I should shove these pages back in the desk, or rip them to shreds, or burn them, but I might leave them as they are. I’ve already written this, then rewritten this, doused the paper in water and flung it to the wall, torn each page into confetti with the delicacy of a flensing knife on skin. My last will and testimony. Even though I don’t have anything to give. This room is filled with jars of calcified urine, empty gin bottles, broken computer parts, blood blister smears of black mold on the walls. Mold, or egg sacs. Hard to tell.
How long ago was it? Decades, now. I was a child, small, towheaded like corn tassels. Walking through a corn maze in the dark, knee high by the Fourth of July. Much taller now, too tall, too fast. Soon it will be harvest time. Stalking the rows, left, right, right, left, right again, hopelessly lost, greensleeve shibboleths on all sides. They’ll be able to tell I’m not one of their own, as the sibilants spill out of the side of my mouth. Spiel out the schide. No password to get by this devil’s night. Lost, lost in the tangle, at the witching hour. I would soon become a starved scarecrow husk, skin rent and draped over a tau cross as a ghoulish admonition. Not even fit for a sky burial. Urine leaked down my leg, the scent mingling with charred cedar and crow spit. Frozen in space and time, victim of a medusine stare. Moses miscarried amongst the reeds, firstborn blood. I started hearing it then, faintly, extremely faintly, as if it came from inside my skull. A sound like rubber bands snapping empty air, thk thk thk thk coming from nowhere in particular, implacable, as much inside as outside. Something above smearing across the cosmos like dripping pitch, swallowing a star, then a cluster, then a constellation, charting a diagonal path, blotting out the harvest moon. Black mass above. I followed its sluggish path across the sky and ended up back at the entrance of the maze.
This was in 1993, which is only of note due to the fact that what I saw in the sky may have been one that showed up in Mogadishu earlier that October, one that may have slurped up all those soldiers. The “black hawk down” fracas, with the downed helicopters. Back then I was a sniveling child, useless. Afraid of everything and anything, prone to hysterics, prone to exaggeration, confabulation, histrionics. Wolfcrier. I needed a good thrashing, no one should be behaving like that, child or not. Especially a child. Makes you grow wrong, makes you infirm. Weak-willed and feeble minded. I should have lain down and died like a dog out there, it would have been deserved. A just end. But somehow, I lived on, though I had no constitution for it. I survived because I was helped from above, even though now with hindsight, it’s clear that I was a target. To what end, I couldn’t say. Shoulder devil? Shoulder angel? I call them terrorhawks, because it feels more comforting to view them as some sort of hellacious bird, or one of those dragonfly species from prehistory. It’s easy to mistake them for helicopters; they look very similar, and have a sinister tendency to travel with military fleets, but they’re different. They’re smooth like sealskin, no wrinkles, no visible blemishes. The blades up top are actually some sort of appendage, it’s unclear if this aids in lift or thrust, I don’t know exactly how they stay in the air. I used to imagine them with a row of orcateeth, but it's more likely they use a proboscis. I don’t know how they make that sound, the one that helps them blend in, the dull thump like a car engine failing to turn over, like a cartoon mallet.
I didn’t see one for a long time after the first encounter, but I held onto the memory, rotating it in my mind like an obsidian pyramid. The next time I saw one, I was a teenager. It was Halloween. I was forbidden from going out, from leaving my driveway candy duty, but I didn’t care. I left the lawn chair in a hurry as soon as my mom went inside, turned the corner, out on a mission to find the closest party, to sneak in, grab some beer or smokes. Maybe ruin some people’s lawn decorations, smash some pumpkins, break a window, if I felt up to it. I kept wandering for half an hour, when I noticed the police helicopters hovering nearby. This wasn’t unusual, especially for a holiday. Ghetto birds probably trailing some drunk driver. I paid it no mind, until two became four became six, and my interest was piqued. They started using the loudhailer, shining the spotlights. Maybe a standoff, a guy with a gun, holding his family hostage? I started walking back to check it out, and as I approached, things congealed into hideous clarity. My house, above my house. My name, they’re calling my name. In front of god and everyone, my name, my house. My breaths became ragged, shortened, my pace quickened as I started running. God and everyone. My house? What are they doing there? My name? Everyone? I turned the corner, and my street was barricaded. God. Seven cop cars, parked outside my house, in front of god and everyone. My mother crumpled in a heap, wailing and carrying on in front of everyone. Rubberneckers everywhere, glaring at me as I bounded up to the front door. Screaming, she couldn’t even form words, just howls, howling. Go back inside your houses, you people are animals. Less than animals. Piles of protoplasm. A whole line of cops trying to talk to me. “We heard you were telling people on the bus you were going to run away, are you going to run away from home? Are you running away? We can take you into town, take you downtown, show you what hell looks like, it ain’t pretty down there.”
I wasn’t running away from home, which I told them, like I told everyone on the bus, and nobody seemed to believe it.. I told them I was going out that night anyway, no matter what anyone told me. I told her that too, over and over. I told my mom I was going to leave anyway. I told her I was going out on Halloween. She taunted me. Dared me to. I told her I would, and then I did. Then she called the police, put on this whole pathetic, fawning act, “I can’t believe you would do this, I never thought you could do something like this, how could you do that,” all for attention, for pity, sympathy, for show. She’s lying, this is a performance. She’s always done this, and people lap it right up. The police were eating it up, the crowd of gawkers were eating it up, I was the only one looking up, the only one paying attention, the only one who was aware. Straight up, as they were all lambasting me. Hovering a few yards away from the helicopter right above me, like a withered shadow. Bobbing up and down, back fin wriggling, like it was ready to dive in. Frothing and ravenous. Something smelled like a bad tooth, or the smell you get when you pinch your nose too hard. Ammoniac, metallic, decayed. I went slack and lost my bearings, slipped onto the sidewalk, scraped my elbow. Blood on the ground, blood in the water. Inside. Need to go inside. Need to go, need to leave now, now. NOW need to go in. I ran past everyone and locked them outside.
When my mom called it in, they sent out an Amber Alert. That was her crime. She called it in without even thinking twice about it, called the police and said “my child is missing, please help me, please please officer, please help me, I don’t know what happened, I don’t know-.” She didn’t know, she couldn’t have known. How dangerous, how reckless that was, how stupid. How it would last forever. She wouldn’t know that the alerts are their dinner bells. It’s a signal they send out when they find prey, someone young and vulnerable, someone who wouldn’t be missed. How many of those missing children make it back, after the alert goes out? She’s lucky I made it back at all, that I wasn’t plucked like an ingrown hair from the sidewalk, carried up into some nest atop a cell tower, dropped into the gurgling maw of a fledgling, swallowed whole, sliding down the esophagus, eaten alive. My precious baby, my sweet angel. My angel baby, dissolved into a sludge, bones and all. Bones and all. My baby. Where did my baby go? Where did they all go? I don’t want to remember things like this. I don’t want thoughts or feelings like this. I don’t want to hold it against her. I don’t want to think ill of her. It only goes poorly when I do that. This is her fault, at the end of the day, but there’s no use keeping score. I'm afraid if I get too mad at her, if I focus that anger too much like a white-hot beam, something really bad might happen. I remember once I was so mad at her, I imagined her turning into a massive, headless snake. I saw her body crunch down, contort, saw scales spring up all over her body, so clearly, crystal clear. I stood up in class and screamed bloody murder, slamming my tiny fists against the side of my head. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. She rushed to pick me up from school, and as I watched her stop by the mailbox on the way home, I imagined her head popping clean off her neck, floating into the air like a balloon. The screams rose in volume and pitch. All of this is beside the point.
The point is, I couldn’t talk about this with anyone, because I clearly couldn’t be trusted. There was always an easier explanation, Occam’s razor slicing against my grain. “When you say there’s pictures in your head, are they pictures inside or pictures outside?” What does it matter? I know what you’re actually saying. Crazier than a shithouse rat. Headcase, fuckup, touched. That’s what everyone thinks, so that’s how I continued to act. Once I made the decision to act, I never stopped acting, no matter the consequences. If everyone thinks you’re damaged goods, what do you have to lose? Troubled people trouble people. I got in with the wrong crowd, other kids like me, fucked in the head, wired wrong. One hotwired a car and got sent to remedial school. A few went to juvie. I kept my nose the cleanest, so I was crowned the ringleader of our scruffy cabal. We would go to college parties and sell pills. We said it was ecstasy, but it’s hard knowing what was inside. Some may have been pure, but a lot weren’t. I don’t feel shameful. Guilty, maybe a little, but I don’t feel ashamed. What do I have to be ashamed of? I’m not a bad person. It was just way too easy, a premeditated crime of circumstance. We could waltz right in, ply the fools while they pried open their wallets. And these aren’t model citizens we are talking about here. These are the types of people you wouldn’t mind seeing purple in the face from choking on their own bile, or wrapped around a telephone pole. It’s of little consequence to me. Live or die, they had their fun. We’re both having fun at the other’s expense. The road to heaven is paved with bad intentions and caulked with ulterior motives.
One night, I drove my silver bullet alone down the backroads, avoiding the main arteries, spare wheel well stuffed with baggies. I needed to make it back to our base of operations, our den of insouciance. Not too fast, but not too slow, don’t want to draw attention, don’t want to seem out of place. Steady, steady hands, steady legs, steady mind, nothing to worry about, no trouble, no issue, nothing to fear, nothing at all, nothing. Green light ahead, green as the stone from Lucifer’s brow. Visio smaragdina. It’s okay. You’re fine. Green skies at night. One more left turn. Police helicopters out tonight. Par for the course, it’s fine. It’s fine. Keep driving. One’s flying in low, spotlights out, getting closer. Why? What did I do? How would they know? They wouldn’t know it was me, they wouldn’t know it was the same kid, the runaway, the missing person. They couldn’t know. Light flooding into my car interior, staying steady, even as I continued driving. How? The light feels green. Frozen in time and space. Don’t look don’t look don’t look. Not worth it, it isn’t worth it. One look, one look. Black shape right behind the chopper. Like it would drop a velveteen tongue right onto the back windshield at any moment. Lapping and lolling at the mirrors. Too, too close. Matte black, its sound muffled by the helicopter rotors, a mocking echo. Please leave me alone. Please, please stop. Thud thud thudding like a low witch’s cackle. Let me leave. The light feels black. Urine leaking down my pant leg, the scent mingling with gasoline and rotting leaves. This isn’t happening. What do you want? Is this revenge for escaping last time? Have I not been punished enough? Sucker dropping like a rope ladder, sliding into the rear window, sticking into the back of my neck. Any moment now. I still don’t know why, but after a while, they both took off into the night. Terrorhawk tethered to its host. It’s gone now, like it was never there. I pull off to the side of the road and scream so hard my ears start ringing.
That was only a couple years back, even though it feels like three lifetimes. My crew disbanded, after I started being more honest, more vulnerable. I decided to start talking about it, letting them know the signs, what to look out for, where to avoid, how to hide. I told them about the research I had been doing. They looked at me like I had two heads. Eventually, it ended up just me and one out to lunch tweaker we all hated. Had one bad week, stayed up too many nights, shot his basset hound in the head in broad daylight because he swore he saw it levitating. Neighbors showed up, and he pointed the gun at them. They pressed charges, and the cops took him away. Don’t know where he is now. Probably died in county. Can’t say I’m not envious. I want to have been dead for years, to be already forgotten, for everyone to have moved on. I stayed in our flophouse for a while, and got a bit deep into the drink. It wasn’t this bad before, it only became a problem after I started thinking about things more, started weighing options, being more perceptive, speculating. Have you ever heard of a tarantula hawk? They’re a type of wasp that lives out here. They have the most painful sting of any insect, excruciating, even for humans. They find a tarantula, sting it to incapacitate it, then lay an egg on its prone body. When the egg hatches, the larva chews inside the spider, then eats it alive from the inside out. It makes sure to avoid the vital organs, so the tarantula can live as long as possible. I realized I had been wrong about how they feed, how they procreate, how they grow. I started seeing black spots in my food, in my vomit, tiny black velvety threads sticking out of my skin. Black spots under the nailbeds that seem to grow larger every morning, blackheads popping up on my back. Have you ever coughed so hard you see black spots dancing in your vision? I think that’s their larvae. I think when you start seeing it in your vision, you might be too far gone.
So I left town, started driving north, up north, up where the desert ends and mountains begin. Sold all of my supply and rented a motel room with most of the money I had left. The room with the bottle shards, the torn curtains, with the spots that keep growing blacker. I’ve been here for the last six months. I drink, sunup, sundown. I may as well cause the vital organs to fail sooner rather than later. Maybe the pupae will slip into an ulcer, maybe they’ll tumble into a lesion in the brain like a sinkhole. I may be able to flush them out entirely if I keep this same pace. I don’t have any better ideas at this point. I would kill myself, but I don’t know what would come out of my body. I don’t want anyone else to be subjected to this; as much as I do hold hatred in my heart, for nearly everyone, I don’t wish this upon them. I don’t wish it upon anyone. I don’t have a way of contacting anyone. I broke my phone, and no one knows where to find me. I only leave the room to go to the corner store, only in the dead of night, and no one there asks any questions. None of the other occupants say a word. Everyone is here for a reason, one they’d rather not discuss. I don’t know if my mom is still looking for me. I don’t know if she’s even still alive. I hope she’s not, for her sake. I don’t know how long it took her to stop looking, if she is. My sweet baby. Where did my baby go?
-- Daphne Dhalgren is a writer and editor living in the American Southwest. One-half of Organ Bank, a small-press publisher of experimental comics and literature, anarchic pictures and words, violence, deviance, and the occult. Morgan Vogel Forever.
