Ionic Relapse Read online

  His voice would finally be heard.

  Approaching the boy in a low running stance, the man holstered his gun and produced the knife. He reached Christopher and quickly got down, one knee against the boy's heaving chest. Soon, they were looking into each other's haggard faces.

  “You fuckin’ idiot!” the man hissed down at him as the gunshot rolled through the sleeping hills. “You think They will want you?? Fuck no. I could tell from the second I saw you that you were nothing. A piece of trash with arms and legs. They have standards, you know. Standards that are expected of me. Not you. ME!” The man’s voice began to rise in octaves. A crescendo of broken sanity that rose sharply with each syllable. “Did you ever stop to think about that?! NO! You fuckin' didn’t! And this is what you get for wasting my goddamn time!”

  The blade sliced through Christopher's throat so quickly that he barely felt its steel edge.

  As his mouth pulled sour air through his jagged larynx, he felt his body systematically shutting down. Like a million scraps of brightly colored paper dropped over a crowd, he felt his collective self spread into tiny individual pieces until there was nothing. An object once whole now dispersed into the void.

  And just like those festive pieces of confetti, he would be swept up by the coroner's office the next morning and dumped into a furnace. The investigation into his murder went cold and eventually found its way to the incinerator. No one ever came to claim his body. His ashes were sifted out into the dumpster behind the church with the moldy bagels from last month's Sunday brunch.

  Trash is only an item left unclaimed by its original owner.

  Or in this case, parents.

  Chapter 11

  April 8, 2006

  5:43 pm

  Hampden, Maine

  “Did you remember to take out the trash before we left?” Kieffer’s mom asked offhandedly, sitting straight up in the driver's seat of their third-generation Corolla. Her thin, wrinkled face momentarily shined over the glowing red embers of a lit cigarette propped between two slim fingers. The coals brightened as she inhaled deeply and steered the car down patchy, snow-lined streets.

  Through a cloud of stale smoke, she added, “Couldn’t help but notice that it slipped by you earlier this week.” She was a short scarecrow-shaped woman in her mid-thirties. Though, she could have easily passed for forty. A lifetime of heavy smoking and social drinking melted her once youthful smile. Flaky, cracked lines and yellowed wrinkles of skin covered what at one time had made her such a hit with all the local boys. Always trim as a child, sporty as a teenager, her physical deterioration came with the birth of her son at the age of nineteen, but was sealed by the leaving of her husband three years later. Being a single mother had its tolls, and beauty was usually the first to be collected. Her mid-twenties were spent tirelessly looking for babysitters and consistent work. She had no time for anything else.

  The little joys in life, like cigarettes and white wine, became her lifeboat in a raging sea of pointlessly long days and selfless nights. Of all the two-sided stonewall challenges that came with being a single mother, obtaining pure selflessness was by far the hardest. Because of that, those little joys became the extra boost needed to nudge her along in life. But, of course, they also brought her closer to the sweet release of death. She knew that her life had peaked a long time ago. All things considered, she hadn’t done a terrible job if you took the situation for what it was. She was a single mom who had been left with no life insurance money after her husband's death. Only bills. Considering that, she was doing fine.

  But, things could always be better. She barely made rent from month to month, holding two jobs at a time just to avoid state welfare assistance. Say what you want about Kieffer's mom, but she didn’t look for handouts. If she could ask for help of any kind, it would be regarding her love life. Just because she was broke didn’t mean she wasn’t deserving of a partner. Kieffer’s mom knew she was what Sharon Bennett would pitifully refer to as “used goods.”

  “Uh, no, sorry about that,” Kieffer said, sitting in the passenger seat watching the streetlights start to shine as they passed against the deepening red and orange waves of cotton burst clouds. He wore his only pair of dress pants along with a sun-faded black button-up shirt. Usually his funeral clothes, the uncomfortable attire was the classiest threads he owned. If he wore his usual unwashed t-shirt and jeans and everyone else dressed up, he would be blatantly upsetting the fragile balance of events.

  His absent left hand played with a loose thread on the seam of his slacks as he sat anxiously pondering endlessly renewed obstacles to come. His palms were oily and his head swelled with fractionalized scenarios. Each one containing only a fractal of difference that could send the evening ahead careening into disaster. He stopped the sudden burst of thought before it could fester.

  “After what happened at Ashley’s house, I completely forgot,” he said after pulling back out of his head.

  Kieffer’s mom took another deep breath, once again igniting the cigarette, before flicking the tail of ash out the cracked window to her left. “I wouldn’t think too much about it, kiddo. From what you told me, it sounds like her stepdad was just rattled at the sight of such a young and handsome man hanging around his daughter.” Her breath wheezed in short giggles as smoke plumed out from her chapped lips and nostrils.

  Without looking at her, Kieffer shrugged. “Seemed like he wanted to tear my face off, but yeah, I'm sure he’s just jealous of my amazingly good looks.” He felt the light tap of his mom jabbing him in the left shoulder, letting him know that his sarcasm didn’t go unnoticed. For a moment he almost brought up the part where he saw Wayne transfixed by the menacing flat faces on his Sociology poster, but decided against it. Its lack of relevance would only prove what she already knew.

  Kieffer was looking for a way out.

  “It can be hard for men to admit that their little girls are finally growing into little women,” his mom said as a matter of fact after several silent moments. “It reminds them that someday they won’t be the most important man in their daughter’s life. I’m sure his little freak-out wasn’t meant to be directed at you. He was probably just angry at the situation. Just another ignorant father among many.”

  Kieffer sighed heavily and kicked at the slush-covered floor mat. “But he’s not even her real dad, Mom. Why get so butthurt about all that if Ashley’s not even his kid?” The realization of how bitchy and immature he sounded dawned on him as soon as the question left his lips. But, by the time he realized, it was too late.

  “Let me tell you something about family, Kieffer,” his mom snarled. Her usually lighthearted voice became a steam charged locomotive. Its revved engine growled as rolling fire and steel powered down a long stretch of brittle tracks. Kieffer felt the car lurch in its forward flow. The orange halos of the streetlights above zipped by a little faster. “Family are the people who love you unconditionally. They are the ones in your life who help you and tell the truth even if it isn’t what you want to hear. They stick by your side no matter what happens, regardless of what they have to gain or lose. They don’t just turn tail and run when things don’t go the way they want them to. Real family never gives up on you because you would never give up on them. No, real family would never do that. Being related has nothing to do with it. It’s about love and trust. TRUST.”

  Kieffer couldn’t bear to look at her when she got like this. The corny thespian melodramatics sickened him. She would pull out this generic speech anytime he made a comment that seemed rude or disrespectful. Somehow, some way, she would always make her lectures loop back around to his dad. And he wasn’t exactly around to defend himself.

  Kieffer patiently listened as she paused to sniffle and physically bite back the onslaught of salty, yellow tears. He knew he could never fully comprehend what his dad did to her beyond leaving the two of them to fend for themselves. His mom never talked casually about his dad, so neither did he. She never explained why dad shot himself with a twelv
e-gauge shotgun that day in the garage when Kieffer was three. So, Kieffer never asked.

  It just was.

  There were hazy memories of his dad along with a couple of old Polaroids from a random trip to Old Orchard beach, but they barely sustained a complete image. No one knew exactly why he killed himself. There was no note, no clear sign to point at as motive. But, regardless of the lack of clues, they all knew.

  His father was spiritually doomed.

  Kieffer couldn’t remember hearing the gunshot or seeing the police and paramedics come. He missed seeing his dad's limp body being wheeled out of the garage. He couldn’t remember seeing the scarlet rose of color spread over the man-sized shape with empty shoulders being carried away on a stretcher across the front yard. He didn’t see the streets lined with people, all of them staring silently at the ghostly humanoid lump that the paramedics walked to the curb like so much spoiled meat.

  His only memory of being three was the time his parents accidentally let him watch the movie Pumpkinhead from his crib in the living room. The giant monster’s melted reptoid head and long grey-wracked hands haunted his sleep for months. According to his mom, Kieffer would wake up screaming in the night. It would take both his mother and father shaking and jostling his bed to completely wake him up out of the nightmare. Kieffer had vague memories of those long imaginative runs for his life through the misty woods, but not of much else. Even though both his parents were present, none of the flashbacks contained even a trace of his dad. He had been a man of few words and of even fewer emotions. Known as an interloper, he was more of an acquaintance to most of the people in his life. Constantly stuck between scorched anger and insufferable sadness, Kieffer’s dad had his own set of difficulties that he alone had been forced to bear. Pent-up secrets and rotted dreams that tormented his every waking moment.

  He had his own set of monsters in his head.

  Soft-spoken in public but unpredictably volatile at home, it was only a matter of time before something irreversible happened. He was a man mentally broken by too much debt and personal responsibility.

  A literal dead man walking.

  There were rumors of him just being flat-out crazy, hearing and seeing bizarre things, but there was never a record of reported mental health issues to reference. Rumors came with most suicides, but Kieffer’s father was one of little question. He had been known around the community for being a little eccentric: a little off kilter. And that was where father and son paralleled each other. Kieffer, just like his old man, was too scared to ask for help. Kieffer and his dad were two sides to the same coin. Two blown circuits on the same board. They knew too much. There was no telling how long son would outlast father.

  If he did at all.

  Only, Kieffer was young and strong-willed. An empathetic soul with an inquisitive mind. The chances of him beating this on his own weren't great, but not inconceivable. At least not to him, anyway. He patiently waded through the blackened waters of pain the same way his mom did. Only, he thought, his pool was much shallower than hers. She knew the horrible truth about his dad. Everything, except the mental virus that got passed down to their son.

  “Ashley’s stepdad,” she went on, her voice now a shaky calm, “is real family to them. Just like you, her real father probably bailed—” cutting herself off, she grasped for a better phrase, then said, “I mean — left them. Wayne stepped in to fill a major role in that little girl's life, and that’s no small potatoes, Kieff. Do you even know if Ashley and Wayne are close or not?”

  Kieffer couldn’t remember Ashley ever bringing Wayne up in a negative light. But really, he couldn’t recall any mentions of her family life at all. Not unusual, considering most of their discussions revolved around fart jokes and random South Park episodes. She explained online later that she had never seen Wayne freak-out like that before. By all accounts, he was a pretty chill guy with a weird hobby and a strong work ethic. She told him that he never even so much as grounded her, let alone yelled in her face the way he did that afternoon. The next day at school, Ashley had said Wayne apologized over breakfast that morning and extended an offer of dinner this Saturday to make up for his rudeness. And up until yesterday, Kieffer had hesitated to commit.

  He talked to his mom about what happened, with the omission of his poster’s mental spell over Wayne, and she had sternly insisted he go. “If you don’t go, you won’t be in good graces with her parents. Might make things a little difficult for you guys in the future,” she said over her six-thirty rerun of FRIENDS. She even offered to drop him off before her shift at the drugstore. Kieffer tried to get her to come along, really hoping she could cushion him if anything should go horribly wrong. Unfortunately, she was scheduled for a late shift and wouldn’t be able to make it.

  At first, Kieffer couldn’t help but personalize the unexpected verbal ass-chewing from Wayne. But, after obsessively toiling over it for the last four days, he could no longer see any reason in it. They didn’t know each other. Really, what was there to be mad about? Wayne hadn’t caught them doing anything inappropriate. What else was there for him to lose his shit over? The poster, maybe… but, why? What was on there that made him act so crazy? It made no sense. His mom was right. Wayne was just another poppa bear protecting his young.

  “I dunno,” Kieffer replied, “I just assumed that he was mad at me or something. You should’ve seen the look on his face. He—”

  Suddenly, he felt immense guilt for having inadvertently forced his mom into crocodile tears over something so petty. Even the panel of voices in his head told him that there was nothing more to what he saw. It was a stinging feeling in the very back corner of his mind that kept the spark of thought alive. He decided then that he better cut his losses. “I didn’t think that he might see Ashley as his daughter. Sorry.” He tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, but, being sixteen, it was a nearly impossible task. At this point the snarky inclination had fully integrated into his regular mode of speech. A generational accent, if you will. One acquired upon taking the first step into existential understanding. The obvious lack of reasoning over the last four days on his part poked at him like the blunt end of an old man's cane. He felt like a self-absorbed asshole and kicked himself for not seeing the truth sooner.

  Satisfied with his response, Kieffer’s mom sniffled a little, straightening her navy-blue work shirt out behind the wheel, and said, “I'm glad you see it my way. Now, don’t go gettin’ this girl pregnant, dingus. I can’t afford a shotgun wedding unless you guys are okay with the ceremony being held at Pizza Hut.” She let out a raspy chuckle before tossing her still burning butt out the window.

  Kieffer’s rebuttal was stopped short by the sight of the faded yellow Volkswagen sliding into view past the finger-stained glass. He looked over and saw Ashley’s house, windows bright with warm light, sitting down at the end of the freshly salted stone walkway. His clenched fists strangled the seatbelt in his lap, twisting nervously as the car slowly whined down to a stop.

  “This it? 122 Cornwall Drive, right?” his mom asked as she put the car in park and dipped into her purse for another smoke.

  “Yeah, thanks for the ride.” His voice was dry and crackly like the newly hardened ice snaking its way up and around the dirty snow-littered curb. He unbuckled the seatbelt and let it retract back before opening the passenger door.

  “Alright, make sure you catch the eight-thirty bus and don’t forget to put that trash out to the curb before morning. Have fun.” His mom flashed him a tired, sympathetic smile from under the little yellow dome light. “And remember, he loves her too. Always respect that.” She capped the sudden spurt of saged advice off with a motherly peck on the cheek before breaking into a fit of deep-chested coughs. Kieffer smiled back weakly, then turned and slowly exited the vehicle. He stood facing the front door. His black low top sneakers soaked up ice and snow as he felt the presence of the dented Corolla pull away and disappear into the dwindling daylight.

  He was now on his own with only o
ne way to go.

  With each shaky step down the narrow path, the red door ahead grew into a towering monolith. The frame, completely detached from the dwarfing backdrop of the surrounding windows and paneled siding, seemed to stretch eighty feet taller at every loosened step. In seconds, the distance disappeared between them. The megastructure's splintery hide and giant, sun sized brass knocker pulsed with vibrational intensity. Its substantial mass could be felt from where he stood just a few feet away. Kieffer repeated to himself that whatever, or wherever, lay beyond the massive door couldn’t exist. It was all in his head.

  From a perch high in the scaffolding of his introspective thoughts, he felt his aluminum-cast legs take two long steps forward.

  Kieffer found himself standing on the front step, craning his head up to the darkening sky at the megalithic door that stretched up into unseen space. Each weathered crack was ginormous; island-like gashes filled with hardened pools of glossy red paint that had once poured down from the heavens. These hardened pools filled in every building sized crack and splinter that covered the immeasurable multi-granular door. Millions of lines of paint ran down its rough surface in raised zigzagged lines. They crisscrossed and merged for hundreds of miles from the sky before revealing themselves to be the tail end of stadium-sized teardrops. Crimson highways of an unwanted grid system, frozen mid-construction by the high-altitude winds and thick coating of waterproof sealant.

  Intense vertigo eventually forced Kieffer’s wooden eyes back down to the welcome mat that cushioned his slippery feet. He practiced his breathing with little luck. The sense of control soon started to return. Still feeling the dizzying aftershock from coming back down, he forced himself to push on. There was no turning back now. Head still tilted down to the ground, he reached out with one silicone encased hand full of pooled blood and knocked distantly on the front door. As he listened to the rap of his knuckles echo and hum through the impossibly dense matrix of cellulose fibers, he closed his eyes and waited.