“When the fuck was this?”
“Two nights ago.”
“You guys hear about this?” Calvin asked. He was peering over the backseat instead of looking out at the road.
“I didn’t hear anything,” one said.
The other shrugged. “He’s full of shit. ”
“Fuck you,” I said. Then I drove my elbow into the guy to my right, hard, and then into the guy to my left, even harder, smack in his jaw, and he spit up a tooth, and Calvin said, “Fucking hey,” and he reached behind to grab me, and the car skipped up on the curb and smashed into a telephone pole. The hood crumpled, wrapped around that pole with a screech of bent-metal hug, and then the alarm whomped into full freak-out mode.
“Fucking asshole,” Calvin said.
He tried to bang the car into reverse, but we were stuck.
“Get out and push,” he said. The alarm kept whomping.
The two guys jumped out, and I slid toward a door too, but it slammed in my face.
“Not you, motherfucker,” Calvin said.
My heart was a single dried lentil. You need a big meaty heart to feel fear. I swung the door open and said, “I’ll help or some shit,” and then I just got out. The two dudes were in front of the car. Calvin was in the driver’s seat.
“Stop him!” Calvin yelled, but by then I was out in the road. A red Mazda slowed down because otherwise it would have introduced parts of me to the tar and gravel, and all the while Calvin’s car alarm swore at us.
Calvin couldn’t even drive. There was no way he could have blown up a building. I thought that as I threw myself on the hood of the Mazda and stared through the windshield at a head of blondness. I flipped myself across to the passenger side, ripped open the door, and crawled onto some college girl’s lap.
“Drive fast,” I said. “Those dudes are trying to kill me.”
For some reason, the blondness drove, perhaps in the fastest way she knew how, which was a calm, careful three miles over the speed limit, and she did not say “Oh, my gawd,” even though you want her to.
The driver actually said, “How do you know we don’t want to kill you too?”
And the girl who was my chair said, “Bethany!”
My chair smelled like shampoo, kumquats or some shit. Vitamin E. I am not objectifying her. She held me in her arms. She was a loving human and a chair. I honestly felt a kind of love, even though I didn’t really see her face.
“I’ll call the police,”she said. “Let me get my phone.”
“Don’t,” I said.
I kind of loved her. And Bethany too—she had a helium foot.
I thought they could take me home and soak my lentil heart,wherever their home was. They would make a soup of it. Instead I convinced them to drop me off downtown.
Calvin would be pissed, but that’s been a given for hundreds of pages.
Those gals wouldn’t even let me buy them a drink. That’s the kind of gals they were. Their hair would never smell like hair. I think that counts as a minor tragedy, a trage-let.
All of this might seem like an aside, but my task is to serve you the truth, and that’s what happened. And I should mention, too, that the fucking kid matters somehow. That poseur Dickensian urchin spawn of Calvin had some kind of bead on me. If I didn’t already have a ghost, he could have applied for the position. He was qualified in every way except being dead.
He would come back. He will come back. You can turn to page 266 and find him, but that will be some other fresh, new sun-wiped day. You could flip forward, but I wouldn’t fuck with time like that if I were you. Time’s a dangerous thing. All day long we cut it up. All day long we snort it down.
CHAPTER ONE
When I was seven years old, I did have to beg sometimes. When I lived with my grandmother, who talked to angels and devils—she had time for both, a particular courtesy for devils—I often ate meals out of a garbage can.
It fortifies the stomach flora.
The microbe-laden pizza that would lay you out, that would turn your skin a vivid shade of puke, just infects me with nostalgia. I can eat seconds and have the rest for breakfast.
I don’t think you should act like a beggar unless you are a beggar. My grandmother would say that to the angels. Sometimes she’d say it to them when I was standing right there. She stirred big pots of water on the stove and called it broth. She referred to the devils as sir. I wore the same pair of pants for a month.
She loved me in her own way.
She did not like to talk to humans. She had so many more interesting guests.
Can you see the family resemblance?
There’s this part of me, some gland shaped like a bug, that thinks my grandmother had a Ghost Machine too. Maybe it was hooked up to a Victrola. Maybe her son came back to haunt her.
Don’t worry me with questions of anatomy. I believe in all kinds of glands, all kinds of hormones. My brain is full of that shit. My whole life has been a quest for dopamine.
When you are thirteen and scared and polluted already, a pint of gin will smooth you out for a couple of hours. Wouldn’t you pay twelve bucks for that?
Can you tell I was fucked from the beginning? That’s how I should have begun, really. Not I am born. I am fucked.
If I’m too honest for you, read some other fucking book.
CHAPTER ONE
I was born fucked.
And then things got even worse.
CHAPTER ONE
I wouldn’t want my father to be my ghost. He convinced my mother to give up on life, to give up on me.
If they had taken me with them, I think I would be restless. I think I would have come back.
What if a baby haunted you? What would you do?
If you think a squalling baby is bad, wait until you see a ghost baby. It’s coming. I see that ghost baby in your future.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t even know my own self. Sometimes I say something, and then I think, that’s not me. I used to think that after acts of violence: That’s not me. That’s not me.
But, of course, it was me.
CHAPTER ONE
I don’t think you’re getting it. I keep trying to explain, and you’re all like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” and then I see some sort of halo of uncertainty, up there circling your brain. Maybe it’s not uncertainty. Maybe it’s not a halo.
I think maybe you need to go back and reread. Please return to Chapter One and try this thing again.
CHAPTER ONE
Welcome back. I assure you you’ve missed nothing of value, either emotional or intellectual.
I think what happened, what just happened, is those two girls—benign Samaritans—unloosened something gooey in my brain. You would think I’d like the soft/firm one I sat on, but I actually liked the one who joked about wanting to kill me.
Maybe that wouldn’t surprise you.
Maybe it wouldn’t surprise you that they dropped me off downtown, not at the Replay but at the Taproom, which I considered a clever fucking venue-change curveball, and sitting at the bar, an unlit cigarette bobbing in her lips, was Saskia.
“Don’t play it cool,” she said.
“I won’t,” I said.
Her eyes were big, flat, wet at the corners.
She didn’t look at me really, just pulled the unlit cigarette out of her mouth, wiggled the beer in her hand to watch the amber plane of the surface shift and shimmer.
“What happened with that girl you were with the other night?” she said.
“Uh, she thinks I killed Marilynne. I don’t think we’re simpatico anymore.”
I watched her watching the beer that twitched and lurched in her hand.
“I would piss on your head,” Saskia said, “but I would never accuse you of murder.”
“Thanks,” I said.
She nodded at the bartender. He poured whiskey into two shot glasses.
“To not playing it cool,” I said.
We clinked glasses and drank it down.
I sat next
to her and our shoulders brushed. I let them keep brushing.
She said, “You smell like a girl.”
“I was just sitting on a girl!”
“I thought we weren’t playing it cool.”
“I’m being earnest,” I said. “I’m trying it out, earnestness. I was literally sitting on a girl, who was sitting in a car that rescued me from Calvin.”
We sat for a minute, then she said, “I appreciate your face, your earlobes. You have promising genitals. You are sometimes rather funny. Your dysfunction puts my life in clearer perspective.”
“I think all that’s ice-water territory,” I said.
“It’s not,” she said. “Not at all.”
She motioned to the bartender, and he refilled our glasses.
“To earnestness,” she said.
“To not playing it cool,” I said.
Our glasses tinked against one another.
“I was so worried you’d end up dead,” she said. She was crying a little.
If she asked me to give things up, I would give it all up.
CHAPTER ONE
You wouldn’t think it was that easy, but it was that easy.
It’s not like I just happened to run into Saskia. It wasn’t this great coincidence. I called her on my cell phone. I called her on the advice of those two gals who rescued me from Calvin.
“Call her,” one said.
“Call her!” said the other.
Then, when I did, they fed me all my lines.
“Don’t say you love her,” one hissed at me.
“Say it!”
“Bethany, no!”
“I’m getting mixed signals on the love question,” I said.
“What?” Saskia said.
“Tell her you’re sorry,” one said.
“I’m so fucking sorry,” I said.
“I know,” Saskia said. “You can be kind of a fucked-up dick.”
“I love you,” I said, and one of the gals gasped.
You didn’t think I was capable of love, but I didn’t think you were capable of reading a book.
CHAPTER ONE
“Also,” she said, “you are not unattractive.”
She said that at the Taproom, under the influence of whiskey and earnestness.
I can’t remember the whole conversation because something fucked up happened or was about to happen. I’m sure you’re surprised.
I am a great admirer of her caudal region. She has a sharp, feral face with a pointed chin, a pointed nose. She’s all angles. A sloppy caricaturist would make her rodent-like. She has fierce niblet teeth, but as you know, I am anything but sloppy. She’s not rodent-like. You’re not looking closely enough. There’s a feline touch to her eyes, their slightly wide set, and to the points of her ears. When she smiles, she’s all human. She doesn’t do it very often. She seldom blinks. She watches coolly.
She’s both cat and mouse.
Her ribs show through her flesh. I’ve counted them with my tongue.
When I say her name, it’s like pushing a raft into the water.
This doesn’t make sense, yet I feel that it’s true.
I’ve never been on a raft. I’ve peed in a river. I’ve been smacked in the head with an oar, but that was on dry land.
I have never pushed a raft into water, but I’ve said the name Saskia again and again. I’ve whispered it into her ear.
It’s the same thing, basically. Embarkation. A beginning.
CHAPTER ONE
Saskia signaled to the bartender. I waited for the whiskey, but he walked into the back room.
Saskia and I talked, and we talked some more. She had a hand on my knee, and the day seemed like night, and the bar door opened and then shut behind us. I didn’t even look, because if it was Calvin, I could deal with it—I could deal with anything—and then a cop put his hand on my shoulder.
He said my real name, and Saskia made a face.
“You’re under arrest.”
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s the only way.”
Of course, you knew all along that the only place I could end up was jail. That was my destination. Maybe you think that’s where I belong.
The cop scissored my arms behind my back and clipped them together with his handcuffs. Unless this has happened to you, you won’t understand the full plight.
If you’re handcuffed like this and start running and trip over something, you can’t catch yourself. Your face will meet the pavement. If you need to scratch your nose, you’re shit out of luck.
Saskia seemed to be crying.
“Don’t call me a bitch,” she said. “Don’t even think it.”
I was too forlorn to call her a bitch. I felt the whiskey in my veins.
“I know you didn’t do it,” she said. “This is the only way to get it over with.”
The cop and his partner pushed me toward the door.
I looked back at Saskia. Her chin was this sharp delicatething pointed at the floor. Everything she had pointed down. She was crying for real now, trembling.
The cops escorted me out the door.
The handcuffs didn’t feel as cold as you’d think. It’s almost as if they warmed them up for me.
That’s when they read me my rights. I sat in the back of the squad car, and Marilynne’s ghost sat next to me. It was nothing like the shit they do on TV. Your arms start to feel funny, go to pebbled sleep; your arms belong in front of you, or at your sides, but the police have a way of bending your contours.
Marilynne just sat there, with her dumb ghost face. I couldn’t blink her away.
As you know, I have never exercised my right to remain silent.
I don’t believe in silence, but I didn’t call them motherfuckers until one of them said, “She’s a good-looking chick, but she’s a little freaky for my taste.”
Both clauses of that sentence bothered me.
I motherfucked my right to silence away.
“We can add resisting arrest to the charges,” one of the cops said. He was coming into focus: a young guy with sandy hair. He smiled a lot, no matter what he said.
“I’m resisting stupidity,” I said, but I also stopped kicking at the window of the patrol car.
“Those things are impossible to kick out anyway,” the other cop said. He’s fuzzy in my memory. He was fuzzy back then. The other one had a big nose and that big fucking smile. His features were enough for two cops.
“What are you charging me with?” I asked.
“We’ve got enough to hold you on murder,” Smiley said.
“You know she called, right, that she turned you in?” Fuzzy said.
“I know.”
“Don’t rub it in,” Smiley said. “This fucker’s on his way to jail.
” They both sort of laughed in a rueful way.
CHAPTER ONE
The cops wanted to know about stuff. A tall lean guy with red hair and a beard asked most of the questions, frowned most of the frowns. He wrote notes in a notebook the size of a deck of cards.
They took my statement, and I told them just about everything I could remember, just about everything I told you.
“Did you touch anything?”
I had touched everything.
“Just her and the whiskey and the phone. And I almost slapped her head because of the fly. But I stopped myself. And the iron.”
I tried to tell them the whole truth. I tried to tell them I didn’t do it.
They asked me if her body still wore the oven mitt, and I couldn’t remember. If I had already written this book, I could have pulled it out and turned to page 59 and checked, but this book didn’t exist yet.
CHAPTER ONE
It’s called Death by Hibachi. You can Google it.
It sounds like an all-you-can-eat special at a Japanese steak house, but it’s how my parents killed themselves.
I have this single black-and-white picture of them: This raff-ish partly Asian guy with black deadbolt eyes and a tall, slim tan woman who wanted to blen
d into the background. My father had on a black suit and a black shirt, no tie, and he held a bottle of Champagne. My mother held onto the wrist attached to the hand holding onto the bottle. She wore a white mini dress. They came out to Kansas to grow sunflowers; that’s what I think anyway.
Who knows what went wrong. They did some petty crimes, and they were wanted for kiting checks. They didn’t want a horrid, squawking baby. They didn’t want to go to jail. They didn’t want to sober up. They didn’t want to grow sunflowers.
They bought eight charcoal grills and set them up in the living room of their rented house, sealed up the doors and the windows with old T-shirts, newspaper, and duct tape, squirted lighter fluid, flicked matches. Then they breathed in the sweet, sleepy smoke of carbon monoxide until they couldn’t breathe anymore.
Maybe they saw visions, or maybe they just saw the world as it really is. I’m not sure which is worse.
I was two days old. They left me outside on the front lawn in a cheap plastic bassinet. They left me on purpose, I guess. I guess they did me some sort of favor. All I could do was stare straight up and scream. The sky must have been an Easter-egg pastel, a blue you need to search for.
Sometimes I imagine that I’m still that lost shithead baby, looking up at that sky, and sometimes I’m the one who finds the baby, and I pick him up, and I mumble bullshit gibberish at him, and I lie and say everything will be okay.
CHAPTER ONE
For all of my life, I’ve felt the need to keep moving.
Sometimes I remember something that I should have told you earlier.
Sometimes I write that thing down.
A neighbor found me actually. That’s what I heard, anyway.
Pretend we just went through the long, boring part where I got all sensitive. Let’s pretend there was fifty pages of that.
CHAPTER ONE
I believe in the power of defunct technology.
This Book Is Not for You Page 13
