Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

“I’m not going to hassle you,” Renny begins. He’s doing his best to keep his hands still. His hands want to reach out and touch me. To pat me on my head. To shake my hand. Something. He swallows and smiles: “It really is an honor to meet you.”

  I give him my best Author-On-Book-Tour-Meets-A-Fan smile. It’s the smile that says: “You know more about me than I know about myself because reading my book is like reading my diary and I’m afraid that you’ll say something that cuts me to the bone and makes me break down into tears . . . but let’s not make this awkward.”

  “That book of yours,” Renny continues, “you wouldn’t believe how much it . . . well . . . the amount of impact it had on . . .” He swallows and wipes the corner of his eye. “It’s . . . it’s just something,” he says.

  “It’s a hell of a book,” I say.

  “A hell of a book,” Renny confirms.

  Then we shake hands and Renny turns the handshake into a hug and, for a moment, I don’t really mind. Maybe it’s residual mood enhancement left over from the special brownies I had the night before in whatever town that was, or maybe it just feels good sometimes to be hugged by a stranger. Whatever the reason, I don’t pull away from it. I realize right then, right there, in the arms of this strange old man, that I’m alone and have been for years and probably will be for the rest of my life and if he holds me for a second longer, I’m going to break down into tears right here in the middle of this airport and there isn’t anything anyone will be able to do to stop me.

  * * *

  —

  Outside the airport, Renny leads me to a long, black limousine. He opens the door and I get in the back and find the little Black boy from breakfast several cities ago sitting on the other side of the seat, flashing that impossibly dark skin and that impossibly bright grin of his.

  “Uh . . . hello,” I say, offering up a smile of my own.

  “Hey,” The Kid says, waving that dark hand of his. “What’s up?”

  “Not much,” I say. “Would you excuse me for a moment?”

  The Kid nods. “Yeah. Do your thing.”

  I turn my attention to Renny. “Renny?”

  “Yeah?” Renny says. He looks worried. He looks confused. Maybe even a little afraid. Like he’s just watched a grown man talking to someone who wasn’t there. I’ve seen this look before over the course of my life.

  “So it’s just me and you for this trip, right, Renny?”

  “What?”

  “It’s silly, I know. But just play along, if you don’t mind. It’s just you and me making the rounds today, right? Nobody else riding along on this ride?” I very gently tilt my head in the direction of the back seat of the limousine. I’ve done this before. It’s an old trick. The key to it is to tilt my head just enough that it makes him look at the person or thing that could be a figment of my imagination, and yet, I don’t want to commit too hard to the tilt. That way, if the boy in the back seat is real, he’ll let me know and we can move forward without me seeming like too much of a weirdo. And if the boy is just something my imagination has produced, I can deny the nod and he’ll spend the rest of the night wondering if he’s crazy instead of wondering if I’m crazy.

  It’s an elaborate system, but it works.

  Renny leans down and looks inside the car, then lifts his head again. “It’s just you and me,” he says slowly, evenly. It’s the tone one takes around dogs you don’t know and people who have taken too much medication.

  I stick my head back inside the car and close my eyes once. The Kid is still there with that dark skin and he waves with a hint of mischievousness.

  “You okay?” Renny asks.

  “Fine,” I say. “Just fine. This limo have a partition?”

  “It does,” Renny answers.

  “Good,” I say. “I’m probably going to ride with it up for a while. I usually don’t do that because I think it makes me feel like a snob or something. But it’s been a long flight and—”

  Renny waves me away. “Don’t bother explaining,” he says. “I understand. I’ve been driving this car for ten years. I know how it goes. I used to ride in limos and I’ve been there.”

  I want to ask how Renny went from riding in limos to driving them. There’s a backstory there, and backstories are where the real stuff is. But Renny’s backstory will have to wait a little while.

  I get in the car, shut the door, raise the partition, and I lean into the adventure that lies ahead.

  * * *

  —

  “Okay, kid,” I begin.

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “I don’t doubt that at all, Kid. So you want to go ahead and tell me a little bit about yourself?”

  The Kid clucks a laugh. “Man, don’t you want to know why that other guy couldn’t see me?” There’s a clear note of pride in The Kid’s voice, like he’s fooled the whole world but can’t stand not letting somebody in on his secret. Luckily for him, I already know his secret.

  “I already know why he couldn’t see you.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course, Kid. I’m not new to this. I been around the block a few times in my life. I’ve set fire to the starlight before.”

  “You talk weird.”

  “You’re not the first person to tell me that.” I lay my head back on the headrest and close my eyes. Sometimes that makes my daydreams recede. Sometimes it doesn’t. “That’s a nice accent you got there. Sounds like the South. North Carolina, even.”

  “How’d you know?” he says. He’s trying to hide the lilt all of a sudden, but failing at it.

  “Because I know my own. I’m from North Cakalak.”

  “You don’t sound like it.”

  “Trained it out of myself.”

  “Why?”

  I open my eyes and take a long look at the kid. His smile has dimmed a bit, as if there’s something on his mind, something to do with why I talk the way I talk. But I’m not going there now.

  “Well,” The Kid says, “don’t feel bad about that guy not being able to see me. It’s just that—”

  “I know.”

  “You know what?”

  “I already know why he couldn’t see you.”

  “Think so?”

  “Yeah. You’re not real.”

  The Kid’s eyebrows take a confused dive. Then he laughs. Long and hard. The laughter pours out of his dark neck and washes over his bright teeth and it is the sound of every good thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I wish this kid could laugh forever. “I’m not real?” he asks when he finally stops laughing long enough to speak.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “You don’t have to be real to matter. I mean, it helps, but it’s not a requirement.”

  Again The Kid laughs. “Why am I not real?”

  “Because I have a condition. I see things. People too. They say it’s a sort of escape valve for pressure on the mind, probably caused by some sort of trauma. But I don’t go in on that. I haven’t had any type of trauma in my life. I mean, yeah, I’ve had my fair share of bad luck, but nothing big. Nothing worthy of a Lifetime network movie or anything like that. Know what I mean?”

  “Haha! Nah. That ain’t it. Seeing stuff that’s not there . . . that’s what crazy people do. And you ain’t crazy.”

  “It’s always good when a figment of your own imagination reassures you that you’re not crazy.”

  “Nah, that’s not what I mean,” The Kid says. He reaches over and drives his knuckle into my arm. “I mean I’m real. So you ain’t crazy. If I thought I was seeing things that weren’t really there, it would probably freak me out. No, it would definitely freak me out.”

  I sigh. I’ve got a headache and my mouth feels like cotton ass. I’m not hydrated enough for this particular daydream. “Okay, Kid. I’ll bite. You’re real. Sure. So why couldn’t Renny see you? That’s what you w
ant me to ask you, right?”

  “Because I can be invisible when I want to.”

  Now it’s my turn to laugh. “Oh. Okay. That makes a lot more sense. That really puts the cheese on the burger.”

  “No, really,” The Kid replies gently. “I have this gift. If I want somebody to see me, they can. And if I don’t want somebody to see me, they can’t. Pretty cool, right?”

  “Yeah. Real cool.”

  I wish I had a drink right now. It always makes me want to drink when my daydreams try to convince me that they’re real. It’s always simpler when a person who doesn’t exist just admits that they don’t exist. “So, you’re some new kind of superhero, I guess. The Invisible Kid—here to save the invisible day!”

  “Yeah,” the boy says brightly. “I never really thought about it like that, but I think that’s pretty dope. Like I can be here one moment, and then not here the next. Whenever I want. Nobody can see, or hear, or even touch me if I don’t want them to.” Something akin to pride creeps into his voice, but it’s a hollow sort of pride. It’s the pride of someone who’s rarely proud of anything. It’s the type of pride that can be knocked over with a feather, and so it rarely gets to shine in the face of the world. The little Black kid flashes those impossibly white teeth at me and he laughs and then he covers his smile and quells the laughter like Miss Celie used to do, and I know that he’s spent his entire life being afraid to be happy.

  “I’m sorry, Kid,” I say, leaning back.

  “What are you sorry for?” The Kid asks.

  “For whatever trauma of mine led you here,” I reply. And before I know it, everything and all of it hits, and I’m asleep.

  * * *

  —

  “You know, you seem pretty odd, even for a fiction author.” Renny carves the car through the highway traffic like a hot knife. “Most of the fiction authors I meet are fairly ridiculous. Pure weirdos. But you’re on a different level. Where did you go to school?”

  “Actually I went to the University of—”

  “Wait! A state college?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m sorry,” Renny says. “I’ll use smaller words,” he says with a small grin.

  I sit up and look out of the window, watching the city slide by around me. “I don’t think I’ve been to San Francisco before, Renny.” I sit back and close my eyes. “It looks beautiful, though. A marvel of the civilized world.” I burp, and it tastes like airline bourbon.

  “You look pretty drunk,” Renny says.

  “Drunk’s a moving target,” I reply. “Just a state of being, like water, or steam, or financial solvency. To be drunk is simply to define a moment. And since every moment has already passed by the time we’re able to actually register its existence, can a person ever truly be drunk? I’m pretty sure that’s in the Bible, Renny.”

  “Must be one of those state college Bibles.”

  “That’s neither here nor there,” I say. Then: “What’s on the itinerary, Renny?”

  Renny reaches into the passenger seat beside him and looks it over. “Five radio spots. Two television interviews. And then the bookstore event this evening.”

  I sit forward and peek into the small minibar in the back of Renny’s car. “We’re gonna need a bigger bar.”

  * * *

  —

  The radio interviews come and go with the same cadence of questions and answers. “So,” they say, “what’s your book about?”

  And then I lay it all on them. Give them the same beautiful narrative that I give every other interviewer I ever speak to. And then they smile and ask a few solid follow-up questions. And then I smile and give a few solid follow-up answers. And all the while, Renny is right there with me like a faithful sidekick. Getting a media escort when you’re out on tour isn’t a groundbreaking affair. In fact, it’s a tried-and-true tradition. The media escort’s job is to herd the cat—you—from one location to the other and to make sure that you’re everywhere you need to be whenever you need to be there.

  But Renny is the type of guy who goes the extra mile. Case in point:

  We make it to the television studio after all of the radio interviews are done. The studio is a large, sprawling maze of cubicles, and floors, and desks, and stairs, and the fact that I’ve already nearly cleaned out Renny’s minibar did nothing to help make Daedalus’s maze any more navigable.

  But there is Renny. Right there beside me the whole way.

  At one point, we walk into the room just before you go into the interview room and we sit and wait for our turn to go on while a receptionist sits at her desk and plasters the wall behind her with Post-it notes. Only these aren’t the random, odd assembly of Post-it notes like you might expect. Not at all. It takes me a while to notice, but the woman is actually creating something on the wall behind her. She has three different colors of Post-it notes and is positioning them with the most meticulous precision I have ever seen.

  And the longer I stare at the wall of Post-it notes, the more I begin to understand that I’m not just staring at a wall of notes, I’m staring at something greater than that.

  The Post-its blend and bleed into one another, slicing out the silhouette of a castle—Gothic and grand—perched upon a cliff, dangling over a breaking sea. Violet sky. Ebon stone. A salty sea of paper and dye fluttering in the blow of an approaching storm.

  It’s a glorious thing. An honest-to-God work of art. And I wonder if anyone else can see it. These kinds of things go unnoticed by too much of the world, in my opinion.

  I sit there with Renny at my side and all of Renny’s alcohol in my bloodstream and I stare at the Post-its. How many hours it must have taken to create such a thing, I can’t honestly say. Anything worthwhile takes time. Maybe that’s what time is for: to give meaning to the things we do; to create a context in which we can linger in something until, finally, we have given it something invaluable, something that we can never get back: time. And once we’ve invested the most precious commodity that we will ever have, it suddenly has meaning and importance. So maybe time is just how we measure meaning. Maybe time is how we best measure love.

  Finally, someone sticks their head out of the back of the TV studio and calls my name. Renny and I stand and make our way toward the studio door and, without really trying, I manage to walk directly into the wall. Maybe I’m more intoxicated than I thought. Luckily, Renny’s a good man. He catches me before I hit the ground and props me up and steers me into the studio without so much as a hint of judgment.

  After the television interview has come and gone—more of the usual question-and-answer periods—we’re back in Renny’s limousine headed to the next destination. But I can feel Renny’s eyes watching me in the rearview mirror.

  “You making it okay, State College?” Renny asks.

  Even though I’m awake, I’m not really able to answer. The words are in my head but they don’t seem to be able to make it to my mouth.

  Renny stares at me for another second in the mirror. Then, without ever taking his eyes away from the mirror, snatches the steering wheel so that the back of the car whips for a second. I’m thrown across the back seat and bang my head against the door. A shocking experience, but at least I’m able to speak now.

  “It’s a wonderful book!” I exclaim. “I had a terrific time writing it. It’s about . . .” I’m reflexively in interview mode, answering questions about my book that even I don’t fully know the answers to.

  But before I can finish the sentence, my stomach makes a sound like a hell beast and I’m not completely sure there isn’t one tucked down inside there.

  “You okay?” Renny asks.

  But I’ve got no time for queries just now. I’m able to get the rear window down just in time to vomit all over the expressway. I manage to keep it off of Renny’s car—thanks to my profound understanding of aerodynamics—but the brand-new Ford Fusion zoom
ing along behind us is at the right place at the right time to get the full brunt of it. As the spray hits their windshield, the old couple inside the car look aghast—but maybe also a little understanding. They seem like nice people as their pearl-white automobile is plastered with 98.6-degree, salmon-colored bile.

  They take it like a pair of heroes.

  Not to be outdone by their magnanimous nature, I tuck my head back inside the car—after the eruption has ended, of course—and I grab a copy of my book. I sign it and stick my head back out the window just as our two cars pull up to a stoplight. I toss the freshly autographed Hell of a Book at their windshield. Then I offer a hearty thumbs-up and mouth the words “You’re welcome.”

  The couple in the bile-splattered Ford Fusion smile. The old man gives me a salute.

  * * *

  —

  Next thing I know, we’re at the bookstore for the evening’s reading. Renny parks the car and I can feel him watching me in the mirror again. Renny reminds me of my mother. All that affection and worry. To be honest, it’s not a bad feeling. Just one I haven’t felt in so long that I’ve forgotten what it honestly feels like.

  The door suddenly opens and Renny is there. Exactly how he got from the front seat to my door without my noticing, I can’t exactly say. But I’m also not in my most sober and knowledgeable state of being right now. So I’m in no position to explain such things.

  Renny helps me out of the car and props me up against the rear of it. As he reaches inside to grab one of my books, my legs go all rubbery and I slide down the side of the car. Quick as a flash, Renny’s there. He grabs me around the waist and props me up again.

  “State College,” Renny begins, “are you going to be okay?”

  “Swell,” I answer. “Just swell. I’m a professional, dammit.”

  Renny reaches into the car again, making another try at grabbing one of my books so that when I walk into the venue I look like somebody who’s not a wasted heap of intoxication. And as soon as he does, I slide down the car again.