there
“No one is here,” Perry said quietly. columbo is here isn’t he
“No!” Perry fought back panic, tried to keep his voice low-he didn’t want another visit from Big Al upstairs. “No one is here. It was just the telephone. It’s nothing to worry about.” High-pitched noise ripped through his thoughts as the Triangles rooted around in his brain. Perry sat very, very still, wondering if a blast of angry shouting would hammer the inside of his head.
Low-pitched noise followed as the Four Horsemen added new words and phrases to their growing vocabulary. telephone so you can talk to ones who aren’t here right
Perry worked his way through the Triangle sentence. They put right at the end of the sentence. They were asking a question.
“Yes, that’s right, so we can talk to ones that aren’t here.” He remained frozen on the couch like a hunted rabbit, waiting for the pain to sear through his head, a weed whacker trimming up his brain. we do that without telephones talk to Triangles
“Are you talking to some of them now?” Perry carefully led the conversation away from the telephone call, still wary of the mindscreaming although he sensed no anxious emotions from the Triangles. It seemed that they understood the concept of a phone and realized that no one was in the room. There was a bit of high-pitched fuzzy noise before the Horsemen’s response. calling one up now, we are talking to them
“Are they nearby?” High-pitch sounded in his head. how far is nearby
“You’re familiar with the concept of distance?” He felt them looking up the word distance. Unbidden, images flashed through his mind-maps, a hundred-yard dash, third-grade story problems. yes. how far is nearby. show us
He’d have to start them out on inches and feet. “Nearby” was a relative concept and he wasn’t sure how he’d explain it. He hopped toward the junk drawer to get a ruler. As he moved, the faint wisps of a foul smell drifted across his nose, and then it was gone. He sniffed again but caught no further traces of the scent. He brushed aside a roll of duct tape and pulled the ruler from the drawer.
He steeled himself. What he was about to do-educate them-made it even more real, even more hopeless. It was like admitting that they were just as normal as the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day or Saturday-morning cartoons.
He slid up the sleeve on his left arm.
There sat the Triangle, bright blue under his skin. But the eye slits were still closed. show us.
“I can’t. His…his eyes aren’t open yet.” some can see. not all. not yet.
“So which one of you can see? My back? My…my balls?” no, your ass, show us
“No.” show us
“No fucking way.”
SHOW US
The low-level mindscream hit him, causing more fear than pain. What he had to do sickened him, but he had no choice.
He dropped his pants and bent over, gripping the counter edge for support. He held the ruler behind him at ass level, parallel to his butt cheeks, directly in front of the Triangle buried in his posterior.
“Do you see this?” Perry felt embarrassed, like a teenager who’s pantsed in front of the girls, or someone caught masturbating. He felt his face flush red. He was standing there in his kitchen, pants about his knees, bent over like some silkyboy waiting for a bull fag to take it to him. He’d certainly rather have some three-hundred-pound convict sticking it up his ass than deal with the situation he had now. Even AIDS would be better than going out this way. yes what is it
He felt loud, high-pitch noise. Excitement rolled into his thoughts, an overflow emotion from the Triangles. He’d had all the Triangles covered up from the first moment they could see. The Triangle on his shoulder had enjoyed only a few moments of vision before Perry fucked up its whole day. Aside from an eyeful of fork, this ass- eye view was really the first thing they’d ever seen.
“It’s called a ruler. It measures distances.” Perry closed his eyes and laid his head down on the counter. It felt cool against his warm face. “See the lines and the numbers?”
He felt them accessing the new words. yes lines and numbers yes
Their excitement level soared, leaking into his own mind. Perry fought it down. Anger crept into his thoughts-he wasn’t going to let their emotions overtake him.
“Okay. The big lines represent inches. That’s a unit of measurement. The numbers count how many inches there are. There’s twelve inches on this ruler, twelve inches is called a ‘foot,’ which is a larger unit of measurement. Understand?” The fuzzy noise in his head was a speedy blur, then it was gone. yes. twelve inches in a foot
“Okay. Now, there’re the twelve inches in a foot, and if you have three feet-” three feet is a yard
They were at it again, checking his brain like the Perry Public Library. It was a redefinition of being used, and one hundred yards in a football field there was nothing Perry could do about it. Nothing. His anger continued to grow, his temper slowly mushrooming like a nuclear pile approaching critical mass. Perry shut his eyes tight and tried to
5,280 feet in a mile control the emotions, but there were too many: excitement, frustration, humiliation from being bent over the counter with his ass exposed like some prison bitch waiting to be taken, and rage at having his brain and memories fingered through like a Compton’s Encyclopedia.
His father’s voice came to him, unbidden. This time it sounded real and vibrant, not a memory but something angry and new. Look at yourself, son. Bent over like some nancy-boy, you’re a goddamned disgrace. I oughta teach you some manhood, boy. You gonna let them treat you like that? You gonna let them? Huh, boy? You gonna let them
PUSH YOU AROUND LIKE THAT?
A narrow-eyed snarl slipped across Perry’s face. He reached his left hand over to the stove and cranked the front right burner’s knob to “high.”
He stood and pulled up his pants. Their disappointment overflowed into him, as pure and as powerful as the excitement had been. let us see. let us see
“You wanna see? See the fucking shit stains in my underwear.” let us see let us see the ruler
“Shut the fuck up, you’ve seen enough.” Part of Perry hoped they’d continue. He wanted to hurt them, teach them some manners. Another part of him (the part that had been all of him until a week ago, the part that was fading fast) struggled to bring his temper under control. He was split right down the middle, and he didn’t give a ratfuck which part came out on top. let us see See SEE
Perry flinched as the Triangle volume started to rise. A mindscream fast approached. The part of Perry that hoped for a peaceful resolution shrank away to nothingness.
In that moment, he was his father’s son once again.
“You want to see?”
Pain was coming, Perry knew. Truckloads of it. A clearance sale on agony.
“You got to learn not to talk to me that way. Tell you what, I’ll show you how I cook your dinner.” Perry hopped up onto the counter.
He sat with his ass on the countertop, legs dangling over the edge, right ass cheek almost touching the edge of the electric stove, back resting against the cupboards that held his mismatched plates. He watched the burner slowly change from black to a soft, glowing orange. An orphaned, dried-out grain of rice sat let us see on the burner. Perry watched closely. The grain was at first white, then slowly turned black.
It began to burn, sending a thin let us see now tendril of smoke toward the ceiling. The little stream thickened as the metal continued to heat, smoke rising in a tiny column then dissipating into let us see, we’re
