All books are about the pleasure of pages accumulating in your left hand, the glee of them disappearing from your right. Ruffle them a little. Go ahead. It’s okay.
Don’t you love the accumulation of pages in your left hand?
We’re moving now!
CHAPTER ONE
If you’re reading this on an electronic device, then fuck you.
CHAPTER ONE
The Douglas County Jail lurks outside of town, by the cornfields and the rental storage units made out of corrugated steel. All the crap people don’t want but just can’t get rid of is sent out there: boxes of 45s, spare auto parts, dead grandma’s sofa, assorted criminal types such as myself.
I was handed a banana-yellow jumpsuit. They took all my stuff. The underwear they supply is made out of Kleenex, and I ripped mine nearly in half, but they wouldn’t give me another pair. They stripped me down and yelled at me.
The cops took pictures of my face from different angles. I held up one of those little signs with the numbers. It makes you feel the way you’d think—not very good, that’s all I’m saying.
I was used to all the attention, though. I had done my time in juvie, down in Wichita. There’s a rhythm to those places. You just need to follow the beat. A fat guard with a buzz cut walked me through the electric doors and then up an elevator, then through more doors until we got to a gray cinder room with a gray cinder cot and a hole in the floor to shit in and a gray cinder blanket and no pillow. I actually felt comfortable there. It was like coming home. Sure, your mother was pissed at you, and your brother wanted to beat the crap out of you when the lights went out, and your uncle was a pervert, but isn’t that home?
I had lived in worse places.
“It’s a good place to sober up,” the guard said.
“I am sober,” I said.
The Marilynne ghost stood in my cell. For the first time, I almost liked having her there. If she could watch over me, I felt like I could watch over her. We didn’t need words.
They hadn’t even let me make a phone call. I couldn’t remember if that one-phone-call thing was real or something made up for TV.
CHAPTER ONE
They put me in the Special Management pod, which is another concept that might sound pretty good in a different context.
I’d get to stay in my cell for twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four.
As long as you pretend you’re not alive, jail can be fine. Jail time is an empty bucket that you have to fill up.
All you can do is piss in it.
I could only think of one person who would absolutely definitely come and bail me out, but Marilynne had been dead for almost two hundred pages.
CHAPTER ONE
The scream thrashed through my ears, and I woke into that moment, woke into that sound. I tried to take it in: the yelling voice, the strange stiff cot under me, the darkness, the death of Marilynne sitting in my brain, the ghost of Marilynne in the corner, the rough snaky itch on my wrist where a handcuff had bit away at me.
He screamed again: “I didn’t do anything.”
I had thought it was a fake voice, but it was real.
It was the dog-man who had called me with Marilynne’s cell phone, who said, “Don’t go home.”
In the cell next to mine, he was coming down from something, and he was coming down hard, like an egg thrown off a roof. The yolk of this guy must have been splattered on a street somewhere. He kept yelling and yelling.
“I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything!”
Then I could hear the background fuzz of the jail speaker. The guard was talking to him over the PA.
“Just settle down,” the guard said. “Settle down.”
Then louder: “Settle down, settle the fuck down.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Settle down.”
They played out that call and response for I don’t know howlong, and I lay there in the soupy blackness of night, listening.
CHAPTER ONE
When they let us out for that hour, if I had the chance, I could bludgeon him with my lunch tray. It was the only weapon I could find. We didn’t even have shoelaces.
When I was thirteen, I almost choked a guy to death, but he made it through and found the Lord, and I spent those six months at a juvenile detention center. That’s all supposed to be sealed up and forgotten now, but I want credit for turning that guy on to God. I didn’t even know his name. It was one of those things. It could happen to anybody. Maybe not you, but almost anybody.
You might wonder if I could still do something like that, and I could, but most of the time, I don’t think I would.
This will have to suffice for human development.
CHAPTER ONE
About twelve of us were banana-suited guests of Douglas County, but I didn’t care about anyone except him.
I sat across from him at a table bolted to the floor. The chairs were bolted too.
He was several degrees more fucked up than I was.
He looked like he had been wrung out and hung up on a clothesline. He had a sheen of sweat on him, and his left hand was shaking. His right didn’t quiver at all.
“Ain’t that fucked up,” he said. He held out his left hand, then his right.
Left: “Shaky,” he said.
Right: “Ain’t shaky,” he said. “It almost makes me want to shake it on purpose.”
I just looked at him. His voice was real. He really talked like that, barked like that.
His face was thin. His bones looked sharp under the skin. He had pale blue eyes, an expiring blue, like the sheen of skim milk. Those eyes didn’t seem to belong in such a face, in such a setting.
“What did you do?” he said to me.
“Nothing,” I said. I picked at my left thumbnail with my right index finger, spunked out some grit.
“Hah,” he said, “me too. But what did you really do?”
“Nothing. What about you?”
“Nothing,” he said.
The dirt was stuck under my other fingernail now. I imagined passing it back and forth under my fingernails forever. I looked at my hands, but I could tell he was looking at me. His look had a weight to it, and I turned and cocked my head up toward him.
He watched me, and I watched him back. I felt a hot burr of words stuck somewhere. He didn’t flinch. We sat there looking into each other’s noses, eyes, hairs, veins, arteries, capillaries, pores. He had a couple of blackheads. He had short blond hair. He had a black tattoo, just a squiggly line, growing out of his yellow jumpsuit, writhing up his neck.
“Look at us,” he said, “just a couple of assholes.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Howard,” he said. “Howard Asshole.”
“My name’s Neptune,” I said.
His face quirked, but he caught himself.
“That’s a made-up name,” he said.
“I’m Neptune,” I said, and I tried to look at him in a cellular way. He still didn’t flinch.
“Neptune Asshole,” he said, “like we’re brothers.”
I met Howard Donaldson at the Douglas County Jail. The police arrested him approximately six hours after they busted me. He was fucked up on meth, had been for days. He blew through a red light in a stolen car and got pulled over. He had all kinds of outstanding warrants. His luck was as bad as mine, worse even.
He had the cell next door to me. We could whisper to each other through the walls.
CHAPTER ONE
A raccoon hunched up its back and looked at me. We had a moment of mammalian recognition, and as I looked into its black eyes, like lumps of charcoal that were burning down to hot dust, I knew it was dead. It was a ghost of a raccoon. I felt the sweaty idea of this wrap around my neck, and the raccoon sort of nodded, then scuttled away. It was dead and gone, and I wondered how many ghosts were out there, pigeon ghosts on the roof and cat ghosts dreaming about those pigeons.
In my cell, ghosts accumulated and th
en dispersed.
A ghost snake slithered in and out of my vision, and I had to dig a long time before the memory came loose: I had killed it, for no reason at all, with a heavy rock when I was six or seven. A dog I didn’t know gloomed in. A ghost dog never feels at home, never sits, never belongs to anyone anymore.
Thousands of ghost bugs flittered, buzzed soundlessly. Or maybe it was the same five bugs again and again, seeping into the room, then out.
The ghosts made no sound. That seems like the greatest drawback of death: the unceasing silence. Okay, the world says, now we mean it: you’ll never be heard again.
If they all accumulated at once, the cell couldn’t hold them.
Only Marilynne stayed the whole time.
Marilynne and I watched the ghost birds, the ghost worms, the fossil ghosts, the ghost squirrels, the ghost beetles, the ghost flies that almost seemed alive.
CHAPTER ONE
When it’s all over, where will you end up?
CHAPTER ONE
Ghosts have a calming presence once you get used to them.
They’re a form of downer.
You could OD on that shit.
A ghost fly hovered in the air, but it was buzzless. It wasn’t a real fly, or at least it wasn’t a live one. I tried to figure out if it smelled like gin.
For a while, I thought all of those ghosts were things I somehow killed.
How many bugs have you killed?
But then I thought, did I ever kill a raccoon? A Scottie dog with a wool sweater?
And I didn’t kill Marilynne. I’ve never killed anything bigger than a snake.
I think the ghosts just liked me for some reason.
Maybe they were speaking to me in some ghost language and I just wasn’t dead enough to hear.
I don’t think ghosts have emotions or intellects. I think ghosts are all instinct.
If you’re ghost bait, they’re drawn to you.
I don’t think it’s even about the ghosts. I think the problem is being the fucking bait.
CHAPTER ONE
I began to tell Howard Donaldson about my ghosts.
“I can see all these ghost bugs I crushed with the palm of my hand,” I said. “Beetles I crunched, roaches, sure, too many roaches.”
“You’re fucked up, man,” he said, and he wasn’t quite whispering.
“That old lady’s ghost is here,” I said. “I can see it. Her face is mashed in with an iron.”
“You’re full of shit, dude.”
“Her name was Marilynne,” I said, “and you called me after you did it. You said, ‘Don’t go home.’”
He didn’t say anything.
“She’s here, man,” I said. “You did it. You know you did it.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“She’s just standing here, face stove in, lip cracked, eye busted open.”
The intercom crackled, meaning a guard was about to announce something.
“Everything all right in there?” a guard asked.
“Fuck, man,” Howard Asshole said. “I’ve got to talk to the fucking sheriff.”
“No profanity allowed,” the guard said.
“I mean it,” Howard Asshole said. “I’ve got to talk to the sheriff.”
“What do you need?” the guard said. It was more of a command than a question.
“To confess. I killed somebody.”
We heard grumbling over the PA.
“It’s the worst thing I’ve done,” Howard Asshole said, and then he said, quieter, “Is she really there?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It seems like she’s haunting the wrong one.”
“I’ve done some awful things too,” I said. “I used to keep doing them.”
We could hear the guards being buzzed into the pod.
“Where’s the murderer?” one of them asked.
“Over here,” Howard Asshole said.
They buzzed him out of his cell and handcuffed him. They weren’t gentle about it.
“See you, Neptune Asshole,” he said. “Shut up,” one of the guards said.
CHAPTER ONE
None of this seemed to bring the Marilynne ghost any pleasure. When you’re dead, you’re dead.
She stood there in my cell, this sentry, as I did push-ups, as I read Huck Finn, as I ate my plain white bread smeared with peanut butter, no jelly.
We waited for Howard Asshole to come back, but he didn’t come back.
That’s about all I know about him: he warned me not to go home, he declared me his brother, he confessed to murder.
Apparently Howard Asshole was fucked up on meth, drunk, forlorn, and he stumbled on an opportunity. A door was smashed open. He thought he’d clean out whatever the burglars didn’t take. He’d just scavenge, vulturize, which is not a word, but it’s how he thought of it. I’m recreating this here. This is what I heard.
Except he didn’t find an empty burgled house. He found Marilynne.
The house was a mess. A spray-painted message was on the wall. He thought it was my house, Neptune’s house.
Marilynne somehow got her cell phone, and she called me— the least likely savior—and Howard Asshole tried to smash the phone out of her hand with the nearest thing he could grab, an iron primed for cotton. It hissed out steam as he slammed it into her.
Do you see how I give him the benefit of the doubt? Maybe he wasn’t trying to kill her.
Even he, even Howard Asshole, tried to respect life in some way. He failed at it, but he tried. I think he tried.
She’s dead anyway. Even her ghost is gone now.
CHAPTER ONE
The other ghosts disappeared. It was just me and Marilynne.
Howard Asshole wouldn’t have wandered in there if I hadn’t taken the dynamite and pissed off the anarchists. They wouldn’t have smashed down her door.
I blamed myself for all of this, and then I did it again.
Still do.
I apologized to her ghost, and then I did it again.
I meant it fully and completely this time.
She stood right before me, closer than she’d ever been.
The bad eye cleared up, the wound disappeared, and then something about her face looked shinier, tighter, and then she had a thinner face, and then her hair grew suddenly longer, and then it became shorter. Her eyes no longer protruded. Her double chin disappeared. Her wrinkles smoothed out, except for the crinkles around her mouth.
I couldn’t stop shivering, and I just kept getting older. Every second seemed to count, and Marilynne just looked at me with those dumb eyes. I wasn’t cold, but my skin was wiggling, and my insides were wiggling, and my bones were still, and my hair was alive and electric.
She became thinner. The dress shrunk with her.
Parts of her curved in; parts curved out.
Her lips looked bigger, her eyes larger.
The crinkles around her mouth evened out. A dimple formed in her chin.
Her hair grew down her back, longer and longer, then it snapped up to her shoulders.
She grew smaller.
Her teeth bucked out. Her eyes got smaller.
Her curves disappeared.
She lost several inches and then several more.
Her ears shrunk.
She came up to my hip.
She came up to my knee.
She was on the floor, trying to crawl.
She rolled on her back.
She was a baby, raising her little fists.
She squirmed.
She went still.
She was gone.
I watched the empty place where she lay for a long, long time.
CHAPTER ONE
At first, I thought she was degrading, wearing away, but I was as wrong about that as I am about many, many things. She was headed back to zero, to the beginning, to when we are pure.
The whole devolution took thirty seconds, maybe less. I didn’t clock it or anything.
For half a beat, she was this fucked-up ki
nd of beautiful, this gorgeous fuck-up—I could tell she was a fuck-up even then— and her hair ran all the way down her back, and something pinged inside of me, and I thought, what if I knew her then?
Mainly, though, I felt light-socket jabbed, fried and tingled. The current of her backward life ran through me. It made a circuit of my brain.
I don’t know what the hell happened to her. I bet you don’t either.
Not even Saskia could figure this shit out, and she’s so much smarter than both of us put together.
CHAPTER ONE
I’ll never know what I really meant to Marilynne. I’ll never get to make amends.
It isn’t fair, but here’s how I used to picture her: scared of her students, and scared of her fingernails, and scared of “little people,” and scared of the hallway, and scared of the rug in the hallway, and scared of the floor beneath the rug. Scared of pretzels. Scared of the noise outside right now. It could be someone screaming, or it could be bad brakes. Scared of dirt, which leads her back to her fingernails, which are even scarier now. They look kind of greenish under certain lights.
Marilynne was gone, and so were her big flabby mouth and her British-lady hats that looked as if they had swooped down and perched on her head. She was approximately four foot eleven. Her face was round, ovaled with wine fat, and her eyes had a fuzzy gray-blue clarity.
Marilynne with her puffed-rice face and her hat that looked like a work boot. Marilynne with her sad cumulonimbus eyes.
I’m not being fair. I’m never fair to her. I’m never fair to anyone.
Except you, I’m fair to you.
CHAPTER ONE
They made me stew for long time. Maybe it wasn’t stewing. Maybe it was some kind of braise, a marinade.
I can’t give blood because I was in jail for more than seventy-two hours. I didn’t even get buggered. I didn’t even bugger anyone.
Sure, my mind got fucked, but that happens all the time.
This Book Is Not for You Page 14
