The rain, p.1
The Rain, page 1
THE RAIN
PAUL NEUHAUS
1
THE RAIN
I didn’t speak for most of the ride into the North Georgia mountains. I couldn’t. It would’ve messed up my whole pattern. The pattern I’d created by accident, and also not by accident.
Daniel knew the deal, but, after two and a half years, he still didn’t understand it. Where it came from. How to navigate it. How could he, since there was no obvious logic? I was the way I was, and he was the way he was. I was an unstoppable force, and he was a movable object. I’m not a sociopath—at least I like to think I’m not—but, back then, I was so convinced no one could love me that I had to test anyone who dared try. A test with no victory conditions. A tunnel with no light at the end.
If I may do some victim blaming… He should have learned his lesson. Should have realized I was exactly the wrong person for him. Opposites supposedly attract, and sometimes one opposite eats the other.
The ride was intensely boring. Have you seen pine trees? Have you seen red-clay earth? Then you know what Georgia is all about. I suggest you skip it.
I was crammed into the passenger seat with my legs up. I knew what that did to him, seeing my bare legs. (I’m a tall girl—five foot nine—and he was a leg man.) I kept my legs smooth and tan. Looking back now, I’m sure my leg maintenance was part of The Pattern. Getting him hard, but wanting nothing to do with him physically. Why did I tease him with my legs? Why was I going with him to our lover’s hideaway? Why did he play along in our dance of neuroses? Why did he view it as a twisted kind of foreplay?
The Pattern. Daniel was just as much a part of it as I was, although he probably never thought about it consciously. Talk about your Stockholm Syndrome.
I could feel him looking at my hair. Before I left, Leigh, my sister, gave me French braids. “Don’t you want to look good for Daniel?” she’d said. Sometimes I did. Most of the time, I didn’t. Since I rarely prettied myself, he was probably thinking it was a good sign—despite my silence.
It took him a while to say the words. The most anodyne phrase he could think of to avoid any tripwires. “Your hair looks nice.”
My neck was turned to the side with my head resting against the passenger-side window. I straightened not because I wanted to engage but because I was growing sore. “What?” I said, though I’d heard him just fine.
“I said, ‘Your hair looks nice.’”
“Okay,” I replied, putting my bare feet on the dashboard and scootching further into my seat. I knew he didn’t like me putting my feet on the dash. He’d said it many times. (Something about it being unsanitary.) I looked forward and stared at a fixed point in front of the car.
The only thing I thought about was the thick cloud layer. The way the clouds looked, moving as if in Time-lapse. It was definitely going to rain.
Daniel sighed, frustrated by his lack of headway—and probably by my feet on the dashboard. “Did you put those in yourself, or did Leigh help you?”
“Leigh.”
“What do you call it?”
“Hair.”
He shifted his weight to his other hip and tugged at the waistband of his jeans. The Levi Strauss Company did not make erection-friendly garments. I almost felt sorry for him. He laughed. Not a humorous laugh, but a laugh that said, Here I am, and I don’t know what to do with myself. Like always.
I forgot he was there. My brain was still locked onto an invisible point in front of the car. The clouds rolled in my peripheral vision.
I helped him unload the trunk without being asked. I’d softened during the last leg of the drive. Being as rigid as I can be gets exhausting. Hardening and softening, hardening and softening. The Pattern at its most basic level.
The cabin was…nice. It’d come to him through his family. After his dad died. I had no stake in it all. Like the car, and like our apartment in Atlanta. I was still working on my BS in Psychology. A seven-year and seemingly endless process.
Thankfully, no woodland creatures had squatted somewhere in the cabin’s nooks and crannies. Not like last time when some possums made their home in a woodpile on the property. If you’ve never seen a possum, they’re foul little creatures with evil eyes and teeth and a tail like a long worm. Really nasty. I wouldn’t go anywhere near the house until Daniel drove them off. He said I should have been more neighborly. Maybe sent a bouquet to our new possum neighbors. No. Possums can fuck all the way off.
The little house’s front yard had no grass. Red Georgia clay. Pine trees on the other three sides, coming very near the building. Pine trees across the road. Pine trees and red mud: The Georgia stereotype. There were no other houses nearby. We really were in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. The closest outpost of civilization was a gas station eight miles down the mountain. I say “mountain”… Not a pretty mountain. None of the mountains were pretty. Not like the ones in Utah or Colorado. Our mountains were nothing but hard gray stone, boring as hell.
The sky grew darker, despite it being late afternoon. I knew what Daniel was thinking. He was thinking it would rain all weekend and he’d be stuck inside with The Thing That Wouldn’t Talk. He’d used the phrase a time or two, and it’s not like he was out of line. Though he so rarely had the stones to bite back. Again, The Pattern.
“Come on,” he said, a bag of groceries in one hand and charcoal briquettes in the other. “Let’s see if we can avoid getting caught in this.”
We entered the house through the front door, leaving my purse, his wallet, and his keys on the little table just inside.
I leaned against the sink, tossing a salad. I’d taken the braids out of my hair and let it fall onto my shoulders in whatever way it wanted. You’d think me being unkempt would dull Daniel’s sexual feelings, but he claimed to like me in what he called my “natural state.” Further proof, as far as I was concerned, that he was not bright. His bar was as low as his self-esteem.
But I had softened. And who knew how long it would last before Angry Kate returned. I could tell Daniel had picked up on it, and he was weighing his options. The smart thing to do would’ve been to start the grill and cook before the rain came, but he could be very, very focused when he wanted sex. Even though getting sex was often a minefield. Such a minefield, it couldn’t possibly be worth it, but again, low bar.
He set his briquettes by the sliding glass door to the patio. The die had been cast. Before I knew it, he was behind me, lifting the hair from behind my neck and kissing me there.
It wasn’t unpleasant. I’m only human. Sometimes.
I kept pulling clumps off the head of iceberg as he slid a hand under my shirt. My bras fasten in the front. He popped the clasp and cupped my breast with his right hand, taking my nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Squeezing gently.
I moaned.
You can’t keep someone on the hook with just the stick. There has to be some carrot, too.
I let him undress me in the kitchen, then he picked me up, carrying me to the comparatively soft carpet in the living room. He lay me down, kissing my body as he fumbled with his Levi’s. He liked to give me an orgasm before he fucked me. “Covering his bases,” he called it. He went down on me, a thing, I must confess, he was good at.
After I came, with his pants half-down, he entered me.
Afterward, I didn’t say anything about the fluid leaking out of my vagina. I despised the sensation, but mentioning it made Daniel self-conscious. I didn’t mention it because it wasn’t time yet for more stick.
He wasn’t asleep. Of course, he wasn’t asleep. He had a supernatural sense of when I was awake. Whenever I opened my eyes, there he’d be, staring at me. Some girls might’ve thought that was romantic. I mostly thought it was creepy. My own live-in stalker.
His arm was draped over my body, his arm pressing my crucifix into my chest. It hurt. I pushed his arm away, and he grunted. He was warm against me, but not warm enough. “Daniel? Make me a fire.”
He hesitated. He always ran hotter than I did. He didn’t want to make me a fire, but he would anyway. Chivalry is not dead. The Pattern marches merrily on.
He peeled himself away from me (we were bound by our mutual sweat) and rolled through the gathering dark to the stone fireplace. I picked up the crucifix and moved it next to the divot it had made on my chest. I wore the necklace as a concession to my Catholic mother, which was weird since she’d retired to Boca Raton years earlier. It was gold and it was pretty, but I hadn’t believed in Our Father Who Art in Heaven since I was seven or eight years old.
The rack of wood on the hearth was still mostly loaded from the last time we were there. Daniel got the fire going quickly, and the orange light made shadows from the furniture. He put the box of long matches down next to the wood rack and pointed at his pubic hair. “One of these days, I’m gonna catch a spark.”
That struck me funny. The thought of him immolating his own genitals. It wasn’t at all hard to picture.
He grinned and crawled back to me. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d finally be free of Big Jim and the Twins.”
I giggled. “I’m sorry. It’s funny.”
“Is it? Losing your unmentionables in a five-alarm is hilarious to you?” He reached over and flicked my nipple, punishing his imagined pain with very real pain for me.
“Ow!” I said, smacking away his hand. I made a bra with my hands. I’m certain he found this cute. It was cute
The playfulness led to a second round of intercourse. Sometimes I can go with the flow.
Like normal people.
A while later—I
I took down the platter we used for meat and laid out a steak for him and a chicken breast for me, making sure they didn’t touch. By the time I spiced them, Daniel had the grill going and claimed them.
He was mostly through cooking the protein when the sky broke and dumped its contents onto him. He yelped, and his coals went out instantly. He collected the chicken and the steak with tongs and rushed inside. He looked like he’d fallen into a river as he placed the wet meat onto the counter. Grumbling, he grabbed a towel from the downstairs bathroom and wiped his body and hair.
I only ate salad. I didn’t like the way the rain had smeared the grill marks on my chicken. Daniel was annoyed I didn’t eat it since he’d braved a monsoon to cook it. He didn’t say anything.
Instead, he complained about the rain throughout the meal, saying it had hurt him, almost like it’d been hail rather than liquid water. I believed him based on the continued ferocity of the downpour. He rubbed his face and torso.
We didn’t have a TV or any board games. This was before broadband internet and portable tablets and phones. We were both beat. Me from the sex and he from his encounter with Mother Nature. We decided to call it a night at seven-thirty.
The moon shone through a thick cloud layer, making the light in our bedroom diffuse. The storm had lessened, but I could hear rain tinkling on the roof. It was going to last all weekend. Daniel really would be cooped up with the Thing That Wouldn’t Talk.
It was weird that I was awake and Daniel wasn’t. Being doused had taken a lot out of him. Even though he was asleep, he still rubbed at his face and body. I could see he’d broken out in a rash. Weird. We were miles away from any industry. Acid rain seemed unlikely. I wanted a closer look, so I turned on my bedside lamp.
Daniel spooked me when he sat upright and gasped. His voice didn’t have a trace of grogginess, but it did have outrage. “What the hell’re you doing?!” he said.
I clutched at my chest. “Don’t do that! Goddam!” Despite the shock, I leaned toward him, examining his skin. My eyes were still acclimating to the stronger yellow light. The rash was unmistakable. It wasn’t just a rash. It was more like welts. “I wanted to see something,” I said. “Go look at yourself.”
“What?” He scratched at his cheek, and I batted his hand down. I was afraid he was going to make himself bleed, maybe make some scars.
I laid the back of my hand on his cheek, and he recoiled as if I’d touched him with ice. “You’ve got a rash. It looks pretty bad.”
He touched his face, then lay his forearms in his lap, rolling them. They were also covered with red blotches on both sides. It was weird because he was broken out in places the rain hadn’t touched. I didn’t think that was the way a rash was supposed to work. The welts looked more like a sickness, the result of a fever, maybe. I’m no doctor.
“How did you get poison ivy already?” I asked him, grasping at straws. “We just got here, and it was raining.”
He poked at his abdomen and winced. The welts were there too, under his pajama top. “It’s not poison ivy.”
“How do you know? Go look at it.”
He got out of bed and went to the master bath. The light came on in there briefly, then went out. While he was gone, I checked his side of the bed, looking for I-don’t-know-what. Residue? There wasn’t any.
He came back and resumed his place in the bed, annoyed at being made to get up.
“What is it?” I said, moving away from him, sitting up straight.
“Not poison ivy.”
“Okay, but what is it?”
Daniel glared at me, tired of the third degree. “I failed out of dermatology school.”
Okay, whatever. If he wanted to suffer, he could suffer. (I guess I didn’t have the market cornered on petulance.) I flipped off the lamp on my nightstand. “It better not be contagious. Maybe you shouldn’t touch me for a while.”
In the near-dark, I heard him roll over and mutter, “Just the excuse you’ve been looking for.”
I love to sleep, and it bugs me when I can’t. At first, it was the moonlight and the quiet (were there really no woodland creatures or crickets out?). Then a series of noises broke the quiet. Repeating noises, at five-minute intervals.
Thanks to the repetition, I knew it wasn’t woodland creatures. Unless woodland creatures had grown a sense of rhythm. The sounds were also organic; otherwise, I would have thought it was a machine.
Part of me wanted to wake up Daniel, but that kind of girliness isn’t in my nature. Besides, I’m nearly as tall as he was and probably as strong. Plus, he’d just complain about me not wanting him to touch me, and that song could wait.
For a while, I listened. The sequence was this: A sick thump, like a melon dropped on the ground; a rustle like a dog shaking lake water from its fur; then six raspy coughs.
Again and again. In that exact order, every five minutes.
I slid the covers off of me and swung my legs out of the bed. I grabbed my robe and, standing, I put it on. (Back in those days, I slept nude—which Daniel said was entrapment.)
I went down the hall, past the spare bedroom we didn’t use, and descended the short staircase to the lower floor. I was jittery. The sounds got louder as I approached the sliding glass door in the living room.
There was something outside.
Somethings.
The tree line came almost to the back of the house. On the red clay that made up the narrow backyard, there were things.
Creatures.
No two were the same. They were like combinations of animals that had no business being combined. Pieces of animals I knew spliced with others I didn’t. A catastrophe at the genetics lab.
Nearest the glass door was a lump of throbbing flesh the size of a Christmas goose. Rolling on the ground with vestigial limbs like wings and the arms and hands of human infants. It propelled itself with awkward corkscrew motions. A shiny membrane shot through with thick white veins.
Under the film, it looked like a fetal pig with shiny red eyes.
I recoiled, stifling a scream with my hand. Revulsion filled me—along with an instinctual need to kill the thing.
But there was no way I was going out there. The pig-thing wasn’t alone. Not at all. So many of them, each a unique obscenity. And the creatures weren’t the only thing assaulting my sense of the world. Football-sized toadstools covered the clay and ran up and down the trunks of all the pine trees I could see. Pale and shiny with excretions flowing from their caps. One at a time and at intervals, the mushrooms exploded, expelling a new creature onto the wet ground with a dropped-melon squish. Then, the newborn would shake itself dry and cough exactly six times to clear the placenta from its lungs.
All the sounds I’d heard from above.
Girliness or no, Daniel had to see this. It was deeply wrong. We had to get out of there. I banged my hip on the little table with our purse and keys. I fell twice as I retraced my steps. I crawled the last few feet to Daniel’s side of the bed.
“Daniel!” I shook the mattress as hard as I could (which wasn’t hard at all). “Danny!” I was hoarse.
He was facing me. His eyes popped open. I thought I saw something weird. I thought his eyes had a white membrane under his eyelids. Like an alligator. It had to be my imagination. It had to. “Danny… something is happening out back. You need to come.”
He smacked his lips. “You only call me ‘Danny’ when you want something. What do you want, Kate?”
“I want you to come downstairs. I want—“
He cut me off. When he spoke, it wasn’t with his own voice. Or not only his own voice. There was another layer. A deeper layer. A more aggressive layer. “You know what?” the voices said. “I want something too.”
As with the membranes in his eyes, I couldn’t process the strange quality of his voice. And my back was up. He was annoying me. “Danny, I’m not fucking around. Something is going on out back. You need to—“
