— Burn or other smudge marks on hallway baseboard, some kind of chewing
— Living room ceiling dripping what?
When not writing, the father clenched the list inside his mouth to keep his hands free so he could rummage. He bit down so hard, not realizing, his teeth went through the paper, through his lip. The blood fed him gulping, warm as from a mother’s nipple, brown.
PASSAGE
On his knees down at the air vent in the guest bedroom, the father clasped his hands. He pressed his flesh against the grate’s face’s metal tines — a mazemap pressed around his eyes. Through the gaps a lukewarm air blew, moist like raindamp, stunk like rice. The screws that held the grate in had no divots in their heads. The father could not pry them up using his fingers. A screwdriver chipped the paint, caused him to cut his right hand open with its end — more blood, from a new hole, though this blood smelled not the same — not like blood at all, but charcoal. The father sucked the squirt. He pushed and battered at the grating, bumping his fists, saying god’s name, until after some unapparent pattern, the vent’s face fell off in his hands. Another pucker. The drywall shedded ash. Somewhere upstairs he heard a brief instance of strange brass.
The father had never seen such a large hole. The vent’s revealed mouth matched exactly with his shoulders’ width. He stuck his head in, already sweating, his teeth tight in his gums. The passage went along a long way straight before him before it turned quick at a right angle, toward the TV room and to the kitchen, thereafter blooming out to other rooms. The father felt a sudden want to sing into the warm hole, to fill the house with sound. He could not think of any songs.
With his shirt between him and the metal, the father forced himself in along the hole. He felt he’d gotten fatter. His flesh-bulged form fit to the rectangle. His feet and shoes dangled in the air in the guest bedroom and then, following his ass, became drawn in.
Where in the vent the roof had ridges, he felt his back’s long black hairs becoming ripped out of their pores. It kind of hurt more than it should have. The passage seemed too small. Some goop of residue caked on the pipe’s sides was rubbing off all on his pants and hands, his hair. He tried to stop and back out from already several feet deep. The air was blowing hotter, harder, at his body. Like someone breathing. Somewhere: babies. Mothers. Money. His hips seemed swelling. His thighs were meat. The vent’s skin sucked in all around him. Nearer. Leaning. The father cursed and breathed the ripping air. He half-called for someone to come and help him. Half-called less loud. Whispered, Help.
Help! His crotch was sopping. The air was thick, and more so the further in. He knew he should not be crawling any further—what if someone came along and screwed the vent’s grate face back on behind him, moved a dresser to block its eye? And yet, ahead, where the vent curved in an L out of his vision, the waiting metal shined. The seizing of his cells inside the terror made the father’s teeth taste sharp — made his heartbeat lurch inside him, metabolizing. The air grew warmer, quicker, tighter, the deeper still into the house the father crawled, still with his mind inside him thinking, Help
Help
Help
Help
Help
Help
Help
DECISION
That night on their mattress, lying spines entwined and sleeping, the dusty father and itching mother agreed by grunt how it was time to sell the house.
HIS
The son received a package in the mail. The son had not ordered anything or been expecting gifts, nor could he think of anyone remaining who would give him gifts or want to. The son had not given his new address to anyone he could remember, or spoken it aloud into the air, though he may have written it on a free contest entry at a local food chain, which made him eligible to win a free week of gym training: Shape the Self Inside Your Self. He planned to exercise unbounded if he won. He would one day ripple in bright light.
When the son was younger, the mother’s mother had often sent the son things for no good reason. At Christmas, the mother’s mother sent the son special food that arrived already rotting — she did it every year. Once the mother’s mother had sent a shrunken gown and a locket with a name inscribed — the mother’s mother’s name, not the son’s. Folded between the locket’s metal halves there was a picture of a man. The man had black hair grown down over most of his face. He always seemed to be looking directly at the son. The son tried to wear the necklace despite the father’s protest but he felt it choked him anyway. The son threw the necklace out a window. He’d found it several times sindce then: around the neck of his favorite doll; looped over the brass knob to the closet. Once he’d coughed it up. The son could no longer see or feel the necklace around his neck if he put it on.
This package was not likely from the mother’s mother, as this year she was underground.
This package fit the exact shape of the mailbox. It was black and weighed more than it looked like it should, and yet the son could lift.
The son didn’t think too much about it. He had his mind cluttered with other things, like how at school no one would come near him and how when he went into certain rooms he gave off smoke and how ceilings always seemed just above his head. Even the teachers went on calling him the wrong name — sometimes the mother’s name, sometimes the mother’s mother’s. Sometimes the son’s name came out as silence, just these moving lips. Other names they used could be found inscribed on plaques and trophies in the glass box at the front of the school, with photos of students left from long ago. They were mostly ugly. It was a very, very old school.
The son took the package out of the mailbox and carried it into the house under his arm. He went up to his room without speaking to anyone — to tell his mother how the new shoes they’d bought over the weekend were now melting in the soles. Even if the son had gone searching, even if he’d felt ecstatic with new bright news, the son would have found no one in the house. They’d all gone off somewhere, maybe. Or they were hiding. Or something else.
Had someone been around to see the son come in, perhaps, they might have stopped him, touched his hand. What’s in that package, they might have said. Let’s make it open. You are so young to receive mail. Instead the son went into her room and closed the door and locked it and turned around and set down the package and took off his clothes and faced the wall.
THE SON’S BOOK
The son was writing a book. The son did not realize he was writing the book because most of the time while he was writing he was asleep or not paying attention or in the mindset of doing other things. Some nights the son would believe he was playing putt-putt in the backyard with the plastic golf set his father had bought to try to get him interested in sports, but the son was actually writing the book. The son would think he was languid in front of the television watching some kind of program about trucks or swords, designed to ensnare young boys’ attention, but the son was actually writing the book. The son had also mistaken himself for eating dinner, painting pasta, laughing, and brushing his teeth while he was actually sitting in his closet with the door shut and his fingers typing into a very small computer he didn’t know he had.
The computer’s keyboard did not have markings. The light gushed from its screen so bright it would for hours make the son not see. He could not see the words he’d already written as he wrote them, not even inside him. Nothing. His eyes spun in his head.