Heartbeat

On Thanksgiving Day, we wake up to a note on the table from Mom telling us to get all the food together while she does her last-minute shopping for the perfect turkey. I peel potatoes and get the gravy our and soften butter, while Hannah runs off back to the school to avoid chores. Today, instead of helping her own family make their dinner, she’s going to help make stranger’s dinners at the shelter. Turkey sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise for the homeless tonight. I’m stuck in a muggy house with a father who’s a genius in the medical field but can’t do shit when it comes to cooking. I heat up butter in and microwave and give him the easy things to do like putting the biscuits on the cookie trays to bake in the oven. That is the simplest job; simply popping the biscuit dough out of the can and waiting for the oven to heat up after pressing some buttons, then sticking them in the oven and working on other food while the biscuits cook.

It must all be timed out correctly, Mom tells us. Everything must be cooked and baked and heated and stirred together in a way where every aspect of the meal is ready to eat all at the same time. It’s impossible to do because we only have one stove and oven and the woman who knows how to cook the best is out buying the turkey that’s going to take years to thaw.

Mom speeds into the driveway and nearly sprints into the house, dumping the turkey in a hot vat of boiling water in the sink where she stabs at with an ice pick. Dad retreats back to the living room and turns up the volume on the television. I watch from the dinner table as Mom jabs the pick in and out of the frozen turkey corpse. A cigarette hangs between her lips limply and he eyes look tired and groggy. I don’t think she’s slept.

The metal of the sharp end of the pick jacks in and out of the pale, whitish flesh of the dead, beheaded holiday bird. It makes me wince and my bruises twitch. My face tingle with a smack that’s just like the pick, jabbing in and out of my skin with my body not moving because it’s already frozen and dead.

Mom takes over the entire kitchen and shoos me away. She always gets like this around holidays that require huge meals. She takes control of the entire kitchen where she bakes everything and reheats everything and has every appliance in the kitchen working all at once from the microwave to the toaster. We’re not even allowed to step in and grab a quick snack.

I snatch the box of donuts underneath the key rack near the phone and retreat up to my bedroom with it. I find some old comic books hidden in the shadowy depths of my closet. I flip through them and inhale a couple of donuts. Outside the snow is really starting to come down. The heat in the house needs to get turned up. I’m shivering. I flip through superheroes with powers I used to think were cool. The oldies like Batman and Superman. I used to think they were so neat, running around the house with my bed blanket tied around my neck like a cape, imagining I had perpetual, exotic powers like magically brainwashing my mother into allowing me to have a cookie before dinner, when she would usually tell me no, because it would ruin my appetite. Little-kid wishes. I miss those days. I toss the comic books back into the closet and have another glazed donut.

I turn on the television in the upstairs TV room and ready my controller. Coldblood D Time.

The premise of Coldblood D is easy. You play as a ridiculously good looking raven-haired man, (originally a Japanese game; there’s no ugly people in Japan, so the Japanese game makers don’t know how to design Normal-looking characters) who’s a patient in a hospital in Tokyo after a long coma from a car accident, only to see that the whole hospital’s been abounded and wrecked in a truly post-apocalyptic fashion. The only other people in the hospital are tiny amounts of patients and doctors and nurses. Most patients have been turned into zombies and now slump around the hospital and gimp over to you to bite gashes into your skull. The doctors have all been killed and lay in bloody heaps on the floor, alongside some nurses. A true survival-horror game. Some patients are good. You meet one little girl who wakes up as well, still human and sane. But she disappears early on almost as fast as you see her, running off into another room when the zombie patients scare her shitless. I suspect she’s an important character; she’s bound to pop up later in the game, towards the end or something, to miraculously help me out with the last, final hardest level. You walk around and fight off the zombie patients with whatever medical item you can get your hands on. Cardiac machines, folded-up wheelchairs, giant syringes with long, sharp needles, heart shockers still plugged in, formaldehyde jars with dissected gutsy brains and hearts and bloody appendages inside to throw at the zombie’s head and the shatter the glass of the jars right into their eyes. A very gory, blood-filled video-gaming experience. Rated M for Mature for obvious reasons.

I fight off two neurosurgeons turned undead with an electrocardiogram, bashing the television-like monitor right onto one of their heads, smashing through his zombie brains and killing him immediately. I beat up the other zombie by choking him with transfusion tubes.

Downstairs, Mom swears like a rapper in a bad MTV video, as she gets the turkey ready. Dad clinks three ice cubes into a cup of liquor and drinks while he channel-surfs.

I continue smashing down buttons to fight off the zombies as they come gimping my way. You’d think it would get boring after a while, since the whole game practically takes place in only the hospital. No other worlds to visit, except for when the storyline switches back and forth between reality and mysterious flashbacks of a little black-haired girl who looks crying and miserable and beaten-up. The flashbacks continue to lead me onto to the fact that she might have something to do with why everyone in the Tokyo prefectures have been turned into brain-eaters. Delirious patients who aren’t quite zombies keep mentioning nightmares and a virus that infected everybody. I continue to kill off more zombies, occasionally finding actual weapons like guns and such, left behind by whoever. I use them to fight off more zombies as the amounts that come after me get bigger and bigger, making the game an increasingly harder challenge.

The carbon-monoxide alarm blares out after two hours of swearing and bashing turkey meat downstairs, making Mom swear loud again, stressed out and angry. I want to go downstairs and tell her that it might be a better idea to just ditch the whole holiday altogether; make spaghetti or something, anything easier than this. But I know I wouldn’t survive the day if I did.

When I finally begin to whiff smoke and burning something-or-other, I come downstairs.

The turkey dinner is ready, but the kitchen smells horrible. I hear Hannah’s friend’s mom’s car pull into the driveway. Out the kitchen window, I can see her step out and come into the house, smelling of turkey sandwiches and old people. She takes one whiff of the air and crinkles up her face. “What died?”

Mom ignores her and tries to act like nothing is wrong. The cooking part of the dinner is over; now all we have to do is gather around and pretend to be a real family for one hour while we eat.

My mother and my father and my sister and I all gather around the table in silence. Dad asks who wants to say grace, even when we’re not religious and usually aren’t as thankful as we’re supposed to say we are.

“Hannah?” Dad looks over at Hannah as we reach over and grab onto each other’s freezing hands. Mom’s fingers in mind feel clammy and wet and cold. Dad’s feel raspy and scaly like alligator skin. Thank God I don’t have to hold Hannah’s hand. I don’t even want to know what that must feel like.

Hannah smiles, proud and loyal, as she straightens herself in her chair and clears her throat, ready to fling out whatever crap she has to say around controversial holidays.

We close our eyes like we’re supposed to and lower our heads. I’m supposed to be thinking about how thankful I am for the meal on the table, like God made it Himself, even though it was my mother who made it and it doesn’t look that good anyway.

“Dear, Lord,” Hannah starts out crisply. “We want to take a moment to thank You for this festive Thanksgiving holiday. And for all the gross material possessions we are able to buy and enjoy. And for letting the Indians help us white people, while we being the greedy slobs we are, return them with guns and diseases, while we steal their tribal lands and rape their utmost traditions.”

I can feel all of our eyes peeling open, right in the middle of Grace, while we raise our heads back up to leer at Hannah with deathly eyes. She really knows how to ruin a holiday.

“And thank you for letting us stuff our faces like selfish pigs, even though there are infants in Ethiopia dying every three seconds of extreme poverty and hunger, and children in the Middle East being napalmed--”

“Jesus Christ, enough, alright!” Dad finally cuts in. We glare at Hannah and give her dirty looks. She simply sticks her nose up in the air and shrugs us off, believing nobody but herself. Like always. Dad looks over at me. “Frank, pass me the rolls.”

I do as I’m told and slide the bowl of biscuits across the table. We chew our turkey engulfed in gravy, and pick at the asparagus that makes your pee smell funky.

When we finish eating, Mom takes out a pie for dessert that I don’t feel like eating. I go back up to my room while Hannah plops down with Dad on the couch and watches A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

I get a scream from downstairs an hour later, after getting three more levels farther into Coldblood D; Mom telling me that Gerard is on the phone. My stomach sinks down into my butt as I pick up a cordless phone on a side table out in the hall. Gerard tells me he didn’t go with his family because seeing his relatives depresses the hell out of him. None of them like him, which is very understandable, but I say nothing about it. He asks me to come over to his house because his family is still with their relatives, except it comes out more like a demand than an invitation, so I go because I have no choice or alternative. I bundle up into a baggie hoodie and a beanie hat and trudge over to his house in sloshy snow-covered sidewalks in below-zero temperature. The air is so cold, I can see my breathe. The lights are turned on at the Way household, and he pulls me inside to a warm, heated home with junk food littering the kitchen table. He has a slasher horror movie on the television, with a psychotic serial killer masked in a face made of other people’s skins, wielding a chainsaw, while he chases an unintelligent blonde teenage girl through a cornfield at night. I can’t watch the movie because he’s on top of me, pushing his tongue into my mouth and I have to close my eyes so I don’t look back at his. I can feel him bashing his hips and crotch against mine, our bones clinking together. He runs his fingers through my hair and asks me if I want to.

My lower lips curls in and becomes sucked in behind my teeth. I bite down on the skin and try to eat myself whole, but it doesn’t appear to be working. I can’t swallow my whole soul because it’s too rickety and cut-up for that. It would make my throat bleed.

I close my eyes and see his in my mind again, and the stars and how drowsy I feel and how it feels good and bad at the same time and how I can’t figure out what’s going on and how cold it is outside and the bushes cutting up my face. His voice in head and his hot breath in my air, “You want to…?”

“Kiss me back,” he demands into my mouth. He disconnects from me. “You don’t ever kiss back. Kiss me back.”

I don’t know how to kiss back. Pushing my lips forward and trying to copy his facial movements is about as far as I get. It reminds me of the articles and polls in Mom’s woman-magazines, talking about ‘hot’ and ‘sexi’ new ways to make out with your man.

I push my tongue back into his mouth and it feels slimy and alien. I hear him groan into my mouth and I roll my eyes behind my closed eyelids. He continues to run his fingers through my hair and asks me again if I want to. I still don’t answer. He doesn’t wait for an answer this time. Pants at ankles, shirt on the floor, and a decorative blanket that his mother draped over the couch to cover us up, and it’s too late to say No.

I wince and my face crinkles up every time it hurts. He either sees it and ignores it, or is too deep in a pit of ecstasy to notice anything at all.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Back at my house, it’s dark and everything smells like turkey. The holiday smells and scents have waffled onto our clothes and it’ll take forever to get the stains out. I go up to my room and lock the door. I get out the paper and the pen. I write the note in several different ways, trying to figure out which way I like the best.

Dear, Mom and Dad…
Dear, Mom, Dad, and Hannah…
Dear, Mom…
Dear, dead pet dog from fifth grade, Buddy.

I don’t know who I’m supposed to address it to. I put Hannah in as the addressee in the end, and get going with the letter.

Dear, Hannah
Tell mom and dad I joined the Army. I’m really sorry about this. But I hate it. Its too hard. It would have been cool if we were friends. Sorry.
P.S: Don’t take my computer.

The Bayonne Bridge. That is where I will do it. I can feel the wind brushing up against my face as I fall and when I hit the water, it will feel so cool and relaxing and I can finally drown for real and not ever be hurt ever again.

But then I rethink it. The fall will be long. I will get too scared. When I hit the water, it’ll smack me like a thousand daggers stabbing into my skin all at once; the equivalent of Gerard’s hits and smacks, taken to a much higher level. It will take forever to drown.

I steal one of Hannah’s scarves instead. Inside my closet, it’s dank and cold. I tie one end of the scarf to the metal bar that holds all the clothes hangers. I wrap the other around my neck and step up onto a couple of shoeboxes. It brings me high up to a height I’ve never been at before.

And then I kick the shoeboxes out from underneath me. A toppling sound of the shoeboxes falling over onto the floor and the snap of the scarf and my body whooshing towards the ground, only being held up by a tight fabric asphyxiating me, cutting off my oxygen, and killing me. I can’t feel my fingers.

And then there’s another snapping sound. The rushing feeling inside of my stomach like how you feel when you first go down the tall hill of a roller coaster, like your stomach is just going to fly up into your throat. And then my ass hitting the ground hard and a dozen shirts on hangers toppling on top of me and the metal bar clunking to the ground. I’ve broken it with body weight, because it was cheap and not built for suicide.

I sit there for a moment and hold my face so still like drying cement, refusing to let myself cry. I shove the lump in my throat back down inside of me, not allowing myself to lower down to the likes of that.

I untie the scarf from my neck. Readjust the bar on the shelf and pick up all the clothes. Crumple up the letter and toss it into the trash. I can’t even kill myself right. My head pounds with bruises on my temples. My wrists aching with bruises that won’t ever go the fuck away. Every time they fade and I think I’m going to get rid of them for good, his hands are clenched around them or he’s grabbing my hands and bashing them on hard surfaces or I’m whacking them over my head to shield my face from the back side of his hand.

I planned on it being on the Bayonne Bridge. Miles and miles away, vacationing families would find my dead, bloated, purple body float up onto shore, after going through several other rivers and a waste-management system. They’d bring my body back to Jersey and embalm me and make me look new again. Mom would buy a white tacky casket, instead of a one that looked like wood. Hannah would steal my computer anyway, whether or not it was my death wish for her not to. They put boards over my windows and clean out my room. Throw away every artifact that reminded them of me. Get rid of my bed sheets. Paint the walls tubercular gray.

I stop thinking about it after a while, and instead of ending my life, I sit down in front of the television with a plate of heated-up pumpkin pie, to watch a Back To the Future marathon on TV. Planning your own funeral is kind of sick.