there’s more than one kind of abuse.”
He had hugged her then, and she buried her face in his neck.
Now she wouldn’t hold him anymore. He could still hear her pacing over the tunnel. He slapped the wall of cool earth, hurting his hand. He needed to hold her. If there had been a post nearby, he’d have filled his arms with that.
She would make him forget stopping aides in St. Anthony’s halls, telling them he had damaged the plastic on his head and badly needed fixing. She would make him forget the dream he had a few days after his father’s phonecall. He is in a ward with dozens of patients, blank-faced babies and drooling old men, women in dirty yellow pajamas. A picture postcard from his parents: “Wish you were here.” Pointed and curled red cliffs on the postcard, yellow and purple spherical plants…
The last two boxes in the tunnel were unsealed. He recognized some of them as childhood possessions. Books, old books mildewed and rotted, the covers pulled off, pages falling into flakes, cloth going back to thread. The fetid remains of his old clothing, his cousin Louise’s toys, some of his own. There was just the head of a doll.
Morgan touched the doll’s hair, then noticed it moving and stared in fascination as the small nest of black insects shifted position on the pink plastic skull.
Looking closer he could tell it wasn’t Blue.
…There’s a baby in the corner of the hospital room. Playing quietly, now humming. Eyes the size of silver dollars, bulges in the forehead like two knobs. Its head appears to be unnaturally large…
Something scurried above him. Morgan jerked up his head, just in time to catch sight of a rodent disappearing into a rift in the stone-and-earth ceiling. He could still hear Alice’s pacing, seemingly closer now, and he suddenly wasn’t sure he could remember what she looked like; anxiety pricked the back of his neck.
He could see the pockmarks in the walls, the small craterlike holes in the floor, the ragged surface of the terrain—as if he were on the moon. He shouldn’t have been able to see so well in this part of the tunnel.
A low whimpering, more like mewling, erupted from the dark end of the tunnel, continued on a space, then died.
Then the night after graduation, the night his father staggered home drunk and started kicking Morgan, screaming at him, accusing him of a number of perverted acts, and Morgan didn’t, couldn’t fight back couldn’t say a word, the doll acted.
When Morgan went back to his darkened room, he discovered a pale light beneath his bed covers. Lifting up the sheet he found two glowing pieces of glass—Blue’s eyes. Then wetness on his leg. He reached frantically for the light switch.
Blue was lying by his foot, covered with blood. The plastic head was almost severed at the neck, and the doll was greatly bloated and yellowish. The enormous empty sockets seemed accusing as they gazed up at Morgan. He swore he could hear it whisper, if he could only strain hard enough.
That night he wrapped the doll in newspapers, walked down to the creek behind the house, and threw it in. It took a long time for the creek to carry it out of sight.
…The nurse bounces a ball, smashing it into the baby’s face. The baby screams. Why doesn’t she realize what she’s doing? She bounces it harder and harder; the baby screams and screams, its mouth stretching in agony, and still she strikes it, beats it, smashes the ball into the baby’s face…
Then Morgan could see the trail through the tunnel, a shallow furrow as if from something being dragged, with two small balled prints on either side.
There was a slight whispering sound, then several sharp cries. Rats scurried in the boxes behind him. Alice quickened her pace overhead.
…The baby bleeds from the nose, the baby’s arms too long, the baby with no legs, the baby hobbling away on its hands, dragging its narrow torso, whimpering. Morgan wants to scream, but is afraid of being punished…
Alice had changed since they’d come to Virginia. She was irritable most of the time; they argued more. She blamed him for her depression, saying she’d only come out here to please him. She preferred the dry air of Colorado to all this horrible humidity and rot. She complained of suffocation. Then the whispers, the cries, the whimpers began to take over the house, the voices he thought he had left behind here years ago.
As soon as they got into town they had driven up to his mother’s place. He didn’t really want to see her, but he felt he had to go there first. His father had died three years ago from a broken vein in his head.
“Did I ever tell you what it was like, havin’ you, son?”
“Oh, I always supposed it was just the usual way.”
He smiled conspiratorially at Alice.
“Not that usual, no sir!” She gestured expansively. “I had a fourteen-hour labor and the doctor was drunk. Family friend, and he was drunk, and scared as anything! Broke my pelvis bad, gettin’ you out, you being big, sixteen pound they said. Blood and all that over the floor, me, him, and the nurse. And no knock-out drops in those days, nothin’ to help me. He almost dropped you, gettin’ sick he was. Nurse grabbed you, and whooee, he was outta there! Lord, the way I was screaming and bleeding! And you was hollerin’ to beat the band. Why you shoulda seen the way he wrenched your head comin’ out, bruised it something awful; nurse got quiet as a mouse when she saw that, but I could feel him bump me with ya. I knowed he done it. Coulda been a retard, they all said. Coulda had the brains of a baby doll!”
Morgan closed his eyes. His head was hurting again. When he looked up Alice was staring at him, her lips tightly pressed and trembling. His mother died two weeks later.
…The patients take off their clothes, dance, wrestle in the middle of the floor. Pus glistens on their skin. They laugh, they scream. They open their mouths so widely their lips crack and split. The nurse plays the honky-tonk piano, her arms and legs thrashing. Her skirt rises over her hairy thighs. Looking closer, Morgan sees that she has a moustache…
* * * *
The trail led far into the tunnel. Morgan knew that the tunnel couldn’t go this deep into the hillside. He should have passed the seam of coal long ago. But the tunnel continued, at a slight downward angle, yard after yard. The light was slightly brighter here, and he saw the bones of tiny animals strewn along the path. A flat frog skeleton, like the frog he had seen devoured by a waterbug near home. First its snout pierced the side of the frog, then the frog slowly deflated like a punctured balloon, the insides dissolving, being sucked through the snout, leaving skin and a few bones.
The tunnel narrowed. He had to crouch. Rounding a slight bend, he heard a rustling. But when he made the complete turn he saw nothing.
He could hear water dripping. A few spider webs patterned the wall. He had forgotten his fear of the dark. He couldn’t hear the whimpering.
He never would cry.
…The patients rip at each others’ open wounds, some tearing at bed sores with broken teeth. Morgan runs into the hall. Pale faces leer at him from open doorways. He runs as fast as he can, but seems to make no progress down the hall. A passing nurse grabs him by the neck, forces his mouth open, and throws a pill between his teeth. He chews it vigorously…
He never would cry.
The night after his eighth birthday party, when
