People say the humidity pushed me over the edge. Things down South are different, a little crazier, a little more corrupt, a little closer to coming undone, because of the constant choking humidity. That sweltering heat. Indoors, you shiver in Antarctic air conditioning, the machines perched on your windowsills spitting out ice cubes and penguins, but you steam in your own juices like a lobster in a microwave the instant you walk outside. Everybody from the South is naturally a few steps closer to a psychotic meltdown than, say, their Pacific Northwest countrymen. After years of having all the oxygen sucked out of your brain every time you step out your front door, something bad happens between your ears.

It couldn't happen here. You wouldn't think so, to look at where we lived: a nice suburban ranch house outside of Raleigh in a nice suburban neighborhood, quiet, sane, two cars in every garage, dogs named Fido and cats named Fluffy. Station wagon moms drive kids to soccer and Little League, ballet and tap classes. Dads work as accountants and junior attorneys, teachers at the local colleges, nice sane respectable jobs. With nice sane respectable kids.

My parents weren't your average Ralph and Gloria, and as Justins go, I was maybe just a little bit too tightly-wrapped.

In gym class my first day back at school after Elizabeth's funeral, this boy named Curtis Vernon saw blood on the back of my underwear. We were both running late, detained by the teacher in our previous class, so we were the only ones in the locker room.

"You been takin' dick up your ass, Justin?" he said, flicking me with his towel.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" I'd had a difficult night. My energy and patience were about gone. My internal organs shrank three sizes just then, leaving terrible empty places inside of me, increasing the void already there.

"Man, you gots blood on yo' ass. Somebody been stickin' it to you, or you sick, or what?"

I didn't have a Daddy Fucks Me tattoo across my forehead, but I wouldn't have minded one if that's all that had been going on. I couldn't have been the only kid in school with an elastic asshole because Daddy had decided that Mommy's vagina was, as he said one time when he greased his dick with Jergens hand lotion and shoved it in, like throwing a garden hose down a well. There was more going on than that, but Curtis Vernon couldn't have known what we'd been eating for dinner all week. Hell, I'd just found out, myself.

"I don't feel so good," I said. "I think I'm sick." This wasn't too far from the truth.

"No, man, you been takin' it up the ass, don't bullshit me."

"You would know." According to rumor, Curtis had been seen loitering in public restrooms and even a truck stop outside of town. To his credit, he was kind of cute. The truckers probably loved him. "You wish you'd been the one doing it, right? Is that it?"

I grabbed my abdomen as if I'd been hit with an attack of cramps, dashed to the nearest toilet stall, and slammed the door shut. Thank God this isn't one of those schools where the stalls don't have doors, I was thinking. I pulled off my jockey shorts and sure enough, there was a patch of blood the size of a silver dollar. With a wad of toilet paper, I dabbed at my ass. The paper stuck and tore. I guessed the blood was drying. There wasn't that much of it, you know, I wasn't gushing like a vampire on a rotisserie, but… blood. Coming out of my ass. Not the best way to start off what was already a crappy morning. At least now I knew what was going on. I had been kind of achey back there. It had been a long night.

"You got the shits, butthole boy?" Curtis taunted from the other side of the stall door. He pounded on it and laughed, probably hoping for a few splattery farts to prove his point. "That big sloppy hole o' yours cain't keep the poop in?"

Sometimes, when you've had enough, it's not like a neon sign switches on and flashes red all night. No. It's more like the pop of a soap bubble in the breeze. A still, small voice at the back of your mind says, Well, that was the cherry on the cake of my day. After that, you give up. All bets are off.

I pulled on my underwear (after wedging a clean wad of toilet paper between my butt-cheeks) and opened the door without flushing the toilet.

"Curtis, it's awful," I moaned. I leaned against the side of the stall. "I just… all this blood! Fuck! Go tell Coach Galveston I'm going to be late."

Curtis hovered outside the stall door and alternated between making fart noises and laughing.

"GO!" I screamed.

He went. I fastened my pants and bolted out of the locker room. Supposedly the closest door was a fire exit but the alarm had been disabled as long as anyone could remember. I dashed through it, sprinted across the parking lot beyond, and hiked far enough away from school to jump on a city bus without the driver immediately turning me in.

I got home and found Mom in a strange green hat. She was dancing around the kitchen with no music on, waving her arms about and yowling. She had been watching belly-dancer videos lately, so she must have thought she'd learned something. Her rhythmic wailing was probably meant to be exotic and mystical. It wasn't working. The hat, when I looked closer, contained a live plant. I poured myself a Pepsi, plunked a couple of ice cubes in, licked the cola that ran down the side of the glass, and asked what in the world she was doing. Being up and around beat lying in bed with the curtains drawn and the pillows over her head, arms and torso weeping blood into yards of bandages, but that plant. On her head. I wasn't sure it was an improvement.

She did the hootchie-cootchie dance around the island in the kitchen, and undulated before me like one of those Indian goddesses with more arms than anyone human could possibly need. One of her bandages came loose, and she slapped it back into place. A hunk of flesh was missing from her left bicep. She ought to have gone to the doctor for stitches, but she refused to leave the house.

"I'm trying to get the plant's roots to grow through my skull and into my brain. We'll become symbiotic," Mom chanted, between wails.

"Why would you want a plant growing in your brain?"

A long time ago, I read in one of my grandmother's scandal-sheets that a woman in some midwestern state had gotten an apple seed stuck in her throat. It germinated and grew there. According to the article, she lived out her days with an apple tree growing out of her head, unless she found a doctor to remove the thing - either the tree or her head, whichever she needed less, I don't know.

"Plants produce oxygen. It will aerate my brain, and I'll think better," Mom said, dancing back to the sink and waving her arms over it.

She stopped her dance all at once, and turned to face me. She had a sharp critical stare, as if I were someone else's kid and had just spilled something. She didn't usually look so there.

"I should have named you Oxygen," she said.

"I like Justin better," I said.

I left the room.

I'm going to date myself by revealing this, but I grew up with a father who had napalmed one Vietnamese villager too many. My earliest memory was of Mom rocking me and crying because Dad was in Da Nang or Hue or wherever, blowing things up, bayonetting babies, pressing his face into rice paddy mud and trying to look dead in order to stay alive. Entire paragraphs of his infrequent letters were blacked out by government censors. Mom didn't know whether the next time she saw him, he'd be a charred, bloody mess in a long pine box covered majestically with the Stars and Stripes. When he got home, Mom told me later, he had turned into somebody else.

He no longer allowed Mom to leave the house. Nor to wear makeup, unless it was to cover a black eye. No clothes that were too revealing. He read her letters and had to be in the room when she talked to her parents on the phone. Her friends drifted away. She held me in her arms, mashed my head against her breasts, and cried most of the time. She kept me nearby as much as possible, because she said she didn't like being "messed on," her word for sex. With me around, she explained, he wouldn't try to do anything to her with his thing. I was her little saving angel.

My father started visiting my room then, late at night.

I suppose you have to find your comfort somewhere, when your wife has run screaming into the night, in hysterics, and occasionally has to be taken to Dorothea Dix Hospital and given strong drugs and electroshock therapy because she won't stop making this combination giggle-sob noise that makes your hair stand on end. You can't have relations with a woman who's being kept an hour away. Even if you feel like making the drive when the urge strikes, there would be the straitjacket to remove, and the presence of bulky Nurse Ratchet types who won't give you a moment's privacy. It's hard to be sure she won't take bites out of your shoulder or pee on you when you try to fuck her. And there aren't exactly whores on every street corner in North Carolina cities.

In retrospect, I guess he acquired his taste for boy ass overseas. Sounds like the sort of thing GI's get up to during wartime, right? Smoke a few bowls of weed and/or opium, suck down a few bottles of beer, and if your dick can still get hard, you won't care what kind of hole you sink it into and how it smells when you pull it out.

I can see how it happened.

Does it sound like I'm excusing him? If so, let me put things in a different perspective. After a while, after I got used to it, it felt good.

Now? Well, everything is different. I'm…, technically I'm safe. That counts for something. How sane? That's debatable. Besides: safe and sane? The words mean different things to different people.

Canada, unlike the United States, has always seemed to be a bastion of sanity. Uncle Sam, a scowling retirement-aged monster whose mouth dripped with the blood of all the 19-year-old boys he'd sent off to die in Vietnamese jungles, scared me to death. My family would watch the evening news as we ate dinner, and I'd singlehandedly keep the conversation going: "The body count's up to… how many thousand is that? I can't see the TV from here, Mommy. Why don't you make rice anymore? I'm tired of potatoes." My father would make a face and tell me never to join the military. Nothing could be worth getting your ass blown up or dying in a ditch thousands of miles from home, and Uncle Sam would only screw you over, even as he expected you to salute and thank him for the opportunity to serve your country. The conscientious objectors - the ones who had the most sense, in my grammar-school opinion - were treacherous but sort of heroic at the same time. To me it was simple logic. Stay in America and Uncle Sam will come along and kill you at some point. Move up to Canada with the CO's, and you'll be safe.

I'm not in Canada, but I tell myself I will be soon enough. Everything else will fall into place, once I'm there.

When I was 13, Mom got pregnant somehow. I say "somehow" not because I don't understand the process, but because I couldn't figure out how it happened. If my father hadn't fucked her, then who had?

To hear my father tell it, he didn't have anything to do with Elizabeth's conception. Babies just look like babies - aside from skin color, I don't see why people say they look like their parents, because all they look like is other babies - but my father rampaged through the house like a poltergeist while Mom was pregnant, shouting at her every other minute. It's a miracle she didn't miscarry.

"Who was it? You fucking whore, who did you let into the house while I was away?"

He'd lock me in my room unless I told him who came and went. "Nobody" didn't seem to be the correct answer, even if it was the only one I knew.

When Mom gave birth, he couldn't be bothered to show up. He went out drinking with a couple of his Vietnam buddies, these scarred and tattooed guys who drove pickup trucks and lived on beer and cigarettes. Didn't come home for two days. When he did, he stank of smoke and alcohol sweat, and his hair showed more streaks of grey than before. Mom's own parents had to drive her home from the hospital. She alternated between sobbing "I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry!" and cooing at baby Elizabeth.

"It wasn't mine," my father sniffed, when someone asked how things were going. "I'd divorce her if she wasn't a fucking lunatic. Don't ask me how she got pregnant, because I was the last person to know."

He never beat me up much when I got in trouble because he didn't like to fuck a black and blue ass. Elizabeth, on the other hand, got backhanded if she so much as looked at him funny. Which of us had it worse? Since I've never met a masochistic toddler, I guess it depends on your fondness for getting plowed, and how much you're into pain.

I ran away from school my first day back after the funeral. Elizabeth's funeral. The day she died, I got home from school and found Mom in one corner of the kitchen, turning around and around with her eyes shut. If she heard me come in, she gave no sign. The noise she was making confused me at first and scared me second. The sound resolved itself into words: "I'm a propeller I'm a propeller I'm a propeller." She lost her balance once, slumped against the wall, then pushed herself upright again, resumed spinning, wobbled. It was all she could do not to fall down.

"I'm a propeller I'm a propeller I'm a propeller."

"Mom?"

She came to with a little scream. "Justin!"

"Are you OK?" This was a standard question of mine in those days. She had never been OK and never would be, but I had to ask. "Is something wrong?"

"Oxygen," she said. "Not enough oxygen. She's going around and around. It's all my fault. I'm trying to understand what she went through."

"I don't understand." I had come into the kitchen for some potato chips and a Pepsi, but my appetite evaporated.

"She didn't get enough oxygen," Mom said. "Like the crops, when the farmers till the soil. They do it to let in the oxygen. That's why legumes are an essential component of crop rotation. They aerate the soil."

"Mom, who didn't get enough oxygen?"

"What they ought to do is have a big propeller churning through the earth, like the blades on an outboard motor. Only in slow motion, so the dirt wouldn't fly through the air. The blades could churn slowly through the earth. They'd be dozens of yards long. You'd be walking above them, on the surface of the earth, while they were spinning away in the ground under your feet. FWOOMP! FWOOMP!" She thrust out her arms and turned in a circle, to imitate the big machines she was talking about.

"You make it sound like a Cuisinart. Who didn't get enough oxygen?"

She kept spinning and making the FWOOMP noises. When she faced toward me, I could see tears streaming down her cheeks.

The house was too quiet.

"Elizabeth!"

I left Mom to churn the air in the kitchen. "Elizabeth!" When I dashed upstairs to her bedroom, she was not there. The flotsam of her toys across the floor suggested recent occupancy. Had she gotten outside somehow? Toddled down the street? Had she gotten herself lost in the overgrown azaleas and hydrangeas behind the house? Those shrubs were gigantic. If she'd wandered off the property, we'd never find her. She could waddle out in front of a car. "Elizabeth!" Black suspicions bloomed in my head.

"Elizabeth!"

No answer. Normally she'd babble.

I sprinted into the back yard, passing my mother (now chanting "round and round and round and" as she spun), stopping on the back steps to survey the yard. Nothing. No rustle of bushes, no toddler jabber.

"Elizabeth!" I yelled, with my hands cupped to my mouth. "Elizabeth! Where are you?"

Nothing.

Back into the kitchen.

"Where is she?" I screamed.

Mom covered her face with her hands.

Then it hit me. I knew exactly where I would find her.

When the ambulance guys came, I told them Elizabeth liked to play in the dryer, and it wasn't even a lie. She sometimes slept among the warm clothes in there. It was her hiding place, a womb she could still fit into. Why Mom would turn the dryer on when the clothes were already dry, I'm not sure, but there are some questions you're not ready to ask, much less have answered. Maybe Mom forgot the dryer was full, threw a load of wet clothes in with the dry ones, overlooked her daughter, and left the laundry room. Or maybe Mom knew and did it just to see what would happen. I can't say. Beyond that, there was no talking to her. Elizabeth asphyxiated among the clothes in the dryer. If she screamed, any noise she made must have been muffled by the clothes and the noise from the motor.

And ever since I've been in here, where the walls are beige and the beds are single and the pills come in a small paper cup each morning with breakfast, I've been trying to recreate Mom's mental state. How she could look the other way as her daughter suffocated. I stretch out my arms like the crucified Christ, shut my eyes, and spin around: I'm a propeller I'm a propeller I'm a propeller. Still, I don't get it. I'll never quite know what made her tick. I tell myself it's a wasted effort. Yet I keep trying.

Dad refused to let Mom go to Elizabeth's funeral until she promised she'd be quiet. Her parents drove in from Greensboro and made sure she took her pills, strong sedatives Dad sometimes crumbled up and sprinkled into her food when she wasn't looking.

Mom started wailing and didn't stop until late that night. A series of loud crashes from the bedroom left me trembling, wondering who else was dying in there, but I didn't leave my own room to find out. I locked the door and hid under the covers. Even when the air grew hot and stale, I stayed beneath the sheets.

Next morning, when I went downstairs for breakfast, Mom started crying again. She was mixing pancake batter. Mucus dripped from her nose into the bowl. I wondered if anyone else noticed, and whether anyone would yell at me for not eating the pancakes.

No point in mentioning it to Mom. She'd just say, But you came out of my body, so what difference does it make? As if, with that in mind, I should then ask for a glass of her urine to go with my pancakes.

Birds were singing outside and I wanted to shoot them.

When we left for the church, Dad and Grandpa had to help Mom walk. Drugs and grief had left her limp, a big crazy Raggedy Ann doll who wouldn't stop crying. I hung behind and didn't say anything for the rest of the day.

That night, I asked Mom about the big bandage over her upper arm.

"Expiation," she said.

Mom looked more pallid than usual. Definitely kind of ill. I didn't know what the fuck she was talking about and didn't care to ask. It sounded like more of her psychobabble. Best to keep my distance in case she forgot to aerate her brain with one of her strange rituals and did me in by mistake.

I couldn't be in the same room with my mother after Elizabeth died. Couldn't stand to look at Mom, couldn't stand the sound of her voice, couldn't stand her insane fucking gibberish. Walls grew around the perimeter of my brain, to block off all thoughts of her. Hadrian's Wall. The Great Wall of China. Hell, the one from the Pink Floyd movie would have done just fine, as long as it established a boundary she couldn't cross.

"I'm trying to make it up to you, Justin!" Mom cried two days after the funeral. Dad was forcing us to eat meals at the same table. I wouldn't look up. "I'm putting my body and blood into making things right again! I'm trying with my entire being! Don't you understand how sorry I am?"

I stared into the melted circles in the veneer of our tabletop. Mom tended to take pots off the burner or bowls out of the microwave and set them, still blazing hot, directly on the table. Drinking glasses damp with condensation left round footprints in the waxy finish. I didn't look up, didn't open my mouth.

She killed Elizabeth. Crazy or not, she killed Elizabeth, and we might have covered up for her.

All the oxygen seemed to be sucked out of the room whenever I allowed that thought to enter my brain. My mind ground to a halt.

I finished my omelette (she'd put salsa in it) but did not ask to be excused from the table. My grandmother was softly crying.

Mom clapped her hands (both bandaged here and there) to the sides of her head.

"I can't breathe with you doing this to me!" she screamed. She flung herself away from the table and ran up the stairs.

"Now see what you've made her do," my father said, glowering into his omelette.

The night before I was to return to school, that's when things fell apart, when they broke past the point of repair.

I hid from Dad but he found me and beat the crap out of me, then burst into tears and held me close as sobs wracked his large, solid body.

"What's wrong?" I asked him, stroking his hair and wondering who was in charge here. I was sixteen. This wasn't how parents were supposed to act. "Why are you crying? I know it's not because you're sad about Elizabeth?"

After a few minutes he exhausted his supply of tears. He pulled away and looked me in the eye.

"I'm sorry for putting you through that," he said.

He turned around to look at the door, then rose to shut and lock it. I unbuttoned my belt.

"No, Justin, that's not why I'm here," he said, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. The look on his face made me wonder whether he'd had second thoughts about his late-night visits to my bedroom. "I guess I loved her too, in spite of everything."

"Then what's the matter?"

"Your mother. I'm sorry to tell you this, son, because it puts you in the middle of something you're not old enough to handle. I've thought about it, and there's no other way. It's something you need to hear from me.

"I know you're… you know, what boys do, when they're your age." Now he was blushing. "It's natural. To, you know, experiment."

Experiment? With what? What could I be experimenting with when I already knew the positions from which I could best be penetrated? I shut the fuck up and let him keep talking. No sense aggravating him. Grief might make his temper worse.

"I don't understand. What am I doing?" I backed up on the bed, to put some space between us. Just in case a word came out wrong, he'd have to reach farther to slap me. If I couldn't duck away from the blow, at least it wouldn't hurt as much when it connected.

"It's normal," Dad said, his face as pained as I'd ever seen it. After a couple more moments of this, he spat the word out: masturbating.

"Oh, that. Uh, yeah?"

"Your mother admitted something to me in the hospital, when they took Elizabeth's body." He took a deep breath. He wouldn't look at me. He looked at the sheets on my bed, which I hadn't made up. He looked at the decals on my lamp, at the book on my bedside table. He looked out the window for a long while, then fortified himself with another deep breath. "She wouldn't say how she did it. I couldn't get her to tell me, whether it was from your bedsheets, or some tissue in your garbage can, or what. I just don't know. She must have been spying on you, to know when it was still fresh. Jesus Christ, I'm not old enough for this. Fuck! Justin, Elizabeth was my granddaughter."

The farther toward the Arctic region you travel on the North American continent, past the Great Lakes and into Canada, north to where the land flattens out and becomes tundra, the more you feel you're on another planet. Overhead, the Aurora Borealis flickers like the dying breath of some distant star. The farther north you go, the less everything down here in the sweltering South seems to matter. It's all a malaria dream someone else had.

In my mind's eye I have a black pickup truck fitted with a camper shell. I'm driving hours and hours straight, stopping only to piss or refill my tank with gas. No special hurry, but I'm not taking needless breaks, either. Beyond Edmonton, things just peter out. Little towns come and go. I keep driving inexorably north, as far as I can go until the road ends, the land ends, or I end.

I can't leave this wing of the hospital but if I could, I know where I'd go.

In my dreams, sometimes some guy is with me, the boyfriend husband partner lover I have never had, only imagined I might meet someday. Other times, I'm travelling alone.

The farther north you go, into the perfect white sterility of the Arctic ice, the cleaner everything becomes. Safer? No, because those extremes of climate are never safe, but the white purity of the ice goes a long way to compensate for that. If I drive far enough north, past the Great Slave Lake, into the frozen wild wastelands of the Northwest Territories or Nunavut, everything will be different. I'll be a different person. None of this will have happened.

It was almost time for dinner. Mom was downstairs cooking. She'd been doing this Italian thing all week, ever since the funeral. Because she was a North Carolina ethnic mutt with no grief traditions to speak of, she had to borrow from Catholicism to mourn with a satisfying degree of drama. The Baptist Church left her bereft of the consolation of black veils and ashes.

Walking downstairs to eat was unpleasant: invisible rubber bands held my arms and legs back. I didn't want to go near her but the alternative was starvation and she'd already killed one kid.

She held her left hand over a pot of bubbling tomato sauce and lopped off the pinky with one swift, sure slice of a gigantic knife. The scream came out of my mouth, not hers. I ran. She tried to follow me out of the house. When I looked back, I saw blood leaking from beneath her right hand, which she'd clapped over the hole where her pinky had been. Her face had gone chalk-white and waxy. I stopped as she sank to her knees.

"I'm trying to make it right, don't you see that? I'm trying to do penance! And you don't even care, you fucking ungrateful shit!"

Grandma came outside knelt next to her, whispering into her ear. The look on Grandma's face mirrored Mom's anguish. What I'd done for it to be directed at me, I had no idea. I wanted to ask, Aren't you overlooking a few basic facts, here? But I couldn't say anything, because I couldn't go back. I couldn't turn back. I couldn't face them.

I ran down the street and caught a bus into the center of Raleigh, ate at McDonald's, and wandered the streets until midnight. A man in a public restroom looked at me a certain way and I followed him into a stall. His cock slid right in. It was so long I thought it was going to poke out through my navel, and later, his come was a hot seepage I had to dam up with a crumpled handful of toilet paper. I walked all the way home bowlegged, crawled into bed without a shower, and nobody in the house seemed to notice I'd been gone.

Next morning, there was no trace of Mom's blood in the kitchen.

I got home from school that day and I'd had enough. There was no chorus line of Vegas showgirls holding up glittery placards that spelled out FUCK THIS, nothing dramatic at all. Just a quiet switching-off of the part of my brain that cared.

Downstairs, Mom gyrated around the kitchen, hands waving in the air like kelp from the Sargasso Sea. The plant kept threatening to fall off her head. It would list to one side, and she'd clap a bandage-plastered hand down to hold it in place. Most of the plant's leaves were broken.

Dad kept all his guns in an armoire I called the arsenal. I chose one of the longest and aerated Mom's brain with a blast to the back of her head when she wasn't looking. Not enough oxygen in there before? There was now. Dad got home half an hour later and I nailed him the second the front door swung shut behind him.

I took off for the border in his car and didn't make it, obviously. I didn't even get out of North Carolina. Note to anyone with parenticidal aspirations: don't take the family car once you've done the deed, and don't speed. It's a really bad idea.

So here I am. Getting well. Every minute of every hour of every day, I am recuperating. I am approaching a state of mental health as pristine as the ice in the far north of Canada. When my brain has turned into a sparkling white glacier of sanity, I will leave this place and drive north.

I'll tell you one last thing. Do you want to know why I really did it? Not because of Elizabeth, no. When Mom cut off little bits of herself out of guilt, and feeding us minced bits of her flesh and blood, a sacrifice of atonement, I thought the meals tasted good. Delicious, actually. Just like what Dad was doing to me. Delicious. Evil and horrible, yes, those too. But that's still not it. I had to shoot them both because I liked what they were doing, and it couldn't continue. It couldn't last. So it was either them or me, and I wasn't in the mood to die that afternoon.

©2001 Marshall Moore - Contributor's Bio