There are the footsteps again, two pair this time.
Their voices in the other room blur into the television conversation still trickling down the hall in a murmur of fictional dialog.
* * * *
Dear Journal,
Sammy hasn't arrived yet. I've tried calling him, though. There's a stack of comics on the table at the empty side of the bed waiting for him.
(If you can read this Sammy, won't you come find me?)
Another joined the group yesterday, a week after Eliza's arrival. I'd found her with a copy of The Sun Also Rises the day before Brett arrived. I'm not sure what attracted her to someone so modern, but I guess I can imagine the appeal of fiction from the future. I think it was a decision for the sake of companionship more than anything else. No one wants to be left out of a game.
Brett's arrival is worrisome nonetheless. I'm planning on editing my library tomorrow while they're out. The last thing we need is a simulacrum of Humbert Humbert joining our impromptu community, even if it is, as of now, bereft of thirteen-year-old girls.
(Even your comics seem a dubious presence on the bedside table, but I'll continue to hold them here for you, Sammy.)
Eliza seems to be fairing much better with Holden than I ever did.
They grow louder through the wall each night.
* * * *
Dear Journal,
Holden's been spending more and more nights on the couch recently. Then yesterday, he asked if he could sleep on the floor of my room. I told him he could.
Space has been getting tighter since Brett invited Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby last week. The two of them spend the days driving across Bakersfield's barren landscape shooting the eyes out of billboards. I'm not sure where they acquired the guns, but in a town like this it doesn't seem so hard to do.
At night, they hit the bars and return to hold court with their suitors, whom they address alternately in dense, beautiful dialogue and short, clipped statements. Often, I get confused listening to them, only to recognize Brett's voice as her own once she has finished speaking.
* * * *
Now, whenever there's a knock at the front door, my chest tightens at the thought of you standing there when it opens. So far, it hasn't happened yet. That isn't to say I've given up hope, Sammy. I haven't.
* * * *
Dear Journal,
I walked Holden to the bus stop today. He said he was going searching for something. When I asked him about Eliza, he said he'd been wrong about her. He said she was just another phony. I asked if he would look for a way back into the book and he said he wasn't sure but probably.
There was just more there, you know? he said. Like, everyday I got up knowing I was doing something. Even if it was something stupid or sad, it meant something. He paused to adjust his grip on the duffel bag he'd taken from the hall closet. Here it's different. You can put in so much without getting nearly anything back. Like it's something, but not enough something.
I nodded, pretending I understood.
I asked him to write me if he found a way back.
He said he'd try.
I asked him if he wanted to kiss one last time before he left, to make sure. When we did, it was no different than before.
Okay, I said.
Okay, he agreed.
We hugged and he got on the bus.
* * * *
Dear Journal,
It's hard being here without Holden. I wandered out into a party last night when I was getting dinner. I could hardly recognize anyone in the crowd. Billy Pilgrim's here, and Camus’ Meursault. I can't imagine why anyone invited either of them. They just mope around the house. Half the time, I'm not even sure that Billy's really here. I guess he and Meursault have that in common.
Yesterday I found a picture of a woman with a Shetland pony magneted to the fridge like a report card. So it goes.
I don't know how long I can keep waiting here for you, Sammy. If you came, we could just leave them all behind and move somewhere else, somewhere free.
I think you could like it here now, Sammy. We wouldn't have to love each other in distant, overfilled cabins fearing the police. We've got Gavin Newsom and Michael Cunningham. We have David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin and Castro St. We could make our own territory here, our own home at the end of things. You'd see.
You could even call me Tommy, if you wanted to. I could handle that if you came. If you're out there. If I'm allowed to play the game one more time.
* * * *
Dear Sammy,
It's been a month since Holden left and still no word.
Eliza and Daisy are gone, now. As are Billy and Meursault. From what I remember, the latter said they were going to head west. Toward the beach, I think. I don't blame them. It stinks in here, and food and empty alcohol containers litter the floors and countertops. I won't even check the spare room.
* * * *
I bought a bus ticket today.
If you're reading this, then know that I'm leaving to find you tomorrow. I've held out as long as I can, but now my bookshelves seem hollow and my house is occupied by dozens of strangers who scrutinize me whenever I leave my room. I can hear them outside sometimes, joking about me, jealous of this room I've held for myself.
Hopefully Holden was right and there's a way back. I think I remember Sharon moving to Berkeley after graduation. If I'm lucky, she's still there.
I'm making my way north to see her. If you're reading this (and I hope you are) know that I'm thinking of you.
Don't worry, Sammy, I'm coming.
Yours,
Tracy
[Back to Table of Contents]
A Wizard of MapQuest
Alex Wilson
Start out going Right (East) on Everett Street toward Lake View Road, 1.4 miles, if you're sure this is what you want to do. Understand if you can, my son, that right is no longer East. Ahead is now East, and Right is South. Had you chosen to stay in the tower, I would have eventually instructed you in these world complexities and perspectives. Do not let them frighten you. But if you do get frightened, call.
Turn Right onto Lake View Road, 0.3 miles, past the picnic table where on your twelfth birthday I taught you the language of the dragonflies. Recall how a Merely interrupted our private celebration. He wore bright colors. He carried a crude, immagical fishing instrument. His boots crushed the grass beneath him, rendering it useless for even the most common potionwork. He defiled us with his presence, under the pretense of some vague Merelian interest in the status of the weather clouds. Recall how the Merely smiled, how his unplucked forearm hair and omnivorous teeth frightened you, and how, sobbing, you clutched my tunic until you fell to sleep in my lap. The Merely was gone when you awoke, almost as a birthday gift to you. And then you wished to return home. Your idea, not mine.
Veer Left to stay on Lake View, 2.1 miles, and remember if you can that other time I let you out of the tower. You were five. We went to the mall downtown. You ate your first corn dog at the food court, once I'd consecrated the deepfryer and removed the taint of Merelian hands. You see? We do have much fun together. I was planning something special this year as well, but that's okay. I understand that you have things to do.
At the next light, Lake View becomes Pleasant Road, 0.6 miles. This isn't something you did, my son. The world outside the tower is inconsistent, and full of Merelies who would rob you in your confusion. Should a Merely rob you, do acquire a clump of its hair and overnight it to me using the FedEx account number I bade you memorize. I will take care of it.
Merge Left onto State Route 11 heading South, and feel if you can the moment you quit the borders of Lothboro, 1.9 miles. Should you choose to turn back even at this far point, you will find your room just as you left it. I'll even place your giant rat in stasis, to appease your concern about my slaughtering it for ingredients, or my remembering to feed it only the dry food. But if you truly loved your familiar, you would not leave it at all. If you loved it, you would stay at l
east through Autumn. But I'm sure it understands. It is only a rat. Surely it cannot feel betrayal.
There may be roads closed due to construction or weather conditions. There may be detours. Outside Lothboro, I can offer only guidelines. I am old, as you have said, and my wisdom is ancient.
Visit the AAA website for more recent updates and traffic patterns, but give heed to its conditional terms. Understand that they, too, make no guarantees of accuracy. You can trust no Merely. And should the weather force you to turn around, so must it be. But do not think I had a hand in it. I might keep the inside of the tower ever at seventy-eight degrees and sunny, but I possess no power over the outside skies. Think on this when it thunders, tempests, and quakes so far away from home. Seventy-eight degrees and sunny. Always.
You have chosen the fastest route. For the safest route, wait at least until Autumn. Find nearby restaurants with food satisfactory only to the basest of Merelian palates. Find cheap hotels, and may they feel as much like home as you can tolerate. You may reverse these directions at any time. I mean that. Should you fall in love with a Merely, FedEx me a clump of its hair, and I shall take care of it.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Marie and Roland
Kirstin Allio
Roland Chapsky was tall, heavy-boned, with a rolled brow and a bad stomach. Ulcers gave his breath the smell of cooked tomato. He chewed tablets made of plaster but did not quit what Marie put in the hip flask. Off duty he wore a sun-faded baseball cap with salt deposits in a wave-line of sweat—he had never been to the ocean. He had fifteen acres abutting his father-in-law's fifty up the side of a low hill almost hollow from mining. The town of Drury, Pennsylvania was a coffee can with just enough loose screws to cover the bottom, rattling losers, miners and soldiers with caved-in noses telling the same old stories. As a police officer Chapsky knew his population: Who lived on the road, culled basement junk and arranged it on card tables weather-permitting weekends, like kids playing store; and who lived in sunken shacks like planter's warts embedded in the hills stripped of coal for at least a decade. Chapsky himself had grown up with a single mother in an apartment in town, a radio and a television like a cat and a dog vying for attention in the same household. His hallmark as an officer: He didn't take sides between town folks and outlaws. He liked to say ruthless and fair were the same in his profession, knowing he was neither. Nevertheless he could still spook himself when he had to go out to one of those private encampments—some had no electricity and no women.
Like hell they wanted a cop car nosing in on their moonshine, squirrels drying over the railing. He wanted to tell them he was nothing like what they saw on TV, cop shows, bouncing his balls over potholes like craters to get out to their places, only they didn't have TV at their places.
* * * *
Chapsky's own father-in-law lived in a dug-out shed in a crease of the mountain. Marie's nugget of childhood. As they used to say in town, she “came down the mountain.” Lately you could find the old guy flat on his back under the shells of junked autos. Chapsky's father-in-law called them autos, as if he'd been to school about it. Chapsky thought: You know the way yellow jackets or wasps die stiff and crackly if you spray them? That's what the old machinery from the mining operation at his father-in-law's put him in mind of.
Marie said they were big heavy lids that kept her dad from boiling over. Marie's mother had run off—and when she'd come back he wouldn't take her. Everyone had a heartbreak that split the trunk of the person, thought Chapsky, and then the two halves of the tree grew away from each other. Indeed the old guy (was he even sixty?) had once pleaded: How could you look a woman in the eye if you were off to blast the guts out of the center of the mountain?
Marie's mother was part Indian.
Maybe junked cars looked like spaceships, underneath, thought Chapsky.
* * * *
He'd done everything to please Marie's father: Police Academy, for instance, although back then there was still money in mining.
For the old guy's sake he'd moved himself and Marie out of town, off the grid, so to speak—not so much electricity, but snowplowed his own back assward mile—still Marie's dad didn't say two words to him. Marie kept chickens and a patch of vegetables. Chapsky put up deer fence charged by a deadly volt of hand-rigged, generator electric. She raised a fawn anyway—shit, it was like Bambi—and let it eat everything. That was a scurvy summer with no garden. Come fall the sportsmen from Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, even Philly—the way Marie went on about it, every last hunter had contributed a bullet to Bambi. But he had always thought of himself as a man who would do anything for a woman.
* * * *
His own mother: When Chapsky was six or seven her boyfriend had provided initiation into hunting. Remember he was a town kid. The other side of the mountain was coated with deep forest owned by Proctor and Gamble. The whole vast slope—he'd heard ten thousand acres—would be bulldozed into headquarters and factories sooner or later. The Goliath of soap didn't give a shit for a couple of poachers with slingshots. Did Roly Poly think the president of P & G ate venison?
That boyfriend started Roly Poly. That boyfriend said hunters were supposed to be good lovers. Doesn't bother you none, Roly; me and your mother?
Or, he was the Turtle. His short neck collapsed into his fatty shoulders. He thought he didn't mind about the boyfriend, but he wasn't going to stick his neck out (heh, heh) and pave the way to his mother. A couple of step-grandparents would adopt him—he'd make a sweet grandkid. He'd take their name, even. It was unmanly to have your mother's maiden name; his father had never claimed him.
* * * *
Marie cooked what he killed like a pioneer woman. She had instincts for salt and sex—never been to the ocean either. She had skinned squirrel for her daddy; but under his roof, Chapsky's, she would never have to hold a buck knife. He'd bought her a set of carbon and steel from a booth at the county fair in Bloomsburg. He'd hung on to the booth like a leaf to a log midstream. The crowds were a relentless whitewater rush around him—and he'd thought because he grew up in town he was used to people.
A sharpener too studded with real diamonds. Her skin had a pile to it, like velvet. Like the forest of Proctor and Gamble.
Indian summer they had eloped in blue jeans. Stayed drunk for a week in the woods like crazy Indians. With his own two hands he built her a log cabin.
* * * *
He'd put up a tree stand in princess pine and lichen where deer came to nuzzle for drop apples. Probably once a pasture—sparse crabapple and cedar. He liked to lie on his back on the little platform. This season was blood warm—you could almost forget where the air stopped and the body started. They called that temperate, thought Chapsky—or Indian summer. He could sleep like a dog and wake alert. Sometimes he dreamed Marie came to him and swept her black hair across his body. He woke and was ready to shoot an animal.
Lately Marie had been dying her hair and he found he was disappointed. He wanted them to grow old together. She kept it long and straight and didn't go into town more than she had to. (Then who was she dying it for?) She wasn't a common Polish-strain blond with a blocky middle and pinched buttocks like a turkey. Like his mother. You see? It was okay. He couldn't imagine Marie a mother.
She was slight as a girl, whittled down; he liked to think from what they did in the bedroom. He could see the ribs across her chest like washboard; her bony outline beneath the thin fabric of her breasts at forty. Her stomach hung too, around the shiny groove of a scar shaped like a sickle. A C-section. Sounded like instructions to an airforce pilot. He had seen her fight—teeth and nails and fur, red saliva—like a woman. No weapons, just body to body. They rolled the baby up in white and folded it into a new family. He and Marie were seventeen, high school books in a locker. They didn't elope till ten years later. That was his life story if he was ever interviewed for radio or television. The fine print, as they said. The way they hooked you.
* * * *
Drury had three office
rs. Red, they called Rankin, lost his wife to cancer, and McGrath was a shifty case that slept in a shed behind his uncle's. Chapsky loved them like brothers. Marie cooked for the whole police force and she wasn't afraid of their boozing. She boozed herself; why shouldn't she? She didn't have to look out for a handful of brats running into the road or playing with matches. When she took her afternoon bath her breasts grazed the water like floating petals. Brown bruised centers.
You see? Who said a childless woman was a hard woman? A hard woman wouldn't bruise so easily.
If she didn't give her heart away to nine kids and a kennel of puppies a woman wasn't natural? Well that was a crap-load, thought Roland. He, Roland Chapsky, did he know the size of his own organ? It was supposed to be as big as the fist that owned it. He had big, star-shaped hands and a heavy pulse like cannons under water. He liked to put his fingers inside his wife, like hand-feeding. He liked tying flies and he liked cleaning his rifle. He liked to shoot to punctuate his thoughts. He almost always threw the fish back in the water. Afterward, his heart was empty.
Not after I saw what that baby did to you, he liked to tell her. Even if you could have another I wouldn't allow it. Marie snorted. She watched over her daddy. She tended the garden and feathered the chickens and took the meat off his hands—still warm—when he brought her a trophy. She had plenty of time to sit on the porch of the log cabin he built her and drink whatever it was mixed up in her private tumbler. What a life for a woman.
* * * *
It was early evening when a little doe wandered by the tree stand. You really could say there was no separate—he moved his hand through the air to show it—contour. When he closed his eyes he merged and drifted. If only his mother could've enjoyed these breezes. She'd been miserable in “weather.” In summer a host of table fans churned hot breath through the second floor apartment. She pulled the shades and swayed beneath the same sack dress she claimed to have worn when she was pregnant. He recalled it smelled faintly of blood and iodine. It must have taken some doing, some loyalty—to him, Roly Poly?—to keep that dress in her closet. The fashions changed, even a man like Chapsky could see it. She'd never married. No, what he'd felt earlier, before he'd dozed here in his hammock of air, wasn't true at all. He had never wanted his mother to marry. Not to the boyfriend who showed him hunting, not to any of them.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 23 Page 5