Years of the Beefeater
by Tremain Xenos
I wish I had a way to begin that might provide some hint as to what would become of me and Joshua. The truth is I can’t recall when the prickly numbness first crept down my jaw to place me on a tandem with the man I might have been. I close my eyes and climb unscalable accretions of remembrance to grope in vain for impressions still endowed with sentiment. I open them and Joshua still lies on the sofa among the mould and plastic bags and rats to colonize our squalor. I crave nothing but the needle, the return to the womb, the obliteration of chronology. And yet—somewhere in my memory—there sits a snapshot of our childhood on the knoll.
I’m sitting with my bucket in the grass. I’d caught a garter snake. I’d thought the term my mother used was “garden snake,” since that was where I found them. I asked her once where our cat had gone when she died. Animals don’t go anywhere when they die, she said. They just die. But I’d caught a snake that had a name and knew it, and Joshua would be my witness.
“Are you a boy snake or a girl snake?” I ask.
In the middle of my question, the snake twitches.
“You’re a boy?”
Again, the snake twitches.
I rattle off every boy’s name I can think of. When I get to Mark, he twitches.
“Your name’s Mark?”
He curls in the bottom of the bucket, flicking his tongue.
Chronology bleeds through. Remembrance is reflection on the windowpane, extinguished by the merest change in light. I should rouse Joshua, should find us something in the decomposing kitchen before the darkness gives our hovel to the vermin. I must gather my remains tomorrow, must press myself into the mould of functionality, must arrive on schedule at the severance theatre. But tonight, I know, the tickling itch will disappear. Orange bliss will eat the memories. Shrik shrik shrik comes up the sink drain. Ticklish green between my toes.
I’m running barefoot down the hill.
I hit the asphalt and race past the grassy field along the great round road faced by all the buildings of our complex. Joshua’s is on the steepest hill, the building with the longest porch. I leap onto the landing and rap the screen door. His father is a silhouette against the white of the kitchen window, a shirtless kid-sized man with dirty hair. Snot-faced little Jamie toddles to the door, stares wide-eyed up at me, and says something that sounds like, “Pooh?”
“I wanna show Joshua my snake.”
Joshua leaps from the darkness and resides in a squat beside the bucket.
“It’s a garden snake,” I said. “His name’s Mark.”
“Can I touch it?”
“They don’t bite.”
He reaches inside to stroke Mark’s tiny head. A stinging itch. I smack my arm. My blood is smudged with black remains of mosquito. My mother had said God made all the animals as food for people.
God made mosquitoes as food for us? I asked.
God made all the animals, she said.
I think now of the tiny cross she always wore, and will myself not to bleed at the severance theatre. I’ve been reprimanded once already. My supervisor called me in to tell me in no uncertain terms that any sign of my discomfort could upset and drive away the observers. Our observers are everything, he said: If we lose them, we lose everything.
My contract stipulates the price of my flesh by weight, and compensation is generous. At first I performed only once per week, all nerves when I traipsed naked into the spotlight. Silent and anonymous in their hazmat suits, the observers faced me from their dusky pews. I’d attempt to diffuse the tension with a joke or small talk, though they and I both knew they were under no obligation to acknowledge. I’d wish to see the eyes behind their goggles, to find some spark of indication that, perhaps, they weren’t so different from me.
I know better now. I have inured myself to parting with that part of me they’ve paid to see removed, and to never glancing back to see it taken or ignored. My contract makes it clear that what they choose to do with my liberated flesh—and even what it is they’re paying to observe—is no concern of mine, and that in any case, my remuneration is the same.
Somewhere, as a memento, sits our childhood on the knoll.
“Can we catch toads in your backyard?” Joshua asks.
“I caught a turtle one time,” I lie. “Steven and Michael tried to smash its shell with a hammer.”
The lie was easy to believe. Steven and Michael—the landlord’s grandsons, twins who look nothing alike but are equally stupid and cruel and frequently incontinent—would kill anything they could. They beat us when they could, and beat each other when they couldn’t. At the end of every fight the loser wailed, “I’m tellin’ Papa!” and the winner pissed or shat himself. Papa was a hill of random lumps, a belly roll from stained unbuttoned trousers. Mama was a pretty blonde with cream-brown eyes and dimples.
I scan the length of porch, all darkened windows where relics of a bygone age sit staring through the chinks in their venetian blinds. Next door to Joshua’s, the last apartment before the shady hummock, was always empty. The other kids all said a sketchy creep named Felipe blew his brains out in the living room. In my building, only the unit upstairs from us is vacant. The man next door to me is tall enough to swing himself from the lawn up over the second-storey guardrail. I once saw lightning strike the lawn there. All the kids saw it. Near the fire escape. Just before the weedy slope that led to Steven and Michael’s building.
We’d have to cross the hummock and pass that slope to reach my backyard.
I clutched the bucket to my chest. Joshua and Jamie ran hell-for-leather after me. We’d barely passed the fire escape when the shouts rang down from the slope.
“There’s Tommy and Joshua!”
“And Joshua’s stupid little brother!”
“What’s in the bucket?”
“Lemme see it so I can kill it!”
I tried out for track and field in middle school. I wouldn’t have if I’d known Steven and Michael were on the team. When they saw me run they laughed so hard I thought they’d piss and shit themselves again.
I smoked my first blunt with Joshua in high school. My mother used to say our upstairs neighbour “smoked pot.” I thought it meant she sucked the handle of a frying pan. One day she tossed her seeds and stems out the window. Pointy leaves poked up between my mother’s geraniums. My mother dug up the plants and brought them to the lady as a gift in little pots. The lady blazed a grin more brown and charcoal than enamel, her eyes as wild as the kids’ who’d seen the lightning.
Our biology teacher once turned an entire class period into a sermon against marijuana. There were eight hundred chemicals in the plant, he said, which when transformed by flame became two thousand. Of those, he said, “Science has explored and named about four hundred.”
“So what?” Joshua later sneered. “The number of chemicals in tomatoes increases when you cook ‘em. You scared of pizza now?”
The smoke stuffed Joshua’s car and pressed against the windows. I stumbled out the door and up my driveway, bewildered by the grainy waves and blotches in the stone and the profundity of green in the blades of grass and their pandemoniac angles. I lost myself among the cracks and desiccation of my own front door. When at last I pushed it open, I couldn’t name the forms that had been furniture. I drove my teeth into an apple, its juicy balm a waterfall to wash away all sin. From that day on, I needed fruit each time I swam the clouds with Joshua, or else I’d feel the prickling down my jaw, feel my teeth turn brown and black, and see nothing in the mirror but corruption.
Once, after my shift at the severance theatre, I took too long to dress my wounds. I left the cloak room expecting the hall to be empty. Instead I stepped directly into the gaze of the observers.
They had been human all along, underneath their hazmat suits. The kid-sized man with dirty hair. The man so tall he could’ve swung himself onto the balcony. The grinning lady with discoloured teeth.
The pretty blonde with cream-brown eyes and dimples twirled toward me in her satin dress. “Would you leave me half your chest?” she smiled. Then, tossing back her head to laugh a blithe and fulgent laugh, she met my gaze with eyes as distant and sequestered as a masterpiece of holy art I could never hope to touch.
In our high school cafeteria, I asked Joshua what he’d do if he knew the world was about to end.
“Grab the hottest girl here,” he said as he bit into a dried fig, “And start pumping.”
“That’s what you’ve always wanted to do?”
“No,” he said. “But I’m not dying a virgin.”
I reconnoitred the shapes and sizes of our classmates, trying hard to want the girls. My fantasies held nothing but destruction: Our gym teacher in the locker room with his newborn in his arms roused in me a desperate yearning to dash the baby to the concrete floor. Each time I held a knife or scissors, I longed to plunge them into someone’s gizzard—my mother’s, Joshua’s, my own. Fruit swirling in the blender made me wonder what would happen if I ground the glass itself and drank the shards: Would I feel it when they shredded my intestines? Would it feel at all like the pain that swells them now, and makes the darkness all the more a void as it wraps around the chaos?
A flash of flame under the spoon. My pores and wrinkles blend to herringbone from wrist to knuckle, dirty, pachydermatous, monochrome.
Our childhood is a snapshot on the knoll.
“I don’t do drugs anymore,” Joshua tells me. “That’s how my brother died.”
Soaring through the nightscape high on whippets, Jamie had collapsed on Joshua’s shoulder. Joshua laughed and shoved him hard—“Get off me!”—then wondered why he wasn’t moving.
Behind him in the decomposing kitchen, empties crowd the countertops. Black clouds of flies disperse and settle in the sink. Joshua downs a bottle every day. He drinks until drinking isn’t enough.
Each day, I watch his spattered walls, the rivulets of filth like tears in stasis. Each day, I mark the calendar with the day I’ll quit. I contrive new tricks to fool myself and set out again on the road to freedom, only to fall deeper into bondage. I bargain with myself. I pledge again this week not to fail, to make it through the day, to make it through a single morning.
I’ve heard us called insane who repeat the same behaviour expecting things to change. If this is so, the bulk of humanity must also be insane, returning as they do each day to school and then to work, chasing the hope of light at the end of an endless tunnel, believing there will one day come a greater prize than whatever they select to numb themselves—and likewise the rest of the animal kingdom, driven as the ants to rebuild their houses daily in the paths of human feet, or as cats to scratch in desperation at the walls and floor outside the litter box, at anything but the litter that would bury their reeking excrement?
I will leave her half my chest.
I clutch the bucket and race back past the place where lightning struck. Up the shaded hummock. Behind the longest building. A potter’s field of hoses, broken pots and tricycles. I shove Joshua hard, watch him stumble. I do nothing as he staggers backward. The bucket overturns. Mark’s flesh is pinned under Joshua’s foot, his body split and bleeding creamy brown. Joshua’s face distends. A snapshot of the knoll. His body smudges with the sofa and debris. In the evening I will see if he has stirred. There will still be parts of me to take.
I will leave her half my chest.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Beginning in the eastern United States, Tremain Xenos migrated westward until he crossed the Pacific, where he married an artist and bought a crumbling shack between the rice paddies. He and his long-suffering wife raise vegetables and chickens and are currently collaborating on a new novel. His short stories have been published in Propagule Magazine, The Dark City, The Psychedelic Press, and a few other places.