This is what it said.
“My great hope—well, not great—but my hope remains for some sort of freedom.” And then someone laughed, not me, and then a girl’s voice said, “Keep going,” and I said, “You can’t put it into words. When you put it into words, it falls apart.”
I was fourteen, I think. We weren’t drunk, but we weren’t sober. I had run away from a foster home. I was giving a manifesto in some girl’s bedroom out in Johnson County, the fancy suburbs south of Kansas City. I didn’t even know her, really. She demanded manifestos, and I slept on the floor next to her bed. The next morning her parents called the cops.
That girl made you tell her what you believed. She had bed sheets printed with cartoon ponies.
“Say it,” she said. “Say what you believe.”
Then the machine clunked again, whirred again.
“Marilynne,” I said, “I’m here with Kurt Cobain.”
I was talking to her on the phone about this guy I met in San Francisco. He looked like Kurt Cobain. He even sang like him, but an old version of Kurt, one who had never died. The guy worked hard to do all this pretending. It got him free drinks. It got him drugs. It got him laid.
“Who?” she said.
“Kurt Cobain.”
“Don’t know him,” Marilynne said. “Where are you? Could you run down to Dillon’s? I need a gallon of ice cream and some tonic water.”
“I’m in San Francisco.”
“What time is it there?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, and then I must have looked down at my phone. “It’s 2:38 a.m. What time is it there?”
She said, “So you think of me when you’re in San Francisco?”
“I thought you’d want to know about Kurt. I figured I should call.”
That’s what I said, but I think I just wanted to hear her voice. I missed her.
“What happened to him?” she said, and she sounded like she was inches away from me. She sounded like she was bleeding gin.
“He didn’t die,” I said. “Everyone thinks he died, but everyone’s wrong.”
“Good for everyone. What about my tonic water?”
Then fake Kurt shouted to me, “Let’s go smoke something.”
“I’ve got to go,” I said into the phone, and out of the phone, I yelled, “Wait up.”
“Don’t go,” Marilynne said.
And then I must have pressed a little rubbery button on my phone and killed her voice.
I don’t know what she said in Lawrence, Kansas. Her voice was gone. In San Francisco, fake Kurt said to me, “Your mom sounds like a bitch.”
The Ghost Machine clunked, then whirred.
“I just wrote that we’re hanging out,” I said.
“Is that what we’re doing?” a female voice said. It sounded like Saskia.
“I’m finishing a book,” I said.
It pissed me off. Now the fucking Ghost Machine was making shit up. I couldn’t remember this conversation at all. I had only read one book in front of her, and I didn’t even finish it. I never said that shit to her.
That’s what I thought anyway. That’s what I guessed. Or maybe it was playing my whole life now, not just the past. Maybe it was the future. Maybe I would have this conversation with her someday. Maybe she’d come back.
Or maybe I could just plug myself into this machine and hear it all, pretend it happened, live a virtual life. I could surrender to the machine, believe everything I heard, sit in a coffee shop and let it fuck with my brain.
The machine clunked again, whirred again.
“You little shit,” someone said, and I heard the sound of flesh on flesh.
The machine clunked again, whirred again.
“Neptune Asshole,” a voice said, “like we’re brothers.”
The machine clunked again, whirred again.
“I love you,” Marilynne said.
The machine clunked again, whirred again.
I heard punching and breathing.
“Stop,” I said. It sort of wheezed out of me.
Someone was breathing heavily. I heard myself groan. The punches didn’t stop.
I wasn’t throwing them. I didn’t want to think about it.
The machine clunked again, whirred again.
I heard the hiss of a lighter.
I heard myself screaming.
Then the cassette spokes whirled without catching for a while. No sound came out, and it pissed me off, and I slammed my hand down on the table next to the machine. It clunked. It whirred.
“Maybe we can’t do it—because of the baby,” a woman said. I didn’t recognize her voice.
“We should bring the baby in too. Our baby shouldn’t suffer through life either,” a man said.
“No,” the woman said. “Please don’t do it to the baby.” She began to cry.
“We talked about this,” the man said.
The woman didn’t say anything.
“Fine. Put him outside. Someone will find him, one of the neighbors.”
I heard shuffling.
“Hand me that blanket,” the woman said.
“Hurry up,” the man said.
I heard a door open and then close.
Someone—the woman—hummed. It wasn’t a lullaby. The baby cried and then hushed and then cried again.
“We love you,” the woman said. “You are loved.” She was sobbing. “You are loved.”
I heard lips on baby skin. The crying stopped.
For a few seconds, the tape played the sound of nothing.
Then a door closed quietly.
Baby Neptune cried and cried. It went on for a long, long time.
CHAPTER ONE
I had the backpack with two sticks of dynamite. I put the Ghost Machine in next to them.
I bought a collapsible shovel at the camping store. It cost me two pitchers’ worth of beer.
On my stolen mountain bike, I rode down Massachusetts. A hippie at Free State waved to me. A police cruiser drove by going the other way, then turned around, hit the lights and the siren.
It felt like the end.
I pedaled with my knees up by my ears. I was bent over,aerodynamic, committed to the angle of escape.
At the red light at Mass and Sixth, I raced on through. I whooshed toward the bridge.
I pedaled harder, and the lights flashed right behind me. Then something miraculous happened. The cop car blew past me and pulled over a Subaru full of college kids. Jam band stickers glared at me from the bumper.
I thank those kids for their traffic violation. I appreciate their temporary pain, their eighty-buck fine, which bought my deliverance. I’m sorry they like jam bands. I can’t do anything about that.
Maybe it’s hubris that makes me believe all cops are looking for me, but I prefer to think of it as a healthy defense mechanism.
As I slipped over the bridge and down to the trail, the bike felt lighter. Seeing cops accost someone else turns you into something airy and bright. It’s the feelings the stars look like, but not what they are.
CHAPTER ONE
If I had to destroy, I would destroy only grass, a backpack, a Ghost Machine.
If you had a Ghost Machine, you’d try to destroy it too.
I went to work. I began to dig. I won’t tell you about the digging.
My goal is to bore neither you nor me, but I think I’m borednow.
Let’s turn the page.
Let’s blow something up.
CHAPTER ONE
I shoveled till my hands ripped up, then I shoveled some more. The hole was the shape of a grave, but I didn’t realize that until it was already done. I put the Ghost Machine in there, and then I put in the backpack. I had some rolled-up paper, which I lit with a lighter, and when I tossed it in the grave, I ran like a motherfucker.
It made a firecracker sound multiplied by war, and a gout of fire shot out of the hole and then died on itself. When I went back to stamp out some sparks in the grass, the shovel had melted beyond
use. A sign: you, Neptune, are not a gravedigger. Another sign: the shovel was swirled into a comma.
The Ghost Machine and the backpack and the dynamite were gone, incinerated.
My ears rang as I poked around in the ashes of the grave, and then I thought, oh, fuck, oh, holy and lost fuck, because Marilynne’s ghost stared down at me from the edge of the earth. I thought killing the Ghost Machine would make her disappear. I guess I thought she’d die again, but I didn’t think of it as murder. I thought of it as release.
You can’t blow up a ghost. You can’t blow up a memory. You can black it out for a while, sure, but just for a while. It’s like those computers. Even when you think you’ve trashed all your data, it’s still living on somewhere in the digital gloom.
I had destroyed as little as possible with a great amount of force.
My ears rang. Specks of light salted my vision.
To the stars through difficulties, motherfuckers.
CHAPTER ONE
I was and am so sick of ghosts.
Ghosts are pathetic, passive. They just stand there.
If you think squirrels are dumb, wait until you see a squirrel ghost: it’s dumb to the second power.
Don’t get like that. I can make math references. Just don’t expect me to solve the actual equation.
I’m pretty sure the second power means you multiply one thing by itself.
My own ghost would have the same intellectual deficits. That’s a given.
My ghost would have to ask someone about that second-power business just to be sure.
My ghost might just stare at you dumbly. I’m already good at that.
Marilynne’s ghost almost never moved. Her face was bashed in on one side. If you knew she was hit by an iron, you could make out the shape of it. I didn’t like knowing. Sometimes the ghost wore the oven mitt, sometimes it didn’t.
I thought maybe ghosts got confused. Maybe they lost things. Maybe they tried to send signals.
If you see a ghost, don’t bother looking for signals. I’ve already warned you about looking for clues, though I know you don’t listen. Ghosts aren’t here to tell us something.
If you’re looking for messages, you’re better off reading a book.
CHAPTER ONE
Fuck that. Books don’t have messages either. Just read.
It’s just a story. Everything happened, but it’s just a story. So is your life. It will end at some point. When in doubt, love someone until you’re weak and feverish and bent at some new angle.
And congratulations by the way: that’s your first step in becoming a master of origami.
CHAPTER ONE
I walked over to the bike and headed back. As I rode toward town, another cop car drove toward me.
The police must have received a call about the explosion.
I had to scoot off the bike path because the car took it all up.
The cop driving rolled down his window. I didn’t recognize him.
“You hear anything out here?” he said.
“Like what?” I said.
“Huge fucking explosion?”
“Nah,” I said.
CHAPTER ONE
You need to understand that as you read this I am doing complex fucking things to your brain chemistry. Well, not me, this book, but as we’ve already discussed, I both am and am not—amn’t—this book.
I don’t care if amn’t isn’t a word.
As you read this, you will become more empathetic. Scientists—or at least psychologists—have confirmed that the act of reading helps you care more for others, to understand, to sympathize with their plight. After you read this, you will reach outside of yourself. You might pet a slightly mangy dog. We can’t be sure of the results. It’s up to you to put it into action.
But I’ve done the hard work already. Your brain chemistry is changing. If we shove you into an MRI machine right now, who knows what parts of your brain will pulse with light?
I know actually. The good parts.
And if we ever get to the end, I promise some shit:
You will feel new somehow. You will have gone on a journey. You will embrace new words.
I’m just joking about that.
We’ll never get to the end.
And I promise you nothing.
CHAPTER ONE
Of course you think it’s stupid that I kept going to the same places, places where I was recognized, places where people knew Calvin, places where I drank my brain into agitated stillness. But where else would I go?
These were my places. These were my people. The Replay was the closest thing I had to a real home. You know what Robert Frost said about that shit.
And it’s not like I had a car, a house, parents. What if I took all of those things away from you? Where would you go then?
My life kept on ending up, and after every end, I found myself at the Replay.
I thought I had blown away the sun, but outside the bar, it was somehow still afternoon. A child with a streak of dirt on his face, mittened and stocking-capped, shook a Styrofoam cup at me. A couple of coins clanked. It made a lonely sound.
My face had to be dirtier than his.
His jacket looked brand new, same with his jeans. He was probably seven. The cup was clearly unused, perfect in its foam awfulness, no coffee drips.
The child eyed me from under his bangs. It wasn’t cold enough for mittens. He booped something into a cell phone— I could see his pointer finger extended and pushing out of the general mitten area, the international symbol for “I want you to believe I have a gun.” He turned his fake gun back into a hand and then slipped the phone away.
“Hey, kid,” I said.
He chanted a little songlike thing: “Spare change, spare change, you’ve got to chain-ain-ange, spare change.”
“I don’t think you really need to be out here,” I said.
“Are you calling me a poseur?” he asked.
“Yup.”
When he winked, he used everything above his neck, like he couldn’t get the eyelid to blip up and down without rocking his head.
“You Neptune?”
“Who’s asking?”
“I’ve got a message for you,” he said.
He had a round face, sort of squat and wily. I knew he had brushed on the dirt himself. I should have thought of this child as a threat, but instead I thought of him as a child. I believe mothers and fathers make this same mistake.
“A message?” I said. “From who?”
“From whom,” he said.
He did his whole-head wink again.
“I’ll make a grammar note,” I said. I winked back at him,with a full head bob and an upper-torso bend.
He winked too. I felt like we could keep on doing this for the entire afternoon, wink for wink, a frisson of aerobic activity.
I thought about my pronouns.
“Who is sending me the message?” I asked.
“It’s on the way,” he said, and then a car screeched down Tenth, slammed into a parking space, and Calvin and two of his boys jumped out.
“Shit,” I said.
“Asshole,” the child said.
I turned to book it, but the kid threw himself at me, grabbed my legs. I’d nearly kicked him off when Calvin grabbed me from behind.
“Fuck you, Calvin,” I said.
“Don’t swear in front of him,” Calvin said.
“Just like you said,” the kid said. “He’s a real piece of work.”
“Who is that little shit?” I asked.
“That’s my boy,” Calvin said.
Calvin had his arms wrapped around me, while the other two guys took up position on either side of me.
“It’s too bad about your leg,” Calvin said.
“What?” I said, and then the guy on my right drove his combat boot into my right shin.
“Fuck,” I said and then added several more fucks.
“Help him in the car, boys,” Calvin said.
They wrapped their arms
around my shoulders like I was limping off a soccer field. The one on the left smelled like weed and talcum powder.
“Fuck you guys,” I said.
“Not in front of the kid,” Calvin said.
CHAPTER ONE
So Calvin had me. He was driving, and I could see his big eyes staring at me via the rearview. His pores looked huge. I was wedged in between the two other dudes in the back of the car.
“I never thought I’d see your motherfucking face here under the circumstances,” Calvin said, “but then I thought, who the fuck’s dumb enough to go out to the Replay when he’s wanted for murder? There’s only one answer to that question.”
Calvin glared via the mirror.
“Where’s the dynamite?” he asked.
“I blew it up,” I said.
“I think we have to kill him,” the guy to my left said. “Right,Calvin? Kill him?”
They weren’t going to kill me.
You know that I live.
How would I write this otherwise?
“You guys fucking killed her,” I said.
“We didn’t,” the guy on my right said.
“It’s bad luck to kill an old lady,” Calvin said. “We just scared her a little. Smashed the door in.”
For some reason, I believed him. Violence can just show up, knock on your door.
CHAPTER ONE
I moved my arm up toward my shirt pocket, and one of the dudes flinched.
“I’m just reaching for my smokes,” I said.
“No smoking,” one of the guys said. “I’m allergic.”
“He’s a very sensitive dude,” Calvin said.
“Where are we going anyway?” I asked.
“You know,” Calvin said, “you used to be all right. I thought we could work with you, but this is a serious sign of disrespect.”
“This?”
“Stealing our fucking dynamite!”
I couldn’t deny it. I couldn’t reason with him. I had pissed away all of my options, and then I had pissed on them again.
“Where is it?” he said. “If you give it back, we’ll take it easy on you.”
“It’s gone,” I said. “I blew up a dumpster out behind Burrito King. Melted the metal. People heard it for miles. You guys didn’t hear that shit? It smelled like rotten burrito all night.”
This Book Is Not for You Page 12