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He knows she was forty-three when she had him.
He knows Aslaug was the safe, reticent decision for an old maid, pregnant out of wedlock, desperate for stability for the little accident forming in her stomach. He knows she grew up as the child of immigrants who spoke one language at home and another at school and was meek and eager-to-please and cherished what very little she had and hoped her son would enjoy the gift of things like electricity that did not go out when the bills were not paid and food that was plentiful and all sorts of colors and the privilege to dream that he could become whatever his heart desired.
He knows there was a time when Aslaug loved her and she loved him, the stranger within her flesh, the boy she knew better than herself and knew nothing about, the child that might have eyes of blue or gray or the cheekbones she would trace on herself in the mirror or her incessant craving for rye crackers and cheese.
He knows there was a time when she spoke to him, sang to him, before he could remember, before he was even a being with fingers and toes, before he could disappoint.
----
He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sins from the beginning.
----
There are these periods in his life where he has wondered if he will ever be able to dam the flow of hurt. He is not naive- when he looks back in a day, in a month, in many many years after he has grown into somebody new and shed that skin, he will think how silly he was to believe that his tears would flow forever.
But it is the moment of prolonged pain, the nexus of it , the rock and it's hard place, the trap.
He is unsure his body remembers how to soothe itself. He is unsure his eyes know what to do to stop their crying.
He rocks on the floor and the side of his head finds the flat of the wall and he hits it until the words on the page are illegible and the insides of his ears feel hot and spin like a whirlpool and he collapses like a lump of laundry and sobs through his entire body.
He cannot tear the paper, not with his mother’s neat black-ink script. He can smell their dusty two-room shack, feel the worn wood table and the shape of her crude dip-pen. He knows she worked by lamplight, holding her fingers close to the flame, squinting as it flickered on the paper. He does not know if Aslaug was there too, haunting the doorway, silently dictating her assault on his everlasting soul.
The man does not want to talk to him- did not ever want to talk to him. He imagines, instead, that she wrote in secret, even her scolding an act of defiance. Maybe she loved him enough to beg his passage to heaven, but he would not.
The letter falls loose in Toki’s open palm. It slips free when he crushes his wet cheeks in both hands and weeps down the slopes of his fingers. He knows he is in Florida, in the poorly furnished living room where he sleeps on the hide-a-bed, with the AC chugging in the window and humid condensation bleeding down the walls. He feels the crisp air of Norway, feels that he is there, shivering on straw-topped dirt. He feels the whip on his shoulders and the prayer beads wrapped tight between his fingers and he whimpers the Ave Maria’s he doesn’t believe.
His fear regresses him to that primal place whose instincts beg forgiveness. God can see him here, too, sweating and writhing in Tampa. There’s no running from sin, not when it’s carried in the very marrow of his bones.
It turns to the urge of the flagellant. He can wash his sin in blood, clean the filth that has dirtied his soul.
He stands.
——
“Why the fuck are you doing that in the kitchen?” Pickles asks, and it startles him from his frantic quest of self-destruction. Why is he doing this in the kitchen? Why did he assume he was alone? He should know better. Why doesn’t he know better?
He puts down the bread knife. He feels stupid for choosing that. He can’t remember making the choice, can’t actually remember the past few minutes of blindly grasping for any way to transfer the hurt, can’t really remember how he even got here, knows only that he is here, standing dumbly at the counter, sticky blood all over his palm, in between his fingers, running down his bicep and into his elbow and across his forearm.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones
He stares at Pickles, feels the beginnings of numbness tracing up his wrists, watches and does not feel the knife being removed from his hand, Pickles glancing at the overflowing sink and thinking better of it and setting the knife on the counter and huffing and smoothing his hands over the sparse dreads on the crown of his head.
He looks kind of angry, but not the red-ears fuming-and-screaming kind of anger that Toki figured out to avoid pretty early on. He just seems tired-angry this time, wrung out and beaten down, a tense kind of upset. He gawks a little at the blood-weeping gashes Toki has cut into himself. His brain seems to reboot, finally kicks him into action. He grabs paper towels, wets them in the sink and grabs Toki’s hand and starts pressing to staunch the bleeding.
He spots the letter on the counter and gives it a sour eye and opens it before Toki can grab it out of his hand. He squints at the unfamiliar language, deduces what he can ( Bible verses? ) and watches Toki crumple with his fist balled up against the towel, stained watercolor red, blooming with his growing agony. He lashes out to grab the letter from Pickles, who recoils and releases his grip, and he throws the vile thing as though it could do damage.
“They said I’m a sinner,” Toki wails, and Pickles is smart enough to put all the pieces together right then.
“C’mere, kid,” he says, and Toki feels little all over again, the size of bilberry bushes, prickly like pine needles, spindly and weak, everything about him clumsy with pain.
He tumbles into Pickles’ arms like he’s being blown away, chokes out an animal squall, falls apart at the seams like unraveling crochet. The man pats his back awkwardly and struggles to heft his muscled weight and Toki clings with anguished strength. His forearms tremble through his fingertips. His middle heaves oppressively.
Toki exhausts himself eventually, as Pickles begins to feel he really can no longer hold his lanky form up. He sags into him, accepts the pull to sit down beside him on the kitchen floor, shrinks against him with his head on the linoleum and his knees brought to his chest and his long arms limp in front of him.
“You know none of that’s true, right? That stuff in the letter?” Pickles asks. It sits just past the metal bar that splits the kitchen from the living room carpet, lying in the shadow of the overflowing trash can. “Nobody’s ashamed of you except them. You’re a fucking talented-ass guitarist, and they’re just mad you’re out there doing cool shit.”
Toki swallows. He looks down at his forearm, at the plastic beads of dry red blood, at the anger of his opened skin. It’s a little ridiculous, when he thinks about it, that he’s exchanged the external abuse for an internal one. He can stop himself, he thinks, pretending he’s gone blind to his bodiless frenzy.
It’s easy to regret after all’s said and done, to admonish his stupidity.
“Don’t beat yourself up, kid,” Pickles soothes, with a warm little hand on his broad lower back.
——
He was a wretched little thing, an eyesore of a child, the kind no one wanted seen nor heard.
The reverend Aslaug did not like little boys, would not have liked him any better were he a little girl, would not like him for anything because a child was a curse in and of itself, a useless thing that required diapers and soothing and gentleness and love. It was meaningless when it could not work, bothersome when it grew old enough to walk and grab and ask ‘why?’
Anja learned quickly that her child was not worth the attempt of love. Whatever crumbs she snuck his way, Aslaug beat from him. She first wished he would raise up his hand against her instead, then that he would spare the child the harshest of his blows, then that he would find some sliver of mercy to be done when it could reasonably be said the boy was punished, then nothing at all, when her spirit broke for good.
She began to believe him, his biblical claims and recitations. Toki wore the mark of the devil. He was some unworldly changeling child. He was not the decent son she was promised, but an entity her womb had put forth to punish her. It was her sins which had made him, her sins which had brought her to labor, her sins which gave him Aslaug’s name and none of his semblance.
If she could only beat the sin from him, straighten the path she herself had made twisted, mold something godly and good out of him. That could be her penance.
——
Hot water burns down his skin, etches it raw, stings like vinegar. Toki whimpers a little and sinks down to squat on the balls of his toes. The shower pours down over his hair and it balloons around him like the cap of a mushroom, sticking to his shoulders and sheltering his face and making everything sound muffled like he’d put his ears in a river.
The hurt has slithered back inside him now, and it gnaws at his mind and constricts his breath and works acid up his esophagus.
The water turns pink, then clear. He can see the red-gray meat beneath the dermis of his skin. In some spots blood continues to well, where he’s cut down to the muscle. The new marks overlap old ones in layers of purple and pink and white. This part of him is cut up differently than the rest, in a far more familiar manner. He prefers the scars that come from his own hand. In their shape is the texture of control, the intimacy of self.
No one else can hurt him if he does it first.
When he gets out, he rubs the stinging wounds with his towel and stems the weeping plasma with wads of toilet paper. It sticks to his wet skin, peels away in little sheets and leaves pulpy film behind.
He wraps up clumsily, with a pad of starchy gauze and sticky white bandage. In the worst parts, he can see the blue tint of blood beginning to seep once more from underneath. He goes out in a hoodie, even though it has not been below 90 degrees in more than two weeks, and the humidity soaks him through before his sweat has even a chance.
He holds his arm against himself, birdlike, cradles the burn and ache in reverent gentleness. Maybe this is the part he likes best: nursing the living, breathing form of his anguish. It’s a private pain now, a secret companion, a part of him forever.
Remorse comes when he is on his bed, holding Deaddy Bear and looking at his little plastic-button eyes. He feels bad that his first reaction was to comfort himself so violently. He feels bad that Pickles had to see. He feels bad that the letter got to him so much, that his parents’ loveless words drew him to act on such irrational impulses.
This could be the last time. If he were better, braver, unbidden to those horrible feelings that drowned the rational cortex of his mind. If he were not a slave to the tortured memory of his unhappy upbringing.
——
They go out the front door, to the dilapidated shared balcony. Skwisgaar sits on the neighbor’s cracked plastic chair and Toki sits on the floor, dangling his legs under the mossy railing, looking out at the piss-poor pavement of the parking lot.
It is so hot, even after dark, that his cold-damp hair turns quickly warm, and the drying water on his skin turns fast to sweat.
Skwisgaar passes him a lit spliff and he inhales and coughs when sharp Camel tobacco burns the back of his throat.
“Pickles said your parents wrote.”
“Why do you care?” Toki snaps.
Skwisgaar holds up both his hands to defend himself. “Fine. Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know.”
Toki hits the spliff, more competently this time, and he sticks his arms between the railing’s metal fence bars and leans into them and lets his hands dangle towards the misshapen shrubs on the ground. He breathes in smoke and hot palm tree air and pool chlorine and the iron bars indent his forehead when he presses it against them. He sucks up more smoke from this position, then untangles himself from the railing and leans back to return the spliff.
They smoke it down to the folded-piece-of-index-card filter and Skwisgaar switches to a plain cigarette, which he perches between his slim fingers and points in a diagonal towards the sky.
Toki clutches the railing apprehensively, watches a Corolla with no front bumper pull into the lot and circle. Two people walk out from an apartment below and get in and they turn out into the street and park down the block. He waits for the pit in his stomach to become a sinkhole, his presence in reality to waver.
Mercifully, it does not. He feels bad now for being short with his friend.
Skwisgaar extends the pack of cigarettes to Toki and he twists back and pulls the one next to his lucky. He lights it for him and Toki thinks this is good enough to say they’ve made peace and now he owes something in return, some piece of honesty.
“It was my mother, actually,” he says bitterly.
“Oh.”
The words lapse between them and Toki burns through the filter of his cigarette and he feels again like a hurt dog licking his wounds.
“I don’t have a relationship with my mother, either,” Skwisgaar admits. Toki turns around and looks at him with shock-widened eyes and sees him look at a crack in the concrete ceiling and the condensation that has formed around it and then the bike with its tires stolen that is chained to the railing by the stairs and the illegible welcome mat outside another neighbor’s unit.
He looks like he, too, is afraid to talk about it.
The words spill from Toki’s lips like confession, timid, wet with the tears he’d wrung out earlier.
“I think I understand her more now… sometimes. She didn’t have much growing up. She wanted me to have better.”
Toki fiddles with the split ends of his hair. He watches their neighbors walk back down the sidewalk. They stop at the corner, pull out their house keys and lean in to sniff bumps off them.
“But my father kind of took her spirit away,” he whispers. The space behind his eyes begins to sting. He shuts them and meets cool metal with his forehead and sees her face on his eyelids, her dour grimace, her cold skin, her sapped affect. There were no pictures for him to remember her young. There was nothing at all of her smile except some wish in his own, something he could plaster onto his thoughts of her like some Frankenstein being.
He has her cheekbones, her chin, between his knuckles her crepey skin. And he has nothing of hers, no deep-worn sadness, no engulfing remorse. The world did not win in its efforts to wear him down.
“I think I’d feel something for her if he wasn’t always there.”
Her fear simmers off her shrouded figure. Her eyes are hollow. She does not love Aslaug either. There is only perversion between them, a twisted deception of what love ought to be. It is the dependence, the sickness, the addiction, some false thing characterized in god-graced devotion. Her god is not loving, her Jesus unyielding, her bosom stone and tar.
“I think she was afraid of him too. I was too young to get it, but I-“ Toki’s voice fails him, his mouth trembles and shapes in vowels and consonants that never speak, the pressure in his face gets hot and large and all-consuming. He chokes down sob after sob and hits his head against the railing and that ‘smack’ is louder than the aborted noises wrung from his throat.
If he were a better son, they would have slipped free together. If he were a better son, his selfish dreams would have been no trouble to set aside. If he were a better son, he would have cleared room to love her. He would have convinced her that she wanted it too, the hard-won agency, the hard-knock life of busking and train-hopping and gig-finding.
And she would never have loved him like that either. She does not love him like this. She does not love her son the music-player, the Floridian, the long-haired heathen, the devil-worshipper, the video-game-player, hot-pocket-eater, mall-shopper, weed-smoker, gas-station-condom-buyer.
She does not desire to find her freedom from hell. She is of the rare persuasion of people who think they ought to be there, that their worth is in pregaming their immortal torture, that just in case it isn’t real they may as well get it over with now.
He thinks it’s like the safety briefing on the airplane: put on your own oxygen mask before you help anybody else. Even if they are family. Even if you are supposed to love them. Maybe that is how you love them, maybe by helping yourself first.
Skwisgaar slides in next to him, an inch gap between the tops of his thin legs and the railing, his pack of cigarettes in his lap, his hair bunched over one shoulder.
He eases another smoke from the pack, reaches between the metal bars, nudges it into Toki’s shaking hand. Their fingers rest against each other until Toki tightens his grip and brings the cigarette to his mouth. He leans forward for Skwisgaar to light it and the dim porch lights shine through the tears on his eyelashes.
Toki inhales, savors the bite in his throat, clings to the feeling, cherishes alive-instead-of-living.