A Wickedness

by Daniel David Froid

Why this sense of frailty in the face of catastrophe? Why this pathetic, shambling way in which I go to meet it, helpless and weak, ready, even eager, to open the door and permit it to approach, trusting it just as I would any aging relative, neither dear nor warmly regarded, never that, but familiar from years of long acquaintance and a loose familial resemblance? It is true that catastrophe runs in my blood or, at least, that this taste and talent for it, tendency or proclivity or preference, courses within it. We do not know how to do it—how to live—and never have, but we know how to contrive spectacular failures; and, therefore, when catastrophe knocks at our door we welcome it in, perhaps even embrace it, ask where it’s been all these years and how it’s been faring. And even those few of us who have managed to effect an escape from that town, to desert the others, must always confront the fact that any success we might seize hold of for ourselves—when success is calculated chiefly as a matter of distance—will ever contend with this desire to destroy it—the success—or to see it destroyed, and to wallow in defeat, to face the moment when we think, with a sigh of relief, Here it comes: the moment when it all comes crashing down at last, we who knew we were always kidding ourselves, anyway, that we could never get far from that town and our destiny there, given that most of us end up throttled one way or another and stuck once more; throttled and worse. Sometimes much worse, as in mutilated, destroyed, as in the fate of my cousin and my parents. Imagine: three bodies, two cars, one collision, one shared fate. All three of them dying in the very same crash, instigated by that wicked fool I am forced to claim as blood but nothing more, but whose death at least offers some faint succor, though the succor sours when mixed with the nastiness I cannot help but conjure in my mind, the bodies crushed to pulp, to waste that was for a brief time human, and the minds zapped to nothing. He the instigator, already not much more than nothing, had found a method of making a permanent mark just before his mind burned out for good. I used to wonder whether, when it happened, even from a thousand miles away, I would feel some degree of relief as of a burden eased; feel the world shift just a little, the fulcrum of its moral lever quivering as it moved a smidgen toward the good because he was not in it—not in the world. But, as it happened, the world could not shake him so easily, and I would have to gulp my share of sorrow soon enough.

I was dancing on the precipice and knew it, all the time. Always that edge loomed down which I would tumble, never to return. Everything I do feels just in time; everything I work for and earn through my work, by my own hands and mind, feels hard-won, as though desperately wrenched from the claws of some begrudging villain who would rather see me burn than sleep the length of a single night in peace. The vision of my long journey home suggested katabasis—but no hero I, who would lower myself into the frightful black depths and emerge with some nugget of knowledge, wrested from the preternatural forces that reside there. No. I could picture myself, just, as a helpful shade in a real hero’s journey, some poor sap who never made it out, there to offer an amusing tale or bit of timely guidance such as I will never obtain for myself. It felt, therefore, like things were slipping. And I wished to slip away somehow, shuck all duty or obligation, but naturally that would not prove possible. I would go back, would descend and face the wretchedness, bury my parents, perhaps dance on Tray’s grave for good measure. But even if I did, I believed that he would not be exorcised; he would linger on inside me. The memories would not disappear. And where do wickedness and worthlessness go, anyway? He was worthless, as perhaps we all were—and trashy, too. It is in, or comprises, our blood. Trashiness is more than anything a state of mind: meanness or coarseness of the heart, the inability to peer very far beyond the meager confines where one’s spirit resides—a spiritual condition, whatever the external trappings—and the tendency to seize whatever one comes across and yank it down to one’s own lowly level. Trash is as trash does: we were and did. But Tray surpassed us all, Tray who peered out at the world with a permanent look of sullen resentment, a vicious glare; who started fights regardless of whether he could win them; who devoted himself to nobody but various species of the bottle; who badly stank, something like old pennies. All the world, for him, amounted to no more than a series of inconvenient encounters, getting in the way of what he really wanted to do, whatever that was, though it was mostly no good, villainous, cruel, if not outright criminal. My memories of him arise in my mind, not of my volition, playing out like a video I’d rather not watch—a snuff film—and there he is, scowling above the ratty neck of a shirt worn soft, emblazoned with a superhero’s visage, and he scowls until he doesn’t, lit up, animated or possessed by a demonic thought, which might have been less than a thought, just an impulse to do something pointlessly nasty. He pulled up strangers’ flowers, smashed mailboxes and yard decorations, tried to hunt and hurt whatever children or animals he came across. A predatory canniness in him would detect whatever creatures roamed nearby—a cat’s tail to yank, a dog’s ears to pull—and evade them when necessary; no cat’s scratches or dog’s bites ever deterred him. Habitually, he would grin at us cousins and try to marshal us to follow and obey some new whim or, at the least, to bear witness to it. He wanted witnesses, always. And so, when I woke up the morning after my parents were gone, before I even heard the news, I could detect him in the air: close, bodily odor and aura of menace. I woke up to an air suffused with him and knew its source. Though I cast my gaze around and searched for physical signs, I found none. What is a specter that cannot be seen, an apparition sans appearance? Call it delusion, but I knew it was not. He was with me and followed me throughout the day, in the kitchen and the bathroom and the living room, as I made my coffee and dressed and left for work. The feeling never abated, compelling subtle glances over the shoulder and abrupt pauses in the middle of the sidewalk. But this was not paranoia. I was entrenched within a thick sludge of menace, thick enough to be scooped up or carved—the rancid aspic of a posthumous Tray.

Tray was haunted by ghosts of his own. I hadn’t seen him in years, but I’d heard how he worsened, heard of constant arrests—for attempted thefts of beer and tawdry junk, for drunkenness in public, for getting into fights—yet he always persisted in that wretched town. Nothing good happens there, but everything bad does, everything that is within the scope of humanity to do that is cruel—cruelty is, after all, at base, the only bad thing—but some places are like that, cursed and stranded moral islands where strangers are unwelcome and uninterested and where lost souls get pickled in their own obscure miseries and sins. (There was, for instance, the former owner of the gas station, arrested with his wife a few years back for. Well I remember his face, suspicious and sallow, as it studied me whenever I used to stop there, judging me and my every move; while he stood, ringing up my gas, he had in the back of his mind, and in his home’s basement, a scrawny child growing ever more so, languishing for reasons unknown except to him and his wife, for they were not poor but malicious. Or there was the preacher, that harbinger of misery, who descended on the town and accused everyone around him of evil, who besought his acolytes to repent and pay, and pay, and pay, and who, it turned out, robbed them all blind. I could go on ad infinitum.) This town was, as such, Tray’s rightful home. He held down jobs of an unclear nature, maintained or inhabited a hovel of a home. All the time, I imagined, the creatures he destroyed trailed in his wake, spectral parade of bugs, birds, rodents, and cats. Yes, behind him marched the parade of all the living things whose vivacity offended him, which he needed to destroy. As a child, he squashed bugs and mice; later, he set traps for larger prey; as a man, he pursued who knows what quarry. There was, I would come to believe, a kind of logic in his persistence after death. He clung to life, as seemingly indestructible as a roach, even as he declared himself life’s arbiter. I even wonder if he did it on purpose just to see if he could: rammed his car into another to exert his mastery over man and machine. Is that too grandiose for Tray? I don’t think so. In death his body went up in a fearsome fire, and his sick mind flamed out, too, but his presence, the malice he comprised, could not so easily be doused. He would not succumb to oblivion. Pulsing through the air, wending his way to where I lay in ignorance, he found his new target. Drifting dazed and full of cresting dread, I knew something had happened, knew but could not quite articulate it. An entire day passed like this before the call came to tell me that my parents were dead. It was Aunt Letty who called, her voice croaking and quavering, burdened by the weight of what she had to say. She said his name, too—Tray—and the spectral cloud that enwrapped me solidified for just a moment. The knowledge coursed over me as though I had set my own skin on fire, and I saw him and knew him and knew he had called me back home. At that point, I could not help but see him. There he lurked in my peripheral vision, unrelenting but unreachable. When I tried to look at him head on, he leaped out of sight somewhere. I knew that I would have to go home, arrange the funeral, undertake all the innumerable details of twin deaths. All the while, as I thought and planned and wished very fruitlessly for things to be otherwise, I knew he was there and smiling a smile first etched in my memory long ago. I was familiar with his nature, but now I was coming to know it further.

On the day when I saw what he was, he succeeded in his heart’s desire: to obtain a witness. We had gathered at Aunt Letty’s, where she lived just down the road from my parents. Tray, not her child, was staying for a long weekend. The adults, eager as ever to cast us outside so they could exchange their gossip in peace, bore palpable looks of relief when they realized that Tray wished to play outside, that he would lead his cousin in something, anything, that might get us out of the house. Go play! They all chimed. Go out and play with Tray! We did, the two of us—me sallow and weak, Tray loud and bullying—moving out like fresh-faced troops dreading our first taste of war, though it was certainly true that I had tasted this particular flavor of conflict before, knew how acrid, how fully repugnant, it could be. We went out, and Tray seemed delighted and a little proud to be leading me on a march, as if he’d achieved something real rather than having served as the convenient conduit for the grown-ups’ exasperation, as well as its release. Still, I felt forced to humor him with great reluctance. What choice did I have but to stride alongside Aunt Letty’s house, situated on one edge of a large and largely unused acreage in the middle of nowhere, on this chilly, damp, and foggy afternoon? The land was strewn with sagging old buildings, the remains of farming operations abandoned years before. Here, for instance, a barn eased slowly earthward, filled with moldering hay and damp wood. I wonder now what precisely Tray’s aim was that day, whether he knew what he wanted and what he planned to do, and I cannot help but think he did, following a plan that shone in his mind like a jewel, bright and graspable. Tray’s life was like that, his mind was like that, held hostage by increasingly complex (and as it happened disturbing) impulses. His background was of the kind we all shared, dim and grim, pathetically full like all of ours of assorted indignities. I felt nothing for him, nothing in the way of sympathy or pity (and even less now, even now that he’s dead and more—or less—than that, a lump in a hole in the ground and the menacing aspic that entraps me). His leaving for good is the fate I have longed to witness since the day in question, when Tray led the two of us on a march across Aunt Letty’s acreage, around the ruined chicken coop whose nearer side had been plundered by weather—wind and all it carried—and whose walls were covered in dirt and mold and more, where Tray drew to a halt and let the plot unfurl.

There, inside the chicken coop, Tray stopped his marching—and it was a very silly-looking march, arms tucked close to his torso and elbows and ass sticking out, like a pose he had seen in a cartoon and believed to be funny—and drew his limbs closer together and looked at me with a grin, a large and crooked smile that, paired with those eyes, could not help but chill me. We stood there, having trod on hay and shit and mud, covering our noses or breathing through our mouths. It was a cold day, but our exertion had begun to make us sweat. I watched as Tray approached the wreckage of collapsed beams and piles of wood dragged from elsewhere on the lot and left here for some reason, and he scrambled across it. Tray had evidently become highly familiar with the pile, or he had a startling, intuitive awareness of his body, his movements precise, attuned to which pieces of wood would give way and which support him, as he climbed up the pile, moving fast, not allowing his weight to settle for long in any spot that might give way—his agility impressed me as I stood near the doorway, wondering what I might be in for, what Tray had in mind—until he reached a high point in one corner of the building, close to the eaves and exposed to the sky, where, with a little more effort, he could have grabbed hold of the hole’s small perimeter and pulled himself onto the roof. The grayness peaked through that hole, meekly illuminating Tray as he cried “Here!” and stuck a hand above his head. The hand shot out into a shadowy crevice and lifted something out with care. He retrieved a small nest from the eaves of the building, its twigs extending not far past the palm of his hand—retrieved it from where a watchful, wary, canny mother bird had constructed a secluded home for four chirping and naked pink nestlings. So tiny they were, unused to the world and their physical trappings within it, bobble-headed and ugly in a tender sort of way, as they chirped and gazed unseeingly around them, at Tray, at the sky, and at us down below. And as he clambered down from his perch, nest in hand, Tray continued to look at me, to look out from those eyes that glowed with something horrid. I felt, then, too cowardly to lock eyes for long. An intimation of dread caused a prickling on my skin. I knew that it was there: that is to say, a darkness loomed just ahead of us, and it was coming from Tray, Tray had called it forth, as a sorcerer might summon a demon. Some wicked people have made of their wickedness not art but sport: a game, with rules and winners and losers, points to earn according to some unfathomable calculation. Artless but deliberate, he bade it, whatever it was, come forth. It was not seductive or appealing, what he did: it was a matter of wishing to see a little farther into the dark or to retrieve something from it. The room was airless, everything stank, I felt dirty and sick and uncertain of what was to come, if certain that something was coming, and reluctant to see what it was, and yet I did not budge, and why? I, Tray’s unwilling crony, henchman to his designs, remained still. I could have run back to the house, tattled, asked for help, and someone would surely have sprung to action, gathered us inside, scolded Tray—right? Yet I was transfixed, for something had begun before we knew it truly had, and it was over before we’d fully grasped it. Had I somehow foreseen the next ten minutes, I would surely have run, have spoken up or done something—or so will I plead until my body gives up and the neurons in my brain cease their firing. Something arose from Tray, whether his own ill will or something more elusive and harder to explain. Something was underway, and I knew it, just as I have come to know it now, so many years later.

Tray raised the nest high above his head like a prize trophy—let us call it the only prize he ever won, bestowed by him upon himself—and told us that he wanted to play a new game. I asked him what the game involved, and he shrugged, smirked, said that I would see. He moved again, back on the march, though this time he walked with shuffling feet and elbows drawn inward, cradling the goods with what a distant spectator might have taken for touching care and sensitivity. We snaked along the coop and the barn until we found ourselves on the far side of the latter, at a section of the yard that separated us from the house. In other words, we could not be seen from the windows, here in the pale midday gray, the sun wrapped in thick gauzy clouds, and nor could we see the windows or our parents’ silhouettes within them. We had traded Aunt Letty’s for a wilder, more isolated region. The grass was taller and less maintained than that near the house, extending past our ankles, and here and there were clumpy lumps of mud. Tray lowered the nest to the earth—in a patch of grass between two pockmarks, one of which looked especially wet, a small and shallow pool—first stomping a couple of times to flatten the grass, all the while moving very slowly, each movement of his body, of waist and wrists and fingers, highly exaggerated, as though he were miming the action and it was my task to guess what he was doing. And then he looked at me, eyes moving from the top of my head to my feet, wishing to record my full reaction, to preserve it in his memory. Watch this, he said and picked up one of the tiny pink nestlings and palmed it, and then he rotated to face the side of the barn, and he threw it. He threw the bird against the side of the barn, and it made a soft low thud as it hit the building and fell to the earth, vanishing somewhere in a mud puddle ringed by tall grass. I cried out at once, in alarm, and now, I think, how stupid could I be; had I really had no idea that that was what he might do? When it happened—when the frail clump of unfeathered skin smacked the building—a shift had already taken place, and both of us felt it and knew that he had brought it about. Tray smiled and gave out a whoop and, presumably, contemplated picking up another baby bird, but he did not move further. His body froze, locked in indecision for the first time that day, he who never failed to decide to follow the dark lure of the impulses within him—yes, even he refused to proceed. For the air had thickened; it became somehow harder to breathe, as though smoke had begun to infiltrate my nose and lungs. I noticed a faint shimmer, as in extreme heat, though the day remained cold and damp. The scent changed, deepened to something richer than mold and dried shit and human sweat. My eyes flickered downward, somewhere in the bird’s vicinity, and though it remained invisible in its sodden grave the patch of mud caught my eye: it had heated up, it was boiling, and little bubbles of mud sputtered up from the hole and landed on the grass. All around us manifested signs of an intense but largely imperceptible sort of heat. It is possible, even likely, that now I err in my description, that I was or am mistaken, but I have nothing to offer but my sense memories—of a bright rich stink and shimmering air and bubbling mud while we hesitated, unsure what to do or whether we should flee the scene. And all of this was more than the bird, and it was more than Tray, or, rather, it was that Tray’s destruction of the bird was a conduit, evil, yes of course, but also merely the means by which the shift had occurred and by which something traveled from its home to that miserable patch of land. Tray had wished for—what? My approval, giggling conspiratorial grins, clapping of hands and cheers of amazement and delight for, after all, he was putting on a show for me his audience, and he wanted me to recognize it and join in on the fun. Yet this thing he had invited in had spoiled the mood, he now saw. Both faces, mine and his, were now stricken with misery and unease, and he knew it, and he knew obscurely that he had caused it or set it in motion. The mud continued to bubble, and a hot gob struck me in the arm, and I cried aloud in pain. We both of us leaped back, but we did not leave, rapt—no, held in place. The mud grew louder now; it gurgled; and mud gushed from the hole like blood from a mortal wound. The difference, the hard line that divides Tray from me, lies in what he did next, for he could have stopped, turned around, showed some hint of awareness of what was going on, or contrition, even if none could understand it, but it was here, now, the decisive moment, when he realized what had happened and found the glee lodged deep within it. Smiling, he looked at the nest he still held and commanded me to try. 

My memory of him is his asking me to try, to share in what he did and what he was. And my memory records my steadfast refusal. He might well have dove into that little well of mud and asked me to follow him there, but I balked and held my ground. I found the guts at last to begin to move. I began to run from Tray. I would not indulge him further. Outraged at being left alone, he called out to me. He tossed my name into the wind, where it drifted off to nothing. His face screwed up in anger is my last real image of him, which I’ve carried with me all these years. Whatever he registered in that moment will never be revealed to me, but he knew that something was there, another presence between us, that he had summoned forth. He had wished to join it but had wished, too, not to face it alone. It pained him that I would not. I believe he clung to it nonetheless, though whether he merely honed his own wickedness or whether he really did awaken something else, something that cannot be fathomed, is beyond me. It is a question I have no interest in pondering. If that moment left me with anything, it was the ability to maintain my refusal, though I would not call it courage. Call it a certain drive or fortitude born of desperation, but the fortitude stuck. From that point, I rejected him altogether, would not face him at all, no matter the circumstances. I refused to go to family birthdays, holiday gatherings, if Tray would be present. If I encountered him anywhere, at someone’s house or in the drugstore, I turned around and calmly departed. And naturally this refusal dug at him, disturbed him. Tray must have seethed at it. Perhaps I even formed a sort of mental specter, eating away at him, so that he wished ultimately to wreak revenge upon me. Afterward, the mean machinations of his mind, shorn of a body from a violent death, aimlessly roved through the fetid air above his corpse and turned naturally to his faraway tormentor, still living, and fixed upon him—that is to say, upon me—as the natural object for his loathsome work.

And now here I am, come back to face it, the wretchedness of my origin and my loathing for it, all because my reckless, feckless cousin destroyed himself and my parents in a car crash. Though I know my feelings now, I wonder if they will ever change, if they will change when I face them in their graves, the three of them or, rather, the two of them: for I will never gaze at his grave so long as I can help it. A deep certainty has lodged in me that says no flicker of pity shall ever alight in me for my loathsome cousin Tray, no matter whether it ought to be so. That old malice lingered in him, or he served as its avatar; over the course of twenty-odd years he lived with it, and now that he is dead the world should rejoice that less badness flourishes within it. But the place is still here. The family remains. The catastrophe that is our trademark, our birthright, will not die. And I have come to meet it head-on. Naturally, I would be forced to come back here, where I never would have come unless some good reason bade me, and I suppose these reasons were good or, rather, good enough (to mourn, to pay respects, to cling to and confront an impending sense of doom and an ever-present—and now, I know, never-dying—sense of guilt, buoyed by a prickling devotion to my own unhappiness), good enough for me to pull myself away from life and toward the airport, ticket in hand, to board the plane and fly home to meet my doom. En route, Tray did not make himself seen—again, I could not spy the specter. Yet the scent of dirty pennies filled my nose, my mood remained low, and I moved as if submerged or weighed down, But I was! In town, I drove to Aunt Letty’s, acknowledged her solemnly, ate her stale cookies and looked at the ceiling. Here, he made an appearance. We sat in sad silence as Tray whirled around behind me. He did not or could not touch us, but he seemed to delight in an obscene sort of flailing. In my vision’s dim corners, he thrashed. We did not mention him at all.

Later, I wended my way to my parents’ house, where I looked among their things. All the stuff that gave their lives texture—coffee pot, ratty old couch, stacks of magazines on the floor—now simply trash. I tidied their kitchen. I swept their floors. I emptied their mailbox. What else was there to do? Later, in my rental car, I drove through the empty streets. The shuttered restaurants along the main drag, the seedy hotel, the little hardware store that this year celebrated—according to a sign near the door—its fiftieth year in business let me know I was truly here. It is a fact that my mere coming back is the catastrophe, sign I will never be able to run away from home for good. Yes, home, the place of my origin, putrid and protean puddle out of which my kind crawled, us puddle-scum, once long ago when the world had turned a blind eye to its own misbegotten doings, or to the misbegotten doings that flourished across its surface and that it, or some foolish god, had chosen for a time to ignore. Part of me fears I will never leave now that I’m back and that I will never shake off Tray. How can I? How can I step out of his miasmatic grip—his or that of this site of my origins? And so I do just what I knew I would, feeling that sense of resignation overcome me as catastrophe offers its overwhelming embrace. Here I am: I’m home.

Daniel David Froid is the author of My Home Is Not There (Bottlecap Press). His stories appear in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Black Warrior Review, Post Road, and elsewhere. He lives in Arizona.