| FIC: B Is For Bullies: The Importance of Invisibility According to Adam Ross |
[Dec. 2nd, 2008|10:44 pm] |
Author: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) laguera25
Fandom: CSI:NY
Rating: FRM for images of domestic violence.
Pairing: N/A; Gen
Word Count: 3,852
Spoilers: Spoilers for 315, "Some Buried Bones".
Warnings: This fic contains graphic depictions of domestic abuse.
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
B is for bullies. It is also for bruises and broken bones. Adam doesn't think that's a coincidence as much as a correlation. He has no empirical evidence with which to back that assumption, no catalogue of brain scans, no spreadsheets whose numbers quantify the rage behind a striking fist or the fear that cowers in the heart of a cornered victim, a rabbit run to ground by the lethal shadow of a circling hawk.
No, no hard evidence. But he's got plenty of anecdotal evidence. He's spent plenty of his nights in the emergency room, slouched in a stiff, vinyl chair that baked beneath fluorescent lights while a doctor with a face the color of slate worked behind the curtain to undo the damage caused by a fist or a plate or a book, the great and powerful Oz putting the scarecrow together again and holding her stuffing inside with gauze and the miracle of dissolving stitches. Sometimes, she moaned, the scarecrow, and sometimes she cried softly, the sobs thick and bloody as they passed through her swollen lips like sputum, but the wizard never said anything, never offered a token word of comfort. The wizard had seen it all before, and there were graver wounds to which he must soon turn his attention, wounds unexpected and unearned. Besides, the wizard had known such words were of little use, mist upon a raging fire, and so he had not wasted them, not on a scarecrow determined to sink roots into her poisoned field. He'd simply written her a prescription for Demerol and turned her out with a haggard, speculative look at him as he'd sat in the comfortless chair and tried not to scuff the toes of his sneakers on the tired, green linoleum.
He tells himself he can't remember the first time his father hit his mother, and maybe that's true as far as it goes; it's likely that the first blow came long before he was born. For all he knows, he caused the first bruise, the first fat lip or stinging cheek, a startling swell of unanticipated obligation inside his mother's belly that had moved his father's hand to anger and roused in him a love of ruthless dominion. Maybe he was the straw that broke his father's patience and his mother's jaw in three places. He doesn't like to think about that, but sometimes he can't do anything but. It's the job. It harrows the fertile soil of his conscience and reveals things he'd rather not see, exposes them to the light and lets them breathe their stale yet potent truths into his face like gris gris dust from the palm of a grinning houngan. And once they're above the ground, there's nothing else for it but to look them straight on, and so he does.
So maybe he doesn't remember the day his father became a bully, a bruiser of faces and breaker of bones, but he does remember the first time he saw the monster for himself. He'd been four and playing with his Hot Wheels and Micro Machines on the parlor floor. The parlor floor had been his favorite place to play with his cars because the wood had been smooth and dark, kept spotless by the polish his mother applied twice a week, crawling across the expanse of the room on her hands and knees with a cleaning chamois in one hand and a bottle of Old English in the other. The smooth, flat, dark wood had lent itself to any landscape his imagination could conjure-the serpentine ribbon of a dirt road, the muddy, brown water of the Mississippi, or maybe the Nile as it wound its way to Lake Tanganyika and the broad, lush delta that fed Egypt, the red, trackless surface of Mars, or perhaps one of the numberless planets explored by the space cowboys of Battlestar Galactica. That day, he'd been a daredevil, Rad Ross, and he'd used the blocks to build a ramp and obstacle course for his squadron of tiny toy cars.
He'd been at it for a while, putt-putting and vrooming around the living room, his imagined awesomeness aided by fat, vibrato plips from his mouth. Two cars in his fleet had made the jump, much to the amazement and delight of the sellout living room crowd, and he'd been reaching for a third when he'd heard the first uneasy stirrings of an argument from the kitchen. His mother had been in there most of the morning, cleaning and preparing lunch, but now, his father had been there, too, voice low and ominous, the rumble of distant thunder.
He'd tried to ignore it. His father's voice had never comforted him, but the thunder-voice had frightened him, made his belly flutter with a nameless, greasy fear that had made his car slick and clumsy in his hand. It was the grating, subterranean voice of the bogeyman who lived in the basement, crouched in his nest behind the washer that shivered and trembled every time his mother did the wash, and who sometimes crept up the stairs to his room to hunker in his closet behind his clothes. Bogeymen came from the dark, bad places of the world, and even at four, he'd understood that fathers shouldn't sound like bogeymen. So he'd crouched in the parlor, balanced on his toes, head down and breath swollen and stale inside his mouth, and prayed for his father to go away.
But the argument had continued, his father talking in that awful, thundery voice and his mother answering in her quiet, subdued one, the thunder and the wind. His father had said something, but the house of his childhood had been old, and the thick walls had smothered the words before they could reach him. Only the cadence had come, the throaty, dangerous grumble of the bogeyman, and Adam had known that if the argument went on much longer, the bogeyman inside his father's clothes would simply reach out and gobble her up.
Be quiet, Mommy, he'd thought. Be quiet and run far, far away as fast as you can, like that little piggy that screams all the way home. Then, dreamily, Fe fi fo fum. The thunderous voice of a giant with a taste for bones.
But his mother had not been quiet, had gone on talking, and he'd wondered why grownups could never see the monster until it was too late. Maybe it was because they were too old to be scared, or maybe it was because the monsters lived knee-high to their chosen prey and thus went unseen by eyes set too far above the ground. His mother had been face to face with the bogeyman, and he'd known as he'd crouched in the parlor with a car in his steadily-slackening fingers that she couldn't see it, wouldn't see it until it was too late to do anything but scream.
He'd been tempted to hide, to secret himself in the hall closet and huddle behind the umbrellas and the raincoats that hung from hooks like stretched hides. But the thunder-voice had been possessed of a terrible magic, and he'd been rooted to the spot, held in thrall by the rumble of approaching doom. And deep in his heart, he'd been afraid that if he moved, the bogeyman would eat him instead, a tasty morsel of boy meat with which to slake his hunger. So he'd stayed and waited for the storm to either break or pass.
"I don't think-," his mother had said. It's a phrase he remembers quite clearly, one he brings up with him from the deep well of sleep, a dismal warning half-remembered by the time he wipes the crusty caul of sleep from his eyes and forgotten by the time his feet touch the floor. I don't think-
"I don't think-," she'd repeated. Then, "No!" Shrill and thin. "No, please-,"
A dull, meaty crack, followed by a thud and the tinkling crash of shattering crockery. The car had slid from his fingers, squirted loose like a small, struggling animal and clattered to the floor. If it had landed wheels-down, it might have rolled across the floor, but it had landed wheels-up and had lain at his feet like a dead insect. He'd stared stupidly at it, reached down and idly prodded its cheap plastic undercarriage. It had been stiff and cool, a beetle carapace, and he'd jerked his finger back in unreasoning distaste. The sudden movement had unbalanced him, and he'd swayed drunkenly on his toes.
Don't fall, he'd thought. If you fall, he'll come for you.
He'd risen on unsteady legs. The house had been quiet. The thunder and wind had stilled, but somehow that had brought no comfort. The air had still been curiously hot and thick with the promise of another squall. He'd blinked to clear his eyes, and his mouth had tasted of metal and brine, lightning on the tip of his tongue.
He hadn't wanted to move. Instinct had whispered that it was safer to remain where he was, silent and unmoving, unseeing and unseen until the bogeyman had gone and taken his thunder-voice with him. But terror had carried with it an irresistible, groggy curiosity, the desire of the doomed to see the face of their death, and so he'd lurched into hesitant, rubber-legged motion. His legs had prickled and sizzled with the return of unhindered circulation, and he'd done a queer, stumbling jig to the threshold.
For a moment, the only sound to reach his ears had been the furtive whump of his pudgy, bare feet on the cool, smooth wood, but as he'd drawn closer to the kitchen, he'd heard an odd, snuffling keening, the pitiful mewl of a dying kitten. Mrew. Mmmrew. M-m-mmreww. The sound had raised gooseflesh on his arms, and he'd slowed his advance, reluctant to see the source of the noise.
Mmmrew. Mreewww. M-m-mrew. Quailing and pitiful, and his chest had constricted with the threat of tears, with the ill-advised lunacy of noise.
Then the bogeyman had spoken, the grinding, seismic rumble of shifting earth, and all thought of crying had died on the vine, withered in the stark, ruthless light of self-preservation. It was a light, he would think when he was older and safely jaded, that bore a startling resemblance to the fluorescent lights of hospital emergency rooms.
"Stop it now," the bogeyman had warned. "You stop that noise now."
The mewling had stuttered to an abrupt stop, replaced by a glottal, gurgling slurp that had reminded him of the roiling boil of the water with which his mother made her beef stock. Thick and soupy, gelatin and dissolving bone.
It's Mommy, a small voice had whispered inside his head. That's what it sounds like when the monsters eat you. The bogeyman's put her in the soup pot and is boiling her bones for his stew. Fe fi fo fum.
He'd had a vision of his mother bobbing in her soup pot, fingers curled over the side and eyes and nose poking over the metal rim, a wet, wide-eyed Kilroy in her own kitchen. Her brown hair had clung to her scalp, plastered there by the steam and flecks of boiling water thrown up by the pot, and the ends had boasted bits of carrot and potato peel. Celery had kissed her upper lip like mucus, green and viscous. Her lips had twisted in a smile, and she'd waggled her fingers at him in a fragile gesture of reassurance, but before he could respond, the vision had burst like a bubble atop the pot's rolling boil, punctured by the resumption of that terrible keening.
"I'm not going to tell you again," the bogeyman had said, and Adam had willed his mother to stop, because he could hear the reptilian creak of opening jaws.
But his mother hadn't stopped, or maybe she couldn't, and there had been a second meaty slap. A sharp, helpless cry of pain, and then ragged, reedy breaths.
He'd peered around the doorframe of the kitchen in time to see his father the bogeyman looming over his mother, who'd sat, shrunken and huddled, in the incongruously chummy embrace of the right angle formed by the kitchen counter. Her hair had been a disheveled frazzle around her blotchy, tearstained face, and one hand had clutched her cheek. She'd still been holding a dishrag, and the dingy, white fabric hanging from her clutching hand had made it look as though her cheek had slipped from its mooring on her cheekbone. She'd stared up at his father with an expression of surprise and naked terror. Her free hand had lain limply in the puddle of her skirt, and in the center of her palm had been a small, glistening, white fragment. He'd blinked at it in logy incomprehension, had wondered why she was cradling a lump of gristle. He hadn't realized it was her tooth until weeks later, when she'd smiled and revealed an unfamiliar void.
There'd been nothing of his father in the face that had gazed dispassionately down at her. Just the red, mottled face of the bogeyman, with dead eyes and spittle-flecked lips. His father's hands had hung loosely at his side, the fingers of his right hand the curved and deadly fangs of a serpent. The fingers had twitched delicately, as though they'd not yet spent the entirety of their venom, and he'd shrunk from the scene involuntarily, mesmerized by the sight of those twitching fingers and his mother's stricken face.
He didn't eat her, he'd thought as he'd retreated to the safety of the parlor, where his toy cars had been strewn haphazardly across the floor, the victims of a multi-car accident. The crowd had gone home, and only carnage had remained. He didn't gobble her up, not this time, but he bit her really hard. He'll eat her sooner or later, though. The monsters always do.
His father the bogeyman had left shortly thereafter, had stalked out the front door and down the front steps, bound for the secret places monsters went when they got tired of their grownup costumes. Adam hadn't breathed until he'd heard the glassy, coughing roar of his father's work truck, and when it had faded into silence, he'd gathered his cars and blocks and carried them upstairs to his room. He hadn't wanted to be Rad Ross, daredevil, anymore. He'd tossed his cars into his toy box and crawled into his bed, where he'd hidden in a nest of clean, white sheets until his mother had called him to lunch, peanut butter and jelly on bread that had gone hard from exposure to air. His mother had smiled at him with fat, rubbery lips and run her fingers through his hair, and if she'd noticed that he was white as the bread he'd been eating, she'd never said so. She'd just returned to the kitchen to start dinner.
No broken bones that time, just a black eye and fat lips and a swollen cheek and a shattered bicuspid that the family dentist had replaced with a ceramic one a year later.
His father had hit him for the first time when he was seven. He doesn't remember why, though he has a vague recollection of leaves in the yard and a rubber ball round and ripe as a cherry tomato. His father had whipped him with his belt, pulled it from the loops of his Levis and brought it down like a lash. He doesn't remember the pain so much as the queer, humiliating sense of violation as that strip of leather had lapped at his flesh like an eager, alien tongue, the sense of helpless exposure. He remembers the shame, too, a deep, frosty ache underneath his burning skin. He remembers the monster's kiss.
There'd been broken bones that time, but not his. His mother, who had no courage for herself, had summoned it to save him, and she'd paid for it with three cracked ribs and a broken arm. His father's feet had sounded like drums as they'd sunk into her ribcage, and his mother had screamed when her arm had broken. She'd never screamed before, never howled and scuttled away on her three remaining limbs, coughing weakly and dripping snot into the leaves he'd forgotten to rake. He'd been too stunned to scream, too sickened by guilt to do anything but stand in the yard with his eyes screwed shut and wait for the screaming to stop. Eventually, it had, but he'd kept them closed until the front door had slammed and sealed the bogeyman in his lair.
He'd tried to help his mother up, but she'd screamed when he'd touched her, and so he could do nothing but hover nearby while she'd struggled to her feet and staggered to the car, broken arm cradled against her cracked ribs. She'd driven to the hospital with one arm, hunched over in the driver's seat and crying with every shallow breath. He'd sat in the passenger seat and kept his gaze fixed on the landscape outside the car so she wouldn't see him cry.
They'd gone to see the wizard that night, and he'd waited in the chair while the great and powerful Oz had put her stuffing back in. It had been harder to do that time, and she'd moaned while the wizard worked his magic. It had taken her a long time to emerge from behind the curtain; the wizard had wanted her to stay overnight, but his mother had refused. She'd been afraid of what his father might do if she were gone that long and even more afraid of sending Adam home alone with him. If she did that, then Adam might disappear into the mists of nowhere, spirited away by his spiteful bogeyman father or snatched by the specter of DHS and banished to the loveless exile of foster care. So, she'd gathered her things and run from the bland sanctuary of the hospital, the prescription for Vicodin pinched carefully in her hand.
He'd looked back at the wizard as his mother had led him from the triage station. The wizard had been old and tired, grey and stooped as he'd peeled off his gloves and tossed them into the waiting gullet of the trashcan marked BIOHAZARD in blocky, black letters. He hadn't looked at Adam.
When are you gonna put my stuffing back in, Mr. Wizard? he'd thought desperately. Mine's all falling out, too. But the wizard hadn't heard him, had already been turning toward another supplicant, pulling a fresh pair of gloves from the pocket of his rumpled coat.
He'd hoped that his mother would get into the car and drive anywhere but home, would flee from the bogeyman and start anew in a distant town. They could change their names, shed the taint of the bogeyman, and she could be a teacher again, like she'd been before she'd fallen into the bogeyman's trap. He'd never be able to be Rad Ross, but that was okay by him. He could pick out a better name, and when he became famous, no one would ever know that his father was the bogeyman.
But there'd been nowhere to go but home, and that's where they'd gone. Two days later, his mother had been on her hands and knees, polishing the parlor floor inch by painful inch. She'd cried from the pain of her abused ribs, had stopped and pressed her forehead to the floor and cried in hitching, shallow gasps while her arm throbbed in its plaster. It had taken her three hours to polish the floor, but she'd done it, and when she was finished, she'd vomited into the kitchen sink and turned on the garbage disposal until the mess was gone.
He'd never stopped hoping that his mother would find the courage to leave the bogeyman, but she never had. His magic had been too strong and her fear too great. She'd sunk her roots into the soil of her chosen homestead and let the monster bruise her and break her bones. There had been other broken bones, too many to count, and with them had come lessons, lessons earned with every slap and kick and punch, etched into blood and bone with screams and hastily muffled sobs.
Chief among these lessons was the necessity of invisibility, of being a secret keeper, and so he's surprised when he says to Danny and Stella, "Maybe she had a bully in her life."
He's surprised and embarrassed by his uncharacteristic slip. It's not a secret he'd ever intended to tell, not to anyone, much less to the people with whom he spends so much time, people who make their living unearthing the seedy, hidden truths of other people's lives. He hopes the remark has passed unnoticed, but he knows better.
He sinks lower in his seat and waits for the moment to break, but it never does. It just spins out. Danny and Stella are watching him; Danny's gaze is contemplative and more than a trifle knowing, and that surprises him not at all. Danny is a member of the walking wounded, too, but unlike Adam, who's survived by becoming invisible, he's survived by fighting back, by bluffing when he can and baring his teeth when he can't. Danny's got a bogeyman to call his own, and Adam's willing to bet that if he were to catch a glimpse of Danny's monster, he'd see the family resemblance to the one that crouches in his closet on the bad nights and presides over the family table on worse holidays.
Stella's gaze is no less intense, but it's softer, filled with a dawning suspicion and a sympathy that he can't stand. It's too close to pity, too close to the sorrowful, useless glances of the nurses at the triage station who'd watched him and his mother limp into the world with their stuffing bulging in all the wrong places.
He doesn't want Stella to see him like that. He wants her to see him as smart and good at his job, as a scientist and not a wounded child in geek's clothing. So he opens his mouth to offer an insight that will break the case and give him time to regroup, but what comes out is, "My dad was kind of a bully," and in that moment, he could gladly crawl through the monitor and join the space-age shoplifter in her two-dimensional world of high-end merchandise. Danny's expression sharpens, and Stella's deepens, and it's hard to look at either one of them, so he fixes his gaze on the screen in front of him and watches the unknown woman slip a scarf into her handbag.
It's safer not to talk. All his stuffing is spilling out. So he doesn't say a word, no matter how heavy the silence grows. He watches and waits, and at last the subject returns to the case and the woman on the screen, and when it does, he breathes a sigh of relief and does his best to make himself invisible. |
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