“This ain’t fucking Tax.”
“You know him?”
He laughed again. Even more of it had been cut away.
“I’m trying to do you a solid,” the voice said.
“What?”
“Don’t go home.”
I felt zapped by it, licked by it.
“Fuck you,” I kicked back at it.
But the call had already clicked into the abyss.
“Fuck you,” I yelled into the hole where communication dies, into my little piece of plastic and cadmium and coppery wire. I stood on the sidewalk before a pale blue house the color of pool water. The street had a feeling of coming alive. A few houses up, I could see a man in a suit going out to his car. Maybe I could catch a ride with him. He would loan me a suit. I would hide in his cubicle, crouching under the desk, and he would feed me crumbs of a glazed donut from the palm of his hand.
I didn’t recognize the voice, its bark of a dog, its bark of a tree. That voice had texture and tack, like cigarette tar and canine slobber.
I couldn’t go home anyway. I wondered if the anarchists would just kill someone like that or if fucking Tax would do something like that, and have I mentioned that almost everyone I love ends up dying?
And then I thought about Casey, curled up in her bed.
Oh shit, I thought. Shit shit shit.
I called Casey’s cell.
After four, five, six rings, she said, “Hello?” She sounded pillowy, sleep sick.
“Something’s gone down, Casey, like something bad.”
“What do you mean?” She said it quickly, her voice suddenly tight and awake to the possibility of misery and my fuckheadedness.
“I don’t know,” I said, “and that makes it worse.”
“What happened?” she asked. “Are you crying?”
“Marilynne’s dead, and I think the police are coming for me.”
I could hear police sirens revving up toward Marilynne’s house two blocks away. I heard a chorus of them.
“You’re kind of freaking me out,”she said.
She hung up on me too.
CHAPTER ONE
Let’s get some things straight:
* This is Kansas, but spare me the Oz jokes. (I will not tell Dorothy that you said hello.)
* Yes, I’ve heard the one about Uranus being the closest thing to Neptune.
* It’s not because I have ADHD or anything. Sometimes I just want to start again.
* The ghost was really there.
CHAPTER ONE
A friend of mine, a guy named Jimmyhead, rented a little house on New York Street. I booked it there as fast as I could. I pounded up his porch and knocked on his door. Jimmyhead and I didn’t hang out that much anymore.
“Hold on,” he yelled from somewhere inside.
I listened to the empty call and response of carbon dioxide and oxygen, and I thought about when Jimmyhead used to be fun. One night we had kicked in the closet doors of his house, just to see who could do it with one kick—the answer, nobody. We had to kick those things until our shoelaces snapped. Another time we had an after-bars party there, and Jimmy said he woke up naked the next morning with all his doors and windows open and air blowing in and sunlight staring at his penis. He had slept on his couch under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.
Old Abe looked after people like Jimmyhead. No one even stole his stereo that night.
When Jimmyhead finally opened the door, his long brown hair was slick and wet and he wore just an orange terry-cloth towel around his waist.
“Don’t you ever wear clothes anymore?”
We both looked down at his towel. It had a couple of bleach spots.
“What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” he asked.
I almost called him Jimmyhead, which he didn’t like any more, and then I said, “Jimmy, I need a place to crash.”
He gave me a shit monkey look and then waved me inside. I sat on his couch under the photo of Abe Lincoln. Abe knew I was naked under those clothes. He knew I had sinned. Wasn’t I a man? That dude knew sin was part of the ground rules.
Jimmyhead came back wearing chinos and a collared shirt.
“What did you do now?” he asked.
“I’ve got some bad news, man.”
He sat down across from me. His face wrinkled up around the corners of his mouth and at the ridges of his eyes. He knew Marilynne too. She had introduced us at some party, back when she threw parties.
“Marilynne’s dead,” I said.
He wasn’t surprised by this at all, but he looked old all of a sudden. The skin around his eyes formed tight papery gullies, and he gathered his long brown hair behind his head, gave it a yank as if he were trying to start his brain via pull cord. He pulled on his hair again, and then he cried a little bit.
“She was a good lady,” he said.
“She was,” I said, and the Marilynne ghost and Honest Abe both watched us. Jimmyhead rubbed his eyes and nose with the cuff of his shirt.
“And, man,” I said, “the cops are going to think I did it.”
He gave me a hard knot of a look, then held it.
“Did you kill her?” he asked. His quiet voice slithered between us. “Is that her blood on your pants?”
“Fuck no,” I said, “you fucking asshole fuckhead.”
He looked at me some more.
“It would have been the worst thing you’ve ever done,” he said flatly.
“I didn’t do it.”
The three of them looked at me. The portrait of Abe Lincoln seemed the most alive.
“I see her everywhere,” I said.
“She was kind of like a mother to you, wasn’t she?”
“She was the fucked-up Freudian mother I never had.”
I tried to tell him the whole story. I told him everything I told you, except for the intimate details of my anatomy. The rest is for everyone, but only you are allowed the privilege of touching my comma scab.
“That’s a fucked-up story,” he said. “You’re the most fucked-up person I know.”
Jimmyhead brought me a cold can of Miller Lite and a big mug of dirt-black coffee.
“I’m letting you stay for a while because I’m your stupid asshole friend.”
I drank from the beer and then the coffee and then tried to bludgeon the tang of both with more beer.
“If I find out you did it,” he said, “you’re fucking dead.”
CHAPTER ONE
Jimmyhead had to go to work.
I called Casey on my cellphone, and she didn’t pick up, and she didn’t pick up again, and she didn’t pick up another time. I actually thought I should call Marilynne, and then I remembered. Maybe I cried for a while.
I found another bleach-stained towel, and I took a long hot shower. I wanted to turn into steam. I figured I had better wait until nightfall to go looking for Tax.
Jimmyhead owned about two hundred books, including all of Marilynne’s. Here’s what she wrote in one of them:
Dear Jimmyhead,
It’s the stupidest name ever for the stupidest,
sweetest man.
With much love,
Marilynne
I didn’t want to read her books, not even her inscriptions. I didn’t want to read Kafka. I didn’t want to read anything that seemed to be about anything. But every single book I started seemed to want to create meaning.
I bet you didn’t even think I could read (but I can). I thought about that “Don’t Go Home” note in Great Expectations, and let’s just say that some of the Lawrence cops were familiar with who I was. Maybe I should have told you some stuff earlier, but it didn’t seem important at the time.
Jimmyhead didn’t have Great Expectations, but he had David Copperfield.
I read the words “I am born,” and then I read that first line about whether or not Copperfield will be the hero of his own life, and then I thought, who wants to read a book about a fucking orphan? I slayed David Copperfield on the spot.
And,
yes, I know what Holden Caulfield said about all that Copperfield crap. Of course I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye. If you haven’t, put this book down and go read The Catcher in the Rye.
Then I saw that Jimmyhead had a copy of Huck Finn. I had never read it before, and that suddenly seemed fucked up and sad.
I sniffed the book. It smelled slightly minty and oaky the way certain books do, and I ruffled the pages, which were still tight and new and crisp, and I wanted to stay there in that moment, but it passed. I could feel Marilynne’s ghost scrutinizing me.
It was a cheap-ass paperback, the absolute best kind of book. When you drop those fuckers in the bathtub, they mushroom out to twice the size. That’s a bonus for you, twice the absolute mass. You can squish those things into a jacket pocket. You can lose them on the bus. Books were made for shit like that. They are the friends you can absolutely rip apart. Snap their spines and see if they care.
Try it with this one. Bend this motherfucker back. Flip ahead to 209 and dog-ear the page. You’ll get to it later. It will be worth it—I promise. You’ll get there and you’ll think, I should have believed good old Neptune. But that’s between you and me. (I’ll be checking page 209 for your dog-ear, by the way.) This was between me and Huck and fucking Abe Lincoln and poor dead Marilynne gawping away. I had no idea if they wanted me to read the book or not, but Huck Finn looked like the kind of thing that could crush your brain for a while. What else was I going to do? Pray? I needed to squish my gray matter because my neurons kept running back to Marilynne’s house and finding her and telling me not to pick up the iron as I picked up the iron. Was it hot when it bashed in her face? As if that could have made any of it any worse.
On the inside front cover, I wrote Property of Neptune. Then for good measure I also wrote it on page 43. Then I started from the beginning, the only way to recreate the world.
CHAPTER ONE
I consider reading a form of prayer. And you should too. You’d feel holier already.
Even reading this piece of shit would classify as spirit work.
Bless you, pilgrim. Bless you.
CHAPTER ONE
I don’t know why I was reading, to be honest.
Maybe you’re thinking the same fucking thing.
Sometimes that shit just happens.
I stayed there all day, drinking Jimmyhead’s Miller Lite and reading Huck Finn and frying up the last of his bologna and eating it on stale white bread. I washed my jeans in the bathroom sink, pummeling them with bar soap, scrubbing the bloodstains from red down to pink and finally a funny tan blur that wouldn’t surrender. Those pants would never just be jeans again. I sat on the edge of the tub and transformed them from soaking wet to a cloying dampness with Jimmyhead’s hair dryer. When I tried to put them back on, I felt like a burn victim, swaddled in something cool and weird and medicinal. Maybe nothing would feel comfortable ever again. Maybe the jeans were fine and it was my skin that would be fucked up and clammy forevermore.
You would have had the same cockeyed thoughts, just in some different way.
Or maybe you wouldn’t have even tried to pull those wet pants back up your legs.
Probably you wouldn’t have ended up in a situation like this. If you ever do, I’d recommend drying them in a microwave. You can watch the rivets and buttons spark. Jimmyhead didn’t have a microwave. He barely had beer. I shed those pants. I read the book in my boxer shorts. “What?” I said, and the ghost didn’t say anything at all.
CHAPTER ONE
Although parts of this book may seem flippant, none of this stuff felt flippant at the time. I’m kind of glad I can’t recreate the sadness. It was bad enough once.
It’s not that kind of mystery; I can tell you who did it right now if you want.
Maybe by now, you have your own “theories.” Maybe I warned you about them. Maybe you’re absolutely fucking sure you know who did it.
Maybe you consider me something worse than a liar. I’ve been called worse things. I’m used to all that.
Think all you want. It’s probably good practice for you.
CHAPTER ONE
That’s when I finally remembered my phone.
Maybe you would have checked your phone right away. But maybe you’re intent on solving a crime. Maybe you check it all the time.
I listened to my messages.
Calvin at 12:05 a.m.: “Just bring it back, dude.”
Calvin at 12:06 a.m.: “Bring it back now, the stuff.”
Calvin at 12:07 a.m.: “I’m getting kind of pissed, asshole.”
Calvin at 12:33 a.m.: “All right, Neptune, real fucking funny.Just bring it back now.”
Calvin at 1:15 a.m.: “Just bring it back and there’s no problem. I mean it.”
Calvin at 1:18 a.m.: “You are one of the top three stupidest motherfuckers I’ve ever met. You are fucked six ways to Wednesday.”
Calvin at 1:20 a.m.: “I mean it: you’re dead. When we find you, you’re dead.”
Marilynne at 2:05 a.m.: “Neptune, pick up. Pick up! Pick up. Some men were here looking for you. They broke down my door, kicked it in. They owe me a new door. You owe me a new door. They want you and your backpack. That door was beautiful, you know. Get here as soon as you can.”
Marilynne at 2:06 a.m.: “Those men are gone now. I should have said that.”
Marilynne at 2:07 a.m.: “They said you stole something. I don’t like the police, but that’s not why I’m not calling the police. Get here as soon as you can.”
Marilynne at 2:08 a.m.: Just the click of someone hanging up.
Calvin at 2:15 a.m.: “The old lady said you were there. That bitch’s as fucked up as you are. We trashed your apartment too.”
Calvin at 2:16 a.m.: “In case you were wondering, you’re still dead.”
Marilynne at 2:43 a.m.: She didn’t say hello. Just: “Help. Help please.”
It boiled just over the level of whisper.
“What the fuck are you doing, bitch?” a voice yelled, and then Marilynne said, “Stay back” in a steady, normal voice, and then a “Stay back” strained through a tight, narrow opening, a keyhole peering into fear, and then I heard a gruff “Fucking bitch,” and then I heard a loud wet clapping sound.
Oh, Christ, I thought. I played it back, listened to her die again.
“What the fuck are you doing, bitch?”
It was loud, slurred. It was a black and blue voice. It was made out of tar. It stuck to your ears. It was the man-dog’s voice.
I listened to her die again. The “Stay back” was so calm and then so terrified.
Of all the things to do, she called me.
The clapping sound was deep and hollow. I could hear her blood. I could feel the steamed scorch of iron kissing the fabric of her: skin and fat, muscle and bone.
The Marilynne ghost watched me as she died over and over on the phone. I listened until my left eyelid twitched, and then I listened some more.
Each time I listened, I wondered: did they kill her because of me?
CHAPTER ONE
There were a lot more messages from Calvin telling me what flavor of dead I was.
I called Marilynne’s cell, but all I got was her recorded voice saying, “Never ever leave a message.”
Whoever stole it might not even have it anymore. How about that for detective work?
Even I had to create some form of organization. I gave each of the numbers—Calvin, the bark-voiced man—a different ring tone. The phone would ring, and I could say, Oh, it’s Marilynne’s murderer.
I did not get cute. None of them were “Sympathy for the Devil.”
If the phone made a short rude moan, it was the killer.
That’s how you’ll know when a killer calls for you.
I bet your phone has a murderer setting too.
CHAPTER ONE
I stewed in my own sadness. I studied the trajectory of guilt. I read the book.
I considered giving you pages and pages about my own reading: a list of pages I
dog-eared, phrases I underlined, how I sometimes stopped and thought about all the horrible stuff that had happened, how I stopped and looked around for the ghost, how I sometimes saw her (just watching me), how I sometimes unzipped the backpack to count the sticks of dynamite (always six), how I sometimes thought about checking my phone and then stopped myself, the way I got to know Huck, the way I got to know Jim, the way I held the book with one hand and sometimes picked my nose with the other or scratched as far as I could down between my shoulder blades. I ate Jimmyhead’s snacks, such as they were, bologna-based mostly.
Instead, let’s talk about the past.
As you excavate my ancient shit, layers and layers of it, I’ll just be sitting here reading a book. We’ll catch up with me later.
CHAPTER ONE
Actually I’m not sure I can get into all of that shit right now.
Let’s just say that everyone who was supposed to love me died or went crazy, sometimes both.
After all that, you’d want people to keep their distance.
It’s not that I don’t like other humans. I don’t trust other humans.
I don’t trust myself. I’ve done the stupidest stuff ever, and I keep doing it. How can you count on people when they do that?
What if I wake up in the morning, all hungover and destroyed and ready for something different, and then by 10 p.m. I’m doing the same exact shit I did the night before? What if I wake up proclaiming never again, and then the cycle repeats?
Now do you see why I don’t trust myself? You probably don’t trust me either.
I’ve seen how you look at some of these pages. I know what you skim, how you blanched while touching my comma. I didn’t even ask you to stroke it.
Do you see how that verb changes everything? It’s not that kind of comma.
CHAPTER ONE
We haven’t even gotten to the Ghost Machine. We haven’t even gotten to Saskia.
Whether she’s to be the fucking hero of my life or not, let these pages decide. Isn’t there some book that goes like that?
This Book Is Not for You Page 5