Insidious Though They May Be by Chris Carrel

I had the two of you lodged in my heart, less like shrapnel than some slow-spreading poison. Inexorable, the capillary action of family ties draws the poison deeper and deeper into my flesh.

You weren’t even pictures in my mind anymore, that’s what bugged me. One of you had been dead for ages, the other was presumably alive but incommunicado, out there on the loose somewhere in southern Oregon. Brother, you have been missing for decades and yet you are ever present. You are never not here.

How did we get this way when we were born innocent? It seems we were destined for bad times and guided all along by the dark hand of fate.

#

I often wonder what it is to be a ghost. Could you pierce the veil of this haunting and tell me? I would accept continued possession in exchange for an answer.

Father, I understand, with his poorly contained interior rage and that voice like hell waking up. And the whole being dead thing. But you, you’re still alive. Presumably. And yet your ghost spoons me at night and hovers behind me as I walk the hallways at work. You hector me to destroy relationships. You whisper words of poison into my son’s ears. Stay away from him, I would scream if only there was something corporeal to yell at.

#

I’m laid out in blood vessels and nerve fibers, blue, white and red ribbons unwound in their delicate tendencies. Fine microscopic streets that spool the neighborhoods of flesh, wrapping those pearly white bones in layers to be left to the crawling insect hordes of time and capital exhaustion. We committed our childhood to building bones and growing flesh around them, only to spend the remaining decades wearing away like tenuous Kansas topsoil in the face of the perpetual prairie wind.

#

Where is Mother, you might ask. She once contained us both, nurtured her little eggs into clumps of flesh, grew us brainstems, bones and balls. That woman sacrificed her body for ours and then unleashed her little monsters on the world. Yes, I too would like to ask her questions, but I can’t find her remains inside me, though I know she’s there. Sometimes when it's quiet and the wind stops blowing, I hear the lamentations of her small voice inside my chest. The doctor listened with a stethoscope and diagnosed me with a haunted heart. Yet another ruined vessel of devotion, she said.

#

There is an image of a half-broken house in the High Desert. Sometimes it appears in my dreams. Other times, I see it on the walls of passing buildings while riding the train, or in the soft light of the unfocused distance. I don’t know if this is where you are living now, but I am certain it is where your body will be found.

#

What are we to do with this entangled state of us, this spooky sibling action at a distance? I am glad that we are not twins. You would have eaten me in the womb to eliminate the competition. But look at us now. We’ve killed each other off in our respective timelines. When people ask, I imagine you say that either I am dead - thus milking a sympathy you do not deserve - or that you are an only child, which was your wish from the beginning.

#

On my days off, I walk through abandoned buildings you once haunted, raided grow houses, condemned squats, and derelict strip malls with worn carpets and stripped wiring. The residue of your ill will and criminal intent still lines the walls, looking for a body to purchase. But you are nowhere to be seen, committed as you are to your vanishing act.

At a worn-down ranch house just outside Molalla, the air was rife with the residue of cooked chemicals and bad choices. I thought I saw Father peering around the corner. It must have been him, the same crazed eyes and wilderness beard. And just as he was in life, his ghost remained tantalizingly out of reach.

#

Perhaps you recall a certain Christmas Eve from our childhood, not long before Mom disappeared? The two of them were drinking vodka in the kitchen with the neighbors we didn’t like. It was loud shouts and laughter, thumping rock music, and the four voices jockeying against each other, seeking the spotlight. We heard the evening build like steam through the walls heading toward some explosion. Later, from their bedroom the shouting and breaking glass, then the blunt noises of two bodies shoving themselves together in furious passion. Were you thinking the same thing then, is this how I was made? When I asked you, I got a fist to the side of my head for an answer.

#

Why is it so hard to keep from going backward? I know that I should leave you behind to whatever fate you’ve fallen into, but I cannot stop it. My therapist tells me I need to orient myself toward the future. You need to understand your past, she says, in order to let it go. The better voices in my head say something similar, that there’s no good that can come from a reunion. But the poison is in my bloodstream and the poison is in my mind. I take days off and drive out into the desert thinking I’ll just have a look.

#

The night that I find the dream house, it is, as advertised, broken down and seemingly empty. The High Desert stretches around me like a graveyard, full of decay and unfathomably dark ideas. The air is still as if the world is holding its breath, waiting for the next surprise. I know that I should not get out of the car, that I should not go inside. But then why did I come?

The door yields as if it expected me, and the stench of dead, rotting things finds my nose immediately. This thin veneer of normality is always slipping from the world’s shoulders, threatening to reveal the horror of existence, the place where the will to power meets human flesh. When I pause at the threshold, I believe I can hear The Loathm whispering for me to step inside.

Given time, the authorities will eventually arrive, and when they do, I have to wonder whose bodies they’ll find.