Acceleration

by Graham McNamee

  Jacob rings the bell. We reunite a woman with her bowling ball. I grab a cup of water at the cooler and pop a painkiller.

  “You made all the papers,” Jacob says, not looking up from his word jumble.

  I swallow. “Five weeks of pain for fifteen minutes of fame.”

  He circles a word with his pen. “So why’d you come back?”

  I lean my cast on the cooler's jug. Good question. I don’t need the money that bad. But escaping the oven of my apartment for the cooler air underground, that's a real incentive.

  “Don’t know,” I say. “What would you do without me?”

  “Get some peace and quiet.”

  I shrug, saying, “You can get that when you’re dead.”

  My words hang in the air a long time, like stones I’ve tossed into the bottomless pit of Jacob. I wait for a sign that they’ve hit something. He focuses on the blank wall straight ahead. Hard to say what thoughts are passing behind those eyes. Jacob would make a great statue.

  Why I try, I don’t know.

  But then—

  “Guess so,” he mumbles, so low I almost miss it.

  I’m stunned. This is the closest we’ve ever been to actually having a conversation.

  I think of saying something more. But I leave it at that, with my small victory. He heard me. And for once he didn’t brush me off.

  Walking into the stacks, I take my post and lean back. The morgue is quiet today. Like every day. We’ve both been doing our time down here. My sentence is almost up. Jacob might just be a lifer.

  But I’ve still got a couple more weeks to work on him.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “What are we doing here?” Vinny asks. “I thought we were going for Slurpees.”

  We’re standing at the fence that surrounds the pool in Amesbury Park. It's after midnight, and the crickets are rioting in the grass, filling the air with an electric buzz.

  “Later. Let's go for a dip. I’m dying in this heat,” I say. “If I don’t get some relief I’m going to spontaneously combust.”

  “Man, that's a myth. People don’t just burst into flames.”

  “Wait a couple minutes and I'll make a believer out of you.”

  These are the dog days of August, when the air is so still that the air you breathe out is the air you breathe back in again.

  “Go ahead. But make it quick,” Vin says.

  “You’re coming with me.”

  “You know I don’t swim.”

  “You don’t swim when people are staring at you. Ain’t nobody here but you and me, and I can barely see you.”

  All I can make out are shadows around us. There's only a flicker of street light that makes it through the trees, reflecting off the pool. In the dark, the only thing that stands out is my cast. It's so white it seems to glow.

  Vinny looks at the fence, looks at me. “Just how hard did you get hit in the head?”

  “Hard enough,” I say.

  “Anyway, I can’t climb that.”

  The fence is eight feet high, the links at the top bent over from years of late-night trespassers.

  “If I can climb it with one arm, you can too,” I tell him.

  It's a struggle, and it isn’t pretty with my useless left arm, but I manage to make it up and over. My right arm is pretty much back to normal, but the long red scar throbs and itches sometimes. I drop the last few feet to the pool deck by the deep end, wincing at the way the impact makes my head pound. The migraines have died down, but I still get the occasional flare-up.

  “Nice dismount,” Vin says.

  I kick off my shoes and slip off my socks. “Let's see you try.”

  He takes a minute to plan his climb before he starts, making calculations in that massive brain of his. His dismount is smoother, just to show me up.

  “I don’t know, man,” he says. “I didn’t bring a swimsuit.”

  I test the water temperature with my toes. “Warm but sweet.”

  “You going to swim in your jeans?” he asks.

  I drop my pants in response, then throw off my T-shirt.

  “You strip naked and I’m out of here,” he says.

  “I'll keep my briefs on,” I assure him. “Don’t want to make you feel inadequate.”

  “What about your cast?”

  From my pants pocket I pull out a plastic Safeway bag and some elastic bands. “Be prepared. That's the Boy Scout motto.”

  “Really? I thought it was ‘You gotta fight for your right to party.’ “

  “No, that was the Beastie Boy scout motto.”

  I stick my left arm in the bag and fix the bands really tight, for a waterproof seal. Meanwhile, Vinny strips down to his underwear and a long-sleeved sweatshirt.

  “You try and swim in that and you'll sink like a rock,” I tell him.

  “Look the other way. I don’t need an audience.”

  I leave him to his slow striptease, stepping up to the edge and jumping into the deep end. In daylight, the water is a bright chlorine blue. But in the dark, the water changes to a deeper blue, mirroring the night sky.

  I told Vin a half-lie back there when I said I was here to get some heat relief. I was feeling combustible, but the real reason I’m here lies down at the bottom of the pool.

  The cast makes me awkward. I can only stroke with my right arm. I move out into the middle of the deep end. Taking a deep breath, I dive.

  Weeks ago, on the scorching day I was here with Wayne, the darkness that came over me underwater was all in my head. Now the dark is real. It's so black, it leaves me blind. I push down, stroking deeper, until my hands touch bottom. Then I just hang there, waiting. My eyes are wide but useless.

  After almost a minute, my lungs start to protest.

  I wait for them. For the screams I’ve been hearing, awake and asleep, this last year, echoing inside my head. I hang still, weightless.

  But it's so quiet right now, like the whole world has stopped between breaths. My lungs start to burn. I sweep my arms out over the bottom, searching for contact, terrified of finding it. But there's nothing. Only empty water and silence.

  My lungs are starving. Can’t hold out any longer.

  I whisper a silent Sorry. Then I kick off for the surface.

  She's not here anymore. Her screams have faded away to nothing. I guess even echoes have to die sometime.

  Breaking through, I suck in the night air. By the side of the deep end, Vinny's hanging on to the ladder with his chin just above the surface. I stroke over to him.

  My oldest memory is a blurry one, of dog-paddling in shallow water, breathing the smell of chlorine. It must be from those baby swims Mom took me on before I could even walk. Sometimes when the water's warm, like now, I can’t even tell where my skin ends and the water begins. I was born to swim.

  “Man,” Vinny says when I grab hold of the ladder beside him. “You were down there so long I thought you were never coming up again.”

  Quietly, I say, “She's not there.”

  “Who's not where?”

  “You know, the girl. Maya. She's not down there anymore.”

  Vinny gives me a worried look, but then he nods. “That's good, man. Let her sleep.”

  “Yeah.”

  I look out over the calm dark water and whisper, “ ‘Night.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Graham McNamee. Male Caucasian. 5’102. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Do not approach. Extremely shy. Author of: Hate You, Nothing Wrong with a Three-Legged Dog, and Sparks. Hate You was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and an ALA Quick Pick, won the Austrian Children's Book Award, and was nominated for the Governor General's Award. Sparks won the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship.

  Born and raised in Toronto, McNamee has been sighted in Vancouver. Present whereabouts unknown.

  If you had found the diary, what would you have done?

  Duncan's summer job sounds awful and depressing; he works underground for most of the day. What other horrible summer jobs can you think o
f? What do you think would be a good summer job?

  Duncan works in a lost and found, surrounded by other people's belongings. Have you ever lost something important to you? Did you eventually get it back?

  Duncan and his friends, Vinny and Wayne, are all very different from each other. How does their friendship work?

  Where do you think Duncan, Wayne, and Vinny will be four years from now?

  Why do you think the police ignore Duncan's pleas to look into the diary? Is it because he's a kid? What would you have done in Duncan's situation?

  Do people like Roach really exist? Why would someone act that way?

  People tell Duncan, Don’t be a hero.” What do they mean by that?

  Q. What inspired you to write this story?

  A. I love a good suspense novel. So I thought I’d set one where I grew up, with the kind of slacker guys I hung with, and give them the impossible task of hunting down an anonymous psychopath. Sort of like What I did on my summer vacation” meets Silence of the Lambs. I wanted it to read like a movie, real visual and atmospheric, and to be something you could sink into, like quicksand.

  Q. Tell us about your writing habits.

  A. I usually write from midnight to four in the morning. Why? I don’t know. I get to feeling guilty for wasting the day doing nothing, so I make myself sit down, shut up, and just write something. I write on the computer, mainly because I can’t read my own handwriting.

  Q. Did working on this book make you feel differently about the subway?

  A. My buds and I used to hang out in the subway when we were young and bored. We’d do dumb stuff, like run from one platform across the tracks to the other side. We didn’t know about the third rail back then, the one that carries the electrical current and will fry you to ashes if you touch it. And we’d dare each other to run down the tunnel to the next station. (Don’t try this at home, unless you want to get flattened into an idiot pancake.) Years later, when I was working downtown, I had to ride the subway during rush hour. Packed so tight you couldn’t move, me and the rest of the workforce drones would wait on the platform for the next train. A lot of times I’d be standing at the front, my toes inches from the edge, and I’d think how easy it would be for someone to just give me a little shove, nothing conspicuous, and push me over the edge. Staring across at the platform on the other side, I tried to figure if I could squeeze in that little space under the edge. And every time, as the train rushed in, I’d feel a tiny tug of vertigo, like I was starting to fall. But I never did feel that hand on my back, pushing me over. And I never found out if I’d fit under the edge.

  Q. Did you always know how Acceleration was going to end?

  A. I knew the ending before I knew the beginning. I had the death scene in my head for months before I wrote it down, replaying it over and over so I got the choreography of it just right.

  Q. The guys in Acceleration live in an apartment complex called the Jungle. Is this based on an actual place?

  A. The Jungle is real. It's located right on the edge of an industrial area in Toronto. There are factories, breweries, and a steel mill nearby. The city dump is two blocks away. It was a fun place for us to grow up, a great urban wilderness to adventure in. We’d raid the factory Dumpsters for stuff like defective rolls of decals and half-melted toy soldiers. Stuff nobody wanted but us. At the dump we’d do target practice with my buds’ pellet guns. We didn’t go down in the sewers much, but there were big runoff drains where you could squeeze through the bars and go exploring underground. (One little note: rolled-up newspapers make bad torches—they burn fast and wild, and it takes months for your eyebrows to grow back.)

  Q. This was your first thriller. How did writing it compare to your other, very different books?

  A. Tough question. I mean, after I write a novel and it comes out in stores, I always shake my head and say— Man, I wrote a book?” I’m pretty clueless how I wrote those other novels. All my stuff is told in first person, and I have to really get in the character's head to nail their voice so it sounds true. Once the book is done, the voice is gone. Kind of like an exorcism. Acceleration is darker and more intense than the others, and setting it where I grew up was kind of like going back home again, and waking up the ghosts.

  A. Probably the animal mutilation stuff. I’m one of those freak vegetarians who won’t even eat eggs or dairy. I avoid honey because I’m never sure the bees are being treated nicely enough. So writing about this psycho who tortures small, furry creatures haunted me for a while.

  Q. How much rewriting and revising do you do?

  A. Endless rewrites. Sometimes the first draft is total garbage. I shred the pages, then burn them to ashes and bury them deep in the forest where nobody will ever find them. But I keep going, and eventually I come up with a decent sentence, then a catchy chunk of dialogue. And kind of by accident it starts to look like something. It's sort of like a blind guy building a house.

  Q. How much research do you have to do before writing a book? Where do you do this research?

  A. I used to work at a library, where I’d spend half my shift hiding in the stacks, hunting down details for some new story. Then I’d get hopelessly lost on the Internet searching for things that don’t exist. But I gotta tell you, research sucks. Too much work. You know how at the beginning of some mystery/suspense/thrillers the author will have these acknowledgments” where they thank all the people who helped them get the details right? They'll mention people like doctors, historians, lawyers, and cops. Well, I ain’t got those kinds of connections. The only people I know are white trash like me. So if I have questions about scrubbing toilets, working at McDonald's, or defrauding Unemployment Insurance, then I’m in luck. Otherwise, I’m on my own. And screwed.

  Q. Are any of the characters in Acceleration based on real people?

  A. It's more like I tossed a bunch of my buds into a blender and then saw what stuck together. There was a kid I knew with a deformed arm who was really smart and crafty, like Vinny. But this was one angry guy, and hanging out with him was like leaning on barbed wire. There were a couple of Waynes, basically criminal but easygoing guys, who like Wayne never did a crime that had a face.” And Duncan? Well, I guess he's me. The hero, of course. Only he's got more balls, and he's way less moody than me.

  Q. Roach is such a scary, awful character. How did you think him up?

  A. Roach came from research into the dark places twisted people go to feed their deviant desires. I had to read a bunch of ugly stuff about these grotesque personalities to bring Roach to life. That kind of stuff leaves a stain on your soul. You know, once you see something you can’t un-see it. You just have to make sure you kill that Roach scuttling around in your head when the book is done, before it becomes an infestation.

  Q. This could be considered a pretty violent story. What do you think about violence and the world we live in today?

  A. I guess it's a violent book. I mean, people get brutally beaten, cut, drowned, and run over by a subway. But still, come on, there were some laughs. It wasn’t all death and disfigurement. Seriously, I’m not really smart enough to say anything about violence and society. I mean, what do I know? Except maybe this—there's a dark place in the human heart that can go undiscovered your whole life, where an animal capacity for violence lives. Maybe it's hidden in that oldest reptilian core of our brains— the instinct that to fight is to live another day, to kill is to survive. But seriously, what do I know?

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