Jawless

Image courtesy of Alberto_VO5 on Flickr.

When we lived in Ottawa in the Eighties, the manufacturing plant where the glow-in-the-dark paint killed all those women was just a few miles down the road from our house. I went by it every day on my way to school. It was a flat, two-story brick building with plywood covering the windows and words spray painted on the side. I was just learning how to read then; the only word I could make out was D-E-A-T-H written in letters four feet high. 

“How can the mayor say there’s no radiation? The plant is closed and the company is gone. The criminal who owned it is in the wind. Who is he protecting?” my mother would ask. Dad would just shake his head. Dad didn’t like to talk about it. His grandmother had worked with the glow-in-the-dark paint and it made her grow a second knee on her left leg. The doctors kept cutting it off until there was nothing but a motionless stump under her hip. 

When I was older and could read better, they tore the brick building down and put a chain-link fence around the empty lot. A sign on the fence read CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS with the radiation hazard symbol on either side of the words. 

One night when I was in seventh grade, I was at a sleepover in my friend River’s basement. Ryan Michaels, who we called Ducktail, had smuggled in a VHS copy of Risky Business and we were watching it with the volume low so that River’s mom wouldn’t hear and make us shut it off. The basement smelled like mothballs and the Doritos we were carelessly crushing into the carpet. 

“I’m bored,” River complained. “This movie is boring. You know what we should do? When my mom falls asleep, we should sneak out and climb the fence where all the atomic stuff is.”

Ducktail nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s do that.” They both turned toward me, their faces lit by the flickering TV. I wrapped my arms around my torso. My Chicago Cubs sweatshirt suddenly didn’t seem warm enough. 

“Come on, Cody,” River goaded. “Don’t be a candy-ass like you were today in Dodgeball.” 

I frowned. “I was not a candy-ass in Dodgeball today.”

“You were,” said Ducktail. “You ran away like a girl every time the ball came near you.”

“That’s the point. That’s how you play the game.”

Ducktail and River looked at each other and laughed. “You’re supposed to catch the ball, you pussy.” 

Ducktail crossed his arms while River pulled his hood over his head and pulled the drawstring until only his nose showed through a tight little hole. 

“Come on,” River said, his voice muffled by fabric, “If you come with us, we won’t throw the ball at you next, Cody.”

I glanced at Ducktail, then at River’s nose. His nostrils flared taking in air loudly like Darth Vader. 

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll go.”

We crept out of a basement window as quietly as we could. We crept through the sleeping streets until we came to the fence. As we walked, River and Ducktail told stories about the people who had worked with the paint, how they glowed like extraterrestrials and how their faces fell apart after the paint made them sick. 

“Did you hear about the guy,” River said, “who drank this water that had the same stuff in it as the paint? He thought it would make him, like, Superman, or whatever. He drank these little bottles of it -- dozens of them, every day. He drank so much of it that his whole jaw fell off his face. There was nothing left but his top row of teeth and a neck hole.”

Of course, we’d heard that story. We’d heard all the stories about people who were made into freaks by the stuff in the paint. The stories had become a kind of ritual, more of a call-and-response than a conversation. 

“So, how did he eat?” Ducktail asked, repeating the usual question. 

“They just poured his food down the neck hole,” River said. “Through a funnel.” 

In the darkness, the chain link seemed to go on forever, making little diamond patterns against the black sky, corralling the stars into small clusters. 

“Go on, Cody,” River said to me. He and Ducktail stood next to the fence, waiting for me to climb it first. 

“Why do I have to go first?” I asked. 

“You’re the one who has something to prove,” said Ducktail. Reluctantly, I curled my fingers around the cold metal wire and shoved my foot into one of the diamonds. The fence rattled as I pulled myself up. It was at that moment that a flashlight beam cut through the dark and burned right into my eyes. 

“You kids get away from there,” said a familiar voice. It belonged to a cop. That’s when I noticed the outline of the police cruiser by the curb. It had its lights off. River and Ducktail turned and ran, the sounds of their feet hitting the pavement vanishing in the difference. 

I froze, unable to release my grip on the chain link. 

“Come on, son,” the cop said, and held out his hand. I let go and grabbed his hand, yanking my foot out as he helped me down. “Did you see how your friends took off running? Remember that the next time somebody wants to get up to shenanigans. They’ll leave you behind just like that.” 

He asked me where I lived and gave him River’s address so my parents wouldn’t see me come home in the squad car. I pretended to open the front door, and after the officer drove away, I crept around to the side yard where the basement window was still open. I slipped inside. River and Ducktail weren’t there. I gathered my sleeping bag and backpack and went upstairs to the kitchen where I called my mom to tell her I was sick and wanted to come home. 

Two months later, we left Ottawa. Dad’s new job took us first to Chicago, then Baltimore, and finally San Diego. With its Mexican fan palms and sushi restaurants, San Diego felt like it was as far away from Ottawa as you could get. 

But Ottawa was never that far from me. 

During the day, I walked the sunlit halls of my high school. I opened my books in class. I carried my tray through the cafeteria line. I joined the marching band and made first chair in the trombone section. I got supporting roles in school plays and was a second-string guard on the basketball team. 

At night, every night, I had the dream:

I was back in Ottawa, gripping the chain link in my hands. I was alone. I climbed the fence. On the other side, the empty lot was suddenly filled in by the squat brick building, its windows uncovered and emitting a faint green glow. The door was open. A force I couldn’t see pressed against my back, shoving me through the open door. 

Inside, there were rows and rows of women sitting at desks. The green, glowing powder clung to their hair and clothes. It hung in the air. They didn’t move or speak. When I got close enough to see their faces, I realized they didn’t have any: they were bare skeletons, draped in old-fashioned clothes. 

The door slammed shut. I ran past the rows of bone-women, whose naked fingers still gripped slender brushes dipped in radioactive paint. I ran toward a long, dark rectangle, a door that opened to nothing. When I reached it, a long metal staircase stretched out in front of me. I dashed up the stairs, taking them two at a time, while sweat ran down my back and into my eyes. Each time I reached a landing, a new set of stairs rose up out of nowhere. I climbed until I wanted to vomit. 

Finally, I was on the roof. I looked down at the tiny streetlights. 

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around. I was face to face with the jawless man. His dark eyes blinked. Under his nose, there was a row of glistening teeth, the roof of his mouth forming a sharp cliff over the empty chasm where his jaw should have been. I heard the wet sucking sound of air leaving his naked neck hole. 

He put both of his hands on my shoulders as if he meant to push me off the roof. I punched his remaining teeth and kicked him as hard as I could.

Then, I’d wake up in the early morning light with my blanket twisted around my legs. 

In eleventh grade, I started going out with Mary Grant. She had long dark hair and wore gold hoop earrings that shone brightly against her bronzed skin. She played Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and tenor sax in the marching band. I sat behind her during practice. Sometimes, she’d turn around and wink at me, and something about the curve of her neck made my jeans feel tight. Thanks to the trombone in my lap, no one noticed. 

One morning, the band director announced that we’d be taking a trip to Chicago. 

“Aren’t you excited?” Mary asked me as the band room slowly emptied. Behind us, one of the percussion kids practiced a marimba solo. 

“For what?” I asked, playing dumb. I tucked my trombone into its felt-lined case. I couldn’t go on that trip. I’d have to share a room with three other guys, and I didn’t want them to see me thrashing around at night. 

“Chicago! Isn’t that near your hometown?”

“It’s about a ninety-minute drive,” I said. Mary pulled a little piece of cloth through her saxophone to dry the pads and unscrewed the reed from the mouthpiece.

“Don’t you have family there? Won’t they want to drive up to see you play?”

I flipped the metal latches on my horn case and shoved it to the side. “There’s nobody left in Ottawa,” I said. “Not for me, anyway.”

I got up from my chair and grabbed my horn case when I felt her fingers encircle my wrist. She looked up at me, her hazel eyes pleading, but I turned away. I disappeared into the crowd of kids in the hallway and crammed my horn into my locker, kicking the case until it fit. When I slammed the locker door shut, Mary appeared, and the shock of seeing her made me fall back. 

“What is the matter with you?” She asked, hands on hips. 

I sighed and leaned against the lockers, as if the cold metal could replace my spine. I knew I had to tell her. 

“I can’t go on that trip, Mary. I can’t go on any trip, but I especially can’t go to Illinois.” I told her everything: the radioactive paint companies, the abandoned factory, the night I climbed halfway up the fence, the nightmares.

Mary watched me silently for a moment. Then, she slipped her small, warm hand into mine. “Come on,” she whispered and led me up to the third-floor chemistry lab.

“You have AP history this hour,” I reminded her as she opened the chem lab door. She shook her head as if to say “so what” and pulled me into the room. 

“Mr. Martinez,” Mary said, “Cody’s hometown has an empty field where a factory used to be. The factory made -- what was it?”

“Glow-in-the-dark paint,” I said, “they painted it on clock faces and watches.”

“Oh,” Mr. Martinez said. He sat back in his chair and ran a hand through his thick hair. “Radium paint. Those places shut down in the 1930s, I believe.”

“One of them did,” I muttered. “The other one stayed open until the ’70s.”

Mr. Martinez gave a sober nod. “I can’t believe it went on that long. Many of the people who worked with luminous paint got very sick.”

Mary squeezed my hand. “That’s what Cody wants to know. If he could get sick too.”

“I climbed the fence,” I said, and immediately felt like an idiot. “The fence around the factory where they painted things.”

Mr. Martinez tilted his head and smiled. Behind him, a periodic table was plastered to the wall, little squares with letters in them like the board on Wheel of Fortune.

“Cody, people got sick from radium because they ingested it or inhaled it. I’m sure you couldn’t have been exposed to that much radiation just from walking near the site.”

Mary looked up at me, the green flecks in her eyes glowing in the fluorescent light. She squeezed my hand.

That night, I dreamt I was kissing Mary when she suddenly pulled away and screamed. She reached into her purse and took out a small mirror and held it up to my face. I was jawless. Under my nose, my top lip peeled away to reveal a bare set of teeth. Below them, there was nothing but a dark, wet tube leading down to my stomach. I tried to talk, but the only sound was viscous bubbles forming between my naked vocal cords. 

Mary ran. I tried to chase her, but I found myself climbing a fence that rose higher and higher, like a stairway to the stars. Finally, I tumbled over the edge just as a wrecking ball swung through the air and burst through a wall, showering me with bricks. As I lay trapped, a crack formed in the earth and vomited gallons of green, luminous, glow-in-dark paint.