The Reason You're Alive
Page 18
Even before the war, I was a hardheaded asshole. My mother always used to say so. I was born set in my ways, and I’m not sure my ways were good for Jessica in the long run. So maybe her killing herself doesn’t have anything to do with the Vietnam War at all. But then I go back to thinking about why she went to that drug house and how far gone her brother was and how that affected her at a young age, which was compounded by all of my crazy baggage.
Jessica developed all sorts of tricks for dealing with me. The first time we slept in a bed together, I had the fucking nightmares like always and started screaming in my sleep. I had told her never to wake me up under any circumstance whatsoever, but she didn’t listen, so the next thing I remember, she’s on the floor and I’m holding a knife to her throat. I regained consciousness and came to my senses just in time to refrain from opening up her jugular. Not a great way to start off a romance, to say the least. But Jessica learned and adapted.
She didn’t wake me up from then on, but sang lullabies to me whenever I started to scream, and whispered through the darkness that she was with me and everything was okay. Sometimes this stopped my screaming completely. Other times I simply woke up, which was just as good. It took time to implant this trigger in my brain, meaning I would subconsciously associate her voice with safety. It became a switch to turn off the horror movie in my mind. Some nights she would sing and whisper for hours before I stopped screaming, and you can imagine what that did to her own circadian rhythms or whatever the fuck you call them.
Roger Dodger used to drain her too, coming around the house when he knew I was at work, distracting her from Hank and her paintings, trying to steal shit from our home to sell. He once stole all our silverware and the TV set when Jessica was in her studio, and yet she used to make him coffee and listen to him rant about the war and the government and how America was a scam and his wild theories about Light People too. That shit takes a toll on a sensitive person. She was counseling two Vietnam veterans, and all while she was depressed herself.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, especially when Hank was little and her painting was going well.
I got my first convertible in the mid-seventies—a mint 1969 Camaro, black with two thick white stripes on the hood. I bought it because I got a good deal, and my wife said driving around in the wind and sun would help with her depression. I remember Jessica and Hank absolutely loved feeling the air ripping through their hair and hand-surfing the world as it rushed by, and I was proud to have made enough money working at the bank and doing some other side investments to buy the car that they wanted.
The first trip we took in the Camaro was to a rented house in the Poconos, on a lake. It was summer, so I took off my shirt and drove the whole way like that, soaking up the rays, feeling free as could be, back before everyone was so goddamn worried about skin cancer. I might have even sipped from a can of Budweiser as I drove. And I remember looking over at Jessica, who was still only in her early twenties. She had her hair wrapped up in a silk scarf, and she had on these big oversize purple sunglasses, and she had even put on some lipstick, which was rare for her.
I felt so happy that I leaned over and kissed her right on the lips, which made her laugh. Then I looked into the rearview mirror and saw little Hank holding his hands up in the air and smiling at clouds, and I thought I was the luckiest man in the world. I had survived the little yellow bastards in Vietnam, and now I had a beautiful family in the land of the free and a promising career at the bank.
My father and mother were following behind us, and they were still in good health at the time, being that they were just in their fifties, which is almost twenty years younger than I am now. And I remember holding up my hand in the air, beeping the horn and waving at my father. I could see him smiling in the rearview mirror, and he beeped back and then lifted his own worn, battle-tested hand up outside his window. I was taking all of us to the Poconos to celebrate my mother’s birthday, I think. Yeah, that was it.
And I also remember swimming in the lake with my family and smoking with my father, both of us sitting at a wooden picnic table shaded by giant oaks, ashing into a flowerpot filled with sand. And my mother working the charcoal grill, cooking up the hot dogs and hamburgers, and Jessica in a bikini, looking like a top model herself as she used sticks to draw pictures in the sand with Hank.
Sitting right there on the picnic table by the lake, my father put his arm around me and said I was really doing okay, meaning he was proud of his only son who had made something of himself after returning from war, and I nodded back, because all I ever wanted in life was my hard-ass Nazi-killing father’s approval, and I felt I had it on that warm good afternoon in the Poconos.
And later that night in the cottage I had rented, Jessica opened all the windows so that you could hear a billion fucking crickets chirping and the night birds singing their hunting songs, and you could even hear the glow of the full moon spilling over everything like ghostly milk. It must have been one of those rare nights when Jessica wasn’t feeling depressed and I wasn’t too fucking stressed from work, because we made love right there in the Poconos bed as my mother and father and Hank slept in rooms below us.
And when I was inside Jessica and kissing her neck, I suddenly felt a great sadness, because somehow I knew life would never ever get any better than that moment right then and there, which would be gone for good by the morning.
It never did either.
I was fucking right about that.
But I never stopped missing Jessica, the only woman for me, which is what made attending weddings hard.
Back outside Sue and Big T’s party, I felt a hand on my shoulder. By the rough manly grip, I knew it was Frank, who I hadn’t spoken with yet that evening, because his bitch wife hates me, and—despite my warnings—Sue said we had to invite her too.
Frank said something about our dancing days being done, and I told him a lot of our days were done.
So he busted my balls a little, asking if I was finally buying the bullet, and I told him that his ugly ass wasn’t getting rid of me that easily.
That’s when Frank started telling me all about your organization—how you collect stories from veterans like myself. He said that I had a fascinating tale to tell, and that civilians could learn a lot from it. Then he swore up and down that no one would edit my words, twisting everything to fit some bullshit political agenda.
I was worried that some of what I had to say could get me into legal trouble, because you never know what might happen when the thieving hypocritical US government gets a bug up its ass, and I don’t trust lawyers and the current judicial system one bit. Plus I didn’t know who the fuck you were, and still don’t really.
And that’s when Frank told me that there was the option of making my story into a “time capsule” that would not be read by anyone until after I was dead. This way I could tell the truth without fear of repercussions, and that made me feel a little better about the idea, especially because I could change names to protect the innocent and no one could fact-check with me after I was dead, so no fucking civilian idiots hounding me with stupid moronic questions.
Frank said that if we didn’t document all of what had happened to us, it would be lost forever, and how could future generations learn from the past if only morons and the lying government wrote the history books without any rational, thinking, intelligent, cerebral people getting a say in there too.
There was no arguing with that logic.
Despite the fact that I’m clearly no storyteller, I finally told Frank I would do my part, even though I’m not stupid and therefore realize that you are most definitely connected to the US government somehow, even if Frank thinks otherwise.
Every fucking thing is connected to the US government. Can’t get free of that, but fuck it, I’m done being silently complicit when it comes to the lies about my war and the good men you sent to fight it.
I could tell Frank was proud of me because he squeezed my shoulder once more and complim
ented me on the camouflage bow tie and vest. It was nice to have a friend like Frank, who was always offering me opportunities for closure when it came to the Vietnam War. And I felt lucky.
But all this is moot anyway, on account of the “time capsule” aspect, meaning no one sees any of this shit until I die.
Let me tell you something. Not gonna happen, because I’m gonna live forever.
So all of you fucking imbeciles who make up the so-called general public are never gonna see this report anyway.
Only the good die young, and I’ve lived nasty.
Live nasty, live forever.
Sweetheart, you can bet your pretty little ass on that.
About the Author
Matthew Quick is the New York Times bestselling author of several novels, including The Silver Linings Playbook, which was made into an Oscar-winning film; The Good Luck of Right Now; and Love May Fail. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention, among other accolades. He lives with his wife on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
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Also by Matthew Quick
Every Exquisite Thing
Love May Fail
The Good Luck of Right Now
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the reason you’re alive. Copyright © 2017 by Matthew Quick. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
first edition
Cover Design by James Iacobelli
Cover Photograph © Samunya / Shutterstock.com
Digital Edition JULY 2017 ISBN: 9780062424341
Print ISBN: 978-0-06242430-3
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