Eat'em (2 page)

Chapter 2

“Rise and shine, Jake!”

My Uncle Patrick.

Uncle Patrick much preferred to go by his middle name, Valentine. He flat refused to respond to uncle anything. He was actually two days younger than myself, a fact my parents both resented. Not much takes the wind out of a mother-to-be’s sails like the grandmother-to-be sharing the same news. My dad swore up and down my grandparents did it just to spite them. He even believed my grandma intentionally postponed labor so Patrick Valentine would be the most celebrated of the two newborns. A picture of Val right out of the hospital has him in a ‘World’s Best Uncle’ onesie. It hung proudly over the thirty-two inch plasma screen in our single bedroom apartment.

Val flipped the light on and I cowered deeper into the cushions of my parents’ old leather couch.

“Seriously, Baby-Jake!” Val’s chipper,
Every Morning is a Good Morning,
tone tended to conquer any other noise polluting the atmosphere. Silence wasn’t something I’d experienced in some time. Calm was anything that broke through the storm, which Val could do without effort. “Come on, you lazy orphan, get up. Get up! Get up! Get up!”

Orphan for us Brooks more-or-less represented a term of endearment. We were both orphans. Mortality struck my dad first (Val’s brother), and then it grasped its mangled fingers around the lives of my mom and stepfamily, finally, catching up to my grandparents within six months of each other. Val and I lived in our own apartment for only a few months. For his parents, death lingered agonizingly close for years, leaving me in the care of an uncle younger than myself. A cruel punch line to a joke only Val and I would ever be privy to.

“And could you put a shirt on, for the sake of humanity?” Val opened the fridge and rummaged around. “I swear to god, Jake-Nasty, I wake up early every morning, I’m tired of being rewarded with your Wicker Man physique. Plus, you’re getting your damned nastiness all over my couch, Deadpool, so put on your costume if you’re going to grind up on my stuff.”

Eat’em pounced on the back of my head as I buried it into the security of a squished-to-mush pillow made out of some space-age memory foam; the guaranteed firmness of which gave out after a weeklong spell we suffered with no air conditioning. I futilely shoved fistfuls of mashed foam against my ears to block out The World’s Best Uncle and my eager demon.

“Waffles, yes,” Eat’em said. “I shall gulp the innards of Aunt Jemima, lapping plasma from her hollowed skull, yes. Imbibe her succulent fluids until she’s empty once more!”    

“Why can’t you ever sleep in?” I shouted into a pillow.

“Because, Your Jakeness,” Val skipped from the kitchen and stomped as he jumped into a squat in front of the couch. Then he sang in his best VeggieTales impression, “It’s the first day… of the first grade!”

“No!” I grunted wearily.

“Yes!” Eat’em yelled.

“Yeah buddy,” Val cracked the top on a soda. “First day of college. Wealth is no excuse to be an uneducated dolt.” He sang Sublime lyrics, “Early in the morning, rising to the street.”

“I’m not going.”

“The Hell you aren’t,” Val kicked the couch and slapped the wall over my head. He trumpeted an off key version of
Taps
with his face a few unintended inches from Eat’em’s backside. “WAKE UP, PRIVATE STUPID! IT’S TIME WE LEARN YOU SOME GOOD!”

All my strength went into rolling over.

If one didn’t know any better, they’d think Val and I were separated by years instead of days. His skin shone bright like my dad’s once had. In fact, he could have passed for a younger, skinnier version of my father, with green eyes and fiery hair. Val’s hair was unkempt and looked youthful. He never had to shave either, taking even more years off his complexion.

By comparison, I grew a tasseled bird’s nest, crested with an ever-receding hairline that I’d been blessed with before stepping foot out of high school. Crests formed at the edges of my eyelids, burrows on my cheeks led from the sides of my nose to the corners of my mouth, and I’d been told my deep-set eyes resembled those of Steve Buscemi. Nobody ever said a
Young
Steve Buscemi… just I looked like Steve Buscemi.

The exception, of course, was my red irises. Sometimes I introduced myself thusly, “My name is Jacob Brook, and no, I’m not wearing contacts.” The typical, “Okay…” takes up less time than when I waited for people to ask. Then they’d have to say, “Weird” or “that’s cool!” “Were they always like that?” “Do you see things different?” And the conversation would lead to the scrutinizing of the rest of my features and eventually the inevitable, “Has anyone ever told you, you look just like that guy from the Adam Sandler movies,” or “
Con Air
,” or “
Boardwalk Empire.
”

Yes. Yes, they have.

“Soldier!” Val stood in mock attention. He held out a can of Jolt Cola directly over my head. “Hair of the Dog. You’ll feel better after you’ve got some sustenance.”

“I want some!” Eat’em shouted, standing rigid, at attention on the back of my head. “Sir, it’s just the Jolt I need to slay that immortal hag Jemima.”

“No!” I rolled over, tossing Eat’em to the floor as I did. I typically paid no more attention to the demon than I would a mole on my back. It’s easy to forget I’m the only one who sees and hears the little devilish nuisance.

“You act as if I’m giving you a choice, Private Jake-Nasty.” Val plopped the can onto my chest, using a deep scar on my right pectoral muscle as a makeshift coaster. “Hydrate or die!”

I grabbed the energy drink and sat up. A heartwarming desire to shove Eat’em into the garbage disposal gave my day new purpose. I shouldn’t have stayed up watching movies. “Sure, I’ll drink it,” I said, “but it’s not going to help.”

“Just a sip, yes?” Eat’em tugged at my ankle. “One insurmountably insignificant ingested sip of said savory sensational liquid is all I request!”

“Just shut up,”

“Shut up?” Val asked.

“Yeah.” When I needed to speak to Eat’em, I disguised it as a conversation between two parties. “I’ll drink the Jolt and I’ll go to school, but you got to stop the singing in the morning… and the soldier act.”

“Yes sir, Colonel Jake.”

I dressed, drank my breakfast, and snuck a couple more energy drinks into my backpack for my secret companion. A wired demon was a happy demon. I found the sugar-crash to be far more agonizing than the sugar-high. But if anyone had advice on how to wean a demon off anything a demon wants, I hadn’t heard it.

I grabbed a wireless headset for my phone and slipped it over my ear before checking myself over to see if I’d forgotten anything. Val made a scoffing remark about my need for a headset when I don’t have friends to talk to and I subtly waved for Eat’em to get out of the kitchen.

“Let’s go, Crazy Jake,” Val threw open the door to a sallow sunrise, which immediately overwhelmed the apartment in a blinding veil of white.

Valentine and I crossed the threshold into the bright sunlight, followed by a victorious Eat’em - an empty bottle of pancake syrup skittered behind us, lynched in the demon’s tail.

Chapter 3

“Of course, I didn’t think any of it was real either.” I’m trapped in a box with Mike. My pudgy lawyer stares at me as I confess the existence of Eat’em like a grown man with an imaginary friend I never grew out of. “I didn’t want to. I’d rather have been going through some schizophrenic phase than have accidentally adopted a foot-tall talking crimson porcupine-spider monkey thing only I could see and hear. From what I’m reading in prison, serial killers are often bed-wetters when they’re a kid. That doesn’t sound so bad in comparison.

“I get that it’s hard to imagine how someone thrust into abnormal circumstances could simultaneously have a normal upbringing. But it’s not that I didn’t have more than my share of strange experiences. Not everyone’s life can be humdrum boring, but that doesn’t mean I’m automatically a psychopath. It’s not like I chose to have the fantastic thrust upon me. And it’s not like I didn’t attempt to make it disappear.”

Mike scrapes his palm across his five o’clock shadow. Microscopic flakes of dead skin flavor the air and float up toward an open vent. I wonder if the filter has been changed recently. He raises an eyebrow as he catches me staring, beckoning me to continue.

“See, I figured if Eat’em was real,” my eyes drift to the demon sprawled out across the table, one arm dangling over the edge as he pretends to sleep, “a real life imp with the inability to be seen, or heard, or to shut up… then I should be able to kill him, right? What normal child, tormented by such a creature, wouldn’t try to kill him?

“I have no history of killing animals or any of that crazy nonsense
actual
crazy people do. Killing things isn’t in my nature. So, being the first thing I wanted off this mortal coil, Eat’em wasn’t up against some grade-A natural born killer. He was up against a kid who just couldn’t fathom his first date being chaperoned by an imp.”

Mike stretches and squishes his face before he asks me anything. A hair bothers him from inside his nostril. He thumbs at it as he says, “So, Eat’em… he shows up. He gives you the impulse to kill things?”

“Not exactly.” Eat’em pays me no attention. Our current circumstances bore him. “You got to give me credit for making it through the first four days before I began daydreaming about throwing him in the power wash or taking him out with the trash. Days one and two were devoted to hiding him. I realized there was no point to that when my stepdad barged into my bedroom and didn’t acknowledge the thing hunched atop my dresser like a gargoyle, drinking a family-sized tube of toothpaste. I started walking him downstairs on my shoulder like a pirate. I’d go to the fridge and he’d tell me what supplies to gather. Jolt Cola was our number one source of hydration those first few days. Eat’em would keep me up at night. I couldn’t sleep. Halfway through my fourth night, that’s when I decided to kill Eat’em.”

“And how do you kill your imaginary friend?” Mike says without a hint of sarcasm. In his profession, I must wonder if he’s no stranger to bizarre stories and excuses. I can’t tell if his demeanor derives from belief, curiosity, or experience. Sweat builds on my palms and I wipe them discretely on my pants.

“The easiest way to kill a devil,” I say and wait for a response from Eat’em before continuing, “especially one with a penchant for eating anything you give him, is to poison him. I figured it wouldn’t be hard… He ate just about anything. Even things he disliked were impossible to pry from his tiny hands once he decided they were his. And almost everything inevitably made it into his mouth.”

“Eat’em sounds like a child,” Mike plays psychiatrist. He thinks he has me figured out. “Maybe a relic of a time you feel is missing? Stolen from you, perhaps?”

“Hardly,” I go on, “I conjured up some potent combinations of laundry detergents and dishwashing fluids. I poured him cup after cup of ammonia. I gave him bars of soap to snack on. All I managed to do was make my room smell as if a manufacturing plant for cleaning products exploded. Eat’em could chew the rust off a carriage bolt, wash it down with bleach, and brush his teeth with arsenic. Poisoning him accomplished nothing.

“My second strategy,” I went on, “was to get one of my family members to accidentally kill him. They couldn’t see him, so getting them to do the work was pretty difficult. I thought about waiting for Eat’em to sleep and tucking him under one of the tires of my dad’s Prowler. Eat’em doesn’t close his eyes for more than a few seconds at a time. I thought about somehow tricking him into standing in front of the riding mower. He may have swallowed thumbtacks, but even I couldn’t think of a way to get the suicidal bastard to face down the John Deer.”

“These are pretty violent thoughts, Jacob,” Mike pulls the flab on the bottom of his chin and allows it to bounce back into place. He rubs his face to conceal some hidden emotion. Perhaps distrust. Mike seems too ready to accept what he hears. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

“No, you see, I wasn’t creative enough to think of a way to kill him.” Eat’em wakes. He smiles at me. “I wanted to. But I couldn’t. The prospect of just grabbing a kitchen knife and hacking him to bits never crossed my mind. It was too personal, and I’d have to live with it. Despite the fact that I questioned whether he was real in the first place, I wasn’t some hardcore animal slaughterer. I just didn’t think I’d be able to live out the rest of my life with him strung out on energy drinks. My very own blood-red addict.”

Mike writes something down before laying a phone on the table and setting it to record. “What I want to talk about, Jacob, is the first moment you decided to take a life. I don’t want to hear about your fantasies. I want to know the instant you decided to take a human life.”

My gut lurches at the word
fantasies
. “I never decided to take a human life. Never decided to take a human life. Never. I’ve only ever wanted to protect human life.”

“From what?” Mike asks.

“From the infection.”

Chapter 4

The palpability of the Texas sun covered my skin like burning oil. Nothing prepared me for the dramatic change in climate when we arrived to the state by train two months prior. Even still, my body refused to adjust to the summer heat.

I sat in the back of Val’s ’04 mint-green Mustang to make room for our neighbor, a short guy named Isaac. Overdressed, Isaac climbed into the car, parting a suit jacket as he sank into the front seat. He always wore a vest and scarves, even in the hundred-degree heat. His dark hair swooped to the side with a cavernous part about an inch over his right ear. He was considerably older than my uncle and myself and seemed even worldlier than someone his age typically does. I suspected this was his second shot at college life. Either that or he’d taken a few years off after high school.

“I loathe this one, Jacob,” Eat’em plugged his nose and pointed to Isaac with his tail. He crossed over the dash, hopped onto the center console, and leapt onto my lap in the back seat. He climbed my shoulder and whispered into my ear, “He smells funny, yes! Not the good kind of funny… but the bad kind. Like the kind of funny that makes you want to burn down a village to get rid of the stink.” In reality, he smelled like mothballs.

I tapped Isaac on the shoulder and asked, “What kind of cologne you wearing?”

Isaac smiled. He had an awkward grin that bared his bottom teeth as much as the top, like a young child faking it for a family photo – warmer though, and more genuine. “I don’t wear any… maybe you smell the starch. Does it bother you?”

“Not at all,” I said at the same time Eat’em arched backward, holding onto my collar, and yelled ‘YES!’ I returned Isaac’s sheepish grin. “I like it. I was just trying to place the scent.”

“No! No! No!” Eat’em ranted. “You have to extinguish this fool from existence. Drown him in a bathtub, yes! Use lots of soap. In fact, if you care anything about the prolonged survival of your species you would get out of this car, stop by the gas station, grab fifteen gallons of bleach and a ten pound bag of Gummy Worms, soak this putrid moron in the bleach and give me the Gummy Worms, yes… and a slush!”

Val gave me the eye from the rearview mirror. Clearly, he agreed with Eat’em.

“Mind if I smoke in your car?” A cigarette stuck out the corner of Isaac’s mouth even before Val could answer. A few years would pass before smokers became almost entirely segregated to pits across the United States. At the time, the smoking section was anywhere your foot touched outside, unlike the designated areas that came into existence soon after, freckling the Earth in carbon monoxide clouds.

He offered the pack back to me, and I almost accepted, but declined when Eat’em said, “Blech! See, he’s evil, yes! He wants you to smell like death, too.”

Though Val and I share the same birth year, our academic achievements didn’t quite compare. Having a demon willing to cheat on my behalf in return for some cheap culinary treats (as he sometimes called the junk food in the checkout line) gave me a unique advantage over other students. I was accepted into every college I applied to. Val had a lesser selection to choose from after high school. We compromised on UTA, a satellite of the University of Texas. Val would have to work full time for a year to earn enough money to enroll. I would be on scholarship. He wanted out of Virginia as badly as I did and so we landed in Texas.

We stopped in the front of a full lot. Val lowered his window as Isaac and I climbed out of the Mustang, followed by Eat’em, who crawled up my leg and found a perch on my backpack.

“You know where you’re going, Jake-Nasty?” Val asked for the fiftieth time in the last couple days.

“Not really,” I looked over the campus. It spread out like oil on a cloth, same as everything in Texas. Most of the buildings were only a couple stories tall – the space between, utilized only as a walking path, was wide enough to land a fleet of jumbo jets.

“I got you,” Isaac dropped his smoke and smashed it into the curb. “I know this campus better than anyone. Don’t even worry about it.”

The second we climbed out of the car, the heat once again hit me like the open door of a sauna. Sweat dripped from my fingertips, my face, and my elbows. Isaac led the way as I left a trail of droplets in my wake.

“There is literally not a room on this campus I haven’t been in,” Isaac spoke so matter-of-factly, I didn’t question whether he might be embellishing. As out of place as he should have looked wearing a suit under the Texas sun, he actually fit right in. He walked with a sense of arrogance, though his head canted forward and the jacket gave him the slightest appearance of a hunchback. Even with his squat stature, his awkward posture, and formal attire, he looked like any other student walking the campus.

Some girls walked by in pajamas and slippers. One had a sundress. A few people wore shirts with the university mascot, which was either a horse or a bull depending on the shirt. There were a few cyclists and a dude wearing a wife beater, swim trunks and flip-flops, gliding by on a long board.

“If you need to know anything I pretty much have my finger planted on the pulse of this place. I know what’s playing in the theater, I know when the next basketball game is, I know where the best house party will be this weekend. Heck, if people are getting it on in the library,” Isaac pointed to a large building to our right, “I know about it. Truth is, I’ve seen it all. I can tell you what’s hot and what’s not.”

“He’s a regular Van Wilder, yes?” Eat’em said from my backpack. “I hope he steps into traffic.”

“There’s a coffee shop in both the theater building and the library, sweet hangout spots, you can usually find me at either place reading the paper, which by the way, is Arlington’s main local paper.”

“Yay…” Eat’em groaned.

“Over here’s the science building,” Isaac pointed to one of the taller structures, “there’s a couple science buildings, actually. This one’s mostly for biology crap, if you like that stuff. They are in the process of planting a garden on the roof. There’s also a building where they’re researching how to convert water into power, like gas for cars, and I’m pretty sure that one has a garage where they build stockcars if you want to take a mechanics course. You can actually race them too, which is pretty fun.”

“You’ve done that?” I asked.

“Yeah, man,” he increased his pace a bit, “I’ve done everything here. Seriously, professional student! On the west side of campus there’s a nanotech lab. They’re making a microchip that’s small enough to fit into the tip of a pen. South of that, near the theater, that’s where you’re going to take a lot of your English, history, languages are spread all over, but there’s also photography, that kind of crap. Humanities. Do you like sports?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I hope you don’t like football,” he pointed off in the distance to an ambiguous location blocked by countless buildings. “There’s a football field and used to be a team, but it’s gotten nixed. Still though, there’s basketball, but they’re in a gym that doesn’t really have a designated court. Maybe someday, but even if not, there are sporting events all over Texas. The state is obsessed. Here though, it’s about girl’s volleyball. I’ve seen every game.”

“How do you have time for everything?” Val asked.

“Patty,” Isaac smiled, baring all teeth, “there’s always time for girl’s volleyball. Plus, I practically live here”.”

Eat’em chimed in, “Does your grand tour include a shower?”

We followed Isaac into a set of double doors and down a hallway, where he grabbed a newspaper from a rack and kept walking. We passed a cafeteria on our left and entered a huge lobby filled with chain restaurants and a small shopping center.

“Are you a philosopher, Jacob?” Isaac took a seat, tossing his coat tails to either side, and opened the paper. “There are some great philosophy classes if you are into that kind of thing. They talk about how different people view the world. Some see us all as part, as one with the universe, whatever, all kinds of stuff. I find it fascinating. So many people with different points of view, different perspectives of the same events. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to see life through all of these different viewpoints. The world is becoming more connected all around us. It almost seems as if this should be the natural order of things. Together we can achieve much more than as individuals.”

“Nut job!” Eat’em blurted. “Can we visit the soda fountain?”

“No,” I answered.

“No?” Isaac lifted an eyebrow and again grinned like a whale eating krill. “I didn’t mean that as a question. I definitely am not trying to start an argument.”

I sat. “I just have to disagree with your philosophy. There’s value in individuality. Historically, individualism has had some of the greatest contributions to cultural growth, right? I mean, our foundation is built by those who’ve denied societal constraints. Darwin, Edison, Jobs, Van Gogh…”

“Aren’t you two perfect for each other,” Valentine scoffed as he found a seat and ogled a group of passing girls.

“Merely men!” Isaac ignored Val, “And men are like cells. We’re part of the bigger picture. The arm doesn’t mourn when a cell dies.
It just makes more cells. Yours is an interesting perspective, though. You should take philosophy. I think you might change your point of view. You’re a smart kid…”

“A regular John Forbes Nash,” Val said.

A ripple of excitement rushed through Isaac’s face. “I like you guys. We should carry on this conversation again sometime after you’ve both taken a few classes. Maybe then you could teach me a thing or two. What kind of girls you like?”

“I don’t know,” I said at the same time Val answered, “What kind of girls don’t I like?”

Dating would be impossible with Eat’em lingering. Even before Val finished the question, Eat’em belched and chirped, “Girls suck!”

“Well, find out and get back to me,” he smiled. “I’m glad y’all moved in next door. You know how it is; us geniuses get all lost in our heads and get bored. Need other geniuses around to keep things interesting.”

“Don’t be his friend, Jacob,” Eat’em pleaded as he leapt from atop my head onto the table. He stood between us, trying to block my view. “I don’t like him. He’s smelly? Check. He likes girls? Check. He has big boring conversations? Triple check! Yes? Yes! And he smells. I don’t want you to be his friend… please? Please, please!”

“Sure,” I said. “Geniuses stick together, I guess.”

“No!” Eat’em yelled. “You fool! This is the beginning of the end! Put me in a box and ship me to wherever this isn’t, because this sucks, yes. SUCKS!”

Isaac’s teeth glinted in the dull light of the dining facility. “Good, man, now what do you got? What’s your first class? I’ll help you find it.”