For After Your Little Blue Heart Explodes

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,

The sheep is in the meadow, the cow is in the corn,

Where is that boy who looks after the sheep?

“Lying in the cornfield,” he mumbles, head mashed against the stall door in the men’s room of the Brown Bear Bar & Grill, “fast asleep.”

But the boy hadn’t been asleep, and Russell was forced to accept this fact the moment he found his son, Sawyer, sprawled face down in the spongy earth.

It was 2034. His wife Moni was in town getting her dirty-blonde hair permed and nails lacquered in creamsicle orange, and Russell had been calling his son’s name for almost half an hour. He circled the house twice, checked every room—under the beds and inside the closets—the basement, the garage, each of Sawyer’s favorite hideaways, avoiding the cornfield until he had run out of options. 

Even during their marathon rounds of hide-and-go-seek together, Russell’s son knew better than to go into the cornfield alone; in fact, he had been punished the previous day for venturing on the field’s border, his chubby hands filled with die-cast toy cars. The corn covered less than six acres, but Sawyer was a small child—only four years old—and it was not difficult for Russell to imagine him becoming lost in the high stalks and wandering out the opposite end. Beyond the field was the marsh, a tangle of drowned trees and prairie grass sharp as crosscut saws, bulrushes and cattails stretching to the horizon under a sun that scorched the atmosphere and was like a bullet hole in the sky.

Russell found him a few paces from the yard, the corn stalks casting jagged shadows over the boy’s flaxen hair and acid-washed denim coveralls. The left side of Sawyer’s face—curled-up shell of one ear and fleshy ridge of jaw—was visible, and Russell could see the blue tint of it as he pulled the child from the dirt and lifted his lifeless body. Sawyer’s tiny fists were clenched, and there was blood beneath the fingernails from having raked at his throat as the toy—a yellow Hot Wheels taxi cab that he was constantly sucking on—became lodged in his trachea and drove the oxygen from him.

Corn silk blew around them, the husks jeered, and as he carried his dead son from the cornfield, Russell could hear Moni’s Camaro pull into the driveway, the radio tuned to Iowa’s lone classic rock station, blaring: “Come on baby make it hurt so good / Sometimes love don’t feel like it should / You make it—”

 “—hurt so good.”

Russell comes out of his nod with the lyrics from that song of so many years ago draining from his mouth and the syringe still bristling from his neck. He has managed to end up in the one stall in the Brown Bear Bar & Grill’s bathroom that still has a door, and he reads the sentiments scrawled on its surface: “CLASS OF 2042 RULEZ,” “I LIKE GIRLS WITH A SLOPY PUSSY” and “FUCK U” to which some wordsmith has added: “niversity of Sacramento” in red ink, as he pulls the needle from his jugular vein, caps it with an eraser pried from the gnawed-upon ferrule of the pencil he had borrowed from the bartender, and slips the syringe delicately into the pocket of his jeans. To conceal the abscess throbbing at the injection site, Russell flips up his collar and gets to his feet. 

The Brown Bear Bar & Grill is illuminated by the neon signs burbling and blinking in the front window and jutting out of the walls, shedding red and blue light across the scuffed floor and twisting it over the gloss of the stools and bar. On the vintage jukebox Desmond Dekker and the Aces are playing: “My wife and my kids they are packed up and aah-leave me / ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I was yours to be seen’ / Poor-oor-oor-oor me, the Israelite-aah.”

Russell shuffles out of the men’s room, leans up against the bar, and tries to keep his voice from quavering as he requests a shot of Old No.7.

“Last call was twenty minutes ago,” the bartender tells him, but pours the drink anyway. “Let’s hustle it the fuck up.” His eyes are brilliant with flamingo pink light, beard yellowed at the crook where his bottom lip meets the top, and he wears a flannel shirt that has been secured with safety pins at the elbows. The pompadour atop his head is carved from marble.

Russell ratchets his head back, throws down the drink, bites the rim of the glass softly and places it on the bar, followed by a ten dollar bill. He feels the bartender studying him until he exits the door of the Brown Bear Bar & Grill and rounds the corner.

The streets of Chico are white with snow, crusts of ice spiderweb over the sidewalk, and overhead the moon darts across the starry branches of the night sky like a flying squirrel. Russell follows the plume of his own breath for six blocks to the two-bedroom apartment he shares with his grandmother MorMor and her clowder of cats, whose name is Legion.

Russell is 41 years old, and has been living with MorMor for the past three years, ever since her husband passed away. Before taking up residence in the apartment, his grandparents had rented out the spare room to a robot named Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5, who stayed with them for six years from 2033 to 2038 and had a penchant for table tennis. Russell is conditioned to finding issues of Popular Mechanics and the charred remnants of plastic balls stashed in closets, and in the crevices where the carpet meets the baseboards, tangles of electrical wire and burnt sprockets. According to the most recent reporting, and as related to him by MorMor, Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5 had been recently released from the High Desert State Prison after having served five years of a ten year sentence for the attempted virtual rape of a minor.

The key to the apartment is on a chain Russell wears around his neck. A pencil-thin mustache rides his upper lip, and in contrast to his hair—a morass of black streaked with gray that he’s let grow long and matted—he keeps the lines of it precise and neatly trimmed. Russell pulls the chain over his head and jiggles the slim wedge of the key into the lock until the door can be shoved open.

One of MorMor’s feline daemons, Pancake, clambers up a shelving unit and hisses down at Russell as he creeps across the darkened foyer. Glittering eyes and meows that, to him, sound judgmental, track his every movement through the blackness of the apartment until he is past the living room and safely behind the closed door of his bedroom, the only area where cats are not permitted.

Russell strips off his denim jacket and polo shirt, drops them in one corner and flops down on his mattress. The room is as tidy and sparse as his facial hair: a narrow army cot, wooden chair, banker’s lamp atop a single dresser. In the bottom drawer—beneath his socks and collection of skin mags—Russell keeps his works in a faded Arturo Fuente cigar box.

The walls of the room are bare save for a 12 x 12 embroidered tapestry that MorMor cross stitched for Sawyer’s first birthday, was installed in his nursery back in Iowa, and now is mounted alongside Russell’s bed. He watches it discern itself as his eyes adjust to the absence of light, the familiar words of the poem hanging above a cartoon child decked all in shades of blue, reclining between rows of corn with his head thrown back and the letter “Z” issuing from his open mouth.

He has looked at the rhyme a thousand times, first as it adorned the wall of Sawyer’s room and now in the wilderness of oblivion Russell spends his days and nights exploring, listening to the mewling of MorMor’s cats in the hallway and the ear-blistering decibel level his grandmother turns the television to while watching “Wheel of Fortune” and “Family Feud” and—as he has heard her insist on calling “Jeopardy”—“The Alex Trebek Show.”

The tapestry is the only thing Russell recalls taking with him after his marriage fell apart seven years ago and he fled Iowa for California—first crashing with friends and, as his addiction started to take hold, moving in with his recently-widowed grandmother—and although he knows the rhyme by heart, the last lines of the poem have become blurred in his mind and begun to read different to him:

Where is that boy who looks after the sheep?

Lying in the cornfield, fast asleep.

Will you wake him? Oh no, not me,

For I’ll see he’s dead and surely weep

Russell opens his eyes to sunlight seeping through the gaps in his vertical blinds, and the alarm clock on the floor beside his bed broadcasting the time as 1:50pm in holographic, red digital numerals. He sits up, feeling the familiar pull and knotting of his back as he untangles himself from the sheets.

In his sleep Russell had been hauled back to Iowa, the sky occluded with clouds, Moni’s bare legs flashing from the hem of her sundress, her mouth open, the sun sparking off her teeth, Sawyer’s name on her lips. She was looking beyond Russell’s shoulder, past their yard and to the rows of corn stalks clattering together, and he spun around to follow her line of sight.

Emerging from the chirring shadows of the field, Sawyer appeared in a net of corn silk, eyes dangling from their sockets and his arms reeling, scattering hundreds of Hot Wheels. His throat was swollen, the outline of a toy car clearly visible where it was wedged in his windpipe, and Russell felt the weight of a blade in his hand. It was the folding Buck hunting knife his wife had given him for his 33^rd birthday, its edge still sharp enough to—as his grandfather had remarked when seeing it—shave the silence from a monk.  

Tracheotomy! Russell thought, and tried to rush to his son’s aid, but his knees weren’t moving. He looked down and saw the bartender from the Brown Bear Bar & Grill with his arms locked around Russell’s legs.

“Let’s hustle it the fuck up,” the bartender said, and tightened his hold as blue streaks climbed like frozen vines up Sawyer’s face.

Russell senses the dream sticking to him, plowing its fingers through his skull and taking up residence in his mind as he rises from the mattress, goes to the dresser and pulls the bottom drawer open, pushing aside his socks and lifting the cigar box from beneath the magazines. A plastic bottle of AquaFina rests beside the alarm clock. Russell sets the box on the mattress, pulls the syringe from his pocket, uncaps it, and fills the hypo with water.

Everything closes in on itself, the room collapsing, the sunlight in the blinds folding around a tiny black fortress in a heated spoon where the focus is precise, each detail in perfect definition. The smudged surface of the tar blinks and the liquid hisses. Russell wraps the rubber tubing around his bicep, feels for the vein in the crook of his elbow, slams the spike into his arm and jacks the plunger back. Blood swirls into the barrel and he watches it fuse with the heroin before he inhales, bites his bottom lip and funnels the compound into his body.

It is approaching ten o’clock when Russell pulls himself from the carpet and switches on the banker’s lamp, its yellow light chiseling away at the darkness. His works are spread out on the mattress, the box overturned, and he can hear the cats hissing outside his door. He pulls on his polo shirt to ward off the night chill settling in the window, puts his rigs in order and stows the cigar box in the dresser.

Some of the addicts he encounters complain about constipation, but Russell has never experienced that, and as the sensation of feces hanging suspended just above his rectum presents itself, Russell consults the alarm clock, which reads: 9:55pm. By his reasoning, MorMor is certain to be asleep by now—sequestered in her room and entombed beneath a mountain of flannel sheets, heated blanket, two quilts and a comforter—and therefore won’t be available to berate him as he makes his way to the bathroom.

Russell opens his door slowly, using his bare feet to push aside the moaning felines that have congregated in the hallway to block his path, and slinks past MorMor’s bedroom, moving carefully to keep the shit from coming loose and destroying his briefs and his only decent pair of pants. 

As soon as he enters the bathroom, Russell feels a wave of nausea break and roll over him, and he’s reminded of the first time he mainlined, heat radiating slowly out from his stomach, laying on his side with vomit coating his chin. 

The bathroom is filled with blue light, a blue that is almost black, like the color of the sky moments before dawn when the sun cuts its teeth on the horizon and chews away the last traces of night. The dark glue of it is smeared across the tile, its cobalt illumination ricocheting off the fixtures, quivering on the porcelain and spinning from the mirrors. Russell can smell the hot Iowa wind, the smoky scent of Moni’s skin, the odor of milk and crushed grapes on his son’s breath.

“Sawyer,” he whispers.

Russell’s son sits on the edge of the bathtub, ankles crossed, clutching an elongated plastic tube that is painted yellow and coated with raised bumps to resemble an ear of corn. He turns toward Russell, the blue glow following his movements as if tied to him, little baubles of it fluttering in his mouth as he speaks:

“Here, Daddy,” he says, and holds the horn out to Russell. His voice echoes, bouncing off the bathroom tiles. “He gave it to me, but now it’s your turn to play it.”

A fresh surge of pain more violent than he’s ever felt before—worse than withdrawal, when death was preferable to the hells of detox—slams through Russell as he watches his dead son spring off the edge of the bathtub and run toward him, his legs throwing bruised light across the ceiling.

“Don’t be scared,” Sawyer says, and throws himself into Russell’s arms. “He showed me how it’s easy to play.”

“Who?” Russell asks, and falls to his knees, his son’s arms locked around his neck. He feels the abscess at the site where he had delivered a heroin shot at the Brown Bear Bar & Grill the previous night constrict beneath the freeze of Sawyer’s flesh. “Who showed you?”

“Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5.” Sawyer giggles. “He gave me the horn and showed me how

it’s played right before he jammed the car down my throat and turned me dead.”

Russell feels connections twine together in his brain, recalls MorMor’s voice over the phone in 2033—when, he realized, Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5 would have known exactly where Russell, Moni and Sawyer lived: “The robot travels all over for ping-pong tournaments. He’s even been to Iowa in your neck of the woods a few times.”

“I should have paid attention,” Russell says. “Fuck, I should have realized. I mean, if I knew, Sawyer, you wouldn’t have gotten lost, and the robot, he wouldn’t have—”

“None of that matters now.” Sawyer pulls away, and his lips peel back, swollen and purple, as he presses the horn into Russell’s hand. “I’ve got to go now, and you have to play the song.”

“I can’t. And I don’t want to let you go.”

Sawyer says: “You have to. Play the song. You’ll recognize the tune if you remember the rhyme.”

“But,” Russell says, “I don’t know the words.”

“‘For I’ll see he’s dead and surely weep,’” Sawyer recites, and his smile dissolves. “It’s time to play the final line.”

Russell puts the horn to his lips and blows a single note, tears rappelling down his cheeks, catching in the bristles of his mustache. Sawyer’s image flickers before him, his features growing transparent and finally blinking out altogether. The blue light twitches and fades, the Iowa wind going cold and sterile with the smell of bathroom disinfectant. Russell lays the horn on the tiles and covers his face with both hands, as the abscess in his throat reopens and throbs.

“You found him eventually, didn’t you?”

Russell spreads his fingers, hearing the hiss of a hydraulic system as Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5 appears from the shadows, the silhouette of his metal frame scarcely visible in the darkness. The dome of his head bobbles on the concertinaed spindle of his neck, and his circuitry buzzes.

“You killed him,” Russell says.

“Who, me?”

“You murdered my son.”

“He wasn’t lost, after all,” Dwayne 2000-XL7-B5 responds, his laser cannon springing out from his chest and leveling itself at Russell. “I was… watching him. I’ll take care of you now.”

Russell closes his eyes and waits for death, a death he’s been chasing ever since Sawyer left the world. Thank you, he thinks. Thank you, Dwayne 2000-XL-B5, for coming to kill me. I can’t wait to see my son again. I’ve missed him so much. I can’t let go.

In his final moments, before the laser blasts through his head and spatters the tile walls with blood and fragments of his skull, Russell imagines the cornfield, barcode clouds invading the sky, his wife’s Camaro barreling down the road, the robot hunched over his son and shoving the Hot Wheels car into Sawyer’s throat as his father called his name over and over.

“Please,” Russell says, eight years too late. “Please, don’t do it.”