USA Noir Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

by Johnny Temple

  I went to the neighborhood in which my father grew up. I went to his house. My father is not a known person. There will never be a plaque outside of his childhood home letting the world know that he was born there. I had a plaque made, mailed it to my younger brother, and asked him to affix it with Velcro on the sixteenth of the following month. I returned to his house that afternoon and there it was.

  Instead of dropping myself back down in Princeton, I decided to walk all the way home. It is quicker to walk in the map, as each stride can cover a full city block, but I knew it would take me most of the night. I didn’t mind. I wanted it that way. The night had to be filled. Halfway across the George Washington Bridge I looked down.

  Nothing ever happens because nothing can happen, because despite the music, movies, and novels that have inspired us to believe that the extraordinary is right around the corner, we’ve been disappointed by experience. The dissonance between what we’ve been promised and what we’ve been given would make anyone confused and lonely. I was only ever trying to inch my imitation of life closer to life.

  I can’t remember the last time I didn’t pause halfway across a bridge and look down. I wanted to call out, but to whom? Nobody would hear me because there’s no sound. I was there, but everyone around me was in the past. I watched my braveness climb onto the railing and leap: the suicide of my suicide.

  * * *

  On the fourth of the next month, I walked beside the vehicle. It was easy to keep pace with it, as the clarity of the photographs depends on the car moving quite slowly. I took a right down Harrison when the car did, and another right on Patton, and a left on Broadmead. The windows were tinted—apparently the drivers have been subject to insults and arguments—so I didn’t know if I was even noticed. The driver certainly didn’t adjust his driving in any way to suggest so. I walked beside him for more than two hours, and only stopped when the blister on my right heel became unbearable. I had wanted to outlast him, catch him on his lunch break, or filling up at the gas station. That would have been a victory, or at least a kind of intimacy. What would I have said? Do you recognize me?

  I went home and turned on my computer. Everywhere you looked in Princeton, there I was. There were dozens of me.

  Hi, it’s me. I know I’m not supposed to call, but I don’t care. I’m sad. I’m in trouble. Just with myself. I’m in trouble with myself. I don’t know what to do and there’s no one to talk to. You used to talk to me, but now you won’t. I’m not going to ruin your life. I don’t know why you’re so afraid of that. I’ve never done anything to make you think I’m in any way unreliable. But I have to say, the more you act on your fear that I will ruin your life, the more compelled I feel to ruin it. I’m not a great person, but I’ve never done anything to you. I know it’s all my fault, I just don’t know how. What is it? I’m sorry.

  I was spending more time each day inside of the map, traveling the world—Sydney, Reykjavik, Lisbon—but mostly going for walks around Princeton. I would often pass people I knew, people I would have liked to say hello to or avoid. The pizza in the window was always fresh, I always wanted to eat it. I wanted to open all of the books on the stand outside the bookshop, but they were forever closed. (I made a note to myself to open them, facing out, on the fourth of the next month, so I would have something to read inside the map.) I wanted the world to be more available to me, to be touchable.

  I was puzzled by my use of the map, my desire to explore places that I could easily explore in the world itself. The more time I spent in the map, the smaller the radius of my travels. Had I stayed inside long enough, I imagine I would have spent my time gazing through my window, looking at myself looking at the map. The thrill or relief came through continual reencounters with the familiar—like a blind person’s hands exploring a sculpture of his face.

  Unable to sleep one night—it was daytime in the map, as always—I thought I’d check out the progress on the new dorms down by the water. Nothing could possibly be more soul-crushing than campus construction: slow and pointless, a way to cast off money that had to either be spent or lost. But the crushing of the soul was the point. It was part of my exile inside of the map inside of my house.

  As I rotated the world to see the length of the scaffolding, something caught my attention: a man looking directly into the camera. He was approximately my age—perhaps a few years older—wearing a plaid jacket and Boston Red Sox hat. There was nothing at all unusual about someone looking back at the camera: most people who notice the vehicle are unable to resist staring. But I had the uncanny sense that I’d seen this person before. Where? Nowhere, I was sure, and yet I was also sure somewhere. It didn’t matter, which is why it did.

  I dropped myself back down on Nassau Street, drifted its length a few times, and finally found him, standing outside the bank, again looking directly into the camera. There was nothing odd about that, either—he could have simply walked from one location to the other, and by chance crossed paths with the vehicle. I rotated the world around him, examined him from all sides, pulled him close to me and pushed him away, tilted the world to better see him. Was he a professor? A townie? I was most curious about my curiosity about him. Why did his face draw me in?

  I walked home. It had become a ritual: before closing the map, I would walk back to my front door. There was something too dissonant about leaving it otherwise, like debarking a plane before it lands. I crossed Hamilton Avenue, wafted down Snowden, and, one giant stride at a time, went home. But when I was still several hundred feet away, I saw him again. He was standing in front of my house. I approached, shortening my strides so that the world only tiptoed toward me. He was holding something, which I couldn’t make out for another few feet; it was a large piece of cardboard, across which was written: YOU WON’T GET AWAY WITH IT.

  I ran to the actual door and opened it. He wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t.

  * * *

  As computing moves off of devices and into our bodies, the living map will as well. That’s what they’re saying. In the clumsiest version we will wear goggles onto which the map is projected. In all likelihood, the map will be on contact lenses, or will forgo our eyes altogether. We will literally live in the map. It will be as visually rich as the world itself: the trees will not merely look like trees, they will feel like trees. They will, as far as our minds are concerned, be trees. Actual trees will be the imitations.

  We will continuously upload our experiences, contributing to the perpetual creation of the map. No more vehicles: we will be the vehicles.

  Information will be layered onto the map as is desired. We could, when looking at a building, call up historical images of it; we could watch the bricks being laid. If we crave spring, the flowers will bloom in time lapse. When other people approach, we will see their names and vital info. Perhaps we will see short films of our most important interactions with them. Perhaps we will see their photo albums, hear short clips of their voices at different ages, smell their shampoo. Perhaps we will have access to their thoughts. Perhaps we will have access to our own.

  * * *

  On the fourth of the next month, I stood at my door, waiting for the vehicle, and waiting for him. I was holding a sign of my own: YOU DON’T KNOW ME. The vehicle passed and I looked into the lens with the confidence of innocence. He never came. What would I have done if he had? I wasn’t afraid of him. Why not? I was afraid of my lack of fear, which suggested a lack of care. Or I was afraid that I did care, that I wanted something bad to happen.

  I missed my wife. I missed myself.

  I did an image search for the girl. There she was, posing on one knee with her high school lacrosse team. There she was, at a bar in Prague, blowing a kiss to the camera—to me, three years and half a globe away. There she was, holding on to a buoy. Almost all of the photos were the same photo, the one the newspapers had used. I pulled up her obituary, which I hadn’t brought myself to read until then. It said nothing I didn’t know. It said nothing at all. The penultimate paragra
ph mentioned her surviving family. I did an image search for her father. There he was.

  I entered the map. I looked for him along Nassau Street, and at the construction site where I’d first seen him. I checked the English department, and the coffee shop where I so often did my reading. What would I have said to him? I had nothing to apologize for. And yet I was sorry.

  It was getting late. It was always the middle of the day. I approached my house, but instead of seeing myself holding the sign, as I should have, I saw my crumpled body on the ground in front of the door.

  I went up to myself. It was me, but wasn’t me. It was my body, but not me. I tilted the world. There were no signs of any kind of struggle: no blood, no bruises. (Perhaps the photo had been taken in between the beating and the appearance of bruises?) There was no way to check for a pulse in the map, but I felt sure that I was dead. But I couldn’t have been dead, because I was looking at myself. There is no way to be alive and dead.

  I lifted myself up and put myself back down. I was still there. I pulled all the way back to space, to the Earth as a marble filling my screen in my empty house. I dove in, it all rushed to me: North America, America, the East Coast, New Jersey, Princeton Borough, Princeton Township, my address, my body.

  I went to Firestone Library to use one of the public computers. I hadn’t been to the library since the investigation, and hadn’t even thought to wonder if my identity card was still activated. I tried to open the door, but I couldn’t extend my arm. I realized I was still in the map.

  I got up from my computer and went outside. Of course my body wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t. When I got to Firestone, I extended my arm—I needed to see my hand reaching in front of me—and opened the door. Once inside, I swiped my ID, but a red light and beep emitted from the turnstile.

  “Can I help you?” the security guard asked.

  “I’m a professor,” I said, showing him my ID.

  “Lemme try that,” he said, taking my card from me and swiping it again. Again the beep and red light.

  He began to type my campus ID into his computer, but I said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Thanks anyway.” I took the ID from him and left the building.

  I ran home. Everyone around me was moving. The leaves flickered as they should have. It was all almost perfect, and yet none of it was right. Everything was fractionally off. It was an insult, or a blessing, or maybe it was precisely right and I was fractionally off?

  I went back into the map and examined my body. What had happened to me? I felt many things, and didn’t know what I felt. I felt personally sad for a stranger, and sad for myself in a distanced way, as if through the eyes of a stranger. My brain would not allow me to be both the person looking and being looked at. I wanted to reach out.

  I thought: I should take the pills in the medicine cabinet. I should drink a bottle of vodka, and go outside, just as I had in the map. I should lay myself down in the grass, face to the side, and wait. Let them find me. It will make everyone happy.

  I thought: I should fake my suicide, just as I had in the map. I should leave open a bottle of pills in the house, beside my laptop opened to the image of myself dead in the yard. I should pour a bottle of vodka down the drain, and leave my wife a voicemail. And then I should go out into the world—to Venice, to Eastern Europe, to my father’s childhood home. And when the vehicle approaches, I should run for my life.

  I thought: I should fall asleep, as I had in the map. I should think about my life later. When I was a boy, my father used to say the only way to get rid of a pestering fly is to close your eyes and count to ten. But when you close your eyes, you also disappear.

  RIDE ALONG

  BY JAMES W. HALL

  Coconut Grove, Miami

  (Originally published in Miami Noir)

  Jumpy was reaching for the door handle to get out when Guy took hold of his arm, saying, “Nothing weird this time. Promise me.”

  Jumpy took a few seconds to turn his head and look at Guy.

  “Define weird.”

  He had a point. It was more than weird already, an oddball pair like them out on a Sunday morning, four a.m., parked in a gravel lane next to a boarded-up house, with the orange sulfur lights from Douglas Road flickering like sky-fire through the big banyans. Three blocks north was the rubble and peeling paint of the Coconut Grove ghetto, three blocks the other way the mansions rose like giant concrete hibiscus blooms, pink and yellow, surrounded by high fortress walls, video cams, and coconut palms. The have-nots getting the exhaust fumes from Dixie Highway, the haves taking nice sweet hits on the ocean breezes.

  Thirty feet in front of where Guy was parked, standing next to a battered Oldsmobile, two black dudes were fidgeting while Guy and Jumpy stayed inside the white Chevy with the headlights off. Been there two, three minutes already. Doing deals with fidgety folks wasn’t Guy’s idea of good business practice.

  “The soul train must have a station around here,” Jumpy said.

  “You’re jacking yourself up, man. I told you. You freak out this time, it’s over, I walk.”

  “I don’t like dreadlocks,” Jumpy said.

  “It’s a hairstyle is all,” Guy told him. “A Rastafarian thing from Jamaica. Same as a crew cut is to you.”

  “I never did like dreadlocks. It’s a gut reaction.”

  “Okay, so you don’t like dreadlocks. But a little fashion incompatibility, that isn’t going to keep us from doing our business, right?”

  “It looks dirty,” Jumpy said. “Unkempt.”

  “Yeah, well, then let’s forget it. Start the car, get the hell out of here.”

  “You losing your nerve, teach? Get right up close to the devil, feel his warm breath on your face, then you back away?”

  “Nothing weird, okay? That’s all I’m asking.”

  Jumpy was 6'4", skinny as a greyhound, pasty-skinned, all knuckles and Adam’s apple. Kind of muscles that were easy to miss in that string bean body, like the braided steel cables holding a suspension bridge together. From what Guy had been able to learn, Jumpy had a couple of years of college, then he’d shipped out as a Marine for two hitches, then a lone-wolf mercenary for a while, off in Rwanda and Venezuela, spent a few years in a federal pen in Kansas, now he was on the prowl in Miami. Whatever unspeakable shit he’d been into never came up directly in conversation. Guy didn’t ask, Jumpy didn’t say. But it was there like a bad smell leaking from a locked room. The man was dangerous, and Guy loved it. Got a little tipsy from the proximity. So much to learn, so much to bring back to his own safe world. Riding the knife blade of violence, ever so careful not to get cut.

  Jumpy didn’t pump up his past. Very understated, even flip. Guy considered that a form of extreme cool, like those muscle-bound bodybuilders who only wore loose clothes. Tight shirts were for showboat assholes.

  Jumpy didn’t have to flaunt. There was a halo around him nobody could miss, a haze of androgen and pheromones that could turn a barroom edgy in a blink. Guy had seen nights when the bad boys lined up for a chance at Jumpy, pool cue in one hand, switchblade in the other, one by one coming at him like twigs into a wood chipper. Going in solid, coming out a spew of sawdust.

  Trouble was, in Jumpy’s line of work, nuance might be a better strategy than overwhelming force. But try to tell that to Jumpy. Dialing back that guy’s throttle, even for Guy, a silver-tongued specialist, a man Jumpy respected, it could present a challenge. Not that Guy was morally opposed to violence. In the abstract, inflicting pain and drawing blood was fine. He’d written about it for years, described it in excruciating detail. But putting it into flesh-and-blood action, no, that wasn’t his instinctive first choice like it was with Jumpy.

  “So we cool on this?” Guy said. “Do your deal and walk. No crazy-ass banter, no stare-downs. Right?”

  Jumpy kept his lasers fixed on the two dreadlocks.

  “I need some signal of agreement, Jumpy. A grunt is enough.”

  Jumpy turned his head and blinked. That was
all Guy was getting.

  They got out and Guy tried to match Jumpy’s casual saunter over to the Olds.

  The two gangstas insisted on patting Guy down, then after a moment’s indecision, they did a hurry-up job frisking Jumpy and stepped away like they’d burned their hands. The tall one went around to the trunk of the Olds and popped the lid.

  Guy stayed a couple of steps behind Jumpy while the tall dude, wearing a black T-top and baggy shorts, showed off the Squad. His dreadlock buddy stood by the driver’s door watching. His right hand fiddling around his shirttail, ready to quick-draw if things went bad.

  Dreadlock One was extolling the merits of the Squad Automatic Weapon, otherwise known as SAW. Eight hundred–meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred–round magazine. Talking straight English with a little Bahamian singsong, none of the hip-hop, we-badass bullshit.

  When Dreadlock One paused, Guy said, “You want to hold it, Jumpy? Inspect it?”

  Jumpy was silent.

  “One of you should check that shit, man, we don’t want no pissing and moaning later on.”

  “Let me know when the sales pitch is over,” Jumpy said. “I’ll get the cash.”

  Dreadlock One shifted his angle, moving for a better view of Guy.

  “What’re you looking at?”

  “That’s what I’m asking myself,” he said.

  “Do that again?” Guy said.

  “Who’m I doing business with,” Dreadlock One asked, “man or woman? From across the way, you look like a dude; up close like this, you could be a bull-dyke bitch.”

  Guy felt Jumpy shift closer to him.

  “Happens all the time,” Guy said. “It’s the haircut.”

  Guy had blond shoulder-length Jesus hair, slender hips, and sleek Scandinavian features. A man of long smooth planes. Not feminine so much as asexual. A floater. Hovering between the sexes. Some women found him sexy, and just about as many men.

  “More than the freaking haircut. It’s your whole entire weird-ass self.”