Andrew Sullivan - Waste

The drill whirred twice before the battery died.

“Useless. Mastercraft ain’t worth shit. Gimme DeWalt any day.”

The two figures loomed over the body in the middle of the woods. Their shadows hid amongst the trees. Their beards were full of sweat and old smoke. One leaned down and slapped the body across the face.

“Connor, you dumb shit, open your eyes. Connor!”

Connor Condon always hated his name. He hated the concussive force of those two C’s crashing out of his mother’s mouth every time she was pissed, back when they’d lived in his grandmother’s apartment. The sound chased him from room to room, rattling the dusty shelves and weaving its way through porcelain bears to find him hiding under the pullout couch he shared with his mother.

“We need you to wake up, and don’t you dare puke again.”

It wasn’t until sixth grade that Connor’s name truly became a curse in the outside world. The new bus driver, Marlene, believed she had to take attendance. Her tongue seemed far too big for her mouth when she drawled out his name through pierced lips.

“Tommy, just slap his face to wake him up. One good slap.”

All Connor heard were titters of laughter from the backseats. The bus driver’s massive tongue had mangled his name somehow. Kids stopped sitting beside him. Connor Condom. The name followed him for years, hunted him down hallways and trapped him in bathroom stalls, kids breathing down his neck, asking if his father was a Durex or a Trojan.

“Probably would have been easier if he was wearing clothes.”

A Thursday. It was a Thursday in tenth grade when they pulled the plastic bag over his head on the bus. The driver was too busy navigating a left-hand turn to see Connor’s face slowly turning purple as the bag pulled tighter and tighter. Connor remembered now that there was a green Chevy stalled in the turning lane. Before he passed out and smashed his face against the window, he noticed there was a receipt for Kmart in the bottom of the bag.

“Did you bring extra batteries, Al?”

For the next week, they had Connor in the hospital, measuring his breathing and brain activity every hour. They drained fluid from his brain on the second night. Connor did not remember that week. Two weeks later, he emerged with a new learning disability, a severe lack of hand-eye coordination, and a constant migraine. He walked home from the hospital.

“This happened before, remember? They’re on my belt, if you’d take three seconds to look somewhere other than your own dick. Slap the kid again.”

Astor Crane never called him Condom. He didn’t offer him lube at the bus stop or ask him why all his relatives eventually ended up in the sewer. What he did offer was a smoke on the roof one night after he found Connor pitching pigeon nests at the super’s car five floors down. Hours later, in Crane’s apartment, Connor sat and watched Eddie Murphy on bootleg VHS, unable to stop talking about pigeons. Crane just nodded along as he chopped plants on the coffee table, asking questions and laughing in the appropriate places. Astor asked if he wanted a job.

That was five years and endless baggies ago.

And now Connor was here, somewhere in the woods with major head trauma and three broken ribs. They’d busted through the front door while he was in the bath, soaking his feet and playing the drum on his beer belly. Connor didn’t see any faces, only thick gray hair and long beards like ZZ Top. He’d puked on the way down the stairs, chunks of it sticking to his chest hair. A purple horseshoe from the Lucky Charms he’d had for dinner lodged inside his belly button, half digested. One of the men was carrying a drill. Connor could feel the hundreds of pine needles collected in his leg hair. Tiny cuts from the rocks and roots he’d been dragged across as they pulled him deeper into the trees.

Astor wasn’t here to help him now.

“Connor, we aren’t supposed to kill you outright — you know that, don’t you, you little hairy gash? Stay still, now.”

The two stood over Connor. Snow began to fall. One of the grey beards leaned down, his vest covered in dandruff and snow. Connor reached out to grab his hand.

“Tommy, you got the goddamn drill or what?”

Snowflakes fell into Connor’s eyes, but he’d lost the ability to blink. He felt them melt one by one down his face as the drill buzzed and buzzed, ploughing through the patella and deep into the meat behind his kneecaps. Little eruptions of purple and yellow spurted from his flesh. The sensation did not touch his brain like pain, just in scents that no longer made sense. The beards smelled like burnt meat, his own blood like apricots.

“We haven’t killed you, have we? That’s not allowed. Only our second non-screamer. That’s impressive, but don’t start thinking there is a light at the end of this bleak-ass tunnel.”

Connor could no longer see. Too much snow built up over his eyes.

“Here it is. You crawl out of here alive, consider all your debts repaid, all your capital returned to you, and all our apologies intact, signed, sealed, delivered. The man on high says you are in the clear. If you don’t…well, you take that up with whoever you want. I gotta piss.”

Connor heard them stumble off. He tried to close his eyes, but the muscles did not respond.

There was no moon. Connor lay there in the dirt and the pine needles, trying to connect each thought to the next. His jaw clicked as he tried to speak. Snow gathered in his hair and in his wounds, turning the flakes pink. Each breath was animated by the cold. Connor did not try to crawl. The holes in his knees filled with melting snow. The vomit on his chest was frozen tight against his skin. Somewhere in his brain, dead cats and grandmothers and rainbows collided. He lay dreaming with his eyes open, his mother pouring red wine into giant vats of diet cola, broken girls in veils dancing in circles around his body in the snow, the black night a backdrop for hallucinations that crackled like busted televisions.

He would be buried in snow. He would drown slowly as flakes melted on his lips, trickled down his stubborn tongue, and filled his lungs with fluid. Connor did not worry about these things. Sliding in and out of consciousness, he prayed the newspaper would not print his full name for the world to see. Nameless, faceless, half eaten by dogs, suffocated in a plastic bag until every brain cell began to fail, Connor Condon would take all these things, as long as no one misspelled his name in the obituaries, as long as his gravestone remained untouched, history slowly fading on locker doors, birth certificate eaten by mice, every trace of him erased.

“So they find this kid, right? What’s left, ’cause it’s probably been months. He’s frozen solid.”

Jamie Garrison was barely listening, but the little skinhead just kept talking. Moses Moon’s head was covered in angry ingrown hairs fighting to push through the skin. Two hours listening to the kid shoot bullshit while they hosed down the prep room and rolled the waste bins full of fat and trim outside. Donnie would be opening the butcher shop in the morning. He would find a mistake no matter what they did, and Jamie would blame Moses.

“Nothing tried to eat him?”

One of the streetlights in the parking lot was busted. Moses stood shivering in the cold, his toque barely covering his head, ears bright red. Frost beaded on his pants. Jamie tossed his keys from hand to hand, watching his breath rise up to the flickering light.