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The Destroyer of Dreams
My father, the Destroyer of Dreams, comes in after midnight, and he is unhappy. I can tell, even though he tries to hide it by pretending to be mad at me because I'm up so late; I'm pretending to study, but I'm really up because I want to see him get home. I can be up late because tomorrow is Sunday, the day we go to see Mom. "You're supposed to be in bed two hours ago," he growls, in his interview voice, the one he uses to threaten mayhem and doom on his opponents, the voice he uses to challenge the crowd. "I am sixteen," I remind him, in my sweet voice, the one I use to persuade him of my maturity, "and it's Saturday night. I didn't have a date." Actually, I never have dates. I'm too long and bony and I don't have many friends, girls or boys; we don't stay long enough in one place. He knows that. He turns off the voice, and says normally, "Go to bed, Peach." He doesn't mean it. I watch him disappear into the kitchen, filling the doorway for a moment with his big shoulders on the way through. He is limping, just a little. He calls me Peach because he knows I hate it, but it's a signal he isn't really mad. If he was, he would use my real name, which is Rose Ellen. I hate that, too, and he doesn't use it very often. The fridge opens, closes, and I hear him pop the tab on a beer. He drinks too many of those. He comes back into the living room with it, and lets himself fold backwards into his favorite chair. "Lost, didn't you?" He shrugs, takes a big gulp from the can. "No big deal. Had to happen." "The belt?" He shrugs again, takes a smaller sip. He is no longer champion. He knew it would happen tonight, probably has known for weeks. And he knows I know he knew. But he seldom tells me these things in advance, and I don't ask.I think it preserves something of the excitement we had five or six years ago, before I figured things out. As I sit here watching him down the beer, I figure out another thing: He will never be champion again. "Johnny Lightning?" I ask, knowing. He swallows, and nods. "Bet that made the fans happy." "Maggots," he snarls in the Destroyer of Dreams voice. Then he laughs, the deep full-throated rumbly laugh that makes me laugh too. "Didn't take your mask, did he?" "Nope." He finishes off the beer and pauses to suppress a belch. "He gets to in the rematch." "Oh." "Part of the business, Peach. Ow!" He hauls himself back to his feet, with more than the normal awkwardness of a man his size, and heads back to the kitchen, trying to disguise the limp. I follow him to the door. "You okay?" "Yeah. A little knee twist. Bastard threw me over the top rope and I landed wrong. Be all right in a day or two." "I thought if he threw you over the top rope, he got disqualified." "Ref didn't see it." "How come?" With the back of his big hand he wipes foam off his lip. "I knocked him down." "Why?" "So I could gouge Lightning's eyes with the chisel I had in my tights." "Did you?" "Nah. Maggot hit me from behind while I was showing it to the crowd." I go back to my chair, pick up my book and stare at it. "When do you go again?" I call to the kitchen. "Not till next Friday. Memphis." "Against who?" "I don't know, some nobody. Him I beat. He'll pay for me losing the belt. Want to know how?" "No." "I knock him out with a chair." "I don't want to know." "Then I stomp him a while," the voice of the Destroyer of Dreams thunders from the kitchen. "Four or five refs run out of the dressing room and drag me off him. They carry him out on a stretcher."
~ What my father, the Destroyer of Dreams, does is so definite, so comfortably predictable. Tonight, he lost, because he was supposed to. Friday, he will win, for the same reason. He has friends, he has enemies, and he knows exactly who they are, even if they switch around, which they sometimes do. It reminds me of the ballet I got taken to on a school outing in Wichita last year. There was a hero, a heroine, even a villain in a mask. Each dancer knew everyone else's steps. About the only difference was that nobody in the ballet got body-slammed. My father is a Bad Guy. Or rather, the Destroyer of Dreams is a Bad Guy. He wears a black mask with red around the eyes and silver fangs at the corners of the mouth, and stands in vicious opposition to all that is good and true and holy. People in the stands, he calls them maggots, they scream and swear and throw things at him when he enters the arena, and he snarls defiance back. He has humiliated the best of their heroes, the Golden Boy, Flying Julio Ortiz, Gentleman James the British Heartthrob. I am the daughter of the Destroyer of Dreams. I can't tell anybody. At six feet six, something like two-ninety, with arms the size of fence posts, my father is big enough that when we go out anywhere I always catch people staring at him. None of them know he's the Destroyer of Dreams. I tell people that he's involved in athletic promotions and has to travel a lot. It explains why he is gone so much. Now that I'm sixteen, he trusts me enough to let me stay home alone when he's gone, although he calls every night and I know it bothers him. It's part of this world he works in, this dance, that he will someday be unmasked. Until tonight he's never talked about it, but it's another of those things I figured out a while back. Three or four years ago, there was another masked guy, really mysterious and ghostlike, all wrapped up in white like the Invisible Man in the movie, known only as The Presence. Rumors spread by the ring commentators speculated that he hid his face on account of some horrible burns or disfigurement. He would show up unannounced, and right the wrongs done by people like the Destroyer of Dreams. Finally, in one of his biggest matches ever, the Destroyer of Dreams beat him, and as part of the deal got to unwrap him in front of the booing throng of maggots. The Presence turned out to be a perfectly normal-looking somebody named Hayes or Haynes or something, and not long afterward The Presence became absent. Without the mask, nobody wanted to watch him anymore, no matter how good and heroic he was. Mr. Leslie, the little man who runs the organization, needed the Destroyer of Dreams to be champion for a while, so Johnny Lightning would have some real evil to vanquish for the belt. With the belt now gone, only the mask is left. You can't wear a mask forever. In a month, six weeks maybe, in Jacksonville or Bakersfield or Cedar Rapids, Johnny Lightning will defend his new title against the Destroyer of Dreams. Belt against Mask. It will draw a big crowd, maybe the biggest ever, and make lots of money for Mr. Leslie and the organization. While his fans scream for vengeance, Johnny Lightning will keep his belt and tear away the hated mask, unveiling the vile creature who has hidden all these years behind it. Unveiling my father. They will cheer and flaunt the success of their hero, these maggots, and they will demand a full accounting. It will be on TV, and I can't imagine watching it. I can hear them, I can see their screaming, distorted faces as the camera pans, seeking out the most grotesque. They will make my father, no longer the Destroyer of Dreams, step up to the microphone and announce for all the world who he really is. What will he say? Will he give them his real name, which is Lyle McAlpine? Or will he invent something, something innocuous and phony, Dave Miller, Bruce Williams, Art Nelson? He could be from Wilmington, Delaware, or Rapid City, South Dakota, or Fresno, California, all equally phony. These details will be determined in advance, too, probably already have been. I should ask him, but I won't. He limps back in, not trying to hide it so much now, with another beer and a raggedly constructed sandwich. Being evil is hard work. The Destroyer of Dreams has an appetite tonight.
~ "What time do we leave in the morning?" I ask. He shrugs. "Early, I think. It's about two hours getting there. We can stop and have something to eat before visiting hours." I dread tomorrow. I always do. I can never decide what to do when we get there, whether to go in and see her or just wait in the lobby. The last three or four times I stayed in the lobby, staring at year-old Time magazines. He didn't object. Mom, or the organism that once represented Mom, has been in the hospital since I was seven. I try to remember her before, but it's hard. Mostly I remember when things started to go bad. For some reason, what sticks in my mind is that day when she started digging holes in the back yard, and wouldn't stop, no matter what my Dad said or did. I remember asking Dad what Mom was doing, and his mouth smiled, sort of, but his eyes looked real funny. He sent me upstairs to clean my room, which wasn't very messy, and told me not to come down until it was done. Then the ambulance started, and I went to my window in time to see it drive away, with the lights still on. We had a big house then, in St. Louis, and my room was over the porch. I was making my bed when I heard what sounded like a truck pull into our driveway. I looked out and it was an ambulance. The lights were on, but no siren. I heard voices from downstairs, and I listened at my door, but I couldn't tell what they were saying I remember being afraid to go downstairs. After a while, Dad came up to my room and told me that Mom had a sickness but she was going to be all right and we could see her maybe the next day. But it was a long time before I got to see her again. One day Dad had me put on my best dress and told me we would go see Mom. We drove out of town and he took me to this big building with a beautiful park around it, trees and flowers and grass. I remember we passed two nurses pushing a couple of old people in wheelchairs. Inside, we went into this room where there was another nurse and a woman sitting on a chair, looking out the window. She was wearing a bluish nightgown thing and held her hands in her lap, rubbing them together. I told Dad I didn't want to be there, I wanted to see Mom. He just squeezed my hand a little, a signal I knew meant I should be quiet. The woman looked at me real quick, once, then looked away out the window at the trees and flowers and grass, and kept rubbing her hands. Dad said something to her, and the nurse moved a couple of chairs around to where we could sit next to her. I watched her and clung to Dad's hand, listening to him talk to her without ever hearing the words he said, and at some point, I knew. Her hair had been cut real short and her eyes were, I don't know, different. Afterwards, Mom was in and out of a bunch of places. When she was home, she wasn't quite Mom anymore, she was too smiley and scary. I remember she washed her hands all the time. She wanted to hold me a lot, but only for a few seconds, and then she always had to go wash her hands. Finally somebody decided she would need to stay away from home for good. Since then, she's gone from place to place, each one pretty much like the rest. Dad keeps looking for the right one, I guess, the one he hopes will do some good, or at least not too much harm. Somewhere in there he stopped telling me she was going to be all right. I was twelve when she remembered who I was for the last time. The place she's in now, she sits in this chair all the time, rocking back and forth, rubbing her hands, making sounds. Just sounds. They don't have any meaning. I don't think she recognizes my father anymore, either. The last time I saw her, about four months ago, my father talked to her, just as if she was listening. Who knows, maybe she was. But she doesn't show it, not that I can tell. I hope it's because she just doesn't understand. It would be awful to be able to understand what someone says but not be able to show it because you are trapped inside this mind that doesn't belong to you anymore. They don't tell me, and my father doesn't either, but I know they keep her doped up pretty well. She has a really bad purple scar on her right forearm where she put it through a window at another place, before they figured out she couldn't be left alone anymore. I think they have to feed her, too. I don't think she's aware of enough to know how to eat. Probably there are other things they do for her, too. I don't want to know. A lot of the time I wish she would die. It's not because I'm mean or angry or bad or anything, even if it makes me feel that way. It's just, the person called Mrs. McAlpine in the hospital isn't Mom, isn't anybody really. When something goes so wrong inside your brain that you can't even know you're alive, I don't think you are anybody anymore.
~ Dad pays a lot of money to keep Mom taken care of. There's some insurance, but I know it isn't enough. Where she is now is a good place, he says, and good places cost money. He's said that before, about where she's been, but every year or so he moves her. I suppose that's where most of the money goes, because I know he has made a lot of it over the years. The Destroyer of Dreams is really vile, and being really vile is worth big bucks. People will pay amazing amounts of money to watch someone as bad as the Destroyer of Dreams, and nobody has been so bad so long. But this year the Destroyer of Dreams and his daughter live in a rented house on the edge of a desert suburb of Albuquerque, New Mexico, five rooms if you count the bathroom. Last year it was a trailer in a prairie suburb of Wichita, and I don't know where it will be next year. Arizona, maybe. We seem to be slowly moving west. Our car is eight years old and needs transmission work. Johnny Lightning, whose real name is Merton Kramer and who just became champion, drives a Porsche and has at least one big boat. He's not married, and for all I know he might be gay. He bleaches his hair, which hangs to his shoulder blades, and he has a big square chin and twelve-year-old girls and sixty-year-old women would machine-gun each other for a chance at his autograph. I've been to his house. He lives in Malibu, up on a hill where he can probably see Japan. He keeps the fans away with Rottweilers. They have bad brush fires out there every few years, and I hope his house burns to the ground with him in it. Last summer, the time Mr. Leslie got a bunch of the guys together out at Johnny Lightning's place for a meeting, Dad took me along. There was an outdoor party around the swimming pool. Johnny Lightning had a patch of gauze taped over his left eyebrow, where somebody, not the Destroyer of Dreams, had actually given him a cut. Cuts happen sometimes, even through a mask; it makes good TV. My father has lots of thin scars wrinkling his forehead. At the party Johnny Lightning smiled too much at me and once, when I was leaning over a table assembling a plateful of food, he stood behind me and ran his hand up thigh. I never told my father. In the real world, the one containing the little house in Albuquerque, my father could crush Lightning like I've seen him do a can of beer. He would, too, if I told. But that would end the dance for sure, and I know we can't afford it right now. My father is now forty-four. His current contract is up at the end of the year, and probably there will be a new one, but not as good. After the mask comes off, he can keep going for a while as one of the bad-guy losers, beating nobodies once in a while, but mainly being there as the villain the heroes get to vanquish. Maybe it will work better for the Destroyer of Dreams than it did for the Presence. He doesn't say anything about this, but I know it doesn't pay as well. I don't know how we'll afford the hospital then. I don't know if we have any money saved anywhere. I don't know what will happen. I'm pretty sure he doesn't, either. I should ask about these things, but I can't. Maybe he'll tell me when he thinks I need to know. ~ He finishes the sandwich and the second beer while I pretend to read my book. I glance down at it when he looks up at me. "Peach," he says, "it is bedtime. I'll set the alarm for seven." I close the book. "Okay." He struggles up from the chair, wincing, and takes the plate into the kitchen. I'm about to go to my room when he comes back out and says in the Destroyer of Dreams voice, "I don't know, what do you think, Peach? Maybe instead of using a chair, I should drag the maggot out of the ring and smash his head into the announcers' table. Lightning got a real good reaction when he did that tome tonight." The Destroyer of Dreams is trying to make me smile, because of tomorrow. I know, too, that he likes to think about exactly what he'll do in his matches, because it's something he can control. If he wants to smash the maggot into the table, all he has to do is tell Mr. Leslie, and he'll get to do it. I don't look up at him. I'd like to smile for him, but I can't."Yeah," I say. "Maybe." He sees it isn't going to work, and pauses. The voice becomes my father's again. "Look, I know you don't like going there. I don't either. But she's your mother." "She was my mother." "She's still your mother." He pops the tab on another beer. "You want something to eat before we leave?" "No. Maybe. I don't know." I go to bed, but I won't sleep for at least an hour, probably more. Should I go see her? I don't know. Should I have something to eat before I go? I don't know. I wish someone would tell me what to do, what is going to happen. It would be nice to know, for sure, the steps to the dance, even if they're bad. I wish there was some villain in a mask I could scream at, somebody I could knock out with a chair for causing all this. I even wish I was that villain, and I knew the day, the hour, when some blue-eyed Johnny Lightning would smash my head into the announcers' table and rip off my mask, so all the maggots, me included, would know who I was. Right now all I know is, it's late and tomorrow the alarm is set for seven.
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