But Jeff Pepper never did get better.
On New Year’s Day, when Jamie was ten, his mother came home after the most recent incident soaked with rain, her face slacken. She came into the house, stared through the doorway at Jamie, who was sitting in front of the television in the living room, then went into the kitchen and poured a glass of wine. When she didn’t return, Jamie went through the house looking for her. He found her sitting at his father’s desk, one hand on the typewriter, the other pressed to her forehead. The wine glass sat empty on the edge of the desk. Jamie stood in the doorway and she turned to him slowly.
“Jamie,” Lynn said. “I’m afraid Daddy won’t be coming home.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Are you any relation to Jeff Pepper?”
It was a question Jamie had been asked countless times before. When he was younger, people would stop him on the street, commenting on the striking resemblance he bore to “that odd writer in town…” And as he grew older, the similarities between them only increased. He had his father’s features, the smooth, boyish face, the narrow nose and slightly furrowed brow. His eyes were the same deep shade of green as Jeff’s. Jamie’s mother often commented on the almost frightening echoes in their mannerisms as well. Even after the symptoms of Jamie’s PD became constant, there were flashes when his movements were unmistakably those of his father. Many times in later years, Lynn had looked out the window as Jamie approached the house and felt a sudden shiver ripple up her spine, thinking for the briefest moment that she was seeing a dead man returning home. They had the same stride, the same unusual lightness in their limbs. In college, many of Jeff’s classmates had pegged him as homosexual, owing to the wispy quality of his hands and arms, which were always somewhat tensed, elevated ever so slightly towards his chest, as if held by strings. His soft, even voice added to this misperception. After the publication of Dub Taylor, a book whose main character was almost universally seen as an autobiographical portrait of the author, the novel’s bisexual undertones only cast further speculation as to Jeff Pepper’s sexual predilections. Truth be told, there was little in Jeff Pepper’s most famous work that offered insight into the life of the author himself, and both his friends and family knew that the only man who held romantic interest for him, was himself. Like his son, Jeff was enchanted by women, obsessed with them, but before women, his first love was and always would be his own psyche, a fact that made his marriage to Jamie’s mother all the more difficult over the years. Not that any relationship between writers has ever been easy, but Jeff’s self-assaulting criticism and determination to “find the truth” in his work, were not only completely contrary to Lynn’s journalistic sensibilities, but they tested her ability to take his obsessions seriously. Preternatural navel gazing, that’s what she dubbed it during their more unhinged arguments. Yet, unlike Jamie, Lynn understood what made her husband’s work great, or what made others feel that way. But, perhaps more in line with her son’s later impressions of Jeff’s writing, she increasingly had the feeling that some of her husband’s work, as well as his mental struggles, were an overly romanticized “tempest in a teapot.” Still, as with most relationships, their careers had little bearing on their feelings, and they did love each other, greatly, which is was why Jeff’s final period of depression and his ultimate disappearance, remained an event Lynn had never stopped turning over in her mind.
Jamie, on the other hand, had long ago embraced his father’s myth. Though unable to fully comprehend the impact of Jeff’s work, let alone the appeal, he had, for the greater portion of his life, attempted to adopt his father’s obsessions. Yet, aside from his voice and mannerisms, the two could not have had more different personalities.
Jamie was calm, quiet. True, he had an undeniable introspective streak, a tendency to pick away at a question in his mind, but unlike his father, Jamie also had the ability to arrive, if not at an answer, than at a point of acceptance. If he couldn’t put a question to sleep, he had no problem setting it loose in the wilds of his mind. Jeff, on the other hand, felt any question about human behavior, world events, or his own motivations had to be understood, taken apart, and analyzed on the spot. If not now, when? He could not accept that certain aspects of life were simply incomprehensible. As a result, his life and work were a pure reflection of the unbearable inner turmoil that raged inside his head.
Tragic writers are the stuff of legend. Papa Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allen Poe, the greater the turmoil in the author’s work, the more the scholars seem to take note, picking apart each of their pieces, looking for answers and insights into life and its workings. The thing with Jeff Pepper was that aside from his last couple of years, his was not a classically tragic life. Despite the darker tone of his works, his career and popularity were more along the lines of Woody Allen, had Allen written The Catcher in the Rye in college before making Annie Hall and Manhattan. Yet, after the accident, Jeff’s life had taken an unexpected turn, and with it, his career gained the weight of tragedy from which literary and pop culture legends are made.
It was not an uncommon question to come up, and when it did, Jamie usually tried to brush it away as quickly, and as gracefully as possible. He understood the fascination, if not the fanaticism, and he tried to answer as politely as his father had when he was growing up. Still, the attention had always made him uncomfortable. This time, the source of the question had surprised him.
“Are you any relation to Jeff Pepper?” Professor Ryan asked.
Class had just started, and Jamie and Kelli were sitting down at the front table, running late after an early morning quickie had taken longer than expected. Ryan let the class wait as he sat silently on the front desk for a few moments. He stared down at the class list, then he looked up, locking directly on Jamie and uttering that familiar question. Jamie should have known his luck would run out sooner or later. In three weeks on campus, no one had made mention of his last name, or taken note of his resemblance to a certain literary cult figure. He’d briefly stopped by Gabe and Will’s room the night before, and watched Will warily as he poured over notes from one of his classes. Jamie was still on edge around the guy after learning more about his infatuation with Kelli, but he was trying to smooth things over to avoid any tensions. Jamie had just launched into a conversation with Gabe over the latest floor gossip, when in midsentence he’d looked at the shelf above Will’s desk and noticed a copy of Dub Taylor. His mind went blank for a moment before he was able to return to the conversation and quietly make his exit. Since then, every time he saw Will, Jamie had been waiting for him to make some mention of his father. It still hadn’t happened. Even Kelli had not yet made the connection.
Now he was caught off guard. The mood in the room changed immediately. Jamie could physically feel his classmates’ eyes watching him. He couldn’t see Kelli’s expression, but he heard the wooden chair beside him creak softly as she shifted towards him. After an uncomfortably long pause, Jamie regained his speech.
“Yeah,” he replied. “He was my father.”
Professor Ryan nodded his head slowly. “He was a good guy.”
Jamie waited for him to continue, expecting the usual comments about the book or the movies, or at least the whispered “It’s a shame what happened.” But instead, Ryan just stood up, walked up the aisle to the back of the room, and asked someone in the back row what movies he had seen that weekend. The answer launched the professor into a lecture on the mass media and the phenomenon of weekend box office. But Jamie’s concentration was shot. For the rest of the two hour lecture, all he could think about was Professor Ryan’s comment. He could feel Kelli looking over at him, and he tried to talk to her, turning his head to whisper comments about the class, but he couldn’t focus on what was being discussed.
At the end of the lecture, as they were filing out of the room, Professor Ryan called him over.
“I knew your father,” he said matter of factly. “I worked with him on a couple of his shows.”
Jamie lo
oked at him blankly. Kelli watched them out of the corner of her eye, then walked past and waited in the hallway.
“Which shows? Jamie asked.
“It was that whole series he did with the anti-social police detective character, Brick Ransom. I worked on the animated sequences. I was on that show for a couple of years in fact.”
“Yeah, those were pretty popular.”
Professor Ryan was gathering up his books, pulling on his jacket. He studied Jamie for a moment.
“They were brilliant.”
Jamie nodded his head slowly. The Professor looked at him closely, almost staring through him.
“You remind me of him, a lot.” Ryan said, as he tucked his books under one arm and walked out of the room.
***
“So I guess I’m the one who has to bring this up.”
Kelli was stretched out on her back, her feet dangling over the edge of the bed. She was dressed in sweatpants and a sweat-soaked tanktop. They’d just come back from the gym. Jamie lay on the floor, one hand held to his head. He was feeling odd after his workout. Professor Ryan’s comments had caught him off guard. He knew the guy liked to throw people curve balls, but the way he’d brought up his father, and their odd exchange after class had twisted Jamie’s mind in on itself. Going to the gym had helped, but he still felt somewhat removed from his senses, as though the tiny hairs on his head were dancing in place. He didn’t like it.
“I said, I guess I have to be the one to bring this up,” Kelli repeated.
“Bring what up?”
“You know what.”
Jamie sat up and looked at her.
“What do you want to talk about, the books or the movies?”
Kelli stared back at him, her eyes narrowed.
“Neither.”
“Come on. Just ask. I don’t know much about the guy, but I can tell you more than you’ll read in the books, probably. Lets get it over with.”
“Don’t be an asshole. I’m just wondering if you’re upset.”
Jamie lay back on the floor again. He was quiet for a moment.
“Nah. I’m used to it.”
“I didn’t know,” Kelli said. “If that matters to you--”
“Do you know who he was?”
She didn’t say anything, only stood up and walked over to a shelf of books. Shoving several away, she tossed one across the room. It slammed down on the floor to Jamie’s side. He turned his head and looked at the book’s spine. Dub Taylor.
“It’s a great book,” she said.
“So I’ve been told.”
“I meant I didn’t know he was your father. And quite frankly, I don’t give a shit. I was just worried it was supposed to be secret.”
“No, not a secret. Just…” he trailed off. “Just not the only thing I want people to know me for.”
Kelli walked back to the couch and sat behind him, spreading her legs on either side of him. She leaned down, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him behind his ear. She could taste salt on his skin from the workout.
“Do you remember him?”
“Yeah, I remember. I was ten when it happened. He didn’t start going nuts until I was eight. But we still had some good times.”
Kelli sat up, raised her hands to the back of Jamie’s neck, and kneaded the tensed muscles. He sighed softly. The sounds of the dorms echoed out in the hallways. Two girls yelled at each other over the volume of music blasting from their rooms a few doors away. Kelli slowly massaged the bristly skin at the bottom of his cap, then she slipped her fingers under the edge and pulled it off. He still grew tense whenever she removed his hat, breathing in suddenly, then visibly willing his body to relax. The scars still surprised her. She was getting used to them, but hadn’t asked him for an explanation, not yet. She was waiting for him to bring them up himself.
“He was in therapy for years, but we knew it was coming. He’d leave us suicide notes, then disappear--”
He stopped abruptly. The sounds of footsteps came rumbling down the hall as two people ran past the door. A girl’s hysterical laughter echoed down the corridor.
“I just can’t help remembering things when I meet someone who knew him.”
“Were those shows Professor Ryan talked about filmed in town?”
Jamie nodded. “Yep. They did a lot of his stuff at WXXI here in town.
“You know, we watched a few of those in my classes last year. They’re amazing.”
“Yeah, I always like the TV stuff.”
Kelli leaned down and kissed him on the head.
“I never got the books though,” he said after a few minutes.
“I loved the first one. The second one was a little…”
“Fucked up?” Jamie asked. “Who writes their suicide into a book? It’s so--”
Kelli waited for him to finish. He remained silent.
“So, that was true?” she added.
He nodded his head.
“Yeah, they found his car in the ferry parking lot.”
“But did they ever find him?”
“No, but his credit card had a charge for a ticket. He got on at one end, didn’t get off at the other. If there was any doubt, the book cleared that up for us nicely.”
Kelli had read the sequel to Dub Taylor a few years ago. She didn’t want to tell Jamie how much the first one had meant to her, to sound like a cliché, but she still saw it as a touchstone reading experience. There were a lot of comparisons between Dub Taylor and Holden Caulfield, which she could understand. It was probably unavoidable. People were always looking for the next character with whom they could identify, and the attitude and excitement of Jeff Pepper’s book made comparisons irresistible. She liked Dub Taylor better, had actually read it three times, most recently that fall after she and Mike had broken up. She first read it in high school, then, despite warnings from everyone, she’d read the sequel, called simply Dub. She remembered hearing about the book when she was younger. It had been tied up in lawsuits for years. Dub, as it was published, was not a completed work. In fact, until Jeff Pepper disappeared, no one really knew how much of it had even been written. As Jamie had alluded, the major controversy surrounding the posthumous work, was that Jamie’s father had written his own suicide into the storyline. Whereas he had always strongly denied any similarities between his most famous character and himself in the original, in the sequel, Jeff had very thinly disguised elements of his own life, even going so far as to give Dub’s son the name Jamie. In the aftermath of Jeff’s disappearance, the news of the second book’s existence had kicked off a media frenzy, during which Jamie’s mother had tried to block publication, claiming it was the right of the author’s estate to give final approval. Ultimately, complications with the advance for the book, along with the costs of Jeff’s on-and-off treatment for the two years during which the fractured work was completed, forced Lynn to give in and allow it to be released. Morbid curiosity and a sincere hunger for the continuation of a cultural milestone, sent sales soaring. But such high anticipation, combined with the incoherent, rambling nature of the product itself, made the critical response more vicious than warranted. The most infamously lurid connection between fact and fiction was the character’s own suicide, committed on New Year’s day; it seemed both Jeff Pepper and the fictional Dub Taylor had chosen a leap from the Toronto ferry into the icy winter waters as the ideal way to stop the voices they had both come to hear in their heads. Jeff Pepper’s car was ultimately found parked at the Toronto ferry terminal, and several witnesses later recalled seeing the famous writer on board the boat the day of his disappearance. Interestingly, unlike the family of the book’s main character, Jamie and Lynn Pepper never felt the sad relief that the fictional Taylor clan experience when the body of the long-unstable main character washes up on shore. For one thing, Jeff Pepper’s body was never found. For a time Lynn darkly joked that it was a good thing Jeff had killed himself, cause the reviews for his final book, which The New York Times summed up as “the in
sane, raging words of a once-great writer,” would have killed him.
Kelli stared at the top of Jamie’s head. She wondered what was he was thinking. Despite everything, she was feeling an undeniable excitement welling up in her arms and legs, and she was immediately disgusted with herself. The response she felt was probably the exact one Jamie had hoped to avoid in the first place. Who wouldn’t despise the constant shadow of a dead parent? He must have resented the man terribly. Kelli pushed her questions to the back of her mind. She would wait for Jamie to tell her what he was thinking, just as she would wait for him to bring up the details of the scars on his head.
Jamie sighed and looked up at her. She leaned her head down, looked him in the eyes, and kissed him.
He knew she’d been looking at his scars again. She had still said nothing about them. He wanted to talk to her about them soon, but for now, he just wanted to be with her. He closed his eyes, and suddenly had an image of the piece of metal, suspended in his head. His eyes shot open, and he looked at her again. The air in the room was growing heavy with questions.
He knew when he went to sleep that night, the nightmares would be back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jamie lay awake. His bare arm was pressed against the damp, warm skin on Kelli’s naked back. Her body was pressed against him, her face buried against the side of his neck. He could hear her breathing softly.
Winter quarter was going quickly, just as Kelli had said it would. After the ten-day break at Thanksgiving, there were just three weeks of the new quarter’s classes before everyone again scattered for Christmas break. Professors hated the arrangement, felt it disrupted their classes and gave the students a distracted manner, as though the first three weeks didn’t count. For some, that was definitely true. Most saw it as the more relaxed portion of the year before the long, gray midwinter that stretched out until spring. For those in new relationships however, it was a period fraught with anticipation and uncertainty. For Kelli and Jamie, there was no fear of things falling by the wayside as they separated for the holidays, no concern that either would meet someone else or lose interest, but simply an anxiousness at being separated, if only for another ten days. Kelli had begun staying in his room almost nightly, and their relationship had grown much more intense, both physically, and emotionally, than either would ever have expected. Though they never put too fine a point on it, both felt more attached to the other than they cared to admit. During the days, they found their minds drifting towards the other, their bodies tingling and responding to the memories of what they had done together that morning, and the night before. Kelli would sit in her classes, nuzzling her nose under the collar of the shirt she’d swiped from Jamie’s chair. Jamie would think of things he wanted to tell her, or that he definitely wanted to avoid, then he’d bring them up anyway, unable to keep them to himself.
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