Then, of course—there’s always a then, and always an of course.
Then, of course, I fucked it up.
“He did this, right?” I couldn’t see it, but I smoothed the small of her back, near the scar.
“Don’t touch it,” she said.
“It still hurts?”
“No,” she said, “I just don’t like having it touched.”
“He did it.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“When?”
“I don’t really know.”
We were wrapped up together. My leg was in between hers.Her arm was wrapped around my waist. We breathed into each other’s mouths.
I knew she was lying, and I knew then when he had done it. She knew I knew.
She didn’t move or say anything. I waited.
“I’d do it all again,” she said quietly.
Then she disentangled herself. Then she started putting on her clothes.
“I’m getting out of here,” she said. “This is too fucking much.I didn’t think it was, but it is. I’m freaking out.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“You can have the Ghost Machine.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I wasn’t really looking at her. She came up and touched my shoulder, and I shrugged her away.
“Are you trying to make this worse? Rub it the fuck in?”
“Don’t get mad,” she said. “It’s just too much.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice wasn’t her voice.
I might have sat down. I could hear her rummaging around. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Whatever the fuck I want,” I said.
“I’m serious!”
“Just get the fuck out of here.”
“Don’t say it like that,” she said. “I feel awful.”
I looked at her then. I figured it was the last time. She was embarrassed, angry, and her eyes were wide and tearing up. I had fucked up something beautiful.
“You don’t even look like you,” I said.
I reached out a hand toward her, and she didn’t take it. I let my arm hang there.
“This is not a big fucking deal,” I said. “Just forget it. Fucking go.”
I closed my eyes. I heard her creaking over the floorboards. I heard the zipper of something opening, displaying its guts, closing. I heard the door. I heard her whisper goodbye.
CHAPTER ONE
I forgot one thing.
Before she left, she said, “I only gave them four sticks of dynamite.” She handed me a backpack with the other two.
She left me the Ghost Machine and two sticks of dynamite.
For a while after that, I didn’t give a shit about anything.
I mean I gave even less of a shit than normal.
If Calvin killed me, okay, whatever, and if a ghost hovered bymy side, no biggie, and if I got arrested and charged with murder, sure, fine—I’d survived worse.
I went to the bars.
With my hood flipped up, I could have looked like almostanyone at all.
Why didn’t the cops just come and arrest me? I wasn’t hard to find. Maybe I’ll ask them later. Maybe they just thought it would be a better book.
At that point, I thought Tax did it. He ran the wrong way in the woods, and they arrested him with four sticks of dynamite and a snub-nosed handgun, and I thought he’d be charged with Marilynne’s murder.
I believed in a lot of stupid things, but you know that already.
Maybe it seems like I was in denial, and no, I’m not denying it.
I went to the bars, and the ghost went with me. The dynamite too.
When in doubt, I had a drink. I was always in doubt.
If I didn’t tell you this earlier, I should have. Maybe this should have come first.
CHAPTER ONE
Maybe the dead think no thoughts.
Marilynne is dead, and the brown crinkling leaves are dead, and the doornails are dead, and the dead hate us for our carbon dioxide, our mouthwash, our American cheese served on burlap crackers. When you’re dead, you’ll miss these things. I miss them already, and I’m only lying here in the dark, writing. If these words don’t make sense, don’t blame me. Blame the dark.
It might help if you read this in the dark too.
We can be simpatico. Shut off the lights and see if we get along.
CHAPTER ONE
Throughout this whole thing, sometimes I almost forgot about Marilynne, and sometimes I didn’t do anything at all. I sat down and read Huck Finn a lot, but only during the boring parts. I recommend it to you too: you may read a book during the boring parts.
Out on the Replay patio, the ghost slouched and hovered. Not literally—her feet seemed to touch the ground. If they’re with you long enough, ghosts become commonplace, the way you grow used to a tumor, a smoker’s cough. I barely noticed her. I was inured, perhaps immune, to ghosts. If she had a purpose, it was lost on me.
I had bought two drinks at the bar, and I lined them up next to each other. A fly seemed to be dying in one. One of the drinks tasted more like gin, and the other tasted more like tonic. Neither tasted like dead fly. I drank from one and then the other, and my tongue began to feel junipery and light.
I read until my drinks were gone. I crushed the ice with my frozen teeth. I juiced every molecule of alcohol out of my glass. All the late-night people had awoken, and some had come outside. I could see tattoos that said black flag and rolled-up jean cuffs and hair the color of cherry cough drops. I could see lips that wanted to kiss and teeth that wanted to bite and tongues that wanted to waggle until words came out. Every part of every person wanted something.
Everything I did in Lawrence led to this: this moment in the Replay. There were all these moments there.
I read until they yelled last call.
I read until they threw me out on the street.
CHAPTER ONE
At the little blue house on Ohio, I saw some lights on. I didn’t knock. I didn’t know who really lived there, but I’d been there before.
“What time is it?” I said to a hipster-looking dude with an ironic mustache and a flannel shirt.
“It’s got to be something,” he said.
“I know,” I said, and he handed me a semi-cold can of beer, which I can’t quite remember the brand of but I will happily lie about if some major brewery would like to pay me a lot of money to advertise it here. It was really wet. It tasted like beer.
I woke up at the stranger’s house, and then I biked out along the Kaw River, sweated through two layers of shirt, punished my stolen bike, tried to let the toxins seep away. I pushed way out of town, past the interstate, past the fields past the interstate.
My head was gone, and a bulb of hurt had taken its place. It throbbed and burned. I felt kind of lonely and ready to try again. The horizon was a vast grimace.
In my head, I kept walking into her house, and Marilynne kept lying on the floor, face down, like some sort of collapsed prayer toward the earth, and I kept thinking she was joking, and I kept saying, “Come on, get up, get up.”
And then I felt sweaty and rough, and my pulse split my head into two parts, dead and alive, and I yelled, “Get up, get up, get the fuck up.”
When I flipped her over, one eye was open, the other cobwebbed with pink. The left cheek was smashed in.
In my head, I kept touching Saskia, and then we kept yelling at each other.
I try again. You have to give me that.
When I fuck things up in my head, I try again.
CHAPTER ONE
Have you forgotten where you were?
Me too.
CHAPTER ONE
I’ll bet you thought I’d never get back to being at Jimmyhead’s house. But we’re back. It seemed like the safest place for me to sleep away an afternoon
. I had to break a window to get in.
He found me on his couch, Huck Finn steepled over my chest.
“What the fuck are you doing with my copy of Huck Finn?”
“I’ll buy you a new one,” I said.
“I almost called the cops on you the other day, dude,” he said. “I wanted to do it, even though I know you didn’t kill her. I’d be able to tell if you had. But I just wanted to get you the fuck out of my house.”
He had the tips of his fingers pressed together and he brought them up and pressed them against his lips and his chin. He spoke through that lattice of flesh and bone.
“You have some kind of badass karma,” he said.
I just sort of looked at him.
“As soon as it’s dark, I’m out of here,” I said.
“You owe me three bucks for bologna and like six bucks—no, ten—for that book.”
“I broke your window too,” I said.
“Asshole,” he said, and then he brought us each another beer.
We sat there waiting for something that didn’t arrive.
A few minutes later, he said, “I’m just ripped up by all of this.”
“I feel like my guts are squished up into my heart,” I said.
“Up near your lungs?” he said, and pushed his forearm up toward the top of his chest.
I nodded, and the ghost mooned over it all.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked.
“Maybe just leave town.”
“Good call,” he said. It was almost dusk. “And if you need anything, don’t ask me.”
CHAPTER ONE
You’ve wasted at least, what? Two hours reading this shit? Maybe just thirty minutes if you skimmed. Three hours, maybe more, if you had to stop and Google Ghost Machine and Ad Astra Per Aspera and Neptune.
You’ll never get that time back, and now you’re fucked. You might not have any happy choices anymore.
If you quit reading, you’ll never know what happens, not really, not in the right way, not even if you skip to the end. It won’t make any sense. None of this makes any sense, but still.
For a long time, I didn’t want to finish this either.
For a long time, I couldn’t finish this.
I thought it would never end.
CHAPTER ONE
I felt my life sloshing inside me. I was 32% sadness, 3% college dropout, 2% drunk, 9% hopeless, 8% lust, .5% gin, .5% tonic, 17% ennui, 7% bad beer, 6% hunger, 10% guilt, and 5% unsure of my math.
I thought about just turning myself in. To the cops. To Calvin.
I looked up Massachusetts Street. Downtown Lawrence is really just five and a half blocks of two-story brick buildings— stores and restaurants and bars below, apartments above—big sidewalks for the undergrads to puke on, and once in a while a sickly tree stuck in a big cement pot. Quantrill had burned this town, and the hippies had saved it back in the 1970s with their organic bakeries and their ear-candle shops, and now Starbucks and frat boys thought they owned the place. Three cars whirred by and I breathed in the goopy air of night. I peered at a neon sign. It glowed like blood seeping out of a wound. I believed in the red light, Pabst Blue Ribbon right from the can.
When I saw a cruiser coming, I ducked into the Replay again.
I wasn’t ready for the cops yet.
CHAPTER ONE
Uncle X was inside at the bar.
He said, “Neppy!”
Uncle X knew all the fringers, the skins, the anarchists. He stayed out of shit, but he knew everyone.
He circled his arm around my neck, pulled me to his rough face. He yelled in my ear, “Some friends of yours are kind of pissed off, you wanker.”
“They can fuck themselves,” I said.
“Anatomically doubtful,” he said.
In his right hand, Uncle X hoisted a pitcher of Guinness, the beautiful black murk of tar and dead brain cells.
“It’s full of vit-a-mins,” he said, and he poured me a glass. The first mouthful brought peat moss and smoke and burnt toast.
I looked at all the pretty nihilists. A girl with green lips pouted at me, and I pouted back, and we didn’t say a word, and then our moment was over. A girl I once knew was bumping her hips into invisible hips adjacent to her. She had blond hair that drooped all the way down her back. She could have tucked it into her jeans, and I once encouraged her to do this, and she never did, and she didn’t even wave at me, and a black-haired punk in a Mekons T-shirt gave me the finger. He had a mushed up stack of hair on his head. It looked so casual that you knew it took effort. He was wired by something. I wanted what he had, and if you looked at him you would have wanted it too. He had the answer to something. You could feel it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone who looked like Saskia. It looked so much like Saskia that it had to be Saskia. It was kind of fucked up. I was kind of fucked up. She was kind of beautiful. She was across the room by the pinball machines, and I felt a hot burst of blood surge in my head. She looked at me inscrutably, and I shrugged in her direction. She wasn’t a ghost, except in the way that she was. This is the only ghost metaphor in the entire book. The other ghosts are real.
“Who are you looking at?” Casey asked. I didn’t even know when Casey got there. I didn’t even know why she was talking to me.
I shrugged at Casey and shrugged back at Saskia. I was a shrugging machine.
“That girl over there,” I said. “Don’t look.”
“You don’t look.”
“I wasn’t,” I said.
Casey said, “I thought you fucking killed her.” Her voice sounded like a dry sponge scrubbing against her throat.
Casey had the glint of a knife in her eye, something sharp and shiny; her cornea was dangerous. Saskia was gone now.
“I didn’t kill her,” I said. “I was with you.”
“I can barely even remember that,” Casey said.
I said, “I can barely remember anything.”
Casey played with her hair, and she played with her eyes, rolling them up and rolling them down; she could go clockwise and counterclockwise. She rolled them so much it signified nothing. That was one of the things I used to like the most about her.
Then I was looking at my little phone. She was looking at her little phone too. It was some kind of ending.
The non-ghost Saskia was definitely gone too.
CHAPTER ONE
“I am one drink away from just being morose,” I said.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so,” Missy the bartender said.
I could feel it: a beautiful fuzzy hum in my mouth, in my brain, in my veins. Some of us were meant to throw our heads back and pour the stuff down our throat. Marilynne was like that. She knew how the stuff worked: the gin, the words, the smell of a pencil, the white page waiting for you to fuck it up with all kinds of scratching that might be wisdom or, more likely, just evidence that you’re alive.
My cell phone rang, and I answered it quick. I could barely hear over the crowd, the jukebox. I had to shout.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Me,” a female voice said, and I knew, but I pretended I didn’t.
“Me?”
“Saskia.”
“And,” I said.
“And what?”
“Why are you doing this?” I said. “What do you want?”
“To save you,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
Maybe I didn’t want to get saved. Maybe I didn’t need to be saved. Maybe I didn’t deserve to be saved. Maybe she was a liar.
“I’m still fucked up about this,” she said.
“I am too,” I said, and then I hung up.
CHAPTER ONE
I could feel last night’s beer fizzing away in my skull. It joined the beer from the night before and maybe the night before that. It felt like battery acid cut with Clorox and ammonia. I could feel my brain cells dying. Each one hollered, convulsed, and then took its own life.
I had slept in my tra
shed apartment. The door wouldn’t even close fully. The ripped-up mattress gnawed on me like a giant mouth.
Another brain cell committed some kind of shuddering death, and my whole body trembled.
If enough of them died, I could just sit in the corner and drool, smell my armpits, whimper.
Sunlight suffused the apartment, like liquid pain being poured in my eyes. Each thought seemed to require brain surgery.
I pulled on last night’s pants, which were marinated with last night’s smoke. I selected a T-shirt that looked wrinkled enough to hide the dirt. My hair was smooshed down with pillow breath. I shuffled down the stairs, through the streets.
I retreated to The Bourgeois Pig.
People were stirring their coffees too loudly, but it was dark in the back, and I slopped some coffee into my mouth. It tasted like an earthy, happy punch in the guts. I could feel the caffeine buttering up my veins. I would probably live.
CHAPTER ONE
I pulled out the Ghost Machine and listened a bit. It always played something new, some moment stolen from my life.
The machine clunked, whirred.
“This here’s Neptune.” I knew Allen’s voice right away. He was talking to a group. I could hear the background sound of people. I remembered: it was when he introduced me to some of the other skins. It was almost an initiation.
“He’s a chickenshit,” someone shouted.
“Stuart,” Allen said, “I will kick your ass right now.”
“Sorry,” Stuart said.
“Sorry what?” Allen said.
“Sorry, Neptune.”
“Neptune’s one of us now,” Allen said. “His blood is our blood. When we bleed, he bleeds too. When he bleeds, we bleed with him.”
There was the sound of a beer can spritzing open. I remembered Allen pouring it over my shaved head. I listened to the sound of baptism.
Another click, another whir.
I recognized my voice even as it seemed estranged from my existence, from my belief in my voice. It wasn’t higher or lower, just different, but I could tell I was younger.
This Book Is Not for You Page 11
