Heartbeat

I wake up on Christmas Day to the sound of silence. The snow wisps down from the sky outside and nobody is awake but me.

Around this time, the sun should be rising. But the gray blah in the sky is blocking off the entire universe, so we can’t even see the moon.

Our house is decorated in Christmas everywhere. Red and silver tinsel twirl around the railing of the stairs. Those Spanish red and green flowers are planted up on our window sills. Snowflake window stickers are stuck up onto the window. Our immortal plug-in tree sits in the corner with presents growing from its branches. I pick one off and peel it. It has my name on it. Mom hates it when we open presents before we’re all together in the morning, when we can open them together, but I really couldn’t care less at this point. It is a new video game that she’s placed inside of a shoebox for the purpose of trickery. She always does that, instead of just wrapping the object itself, just to shroud what our presents really are, in secrecy. I look at the game. A new survival horror game. She notices I get into these. It almost makes me smile. She notices something about me. Baffling. I look on the back cover. The storyline is that you’re stuck as a scientist working around in the Arctic. The problem starts in when the No-sun-for-thirty-days time period sets in, and it’s Nighttime for a whole damn month. That’s when the vampires come out. You’re stuck alone and they’ve already managed to kill off all your colleagues. You can either choose to be caught and turned into a vampire to hunt down other scientist suckers, or fight them off and survive them for the whole month. I put them game into the console. It’s harder than I thought it would be. The first five seconds of the game consist of you as the scientist waking up on the first of the thirty nighttime days. The very first thing that happens is that a dying scientists chick bashes through your dare, scaring the crap outta you, because she’s bleeding like nothing else and screaming out demented things like ‘Run away! Get out! They’re already here!’ But the main character is stupid and doesn’t know what she’s talking about, until he walks outside and sees that there’s over a thousands Arctic vampires hiding in the darkness, waiting to spring out at the best time.

I get only a tiny bit into the game, before the rest of my family wakes up. Mom starts making Christmas pancakes while Hannah tears open her own presents. She squeals with joy at some things, but mostly stays silent for others. I decide I don’t want to be with my family right now. I can’t stand it. This is the most awkward time of the year. And I hate opening presents in front of the people who gave them to me.

I try to think of something Creative. Something that the regular Frank would not really do.

I will make myself a child again.

I find a hat, gloves, and a hoodie. I switch from baggy pajama pants into regular jeans and stick on some boots. I waddle out onto unmapped territory and plop myself down in the snow. I feel the snow in my hands. Cold and moist. I melts through the felt of my glove and cools my fingers. I clunk it back into the snow and begin to roll.

A snowman. I haven’t made one of these since second grade. I miss those days. Nothing bad ever happened.

The snowman ends up looking demented. It’s body is disproportioned, and I still have yet to put its face on. A faceless snowman. An emotionless winter man. I find two rocks and put it in as eyes. A long twig as a nose. I draw the mouth in with a gloved finger, but once I see how barely visible it is, I pick off some frozen blueberries from the bush near the front door. A blueberry-mouthed snowman. Mom sticks her head out the window and see what I’ve been doing out here for so long. She sees my creation. She smiles.

“How cute!” She grins. I do not grin.

She continues to smile at me again and tells me to come in for some Christmas breakfast. I don’t move. She closes the window once the cold starts to seep into the house, and leaves me alone. I look back over at the snowman. He grins at me with blueberry lips. I do not grin back. I go into the garage and find a shovel. I walk back to him. His face is gone the second the shovel connects with it. I bash his frozen body to the ground. I disfigure his face. I crack every bone in his body. I smash up his inners. I crumple him down into a pathetic frozen waste, until there’s nothing left but a bunch of frosty clumps in the show, with some blueberries and rocks.

When I come back inside, I gather around with my family around our plug-in tree. Dad has the television turned onto A Christmas Story. They pass me my presents and I sit on the couch and open them up. I get another video game, two CDs, another poster, and basketball. I hear Mom mention something about how great of an idea it would be for me to join some sports at school, as I open up the basketball. I hold it in my hands. Fresh and clean with the perfect bounce. It even smells new.

I force a smile. It hurts my mouth. They buy it, and smile back. I force a thank-you, even when I know I’m never going to play sports, no matter how much people bully me into it. I take the basketball and toss into the back of my closet. I add the video game to my collection. I stick the poster up onto my wall; a rectangular picture of a long-haired musician screaming his lungs out into a microphone. I wish I had a voice like that. I stick the CDs back into my CD collection and go back downstairs. I join my father on the couch. Mom cleans up the trash and sticks all the wrapping paper in a garbage bag. She pours green and red M‘n’Ms into a bowl for a snack and starts getting ready for Christmas dinner. She tells me and Hannah to get ready and look nice. Grandma and Grandpa are coming over soon.

I trudge up to my room, with a scream starting in my gut. I want to punch something. But I can’t, because my wrists hurt too much. I get dressed into regular clothes and stay real quiet. Grandma pulls into the driveway in their rickety five-hundred-year-old car and drags my loony grandfather inside with her. We hug the mandatory Family Hugs that you’re supposed to do with all of your relatives, even the ones you hate. Grandma hugs me tight, smelling like potato salad, lawnmowers, and old people. I hug Grandpa, neither of us wanting to do it. He smells of cigarettes and liquor and nursery home. Mom and Grandma start teaming up in the kitchen to make Christmas dinner. Dad and Grandpa shake hands. Grandpa is my mother’s father. He doesn’t like my father. They hate each other so much that the first time my mother introduced my father to her family, Grandpa hawked a big, sloppy wad of spit right onto his shoe. They avoided their differences with each other by barely speaking to each other and pretending to be good friends when my mother was around. I join Grandpa on the couch while Dad sneaks out back to the hospital to do whatever. Grandma gives me my present: a sweater from JC Penney that looks like something only dads from 80s sitcoms would wear. Not for me at all. Grandpa didn’t get me a present, so Grandma signed his name down on the envelope to make it look like he did. He sits on the couch and grumbles about what a crappy holiday Christmas is. And for the first time in my entire life, I actually agree with him.

It’s too commercialized. Family values are hopelessly abandoned (if you even have the family values to begin with). Mom always goes insane, even when it is supposed to be a festive, happy holiday. It’s always too cold. I wish Christmas weren’t during the winter. It doesn’t fit. Christmas is supposed to be a cheery holiday. Winter is not cheery. Grandpa agrees. He says it too cold. It’s too long. Nobody likes it. And it’s obvious that nobody likes it because the second they see the first snowflake drizzle down from the sky, they pack their bags and stampede their way down to Florida. Why does anyone even live here, if they don’t like the cold weather? I want to pack up and move to Arizona. Live in a little isolated shanty house on the edge of the Grand Canyon. It would be warm all year round and the most I’d ever have to worry about is accidentally dropping my car keys into the canyon. But I can’t. I’m stuck here in Jersey with my parents and sibling, who are all in denial about the fact that we’ve completely failed as an adequate family.

Grandma notes to Hannah that Christmas is not all about presents and all that jazz. We have to remember the Bible stories from our religious nursery school. About Jesus and how he was born on Christmas and died on Easter and did some miracles in between. She also notes that it is the one day of the year that we need to be as selfless as possible. Grandpa grumbles. Very typical of him. He has never changed. Still the same man who told his five-year-old grandson that Christmas was a Republican capitalistic conspiracy created by the Hallmark Greeting Card corporation and the government for greedy financial gain, and that if Jesus were still alive today, he’d be down in Nicaragua rallying the Sandinistas. That was Santa was dead because his sleigh was shot down over the sea of Japan. That all the reindeer were captured in Viet Cong, Vietnam by NLF soldiers for interrogation. He made me cry, that little five-year-old version of me so scared that Santa Claus was actually dead. He complains more about how Christmas is just a conspiracy created by the government to fool us all into their Scheme, whatever it was, just like how The First Moon Landing was fake, also created by the government, as it was filmed in a Hollywood studio and directed by Steven Spielberg--that’s how he got the job for Jaws.

I go back outside to get away from the psychopaths I’m supposed to call my family members. I sit out on the snow, where I murdered my snowman. I lay down on the snow and stare up at the sky. I want to lay here forever. Even though I hate winter, right here and right now is perfect. Serene silence. The branches of our tree rustle up against the gray backdrop of the sky. A lump grows in my throat. My wrists ache. My skull aches. Everything aches. When Winter Vacation is over I’m just going to have to go back to him. There isn’t anything I can do. I want to run away or scream or cry, but I know that’s not going to solve anything. It will get me nowhere. There’s nowhere to run. I can’t scream because my throat hurts too much and if anybody ever saw me cry, their reactions would be abysmal. I’m going to go back to him on Monday because I’m too weak to do otherwise. And I’ll be back at the bottom of the hole, just like every other time. There’s a saying that when you’re in a hole, there’s no way to go but up. I’d go up, if there was anything to grab onto. There isn’t. I wonder about the kids who got guidance counselors. The ones who were found in the bathroom stalls with the razors. They always gave the same reason: because they wanted to make sure they could still feel. I would kill to have that. I hate feeling this. It’s making my body hurt too much. I want to know how it feels to not feel anything at all. I bet it feels good. My mother’s painkillers for her back problems sit on a shelf behind a mirror in her bathroom. I could take some. Or I could take a lot. I could get so numb that even my heart would start to tingle with the feeling of the lack of any working nerves. Then maybe it would stop. They’d find my body overdosed body on the bathroom floor with my head lolling around near the bottom of the toilet next to the plunger; foam and saliva gurgling up over my lips with my eyes blank and not seeing anything. How would it feel? Does death feel good? Does it hurt for everybody? I think about my old relatives. My grandfather on my father’s side. He wouldn’t die no matter how old or sick he got. He was always grumpy and didn’t like any of us, so we were all sort of secretly happy that we didn’t have to come visit him anymore, once he just took a nap one day in front of the television during a baseball game and just didn’t wake up. My great aunt Lydia dropped dead in front of the sandwich line at a Subway restaurant. My great uncle got cancer and rotted away in a hospital bed, bald and miserable with tubes stuck up his nostrils. My aunt committed suicide. My other aunt’s anorexia caused her to have a premature heart attack.

Did they like it?

I close my eyes and listen to his voice inside of my head. It sends shivers up my spine. The branches continue rustle around overhead. The snow seeps through my jeans and soaks my underwear. Makes my butt cold. The cold in the air freezes up my cheeks. I pull the neck of the hoodie up over my mouth. My breath is warm and thermal as I breathe in and breath out within the enclosed space behind the fabric. When I pull the hoodie away, the moisture quickly freezes back onto my face. If I cried right now, the tears would freeze up into little icicle droplets on my face and I would look like some kind of little Ice Boy from a winter fairy tale. The Whit Witch of Narnia’s slave on a leash. I yawn and close my eyes to sleep.

My headworld is boring today. A dream about Grandpa being nice. It baffles me, but is not all that interesting. I wake up to Mom’s face so close to mine and she’s yelling at me. She drags me back inside and they crowd around me, giving me blankets. I sit there and let them have their panic attacks. They thought I’d fallen asleep outside and frozen to death; my ultimate dream and goal for the season. Mom yells at me, telling me how dangerous it is to fall asleep in the cold weather because when you sleep your heart slows down and since it’s winter, the cold freezes up your heart even more, making the chances of freezing to death with your heart stopping, right in your sleep very high. They give me hot chocolate and go back to their lives. I sip it and it burns the roof of my mouth.

“No! No! I want an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle!” Ralphie declares to the Mall Santa on the television. His mouth twists into a horrible ventriloquist doll-smile. Santa disagrees with him and informs him, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!” And then a Christmas boot to Ralphie’s face as he slides down the slide backwards.

Gerard calls me later that day. I come over like I knew I would. It hurts so bad I think my body is going to tear apart in two. I bite my lip and scrunch my eyes and try to go into my head but can’t. He’s got his hands around my middle and I’m nothing more than a rag doll. I lay down on my stomach on his bed and put my face into his pillow. It smells of sex and sweat and shampoo and bad morning breath. A scream starts in my gut. His skin rubs against mine and the flesh inside of me is tearing. It stings. My eyes water with the sharp pinches of pain. The animal scream inside of me keeps growing bigger and bigger until it’s right up in my throat and I open my mouth and try to let it out, there is nothing but screamed silence.

He still doesn’t stop. He thinks it’s a scream of ecstasy. I lift my head out of the pillow and look over near his window. For a moment, I can almost see myself.

“You need to tell him to stop,” Frank #2 says. “He’s hurting you. Tell him to stop!”

I wish it were easier than that. I put on sympathetic eyes and look over at Frank #2, begging him to understand that doing that is not as easy as it sounds. I can’t tell him a word.

“You can’t keep letting him do this to you,” Frank #2 goes on. “He’s using you. Abusing you. Do you know what that means? It means that you need to get the hell away from him! Stop seeing him! You’re letting yourself get beaten up!”

I still wish it were easier than that.

I close my eyes tightly and shove him out of my head. It makes me wonder who’s left.

When I get back home, I check on Grandpa, asleep on the couch, snoring just fifteen minutes into a boring, old black and white war movie. Grandma is sleeping soundly on the chair next to him, crocheting tools in hand. My mother and father are cleaning up the kitchen. My mother gives me a glaring look.

“Where were you?” she says, putting her hands on her hips.

I shrug.

“You missed dinner,” she informs me. “You know how important Christmas dinner is!”

I say nothing.

She growls at me. I don’t move or speak. I simply give her the same look I managed the day I came home with the crappy progress report. It baffles her. I stalk upstairs and fill up the tub to the very top, shed all my winter fur and expect myself in the mirror. All the bruises are in their right places--still there, not going anywhere. I step into scalding hot bathwater and fill my lungs up with air so I can float at the top for a moment, and then let the air out and sink to the bottom. I hold my breath and close my eyes listen closely to my own heartbeat. Beat beat beat. The blood rushing in my ears, still keeping me alive. Thumping behind my rib cage and bumping softly against my bones. Beating beating beating. I listen to it and it relaxes me so much that I almost forget I’m underwater. Right up until my lungs start to compress and I feel a prick of pain in my chest and I burst up out of the water, taking in huge gulps of air. I cannot hear it anymore.

The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet.

I step onto a towel and approach the sink. Wash off my face with cold water that comes out of the hot faucet. Something is not right with the water tank in this house. I look at the reflection in the mirror and it pisses me off that this kid still looks the same. Same dark, raccoon eyes, no matter how hard he tries to get in some sleep. Same pale, pigment-less skin. The face of a mannequin, emotionless and molded out to look attitude-neutral. I dress myself back up in the clothes that my body’s been made to fit into, and gimp my way back to my bedroom.

The roar that we hear when we place a seashell next to our ear is not the ocean, but rather the sound of blood surging through the veins in the ear.

I cup my hands over my ears and listen to the blood sliding through the veins inside of my head and fall asleep to the sound of it.