Fear itself

6

Lying on his back, glued to the bottom of the tub from the back of his shaved scalp to the skin of his ass and testicles, with his arms and legs splayed out and glued to the sides of the tub, even the slightest shift of position is excruciatingly painful for Nelson. He can’t move, he can’t sleep, and worst of all, if there is a worst, with his lips sealed, he can’t even scream.

And unlike Wayne Summers, Nelson Carpenter has no imaginary cello to play, no Bach suites committed to memory. For most of his life he has focused his attention and his energies so intently on his phobias that he has no other real interests, no driving passions, no inner resources to draw upon in order to distract himself from this waking nightmare. His only respites come during the spells of panic-and-sleep-deprivation-induced psychosis that overtake him for ever-lengthening periods of time, at ever-shortening intervals.

Small wonder, then, that by late morning Nelson is spending most of his time in a long hallucinatory doze, reliving the death of Simon’s grandfather over and over again. It doesn’t get any easier, either, starting with the shame of being caught in flagrante when the old man walks in on the boys during a meeting of the Horror Club.

Meeting-that’s what they still call it, anyway, though by this point in their adolescent development an observer would be hard put to distinguish the game they play at every session from a good old-fashioned homosexual tryst. Nelson, in fact, would be just as happy to skip the horror phase entirely, but Simon seems, not just to enjoy it, but to need it: no horror, no sex, Nelson has learned, and wearing as it is on his psyche, he is willing to put up with the former for the sake of the latter.

So here he is in Simon’s room late one Friday afternoon in December of 1963, a few weeks after his thirteenth birthday. It’s dusk, the curtains are drawn, the room is dark except for the conical beam of Simon’s eight-millimeter Bell and Howell projector and the flickering black-and-white images of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari unspooling against the back of Simon’s bedroom door, and the only sounds are the crepitating whirr of the projector and the muffled, rhythmic grunting of the boys humping on the floor so the squeaking bedsprings don’t give them away.

And that’s how the old man finds them. Once again, lying glued to his bathtub, Nelson hears the film clicking through the Bell and Howell, smells the characteristic projector odor of hot bulb, warm celluloid, and burnt dust, sees Grandfather Childs standing in the shockingly open doorway with an appalled expression as the images from the film flicker, wavy and distorted, against his white shirt front, his ashen face, his glabrous scalp.

The worst beating of Simon’s life begins then and there, as Nelson scrambles for his clothes and dashes out of the house half-naked, past an openmouthed Missy and a frowning Ganny Wilson. Not that old man Childs would dare lay a finger on him-his father’s a lawyer and none too fond of his neighbor. Nelson is barred from the premises forever, though, and Simon is forbidden to contact him-also forever.

Forever lasts two days, which is how long it takes for Simon to recover enough from the beating to be able to leave his bedroom. They meet in Nelson’s old tree house; Simon shows him his bruises and makes him swear an oath of revenge. It’s all very dramatic, but a little hard for Nelson to take seriously.

Not Simon, though: Simon is deadly serious-and he has a plan. Everybody has a weakness, he tells Nelson, a crack in their armor; everybody’s afraid of something. In the old man’s case, it’s fire: Grandfather Childs is deathly afraid of fire. They’ll have to be very, very patient, though, Simon informs him-they’ll have to wait two whole weeks, until Missy goes home with Ganny for her pre-Christmas sleepover.

Lying in the bathtub thirty-six years later, Nelson relives it one last time. He’s in his own bedroom, waiting for Simon’s call. He’s trying to study, but his eyes skim the print of his American history textbook uncomprehendingly. The phone rings; he snatches it up before his parents can answer. “Hurry up,” says Simon-that’s all, just the two words and the click of the receiver in Nelson’s ear.

The onset of Nelson’s acrophobia is still a few years off; he has no trouble climbing out his bedroom window, cutting through the backyard and across the patio to Simon, waiting at the back door.

“He’s in the shower,” Simon whispers urgently. Everything’s ready-they’ve dry-run it a dozen times in the last two weeks, when the house was empty. As they race through the kitchen, Simon grabs the box of safety matches from the drawer next to the stove; Nelson grabs the big turkey-roaster pan from the cabinet under the counter and the newspaper from the kitchen table, and races up the wide stairs after Simon, who’s already emerging from his room carrying his straight-backed metal desk chair. They hurry down the hall and through the open door of the master suite. The moment is electric; even Nelson is more excited than afraid as he helps Simon jam the chair under the knob of the bathroom door; on the other side of the door he can hear the shower running.

“Care to do the honors?” Simon whispers. Nelson shakes his head. Simon gives him a suit-yourself shrug and takes the newspaper from him, rolls it into a cone, lights it, and as it begins to catch, carries it over to the wall socket where Grandfather Childs’s prize Tiffany lamp is plugged in. After unplugging the lamp, scorching the plug, the wallpaper under the socket, and the socket itself, Simon retraces his steps, scorching the carpet until he reaches the bathroom door again. He holds the torch to the crack under the door until the fire threatens to burn his hand, then, with a conjuror’s flourish, drops the flaming Chronicle into the roasting pan.

And as the sound of the running water stops abruptly and the room begins to fill with smoke, Simon backs away to join Nelson over by the doorway. Together they watch, wide-eyed with excitement as the doorknob begins to turn as if by magic, then rattles frantically. A moment later-bam! — the door shudders, the chair wobbles. Bam, bam, bam again; Nelson pictures the old man throwing himself against it. A shiver of fear runs through him, but the door holds, the chair holds. Nelson can hear the old man screaming now: eeee, eeee, eeee-a high-pitched, keening sort of sound.

“Listen,” giggles Simon, putting his arm around Nelson’s waist, giving his love handle a little squeeze; “listen, he’s squealing like an old woman.”

“An old woman,” Nelson agrees. “C’mon, let’s-”

But before they can carry out the rest of the plan (ditch the ashes, put the matches, the baking pan, and the chair back where they belong, then take a powder before the old fart figures out the bathroom door is no longer mysteriously jammed; old fart, old lamp, old wiring, electric fire-hey, it happens, you know?), the door stops shuddering, the sound of the old-womanly keening dies away, and they hear a heavy, meaty thump, followed by a breathy, gasping gurgling, followed in turn by…

By nothing. By the soft crackling of the newspaper in the roasting pan. But from inside the bathroom, not another sound, until they are standing together in the bathroom doorway a few minutes later, looking down at a bald old man lying in a pool of blood, his throat cut from ear to ear, and a straight razor clutched in his lifeless hand, at which point Simon turns to Nelson, and in a voice filled more with awe than with fear, guilt, or rancor, says, “Sometimes you get lucky, Nellie-sometimes you just get lucky.” And sometimes you don’t. Something drags Nelson out of his hypnotic doze. Pain-it’s pain: his right leg, glued slightly higher to the side of the tub than the left, is beginning to work itself loose. He is encouraged briefly-then the pain begins to build. It’s a whole new order of misery, exfoliation by gravity, the fine hairs on the side of his calf being ripped out in agonizing slow-mo. He tenses the leg, holds it up against the pull of gravity for as long as he can, breathing shallowly through his nostrils. Eventually, though, the muscles tire, the leg sags, the torture begins again. Tears swim in his eyes, blurring the midnight blue wall tiles, but even the release of a good cry is denied to Nelson-if his nose stops up, he will surely suffocate.

Finally he can bear it no longer. Summoning all his courage, and the strength of despair, with one convulsive effort Nelson manages to yank the leg free of the porcelain, leaving a patch of hairy, bloody skin the approximate size and shape of a Dr. Scholl’s insert adhering to the inside of the tub. But the pain, at its flood stage, is worse than he could have imagined, and even after it begins to ebb, he knows he will never be able to summon either the courage or the strength to face it again.

And with the departure of that last, forlorn hope-that he might somehow be able to free himself, a limb at a time-comes a sudden clarity. But even though Nelson knows what comes next, the life force is still surprisingly strong within him-if it hadn’t been, he’d have ended his own life years ago, ended it a hundred times over. So as he uses his free heel to kick down the lever that closes the drain, then to nudge open first the right-hand tap, then the left, he tells himself he’s only running a bath. For the warmth. And maybe the water will melt the glue before…

The running water is the first sound Nelson has heard since Simon left, except, of course, for the high-pitched squeal of his own stifled screams. He closes his eyes. The water rises, rises; it covers his ears, muffling its own roar. It sounds like a distant cataract now, and Nelson is floating downstream toward it. It’s all very peaceful, in a hallucinatory sort of way, until the first trickle of water tickles his upper lip. He tries to raise his head, is almost surprised to find it held fast.

Not like this, he thinks. Death, yes: being dead meant you didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Funny that hadn’t occurred to him before. And drowning, sure: there was supposed to be some kind of reflex that kicked in after your lungs filled with water, that made it a much more peaceful way to go than most people thought. But not slowly, not like this, not a trickle at a time. Then the trickle becomes a steady flow, and the flow a warm, choking flood; Nelson flails wildly with his free foot, trying to find the taps again, trying to find the drain lever as the warm water begins to close over his head.