Book of Souls

by Jack Ketchum

  Hell Night rolls around finally and you heard them into an auditorium and wander amidst them for a half hour while the abuse flows like poison. Groans and screeches and harsh metal discord issue from the sound system. Lights are low. Then gone altogether, replaced by flashlights darting into freshman faces. They're screaming, yelling. You're screaming and yelling even louder. All hell's about to break lose there.

  The stage lights rise to dim. One of their leaders is there. Blindfolded, tied up hand and foot. Then what isn't supposed to happen, happens. Suddenly the guy's getting the living shit beat out of him. It looks absolutely real! He's in on it of course but the crowd doesn't know that yet and just before they rush the stage and punches start to fly the house lights come up and the whole sophomore class is grinning and applauding and embracing the enemy. Welcome! You're one of us! Aren't you happy?

  The weird thing was that for most of us this actually worked. It had for me the year before. I'd emerged as one of the angriest of the whole damn class, then afterward embraced the ruse wholeheartedly. And this year—perhaps because of that – I was class President. So that along with the Hazing Master and Hazing Mistress I was god to these kids.

  I loved the part. I played it half Dracula and half Wolfman. Alternately quiet slinking evil and utterly ravenous.

  The following year when Jen—I'll call her Jen--moved into the basement apartment below my own third-floor apartment she told me that at first she was actually afraid of me.

  A few months later she was scaring me on a daily basis.

  Taking risks.

  2.

  I DON'T BELIEVE IN OMENS,

  BUT I THINK YOU CAN KNOW

  WHEN YOU'RE IN TROUBLE.

  Jen was the first to turn me on to marijuana. She and her girlfriend and I smoked a joint in my apartment and then in the midst of this strange new sensation which was nothing like the beer-highs I'd been used to and under the influence of which I felt at once elated and confused somebody decided it would be a good idea to take a walk. Nice night.

  I no sooner hit the streets of Beacon Hill when paranoia descended like an oncoming Angus bull. Streetlights seemed more like spotlights, preternaturally bright. The distance between my feet and my eyes was way too far—as though I were walking with somebody else's feet. Every passing car was brimming with cops.

  The girls were used to getting high of course so they went their merry way chattering about whatever while I shambled along behind them in the grip of something very much like existential terror. Even their chattering frightened me.

  How could they be so normal? Had they actually smoked that joint? Had they maybe poisoned me? Revenge for the goddamn hazing?

  When they turned into an alley—an alley for godsakes!—that connected West Cedar Street to Charles Street without saying a word to them I hightailed it back home to my apartment. With the door locked behind me I felt safe again. At least I did initially. Then I thought, what if they come back looking for me? I bet they will. I'd been a total coward, that was clear enough. And I already had the beginnings of a major thing for Jen. What in the world was I thinking? What would she think of me?

  More paranoia.

  My solution to the problem was to turn off all the lights and sit huddled in the dark of my living room. Nobody home.

  And after a while I heard a knock at the door and Jen and her girlfriend calling me and more knocking and then a kind of puzzled laughter as they drifted away downstairs.

  The next day I told her I'd missed their turn into that alley somehow and wandered the streets of Boston for an hour or so looking for them.

  She laughed. More importantly, she bought it.

  I smoked a lot of dope with her after that mostly down in her apartment and gradually we became lovers of sorts.

  I say of sorts because her first love was speed. I learned that early on.

  3.

  BUT RIGHT AWAY SHE SCARED ME

  She'd go into the bathroom and come out a different version of herself suddenly all bright and cheerful when moments before she'd been depressed as hell talking about her troubled relationship with her father back in New Jersey and all the shit that was going to hit the fan once her mom and dad discovered she'd dropped out of college or the break with her former boyfriend or whatever, but she'd be moving around the apartment now like a woman with a mission—cleaning, my god, I remember her cleaning practically every surface of the place over and over—switching cuts on the record player and talking about the songs, the records, the Beatles' lyrics or Donovan, searching out books on her bookshelf to reference this point or that or else poems by Rilke or Baudelaire or Rimbaud to read to me and this could go on all night and well into the mornings and usually did.

  ~ * ~

  When she confessed to me the source of all this energy I wasn't that surprised. I'd already tried the occasional Dexedrine to finish up a paper here and there. Even the occasional Black Beauty. It was only that she was shooting. It was the needle I was scared of. What if she overdosed? What if some innocent air-bubble in the works exploded in her brain?

  Whenever she'd disappear into the bathroom I was afraid it was for the last time. Afraid I was never going to see her again.

  Not alive anyway.

  To try to keep up with her jagging I started snorting the stuff myself. I was holding tight to my class-schedule but weekends we'd go without any sleep at all and the crash after two nights running and living on nothing more than OJ to keep up the good old Vitamin C was brutal.

  And in the end I couldn't keep up with her. Not if I wanted to stay in school. She'd already rejected that option.

  So had most of her friends, none of whom I either liked or trusted. But while I was hanging in there attending to classes she'd be gone with them for days on end. To god knows where. Cambridge maybe. Some crash-pad way up on the Hill. You never knew. There were days and nights I literally waited by the phone for a call which never came unless she'd arrived back home again. There were fights. Recriminations. I felt I had a right to know where she was at least—and even who she was with. We loved one another, didn't we? Well, then?

  Beneath it all was the fear of that goddamn needle. Fear that it would get to her sooner or later. That it almost had to.

  There was a saying, rightly or wrongly attributed to William S. Burroughs. There are old junkies. But no old speed-freaks.

  I'd heard it many times.

  4.

  THAT NIGHT WE SLEPT TOGETHER

  ON MY BED. IN THE MORNING

  SHE WAS GONE...

  Did we make love? Of course we did—though not very well. Speed is the natural enemy of orgasms. Or as she told me, shooting speed was a powerful orgasm in itself and the real thing just didn't compare. But I loved her body—her generous mouth, the softness of her skin. I loved simply holding her. And I held her a lot. The downslope of Jen's high after two or three nights of riding it and despite the grass or downers we used as buffers as often as not was a case of total emotional meltdown. The sadness in her seeping through like some slow quiet flood of dark water. I remember holding onto her until her body gave in and the shakes stopped and finally she slept. They say that the sense of taste is the most powerful agent of memory. I believe I can still recall the taste of her tears.

  5.

  "WHAT DO YOU WANT, CASE?

  WHAT'S WORTH HAVING?"

  I did a terrible thing.

  I got her a kitten.

  I believe I was a little insane by then because I damn well should have known. She was already much too thin. Her jaunts into the Boston wilderness had gotten longer and longer. Each crash harder. But I thought, what she maybe needs is some responsibility here, a really good reason to live and do so somewhat normally, someone or something to give her full-time love to. I knew she was very much capable of love.

  I knew she loved cats. So I went to the ASPCA. I went to the market on Charles Street and bought cat food and a cat box and litter. Then the kitten and I—a tiny black and white tuxedo�
�waited in my apartment for the phone call that would tell me that she finally had returned to hers. And while I petted and scratched him and he purred against my chest I instructed him in his duties. Out loud. Through tears of what seemed to me hope and joy at the time but were probably more like desperation. He was to purr a whole lot just like he was doing right now. He was to sleep with her every night. He was to be good and sweet and love her like crazy.

  When the phone call came I slipped him into the pocket of my coat and went downstairs and from the look on her face when I presented him to her I knew I'd done the right thing. She adored him immediately. Couldn't believe I'd done this for her. We found makeshift toys for him and played well into the night. There is nothing quite so beguilingly ridiculous as a kitten playing in a new environment and the night was simply lovely.

  What'll we call him? She wondered. Jen was very fond of Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight in particular. A book at once lyrical and drenched in a sense of loss and fear and suffering.

  Had I not been so happy for all three of us I might have seen it right there.

  Albion, she said. We'll call him Albion.

  ~ * ~

  I don't think it was a month later that Albion was gone. Jen was as devastated as I'd ever seen her.

  She'd taken her kitten with her one night to show to some friends.

  She didn't remember where.

  6.

  THERE WAS NO WAY TO FEEL GOOD

  ABOUT IT, NO WAY AT ALL...

  "Come here. I want you to see it," she said. "Then maybe you won't be so goddamn scared all the time."

  Or something to that effect.

  She was in the bathroom and this time the door was wide open.

  We'd been having a fight. I'd begged her to cut it out, to get help. Probably for the hundredth time. I'm doing what I do for godsakes—I'm shooting up and then I'm going out. No you're not. Yes I am.

  And this time I was just mad enough to say all right, fuck it. So I stood in the doorway and watched her tie off. Use the dropper and the spoon and the match, use the needle. Almost a cruelty about her now, a kind of awful pragmatism, as though she were saying to me, this is the real world, asshole, my world—the one you're too damn chickenshit to watch. Well, watch it now. Watch me swoon.

  So I did.

  ~ * ~

  If my saying I don't remember exactly seems almost like a motif here it's important to imagine the changes I'd been through—the changes and the times. In the course of a single year I'd gone from Class President, who you could often catch in suit and tie, to tie-dye long-haired hippie. Elvis had been replaced in my affections by the Beatles and the Byrds and the Stones. Not only was I snorting meth and smoking dope and hash but I was tripping on acid and mescaline too.

  So I really don't remember exactly what prompted me to call Jen's sister.

  I know that by then it was not only a case of my fearing the needle but fearing for her mind and body as well. You rarely bothered to eat on speed—it seemed irrelevant—so that over the past few months she'd gotten so damn skinny that her breasts were disappearing and her skin stretched tight over her hips and ribs. Her color was gone. Her eyes were bruised from lack of sleep. Her memory was shot. Her crashes got so bad and so prolonged that I feared for the strength of her heart.

  Her family knew nothing of this. The one thing she was always dutiful about were her calls to mom and dad and she'd skipped coming home on school vacations. They didn't seem to mind or worry. They trusted her.

  So as I say, I don't know exactly what incident prompted it. Or if there was any incident at all but merely a desperate cumulative exhaustion of the spirit.

  But I called her sister and turned her in.

  Tell your parents, I told her. Tell them to come get your sister.

  I think she's dying.

  It was not easy to make this call because it was going to be the end of us, of Jen and me. Jen would not forgive this phone call. How could she? I was betraying her deepest secret, revealing her naked in deepest pain. It was going to throw not only her but her entire family into a world of grief

  I wasn't kidding myself. I knew that part of this was also a matter of self-preservation. If possibly I was saving her life here then I was trying to save my own life too. I'd carry more than a little guilt around for this. But I could not any longer bear the constant ache and sorrow of loving someone who seemed not to love herself.

  I could only hope that in time she'd forgive me. In time she did. But it was the end of us all the same.

  7.

  THE DEATH FREAK IN HER WAS DEAD...

  Therapy worked its slow and agonizing wonders. Jen married, had a child. Divorced and married again.

  The last time I heard from her she seemed happy.

  A strange link between us remained over many years. Now and then I'd call her. Not on birthdays or holidays but always just out of the blue. She'd invariably tell me that it was uncanny. That whenever I called she'd been down and depressed. As though I somehow sensed over great distances that she needed to talk with me and only me at exactly that time and that our talks always served to soothe her.

  8.

  ...AND I'D NEVER MISS IT.

  We lost touch years ago. I have no idea where she is now and we have no friends in common of whom I might ask.

  So wherever you are, Jen, I hope you're well and peaceful. And forgive me again. This is merely a poor sketch of you and by no means does you justice.

  I'll never miss the risks you took with your life or those we took together. But you always miss the ones you love, don't you? I think you must. Alive or dead, happy or troubled. It's a human imperative I think. Something which fades only when you fade.

  And sometimes with great good luck it even lives awhile further, in between the lines, in the pages of a small book.

  —Jack Ketchum June, 2007

  US AGAIN

  (with Carolyn Kessaratos Shea)

  PROLOGUE: E-MAIL FROM GROUND ZERO

  10/21/2001

  2:53 AM, Sunday morning

  Surfkitty:

  Went down to World Trade today. I've never seen so many shattered faces. The tourists were out with their cameras thick around Fulton because it was a beautiful summer-like day, but if you got off the subway at Chambers Street where only a sliver of the Trades would have been—not the major photo-op Fulton presents with all that empty sky—walked out and smelled the burning and wondered, as you almost had to, exactly WHAT was burning, looked into a sky bright and blue and tarnished with plumes of blonde smoke and then turned around, you saw all these shattered, stricken faces. People barely able to hold back the tears or not able to at all, wiping them away, old people and young people and little kids. Walk a block and maybe one person in thirty is smiling. This, in New York City! On a window at a filthy, closed, boarded-up Chase Bank the entire surface of the glass is ID shots of cops and firemen dead—the entire window, Kitty, all these young men looking out at you. The walk leaves a taste in your mouth. You can't get rid of it. And the silence. Broken only by a truck rolling by or fire-engines—today I guess they hit another hot-spot and needed reinforcements—sounds of distant dredging. But we, us survivors, silent. And all the way to the court buildings, barely a hint of a smile. All along the avenues.

  Just me, testifying.

  Love,

  D

  ~ * ~

  10/21/2001

  3:14 PM

  Hi, D.

  Did my own pilgrimage today down to the Village, had to see something that had NOT changed—from before everything, from the past when there was a kind of innocence. There were people smiling, enjoying the cafes and each other and the beautiful morning. It was brunchtime and the restaurants were packed, with laughter and conversation oozing out the windows. Relief! Normalcy on a bright sunny day in autumn! Then you listen to snippets of conversation as you pass. A couple about nineteen were talking about anthrax and gas masks for godsakes. Another group were saying nuke 'em all. A
nd another were debating whether they should go to Ground Zero to see it for themselves or go across the river to look at the gap in the sky. Dammit there's A GAP IN THE SKY. Where there used to be discussion about going for a drive for foliage season or antique shopping, there's talk beyond anything we could ever have imagined littering our everyday conversation. So I guess EVERYTHING has changed. My city, as I know it, is gone. I cried again.

  Back atcha I guess.

  Love,

  Kitty

  ~ * ~

  10/21/2001

  3:54 PM

  Kitty —

  Of course you cried. I did too. I know I will again. Crying's all right. It's what you do when you're in mourning, right? But I still like this story—which I read in the International Herald Tribune over in Greece—probably because I think it says as much about New Yorkers and what we're capable of as suicide runs say about the Taliban.

  The week after September 1lth, the New Yorker ran no cartoons—which it hadn't done since Pearl Harbor I think—and the staff debated running any the week following. Finally they settled on one, and one only. It's a well-dressed, sophisticated New York woman sitting at a bar, and next to her is this guy in a real bad checkered suit. And the caption, best I can recall, reads, I thought I'd never laugh again. Then I saw your suit.

  Cheer up, Kitty. Think of all those suits out there.

  Love,

  D

  ~ * ~

  There will be other important topics of conversation in New York City beyond the events subsequent to the morning of September 1lth.

  But not for a while I think.

  At a dinner party last night I found myself holding forth mightily—maybe too mightily, it's possible, since my talk was fueled by a fair amount of scotch and to some extent at least, the attractive woman sitting beside me—about post-World Trade Manhattan, about the climate of irrational and not-so-irrational fear we're living in now. Most of it, happily, I don't remember too well.