The Totem
Candace stands in the post-coital calm of the rain glazed foliage, the sleepy naked leaves tossed by light winds or flicked under rain drops. The plants seem timid now, as if to retreat from the emptiness left between them and the grey sky above. How sensitive is the veined green skin, like the pinked patch of a fresh burn. The birds sing now, and animals scurry. But the leaves meekly yield like a beat dog, trying to coil in just as they are nourished and fertilized. Overhead flows the grand canopy of spent clouds in quiet arc over their partner, soon to leave and soon to return.
— -
Candace may never forgive mom for not preparing her for the vulgar traffic that would eventually flow in and out of that sacred gateway of the flesh. Mom spent plenty of time passively sanctifying it, which only sowed the seeds for its inevitable defiling. Anointing invites defiling. Candace thinks, the earth isn’t dirty because no one ever figured to make it clean. Why try and make me something that’s supposed to be pure? A dog can lick itself clean. Why the hell can’t I?
Mom wasn’t a bad mother. Just not a very smart one.
— -
Mom ate a BLT when she was pregnant with Brandon, scarfed it down behind the diner on her lunch break. As a result, he is piggishly gluttonous, has a weak mind, and is round and plump and often reddens with anger. And you know what his name is? Brandon Lyle Thomas.
He would abuse cats sometimes. Lure them into boxes, then float them out to the middle of the water, wait for them to claw their way out of the box and see what they do. When he got bored of that he would stick roman candles to their flanks and watch them run in terror at the bursts of spark and fire spraying off their backs.
In a later offense, a large step in cruelty from his previous projects, he caught a cat, sedated it, cut off its back legs, then stitched up the wound, and wrapped its torso in gauze. When his sister Candace saw this, she assumed a complete and unforgiving hatred for her brother. She took care of the poor thing until it dragged itself off one day and never came back.
Brandon stayed away from dogs, though. His mother was bitten by a dog in the third trimester, and so he never touched them.
— -
The first time Lorian ejaculated he had to face the fact that his penis was something wholly other to himself. He noticed, in the course of his daily movements and frictions, how good it felt to rub it, and then in a sudden moment the penis took control and started firing pale globs into his underwear. There was a lurching clench and heaving recoil after each shot. He felt sick.
One day, mom found Lorian’s bin full of petrified, off-white tissue wads and told him, “This is disgusting.” He was full of shame and then anger and muttered under his breath, “And who said you could come into my fucking room?”
But the semen was indeed ill-used. It is supposed to be deposited into a woman, as it contains a share of one’s life; it must be deposited into a woman that will guard it from demons. Then she either transforms it into a child, or she returns it to the sender through loving service. But Lorian deposited it into tissue paper, left vulnerable in the black wire bin.
A few weeks later, mom went into his room and found his body flashing, limply reclined on the couch in the middle of his dark room. His fingers loosely held the controller on his lap, his head hung to the side. On the TV screen it said, “You died” because his character had died. Lorian was also dead. Two energy drink cans lay empty next to him. Because none of the family heard or remembered what the doctor said, they all assumed his weak heart beat itself to death.
— -
The family was gathered at the table for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Styrofoam squeaked, bags crackled, ice rattled; the table was set with plastic plates, and then they all fell still, as quiet teeth shattered the breading and pulled white meat from the bone. A straw screeched in the cap.
Mom chewed out Lorian for not taking the food-stamps when he bought the week’s supply of hot dogs that day. “Pride’ll kill ya. Ya gotta learn that.”
Candace snorted, “Then how come you still alive, ma?”
Mom flicked a greasy bone past Candace’s head, with a grainy laugh.
“Two kinds’a pride, Can, one has ya shittin’ yer money away, makin’ like you got some when you don’t. Other kind keeps yer head above water. That one will save you. Brandon, yer fat ass better not be eatin’ all them potaters.”
— -
Brandon always pissed on conifers, since that’s what happened to be around the trailer. Conifers are a soft wood, so Brandon always had erectile problems. Could never get the thing up when he needed it. But that didn’t stop him from grabbing girls and groping them all up, but lacking any penetrative tool, he just pounded them with his impotent pelvis and ran off, leaving him humiliated and angry, and the girl violated.
— -
Candace descended from a matrilineal heritage, or, in other words, a long line of paternal abandonment. The lineage was marked by the butterfly. This means that Candace must experience, at some point in her life, a moment of almost complete dissolution before she truly becomes herself, in a moment of hardening. She doesn’t know what qualifies as total dissolution. She has a few miserable experiences that might count. Her mother says it was the death of her boyfriend. Grandma’s was getting beaten and raped in her kitchen. Sets the bar pretty high. But maybe it’s just a comfort to them, a way of believing that it’s all downhill from there. Easy to say in retrospect. It has the opposite effect for Candace who knows from history that there is no limit to the pain and suffering you can be submitted to. Joy seems to have a pretty low ceiling, but suffering can always go deeper.
Candace always assumed it would be sexual assault, but the years passed by and she remained unviolated. She figured it was because she was monstrously ugly. Though, she is not quite monstrous, but more that her face has the disproportion of a child’s attempt at a portrait. Eyes too far apart, nose blocky, lips gracelessly round. It became a confusing issue for her. She didn’t want to be sexually assaulted, but not because she was too ugly. Of course, physical appearance didn’t have much to do with it, as she might one day learn.
At one point in their wanderings, when Candace shared her anxieties with Brandon, he tried to lift her hopes by saying, “We call someone like you ‘doggy-style’.” It took Candace a moment, but she eventually realized he was describing in what position, with her face concealed, she could be agreeably fucked.
— -
Lorian was the beautiful child, everyone knew. The other two children were the type people expected to sprout out of the trailer park. But Lorian was a diamond in the rough. He had unusually smooth skin, slim figure, soft hair and blue eyes. No amount of chicken fat could mar the skin or swell his figure.
— -
“Where the fuck are my children?” Her kids haven’t visited her in 3 years. Mom figures she would have gone crazy by now, stuck in a place like this on earth. But here her brain stays completely the same, endlessly stirred with a steady simmer of frustration verging on outrage. And besides, there’s nowhere like this on earth. She never realized how many things there were in the world until suddenly there’s nothing.
Mom never imagined she’d be swearing in her spirit life. But here she is in the fucking spirit realm tossing around the fucking f-word. Lorian knew it. He’d said, “You’d better clean up your talkin’, ma, or the angels’ll kick ya out of heaven.” No angels, here, though. Just mom waiting for those ungrateful little shits to grace her with their presence.
The only thing she has with her is a small metal BB that her brother shot into her left knee when she was five. Also, two gold fillings were there at her feet alongside the BB when she first came to. She flicked those around for about 30 seconds until it got boring. That was 3 years ago.
— -
One contender for Candace’s moment of dissolution was her last day as an aid at Morning Glory retirement home. Quiet, empty halls, 2 AM; they all slept, and she knew they slept. So, slowly her eyes faded, the hallways compressed and disappeared. Until a shake on her shoulder-what-where am I?
“Gotta stay off the couches, girl. They’ll drag you down to dreamland.”
“You leaving, Marina?”
“Thank god. I’ll see you on Wednesday, honey. Stay on your feet. And drink lots of coffee.”
“Sleep a few hours for me, too, would ya?”
“Probably wouldn’t even if I could,” she said with a laugh and then she was out the door. Candace stood up and walked the hallways. The lights passed over her head like the throbbing bass lines they always played at the club. Swell and fade. Fuck the club. She never belonged there, and her friends knew it, but they kept bringing her as a charity. No, no, no. They’re good friends, she tells herself. There was a click down the hallway and a small liver-spotted face poked out of the door and looked around confused. Candace approached and asked, “Everything all right, Pete?”
“What time is it?”
“About 2:30.”
“Oh, that’s too early, isn’t it?”
“I’d say so. You just go back to bed.”
“Ok. Ok.” He closed the door behind him.
Anxiety crept up, spreading over her lips and lungs. She went downstairs to the basement room where the CNAs all stole their smoke breaks. She lit up and sat on the table as her anxiety decayed into exhausted drowsiness. She absently dropped the cigarette into the bin and left the room to return to the lobby. No one around so she gave herself that luxury of collapsing onto the couch. Just a minute passed, and her eyes became whirlpools and she was gone. She woke to thick clouds of smoke and the aggressive beeping coming from everywhere.
“Oh shit.”
Doorway to doorway, she dragged these aged, sleepy forms from room after room, until younger shouts broke in, and the red and blues started flashing at the windows, dispersing through the smoke. A firefighter caught Candace and guided her out, saying, “We’ll take it from here.”
Candace wandered on the fringe of the chaos with her eyes burning from smoke and the tears of rage. “Stupid shit,” she says to herself, “Stupid bitch.” She looked away into the darkness around her and the rage subsided, but upon glancing back at the smoking, flashing building she winced with agony. I did that, she thought. She bared her teeth and groaned and then walked away. She didn’t have a car, so she just walked down the street through the blackness.
Brandon had been planning to drive south in the next couple weeks. When she came into her place at 5 AM, she found him watching porn on TV the way old people watch the news, a practice beyond her understanding. She asked him what he thought about leaving today. Now. He said fine. She was surprised and, despite her hatred for him, thankful. In the next two hours they packed up everything, drove away, and never looked back.
— -
Brandon descends into the water thick with every kind of runoff. Don’t think about the sewage, he thinks. He wrenches open the window then resurfaces and inhales, meets Candace’s eyes as she sits patiently in the boat. He takes several deep breaths to saturate his lungs and dives again, slithering through the window and feels the floor. Carpet like algae, then it ends and feels like linoleum. The kitchen. He feels along handles pulling on them until one sticks. He gives it a yank and it swings downward. He reaches in and feels the straps of a duffle bag, which he extracts and with his lungs sucking desperately, makes his swift exit before the murky depths swirl and swallow him. His head breaks the surface with a dramatic splutter and gasp. Laughing maliciously, he says, “Fucking morons,” then brandishes the duffle bag. Candace takes it and lays it in the boat, and Brandon climbs in afterwards.
“What if something in there would, like, get ruined by water?”
“You wanna cut the whole dishwasher out, do ya?”
“I guess that would be pretty conspicuous.”
“Huh?”
“Visible.”
“Right.”
Brandon pops open a beer and drinks as Candace looks out over the suburban archipelago. There’s a dog stranded on one of the rooftops.
— -
They walk into a bar, a two-story shack plastered with ads, neon signs, and a “live girls” sign without any live girls actually on stage. There is one girl inside, questionably live, glancing at their entrance with a nervous curiosity. She wears a white tank-top and her bra pushes her breasts up into weightless domes. When they sit, Brandon orders a beer and Candace a rum and coke. Brandon pops a Viagra and washes it down. Then he walks over to the girl. Candace watches him slip her some money, fresh from the pawn-shop register, and withdraw towards the bathroom. She wonders at Brandon’s uncanny ability to identify, with nearly flawless accuracy, a whore in any given place.
Not ten minutes pass; Candace drinking, eating nuts, and watching the court-show on T.V., trying to figure out what they’re talking about, before Brandon hurries out of the bathroom, grabbing Candace roughly by the arm and dragging her back to the truck, and they drive away.
— -
The two of them sleep in the bed of the truck beneath a blue tarp that Brandon has tented above them. It crackles loudly from even the softest breeze, and now it’s pattering away under a light drizzle. There’s something mocking about the rain’s meek return after everything it’s done here.
— -
When Candace sat at mom’s hospital bed, her mother said, “I’m like a busted-up car. ‘Mem’er when we took the Honda into the shop and I had that tax rebate thinkin’ let’s fix this piece us a’ shit right up and they say, “Way’ll, the car is wrecked. Brakes are shredded, the suspension is leakin’ fluid, the… fuckin’… spark plugs is burnt out.” She hacks out a dramatic cough. “Well that’s me right now.” She nods. “’Mem’er what we did with that car? Drove it till it puffed out the dyin’ cough on the side’a the street. Then we hitched our way home.” She sips the 2-Liter Candace smuggled in for her. “Get me out of here.”
“Ma, I’m gonna go have a smoke.” She walked out and didn’t come back.
— -
Brandon stands behind the small boat, pushing it. He’s wearing his tightey-whiteys, which his hairy gut half conceals, draped over like a sack of flour. Candace sits cross legged in the boat. It clanks loudly against a lamp post.
“Watch it, Brandon.”
He grunts. Then he releases the boat, takes a crowbar out of the bed, and splashes over to the window. He thrusts the crowbar under the frame, leans down, pries it open with a crack, and climbs through. Candace looks out over the murky, half-submerged suburb. The moon gives it a ghostly complexion. She should have read the omens: her fierce diarrhea earlier that day, the cat disemboweling a rat in the back of the bar, and most obvious of all, the intestines of the cow from whose flank their burgers were made. Those intestines snaked their way into every evil form the dark spirit can take. But her bowels are empty now, the cat is finished with her prey, and the cow’s guts have been ground up and fed to a dog somewhere. Candace thinks she hears a voice. She lowers herself in the boat and waits.
When Brandon starts splashing his way out of the window, Candace peeks out from the boat and says, “I think I hear people.”
Brandon, with two bags in hand, shrugs and says, “So? Bet they’s fellow looters. If they’s cops, we just tell em we lookin’ for our cat we left behind.” Candace looks over the other side of the boat and sees two men approaching. One of them has something propped over his shoulder. The other man calls out to them, “Hey, open season out here, huh?” Brandon comes around the boat. The man continues, “Us types’ve always lived by the law of the jungle. Now the sky’s dropped the jungle right on top of us.”
Brandon doesn’t say anything.
“Y’all have a good haul?” he continues. The man is bearded and bald, with camouflage waders and a fishing vest.
“We do alright.” It’s now clear, the moonlight catching the metal, that it’s a shotgun on his shoulder. The men draw closer. The pair might as well be twins, both very blandly male.
“Y’all got guns?” the man asks.
Brandon doesn’t respond for a second too long. One has leaned on the side of the boat, looking inside.
Brandon starts, “Yeah-”
“No you don’t,” the man cuts him off. “Well then, because of this tactical oversight, we will be relieving you of your night’s collection.”
“The fuck…”
“Now don’t get sore. Stolen goods is stolen goods.” The man starts lifting things out of the boat, stuffing them inside the large camping backpack he’s taken off his back. When the pack is full, he slings it back on his shoulders. “Well folks, I hope the rest of your evening is more productive. Invest in those second amendment rights or we won’t be the last to get ya like this. That’s one of the laws out here.”
“Pig fucker,” Brandon mutters. Candace feels the hot blood stirring in her brother, his veins swelling with rage, skin reddening, breath heavy. When the men turn their backs, Brandon submerges, silently, scarcely a stir in the water. She lifts her eyes to watch the two men walking away, who betray a little fear with quick glances behind them. Their splashes and sloshes fade as they go. A helicopter chops by overhead, stirring the quiet over the water, and after it passes, the man with the shotgun screams. He collapses into the water. The man with the backpack steps back and draws a pistol that was holstered under his shoulder and aims at the black water. Then a break in the surface and a gasp, three quick gun shots and quiet, panting, then another scream. The man with the pistol is taken by the water and then quiet. Candace twists around, primes the boat engine, and yanks the rip cord. After the second pull it rumbles, and she motors towards the ripples of the struggle. Brandon’s head bursts into sight with a roaring, agonized gasp, then a moan. As Candace approaches, it looks like his cheek has been torn off. He throws the backpack and other bags into the boat, followed by a shotgun, then tries to crawl in, rasping and sputtering, blood and spit leaking from his mangled face. Candace leans forward and pulls him in, his heavy body thudding inside. Then Candace drives them away. Brandon has his hand pressed to the side of his neck, just past his cheek. He grunts and moans, laying on his side in the boat. His moans fade beneath the sound of the engine. Candace looks at the dark trees passing by, trees that have probably never been happier, trunks deep in muddy, nutritious water. The small star-like lights of a plane pass overhead. Her brother has stopped moving. She stops the engine and the boat coasts a few feet as she leans forward and inspects him. His hand has slid away from the exit wound on his neck, where blood has trailed down his shoulders. She presses her hand deep into his fleshy neck to feel for a pulse, then to his wrist, where it lies quiet and limp. Candace sighs and sits back, waiting in silence for several minutes. Another helicopter goes chopping through the sky, ending the dream. Candace hooks her arms under her brother and pushes him out of the boat, splashing into the water, making the boat rock violently. She returns to the engine and starts it up with a hard yank, driving the boat back to the truck.
— -
Mom has taken to positioning her two gold fillings a foot apart like goal posts and flicking her BB, trying to make it through the goal. She sets the goal about twenty paces from herself, locks her middle finger behind her thumb and releases, sending the BB rolling across the void surface. It curves slightly and clicks against one of the fillings, rolling away. “I’m callin’ it, I’m callin’ it. It went in. Fuck y’all, it went in,” she says to nobody. She stands up and starts walking to the goal when she feels a presence. She turns around and sees her daughter standing in her void. Candace looks through her.
“Hey mom.” Candace stops, as if asking herself what she’s doing. Then she goes on, “Brandon’s dead. Thought I should tell you. Maybe you know already. I don’t know how it works where you are.” Candace stops talking. Her mother takes a few steps towards the apparition.
“I’m sorry about the hospital. That was a dick move. Anyway, I’m going to go to the Midwest, I think. Or maybe Colorado. I hear Denver’s gonna have a lot of medicine-type opportunities. Maybe I can get in on the ground floor. So that’s it.” Candace drops her head and begins to turn. Then she stops and says, “Oh, also, fuck butterflies. It’s dogs now. No more of that butterfly bullshit.”
