by John Marco
Friendship and marriage have much in common, but I look back at my own short-lived marriage and realize that what makes the marriages work that last a lifetime is true friendship. It is friendship—actually liking the person you are married to—that carries you over the dark times that inevitably arise. I tried so hard to save my marriage, but the truth is that during the good times, we were fine . . . the hard times is when things weren’t fine. I have learned that real love isn’t the water, and that while being in or out of love may be the waves coming in or sliding back to sea . . . real love is the sand. Real love is what lies beneath all the fleeting moments that are passing overhead.
I suppose I should tell you about the Writer Voice. The Story Voice. The voice that I simply cannot shut up despite the fact that all I have written since the last book is (very, very bad) poetry and checks. That Voice . . . it wants me to write, Valdis. It wants to turn every bit of my life into a story, as if it could take all the good and the bad and the often ugly times and put them into some sort of blender and make me spit it all out again. As if it wants me to regurgitate my life onto the page. I hate the Voice, and yet . . . I would not know what to do without it.
Even in my sleep, it speaks to me. Out here alone, waiting for the end of my life to come and taking Damn Dog for a walk through the desert or riding Damn Horse for as long as my joints can take it, I want to talk to you. But the Voice . . . it talks to me.
“Do you know what your problem is, boy?” it says to me. It calls me “boy,” which I suspect it learned from my father. It wants out, wants me to write, and because I can’t, won’t . . . it will torment me.
When I don’t answer, it says, “I said, do you know what your problem is, boy?”
Giving in, I tell it, “No. What is my problem?”
“You think too damn much. Life is never about the now with you, is it? It’s always about the past. You live there like a goddamn ghost. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have written word one. I am your memory, your conscience (not that you have a huge one), and your parents. I am all you’ve got left, and ain’t that a goddamn shame? I am your best friend.”
This is what angers me the most, Valdis. That it thinks it’s my friend, when all it has ever done has brought me misery. “That’s not true!” I tell it. “I had a wife, children, a family. I . . . I had Valdis. She is my best friend!”
“Bullshit,” the voice says to me. “You hide out here to avoid the truth. Your wife is your ex-wife and wouldn’t spare you the cost of a cup of prison coffee. Your children hate you, hate what you became after the last book hit so big and scared you to death. And Valdis? Valdis is dead. Dead and dust and crunchy bones.”
That’s the part that always shuts me up, Valdis. I don’t want the Voice to know the truth. That you are dead, but somehow, I can hear your voice, too. Sometimes loud, sometimes soft, but I can hear you. I know you are not dead.
“I am you and better than you,” the Voice continues. It is relentless. “I am the you that spoke at conferences, told stories, found the rhythm of the language. I am your best friend, not a pile of bones, because without me, there would be no you. Without me, you’d still be selling cars in Appleton, Wisconsin, and drinking your lunch every day.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I admit. “But without you, I wouldn’t have written that stupid book that ruined everything, either.”
I hate the Voice, Valdis. I hate it because it’s always there. When it is quiet, I can think clearly. I can remember you, the past, and feel it for myself without any translation. Without interference. I can think of my wife and my children. I can look at it all and know it for what it was, what it is, and I don’t feel compelled to make it into a storyline. Does that make sense to you?
“For you, boy,” the Voice once told me, “everything is a storyline. Remember when your mother died?” Sometimes the Voice sounds like my mother, more often, my father. Sometimes, it is just my voice, only more resonant, stronger and sure. No matter what it sounds like, however, the Voice is impossible for me to ignore.
“I said, do you remember when your mother died?” it repeated.
I closed my eyes, Valdis, and I swear to you that I could almost picture the Voice. As if it had a body of its own. “Yes,” I told it. “I remember. How could I forget?”
“You and I . . . we turned that into a story, didn’t we? A hell of a story, in fact. All that pain on the page. That’s when it’s good, you know. When I can get you to go deep, organ and blood and bone marrow deep, and find some hidden artery that we cut open, and you get to bleed all over the keyboard. That crimson flood is what makes it really work.”
I hate the Voice, Valdis, because so often it is right. I hate it because even when I think it isn’t listening, it is. It’s spent years watching, recording, taking down little details—the way rain sounds on a particular surface, or how a scar on my wife’s leg looked, or the feel of silk sheets on a hot summer day. Or . . . or the way those orchids looked in your hair. Anything and everything it could pull inward and use later.
I hate it because it’s right, Valdis. You were my best friend, but I killed you. I killed you, and all that was left for such a long time was the Voice. And the sorry, sad, truth is that if I could send the Voice away, never to return, I’d miss it. He’s all I thought I had left until I began to hear you, to know that even in death, you’d found a way to reach me.
What I don’t understand yet, my dear friend, is how I can hear your voice—I would know its tones anywhere—yet not understand what you are saying. I know it’s you, but the words are unclear, as though they were coming through a wet, heavy cotton comforter. I wish I knew what you were saying, that your voice were as clear to me as the Writer Voice. I don’t know how a voice, a sound in my head, can be something so hateful to me, and yet . . . so needed. The Voice is me, and I am the Voice, but we are not the same, Valdis. We can’t be.
“We aren’t,” the Voice assures me now. “You’re the idea man, but I’m the one who gets the real words on the page. I’m the cutter. You’d never bleed enough on your own. You haven’t got the stomach for it.”
“Fuck you,” I tell it. I still have my own memory. I know what happened and how it happened. “I’ve bled plenty.”
The Voice just laughs at me, Valdis. It laughs and laughs because it knows.
Despite the fact that I can hear you, feel you . . . I was the one who killed you, and it knows my guilt. Ha! Somehow or another, I’ve wound my way back to it, and I guess it’s time for me to put it on the page. We need to talk about what happened, and I can only pray that these words will reach you.
Part V: Where Crazy People Live
Jamie looked up from the pages in his hand and realized that the old man wasn’t just some strange guy living in a tiny trailer in the desert. The old man had been crazy. He was writing a letter to a dead woman— a woman he admitted to killing—and talking about the voices in his head. It was little wonder that he lived out here by himself. He probably had to.
He scanned the small living room once again and wondered about the books. Many of them were classics: works by Faulkner, Melville, Hemingway and others. Various other well known writers like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, romance authors like Nora Roberts and Danielle Steele, plenty of science fiction from Frank Herbert and Kevin Anderson. And many more still. He looked closer and saw that the shelves— which went from floor to ceiling—were double or even triple stacked in some places. The books were worn, too. These weren’t display copies like he’d seen in some people’s houses. The old man read the books he owned.
Jamie wondered where he kept his own books and stood up to look at the shelves more closely. He finally found them on the top of one shelf, not displayed prominently or proudly, but stuck up there as if they were afterthoughts. Most of them were paperbacks in various genres—a fantasy novel, a mystery, two science fiction novels. But there was one hardcover, and he pulled that one out and looked at the cover. It read: Lies We Told: A Fictional Memoir by Rh
ys Dylan. The image on the cover was a strange close-up shot of three faces, the profile of a woman on each side and a man behind. Nothing but their lips and noses were visible and each of them held a finger to their lips in the universal gesture of “be quiet.”
On the back, there was praise from a bunch of different reviewers, but the one that caught Jamie’s interest was from the New York Times; it said, “Dylan’s so-called ‘fictional memoir’ captures effortlessly the words we wrap around our own lives, the lies we tell ourselves and our loved ones. Demanding, scary and deeply emotional, this is a novel that should be shelved under both fiction and nonfiction, if for no other reason than whatever lies it contains are also truths that should be heard.”
Jamie made a mental note to try to find the book and was reaching to put it back when a small piece of note paper slipped out of the back cover and drifted to the floor. He picked it up and read it: Mr. Marsters, go ahead and take this copy, if you like. Though it adds little (if anything) of value, I signed it for you as well.—Rhys Dylan.
Jamie opened the book and turned to the title page, where he read the inscription left by the old man: For Mr. Marsters, who stopped by for lemonade and brought a little light into my last days. Best wishes, Rhys Dylan.
A small shudder wracked through his body. The old man had known he’d come inside, had known he would get lemonade, would read the letter, find the book. He was clearly crazy, and yet . . . how could he have known all of that from a few front-porch conversations?
A quick glance at his watch showed him that he should already have returned to the post office, but now he had to finish the letter. He had to read the rest of the story and find out what happened. Some mysteries—like the old man’s almost preternatural ability to guess what he was going to do—could wait. The letter for Valdis could not.
Still carrying the book, Jamie returned to the desk, set it down, and once more turned his attention to the pages of the letter.
Part VI: The Distances Between Us
My mother died on October the 25th, as you know. Do you remember when I called you? That was during those long years when it seemed that the only times we talked—once every year or two—were to report on some tragedy or another. The loss of someone we knew. A marriage or a birth (tragedies in their own right), or just to make sure that the other was okay.
She died, Valdis, and every year after that, no matter where I was, I spent that day driving. I would get in my car or my truck—these last few years, I’ve ridden Damn Horse, because I don’t drive anymore— and I would just go. As fast as I could, as far as I could. I never put that part in the story I wrote about her death, but it didn’t matter. I drove all those miles for me, and I wish I could tell you why, but all I can do is guess. My best guess is that maybe deep down I figured if I drove hard enough, fast enough, one day I’d just . . . vanish. Like the way a beam of sunlight can disappear in an instant when the clouds race overhead.
The distances between us, Valdis . . . we’ve never been able to overcome them. I left Nebraska all those years ago, burning bridges and shooting flaming arrows behind me as fast as I could. I ran because I couldn’t have you as anything more than a friend. I ran because the Voice told me I had to go, to escape, to find some place where the words would flow more easily than they do in that dumpy little town we grew up in. In short, I ran because I was afraid to stay, and in so many ways, I’ve been running ever since.
But the world is such a small place, you know? You can run and run, and as the pavement blurs beneath you and the wind sings in your ears, sooner or later, you find yourself . . . back where you started. It seems that I could never run far enough to get away from where I came from, never drive fast enough to escape my mother’s death. And, finally, I ended up here. In this little trailer, hiding away from everything during my last days and wondering how I could ever get away from my responsibility to you. For what I did to you.
Do you remember the little gas station, Valdis? I can’t recall its name, but it was situated across the street from that ugly casino you were staying at for the conference. You’d wanted some fresh air and a walk, and I was leaning against my car, filling it with gasoline. I looked up and . . . there you were. Walking across the concrete parking lot and looking as beautiful as the day I’d last seen you, your hair a bit shorter, but still as red as I remembered.
For a moment, Valdis, I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. Time slowed down, and I knew that the distances between us had somehow shortened, that we were meant to see each other again. I found my breath, called your name, and you turned, and then that smile of yours, the thousand-watt one that can stop an entire room, was on your face, and in three running steps we were in each other’s arms. Hugging and laughing and crying because it had been so long. Too long.
And in those few moments of excitement, Valdis, I forgot everything. I forgot that I was standing at the pump, filing up my car. I forgot that it was October the 25th and I was going to drive that day, as fast as I could, as hard as I could. I forgot my sorrows, forgot about the stupid book, forgot everything.
You said you’d lost track of me, didn’t want to bother me now that I was famous. I told you that all of that was over. There weren’t going to be any more books, and you asked why, and while I was trying to find the words to explain it, my gas tank overfilled and . . . and just like that . . . we were friends again. We were talking again, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to ask you if you wanted to go for a drive with me.
I wish you hadn’t said yes, Valdis. I wish I had told you to go back to your conference, that the night air in Vegas isn’t refreshing but dark and heavy and weighted-down with guilts most people want to forget. Wishes and wishes. But I didn’t. I asked you, and you said yes, and we got in the car and headed north.
We took Highway 95, the only real way short of back roads and byways to get between Las Vegas and Reno. I’ve been to many places in my life, but in many ways Nevada is the “Big Empty.” There are massive areas of the state that are nothing more than desert, rocks, abandoned mines and forgotten shacks. The government owns most of it.
It’s a long drive between the two places, about sixteen hours round-trip. I didn’t set out thinking we would go all the way north. I lost track of time and space, got lost listening to you and seeing you again for the first time in so long, that before I knew it we were winding around Walker Lake. The road there is all curves and hills, and overhead, the stars were racetracks of light.
You asked me about my wife, my children, where they were now. I told you they were gone. She was now my ex-wife, and my children hated me. You laughed, soft, and said, “They’ll get over it when they grow up,” and just hearing you say it made hope blossom in my chest.
We talked of many things, but by the time we were driving around Walker Lake, the conversation had started to run dry. I made it clear to you, when you asked, that I didn’t want to talk about the book or the stories or anything else. What I wanted to talk about was us, and I tried to force it. In my loneliness, I wanted you to tell me that you’d missed me, that you’d been wrong about us.
Instead, you asked me if I remembered kissing you. I said that I did, my eyes leaving the road, searching yours for some sign.
Then you said, “You shouldn’t have kissed me, you know. I knew then we’d never be more than friends, and it would have been nice to have that little mystery in my life all these years. Wondering if kissing you would have changed everything.”
Before I could reply, before I could find the words to tell you that you were wrong, that the foundation of love and marriage is friendship . . . the car left the road on a sharp curve. I remember the sound of the engine revving, the way we catapulted into space, spinning like a top.
I remember the way time slowed down, and for a moment, I could see the stars overhead, and it crossed my mind that the meaning of your name, Valdis, was from the Scandinavian. Your name means “Goddess of the Dead.”
Then you screamed, the
car hit the top of a rock outcropping, and even over the crunching of glass, the shriek of metal on metal on rock, I could hear the snap of your neck as it broke, a branch breaking in winter, cutting off your voice, your smile, your light.
And just as suddenly, it was over. You were dead and I was alive. There’s an old cliché that God protects children, drunks, and fools. I am a fool, Valdis. I should have died in that accident, should have been just as dead as you were. But I lived. I walked away from it with little more than some minor bumps and bruises and scrapes. The police blamed me for the accident, and rightly so, but my punishment was far less than I deserved.
I should have died, Valdis, and in so many ways, I did. I have driven that road many times since. I have raced to that curve, that hill, hoping that somehow the hand of God would reach out to right the wrong, that the car would slide, that I would be catapulted over the rocky edges of Walker Lake to drown or be crushed against the bottom of the precipice.
But each time, I lived. I lived and survived and finally, when I could take it no more, I moved here, to this dingy little trailer in the middle of nowhere. I took Damn Dog and Damn Horse and retreated to the high desert to wait for death, for absolution, for understanding.
You were always my best friend, Valdis, despite my old man’s longing for more, despite your knowledge from that very first kiss that it couldn’t be more. You were my best friend, and when my eyes searched yours for the words I wanted to hear, my attention drifted from the road . . . and I killed you. For that, I cannot be more sorry.
And now, after all this time, I can hear your voice. I hear it dimly and I wonder what you are trying to tell me, my old friend. What words would you give me? Why do I suspect—hope?—that what you are trying to say is that you forgive me?