Well nobody wants to lend us their car. Time for Plan B I said. Now you’ll see that I mean to tell the truth always because I’m not afraid to face the shameful things I’ve done. I look at those things face to face and I consider them real hard. Prison isn’t made for rehabilitation at all but that’s what I’m trying for. We went around back of the bar and waited just outside the light there. Guys were always coming back there to drain the weasel because there was only one can inside and the college kids who came to Diana’s generally could not hold their beer. So we waited there in the shadows watching the bugs fly into the light and bounce off. I said fuck it Murray let’s go back in and drink some more. But Murray had hatched a Plan B of his own after hearing me say Plan B. I never had a Plan B really.
The music got loud for a second then I looked up to see this college kid coming out the back door. He stumbled down and stopped to let the wind hit his face. He staggered over out of the light to where everyone used to take a leak and I’m standing there waiting for the right moment. Murray runs up and tackles the guy as soon as he’s standing in the dark. This should give you some idea as to how fucking stupid Murray was. He brings the kid down in a puddle of piss and the kid is pissing all over himself and Murray asks the kid if he has a car. The kid says fuck you so I walk over and point the gun at the kid. The three of us walk to the kid’s car and Murray drives while I hold a gun to the kid in the back. He stinks like piss so we drive with the windows down. He wants to know where we’re taking him but I don’t know and Murray’s not telling. Again I know that this was criminal behavior and stupid on top of that. We would have left the kid in the parking lot of Diana’s Grill except we would have gotten caught too quick. We were just looking to have a little fun. We drove upstate a ways. The kid threw up a few times and cried for a bit. But he could see we were just having fun and I think he figured that if he helped us have fun we wouldn’t shoot him. He started telling jokes. He told all kinds of jokes. Helen Keller Polack Nigger Fag Beaner Leprechaun. You name it. He wasn’t funny at all. He couldn’t tell a joke but we laughed anyway because we couldn’t believe this piss-soaked kid thought telling jokes was going to get him out of this. Murray kept driving until the kid ran out of jokes. He must have told us every joke he ever heard all the way down to the Vampire ones. My favorite one of all came near the end. It gets funnier the more you think about it which is the opposite of most jokes: Why did the cow roll down the hill?
Because it didn’t have any legs.
Who the hell knew where we were when the kid ran out of jokes and Murray pulled over. I tell the kid to walk out into the forest. It’s pitch black except the light from the car. We walk through some trees and there’s an open meadow. The kid was crying again. He thought I was going to cap him but all we wanted was use of his car a little longer and this was the best way to keep him occupied. So I say to the kid Run but he doesn’t run anywhere. Don’t shoot me he says. Run I say and I point into the darkness. He starts off kind of slow which was too slow for my taste so I shot the gun into the air. Nowhere near the kid. He hauled ass into the woods. I could hear him stumbling. I laughed real hard until I heard the tires screeching away.
Murray thought I shot the kid which I did not.
What happened next was that I walked for a long ways by the road until a trucker gave me a ride into the nearest town. I don’t know if you know towns out here but it was not the friendliest place. When I woke up in their park in the a.m. the Sheriff was already riding my ass. My head was pounding cause of too much drink. I was sure the Sheriff was going to take me in for stealing the car or dropping that college kid in the woods but to my surprise and relief he hadn’t heard anything and just drove me to the bus depot and told me they didn’t need my type around their town. Little did I know I would see him in court later and the whole morning would become public record.
From there I bussed it home where I eventually got my pickup and fixed the problem aka the alternator. When I found out I was wanted and Murray had snitched and the kid was dead I did what any sane person would do and took off hoping they would clear it all up before they found me. Which as you know is not what happened. The deed got pinned on me because of circumstantial evidence. I know what I did was wrong and I’m fine doing the time for what I did but I don’t need to be doing someone else’s time on top of that. I also know the evidence against me was strong enough to convince a jury and if I had been in that jury I would have been convinced too. Stupid Murray got scared and made things sound worse than they were. He probably still thinks I shot the kid out there but who in his right mind would kill that kid for no reason in the middle of the woods? Not me. I liked his jokes even though he wasn’t funny. I think he got hit by a stray hunter’s bullet. I threw my gun in a lake when I was on the run but they didn’t try to fish it out to prove that the bullet wouldn’t match my gun. Instead they planted bullets at my house to match the bullet they found in the dead kid. They call this BALLISTICS. I call it framing an innocent man with hocus-pocus. The system doesn’t want to prove my innocence. I bet it’s too late anyway and the gun has rusted away otherwise I’d ask for your help in getting it out of the lake and clearing my name once and for all.
I told you it was a sad and stupid story. Sad cause a college kid got killed. Stupid because a little goofing off with no harm meant to anyone ended up with me being incarcerated. That’s my story and since my hand is cramping I’m going to sign off for now.
Love
Henry
PS Next time I’ll write more about my past like you asked. But first you have to tell me more about yourself specifically something to help this lonely inmate get through the night if you know what I mean.
Of course, Raven killed CJ. He lied blatantly to Lily while pledging himself to openness and truth-telling. How I wanted to confront him directly! But now was the time for Lily to get suckered by Raven, to let him seduce her, until he thought he had her in his clutches, and then to tear her away from him.
Seduction works both ways. Even when the so-called seducer is at his most calculating he is being drawn inexorably into a trap built for two. The more she gave herself over to him, the deeper he would step into the trap, which, as I had planned, would snap down as Lily—as deep into it as her counterpart—disappeared into a poof of particles, a magician’s cloud of smoke. In this scenario, I stand to the side, the magician, manipulating the mirrors that make the illusion possible.
There was a minor victory at the end of his letter, no question about that. He had signed it “love.” Whether he meant it as a gesture of goodwill, an impulsive expression of feeling, or a calculated move to harvest from his correspondent some masturbation fodder, he had, by writing that four-letter word, exposed himself. Even if he considered it a cool and opportunistic stratagem, there lay behind that word the desire for a response, the expectation of a response, the notion that he was not writing into the void or even to an irregular correspondent but to someone he could expect something from. He’d gotten hooked, a bit, whether he knew it or not.
For that, Lily would throw him a bone.
I went to work modifying a new photograph, a woman, tan and youngish but not firm, standing poolside at what appeared to be a desert hotel, wearing a yellow bikini. I’d found her by searching an image bank for the word “poolside” and scrolling through 376 personal photographs. My initial search, “bikini,” had yielded a surfeit of soft porn and assorted images of pin-ups, hot-rods, underwear advertisements, anime, a very fat woman, and a mushroom cloud over the Pacific. The woman’s face, to be covered by Eileen’s from a hiking snapshot, made me think of the schoolteacher’s brand of strict cheerfulness. I visualized that impression shining through a sort of digital palimpsest, to suffuse Eileen’s image with a dash of Lilyness.
The creation of this latest Lily led me again through all the photos I’d scanned of Eileen. With each new image came a flood of memories, some of them of moments I knew I had not witnessed. Part of me could see them as if they were
a movie playing in my head, while another part cried out across the chasm to remind me that I had not been present at these events. Other memories were real, and those rose like zombies from a graveyard, staggering across my consciousness, each demanding a piece of my brain.
Eileen used to call me late at night and tell me about the situations she’d find herself in. Ditching a stolen car in the LA river, stripping in the VIP room at a club, leaving an OD at the entrance to the ER, and so on. I wouldn’t hear from her for months, and then she’d call three nights in a row. She needed to talk it out, she’d say. She needed an audience. I was always there for her. When she died I half-expected the phone to ring at 3:00 a.m.: “Dude, you’ll never believe where my soul ended up …”
The word ghost should be like the word pants—it should never be singular. No one leaves behind one ghost. Everyone who dies leaves behind at least as many ghosts as people they knew. I had been sidetracked in my Lily-making by two dozen of Eileen’s ghosts, and when they were finished with me, I turned my thoughts to the ghosts that had been haunting me more recently, those radiating from Calvin Stocking Junior. I had wanted to know how this young bastion of certainty, this brat, this loved one, this window-breaker, had fared in the last moments of his life; if Raven was to be trusted on the details not pertaining to his guilt, I now knew. He vomited, cried, told every joke he knew, cried again, and turned toward the darkness when ordered to. Then, according to testimony provided by two independent forensics experts, Raven shot him in the back of the head.
21
Dear Henry,
I appreciate your honesty. Thank you. And I’m sorry if I seemed to be preoccupied about not knowing you. It’s not easy waiting for your letters. I had a few drinks tonight in preparation for this one. I must say I debated whether or not to share my fantasy with you just yet, but then I thought about what I asked you and how open and honest you were in writing about it, and I decided I should respond honestly to whatever you ask of me. It’s just you and me, after all. I hope you won’t be offended that it took three cranberry and vodkas to get me to write this, but it’s personal.
I have many fantasies, and I like to change them often, but there are a few I return to again and again. I used to picture a man without a face, but now I let myself peek with my mind’s eye and there is a face—yours. I am not one for wide-open places in my fantasies. In regular life I love nothing more than looking at the ocean spread all the way across the horizon … but let me get on with it. I’m afraid, I think, to write it down …
I am getting ready for school. It is early morning, and though I’ve showered and done my hair, I’m still wearing my robe. I hear the doorbell. I tighten my robe and look through the peephole. It is you, but you are wearing an electrician’s uniform. The shirt is tight and barely restrains your muscular forearms. I watch you through the peephole as you ring the bell again. I take a deep breath and reach for the knob. I know that as soon as you are inside you will be in control. I open the door, half-expecting you to ravage me right there, but you ask me where the problem is. I say the outlet in the bedroom is not working. We go to my bedroom and you test the outlet. It’s dead. But you soon figure out that it is connected to a switch on the wall. You begin to explain it to me then realize—this is my favorite, watching it dawn on you—that I know all about the switch. I called for another reason.
You put down your tools and approach me. We stand face to face for a long while. I reach out and touch the front of your shorts. There is a substantial bulge and it feels hot to my hand. I unzip your fly and pull out your thing through the front of your pants. I play with it until it feels like it is about to burst through your skin. Your fly pushes on your balls and your thing is super-hard. You look at me now. You are thinking of what you want to do to me. You reach for the belt of my robe and I think you are going to loosen it, but you pull it tighter. You take my shoulders and turn me around to face the wall. You do this gently but with total authority.
You press me against the wall, not violently, but with a good amount of pressure, so that my cheek is against the plaster. You pull my belt tight again. You reach under the back of my robe to touch me. I have never been so wet. You pull the robe up and enter me from behind. You push and push me against the wall, and we move sideways until we are in the corner of the room. You’re pushing me into the corner now. I am full of you and I am being pushed by you and by two walls. You groan and I like it. My knees collapse and you come down to the floor with me. You fill me and push me into the corner at the bottom of the two walls. My head is where the walls meet the floor and you are pushing from above and behind and the walls and the floor are pushing back and this is where I usually have an orgasm.
I can’t believe I told you all that but I’m going to drop it in the mail right now before I reread it or tear it up. I have never written that stuff down for anyone, Henry, including myself, so you’re the first one to have me like this. Please write back to me very soon as I will be worried all week about how this letter will be received.
Love back,
Lily
PS In your last letter you mentioned that you had to spend the night in a park, and that the police woke you up and ran you out of town. This is the most unlikely of coincidences, Henry, but I too have spent the night in a park only to be awakened by the police. I was a teenager, and I had run away from my aunt and uncle’s house for the night. I stole a sleeping bag from a sporting goods store and rode the bus until the end of the line. I slept outside, in the cold, and I was happy because the outside was matching up with the way I felt inside. I can’t help but think our shared experience is a sign.
Lily’s letter, apparently written in haste and sent off immediately, was actually composed over several nights, as I tried to fine-tune the raw but still Lily-like language and, more importantly, the subtext of Raven’s growing power and domination over Lily. Yes, Raven, dominate her! She is yours, make her precious and constant in your mind, take her for granted, visualize her, sexualize her, fetishize her, entwine your heart with your image of hers! Nibble at the cheese while you can—the spring will come to break your neck.
I knew Raven well enough to know that further masturbation over pictures of Lily, or better yet, over the mental vision of Lily, could only cause her to loom larger in his mind and heart, could only sink the hooks deeper into him, and make the tearing away that much more painful. And I knew that the more vulnerable I made her, the more powerful I made him, the better chance he would really enjoy it.
In constructing Lily’s fantasy, I made sure to blend elements of women’s fantasies gleaned from old girlfriends (the faceless man, the emphasis on context and story) with the more male-centered imagery of domination and bondage, not to mention a physiological focus and general pressure-building. Still I felt as though I had only scratched the surface.
Rereading it, I thought it a little cursory somehow, probably because it had taken me so long to compose—I expected it to take as long to read as it had taken to write. The composition period was strenuous, given the type of research I pursued—an issue of an octavo-size narrative-form porn magazine—and the necessity of relieving my own pressures along the way. I couldn’t help but picture aspects of the situation Lily had written about, and I couldn’t help but become aroused by them.
Once, on a time-out in the bathroom, I pictured myself in the electrician’s uniform, pounding away at Lily, then Eileen, then Patty, as she moved from a one-dimensional wall, to a two-dimensional corner, to the three-dimensional meeting place of two walls and the floor. I had not planned to step into Raven’s shoes like that.
22
I went into the office to submit some of the documents I’d been working on. Despite all the Lily-Raven correspondence, I was actually ahead of schedule. I have always been a natural at writing, so I was able to rush chapters without compromising quality. Neil missed having me around the office. He needed the security of seeing me actually work on the project alongside him. A normal human imp
ulse, but one that led him to impugn the quality and timeliness of my work.
“You’ve missed deadline on the last two chapters, Owen. I know it’s been a rough time, but I need you to speed it up. When you’re late, the graphics-and-layout deadline doesn’t change. I’m the one who gets crunched.”
“I’ll tell Peter to give you more time.”
“No matter what, I’m going to have to pull all-nighters to get these chapters done.”
“I’ll get on it. I’m sure Peter will be sympathetic.”
“He wasn’t happy with the last chapter. I told you the text was a mess.”
“It’s all there, Neil. Don’t sweat it.”
“You can’t just stick in your aphorisms and think they’re going to slip by the editors.”
“Live a little.”
“I need the last two chapters.”
“What’s your favorite joke?”
“Do you have the last two chapters?”
“Have you got a favorite joke?”
“You’re not going to start slipping jokes into the manual?”
“Why did the cow roll down the hill?”
“You’re going to get us both fired if you keep this up.”
“And someday you’re going to die.”
“Jesus, Owen.”
“What’s going to happen then? Isn’t that worth thinking about?”
The Interloper Page 14