‘Somewhere in the heap of him.’

from Patricide in C Minor
by Brian Henry

He considered telling her he would take on her pain if he could, or half of it, but assumed the thought, the sentiment, lacked originality, the sort of punch she preferred, and feared disappointing her with a sentimental sentiment, her resultant disdain, so let it go unsaid.

*

One could accelerate the rate of dying such that she died the next day, or at least became so ill she lost cognizance of what was said around her, and allow the sentiment to fester into guilt, but the overt manipulation inherent in that approach would alienate in its obviousness. One could make a motif of the unsaid, spread it across her story—choice integument—or front-load the piece with speech held back and deliver it, that much stronger for the emotional connection developed, at story’s end. One could wake him late in the morning, touched emotionally by her pained sleep, and

*

How crushing, she thought, flipping through the day’s mail, nothing but rejections. Jobs, middling graduate programs, ex-friends: all had in common their disregard for her, her skills. However one looks at it, she mused, however I look at it, the arrival of bad news can never co-opt the absence of news. News needs no void to fill; there is no saturation point.

*

Her computer wanted to write Saturday instead of saturation, and this annoyed her enough to change her software’s preferences. Typographical imperialism, nothing those fuckers won’t do to dumb down the thing. As she typed, a mouse hurried past her and disappeared behind a bookcase. She sucked in some air outside her mouth, sucked in the air inside it, and knocked over her mineral water.

*

He knew she loved him, knew it somewhere in the heap of him. And he didn’t mind her outbursts, organizational frenzies, her verbal escalations. In fact, they turned him on. He was wired that way.

*

Washable dream, the field between the river and the trees is a dance that sucks the ice, the tissue it has built of water from water. A dance where to step is to break.

*

The man in the suit in the corner of the bar, his hair awash with pomade after a day on the floor, shoes dully polished, but polished, his tie still close to the knot of his throat, furrowed his brow to compound the stare affixed to the woman across the table, earnestness like a bad smell around him. Deep and meaningful. His entire night hinged on his ability to convey understanding and intuition, sympathy and empathy, the sort of body language he had seen women using with each other when they needed to unload serious issues, problems. The woman, seeing this in him, had other plans. Something violent. Mildly so but still so.

*

The plaque on the wall had come loose, revealing a scuffed sliver of wallpaper. The wall itself was painted eggshell white, so the wallpaper, this last scrap, must have held onto its job tenaciously enough to compel the previous owner to cover it. She put her nose to the paper. It smelled like nothing, but since the wall itself smelled like old paint, the nothing became a something. An anti-smell by virtue of the smell around it.

*

The ice when it cracks cracks in stages though the sound sounds singular. There is the primary fracture, wrought by the initial trespass, then the secondary fractures that radiate from the first and spawn their own splinterings in the freeze.

*

When, on sidewalks, he crossed women he considered attractive, especially those palpably in their teens, he inhaled deeply through his nose. He was less concerned with subtlety than with efficacy. The presence of the largest of men never deterred him from seeking his olfactory pleasure. Unlike some men, more intent on the social benefits available through sniffing and then bragging about what was sniffed, he did not try to identify perfumes, body wash, shampoo, musk. He simply inhaled, and reveled in what he inhaled.

*

The feeling that she would leave him for another—a specimen more rugged, more financially endowed—filled him in his laxer moments. This feeling was not without justification. He was sure of that. Yes, very sure.

*

Breakfast is hard to get around here, he said. What isn’t, she said, out here in this fucking wasteland—you call this a vacation! He considered bringing up the poem again, how she was misinterpreting it to fit her current situation: a firebomb hitting a house of straw.

*

Once he understood transcendence was just another form of violence, only slower, he stopped feeling guilty for his obsession with flesh and the memory of flesh, and began to wonder if violence outright would mirror the transcendence he’d tried, at times, to achieve.

*

When she turned the corner she grazed the corner with her shoulder. She tore her sweater. Cursed. The words slurred across her tongue, draped in fur. He stood in the doorway, shoulders hunched, hands stowed. Jangling and harmless. A globe of light yellow against the sky.

*

A body, when it’s broken by a piece of really heavy machinery, sounds like asbestos being ripped from the ceiling of an old school: there is the primary tear then the noise air makes when resisted by a falling object. Or maybe it’s not like that. Not like that at all.

*

Fatherhood had not slowed him, nothing about him had been slowed by fatherhood. He puffed out his chest as he skipped through his chores. After he vacuumed the bedroom, he would treat himself to a vigorous masturbation session, the kind that lasted the better part of an hour and usually left him sore, chafed, in need of the Vaseline and a new fantasy, or, at least, an old fantasy revised.

*

When asked what inspired him—a question asked only in bed, he realized, or after he had read from his latest novel or, curse it, book of stories—he decided for the first time to answer truthfully. Animus. What? she asked. Animus: hatred of something, a feeling so fierce it consumes you, drives you into yourself simply so you can drive that person into the same agony you think they have inflicted upon you through mistreatment, disregard, too much undeserved success. Someone I think is a shit wins a prize, even if I’m not up for that prize, I want them to suffer. Someone with no talent publishes a book: ditto. And women, she asked, where do we fit into this? You’re the muses of rejection: the heat you give off pulls me in, I’m helpless, then find myself discarded, not shattered, no, never shattered, but shaken enough to want revenge. To want to make you notice, again, what you could have had but rejected, out of stupidity, out of heartlessness. To show you what you’ve been missing, what you are missing. To make you suffer, should you encounter yourself in what I’ve written. So you write, she said. So I write. Then he started to cry.

*

At the hour the sons consider the killing of fathers, when the dogs start to call from their half-acres, fences and runs, cardinals and finches teetering on the lips of water bowls, the cat’s stomach pressed to the soil between house and hedge, someone blinks awake and thinks sometimes the sun breaks through and shreds this air, sometimes it’s dark for months.

*

So many stories about violence, she thought. Always against women. Men in uniform, men on bikes, buses, trains. Men in alleys and bars and bathrooms. Men in cars, men in the woods, on the river, on the ocean. Everywhere men are committing violence against women, as if their mission, over time, has changed from hunt, gather and protect to simply hunt, with not even a burial to close the ritual. She wondered how many women were out there, in the world, physically hurting men. Not in self-defense, not with words, but with bulk and steel. One, maybe two. And that one or two would have to be sick, she thought. Which means men, so many men belong in some sort of asylum. A place where they can hurt only each other. And do.

*

This particular pain, when called out into the open, snapped the darkness. The body, so broken it rejected the idea of air, seemed to jerk before it proceeded, in different directions, across the railyard. The steel, thick and rust-colored in the lack of light, continued its task with what in a human would be called determination.

*

A nation of thugs, she thought. Any place with more than one straight man is on its way to being the last place I want to be.

*

He lowered the body into the breakage, scrambled up the embankment he had descended. He started the long walk back to town.

Brian Henry teaches at the University of Georgia at Athens. The above pieces are from a novella that is scattered throughout American Incident, forthcoming in December from Salt Publishing.