This Book Is Not for You

by Daniel A. Hoyt

  Allen slapped me three times across the face, counting each blow out loud.

  “You stupid chink motherfucker,” he said. He didn’t even seem high. I looked at his bulbous fat-baby head; I had shaved it for him before. He gave me a crazy half smile, and then he kicked me as hard as he could, right in the nuts. A note of blue pain pealed in my testicles, then up through my abdomen. I puked a little bit, and I tried to squirt it on one of the guys holding my arms.

  “You always were a fucking pussy,” Allen said.

  He acted like he was going to kick me again and then laughed. They just kind of threw me down on the floor.

  “You want to piss on him or anything, Saskia?” Allen asked.

  “Asshole,” I said.

  One of the other guys kicked me hard in the thigh, then the neck. I was drinking and drowning in thick black sweat and blood. My self couldn’t find oxygen. I had a self in there somewhere. I gulped for air that didn’t seem to exist anymore.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the guy said, and then he kicked me again. “Let’s kill him.”

  Saskia didn’t say anything at all. Just walked over and stood right over my face. I could see up her skirt to a line of orange panty, a curve of ass. She just stood like that over me, squatted over my face. She tugged her underwear to the side with two fingers, and I could see the pink folds of her labia frowning down, a fringe of pubic hair. Some soft, bare part of her bumped against my nose.

  “Don’t look,” she said in a low, quiet voice. “I can’t do it with all of you standing there,” she said, louder. “I’ll meet you out at the car.”

  “I’m not leaving you with this asshole,” Allen said.

  Someone kicked me in the side again, and I felt something creak in my ribs. A hot wave of bruise washed up in my head. “

  Hey,” she said.

  “Sorry,” someone mumbled.

  She said, “This fuckhead wouldn’t dare do shit to me.”

  I stared up and into her. She smelled like grass and soap.

  “Just fucking go,” she said. I could hear their dull footstep clomps and then the door thud behind them. I stared at her vulva, squinted, stared some more.

  “Get a good look,” she said.

  We waited for the liquid hiss of it, the strange relief to arrive.

  “I’m sort of tempted to do it,” she said. She helped me roll out of the way, and then I listened as she pissed a puddle onto the skins’ living room floor.

  She didn’t even look at me.

  “I’m pretty sure you owe me one,” she said.

  Pain floated all around me. I heard it walking around. I heard it slink out the door. She didn’t even say goodbye.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Although you might think I am incredibly fucked in the head, I would have forgiven Allen if he hadn’t beaten the crap out of me. I would have continued to shave his head for him with tender and precise care. I wouldn’t have stirred any blood to the surface.

  I guess I should tell you something else. I am a chink, at least a little bit. You can barely see it in the angle of my eyes. You have to look for the mongrel geometry of it. It’s this sliver of a percentage of me, my chinkness.

  My father was half Chinese and half English, and my mother was Polish and Mexican and Native American. Both of my parents remain absolutely silent on the mathematics of all this. They killed themselves when I was two days old, and I suppose you should have known about that earlier too.

  Allen could have chosen any of these other words: Polack, spic, Tonto, limey.

  My ancestors fucked in the out of doors. They fucked in the beds someone else actually slept in. I bet your ancestors did this too.

  My skin looks slightly browned, like the crust of roasted meat. You wouldn’t think I was anything identifiable at all. Just a tan-looking guy with an eagle-beak nose, eyes that lean a bit, and brown hair the color of brown hair. Most people can’t even guess at what I might be.

  The word chink in itself sounds ugly, harsh, like a pencil in an eardrum. You can stuff that word in some kind of hole.

  My face is the color of toast. Most of the skins were Anglo-Saxons the color of Elmer’s glue.

  We were supposed to be above all that shit.

  Mainly I’m one of those people who never has enough money.

  If you’re hung up on race and ethnicity, then fuck you.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was pretty beat up, even for me, and beat up was my usual state of being.

  I puked a little next to the puddle of piss, and then I thought I needed to call someone, and the only one I could think of was the weird old lady, the English professor I had met a couple of months earlier.

  I called her on my cell—not the one I have now, a different one. Marilynne picked me up that night.

  “What happened?”

  “Shit happened,” I said.

  Even when I was a small child, the size of a bundled sleeping bag, I could take a punch, pain, humiliation. Isn’t that life’s smorgasbord? All you can eat?

  “You knew they were hyenas,” Marilynne said.

  “I’m a hyena,” I said. “I laugh at all of this shit.”

  “You do not,” she said. On this night, she acted more lucid than normal. Maybe she liked the contrast of someone else’s life going awry. She bought me four fifteen-pound bags of ice at a convenience store, and she made me chug Advil and water.

  One of my testicles was swollen, and I had a sharp pain like a pointed stick scratching into my throat. I sat in Marilynne’s bathtub, and she poured ice in and around and on top of my naked body. My skin had bloomed with red and nicotine-stain yellow. I had a fat violet bruise on my chest that I couldn’t even remember. The burns were healing, but some of the skin had broken open, weeping.

  She wanted me to go to the hospital.

  She added more ice, and I sat there and shivered until my teeth chattered. I let myself shrivel down the drain. She left me alone, but she haunted me even then. On the other side of the bathroom door, Marilynne hummed to herself. It sounded like the buzz of static on a radio station that died several miles ago.

  The testicle felt almost normal again. I didn’t feel that awful. They hadn’t even messed with my face much. I put on an old blue bathrobe of Marilynne’s. It was frizzy polyester but clean.

  “I’ll live,” I said to her through the door.

  “Aren’t you going home?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I really have one.”

  “The couch’s all yours,” she said.

  I lurked in the bathroom. I didn’t want to look at her. I didn’t want her to look at me. The bathrobe smelled like her: mint and something just north of must and whiskey and lilac. One of those fuzzy things, like the pelt of a Muppet, covered the toilet seat. I sat down on it.

  “You coming out?” she asked.

  “Not now,” I said.

  “Okay, fine.”

  She was a good lady.

  I sat on that toilet and emptied my head of everything. The air bubbled through and didn’t bump into a single thought, then bumped into Saskia. I shook her out, pressed my hands and then my forehead against the cool white porcelain of the bathtub. My pain felt woody and wet, chewable, like a toothpick splintered between teeth.

  I thought the guy who said “Let’s kill him” had really meant it. That made me happy for some reason, and I know it’s fucked up, but I wasn’t dead. I took almost all they could deliver, and still I was there. I remembered the pink secret of a vulva. I felt something stir above my bruised left nut. I laughed and took six more Advil.

  I sneaked down the stairs and poured whiskey in the dark. I smoked cigarettes and drank and chewed ice cubes.

  I slept on Marilynne’s couch for six weeks, until all the bruises were gone.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Here are some random facts about ghosts.

  Despite all the wonderful things ghosts say on television and in the movies—all that dark and piquant advice—they don’t talk at all. Y
es, they look washed out. Yes, you can feel their presence, but it’s emotional, not tactile.

  Fuck if I know if they can walk through walls.

  They’re sneaky motherfuckers, though.

  Maybe they just materialize.

  They don’t scare you. They make you feel sad as all get-out,like you’ve been drained of blood and pumped full of tears.

  They are not a comfort.

  Ghosts fill your mouth with lonesome, and no matter how much you say, you can’t get rid of it.

  Ghosts wear the clothes they died in. They don’t make a sound.

  They are really there.

  If you talk to them, they will ignore you.

  If you try to touch them, they will shrivel.

  If those facts don’t seem like facts to you, start your own new branch of science, Ghostology or some shit.

  These are the facts.

  I’ve woken up to them, and I’ve seen them at the threshold of sleep, and I’ve seen them in sunlight, when they look dappled and almost nostalgic, like some old movie playing on an ancient VCR hitched up to one of those TVs that gets three channels if you screw with the antenna.

  That nostalgia grabs you by the throat, and then something cuts it, and you have to think, they’re dead, they’re dead, and they don’t smile at you. They only watch.

  They wait for something you can’t give them.

  They wait some more.

  They are patient, jaded motherfuckers.

  A ghost mainly stands there and looks mournful. I’ve seen them, but I know nothing about them.

  I have no philosophy of ghosts.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Here are some random facts about the Ghost Machine.

  There’s nothing random about it.

  In a previous life, it spewed music as a Sony Walkman. It belonged to my father, and somehow it traveled with me—the only artifact that survived from my birth, my abandonment, to now. In foster homes, my clothes disappeared, my shoes, the blanket my mother knitted, but the Walkman was too crappy to steal. No one wanted it.

  It feels eerie on your head. The headphones pinch your ears.

  The foam padding has hardened, threatens to crumble.

  If it reverted to its previous form and became just a Walk-man again, I don’t own a single cassette.

  Maybe my father fucked with that Walkman somehow. I’ve been told he was a computer scientist. I think he feared the future. I think he wanted to fuck with it too.

  Maybe that Indian shaman really knew magic.

  Maybe these are not really facts.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A phone is all voice, all voices.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I am not the hero of my own life. Saskia saved me at least three times, and I’m not talking about her constant and unconditional blah-blah-blah, which buoyed me in times of great despair and blasted me with artificial tanning rays on days that were actually overcast. I’m talking kickass, take-charge shit.

  If you had a Saskia, your life would be measurably better. Maybe you would be able to quantify it, but as you know, I kind of suck at math.

  If her name weren’t Saskia, I don’t know what she’d look like. I don’t know what I’d call her.

  We acquire the shape of our names.

  I could only be Neptune. My parents tried to shape me in some other way, but my ambitions were astronomical. I don’t mean large. I mean to the stars.

  To the stars through difficulty, motherfuckers.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Saskia wanted to run tests, experiments. She thought about these things scientifically.

  She wanted to make her ghost brother appear. That was her ultimate goal. She made minute adjustments to the volume, and I watched the Marilynne ghost to see if she reacted. The Marilynne ghost did not react at all.

  Ghosts are not scientific.

  “What about now?” Saskia said.

  “She’s standing there, just like before.”

  “And now?”

  “Same thing.”

  Her lips were pursed, eyes narrowed. When she made an adjustment and asked me to check, she made a small notation in a notebook. When she went to the bathroom, I scrutinized the pad. I couldn’t decipher any of it, some personal code.

  “I don’t think this is a science thing,” I said.

  “Everything’s a science thing,” she said. “Underneath, we’re all cells.”

  “Even ghosts?”

  “Maybe,” she said. She made a small adjustment to the volume of the Ghost Machine.

  “Nothing,” I said, and she made a note.

  CHAPTER ONE

  She wanted a sample of ghost flesh, a hair from a ghost head.

  Her interest was both familial and scientific.

  When I grabbed at the ghost, I grabbed at nothing. I didn’t want to touch it at all, but I did it for Saskia. I did just about everything she asked.

  “She’s wearing clothing?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s wearing what she had on the night she died.”

  “You were there?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Interesting.”

  She said it in a way that pissed me off.

  “I was there the night before, and then I found her body in the morning. I saw her ghost first.”

  Her look was the kind of inscrutable that makes you want to scrutinize.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s pretty suspicious,” she said.

  “You think I killed her,” I said. “You think I killed Allen too.”

  “It’s plausible.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You don’t think a ghost would haunt her murderer?”

  “She’s not haunting,” I said. “She’s just there.”

  “That’s haunting. That’s the essence of it.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said. “Either of it.”

  “You don’t think you’re capable of it?”

  If I was going to be honest, I had to peel back all the skin.

  “I’m capable of it, and I know it,” I said. “I could do it.”

  She looked at me.

  “But I didn’t.”

  She looked at me some more. Her eyes were wide, wide-set.If I tried to describe their shade, you would say, eyes aren’t that color. She pushed back a clump of hair so it collected behind her ear: the better to hear me with.

  “I didn’t do it,” I said.

  “It?”

  “Murder.”

  “Do you really think I’d be here if I thought you did?”

  She took everything in.

  She wasn’t someone you could lie to. She wasn’t someone you could fuck with.

  “How good’s your BS detector?” I asked.

  “Flawless,” she said.

  CHAPTER ONE

  She was getting pissed about the Ghost Machine. She couldn’t adjust it in a way that mattered to the ghost.

  “Perhaps there’s correlation and not causation,” she said. “Maybe the ghost affects the machine and not vice versa.”

  We sat there and drank beer. The bar was still sort of empty back where we were. It was almost good to be alone with her.

  “Tell me about my brother,” she said.

  “I’ve already told you,” I said. “I can’t see him. He’s not a ghost, or he’s not my ghost or something.”

  “About him, the real him,” she said.

  We had been trying shit for hours. The room was hot, and I was peeled down to a T-shirt and jeans. I could smell the vanilla scent she wore and something under it too, her bacteria smell.

  I reached over and wrapped my fingers around her wrist. She did not pull away, but I could sense her urge to recede. I didn’t touch her hand. I wanted some part of her that didn’t touch back. I grabbed skin and bones and ligaments and veins, and her pulse insisted that we were alive. It beat up through my index finger.

  “He wasn’t always an asshole,” I said. “When I first met him, he was in that
hardcore band. Remember? They were called Nothing.”

  “They were so bad,” she said. “He just yelled.”

  “I met him at one of their shows. I crashed at his house that night. I just kept crashing.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fifteen maybe. He let me move in.”

  “Move in?”

  “I was between,” I said, and then I had to pause a bit, “situations.”

  “Situations?”

  “Living situations.”

  “He wasn’t always fucked up,” she said. “Right? There were times when he was cool.”

  “He wasn’t completely fucked up. You know that.”

  “Sort of,” she said. “It’s hard to remember when he wasn’t an asshole.”

  “He wasn’t always an asshole.”

  “What about that day?” she said.

  I knew what she meant, but I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “What day?” I said.

  “That day he beat the shit out of you.”

  I didn’t say anything. I scratched the left side of my face,where I could feel the deep groove of a scar.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For bringing it up.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “You kind of saved me that day,” I said.

  “Kind of?”

  “Okay, you did.”

  “Maybe I saved him.”

  “For a while,” I said.

  “I saved both of you,” she said. “He would have killed you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “When I went out to the car, when I left you, he was loading a handgun. He was going to go back in there and blow a hole in your head. That’s what he said, something like that.”

  “You talked him out of it.”

  “That and one of the other guys just drove away, got us out of there. Allen kept messing with his gun in the backseat, saying, ‘Turn the fuck around.’”

  We sat there for a bit.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You saved me,” I said. “You don’t need to be sorry.”

  “I’m sorry for telling you this.”