Why would anyone kill her? She didn’t have anything worth taking. She didn’t hurt anyone, not really.
Earlier that night, when I looked through the glass, I had seen him clap his hands together to make the metallic clash, but I couldn’t hear it. It was a soundless sound. It seemed to mean something. And now, here he was.
“Where the fuck are you going?” I asked.
He paused the asshole pause.
“To conduct business,” he said. “You?”
“To fuck into a reverie.”
“Yeah right,” he said.
I got my face right up into his. His baby-soft eyes hardened up. If I stuck out my tongue, I would have licked his cheek. We stood that way. His eyes flipped from hard to soft to nothing. He stepped back.
“I don’t have time for this shit,” he said.
“Pussy,” I said. I felt the hot happy blood of violence pumping hard through my chest, through my arms, up to my brain. It was bleeding within me, and I stepped forward into the space he had just been in, and he stepped back. I stepped forward, and he stepped back, and his eyes were empty bowls; something had spilled out of them. That’s when I realized he was incredibly fucking scared.
“Run,” I said, and he actually ran. He pumped his arms and everything. He disappeared in the direction of Marilynne’s house, but at the time I just knew he was running away from me.
All of this made me feel a horrible neurochemical joy.
CHAPTER ONE
Maybe we could just keep on meeting like this forever. A whole book of CHAPTER ONEs. We could always start anew. The world would keep beginning and beginning and beginning.
Try to stop it. You can’t.
Okay, there’s that way. But don’t do it. Hang on.
CHAPTER ONE
I slid through the side door of the Replay out by the patio and then pushed up front to the bar. It wasn’t last call yet, but they were counting down. A couple dozen people sopped up beer with their tongues. Uncle X and the smug, smug woman were long gone.
Casey’s back was to me. I looked from the soft blond spikes on her head to her black boots and at everything in between, and I pressed my chest up against her back. I kissed down into the false violence of her hair.
“It’s about fucking time,” she said. She pushed over and created a little harbor for me next to the bar. I anchored there. We were pressed together between two inhabited stools. I didn’t really look around. That wasn’t on my mind.
I’d known Casey for a couple of years. Before I knew her, she had been a mess in high school out in the Kansas City suburbs, and her parents sent her to rehab and to Outward Bound, back and forth, until she got sick of it and stopped using. That was five years ago.
When I first met her, she had a black splotch, some strange dark birthmark, on the tip of her nose. It was bigger than a mole, smeary, and it was fascinating. It made her look even cooler and sadder and smarter—marked from birth to do something, may be something epic, maybe not so epic but at least sort of interesting. I talked to her for hours, and when she came back from the restroom, she said, “Why didn’t you tell me I had chocolate on my nose?”
That’s when she was working at the chocolate place. She stole turtles from her employer to help rot my teeth. She was a waitress and graphic designer now, and she was always threatening to design a Neptune logo. “Like with a trident,” she’d say.
I do not want—I will never want—a Neptune logo.
We slept together every few months, like band practice for a shitty punk group that will never play live, but, hey, we had some good songs, and you never know. She wanted to feel tough sometimes. She missed drugs. She wanted proximity to danger.
The dynamite hung on my back. The curve of Casey’s hipbone pressed into my thigh.
“Sorry,” I said “I had to take care of some Marilynne shit.” “
Fun night?”
“The usual.”
“Poor Neppy,” she said, “the bluest planet.” She kissed me right next to my mouth but not quite on it.
I signaled across the bar to Missy, the bartender, who nodded and poured me a beer.
“Hey,” she said, “Calvin’s looking for you. He called and asked if you were here.”
“If he calls again—”
“No one is ever here,” Missy said. “Ever.”
“Did you step in dumb shit again?” Casey asked.
“Me?” I said. “Never.”
“You have dumb shit all over you,” Casey said. “You have blood on your pants!”
“It’s Marilynne’s,” I said.
We layered beer over beer. I had whiskey somewhere in there too. We got all stratified.
So I had stolen some dynamite. So Calvin was pissed. So my phone kept spasming in my pocket. So Marilynne was hurting herself in new and fucked-up ways. None of these things seemed insurmountable.
“Do you want to see my backpack full of dynamite?” I asked Casey.
“Nice pick-up line,” she said.
See: that’s my problem. Even at my most earnest, she still thought I was full of shit.
Missy announced last call, and we fortified ourselves with shots of Jameson, beers to chase it. Casey’s hand rested on the small of my back, right beneath the dynamite.
I kissed the top of her head again. I finished her beer.
Missy pointed at the door.
“Time to go, kids,” Missy said.
“I think it had better be your place,” I said to Casey.
CHAPTER ONE
I’m technically classified as a high-functioning drunkard.
The first step is admitting it.
CHAPTER ONE
Casey took me home. She had a little one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a house on Ohio, up near campus. We wobbled there, kissed on street corners.
Inside, we kissed again, and then she planted her hands on my chest, pushed me away.
“Go take a shower,” she said. “And take off that backpack.”
I did not argue with her, even though I mainly just smelled like me, which would never come out, not even with the plastic vials of honey-smelling goop and extracted butterfly essence lined up along the rim of her bathtub.
I created a little shrine to Neptune: a bag full of dynamite and a pile of dirty jeans, a T-shirt, a hoodie that smelled like beer. I sat on the edge of the tub opposite the vials, breathed out junk and tried to breathe in something clean. I turned on the shower, ducked under, and scrubbed.
When I came out in a towel, she was fully clothed and lounging on her bed. She curled her index finger in toward me, then patted the bed.
“Let me touch you a little,” she said.
I sprawled out next to her, and she ran a hand over my chest, down to my stomach, back up to my chest, down over my abs and then down to the towel. She ruffled my pubic hair and brushed her fingers along my inner thighs. She ran her hands over my Ad Astra tattoo. Her fingers were back on my chest, on my neck, near my penis, away from my penis, back along my abs, over my hip. I closed my eyes.
“This is torture,” I said.
“Torture?”
“Exquisite torture.”
“I haven’t even started to torture you yet,” she said, and then she started to take off her clothes.
I sat on the edge of the bed and watched. She shucked her jacket and smiled, and then she tugged off her boots, her socks, and frowned. As she pulled off her T-shirt, it got stuck on her chin and she laughed, and I looked at her bare breasts. When she freed herself, her spiky hair was wilder and softer and blowsy. She stood there topless and shoved her hand down the front of her skirt. Then she laughed and took two steps toward me, and she pulled out her hand, and she stuck a long wet index finger in my mouth.
“Suck it,” she said, and I did, and I pulled down her skirt and her thong, and I kissed her belly button. I flipped her onto the bed, and she said, “Put your weight on me. No, grab a condom.”
She kept going like that. She told me what
to do, and I did it with teeth, with my tongue, with the tips of my fingers, and with the flat hard base of my hand. I stared at her breasts with my mouth. The entire room became skin. She tasted like sparks.
I woke up under her, needled and pinned, tingling and half erect again.
“Oh, man,” she said, “I just fucked all the desire out.”
“Yeah,” I said, but I was lying. I still had desire. It had leached into my bones. I had desire all over the place.
I lied to her, but I’ll never lie to you.
Her neck smelled like sweat and pink bubblegum. It wasn’t quite morning, and a film of almost-day coated the room.
“I’m getting up for some water,” I said, and she mumbled and rolled aside.
I had not yet entered hangover’s domain. I was still drunk and giddy with blood. I pissed, and the circulation returned to the numb places, and I poured us two glasses of cold tap water.
She was up now. Eyes open but dreamily so.
“Water?”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s done for me today,” Casey said.
I kissed the top of her hip, watched the line of her throat shift as she swallowed the water down.
“How long have we known each other?” Casey asked
“Maybe forever, or at least three years,” I said.
She sat on my lap, naked her, my naked lap, and we listened to the ticking palpitations of each other’s bodies. I could feel the blood flow back to my penis again. It pressed up against her flesh. Casey reached her hand between her legs, tunneled between us, and reached out to me.
“Hold on,” she said. She made a fist around my penis. “This hurt?” she asked.
“Not really.”
She squeezed harder.
“Not in a bad way,” I said.
It felt raw and brutal and happy, and we sat that way for several minutes.
As we sat there in the watered-down light of dawn, stripped down to nothing, Marilynne appeared before the bed, and I knew it was a ghost. She looked at me with her moon face. She was unforgivably dead, and it made everything feel even flimsier and more important. Casey could break my penis off in her hand. Our flesh could shatter. Marilynne was dead, and she stared at us, an awful dented wound on the side of her face. She still wore that flowered dress, but she looked like an old duotone photograph, black and white and gray washed over with tints of blue. It made me think of hypothermia. She was entirely bruise.
“You see that.”
“What?” Casey asked.
“Marilynne,” I said. “She’s here. She’s a fucking ghost.”
“Sure,” Casey said, and she stroked me up and down, once hard and then once more gently. “It’s a ghost.”
“Oh, fuck,” I said.
Marilynne just stood and stared. Her face looked stunted and pained, frozen.
“She’s just going to have to watch us,” Casey said.
She turned around and slipped me into her.
“I just need to feel all of you, living, nothing latex.”
I could see Casey’s eyes crinkle up. I could see Marilynne over her shoulder. She watched the whole time. It felt like a moment that demanded silence. We swallowed our moans.
CHAPTER ONE
I don’t know when Marilynne disappeared. Casey laughed out loud, and she stretched her lips over her teeth, and she bit down over my eyelids one and then the other, and I had no choice but to close my eyes, just surrender to the blind wet tight aliveness. We sat there like that, and I listened to Casey’s panting. I opened my eyes, looked around the room. There was more day and less Marilynne, none at all actually. I could feel my penis shrinking. I could feel the hangover getting hard.
“Kiss me,” she said, and we kissed. Casey rolled off of me. “Maybe we can do that again before I have to go to work.”
“Maybe,” I said. I got up and grabbed my stuff from the bathroom and pulled on my pants. I said a silent fuck you to the backpack as I pulled it on.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’ve got to see what’s going on with Marilynne.”
“What were you saying about all that shit?”
“What shit?”
“The ghost shit.”
“I have this horrible feeling. I think she’s dead.”
“Whatever,” she said. “I’m going back to sleep. I’m available for one more thorough fucking before nine.”
“I’ll be back,” I said as I pulled open the door.
“Bring your ghost friend,” she yelled. “She likes the way we do it.”
The morning wore a bright fizzy glimmer. The sun was nearly up. I lit a cigarette and smoked it quick so the nicotine could buzz around my brain and counteract the hangover. The chemical sadness started to dig in. I licked my lips, and they tasted like Casey burnt at the stake. That’s the kind of thing I thought. I moved my feet fast. I saw an old man with a dog, and the man waved, and the dog looked at me with a greedy, stupid look. I looked back the same exact way. I lit another cigarette.
When I got to Marilynne’s house, it was cruel and full-on daylight, and the alcohol tremor stirred in my fingertips. It wanted to spread up my whole arm. I tried to spit it out of me, but I couldn’t dredge up enough saliva. I spit on her lawn, and then I saw the door had been smashed open. The doorframe was in splinters. I felt a cold drip of something inside my guts.
She was sprawled face down on the living room floor.
CHAPTER ONE
I pushed my eyeballs up against the whole situation. Right from the start, it didn’t look like sleep. It didn’t look like being alive, but I wasn’t thinking about deadness. Marilynne’s face was slanted into the carpet, and her hair seemed pasted against her neck. Her skirt was pushed up, exposing her calves, which looked bruised. Her left leg no longer even looked like a leg. It was a long sack of broken blood vessels. She was bleeding into herself. Or she had bled herself out.
Her lungs didn’t twitch, and a puddle of dark red souped in the rug under her face. I lay down on the floor next to her, didn’t touch her, didn’t think, didn’t look at anything except the inside of my head.
“I’m so fucking sorry,” I said. “I’m so fucking sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
It delivered a strange comfort. That and the hangover centered me, gave me a switch of pain to beat my thoughts with.
I should have just called 911. That’s what you say. That’s what I say. But the me that’s here right now isn’t the me that was there. It was a different me. I flipped her over, and the left side of her face was cavity, absence. The cheek looked sunken. The left eye was no longer an eye. A mashed cornea, something that looked like cottage cheese, an eyelid ripped in half, a raw streak of blood turning black, a smell like sour milk, a fly tiptoeing on her and sucking on the open wound of her face. I almost slapped at it. The rest of her face was mottled with indentations from the carpet, like the tracks of worms. That might have been when I started to cry.
“I’m so fucking sorry,” I said. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
That’s when I saw her again. The corpse still wore the oven mitt, but the ghost didn’t. She stood over me, just watched me and her own desecrated face. She had the same bluish sheen. She looked like the kind of thing you could turn off with a remote control. We watched each other for a while.
I said, “I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t say a word.
CHAPTER ONE
In the kitchen, an electric iron sat in the sink next to a coffee cup and a whiskey glass. I picked up the iron. Strands of her gray hair were pasted to it with blood.
“Motherfucker,” I said. The ghost Marilynne watched me all the while: as I cracked ice cubes out of a tray, as I shoveled them with my bare hand into a glass, as I poured in some whiskey, an inch, a half more for good measure, a splash extra for grace, a splash of water for health.
I called the police from the living room phone. Marilynne watched me as I watched her and her dead body.
“He
llo,” said the voice, feminine and weary, on the other end of the line
“There’s been a murder,” I said, and then I gave the address. I was a pithy motherfucker, and my stupidity was all over the place. My pants were stained with her blood, and my name was indelible, strung across the wall above us.
The whiskey spritzed away at the flame of hangover. The pain smoldered.
I thought about the cops and that motherfucker Tax. As if you didn’t think of him too.
I stood there next to the corpse, drinking liquor that tasted like fingernail polish remover, lurking under the graffiti of my own name. I like to try to picture it from the ghost’s perspective, from your perspective, from the cops’. I’d make some assumptions too.
I let myself out the back door and booked it over to New Jersey. I could sneak back to the apartment and tell Casey. I needed to tell someone, anyone.
I could see the ghost watching me from the backyard gate.
CHAPTER ONE
So I was sprinting up New Jersey, dawn all around me. That’s when my phone rang. It was Marilynne’s cell number, and for a whiskey-thin instant, I imagined she was alive. I imagined how everything that transpired, everything that died on me, could have been an elaborate practical joke, engineered for the entertainment of countless others, or at least countless Marilynnes, and, of course, for my spiritual enlightenment. (Today’s lesson: Don’t take others for granted, not even fucked-up and obnoxious others, or they will fake their own deaths and frame you for it, and then won’t you be sorry? [You will.])
I wanted to believe. I wanted her live voice connected to a live body somewhere in the vast carbon-based universe.
“But you looked so dead,” I said into the phone.
“This fucking Neptune?” a man asked. He bared his tone like teeth.
His pit-bull voice stretched to the end of its chain and lunged at my throat.
His voice sounded so harsh and thick and deep; all of it sounded fake.
“I know it’s you, fucking Tax,” I said.
He laughed like a jack o’lantern—hollowed out, something burning behind it.
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