Mr. Daark (3)
(Part 3 of 15) The gas leak, the house fire, and the staring contest with the boogeyman.
3
They used to call him Aaron, the Jax family did. When he was a little boy, Aaron Jax was very particular about his name. You called him Aaron and nothing else. Legal names don’t always fit correctly though. They’re quaint for a baby who looks like every other baby out there. But babies grow out of damn near everything, and their names are no exception. Often times, the nicknames are barely different than the legal name; Andrew to Drew and all that. Aaron Jax found that he wasn’t an Aaron at all. Aaron (to him at least) was a nerd’s name, and Jax didn’t feel like a nerd. It didn’t help his case that he grew up to be an accountant. Either way, Jax wanted his nickname to be short and cool. Sometime in middle school or high school he read his name off of a report card as Jax-comma-Aaron, and it clicked for him.
Back before that matter, Jax was Aaron, living in a rental home full of empty rooms. The closet had new clothing and the dresser did too. The bed was 100% new. New mattress, new pillow, new blankets and sheets. But no toy chest, nor nightstand, and the only light came from the ceiling fan lamp. There were two sources of entertainment for a while: TV and a new soccer ball to use when playing with his older sister, or more likely by himself. The barren house had nothing in storage to justify its emptiness. Aaron didn’t mind it though. Adult situations show children what’s truly important in life. Maybe Aaron should have gone to therapy for what he saw, but back then therapy was unheard of for children. Children saw what they saw, and sooner or later they would take some quiet time to think it over. They’d be alone in their rooms, or outside just taking the time to think. Adults don’t do that because by then they’ve seen it all or think they understand it all. They don’t. It’s nearly impossible to understand why the world is the way it is, but children think it over all the same, hoping to understand it all one day.
For Aaron, it was the fire. It was before the fire and after the fire. That was what made the least sense to him. GI Joe action figures clash together, climb walls, and shoot each other with imaginary bullets: all before bedtime. It’s time to sleep then, and the world’s supposed to pause until it’s light out again. Sometimes, it un-pauses too early because of a bad dream or the need to use the restroom. But, even then, you’re still safe to sleep while everything’s on hold. You don’t have to worry about a screeching carbon monoxide detector, everything’s paused just for you, and it’ll un-pause in the morning. Everything will be right where you left it. A child’s laws of nature are built upon inexact science where every belief is proven until challenged.
The fire came from thin air, more specifically, a gas leak. By the time any of the Jaxes knew what was happening, the first floor was a flaming mess. That left the second-floor bedrooms with a single bathroom as the only option for mobility. Aaron’s parents woke up at the sound of the smoke alarm in the safe space behind the barrier of their bedroom door. Beyond the bedroom was a smoky hallway with a steadily increasing room temperature. Their side of the house would be near suicide to jump out the windows from. Besides, they had two children to rescue first. Aaron’s dad only touched the doorknob for a second to open the door, but it was long enough to scar a faint circular impression into his hand. Fear overtook his better senses, and he ran through the smoky halls to kick open his children’s doors. The door latches took little effort to break out of the frame; the screws that supported the latch frames were cheap and small.
Each parent took responsibility for one of their children. By opening the windows, they had access to the lower roof that would provide a safer jump to the ground. Aaron added some weight to his father’s descent, but nothing that would affect the landing. Other than some bad knee pain that would last about a week, his father would escape the fire without injury. Aaron’s mother jumped with his older sister, who was heavier than Aaron. It’s not clear whether the weight affected the landing or if Aaron’s mother locked-up her knees or something; but she broke her right leg upon impact with the ground.
Aaron and his sister huddled together while their father attended to their mother’s cries. Fear and realization set into Aaron as the fire flew through the house, licking everything they owned with flames. It was easier to focus on that than on his crying mother. A mother’s tears are filled with such pain, which only the devil could enjoy. The tears taught young Aaron how helpless everything could be. No one was safe from pain, and although parents tried their hardest to conceal their tears from their children, they always managed to let a few seep through. Aaron Jax closed his eyes to hide from the chaos, but the sounds prevailed in spite of him.
“Don’t touch it! You’ll just make it worse!” she sobbed.
For a while in the night all that existed was the fire and his mother. Aaron got around to feeling the solitude of tragedy that could not be broken by his sister. He felt alone in his helpless sorrow, the first of his quiet, thoughtful sessions. As a boy of seven or eight, Aaron did not yet feel that he was a man. That would come later when his crippled mother could do little to help herself or anyone else in the rental home. After some time, Aaron’s sister was sent off to have the neighbors call 911. Soon enough, the sounds of fire trucks and ambulances broke through Aaron’s solitude, and the situation began to get better. The EMTs moved his mother onto a stretcher using a clamshell scoop as her cries of pain warned them not to even try picking her up manually. They took her away along with Aaron’s father while the neighbors provided shelter for Aaron and his sister.
Aaron and his sister slept in the same bed that night although sleep was a relative term. Not only was it difficult to move on from a fire, but the guest room they slept in wasn’t the best environment for sleep. It smelled dank and musty, the smell of mold and water damage. Antique figures lined the shelves in the basement room with the wood-plastered walls. The room itself was elderly, adorned with dresses in plastic bags that were hung up in the closet. From this forest of dresses, eyes gazed at Aaron for the first time. His sister fell asleep before he did, so he had no one to tell about the eyes in the dark. Aaron was either too tired or too afraid to address the boogeyman that time, and in return the boogeyman did not address him.
They held each other’s gaze in a staring contest of the ages. Aaron tried so hard to make the eyes go away by remembering they were not real, but the eyes that glimmered in the darkness persisted. There seemed to be no stakes for the staring contest other than pride, but Aaron’s eyes refused to blink as if they were competing to the death. Then the eyes closed and fully seceded into the darkness. Aaron thought it might have just been his imagination because his parents had told him before that he liked to cook things up for no reason. And maybe the light reflecting off the plastic had gone away, and the eyes were never there in the first place. But reality did not matter as a sense of pride swelled within the young Aaron Jax. He felt like Johnny beating the devil in the fiddle-playing contest from that old song “Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Beating the boogeyman in a staring contest gave Aaron the sense of security that he had not gotten all night, allowing him to finally fall asleep.
The boogeyman, or rather, Mr. Daark did not cease in his pursuit of Aaron Jax after losing a staring contest in the dark. As always, there was more to the story than that. Simply put, time passed. In that time, the Jax family took up residence in the rental home. During the space of time between houses, and even after that, Aaron Jax had plenty of nightmares about the fire. The boogeyman took second place in Aaron’s book of fears, right after house fire. House fire became the sole focus of Aaron’s quiet thinking sessions. He didn’t think to blame God for all of it. God was not yet a concrete concept for Aaron. God was in Sunday school on the coloring sheets and in the picture bibles. God was an image to Aaron, and that image did not hold much power in his eyes. Aaron’s theology was a crackhead’s scrapbook, full of gaps and missing essential ideas. Aaron went to church because his parents went to church. This logic required no further reasoning.
And while the rest of the kids were humming the Veggie Tales tune of “God is Bigger Than the Boogeyman” in bed to put their fears at bay, Aaron worried about spontaneous combustion. He had beaten the boogeyman in a staring contest, which was something he couldn’t do with fire. Fire had no eyes to look into. Fire was a soulless consumer, a being that must be starved to be beaten. Aaron had watched the house fire starve, but he couldn’t figure out how to starve the fire roaring through his brain. And most every night he had those nightmares. The smoke alarm blaring, waking Aaron up to the chaos. The door bursting wide open. It all felt the same again, except for the fact that when his father carried him to an open window, there was nothing outside of the window. No short roof to climb down onto, nor a ground below to jump to. The window acted as the barrier between all that existed and all that did not. So, when they jumped, they fell for an eternity until a barrier broke their fall and ended Aaron’s nightmare.
Most nights Aaron sat up in bed and looked around his room, almost too terrified to fall asleep again. After reassurance from his parents that the house was not on fire again, he could fall asleep in either his own bed or his parents’. But one night he awoke and found the eyes in his closet again. This time Aaron was more confident against the eyes. The eyes weren’t as frightening to him as they probably should have been.
“Go away!” he commanded the eyes. “I beat you once, and I’ll do it again.”
Mr. Daark blinked and said, “Jax. Rather, Aaron Jax. One day, you and I will come to know each other as brothers, and perhaps you don’t see it that way now. Likely, you won’t see it that way for a while.” Mr. Daark poked his face out of the closet so that Aaron’s nightlight might give some feature to his face. Of course, the light in the outlet by the closet was not as bright as a flashlight, but it was able to illuminate the right half of Daark’s face. “If I do not speak to you now and give you a reason to know my face, then you will see me the way the grownups do.”
“They don’t see the boogey man?”
“No. Grownups don’t believe in the boogey man. Their fears are too complex for explanation. Your parents aren’t afraid of fire the way you are. You see the fire. Your parents see the money behind it. You have nothing left, Aaron. You have new clothes and a soccer ball because that is all your parents have the money to pay for. You will grow up and see fears that you ignore because they don’t fit into simple categorical explanations. You won’t be able to explain fear as fire or the boogey man. I want you to remember how real the boogeyman is, how real my power is. Can you do that?”
“I guess. I just—”
“This won’t all make sense to you now,” Mr. Daark said. “I could never hope to explain it all.”
“Okay.”
“There is one last thing. The fire. You are in control. I want you to remember that it will only burn again if you let it. Say that back to me. I want to know that you will remember.”
“I’m in control. It will only burn again if I let it.”
“Again.”
“I’m in control. It will only burn again if I let it.”
“Good. Remember these things even if it means you have to say them over and over to yourself to the point where you don’t even remember why you’re saying it.”
With this settled, Mr. Daark receded into the forest of clothes, ending the interaction just as soon as he had begun it. Aaron said the words over to himself at least ten more times until the counting sheep effect lulled him to sleep.