The Convulsion Factory

Mae blinked over her shoulder at me. “Okay.”

“What was it you saw in Jamey, mainly?”

Mae wasn’t sure what to make of this.

“Two years ago when we first met you, and you know how much Nathan loves to dissect things, he said he was pretty sure you saw Jamey as some sort of father figure. I’ve always been curious how on target he was, and today … today seems the day to ask.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” said Mae.

Rachel nodded. “I kind of thought so.”

“I mean, he did so much for me, and really I do love him for that. But if I was going to settle on a father figure it’d have to be someone more … stable.”

“Stability? How does stability figure in?” Rachel said, but sounded purely rhetorical, then she pulled Mae’s head down to her breast again, and Mae cuddled closer and reached back to drape one arm over my waist and pull me closer too. I watched the sky in the window like shades of pixel gray, rooting for the sun but it never came, another lesson in misplaced faith.

*

Rachel was a month from premature birth when my stepfamily was forced on me, two of them, a father and a son, who was called Thumper because of something to do with that Disney movie. He was four years shy of my six, and a few days before they were set to invade, my mother called me to the living room and there he was. My mother beamed as though he were the cutest thing since cartoon rabbits, and said, “Meet your new baby brother. I bet you didn’t know you had a baby brother, did you?” Thumper was carrying a toy hammer, and shortly after we were introduced he threw the hammer into my forehead so hard it knocked me down, and as soon as everyone had ascertained I wasn’t bleeding they said how funny it was, because anything a two-year-old does is adorable, especially when done to an over-the-hill six-year-old.

He loved tools. Thumper loved tools and taking things apart, and when he was all of five he dismantled the air compressor of my aquarium while I was at summer camp, and all my fish died. Coming home was like finding one of those mysterious towns you’ll hear about, from years before telecommunications glued us all together, that were found empty but with uneaten meals still on the table, and no one knows what happened. I came home and looked in upon a tankful of still, cloudy water, and nobody was swimming around the castle and the lid to the treasure chest wasn’t slamming up and down in a gush of air bubbles. Only the skeleton looked at home.

“I’m sure he’s sorry,” my mother told me. “But we shouldn’t discourage Thumper’s natural talents. How else will he learn?”

Later, when I told Andre about it at the slaughterhouse, over experimental cigarettes, he just said, “Good thing you don’t live in an iron lung.”

She stood up for Thumper a lot, I was noticing, a habit gotten into early and never broken, to prove to my stepfather that she wasn’t playing favorites. Of course Thumper caught on quick, and now it’s obvious to me why he’d set about trying to dismantle as much of my life as he could get his hands on, if not how he’d gotten the idea I’d even want to steal his father.

“You’re not my father,” I used to tell the guy any chance I got, and he would look expectantly toward the nearest door, saying, “Of course not … I’m here,” until it had become a game and one of us had to wear the other down.

I won, I suppose, one evening in preteen cockiness reminding him who he wasn’t, and he fixed on me with nullified eyes while chewing at the insides of his cheeks, then in a low voice I’d never heard before said, “You know why I’m nothing like your father was? You know what was different about him from me?”

Whatever I’d forced out of him, it had to be big.

“You ever hear the word ‘impotent’ before? Know what it means when a man’s impotent? What that can drive his wife to do?” He nodded with the conviction of natural law. “That was your father for you.” While I wasn’t sure what the word meant, I could read from his face that it was truly terrible, shameful beyond telling, and that the dictionary would back him up.

Thumper watched, and even though he wouldn’t have known what the word meant either, still snickered into his hands. Later, after I’d consulted Webster, Rachel brought her stuffed panda into my room to leave it with me, so I let her stay too because I knew she was afraid of Thumper, and that he grew suspicious whenever we got together and looked as though we were talking about him.

It felt weird, none of us a complete sibling to another, steps and halves stitched together into a Frankenstein’s family — how could the usual rules apply? Every time I saw a commercial on TV about needy orphans in faraway lands, I’d pretend that Thumper belonged with them, face streaked with mud and belly swollen from hunger as he stumbled along squalling to the village’s gods at the injustice of it all, wondering how he’d gotten there.

I held onto that dream for years, until I outgrew it, finally able to take pleasure in subtler tortures, Thumper’s father now using me as a motivational weapon he could wield over a son whose brain was ill-motivated or ill- equipped to process math, science, the higher intricacies of his native tongue.

“Why can’t you be more like Angus, why can’t you even try?” he’d challenge. “Those report cards you bring home, they’d shame a village idiot.” Thumper would glare at me with all the resentment his maturing face could muster, while Rachel made sure he didn’t miss her Mona Lisa smile, and knew whom she was siding with and always would.

Came the day, then, fourteen months after he’d been driving, when a drunken Thumper rolled his car. A lumbar vertebra crunched like a hambone in a dog’s jaw, taking the spinal cord with it. After that, he confined his driving to a wheelchair, mostly around the house, but of course I was gone by then, having let Chicago swallow me, make me anonymous, reprogram me with its different rhythms, its harsher harmonies and jagged dissonances.

I can still recall the look on my stepfather’s face in the hospital waiting room, after they’d given us the news on Thumper’s lower extremities, and while I was not without pity, a part of me felt responsible, too, because for over a decade I’d been wishing harm on him, and finally that muscle had flexed.

I looked at my stepfather’s slack face, remembering what it had uttered about my real father, and wondering if I should remind him of that, since impotence had again become a fact of life close to home. But at least my dad could still walk — which, as I quickly realized, had been an option he’d exercised only too well, so I kept silent, my stepfather still holding the means with which to cut the legs from beneath me, too.

*

Days passed and Jamey never would go rank, not even when the city and the ‘burbs broke new sweat in the heat of Indian Summer, his decomposition arrested by a force beyond our reckoning, until it got to the point where I couldn’t think of him as Jamey any more.

I’d make a trip out to the slaughterhouse every several days to check on his progress, or lack of it, and it was obvious that I wasn’t the only one, other recent visits annotated by gifts left in front of the bedsprings, below his cruddy bare feet. Coins and locks of hair and interesting chunks of scrap metal and sticks of incense and shredded audio tape and the odd piece or two of drug paraphernalia — offerings of these and more. He who was no longer Jamey hung above them all, bent-limbed and woven into the rusty springs like a 3-D portrait of a Hindu deity, no more or no less skeletal than he’d been in life, just incredibly resistant to change.

I’d come home and tell Rachel and Mae about it, and it was always fun to try and figure out who’d left what.

The signs went up during the third week, scrap lumber shoved horizontally into the springs, slash letters burned into the wood and chipped paint with a soldering iron. The sign at the bottom read Musica mundana; the one over his head, Deus ex nihilo. Given this further Latin I rightly figured it had to be Nathan’s doing.

“Well, what do you think it means?” he asked me on the street the next day.

“Is this from another private confab you had with him?”

Nathan shook his head. “This one I made up for the occasion.”

I resigned myself to puzzling it out since there was little else to do, Nathan and I sixth in line from a theater