Book of Souls

by Jack Ketchum

The current of emotion in her voice was startling. It ran at my own feelings like an oncoming train. I could feel tears well up in my own eyes.

  Some job, I thought. Attending to a man living in a state of grace. Lucky woman.

  ~ * ~

  A state of grace.

  I thought about it as I drove down the canyon, battling back unpredictable sudden tides of joy.

  I felt I'd met a man who was insusceptible to harm. Wasn't that something like grace? He'd never be poor again. He and the world would see to that. Nor would his body support any lingering debilitating disease—he'd go very quickly when the time came.

  And as to death itself, he was ready for it. He'd go back to the Wheel without a goddamn qualm.

  I thought over what I knew of his life. The struggle to love and understand June—the impulsive, reckless woman of The Rosy Crucifixion. The struggle to master word and line and form. His rage against the country and the woman who bore him. The search for god in himself and for heroism in a much diminished race. Most of all, the struggle to push himself to his limits, to make at least one man, himself, into what he felt a man might truly be. It was fitting that he should find his soul in Greece, that "man-sized world," and that there, where in its Golden Age man and gods and art were so inextricably entwined, he should devote his life to what he called the recovery of "the divinity of man." That reconciliation with all that had come before and would come.

  "There is something colossal about any human figure when that individual becomes truly and thoroughly human," he wrote. In that frail little figure on the bed I felt I had met such a man. Impervious to moral harm now as he was to the physical. He had come by that grace by living hard and well, brutally and tenderly, by living in the gut and in the spirit and seeing no contradiction whatsoever between the two. He was still at it, polishing his creation. If his writing was no longer brilliant he had never lost his genius for living.

  The man inside was preparing to die.

  Holding gently, firmly, to what was precious.

  ~ * ~

  In 1980 I heard on the evening news that Miller was dead. He was eighty-nine. I had been writing professionally for about four years and was working on what was to be my first published novel, Off Season. The courage to dare to do any of this was in no small way born of that single two-hour meeting.

  I phoned Noel Young and found that his death had been quick and peaceful, that he had been surrounded by friends. I'd expected nothing less.

  We talked awhile and finally I said, "you know, driving back to L.A. that day I was driving like a crazy man, laughing and crying, whooping into the air, slamming at the steering wheel. Any cop would have arrested me on the spot. You can't believe the sheer fucking hope he gave me. That a man like that could still exist! I felt I'd met the closest I'd ever meet to a living fucking saint!"

  "I think you did, Dallas," he said. "I think you did."

  That night I raised a glass of good French wine to him and thanked him. For that long-ago meeting, of course, but also for the books and enthusiasms, for all he'd shared with me over all the years.

  I thanked him just for being.

  ~ * ~

  AUTHOR'S NOTE:

  I wrote this piece at the insistence of Phil Nutman, to whom I'd told the basic story in some long-forgotten bar at some long-forgotten horror convention. It was published in a 1996 issue of Bruatrian Magazine under the title As Close To You As Your Skin. I have yet to figure out why. The magazine was having trouble at the time and the font and murky background for the font made the thing essentially unreadable.

  When my first limited-edition story collection was published two years later—The Exit At Toledo Blade Boulevard—I decided to add it on at the end as a kind of feel-good coda to all the dark goings-on which preceded it.

  I restored the title.

  The font was readable.

  Sometimes the author wins.

  THE DUST OF THE HEAVENS

  Kenneth is dying of AIDS.

  His ex-wife called me.

  He's in a Pennsylvania hospital which Helene says he'll never leave because he's much too weak to walk and there's no one to care for him at home nor any money for hospice care. So they'll keep him in the hospital the two months or so it takes him to die.

  That's all they give him, two months.

  Which means, among other things, that he won't be coming after me any more.

  I can call off the dogs.

  ~ * ~

  He arrived at the hospital via the cops...

  Kenneth is my age, forty-seven. His son Colin goes to college in New Jersey. Helene and Colin had seen him over Christmas and noted that the anti-psychotic pills seemed to be working. He was calm and relatively reasonable. Though he did look physically ill. Alarmingly so. They suggested he get himself a checkup right away but suspected he'd ignore that advice. Apparently he did.

  Knowing, I'm sure, just how much good a checkup was going to do him.

  Then in April he must have gone off the pills or else he was experimenting with his dosage again because Colin started getting calls at the dormitory, crazy calls, the kind Kenneth makes from time to time, and finally he wouldn't speak to his father any more. To his father, Colin just wasn't in. So Kenneth responded by telling whoever was fielding the calls for him that he'd better hear Colin on the line right now or he was coming over there armed and dangerous and there was going to be a whole lot of blood on the floor by the time he left. When he hung up they phoned the New Jersey police who in turn called the Pennsylvania police who arrested him for making terrorist threats to innocent college kids and Kenneth was back in the hands of the system again.

  Not the first time.

  In fact the last I'd heard he'd gone to jail was less than a year ago. He'd walked into a police station to accuse Helene of child abuse. Walked in with a paper bag over his head to protect his anonymity because he knew that there was a warrant out for his arrest on charges of threatening his mother's life.

  Kenneth—the Unknown Plaintiff.

  It took the cops a few hours to convince him to remove the bag. Eventually, he did.

  Anyhow, by the time the blood-on-the-floor incident rolled around the police in Pennsylvania already knew him better than they'd ever wanted to. Still they did the decent thing. Instead of taking him to the slammer they brought him to a state psychiatric facility and checked him in.

  Kenneth is a paranoid schizophrenic. Has been for many years now.

  A fine, brilliant soul living in a jungle-maze of misfired synapses and bio-chemical warfare which sooner or later might well have found him lost and dead anyhow. Had not the AIDS come along.

  He's also my oldest friend.

  ~ * ~

  We go all the way back to junior high together. To 1958 I think, though we may have met even earlier. Oddly enough Kenneth would be the one to know this.

  I bet he could pin the year down cold. My own grip on dates, time and events has always been shaky at best and grows worse as I get older. But Kenneth collects events—real or imagined—or a mix of both—the way a squirrel collects nuts for winter. The way, the old joke goes, a woman stores her grievances. Dates and times always seemed to center him, to pin him down to reality. Even then.

  "Great art," he wrote me once, "is the dust of the heavens."

  Sad thought—but beautiful too.

  This in the midst of a long rambling letter that detailed how the State of New Jersey was out to destroy him.

  But it was art and the love of art that threw us together—his for painting, mine for books. We couldn't help it. We were both precocious as hell. Nor could we help the fact that caring about either of these two things was bound to set us apart from everybody else we knew, from every other kid we hung around with. Nobody else was going to get passionate about Shakespeare or D.H. Lawrence or Michelangelo or Paul Klee. Nobody else was going to sit up all night during a sleepover leafing through art books and reading Ray Bradbury aloud. Not a soul. We were stuck with each another.<
br />
  Fine. I was amazed to even have found a kindred spirit in our little suburban New Jersey town. Certainly not somebody so enthusiastic and so generous, so much into sharing his enthusiasms. Without even quite knowing it we set out to educate each other. Especially the kinds of stuff you weren't going to find in school. We were teenagers after all. In the grip of our gonads. In a repressive place and time.

  So I turned him on to Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropics and Justine by de Sade. He introduced me to the German Expressionists, their grim perversity, to romantic pre-Raphaelite nudes sexy as anything in Playboy and to Lautrec's dancers, drunkards, whores.

  He started writing some. I tried painting. We'd go down into my damp dark basement and Kenneth would set up a canvas for me and hand me the paints and I'd do awful, ridiculous imitations of Jackson Pollack.

  I couldn't even get the drip right. Never mind the smear.

  While he worked in oils and produced these amazing abstract studies on the other side of the room in the same time it took me to realize that I'd failed again. Shapes like catacombs filled with light, like Nemo's Nautilus gliding through a cavernous sea.

  He was much more advanced in his craft than I was at mine. It didn't bother me.

  Though later on, it bothered him. In time it came to bother him a lot.

  And I think it was then that I began to fear him slightly, that I began to draw away.

  We got into photography. With his savings from work after school he bought some second-hand equipment and set up a darkroom in his basement. I photographed girlfriends. Or would-be girlfriends. He photographed forests, brooks, trees. Human subjects didn't much interest him. We spent practically every Saturday in his basement for a while, developing, fudging, cropping and printing, awash in the smell of chemicals and silent under the dim red lights.

  It was just about the only time I ever saw his house. And even that was fleeting. Barely a moment to gaze at his mother's Japanese prints on the wall or pass his father's World War II model airplanes, wave a quick hello to whichever one of them was at home at the time—they never seemed to be together there—and then hit the stairs.

  I remember Kenneth in dim lights.

  The red light from the basement.

  The night-light by my bedside.

  Sleepovers were big then, all through high school. Kenneth slept at my house many times.

  I at his house—never.

  The reason was, ostensibly, that his mother didn't like having company around when she got up in the morning. That didn't make a whole lot of sense to me but then I hardly knew his mother. She was just a college teacher like his father who smiled at me whenever I showed up at his house and who collected Japanese art. She had a nice smile. It was hard to believe she was the awful bitch that Kenneth said she was. That she'd lock him out of the house at night if he was five minutes late. That she was prone to frequent rages, trying to slap hell out of him over some imagined affront. That she went through his drawers and stole his money.

  She was just this little dumpy Italian lady with a pretty smile. That's all I saw.

  Certainly my mother didn't believe him.

  We'd talk after he left.

  "How could a mother be that way?" she'd ask me. "A mother?"

  She figured he had to be exaggerating. It was impossible to blame her. It would be years before TV and media started showing us babies dropped out of windows or scalded to death or drowned and dumped in dumpsters.

  Was Kenneth an abused child? I don't think anybody will ever know for certain. Like my mother I thought he was exaggerating at the time—even then he was given to bouts of self-aggrandizing, mysteriousness, wild flights of fancy. It was part of his charm. Part of his precocity.

  Now I'm not so sure. Knowing where he went and the hard road he took to get there it seems likely to me that he was telling us the truth. But nobody really bought it then. Not even me.

  But you had to see that something strange was going on.

  I've never seen a kid spend so much time at somebody else's house as Kenneth spent at mine. Not before or since. Overnights, after school, weekends. Many nights he ate dinner with us before the two of us started our six-to-ten shift at my father's soda-fountain-candy store. My dad was not fond of Kenneth or of having him at his table. He'd hired him only at mom's insistence.

  Art, in my dad's book, was not a man's game. But then, neither was literature. He had no say in it though because by then Kenneth and my mother had sort of adopted each another. Once again, I had no problem with that. I was an only child. I liked the company. But these two were truly diligent in their relationship and serious about maintaining it. There were nights I'd fall asleep on the couch while the two of them sat up and talked far into the night. It was my mother—not Kenneth's—who received cards and gifts for Mother's Day. Whose birthday he remembered.

  He spent every Christmas with us for eight years.

  Even my dad got a present.

  ~ * ~

  It was hard, eventually, to tell my mother that the Kenneth she knew wasn't the same anymore, wasn't sane anymore. That he scared me.

  ~ * ~

  Helene thinks and I agree that the worst of it began with his marriage and then took a quantum leap after Colin was born.

  Before that, through college at Rhode Island School of Design and work at design firms like Germaine Monteil he'd shown constant promise—if a tendency toward high egoism and defensiveness that often found him butting heads with the bosses. But his work was getting noticed. He had paintings at the OK Harris gallery in Manhattan, sharing space with Warhol and Jasper Johns. Art mavens Ivan Karp and Leo Castelli were admirers.

  Through all those years we kept in close touch.

  I remember a lot of firsts with Kenneth. The first time I ventured into Newark after dark was with him—to see Mamie Van Doren Live! at the Art Theatre after her nude appearance in Playboy. My first trip to Manhattan without my father was also with him, to a party hosted by Andy Warhol, during which I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, that I'd somehow managed to pick up the most beautiful woman in the room until she turned around to get a drink at the bar and the dark tufts of hair down her backbone told me I'd picked up the most beautiful guy in the room instead. The first time I smoked hash was in his dorm at RISDI. I had my first cognac there too. Unfortunately, the same night.

  And he was the first to tell me and make me believe that it was possible that I could someday write as well as the people I was reading—that in me lay the potential for at least a speck of artistry.

  As the seventies rolled around I got involved with a woman and moved to Manhattan and Kenneth married and settled across the river in New Jersey. Meetings were sporadic. And most often, uncomfortable. It was like he wasn't talking to us anymore, he was putting on a show instead. His Kenneth-the-Genius show. It was important to pour over the paintings, admire them, and to talk about them in great detail, to talk endlessly about his plans for future works, their technology, subject matter, where and when he was going to show them when the time was exactly right. It was important to allow him to rant bitterly at his cheapskate bitch-witch of a mother. It was important to listen to him blast away at all those critics and dealers who weren't exactly pounding the doors down to get his stuff.

  Helene didn't help. I think she was in awe of him at first. For a woman with little artistic talent of her own to speak of and only a moderate education Kenneth was a pretty heady brew. I'd seen him bowl over people far more sophisticated. You couldn't blame her.

  One day he announced to me that she was pregnant.

  There was going to be no abortion. Kenneth was going to be a father.

  I tried like hell to talk him out of it. So did my girlfriend. We stressed the practical reasons—like he wasn't making a whole lot of money and why did he want the burden of a kid just then—but I think we were both well aware that Kenneth's ego was already beginning to run amok. That his ego could swamp a kid.

  Which I guess it a
lmost did.

  ~ * ~

  The last time I saw him he arrived unannounced at my apartment in the middle of the day. I'd been working.

  I was surprised—to put it mildly. He'd obviously been put off with me for about a year now. The reason was mostly that both Paula and I refused to take him terribly seriously when he talked about the elaborate murder conspiracy he was documenting which had, he said, already taken the life of a New Jersey doctor and a teenager, Kenneth's second cousin—a faked suicide in a police-station holding cell—and which involved high-level Mafioso types with political ties to both his mother and other members of his mother's side of his family.

  Nor would we take seriously that he had recently acquired a direct psychic mainline to both Mother Teresa and the Dali Lama.

  Nor his assertions that Helene was abusing Colin and that his mother was engaged in slowly poisoning his father to death.

  And certainly not his notion of avoiding child-support payments to the by-now-hated bitch Helene by faking a new Social Security number and tax returns and then fleeing to a concrete bunker of his own design and execution somewhere deep in the Pennsylvania hills, surrounded by wild bears which he would train with jars of honey and coyotes he would tame to guard him against all trespassers—Mafia, police, or FBI. All of whom were supposedly on his case by now.

  Paula and I were buying in to none of it.

  There was too much dope in his life for one thing. And too many pills.

  My own individual offenses were worse. I had suggested that now as a couple of times before a hospital was where he belonged. That he was doing himself no good this way. That he needed help.

  Which made me part of the problem. The problem was that no one would believe what he knew to be true.

  The mafia, the murders, Mother Teresa.

  The whole damn ball of yarn.

  He'd resented me for quite a while.

  His own career had faltered, while I had just published my third novel—and if I wasn't getting rich out here in writing-land I was at least holding my own, making a living, doing what I'd always wanted to do, what so many years ago we'd talked about doing. It looked like the pupil had somehow slipped by the master, to him at least. He made it known to me that beyond my first book he had never read me and didn't intend to. That I had sold out in his judgment—I had written a popular novel. And while he could admire its craft...well, craft was part of the problem too.