Kiss Of Evil

66

An unknown room. Beyond dark. Black walls, ceiling, floor. A large round object in front of him, like a kettle or an old gas grill. He is surrounded by candles, but the light is instantly devoured by the gloom, immediately digested into the air, thick with death. Thumping music comes from somewhere.

He had traveled, definitely. He had been in a car. He looks at the object on his lap.

It is a gun. His gun.

The smell is coming from the huge bowl in front of him. He leans forward and, as he does, in the scant light, he sees the putrefacted flesh, the blackened organs, the shimmer of a thousand maggots, fat with marrow. He bolts to the corner of the room and, like the inevitability of vomit itself, gives in to the nausea and retches on the floor, near the corner. His vision vibrates with colors around the edges.

He wipes his mouth, tries to steady himself, a deep paranoia rummaging inside him. He hallucinates wildly, thoughts and sounds and emotions whirling. He finds the chair, pulls it back to the wall, sits heavily.

One minute of black silence passes, then:

“Son?”

Paris raises his head. He sees a chair on the other side of the big kettle. A figure is sitting on it. Sitting? No. More like floating just an inch or so off the surface, a weightless, matterless being.

It is Frank Paris.

“Dad?”

The figure on the chair shimmers, disappears, returns, like a pixilated image coming and going from clear focus. His father is robust and healthy again. His hands look huge and nicked and dad-grimy.

For some reason, the sight of his father, dead these many years, does not scare him. What scares him is his father’s scrutiny. After all this time his father can now assess him as a full-grown man, instantly, as he might a too-young doctor holding onto a clipboard that would chronicle the end of his life.

Jack Paris wonders: Am I tall enough? Am I smart enough? Am I man enough?

Am I father enough?

Frank Paris will say no to that one. No, son, you are not father enough. You couldn’t make your marriage work, and you will never be father enough to my granddaughter.

Shimmer.

His father is suddenly thinner, young-old again, his face is drawn downward in a sallow avalanche of skin. In his hands, a battered Etch-A-Sketch.

Happy Birthday, Daddy!

“Do a trick for me, Jackie,” his father says.

“What, Dad?”

Silence.

You’ve got to know what breaks his heart.

“Dad?”

Again, silence. The definition of empty.

His father is gone.

Then, suddenly, all the lights of hell explode in Jack Paris’s eyes.