The Convulsion Factory by Brian Hodge Read Free Book Online Page A

doesn’t talk much anymore, either.
    Alex keeps his own vigils and stares down at her, with tubes in her arms and up her nose, and it’s like a time machine. He remembers staring down at her in much the same way years before, only his face was much closer to the bed in those days because he wasn’t as tall, and he would shake her and call to her and she would groan and stir and her breath would smell like bad medicine and eventually he would toddle off to fix his own breakfast.
    The weeks go by and the days get longer and hotter and little by little they don’t sit at her bedside as much as they did in the beginning. Alex thinks it’s like going to visit a grave, only the body’s on top instead of underground.
    Pretty soon it’s summer and Alex is out of school and he’d just as soon still be going, because there’s even less incentive now for getting up in the morning. He can’t really get excited about hanging out at the mall from opening until closing.
    The house reminds him of some story he read or movie he saw, he can’t recall which. But it took place during the Civil War, in a house straddling the Mason-Dixon line, half in Union territory and half in Confederate. One brother was for the North, the other for the South, and so they each lived in their separate halves for the most part and pretended the other did not exist. Alex now understands what that must’ve been like, and thinks maybe the Civil War still rages, in spirit if not in strategy and tactics.
    There’s probably no point to continuing his rituals with the safety pins, but old habits are hard to break.
    Dad spends most of his time at home at his worktable in the rec room, and overhead fly his plastic dreams, frozen in time and motion, and instead of winning dogfights and Kelly McGillis they collect only dust. Sometimes Alex wanders in and watches him stare down at scattered pieces of the Stealth Bomber model, like he’s trying to assemble them by sheer will of the mind.
    The rest of the time, Alex watches MTV and the Discovery Channel. They’re a lot more interesting than Dad. He cries, too, sometimes, lets the tears drip down his body while he’s shirtless, and he tries to joke with himself by saying it’s a good thing the safety pins are stainless steel.
    “Dad,” Alex says one day, and Dad is hunched over his table and has needed a haircut for a long time. “Dad? Do you think she did it on purpose?”
    There is no answer.
    “Do you think she really just wanted to sleep forever?”
    Alex doesn’t know why he’s trying, but trying seems more important than getting an answer. He feels like an explorer, climbing to the top of Everest in a blizzard. He’s a bold adventurer.
    Finally Dad looks up, and his eyes are ringed with dark circles that look like bruises.
    “She needed to be watched more,” he finally says. “She needed to be watched. Very fragile, you know. I should have watched.”
    It’s all Alex can coax out of him, and Dad repeats it several times, and finally his old man clambers atop the worktable and starts flailing at model airplanes. His arms wildly windmill about and plastic clatters and then plastic flies and airplanes are going into crashdives left and right. Dad looks like King Kong at the end of the movie as he snatches a Sopwith Camel free of its little cable and flings the bi-plane across the room to shatter against the fireplace hearth.
    Dad can reach no more, so he leaps down in a rage and grabs a cue stick from the pool table and trashes yet more planes and Alex covers his ears and wails as if he really were in a war zone, and finally Dad falls sobbing to the floor, his fury spent. Alex looks up, and most of the planes are downed, with occasional chunks of debris still dangling from the wires, and now Dad looks like what he really is: a demented little boy in a room full of broken toys.
    Dad cries for several more moments and then scrambles about the floor, scooping up the broken models and cradling the