Harrison Changes - Part IV
In Part III, Harrison continues to withdraw into himself, becoming crabbier and, our narrator notices, sicker. His body is changing. Then, one night, he surprises Blair and her boyfriend, and the apartment erupts into chaos.
Blair and I did the best we could to clean the bathtub, with endless disinfectant wipes and an impossible volume of blood and skin circling the drain. We passed out together in the living room. When we woke up to the sun cutting through the window blinds, we took turns showering and tossed our soiled clothing in the dumpster. The smell had permeated the entire house, and so we propped up the rickety ladder that Quinton had kept on the side of the building and climbed onto the rooftop of our rental.
“I don’t know what’s happening to him,” Blair said, dangling her feet over the ledge. “But he needs help. More than we can give him.”
“I guess,” I said. I spat onto the pavement.
“How much longer do you really think we can wait this out?” Blair asked.
It was far, far too late, but I conceded that she was right. These days, when I play woulda-coulda-shoulda with Harrison’s life, I sometimes wonder how different things might have been if I’d taken him straight to the ER after he puked up worms, or after the wings cropped out of his body, or after we found him like that in the bathroom. It wouldn’t have done any good, though. I’ve come to understand that this happens with distressing regularity. Harrison wasn’t the only person to change in Newark that autumn—there was also an old man in a retirement home, a traveling nurse, this poor fucking Boy Scout. And of course, it’s happened since then, too. The newspapers never cover it, and it’s over as soon as it’s started. There’s no cure. There’s no hope. The doctors lie about it. The press won’t touch it. Anonymous government cleaners burn the bodies in trashcans. Any which way it might have gone, there was no getting around that Harrison was out of time.
Game over, man. Game over.
*****
I want to talk about the last time I’ll ever see Blair.
It was a year and a half ago, in a coffee shop in Baltimore. Blair was about to start her second year of med school. She had two dogs, lived alone, and came across as so much more confident and collected than she ever did in undergrad.
We saw each other maybe twice a year back then. I didn’t have a phone or an address, which made communication difficult, but even then, it’s not like we didn’t have each other’s email addresses, like I couldn’t have just called her up from a payphone. I don’t think we could have ever been permanent staples in each other’s lives, though. I remind her too much of that time, and Blair just wants to put it all behind her.
I shouldn’t blame her for this, but I do. I do.
Sitting in the coffee shop, I couldn’t imagine what she must have thought of me. I looked terrible, having hitchhiked from Indianapolis and gone days without showering, shaving, or eating anything of substance. She asked what I was doing in town, and I thought about lying. “Visiting family,” I could have said, although I doubt she would have believed me. “Just wanted to see you.” I almost told her that I missed her, but then I decided, fuck it. We had history.
I leaned forward, lowered my voice. “I’m here to meet this guy,” I said, pausing as a barista walked past us. “I can’t tell you his name, but I can promise that you’ve heard of him. Very high-ranking official. We needed to meet in person—everything you do online gets stored in the cloud, you know—and we’ve been real careful about it, using code names and everything.”
“Come on—”
“He’s got intel on some seriously fucked stuff going down in this country. Everywhere, really. It’s not a one-off, and it’s happening more and more by the year. There’s always a crop of new cases after an asteroid, always within a ten-mile radius. Harrison was a victim. They all are. But we can stop it from happening again. We’ve just got to keep our eyes on the sky, you know? And if we can just get a sample—” I realized that I was breathing heavy, that I was scaring her. I tried to relax. I wanted to appear measured, rational, and so I looked down at the table in between us as I collected my thoughts. “You should come with me,” I said, slow enough that I might dwell in the possibility of her agreeing. “I want you to come with me.”
Blair gave herself a few seconds and then reached across the table. “Steven,” she said. “It’s been years.” She took my hand, squeezed it. “And Harrison’s gone. But you got out. We both got out of that house.” She smiled, kind of, but in a sad way, like she knew already that it was no use.
“We didn’t get out,” I said. “Not as long as it’s still happening. We couldn’t save Harrison, but maybe if we can find out exactly what happened, if we can prove it…” I trailed off. “I owe it to him,” I said. “I miss him.”
“Why don’t you ditch your meeting?” said Blair. “Let’s go see a movie. Let’s go get a haircut.”
There’s a part of me that would have liked that, really, but instead, I just told her, “You never gave a shit about him, did you?” and I left feeling angry.
Angry at Blair for moving on.
At myself for staying put.
At Harrison for being dead, for being Harrison, for not being Harrison at all.
*****
It was too little, too late, but in the end, with Harrison, we tried.
Blair and I approached his door, both keeping a cautious distance from the wood. He wouldn’t speak back to us in words, and the noises coming from his room didn’t sound like anything we’d heard before, somehow at once guttural and syllabic, incomprehensible. There were bags underneath Blair’s eyes. She held up a metal bat that she’d found in the closet, which she said was for protection. “Against what?” I asked, and she shrugged, told me to grab a shovel.
I knocked three times. “Harrison?” I said, squeezing the shaft. “We’re here to help you.”
There was no response—or at least not one that I could interpret—and so I banged on the door again. Louder this time, harder.
“Harrison, come on,” said Blair. “We’re taking you to a doctor.”
I shook the doorknob. He’d locked himself inside, somehow, and in a moment of uncharacteristic action, I took a step back and kicked my foot into the door. I nearly tripped backward as it swung open, and, as I regained my balance, Blair and I exchanged a nod like you see in action movies. We stepped through his doorway and both nearly gagged at the stench. Shit was all over the place, segments of the drywall were stained in piss, and there was a pile of skin and organs in his desk chair, a messy clump of what had once been Harrison, all blood and guts and eyeballs.
And then, hissing from the far corner of the bedroom behind a unkept heap of soiled laundry, I saw at last what Harrison had become. He looked all wrong. Different. This figure retained my friend’s stature, but it was missing all his softness, his skin, everything that I remembered of his body replaced with a cold, shell-like exterior, awash with wet and plasma. It was difficult to see him, crouched like that in the depths of bedroom. It was difficult to look at him at all.
“Harrison,” I said, and I let out a whimper.
His wings extended in a display of dominance or maybe even fear. “It’s okay,” I told him, struggling to control my breathing as he made a kind of clicking sound. “Harrison, it’s okay.” For a brief, deluded moment, I thought he may have understood me, but then he screeched, leapt over the bed, and shot forward with the pincer that had protruded from his wrist pointed right at me. I raised my shovel and whacked him to the ground. Harrison let out a pained shriek like some kind of animal, and then scrambled to get back up, scraping at the stained hardwood, the gash where I struck his body now body leaking insects all over his floor.
I looked down at him. I took a breath. And then I hit him. I hit it again. I just kept hitting it.
“Steven—”
Daisey was sick for weeks before we finally put her down, and I had read online about how when a dog looks you in the eye, it’s to tell you that it loves you, and so I made this conscious effort to look Daisey in the eye when my parents and I put her to sleep. I would have preferred to have said my usual, Goodnight, Daisey, I love you. I love you so much, Daisey. You’re the best dog in the world and you’re my best friend in the world. You’re such a good dog, Daisey. Goodnight, Daisey, I love you, that I’d been whispering to her twice a day in her final months. Her last moments weren’t for me, though, they were for Daisey, and so as the vet injected her with a needle and Daisey convulsed a little and then stopped and then twitched once more and then stopped for good, I did my absolute best to look her in the eye the whole time. And I did. I held the stare. I did not look away.
I couldn’t do the same for Harrison.
Instead, I held my eyes shut as I raised and lowered the shovel, again and again and again saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” until it stopped screeching, until it was just a pile of flesh and insides that had once been my friend.
Behind me, Blair said, “Stop it, come on,” and she rubbed my back as I got sick all over myself. “It’s okay,” she said, her voice quiet and uneasy. I heaved. Blair squeezed my shoulder. She kept starting to talk and then stopping.
Finally: “We’re going to have to get rid of it.”
She was right, only there was never any we. Just me with a shovel, knocking Harrison to the ground, piling Harrison into a trash bag, digging a hole in the middle of nowhere, spending my whole stupid life wishing I had been a better friend.
I stared at what was left of Harrison, and I don’t think I had realized yet that I would never, ever, stop being sorry for what happened to him, just like I would never, ever, stop being sorry for Daisey, because she had really trusted me in those final seconds as I looked her in the eyes to say I love you. All these years later and I still wonder if she knew, wonder if Harrison knew, wonder if you can ever know.
I turned toward Blair and wiped spit from my chin, my whole body shaking.
“It’s over with,” I managed, although, even then, I’m not sure that I believed it.
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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