The Convulsion Factory Read online

  “Just put it on the edge of the table, I’ll sign it a little later.”

  “But I need it tomorrow, and it’ll only take a second.”

  “I never sign anything without reading it twice,” says Dad, words to live by, he’s using that particular tone of voice. “You’ll have it by tomorrow. Now … please?”

  Alex bows out. He’s had his eyes crossed the whole time to see if the old man would notice, and it’s a bet he would’ve won. Tom Cruise would have noticed. Have to be alert to be a fighter pilot.

  He checks on Mom and finds her zonked in the living room and so he lifts the half-smoked cigarette from her fingers so she won’t set the couch on fire. As she sleeps, gravity plays mischief with her face, but that’s for somebody else to lift.

  When he returns to MTV, Michael Jackson is history, so he watches some more and calls a couple friends to see what’s new in their lives since school was out, and pretty soon he’s tired and it’s time to go to bed.

  He digs into his sock drawer in the very back and pulls out a small plastic box full of shiny metal. He takes off his shirt and leans back on his bed. A moment later he selects a safety pin from the box and opens it and skewers it through a pinched fold of skin over a left-side rib. He licks the trickles of blood from his fingers and latches the pin closed again and watches MTV to wait until it quits bleeding. Just like after the ninety-odd pins he’s already put there.

  Sometimes they get infected and he’ll wash the area down with alcohol or hydrogen peroxide. It burns, but he doesn’t mind, likes it sometimes even, because it means he can still feel something, and it scares him to think of what it might mean if the pain were to stop.

  Just like the blood. His scar tissue has gotten gnarly thick in places, and sometimes he’ll sink in a new pin and it won’t bleed, and this never fails to freak him out. No blood, like he’s dead inside. Somehow this signifies failure. Or maybe he’s like an atrocity-hardened veteran who can’t cry, because no matter what he sees it’s just not awful enough anymore. The body won’t turn loose of the liquids.

  He admires the craftsmanship, though, and likes the way they look down his body in their orderly regimented rows, no haphazard placement. Some have been there so long it looks like the skin is growing around them, trying to swallow them and make them its own. He supposes this is what he wants. The only problem is, he has to watch where he rips his T-shirts, so Mom and Dad don’t see, because it’s his secret.

  He should have thought of this a long time ago.

  He knows that every single pin has its own special meaning.

  One per night … for every day since midwinter that they have never told him anything remotely like they love him.

  *

  Mom eats lunch professionally, he decided this when he was ten. Long elaborate luncheons with other ladies like herself, where they plan benevolent crusades and their slogan is probably something like We Will Stamp Out Social Inequity In Your Lunchtime. He has no idea what they actually accomplish, and wonders if maybe what they do is plan to raise money to give their husbands rides in fighter jets to keep them happy in hopes they don’t stray off looking for the Kelly McGillises of the world as a consolation.

  But whatever inequities they fight, he hopes they don’t eradicate them any time soon, because then what will they do? He can easily imagine some new group springing up to attend luncheons on their behalf and decide what’s to become of these poor displaced crusaders.

  Mom has beat him home from school by all of five minutes, and doesn’t question if he went to the doctor or not. She’s happy and fired up, and he suspects that the main reason she attends the luncheons is so she can examine her own life on a comparative basis and feel reassured that it is superior to most everyone else’s who is there.

  “Another divorce in the works in that group,” she tells him with no small amount of glee, then tells him who. It’s no one he can recall her mentioning before.

  “Oh, that’s terrible,” Alex says but doesn’t mean it, because it sounds like par for the course.

  “Pretty soon I’m going to be the only one there who’s never needed a divorce lawyer.” She beams and goes for the Seagram’s. “Aren’t you proud of your mother for that?”

  “Proud,” he murmurs.

  She pours over ice. “An eighteen-year marriage, still as intact now as the day of the ceremony. These days that’s quite an accomplishment. Have you seen my Valium?”

  He spits out a likely location, mostly out of reflex, and when she checks, it’s there and she downs a couple. Mom has three separate prescriptions from three different doctors that she fills at three different pharmacies and she still can’t keep track of them. Once he told her she should tie the bottles with strings to her wrists, like careless children with their mittens, and she actually thought he was serious. Worse, for a moment he thought she considered trying it.

  “Someone said the high school prom is in three weeks,” Mom calls out. “You’re going, aren’t you?”

  “I haven’t thought much about it.” The idea of putting on a tuxedo makes him queasy. He doesn’t bother telling her that the prom is a junior-senior activity and he’s only a sophomore, which is just as well, because what’s he supposed to do, whisk the girl there and back on his skateboard? Maybe next year he’ll feel better about tuxedos. At least he’ll have a car.

  “Why don’t you ask Tawny Bradley?” Mom doesn’t let up. She can’t be thinking about grandchildren, though, because the notion of her becoming a grandmother would probably send her off seeking a fourth prescription. “Her mother was there today, and it didn’t sound like she was going with anybody yet. You’ve always liked her, haven’t you?”

  Alex swallows a sick lump in his throat. “Maybe I will.” It’s the quickest way out of this, combination safety valve and backup parachute all in one. Maybe I will. It gets her off his back.

  Mom knows good and well he’s always liked Tawny, or at least used to. Alex and Tawny went to the same gradeschool, where he developed a giant industrial strength crush on her in fifth grade, and she pretended not to notice that he was alive.

  He made the mistake of confiding this unrequited love to Mom and Dad, as he was naïve in those days, and the memory still claws at him as viciously as a tiger. There was a night when they bought him a tape recorder because they said it might do him good to record some of his class lectures, and he looked at it thinking But I’m only in fifth grade, and they were all three sprawled out on the family room floor so they could show him how it worked. For some reason Tawny’s name came up and he remembers that he blushed and before he knew it the tape was rolling and Mom was singing her name over and over and he was absolutely mortified. Then Dad joined in like he was a bass singer for some dinosaur 1950s group and he was crooning, “Tawny, I neeeeed you,” and they kept it up because they found it so amusing, and all the while his thin, piping voice rose to a frantic screech begging them to stop while on the tape he fancied he could hear the sizzle of tears as they vaporized down his burning cheeks.

  It’s probably the one thing he can never forgive them for, because even today whenever he talks to a girl he remembers the shame he felt that night that love was somehow wrong and something to hide and they made him cry for wanting the girl two rows over to notice him. So if they never have any fucking grandchildren it’s their own fault, theirs and the Sony Corporation’s.

  He’s about to go downstairs to his room when he looks back and sees Mom standing in front of a hallway mirror looking over her shoulder at her behind and she shifts to catch the view from various angles, and the Seagram’s sloshes in her glass. “Do you think I need a butt tuck?” she asks.

  He doesn’t know what to say because he’s not used to looking at Mom’s ass that way and it makes his cheeks burn all over again. He wonders how his friends see her, because sometimes he’ll notice that some of their moms look pretty decent and he’ll entertain thoughts of them that involve anything but maternal activities and wonder if he’s suff
ering from an Oedipal Complex, once removed. Mom stretches the fabric of her dress taut over her rump and seems satisfied with the way it looks and he fleetingly wonders if she’s trying to seduce him, and fears that if she is and something happens, she’ll find out about the safety pins.

  “No, I don’t think I do, maybe I just need to get serious about my tennis again.” She nods at her reflection and cinches the dress about her waist and hips. “Good thing I stopped at one kid.”

  He leaves her standing there and hurries downstairs and finds last year’s high school yearbook and carries it into his bathroom and locks the door. He finds the picture of Tawny Bradley and drops to his knees while staring at the picture and frantically whacks off into the toilet and then flushes the evidence of his crime. As the remnants of his seed swirl downward, he wonders if any illegally aborted fetuses are down below, and if they feel anything, and if they do, if the sewer is anything like the womb.

  *

  He’s a sidewalk surfer, and Friday after school he rides his skateboard to the mall. As sometimes happens, he has trouble with the electric eye door openers at the main entrance. He thinks it’s kind of ha-ha funny and kind of weird funny, but lately they don’t want to open for him. He wonders if maybe they operate on the principle of scanning for personality instead of for bodies, and if he has problems because they don’t see his because it’s not really there. But he’s learned how to beat the system by holding up the wide flat top of his skateboard and that fools the sensors. In he goes.

  He feeds a few quarters to the arcade and when he passes by Frederick’s he peeks out of the corner of his eye at the mannequins and what they’re wearing, and pretty soon he’s thirsty and gets a giant cherry Coke and takes it into the record store. He’s not supposed to have food or drink in here, but most of them know him so it’s cool. He’s in luck, Allison is working, and she waves to him from the checkout counter and he hears her tell her co-worker that it’s time for her break.

  He’s known Allison almost ever since he can remember, because they grew up in the same neighborhood until Alex’s parents became more upwardly mobile than Allison’s, so it’s not like she’s a girl so much as that she’s just Allison. Her hair is magenta, and her face is as pale as a china doll’s and looks like she’s still about twelve years old.

  She motions him to follow her into the back room. It’s off-limits to non-employees but the main manager is on vacation this week, she explains, so everybody has a grand time breaking as many rules as they can get away with, and Alex wishes he’d brought in some greasy food, too.

  They talk for a while and then he gets bold and decides to share his secret with her because secrets that only you know aren’t really secrets at all, only obscure trivia. Allison will be safe. She does mushrooms with her father. Nothing surprises her.

  “What do you think about this?” he says and tugs up his shirt to show her the carpet of safety pins.

  Allison stares for a moment, then says, “I didn’t know you were into punk.”

  “I’m not, really,” he says.

  “Wow. It still makes a statement. Wow.” She reaches out and touches a few of them and her fingers are cool. “What are they for?”

  He tells her how he puts in one per night and why he does it, and she nods and says, “It still sounds pretty punk to me.” So he tells her he didn’t get the idea from hardcore punks at all, even though it may look like it at first glance. Alex explains how back in the winter he was looking for an alternative to MTV just to prove to himself that his mind wasn’t a one-track echo and that he ran across the Discovery Channel. They had all kinds of interesting stuff, like headhunters in the interior of Borneo and primal religious drug use in Amazon rain forests and all kinds of things he never even dreamed went on in the world, and then he really got entranced when he saw something about a tribe in Africa that practices ritual scarification. He tells her he likes their idea of resculpting your body to break up the monotony of skin and that it can be linked with spiritual meanings and symbolize what matters.

  “I guess you’re right,” Allison says, and then adds, “Any old wimp can get a tattoo or a navel ring.”

  He can tell she honestly approves and then she says how three years ago she threatened her parents that she would get a bone through her nose and they talked her into just getting a few extra holes pierced up the outer rim of her ears instead, which was all she’d really wanted in the first place.

  Breaktime is over soon and she has to rejoin the other kid at the counter, because even though the managers may suck, the rest are generally careful not to shaft each other. She hugs him and tells him to maybe come back after she’s off work and maybe they can hang out together awhile. Alex browses and buys a new CD by some band he’s never heard of, mainly because he likes the song titles, such as “The Blood is the Life” and “Ride the Meathook,” and thinks maybe they’ll become his new anthems.

  He leaves the mall and discovers that way out in the parking lot a small crowd has gathered around a well-dressed preacher sermonizing from atop his van. Alex skates up to listen to the message, which some are heckling and some are amening, and it turns out to be the evils of demon rock and roll.

  Alex yawns. The preacher goes on to cite statistics compiled by organizations Alex has never heard of, and tragic incidents he’s never heard of either, all irrefutable evidence of how demon rock has festered like a sore in the minds of America’s youth and turned them all into a horde of disrespectful, wayward delinquents who cause their long-suffering parents to wring their hands in anguish. The preacher explains how he subscribes to more than a dozen rock magazines and how appalled he is at the things he reads there, and then he asks for contributions, presumably so he can continue to subscribe to his magazines and continue to be appalled all for the good of America’s children. Alex leaves.

  He surfs the sidewalks home wishing he’d brought his Walkman along so he could pop in the new CD and fester some more, but wishing won’t make it happen, so he hurries home and walks into the house and it’s very quiet and that’s when he finds Mom on the couch with her empty glass and empty bottle of pills and realizes with a curiously hollow sensation that she has OD’d again.

  *

  Everybody who is anybody figures she simply lost track of how many she was taking and how much she was drinking. It’s happened before, though with less permanent results. Suicide isn’t really considered, after all, since she’s left no note, and anyway, she didn’t exactly make it all the way to the morgue.

  She’s brain dead, the doctor tells Alex and his father, and the first thing to pop into Alex’s mind is I could’ve told you that years ago. He hates himself for it a moment later and tries to remember something from when they tried Catholicism so he can do penance, but his memory of it isn’t that good.

  Dad takes leave of absence from work and spends a lot of time at Mom’s bedside and holds her limp hand and stares into a face that not only doesn’t recognize him, but worse, won’t even acknowledge him. Dad doesn’t shave much anymore, and after a couple weeks, Alex thinks maybe Dad should at least keep himself maintained, or else Mom will wake up and not know him for real. Pretty soon, Dad doesn’t talk much anymore, either.

  Alex keeps his own vigils and stares down at her, with tubes in her arms and up her nose, and it’s like a time machine. He remembers staring down at her in much the same way years before, only his face was much closer to the bed in those days because he wasn’t as tall, and he would shake her and call to her and she would groan and stir and her breath would smell like bad medicine and eventually he would toddle off to fix his own breakfast.

  The weeks go by and the days get longer and hotter and little by little they don’t sit at her bedside as much as they did in the beginning. Alex thinks it’s like going to visit a grave, only the body’s on top instead of underground.

  Pretty soon it’s summer and Alex is out of school and he’d just as soon still be going, because there’s even less incentive now for getti
ng up in the morning. He can’t really get excited about hanging out at the mall from opening until closing.

  The house reminds him of some story he read or movie he saw, he can’t recall which. But it took place during the Civil War, in a house straddling the Mason-Dixon line, half in Union territory and half in Confederate. One brother was for the North, the other for the South, and so they each lived in their separate halves for the most part and pretended the other did not exist. Alex now understands what that must’ve been like, and thinks maybe the Civil War still rages, in spirit if not in strategy and tactics.

  There’s probably no point to continuing his rituals with the safety pins, but old habits are hard to break.

  Dad spends most of his time at home at his worktable in the rec room, and overhead fly his plastic dreams, frozen in time and motion, and instead of winning dogfights and Kelly McGillis they collect only dust. Sometimes Alex wanders in and watches him stare down at scattered pieces of the Stealth Bomber model, like he’s trying to assemble them by sheer will of the mind.

  The rest of the time, Alex watches MTV and the Discovery Channel. They’re a lot more interesting than Dad. He cries, too, sometimes, lets the tears drip down his body while he’s shirtless, and he tries to joke with himself by saying it’s a good thing the safety pins are stainless steel.

  “Dad,” Alex says one day, and Dad is hunched over his table and has needed a haircut for a long time. “Dad? Do you think she did it on purpose?”

  There is no answer.

  “Do you think she really just wanted to sleep forever?”

  Alex doesn’t know why he’s trying, but trying seems more important than getting an answer. He feels like an explorer, climbing to the top of Everest in a blizzard. He’s a bold adventurer.

  Finally Dad looks up, and his eyes are ringed with dark circles that look like bruises.

  “She needed to be watched more,” he finally says. “She needed to be watched. Very fragile, you know. I should have watched.”