Harrison Changes - Part III
After Brooke left the narrator and Quinton moved out, our narrator needed to find a new roommate. This led him and Harrison to Blair, a chatty and energetic fellow student who immediately endears herself to the narrator.
Blair went to bed, and so I said goodnight to Daisey, drunk-dialed Brooke, and tried to masturbate. I kept getting distracted by Harrison, though, first because he sent me a pair of rare, unprompted text messages—“u were talking with Blair all night,” followed a second later by, “are u going to fuck her?”—and then because he started streaming CSPAN on his computer. Every few seconds he went back and forth between conversing on Discord—characterized by friendly commentary, saying things like, “That was a really good point,” or, “Not sure how they’re going to rebut that,” or, “Ha-ha, they’re totally fucked, did you catch that?”— and switching off his microphone-off to scream at the news. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he’d shout. “You’re going to make an ad hominin attack? In this political climate? Fuck!” It was a volatile, mood-killing stream of consciousness that I doubt his online friends even knew existed.
Here's a thought that picks at me sometimes: what if there was no such thing as the Harrison I thought I knew? What if every time we ever hung out—all through childhood, through adolescence, through college—Harrison was faking it like he did over Discord when his microphone was on? What if every time he laughed, smiled, cracked a joke, or said something kind to me, on the inside he was screaming? What if all his life he was really that stuck and that angry?
I pounded the wall. “Shut the fuck up,” I shouted, and then an impotent, “Sorry.”
He fell silent for a moment, and then, inevitably, he started up again.
*****
A few nights later, Harrison crawled through Blair’s window wearing his cape and his vampire teeth while she was having sex with that guy, Eli, that she had told me about. The one she’d been seeing.
I was in the middle of a turbulent dream about my dog Daisey dying when it happened. The dream was not unusual. It recurred often, sometimes playing out realistically—the vet, the needle, the suddenly lifeless husk of her body—and sometimes abstractly—me snapping Daisey’s neck, her corpse sitting business class on a 747, getting the news from Dad that it was time we put her down over, and over, and over again.
The sound of Blair’s scream jolted me out of it, and, in the space of thirty seconds, I had fumbled a pair of underpants up my legs and charged into her bedroom to find the lights on and almost everybody naked.
Eli had pinned Harrison against the wall with his forearm pressing into my friend’s neck, practically spitting in his face he was so angry. Harrison was wearing only a striped pair of underwear underneath his cape. His whole body was limp, practically, as Eli throttled him against the drywall like a rag doll. The scene was so disorienting that it took me longer than it should have to process the pair of wings protruding out of Harrison’s backside and grinding against the wall.
When I share this part of the story on the forums, or at meetups, I always get asked, “Do you mean, like, angel wings?” but no, they were nothing like angel wings. Harrison’s wings were dirty, frail, and dead looking. There was nothing holy about them. Nothing good.
Blair struggled to latch her bra. “He was watching us,” she hissed.
“What the fuck were you doing?” Eli screamed at Harrison. “Do you like this? Does this get you hard? You goddamn little freak.”
I pushed past Eli and held my friend by the shoulders, stabilizing him. He blinked a few times, and, upon registering my face, seemed to become a little more alert. “What happened?” Harrison moaned, eyes rolling back, drool spooling out of his mouth. “I don’t know what happened.”
Without even thinking about it, I punched Harrison in the jaw. His skull snapped back against the drywall, and he bled out of his mouth like a fountain, coughing up dark red saliva and scattered teeth. Harrison spit out his vampire fangs and then staggered forward, dizzy, before crumpling into me, sobbing. “It’s okay,” I said, and I held him, remembering Daisey’s lifeless body on the examination table, and how I rubbed her coat until the vet said I had to go, and then how I turned back once more as I stepped into the hallway, feeling staggering relief at the sight of her vacant pupils.
“Come on,” I said, and I put my arm around Harrison. He muttered nonsense as I led him to his room and laid him out on his bed. It was the first I’d seen of his living space since before Blair moved in, and it was in awful shape: dirty plates everywhere, scraps of food scattered across the bed, a pile of skin clumped underneath his desk chair. He stretched out on his bed like a snow angel, looking dazed up at the ceiling.
I turned off his light. “You’re going to be all right, Harrison,” I said, and I shut the door.
Blair and Eli were waiting for me in the hallway.
“You’re telling me that’s Harrison?" Eli asked, zipping up his pants. They were waiting for me in the hallway, a large hoodie now draped over Blair’s body. She had her hands in the pockets, and she would not look at me. “I thought you said he was a goddamn activist,” Eli said, incredulous.
*****
The days that followed were lonely.
I say lonely because Harrison seemed to stop coming out of his room entirely, not even for work, and although she kept her door cracked most of the time, Blair would hardly look at me. She was out of the apartment with increasing frequency, and she had taken to answering my questions with curt, one-word replies that left little room for her usual introspection. I rationalized what I had seen that awful night in ways that now feel preposterous. The wings must have been an escalation of the vampire bit, I told myself. Just some elaborate costume. If I came up with an explanation for the lumps of skin in his bedroom, I’m unable to recall it.
One night I came home with another box of LEGOs hidden away in a paper bag, and from Harrison’s room, I heard his usual, “God fucking damn it. You fucking clown. Goddamn it,” as I kicked my shoes off.
This would have been unremarkable, were it not for the wi-fi modem, which spent the whole night flashing orange, taunting Harrison, and preventing me from logging onto Pornhub.
And yet, even with it impossible for him to stream the news, he still shouted like he was bearing witness to the end of democracy itself.
“Jesus fucking shit! Fuck!”
“Motherfucker!”
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!!”
Who knows what he was yelling at?
In another lifetime Harrison might have confided in me, but the poor guy, he could never find a connection.
*****
The loneliness continued for a week or so, until, while I was lighting up one evening, I heard a knock at the door.
“Hello?” I said, answering it.
Standing a respectful distance from the front stoop was a young man, maybe a year or two older than me, his hands crested in the pockets of his jeans. “Hey there,” he said stilted. He had a taper-fade haircut, and buttons with grotesque caricatures and inscrutable political slogans were fasted up and down his denim jacket. “It’s Mike.” And then, as though his name were supposed to mean anything to me, “Mike Trevorrow.” He must have sensed my confusion because he added, “I’m a friend of Harrison’s.”
“Okay,” I said.
Mike was fit, fashionable, taller than me. “I’m with the Democratic Socialists, and it’s, you know, been a while since I’ve seen him around.” I could tell he was trying to look past me into the living room. “Is he here?” Mike asked. “He hasn’t been returning my calls.” I’d scarcely met any of his DSA friends, and it felt surreal, powerful, to have one knocking on my door like this. “Could I talk to him?”
For a second, I considered knocking on Harrison’s door, or calling him, or even inviting Mike inside the house for a minute. I didn’t want to do that, though. I wanted him gone. “Harrison doesn’t want to see you,” I said.
Mike nodded, processing. “Tell him I’m sorry, will you?”
He thanked me for letting him know, and, after I’d shut the door on him, Blair asked, from the kitchen, “Why’d you tell him that?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
Blair frowned. “Are you ready to talk about it?” she asked, and, when I looked up at her and nodded, she added, “A lot of this, you really should have told me.”
We relocated to my bedroom, and, with the door shut, I told her everything I knew for sure about Harrison and everything I didn’t, the latter pretty much starting and ending with the decrepit wings that had emerged from his backside, as well as whatever impulse led him to crawl through her window while she was with Eli. “The wings were new,” I said, “but he did something similar, I guess, with my ex, with Brooke.” I told her about the night in the bathroom and about the real reason why Quinton moved out and about the writhing worms that Harrison ejected from his body.
“I’m worried that something has been wrong for a long time,” I confessed.
Blair thought for a moment, and the craziest thing from this whole fucked up period is that she accepted my apology. “I forgive you,” she said, literally those exact words, like almost nobody else has ever said in my whole stupid life of apologizing for practically everything. I always thought something so straightforward and black-and-white would make me feel better, but instead, it just made me feel worse, like she had to conjure forgiveness into being. Like she had to summon it.
“I’m still seeing Eli,” she told me. “I think. I don’t know. He’s being the worst about this whole thing. He can’t get over that two guys saw his junk. He’s really upset about it.”
“He sounds really chill.”
“Steven,” Blair said. “That was scary.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
“Is Harrison going to be all right?”
“I’m not sure,” I told her, but I mean, come on. I knew.
*****
We agreed to make a plan the following morning, but it turned out there wasn’t time for that.
It was around two in the morning when we convened in the living room on account of a moan we heard coming from the bathroom that was clearly, horribly, Harrison. I was a little tipsy, having polished off a bomber in my bedroom, and Blair looked sick to her stomach. “Should we go in?” she asked, and she was answered by a violent gurgle from behind the closed door.
We went inside, pulled the shower curtain, and found Harrison cowering naked in the bathtub, caressing his legs and whispering his name over and over. He was crying and shitting himself, and the smell was horrible.
“Harrison,” he said, not seeming to notice our presence. “I’m Harrison. I’m Harrison.”
The tub was covered in scabs and splotches. Gory residue was slicked across his skin, and blood bubbled out from a burst scab on his left shoulder, trickling across the warped constellations of his body.
“I’m such a fuck-up,” he whimpered, when he realized that we were there with him. There was shit smeared across the torn, fragile surface of his limp wings. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” Harrison hit his forehead with his right hand. Then he did it again, and again, each time with a force that surprised me. I worried that he would crack his skull right open, that he’d die right then and there. It didn’t look like he could move his other arm, a pincer-looking appendage having emerged out of his left wrist, leaving his hand and fingers dangling, lifeless, as blood leaked out through the open wound. I let him land a few blows like I was on a time delay, and then I stumbled, dumbly, into the bathtub, where I grabbed his arm, and then bent down and wrangled him like an animal. He struggled at first, and then stiffened, and then leaned into me.
“Harrison,” I said, and I cradled him.
Blair watched for a minute or so from the door frame before turning away. It must have been too intimate, seeing the two of us like that, like she was intruding. I tried cleaning him, but the pressure from the shower nozzle kept blasting his skin off even worse, and so instead I patted him down, gentle, with a wet towel. He allowed me to help him out of the bathtub, leaning on me as he stumbled—crying—to his room. “Shit, man,” he said. “The smell.”
“That’s okay,” I told him. “That’s okay. You’re okay, Harrison.”
“I’m okay,” he repeated after me. “I’m okay.”
I ignored the mess and set him in his chair instead of his bed because his sheets were soiled with food waste and long stretches of skin. “We’re going to figure this out,” I promised, and there I was again, in the in-between. If I had been a child, I might have called someone for help, and if I had been an adult—a real adult—I might have sprung into action. But I was neither of those things, and so I told him, ridiculously, “You and me. We’ve got this.”
On my way out, I turned off his light and took one final look at him. Harrison’s back was to me, now, having swiveled the chair around to face his monitor. His wings outstretched glacially until they were fully erect, partially illuminated by the blue hue of his computer screen, where Rachel Maddow was going on about a proposed healthcare bill from an open Chrome tab.
“I’m Harrison,” I heard him say, again, as I shut the door behind me. “Harrison.” And I suppose it’s comforting, maybe, that the last words I would ever hear him speak were an affirmation of his identity, whispered, over and over, as he held onto himself, to his humanity, to that promise of reform from our last night drunken together.
He was Harrison; he was Harrison; he was Harrison.
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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