Grit & Shadows Boxed Set

by J. D. Brink

  Mad, raving paranoia, my inner voice says. This is part of why I can’t drink anymore. I can’t trust myself on water, much less gin. If it weren’t for the airline ticket stub in my jacket pocket, I’d think I hallucinated the whole damn thing.

  Swan’s grimoire is laid out in front of him. His constant smile is broader tonight, he’s so thrilled to have a receptive pupil to tutor on the ancient mysticism of his culture.

  “Before Traveling is Abundance. When you have become full, it is time to move on. Like your dinner.” He aims that finger of his at my stomach. “When you fill up here, you will leave. So it is with the moon. Once it swells to its fullest, it must go back on the path to becoming less, to being new again. It is the Way of all things. The sun at noon is at its height and can only come back down again. A cup at its brim must spill over and be emptied again.”

  A light turns on in my head. And my mouth is still full of cabbage. “I get it,” I mumble, tucking the food into my cheeks so I can get this out before I lose it again. “So maybe, when I get to a place, when I feel like I’ve taken in all I can there, that’s when I get bored. I’m full of the place.” I swallow. “There’s nothing more for me to take in. Instead, time to empty out. Become someone else, somewhere else. Start again.”

  “Like the new moon,” Swan says. “You must begin a new journey. But you, Mr. Jack, are trapped. You keep circling, gaining no ground.”

  “That’s alright,” I shrug, “if it’s good enough for the sun and moon, who am I to complain?”

  “Do you complain? Are you happy, Mr. Jack?”

  There he is, my surrogate father again.

  “No.” The word just pops out of my mouth without me even trying to say it.

  The bell above the door jingles. A couple comes in, a Chinese girl and a nerdy-looking white guy, dripping with rain and laughing together. They must have been caught in a downpour.

  “So what comes next, Swan the swami?”

  The twinkle in his dark eyes tells me he’s glad I asked.

  “Wind above, Wind below. Xun. Proceeding humbly. This follows Traveling.”

  “Wandering,” I say, correcting him.

  Swan reads and translates: “‘If one is humble and gentle in unstable situation, one is able to make friends, to gain trust and support.’”

  Swan’s bony, wrinkled claw draws six lines on a napkin with a tiny nub of a pencil. Starting at the bottom, it’s one broken, two solid, one broken, two solid.

  “Wind is one yielding line of yin under two strong yang. The yin is humble. It lies patiently waiting for the correct time to act. But Xun is two Winds, one atop the other. This shows a driving force that always pushes one forward.”

  Damned if the fortune cookie logic isn’t starting to make sense to me now.

  “So I wait. The wind is at my back, pushing me to go on, but I should… lie patiently, waiting for the right time.”

  “And you have friends here, Mr. Jack. You are not as alone as you think.”

  Twenty-Five

  Edgar transfers back to us a couple weeks later. I pick him up at the airport, taking over for the cute, dark-haired flight attendant who’s pushing his wheelchair. The first thing he tells me is that he’ll be walking again very soon, and that he needs a double-pepperoni pizza, Chicago-style.

  Weeks before, one day after I flew in all by my lonesome, Felix sent his cutthroat lawyer over to the prosecutor’s office on Saipan. (Felix: my other surrogate father, and Edgar’s too, apparently.)

  The lawyer’s story went something like this:

  Edgar, a popular figure in the casino for the two days he was there, was invited by the now deceased Ms. Ming to join her and her bodyguard for a drink in their hotel room. Unbeknownst to Edgar, he had been followed by a Mr. Petey Jackson, also now deceased, a known criminal with a violent record, who intended to rob and murder the three of them. Edgar pulled his .22 caliber pistol, kept for self-defense whenever gambling abroad, and Ming’s bodyguard drew a .38 caliber revolver. Both fired on the sinister Mr. Jackson, killing him, but not before he shot Edgar and Ms. Ming. The mysterious bodyguard, panicked and driven mad by the death of his secret lover, and in a fit of emotional agony, threw himself through the glass terrace door and over the balcony. This man—the only person who might dispute such a story—had yet to turn up. He was likely also the man who later set a fire in the basement and assaulted a couple of security guards.

  Just in case that story didn’t satisfy, the lawyer added that if the Saipan government insisted on pursuing his victimized client with criminal charges, both the prosecutor’s office and the Dynasty Casino would feel the full wrath of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit for damages against his person.

  The prosecutor, an inexperienced man serving a quiet little commonwealth, decided not to pursue the case.

  Twenty-Six

  Edgar makes it home in time for the sale that he nearly died to make possible.

  We’re in the factory parking lot, hanging out with Rummy while he smokes his menthol cigarettes. I’m sipping a cup of coffee from the local doughnut shop and Eddie is in his wheelchair, giving us the exaggerated details of his heroic Tinian odyssey for the fifth or sixth time. Neither Rummy nor myself are really listening anymore.

  “So, I hear you have a date tomorrow night,” Rummy tells me.

  “Yeah, I let Swan talk me into taking out his niece. I figured, what the hell?”

  “Is she cute?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Are you guys listening to me?” Edgar demands.

  “Oh, hey, I almost forgot.” Rummy pulls a square envelope, unevenly bent in half, from his back pocket and hands it to me. My name, and the name and address of the Caterina Playing Card Factory, are written in a feminine hand across the front. There’s no return address and it’s got international postage on the corner.

  “Who the hell would know to write me here?” I wonder aloud.

  “That’s what me and Felix wanted to know,” Rummy says. “Felix don’t like it much.”

  “Well, I sure as hell didn’t tell anyone to send me shit here. Maybe it’s a nice apology from Jerry and the boys,” I joke.

  “Hello?” Edgar calls. “Injured hero, here. I’m about to get to the good part.”

  I set my paper cup of coffee on the asphalt and stick my thumb inside the fold of the envelope, raking it across.

  “Okay, I see how it is. When they make a movie of my life, you can forget me getting Steven McQueen to play your part, Jack. Tom Selleck, of course,” Edgar mumbles, mostly to himself now, “still gets to play me, though.”

  “I’m pretty sure Steve McQueen is dead,” Rummy tells him.

  To which Edgar defiantly cries, “Steve McQueen can never die!”

  I’m too busy with my mail to pay them much attention. Inside is a card with an Asian-style tiger on the front: bright orange body, black striped, green eyes, pink tongue. There are blue clouds and a red, multi-tiered pagoda in the background.

  The Legend of Edgar picks up where he left off, about to seduce his third beautiful siren.

  Rummy gestures toward the street while flicking his cigarette ash. “Here comes the buyer.”

  A black Lexus coasts down the middle of the big empty parking lot and pulls up in front of us. The back door opens and a venerable old Chinese gentleman begins to climb out. His beard is white and wispy and hangs as low as his waistline. His suit looks expensive, dark green and shiny. A kid pops out of the driver’s seat—far too young to be driving—and hurries around to assist his master.

  The way this guy’s moving, I have plenty of time to finish my mail call.

  I open the card and something falls out: two things, actually, both thin like paper. One flops to the blacktop, the other tumbling more slowly on the air, like a folded butterfly. Printed inside the card are several Chinese characters. Beneath them, in English, is the same woman’s handwriting:

  Happy New Year! Come celebrate the Year of the Tiger with me.

&n
bsp; Beijing. Emperor Hotel.

  You’ll love the parade. And I know where we can find eight more friends.

  There’s no signature.

  I bend down for the lost items. The flat one is a playing card, now face down. I hesitate to retrieve it. Too ominous. But, of course, I pick it up anyway.

  It’s a queen of hearts, holding a feather.

  The lost scrap of paper is folded into quarters, which I undo. Drawn on it are eight dominoes bearing shaded lines of yin and yang, sketched by a skilled hand in green pencil. The white highlights indicate polished stone, like jade.

  Rummy takes a long final drag on his cigarette, flicks the smoldering butt away, and goes to hold the factory door. The buyer ambles on slowly, a cane in one hand and the kid holding the other, encumbered by terrible posture and a hump on his back. After what seems like a painfully long walk, he eventually reaches the door and Rummy follows them in.

  “You ever see that Bugs Bunny cartoon?” Edgar asks me, smoothing his mustache with thumb and forefinger. “The one where they race? You know what that old papa-San would be if he were an animal?” Edgar curls up in his chair as if he were a humpback himself. “A turtle.”

  “No, Tortoise,” I say, staring at the door.

  “What’s the difference?”

  I look at the cards in my hands.

  “Ancient magic.”

  THE END

  APPENDICES: AUTHOR’S REFLECTIONS

  Waking in the Dark

  Afterword to A Long Walk

  I wish now, reflecting in 2017, that that would have been the title of the book: Waking in the Dark.

  Maybe with cover art resembling the eight or nine of swords (can’t remember which), the tarot card with a man sitting up panicked from a nightmare in bed and foretelling terrible things.

  I’ll save that for another small collection of horror at a later time. I already have some stories in mind, waiting impatiently to be written.

  The following afterword is what I wrote the first time A Long Walk was published in 2012, and it’s still just as valid, no matter the book’s title. (After all, I wouldn’t remember all this stuff today. My memory just isn’t that good.)

  Enjoy

  Two of these stories were deliberate.

  One was an accident.

  Well, as much of an accident as natural, unexpected inspiration is accidental.

  I’ve been carrying around quite a few stories over the years, revising and reprinting them, lugging drafts from one home to the next in big manila envelopes stacked inside worn-out cardboard boxes with the corners chewed out (not chewed by me, I hope). These three tales you’ve just read, however, are actually relatively new.

  New being less than four years old.

  Both deliberate stories came about on the same night, while I was living in a small but cozy one-bedroom apartment in Carlsbad, California, and stationed at the Naval Hospital on Marine Base Camp Pendleton.

  This location of origin, for those who know me, puts it in perspective as to just how recent this is, my having been in the Navy once for a four-year stretch and then out and then—five years and five relocations later—back into the Navy.

  So at this point, late in 2008, I hadn’t been in California very long and as my character Paul can tell you—as can anyone who travels alone very often—being new in town kind of sucks. You don’t really know anyone and you probably don’t go out much because nobody wants to hit the town by themselves.

  This is especially bad for guys, as being the solitary weirdo sitting at the bar draws an automatic stigma (creepy pervert) from anyone you might think to talk to.

  Of course, this isn’t always true. Some social butterflies can pull it off, and when you’re young it’s easier to find others your age to hit the town with. But when you’re older, all your peers are married with children, leaving you to play the role of creepy pervert all by yourself. That lone figure sipping his beer at the end of the bar watching people come in.

  Yeah, even typing that and imagining the scene makes me think you’re a predatory weirdo, and this is all just hypothetical!

  But anyway...

  This bored and lonely period of being new and friendless in town is both good and bad for a writer: it gives you plenty of time to write, since you’re not doing much of anything else, but you don’t feel much like writing ‘cause you’d rather be out in the world living a life than sitting alone in your apartment in front of the computer.

  So one such Saturday night I had gone to bed early and, for some unknown reason, awoke in the middle of the night.

  As I traveled light in those days, my bedroom didn’t have much to it: a mattress and box spring on the floor, a dresser older than myself that I’d gotten from my aunt Jane when I helped her move, and the same digital alarm clock I’ve had since grade school. The moon was bright that night and shined in through the window above me.

  When I woke up and rolled over, the red digits on my clock read 5:23 am.

  I lay in the relative dark with my eyes open, thinking. Writing came to mind, probably me telling myself that I should be doing something constructive with all this downtime I had with no social life. And hell, I wasn’t sleeping so maybe I should just get up and get to work.

  First I thought I should dig out some of my old stories and try running them through the magazine gauntlet again.

  Then my critical inner voice said, What’s the point? They’re all sissy stories, that’s why no one wants them.

  (Writers, like all creative folks, are very self-critical.)

  It seemed to me that all my work to that point had been awfully fluffy and too touchy-feely. Even if people were killed in some violent way, it was superficial violence, the stuff you see in comic books or a TV movie. I didn’t write adult material, I shied away from sex or anything really intimate or significant. Not that casual and/or meaningless sex is intimate or significant in some existential way, but at least it’s something visceral that happens in real life, in the Real World. How could someone write realistic adult characters avoid realistic adult subjects?

  Laying there in the dark, I was suddenly determined not to hide from that anymore. I wanted to take it head-on.

  Could I even write about sex?

  Maybe I was afraid of it, like a shy teenager.

  Well, fuck that wimpy kid, I told myself. I was going to break out of that PG-13 bubble with some high explosive shit!

  Well... Maybe not high explosive shit.

  I don’t have the chops to write erotica or porn or anything like that.

  (I wish I did. Those people probably make good money.)

  And I’m not exactly saying that these stories found here-in are deep or profound or speak to what it means to be an adult or anything like that. They’re just good fun.

  But what I am saying is, it was about time my characters grew some balls and actually used them for something!

  And so began the sexual experiments.

  In my writing, that is. Not in life. (Sadly.)

  In that dark room, I then and there gave myself an assignment: to deliberately write a story that had at least a sex scene in it, maybe even completely centered around carnal savagery in some way. It was the only way to be sure I could write beyond the PG-13 barrier.

  And it’s amazing what a half-dreaming mind is capable of. In just a few minutes I had the beginnings of what would become both “Lonely” and “Eating in the Underworld.”

  From my perspective on the mattress, I imagined Paul tearing desperately out of the bedroom, slamming against the walls, and rounding the corners of my apartment in clumsy terror, fleeing from the girl he’d brought home in the drunken hopes of staving off his loneliness as the new boy in town.

  I also figured that, short of using some specialized accessories you order under a false name, a blowjob was about as deep into the realm of raw animal pleasures as you could get into. Or at least it was just about the very last thing you should bring up in front of your grandparents at Thanksg
iving dinner. So I also needed a story for that.

  The vampire chick might just bite it off in the middle of the act, so better to have a second story…

  I imagined some fat slob with a slave kept just for that dirty duty. Then the slave idea was softened just a little by becoming someone he had created for the task. And then, naturally, he became the bad guy of the story, so I would need a good guy. (Because no story should feature someone like that as its hero—it’s like Harry says: “Good ole Gene. Still an asshole.”). And “Doll” grew from there.

  I say “Doll” because the original title of the story was “The Doll Business.”

  A year or two later, while my story was still making rounds at magazines trying to get picked up, Joss Whedon came out with his short-lived TV show “Doll House” which starred a hot chick called Echo. In “The Doll Business” Seph’s name was originally Echo, named for her model series and to give Harry a glimpse at her similar humanity.

  (Harry: “What are you?” Echo: “Echo.”)

  Of course, with that new show combining the words doll and echo and broadcasting them out to the sci-fi masses from fan-favorite and nerd guru Joss Whedon, my story was no longer viable.

  As manuscripts came back rejected from editors, I tossed them into a box, still in their return envelopes.

  Getting this story published was a long shot to begin with and now it was a copyright suit waiting to happen.

  “Doll” was dead.

  Time passed.

  One day, I was turning that old story around in my head, flipping it over and checking its underbelly, trying to find a new angle on it and a way to bring it back from the dead. I basically just needed new name and new title, but these changes had to fit well, too. Somehow I came up with Persephone. My brain began to see some literary connections there.