On/Off - A Jekyll and Hyde Story

by Mike Attebery

  It wasn’t Dub Taylor. He wasn’t sure which one this was. Maybe it was something different, another collection of essays and stories from the files. Was his mother sorting out his father’s papers, helping to organize another collection of his unfinished work? She hadn’t mentioned it. He couldn’t imagine her going through any of that again. Jamie crouched down and gathered up the papers, sorting them quickly according to the numbers on the top right corners, then he sat down in the chair.

  The first few pages read like a diatribe against, well, life, and work, and just some vague something. A pile of ranting, raving language, the subject of which was unclear exactly. There was dialogue. There were a few mentions of hands flittering over breasts, talk of tongues in the corners of mouths. Other stuff, good bits, but no real explanation of whether the hands and the appendages they were grabbing belonged to the same people. Were these acts of absentminded self-appreciation, full-out attempts at seduction, or were they something better? Knowing Jeff Pepper, it was any of the above. On the third page he saw the word “professor” written out a few times. On the fourth he saw the give-away, “Dub.”

  So, this was the original manuscript for the infamous sequel. Dub. The one that had all but paid for this house, and probably his college, and most certainly the operation. Well, Lynn had paid for all of those things too, but Dub Taylor had always sort of been - not the foundation - but sort of the oven for whoever was bringing home the bread in the Pepper household.

  The sequel to Dub Taylor, Dub, had snagged one of the biggest advances in publishing history, an advance that would have made even Stephen King rest his chin on the tip of his index finger and narrow his eyes at the absurdity of the whole damn thing -- absurdity, and luck. Whether the book had been any good was beside the point. Dub Taylor was a touchstone by the time of Jeff’s death. Jamie could remember the hype machine blustering into town when the sequel started coming together posthumously. There were meetings between Lynn and Jeff’s editors. Meetings between Lynn and the marketing people. There were news crews. Interviewers. Big ones. Barbara Walters had come, smelling of baby powder and sharp perfume, and had wandered through the house, bossing her crew around, taking a moment to sweet talk Jamie as he sat on the stairs. Charlie Rose had been there, rumpled shirt, mussed hair and all. Jamie had liked him much better than Mrs. Walters. He had that soothing voice, and he never yelled at his crew, or really, at anyone. There had been books everywhere, the feeling of hot lights. Today he realized what a circus it had been.

  People talk about Salinger and his mysterious ways, and yeah, Salinger has his mystique, but there’s also the mystique of the alternative celebrity writers and journalists, the ones who have covered the big stories, met the big names, and slowly seeped into the collective consciousness of the audience. Lynn had certainly done that with her stories from the seventies and eighties. Everyone knew Annie Leibovitz, and everyone knew Lynn Pepper. They were like the founding earth mothers of the magazine now. Jeff Pepper’s fame went without saying. But for the big kahuna of one medium to marry the boy genius of another, well, that was like an arranged marriage of literary royalty. For those same two people to be madly, and publicly wild about each other, that was taking it to a whole new level. Then, for one of them to flip his shit after a literal crack-up, well, that was the stuff of legend and publishing magic.

  As expected, Dub was huge. Out-of-control huge. Everyone bought the damn thing. Everyone had it on the shelf next to their high school and college bible, Dub Taylor. Course, not everybody made it all the way through the sequel. There was the curiosity factor, the nostalgia factor. Some reviewers, the minority, claimed that this book was as good, if not better than the original, but for the most part, the book panned out like a heavily revised bookend. It sat on the shelf, next to its brother, or rather, its younger half, and it completed the collection. Course, for academics, and true fans, this was something to be divied up and savored, decanted, studied against the light, and absorbed in slow, savory, luxurious sips. Jeff felt his mother had not so much enjoyed the book, as she had thought of its preparation as the closest she would get to closure. He’d seen her a few times during its completion, sitting by the fire downstairs, reading the pages, then staring off into space. They’d never found his father’s body, but a year after his disappearance, his memory had washed up in the shape of this book, and it seemed for everyone, including Lynn, that that was what they needed to move on.

  Did the book have the answers?

  No one seemed to think so, or no one of note had yet found them.

  So how did the manuscript end up spread out on the floor tonight? Were the published pages and the original proofs the same, or were they altered somehow? Was it crazy to assume there were no other versions of the book?

  Well, yes, a bit. Jeff wasn’t known for approaching things from multiple angles. He wrote what he wrote, and that was that. What came out first was the way he saw things: very rarely did it change. So the first draft of a book or paper might have one or two brief differences from the final work, a turn of phrase, an exchange of dialogue, but not ten or twenty-page alternative passages. None of that business. With Jeff Pepper, what you saw was what you got, and that was it.

  Jamie stopped flipping through the pages and tapped them on the desktop to even the edges. He set them down again, then reached across the desktop for an old hardback copy of Dub Taylor, which he placed on top of the manuscript to hold it in place.

  Answers. Hmm.

  He, Jamie, must have been up here then, looking through all this stuff. What a freaky feeling to have been sleepwalking. He didn’t like the idea of it. Good thing he hadn’t fallen down the stairs and broken anything. Or worse!

  A shiver rippled through him again. He hurried to the door, flipped off the lights, and hustled down the stairs. He stopped at the bottom of the landing, suddenly aware of a feeling radiating out at him from the darkness. That sense of being watched. His breath caught in his chest as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the blackness around him. Then, before anything became entirely clear, Jamie ran through the darkness to his room. His imagination was getting the better of him.

  ~

  “You were up last night.”

  Jamie sat at the table silently, lacing up his running shoes.

  “Everything all right?” Lynn continued.

  “Yeah, fine. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Me? I fell right to sleep. Just heard you banging around down the hall a bit, then I was back out like a light.”

  Jamie pulled on a set of fingerless gloves and stood up to stretch.

  “Think I’m still trying to wind down from the start of the quarter,” he said. “I keep thinking about the projects I have waiting for me when I get back to school.”

  “That’s gotta be exciting.” Lynn smiled.

  “Oh yeah,” Jamie said with a sigh. “So far so good.” God he hoped so.

  Lynn sat down with a cup of coffee and started flipping through the paper absentmindedly.

  “I’m going for a run.”

  “Be careful out there,” Lynn replied as she looked over the crossword puzzle.

  She’d slipped into the zone, so Jamie headed for the door. He swung his arms from side to side, pulled them back behind his head, feeling the blood seeping into his muscles. He stepped out onto the front porch and continued stretching.

  He tried to push last night out of his mind. It was a fluke of fatigue. He just needed a run to make up for the exercise he’d been missing lately. He leaned against the railing with one hand, reaching down with the other to pull his foot back behind him, feeling the long muscle fibers in his hamstring pull and stretch under the skin, then he switched sides. He was feeling good. He walked down the front steps, pulling his knit cap down over his ears as he stepped off the last riser and took a series of quick steps down the driveway, starting out in a slow jog, then moving a bit faster. He headed out the driveway and down the long path to the main road as he broke out into a full-out
run.

  “Whoo!” he let out, excited.

  It felt great to move!

  The snow crunched and slipped underfoot. He ran to just the edge of the road, then turned off on a path that meandered into the woods to his right. He maintained his pace, but watched the ground carefully, ever wary of that dreaded fall.

  The blood was pumping now as he raced through the trees. Branches skittered and swooped past him as he bobbed and weaved down the hillside. Then he burst out into the snow-covered open stretches of the golf course. Aside from one or two sets of cross country ski tracks, most likely Lynn’s, the place was untouched. The icy powder came up over the tops of his sneakers. He could feel moisture seeping into his socks and the bottoms of his sweat pants, but he was going so fast that he hardly even noticed.

  How many times had he run this same course? When was the last time he’d been through here? Probably back in September. That was the first time they’d started having a bit more confidence that the implant was going to work out. About the middle of the month, Dr. Price had given him the okay to go out for a run, and a day or so later, Lynn had reluctantly given him her nod of approval. He’d felt a little shaky on that first jaunt off the beaten path in over two years, but it was at about the same point on the course, on the fairway to whatever hole this was, that he’d started feeling good again, started opening up his stride and pumping his arms to work up some speed, just the way he was doing now.

  He thought about last night. And he thought about Kelli. And he ran a little faster. Nothing was going wrong. There was nothing to worry about. He was just tired and confused. People do strange stuff when they’re short on sleep and high on stress. Housewives end up at the grocery store in their nightgowns and rollers, wandering the aisles with their shopping lists and recipes. Truckers wander off course, following another vehicle for a couple hundred miles, suddenly snapping to in the middle of nowhere, or worse yet, Texas, trying to remember how they’d managed to maneuver stoplights and intersections for the last few hours, while in their minds they’d been snuggling up to a nice, warm, downy pillow. That’s probably what he had done, woken up in the night, boiling hot, opened some windows, wandered down the hall, and absentmindedly thought, “Maybe I’ll poke around upstairs.”

  Yeah, that was it. That was it.

  Bull. Shit.

  Why upstairs? He hadn’t been up there in years. Why that book? Why the manuscript and not the final published edition?

  He had a flash of Professor Ryan asking about his father.

  “He was a good guy.”

  Had they known each other? The comment suggested that they had.

  But who cared?

  It was nothing.

  But the fact was, he’d been thinking about his father again recently. More importantly, he was thinking about his father as he had known him, around the time Jeff Pepper had started sailing off the deep end. That was the period when Jeff had written Dub, and whether he’d realized it or not, Jamie had been scanning through that book in his mind recently. His father had had more than his share of emotional confusion. Maybe Jamie was feeling some of the same things.

  He’d seen an interview with Michael J. Fox a few years back, where the actor had spoken in detail about an operation he’d undergone to try and control the errant signals from his own Parkinson’s. They had essentially bolted a framework to the outside of his head, then bolted the other side of that framework to an operating table in order to prevent unwanted movement. The surgery was invasive, opening up the brain and gently exploring the nooks and crannies inside, figuring which areas did what, smoking out the sources of the communication breakdown. At one point, the surgeon gently prodded an area of tissue as he asked Fox to speak, and the actor described how he’d felt his mouth draw up as he struggled to form words.

  “Heeeeey. Yerrrr messing witttth myyy braaaain.”

  Jamie knew how he felt. They’d been messing with his brain too.

  His father’s mind was a different matter. It wasn’t a case of an actual, physical problem, so much as it was one of mental confusion. Jeff Pepper was never much for looking on the bright side, which made him an especially bad candidate for the sort of serious car accident he’d been through. A good knock to the head, a fair share of physical and emotional trauma, that was a recipe for trouble, and it often sent victims into a mental tailspin, one from which it could take years to recover. Though he’d often veered from the mainstream and gone his own way, in the case of Jeff’s recovery from the accident, he had, unfortunately, followed an all too-familiar course. The shift was evident in everything he did, and in everything he wrote. Dub had a clear and sudden shift in mood, one that predictably occured at the point Jeff picked up writing again after months of therapy and rehabilitation. Jamie had read the book before, but it was everything from that shift onward that he seemed to be puzzling over. Was there any point in reading the book through again? Probably not. He was just obsessing. What could be worth dredging up?

  Jamie was still running all out, his arms pumping at his sides. His throat grew rough with the cold as he climbed up and over the crest of the hill, opened up his stride, and plunged headlong into the woods on the other side. The trail twisted its way through the trees and back toward the house. The snow was melting and forming puddles along the path. Jamie took a turn a bit too sharply, his shoe sliding in the mud as his body lunged forward. He caught himself before he hit the ground, shivering with relief as he continued on. He broke free of the woods and emerged on the gravel lane leading up to the house. He walked the rest of the distance as a cool-down, rotating his arms, pulling them behind his head, and stretching his body from the run.

  He wasn’t going to look at the manuscript anymore. There was no point.

  He walked up the front steps and pushed open the door. A rush of heat enveloped him as he stepped inside, already pulling off his damp shirt. Three hundred and twenty-five crunches, then a shower, then some sketching. If, that is, his fingers would cooperate.

  No point in reading any more pages.

  He pulled off his shoes and walked into the living room. Crunches. He lay on his back by the couch, feeling the carpet against his bare skin. One, two…

  No point.

  No point in going up there.

  Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty-

  He should focus on his own work.

  Switch sides.

  He’d call Kelli later, find out how her vacation was going.

  Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred. Switch sides.

  He should talk to his mother, tell her what’s bothering him.

  He jumped to his feet and headed up the stairs to the second floor landing.

  Time for a shower and then he’d relax. It was holiday break.

  There’s no point in going up to that office. Nothing to be found. Only the old papers and books of a ghost. No hidden secrets. No revelations. Just yellowed paper and dust.

  Take a shower. Get on with your life.

  He would in a bit.

  Just one more time, just to see what he could find.

  Jamie turned and headed up the staircase to the third floor.

  ***

  “We’ll drive down to see family tomorrow morning. What about you?”

  “Just going over to my Aunt and Uncle’s place for dinner,” Kelli replied. “Same thing as every year.”

  “Same here, same here.”

  There was a crackle of hesitation.

  Jamie was sitting on his bed. The house was quiet and dark. It was around seven o’clock, but it felt much later. Lynne was probably in her office, working. Neither one of them had eaten dinner, despite it being Christmas Eve. The way things worked in the Pepper house, the way they had always worked, was not to plan meals ahead, but to suddenly realize, with the churning of a stomach or the growling rumble of hunger, that it was well past mealtime. In a couple of hours they’d both wind up in the kitchen, scavenging the cabinets for food. For now, they were huddled in their own sections
of the house, Lynn absorbed in her work, Jamie on the phone, talking in the warm comfort of his room.

  “I miss you,” Kelli said.

  “I miss you too.”

  “Wanna open them?”

  “Absolutely,” Jamie replied. “You first.”

  He could hear Kelli breathing into the handset, then the sounds of tearing paper on the other end. The paper was off. She was opening the box now. Lifting the tissue.

  He heard her breath catch.

  “Oh Jamie. It’s beautiful.”

  “You like it?” he asked.

  “I love it.”

  He sat silently, imagining her fingers as they picked up the locket, fingered the latches and etchings, then gently pressed the latch and felt it spring open in her hands. He knew she was doing this, and he knew the moment she folded the halves open and saw the pictures inside.

  “Ohh…” her voice said softly through the receiver.

  Jamie’s breath caught in his chest.

  “I love it,” she whispered.

  Jamie let out a sigh of relief.

  “Open yours,” Kelli said.

  Jamie picked up the package from where it sat between his crossed legs. It was small and square. No bigger than a CD case and about two inches high.

  “What is it?” Jamie asked.

  “Open it.”

  The paper was a shimmering deep red, gothic but romantic. Jamie ran his fingers over it’s surface, slipped a nail under the folded edge, and pulled it away. The distinctive Tiffany-blue peeked out from the box underneath.

  “Wow,” he whispered. “Ka-ching.”

  He lifted the lid to find a small silver flask, engraved with his initials. A pattern of skulls and hands surrounded the letters. Jamie took the flask from the box. It was heavy.

  “You filled it.”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s inside?” Jamie asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  Jamie unscrewed the cap and held the opening to his nose, breathing in the warm fumes. He raised it to his mouth and took a long drink. The liquid rippled over his tongue, spreading down the back of his throat, where it blossomed into warm vapor. Jamie’s eye popped open as his jaw dropped instinctively to exhale. He shook his head in startled appreciation.