Chapter 12: Second Bad Vibel

12

Norman cannot read the following words in the pre-dawn basement darkness.

I’ve got a shirt that I have ruined
from pulling at the threads
and a letter from my ex that
says she’ll never love again
the breaking of her heart
has left my fingers wet and sore
and you, new love, always remind me
that I’m pretty and a whore

the lovers of my life have had
no need for absolution
all I’ve ever wanted is
a peaceful revolution
but I will never understand
why my loving genuineness
makes simpering concubines out
of self-contented feminists

I promise I hold no ill will
I contain only love, so much that
everyone on Earth can take
and I’ll still have enough
so what I want to recommend
a non-dualistic woo
do not fall in love with me
let’s just both love you.

It is a yet-unrecorded song that Norman wrote in the spring, not long after Imogen had moved back out to Maine following the “I don’t want there to be an us” conversation. He wrote the poem sitting in his upstairs studio in that house by the river, while across the hall Sylvia slept off multiple orgasms spawned from their mutual melancholy over Imogen’s recent departure.
Norman tries to read it now again in this dark basement in Maine where the ghosts of Imogen’s sleeping-habit-spirits still linger to swarm his heartstrings. He came across the crumpled piece of paper, once attached to one of his old sketchbooks, while blindly rummaging through his boxes of belongings upon waking up in the dark from a nightmare in which Sylvia had come to him in the form of a karmic tax collector with one hook hand. He sits crouched in total darkness beside the thin futon mattress that is his bed. He holds the uncrumpled leaf of paper close to his eye but still cannot visually make out the words. Some intuitive voice inside of him insists that he read it, that somehow its contents will have wisdom for him in this moment, but he doesn’t have the energy to get up and cross the room to hit the light switch. He barely had the energy to rummage through the box beside his bed with one arm until said intuition told him he had found what it was looking for.
He closes his eyes and tries to look at the paper astrally. The first image that comes to him is Sylvia again, though this time not as menacing as in the dream. She smiles primly but with mildly disapproving eyes. Then she picks up a newspaper and unfolding it curtly in front of herself she says, barely psychically audibly, “A non-dualistic woo my ass. Better be glad you never gave this bullshit to me.”
“A non-dualistic woo?” Norman asks himself aloud, opening his eyes, not immediately recalling that her words are a reference to the poem he cannot read or remember.
A clap of thunder strikes suddenly outside the house, not distant. The thunder ebbs for just a moment then rolls back in for several seconds, filling the air with a strange feeling of imminence.
“Mmm,” Norman muses, looking up at the dark blue rectangles of the basement windows that are the only visible landmarks in the pitch black. “Imminence.”
Feeling the scene into which he awakened now to have been appropriately capped off, Norman turns back to his pillows and slips again into sleep with the crumpled poem held close to his bare chest.

Second Bad Vibel

Some small part of him awakens a few seconds before his body awakens, wrapped in a sheet of plastic packing bubbles that he must have pulled close for warmth, still thinking that he is in the spacesuit that the plastic had become in his dream.
“Get out of my head!”
Lee’s scream makes the insulation walls in the basement cringe and wakes Norman abruptly, shattering the dream he was still resting mostly within. His heart accelerates to sixty in first; he leans up on his elbow and listens intently for more sounds from upstairs, but for several long seconds it is quiet. His brain can’t decide whether or not he is still dreaming. Then he hears her quiet weeps and pleading voice again through the floor and he gets up quickly out of his triply-wrapped cocoon of plastic bubblewrap. He puts on the nearest pants and shirt, hurried by the worry that while he is doing so, Lee is being hurt.
“I’m fine, Norman,” Lee says as soon as he becomes visible at the top of the basement stairs from the kitchen, where she and Ben are standing very close together, he hovering frighteningly upon her. She hides her face with her hand and says, “I’m sorry I woke you, but I’m fine. Could you give us some space for a few minutes? I’m sorry…” She starts to cry again, shrieks, “God damn it!” and stomps out through the breezeway to the garage.
Ben and Norman make eye contact. Ben is dressed in khakis and a white undershirt; it seems he has been interrupted from ironing another pair of pants, which wait on an ironing board by the stove. Norman can see that underneath Ben’s mask of anger, he looks scared.
“What’s going on?” Norman asks him, wielding a chest burning with prepared fury.
“Nothing, Norman,” Ben says in his almost whispered, fake-calm voice. “I’m sorry she woke you. We’ll talk in the garage, and you can go back to bed.”
“Tell me what the fuck happened, Ben,” Norman demands, his eye beaming the full vorpal erection of his seriousness.
“Norman, would you please just let me handle this and mind your own business,” Ben pleads angrily with a stench of the pathetic. Norman steps into the kitchen and Ben steps back, adding, “She’s fine, she’s just scared because I just found out that she’s been emailing Wes again. Okay?” Ben gives Norman a look that appallingly seems to expect comisery.
“And what exactly is it she’s afraid of?” Norman asks with a clearly judgmental implication.
“I don’t know,” Ben sighs with frustration, throwing his hands in the air and tromping off to the garage after Lee. “Lee asked you to give us space, Norman,” he shouts back as he shuts the door to the garage behind him.
Norman stands in the kitchen, only now realizing that the random clothes he chose are all black – T-shirt, open button-up shirt, pants and shoes. He picks sleep out of the corners of his eyes and plods slothishly to the living room, where Jason and Lewis are slouched on the couches, watching some morning cartoon. “Morning, Uncle Norman,” Lewis squeaks without looking at him.
“Morning, dudes,” Norman replies. “How are you guys?”
“Fine,” Lewis replies matter-of-factly.
“Cool, cool.”
Norman returns to the kitchen and sits down at the computer. He thinks about conflict in narrative. Good and evil. What it could mean to be righteous. His facial expression is a powerful, gruesome, tortured sight somehow held in what would look, in a photograph, like little more than a tensely focused gaze into space.
In his imagination, he watches multiple takes of a scene of himself rushing into the garage and verbally finishing off the bullshit beast that Ben keeps brandishing against Lee. Ben buckles under the wisdom and righteousness (muffled, unspecific, like simspeak), Lee’s fear and sadness that tie her to this man disintegrate into peace and happiness once again and even without seeing it happen the boys feel the germinating poison seeds he has laid vanish from their throats.
He opens a new Word file and begins to write to focus his mind, and with the thought that such exposition will be necessary for the book he is planning.

At the end of September in 2003, Norman and Imogen packed as much of their stuff from the Pool as they could into their two cars – her station wagon and his Mirage – and drove a thousand miles from South Bend to Cape Elizabeth, where upon arrival both cars’ engines failed mere stoplights from Lee’s house. They were towed into the cul-de-sac one at a time.
Lee was waiting, despite her newly precarious situation, with welcoming love and grace. She had spoken with Imogen on the phone at the Pool many times and the two had become good friends; now they met in the flesh for the first time. Jason and Lewis ran out behind Lee to hug their uncle and shyly meet his new girlfriend. Ben stood in the breezeway, watching, waiting for them to enter the house before he said hello.
Those first days in Cape Elizabeth were extremely strange and difficult for Norman.
Imogen needed his strength to feel comfortable in their very uncertain new situation together. A mysterious wound from her past seemed to gradually reopen the longer they remained there and she began to sleep longer and longer. She clung to him like a child at night.
Lee needed his strength to remind herself that she was a strong person, an individual that no one could control, indeed that she was worthy of love and respect at all. They sat for hours alone together in the garage, smoking cigarettes and weed, talking about what her marriage had actually been like all those years, how she had been broken down into believing that she deserved such treatment, and Norman always reminded her that she was a powerful, beautiful spirit and that Ben’s deeds had been inexcusable (and also that he had no control over her that she did not give to him, though she protested that it was not so simple).
The boys needed Norman to be a calm, temperate, reasonable male role model who could play Dungeons and Dragons with them without feeding off of them.
And, of course, Ben needed Norman’s strength of forgiveness. Lee was still furious at him, would continue to be for a year or more, and would no longer let him get away with even the most minor of his old bullshit emotional control tactics (of which Ben claimed ignorance or powerlessness that Norman had a hard time believing). He seemed, at first, genuinely remorseful for his behavior over the past thirteen years. He confronted Norman the first night in the garage, crying quietly over his attempts to apologize for everything he had done. Norman embraced him and told him that they would always be brothers, moved by Ben’s performance and unable to imagine the horrific side of the man who had always been a loving older brother-in-law.
But as the months

Norman wiggles his fingers above the keyboard, thinking about where to go next. He leans back in the wicker chair at the kitchen computer. He follows Jason comically with his eyes as Jason walks behind him into the kitchen to retrieve some pretzels from the kitchen pantry.
“Are you working on your novel?” Jason asks shyly.
“Aye, sort of, matey,” Norman replies in an absurd pirate voice.
Jason chuckles and walks back into the living room.
From the driveway outside, Norman hears a car start and then drive away. After a moment, Lee comes back into the kitchen from the breezeway with a tear-streaked face, her lips quivering, and she stands perfectly still, looking downward, until Norman walks slowly up and hugs her, at which point she puts her hands on his shoulders and starts to weep.
“I’m sorry,” she keeps apologizing. “I’m sorry, Norman.”
“Shh; it’s okay,” Norman whispers. “What happened? What’s going on?”
“I need to be with the boys. Are the boys okay?”
“They’re fine. They’re watching TV. What’s up? Do you want to talk about what’s going on?”
“What’s in your hand?” Lee touches the crumpled piece of paper in Norman’s hand.
“Oh,” Norman says, realizing only now that he has had the crumpled poem in his hand ever since he woke, without realizing it or remembering his attempt to read the poem in the dark until now. “I forgot I had this in my hand. I woke up in the middle of the night and picked it out of my box of stuff randomly, on an intuition from a dream or something.”
“What is it?” she asks again, takes it out of his hand and unfolds it. She stands there and reads it for a while, while Norman stands beside her and somehow, as she is reading it in her head, he finds he is able gradually to remember the words.
“I’ve got a shirt that I have ruined from pulling at the threads,” he says. Lee looks up at him and smiles through her tears, looks back down and keeps reading. “And a letter from my ex that says she’ll never love again,” he continues. “I picked this up randomly in the middle of the night last night and couldn’t read it in the dark, but somehow now as you read it in your head it’s like I can remember it gradually, with each line you read.”
Lee looks up at him questioningly and manages a little intrigued smile. “It’s interesting,” she says. “Do you want to come out and have a cigarette with me? I know it’s early for you.”
“No, it’s fine. Totally. I could use a cigarette. I’ll let the boys know.”
“Thank you,” she weeps, turning away and hiding her face again in her hands. “I’m sorry; I’ll be in the garage.”
Norman peeks his head around the corner where the little hall meets the living room and Jason instantly says, “We’re fine; you’ll be back in in a minute,” without looking away from the TV. Norman watches them not look at him for a few moments, nods, then heads out to the garage and sits down with Lee.
“What happened?” he asks her after he has lit a cigarette.
It takes a short while for Lee to find her voice. “Thank you for being so good, Norman,” she sniffs. “I’m so sorry that you had to come back to this. I know you and Imogen probably had about as much as you could take last time. It usually isn’t this bad anymore, I promise.”
“Lee, are you okay? Did he…”
“He didn’t do anything, Norman. Well, I mean, he checked my email account to get an account number for our gas bill and he found a message from Wes.” She looks up ashamedly with tears in her eyes and bites her lips. The last Norman heard, she had ended communication with Wes – an old love of hers from high school with whom she cheated on Ben as catalyst to the unveiling of the whole sordid situation of her abusive marriage. “I love him,” she says with tears. “I don’t think love goes away.”
“I know, Lee; neither do I. But the last I remember, we were discussing what an asshole Wes was and how he had been lying to you,” Norman says with confusion.
“I know,” Lee nods. “He wrote to me just to let me know that he didn’t end up going back into the Army after all. And I wrote back, and then he had written back to that, and that’s what Ben read. But I told Ben I wasn’t going to communicate with Wes anymore.”
“Why?” Norman asks. “Why must there be people you can’t communicate with?”
“Because I made that promise to Ben.”
“So what’s his disposition right now?”
She starts to sob again. “He said he doesn’t know what to think and that he clearly can’t trust me and…” She trails off into tears; Norman leans close and hugs her.
“It’ll be okay,” he assures her. “This is nothing. This is bullshit. He has no leverage against you whatsoever. You know what I mean? How can he think he can hold any kind of moral high ground?”
“I did cheat on him with this man, Norman,” Lee reminds him.
“After he had been beating you for thirteen years and cheated on you with how many women?”
Lee shakes her head and shrugs. “I’m not really sure exactly. I haven’t been able to get him to talk about any of that in much detail.”
“I’m not surprised. Lee, I am really worried about you. I know you’re trying to keep your family together and all of that but I am really genuinely worried about the insidious effect he has on you and on the boys. Are you sure this is the kind of life you want?”
“I don’t know, Norman,” Lee sobs. “At times like this I don’t know anything at all. I don’t know what to do. I’m so scared. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Norman sighs. “I don’t know how to help you other than by reminding you that you had perfectly reasonable reasons for doing what you did two years ago, and I for one am glad you did because it brought everything into the light and saved your life in a way, and to remind you that you are a beautiful, wonderful woman who deserves a reasonable man who is not completely broken.”
Lee sniffs a little laugh. “Thank you, Norman. I love you.” She forces an uncertain smile through her tears, and the sight breaks Norman’s heart.


At work, Norman just sits with his headphones on and his eye focused angrily on the data he is processing, and through the imaginary sludge of PCBs he can see Ben’s face, and the spirit of aggressive lameness at large peering through his eyes, and through its eyes he can see the Heisenburglar sucking, sucking. His mind whirls with anger, an emotion he is unaccustomed to allowing himself to focus on, but this anger is powerful enough that it does not seem prudent to ignore. It feels rational, righteous. Fuck Ben.
He tries without success to let his mind drift away from the way that Ben has brought utterly unnecessary misery upon his family for the past decade. But every time he tries to think about the book he’s planning, Norman is overwhelmed by the guilty feeling that there is something he could actually do to change things, to save his sister and nephews, to finally really get Ben to fully understand why his behavior is absurd and emotionally vampiric or destroy whatever parasitic spirit leech is convincing him to do such things. Despite himself, fantasies in which Ben gets in Norman’s face and Norman is forced to physically defend himself or Lee by beating the shit out of Ben play themselves out in his mind a few times through the course of his workday.
Norman walks into Ben’s office in the other building. Ben turns away from his computer to face Norman and says with nonchalance, “Hey, Norman, what’s up?”
“I need to talk to you is what’s up,” Norman says, trying to make sure his voice expresses the full seriousness of his demeanor. He shuts the door behind himself. “Do you have a minute?” He stares a spear into his brother-in-law-only.
“Um, well I was in the middle of working on something actually,” Ben responds, looking with masked nervousness back to his computer. Norman can already feel fear building in Ben’s spirit. “Is it an emergency, or can it maybe wait until later? Because I’ve had a pretty stressful day so far.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve all had stressful days thanks to your stressful day, Ben,” Norman says, sitting on the edge of a small chair by the door.
“Alright…” Ben protests.
“I need you to know that I can no longer sit idly by while you treat Lee the way you did this morning, the way you do continually despite the fact that we all know you used to beat her and you clearly can’t be trusted anymore, despite the fact that she has shown you universes worth of forgiveness and understanding and love. Your behavior is repugnant to me. Do you have any idea how lucky you are to still be in our lives, let alone just not to be in jail? And still you feel like you can behave this way?”
Ben stares at Norman stoically, listening, trying hard to seem like the calmer one despite his clearly stiffening defenses. He stands and slowly approaches Norman, putting out a field of intimidation energy that turns Norman’s stomach instantly like he’s being hit with a sonic weapon. Standing close to Norman as he opens the door to his office, Ben says angrily, “I think I can handle my family. Go back to your cubicle, Norman.”
Norman considers Ben’s generosity, the fact that he is living in his house and eating his food… The Nine Inch Nails song The Hand That Feeds comes on in Norman’s headphones, bringing about images of himself biting hard into the flesh and tendons of Ben’s financially generous yet wife-beating hand.
He pulls his keys out of his pocket and lets them hang from his index finger by the heavy sterling n keychain Laura gave him. His keys to her apartment are the shiniest ones in the bunch, and noticing that makes him smile. It makes him think about how what he notices is like what he chooses to note in the text of the book scene of the moment, and how noticing something or some attribute of a thing makes that the description of the thing, the truth of the thing in that moment. He pictures Laura looking him in the mind’s eye with a sweet smile. The realization that he could now go home to her instead of to Lee’s house fills him with joy and gratitude, but also with a sort of nostalgic sadness, realizing that the phase of sleeping in Lee’s basement is coming to a close (for him such deaths, even just milieu deaths or significant changes of scene, are often heralded by such an emotional wake, a silly mourning for the loss of a period of his life). Also, he fears leaving Lee again, knowing the depression it delivered when he and Imogen moved back to Indiana. Though he hides it well from his coworkers, his heart quivers softly a couple of times and his eyelids fill with tears just as The Hand That Feeds turns into Cat Power’s song Good Woman, which always brings both Imogen and Sylvia to mind, wherein they immediately gang up on his emotional defenses with vicious, synchronized disinterest.
Feeling compelled by the presence of melancholy mnemonic muses, Norman opens up a Word file and continues the narrative that he began on the computer in Lee’s kitchen.

If Norman’s series of spiritual and philosophical epiphanies in Two-thousand-two and -three had been a period of training and preparation, then the Two-thousand-three/Two-thousand-four school year in Lee’s basement with Imogen was a great battle. Every day was a struggle for peace, reason and compassion against whatever broken spirit had attached itself to Ben in his childhood, passed to him through the dismissiveness of his mother or karmic emanations from previous lives or media images of empty, vampiric masculinity or whatever. Almost daily either Lee or Ben or Imogen would buckle under the gravitas of it all and become a whirlwind of grief, catching those around them in the low pressure and sewing weakness and anger throughout the house. During the day, he always held his peace together, but every once in a while, in the darkness of bed with Imogen, Norman would silently weep and she would hold him, no doubt feeling for another precious moment like their relationship was still emotionally balanced.
Through all of it Norman’s will was strong. His faith was still virgin. He and Imogen spoke of their future daughter by name (Violet). He and Lee smoked in the garage and brainstormed over the events of Gigantomachy with laughter and tears. Norman saw the book as some kind of esoteric spell intended to free Lee from her personal internal shackles. Also, he and Lou continued to collaborate weekly on various writing projects, by simultaneous phone and instant messenger.
For a while there, it felt like the Revolution was happening in that garage. Lee, Norman and Imogen became a powerful spiritual triumvirate, neverendingly discussing politics and art, continually brainstorming their various creative inspirations. To a certain extent, the triumvirate was formed out of a need to put forth a united spiritual front against the powerful vampiric force that was at least occupying the same space as Ben (if it wasn’t, in fact, his direct willful intent to be such an asshole, as he claimed). The political lead-up to the Two-thousand-four presidential race allowed them to remain hopeful and excited about activism toward liberal, progressive ends. It really felt like things might be turning around, and they felt like freedom fighters.
But at the same time, there were daily reminders that the opposite was actually, or at least also true. Chaos reigned; the most evil, though they balked at using such a term, of the largest zeitgeist entities (corporations, nations, religions) seemed to be sweeping over the Earth and digging in their insidious talons of ignorance and apathy, fear, need, et cetera.

Norman stops writing. For whatever reason, recalling the events of that year and ordering them into a state of permanence by forming them into sentences has quickly tired his heart, as if there is some kind of reality-gravity pulling against the immortalization of those days in prose.
He wonders how Lee is doing, and where Ben is at the moment. Images of Ben’s big-knuckled hands striking her in the face and throttling her by the throat play jaggedly in Norman’s imagination. He tries to dispel them, but they remain. As far as thoughts go, you are assholes, he thinks to the violent images. Get the fuck out of my head. In the vision, Ben’s bodiless hand flips Norman off.
“That’s it,” Norman says aloud, standing out of his chair as he pulls off his headphones. Wayne, sitting beside him, turns and looks up at Norman, removes his own headphones. “It’s time for a cigarette,” Norman continues. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Word,” Wayne belches.
Norman laughs slightly. “Nice one. I’ll be back in a bit.”
He walks out to the parking lot and gets into his car, which is dusted with a thin layer of snow. Inside with the door shut, the car is barely lit through the greyly glowing opaque blanket. Norman turns on the motor and the headlights so that all the dash displays light up. It makes him feel like he is in some kind of deep space pod. The music that instantly fills the car is his own, an ambient Box song from The World’s Original Man called Hero Epic. He cracks one of the back windows, lights a cigarette and listens to his own voice singing many long months ago in that hardwood-floored room in Indiana, captured by a microphone and accompanied by a soft cacophony of electronic mist.

Hail to the Great Masturbator!
Indeed, no greater fate for one who loves
than telephone in hand and hand in glove
Everything, everything you do, everything you do is nothin’

The lyrics his voice is singing through the car’s speakers remind Norman of the crumpled poem in his hand. He is surprised to discover that he has been holding it in his fist all day, typing this whole time with only two of the fingers of his right hand. “Oh yeah,” the realization makes him say aloud. He unfolds and reads through it. The poem brings to mind memories of Sylvia naked and those spawn thoughts of Laura’s voice and that somehow brings Norman to his book, the one he is writing right now, the one that is these words, these thoughts of his. He can see them in his mind, clearer in a way even than the words on the wrinkled piece of paper in his hand.
In the space where he can see these words, Norman turns away from them and seeks out Lee’s spirit wherever it is, feeling powerfully certain that this vision of his is astral and that it is some part of his awareness separate from his body. His imagination’s eye swoops through a multidimensional field of scenes from movies and comes down into a small room where Lee is sitting alone in a chair, weeping. A screen on the wall plays images of Ben’s angry face and though the volume is turned down there is closed-caption text at the bottom of the screen listing his constant emotional demands.
Repulsed, Norman turns off that vision and finds himself fully again in his snow-darkened car.
He recrumples the paper and pops the Box CD out of the car stereo when the frenetic drum and bass that follows ceases to suit his mood. He puts an unlabeled CD from his passenger seat into the stereo and gets out to clean the snow off his windows.
Through the process, his seriousness makes him feel like a samurai preparing his steed for combat.
As he drives through the city and across the bridge to Cape Elizabeth, many songs play on Norman’s stereo from what turns out to be a mix-CD he remembers having made many months before in South Bend, but the one song that best encapsulates his demeanor and that rings thereafter in his mind as he locks his car and walks to the breezeway door in musicless silence is the Kinks song Clichés of the World (a B-Movie). Both Lee and Ben’s cars are in the driveway; Norman’s heart tightens.
Two cats enter and one exits when Norman opens the door and walks into the house. The door to the garage is closed and Norman gets an intuitive sense that Ben is behind it, in the garage having a cigarette. He bites the inside of his mouth with anger, various clever/righteous things to say flashing through his mind, debating opening the door and laying into Ben right away, getting it the fuck over with. Aggression, even merely vocal aggression, runs contrary to Norman’s nature and he knows that he is no good at it (always shaky and stuttering throughout), but he doesn’t know anymore how otherwise to make Ben understand just how unacceptable his behavior is and that it can no longer be tolerated. He needs to do something.
It strikes Norman that he would rather confront Ben after a hit or two from the pipe that he keeps downstairs behind his stereo. He heads inside, through the kitchen where Jason is playing Civilization at the computer, but when he opens the door at the head of the stairs to the basement, Lee is at the bottom just beginning to ascend. “Hello, Norman,” she says with a friendly smile as she walks up to him. “You weren’t at work long. What time is it?”
Norman is already shaking, his throat tight. “I’m sorry, Lee,” he says, “but I just couldn’t stop thinking at work…” He trails off, unsure what to say to her. “I was worried about you.”
“Oh, I’m okay,” she assures him as she passes him at the top of the stairs and heads into the living room where the Warren Zevon album The Wind is playing on the turntable. “You didn’t need to leave work. I’m sorry.”
Norman is confused by her strangely upbeat manner. “Is Ben in the garage?” he asks with a nervous swallow.
“Yeah, he’s having a cigarette. Why?” she asks, turning around, seeming suddenly defensive, like she can see his intentions behind his face.
“Lee,” Norman says, his childlike fear and nervous-righteous anger slurring his words, “I need you to know that there are some things that I have to say to Ben.”
“Like what?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t let him do this to you anymore.” He starts to stoically weep, shaking his head, images of family apocalypse (blood, pain, loss) gripping his mind. His jaws are clenched like a vice. “I see his bullshit tear you up and frighten and confuse the boys. I don’t see him changing. I can’t stand for it. I can’t just live here and let it happen, let him treat you this way and totally suck the life out of you, the joy.”
“Whoa,” Lee snaps angrily, “why don’t you leave me a little say in my life, okay Norman? You don’t know what goes on between Ben and me because it’s none of your business, okay? It’s my life, and it’s my family, and it’s my decision to make. Now what you haven’t considered is that certain things may have been discussed today that you don’t know about. God damn it, Norman, if you’re going to stay here you’re going to need to promise to keep the peace. If you can’t promise me that, then we’re going to have to figure out some other situation.”
“I’m sorry,” Norman weeps, buckling under his sister’s wounded tone. His fear, compassion and emotional confusion all crash together in the poorly labeled intersection of this moment as he pleads for understanding, “I was worried about you. All I want is for you to have the kind of life you deserve, and to have a happy love and a healthy family that doesn’t have to live in constant fear and bullshit.” Lee tries to talk over him, her tone quickly falling from angry to remorseful, but Norman continues, hiding his face in his hand with embarrassment, “I was worried about you, Lee. I’m sorry. I’ll find another place. I won’t upset the peace.”
“Norman, I’m sorry,” Lee pleads softly, reaching out to touch his shoulders and slowly pull him closer for a hug. “I’m sorry, Norman. I’m sorry I yelled. Come here; it’s alright. I’m sorry I yelled at you. It was a misunderstanding.”
Norman sobs into his sister’s shoulder, overcome by the irrational fear that he might no longer be welcome here anymore. She hugs him tightly and starts to cry softly herself, which only makes Norman feel more like a jerk. Now I’m the one making her cry, he thinks to himself aloud, noting that in this moment he hears even his inner voice as if it is weeping.
Lee pulls away from the hug just enough to look Norman in the eye as she explains, “Ben took off from work today not long after you went in and we went into Portland and walked around and had some lunch and had a good, long talk. I explained to him that I need him to trust me and that, like you said, he has no leverage whatsoever and simply can’t behave that way anymore. But Norman, you need to understand that he has come a long way, whether you can see it or not. It’s slow,” she adds with a little sniff of a laugh, “but then he’s been reinforced in this behavior by me and by his family for his whole life. He’s finally beginning to realize that these tactics won’t work anymore, but it takes time. But he is working hard, and you need to give him credit for that.”
Norman just nods, his inner speech-writers struggling with each other over whether to agree with her placidly or to continue the thread of reminding Lee about Ben’s failures to date.
“Are you okay?” she asks him sweetly. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I was no better than he used to be.” She looks down at his hands and asks, “Is that the poem you had this morning?”
Norman notices the poem still in his fist and nods. “I’ve been holding it all day for some reason. Barely noticed.” Norman hears the kitchen door to the breezeway open, knows that it is Ben coming into the house. Fear and embarrassment gush in equal proportions into his soul. “I’m okay,” he sighs, wiping his eyes. “I really am. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I think I want to be alone for a minute, but really I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?” Lee pleads. “I really am sorry, Norman.”
Norman sees Ben in the kitchen out of the corner of his eye, tactfully keeping his distance from the scene he clearly knows is going on.
“Seriously. I’m okay. I’m just gonna go listen to records for a while. I’ll be fine.” Norman smiles for Lee and pats the side of her arm for reassurance that she hasn’t scared him or hurt his feelings.
“Okay. Dinner will be taco salad. Is that alright with you? Do you want me to get you for a cigarette later, before I have to start cooking?”
“Sure,” Norman nods as he opens the door to the basement. “Thanks, Lee.”
Feeling like himself at twelve, he bounds down the stairs, jumping the last four, and goes straight for his stereo where he puts on his headphones first, then takes a minute to choose a record. Tri Repetae++, by Autechre. He sits down in the middle of the room, grabs the worn old Jiggly Puff pillow that he got on a lark while working at the Academy but has since become genuinely attached to, and sobs into it for only the first few seconds of the first song, which consists of jarring rhythmic static. After a few moments of the static, when the fierce, industrial main beat comes in, he stops crying and instead simply stares into the purplish darkness of Jiggly Puff pressed right up against his face.
Out of the purplish haze of his self-constructed Jiggly Puff eclipse, a scene appears to Norman. Jiggly Puff floats pinkly above a mauve-curtained stage, playing a levitating organ, his gestures synchronous with one of the sounds in the Autechre song in Norman’s headphones.
Jiggly Puff nods to Norman with a little smile, as if cueing him to do something.
Instinctively, Norman thinks about Ben, considering what kind of life, what kind of experiences could lead such an otherwise caring and intelligent man to emotionally manipulate and physically assault the woman he still convincingly claims to love.
The curtain opens, revealing a wooden stage in the center of which is Ben on a four-legged stool of which one of the legs is short. He wobbles back and forth on it, his hands in the pockets of his khakis, a dejected look on his unshaven face. Norman makes his mind’s eye swoop in close on Ben’s face to study his expression with the hope of being able to translate that into an understanding of his perspective.
At that thought, the whole scene seems to unfold somehow as if in a new dimension, Ben’s head unwraps quite gruesomely for a moment like biological origami being taken apart, and then he is not Ben anymore, but a strange childlike creature with jutting ribs and vicious teeth not terribly unlike the star of the Aphex Twin video for the song Come to Daddy (the not entirely un-Come-to-Daddy-ish sound of the Autechre song playing in his headphones adds to this impression for Norman).
His first reaction, the instinctual one, is terror at the sight. But Norman learned long ago how to dismiss terror, and it merely grazes him as it passes.
The second impression, not as easy to dispel, is revulsion. The longer he looks at the thing in this multi-dimensional light he can see how it is flat in our World but somewhere below it is full. It hangs inside/under Ben, clinging to the belly of his heart. He can see the claw marks it has left on his bones, marking the years (thirty-three, Norman counts). He can even, somehow intuitively, see a log of its whispers to Ben over the years, constantly (and often successfully) trying to convince him that he is what it is.
Norman imagines squishing it like a bug, but the moment the thought crosses his mind (knowing logically, as he does, that death is not the end of coherent experience) he can feel the further pain and anguish that the creature would be put through in just being crushed one more time. It makes him realize that even this creature, this etheric lamprey of whatever horrible kind, is an entity with an awareness, choice-making like himself, like Ben, like everything, and it also is what it is for a reason. Looking farther, gazing down the thing’s history as down along a tunnel (he just can, he finds – the full file on this demon seeming to be unprotected), he sees its brief past, long ago, as a butterfly caught and pinned alive under glass to die of starvation, its decision thereafter as an angry etheric butterfly form not to move forward in any direction but instead to haunt the etheric arteries of this World, and he can see its slow growth thereafter from tiny ghost to dog-sized demon, filling the mold it built for itself out of self-loathing and fear, and he can see it passing from host to host through the decades, from soldier to merchant to cook to tourist to housewife to son, blind anymore to the fact that it even is an autonomous being. All it knows is that it wakes every cycle in darkness, darkly dreaming the life of its host while constantly reasserting to itself that no one deserves happiness.
Pity washes over Norman, but not the kind that makes him want to help the beast. All he wants is for the pathetic thing to leave his family alone. But at the same time, everything history and perception has taught him tells Norman that the only way to successfully defeat an enemy is to help it, to lift it out of the misery that makes violence its only tool. He wants to believe this.
Having to hold his trepidation aside like the curtain of a window he is looking through, Norman addresses the demon. “I’m Norman Newman,” he says. “Who are you?”
The big, shining but sickly eyes of the thing snap in his direction feverishly. Its jagged teeth grate together. “Ben,” it snarls.
“No,” Norman replies as calmly as he can in such company, “you’re not Ben. Ben is my brother-in-law, my sister’s husband, a good and reasonable man who you have been terrorizing, if I deduce the situation correctly.”
“Fuck you, fag,” the thing spits, “you don’t know me.”
“You’re right, I don’t,” Norman agrees, ignoring the thing’s empty insults. “What’s your name?”
“Mind your own fucking business,” it replies, and looks back to the section of Ben’s terrified etheric heart that hangs down into the demon’s realm, goes back to suckling it.
Norman considers for a while how he could possibly remove this creature, find it some new home or hobby, but the more he considers it strategically the more guilty he feels for caring more about his own family than for the thing. It too, after all, is a being that he can interact with, clearly, and deserves to be respected as an individual as much as anyone else. He pictures himself angrily tearing lichen from a tree, an absurd gesture, and yet he can see no distinction, beyond his emotional proximity, between Ben and a tree, and this thing and the tree’s parasite.
“I’m a magician,” he proclaims to the demon, focusing on projecting confidence and power. It glances back over at him, still sucking, and squints hard in his direction but says nothing. “I can free you,” Norman adds, slowly raising one eyebrow mysteriously. “If you want. I can give you a name and build you an energy source, maybe, if that’s what it would take for you to leave Ben alone. You aren’t Ben. In fact, I think you’re hurting him and perhaps indirectly causing him to hurt others. It’s pretty uncool, man.”
“Fuck off,” the thing says quietly, turning its eyes back away from Norman and silently beginning to leak tears that somehow fall upward, into Ben’s heart.
Norman looks the demon over for a moment, then says, “How about Sam? I could see you being a Sam.” The demon doesn’t acknowledge him. “For your name, I mean. I mean, it’s just random really, but I can definitely see you being a Sam. I’m gonna call you Sam, alright?”
The thing removes its lips from Ben’s heart only long enough to idly spit some self-pity in Norman’s direction. Its eyes, however, when it returns to suckling, remain fixed on Norman’s eyes, and he thinks he may have its attention.
“You know, Sam, I can see how you got to this place,” Norman attempts. “I know what’s happened to you. What if I let you stay with me, instead of him?”
The thing makes no sign of reply. The muscles in its body that keep it suspended from Ben’s heart flex softly, clammily.
Norman feels his real throat clenching, a sort of woe-nausea chilling his real spine as if all of the real cells in his body are simultaneously revolted by the misery of this demon, but the warm comfort of Jiggly Puff’s plush body wrapped around his face has the power to calm Norman’s mind enough that he is able to utterly doff his physical senses with a single spiritual sigh.
With all of his will and reason Norman defies the customs of modesty that he can feel still exist even in ethereal space, and he opens his heart before the beast, letting his spiritual skin unfold and the great, beating sun of his central spiritual muscle shine upon the parasitic thing. He thinks a thought of welcome toward the thing, reminding it again of his offer.
Norman waits there for what feels like weeks, everything he knows and loves and treasures loose for the taking or partaking, his physical body weeping shamelessly into its Jiggly Puff pillow. The monster eyes him from across the now-narrow divide between Ben’s heart and Norman’s.
Then, all at once the demon lets go of its host, crawls out of Ben’s cavity with its long, bony legs and into Norman’s wide open heart. Norman feels its weight settle in. He can instantly sense its eyes right beside his, resting somehow under his glasses, blinking out of sync with him. He feels something like a momentary void in his actual heart, then it starts again with a spasm, and the sensation frightens him enough to throw the Jiggly Puff pillow away from himself and stand abruptly, start to pace the dark basement.
“Whoa,” he repeats to himself a few times at first, going back over the events in his mind, somehow now comfortably distant from them as opposed to fully within them, though they occurred mere seconds in the past (and he considers this, as well, for a while).
He stops pacing after a couple of minutes, noticing that this side of the Autechre record he put on has reached its end and is now clicking against the middle. He lifts the needle and stops the record. He puts a hand to his chest and looks down, picturing the demon literally inside him. He can see it, in his imagination, getting quickly comfortable in the elaborately-decorated conditions of his heart.
For just a moment, he feels like he is now the demon.
But then he smiles, remembering who he actually is (and being overwhelmed with peaceful pride by it) while wondering if what he has just done in his mind had any actual attachment to events in the Real World. He whispers softly to himself, “Was there really some demon in Ben’s heart? Have I just rescued him from it? Is it now in mine?”
Wiping his face with the back of his hand, he can’t help but laugh softly to himself. He feels much better. “I feel like I just beat the boss of this level in the video game version of the movie version of my half-fictional memoir of this moment,” he laughs aloud with a couple of final sobs, then stands still for a while chuckling to himself in the darkness, covering his mouth with his fingers, deeply enjoying the line he just got to deliver.
Noting that the hand he is covering his mouth with is empty, it strikes Norman that the crumpled piece of paper, the poem that has been in his fist all day, since the early morning before dawn, is no longer there though he cannot recall having set it down anywhere. He scans the room for it with a glance, doesn’t see it anywhere.
As a reward to himself for the imaginary heroic deed that he doesn’t feel he will probably ever be able to really tell anyone about (as barely honest as it seems it would be to do so), Norman packs a little weed into the pipe that he keeps behind his stereo and takes a couple of hits over by the high windows above the washer and dryer. The effect of the smoke mixes with the gentle pride he was already feeling, filling his brain with a soft, pleasant whiteness.
Norman feels the need to meditate. He needs to calmly pore over the minutes of these events, build a structure of understanding of what has happened and how it relates to all his other knowledge. He wants a cigarette.
Still mystified by his experience, Norman lopes out to the garage absent-mindedly and is unprepared when he encounters Ben there, sitting on the old love seat, smoking a tear-specked cigarette. Norman feels his heart stir.
“Hey man,” Ben says quietly with a nod and a slow blink. He displays an emotionally weary forced smile.
“Hey,” Norman replies. He sits down across the coffeetable from Ben and lights a cigarette. Without looking him in the eyes, Norman asks, “How you doing?”
After a couple of drags from his cigarette, Norman looks up into eye contact with Ben, who moves his gaze back and forth between Norman’s eyes for a moment. Ben allows a very genuine little sad, childlike smile to emerge and says quietly, “Better, Norman, thank you. How are you?”
There is a slight stinging pain in Norman’s left earlobe that makes him bite his lip, then nervously lick his upper-left wisdom tooth, the one with the hole, which is bigger now.
“Mmm,” Norman responds. “Alright. We’ll see.”