When you were five, Mommy let you make little lines of powder on the coffee table with an Uncle Wiggily Card. The game board was molting somewhere but the card survived. Two Hops for Uncle Wiggily Now, he’ll take off his hat and make a bow.

“Mommy needs her medicine,” she says, after she lets you roll up the orange Monopoly money. A $500 bill. (You had the game parts, you just never had the game.)

“Is Tonk a doctor, Mommy?”

“Tonk’s better than a doctor, sweet pea.”

Then she sniffs up the Uncle Wiggily powder, jerks back, closes her eyes. Hum. For a while you can’t talk to her. When she comes back you try to tell her about Tonk. His half-thumb. Your flowered panties. But Mommy won’t hear it. She says he’s harmless. “Tonk just likes to think things up, Hon. He don’t like to actually do anything.”

You’d wake up to pee at five in the morning and Tonk was still talking… Gonna tell me the Energizer Bunny was an accident? Hardcore chefs had the pink bunny in sunglasses inked in banging his drum over their junk. It said something about a man, and it drove the methadrinas wild.

Tonk lifts you off the couch. Shows you demons in the snot-colored ivy that claws its way up the side of the trailer. A week later, he’s still awake, and makes you press your head down sideways on the ground and listen. But you don’t hear anything. “You’re not concentrating,” he hisses. Something moves and makes your ear itch, but he won’t let you get up until he finishes explaining the NSA brainwave chips implanted in the dirt. They send encrypted black-helicopter activation signals via squirrel.

You don’t know what this means but he repeats the words and makes you whisper them back in the dark. “In case anything happens to me,” he says. “Like what?” you ask, knowing it’s bad but really wanting something to happen to him. “They got that invisible paint. NASA shit. They paint stuff to look like air. I could put a coat on you and peek clear through to Venus. You gotta squint,” Tonk instructs. “Then you can see the outlines of all the invisible shit. There’s probably a Gee-Dee chopper ‘bout twenty yards over our pea-brains right now.”

A month later Tonk stops wearing clothes and you have to bang on the door in code after school before he’ll open it. KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK. KNOCK. Except he always forgets the code and sometimes you sit outside till dark. And longer. He takes to clutching his testicles, huddling on the floor in the tight space between the couch and the coffee table. “You see,” he’d skreek, wedged in, sweaty and naked, the table making deep indentations on his chest, underlining his pink nipples. That was the weird thing about Tonk. His whole body was decaying. His teeth would never see green again. They’d gone to fur and whatever comes after that—there’s no word for it. Like some kind of moldy linoleum had melted over his teeth, then scummed over his gums, like cheese melting over the side of a cheeseburger bun. The mold covered it, but not enough so you don’t see the meat and blood underneath, bubbling up in spots. Tonk’s hoots got desperate and melancholy. “I am a man. I need to feel the wood on my chest. You should sleep on wood. Wood conducts Chi. Wood under my butt. The floor. Wood conducts Chi…”