Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  I wish that I could become invisible like The Kid, but I can’t.

  So I sit and wait for what is coming.

  “If you believe all that you say you do, then why don’t you do something?”

  The question hits me square in the teeth.

  “You know why,” I manage, half mumbling, doing the best I can to say nothing at all. “You know how it is. It . . . it just gets too big. All of it. Stacks up every fucking day and none of us can make a dent in it, so we just sorta move through it without ever letting it get its hooks in. It’s survival. It’s how you stay sane. It’s how you stay alive. And there ain’t no way to change that.”

  The woman who is and is not my mother shakes her head.

  The woman who is, and is not, The Kid’s mother wipes the tears from her face.

  “I want my boy back,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “I suppose you want your parents back.”

  “I do.”

  “But they can’t come back.”

  “I know. And neither can your son.”

  “I know.”

  “But that doesn’t make it hurt any less,” I say. “Knowing that something can’t be changed, it still hurts. That serenity prayer people are always chirping . . . I always knew it was bullshit.”

  “This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen,” she says. “We were supposed to be a family. I get so tired of this. I get tired of the news. I get tired of waking up tired. I get tired of being afraid for people that look like him, for people that look like me, for people that look like you. I just get stretched out and worn down by it all.” Her voice quivers, the way my mother’s used to. “Over and over again, each and every day, it wears me down. It hangs over my head, just like it hangs over your head. And it hangs over the heads of everybody else like us.”

  I reach out and take her unsteady hands in mine. For the first time, they relax.

  The oldest memory I have is of my mother’s hands. It’s a disjointed recollection, like a flash of light in the back of my heart. Her hands are large in my memory, large enough to hold all of me. Her hands radiate warmth. They smell of raw earth dug up from her vegetable garden.

  Memory and death are countries that know no geography. Somehow, they have both taken up residence in the hands of the woman who is, and is not, my mother. As I hold her hands in mine, calming them, for the first time in decades, I can feel something other than fear.

  “That boy of yours,” I say, “he seems like a good kid.”

  “You say that like you know him?”

  “Only in my imagination,” I say. Then: “Can I ask you something?”

  She nods.

  “Why me?” I ask. “Why come to me with your story?”

  “Because you’re the voice,” she says. “This time.”

  “‘This time’?”

  And then she does not speak. For what seems like hours, the two of us sit in silence. And then, as if they had always been there, we are surrounded by the audience again. I’m onstage again, staring at the camera. The audience is just as shocked and awed as they were before both my mother and The Kid’s mother left.

  Of course, she was never really there.

  “I should go,” I say to the morning show host, my words catching in my throat.

  Since starting the medication, every day was a daze for Soot. The world was always far away. Sometimes, he sat on the edge of his bed looking down at his feet and trying to understand how the floor had gotten so far away from them. His feet hung there, feeling as though they belonged to someone else. His whole body felt like it belonged to someone else.

  He didn’t laugh. He didn’t cry. He didn’t get angry—which wasn’t a thing he did much before the medicine, but that wasn’t the point. When he rode the school bus in the mornings and Tyrone Greene came over and began asking him why he was so black—the brief reprieve he had been given after the death of his father couldn’t last forever—Soot didn’t feel any dread, or worry, or shame anymore. He only sat quietly and let Tyrone ask his question over, and over, and over again. He only heard the words calling him “so black” and he let the thoughts about what it meant to him come and go.

  The medicine was supposed to take away the things that he saw, but that was hardly the case. He still saw creatures in the sunset. He still saw black trees sprout from nothing and blossom into everything. He still saw his dead father come and talk to him. The only difference was that now he could hardly hear what his father said to him. His father became little more than an image, a moving picture that came and sat beside him sometimes and tried to talk to him about life and the world and, perhaps, tried to tell his son that he loved him even after death and that all he wanted was for the boy to be safe in this world.

  But Soot no longer heard his father’s words or felt the love that the dead man was trying to give. His father was just a ghost now, in the way that ghosts existed in stories. He was just an apparition, a shadow of the man that once was, that came now to haunt those who were left behind.

  The psychiatrist told Soot that this was the best way. She said that, eventually, even the ghosts would fade away into nothing. “All you have to do is trust the medicine. Trust that it will work.” And Soot did trust in it. He trusted in it for as long as he could, but he couldn’t feel his mother’s love anymore and he could not feel his own. Love, much like the dead father who used to be so real to him, was nothing more than an idea. He knew that he loved his mother and that she loved him, but he did not feel it.

  When he woke up to the sound of her crying alone in her bedroom, he knew he wanted to care about it. He wanted to be sad for her. He wanted to get up and go and sit beside her and hold her and let her cry into him, losing himself in the cool of her body the only way that melting into a mother’s love can happen.

  But night after night she wept, and night after night he lay awake listening, and he searched for compassion for her pain, and he searched himself for sorrow for her tears, and he searched himself for love enough to go to her, but he found nothing. The medicine took it all away.

  So he stopped taking the medicine and, soon, everything that was not real came rushing back to him along with everything that was. They seemed glad to be with him again, the impossibilities that only he saw. The creatures loved him again and the sunsets sparkled again and he could hear his father’s voice again when the man appeared out of nothing and said, “I love you, son.”

  This was when Soot found writing. It was a way to capture his father’s love, a way to keep the man alive, page after page, story after story. It was the means by which he could see his father and not get caught up in it so much that the doctor realized he was off of his medicine.

  I’m sitting in the luster and glow of pale sunlight funneled in by the faux open-air design of the Denver International Airport and, thanks to a credit card that my publisher hasn’t had a chance to deactivate yet, I’m well on my way to a good, self-flagellating drunk. The kind of bender we all deserve when our lives have come crumbling down around our ankles. I’m at a small bar fiddling with the brim of my hat—trying to pick together the threads of my sanity—and staring up at a screen where I can see myself and, for once, I think I’m not just imagining it. There’s the image of me on-screen yelling at the camera, screaming, “I wrote you!”

  The caption beneath the video reads “AUTHOR MELTDOWN ENDS BURGEONING CAREER.”

  The world works fast.

  You wouldn’t think everything a person chased after and fawned over for the whole of his life could come crashing down around the brim of their hat so quickly, all on account of a little ol’ semi-psychotic break on local television that went viral. I mean, don’t it seem like life could just take something like that in stride?

  I feel like I’ve been living in this airport. I couldn’t tell you how long I been here. Few hours? Few years? Who the hel
l knows? I just know that the Illuminati did a real good job designing this place. The swastika-shaped runways, the creepy murals of blue swords and red savagery, the blue mustang with the laser eyes. This is the kind of place that disrupts an unsettled mind and answers questions only a shattered brain can ask. Maybe that’s why I feel so at home here.

  I could live here if somebody gave me half a chance. And why shouldn’t I? People have lived in airports before. Just ask that guy who used to live in the Charles de Gaulle. Eighteen years of living in the space between destinations, the world between worlds. He did it because he had no country, and I figure that’s a sentiment people like me can relate to. They tell me I have a country but, hell, try telling my country that. Try telling my world that.

  Is it any wonder I lost my shit like I did?

  I keep trying not to check my phone, but, let’s face it, who can ever get by without keeping up with that little rectangular soul-killer? What am I looking for when I compulsively pull it out of my pocket more times than an OCD exhibitionist with a penchant for pocket jobs?

  I’m looking for her, of course. The Alpha Kelly. The one that got away.

  I tell myself that I need her.

  A text. A call. Anything.

  I love her . . .

  . . . I think.

  Love’s a hard thing to nail down, even after you get it backed into a corner. All I know for sure is that it’s easiest to call it love. It’s easiest to pull that word up from the soles of your feet—where you’ve been trampling it beneath your heels for years—and stuff it into your head and decide that it’s really what you need to be okay.

  I wonder if Kelly’s still there. I wonder if she’s still waiting for me to get back to her, still willing to believe me when I tell her that I’m looking for a love story. I need to be believed when I say that. I need everyone to believe me when I say that, even if it isn’t true.

  I like to think that if I called her up she could solve the problem of me. But what if she’s just another fantasy? Just another person who isn’t really there? Just a phantasm pumped out by the mind of another Mad Kid grown old.

  I check my phone yet again. And, this time, much to my surprise, I catch the incoming call. The caller ID says “Alpha Kelly.”

  * * *

  —

  “Hello?”

  “Hey,” she says, her voice sounding like a dream. “You still there?”

  “I guess,” I say.

  I’m more than a little thankful for the fact that this is all happening over the airwaves and fiber-optic signals rather than face-to-face. I’m not fully sure that I could handle facing her right now.

  “So, I saw your interview,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I reply, swirling the bourbon in my glass, watching the copper-colored sea invite me to take a dive. “Was a hell of a show, wasn’t it? I wonder what the Nielsen ratings people are gonna have to say about it. ‘Viral,’ that’s the term, right? I’ve officially gone viral. Hell of a thing to accomplish.”

  “Why do you keep doing this to yourself?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why do you keep running away from everything until you fall apart?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Toots.”

  “Don’t fucking call me Toots. Be a person. A real goddamn person.”

  I take a long drink of the bourbon. I empty the glass down my gullet and, already, I can feel her voice beginning to fade away. The sunlight spilling in through those Mason-designed Illuminati windows seems to grow five shades less golden. This is the start of running away again. And, this time, it’ll be permanent. I know it, and I think that she knows it. “I don’t know what a real person is anymore,” I say. “That’s my whole problem. Haven’t you been paying attention to anything at all? Why don’t you just get on with it?”

  “Get on with what?” she asks, and I can hear the frustration in her voice. She sounds like she’s reached the end of her waiting with me, and who can blame her?

  “Get on with the fixing, Dollface.”

  “I told you not to call me that.”

  “I need to be put right,” I say. “I need to be squared away, and that’s your role in all of this. You’re the love interest, have been since the very beginning. I’ve made promises about you and me, promises to people you don’t even know. Promises to people all over the place. This is how it’s supposed to be. This is how it’s supposed to go. You’re supposed to teach me about all the failings within myself, you know? Heal me with the power of love.”

  “Heal you with the power of love?” she says, and it sounds like she wants to laugh. Or maybe she wants to cry. It’s always hard to tell the difference. But it’s never hard to tell when you’ve missed your chance to change who you are. That moment, even if we deny it, is impossible not to recognize.

  It was always going to fail, so let’s get on with the failing.

  “Don’t act so surprised,” I say, adding a few sharp edges to my tone. “Your role is one of the great traditions of not only American storytelling but Western storytelling as a whole. The woman is the oracle through which men like me find redemption and self-correction. You’re the mirror in which I’m able to see myself for who I really am and, in doing so, correct the flaws that have been plaguing me from my earliest days.”

  “Fuck you,” she says. Each word is an anvil slammed across my spine.

  I tell myself that her resentment is misplaced. I mean, who doesn’t mind being the tool by which somebody heals themselves? It’s like the redshirt who sacrifices himself at the beginning of a Star Trek episode so that the viewer knows the monster isn’t foolin’ around. People like me have been redshirts for generations of storytelling.

  “Just play your part,” I tell her. “I mean, when you really stop to look back on it, you’ve been a great secondary character in this narrative of mine. But the thing is, I misunderstood your role. I thought you were the unachievable trophy. But you’re not the Trophy, you’re the Healer. So . . . you know . . . go ahead and get to healing. Sort me out. Sort me out and send me home. Make me a better man like all the Hallmark cards and Lifetime movies say you’re supposed to do.”

  The sunlight’s all but gone now. Something gray and impenetrable has moved in and covered up the clear blue skies behind the airport glass. And to make matters worse, the entire airport is empty. Every single schmuck has gone away. There’s just me, the bar, and the blackness beyond the windows.

  No, that’s not all. There’s one more thing: the silence. The long void of two people dangling in the space between the life that might have been and the life one of them condemned them both to.

  I’ve always lived in that silence. Always found comfort there. As cruel as it can be, it’s easier than saying something. Saying something sounds a lot like change, and change isn’t something I’ve ever been particularly invested in.

  And maybe the same can be said for her. Who can say? I never treated her like a real person so there’s no way I know her. I just wanted to know someone other than myself.

  So I could say something, and keep her in my world, or I can let her go, and see if I’m able to really figure out what my world is. Maybe actually get to know her some other time, if those three Greek ladies that guide us all cut us some slack.

  After thinking it all through, I’ve got only one choice.

  I hang up. I let go.

  As soon as the call’s over, the black void around the airport disappears. Sunlight blooms in the heavens again. Only . . . it doesn’t look the same as it used to. It’s not as warm, and I don’t know that it ever will be again. Some decisions are irrevocable, even for imaginations like mine.

  The people repopulate the airport, shuffling about their lives. I’m even back on TV again, still having my meltdown in front of the world. Proof of irrevocability.

  Just then, my cell phone buzze
s and, right on cue, my heart sinks. If it’s her calling back I don’t know what to do about it. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on what version of life you’re rooting for, it’s not Kelly, it’s Sharon: “I’ll be brief. And after today’s scene . . . well . . . I just don’t think you and I will be able to keep working togeth—”

  I end the call. Nothing more to see here. Move along.

  More drinks.

  More time passes.

  “I’m sorry,” The Kid says.

  I turn in my chair to find him sitting next to me. I knew he would come.

  “What for?”

  “For what happened to your mama.”

  “You shouldn’t apologize for things you didn’t do. And unless you ruptured the blood vessel in her brain and made me write a whole book about it, it wasn’t your fault.”

  The Kid thinks about this for a moment. “Just because I didn’t do it doesn’t mean I can’t be sorry that something happened to you.”

  “Sorry is pity. And I don’t want pity.”

  “I think you do,” says The Kid. He keeps staring at me, like he’s waiting for something. It’s a gentle type of demand. He sits there with that apology of his hanging in the air between us, promising that maybe somebody in this world really does care about me and all of the things that I’ve been through. I know he’s just a figment of my imagination, but maybe that’s the best way that the mind can take care of itself.

  “I’m not imaginary,” The Kid says.