i. They call me Gruesome, and I goad them on.
“Yes,” I say.
“Fantastic,” I say.
“Call me Mister Gruesome.”
Have you seen me? It was an ad they had me in—a Dunkin’ Donuts promo. I made $450 for the shoot and $850 in residuals. YouTube didn’t amount to much, but the TikTok went semi-viral, with 461K views and over 400 comments. Dunkin’ called it “representation,” but the people didn’t like it so much. Just look at the comments:
@courtneycrawf12: Dunkin WHAT
@brmr360x: who are they trying to hide back there…
@11matt: Serious question. What could have possibly happened to this man?
I saw these comments. I saw them with my own eyes.
ii. They’d like me to scare Waylen. I’ve never met him before, but they’d like me to appear in his bedroom. Always, I am being asked to appear.
“Eighty.”
It is Howie who meets me, a ginger who takes darting licks at his lips and eyes me under the bill of his ball cap. It’s the parking lot beneath Haggen Groceries, where shadows are slight. “Jesus,” he says, stepping back to frame his fingers like a camera. “Your proportions. You’re beautiful, really. In your own way.”
He flaps the twenties once against his palm.
“Waylen’s inscrutable,” he says. “A genius, really. But inscrutable.”
He’d reached out via e-mail. I saw Howie’s address first, above four men cc’d. The subject line: PRACTICAL JOKE FOR A COWORKER
Howie describes the water district as a mess of pipes and tanks and fertilizer, all held up by ‘The Great Fixer’ Waylen. “You can ask him to put anything back together and he will,” he says. “But he’s not exactly a, uh, conversationalist. There’s something you can’t quite reach there. A little adrenaline might not be so bad for the guy. Get him a little less uptight.”
He paints Waylen’s house to me, until I can see it in my mind. It’s the treeless sprawl along Courier Avenue, right before the dead-end sign: a heaving house with shuttered windows and a buckled porch. You break the grass when you step on it, disturb the still and clotted air.
“Odd place for an odd fellow,” Howie says, but stops like he’s said too much. “But he’s a good friend. A hell of a friend.”
It’s a splotchy face he’s got. I haven’t said a word to it.
iii. In the ad, I drink a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee alongside savvy women in athletic clothing. It was a group of nine, all of whom did their best not to stare. I later learned we had an “influencer” at the front of our pack. I had wondered why she was given a line and her own little dance. But nobody had treated her differently, so how was I to know?
Her name is Reneé Rapp. I learned it from the comments.
iv. Waylen’s routine is this:
At 9:15, he opens his front door for his dog, Wendy, and retreats into his bathroom. As the shower nozzle fires, the mutt rolls once, then twice in the grass. I am to pay no attention to her, but rather the yellow light emanating from within.
Waylen showers for ten minutes, Howie tells me. He’s a creature of habit. Never breaks his routines.
“He’ll towel, then dry, then comb,” Howie says. “Then when he turns to call Wendy… he’ll find you.”
I can almost picture myself in the dark.
“Does he have any heart conditions?” I ask. “Or a pacemaker?”
No, Howie says.
Good. I wanted to make sure his heart wouldn’t stop.
v. I once made a child wheel away from me.
Miriam lived in the house on Baxter, with the steep roof and the knocked-down gutter. After much deliberation, her father placed me in her wardrobe. It was the night before Halloween, and she was having a birthday party. I waited an hour before the brigade of girls threw open the closet to play dress-up. You wouldn’t believe the look on Miriam’s face. I told her I’d been hired by her dad, but it didn’t stop the sobbing. It didn’t stop any of them. Her father instructed the crying gang to shut their eyes as he led me out the door. “Just a little longer,” he’d said. “Just keep those eyes shut.” He didn’t understand the ramifications.
His subject line had read: BIRTHDAY SCARE 🙂
vi. In the garage, Howie pulls himself into his truck. A red Chevy Silverado, with a busted bumper. He stops with the door half-closed. “I gotta know how it happened.”
I blink at him.
He blinks at me, then gestures down to my body. I blink again.
“All that,” he says.
I shake my head.
“All what?”
Howie shows his teeth. “Your skin,” he smiles. “What happened to your skin?”
“Whose skin?” I say.
Howie laughs as he shuts the car. The Silverado makes a slow, wheeling loop around the garage and passes me in a puff. That muffler makes more noise than it should: a roar that judders the garage. He wanted it that way. I can tell you that much.
vii. The Dunkin’ Donuts film crew treated me with great respect, but I know they had other motives. I believe they had a bet to find out what had happened to me.
The sound mixer tried to ask it casually, as he undid my lavalier microphone. He slid the question between one of his sentences, like I wouldn’t take notice. “It’s a hereditary thing, right? Something muscular?”
“Something like that,” I said.
He said, “Huh,” and acted like it was no bother. “I’ll get this mic off you,” he said, but I hadn’t had a word in the commercial. They were just picking up mouth sounds.
viii. The men come to watch. It is night.
Usually, my spectators hide behind trees, but Waylen’s yard has none, so they hide in the truck. Wes, Hal, Howie, and Devin. They are the street’s sole occupants, besides asphalt and covered cars. They parked right at the edge of the curb, under the dead-end sign, the metal dark and fleeced in spray paint.
I wait until 9:15 P.M. I wait for the door to open and the dog to emerge.
I come from a trail. I come from out of the dark.
I cross the street, past the car, past the men. ‘The Great Fixer’ passes the windows, just like Howie had said. His silhouette is odd and ill-formed, like something bent, but I can’t study it before he vanishes. The men’s heads track me like black cut-outs. My steps scuff the concrete and break the grass.
I’ve always liked the night. What it does to my shape. My proportions.
Waylen’s dog is just where they said he’d be. She lays on her back and kicks her legs toward the front door. The frame’s wide open: a gulf of black beyond, with one light inside. The dog hardly looks at me as I pass onto the porch. There’s no need to be quiet. That shower drums loud.
“Hello steam,” I say.
As it rushes to meet me.
ix. Another crew member tried in the parking lot. He stopped carting the Dunkin’ film and asked me like he was exhaling, like he was taking a well-needed breath.
“I don’t mean to pry,” he said with both hands on his cart. “I’m just curious.”
“I became me,” I said.
He blinked and fixed his cap, not taking his eyes off me once.
“Could it happen to anybody? That’s what I’d like to know.” Evening his breath then: “Could it happen to me?”
“Why not?” I said.
His name was Garrett. He was the 1st AD.
x. Ready or not, here I come.
I pass through the foyer and the kitchen. I pass a thrown-over rug, and counters lined with ticking appliances. The toaster whirs and rattles in place as a piece of bread browns inside. They said he was a mechanic, but I see no tools.
I wander into the bedroom. The bathroom door is open by inches and lights me in its yellow stripe. I stand still and tall beside the bed, trying to imagine myself anew. I listen for the clock, but there is none, so I time out the seconds in my head, as I eye the empty furnishings. There is no nightstand or bookcase, just a mattress set into its frame. The open window shows the Silverado and all the watching heads. From the shower, Waylen doesn’t even hum.
He is a creature of habit, I know. In two minutes, that shower will stop. In two minutes, he will emerge. I listen for the squeak.
xi. I looked normal as an infant. I can tell you that much.
xii. Waylen scrapes the towel along his body.
I hear it scrub his arms, then his legs. It is easy to imagine him at work: hunched and precise, beating fine belts and screws.
At once, the door slides open, and I step back to keep in the dark. Waylen passes beneath the beating fan to drop the towel at his wardrobe. He has no thighs to speak of and a hollow butt.
Up comes his underwear. Down goes his shirt. It is a janky way he moves, like something improperly built.
“Wendy,” he calls and peeks at the door. “Wendy.”
The dog takes no time to enter. She scrabbles over the frame but passes Waylen altogether. It’s me she approaches, looking for these ankles of mine, ready to lick.
And then, Waylen turns. Turns and looks.
I see him, and he sees me.
The man stays perfectly still. It is a broad and smooth face he has. Infant’s eyes, blinking and blank. We are half-lit in this place, and I feel the fan on my back. The beating ceiling.
“Oh,” Waylen says.
He turns and limps, but I am still. I say nothing to him, only watch as he closes the door and locks it behind him. Only watch as he rounds the kitchen’s corner to slide a tool from the knife block. I know the shape of a blade when I see one. I see its point against the dark.
“There you are,” he says. It is the only word he can form. With that deep, impressionable face.
“There. You. Are.”
He holds it like he holds any tool. I see how he’ll try to fix me.
xiii. Look at those comments. Look how curious they are:
@renoirdesc344: dunkin will you pls give us the lore on this man
@thehouiiiind: medically HOW
@tri3923: we got any doctors here….?
It’s as simple as this. One day, I started swelling. And I never stopped.
xiv. Waylen creeps toward me.
“I saw you coming,” he says. “I knew it. I been waiting.”
“Yes,” I say. And feel Wendy’s tongue.
“Get ‘im,” Waylen says, in his shaky baby’s voice.
“She’s got me,” I say.
Waylen takes a little step forward. Licks the edge of his lip. “I saw you,” he says. “You’re the Dunkin’ man. You were in the background. I thought you were funny.”
He is ready to kill, I see. There’s that stillness, Howie described: the unreachable thing you can’t grasp, a man beyond explanation, but I see something like innocence in him, in all his deformations. He has twisted, damaged ears. A bum leg and illiterate eyes. That face is calm and still, but there’s something beneath it. Stupidity.
I imagine Howie putting two broken people in a space. Winding them up.
“I’m you,” I say.
“Who?”
“Mr. Gruesome.”
In one motion, I grasp the knife in his hand. I do not pluck it, just lean slightly, so my palms close in on the blade. But he listens. Stills. Lets me hold on to that weapon of his. I put my mouth beside his ear, so he can feel my voice as it rattles out of my throat.
“It’s not me,” I say.
And gesture out the window, to the shape of that truck. To their dark heads, steaming the glass.
“Them,” I say.
And he nods.
“Evil.”
Waylen watches my face for a sign. And I now know he is ready to kill. I only have to tell him when. We watch that truck idle, with their shapes hunched and peeking inside; all of us waiting, them and us, waiting for sight or sound, for motion or panic, blood or screams.
“Shall we scare them?” I say.
Waylen’s voice is dry and husky in that yellow room, like a beam cutting through wood. “Yes.”
The Silverado’s muffler purrs the room. I ask him if he has another knife.