he said. “Look, Beth, I want you to leave your husband.”

She coughed. “Whoa, where’d that come from?”

He shrugged. “I just want you to.”

“Well, we don’t sleep together. I know you probably don’t believe that, but he really does live out there in the tree house and I hardly ever see him.”

“Why don’t you just file the papers, then?”

“I have, but he won’t sign them.”

“Oh, right I remember you told me. Well, I guess you’ll just have to move in here, then, with me.”

She smiled. “I would love to.”

“Well?”

“I don’t want to hurt him right now.”

“Yeah, I think you told me that too, but isn’t this hurting him?” He gestured to the both of them where they lay.

“If he knew about it.”

“Oh, come on. He doesn’t know you’re out doing whatever right now? He has to know, Beth. No man is that blind.”

She mulled it over. “He might. It’s not really about that, though. We haven’t been monogamous together for, oh, like five years. He has women over. Did you know that?”

He laughed and rolled onto his back. “God, what kind of—”

“I know, it’s weird. Don’t hate me for being such a reject. But I just—how do I say this?”

“It’s fine,” he said. “I don’t want to know. You can just come over whenever and we can, you know … I—I just like your company. You soothe me.”

“Do I?”

“You do.”

“Don’t you have some little hot number going to come in here the second I walk out?” she teased.

“I resent that.”

“Oh come on!”

“And if I did? Then what, huh? I guess you better never leave.”

She squashed out her cigarette in a clean ceramic ashtray and pushed the covers off baring the whole of her naked body to him. “Sloppy seconds?” she asked.

He howled with laughter and said, “You’re gross! But I don’t mind if I do.”

Beth left in the early morning hours, leaving a note behind that said, “Call me later. xoxo.” He folded it and set it on the bed stand. He liked her and if he wasn’t careful he was going to get his heart stomped on. She was sweet with an almost hayseed personality, but back of that she was a paramour to be respected. In so far as he knew, she had not been unfaithful to her husband until her second child left the house. She then filed for divorce stating that she had wanted to “all along.”

Jack was sure that Rick—the Soon To Be Ex—couldn’t understand that. Neither could Jack, but he also knew from his own failed marriage that these things rarely standup to logical third party scrutiny.

He sighed and went into the bathroom, but it wasn’t until he picked up his tooth brush that he noticed the blood.

“Oh my God.”

Instinctively he reached for a tissue. A clump of ocher-colored dried blood hung gruesomely from his left nostril. Almost like an icicle formation. He fiddled with it, probed it with his fingertip and it broke off and fell into the sink, melting into the trace amounts of water surrounding the drain. He inspected his nostril with the light and mirror as best he could, then grabbed a tissue and wiped it out. Dried blood crystals rubbed on the tissue. He went back into the bedroom and inspected the pillow casings because he hadn’t noticed any stains when he’d woken up. He used white sheets; pristinely white. He always had. There was something intensely comforting about spotless white sheets.

There were no blood stains on the pillows or the head area of the mattress. He did find a few grains of dried blood that must have flaked off, however.

But how does that even happen? Not a single drop staining the sheet or pillow casing?

Then his eyes caught something in a crook made by the top sheet and the comforter: a long, narrow stain that seemed to emanate from a source point below it.

His palms jumped to a sudden sweat as he gripped the hems of the covers. Slowly, he pulled them back. His jaw dropped to a gag. In the center of the bed were not just blood smears, but a large, blood deposit.

“Oh, Christ.”

He could see that the blood was still fresh, pooling shallowly in the center of the bed. His head was swimming. Sweat broke out on his forehead.

“No,” he said, retreating backwards toward the bathroom door, step by step as though he were being pulled by a string around his waist. “Just blood. Whatever else it is, it’s just blood.” But there couldn’t have been a less comforting observation. Blood in his bed? In his bed?

He steadied himself. Before going completely over the edge into a panic attack, he took several deep breaths and found his courage. He’d had a few of them—panic attacks—since the divorce, and he knew how quickly they could escalate.

He bolstered his nerve and stared at the mess.

Now he had lived with women—or a woman—for most of his adult life. And while “being on the rag” wasn’t his favorite subject in the world and it was surely something he knew more about than he cared to, he had gotten over the heebie-jeebies factor on it about twenty some odd years ago. Yet this …

“That’s vomit,” he said quietly and rubbed his forehead. “Or a still birth.”

Had this come from Beth? Wouldn’t he—she—have known or said something? He picked up the note again. Examined both sides. There was no evidence of distress in her neat, even script. And “xoxo” was hardly code for “Help, I just lost my uterus under the covers.”

He reached for his phone and called her. It went straight to voicemail and he felt awkward leaving a message about it, so he just hung up.

On his return to the bathroom, another onset of panic opened up a breach in his mind. It could have come from somewhere else, he thought. Breath coming short with a clenched burning in his gut, he slid his hand down into his underwear, first the front and then, God help me, the back.

He exhaled relief. Skin and hair and that was all. Nothing sticky or gooey or dried.

“I’m fine,” he said saucer-eyed and astonished to his reflection, a rime of crusty blood circling his left nostril.

“Totally fine.”

3

Hi, this is Amy, I went to Cancun!

That’s all Jack got when he called his daughter. Oh, her trip, he thought, I forgot all about it.

She had planned that trip for over a year and a half, and though the last time he had seen her, she had reminded him of it, he’d forgotten. It occurred to him, suddenly and crushingly, how far apart they had grown.

“Hey baby, it’s Daddy. I hope you’re having the time of your life. You deserve it kiddo. Listen, Bones, when you get back give me a call right away. I got some news and … yeah, just give me a call. Don’t worry though, the doctors are uh … well, just call me. All right, honey, love you. Stay safe and mind your P’s and Q’s.”

Saturday ticked by in a slow march of anxiety.

Jack wore gloves to “clean up” the sheets, not bothering to actually clean them, but throwing them out. He had a replacement set in the closet, but needed to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond to purchase a new mattress cover.

He called Beth three more times and decided to leave a message the last time. He brooded after that, sitting on the couch, staring at the wall. Hunger finally moved him, and he ordered a pizza with double cheese and threw in a twenty ounce coke just for the hell of it.

He was not happy.

He went to bed early for a fitful sleep filled with bad dreams and hunger. He got up to eat three times going through half a jar of peanut butter. When he woke up early the next morning, he was starving. The doctor was wrong; he had to have a tapeworm.

By the time he showered and dressed he was feeling, at least, sarcastic.

He ate at the IHOP a few miles from his home, sparing no expense, feasting like Henry the Eighth, piling up pancakes and eggs and bacon and dousing it all with a healthy dose of sweet butter and high fructose blueberry syrup.

The mother of all tapeworms, in fact.

He had heard urban legends—at least he’d thought they were urban legends—of people suffering from huge tape worms that ate all their food and made them ravenously hungry. But doctor Gromwell had been pretty adamant that it was not such a worm, still, he’d been eating like this for the past three days.

He bolted it down and chugged two steaming cups of coffee. It was gluttony at its finest, and sickeningly good.

He astounding even himself as he folded the pancakes, soggy and steaming, doubled over his fork tines and crammed a dripping wad of egg and cake into a mouth still half full from the last forkful. It was as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

Does sex make me this hungry?

When done, he sat back and burped silently, becoming aware for the first time that the couple across from him was staring. Had he really made such a spectacle? He gazed down at his plate, multicolored with yellow, blue and amber hues, potato slices mixed in with hunks of unmelted butter. Then he laughed wickedly under his breath. Candida, eh?

He had not heard back from his doctor yet. He still did not know what he had.

His phone buzzed. It was Beth. He picked up.

“I didn’t think you were checking your voice mails,” he said. “Hello? Beth?”

“Yeah, Jack …” Her voice sounded harried, like she’d just been having an argument.

“You all right?” He asked, getting up from his table and taking the ticket to the register.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I—I got all your calls and I listened to your voice mail. Look Jack, I have to tell you—”

“Hang on a sec, Beth. I’m at a restaurant. Just a minute.”

He paid with his credit card and stepped outside into the drizzly rain.

“Okay, sorry about that. Go on.”

She exhaled into the phone like a tired parent. “I’m sorry, Jack, but—Jack, Rick and I are getting back together.”

He felt it like a blow to the gut. He’d almost known it was coming, some sixth sense he hadn’t really believed. And now here it was. A cannon ball of confusion exploding in his brain.

“Oh?” was all he could manage.

“Yeah. Oh God, Jack. I’m so sorry. I know how this all must seem to you. I—I don’t even know what to say about it. I like you, Jack. I do, a lot, but Rick and me … well, it doesn’t make sense.”

Months ago, when she had first told him of how and why she had left her husband, he hadn’t been able to reconcile it in his own mind, either. But he had let it slide with the overly trite logic of “different strokes for different folks.” Looking back, he had probably done that because he liked her so much, not because he really believed in the philosophy.

“I’m sorry, Beth,” he said. “I really am. But, I understand.”

“Oh Jack …”

“It’s killing me,” he said, “I won’t lie. But, like you said, it doesn’t make sense.”

“I feel like such a bitch,” she said. “You must think I’m a total loser.”

“That’s the last thing I think of you. Beth, you need to do what’s right and”–it occurred to him that he hadn’t had the chance to ask her about what he had found in the bed–“and you need to.”

“Is something the matter, Jack? I mean, something else you want to say?”

“Yeah,” he said, “there is one thing. Listen, Beth, I wanted to ask you about when you stayed over the other night. Um, are you feeling better?”

“Sorry?” she said. “What do you mean?”

“Well, um, what happened? You know.”

“I’m sorry, Jack, I’m not following you.”

He laughed slightly. “No, I’m sorry. I’m not being very clear. Um, did you—did you have a period or something?”

She giggled. “Oh, Jack, I’m not pregnant! You don’t have to worry about that.”

“No, ah …”

“Believe me, Jack, I’m not pregnant.”

He had a sense of words being put into his mouth.

“Beth, that—that’s not what I meant,” he said, observing a note of annoyance coming into his voice.

“Well, what did you mean then?”

“I—look, I just wanted to know if you had had your period in the bed, um, my bed the night you stayed over, not that I mind, I mean, I just—”

“Jack, I had a hysterectomy after my second child, so, no, I didn’t have a period in your bed. You sure you didn’t have that hot little number come in the moment I walked out?”

He was awestruck. What they might have called gobsmacked in earlier times. Shock, he thought. “I’m going into shock.”

“What did you just say, Jack?”

He inspected the back of his hand, half expecting to watch the blood drain out as he stared at it.

“Yoohoo! Jack Be Nimble!”

“I’m sorry!” he said breathily, on the verge of hysterics. “What did you just say?” He had a giggle in his voice, just below the surface. He was giddy, insanely so. He couldn’t believe it; couldn’t afford to believe it.

“Were you bleeding at all? From anywhere else? It’s okay, Beth, you can tell me? Were you sick? I mean, did you get sick in the middle of the night?”

“Jack!” she said, trying to laugh it off. “I told you, I can’t be pregnant. I had a—”

“But what was it then?” he asked, cutting her off. “What the heck was it?”

“Jack, are you okay?” she asked in a small voice, seeming far away. “I feel like you’re not. I feel like I really hurt you.”

How could he say it? Something was the matter with him and he hadn’t been truthful with her.

“No,” he said. “No, Beth, I can handle that. No, it’s just that, the uh, Beth—Beth, I didn’t tell you this, but I’m sick.”

The phone went silent. Too silent.

“What do you mean?” she asked in a near whisper, now her turn for hysteria.

“No,” he said. “It’s not like that. The doctor said it’s not …”

That wasn’t quite true, though. Doctor Gromwell had said he didn’t think it was a venereal disease. Didn’t think. There was a world of difference between that and negative test results. And he had told him to abstain, hadn’t he?

“Jack?” she said, her voice stern. “What the hell are you not telling me?”

“No,” he pleaded. “He said it wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what, Jack? Goddamn it, you need to tell me what you have. This isn’t funny, you need to tell me—”

“No, I—I’m not laughing, Beth. I’m not joking. I know it’s not funny. I know it sounds like”—he could barely bring himself to say it–“it sounds like a VD, but it’s not!”

“VD? What the hell are you talking about, Jack? My God, you have a fucking VD and didn’t bother saying anything?”

“Not a VD,” he asserted. “Not!”

But what, then?

“Jack, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but God help me, if you have something that I could have caught, then you need to tell me right the now, okay? You just need to tell me. That’s all Jack. Just tell me.”

He was sobbing. He was sobbing into the phone.

“Jack, just tell me, okay? I won’t be mad at you, I promise. I won’t be mad, just tell me.”

“I don’t know,” he said, feeling just like that aging fool of a doctor. “They don’t fucking know. I’m sorry, I didn’t want to say anything the other night. I just … they think it’s a parasite,” he said, at last.

“Think or know?” she asked.

“Think,” he said. “That’s what they think. That’s all they can do, they just think and think and think. They don’t’ know anything. They don’t do anything. They just say what they think, what they always just think.

“They’re doing tests, but I’ve lost a lot of weight, and more every day. I dropped a few more pounds. I mean, I’m eating, oh boy, let me tell you, I’m eating, but …”

There was long silence on the phone, before she said, “You take care of yourself Jack. I mean that.”

He wiped his eyes. “You too.”

“I’m gonna get some tests done, just to make sure.” She was apathetic now, resigned, as if a great burden had been placed on her shoulders, as if she’d gotten very tired. “If they come back … with anything, then I’ll let you know. I hope they don’t Jack, I really hope they don’t.”

“No,” he said. “They won’t.” But he wasn’t sure if he believed that.

“You won’t hear from me otherwise,” she said.

He couldn’t keep from weeping.

“Jack?” she asked.

“Yeah?”

“I really do love you.”

“Oh God,” he croaked, squeezing his eyes and taking a deep breath into the phone. “Me too.”

“Good bye, Jack.”

He hung up and sobbed uncontrollably.

4

He wanted to call his daughter, but called Bill Rasthorpe instead. He hadn’t been to work all week. It was the second time he’d checked in with his partner, and instead of another lie about having the flu, he thought it best, at this point, to tell the truth.

“So, what do they think it is then?” Bill asked, the tenor of his voice sounding how it did when he ate a tootsie pop and talked at the same time.

“Well, that’s just it, Bill, they don’t know.”

“Is that why you asked me the other day, about, um, parasites?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

“Jack, why don’t you make another appointment? Isn’t that what doctors are for?”

“I did. It’s tomorrow. Look, Bill, I’m not going to be around for the rest of the week, okay? I’m—I’m going to take it easy. You know, just let the body heal, kind of a thing.”

“You think that’s smart, Jack? Won’t you just worry about it?”

Jack held up his hand to the light, and sighed. “No,” he said. “I need to.”

“You okay, buddy? I mean, right now?”

Jack took the plug of tissue paper out of his nose slowly, confirming that the bleeding had stopped. He realized he was probably sounding nasally over the phone.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, forcing a chuckle. “I’m just … I just want a few days, that’s all.”

Bill laughed heartily. “Hey, I don’t mind you taking time off. Shit, take two weeks, if you need to. I just—I’m just worried about you, you know. I’ve been sick before Jack. I know how it feels and the kinds of things that can go through your head. And you’re all alone to boot.”

“Bill, I have to go,” he said, curtly.

“Oka—”

Jack hung up, pushed himself to his feet and tottered to the bathroom. At the toilet he thudded to his knees and lifted the toilet seat. He felt like he had so many times in college. He leaned into it and tried to relax. He gagged on the scent of stale urine; then dry heaved. The pain wracked through him, shoulders to lower back. Over and over again, his body prepared and executed, but nothing came out.

He felt clammy and was shivering. “Fuck.” He pulled himself to his feet and stumbled to his bed, walking over the blood-stained underwear on the way.

It had been a few days after Beth had stayed the night and had her accident—or whatever—under the sheets, that he had found blood deposits in his underwear. He instantly thought of them as nocturnal hemorrhoids. He had no idea if that was a thing or not, or if he had, perhaps, picked that term up somewhere along the line, but it seemed to fit, and was a whole lot better than the other possibilities his mind wanted to play with.

His “accident” had been just a few drops and he did not believe that the blood spots in his underwear and the blood splatters on the bed had anything to do with each other. But then, how could they not?

Good God, that had been horrific. He hoped to never see anything like that again so long as he should live. But he had done his research and was feeling much more secure about the whole thing now.

After his and Beth’s break-up phone call, once he’d gotten home, he had went online and began typing in search criteria having to do with hysterectomies. Not the most savory of subjects, he had to admit, but he wanted to know about women bleeding years and years after the fact. Well, lo and behold and what do you know, it was there, page after digital page. Whole forums were composed of nothing else. Digital support groups for the middle aged woman.

From this he learned a very important term: vaginal atrophy. It was when the vagina became dried out due to less estrogen circulating in the body. Made sense. Women over forty were victims of it mostly, which, also made it quickly past his bullshit meter—you had to have your bullshit meter on high when you diagnosed medical conditions with the internet.

This would, in some cases, account for a brownish or pinkish discharge. In other cases it was the usual bright red, straight from the vein type of blood that this vaginal atrophy would bring on.

Ten, fifteen, sometimes even twenty years after the surgery this was going on. Creams could help, some reports said. A Chinese herb was recommended in other cases. One women reported that she got it every month like clockwork just like her old menstrual cycle.

The bleeding and discharge years later seemed to occur with more frequency in women who had retained one or both ovaries. In this case it wasn’t vaginal atrophy that was the suspected culprit so much as another thing that sounded much worse, but was very, if not more, common. There was a lot of information.

Well, he had no clue about Beth’s particular case (assuming she was even telling the truth.) It was not something they had ever discussed, obviously. But he knew this: these accounts satisfied his curiosity to know.

Blood in bed equals vaginal atrophy or something worse but more common. Offender: Beth Donovan. Case closed.

He pulled the comforter over his head. “I have to sleep,” he told himself. “I just have to fricken sleep.”

II

His rest was too short, despite waking up well past dark. He woke sweaty and he hated that. Pushing the covers away, he half expected to be sitting hip deep in his own blood, yet, he was not. He was clean and dry, and wiping a finger under his nose, confirmed both ends.

But there was something the matter right now, the thought of which caused him to slap his forehead, a gesture that would have been comical were he not so distressed.

Jack had had one ringer of a sex dream again.

It was a repeating dream that he’d had at least three times now. Dream or nightmare? Better call it nightmare. The nightmare consisted of a series of disturbing episodes. They had begun about the same time as the blood in his underwear had shown up, in so far as he could pinpoint. He didn’t recall having these nightmares before, ever, though nightmares and dreams in general could fool you sometimes.

This one was massively homoerotic, something he wasn’t at all certain if he should be concerned with. It was as if his subconscious had begun exorcising its demons through S&M “wet-mares”—his own coined term. The singular image from the dream was a man, about his height and stature, dressed in skintight black leather from head to foot, but for a slit from where his large, erect penis protruded.

“It’s like Pulp Fiction,” he mumbled, and then twigged on the idea that he must just be re-imagining that movie. That movie, and particularly that scene, had affected him heavily when he’d first seen it years ago. It had been an image that had never left him.

“But three nights in a row?” The tenor of his voice cracked half way through the word “row.”

The anomaly was that he sat here now, naked and perfectly dry. It was called a “wet dream” for a reason. Perhaps, he had only dreamt of an orgasm?

“One, maybe yeah, but”—he swallowed, remembering the heavy sensation he’d had while asleep—“five of them?”

Testosterone, right? Too much squirting around inside him, too much making his testes bulge full. All that testosterone had to go somewhere. He flexed a bicep.

Had that really happened, though? Five orgasms during a single wet-mare?

It does happen, he thought. “God, Jack, come on,” he said to the silence. “It was a fucking dream, all right? Jeeze, and why not?” He laughed. “Most normal thing that’s happened to me this year.”

Yet, the shame of having had that particular type of dream weighed heavy on his mind.

He got up and turned the light on, then double checked the mattress for blood and or semen, preferring the latter.

Finding nothing but white, clean sheets he sighed and went into the bathroom. Not giving into any fearful maunderings, he snapped on the light and stared right into the mirror. He smiled at his reflection.

“You see,” he said. “Nocturnal hemorrhoids do go away. And they …” he thought about it, “get replaced by fake wet-mares.”

Only now, with the light on, seeing his body clearly and examining himself, he saw the evidence of a discharge.

But if true, where was the issue?

He walked back to his bed, and again inspected the sheets just to make sure, and then ran his hand slowly over the linens, which he found still warm from his body heat.

“Clean,” he confirmed, and then giggled at this foolishness. “Just a dream, dude.”

He returned to the bathroom and ran the shower, waiting for it to steam up before stepping in. Inside he took his time adjusting to the hot water, letting it soothe him, body and mind.

“There now,” he said as the water drenched his skin. “You see, mind games. Just those bloody—stupid—mind tricks.”

He was suddenly relieved that he would be visiting the doctor again tomorrow. Thrilled actually, because he was going to find out how nothing was wrong with him. Well, nothing new that couldn’t be, easily—very easily—remedied.

“Hemorrhoids are nothing to fear,” he told himself, despite the stories from his father about old-time treatment for them.

“Hah hah,” he laughed sarcastically. “They don’t do that anymore, do they, Dad? Joke’s on you, old man.” Though he was only hoping those stories were outdated because in truth, he had no idea.

After the blood spots had appeared in his underwear, he had considered going to an urgent care, but he hadn’t because he hadn’t really been bleeding. Spotting is what they called it.

Christ, am I woman now?

He’d bled a little bit—that was it—about the size of a nickel or maybe a quarter, but was that anything to get alarmed about? He didn’t want to make an emergency of it—any of this—if it truly wasn’t. Because nowadays you could simply search online and find an explanation.

He knew that people every day went to ER’s with complaints of heart attacks and life threatening illness, only to be diagnosed with a case of indigestion. Christ, half his insurance cases included such nonsense. What did they do fifty years ago? A hundred years ago? Not call the ambulance every time they had a bad case of the farts, he knew that.

He had diagnosed himself with hemorrhoids because that is exactly what they fucking were.

He knew, because his father had told him the stories.

He would become his own doctor before this episode was through if he had to. A man should know how to patch himself up in this day and age, shouldn’t he? In all days and ages actually. The problem was that society made you lazy. You didn’t have to hunt for your meat, or grow your own crops or solve your own problems. You could just go to the grocery store, or the liquor store, or the Prozac counter. Shit, you could just sit around taking no responsibility for the whole shooting match and collect government subsidy. Well, fuck that. Use half a brain cell and figure it out.

Hadn’t Gromwell been trying to do just that? The man wasn’t all bad, Jack supposed, but Jeeze, how much specialist training did one need to put together a hypothesis that fit the list of symptoms and could account for all that the patient was experiencing? Isn’t that what medicine was all about? Finding causes?

Only problem was, his so-called doctor didn’t bother with the most fruitful information source to hit Man since the Renaissance called the internet!

He wrapped the towel around his waist and went to his computer and searched “natural folk remedies.”

He perused the infinite data sources finding all kinds treatments from poultices for bug bites to holistic headache cures.

“Oh, get off it,” he chastised himself, and just searched: “Hemorrhoids.”

There was a surprising lot of information about them, too. Apparently millions of people suffered each year. Piles they used to call it—awful name, really—back in the days of yore half a hundred years ago. He watched several videos, learning exactly what they were, and that, at the end of the day, it didn’t much matter if they were not bothering you. He didn’t even have the itching or burning they kept talking about.

He leaned back and lit up a cigarette. “Some stories,” he said, remembering his father’s detailed accounts of a nameless man being placed face down on a bed in the middle of doctor’s office. This man, of course, had worn one of those hospital gowns and so had been exposed in the back end, which, to a teenage boy, had been an almost worse affliction than the illness.

The following description told of a wick, and according to his father, a very large one, composed of some absorbent, but very abrasive material. This instrument was then “applied”, or rather shoved up the anus whereupon it would open all the hemorrhoids up and the blood from the ruptured lesions would then gradually drain up the wick just like the red liquid in a thermometer.

This would, among other things, produce terrible screams up and down the hospital halls, but was nothing compared to what was to come. Even now Jack grimaced at the details.

This man—presumably this man was his father, because each time, and there many, that his father had told this story, it was accompanied by full account of physical sensation—would “bleed out” into this goddamned wick. Then, naturally, after about an hour, the doctor would sneak up and rip that goddamned wick out.

That was the end of the story. Jack had never asked if it got cured that way.

Now, sitting at the computer, researching hemorrhoids, he had no idea what the hell his father had been talking about.

There was one thing, however, that was making him very nervous, even though it should be calming him down: the amount of blood in his underwear didn’t correspond at all to hemorrhoids. He squashed out one cigarette and lit another.

He supposed he should be happy about that because his blood spots had been the size of a quarter. Hemorrhoids did a lot more than that. The problem, which he could not yet bring himself to fully confront the ramifications of, was that if it wasn’t hemorrhoids, what the hell was it?

II

Gromwell’s office smelled like isopropyl alcohol. It made Jack’s nose itch. The exam hadn’t been nearly as bad as his father might have embellished. It hadn’t been the most pleasant of encounters, he had to admit, but it had been quick and easy and relatively painless. He was however still wearing that dreaded hospital gown that shamelessly showed his ass off to the world.

“You don’t have hemorrhoids,” Dr. Gromwell said.

“No?”

“No.”

Then what the hell is that blood doing in my underpants?

“But I’ll tell you what you do have,” Gromwell continued. “You have a small tear in your sphincter.”

Jack blinked, trying to process this new and unexpected information. “Like from a big bowel movement or something?” It was all he could think of on the fly.

The doctor took his glasses off and slowly shook his head. The sigh he let out seemed to have been reserved for a petulant child.

“I don’t think from a big bowel movement, though that is certainly not out of the question. Mr. Fuller, you had mentioned in our last visit that you had become increasingly sexually active, yes?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Since my divorce, I’ve been, well, promiscuous. A little.” He blinked. “Why do you ask?”

The doctor pursed his lips and slipped the folded glasses into his top pocket. For the first time, he wasn’t the poker face.

“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “Whoa. What is that look for? Doctor come on, level with me.”

“Well, Mr. Fuller the evidence says—”

“Your evidence says shit!” he announced indignantly. “Fuck you. No, really, just fuck off!” He paused. “Look, I’m sorry, all right? It’s just that you—you’re jumping to conclusions is all. I come in here with a problem, you get that? And I’m looking for honest answers and you—you, what? Accuse me of what—of—of—of homosexuality?”

“I am not condemning you—”

“No, you’re not. You’re not because that prognosis, doctor, is quackery! No, that’s it. We’re done here. I—I’m very disappointed in you, doctor. In the whole staff here. No, really, I am. Do you even have any results back on my supposed parasite? No, you don’t, do you?” He began to laugh gleefully. “I’m wasting away, bleeding out of my asshole and you can’t offer up more than some fucking homoerotic fantasy of yours.”

“Please, stay calm—”

“No!” he screamed. “No, I won’t! Not until you start giving me some answers here! Christ, Doc, I’m down another five pounds! Do you hear me, five fucking pounds!”

A moment passed where neither man said anything.

Jack slumped. All the rage and anger sputtered away and left him numb.

“Oh Christ. I didn’t mean all of that. It’s just—it’s just that I’m so damn worried, Doctor, I—I don’t know what to do.”

“Jack,” the doctor laid a warm hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. We just need a bit more time. Please, though, abstain, won’t you? I mean it now. Just take a break for awhile, until we find out what this is all about, okay? Will ya?”

Jack met Doctor Gromwell’s eyes. For a moment he felt as though he might get all riled up again, might sock the white-coat bastard in the face. He thinks I’m a homo. He honestly thinks, I’m a—

The dream came back in intricate detail, his mind suddenly becoming hijacked with the vivid imagery. He felt it too, as real as if it might have actually taken place. He could smell the sweet scent of leather, the musky odor of the other man, but the face, he never saw the face, just felt the hot breath. But it was the bone-deep fear that gave him the utter certainty that he was not in control. “Don’t let him—don’t—”

A five orgasm wet dream? Really? Who’s got fantasies now, Jackie boy?

He looked up. Found the doctor’s eyes and all but pled into them. “Nothing there,” he whispered, but he wasn’t seeing the doctor now, or the room. He was seeing that damn dream, the top of his mattress and its clean, white sheets. He was gripping that pillow.

“You all right, Jack?”

“There was just nothing there,” he repeated.

“Jack?”

“But felt so real.”

“Jack?” Gromwell’s enormous fingers snapped near his eyes. “Nurse,” he called over his shoulder, then to Jack he said: “Lie down Jack, just lie down.”

The room was spinning. He was sweating all over. His vision had gone spotty. He clutched his chest. “Something’s wrong,” he said, and then in a high pitched whine: “Something’s terribly wrong!”

“Lie back, Jack, won’t you? Come on now, just lie back.”

His breath was coming short and fast. I’m panting, he thought, I’m fucking panting. His back muscles were tensing, he feared they would construct so tight that they’d snap his spine. His heart beat was well above tolerance. It was going to go faster and faster and faster until it clenched up tight as a fist and burst in his chest.

“Doc!”

“Take it easy, now. Nurse!”

The room in his dream—his bedroom—had been so muggy, the man’s scent so yeasty.

“Who was that?” he asked. “Who was that?”

Then he was lying back, a cold, damp cloth pressed to his forehead. A nurse was standing over him, Gromwell was watching in the background.

“Who was that?” Jack whispered feverishly into the open air.

“Doctor?” The nurse’s hushed voice seemed to come from far away.

“What is it?”

“Doctor, he’s bleeding again.”

5

Dr. Gromwell resembled a college dean behind his enormous oak desk. He scrawled a sharp cursive onto a piece of paper. Jack clutched his elbows, still shivering after the attack.

“I’m prescribing a sedative for you,” Gromwell said. “Xanax. Now, I want you to take it and those are my orders. You’ve got anxiety, Jack, no matter what else you’ve got. The effect of it could potentially get in the way of our treatment and make matters a whole lot worse.”

“What happened to me back there? A panic attack?”

Gromwell looked up while taking his glasses off. “Yes, Jack. That’s exactly what happened. You’ve got to take care of yourself. And these are going to help you sleep. They’re also going to keep your brain from playing games with you. That’s all that happened back there, Jack. Your brain got away from you.”

“Doctor, if you don’t mind my asking, how does one’s brain get away from one?”

“Your brain can play tricks Jack. You see, your brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s out there”—he gestured to the air—“and in here”—he tapped his temple. “So, to your brain everything is real. Whatever you tell it to believe, it believes.”

“That sounds dangerous,” Jack admitted.

Gromwell smiled thin lipped. “Welcome to the human race. It’s just how we’re wired. The point is, you’ve got to tell it what you want it to believe. You understand? Right now, you’re upset and scared, so you’re telling your brain all manner of frightening things. And what do you know? It’s starting to believe you.”

“I see.”

“We’ve got to recondition it, that’s all. This is going to settle you down so you can reset. Then, your brain can help you heal instead of making you sicker. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And Jack, abstain.”

Jack ground his teeth.

In a manner that a hard line editor might use to mark up a manuscript, Gromwell ripped out the paper from his tablet and handed it to Jack. Jack took it and tried to make heads or tails of the script.

“They’ll know what it’s for,” Gromwell assured him.

Jack drove home slowly. He stayed in the slow lane on the freeway, and then got off early to take the surface streets. He was still shaken up about what happened and, though suppressed, angry as hell at his doctor’s assumptions. He needed to get a second opinion on everything, obviously, but right now, he just needed to get home. He had begun to feel nauseated on the freeway and it was just getting worse. He thought that perhaps it was hunger, though the idea of food just made the nausea worse.

He stopped at the 7-Eleven and purchased a bottle of Pepto-Bismol and a carton of milk. In his car he rolled the bottle of Xanax around in the palm of his hand. Tranquilizers, huh? He had never taken any kind of tranquilizer before and didn’t know if he wanted to, but the idea of another attack … it was too much.

He popped the cap, then thought he better get home first. He gulped a few swigs of the Pepto, chased it with the milk, and got back on the road.

His place was lonely and cold, austere in the gray light of twilight, as if no one really lived there. He sat miserably on the couch, letting the residual emotions of the panic attack slowly peel away into the past.

“Fucking Gromwell,” he said. “‘And Jack, abstain,’” he quoted.

Take one tablet 2x per day, he read. Then he threw the bottle across the room so that it bounced against the wall and skittered into a corner.

“You fucking abstain.”

He’d be damned if he was going to let himself slide into some degenerate state. If he didn’t watch it, he’d acquire all manner of phobias and disorders. Whoever said that a little panic attack meant you had to curl up into a ball? You should do the exact opposite actually.

Feeling slightly better now with his mind made up, he went to the bathroom with the idea of taking a shower and then possibly making a phone call or two.

The Pepto must be working, he thought. He weighed himself on the scale, 165 pounds. He hadn’t weighed that low since high school. He looked at himself in the mirror. All things considered, he looked pretty darn good.

“Well, why not? Forty-five isn’t dead. Long way from it.”

He went into his home office, sat down at the computer and logged on. There were a surprising amount of websites made to facilitate people hooking up, some more prurient than others. He had been on several of them in the past year and had acquired a bad taste for all of them, but one. Couples catered to a slightly older heterosexual demographic where well-off men could meet well-off women, with the definition of “well-off” here being fairly attainable. You didn’t have to be hosted on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to qualify. A solid job, a little spare cash for a good restaurant or perhaps a couple of theater tickets made the grade more often than not. And because everyone on the site expected it, most dates ended in sex.

Jack had dated five women from the site over the last year, and all had more or less fit into the late thirties to late forties age bracket and all more or less wanted to be taken to a nice restaurant before getting into bed.

Jack navigated the site and found Cheryl’s G’s profile. G stood for Gathswait—he knew from a previous date—and even though the site forbade advertising one’s last name, Jack didn’t think that the name Gathswait should be advertised anyway. The little colored box meant she was online.

He opened a chat box. Hi, remember me? Then waited for nearly two minutes.

Jack! How’s your tongue?

Jack had burnt his tongue on the fajitas they had gotten last time they’d gone out.

You remember that? ;)

Of course! How are you? I missed you. No phone call? wtf????

I know. I’m terrible.

Yeah you are.

Can I make it up to you?

That depends.

On … ?

Cha-ching!

LOL.

They messaged back and forth a series of emoticons, until Cheryl finally wrote: I suppose I’ll let you make it up to me. If you promise to call me the morning after.

Scouts honor.

So cute. Come pick me up in an hour?? You remember where I live, don’t you? You better!

Yes! I’ll bring the limo.

II

Jack picked up Cheryl from her apartment in Glendale. She came out wearing a short skirt that revealed a respectable section of thigh, and her top was tight and revealing. She dressed about ten years younger than she was, but with her figure she could pull it off. She got into the car and drenched him in a cloud of perfume.

“Hi!” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. “Where you taking me?”

“My place.”

She laughed and said, “Sure, as long as you’ve got a five star chef and a wet bar!”

“Oh, is that all I need?”

He knew this kind of flirting would go on all night with her, right until the moment he did take her home. It was the height of their interchange. He got on the freeway and headed toward Old Town Pasadena.

In the restaurant, they flirted until their meal came and Jack hadn’t realized how hungry he was until the waiter put his plate down in front of him. Once he took the first bite, he couldn’t stop.

“Whoa, you’re an eater!” Cheryl accused.

He couldn’t seem to cram the food in fast enough. “I’m sorry,” he said between bites. “I’m just so freaking hungry is all. By the way, are you going to eat all of that?”

He didn’t wait for her answer, but lifted his greasy plate and shoved it at her. She scraped half her plate onto his and when the waiter walked by again, he ordered another coke and another order of egg rolls.

“Jack!”

“I’m sorry, Cheryl. I have to do it. Otherwise I’m going to be starving.”

“Now, I know how you lost all that weight,” she said. “You’ve been starving yourself! Or you’re about to go into the bathroom in two minutes and puke it all up.”

“Definitely not going to puke it up,” he said, cramming another forkful into his mouth. After he’d demolished everything on his plate, he sat back feeling ashamed and gluttonous.

Cheryl giggled. “You still hungry?”

He brought his napkin to his mouth and burped. “I’m so sorry.”

“Nonsense, Jack. I don’t care. What do you want to do now?”

He raised an eyebrow facetiously. “Fuck?”

“Oh!” she laughed. “You naughty little rascal! Jack is that all I am to you?”

He felt his cheeks flush, he usually wasn’t so brazen. “Sorry, I was just being flippant.”

“Bull shit!” she said. “And I never said I didn’t want to. But you did promise me a phone call and if you don’t deliver, I’m going to stalk you and throw your cat into a stew pot.”

“Spooky, though I’m afraid my cat has been replaced by a mouse.”

She took a deep breath. “Jack, there are a lot worse things I could do, you know.”

He looked at her and noticed her smile had faded a bit. “You’re serious,” he said.

“Oh, you thought this was a free for all?”

“No, I—”

“Jack, of course I expect a phone call. Don’t be a jerk. Now come on, we’ve got homework to do.”

He shook his head at her. “You’re bad,” he said.

“Just being flippant.”

They put the last order into a doggie bag and Jack paid the bill leaving a respectable tip. He wouldn’t normally have tipped so well, but with Cheryl on his arm, he was sort of obligated to show off a bit.

In the parking lot, before Jack could open the passenger side door, Cheryl turned him around and began grinding on him. It was awkward with the doggie bag in one hand, but Jack held it out above her head and tried not to dampen her enthusiasm with a request to tone it down.

“You weren’t kidding,” he finally said, which had the same effect, but without the emotional bric-a-brac left behind.

“More where that came from,” she said breathily.

They got to Jack’s condo twenty minutes later and when they stepped inside he tried to pick up messes on his way to the light switch, but then finally decided it was futile. This wasn’t a “best practice” for entertaining a woman in his home.

“I’m sorry, I’ve been being a total slob.”

“You’re getting to be too much of a bachelor,” she agreed. “Though, I’ve seen worse. Let’s see the bedroom, shall we?” She began walking toward his room when he caught her hand and brought her to his chest.

“I’m sorry for being so crude back there,” he said. “We don’t have to, you know, skip to dessert if you don’t want to. I’m not trying to—”

“Jack, it’s okay, I forgive you. Besides, obviously I want to!”

He swallowed. “Well, no, I feel bad about saying that. I mean, I don’t normally blurt those kinds of things out, but somehow with you, it seems appropriate.”

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“See! I can’t even control how much of a jerk I’m being.”

“Oh, stop it. I’m just teasing you. People say that shit to me all the time, are you kidding? So it’s more me than you. Anyway, I like you. And I like making love to you, even if you are a dirty, old bachelor.”

He had no retort for that, but she must have noticed the look on his face because she quickly added: “I’m just joking, Jack! Come on. Now take me to bed.”

He laughed, but it came out slightly tinged with anxiety. During dinner he’d almost forgotten that he was sick at all, but with her invitation all he could think of was Gromwell’s injunction to “abstain.”

“You don’t mind my using a condom, do you?” he asked.

“No, not really, if you want to. I’m on the pill though.” She searched his eyes. “Why do you ask?”

He shrugged it off. “I don’t have to. It’s just—well, how many people have you been with in the last two months?”

“Three,” she said, “but I know them and—”

“It’s just a precaution. It’s fine, I won’t wear one.”

“Jack, if you want to wear one, wear one. I don’t care. I’m gonna like it either way. But you would tell me if you had something, right?”

“Of course! Anyway, you’re sweet.”

“You mean it?” she asked.

“I do.”

He led her into his room and gently guided her down onto the bed. They kissed and began unbuttoning each other’s clothes. Her mouth was willing and her lips full. He cradled the back of her head in his hand, enjoying the lithe curve of her woman’s neck beneath her hair. Their bodies heated up as they touched. Then he pulled back.

“Sorry, I need to go to the bathroom,” he said.

She exhaled. “You better hurry up, Jack. Because I’m really into you right now.”

“Me too, Cheryl. Hang on.”

He got up and went to the bathroom, softly closing the door behind him. He’d decided somewhere between the panic attack and dinner that he didn’t care what he had, he wasn’t going to abstain.

Fuck you, Gromwell. There was only one reason the stuffy old quack wanted him to abstain anyway: the good doctor was a homophobe.

Or jealous, Jack thought.

The check was quick and clean and, despite his sarcasm, he heaved a sigh of relief and washed his hands. Then he paused and listened. Through the door he could hear a soft female moan. It had the effect of turning him on, but all he could think was: What is Cheryl doing out there? Well, he could pretty much guess that.

He wasn’t so much insulted as he was intrigued. Here was a new development, not one he had known Cheryl—or anyone else for that matter—to engage in before casual sex.

He put his hand on the doorknob and slowly turned it so that Cheryl wouldn’t hear the sound of the bolt sliding in its casing. He had to physically restrain himself from laughing out loud, imagining her reaction when he finally stepped through the doorway. The door creaked a little too loudly making him pause, but then he decided that it was now or never and he swung it wide.

His first idea was simply to stand there on the threshold and say: “Hey, what about me?” but his words died on his lips.

Her neck was bent and her eyes were closed. She lay on her back, naked from the waist down, in a deep swoon. She was panting too—actually panting—and the spook factor from that sent shivers down his spine. Her legs were splayed open with her thighs pushed back to her chest. Her skirt was hiked up to her waist and bunched above her hips. Her red under panties were scrunched around her left ankle.

“Hey, what about me” turned into: ‘Holy Christ!”

A man—or something like it—bobbed between her legs, up and down, almost crippled in its effort, as if the strain was too much for it. Pale, translucent skin stretched taught over a skeletal frame, as though the figure had done hard time in Auschwitz. Veins bulged out of a squarish head and ran like cables down the back of the neck.

Jack’s mouth searched for articulation. His jaw swung on its hinges like an old tire swing in the breeze. His lips tried to stammer out a warning.

The creature’s face swiveled and a pair of black eyes locked with Jack’s in a brief instant of uncanny recognition.

“Wh-wh-whoooo—” Jack wheezed, his total ability for speech at the moment. Then finally, as if his tongue had been shocked back to life, he screamed: “Cheryl! Cheryl! Get up, get up! Oh Goddamn it, get up!”

Jack launched from the doorway, but he was fear-struck and his movements were clumsy and disjointed. His limbs felt heavy and obtuse, his knees knocked together in a painful thud, but his eyes watched as his body fumbled.

Jack observed with clarity the wraith on top of his girl. It seemed to slide down one side of her, its form somehow appearing to diminish. He watched it happen, not understanding how it was done. He saw how the edges of the creatures body somehow, someway turned and swiveled and wriggled so that when Jack’s much larger body came crashing down on the bed where the thing had been, he fell onto empty space.

He bounced back up again using the surface of the mattress like the ring ropes on a professional wrestling mat. Then he dropped to the floor and got down on his belly so that he could see underneath the bed, but lost socks and old sweater boxes told no secret tidings of the skeletal intruder.

Jack popped up again on his knees and began swatting at the sheets and blankets and, finding no more reward than he had below, stood up and began stripping the blankets and shoving pillows out of the way.

“Where’d it go?” he shouted. “Where the fuck did it go!”

But there was, quite simply, nothing here.

Jack stood back, winded, breathing as if he’d just run the fifty yard dash, sweat dripping off his brow and moistening his armpits.

“Jack, what is the matter?” Cheryl asked in a shaky voice, one which Jack knew verged on tears.

“Christ,” he said. “Cheryl, oh Christ. I’m so sorry.” He was confused and upset, pissed off at himself for reacting irrationally and frightening her. “I don’t”—he sat down beside her on the bed—“I don’t know what—I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I thought I saw something.”

“What did you see Jack?”

He hated how her question sounded, the matter-of-fact way it came across as if she had already decided that he was losing his mind. He looked at her unable to speak.

“Who?” she asked—this time, thank God, without the men-in-white-coats tone.

“A man, I guess,” he said. “I don’t know. It—well, it looked like a man, but only the image of a man. I don’t know how to describe it, totally. It was like a copy of a man. You know? Like a cartoon or something. Flat. I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s the idea. It had all the detail of a person without the mass, you know what I mean?”

Cheryl pulled her half of the sheet more snuggly around her waist and began laughing at him. She made him feel like a child, but he was relieved that in his frenzy to find the phantom, he had not also ripped her sheet away, because that would have humiliated her in addition to scaring her.

“You didn’t see anything?” he asked. “Really?”

“See what, Jackie darling?” she asked, patronizing now, sitting forward and reaching out to curl a finger behind his ear.

Annoyed, he pushed her hand away.

“Jack!”

He glared at her. “It scared the shit out of me!” Then he too began to laugh, realizing how silly this all was. He giggled when he said: “He was between your frickin’ legs, going like—” He imitated the stilted action.

She cracked up something fierce on that and then held up a hand from under the sheet. Her fingers glistened—her first two fingers. “Can’t a girl have a little fun by herself, Jack? What if I told you I was thinking of you at the same time, would that help?”

The glee of the moment passed, leaving Jack feeling like a total moron. “I’m sorry, Cheryl.”

“Oh Jack, come on. You saw a”—she giggled—“I won’t say a ghost, but a fig-a-ment of your imagin-a-she-on!” and when she said that phrase she used all of the flair and joie de vivre of a circus ring leader from the 1890’s.

He slumped down onto the bed and let out a sigh. “I’m losing my mind, I think.”

“No,” she said in a way you would to a child. “You’re just a control freak is all. You think you have to control everything in the universe and if you don’t, you’ll just go nuts. I know, I used to be one.”

“Is that what it is?” he asked. “A side effect of being a control job?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Duh. Everybody knows that. If you get too freaky about the things you can’t control, then you begin to lose control of everything, including your mind—well, thoughts anyway.”

“Well, it was way more than a thought,” he said.

“Yeeeaaah,” she said. “Close enough.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you for a psych major,” he pointed out.

“Well, I’m not, Jackie darling, I’m a recovering control freak. Anyway, who cares? That’s my big point. Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

“It was so real, though,” he said, pulling one of the pillows he’d thrown on the floor onto his lap.

“And it was screwing me?” she asked with a grin.

He nodded grimly.

She giggled. “How sexy.” Then she said, cheerily: “Maybe that’s why my fingers felt so good?”

He shook his head. “I’ve never hallucinated before.”

She rolled her eyes and flopped onto her back. “Okay, fine. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but hey, when in Rome. It happened to me once, too,” she admitted. “I saw a giant chicken walking down Sunset Boulevard. There, now we’re even.”

Jack shrugged. “Typical Hollywood crap. Man in a costume.”

“That’s the thing,” she said, “it wasn’t that tall. I mean it was round. Squat. Like a real chicken, only it was humongous, like it had been the result of some fast food experiment or something.

“I looked out the window of my car—I was driving slowly on a sunny day, very little traffic—and I saw this thing walking down the street. The detail, oh my God, Jack. You couldn’t touch that with a costume. It had these fluffy white feathers, but they were dirty Jack around the back end, you know, like a real chicken. And the beak was enormous, but it wasn’t perfect, you know. It had chips and scratches on it like it had been used a lot. It looked like the honest to Pete thing, I swear.”

“And?” he prompted, not in the slightest interested in this story.

“And when I blinked, it was gone. Poof. Just like that, totally gone. Like it had never been there at all.”

Jack shook his head and sighed. “Like I said, someone—a midget, I don’t know—wearing a chicken suit who just ducked into a store front or around the corner or something.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. And maybe not. I’m telling you Jack, I was looking right at it. And then poof. Gonzo. A flash-hallucination as they say.”

Jack hadn’t considered there could be a term for something like that, but it made sense.

“Did it ever happen again?” he asked.

“Nope. And I would tell you if it did. So”—she crossed her arms—“do you believe me?”

“About what, that you would tell me or that you saw a giant chicken walking down Sunset Boulevard?”

“Both,” she said, hopeful.

“Sure, but really Cheryl, who gives a shit?”

“Bingo, Jack. Thank you. That’s my whole point. Who. Gives. A. Shit. You saw something, it was gone a moment later. It didn’t come back. Did you really see it? Who cares? Now quit stalling and take off your clothes.”

They shared a good laugh on that and Jack moved in, once again, for the kiss. He was put in mind of his junior year in high school when he had tried on no less than six separate occasions to plant a kiss on Beckie Schumacher’s lips, while copping a feel at the same time, only to be deftly turned away for more creative reasons than he thought a young girl with knockers that big could imagine.

Then he realized that Cheryl was already half—or mostly—undressed beneath the top sheet and that she was not Beckie Schumacher and that this was not high school, therefore increasing his chances of scoring by about 1,000 percent.

Her lips were warm and willing and he took his time with them. He removed her top and then his own shirt. He kissed her slender neck, inhaling the alcohol scent of her perfume—loving that and knowing full well that perfume manufactures knew that he would be loving that—and then fiddled with her bra clasp, managing it with ease, and then Cheryl screamed.

Jack jumped back, grabbing onto her sheet. He scarcely kept himself from slipping off the side of the bed.

“Jesus, Cheryl, what the hell’s wrong with you?”

She shook her head. “I—”

“What?” he said, knowing that he was letting the full force of his annoyance show through.

“I saw something, Jack,” she said, frantically. “I did.” She nodded to the open door of the master bathroom. “There, in the mirror.”

Jack glanced over his shoulder as if he might have just seen something move there. “Holy Christ!” he said. “Now you’ve got me spooked all over again. Cut it out.”

“I’m sorry, Jack, but I saw something.” She shook her hands like a woman about to burst into tears.

“Okay, okay,” he said, realizing that if he wanted to get laid tonight, it would be a good idea to stop being an asshole right about now. “Where?”

Her eyes, open like a china doll’s, glinted in the half light. “There,” she said meekly and pointed to the bathroom.

Jack got up and took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Let me check it out.”

Tentatively he walked over to the door, which had struck the far wall and bounced back during his previous freak out and launch across the room, so that now it was opened by about two inches.

He nudged the door open to about a foot and a half, but from where he stood, along the side with his arm stretched across the breadth of it, he could barely see in. Now, that won’t do, will it? If you’re gonna kill a burglar, you have to see him first.

He counted to three and shoved the door open, then exhaled a sigh of relief when he found the bathroom empty. He turned back to Cheryl and saw the tears sparkling in her eyes.

“I thought I saw something,” she said. “I’m not joking.”

“Like what?” he asked. “Giant chickens?” and just like that, he knew he’d blown his chance.

“I’m not kidding!” she insisted. “Fuck you, Jack. You saw it too!”

He stared at her and for a moment was quite unable to say anything. Then he noticed his heart beat. It was racing.

“You saw a man?” he asked.

She swallowed audibly. “I don’t know, I don’t know, okay? I’m just saying—”

“An emaciated man?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Jack.” Her eyes were round like tea cups now. “Jaaack.” She was backing up in the bed, as if trying to escape through the wall. “Jaaa-aaa-aaack,” she cried, her voice rising to a scream. “Jaaaaaack!”

For a terror drenched second all his muscles locked up.

“Behind you!” she screamed. “Behind you, Jack, behind you!”

His body obeyed, and he turned in time to catch a heel disappearing around the hallway corner.

“Oh fuck!” he yelled, taking off after it, knowing there was no other choice, flipping on light switches as he passed them, screaming: “Who the fuck’s in my house!”

He burst into the kitchen, expecting the worst, his eyes darting here and there, all over, trying to take in every detail of the darkened room, trying to see despite the faded light and his frantic nerves.

“Where are you, goddamn it! Where are you!” he shouted.

The chrome surface of the toaster winked back him, the microwave sat unused with its grease spots mocking in their usual disgusting pattern, the fridge hummed like no one cared how much energy it sucked up.

“Gerrah!” he fumed through his teeth in frustration. It caused the back of his throat to catch from the friction of the sound and made him cough as a result. When he regained his voice and some of his composure he shouted to the other room. “We’re just freaking ourselves out! There’s nobody fucking here!”

He went back into the bedroom to find Cheryl frantically getting dressed. “What the fuck, Cheryl?”

“I’m out of here, Jack!” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I think you need to leave too. In fact, I think you should leave with me right now.”

Jack sat down on the bed and brooded, making a haphazard, nonsense game out of counting the slats in the hardwood floor.

“What are you doing, Jack? Aren’t you going to come with me? You can’t stay here.” She had skipped putting her bra on and just carried it in her hand along with her purse and her shoes.

He let out a sharp breath. “Cheryl, I’m sorry to tell ya, but there’s no one here but us chickens. We’re letting our brains get away from us and panicking the night away.” Then he flopped back on the bed and stared at the shapes in the stucco ceiling.

She glared at him, one hand on her hip. “Walk me out,” she said, coldly.

“Cheryl, come on. There’s no one here. There’s no ghosts or crazy men from German work camps. Nothing. You were right.”

“Jack, walk me out of here right the fuck now.”

Jack had heard that tone before and that was not the kind of woman-speak you could just pretend to ignore. That was code for: Do what I say or I’ll cut your balls off in your sleep.

He sat up and lifted his hands in resignation, as if she were holding a gun on him.

“Okay, I’ll walk you out right the fuck now, but you’re overreacting, Cheryl.” He stood up and gestured her toward the hallway.

“No way, you go first.”

“O-kay,” he said in two breathy syllables, “I’ll go first.”

She followed on his heels and when they reached the door he finally saw that the dead bolt was, indeed, turned in the locked position. He smiled wryly to himself.

Standing outside on the porch, she said, “I’d invite you over, but my son—”

“It’s fine Cheryl. Don’t worry about it. Or me. Everything is just fine.”

“Jack, I’m sorry, I’m just too freaked out in there.”

“It’s okay, Cheryl. I understand. Really. I do. Good night. I’ll call you in the morning. A promise is a promise, regardless of whatever.”

She tried to pout, but it didn’t work. Instead she said: “I’m worried about you staying.”

He shrugged apologetically. “There’s no one here but us chickens. Really, though”—he turned around and gestured to the small condo—“if someone were here, we would have found him by now, and the front door was locked … and I don’t believe in ghosts anyway, so …” Suddenly he was so tired.

“I’m sorry, Jack.” Her hard edges seemed to melt. Less threatened, she was becoming herself again.

“Cheryl—”

“I’ll make it up to you,” she said, hopeful. “I swear it. You’ll call me tomorrow?”

“I just said I would, didn’t I?”

“You promise?”

“Of course.”

“I like you Jack, you know that right?.”

“I like you too, Cheryl.”

She smiled. “Good. Okay, now let me kiss you. Okay. Toodles. Call me tomorrow, and if you see anything else, call the police right away.”

“All right,” he said, letting go of her hand.

“Promise me Jack that you will actually call the police.”

“Okay.”

“Say it Jack!”

“Cheryl, stop it.”

“Say it!”

“All right,” he said. “If I see anything else, I’ll call the cops. I promise.”

“Good boy. Bye Jackie-poo.”

Half way down the stairs she turned around and blew him a kiss before disappearing out of sight.

He closed the door and quietly locked it, then put his forehead against it.

Something like that had happened the last time they’d gotten together too, he remembered. Just like Big Boob Beckie, he thought. She was cute and sexy and always so into him with way too many excuses. He wondered if Cheryl were really even scared or if she was just hamming it up to give herself an easy out.

“Ug,” he said, turning around to stare at his living room. “Ghosts in the attic, eh? Well then, come out, come out wherever you are.”

Nothing stirred but a mote of dust.

6

Jack watched late night talk shows until somewhere around one o’clock in the morning and then headed to bed. He didn’t bother to brush his teeth. He peed in the dark, listening to make sure he was “making the shot,” then, cold and exhausted, slipped under his icy covers and laid awake.

He was still disappointed with what happened with Cheryl tonight. He really liked her, but like him she was so non-committal, which got him thinking too much about his own failures and excuses. He just couldn’t bring himself to buckle down after the divorce, a problem of increasing proportion these days.

The issue was quite simple in his mind: he was losing himself, little by little, out on the existential sea of existence.

He was just as disappointed for what had happened with Beth a couple of weeks ago, and then there were about four other names back of that one that popped into his head all at once: Sherry Tamlin, Rose Garcia, Tammy McKlusky and, what was her name … oh, shit, don’t forget the name, do not forget the—Rhonda Hutchins! Yes, all of those women had been fun, all people he wanted to spend more time with, and all so damn temporary.

It had to do with his problem with commitment more so than a simple desire to be promiscuous. Sure, there were the delights of the flesh, the nuance of a new naked body to explore. They even had a name for it: it was called the Coolidge Effect after an old joke involving the 30th U.S. president, Mr. Calvin Coolidge.

The Coolidge Effect could be demonstrated with laboratory mice and applied to the male sex of every species. It proved that if you were a male mouse and you were put into a cage with a female mouse you would copulate with that female mouse, but after one or two times, you would grow tired of that female mouse and roll over and fall asleep, i.e. a typical man.

However, what this Coolidge Effect went onto explain was that if the mad scientist in charge of the whole operation replaced that “old” female with a new one, why that promiscuous bachelor mouse’s limbic system in the brain would light up like a Christmas tree. Mr. Mighty Mouse would then copulate with renewed vigor, and if you supplied a fresh female mouse every time, why that lecherous rodent would quite simply fuck himself to death.

Jack spoke aloud when he recited the old joke: “Mrs. Coolidge was being shown a family farm for sale and when they came upon the hen house, was stunned to find the rooster copulating with a hen. ‘Does the rooster copulate often?’ she asks.

“‘Oh, yes Mrs. Coolidge, every day,’ the farm hand tells her.

“‘Tell that to Mr. Coolidge for me, won’t you?’

“’Yes ma’am,’ says the farm hand.

“But when Mr. President was informed of this fact, he says, ‘Tell me farm hand, does that rooster service the same hen every time?’

“’Oh no, Mr. President, a different hen every time, sir.’

“The president nods sagely and says: ‘Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge, won’t you?’”

Jack usually chuckled at the punch line. Not this time.

He sighed.

If he were being very truthful, which he was being at the moment, then he had to admit that there was something else entirely at work in his case. Past presidents and genetic urges to the contrary, he simply did not want to deal with anything as heavy and cumbersome as human emotions. He was fine going out to dinner, having fun … pretending. Well, wasn’t that what he was doing?

“I’m the great fucking pretender,” he announced.

He rolled over and sighed. “The moment it gets heavy, I blow. What a cheap fuck I am.”

It was true. He was a cheap fuck, and he was disgusted with himself. How had it all come to this? Yeah, Kate was a bitch, yeah I was an inconsiderate asshole, yeah, sex with younger women was, well, I knew Kate wouldn’t stick around after that … but this?

A drifter; a middle-aged lecher. God, I’ve got to stop all this. I simply have to get into a relationship and stay in it, I think. Either that or go cold turkey and take up fishing or model airplanes.

He wasn’t happy and he was alone.

He needed to go to sleep, but how? He considered masturbating, fantasizing over what might have happened with Cheryl tonight if they hadn’t seen an imaginary ghost. But the idea just turned his stomach. Besides, it was too messy.

“I’m done with that,” he told himself, and then he decided: “From now on, I’m taking a vow of celibacy.”

He rolled over and imagined Mrs. Coolidge with all those hens.

II

He finally fell asleep reading a business book on his e-reader. He didn’t know for how long, but when he woke it had seemed like an hour, or, if he was lucky, two.

He rolled over, spread himself face down on the mattress and nestled deep into his comforter, intending to capitalize on his grogginess and go back to sleep when he heard a clinking sound.

He raised his head slightly under his covers.

“What?”

Clink.

It sounded like dishes being moved. Bizarrely, the noise caused him to realize he hadn’t been ravenously hungry this evening, or during the day. He propped himself up on his elbows.

A hungry burglar?

He exhaled tiredly. Cheryl had come back, that’s all. She felt bad and she came back. He vaguely remembered having given her a key at some point way back when. He got up and reached for his bathrobe.

Or is it Beth who has the key?

Christ, he didn’t remember. It might have been anyone. Well, any one of those people—those women—would be welcome tonight, right? Then he chuckled. Vow of celibacy, eh? Just like a typical priest. He walked down the hall anticipating which female mouse had come to say hello.

He heard the sounds of eating, yet, they were not the dainty sounds of a female snacker, but the heavy nose-breathing food-inhales of the half starved. Maybe Bones? But she’s in Cancun. Yeah, but maybe she came back early because she’s in trouble.

He tried not to notice the scathing rebuke in the back of his mind telling him that his daughter was never going to come here seeking refuge.

It’s a robber Jack, an intruder. The intruder.

He stopped short of rounding the corner and listened. Someone was quite simply and unabashedly chowing down out there. He could see the light cast by the open refrigerator and could smell the faintly pungent odor emanating from something not quite fresh inside.

Let’s get real here. No robber is going to sit in front of an open refrigerator and stuff his face when he should be robbing the place. Right?

The last moments with Cheryl played through his mind. What had she seen? What had he seen? A heel slipping around the corner? Optical illusions. That’s what. But, what had he seen when he’d come out of the bathroom? That thing between Cheryl’s legs pumping into her?

Come on, Jack, grow up! She was masturbating. Is that so evil, so foreign a concept that you can’t wrap your brain around it? You’re acting like some kind of Puritan. God knows you’ve had your fair share of auto-erotic episodes. Don’t play the hypocrite, it doesn’t suit you.

Leave it to Cheryl to do something like that. And why not? If she liked it, he liked it. Consenting adults and all that. So maybe that’s all it had been. A sweet lady getting off.

Because, honestly, had there been someone else in the room with them? No, of course not. When he’d gone over and ripped the bedding apart he’d found empty air. And when he’d searched the whole condo … figments, he thought, and then he heard Gromwell’s words in his head again.

Abstain … don’t get so worked up … stay calm.

Well, he wasn’t doing any of that, was he? He wasn’t following his doctor’s orders so, of course, he was freaking out. That was it. And that was okay. As long as he knew what was causing it, he could live with it.

So, he rounded the corner and gasped.

He felt as if all the thoughts in his head suddenly fell out. He’d been right about the refrigerator door being open, but it was no fresh female sitting in front of it.

It appeared as a large oval on the kitchen floor, broader at the top, and shiny. It reminded Jack of a giant gourd, but it was evenly formed, symmetrical. Jack did not know what he was looking at until familiar contours gave it away. A knotted line protruded down the middle, curved striations on both sides extended out.

He was looking at a wasted, anorexic back.

Yes, he saw the whole of it now, the bow of the shoulders, the tapering curve of the waist, the knobby knees sticking out. A naked man, hunched over and squatting on his heels.

He watched mesmerized, a shiny cue ball of a head supported by a pencil thin neck, bobbing up and down like a cork on a fishing line. Long and boney fingers scooped handfuls of white cream from a container. Then, as if sensing Jack’s presence, it slowly turned the profile of its face to view him with the corner of one bulbous eye.

Cream dripped from thin lips. Their eyes met for an instant wherein that uncanny recognition passed again between them, before the thing scrambled to its gangly feet, throwing off the object in its lap and sending it crashing to the floor. Jack saw what it was in the refrigerator light: an overturned tub of sour cream.

Jack reeled back, arms wind milling as if he were falling off a ledge. The thing was tall, as tall as Jack, and it was spindly and ghastly.

The hip bones jutted out to either side, the space between its legs was huge and rectangular, it was naked and completely hairless.

And yet, all that didn’t describe how terribly, terribly thin it was.

Not thin, Jack thought. Insubstantial.

Some trick of the refrigerator light made it seem to shine through the body. It occurred to Jack that it shone through in the same way that a flashlight beam will shine through your hand when you press it to your palm. Something was stopping the light. Maybe not all of it, but some of it. The light had to go through some kind of physical medium.

Jack had backed up to the wall and still tried to push farther. He locked eyes with this thing, this creature. He swallowed thickly.

“You’re real?” he whispered, as if waiting for a grim head nod to confirm it. As if this thing was here to slay him, to announce a dire omen, to swing a scythe.

It did nothing so intelligible.

To Jack’s utter disbelief, the creature pivoted to the left and scrambled over the counters, knees thudding against the counter top, knocking dishes off, exploding plates and cups on the floor. It disappeared into the dark.

Jack waited, heart pounding, eyes refusing to blink.

“Where—where’d you go?” he breathed.

Silence. Utter silence.

“No,” he said, almost whining. “Fuck no!”

He visually scanned the darkened alcove on the other side of the counters, on the side where the living room became the dining room. The thing had simply fucking vanished.

“That’s impossible,” he said, knowing that this creature was, somehow, still there because, quite simply, it had to be.

He shook his head. Oh God. Was this really happening?

The upside down container of sour cream lay on the floor with the white semi solid fluid splattered in a long streak.

He inhaled sharply as the image of the wormy creature between Cheryl’s legs bubbled up in his mind.

This thing, so starved and thin and ghastly, needed sex so badly that it had to fuck my girlfriend in the fucking three minutes that I left her alone? And she didn’t even notice? How can that be?

But later, she had also seen the goddamned thing. So, it wasn’t invisible after all, so it wasn’t a ghost. He recalled the way it had somehow shriveled or folded or whatever it had done to disappear.

Not disappear, but hide. It’s been hiding. It’s good at hiding. It’s so good at hiding that it can get between your legs without you even noticing. The thought sent wracking shivers down his spine.

How long has it been here?

He licked his lips with a dry, chalky tongue.

How long has this thing been here, hiding?

He shook his head as the next horrifying thought crawled into his ear.

What else does it eat?

He gulped. Oh no. “Oh fuck no, no, no.”

Some parasite, Doc. What else does this thing eat? Drink? Gulp? Why don’t you stain the sheets when you have a wet dream, Mr. Fuller? Why doesn’t the blood from your nose land on the pillow, Mr. Fuller? Where does it go, Mr. Fuller, all that blood and semen and … ?

Fears were bouncing back and forth like pinballs between twin rows of thumper bumpers and extra bonus points were easy to score tonight.

His own disbelief was rigid in his mind, his sense of reality not wanting to yield from his comfortably familiar view of the world, and yet, there was the evidence on the kitchen floor: a carton of Dairy Fresh sour cream. He knew for a damn fact that he had not eaten any. He had not opened the refrigerator door himself, he had not opened the sour cream, and he had not dropped the goddamned thing on the floor.

He wasn’t going to have this. He wasn’t going to have this at all. “I’m gonna getchou,” he breathed. “I’m gonna getchou. Oh, yeah, I’m gonna fucking getchou.”

Obviously this thing was more afraid of him than he was of it. It was the one hiding, after all.

He broke from his paralyzed action and strode over to the light switch nearest him and flipped it on. Then he leapt across the living room and flipped on the light for the dining room. The ceiling lamp cast a solid, bright light with 75 watts streaming out of every one of its three bulbs.

There was nothing in the alcove, nothing but condo; furniture, broken dishes.

Did he dare leave his spot in the living room in search of a weapon? No, of course not. Do that and this fucking thing could go anywhere, and he’d seen it last right here, right here in this spot four yards in front of him.

When you hunt a mouse in your house, you don’t take your eye off the last place you saw it, that’s Mouse Hunting 101, everybody knows that.

Without taking his eye off the spot, he crept backward into the kitchen and then the laundry closet. Reaching behind him, he palmed a broom handle.

The big question—the only question that mattered—was, where did this thing go now? Because there was absolutely nothing in the last place he’d seen it.

He rounded back over to the dining room and crouched as if he might catch a soccer ball. One hand on the shaft of the broom handle and the other clenching and unclenching to prepare for action, he slowly, carefully began reaching for a cabinet door. There were six cabinet doors, all in a row along the far wall of the dining room. He wedged the tip of the broom handle inside one of the cabinet doors.

Then he stopped and shook his head.

He was not hunting a mouse. This creature—this monster—was man-sized, standing just as tall as Jack. Unless, the thing was a ghost, in which case, there was nothing he could do because it would have just vanish—

But do ghosts eat? That’s the fucking question, Jack! Do ghosts eat?

“No,” he shouted. “Ghosts don’t fucking eat. They don’t binge on fucking sour cream.”

So it isn’t a ghost then, right?

When had he ever seen a ghost? Never. When had he ever heard a ghost story? On TV or, no he actually had read an entire book of ghosts stories, true ghost stories and, well, yeah, not one of those things had ever stopped to take lunch.

Ruling out Specter then, he was left with the thing being, what, substantial? If so, that placed it squarely in the laws of physics with mass and space and limitations.

He laughed wickedly. “That’s right, limi-fucking-tations!”

Still, Jack needed to check all the places where a man could fit. Yeah, but he disappeared here right here where a mouse could fit!

Then he thought again. It was dark—the lights had been out; and the thing had appeared quite agile, hadn’t it? Yeah, it had crawled up and over the freaking counter tops. I mean, how does—I couldn’t even do that.

He mustered his courage, it was time to push off all fear and doubt and bullshit and get this goddamned thing, whatever it was.

He stormed the kitchen, inspecting the spaces between the refrigerator, the wall and the counter. He checked the pantry, the laundry closet, and then that spot in the laundry closet around the door where he kept brooms and brushes and tall stuff for cleaning high shit. He checked under the couch, in all the closets, under his bed, in the shower, behind the big plant in the study and even the crawl space in the attic. Then he checked the front door and made sure it was still locked, and when he checked the whole place all over again, with all those little spaces—including every goddamn cabinet door—and still found nothing, he tossed his broom aside and stalked into the bathroom where he stared into the dirty, spotty, finger-printed mirror.

“Fuck! I’m going crazy. Obviously.”

The sudden knowledge that he was losing his mind came over him like an icy wind. Yeah, he was really going nuts. This is what it’s like. Finally, I get to see what it’s like to go bonkers. Like most people, he had always wondered what it would be like to go insane, how it feels, the kinds of things you “see” and all the mental delusion that goes with it. That Cheryl had shared his false visions or whatever they were meant absolutely nothing coming from a person who sees giant chickens on the order of Foghorn Leghorn walking down Sunset Boulevard.

“We’re all just a bunch of loonies.”

He leaned into the mirror and eyeballed himself suspiciously.

“You are crazy,” he said, and noticed a small amount of fog accumulate on the mirror with the exhaling breath of the long “A” sound in crazy. He said it again, this time drawing it out and accentuating the exhale, like a man who breathes his hot breath into your face for a joke.

“Cra-ha-zy,” he said, watching the spot of fog grow on the mirror, when a certain thought, or rather memory, was triggered.

He licked his lips and his heart began to pound all over again. Oh, this is good, he thought. This is really good.

The fog … the image in the fog, standing right here, behind me. Weeks ago, was it?

He stared blinkless into the mirror. A riot of nursery rhymes began running through his head.

Three blind mice, see how they …

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the …

And then he thought of the only one that made any sense: “Tell me Doc, how do you catch a tiger?

“The answer to that riddle my friends, is quite simply, by the Mother. Fuckin. Toe!”

He stomped down, hard. And connected with something substantial.

He heard an ear-splitting shriek of pain, and then something fell off his back. He heard it fall like a shirt that slides off the hanger, like a two sheets of paper slipping apart.

Jack whirled around, grabbed it one handed by its thin, reedy neck, and went down onto the floor with it. He thought the tips of his fingers might touch the tip of his thumb, so thin was that neck.

But he had it, fuck yeah, he had it. Its eyes bulged out of their sockets, its lips pulled back in a skeletal grimace, gurgling and struggling against him.

“I got you, you fuck!” he screamed through his teeth. “I got you, I got you, I fucking got you!”

The thing wailed, high and whining and piteous, its arms flailing, heels thudding against the floor. But it was weak, so weak, it couldn’t push Jack off.

Of course it’s weak, look how scrawny it is!

“Shut up!” he yelled. “Just shut the fuuuurg …” The rage and adrenaline constricted his own throat so that for a moment he feared he was the one being strangled.

Then the thing gagged and went still and Jack, as if he’d been holding a cigarette lighter for too long, recoiled and let it go.

“Dead?” he asked ridiculously. “Are you dead?”

He stared at his hand, as though it had transgressed on its own accord. He sat up. He was straddling it, this creature, this man, pinning it to the bathroom floor. It’s skin was soft, baby soft, only with no baby fat. More like silk, he thought. The thing was warm, too, body temperature.

It—he—lay there, face turned to one side, eyes closed as if sleeping.

With the careful and deliberate motions one might use around a resting pit bull, Jack stood up, wary to keep his arms and hands out in front of him, as if the thing might pop up like a horror movie killer.

He watched it. Waiting and carefully observing every detail. The translucent quality of the skin, the fine features, the papery eyelids, the pulsing veins. Ever so slightly, the creature’s chest rose and fell. Its pubic area was small. The penis of a child, he thought. No wonder Cheryl hadn’t felt anything.

Stay focused. The goddamned thing is still breathing.

Carefully, without taking his eyes off the wretch on the floor, he reached behind him and opened a drawer. Inside, he searched with his fingers through combs and half empty toothpaste tubes to a pair of old fashioned barber scissors.

He curled his fist around the finger holds as he brought the instrument up to his chest, point out in a backwards grip, the way one might to commit a murder.

Then the emaciated man on the floor curled in on himself; feet went pigeon toed, knees pulled in, arms locked above the chest as he curled into a rigid fetal position. The mouth went slack on one side as the thing slapped his crippled hand against his chest and moaned something unintelligible.

“Jesus Christ, what the hell are you?” Jack breathed, and put the scissors down.

7

Jack adjusted the brake on the wheel chair.

This particular wheel had been catching against the brake mechanism, making the chair skid out like a shopping cart with a bad castor. It was supremely annoying. He figured he would have to take the chair back and exchange it for another one. He hoped they wouldn’t give him any grief about it. The thing was too damn expensive to not work properly.

“Is he your father?”

Jack stared up at a handsome looking woman, who he guessed was somewhere in her forties. She was well dressed and manicured. His type.

“Um, yes,” he said. He was never sure how to answer these questions. Often it was, “Is this your brother?” but sometimes the inquirer asked if he was his father. Other times it was simply, “And who is this?” All manner of people asked from random strangers to grocery aisle cashiers. Yeah, he thought, who is this?

“His name is Jerry.”

“It’s so good of you to take him out,” she said and her eyes twinkled. She was hitting on him, he knew that, and it wasn’t the first time that had happened while he was pushing Jerry around. There was something about a man helping a cripple that attracted certain women.

Jack stood up.

“Yeah, I figured a trip to the zoo would do him some good.” He smiled sheepishly and gestured to Jerry who had let a strand of drool escape his lips. Slightly embarrassed, Jack reached for the knapsack attached to the back of the wheelchair.

“Oh, lemme get that.” He pulled a hanky out and knelt down beside Jerry, gently wiping his chin. Not now Jerry; no acting up.

“It happens,” he said stupidly. Yeah, like 24/7, he thought.

“Does Jerry have Alzheimer’s?” she asked. “I’m sorry, I know it’s none of my business, it’s just that my mom—”

Jack came back to his feet and met her gaze. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a hell of thing, you know.”

The woman exhaled relief. “Oh, it’s just been heartbreaking for our family. How do you cope?”

He studied her deep blue eyes. They were beautiful. He struggled to keep his vision level; he knew that a single flash down over her chest would be off putting in the extreme and likely ruin their interchange right here and now.

“One day at a time,” he said, and then suddenly felt bad about using a disease as a pick up line. “I should probably get going.”

“Oh, of course. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to trouble you—have a wonderful day.” She bent down to look into Jerry’s eyes with the neck line of her blouse dipping just enough to stir the imagination. Jack wondered if Jerry was aware enough to enjoy the view from where he was sitting.

“Have a wonderful day Jerry,” she said, cheerily. “You deserve it.” She stood up, the cheerfulness in her eyes turning sad already. She turned to Jack. “Thank you,” she said.

“No problem. Look, if you want to talk later, just call. I don’t mind.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Really.”

She pulled a napkin from her pocket. “I’m sorry, I don’t have a pen.”

“Oh, well, you’re in luck. Here.” He dug into the knapsack and fished out a small pad and pen. He hoped he didn’t look too prepared. The pad wasn’t specifically for catching phone numbers, it had many uses.

She wrote out her name and number and email address.

“Jessica—”

“Harrington,” she cut in. “You probably can’t read it, I know. I have terrible handwriting.”

“Oh, no,” he said, laughing slightly, “it’s quite nice hand writing, really. I just wanted to make sure. Jessica it was really nice talking to you and, like I said, just—oh, let me give you my number.” He flipped to a blank page and wrote it out for her. “My name’s Jack,” he said, handing her the paper.

She smiled. “Jack and Jerry, I’ll remember that.”

Jack watched her walk away, watched and studied. She’s a fit woman, he thought. He grabbed the handle bars of the chair and began pushing.

“You see that Jer, we’ve got charm, the two of us.”

Jerry’s head bobbed to a monotonous groan.

Jack toured Jerry through the many areas of the zoo, pushing the chair over the paved foot paths, commenting on this exhibit or that, reading the plaques aloud as they stopped. Children and families teemed through the exhibits, making it difficult to get close enough with the wheelchair a lot of the time.

Jack knelt beside the chair and told Jerry what they were looking at.

“Now these,” he said, “are koala bears and they originate in Australia, which is a southern continent, which is really just a big island. They used to put criminals there, now they just drink beer and wrestle alligators.”

Jerry’s eyes did not seem to register, his gaze listless at best. It disheartened Jack. There seemed little that could bring Jerry out of his stupor.

It had been a difficult three weeks, and Jack was still questioning himself on why he hadn’t abandoned Jerry just yet. There would be problems associated with that, no doubt, but he could do it, humanely, he was sure. It might cost him though, quite a bit, but the cost of full time care might be a lot less to Jack than the alternative.

Jack had to get back to his life. Get back to work for Christ’s sake. The last weeks had been all about Jerry.

At first, Jerry had been very weak and equally frail, he could have been described as “skin and bones” and yet that didn’t quite say it either, because he had been less than that. Like skin and sticks, maybe. Like skin and toothpicks. Regardless, over the course of a few weeks—just a few weeks, can you believe it?—his body had matured significantly. As in, night and day.

His spindly limbs had filled out and his hands and fingers, once curling on themselves, had straightened and grown out long. It seemed he was suffering from a terrible, wasting disease in reverse with time-lapse photography.

Now it seemed Jack could scarcely remember the image of the semi-immaterial being that he would later name Jerry and come to think of as a member of his family.

How strange was that? He and Jerry had something between them, something all too familiar. And it wasn’t just a feeling. Jerry possessed a lot of the same attributes as Jack did. The height was one thing, but with Jerry being wheelchair ridden you didn’t really notice that he was, from toe to crown, the exact same height as Jack. Exact same, right down to the quarter inch. Six foot three and three quarters. Jack had measured him, painstakingly, again and again to account for it because he just couldn’t believe it. That last quarter inch. Might as well call it six foot four inches. That’s what he always did, reporting his own height as six foot four on driver’s license paperwork or health insurance questionnaires. It’s why he took notice when Jerry measured in at the same numbers with that last quarter inch sheared off from an otherwise perfect even number.

But it was more than that. It was the face. Only you couldn’t see the resemblance yet because Jerry’s face was too slim. The face can change radically with weight loss. Jack knew that. He’d seen it in friends of his, girlfriends on the newest fad diet would drop twenty pounds over a couple months and boy would they look different. And usually—usually but not always—they’d gain it right back in another couple of months—or weeks for God’s sakes—and Jack would see the change all over again.

No, with a few more pounds, Jerry was going to look a whole lot like Jack, as in more than a brother, as in a “spitting fricking image.”

And that scared the holy bejesus out of him.

It was, at times like these, little moments of realization that this was all happening, all real, when the future of taking care of him seemed an eternal chore. The temptation to just leave him somewhere, like by the side of the road, or in some home or something, weighed heavy on Jack. What responsibility did he really have for this individual? What was Jerry, after all? Well, clearly he was a man. He looked like a man, he acted like a man, albeit a crippled one. But did being a man qualify for a lifetime of free home care at Jack’s expense? Common sense said, “No way, bub.”

He’s an anomaly, Jack had finally decided. That’s what he is, an anomaly, and leaving him would be wrong on so many levels.

And yet, how long could he care for and support him, really?

What Jerry was, scientifically, exactly, was an unknown, but Jack had developed certain theories over the past weeks and had settled on the one he believed to be most likely: a post utero parasitic twin.

Parasitic because Jerry very well may have killed Jack had they shared a womb together. In order for both siblings to survive, Jack postulated, that Jerry’s gestation had needed to occur outside of the womb, though that seemed rather farfetched.

In practice, Jack calculated that Jerry had been “on the scene” only as long as he had been experiencing symptoms of poor health, because since the night Jack had wrestled Jerry to the floor and almost strangled him to death, most all of Jack’s “symptoms” had disappeared, his hunger being the last to taper off as his body adjusted back to his normal weight.

The more likely scenario is that Jack had carried the propensity for Jerry his whole life, and that given the right stimuli, Jerry would come out, or be born, the mother role having transferred from Jack’s mother to Jack.

But what was the right stimuli? And why now?

How Gromwell and the other doctors had missed the presence of Jerry could be explained by Jerry’s ability to “come off” of Jack at certain times. Because, clearly, after a certain point in Jerry’s development, he hadn’t needed to stay on or with Jack at all times. The ghastly, almost insubstantial formation Jerry had taken in the beginning could be considered the first stage of separation where Jerry grew strong enough to exist on his own.

That’s why I was so hungry originally, Jack thought. Because I was eating for the both of us, and Jerry had needed a lot of food.

There were still many things to consider and explain. How Jerry could “feed off” Jack, absorbing nutrients and proteins, was a mystery. Where Jerry had actually “lived” during the initial stages of his development was another one.

Had he been riding piggy back the entire time?

No, of course not, that had been a momentary trick. But what, then?

Once Jerry had developed enough to eat real food he had stopped feeding “off of” Jack, or so it would seem. Thus, the sour cream. Jack tried again and again to remember if certain foods had “gone” faster than he thought they should have. He did recall buying a lot of cottage cheese these past weeks, but it was really hard to say if it went faster then normal, because he had been eating so damn much, he hadn’t paid close attention.

But Jerry was now a fully formed organism who continued to develop. Witness the maturation of his body and the “reverse” crippling.

Though, why Jerry had been so nimble that night when he disappeared over the counters, before the “disease phase” was a paradox that Jack didn’t figure he would ever find out.

He laughed out loud staring into Jerry’s face. “It’s one hell of a thing, isn’t it Jer? You’re a freaking miracle.”

The other did slightly less than nod and Jack couldn’t really be sure he had even heard him at all.

“Oh, fuckin’ A,” Jack said breathily. He wondered what Jerry thought about all this, if he even thought about it at all. Oh, if Jerry could speak, what wonders might he impart?

What a joke.

Jerry had never spoken a single word, just moans and grunts and farts. Jack knew he held the capacity for speech because he had a human mouth, for one. He also expressed a wide range of vocal constructs that would seem to indicate a primitive form of language.

One for “I’m hungry” another for “I want it” others for: “I have to go to the bathroom,” “You pissed me off,” “I want to go outside,” and more. But how intelligent Jerry was, was debatable. Jack had seen things that indicated a very high level, and there was a certain gleam that would come over Jerry’s eyes that bespoke of a very calculating intelligence indeed.

The days Jack had spent nursing Jerry in his condo had been very strange, but only because of the circumstances of Jerry’s “birth” (God, could you really call it that?) and his sudden appearance in Jack’s life. He still encountered waves of emotion where it all seemed “so surreal.”

The actual needs of the newcomer were basic and essential to any human being. Jerry needed to eat, go to the bathroom and be cleaned. Jack did not relish any of those activities, but he did carry them out as one might for the elderly and infirm, because regardless of Jack’s intellectual understanding—or lack thereof—of what had taken place to bring Jerry into the world, his emotional tie to Jerry was deep and profound.

His feelings for Jerry were akin to what one might experience for a cat that has been doused with water and now yowls pathetically, or upon seeing that look in a dog’s eyes when it finally realizes it’s about to get euthanized. Something in Jerry called out to Jack which Jack could not ignore. The kind of sentiment, perhaps, that one might have for the “ugly duckling.” It was overpowering, undeniable and totally crippling to Jack’s impassive and often cold detachment to the people in his life.

Jack simply had to take care of him, if for no better reasoning than: who else would?

After a week or so, Jerry’s activity had increased, namely eating, and Jack had had to experiment with different kinds of food. Milk, yogurt and mashed bananas had proven to be among the top favorites and they’d gone through a lot of bananas.

And diapers. God, the adult ones are so frigging expensive.

Now Jerry was able to tolerate semi-solid foods like cheese and eggs. It was an improvement. And he was even willing to sit on the toilet now, all by his lonesome.

Jack believed—hoped—that he would begin to develop actual speech. As well as an actual personality and the ability to be a normal human being and have a normal functioning life.

Perhaps that’s the only ethical way for me to be rid of him.

There were so many questions.

Jerry shifted low in the chair, causing his arm to flop over the elbow rest and stick out rigidly. Jack got up to help him adjust so that he could sit more comfortably, but also so he wouldn’t clip some kid in the ear.

“You hungry?” he asked, but Jerry did not respond.

“Bored?”

Nothing.

“Jerry, come on, you gotta try, okay?”

That earned him a head jerk.

“What, are you mad at me?”

Three quick grunts.

“Oh, I see, you’re pissed off. Okay, and why?”

Jerry moaned.

Jack laughed. “That one doesn’t tell me anything.”

Jerry let out a series of short moans, followed by a long one.

“Right,” Jack said, sighed and knelt down beside him. “Let me see if I can’t figure this out. You’re upset because … you’re hungry?”

Nothing.

“You have to go to bathroom?”

Nothing.

“You don’t like the zoo?”

Nothing.

“Okay, let’s see—oh, I bet I know why. Because I called you my father back there to—”

Uhhh, uhhhh, uhhhh, uhhhh, uhhhh, uhhhhhhhhhhh!”

“Okay!” Jack said. “I got it. I’m sorry, Jerry. I just—you know she mentioned it and I went with it. But if it upsets you so much, I won’t do it again, all right? I promise Jer, I’ll pick up chicks the old fashioned way.”

“Blueeeh.”

“I promise.”

Jerry shook his head. “Mmmuhhhhh.”

“What?”

“Bhuuuah.”

Jack laughed. “You thought she was pretty, didn’t you?”

Jerry’s hand came down hard on the elbow rest, and he swiveled his head so that he could look directly into Jack’s eyes. The anger coming through him was infantile and Jack was hard-pressed to take him seriously.

“Okay, okay,” said Jack. “I did too, all right. But I won’t do that again.”

Jerry’s lips parted and then his tongue came out and he blew a Bronx raspberry.

“Oh come on, Jerry!” Jack hopped back and wiped his face.

Jerry laughed ridiculously through his throat, making it glottal back and forth.

“Yeah, you got me,” Jack agreed. “You got me.”

II

They had lunch at the zoo café. Jack ordered a sandwich for himself and a yogurt cup and two hard boiled eggs for Jerry. After they ate—well, after Jack ate and Jerry gulped down some yogurt and then played with the egg yolks making Jack wipe his fingers, Jack purchased a cup of coffee and a hot chocolate and they sat in the shade sipping their drinks and watching passersby.

Jack thought people made for good exhibits themselves. A family was marked with its own brand of bad fashion. The daughter gesticulated like the mother, the son spoke like the father. He wondered where genetics gave way to social training, if it ever did. How much of who we are and how we act is dictated by instinct and impulse and genetic predisposition he couldn’t know.

And he wondered what people thought of him and his retarded brother sitting in the shade, sipping coffee and hot chocolate, wiping drool and staring. Well, let them think whatever they want, he thought. Nobody’s perfect.

Jack gave Jerry a few sips of hot chocolate before Jerry, quite purposely, reached over and tipped the cup, spilling the lukewarm contents out onto the pavement. They also spilled onto Jerry’s new Keds and Jack decided not to reprimand him, it grew too tiresome. He simply got up and wheeled him away.

He was sure they had people to clean up messes like that. He hoped anyway. He felt guilty about leaving it for someone else, and when he considered cleaning the chocolate residue off of Jerry’s shoes, he thought: Why should I? If Jerry’s going to purposely spill things on himself, he has to live with it.

Jack consulted the map and located the monkey exhibit. It would be the last exhibit before they went home. Jerry would be needing to go to the bathroom soon—something Jack did not want to deal with in a public restroom—as well he needed his afternoon nap.

They pulled up to the first cage and Jack began reading the plaque aloud. “Lemurs are indigenous to the island of Madagascar. The name ‘Lemur’ derives from the word ‘lemurs’ meaning ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit.’

“Well, look at that, Jerry.”

But Jerry was gazing off, his head craned painfully to one side.

“What are you looking at, buddy? Huh?”

Jack traced the line of Jerry’s sight to the other side of the exhibit.

“Orangutans. I might have known. Here, let’s get you positioned so you can actually look at them. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?”

Jack wheeled Jerry around and over the path to the orangutan cages. He pushed Jerry up as close as he could get him without pinching his legs against the bars.

Jerry came to life all of a sudden, as though this was the exact right stimulus needed. He leaned forward, laying his belly against his thighs, in order to get the closest possible view. A rust colored ape, a female Jack observed, came tottering over to the side of the fence, blowing her cheeks full of air and letting it out to a toothy smile.

The female postured for Jerry, walking upright in a circle, then smiling and then picking her nose and clapping.

Jerry went wild, shaking his head from side to side, mimicking the animal, blowing air out of his mouth and chattering his teeth together.

“Hey, Jerry, look, you made a new friend, eh?”

Jack had never seen Jerry so animated before, so filled with delight. He was clapping and moaning exuberantly, trying to emulate all the facial movements and torso postures of the primate.

Then Jerry paused and looked thoughtful for a moment.

“What’s up Jer?”

Jerry stared forlornly, and then looked up at Jack, tears sparkling in his eyes.

“Hey, Jerry, it’s okay.”

Jerry shook his head and motioned in front of him, at the bars.

Jack shrugged. “It’s a wild animal, Jerry. I mean, it’s not a person like you and me, but you know it’s probably got it pretty good here, though, compared to where it came from.”

Jerry negated this with a vigorous head shake.

“Oh, Jerry its okay, Jeeze. They’re not hurting them. Hey, look she—she’s fat. They’re feeding her good Jerry.”

Jerry stared at the ape, then did something that terrified Jack.

Using arm and lower back strength that Jack did not know he had, he pitched forward off the chair to slam himself up against the bars, sticking his hands through the slats reaching for the orangutan. The animal shrieked.

“Jerry!” Jack shouted, terrified, tripping over the wheel chair in his attempt to reach his twin. A molded rubber handle grip shoved painfully into his upper thigh as he went down. He screamed in pain.

The ape reached forward. Jack viewed it as though it were a dream. The animal’s ochre colored fingers, fat and dry like old cigars, wrapped around Jerry’s wrist and yanked. Jerry’s arm threaded through the cast iron pickets with quick ease. Jack watched stupidly as Jerry’s body swept forward into the air, and then stared in horror as his twin’s face met with the iron bars and mashed into them. Blood erupted from Jerry’s nose.

Jack was helpless. With the wheelchair between them, he simply could not get close enough, fast enough to do anything effective.

“Jerry!” he screamed. “Oh God, oh God, Jerry!”

The ape gripped Jerry’s wrist and beat him against the bars. The sound of Jerry’s head gonging against the metal bars sickened Jack to his core. The acid taste of his coffee on the rebound burned his throat.

Jack, finally untangling himself from the chair, reached his twin and flopped down onto his knees in the dirt. He gagged on a heavy whiff of animal urine, but managed to grab onto either side of Jerry’s waist. He began to pull back, but with the ape pulling Jerry in the opposite direction, Jack feared that he might do more damage attempting a rescue.

“Oh God, please somebody help us!” Jack screamed.

Jerry shrieked a terrifying, blood curdling, warbling cry that no man should hear twice. Jack’s next impulse was to kick the bars to frighten the ape into letting go, but then—thank God, oh thank God—the animal simply let go and Jerry fell back, bawling and choking with bright red blood streaming from his nose, sputtering incoherent pleas.

Jack scrambled messily in the dirt, then looped his hands under Jerry’s armpits and hauled him back. “Christ Jerry, oh God Jerry, I hope you’re okay Jerry.”

The ape leapt onto the cage bars, holding on with fingers and toes. It shook the cage wall and screeched into the air.

Jerry would not look away. He stared at the beast, tears streaming from his eyes, blood pumping over his chin and spreading messily down the front of his shirt. Already his lower lip was puffing up like a water logged sponge. Jack hauled him up and clumsily dropped him back into the wheelchair, observing that despite his pain and tears of anguish, Jerry would not look away from the beast that had attacked him. The blood from Jerry’s nose continued to chug out onto his shirt so that Jerry appeared to have been shot point blank in the chest.

Once he got him stably in the chair, Jack pulled tissues from the knapsack and brought Jerry’s hands up to hold the tissues to his nose.

“Hold it there Jerry, come on!”

Jack yanked the chair back to the pavement and pushed it forward on the path ignoring the throbbing pain in his leg, the ogling eyes of the crowd and the fact that Jerry would rather hang sideways out of his wheelchair, bleeding onto the stained walkway and trampled hotdog containers, than look away from the ape that had nearly killed him.

A zoo official appeared out of the crowd wearing his baggy, ill fitting khaki uniform, eyes staring dolefully down at Jerry, then up at Jack. He opened his mouth, but fell short, glancing behind Jack at the still enraged ape hanging off the cage bars, and the crowd of onlookers with their terrified and bawling kids.

“He’ll be fine,” Jack said gruffly. It was the cue the zoo keeper needed, the “I’m not going to sue you if you just get out of my way” undertone inherent in Jack’s manner that allowed the other man to run off and attend to the animal.

II

Jerry looked like he’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. A purple goose egg the size of a golf ball had sprouted on his forehead. His lip puffed up three times its size and hung down in a perfect mimic of a Richard Nixon Halloween mask. His bruises were deepening into a patchwork design.

Jack had done his best to sponge the blood off of him, but short of a full bath, he wasn’t going to get it all.

He undressed him and put him into a bathrobe, then wrapped Jerry’s fingers with gauze and a splint from the first aid kit. He treated his cuts with diluted hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin, and after that he gave Jerry two Advils and a big, tall glass of chocolate milk.

“See how that makes you feel Jerry. Give it a half an hour or so,” he told him.

He was beside himself with guilt. How had he let this happen? How on earth? He played the incident over and over in his head until he felt sick from it.

But thank you God and Jesus and the Holy Freaking Ghost that he has no broken bones, and he’s conscious and fine. Somehow he’s fine.

He’s so resilient. He’s like a baby in that regard.

It was the first time that Jack wondered if Jerry’s bones weren’t more pliable than a normal adult’s.

But Jerry’s arm was bruised and Jack reckoned that by morning it would be stiff and very painful. Jack’s own leg was bruised too, but the pain was minimal. Jerry got bludgeoned and all I got was bruised in a place that doesn’t hurt. He felt guilty.

For the rest of the afternoon and evening Jerry sat slumped on the couch refusing to respond or even eat. Jack wondered if he should take him to the doctor after all, but he decided against it. Tomorrow, maybe, if things should get worse, or if Jerry appeared severely incoherent or unconscious. If he could help it, Jack didn’t want to divulge the secret of Jerry to the world just yet.

Goddamned doctors wouldn’t know what to do with someone like Jerry anyway, and it would be just Jack’s crap-ass luck that somebody would take an X-ray or a blood sample or something and find that—surprise—Jerry’s not normal, Jerry’s a freak of nature, Jerry needs special treatment, and up go the medical bills, higher than the Empire State Building.

Jack did a load of laundry. Both of their shirts were stained so badly with blood and ground in dirt that his attempt to “Shout” it out was unsuccessful. After two washes, he threw the clothes away.

Lousy detergent anyway.

When Jerry fell asleep on the couch, Jack laid him down and covered him with a blanket, leaving the hall light on in case he should wake in the middle of the night and begin to moan: his signal for the bathroom. In his room, Jack undressed and crawled into bed. It was early, somewhere between five and six o’clock, but Jack was exhausted and couldn’t contemplate staying awake for another six hours to complete the day.

The sheets were cool and clean and felt good on legs that were apt to jump when he felt this tired. He nestled deep under the pile of blankets and felt himself already on his way to sleep. He thought of Doctor Gromwell. That stupid, dumb sonovabitch still had not gotten back to him. What kind of idiot? The whole hospital must be staffed with them.

Well, he thought, I don’t really need them anymore, do I?

He thought of the fright that today’s incident had brought about inside him, the panic he had felt at not being able to do anything at all, and the subsequent guilt and shame. And why had the animal released Jerry? Why had it not just continued to knock him senseless against the metal bars? And then there was that moron of a zoo keeper with his doe-eyed stare and total lack of any idea of what the fuck he should do in such a situation. Jack supposed he shouldn’t be critical of the staff though. After all, how many people would just throw themselves up against the bars and reach through? Probably one: Jerry Fuller. Still, the guy had just looked so all-fired dumb about it that it annoyed Jack no end just thinking of it.

Jack thanked God that the creature had released him, though. Thanked fucking God. He sat up in bed. “I love Jerry,” he said, only slightly confused. “Like a brother.”

The concept seemed so foreign, yet so natural. “Well, why not? He came from me, right?” And how strange was that? Or was it? These things, while at first seeming so bizarre, lately began to seem so ordinary. What could be more ordinary than love for a brother? Didn’t that two headed girl—those two headed girls—on the internet, didn’t they love each other? Of course they did. They were the closest friends they were ever going to know. Two girls sharing the same body with two freakin’ heads.

Did it get any weirder—or closer—than that? Christ, a marriage doesn’t even touch that.

That was just the one story of many Jack had found online. There were others, so many others that were just as wonderfully bizarre. The woman with that baby inside her for, what, forty years? Sure it came out calcified, but to think, the old woman carrying that thing inside her for half a life time? Or, how about the “spider twins?” Two women joined at the abdomen, making their money by going on display and showing the world how they brush their teeth and ate salad.

Who ever heard of such stuff?

The man with the face on the back of his head that shouted obscenities at him in his sleep? Come on. You had to be smoking something. And yet, there it was.

The freak show, the menagerie, the real-life circus.

And why the-double-fuck not? Who’s to say what’s normal? Or acceptable? Or weird? Jack had been called weird before, hadn’t he? In high school, sure. He’d been called weird sometimes on a daily basis, and what had it mattered? His life hadn’t been poorer because of it. Probably the opposite actually.

Jerry’s weird, he thought, and then thought better of it. No, he isn’t. The way Jerry came into the world is weird, that’s all. Jerry himself is not weird.

For that matter, isn’t it such an awful mess how we all come into this world? Isn’t it the same thing: one body carries another body within it, until the other body is ready to come out?

God, it’s like pop tarts.

That’s all that happened. It just took a longer time for Jerry to get ready to come out. To pop out. Jack laughed. “That’s all he did, he just popped out!”

Jack wanted to know who else this had happened to.

Surely, the internet would tell of others.

If he told anyone about this they would be, what … horrified? Yeah, most likely, or, at the very least, amazed. After all, what could be more horrific or amazing? At least he and his twin, were not still connected. A clean split was for the best, no matter that it happened mid-life.

Yeah, but you’re forgetting, your twin is a retard.

“We’ll see about that,” Jack said to himself. “He is developing, and maybe he’ll show more signs of intelligence. Christ, he’s probably a Grand Genius of the Highest Realm, I mean, he’s probably got a membership at Mensa with his name on it, for all I know.”

He realized he wasn’t going to get any sleep if he delved any further into the wonder that was Jerry. Perhaps, this was why he had not focused all his attention on it before, the questions were too many to be answered all in a rush, the ramifications too mind-blowing to consider all at once.

But the one revelation that had come today had been the most important one of all: he loved his brother.

8

Jack woke blinking stupidly into a pair of illumined eyes.

His thoughts were rambling, as if he’d been having a conversation with someone in his sleep. He realized that he was staring at Jerry and it seemed as if he had been staring at him for hours or days. The light of a flashlight shone up from Jerry’s chin exaggerating the nooks and promontories of Jerry’s swollen and battered face.

The idea that Jerry could be kneeling or crouching beside his bed didn’t dawn on him the way it might on his awake mind. Here, in a half conscious state, it seemed perfectly normal that Jerry should be present in this manner.

Jack’s mind preoccupied itself with the mundane details, like how Jerry’s nose hair seemed to bush out from his nostrils with the light shining, or the fact that Jerry was breathing through his mouth, sending his stale and pungent breath into Jack’s face, or the scent of farts that emanated from Jerry, a sure sign that he had to go to bathroom, and the obvious reason for his waking him up.

“What time is it Jer?” Jack managed to croak out, before he attempted to rise and help Jerry do his business on the toilet.

Through his nose, slowly and steadily, Jerry inhaled a deep breath until it seemed he had reached the limit of his lungs and his cheeks were full like a chipmunk preparing for winter.

“What’s up Jer?” Jack asked. “What are you doing there, buddy?”

He was rewarded with a Bronx raspberry, produced with maximal spittle from his twin’s flapping lips.

“Oh God, cut that shit out!” He rolled onto his back and wiped his face. “That’s rude Jerry.”

Jerry climbed up onto the bed and before Jack quite understood what was happening, Jerry got on top of him and straddled him across the waist with an idiot laugh escaping his throat.

It was a thought that seemed to come from some back corner of Jack’s mind, an obvious realization: Jerry shouldn’t be able to do any of that.

“Jerry?”

“Djack,” Jerry said.

He should have been amazed that Jerry had just spoken his first true word. He should have celebrated the moment with cake and ice cream and a bottle of gin. He should have done a lot of things, but all he could do was stare at the flashlight gripped in Jerry’s hand. It was the security flashlight, the big, heavy one that Jack kept in the kitchen utility drawer. It was huge and the very same one that when he purchased it, he recalled very clearly thinking: if anyone breaks into my house, I can use this to crack his head open.

It was then that Jack realized Jerry was naked.

“Jerry, what are you doing?” Jack asked, a note of hysteria creeping into his voice.

Jerry began to suck in air and blow it out through inflated cheeks. Not the Bronx raspberry now, but quite something else. Jack’s first concept was that this was Jerry’s idea of a Dizzy Gillespie impression, but Jerry’s wicked, toothy grin that followed gave him a different idea: orangutan.

Jerry dropped the flashlight so that it landed in the bunched up blankets and sheets with a nestling rustle that made it at once seem lost and far away despite a portion of its powerful beam still broadcasting the episode in shadow play on the walls.

He hoisted his arms above his head and waved them, letting his hands go floppy like two loose dishrags. The stink of his breath came down on each exhale, stale and fishy from having slept with an open mouth. His body odor was meaty.

Jerry began posturing with his torso, mimicking the simian motions. He appeared not to have suffered any lasting muscle restrictions from the incident earlier that day. The flashlight beam flickered over the walls and windows.

“Jerry, come on now. Lemme up.”

Jerry pushed his lips together and made a series of ooh, ooh, ooh noises, then brought his arms up again above his head, armpit hair bushy and glistening with sweat, finger bandages monstrous in the strobing flashlight. The posture showed his size.

His dominance.

“All right Jerry, you’ve had your fun now, okay? Let me up, this is hurting me Jerry.” Jack tried to appear calm despite the ever growing well of terror opening up inside.

Jerry began to trounce up, his flaccid penis and dangling testicles slapping hotly on Jack’s belly.

“Jerry, goddamn you!” Jack shouted through clenched teeth.

He ground down with his crotch, pushing into Jack, sending sharp pains into Jack’s lower back.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh!” Jerry howled.

“Stop it Jerry! Right fucking now!”

“Ooh, ooh, ooh!”

“Goddamn it, Jerry, knock it off! It hurts!”

He was heavier than Jack had realized, heavier than Jack thought he should be, but then he recalled the incident at the zoo, how hard it had been to pick him up and set him down in the wheelchair again. Because he grows, Jack, he grows so quickly, he matures so fast. Presto, right before your eyes!

Jerry scooped up the flashlight, glowering down with his lips twisted in the way one does when trying to open the stuck lid of a jar.

Jack was breathing heavily, scared and unsure. Suddenly, he was no longer able to predict Jerry’s behavior, and he realized quite too late that he didn’t really know who Jerry was.

“Thank you, Jerry. Now just let me up, okay? You’re hurting me Jerry. You don’t want to hurt me, now, do you Jerry?” Sweat was pouring off Jack’s forehead and tickling the insides of his ears.

Jerry’s eyes were wide in the darkness, but it was the expression in those eyes, the cast of that brow …

Where have I seen that look before?

Jack swallowed. “Jerry?”

His eyes glinted, blinkless in the night. He raised the flashlight over his head.

That look, Jack thought. I know that—

“Jerry—”

Jerry shrieked. A high pitched jungle cry.

The flashlight swept the room in disorienting flashes. For a moment, as one sees a ball that is tossed into the air and for an instant hangs suspended, Jack saw the big security light clutched in Jerry’s long-fingered fist. Then it came down with violence and cracked mercilessly against Jack’s forehead, making his teeth clack together so hard that he was sure he’d broken all of them.

Suddenly, he didn’t remember where he was or what he was doing. He seemed to vibrate, he had some idea that his legs had kicked without his consent. He felt a deep warmth spread over his crotch.

For a second he thought Jerry had gone, had, perhaps, never been there in the first place. But the moment passed quickly once Jack felt his arm drawn up into the air and cried out in refreshed agony. It only took one zing of new pain down his left side to remind him of what was happening.

Jerry had hold of his fingers and was bending them backwards with the strength of an ape.

Jack tried to fight back, he pushed and struggled and kicked, but his vision became a swarm of black blobs, his head throbbed and all too soon he wound down. The initial blow, the crack over his head, had been too swift, too unexpected and too final.

He even screamed in an heroic, last minute attempt to alert a neighbor, but his voice was cut off by the suffocating, doughy mass of a goose feather pillow pressed down under Jerry’s full weight.

There was simply nothing he could do.

9

Amy Fuller arrived home with a whole mess of messages on her abandoned cell phone. At first glance she appraised the total number of missed calls and messages at well over one hundred.

There weren’t over a hundred, there weren’t even a hundred, but there were enough to make listening to all of them a daunting task. But then she had other daunting tasks after having been gone on Summer vacation for a month. Like all the friends she had left behind, and who, therefore, insisted on her company immediately and forthwith and could not be put off.

So, the voicemails had to wait. Because her friends were online, on Facebook, or just texting.

She lived in the off campus apartments in Westwood, what some called the Chateau. Well, it wasn’t much of a chateau, but it beat the dorms all to hell. Her father’s company paid for it, along with tuition. It had been one of the goals he and his business partner had had when they began their law practice fifteen years ago: fund college tuitions. It seemed like a paltry goal now, considering how well both of them had done, even despite the gobs of alimony bestowed on her mother as part of the divorce settlement.

Amy took it all for granted.

She had a roommate who smoked too many cigarettes, drank like a fish, and mated like a shrew (thank God and Planned Parenthood for the morning after pill), but what else were separate rooms for anyway?

Amy did not have a boyfriend nor did she want one, at least not at this stage in her life. But, in addition to all of her girlfriends, she had plenty of boys who were also friends. Thus the next week or so was spent on just catching up, at get-togethers, going for coffee and general socializing.

By the end of the second week, things settled down into a normal cadence before classes would start again, and she managed, at last, to get to her phone.

She intended just to wipe the voice mails off with the reasoning that she had been back a full two weeks and certainly by now, anyone who had left a message, would have been someone she had already seen or communicated with. One message, however, about the tenth from the last, had attached to it a number she recognized but could not immediately place.

“Dad’s phone,” she said absently before listening to it.

II

Bill Rasthorpe sat in his stuffy office, leaning back in his oversized chair amidst the clutter of case files, unfiled reports and an extensive collection of desk trolls. Amy refused to sit down. She glared at the big man with a mixture of disdain and annoyance. He had just told her that he hadn’t seen her dad for the better part of a month. It wasn’t what he said, but how he said it: blasé.

“Well, don’t you think that’s a little strange?” Amy asked.

“Oh, well, he’s called,” Bill said, recoiling as if from a rattle snake. “He’s fighting an infection, you know? Did you know? Candida or something?”

“When did he last call you?”

Bill took in a breath and then glanced nervously over at her dad’s pristinely clean desk. “Last week,” he said, curtly.

“Last week, and from what number?”

“I get your point,” he admitted.

“His home phone?” she pressed. “The one that goes to a busy signal no matter how many times you call it? Mr. Rasthorpe, are you lying to me?” For some reason, as long as she could remember, she always found him so easy to boss around.

Bill, shamefaced and turning an ugly shade of red, had little of substance to say in return. He had failed her dad, and they both knew it.

“You’re right,” he said. “I messed up. If you want, I’ll go with you to check into it.”

“No,” she said, flatly. “I’ll go alone. I’ll let you know what I find. And Mr. Rasthorpe, you really should have gone three weeks ago.”

II

Amy knew how hypocritical she had been to Bill, but then, the thought of that pathetic look on his face, well, maybe he deserved it. Still, it meant that she also had failed her dad.

He had only visited her twice at her new place, once when he helped her move in last year, and then again at the beginning of summer this year; and since her parents had split—the day she’d graduated high school—she had only seen her dad in his new Burbank home once.

She checked the mailbox and found it empty, then climbed the stairs up to his unit, reached out to knock and paused. What was she going to find inside? The possibility of her dad lying dead spun a dark and visceral image in her mind. He’s not dead if he’s getting his mail. She knocked and listened, and then knocked again.

She cursed herself for not having made a spare key all these years. Shouldn’t she have a key to her dad’s place? She had good reason for not having one, though. Her dad had become a disappointment to her. A big disappointment, but it was worse than that: she was actually ashamed of him.

She knew he had gone downhill after her mother had left him. She knew he had taken to fooling around with random women—girls—some of whom she even knew. That her father was having sex with some of the young women from her school made her sick to her stomach and it was why she had distanced herself from him. She could not afford for anyone to know who her dad was.

It was bad enough to have people whispering about her father, but she could imagine what might be said about her, and the mental and possibly even sexual harassment she’d face on campus should their relation be known. Some of the more predatory guys might get the idea that she was fair game because of it. An illogical conclusion, of course, but just that kind of thing had happened not too long ago to a friend of hers, only the offending parent had been a mother sleeping around with the male students.

It had ended in rape for the daughter, her friend.

So her dad had become her secret. To be fair, she knew he hadn’t targeted those college girls, specifically; and he probably didn’t even realize that they attended UCLA, or that she could possibly know some of them by name, but it had happened. That was all that mattered.

Presently, she stared at his front door. No one was answering and she couldn’t hear anything inside.

No key? she thought. No problem. There are more ways than one to “skin a feline” and it begins with a phone call.

II

“Yes, I understand the position this puts you in,” she said over the phone. “But I am his daughter and … Nine-one-one? No, he’s a verified missing person, haven’t you seen the news?” She could lie so convincingly when she wanted to. “Look, do you want my attorney to contact you? Because if you do it’s no—yes, I’m standing here right now … okay, I’ll be here.”

She hung up doubtful if this was actually going to work and walked back to wait outside the unit. She monitored her phone expecting the lock smith to call back and cancel on her, but after five minutes of no calls she concluded they weren’t going to do that.

The Lucky Locks’ van pulled up twenty minutes later and she waved it over. A pimple faced kid jumped out and, without looking in her direction, went to the back of the van. He returned with a tool belt and a clip board.

“Are you Ms. Fuller?” he asked, slightly apologetic.

“That’s me,” she said.

“Oh hi, I’m supposed to let you into one of these condos or something?”

“That’s correct.”

“Can I see the warrant? I just have to make sure.”

“The warrant?” she asked, more annoyed than she actually felt.

“Yeah, sorry, I’m just supposed to ask first.”

He thinks I’m a cop, she thought. “Yes,” she said. “I have a warrant, but I don’t show my warrants to lock smiths. LAPD strictly forbids it.”

He blinked and seemed confused. She needed to back up her lie with another one.

“Or didn’t you get the memo?” she asked. “If you’re not listed on the warrant … hello? Are you even listening?”

“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Um, can you sign this then?”

She grabbed the clip board and scribbled her signature on the line, then added the word “Detective” at the end, giving the kid a wary glare.

“Um, okay. Where is the unit?”

“Right this way.” She began walking up the stairs with an imperial glance back to make sure he was following.

His fingers were surprisingly nimble and like a medieval thief, he picked the lock, making the latch click in less than a minute. He stood up and grinned shyly at her.

“Not bad, kid,” she told him. She was probably no older than he was and maybe even younger, but she had a way of appearing older. Plus, she was a girl and he was obviously under her spell what with those puppy dog eyes and all. She would have felt bad were it not for a just cause, or so she told herself.

Her heart tap danced as she grabbed the doorknob and just before she opened the door, she knew something was way off. She pushed the door open, and gasped.

Nothing from wall to wall.

No furniture, no appliances other than an empty refrigerator, no clothes. Nothing. She walked each room, astonished. Even the bathroom was as clean and barren as the day it was built. “What the hell?” she whispered, aware that the lock picking kid was eavesdropping from the front door. Then she found a very strange clue.

In the bedroom, above the four dent marks in the carpet that had been made by the bed frame, sat two gaping holes in the dry wall. “Not from the headboard,” she said aloud, “but what then?”

She inspected the first hole to confirm its depth. Definitely through the drywall. A series of short knocks told her that the hole not only went through the drywall, but into a framing stud. Her inspection of the opposite hole confirmed the same thing. Certainly, something had been rigged up over the bed.

That got her imagination going, but that was also where her investigation stalled out. What could have been screwed or nailed into the studs over the bed? And did it even matter?

She suddenly got very worried. Not so much as to where her father had gone, but why. Her family owned a cabin in the San Bernardino mountains and it was a good bet that he had gone there, but it was so … impulsive. Actually move up there, lock, stock and barrel? Her dad wasn’t known for his impulsive behavior, she thought, and then she remembered his affairs.

Oh, Daddy, what trouble have you gotten into now?

She stood back and gazed one last time at the empty rooms, then decided she never wanted to see this place again.

Something here had gone terribly wrong.

II

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About the Author

Andrew Michael Schwarz is an author of dark fiction, horror, urban fantasy and things that go bump in the night.

He can be found hanging out here.