Pasha Malla - The Withdrawal Method

No no no, yelled Shayna, wriggling away. No!

Alex loosened his grip, and the second he did Shayna bucked and flipped him, pinning him there. Her fingernails dug sharply into his wrists. From the shadows in the back of the closet, Heather gasped.

What are you doing? said Alex.

This, you pervert, said Shayna, and she balled her fists and rained blows at Alex's face, his shoulders, his chest. No no no, she said. Stop, moaned Alex, turtling. Please, stop, please.

Shayna pulled away. Alex relaxed, thankful it was over, but then Shayna screamed, No! again and came down hard with a knee to his crotch. For a moment the closet blazed white, as though a flashbulb had gone off in the dark. Alex wilted. Then the door opened wider and Shayna was pushing through and gone.

I got away, she was telling the other girls, as a dull ache spread from Alex's groin to his stomach. There's a rapist in that alleyway! I think he killed Heather!

Heather crawled out from the back of the closet and climbed over Alex. She stood in the hallway looking unsure where to go.

Let's call the police! Alex heard someone cry, possibly Karen. There was a weird bristly fish in his guts and now it was swimming up his throat. Was he dying? He shut his eyes.

WHEN THE POLICE came Alex had to go to jail. Jail was his room upstairs. The girls collected in the hallway behind Ginny, the tallest, the only one who could reach the lock. In his sister's eyes was a resigned look as she stood there. Put the pervert away, said Shayna. Ginny paused. Sorry Dirk, she mouthed, and then closed the door. The deadbolt rattled into place and the girls' footsteps faded downstairs. No one besides his father had ever locked Alex in his room. Ginny was forbidden to do it. Even his mom had never done it before.

Alex sat on the bed. His balls ached very much. After a few minutes he pulled his Detroit Pistons wastebasket over and barfed a sour peanut-buttery paste into it. He covered the barf with handfuls of Kleenex, then sat back on the bed and stayed there very quietly for a very long time, trying to hear what was going on.

Maybe they were still playing the game, he thought. Maybe his part was to sit here and wait, maybe it wasn't over, maybe there would be a trial. But what was the game? Alex tried to find words for it. He couldn't.

There was no sound of the girls though — nothing from downstairs, just the faint faraway chatter of the TV in his mom's room down the hall. He imagined her in there lying on her bed and lay down then too, on top of his Star Wars sheets.

Staring up at the bars of sunlight that played through the blinds onto the ceiling, Alex thought about the moment when he had felt those bumps on Shayna's chest, how softly he had touched them. He hated her. She was mean, a bitch, and she had squared him and then he had puked. And what sort of sister was Ginny? He punched his pillow hard and then punched it again. His pillow was Shayna's face, it was Ginny's face. Alex hit it, he bit it, he screamed into it, he screamed and roared and screamed.

But then Alex pulled away, hot and itchy. He lay there on his bed until the light fanning through the blinds began to go coppery and slow. Soon his mom would head downstairs to start fixing supper. Soon his father would be home and finding Alex locked into his room. There would be hell to pay, and Alex would be the one to pay it. Soon the day would be over, and soon it would be night.

Alex got up and went to his window. He pulled the cord, the blinds went clattering up. Outside the clouds were gone. The sky was clear and the sun was dipping below the treeline of the woods; golden bands filtered through the empty branches. The tops of the trees were frosted with ice, glimmering silver in the dusky light, and the shadows of the trees were long purple scraggles on the snow. But the trees themselves were black. The trees were the woods and the woods were a cave out there past the fence. The woods were a dark, grinning mouth.

Why had the girl Althea gone in there? Those first few weeks in the fall Alex was sure one day he'd be playing in the yard and she'd come wandering out of the trees and across the field and stand at the fence, confused and lost. But she would like him — they were both Als. She would feel safe with Alex and he would take her inside his house and make her hot chocolate. He would call her family and tell them she was okay — or an ambulance, or the cops. But Alex didn't think those thoughts now. He thought instead of Althea's body, frozen and blue, appearing under a snowbank when everything thawed in the spring.

Alex's eyes followed the shadows of the trees, stretching now in the red cleft of sun all the way back across the field, toward the house, past the fence to the square patch that was his family's yard. And then he looked down, directly down, to the space behind the house where the snow fort now lay in ruins. Beside it were the girls.

With the light deepening they seemed too defined, too real, as though someone had cut their pictures from a magazine and laid them down there, one by one, side by side. Their faces were turned up toward the house although they couldn't see Alex, he knew, framed in his bedroom window. It was still too light outside and too dark in his room. So Alex stood there watching them, unseen: four girls on their backs in a line, making angels in the snow.

IN THE FIRST scene of the film we made about dads, we caught them as children, well before they became dads themselves, when their own dads were full-on capital-D Dads-withmoustaches who had been in the war. We got some great shots of the dads at age eight swinging from the monkey bars in the schoolyard playground. Afterwards, we interviewed them about their goals. The answers: astronaut, fireman, psychiatrist, florist, psycho killer, Oscar Robertson. We asked them, "Describe your dad in one word." The unanimous response was: "Mean."

NEXT WE FOUND the dads at sixteen, getting hand jobs on the couch. The cameras were rolling. The dads were oblivious and said nothing, just rolled over on top of their lovers and, fully clothed, humped away until something damp oozed through their jeans. "Can you edit that so I look better?" wondered the dads, wiping themselves down in the bathroom. We smiled, keeping our distance, and told them we'd see what we could do.

IN COLLEGE THE dads grew beards. They bought cars and one night tried acid. We had run out of funding and couldn't shoot. "Remember this," we encouraged the dads, who were giggling at rain.

A FEW YEARS LATER, we received a grant and resumed filming. By then the dads were done college and had found wives to marry. At the altars, the dads said, "I do," and the wives said, "I do," and the dads kissed their new wives and the wives kissed back and then they ran out of the church while people threw rice at them and cheered. The dads and their wives went to Niagara Falls, where they stared silently into all that water and thought, Hmm, and later fell asleep with their shoes on. "Maybe edit in some love," we told the post-production crew. "Okay," they said.

THE DADS AND wives bought houses. The wives taught grade school and brought home children's drawings that they pinned to their fridges with magnetic fruit. The wives looked at the drawings and said, "Aw," in a pointed way. The dads were stuck in middle management; they built workshops in their garages. "That's my workshop in there," they told the wives. "That's my space." We went out into the garages and panned over the workshops, over the workbenches in the workshops, and the tools that would rarely get used. "This is golden stuff," we said to one another. We were making a film about dads.

THERE WERE MOMENTS we didn't get. The dads told us about nights of laughter with their wives; they told us about moments of tenderness, shared joy, or sorrow, a walk in the park and ducks. But the cinematographers' union allowed us a cameraman only for a certain number of hours. We would show up in the morning and the dads would say, "You should have seen us last night," but we could only shrug and say, "Sorry."