Eric Puchner - Model Home

The woman recoiled, reaching back to shield her daughter’s face.

Jonas kept going, entering a more deserted stretch of parking lot. The baby had not stopped screaming since he’d shaken it. He was starting to wish it would hurry up and die. Breathless, he stopped at a lamppost and checked the bolted sign to see where he was: V10. He hadn’t even reached the end of the alphabet. Fatigue swamped his legs, weighing them to the asphalt. He tried to recall where he’d started from. Was it R or T? He couldn’t remember. The number, too, had vanished from his head. The lot stretched on forever, scattered with identical buses.

Jonas contemplated leaving the baby under someone’s car. He was only a kid; who would suspect him?

He sat down next to a filthy-looking pickup truck, the heat of the asphalt oozing through his jeans. The baby’s screams had gone strange and croaky. Jonas had a weird sensation. The sensa tion was that the baby in his hands was himself. He — Jonas — had been sent from the future to dispose of it. That way he could undo his brother’s accident. If the baby died, Jonas would vanish from the face of the earth. Different from dying: he would have never existed.

His family would want this to happen, if they only knew how.

Jonas settled back against the wheel of the truck, waiting for the baby to die. He closed his eyes. Beyond the dying gasps of the baby, he heard a distant sound like a roll of thunder. A roar of cheering voices. He imagined that the voices were greeting him. These were the unborn souls, the ones who’d somehow reversed themselves from existence. It wasn’t until the voices swelled into music that he realized the baby had stopped screaming. It was still and damp and silent. He waited for something to happen, now that the baby was dead, but nothing presented itself.

He opened his eyes. The baby was sleeping, its tiny back moving up and down. Its fingers, balled into a fist, were clutching Jonas’s shirt. The fist was no bigger than the head of a spoon. Jonas cupped a hand over the sleeping baby to shield it from the sun. It would grow up and have any life it wanted. He stood up gingerly. In the distance, gathered in front of a white tent, was a crowd of busy-looking people; Jonas headed in their direction, hoping to find the ambulance nearby.

As always, they were stuck in traffic. It was the one constant in their lives, Dustin thought — the only thing they could count on from week to week. He sat in the backseat of the Volvo with Lyle, listening to his father honk at the convertible in front of him. They were going to pick up Jonas from the police station. Some paramedics had found him at a Dead concert in Irvine, carrying a baby, and had handed him over to the cops. Dustin’s relief at the news had quickly reverted into guilt. He kept thinking about the time when Jonas was four or five, suffering from night terrors, and he’d come into Dustin’s room in the middle of the night, babbling about the Muzwald sitting at the foot of his bed. The Muzwald was a giant vulture with the head of an old lady and a long lizardlike tongue. It sat at the foot of Jonas’s bed all night and cleaned its eyeballs with its tongue. Dustin had gone into his room to kill it with a Swiss Army knife. Entering Jonas’s room, he could almost see it as well, licking its own eyes, a horrible hag that devoured children. For several weeks that winter it became a secret ritual: Dustin visiting Jonas’s room with his knife, killing the monster on his bed until it returned the next evening, summoned fiendishly back to life. Night after night he sent the invisible creature to its grave. Only gradually did he realize what was really going on, that Jonas seemed disappointed when Dustin slit its throat and returned to his own room.

Dustin hadn’t thought of the Muzwald for years until recently, plagued by similar visions himself. The truth was, he’d grown impatient after a month and insisted he’d killed the Muzwald for good. He’d ignored Jonas’s protests, tiptoeing past his room every night so he wouldn’t call out to him.

The car stank of BO and cigarettes. Dustin wondered how long it had been since any of them had showered. Like Lyle, he’d insisted on coming along with his parents. He’d called in sick at the video store. It was important to him, important in a way he couldn’t remember feeling in a long time.

“I forgot to fill Mr. Leonard’s bowl,” Dustin’s mother said, the first time anyone had spoken since they left the house. Her hair was silken with grease. Perhaps, as a form of punishment, they were all turning into Deadheads. “It’s almost his dinnertime.”

“He’s not eating anyway,” his dad said.

“Even if he’s got cancer, we still have to feed him.”

“Who says he has cancer?” Lyle said crossly.

His mother gazed out the window. “Hector. He told me last week he thinks he has lymphoma.”

The car hummed in the silence that followed Hector’s name. When Dustin had first told his parents the truth, that Hector had caused the fire that ruined his life, his father had gone out onto the back deck with one of Dustin’s beers and bent over in plain view, hanging his head between his legs as if to catch his breath. We’ll send him away, he’d said, returning with the unopened beer. He had not mentioned it since then, but there was something in his face now — a harshness as he tried to nudge into the right lane — that spoke to what he’d do if Hector was dumb enough to show his face.

“Where are you going?” Dustin’s mom asked. His father had pulled out of the traffic and was zooming down an exit ramp.

“I need to make a pit stop.”

They pulled into a gas station, his dad straddling two spaces as if he didn’t have time to park properly. Painted on the front window of the mini-mart were the words MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME. After a minute, Dustin followed his dad inside; he couldn’t bear to sit in the car while the three of them choked on their guilt. Heading for the coffee machine, he noticed his father standing in front of the microwave. His eyes were closed in a stoned-looking way. It was the dreamy tenderness of his smile, more than his standing there with his hand to his chest, that frightened Dustin.

“Dad, are you all right?”

His father looked at him for a second, as though he didn’t remember who he was. He was breathing quickly. “Heartburn,” he said.

“Do you want to sit down?”

He nodded. Dustin walked him over to a plastic chair pushed against the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. His father sat down in it. He had always seemed ageless to Dustin, unchangingly dadlike, but now he saw in the harsh light of the store that he was growing old. His eyebrows were getting thick and unruly, sticking up over the frame of his glasses. A freckle on his forehead had darkened, black as an age spot. Breathless, still smiling, his dad took off his glasses and tried to clean them with his T-shirt. One of the metal arms came off in his hand. His father stared at it in betrayal. Dustin went over to the register and found one of those miniature eyeglass repair kits, which he bought from the obese kid behind the register. He asked his dad for the glasses and then squatted beside him, trying with his good hand to poke one of the tiny screws into the end piece. It was like doing surgery on an ant. The little screwdriver kept slipping, sending everything to the floor. A radio behind the register piped out “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Dustin took off his sunglasses so he could see better, placing them on the microwave counter. Even using his good hand, pinching the tiny handle with three fingers, his eyes teared with pain. When he was done, he handed the eyeglasses to his father, who put them on without speaking.