Wickedness. Evil. Are these concepts synonyms? If one is evil, are they also wicked... or perhaps are the acts of those who are evil considered wickedness? I am consumed of these ideas. I drown in thoughts such as these. I believe religiously in the blackness, the inky murk endowed to us by our paternity. Why such a consumption you may ask? Why such a morbid fascination with ideas that stand in military opposition to goodness, kindness and beauty? It's not such a mystery. After all… Some consider me to be evil.
I was late back from work at Express again. This day had been more than a little unsettling... Nothing eventful had been happening with X in a few days. Summer plowed ahead. I had barely touched a piano and had given myself fully over to drinking away what little of my funds that weren't already poured into school debt or car expenses. Over the summer I was rooming with Justin and Eric in Johnson. The largest dormitory, and I think the most cheaply constructed. The school needed the housing fast due to an influx of students some time ago, and had cut corners to get the thing up and moderately functional in time for a term. The walls were sort of a slate-algae industrial grade paint color. The carpet in the halls a patchwork of much the same colored carpet that had holes gauged in it here and there from students moving their furniture in and out as quickly as they could, disregarding the consequences of property damage. As far as I could tell, there weren’t a lot of consequences for that kind of property damage. I texted Eric.
:: I'm coming in late. Prop the side door open?::
He did. Or someone had. There was part of a cinder block wedged in the side door. All the doors were big brown metal and plate glass things with key card access. They locked on timers, and I had arrived past curfew. Summer rules were different though. I wasn't exactly a student over the summer…I was an employee. The rules were a smidge different. Everyone was sleeping or playing games on their computers. The air was wet from a rain, earlier and the building took on a wet smell. It always did after weather of any sort. It just made the human smells stronger. Skin. Laundry. And very peculiar cologne choices.
I slid in through the gap in the door... kicking out the cinder block as I did. The door clicked and locked. The little red lock light snapped on in the door and a security breach was eliminated. I'd been folding clothes for hours. I felt a little numb. The thud of the sound system at the clothing store I worked at had left my cochlea worse for the wear. There's nothing sexy about folding t-shirts even if they're over priced and sold in an environment strung about with night club like sub woofers and overly embroidered jeans. Express clothing. Club clothes. Taste for people who have none of their own.
I had fun working there. Melanie and I used to hang back after work and order hamburger quesadillas and we would gossip about the management. Who was sleeping with who. Melanie was as black as pitch. Still is. She was Haitian. An orphan. And French parents adopted her when they moved to the states. She had no accent. Black or other wise. Her mom is a tiny little French woman who to this day believes that my name is 'Jeffery'... I think that may have something to do with my eating all of the tiny pickles in her refrigerator while quite drunk. I can’t be sure.
I shrugged off my bag. Eric was wondering around the building. Justin was gone for the weekend. He lived in Sumpter I think and maybe was visiting family there. The room smelled like sulfur. Like someone had been playing with matches. I threw my things on the floor slid off my pants. I scrounged around for one of my missing flip flops and grabbed a towel. Squeaked my way down the hall towards the showers. Which was something like a giant ceramic box. The kind of place you may imagine prison rape scenes for crime dramas may be shot. Residue from harsh cleaning chemicals was thick on the ceramic tile. Cold green and yellow tiles in asymmetrical patterns coated the floor, walls and ceiling. Poetically only half the icy blue fluorescent lights flickered on when I switched the light. In the half-light you could hear the thoink of one of the shower heads dripping.
There was a hiss a I slid back the curtain and stepped into piping hot water. I leaned my head against the cold tiles and let the heat drip down my face. Down my back and water pooled slowly towards one of the central drains in the floor. I let a glassy look come over my face. I could feel the water pooling in the cracks. The holes that had been worn into me. The water filled those spaces back up and spilled out everywhere. I thought of nothing, and just let the indomitable tanks of scalding water from the building slowly drain out over me. Just me.
There was a noise in the bathroom... Scuffling. I snapped out of my reverie.
"Medlin? That you in here?"
I leaned out of the shower.
It was Morrisey. Scruffy theater arts student I had met my first week at school. He was the first person who had attempted to learn my name. He was my height with whispy-curly ginger hair. He was always working on these projects. He made things out of paper mache. He'd been in school for years and never went home for the summer.
"What's up?" I pulled back the curtain.
He was standing there with a mask in his hand. The kind that you can get from a party store. White plastic thing that he had begun altering by adding bits of copper mesh and rhine stones. Black feathers made brow lines.
"What's that?" I asked nodding to the device.
"It's fall" He gestured grandly. Throwing a presentational gesture towards the mask. "I've been working on one for all the seasons. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. It's part of this project I've been working on over the break." Michael always seemed like he should have had a drug problem. Always with that cast away at sea look in his eye, and always with those white blue eyes of his glazed over. Maybe he was.
"Oh. That's cool..." I said unconcernedly allowing the shower curtain to gape open. I propped myself up against the shower wall. I wasn't all that concerned with how hygienic that was. Maybe I should have been. He was telling me more about this project. It's inspiration and origins. How he had always been inspired by nature. As he was talking I half noticed his eyes followed the lines of my shoulders, tracing a way, slowly... shyly... down my arm and then the line of my hip to my knee.
He was still talking about that damn mask. He was rambling about how he thought about displaying the masks in shadow boxes... blither blither.
"Are you happy here?" I cut in. Shooting him a black look. I'd had nearly enough of this chatter; this empty prattle about masks.
"I uh. What do you mean?" His fishy eyes locked mine.
"You know. Why are you here. With me. Why are you in school? Here?”
He fidgeted with his hair. Pushed it around and looked bashful. I could hear his pulse over the hiss from the shower. I could feel the hot shame wash over him. He was gobsmacked I had caught him looking.
"Oh... I mean it’s a good school ya know... Im… not exactly on good terms with my family. My dad and I don’t talk." He let his eyes follow the water as it made it's way to one of the drains in the floor.
"Why not? He doesn’t like you or something?" I softened. He had at that moment stopped being annoying. Strange how such simple statement can render a man a boy, or a boy a man. In that moment Michael was no longer an eccentric grown up. He was just a child. A silly one at that. With masks and... complications.
"Yeah. He's ashamed of me." He said shifting his weight.
"Oh I'm sorry."
Steam and water sounds filled the empty silence.
“My dad and my mom aren’t together any more. The last time I saw him was at a family reunion. He had a couple drinks and called me a ‘pathetic faggot’.” He smiled hauntingly as he said this and hung little quotations in the air.
I was taken a back. No one had ever used that word in my house. There were plenty of words that weren’t used, and I hadn’t even learned the meaning of that one until I had been in school for a few months. My mother would have slapped the teeth out of my head if I had used a word like that, and I would have deserved it.
“Why would he say that to you?”
The question bounced around the room until steam pushed it out the door and into the hallway.
“I just think he doesn’t like all the stuff I’m into. Doesn’t understand art. Why I wanna work in theater.” He shrugged about it. Like we were talking about paper weights. “He doesn’t love me.”
And then he did something so… kind. He walked straight across the room, and stood in front of me. He grabbed my right hand while I was just standing there in the shower. And he shook it and said.
“I’ve already decided I’m going to be just fine. And I’m going to do what I want.”
Then he smiled and nodded, and slogged back to his room where no doubt his roommates hated him for the amount of art debris there was thrown all over. I leaned back in the shower. I thought about X. I tried to think if I was like Michael. I tried to decide if Michael was a child or a man… If I was a child or a man. I couldn’t tell.
