by Jaime Clarke
The nearest officer, a rotund man whose uniform was losing its battle to the heat, asked Hands if he knew anything about the assault on Mr. Baker. Hands shrugged, the gesture agitating the policeman. “I asked you a question, son,” he said. “Did you assault this man”—he pointed at Mr. Baker—“along with the others?”
Maybe I let him sweat it out a minute. Or maybe that’s just a story I tell myself to ameliorate the regret for my original sin, which has only led to a life of prevarication and an alienating superiority that has haunted me since. Many stories went around that day and for months and years after, the truth obscured and then lost, which is what compelled me to undertake this confession. The price of lying seemed affordable then. All I desired in exchange was friendship, to break free of my transfer-student status, to find acceptance among some faction of my new peers, a group that had until then resisted my ingratiation, the exception being the He-Man Becky Haters Club, which I’d uttered as a joke to Jason, the other transfer student, whom I counted as my only friend, powerless to reverse the chain of events that led to poor Rebecca Clement’s embarrassed exit from our lives. Forever after I disavowed any suggestion that it was me who was the inspiration for such awfulness, until I was convinced that it was someone else.
As it adjusted for inflation over the years, my lie that afternoon at Garden Lakes was steeper than I could’ve calculated. “He was with me,” I said. The alibi satisfied the officer and cast doubt in Mr. Baker’s confused mind. He muttered that we all looked alike, while reiterating his confidence in his identification of Roger and Assburn, both of whom would be expelled. I hoped for Assburn that his expulsion would bring about the second chance he’d been denied, much as my emancipation earlier in the school year made it easy for me to forego my senior year, freeing me. I never knew. The search continued for more perpetrators, interrupted briefly by the caravan of parents, summoned by the police, who raced to Garden Lakes to look for their children.
It would be some time before we realized that what they were searching for was gone.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to
Josephine Bergin
Rebecca Boyd
Heather E. Fisher
Pete Hausler
Dan Pope
Michael Rosovsky
David Ryan
Lavinia Spalding
Jonathan Wilson
Stephanie Duncan and everyone at Bloomsbury
Clarkes, Gilkeys, Kaliens, and Cottons
Mary Cotton and Max
About the Author
Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novels We’re So Famous, Vernon Downs, and World Gone Water; editor of the anthologies Don’t You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Conversations with Jonathan Lethem, and Talk Show: On the Couch with Contemporary Writers; and co-editor of the anthologies No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from “Post Road” Magazine (with Mary Cotton), and Boston Noir 2: The Classics (with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton). He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston.
www.jaimeclarke.com
www.postroadmag.com
www.baumsbazaar.com
www.newtonvillebooks.com
Vernon Downs
By Jaime Clarke
www.bloomsbury.com/JaimeClarke
“Vernon Downs is a gripping, hypnotically written and unnerving look at the dark side of literary adulation. Jaime Clarke’s tautly suspenseful novel is a cautionary tale for writers and readers alike–after finishing it, you may start to think that J. D. Salinger had the right idea after all.” —Tom Perrotta, author of Election, Little Children, and The Leftovers
“Moving and edgy in just the right way. Love (or lack of) and Family (or lack of) is at the heart of this wonderfully obsessive novel.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
“All strong literature stems from obsession. Vernon Downs belongs to a tradition that includes Nicholson Baker’s U and I, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, and—for that matter—Pale Fire. What makes Clarke’s excellent novel stand out isn’t just its rueful intelligence, or its playful semi-veiling of certain notorious literary figures, but its startling sadness. Vernon Downs is first rate.” —Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine
“Vernon Downs is a brilliant meditation on obsession, art, and celebrity. Charlie Martens’s mounting fixation with the titular Vernon is not only driven by the burn of heartbreak and the lure of fame, but also a lost young man’s struggle to locate his place in the world. Vernon Downs is an intoxicating novel, and Clarke is a dazzling literary talent.” —Laura van den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth
“An engrossing novel about longing and impersonation, which is to say, a story about the distance between persons, distances within ourselves. Clarke’s prose is infused with music and intelligence and deep feeling.” —Charles Yu, author of Sorry Please Thank You
“Vernon Downs is a fascinating and sly tribute to a certain fascinating and sly writer, but this novel also perfectly captures the lonely distortions of a true obsession.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia
Selected by The Millions as a Most Anticipated Read
“Though Vernon Downs appears to be about deception and celebrity, it’s really about the alienation out of which these things grow. Clarke shows that obsession is, at root, about yearning: about the things we don’t have but desperately want; about our longing to be anyone but ourselves.” —Boston Globe
“A stunning and unsettling foray into a glamorous world of celebrity writers, artistic loneliness, and individual desperation.” —Harvard Crimson
“Vernon Downs is a fast-moving and yet, at times, quite sad book about, in the broadest sense, longing.” —Brooklyn Rail
World Gone Water
By Jaime Clarke
www.bloomsbury.com/JaimeClarke
“Jaime Clarke’s World Gone Water is so fresh and daring, a necessary book, a barbaric yawp that revels in its taboo: the sexual and emotional desires of today’s hetero young man. Clarke is a sure and sensitive writer, his lines are clean and carry us right to the tender heart of his lovelorn hero, Charlie Martens. This is the book Hemingway and Kerouac would want to read. It’s the sort of honesty in this climate that many of us aren’t brave enough to write.” —Tony D’Souza, author of The Konkans
“This unsettling novel ponders human morality and sexuality, and the murky interplay between the two. Charlie Martens is a compelling anti-hero with a voice that can turn on a dime, from shrugging naiveté to chilling frankness. World Gone Water is a candid, often startling portrait of an unconventional life.” —J. Robert Lennon, author of Familiar
“Funny and surprising, World Gone Water is terrific fun to read … and, as a spectacle of bad behavior, pretty terrifying to contemplate.” —Adrienne Miller, author of The Coast of Akron
“Charlie Martens is my favorite kind of narrator, an obsessive yearner whose commitment to his worldview is so overwhelming that the distance between his words and the reader's usual thinking gets clouded fast. World Gone Water will draw you in, make you complicit, and finally leave you both discomfited and thrilled.” —Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods
“Charlie Martens will make you laugh. More, he'll offend and shock you while making you laugh. Even trickier: he'll somehow make you like him, root for him, despite yourself and despite him. This novel travels into the dark heart of male/female relations and yet there is tenderness, humanity, hope. Jaime Clarke rides what is a terribly fine line between hero and antihero. Read and be astounded.” —Amy Grace Loyd, author of The Affairs of Others
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Reader
Copyright © 2016 Jaime Clarke
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ISBN: 9781448215645
eISBN: 9781448215638
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