The Bagging #2
We loved each other: Jeff, Melissa, Aaron, and me.
Oh, how we loved each other. Love, at least the kind we knew, was never gentle.
It lived in shared cigarettes, in dirty blankets pulled two or three bodies at once, in the way Melissa laughed when Jeff said something disgusting, in the way Jeff would steal bread and still leave the larger half for one of us.
And even Aaron, distant as he was, belonged to that little system of hunger and tenderness.
We were broke, half-feral, and rotting at the edges, but inside that house we had built something that almost felt sacred.
Maybe it was the danger of it. When people have nothing, they start mistaking survival for invincibility.
But even sacred things rot when the wrong person starts praying over them.
I did not understand that then. None of us did.
We thought Aaron’s distance was just another part of him, the same way Jeff’s jokes belonged to Jeff and Melissa’s reckless laughter belonged to her.
We made room for it. We made room for everything in that house, because making room was the closest thing to mercy we knew.
Still, there were moments when the air changed around him.
Sometimes, late at night, after the wine had run out and Jeff had talked himself into sleep, I would wake to find Aaron sitting alone at the kitchen table with the overhead light off and a candle burning in front of him.
He kept little things arranged around it: bottle caps, dead flies, chicken bones, scraps of newspaper, locks of hair I hoped had come from the bathroom sink.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would have looked especially frightening to someone passing by.
That was what made it worse, maybe. The smallness of it. The patience.
“What are you doing?” I asked him once.
He did not look up. “Listening.”
“To what?”
He smiled then, but only with one side of his mouth. “To what people leave behind.”
I told him he was a creepy bastard and went back to bed, because that was easier than being afraid. In those days, we treated fear like a joke if it came too close. We laughed at things until they either backed away or became part of us.
Aaron never laughed with us for long. Not anymore.
He had started watching the rest of us the way a person watches water beginning to boil, waiting for the first true sign that something has changed.
When Jeff stole food and came back triumphant, Aaron barely touched it.
When Melissa danced barefoot in the living room to some ruined tape we had played a thousand times, Aaron watched her reflection in the dark television screen instead of watching her body.
When I spoke to him, he answered a second too late, as if returning from somewhere far away and resenting the distance back.
The others who drifted through our house carried their darkness loudly.
They wore it on shirts, carved it into their skin, shouted it over music, argued about LaVey, Lucien Greaves, Marilyn Manson, and whatever other names made them feel dangerous for an evening.
Aaron despised them. He said borrowed darkness was still borrowed.
He said most people wanted symbols because symbols did not ask anything in return.
“What does?” Melissa asked him once.
Aaron looked at her for a long moment.
“Doors,” he said.
Jeff burst out laughing. “Jesus, man. You ever hear yourself?”
Aaron only lowered his eyes to the table. “All the time.”
That was the first thing about him that truly unsettled me: not the pamphlets, not the candles, not the little collections of trash and bone and insect husks, but the sense that he was not trying to become strange. He was trying, with less and less success, to remain ordinary.
So, the third year of Bagging was approaching, and though we were bound by love, we were in a wretched state.
We drank cheap, sweet wine and scraped loose tobacco off the floor.
My head rested on Melissa’s thighs, while Jeff rested his on mine.
Aaron sat a little farther away. I saw him fiddling with something in his hands.
“What are you doing?” I asked drowsily.
He lifted a soft caramel, and I didn’t know where he had dug it up; we were flat broke.
Yet in his hands it seemed like a weapon: from either side, the edge of a razor gleamed.
He stared at that contraption with pride, as if he had just invented a cure for cancer.
It was the look of a mad genius on the verge of being seized by a furious mob of bloodthirsty villagers.
“Time to stir a little fun into this,” he said.
We didn’t argue. Tradition was slowly becoming tedious, and it had to be honored.
So, a few kids got handed some caramels with razors, but we didn’t hear any screams. They probably ate them at home, or something like that.
Only a single news article about hidden blades and someone’s mangled tongue made it into the papers.
Aaron spent what money he had on newspapers just to catch a glimpse of the fruit of his labor somewhere within the pages.
That was the first time I understood that Aaron did not enjoy this game the way the rest of us did.
For us, it had always been filthy, stupid theater – a private joke stretched too far by boredom, drink, and the thrill of hearing fists pound on the front door.
But Aaron wanted proof. He wanted consequences.
He read those articles with the stillness of a priest over scripture, lips parted, eyes feverish, as if he had not merely played a prank but reached through the page and touched a stranger’s life.
Jeff called him sick, but with a laugh attached, the kind meant to soften the truth.
Melissa said nothing at all. I remember watching Aaron fold the newspaper neatly after reading it, smoother than the page had been before, and thinking that whatever line the rest of us still recognized had already disappeared for him.
It was only natural, in an environment like that, for a person to start longing for change. At least, that is far clearer to me now than it was back then, though the first signs of it had already been smoldering even in those days.
That same week, I found Melissa in the kitchen before dawn, barefoot on the cold linoleum, wearing one of Jeff’s sweaters and staring into an empty coffee mug as if something might eventually appear inside it.
“You sleep at all?” I asked.
She shrugged without turning around. “Some.”
“That means no.”
“That means some.”
The window above the sink had gone gray with condensation.
Outside, the street looked dead and wet, the parked cars shining under the early light like things pulled from a river.
Melissa reached up and wiped a circle clear with the heel of her hand.
For a moment, she looked through it, then looked at her own reflection instead.
“I had a dream about my mother,” she said.
I waited. In that house, you learned not to ask too quickly. Questions had a way of making people remember they could leave the room.
“She was folding my clothes,” Melissa continued. “All the things I brought here. Putting them back in that trash bag. Like she knew I’d be coming home.”
“You’re not going home.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
But there was no victory in her voice. Not even relief. She lit a cigarette from the stove burner and took two hard pulls before handing it to me. Her fingers were cold when they touched mine.
“We can get out of here, you know,” I said, though I had no plan, no money, and no understanding of what out of here could mean.
She smiled a little. “You mean all of us?”
“Yeah. All of us.”
“That’s sweet.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know. That’s why it’s sweet.”
I hated her for a second then. Not really, but in the small, childish way you can hate someone for seeing through you before you have managed to become convincing. I leaned against the counter and smoked, watching the ash grow long because I did not want to move.
“Jeff would go,” I said.
“Jeff would say he was going. Then he’d steal a bottle, tell a joke, and end up asleep under the table.”
“Aaron?”
She looked at me then. “Aaron is already gone.”
The sentence settled between us with the quiet weight of something neither of us had meant to say aloud.
From the living room came the soft, ugly sound of Jeff snoring.
Somewhere beneath it, or behind it, I thought I heard Aaron moving around, though that might have been the pipes ticking in the walls.
“He scares you?” I asked.
Melissa gave a short laugh. “Everything scares me.”
“You don’t act like it.”
“That’s because being scared never helped.”
She took the cigarette back and pressed it to her lips. Her eyes were tired, but bright in that dangerous way they got whenever she was close to saying something true.
“Sometimes I think we’re not living here,” she said. “I think we’re hiding here. Waiting for something to find us.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Sure.”
“We’re fine.”
She looked around the kitchen: the dishes with old food hardened on them, the flies moving lazily near the trash, the cracked yellow cabinets, the black crescents of mold where the ceiling met the wall.
“Are we?”
I wanted to say yes. I wanted it badly enough that I almost managed to believe it. Instead, I took the mug from her hands and carried it to the sink, though there was nothing in it to pour out. Melissa watched me do this and smiled again, softer now.
“You’d miss this place,” she said.
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“You would. You’d miss having everyone close enough to touch.”
I said nothing.
“That’s what’s wrong with you,” she said. “You think love means nobody leaves the room.”
“And what do you think it means?”
She looked back through the little clear circle she had made in the window. The glass had already begun to fog again around the edges.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe leaving before the room turns into a box.”
Then I knew I needed some kind of change. We all did.