It started to become clear to me that I had done something stupid. Sure, it was an attempt to stop people from doing something even stupider, something deadly even, terroristic. But outside of the Replay, I felt drunk with dumbness.
I watched Tax clap his hands together so that the stupid fucking brass rings he wore chimed. He did it all the time, but I couldn’t hear it on this side of the glass. I could see everything going on but couldn’t hear his metallic shitbag noise; I could only hear the throb of the jukebox. Out here the song was muffled enough so I could just barely not recognize it. It felt like part of my subconscious, and I almost went in to find out what that aspect of me really sounded like. What were the lyrics? I knocked again, and nobody flinched on the other side of the glass. When I felt pessimistic, life was a knock-knock joke where no one says, “Who’s there?” When I felt optimistic, life was a knock-knock joke where you have to listen to the punch line.
No one at the Replay wanted to who’s-there me.
Only Marilynne wanted to who’s-there me. It made me feel like a crumpled-up aluminum can.
I pumped my crumpled aluminum can legs and crumpled aluminum can arms, heading down Mass. I was turning onto Eleventh. I was turning onto New Hampshire. I was heading down New Hampshire. I had a crumpled tin can nose. I’d never get all of those wrinkles out of me. Once the can’s squished, smooth is a memory.
My head felt sodden with beer. At that point in my life, I had never read Huck Finn. It seems important now, but, then, I had some kind of hole in me where Huck Finn was supposed to go. I didn’t think about Huck Finn on that walk, or Saskia or the skins or the dynamite or even Marilynne really. I didn’t even think about the Ghost Machine or sex or whiskey or Casey. I bet you’re jealous, but I used to be able to think about nothing at all, to create a vast, pure fermata of the brain. I could just be.
I walked by all the nice wooden houses of all the nice wooden people. The people aren’t all wooden, actually. That’s not fair. Some of them are actually brick.
The night hung over everything. It dripped off the streetlamps. My phone bleated again. Calvin had called me six times and left five messages. But this time, it was Marilynne again.
“I’m coming,” I said into the little piece of plastic and zinc or whatever the fuck, and two blocks away the words zapped into her ear.
Outside her house, I looked at the shrubs, and I said the word “shrubbish” out loud because I liked the librarian shh-shh of it. An off-white fence ringed the yard, and a brick walk led up to a mauve door. The house itself was a bitter green; it looked like mouthwash. I creaked open the gate, and I took a deep breath, and I sprinted up the walk. The gate slammed shut behind me. I ran right up to the door and turned the knob and pushed with a shoulder and flew in.
When you entered Marilynne’s house, it felt like you had become possessed by mauve. It striped her walls. It assaulted her couches and her pillows. She kept the windows sealed up, and the air seemed trapped in there with the colors—the mauve, the accents of crimson, of sea foam. During one of those months when she refused to go outside, she talked constantly of redecorating. She acquired swatches of fabric and little cards of fancy paint colors—“Egyptian Hummus,” that kind of shit—that she would stick on the wall and squint at. She’d stare as if she could turn two inches of color into an entire wall. She liked to tell me about those colors. She showed me scraps of fabric.
“Touch it,” she would say, and I would run my fingers over the velvet.
“It feels like mauve,” I would say.
She liked to talk about getting the whole house redecorated,but the only thing that changed was a fresh coating of dust, bits of her skin that she sucked up with a vacuum cleaner. You had to fight with that vacuum cleaner, wrestle and shake it, and steal the bag of guts from it. I emptied it for her. Sometimes it felt like I was dumping out the equivalent of a body part: a foot of dust, two and a half ears’ worth.
The constant, empty wish to redecorate came after the parties—years and years of parties—but before her complete fear of people. She gave big, floppy parties, and people would drink and talk about books until the night drained away and their bones turned to drippy wax. They would wake up in corners and on couches, search for the puddles of their brains. I had rematerialized there before, too many times. Most of the people who came to the parties didn’t come around much anymore. They weren’t welcome anyway.
She still had the liquor, sure. But the thump of music, of thought, of fun that turns to its opposite in the morning, was gone. Only the opposite was there now, and it hung around all day, fogging up the rooms.
I might have thought about all these things then; I don’t remember really. But I think about them now. That night when I smashed through her door and into her mauveness, her mauvosity, she sat calmly on the couch. She held a TV remote in her left hand. Her right hand glittered with shards of glass and a wet sheen of blood. I could see clear spikes poking out of her fingers and her palm. Marilynne didn’t seem to notice at all.
“Do you want to see my comma mole?” she asked.
She was sixty-two years old, and she had a moon-shaped face, pale blue eyes that bulged a bit more than normal out of their sockets; they were trying to climb out at you. She was just under five feet tall, and she liked to call herself “a little person.” She was only being partly ironic. She always liked being partly something: partly annoying, partly funny. On that night, she was wearing a flowered dress that looked vaguely Hawaiian. It bordered the territory between silk and polyester. It was big and shapeless, like most of the things she wore. Sometimes I thought Marilynne wanted to forget that she owned a body.
If we were exact and responsible investigators, I wouldn’t try to summon up her face; I’d tell you the exact times of things. We’d calibrate and syncopate and recreate the entire evening, but all I can tell you is it was Wednesday night, unless it was that part of Thursday morning that we still consider Wednesday night. I can tell you that her nose was a girlish and gentle bump; a bit of her moon face slouched past her chin; she had false teeth that were too white and too straight to ever seem real. She wanted them to seem real. She wanted her nose to be bigger now to catch up with her protruding eyes. She wanted her gray hair to fade back to blonde. She had told me all these things, and I remember them. But I’m totally fucked if I have to tell you the time.
CHAPTER ONE
It happened at some point in time.
“What the fuck did you do?” I asked.
Marilynne rubbed her right thumb across her right fingers several times, the way people do when they mean money, but she didn’t mean anything at all. She clicked the remote, and the muted TV shifted to another wordless spasm of color.
“It’s just stuck,” she said, “stuck, stuck.”
She rubbed her hand against her face, and a rusty crimson smear appeared on her forehead.
“You’re fucking bleeding,” I said, because that’s the kind of astute and perceptive person I am. The blood sprouted from her forehead now too. I could see it bubbling up, and I grabbed her hand, looked at it. It sparkled with shards of glass.
“What the fuck, Marilynne? What the fuck?”
It was a question I had asked her before.
I picked each shard out with tweezers, collected them in a cereal bowl. We just sat there on the couch, and she didn’t flinch, didn’t cry, didn’t say much, probably didn’t feel. I counted: eight of them. How did it happen?
She didn’t know. She didn’t know. She didn’t know.
“Maybe a glass broke in my hand,” she said.
As I pulled them out, I pictured her stabbing each one of them in, getting to eight before she called me on the phone. She probably thought about nine. She probably liked the idea of it, but she probably liked the evenness of eight. I didn’t ask. Accidents don’t look like that. Accidents look like a scrawl, a squiggle. This was penmanship.
“You did this on purpose,” I said.
She looked at me with her bl
and moon-pie face. On the television, a bigger face, larger than larger than life, made shapes with his lips that probably formed words.
We listened to the last shard plink into the cereal bowl.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and poured myself a drink.Whiskey straight. I poured an inch on top of another inch.
“Should I call 911?” I asked.
She was pulling herself together. I could see something liquid wash back into her eyes. She got up out of the living room, and I swirled whiskey around my mouth, tasting mauve. The big face on the TV seemed to be shouting. Marilynne had taken the remote, so I got up and punched the man right in the off button. He died on the spot.
I could hear the rush of water from the bathroom down the hall.
“Clean that shit out good,” I yelled.
She came back with a roll of gauze and a plaid oven mitt.
“Do the honors?” she asked, and I wrapped up those fingers of hers, her still bloody palm.
“You’ll live,” I said.
She pulled the oven mitt over the gauze.
“That’s a good look for you,” I said.
I’ve broken glasses in my hand, gripped and gripped until the pressure was too great. It makes an awful steely pop, and shards snap out, and I’ve cut a few fingers, gashed a palm. It doesn’t leave shards in your hand. That takes an entirely different kind of pressure.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“I needed to get you over here,” she said.
“But you didn’t say anything on the phone.”
“You knew. You could hear it in my voice.”
How could I say that I didn’t hear anything at all? I almost didn’t answer the phone. If someone had looked up at the Replay, I would have gone right inside. I had thought about hanging up on her. I had thought about saying, “Fuck off. Not tonight. No way.” The pain I had heard was everyday pain. We all carry that caliber of hurt in our back pocket.
“You got lucky,” I said.
We sat on the couch and watched the big dark TV. It was the safest place to look. I could hear the soft thwap of Marilynne tapping her oven mitt again her leg.
“I’m giving you this house,” she said.
I just sort of laughed. When I looked at her, though, her mouth was a flat line of sneer.
“I’m not so good at owning stuff,” I said.
She had given me stuff before: a taxidermied bat, a six-gallon tin of caramel corn, a couple thousand dollars, several copies of the books she had written. I had thrown the stuffed bat off a roof at a house party as sort of a joke. I lost the popcorn tin at the Replay. I lost the money at every bar in town. I sold the books at the Dusty Bookshelf. She had probably seen those books for sale in there, reread the inscriptions, died a little bit. I only remember one of them:
Dear Neptune,
I can’t say enough about any of this.
With all my love,
Marilynne
In all that time, I had never read one of her books.
I didn’t want to risk it. What if I loved them? What if I hated them? What if I felt nothing?
She would know that I had read them. She could read the bumps on my face, my hair follicles, my smells. My body would sweat out criticism, and her nose would pull it in, and she would never forgive me, not even if I thought she was a genius. I knew her too well already. She knew me too well already. We needed boundaries.
She could call me up and mumble in my ear; I took out her garbage; I pointed out that strangers loitering outside her window were most likely benign. I didn’t need to spend time in another world she’d created. I already lived in one.
“Fuck you,” she said. She was back to being her. Her face shriveled up into an angry raisin. She pushed herself up off the couch and marched out of the room. She took big showy footsteps so I could hear each one as she pounded down the hallway, yanked open a door, then smashed down the basement steps. I thought about following, but then my cellphone neighed at me.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hey,” Casey said, “where are you?” “
Marilynne’s.”
“Wanna hang out?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Meet me at the Replay for last call.”
“I was just there,” I said.
“Come on.”
“I’m coming,” I said and clicked off.
“Coming where?” Marilynne said. She had a can of spray paint in her oven-mitt claw.
“The Replay. My work here is done.”
“Fuck you,” Marilynne said. She shook up the can of spray paint. The balls pinged around inside. She snapped the plastic cap off the can, and it flew across the room. Then she got to work. Right across the mauve, she painted a big black vertical line and then a diagonal one and then another vertical:
N
I just watched, drank up the last of the whiskey. She had given up teaching. I brought her groceries. I drove her car around corners. When the cable dude came, I answered the door while she hid in the basement. Since I had known her, she had been falling apart, sometimes willfully, and now there wasn’t much binding her together. She needed more things than she could imagine. She usually just said she needed gin, sometimes tonic. She needed a lot more than I could supply.
She kept going. She seemed to breathe in concert with the can. They made horrible gaseous hisses together. She inflicted those big black letters, and, of course, by the time she got to the first e or the p, I knew the whole story. She did it the way I do it sometimes, with the big N’s and little everything elses.
Her vertical strokes were shaky, and her horizontal strokes were even worse, and her breath huffed with the paint.
“With those big N’s it almost looks balanced,” she said. “Right? Isn’t that the point?”
I talked to my whiskey in a silent language. The paint kept pulsating out onto the wall. By the time her breath and the paint ran out, it said this:
NeptuNe’s HouSe
“I don’t want a house,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s yours now,” she said. “I’m giving it to you. I just gave it to you. Your name’s on it.”
“I don’t want a house,” I said, and I grabbed my bag of dynamite, and I checked my phone. Calvin had left three more messages.
“I don’t want a house,” I said again.
That’s the last thing I said to her as I walked out the door.
CHAPTER ONE
In the early twenty-first century, a gentlewoman or gentleman might receive a phone call for the purpose of arranging sexual intercourse. These timely summonses usually, but not always, occurred in the nighttime. Colloquially speaking, they were known as “booty calls.”
Sometimes, of course, people received calls for entirely different reasons.
CHAPTER ONE
There’s sex on pages 53, 55, 153, 171, 175. There’s fucked-up titillation on page 121. There’s a splash of lust on page 255. You already know there’s a breast on page 21.
CHAPTER ONE
Property of Neptune.
CHAPTER ONE
Deep inside my chest, a long false fingernail scratched at my lungs, chipped my ribs. It wanted to tear away my aorta. I know I swallowed it somehow. It formed from smoke and carcinogens, stolen dynamite, microwaved plastic, whiskey and hurt feelings. I had asked for it. The point of it was cruelty. The point of it pried up and under my sternum. I felt like I could move it around under my skin. I felt like I could never sleep it off. Sometimes the nails from the rest of the fingers were up in my brain. Sometimes I could feel the color change: black, hydrant red, mauve, mauver.
Marilynne never wore fingernails like that. In fact, I can’t remember her fingernails at all. She must have had them. Aren’t they, like, a package deal with fingers?
I don’t know anyone with fingernails like that, but, still, I wake up with them stuck in me.
I could feel one scratching away as I left the house, but I clipped it right out of my mind. As
I swept down the street, I left all ideas of Marilynne back at the house, her house. She would call me up in two days to paint over my name. We’d cover it all up.
I could smell sex and cold in the air, and I flipped up my hoodie again. Outside it was a normal night, and back at Marilynne’s it had kind of been a normal night too. I looked up for stars and found the wool of clouds. I breathed in and let oxygen settle in my lungs. I walked fast. I was just about to turn off of New Hampshire when I saw him coming toward me, first just a black shape, then a man, then motherfucking Tax.
There’s only one chance to make that first miserable, lasting impression, they say, but that’s bullshit. I’m newly unimpressed with people all the time.
He had a little pointed beard but no mustache. His hair was black, and his blue eyes were soft and wounded. You could tell that he knew girls liked this about them. You could see him softening them sometimes. He probably practiced. He blinked a lot. He drank PBR at the Replay. He seemed to have no other particular places to go. He had those fucking cymbal hands: he wore a ring on every finger, and when he cracked his hands together they made a sound that might have been melodic or might have been noise. He clapped his hands all the time. He had one of those chains for a wallet, but he didn’t carry a wallet. He just stuffed his bills in a pocket. His voice sounded scratched and burnt, like he had just swallowed a cigarette. He was a couple inches taller than me. We knew each other in the way that two people who don’t like each other know each other.
“Hey,” I’d say, and he’d pause and say “Hey” back. He’d pause just long enough for me to remember what an asshole he was and would always be.
That’s all I knew about him. Also, he dealt drugs in Topeka. We slept with a couple of the same women. He had a name that I always pretended to forget.
Could he kill a person? It was pretty obvious he could do anything that assholes do.
Could I kill a person? Likewise.
This Book Is Not for You Page 3