I couldn’t tell if I was sorry or not. I didn’t want to talk to her about that shit. She was beautiful. She made my eyes hurt. She made my brain hurt. A ghost loomed beside her.
“We’re not going to figure any of this out.”
“You’re going to take off,” she said.
“What?”
“You’re trying to take off. I can tell.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not,” but I was. I was angling for the door, and I thought about ditching all of that, Saskia, the ghost, shithole Lawrence. There’s a place out under the I-70 overpass on the way into town where the trains slow down, and I knew how to jump one. I’d done it before, just for the sake of doing it. I could take one of those trains as far as it went. When that one stopped, I’d find another.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“I don’t think we’re going to solve this,” I said. “I need to fucking do something.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, and then I don’t know why, but I told her about the dynamite.
CHAPTER ONE
She reminded me of sunshine, of hard drugs, of the hottest fucking curry they make—you have to beg for more heat and promise not to sue—these things you love that also fuck you up.
I wasn’t afraid of her exactly, but she was right: I wanted to get out of there.
When she went to the restroom again, I didn’t have to think about it.
I zipped the Ghost Machine up into my backpack next to the dynamite. On the way out the door, I gave twenty bucks to Joey for the tab.
I had the type of plan I usually had.
When I was halfway down the block, my phone rang.
If I had taken a minute more, I could have dug into her purse and deleted my number in her phone. Instead, here she was, sneaking through my ear, almost in my brain.
“Hello,” I said.
“You asshole,” she said. “Bring it back.”
“It’s mine.”
“The ghost is yours,” she said, “but the Ghost Machine belongs to me.”
“It’s mine too.”
“You gave it to my brother, and my brother gave it to me. It’s my inheritance.”
“I don’t care.”
“You do care. I can tell. You wouldn’t have picked up if you didn’t.”
I was only outside Louise’s bar. I hadn’t even made it off the block.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Fuck what?”
“Everything,” I said. “I’m on the way back.”
She wasn’t exactly smiling, but she wore this sheen of almost-happiness. I could see it from outside the window, and when I came inside, she hugged me. She held on for a long time.
“I knew you’d come back,” she said.
Thing is, I almost didn’t pick up at all.
This would have been a different book, I think.
CHAPTER ONE
“If we had met in some other life,” she said, “I think we could have liked each other.”
“Liked?” I asked.
“Liked,” she said.
If I were going to write a treatise on ghosts, it would be a completely different book. If I were going to write a treatise on the living, this would be it.
CHAPTER ONE
If you have an idea, write it down. That’s my philosophy. You might never have another one.
CHAPTER ONE
Okay, when I said I had never read any of Marilynne’s work, I lied. I’ve read a couple of little things she wrote.
But I don’t think I actually lied to you, and in fact, you can go back and check because I just did, and I actually said I haven’t ever read any of her books, which is true, and as you know, the earth can crack open and a plague of grasshoppers can fall from the sky and the ice caps can melt, but I am here for you, I am in your brain, I’m part of you now, and you wouldn’t lie to yourself.
I probably should tell you that Marilynne seemed to be writing a book about me. She left part of it out on her coffee table once. I don’t think she left it out on purpose, but maybe she did.
She typed everything she wrote with an old manual.
She liked punishing the letters, smashing them down; at least that’s what she said.
Here’s what she left out, just a couple of opening paragraphs:
chapter one
Pluto gave himself a name pulled from the stars. He had blood and shit on his hands, but that doesn’t matter. Across town, the old woman he took care of played her violin.
Pluto didn’t know he’d kill her, but he would. The old woman thought about death with each saw of her bow. She played inelegantly, harshly even. Still it sounded like music.
She changed my name to Pluto—the poor little planet that’s not even a full fucking planet anymore, the one that was cast out. Either that or the cartoon dog. The god of the underworld, I guess too, but that’s not the first thing you think of.
The name Pluto seemed worse than the idea that she thought I might murder her.
She didn’t even play the violin. Her book was all made up, but it still pissed me off.
You don’t ever want to end up a character in a book. You get punctuated. It’s black, it’s inky. You get crushed between pages.
It’s probably better than dying.
CHAPTER ONE
They got rid of Pluto, and Neptune was all alone out there.
CHAPTER ONE
Let’s begin again.
Imagine if you could. Nothing good or bad would follow you. You could become something new.
I always think I’ll be something new, something different, by the time I get to the next page.
Then I get there, and fuck, it’s still me. I’m still half drunk at Harbour Lights.
“Tell me everything you know,” I said. “All of it.”
“That would take forever,” Saskia said. “A whole lifetime.”
“I think I could do it in one long afternoon.”
“I think you know shit you’re not even aware of,” she said.
“Nope,” I said, “I know nothing.”
If only you had been there—you could have vouched for me.
Maybe at that point we were completely drunk, on beer, on failure.
Harbour was dotted with drinkers. We were into nighttime now. Another day was gone, and we couldn’t solve any equations about ghosts.
We ordered pizza from the place next door. We devoured grease on crust.
“Can we try,” she said, “to pretend all of this shit isn’t going on, to pretend the world’s normal for a minute?”
“The world’s not normal.”
“I don’t even believe in the concept of normal,” she said. “I said pretend.”
“We can try,” I said. “But everything’s so fucked up.”
She reached over and grabbed my forearm. “Try harder,” she said.
She told me some stuff, the kind of shit that cements together a life. She used to own two cats. She was in AA for a while, but now she wasn’t. She was getting a bachelor’s degree in physics.
She began to explain. She drew with the dew from our glasses. She made our glasses smash into each other.
She gave me the weight of the falling object; she gave me the height of the fall.
“I did this in high school,” I said.
“You did not.”
She explained trajectories, something about angles.
“What are you going to do with all this shit?”
“Shit?” she said.
“I’m using it as a general replacement for stuff.”
She got kind of dreamy. She twirled the pen and brushed back her hair, and she finished some kind of long calculation.
“So?” I said.
“Huh,” she said.
“What are you going to do with all this stuff?”
“Rebuild the world.”
We all try to rebuild the world.
Unless, of course, we choose the opposite pa
th.
For a long time, I destroyed mine every chance I got.
CHAPTER ONE
“Why’d you save me that time,” I said. I just blurted it out.
Saskia reached across the table, adjusted my chin roughly, as if she needed to see me from some new angle. Pursed her lips.
“I didn’t think you had anyone else,” she said finally.
“But you didn’t have to do it like that. You could have done it some other way.”
“I needed to get Allen and the others out of there.”
She paused. She made her beer mug collide with my beer mug. It looked like she was concentrating on math in her head. Way in the front of Harbour Lights, a couple of guys tossed darts with their opposite hands; I could tell because of their bad form. Someone had picked an old Radiohead song on the jukebox, back from when Radiohead believed in guitars. You probably know the one.
Saskia reached across the table and ran her hand over my head, down my face. “And maybe I wanted you to see me,” she said.
“You said to close my eyes.”
“But I knew you wouldn’t.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Fine,” she said. Her voice was so low, flat, almost lying on the ground. I had to lean in. “I thought it was the only way you’d tolerate it.”
“What?”
“I thought it was the only way you’d let me save you,” she said. “They’re just parts.”
“There are parts and then there are parts. We’re not talking a shin bone.”
“I have a beautiful shin bone,” she said. “It goes all the way up to my knee.”
I felt a great and unexpected longing to see her shin bone, to trace its length, to test her reflexes: tickle the sole and let the shin do its thing, a sudden uncontrolled kick.
CHAPTER ONE
“Why don’t you just turn yourself in to the police?” she said after I told her about Marilynne and the rest of it.
“Because I didn’t do anything.”
“Maybe you could help them.”
I just shrugged.
She closed her eyes and started taking deep breaths.
We sat like that for a long time. She didn’t wear much make-up. When you looked at her, it was all her. I watched the breath go in and out.
“I’m not fucking lying,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “You’re the most honest liar I think I know. I can tell.”
Something about her face looked either Russian or elfin: the tip of her nose, the peaks of her ears.
“So what’s your plan?” she asked.
“Plan?”
“Like a structured course of action.”
I took note of the definition, but I didn’t say anything.
We seemed to be leaving Harbour Lights.
We walked down to the Replay, and Eddie, working the door, gave me a look, like you sure as fuck you should be here? He said all of this with his eyebrows.
I answered with my shoulders.
I pushed some cash toward him to pay the cover, and he said, “This one’s on me. It might be your last Replay visit ever. You think I’m going to make you pay for that?”
“What have you heard, Ed?” I asked.
“Calvin’s going to squeeze your heart in his fist.”
“Come on,” I said to Saskia. I reached my hand back toward her, and she grabbed it, didn’t let go.
“Thanks, Eddie,” I said.
As we pushed through the crowd out on the patio, I could hear the thrum of the bass jigsawing with the guitar inside. Whatever band it was, they were loud.
One of Calvin’s anarchists was there. As soon as he saw me, he whipped out his phone.
“I think we’ve got about five minutes to enjoy the music,” I said.
“We’ll dance fast,” she said.
Inside, a three-piece punk band—three black guys, I heard they were brothers—was ripping the roof off the place. When they were done ripping the roof off, they slammed it down, and then they ripped it off again. I had seen them before. They could do this about every two minutes. The place was stuffed. The whole room tweaked and tilted.
“Forget drinks,” Saskia said, and she tugged me into the mosh pit.
“This is a song called—” the lead singer said, but I couldn’t hear the rest. Then the drummer slashed out a beat, and the nameless song thundered up. The music punctured the air around us, and I could feel the bass throbbing in my chest. I could feel Saskia’s arm around my waist. Whose arm was it? And whose waist? I could feel my scars letting the music in. And then the vocals kicked in. All we had needed were words, and we didn’t even know it.
I could feel the music, like water but lighter, drier. It wasn’t like water at all. It was like sexual air. It was the buzz of a bee on your skin.
Saskia pushed me into some guy who pushed me back, and then I was a human pinball. I bounced into a dude I knew, who blew hot sour beer stink into my face and yelped with joy.
The band punished their instruments. I bounced horizontally and sometimes vertically, and I smashed into Saskia, into others, back into her. We listened to the song die.
“We better go?” Saskia said through all of her teeth.
“We better go,” I said.
I didn’t know I was practicing for the violence to come. It wouldn’t have a soundtrack later on.
Sorry for the foreshadowing. I try not to do that shit.
CHAPTER ONE
I assume Calvin showed up with a handful of other guys to kick my ass. Maybe we got out of there just in time.
We booked it down Tenth Street and then down New Hamp-shire, up Ninth, all the way to Pennsylvania. We were pretty sure that no one had followed us. We backtracked to Mass and sneaked across the bridge to the Jayhawker Motel. Saskia put a room on her credit card.
Her fingers were longish and thin, but they were really about the knuckles. I bumped into her a little, and she made a fist, and she brushed the ridges of her knobby fingers over my cheek. She grabbed my face and just sort of looked up into it. She didn’t say a thing, and I didn’t say a thing, and she just sort of kneaded my face.
“Are you feeling me or are you shaping me?” I asked. “Sculpting or something.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Both.”
“Good luck,” I said.
She kept kneading. Her fingers were warm. My skin prickled. Someone was yelling outside, down on the street, but it was far enough away that it sounded like a whisper. I couldn’t make out the words.
“You drunk?” I asked.
She shrugged drunkenly.
“You?”
“No,” I said, “just plastered.”
“What are they yelling?” she asked.
I bumped into her again, and I felt the boney fender of her hip through her skirt. It felt elegant. She kept exploring my face.
“You in there?” she asked.
Marilynne watched all of this. I don’t know how long she was standing there, probably forever.
We did everything fast.
We did it, and we did it again, and then we slept the sleep of the drunk and dying.
If I could remember all of the details of that first time, I’d think about them a lot, but I probably wouldn’t tell you.
CHAPTER ONE
In the morning, we woke to the wrong kind of weird.
When I tried to kiss her, she turned away, and I got kind of pissed.
“I didn’t need a pity fuck,” I said.
She and the ghost just sort of looked at me.
“I’m going to pay for this room for a few days,” she said. “You can stay here.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“I might stay here part of the time too,” she said, and I must have given her a look because she added, “I have class, a job. I have a life. I can’t just sit around waiting for you to get arrested or killed or whatever.”
She looked at me like I was going to do something stupid. But I wasn’t going t
o do something stupid. I was going to do many things stupid.
I listened to my phone messages, all of them, the new and the old. I listened to the Ghost Machine.
Saskia dozed and tossed and turned and sat up and looked at me every once in a while.
Then I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. I answered it anyway.
“Yeah,” I said.
“This Neptune?”
“Who is this?”
“Uranus,” he said.
It was Tax. Technology let everyone in.
“You asshole,” I said, “you killed her.”
“Actually, I heard you did,” he said. “That’s what I hear, and I hear you have some shit of Calvin’s.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “I didn’t kill her.”
“I’m going to need you to bring me Calvin’s stuff—and you know what I mean by stuff. I’m going to need you to meet me somewhere.”
“If I had any stuff, why would I bring it to you?”
“Who saw you leaving the dead lady’s house? Who saw your pants covered with blood?”
I didn’t say anything.
“It can be a public place—semi-public. Tonight, after last call, come to my house. There’ll be a little party.”
“I’m not going to your house,” I said.
“So name someplace.”
I told him about a spot out near the river, the Kaw. I told him exactly where it was. I said to meet me at 1 a.m.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and it seemed like he was writing it down.
“You killed her, didn’t you?” I asked.
“So says the murderer,” Tax said, and the phone gave a quiet burp of goodbye.
CHAPTER ONE
Saskia asked who it was and what I was doing.
“Why would you go meet someone like that in the woods?” “Just in case I need to kill him.”
“I’m going out there with you,” she said.
“Fuck that. I don’t want you involved in this.”
“I am involved in this.”
“Not anymore.”
“Stop it,” she said.
“What?”
“You’re being awful.”
This Book Is Not for You Page 9
