The Holy Rite of the In- Between

By Richard Lundy

Three weeks after my love proposes we drive down to Somerset for Thanksgiving. My
parents threw a fit when I told them, offered to come down five hours so we could all spend the holiday together, but I shut that shit down. My future in-laws need to meet and hate me before they meet and hate my parents.
When we enter his house, my love’s mother hugs me; his father shakes my hand and I
yelp. When he sees my cracked, bloody hands, he apologizes about four times. His wife brings sweet-smelling lotion from the bathroom, lathers it on for me, and asks what’s wrong with them.
When people ask why you look like you’ve been in a fistfight, you can’t very well tell
them the world will flame and every building will collapse if you don’t wash your hands six times after touching a hair on the floor. I say, “I wash my hands a lot,” which is either followed by wide eyes and, “You don’t need to do it that much,” or a joke about how clean they must be. My love’s parents go for the latter.
His father has me taste gravy, give it the seal of approval, and when I turn back around my love and his mother are bending over a screen-printed cloth, lighting candles and stacking supermarket cakes in the center.
My love’s father says, “Did Kevin not tell you that Robbie’s coming? His godfather?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
I shake my head. “Nothing. Perfectly fine.” I sit on a barstool while my love and his mother murmur around the circle.
We should have discussed religion before now. If he had told me his parents were occultists it would have been fine, but now they’ll pretend to get a spirit, a dead godfather, and have me play along. Anyone needs at least a day to prepare for that.
A few minutes and a shape floats half a foot above the circle. He has seven or eight limbs and no eyes, only sockets covering his body, blinking and shifting. His smile covers half his head, with three tongues sticking out each time he speaks. He has no other facial features. 

The demon hugs my love’s mother and waves to his father. He faces my love-if he has a front-and pulls a dead raccoon from nowhere. “Taxidermy’s really catching on, you oughta try it. Might actually make you some money for once.”

My love thanks him and puts it in the foyer, where his shoes are. When he comes back, I stop him and say, “What is that?”
“My godfather. Robbie.”

“That’s-what is he?”

He hits my arm and says, “Don’t be rude.” He guides me to the circle. “This is my fiancé, Leonard.”

Robbie looks me over, his indentations pulsing. “Alright.” He shakes my hand and I try my absolute best not to wash it, but I pretend to graze the floor and wash them three times over. Shed the evil off me.
Robbie falls into one of the armchairs and spreads his limbs on its back. He might be sitting upside down. It’s hard to tell. 

My love and his parents get the food ready, and I offer to help, but my love motions for me to sit and talk to Robbie. He mouths, “Be nice,” and I creep into the chair across from Robbie. 

“What do you do?” he asks. “For a living?”

“I’m a classicist.”
He retches. “That’s horrible!”

“I’m working on some spoken Latin. We’re one of the only places in the world that creates new Latin.”

Robbie covers some of his indentions. “No! The last thing the world needs is more Latin.”

My love’s mother then calls for Robbie to get the drinks. He asks me what I want, then the drinks all appear on the table. Mine is spilled.
“Should’ve studied Russian. Russian’s cool.” He smiles and rights the cup.
We sit at a circular table where there’s food piled to the ceiling. It’s too much for four people: Robbie doesn’t count, since he spits out his first bite of turkey and eats nothing afterwards but pumpkin pie.
Robbie asks after my love’s father’s garden, his mother’s woodworking. They ask him how his development in Ohio’s going (“That’s my pet project,” he says, “the state of Ohio.”). He asks how long we’ve been together. There are so many questions that it feels like an interview, no discussion. I try to start one when they ask where I’m from, but I lie so that can’t work. I can’t say I’m from Robbie’s little project. 

When we’re done, we settle down to watch the second broadcast of the parade. Robbie shouts at Snoopy, says he’s a damn good dog, and sits up. “Alright, okay, thought I had longer.” He cracks his neck and points to me. “You, summon me some time. Alone.” He disappears.
Everyone else busies themselves with packing leftovers in Tupperware. I can’t look away from the Bubba Gump float, the giant guitar, a thousand other shapes and colors and sounds until my love says, “Time to go.”

“Is he dead?” I say. 

“Who?”

“Robbie.”

“No, dumbass. He just had to go back. He can’t stay here forever. Grab the potatoes, will you?’

His parents walk us out and ask if we’d like to stay the night, after we’ve shoved a paycheck’s worth of food in the backseat, Tetris-style. We decline and pull out of the driveway. 

I stop the car about ten minutes after we leave, in the parking lot of a Walgreens.
“What’s wrong?” my love says.
I gesture for a while before saying, “What the fuck? What the hell was that?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Robbie, that creature-what the fuck?”

“He’s my godfather. What if I started talking about your mom like that?’

“My mom’s not a demon!” I lean into the steering wheel. “I need to recover from that.”

“Stop being an ass. Nothing happened, it was just Thanksgiving.”

I can’t argue anymore: I’ll probably end up homeless if I do. Instead, I pull out and say, “I wish you’d have told me your parents are occultists.”

“They’re not occultists. They’re Presbyterian.”

I glance at him. “If they’re Presbyterian, why is your godfather a demon? Why do you even have a godfather? Isn’t that against your whole deal?”

“They couldn’t find anyone else to be my godfather, and they don’t really think about that. They dissociate Robbie from their religion.”

“You couldn’t find anyone in the whole world to be your godfather?”

My love shakes his head. 

We go an hour more before stopping, right before we get onto I-75. I pump gas and take a piss, and my love buys a bag of gummy bears. Before he even gets his seatbelt on, he’s popped three in his mouth, smiles and bites their bodies in half.
“At least be humane about your bear homicides,” I say. “Don’t taunt them.”

“Wouldn’t it be bearicides?”

“Gummycides.”

“No, that’s when you eat a whole bag. One is a bearicide.”

For twenty more minutes we argue about what to call the deaths of gummy bears (and other creatures-wormicide and apple ringicide among them). We fall silent, and I say, “Robbie told me to call him.”
“He did?” I nod. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “He just said to do it alone.”

My love grunts. “Weird.”

“What do you think he wants to talk about?”
He shrugs. “Not sure. Don’t know why I’m not supposed to come.”
“Do I have to do it?”

“What, you didn’t like him?”

“No it’s just-worrisome. He’s a demon. He could kill me a billion different ways.”

“So could anyone else. When do you want to summon him?”

“I don’t care.”

“I’ll be gone late Tuesday, I think, will that be good?”
“Sure.”

 

A few days later I take a cloth my love laid out for me and spread it on the floor. I light candles around it, place two packs of off-brand Oreos in the center, and recite phrases I do not understand and squint to read in my love’s horrific handwriting. Robbie appears.

I put a yard between us before he says, “Kid.”
“What?”

“If you want my help come over here. I’m not gonna yell.”
I inch closer. “I don’t need your help with anything.”

He leans back, as if on a hammock. “Everybody needs my help. You really need it, though.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “You’re a compulsive freak. If you keep washing your hands like you do, you’ll have no skin left on them soon. Just muscle and bones.”
“How do you know that? Did Kevin tell you?”

“You’re not very subtle about it. You spent five minutes running the tap in the bathroom. Four minutes in the kitchen sink. But”-he flourishes three of his limbs out-”I can take your obsessions away. This and whatever other stupid shit you got.”

“I don’t have anything else.”

“Good. Makes my life a little easier. I do need something from you, though.”

“What?”

Not a moment passes. “All the candy you can get. But nothing with nuts: I hate nuts. And none of that Great Value shit either. I want the good stuff. Name brand.”
I sit. Robbie peels off layers of his skin in boredom and says, “Don’t got all day.”

I tell him no. He is a demon, he might erase it all, but I can’t imagine it. What can he do that therapy and Prozac cannot?

He floats closer to me, and he is all I can see. He doesn’t speak, but he stretches out and projects images onto his own body: a long-lasting bar of soap, my love holding my hand with neither of us in pain.
He releases me.
I fall back on the couch. Robbie shrinks to his normal form. “Think about it.”

At Kroger I buy $50 worth of sweets: giant variety bags and king-size candy bars. My love yells when he sees it piled all the way up our cabinet. He says we have no money, we’re trying to eat healthy, what sort of thing’s gotten in my head to do this? And when I offer no response he seems to understand.
Days later, when my cowardice has left all the candy untouched, my love says, “Whatever you and Robbie bargained, you don’t have to go through with it.”

I am lying on the floor, suffocating beneath a blanket. I say nothing.
“Really. He won’t be mad or anything. He’s made me about a thousand deals I’ve turned down and he still likes me. Bargaining’s just automatic to him; he won’t take it personally.”
I turn onto my stomach and spread so that my feet stick out. My love is being stupid. 

He sits on his knees beside me. “What’d he offer you?”
I am too burned out to speak, so I stick my hands out and wiggle my fingers. 

“I have no idea what you’re saying.”

I mime scrubbing them and he says, “Get rid of your handwashing?” A thumbs up.

He pulls the blanket off my head and kisses the back of my neck. “That’s not too bad a deal. But I figured it’d have something to do with me. Eternal devotion to you or something.”

“Not everything’s about you.”

He grunts. “Of course it is.” He tucks the blanket under my shoulders so my head and neck are exposed. I feel like a turtle. “He won’t trick you. You’d actually have a chance to get rid of it all.”

He’s wrong. It sounds wrong even as he’s saying it, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
My love stands to take a shower, and I lie there until he yells for me to fix dinner. 

I summon Robbie later when my love is gone: this is a matter he is not in, and I don’t want any chance of screwing the deal up. 

Robbie gobbles up all the candy I offer and says, “Okay, you’re good.”

“I don’t feel any different.”
“It’s a gradual thing. In a week you should be fine. Just don’t rush it.”

The following days I wash my hands less and less, almost only when necessary and quickly at that. I apply lotion whenever I can, and soon they are barely broken. My love takes my hand now any chance he gets and squeezes hard. It is no longer painful. He kisses my knuckles and gets no blood on his lips. It is an Era of Good Feelings, a second of joy. 

Each day I come home from work at five, and my love comes home at five-thirty. If I’m going to be late, I tell him, and if he’s late, he tells me.
On Thursday it is 5:40 and he isn’t home. I think I didn’t wash my hands the last time I used the bathroom and wash them twice. At 5:50 I imagine my love having sex with another person and wash my hands again: this is a dirty, doubtful thought. At six he is under or a car or has had a heart attack. I wash my hands again. 

At 6:15 he comes home and my hands are red. He sets two bags of groceries on the counter and walks over to me. He tells me the supermarket was crowded-he forgot it was the first of the month-and was my day good? His was. 

He takes my hand and stares at it. “How much have you washed your hands today?”

“Not much.”

And that is the end of bliss. I cannot stop scrubbing my hands. They crack and bleed again and no amount of lotion helps.
Before I go to sleep I have to check underneath the bed over and over, because people may have crawled underneath. I don’t fall asleep for a long time. Men may have gone under there since the last time I checked, and I must look again. I only sleep when I surrender to them and care no more if they eat my liver or steal my brain.
My love tries to give me Nyquil, but I refuse it. He yells when I wash my hands too long, but I ignore him.

One night after dinner he shoves the coffee table aside and summons Robbie. Without speaking, he points at me.
“What?” Robbie says.
“Look at his hands.” 

I try to sit on them, but my love grabs my arms and forces them in the air.
“Fucking shit, kid,” Robbie says.
“You said he wouldn’t do this anymore, right?” My love looks at me and I nod. “So what the hell is this?”

“I got rid of it, swear I did.”

“You obviously didn’t. How the fuck could you mess this up?”
Robbie shoots forward and grabs my love with nearly every limb. He grows, quietens, and I hide part way under the table.
He does not speak. I wonder if he ever will. After a minute, my love nods, and Robbie looks at me. “We’ll make another deal and see if it works. Your body must’ve rejected it.” He vanishes.

I summon him later and give him half the cookies I bought to help my OCD and half of them to get my love back to his normal eating and speaking state. 

Even more creatures crawl under our bed and now our windows are unlocked. Three checks but they may have come unlocked. Two more checks.
Four packs of cream puffs and two more bars of soap, gone. My love ten minutes late from work. A frozen cheesecake to know if he is cheating on me. Robbie says he has never, but he could be lying. He is lying. He has not held up his deals before.
I must make fifty deals and waste half our earnings on desserts by the time the month is out. Robbie tells me to stop, but he never refuses a deal: the primal instinct forcing me to make these deals is the same one telling him to agree. 

My love tries to take away my ATM card and do all the shopping, but Robbie accepts other forms of payment. Before my love notices, we have one knife and no DVDs remaining. 

One night my love doesn’t speak to me at all. He looks at me and shuts himself in out room the minute he gets home. He eats nothing and only leaves to use the bathroom. 

I watch TV. That’s all I do. I check on him at nine, and he is asleep. I sit back on the couch.
I wish I could stop existing. How much would that cost?

If my love kills himself, it is because of me.
My love probably will kill himself. 

I pack my things in Kroger bags and stuff them in the car. I kiss the top of my love’s head and worry he will scream, but he doesn’t even wake.
He needs the car. What will he do without the car?

I take it anyway.

I get on I-75 and wonder if drowning in liquor would be best. Maybe light my hand on fire-what a glorious death that would be. But now aesthetics don’t matter: no one will see.
I drive thirty miles to Berea and stop at a gas station. I walk to the woods behind it and wonder if someone’ll do this for me.
I want to die. This is clear. But how?

I run to the car. Drive into a tree! Quick end, beautiful end. But I go farther and somehow get to my apartment, and now it is morning. I did not drive here. I don’t know who did.
I want to asphyxiate in here, but my love stands in the window and waves me in. I cannot avoid him. I walk inside, leaving all my stuff in the car. 

I want to kill him. I want to stab him in the foot or cut his wrists or chop off his ear.
“What were you doing?”
This is the most beautiful scene I’ve ever imagined: cutting off each of my fingers, jumping on my love, stabbing him over and over and over. More beautiful than any nature reserve, more beautiful than him naked, more beautiful than anything in the world. 

“Driving,” I say.

“Where?”

“Out.”
He stares at me before walking into the bathroom. I think he will hide the razor and come hold me, but he stays in there.
I crawl to the corner of the couch and scream into the fabric. I punch it, punch myself. 

Too dull. I get shears from one of the kitchen drawers. Four on the left arm, four on the right. Not as good as a razor, but it’ll do.
My love comes out at some point-I don’t pay attention to the time. He grabs a block of cheese from the fridge and eats it sitting on the floor.
“Why’d you do that to me?”
“I didn’t do anything to you,” I say. 

He snarls. His teeth are orange from where he’s scraped the block. “You dumbass.”

“It was for me. Didn’t have anything to do with you.”

“Shut-shut up shut up. I don’t wanna hear that bullshit.”
“It didn’t.”

He leans back and closes his eyes. He gurgles out a mess of sounds and begins crying.
I have never seen my love cry. There’s never been much reason for him to.
I sit next to him, and he leans into me. I say sorry and he tells me to shut up. I apologize again.
Five minutes or two hours later I doze off with my face tucked into his hair, and he forces me off him. He pulls me up and into our bed. He tucks me in and says, “I’ll be right back,” so I stay up for him.
I am tired. Too tired to check under the bed but still I wait for my love.

In my dream or not I hear Robbie. He apologizes immediately. I tell him it’s okay, but he doesn’t respond.
“What do you need to get away from us?” my love says.
“What?”

“Undo everything you’ve done, leave us alone. Bother some other poor sucker.”

“You don’t want that.”

“I do.”
“You’ve never lived without me.”

“And you’ve never done shit for me. What do you need?”
Robbie sighs. “I need your car.”

“Any compromise?”

“I can’t. I’ll get shit from the higher-ups if I do.”

“Okay. Take it.”

“You won’t be able to call me.”

“That’s the point.”
And soon my love slips into bed beside me. I lean away and over the bed. My love says, “Nothing’s there. Nothing’s ever gonna be there.”

So I fall asleep.

 

Richard Lundy lives in Whitley County, Kentucky. He is a mediocre clarinet player.
He can be found lurking through your local Walmart.