Boys in Gilded Cages Read online

  Boys in Gilded Cages

  Boys in Gilded Cages

  Midpoint

  DISCURSIVE

  MEDIA

  PUBLISHED BY ARCANA PRESS, A subsidiary of Discursive Media

  Portions of this book previously appeared in a slightly different form in Inhertiance: And Other Stories, published by Outskirts Press.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Jericho Elijah Phire

  Copyright © 2014 Jarod Powell. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America November 2014 eBook edition

  Other Books by Jarod Powell

  Inheritance and Other Stories

  Poor Man’s Imaginary Friend

  For Jericho

  MEET ERIC REDMOND. HE LIKES THE NIGHT TIME.

  In the dumbness of night, I have visions you would refuse to understand.

  In the night, most normal people choose to stifle the process of inward contemplation with sleep.

  It is possible for inward contemplation to transform into theater, if you’re willing to stay awake to see it, and if you’re willing to work for it. Dummies come out at night.

  Sleep feels good. It allows you to turn to plastic for a few hours. The compartments of your brain meld together. Then the REM’s wet your eyes, all the way to the core. The natural lumps of the body are hidden, sealed, sterilized, dolly smooth. Nothing leaves or enters your mouth or genitals, or at least you’re unaware of nocturnal emissions or drool or if you piss the sheets. But nothing can enter -- the sheets build an illusion that tells you this.

  In reality, anyone can enter your room and do whatever they wish with your body. The sheets themselves seem almost like pagan superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder. As thrown salt creates nothing but a fine mess, bed sheets serve nothing outside the guise of keeping you warm.

  Have you ever woken in the middle of the night and gazed at your sleeping partner, buried in lush sheets? They’re covered in stagnant sweat. They aren’t really plastic, and they aren’t really dead. But the false security of a body shielded by fabric, is powerful enough to stop time for eight hours a night. Ludicrous.

  And my bed is bare. I’m not kidding; there is nothing on it. My bed sheets lay folded neatly in my closet with a ratty hunk of a comforter on top.

  It’s held neatly together by a carton of cigarettes on one side and the Buddha statue I inherited from my dead cousin on the other—an ideal set of bookends, should I ever decide to buy any books.

  My bed is bare because I do not enjoy sleep. In fact I despise and resist it. Those kids that go around bragging about never sleeping: “Dude, I haven’t slept in like such-and-such days!”--It’s as if they are saying, Hey, I am tough. I study hard, I party hard, I fuck hard; I am hard. It’s projection, an artificial identity meant to add callousness to the sensitive child’s skin, without doing any of the labor it takes.

  I only sleep when my body requires me to. When my heart rate responds wildly to nothing and my eyes start to cross, I know it is time. I have failed to heed those signs before, and I started talking to my brother, who is of course dead, and to friends from school like Daryl, who is only a vision and not physically present in my room. I know a hallucination when I see one, but only in hindsight. At the time, these friends and lovers are real.

  In general, I am not so far gone that I do not recognize when visions are mere visions, but it is a special kind of buzz to blur the line between hallucination and regular REM cycles.

  I would not be honest with you to say that in this daily war against sleep, I am never relieved to surrender. To give in to sleep at the crucial last minute before brain damage, makes me feel as if I have earned it. A willful insomniac hardly cares about brain damage or the future, only principle, and my principle is that sleep is a waste of our precious time on Earth. Staying awake does not indicate a self-absorbed attitude. In fact, it is a virtuous act.

  As the Sun goes down I prepare myself with whatever goodies I bought from Daryl McAdams, my friend and supplier and other brother.

  Smoking it is a sort of preparation for battle, and it feels like hard training. The act can be laborious.

  It has a dead body stench and it burns like fire going down. The stench and pain are striking and it excites me to think about. I turn on my ceiling fan and open my window. I put my box fan in there and stuff the surrounding space with my pillows.

  Though nothing can mask the smell of it completely, I sit in front of the window fan and blow the smoke into a paper towel roll with a filter of fabric softener sheets. I later blame the smell on gas when my mother asks.

  She knows. All she has to do is ask.

  The drug takes a minute or two to take over. Sometimes less.

  It is a crude rush of euphoria. There is nothing clean about it. My brain clunks around in my head and I must remember not to scratch because there is nothing actually on my skin. I usually do a pretty good job of it because a good complexion is important to hiding something that, in a town of meth heads, is so easily brought into the light.

  Daryl says that when I am geared up, I am a soothsayer, as if I belong around a campfire telling the stories I like to tell about people we know. He’s joking though. I tend to believe it.

  I bought Tarot cards a long time ago. I don’t know if they work, but I know I don’t need them. I tell your future, because even a dummy knows that there is no such thing as a happy ending.

  My visions aren’t anything special. They’re nothing you couldn’t conjure if you tried. But you dummies need people like me—weirdoes, druggies, lost causes, to prophesize things that are clearly in front of you. That’s what religion is all about. But this is free of charge. Just listen.

  I know that by the end of the year, the trees will be naked and houses will be crushed. Wal-Mart parking lots will be empty for the first and last time. There will be a lot of dead teenagers. In the next few years, Missouri will be a less lame version of The Hunger Games. I know this. The town’s people can’t say I didn’t warn them. They laugh at me and they doubt me, and forgive me but they deserve to die for being so stupid.

  This town is a scale model of the earth. There are people that control. There are people who do what they are told. There are people who are slowly poisoned, and their brains drained so much, that if they knew they wouldn’t care. There are mouthpieces that follow the program closer than anybody else, and then there is me, the town’s resident troubled youth meth monster, who is made crazy by being awake.

  Avoiding romantic fantasy, I sculpt worlds that do not end well. Without exception, the empires I build and the people that inhabit them perish, no more spectacularly than in real life. When the endings to my stories illicit laughs, it is because the familiarity of them make the audience uncomfortable and the ending kills them off. Laughing is a comfort, the same way that success is said to be the best revenge. Take away a person’s success, and suicide becomes the only option for a great many people.

  I write down everything. I hand-write what feels right, and I type what is important. Written record is a powerful, extremely versatile tool. I once slipped one of my stories into a girl’s locker. She had a hot body, but an ass face. She was enough.

  I was in shallow lust with her, nothing more, and she seemed to have deep contempt for me. Anger will make horniness harsher, and it got to the point that I decided, evidence be damned, that I would fuck this girl, she would want to be fucked, and that this was the only way to start the process.

  In the story, her eating disorder (which was in the for
m of a teenage witch named Paraclyn who cast a spell on her), caused her to lose her beauty—her hair, her teeth, her skin—deteriorated beyond repair. In her new, ugly incarnation, she was forced to confront the boy who had been pursuing her for so long. It would be up to him whether she gained back her old life, or would spend the rest of her days as a concubine for the boy.

  It did not take long for the story to be traced back to me, as my status as a weird kid left few other culprits to consider. The school security guard escorted this girl for the rest of the day until I promised to see the counselor when I got back from suspension.

  From that point on, the stories became literal and private. I keep them in my Tweak Book and they’ll be put in a time capsule when I turn eighteen. I’m not joking.

  The two parts of the book that really count are the words and the worlds behind the words. While the Mayan calendar mapped the world to its end, the Eric calendar maps the town to its end. Unlike the Mayan calendar, The Eric Calendar will not fail.

  Hawthorn, Missouri is on the New Madrid Fault Line, has a climate prone to tornadoes, and enough meth labs to equal a nuclear blast should half of them explode at once. So it’s really not a matter of predicting when it ends, it’s telling the story of how it could end. Doesn’t take a soothsayer to figure out that Hawthorn is on the brink of destruction, but it takes a total retard to overlook it. I’m pretty much the only one in town who sees it.

  So, duh, the death of Hawthorn is going to come and I won’t be sad but I did warn everyone, so fuck them for thinking I was crazy. May their blood run backwards until they are eliminated.

  I will do my best to describe what I mean to describe, but not everyone will get me.

  If you are a happy person, don’t read any further than this.

  If you can’t differentiate between heroes and villains, don’t read any further than this.

  If you’re dumb, none of this will make sense to you.

  But these are all people you know. So it’s up to you. Are you ready for the truth?

  I.

  THE ENCHANTING MARCIA CRUZ

  She used to sleep while awake, and passionately fantasized while she slept, dreaming of a boy. This boy didn’t exist and probably still doesn’t, but allow me to explain him.

  He came to her only when she needed him. When she cried over the diet her mother forced on her, the boy came through sheer blinds and mood lighting as if from nowhere, to touch her cheek and tell her that, no, she wasn’t fat, the Coños in the neighborhood, did she know what those chasmas did to stay skinny? They choke themselves and that diet is for satas with no gag reflex and even less discipline. Marcia’s body was beautiful. He understood. He understood everything.

  He’d kick the faggots’ asses, they were always in the hallway talking nasty trash: Hey Marcia, put your enchilada on this right here! El Gordo! He’d tear their heads off. He’d embarrass the crunchy slags that snicker about her like she don’t know what they’re doing, and he could shut her mother up about her weight, with just a piercing glare.

  And he was not only superstrong and superbrilliant, he was supernatural. Strands of his DNA, if you could picture such a thing, were gold-plated. If you were to look at his cells under a microscope, they’d be sparkly little blobs. He was not a mortal completely but some kind of kin of the Archangel, but instead of visiting death, he’d heal people of their ugliness, of their illness; everyone was beautiful in his presence.

  And, yes, if someone needed to die, they would die because some people are not capable of love or of optimism or to stand up for themselves in their lives and would prefer death, and also would benefit from it. This boy could do anything to anyone and it would be the correct decision because he has God’s blood running through his veins. And being related to God in this way, he could read what’s on your mind and tell how far down your rot goes. Some people are rotten all the way down to the core and this recognition would not go unnoticed, and does not by her, but in his slice of infinite wisdom, this would not embitter her dream boy.

  His tongue would be strong as shoe leather, but sweet like bubblegum because he only chewed the flavor she liked and brushed his teeth regularly. Skin paper-white, so when he was on top of her, she’d look like the roast beef, he the Wonderbread. His body didn’t have any particular shape or tone, maybe because she don’t care about that, but his brain was perfection.

  It was all she thought about, night after night, and then she found him.

  But first she found a morose tub of rat shit by the name of Christopher Schwan (not Chris, he hated that). All that stuff I said about her dream boy – he was none of that. Fat and sweaty, zitted and pock marked with crooked teeth, and the dullest patch of Norwegian tree moss she ever met. What he was, however, was there.

  He was the paperboy for Marcia’s little area for about two weeks. He’d ride by her house and try to escape as quickly as he could when he saw her. When he threw the paper through the early morning darkness one morning, she yelled. “Ow, you asshole! You hit me with the fucking paper you fairy!” He had no choice but to brake his rusty Celebrity. He walked over carefully as she cried out in phony agony, holding her face.

  “Are you okay?” He asked at arms-length.

  “Do I look like I’m okay, or do I look like I’m in a whole lot of fucking pain right now?”

  “Kinda like the second one.”

  “No duh.”

  She’ll tell you, she don’t know why she did that. Sometimes you get so bored you can’t sleep, and fate brings you to your front porch at five A.M. to smoke a cigarette you stole out of your mom’s secret “stress pile” and, in that insurmountable boredom, you want to torture an ugly paperboy because he’s right in front of your face and impulses happen. Home school can really dement a young girl’s mind. He was nice to her and she was horny so she gave it up to him. Or at least, she tried to. He was fragile and scared of her pussy and that made her feel powerful. In the back seat of Christopher Swan’s Celebrity, she said to him in a goofy tone of voice, “Touch it, it’s magic.” He touched it and started to cry. She rolled her eyes and pushed his index finger into the proper hole but that only made it worse.

  “Why the fuck are you crying?” Was all she could say.

  “I don’t know,” he sobbed.

  “Well, stop it!”

  “I can’t! I have to go home.”

  She threw his right hand back to him, and started to clobber him – slapping, scratching. “You stupid fuck! I knew you were gay! You dumb gringo! Fuck you!”

  He kicked her out of the car and sped off.

  Usually Marcia Cruz is shy around boys and the fact that Christopher was actually scared of her, first personally, then sexually, turned her into a beast.

  She could see his point, though. She did force his hand down there, practically forced him to be there as a time-killer for her. They didn’t like each other, or know each other, really, but neither of them seemed to have any other friends.

  After their encounter, she walked home and crawled into bed. Finishing the job was unnecessary. The satisfaction was short-lived, though. She woke up to two very angry parents and a trip to a session with the priest. According to her parents – two old people she secretly despised, she began acting out. They converted to a more ‘cause-and-effect’ based denomination.

  Catholic rituals were useless to a rebellious pre-teen, and confession booths a joke. And now here they are, members of the creepiest little church in the rainiest little town, where all the people that smoke methamphetamine and burn cats alive for fun on Sunday afternoons, go to church on Sunday mornings.

  The building that housed the congregation of Hawthorn Baptist Church was about to cave in. The giant cross, meant to tower and intimidate people into coming inside, leaned to the right and the mood lamps inside of it were either dim or burnt out. If the Bates Motel were a church, it would look a lot like this one.

  Church for Marcia was just as bad as high school. She still had that feeling of dread w
alking down the aisle searching for a place to sit, as she did walking down the center of the school cafeteria. The only brown bitch in the room and no one wanted to be near that. Least of all, the white, big-tittied virgin whores she despised but envied, you know how that goes.

  She finds a seat one row in front of Vanessa and Janessa, who are not related but have obnoxiously similar names. As she plops down on the wooden pew, making a cracking sound, Janessa makes a raspberry with her tongue and Vanessa whispers with a hard tongue, “bean fart”. The girls giggle and Janessa says, “lay off the breakfast burritos, Mar-see-ya.” She envisions the day she can turn around and choke those two skanks in front of everyone.

  That day will come, she decided, but she may as well let it build. When she gets a hold of those bitches’ lily necks, she will kill them. Trust this. Marcia Cruz has rage and she will make it count for something.