Scott Heim - Mysterious Skin

When I arrived home, the only face that greeted me was the one on the television screen. There, the slobbering teenage girl from The Exorcist experienced the height of demonic possession. Brian lazed on the floor watching her, barefoot, his back to me. Another kid sat next to him, hair spiking in precarious angles from his head. A silver necklace, thick as a bicycle chain, sparkled under the stranger’s haircut.

“You’re sitting too close,” I told them. “You’ll go blind.”

Brian rushed to the doorway to take my bags. “We didn’t expect you this early,” he said. I explained how Breeze, my ride from the airport, had risked my life by speeding the entire route to Little River. When I glanced at the sofa where our mother usually sat, Brian said, “She’s still at work.”

Brian’s friend introduced himself. “Eric.” His eyes, smeared with makeup, stared at my skirt’s tie-dyed pattern. He offered his hand, its middle finger bisected by a ring that showed a grinning skull, silver crossbones, and the letters R.I.P. “Happy holidays,” Eric said. “I feel I know you already.”

I’d heard about him too, via different telephone descriptions. From Brian, Eric was “a friend of someone I’m trying to get in contact with”; from my mother, he was both “Brian’s diversion from studying” and “a tad bit messed up, but well meaning.” I shook his clammy hand and sat beside him; on TV, the green demon snarled at the priest. “If I remember right, this is just starting to get good,” I said. “Worry about my bags later.”

We watched the movie’s remainder. There was something deranged and distinctly midwestern about a station that programmed The Exorcist three days prior to Christmas. I’d viewed the original at a horror movie festival in San Francisco, but this was the edited-for-television version. Scenes of violence and sex had been scissored into tameness. One line I distinctly recalled wincing at-the demon’s guttural “Your mother sucks cocks in hell”-had altered, and the replacement voice-over growled “Your mother wears socks that smell.” Maybe this change was for the better, considering what Brian had told me about Eric’s parents.

The demon’s face filled the screen, her cankered skin glowing. Brian grinned at me. “She looks like you did, that Halloween,” he said. “Remember? The year you were the witch.” Yes, I remembered.

Then Brian turned to Eric. “You know what I mean. That night. In the woods. The second time it happened.” Eric nodded, and their eyes revisited the TV.

At one point I moved to see my brother better. During the scene where the priest and a friend sneak into the possessed kid’s freezing bedroom, Brian upped the volume. The characters lifted the sleeping girl’s dress to shine a flashlight on her skin, which by now had bleached to an otherworldly bluish hue. Brian’s eyes stayed glued to this scene, entranced, as if they recognized something. The flashlight lingered as a pair of words blossomed on the blue flesh. HELP ME.

After the credits had rolled and the eerie tinkling piano soundtrack had faded, I climbed the stairs to my room. I began unpacking, layering clothes into my dresser drawers, mixing the smells of my California apartment with the indelible, almost spicy smell of home. A door slammed outside. Through the window’s glass I saw my mother, decked out in her officer’s uniform, rushing from her new Mustang into the house. Seconds later she stood in my room’s doorway.

“I’ve missed you,” I said. I hugged her, and we sat on the bed.

As usual when I returned home, my mother and I chatted about the same humdrum things. I answered her questions about the flight, the ride from the airport with Breeze. I assured her everything was fine with my apartment, my retail job, my night class on weaving and looming. She told me she was overdue for another raise at work; she had briefly worried about money when my father’s child support checks stopped coming and Brian had entered college, but all was still manageable. “And I see you’ve met Eric,” she said. “He’s like the new son around here these days.” I guessed by her tone she didn’t mind.

“Things got a little strange during the summer,” my mother continued. “But Brian’s calmed down now. Maybe that’s due to Eric, preposterous as that sounds.” My mother’s letters and phone conversations had enigmatically referred to these summer “problems,” but I’d never received a direct answer about what any of it meant. I remembered half-jokingly asking things like “Has Brian joined a religious cult?” and “Is he having a nervous breakdown?” only to receive the standard “No, honey, it’s nothing to worry over.” Even now, I could tell, she would promptly change the subject before I inquired. “As we speak,” she said, “Brian and Eric are downstairs, heating up dinner for us.”

They’d not only cooked dinner, but had draped the table with a checkerboard cloth and lit clove-scented candles. The setup overlooked the window’s wintery view of our empty field, the neighbor family’s barren peach orchard, and, beyond that, the stark grays and blacks of the Little River cemetery. I took my place at the table; Brian sat at my left elbow, and Eric, my right. The last time I could recall all four sides being occupied, my father had been here.

Brian ladled potato soup from a tin pot. Since I’d last seen him one Christmas previous, he’d cut his hair shorter, lost about ten pounds, and begun wearing things I attributed to Eric’s influence-a dark, bulky sweater, ripped denims, black Converse high-tops. These clothes didn’t make my brother “tough” or “punk” or whatever else he might have been striving for. They just lent Brian an even goofier look. And he’d developed an odd habit-he occasionally blinked forcefully, a random nervous tic, as if attempting to dislodge dust from his eyes.

The meal shifted from soup to main course. I’d swallowed five or six mouthfuls before I noticed my mother’s guns on the kitchen counter: three of them, as well as a leather holster and belt, a scattering of bullets, and handcuffs that shone in the kitchen light. One month earlier, my mother had called San Francisco to describe a disastrous escape attempt from KSIR. Although she hadn’t been there for the mayhem, she was nevertheless disturbed by what had transpired. The inmates had held two co-workers hostage; prior to capture, their kingpin had buried a hammer’s claw end into one hostage’s skull. My mother had told me how she planned to buy extra weapons. I remembered trying to explain how bizarre that sounded-guns in Little River, a town of less than a thousand people, a town where the most criminal act to occur in the last two decades had been the theft of ten gallons of gas at the local Texaco, “That’s just all your San Francisco peace and love speaking,” she’d said. “If you could see what I’ve seen…”

My mother saw me staring at the guns. “Do those have to be out in the open?” I asked.

To appease me, she stashed the weapons in a cupboard and returned to the table. Her voice took on a mock seriousness. “The way I see it is this. Now, if anyone tries to hurt you or Brian, they’ll have to deal with me.”

When she said that, Brian whispered a question to Eric. “Then where was she ten years ago?” My mother didn’t hear, and I assumed I wasn’t supposed to either. His words elicited a discomfited shrug from Eric. I didn’t ask what he meant.

I woke during the night and thought of how, as a little girl, I would sometimes sneak across the hall to Brian’s room. I’d kneel beside his bed, still woozy within my own somnolence, and imagine myself a world-renowned sleep researcher or a girl with superhuman powers who could enter the mind of anyone she wanted. I’d whisper words into the shell of his ear, words I honestly believed would reshape Brian’s dream scenarios to make him happy.