Scars by Joshua C. Gaines

I am seven years old, sitting nude on the toilet, staring at the line where the pattern breaks on our linoleum floor, when my little brother bursts through the unlocked bathroom door. He jumps up and down to announce the new toy my best friend, Joey, has brought over to show me. From my warmed plastic toilet seat, I have a straight eyeshot across the hallway, through my bedroom door, and to my open bedroom window. Outside the window, Joey and three neighborhood kids wait for me to come admire the toy. Erin, the neighbor girl, points at me. It doesn’t matter which toy Joey is holding. I can’t see it, and in less time than I have left in elementary school the toy will reach obscurity. Now, the commercials for it run incessantly between pre-dawn segments of the Bozo the Clown show, and any other time we might possibly sit in front of our family’s 13-inch black and white screen. Our TV has only a few channels and we change them with clunky dials. We live in base housing on the Air Force Academy, and each day the TV networks begin with the national anthem. I believe the uniformed good-guys who live on bases have special TV channels, and I believe TV stations off base don’t open with the anthem. Erin, the neighbor girl, says something I can’t hear, and I scream at my brother to shut the door. His excitement shifts, his face turns to horror. Either I leap up, my ass unwiped, my prepubescent bits dangling, to slam the door, or my brother does it for me. I assume it’s me because I’m standing there and because I refuse to give my little brother agency beyond what he’s capable of breaking. I hear laughter outside. I lock the door and scan the bathroom for another way out.

I am fourteen, reading Watchmen for the first time, and I’m angry at the wrong parts, the pages full of text I have to slow to read as my page-flipping hand shakes with Tourette’s impatience. I’m not angry at the rape that, while necessary-ish to the plot, seems so common. It’s the 90s and kids my age have stories of what would soon be called date rape, but what the courts currently refer to as: “an error in judgement,” or “boys will be boys,” or they don’t bother to name it at all and instead ask if her skirt touched her knees, or if the no could possibly be taken as an answer to another question. Does is mean is, for example. Our reelected president and role-model says: It depends. My mother, the Air Force Major, refuses to discuss her Commander in Chief with her children. My father stays out late and is still in bed when I leave for school.

I grow my hair long like a skater I saw on MTV and for the first time notice girls glancing at me in the halls. This attention is what I decide I will always want. Does yes mean yes? The young dark-haired intern mouthing, “Yes, Mr. President” from beneath his desk says: It does. On the day I finish Watchmen, the girl I love more than toys or graphic novels says yes to a school dance, and it’s a big deal because I’m me and she’s Mormon, and I practice dancing alone in my room all weekend and into the next week. I walk to the dance, and we meet on the front steps of the school where I’m wearing Bugle Boy pants and an O. P. shirt and she’s in a 90s hot-pink dress that drops barely below her knees.

When I walk up, her shoulder length brown hair flips in the twilight breeze that carries woodsmoke through our Cayuga Lake valley. Fiery leaves gather, swirling in the school doorways, and I don’t have a coat to offer her. We don’t hold hands, but our knuckles brush as we walk into the school dance. We make sure our friends see us together. We eat and drink soda from the lunch line. And for the first time I get onto a dance floor and in the middle of the second song she asks, “Is that the only dance you know?” And it is. The softer me that believes it could work out with a Mormon girl, that believes learning one dance is enough, panics through the school-pizza-filled pit of my stomach and changes, and lies, and says, “No. I know lots of dances.”  For the last time I leave the dance floor. I buy a Dr. Pepper and sit on the partially extended wooden bleachers and perfect the mental gymnastics that will allow me to watch my future partners dance with other men from the sidelines for the rest of my life.

I am twenty-one and drunk in the back of a cab with girls in short party dresses sitting on either side of me. I can feel the cabby’s jealousy through the rearview mirror. The girls are kissing me, and they are kissing each other so close to my face I can smell their clove cigarettes, their vanilla perfume. I grab one’s thigh, and she takes my hand and pulls it up into her crotch, a really weird word for something so warm and damp and desired. I want her now even more than I will want—six hours from now—to never drink again.

When we reach their apartment, we stumble through the humid air, up outdoor concrete stairs, and I slip, or trip, and slide against the stucco wall, embedding fiberglass hairs along a gash beneath my eye. As we sit in the good light of the kitchen floor, their drunken hands are unsteady with the tweezers, and I imagine going blind for this. Neither of them are the woman I’m in a relationship with—a serious relationship where I take her out to clubs and drink and watch her dance with other men. That woman fell asleep hours ago in another town, trusting me like I trust her. I stumble into the bathroom and lock the door. In the mirror, the deep maroon lines along my cheek have begun to swell and feel numb when I touch them with my shock-shaking hand. I pray to the god who only taught me one dance to please not let me scar, even though I was raised Catholic and know I deserve far worse. Outside the door I hear a man’s voice, and when I leave the bathroom he and one of my kissing companions, and another woman I’ve never seen before, walk into one of the bedrooms. The woman who stays with me, who held my hand between her legs, runs past me into the bathroom. She kneels on the terracotta tile floor, wraps her hair around her hand from behind, leans over the toilet bowl and vomits.

I walk into the kitchen, open a couple cabinets, give up and grab a glass from the sink, and fill it for her with water. From the other bedroom two girls moan together as if the man wasn’t even there. When I walk into the bathroom, she flushes and she brushes her teeth. She lights a clove and takes a drag, and I can hear it crackle. She hands it to me and I take a few drags too and try to believe I can’t taste her vomit on the sugar-coated filter. I lean back into her couch with my eyes locked to a water stain on her ceiling and try to stop the room from spinning. When she’s done with the clove, she takes my hand and leads me to her bedroom. She keeps her apartment cold, her air-conditioner cranked, but we’re both sweating. In her bed, we strip to our underwear. She turns on a lamp next to the bed. I lay at the edge of the bed on my back and put one foot on the floor to hold the world to its undulating axis, to keep it steady. She puts on a Mazzy Star CD and lays on my chest with her naked breasts against me, and begins to snore before the first song ends.

From this moment on, our alcohol laced sweat is the most intimate thing our bodies will ever share. When I wake five hours later, the sun cuts razors through her plastic window blinds. My eyes want to puke themselves out and my heart pounds in the half of my face that feels on fire. She has rolled over and her black thong underwear has shifted half way down her ass. Where I had laid my face, pale streaks of blood stripe her pillow, and the tableside lamp remains on. I turn it off and stand and lean against her wall and want to die. I drink the glass of water I’d filled for her, and quietly dress myself.

I walk past the other bedroom door and imagine the scene inside. All I want is a quick peek. Instead, I slip from the apartment, closing the front door and hear the handle-lock’s soft click behind me. At the bottom of the stairs, the Texas summer sun hits me, unapologetic and vengeful. I walk across the parking lot and, after checking for fire ants, kneel behind a dumpster and vomit up the water I just drank. There’s nothing else in it really, some yellow foam that comes out last and briefly floats on top before the dry earth absorbs it all. Some snot clings to my long hair. My neck sweats down my back. I hate this state. I remember: The name of the toy Joey wanted to show me was The Animal. The Animal was a truck with claws that came out of the wheels so that, no matter the situation, it could claw its way out.

I am twenty-eight and my country keeps killing innocent people and I believe I can make a difference. I’m in the Air Force officer’s version of basic training. Kinder. Gentler. They can shave my head, but they can’t call me names, or beat me. Apparently that annoys them, so they pack me off to survival school where they are allowed to treat me as a prisoner of war. In a three foot wide by four foot deep room, I have a prisoner’s burlap hood over my face. They play Muslim prayers and “Boots” by Kipling on repeat for hours, then Yoko Ono screaming the refrain of “Hey Jude” for an entire day. Two feet in any direction from madness, I piss into a can in the dark and they scream at me while I try to pour the can into a bag and drench my sleeve in my own urine. They hit me in the face for that. Then they hit me for reasons I don’t understand.

Later they fold me into a small box with a perforated lid which it sounds like they lock from the outside with a padlock. Maybe I can’t make a difference. Maybe I should have planned for this better. I begin to disassociate from reality. My unbreakable imaginary fists begin to chip away at the top of the wooden box. My hits land like they do in Kill Bill, until the roof slowly splinters. I am asleep and dreaming when they hose the boxes down with thirty-six-degree water. I know the temperature because they tell me exactly how cold it is, and it feels that cold as it soaks through my layers of fabric. It falls through the holes in the box top into my nose, onto my face. Awake, and drowning, and unable to move, I wish I was back on the toilet with the open door, or on the dance floor. This “training” teaches me things I doubt they intend—how to hate them for example. How to distrust a United States uniform as much as any other, maybe even more, maybe even if I’m wearing one. Maybe the water pouring through the top of the box and filling the scant air space around me will wash my own piss off my arm. I begin to struggle and gasp for air.

The Animal could not claw its way from this place, even with its claws out. In practice the claws never worked right anyway—they always ended up getting the truck stuck as they lodged into every crevasse. All that weaponized design and preparation, and when it mattered, the smooth wheels worked best; at least they could steer around obstacles and wouldn’t sink into every hole, every puddle of mud. Maybe the honest and softer me, fourteen and buried on the dance floor, receives a wake up tap on the shoulder as my fortifications of lies, built to protect a vulnerable core, fail in this flood. Or maybe I’m not drowning. Maybe it’s just a locked box and sweat, and the water from the frozen hose comes later. Regardless, I won’t walk away from today as I was. When the water reaches my ears I yell like a wounded dog, and they open the box. Too cramped and cold-numbed to move on my own, two men in camouflaged uniforms drag me by my shoulders from the box and let me fall into a pile of snow. On my back, soaked and shivering, the gray sky appears new to me as if everything outside the box is unknown space, untouched experience. A few flakes flurry on the breeze. And when they finally pull the hood back down over my head, they’re too late to blot out my hope. The me that remains is no longer guided by belief, only purpose. 

I am thirty-five and also seven, learning to navigate a used life and a new one. I have left the Air Force, and thirty-five-year-old me makes the uniforms I no longer trust pay for my brain meds and my graduate school. I have a toddler now, a daughter whose name means dreamland. With her I am seven, and for the first time in my life I know how to be the age I am because I’ve been there before. My role is the big brother I never had, and I teach her the things I wish I had known. She teaches me too. We play, and she moves in and out of her imagination and tells me the sounds I need to make. I am a train, and she rides upon my back. I am a sun bear, and she rides upon my back. There’s a lot of riding happening. When we visit the local pool together, I’m a dolphin, but when I sit on the aluminum bleachers during her swimming lessons I find myself holding my breath for her, so I try not to watch.

At night, she falls asleep in her bed beside the stereo, and I write about music because I’ve yet to read words that reach the same transcendence. I tell the VA shrink, when words I write can move beyond their physical nature, so perhaps can I. For education, I read poems about jazz by writers desperate to capture in verse what they heard in a night so tactile it left their hair smelling like cigarettes for days. And it was too late for showers anyway. The music had soaked into their pillows and dreams, victims of an unexpected high low high low -high-high-higher wrapped in a sound tornado. These dead white beats all want to talk about the Buddha, and petty thievery, and about getting teenagers on their dicks. I just want to figure out how to exist on a page and also float above it. I want to look up at a sky of snow again and close my eyes and open them to the same sky over and over, like it’s some magic trick that no one’s waiting there to cover my head in burlap.

I am seven with adult fractures and I need help. I don’t heal like I did the first time around. My new body remembers every hurt in its bones, and every slight in its dreams. It finds comfort in illusion and hides from the real. I cry harder at movies than at funerals. Though I’ll never wear a uniform again, marching became almost second nature, and my favorite dance move is the about-face. I perform it every bit as well as my otherwise constant state of immediate future preparation. This march of time, this off the dancefloor dance that keeps me unmoored from anything resembling life in the present tense—I am always twenty minutes from now, and always twenty years ago. The new seven year old me plans ahead, and I know to always lock the bathroom door, and by the time she is seven so will my daughter. The younger woman I married, who is also older than me, crawls beneath my blankets. Some nights we share our bodies and some nights we share blanket forts. Either way, she falls asleep on my shoulder, her breasts against me, and when I wake she’s still there. And I don’t have to sneak out, or drink her glass of water.

I am forty-two and have all the answers. They come to me, one after the other, a quick succession of midlife wisdom without doubt, a clarity of purpose I call my midlife opportunity. What I want is as clear to me now as what I wanted at fourteen. I want to go back, and try smarter. And so, I am also fourteen and also have all the answers, a confidence laced in a redo attitude of “if I knew then what I know now,” because this time I do.

I read Watchmen for the second time, and I fear for my daughter and the chain reactions that will shape her many possible futures. I notice for the first time, the only double page spread in the graphic novel, except for the very end, spans the exact center, and the turning point of the story. My story has turned. This time around I am not humiliated by my lack, and my daughter won’t be either. I am a father, and she looks to me for certainty. I feel today-years-old every time I discover “I don’t know” is also a certainty. My daughter takes every cushion off every chair and couch and from them makes a soft three sided tunnel of boxes that she crawls into and calls her “queendom.” She says I may enter, and I tell her I don’t really do boxes. So she crawls out and sits on my lap and says the rest of the apartment can be part of her queendom too, and the soft boxes can be her chambers. Except she doesn’t say chambers. She says “chang-ers,” like hangers with a ch in front. I tell her, we will join your queendom. And I don’t correct her pronunciation. She asks me how many queendoms the world has and I say, none I know of, but we do have queens. She asks why they aren’t called queendoms and I tell her, some words take time to invent. She asks me to play with her hand-puppet badger, Constance, and tells badger-me to keep her company. Together, she and Constance practice holding their breath. After forty Mississippis, she asks me if I was a baby. I ask, me or Constance? She says me. I say, a long time ago I was, but I remember it like you remember your first step, which she then swears she remembers. She asks if she can put her music on while she reads a book about a goat who’s a picky eater. I put on her favorite band, Pearl and the Beard, and when she falls asleep beside her book and begins to breathe heavily, I change it to Mazzy Star.

At forty-two, I no longer take as many medications in the morning, and my dreams run more glide than panic. My quiet revenge against indoctrination is raising a young mind the government will never get to use against itself. My quiet revenge against groupthink are the post-military degrees I milk for all the tax payers are worth. I about-face, regrow my MTV hair, reclaim an earlier mind. I un-remember what ribbons they awarded me for my service. When my daughter wakes, she asks for a back scratch and asks fourteen year old me to dance with her at the living room ball. And I say, yes.

I am forty-nine and I am twenty-one, at a confluence of adulthoods. Forty-nine-year-old me collects memories, and copies them into stacks of legal pads. And I’m doing twenty-one right this time, not in the back of a cab between women I barely know, or dodging tweezers on a central Texas apartment kitchen floor. We have a house now, a dining room. On my birthday, we sit at our dining room table, and the two women beside me in their queendom are neither false nor fleeting. Over dinner, my brother calls for my birthday and I put him on speaker phone while he excitedly fills us in on his new job, tells how he builds organized teams, and works closely with animals. He talks about a few animals he’s in charge of then pauses. He’s been thinking, he says, and the enthusiasm leaves his voice. He begins to apologize for that time when we were kids and he opened the bathroom door when my friend… I tell him we’re at the dinner table and remind him he is on speaker phone. And he says, oh, and his voice brightens as he explains, in laughing detail, exactly what happened anyway before apologizing again. He explains it the way I do, where I’m the one to jump up and shut the door. While my daughter and brother laugh, I say I barely remember any of it, and I say I forgive him. It’s a lie—I do remember. But it’s true that I forgive him. I tell him about a story idea I have where the plot is a spinning top, like a tornado and an anti-tornado meeting in the sky.

While we talk, my daughter takes a quick call from her boyfriend. She dates boys who show up at our home in expensive cars that can avoid obstacles, pot holes, low water crossings, cars that basically drive themselves. I want to tell the boys to keep their hands on the wheel anyway. I don’t, though. Instead, I tell them what time I want her home, and I tell them no means no, and I don’t ask any questions I don’t want honest answers to. I know what can happen in the seats of cars. My daughter sings, and memorizes K-Pop dances, and plays ethereal instrumentals my words fail to approximate. She has no problem asking for what she wants.

When I hit my socializing limit, my wife listens to my brother, responds with dinner-table kindness, and fills him in on our lives adding the details I always miss. While they chat, I clear the table and wash some dishes before putting them into the dishwasher—clean—to be cleaned again. Walking toward the bathroom I pass our hallway mirror with its small ledge where we place treasures we find in the Pacific Northwest forests: tiny pine cones, the lower jawbone of a shrew, a shard of snowflake obsidian. I stop and pull back my graying hair. I turn my face in the mirror, and press my fingers along the two invisible lines that once ruined an evening. Even looking close I can’t see a single scar, but they are there.