Cuckoo Nest
by Lavender

Cuckoo Nest

by Lavender

Most of the time, we'd been happy in each other's company. Underneath that, you have to understand, what there was between us was too small for a man the size of Greg. He had to have more, always more. Terror of that potential was what sealed my fate, as you know. One has to be a courageous person to want to wallow Greg's territory, or at the very least be a complete fool.

You've already figured out which one I was.

Greg and I had hopped into the car that Sunday morning. I was thinking of all the days that stretched ahead, long, lazy beautiful summer days that bring with them hopes of cold beers, Anirondack chairs, and the smell of burning muscles on a rusty grill. We hoard those kinds of memories and keep them close to our hearts, our separate but equal fondness for the summer months. The sunshine brought with it a sense of freedom we'd been denied all through the painfully cold winter, and the equally dull and painful workweeks. We'd saved up all our vacation time, and we had a glorious stretch of three weeks' peace ahead of us. We intended to enjoy it the way nature wanted us to - by driving for eight hours into the far north to be eaten alive by insects and be stalked throughout the day by bears.

The highway stretched before us in a conglomeration of trees, rocks and water only punctuated at intervals by the promise of fast food and gas on the odd off ramps. Greg pulled down yet another one, his third that day, and added another pointless half an hour to an already overly long trip. I cursed him, and rapped my knuckles lightly on the passenger window of the minivan.

Greg frowned at the entrance to the giant mall of fast food restaurants, the gas station hidden somewhere behind them. "What's your problem?" he barked.

"This is the third coffee stop you've made," I whined. "You've had four of the Grand Ol' Jitter sizes - if you manage to sleep at all this year, I'll be amazed."

"Quit your nagging," he said, and pulled the van neatly into a parking spot next to another van full of screaming, ice-cream laden kids. "Washroom break."

"You made me use the side of the road," I reminded him.

"Nag, nag, nag," he said, as he got out of the van. The door slammed shut and I was left alone, watching him as he marched towards the giant fast food mall, his gait hurried as though he was afraid it was all a mirage about to shimmer away.

This was our first vacation together since we'd met about three months prior. I took in his handsome profile as he opened the front door of the restaurant, keys dangling from his left hand, his posture as erect and perfect as when he wore his business suits to work every day. Today, he was dressed in casual jeans and a white T-shirt. He still looked like a man who could own the world.

I'd met him at a company party, where some old coot none of us had heard of was getting his retirement papers and a nice, stainless steel pen. The old man they'd held it for had slight dementia, and was confused throughout the whole thing. He couldn't even remember the name of the company he was being forcibly retired from. Greg had sidled up behind me, an electric shock of physical understanding washing over me at his mere presence.

"You're Ethan," he'd said to me, and smiled. He had two drinks in his hand, and he gave one to me. I gulped it, grateful, wanting so desperately to leave, but was held at this horrible party due to being a supervisor and thus, trapped into responsibility.

"Rumour has it you're gay," he said, and I choked on my drink.

"It's all right," he said, patting me on the back, his palm lingering just that second too long, "this world needs to be a happier place anyway." He winked at me then, with those knowing brown eyes, a softness to them that gave only a hint of the lust underneath. "Don't you think so?"

I remembered taking him in, and thinking, 'He's a big man'. No, not in the big you're thinking of, not in the lustful nor physical sense - he wasn't fat, though he was in good shape, a slender man of wealth and purpose. When I say I had that impression of him, I mean that he seemed too big to be just one person, too full of 'being', a man forced into too tight a space. He looked as though he was ready to burst apart, become more than I could ever hope for. I downed the rest of my drink, and Greg, in his usually big way, gave me a huge grin and offered to take me home.

There was a loud clang at my right ear, and I bolted upright in the passenger seat, terrified. It was only Greg, his trip to the fast food restaurant finished, his arms laden with a pile of food that couldn't possibly be for him alone. I opened the door, and he clamoured in, all manner of bags with him. He already had a bagel and cream cheese wedged in his mouth, and it stayed there while he adjusted himself back into the driver's seat.

"What is this?" I asked.

"Lunch."

"We just ate lunch not an hour ago," I said.

Greg shrugged. "I'm hungry," he said.

He put the key in the ignition and before I knew it we were on the main highway again, surrounded by the sickly smells of fried foods, and slathered on sauces. I picked through a couple of the bags, searching out something that might vaguely tempt my lack of appetite, but Greg snatched it from me, his hands reaching in and eating all that the bag contained in a swiftness that was frightening. A large hamburger with cheese and bacon and more, a large sized order of fries... All of it gone in one fell swoop, as though he had literally inhaled it.

He was reaching for another bag when I stopped him.

"Greg, what the hell are you doing?" I asked him.

He looked over at me for a second, before training his eyes back onto the road. "I'm eating," he said, and shrugged.

"You had a full meal an hour ago, how you can still be hungry, I mean, this hungry?"

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as though he was impatient with either my conversation or the road, or maybe he was just fed up being confined in the van with our vast amount of camping supplies, enough for three people not two.

"I have a high metabolism, you know that," he said. He nodded at the side of the road. "Look, they sell boats here."

"And dead animals," I noted, seeing the handmade 'taxidermy' sign beneath the much larger one proudly proclaiming 'boats'.

Greg was a big man. Even here his spirit seemed to dwarf the hugeness of the north, his aura overtaking every lane of the highway, the confines of the van fit to bursting from him. Behind us were four large ice-boxes, each about two feet wide and deep, full to nearly cracking with food. He'd brought enough for a year, I'd joked with him before we left, but he merely smiled and hinted that we'd probably need to go back into town for more supplies within a week. "It might look like a lot but it isn't," he'd assured me.

I'd known him three months. He was always chewing on something, always searching out something to eat, always on the move and wearing great clothes, and had a burgeoning wardrobe to prove it. He had so much he hadn't thought of what it was like to walk into my home and see my meager possessions, the worn couch, the TV that didn't even have cable, the twin goldfish that swam in a rather undecorated tank. He'd looked at me as though he'd found a person embedded into the worst possible poverty life had to offer. He'd spent the night, and I often wondered if he'd felt too cramped on my queen sized bed, and my home's minimalist furnishings. If we were to make love in future it was always at his own home, which was a grand, sprawling mansion just outside of the city limits, the rooms so huge they echoed when you walked through them.

Beside me, he opened another bag of fast food and devoured it quickly. There was a huge cup of coffee at his elbow, its size dwarfing the gear shift behind it.

"Just another hour," he said. "We'll be sitting in the wilds before you know it."

I tried to take that in, being alone with him for the next three weeks. The time we'd shared together for the last three months was only a shadow of that involvement, I thought. There had always been the long hours at work, the constant movement he had from one place to another, his responsibilities forcing him on call at every second of the day. He had all the work of three people, not just one. Every day his office was packed with new projects, and other CEO's, all of them vying for his attention, his vague yet necessary expertise.

I eyed the coffee, and wondered if this was why he needed it so much. The kick of caffeine kept him going when anyone else would collapse. It was hard work, living as more than one person beneath that slender cage of flesh.

///

He munched on a bagel as we put up the tent, his fifth one since we arrived over three hours ago. Two hours of that we had spent hiking, finding a place inside of the vastness of nature we could truly call 'wild'. We had a good pace going, and at times I had to run to keep up with Greg, dragging one of the ice-boxes behind me. We somehow managed to take two of the ice-boxes, along with the tent, and sweat was dripping down the back of my neck, melding with the tickling sensation of mosquitoes and other insects that lay drowning on my skin. By the time we found a good spot we'd already had two huge fights over where to put the tent-He wanted it closer to the river, and I insisted it should be under the canopy of the trees. In the end, a third choice won, and the tent went up over a section of smooth rock, a rare quartz floor for our sleeping bags and airbed.

When the final peg was finally put into place, Greg stood back, the back of his hand on his sweating brow. Physical exertion had made him sick, not healthy. He had large dark circles under his eyes, his body limp as he collapsed into the canvas beach chair near the fire. He closed his eyes and I half thought he was about to fall asleep, exhaustion overtaking him at an alarming rate.

"I sure could use a coffee," he groaned.

I handed him a beer instead.

We sat beside the fire, the late afternoon sky giving way to purple and pink with streaks of red beneath the clouds. Sailor's delight, I thought, and grinned at the phrase despite myself. Greg snored for a while beside me before coughing awake, his dark brown eyes suddenly wide as they took in the sky above us, the never-ending stretch of green and blue that lay distant on the horizon. He sat up in a kind of wonder, as though he'd never seen this kind of impossible largeness before, as though the world had become a stadium instead of its usual matchbox.

"We're in the real wilderness here," I said to him, my voice holding reverence. "Civilization, if that's what you could call that gas station and church an hour behind us, is a memory. They say this is one of the last unspoiled territories of 'true' forest. It's been a long time, if any, that any kind of human animal put his foot on this soil."

Wonder had knocked him out. Greg was snoring again, his body slouched in the confines of the canvas chair, his legs akimbo and full of black fly bites. I rummaged through my heavy backpack and found my zinc pen. I traced the bites together with it, like a dot to dot of his flesh. His beer lay dangling in the mesh cup holder of the canvas beach chair. He didn't wake up for another hour.

///

We lay in the tent, awake, listening to the sounds of the trees as they spoke to one another, along with the scuttering sound of some unknown animal finding its way through the dark and across the alien terrain of our campsite. Greg sat up, the dark so pure it could hold him whole inside of it, the tent cloaked around him more like a blanket than a real shelter.

"I could use something to eat," he said.

"You should see a doctor about this," I said to him, frowning in the darkness. "Nobody is hungry like you are all the time. It's not natural."

Perhaps he felt hurt by this outburst, after all we hadn't yet made love on the airbed, hadn't christened this place as our own divine freedom. I could feel his eyes burrowing into me in the dark, and shivered when his hand found the inside of my thigh. His thumb was rough as he caressed it.

"You're right," he said.

I tensed at this, and he began massaging my leg, venturing further upwards, my breath catching in my mouth as he teased the edge of my boxer shorts with the slender touch of his fingers. I could feel his bulk over me, his shadow dwarfing my own form beneath the round dome of the tent.

"I have to tell you something," he said.

I frowned, feeling that same skittishness, that uneasiness that told me I was in the middle of nowhere, that no human being had ever stayed in this wild place, that I was utterly alone with this man whom I had only just thought I might love. It was a thrilling, breathless, wonderfully large feeling.

"There's more than me," he said.

I sat up then, my eyes trying to search him out in the dark, trying to find him inside of it. But the tent seemed so full of him I was suffocating from his presence. "What do you mean?"

He sighed, and I could hear him eating. He had tucked yet another bagel in the mesh tent pocket on the wall. I could smell its yeasty dough as he ate it, I could picture his mouth working at it in huge, quick bites.

"When I was a baby, I mean 'really' a baby - as in, when I was nothing more than a pile of cells in my mother's womb, a fetus I guess... It wasn't just me." He swallowed, and I could make out the shadow of his arm, huge in the dark - he took out another morsel of food, and began eating again. "In the beginning, they thought my mother was having triplets. She went through the whole pregnancy expecting the worst, of course. Triplets are sickly sometimes, and she certainly gained enough weight to support all three of us. The doctor had found our heartbeats, he'd mapped us all out according to the shape of us inside of her. No ultrasound back then, of course. If there had been, well... Things would have been a lot different for me, I suppose. A lot different."

The sound of his chewing was getting on my nerves, putting me even more on edge. I bent my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, trying to fight the chill suddenly erupting over me.

"Your other brothers, the other triplets... Did they die?" I asked.

I could feel his shrug. "No," he said. He sighed, hugely, his massive shadow seeming to separate and come together again, a kaleidoscope of a person beside me.

"I ate them," he said.

My eyes locked on his shadows.

"They call it 'vanishing twin'... There were three of us, though, and while I was in the womb I ate them and now we are one. But it's never been that simple, you have to understand. Neither of them were as strong as me then, so I had to help them... They were my brothers, after all. They live inside of me, and it gets so hard sometimes sharing everything the way I have to, it's so damn exhausting. If I want to sleep, another one wants to wake up, if they go to sleep, I want to wake up - and always so damn hungry. Hungry enough to eat anything, hungry enough to eat garbage if that's what the solution is... A metabolism for three, you have to understand, is not easy to manage."

I knew it was ridiculous, it was a silly story meant to frighten me. I grabbed the lantern next to my head nonetheless, and fiddled with the switch to turn it on. Behind me I could hear the smack of his lips as he ate, the licking of his fingers as he devoured what was in his hands.

"...I love my brothers, I do, you have to understand that. It's just, sometimes it's impossible to keep this body going, to have all three people want it at once, and keep up the energy. I have to keep moving and moving, and everything feels so cramped, no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Just living is claustrophobic."

The light from the lamp flickered on and off, casting huge shadows on the walls of the tent. For a split second I could have sworn I'd seen two heads poking out from either side of Greg's hips, their mouths wide and circular like cuckoo beaks, their edges rimmed with shark teeth. The image shifted away, and was gone, and all that was left was the sight of Greg sitting up in front of me, his chin drenched in red gore. In his hands lay a squirrel's freshly dead carcass, torn to shreds by his mouth.

Of course I ran. I ran past the overturned ice boxes, their insides littered with torn open bags of food, empty cans that had been squeezed open by monstrous hands, empty packages strewn all about the otherwise unspoiled landscape. I ran out into the darkness of the forest, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, the smell of fresh blood still congealing in my senses. I ran until the campsite was far behind me, and then I ran further, off to the side of the river, further and further down, and then a sharp turn deep into the wild woods, virgin territory being spoiled by the cries of terror of a suburban man.

I talk to you, that shadow of a reflection in the pond that was once myself. I've told you my story, and wonder what things I might be hiding inside of myself that I'd not yet revealed, or know about. I wait by the shore, listening to the songs of frogs, and shivering in both terror and exposure. Somewhere in the darkness there is a predator waiting for me. I fear his shadow. It's more gigantic than a bear's.