Harrison Changes - Part I
We’re back from our month off, and we have quite the story to share. I first read Chris Vanjonack’s work in One Story and was immediately compelled by the voice and longing underneath this contemporary ghost story. Reading “Harrison Changes,” I was thrilled to see how he brought this same energy and emotion to body horror (with fewer mullets than in The Fly). “Harrison Changes” tells the story of two young men who grew up together and are adjusting around each other through college. Our narrator has always held a soft spot for Harrison, but as he’s aged Harrison has become a bit prickly with an appetite for darkness.
This story is bold, grotesque, and heartfelt. It ruminates on friendships and growing up in ever surprising, original ways, and I’m so excited to share it for Issue 10.
-Michael
Harrison changed slowly at first and then very suddenly towards the end.
His gradual, expected changes began in middle school when his balls descended and his pubes spurted out, but the all-at-once changes held off until junior year of college, a turbulent couple of months during which strange biological alterations overtook his body and transformed him into a winged, insectoid atrocity that hissed and scratched and shed his skin like an orange peel midway through fall semester.
The whole thing still keeps me up at night.
Blair’s opinion is that I should move on. “It’s in the past,” she used to tell me, sounding more urgent by the year. “Nothing’s written.” She’s always saying things like this, and I wonder if she has a notepad full of them, or if rather they just come to her naturally. She’s probably the best friend I have at this point, which is funny in a sad way because I don’t think I’ll ever see her again.
Some nights I really would like to take Blair up on her charge to get normal: settle down with a 9-5 job, get a cell phone, get an address, start dating somebody stable. It’s been a long time since I was with a partner who didn’t insist on being referred to by an alias, whose apartment wasn’t wallpapered in newspaper clippings. Like, what if I dated a dentist? Or an IRS agent? Some nights I imagine the kind of life I might share with this imaginary person, and I have prophecies of baby showers and playdates instead of the usual apocalypse. I imagine we would buy a house back in Jersey, make love all the time, open a dog rescue, and put up a white picket fence to close a couple of kids off from the horrors of the outside world.
Some nights I really would like that.
Other nights, when I’m sober, it’s bright enough and I’m clear enough to know that a life like that isn’t really in the cards for me. By the time he had finished changing, Harrison wasn’t Harrison anymore, and, truth be told, I wasn’t me.
*****
Harrison’s horrific, aberrational changes held off until the fall of his 21st year, but hormonal, pubescent alterations began to shape his body as early as middle school.
I first noticed in 9th-grade gym class. We were in the locker room, just coming out of the showers, and Harrison scrunched his face, waved the air, and said, “Game over, man, game over,” on account of somebody had shit and jerked off in one of the urinals the Friday before a long weekend. “No goddamn sense of decorum,” he added, dropping his towel, and I couldn’t help but gawk at his naked body. Harrison’s balls sagged. He smelled. Surrounding his groin was a thick, unkempt bush of pubic hair, the likes of which I had only seen on much older men at the rec center. I felt self-conscious about my body and envious of his, and it wouldn’t be until high school that I finally grew pubic hair of my own. For months I would sometimes get lost in it, wrapping strands around my index finger until the tip of my cuticle turned purple.
Fourteen years old and already our bodies were diverging, but even then, a part of me understood that Harrison’s changes went beyond just an early ascent into puberty. Whereas we had once shared a common language of in-jokes and references and pop-culture obsessions, one day, without warning, Harrison suddenly stopped giving a shit about Battlestar Galactica and Call of Duty, fixating instead on archaic-sounding matters of the adult world: the Bush administration, climate change, the war in Iraq. He became preoccupied with politics, beginning a dogged campaign to get me to watch The Daily Show and sprinkling our walks home with complaints about the electoral college, tax brackets. “It’s juvenile,” he once told me. “Your priorities.”
It would have been around this time that Harrison joined the speech and debate team. He made new friends in this space: boys with glasses and serious, soft-spoken girls who seemed to know something about the world that I couldn’t begin to grasp. They ran circles around me intellectually, fundraised for causes I’d never heard of, attended Gay Straight Alliance meetings during lunch. I was jealous of their certainty and paranoid about getting replaced. Harrison seemed to indulge me with an air of obligation, once even interrupting our annual marathon of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies to make us watch the back half of a Democratic Primary debate. I remember him jotting down notes while we watched, grumbling critiques under his breath whenever a candidate would make an imperceptible error. “He’s talking around the question,” Harrison would say in a half-whisper. “Fucking amateur hour over here.”
Of our old rituals, there was only one that he never seemed to tire of. For as long as I can remember, we had this running joke where he would pretend to be a vampire. Only in front of me, though. Or perhaps only for me. The basic idea was that if, say, we were killing time in a group setting—one comprised of our old friends, of course, never the speech and debate crew—he’d wait for a moment when we were alone together, and then stand on his top-toes, bare his teeth, and gesture menacingly with his hands up like he was Bela Lugosi performing as Dracula. “He’s doing it!” I’d say, as Harrison crept toward me, hissing. “Right now! Come see! He’s doing the vampire!”
Harrison would always drop the act right away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he’d tell me, feigning ignorance for our unimpressed mutuals. “You sound fucking crazy.”
Who knows why I went along with it, why I encouraged him?
He seemed to enjoy it, playing with me like that. And I seemed to enjoy being played with.
It was fun, I guess. It was scary.
We were kids.
It’s funny, looking back, how close adolescence is to adulthood, but once we were babies, children. Our bodies looked nearly identical then, the Venn diagram of our interests practically a circle. One day during second-grade recess, we went to the bathroom and touched the tips of our penises together. Small and hairless, I thought a light would shoot out, and Harrison figured we’d get superpowers.
Nothing happened, but—shit, wow—wouldn’t that have been something?
*****
For the longest time, I never told anyone about the penis thing, until one night my junior year of college, when this girl I was kind of seeing, Brooke, ran her finger up and down my pudgy backside and asked me to tell her something no one else knew about me.
“Huh,” she said, once I finished. “And now you live together.”
It was true. Harrison and I were residing at 642 South Meldrum, a town house just a couple miles from campus. Our place was an absolute shithole, over-priced and under-maintained, with a toilet that got clogged up half the time you took a shit in it, busted window screens, and a broken AC unit that made the summer months practically unbearable. The wi-fi hardly even worked—some terminally undiagnosed issue with the coax outlet that caused the modem’s light to switch back and forth at random between a reassuring, solid green, and a flashing orange indicating that the internet had crapped out yet again. I loved the place despite or maybe even because of its myriad flaws. It felt so much more real to me, more honest, than the two-story suburban cut-out I’d grown up in. Harrison and I also lived with a third roommate, Quinton, who I’d met in a 100-level anthropology class and Blair would soon replace.
It was October, only a handful of months before Harrison’s body betrayed him.
I remember the leaves turned early that year. The Newark mayor, Michael Grassley, was in the middle of a fierce reelection campaign, but the whole town was much more preoccupied with a small asteroid that had crashed into a field at the edge of town earlier that month. The local outlets were milking the story for all it was worth, interviewing astronomers and university professors and even a gaggle of UFO obsessives who flooded in with cameras and conspiracy theories shortly after the news broke. The day after it hit the earth, Harrison and I rode out to the crash site together, walking our bikes over wet grass to the yellow barricade tape that had been strung between traffic cones to block off the crater. We had to strain to see past all the true believers crowding the scene—“Virgins,” I remember calling them, “losers,”—but even then, we couldn’t make out the hole in the ground, only catching glimpses of hazmat workers circling its perimeter. “I’m not sure how this is going to impact the election,” Harrison whispered to me. “But there’s got to be some way for Grassley to capitalize on this. There’s got to be an angle, rhetorically.”
The whole town had extraterrestrial fever, and before coming back to my place that evening, Brooke and I had gone to a screening of Close Encounters at the Art Theater. It was the last night she and I would spend together, cramped for space on my twin-sized mattress, with Brooke’s back pressed against the too-thin drywall that mounted a weak divide between my room and Harrison’s.
“It’s good of you to stay with him,” Brooke told me. “With Harrison, I mean.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, but she had seen how frustrating it could be to live with him, how upset I got when he’d bail on me or blow off plans. Beyond that were the usual roommate complaints that seemed to afflict nearly everyone I know at the time. Harrison was a lot messier than me, for instance, only doing laundry once every couple of months and showering at best intermittently, but he kept to himself, usually, holed up in his room shouting at talk show pundits at all hours of the day and night. The noise associated with his cable news consumption wasn’t a problem until a couple of months prior, when Harrison had some vague and impenetrable falling out with an organizer of the local DSA. I had been excited at first by this development, mistakenly assuming that I would fill the space left by his old social circle. Instead, Harrison went and joined a Discord server populated with other political junkies from around the country, with whom he would illegally stream house floor proceedings on C-SPAN and senate debates on C-SPAN 2, shouting creatively phrased profanity at his desktop until two, sometimes three in the morning. “Filibuster!” he would screech. “Use the fucking filibuster!”
“I’m serious,” Brooke told me that night. “Not everybody would stick around.”
Compliments like that make me uncomfortable, so I laughed, kind of, and asked her to scoot over. “I’m falling off the bed here.” She inched closer to the wall, and I said, “Thanks, sorry.”
“What are you always apologizing for?” she asked.
I’ve never been good at answering that question, and so instead of saying anything, I just wrapped my arms around her for long enough that I could credibly pretend to have fallen asleep, maintaining that position until finally Brooke slipped out of bed to use the bathroom. With a minute or so of privacy ahead of me, I got up to say goodnight to my dead childhood dog, Daisey, vis-à-vis the picture I kept inside my desk drawer alongside a zip-lock baggie that held a tuff of her fur. I only got halfway through my nightly ritual—“Goodnight, Daisey, I love you. I love you so much, Daisey, you’re my best friend in the world. You’re such a good dog, Daisey”—when Brooke let this awful scream from the bathroom. I dropped the picture and stumbled through the hallway and into the doorframe, where I discovered Harrison standing in the bathtub with the curtain drawn. He was shirtless, wearing only a cape and his boxers shorts and a pair of cartoonish looking fangs that he wore whenever he’d pretend to be a vampire.
“Scared the hell out of her!” he laughed, affecting a half-assed Transylvanian accent.
Brooke was already fumbling for her keys and cursing her way out the door. “The heck is happening?” Quinton asked, emerging groggy from his bedroom, the umpteenth night in a row that Harrison had interrupted his sleep schedule. I ignored him to chase after Brooke, and as I stepped onto the concrete, several inevitabilities dawned on me, the first among them being that Brooke and I were done, clearly, and that the last kind thing I might ever hear her say was that it was good of me to have stuck with Harrison.
And so I guess it was funny then, that as I sprinted past the parking lot and the mailboxes and the dumpster with the raccoon infestation, I knew I’d stick with him through this one, too.
*****
I tried like hell to explain it to her:
“It’s usually just for me. I think he was trying to include you…”
“He didn’t mean anything by it…”
“It’s how we’d play…”
Brooke said: “Don’t call me.”
*****
“I can’t do this anymore,” Quinton told me in the kitchen, two weeks later, an echo of Brooke. “That was messed up, what happened. I can barely even sleep on the normal nights.”
I took Quinton out for dinner just before he moved out. It was only me and him—Harrison sat it out like he sat out everything—which worked well enough because Quinton never liked Harrison to begin with. After dinner, Quinton and I leaned against the bumper of my old Corolla, cracked open a pair of Arizona Ice Teas, and bullshitted for a while, both of us trying to stretch the evening for as long as we could. The world was dark except for the fluorescent glow of the ShopRite sign towering above the nearly empty parking lot, an inflatable little green man tethered to the letter S. “I would have kicked the stuff out of Harrison,” Quinton said. “If he’d done that to Tracey? Heck man, I can’t even tell you.”
I just shrugged; Brooke and I were never going to last, anyway. I thought about telling this to Quinton, but then figured it wouldn’t prove much, or at least, not what I hoped it would.
“Are you happy?” I asked Quinton, and he told me he was. He said that he liked his life, that he loved Tracey, and that he was planning on marrying her, even—first in a civil ceremony over the summer, and then a temple wedding the year following.
“Are you going to be okay, just you and Harrison?” he asked, and when I didn’t say anything, he extended a handshake. “Good luck,” he said.
“You too,” I told him, and that was the last time Quinton and I would speak until a few months after Harrison was gone, when I called him up, strung out at two in the morning, to ask if we’d missed something early on that might have saved him, if there were clues we’d disregarded.
“There must have been something,” I kept saying. “Was he in the woods or anything? Did he get anywhere near the crater where the asteroid hit? We biked up to it, once, but we didn’t stay long, never went past the tape or anything. Could he have gone back out on his own? Do you think there’s a chance of that?”
“What the heck does the asteroid have to do with Harrison?” Quinton asked, and then I was struck by a vivid, rainbow memory of the pact that Harrison’s parents, Blair, and I made in the corner booth at Denny’s to keep things X-Files secretive, and so I abruptly ended the call. Quinton texted me a few times after that, first to ask what I meant, then to ask how I was doing. Months later, he called to follow up on the invitation he’d sent me to his civil ceremony, which, of course, I had failed to RSVP to in either direction.
“Yeah,” I said, lights buzzing around me on my fourth day of consciousness. “I’ll be there.”
But I wasn’t, of course. I missed the ceremony on account of I had a meeting with a handful of guys—scam artists, really—who had falsely claimed to be keeping a live extraterrestrial in their basement, and I never heard from him again.
I hecked up real bad, as Quinton himself might say.
To be continued…
Chris Vanjonack is a writer and educator from Fort Collins, Colorado. A recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, his fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in One Story, Barrelhouse, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he currently teaches creative writing at the Ohio State University as a Post-MFA fellow.
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