CHAPTER TWO

In which I begin to make excuses for what was to come

 

As it turned out, my Daddy came from hard times and not only that but his parents were not like other people.

Grandma Zdaemon looked like she was born a Grandma and had this crooked little nervous smile that never turned into a grin.  She had been a simple peasant girl in her previous 10,000 lives, and had no intention of ever being anything else.  When I looked inside at her soul parts, I saw her wringing her hands and crying, not knowing why, and not really wanting to know.  It was just the only way she knew how to be.

Her husband had been a deaf-mute in all his previous lives, and had been accidentally born into his present body with actual working vocal cords, but had never got around to learning how to use them.  All his life he had worked very hard at the worst jobs he could find so that he wouldn’t have to get involved in this verbal sparring that most people consider normal conversation.  His way of dealing with visiting relatives was to sit in the corner and make funny noises at their children until they made of him a human jungle gym, through which no pesky conversation would attempt to pass.

I loved my Grandma and Grandpa Zdaemon, and had no doubt that they loved me.  But they lived in a bubble 150 miles from our town, and visiting them twice a year didn’t make them real for me.  I considered them figments of my imagination, pleasant dreams.

Grandma Wrathburn was a whole different story.  She lived 20 miles away, and the whole family piled into the station wagon every Sunday to go to her house and spend the day with her.

She was not someone who didn’t know what she wanted to say.

In her last life, she had been Joan of Arc.

One of her deepest regrets in life was the existence of my Daddy in my Mama’s life, and as One Who Knows Better, it was very important to her that the whole world be made aware that her daughter had made a terrible mistake.  When we were around Grandma Wrathburn, the black beast Elsie didn’t need to come around; Grandma was proud to do the job of making my Daddy miserable all by herself.  She always needed a man around to pick on, and having given up on marrying the worthless things, she had to settle for visiting scapegoats.  My Daddy, being open to any kind of abuse, made a perfect target.

As I grew, I began to remind Grandma Wrathburn of my Daddy, and so I became an alternate target for her projectiles.

So did my cousin Dale, who is right now as we speak laying under a piece of cardboard somewhere, sucking on a bottle of whatever he can get cheap.  So maybe she was right about him, though how she could see into the future of baby Dale, I don’t know.

It so happened that I was alive less than a year before my Mama started getting pregnant again, and she kept on getting more and more pregnant until one day my Daddy had to take her to the hospital so she could get more of those doctor drugs so my brother Dirk could pop out while she wasn’t looking.  When Dirk brought my Mama home he immediately began to run the whole house from his crib.  My services as prankster were suddenly not in demand at all, and it was quite a jolt for me to find that such a lovely little baby could do such an evil thing as to rob me of what had been a captive audience.  His plot to deprive me knew no bounds; after a few months of torturing me at home, he developed a chronic case of diarrhea and took my parents to live in the hospital with him while he threatened to shit himself to death.

He must have known that my sisters and I would have to go live with Grandma Wrathburn in the absence of our Mama and our Daddy.

Now that I had a little blond brother who didn’t look anything like my dark-haired Daddy, it was quite apparent to Grandma Wrathburn that I was the absolute scum of the Earth, and to her great delight I was right there in her house for two whole weeks so she could concentrate on destroying me.  When my parents visited on break from the hospital at the end of the day, they would find me locked in my crib where I had been languishing all day wearing the same diapers I had worn to bed the night before.  They would have objected, but who were they to question the All Knowing?  And with their little baby dying in the hospital, they can be forgiven for letting their nearly grown 1½-year-old fester behind bars for two weeks.

Now here’s how I remember it.

One day I was laying there in my crib, squishing shit between my thighs, and crossing my eyes to make the bars of my crib look like they were moving around and trying to part, when suddenly it seemed like the whole Earth began to shake.  When the shaking stopped, there stood my demon, outside the crib, looking in at me!  I had forgotten that he existed, having become him, and to see him standing there looking at me with that pitiful expression on his face made me feel like some sort of empty shell.

It was a short conversation.

He’d had it with being treated like a criminal.  He wouldn’t sit still for this battle-ax busting his nuts every time he tried to have fun.  No self-respecting prankster demon was going to lay around in a pool of shit and stare at the wall all day.  Empty shell or not, he was not going to stick around to pity me.  From now on, self-pity would be my job, not his.  The universe was a big place, full of nooks and crannies to explore, and being locked in a closet was not his idea of a good time.  He shook my hand solemnly, and walked out of the house right through the bedroom wall.  I could hear his shrieks of delight as he flew off into the open sky.

A vibrating sensation in my forehead ground to a halt, and I hadn’t even noticed it was there until it was gone.

 

Dirk didn’t die, so one day we all went home to our own house in Trippabad and took up where we’d left off when he’d gotten sick.  With one exception:  I was now an empty shell.  My Mama and my Daddy and my sisters kept giving me funny looks and asking me if I was all right.  Instead of running around the house causing trouble I would sit on the rug and pick my nose till I was drowning in blood.  Instead of running up to visitors to jump in their laps, I would hide under my bed when the doorbell rang.  Instead of constantly jabbering in infantese, I would mumble or say nothing at all.

After a year-and-a-half of this, it seemed apparent to my family that I was not learning the English language.  Actually I was learning the words, but was tucking them away for future reference and was stuck at the level of a 22-month-old empty shell.

Then one day we drove to Grandma and Grandpa Zdaemon’s house, and while we were there, I looked up from my infantile drooling and saw something flash past the window.  I suddenly realized that my demon was out there watching me.  I felt a very small fluttering between my eyebrows, and a tiny little surge of energy.  I climbed up on my Mama’s lap and whispered in her ear.  Listen woman, I said, I am going to make you wish I was dead.

Then I climbed up on my Daddy’s lap, and said, Hey buddy, you don’t even have a name in my book.

After that they were no longer fooled.  They knew I had the vocabulary of a normal three year old.  They knew that I hadn’t gone retarded on them.  But it was many years before I would speak to any stranger.  And every Sunday when we went to Grandma Wrathburn’s house, I sat on the couch and stared at the floor.  If I saw her shoes enter the room, I would look away.  She tried to pry me open but I took no pity on her.  I would punish that witch with silence and there was nothing she could do to make me ever look at her again.  One day she picked up a little wooden mouse from her mantelpiece and held it up for me to see.  What cute little feets it has, she said.  What a knobby little nose.  What big floppy ears.  I looked at the mouse.  It was cute all right.  I especially liked the way it floated in the air all by itself.  Grandma Wrathburn had become completely invisible to me.