Soft Skull: The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla

Pieces from the story PUSHING OCEANS IN AND PULLING OCEANS OUT
It’s April and the world is opening up like a hand with something secret in it. The world is all, Hey I’ve got something to show you, so you lean in and go, What? You go, Show me! And you look and the fingers peel back and then whammo there it is, green and muddy and fresh and dripping wet with rain.
~
The world is melting but it’s almost all water, anyway. The world is like 75% water. It’s a ball made of water and some mountains and other stuff, some trees and hills and deserts. Buildings and roads. People walk around on it and we’re like 75% water too. My dad Greg is 236 pounds which makes him 177 pounds of water, like a hundred thousand glasses of water, maybe more. He’s a bathtub full of water – bigger than a bathtub, a kiddie pool. Anyway, my dad Greg is a whole lot of water. And Mom is the moon.
~
You learn all this water stuff in grade five science. The units are called The Earth and The Human Body. And in The Human Body we learned about vaginas and wangs. Big whoop, though, right? Vaginas and wangs, big whoop.
~
It’s springtime and you’ve got to make sure that Brian wears his rubber boots because of all the mud. Like Granny says Brian’s slow and only seven and my dad Greg’ll forget if I don’t do it. But my dad Greg calls me Big Gal or BG for short because I’m responsible and mature for my age (9).
Brian crapped his pants four times in class already this year so one of his teachers called home to see if maybe he needs diapers and my dad Greg said no so they said well okay make sure he wears pants with elastics around the ankles. Get it?
But one time he came home with a diaper on anyway and my dad lost it. He called them up at Brian’s school and said fuck and everything, I heard him. He said, Are you telling me how to raise my fucking kid? And then after he went and sat on his bike in the garage for like thirty hours or something.
My dad Greg won’t let us talk about Mom. He took all the pictures of her that were around the house away and hid them somewhere. One time we were having lasagna for dinner and I tried asking him if he could remember if Mom’s favourite food was lasagna because mine is and but my dad’s is burgers. I had to get it from somewhere! But he didn’t say anything, just kept eating. And when I asked again he gave me a long quiet look that I could tell meant: Stop.

...

FINALLY at 3:15 the bell rings. Everyone goes running out into the hall and it’s Easter. I get my bag at the rack and I’m putting on my jacket and Jared Wein comes up and goes, Wanna walk home? Because we’re neighbours. Jared’s okay, he wears glasses that are always falling down his face and he has to scrunch his nose to move them back up. I go, Yeah. Also he usually gets a nosebleed.
~
On the way home from school Jared and I go down to our fort in the woods to check if it’s okay. There’s a path with trees that grow over from either side and make a tunnel, the branches bend in and touch over top and you have to duck when you’re walking along. Then it opens up and that’s where our fort is. We call it The Inner Sanctum and it always needs fixing because teenagers come down and drink beer and light fires and mess everything up.

...

If we stay late enough it’d get dark and we could lay back and look up at the sky and see the moon up there through the space in the treetops, white as a bone, full or half or waxing or waning (part of The Earth was to learn about the moon) and we’d lie back and I’d maybe let Jared put his head on my stomach and we’d both look up at the moon and I might tell him, That’s my Mom Jared, that’s Mom looking down. Then I’d wave at the moon: Hello, goodnight! But I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t cry, or anything.
But we can’t stay that late because I have to get home for Brian. Besides, if Jared Wein gets a nosebleed we don’t have any Kleenex.
~
We fix up The Inner Sanctum and Jared goes to his house and I come home but Brian’s not there yet. My dad Greg usually gets in at 5:30 from his job at the parking garage. If he’s not home for dinner you got to make hot dogs, one for you and one for Brian. Sometimes my dad Greg’ll leave you a note and sometimes he won’t.
...

At 5:34 the garage goes up and the bike comes growling inside like always, and then my dad Greg is in the kitchen in his security guard uniform and he picks me up under one arm and Brian under the other and spins us around. I sometimes forget how big my dad Greg is: he’s like four of me, maybe more.
We sit at the table in the kitchen while he makes beans and toast and eggs for dinner. He sings Beans, beans, the magical fruit and makes fart noises and stomps around like he’s crazy, and the whole house shakes. Brian laughs but then he does that thing where he starts rubbing his face with his knuckles, so my dad Greg has to come over and put Brian on his lap and hold his hands for a bit. Wanna stir the beans, BG? he says to me, so I go over and do it.
When everything’s ready my dad Greg puts the beans out on plates with the toast and eggs. He puts mine down and he points at it to show me the toast is cut in triangles and there’s an egg on one side and the beans in a little neat pile on the other, how I like it. Symmetry.

...

11:38. I’ve been lying staring at the moon and planning the egg hunt for like three hours. I’m going to have to make a list, write it down so I don’t forget, so nothing happens like chocolate getting into the TV again. I keep thinking about Easter, imagining Brian going around with his little basket and finding eggs, all smiles and laughing and happy.
But maybe I have insomnia? Insomnia is when you can’t sleep, my dad Greg has it, sometimes. You just stay awake for ever. You can die from not sleeping. Yeah, I think I have insomnia. I should count sheep.
One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight twenty-nine thirty thirty-one thirty-two thirty-three thirty-four thirty-five thirty-six thirty-seven thirty-eight thirty-nine forty forty-one forty-two forty-three forty-four forty-five forty-six forty-seven forty-eight forty-nine fifty fifty-one fifty-two fifty-three fifty-four fifty-five fifty-six fifty-seven fifty-eight fifty-nine sixty.
Nothing. Sixty seconds is a minute. Sixty minutes in an hour times sixty seconds = three thousand six hundred seconds. Twenty-four hours in a day = ?
Hold on, I need to write this down. I just have to turn on the light and find a paper and pen.
24 hours in a day = 1440 minutes = 86400 seconds. And that makes… 604,800 seconds in a week. How many seconds in a year? Whoa, hold on.
31,339,600.
~
The other thing you can do if you can’t sleep is have some warm milk. So I wait until exactly 12:00 midnight and get up to go down to the kitchen. I stop on the stairs. My dad Greg is still up, I can hear the TV. I lean over the banister and look into the den, all quiet. Like a spy.
The TV’s on. There’s a lady moaning, like she’s being hurt or something? My dad Greg has the sound way down, but I can hear it. He’s sitting on the couch, I can see him, with his feet sticking out from under a blanket. He’s sort of twitching or something and the couch is going CREAK CREAK, and the lady on the TV is going UH! UH! and he’s making noises too, like grunting. Creak creak, uh uh, grunt, grunt.
I take another step down on the stairs and lean even more over the banister so I can see the TV and there’s a lady with her boobs shaking and flopping around, like slapping up against herself, and now there’s a man on her too with his butt in the air and I realize he’s humping her, and the blanket on the couch is shaking in time with the boobs and the butt and I can see my dad’s face and his face is different, it’s like a secret side of him I’ve never seen, mean and hungry and weird, and the couch goes creak creak and the lady with the floppy boobs goes uh uh and my dad Greg goes grunt grunt. But then something in my tummy goes gloop and I have to pull away from the banister because my head is all funny, and I turn away and run upstairs to the bathroom.
~
And then I’m washing my hands. I didn’t even turn the lights on so now I’m washing my hands in the dark with hot water and lots of soap, hard, and the water’s too hot and it hurts and I can already feel my hands burning from it, I know they’re going pink but I don’t care.
I hear someone behind me but I don’t look. I hear my dad Greg go, BG. He leaves the lights off and comes over, so he’s right behind me. I still don’t look.
He reaches over and turns off the tap. My hands are sore, my stomach still feels weird and like gurgly. BG, he says again. I don’t turn around. We stand there in the dark. Then he reaches out to put his arms around me but he sort of stops, and he just stands there, and then he pulls a towel off the rack and hands it out to me, but I don’t take it. I just want him to go away.
~
...

Top Secret List Of Easter Egg Hiding Places! (so far)
1. Kitchen – between the Wheaties and Sugar Crisp boxes
2. Kitchen – in the handle of the silverware drawer
3. Kitchen – on top of the breadbox
4. Kitchen – in the fruit bowl
5. Kitchen – under the kitchen table (stuck with tape!)
6. Den – between the couch cushions
7. Den – on top of the VCR
8. Den – under the lampshade
9. Hallway – on the frame of the picture of me and Brian
10. Stairs – one egg on every stair, in the corners
~
...
~
After dinner (fried baloney, Tater Tots, hot V8) we watch a movie on satellite. My dad Greg tries to get us to all sit on the couch together with the blanket overtop like usual. I tell him I’m okay and sit on the floor. The opening credits come on and I can feel someone like nudging me in the back with their toe. I just stare at the TV as if I don’t notice but I it’s hard to focus what’s on the TV, it’s like I can see the pictures but my brain can’t figure out what they are.
The movie we watch is The Parent Trap. My dad Greg is all excited because it’s a movie that was out when he was a kid. At dinner he told me, It’s more for girls than boys – you’ll like it, BG. When he said the name I thought, Cool, a parent trap, what an awesome idea. You’d dig a hole and cover it with sticks and leaves, maybe put a case of beer on the other side for dads. Something else for moms? Then dads would come along and be like, Oh great beer! and when they went to go for it they’d fall through and into the hole. A parent trap. Then you could study them and stuff, poke them with sticks, do experiments and tests.
But it turns out to be Disney! The worst! There’s this girl and she’s got a twin sister but she doesn’t know or something, and then they try to get their parents married. There’s no trap really, just a plan, and not even a good one. I squirm around on the floor a lot and my dad Greg keeps going, You want to come up here with us? But I don’t say anything to that.
The movie gets done at 8:58, kind of late, so my dad Greg hustles us off to bed. And then goes back downstairs, so I’m left lying there wide awake, thinking about what he’s maybe doing down there under the blanket with the groaning ladies on the TV. But I guess I’m tired from the night before so after not too long I forget about my dad Greg King of the Perverts and start to get really sleepy and before I can even check out the window to see the moon I fall asleep.
~
I wake up and I feel like swampy and slow but I have this idea there’s something I should be doing. It’s – 4:17 a.m. There’s something, but everything feels cloudy and my brain is only just winding up, still maybe half-asleep. I roll over and then I’m drifting off to sleep again, before it hits me.
Easter.
The egg hunt.
In like three hours Brian is going to get up and go hunting for eggs and I forgot to even finish my list let alone hide any eggs. I wait until 4:20 (which isn’t perfect but this is an emergency) and get out of bed, swing my legs over the side and it’s like slow-motion, all heavy and weird, and in the dark my room is sort of blue from the moonlight through the window.
Moving out into the hall I still feel sort of underwater, swimming, looking around, trying to adjust my eyes to the dark. Wait. There’s an egg on the floor outside Brian’s room, a little dark lump against the carpet. I lean down and it’s like I can’t believe it and for a second I think maybe the Easter Bunny really did come. But then I realize who would have put it there, who knew it was my job and went and did it themselves anyway.
I pick up the egg. The foil around the chocolate is starting to peel so I smooth it down and put it in the pocket of my pajamas. I look at my dad Greg’s bedroom door which is closed with only black showing from the crack underneath, and then I start to tiptoe down the stairs, slow.
Guess what? There are eggs lined up in the corners of each stair JUST LIKE I WROTE ON MY SECRET LIST. The eggs go into my pockets and it’s like I’m doing a weird kind of frontcrawl or something, down one step and reaching, then the next, eggs into my pockets, but feeling I’m maybe sinking, maybe drowning, and the house is dark and still with only the hum of the fridge from the kitchen to prove the world is even alive.
I move around the house, silent, leaving the lights off, looking in all the spots I wrote down, taking the eggs and loading up. Between the cereal boxes: check. On top of the VCR: check. Etc., all of them. He’s put them in other places too, stupid places like lined up on the kitchen counter. Way too easy. But even finding eggs in places I didn’t have on my list makes me feel weird – my hands go prickly for a second, I feel my face hot. Once the egg disappears into my pocket the feeling goes away.
Around 4:50 my pockets start to get heavy – they’re sagging and bulging with eggs. I look around one more time but I’m pretty sure I’ve got all of them. So I go to the back door and put on my shoes.
~
Outside it’s still dark. The sky is navy blue, almost purple, all clouds left over from yesterday’s rain. There’s no stars. Only the moon glowing in a little white fingernail behind the night. I shiver a bit in my pajamas and it’s hard to walk with my pockets full of eggs, the way they swing heavy at my sides. I have to hold my pants up by the waist to keep them from falling. I close the backdoor quietly and drop a single egg there. The porch light shines off the silver wrapper. It twinkles.
I go out across the lawn all wet from a day of rain, soaking the bottoms of my pants and cold on my ankles, and then onto the street where my footsteps echo a bit, tap tap tap in my runners on the pavement. Every twenty steps exactly I drop an egg. I count twenty and duck and put one down, then twenty and duck and put one down, again and again all along the curb of the street. I put one right in front of Jared Wein’s house and think about knocking on his window, getting him to help, but I decide no this is something I have to do on my own. Then at the end where there’s the path I look back and there they are, all in a line lit up by the streetlights.
Down the hill at the end of our street, along the path, into the woods. Eggs dropped all the way. It’s dark because tonight the moon’s not enough but I know the way by heart: where to step, where to duck. When I come to the entrance to the tunnel that leads to The Inner Sanctum, I stop. I’ve only got two eggs left, but I made it. From way up above Mom the moon is looking down. She’s faint and like out of focus, just the corner of her face like she’s turning away and every now and then little wisps of darker cloud go past like smoke. All around her the night sky is a big, murky sea but she shines out of it faraway and watching, up there.
~
I haven’t brought anything to dig with, nothing to make the hole for my Parent Trap. There’s a broken beer bottle behind the log so I use that, holding it by the neck and using the jagged edge to carve into the mud. I use my feet too and my hands – dirt gets up underneath my fingernails and sticks there. I go down on my knees and can feel the earth cool and wet through my pajamas. But I keep digging, I dig and dig and I’m sweating even though it’s cold out and I’m shivering and digging and covered in muck.
As the hole gets deeper and deeper the earth gets wetter and once I’m a ways down there’s water at the bottom collecting in a little pool. I stop for a second and think maybe it’s from the ocean, that this is water that flows in a river all the way from the coast underneath the surface of the world and I’ve tapped into it. An underground seaway, linking all the water on the planet.
In the Human Body we learned a little bit about all the tubes you’ve got inside you – fallopian tubes and whatever, all those tubes like canals and rivers carrying stuff back and forth around your vagina, or wang – depending what you’ve got. And right then right when I’m thinking that – I swear – the clouds break up a bit and even though she’s gone so tiny Mom the moon comes smiling down into the water at the bottom of the hole, lighting the puddle up silver.
From my pocket I take the two last eggs and open my fingers to plop them one at a time into the water at the bottom of my Parent Trap. But I don’t. I look down and the water’s gone black again. The hole’s not big enough for a parent. It’s barely big enough to trap a cat. I’d need like a digger and a crew of a thousand Jared Weins to make a Parent Trap big enough for my dad Greg, to trap him there and keep him for a while and teach him a lesson.
So I put the eggs back in my pocket and I squat there beside the stupid useless hole in my pajamas in the mud kind of cold and it’s five in the morning and for other people tomorrow will be Easter, but not us. This year there won’t be any Easter. There’s nothing that makes my dad Greg sadder than seeing Brian sad, and if there’s no chocolate for Easter Brian’ll be the saddest he’s ever been ever, and my dad Greg will be even sadder. But I’ll have saved two eggs. Later I’ll give my brother one in secret and I’ll have one too and no one will ever know.
Right then I hear a voice go, Hey, and nearly fall over. I have to put my hands down in the mud to stop myself.
It’s my dad Greg. He’s standing at the entrance to The Inner Sanctum. The branches are low so he has to duck and it’s still dark so he’s like a black hunched up shadow but it’s definitely him. Hey, he says again. But he doesn’t come in.
My heart’s going crazy, I wait for it to slow squatting there in the mud, seeing what my dad Greg’s going to do. He doesn’t move and I don’t either. We both just wait for something to happen. It’s like in Trouble when you’ve got one guy left and Brian’s got one guy left but they’re both in their homes and you’re just popping the popper and popping, trying to get out.
We wait for a long time, me and my dad Greg. Both our breath comes in clouds. He sits down after a while in the mud but still doesn’t say anything. I don’t either. My hands are covered in mud and I can feel mud stuck up under my nails and all grimy and drying in streaks up my arms but I don’t really care. I’m tired.
After a while the sky starts to lighten a little, going grayish up through the branches of the trees. The moon’s fading. Soon it’ll be morning and the moon will be gone for the day, and then the next night she probably won’t be there at all.
I start thinking maybe if the world is like a person and underground seaways are the tubes, making the world go on, then when the tides go in and out it’s like the world having its period. Like the blood of the world rushing in and out and making everything grow. It’s a big thought like the kind you have to say out loud when you think them and it kind of makes me go whoa a little bit. But I can’t tell my dad Greg about it, about periods and stuff. Not him. Even though he’s over there just waiting for something, I’m not sure what.
So then he goes, Hey, in a weird sad tired voice.
By now the light is morning light, it came so quick, it’s pale and thin but it’s washing over the night, erasing the night.
And my dad Greg goes, Hey, again, and that’s when I realize he’s showing me something. He’s holding out his hands, cupped together. I can’t see so I have to get up and take a step closer. It’s the eggs. They’re all there in his big hands, like twenty of them, maybe thirty. I found them, he tells me, like he’s proud.
And I say, Yeah. I look at his hands, my trail of chocolate eggs collected in there together like grapes. I put my hand in my pocket to make sure I’ve still got the two extras.
You found them, I tell my dad Greg. You found them all, I say.