The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  This is what he left behind: “To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?”

  None of us could think of what work Maxwell referred to. Someone suggested the gallows itself—which was imposing—but that was too reductive to make sense.

  I learned later that his words were not his own. They were the words of the famous founder of Eastman Kodak, George Eastman. Maxwell had stolen Eastman’s last words, which plagiarism rendered them, I thought, more poignant.

  We all of us went to the funeral, where, surprisingly, a large contingent of relatives awaited us. They sobbed in an inconsolable fashion, and a beautiful young woman in a grey business suit became hysterical. I learned that she was Maxwell’s daughter by his first wife. Who would have guessed that Maxwell could inspire such powerful emotion? I talked to the beautiful daughter and shared my thoughts on the craftsmanship of her father’s final project, but she was too agitated to take any comfort in my words, and, indeed, glared at me as though I had said something reprehensible.

  * * *

  The house was put up for sale, and we were all obliged to move out. I guess I wasn’t aware, when I moved to the Paris Apartments, that most of the residents here are old folks, many of them retired. Thanks to this older demographic, the management schedules activities such as daytrips to the restaurants in neighboring towns, bridge games, visits from a podiatrist, group exercise and lectures on nutrition. I don’t attend any of these events. I am of the opinion that the less contact you have with your neighbors the better. I don’t have time for their stories. I’ve got my own, after all.

  My first novel, Fat Lip, was written when I lived in Fairfax, Virginia, and it was a minor success (by which I mean that it continued to generate royalties after the paltry advance paid out). My hero was a private detective named Hoyt who was allergic to lies. I was thirty-one when I sold that novel, and I’ve written eight more novels (sequels, because my agent says that most bestsellers are sequels although not all sequels are bestsellers), and a couple of dozen short stories. If you have read anything I’ve written you may have spent some time in a psych ward. That observation is based on the fan mail I receive, and I feel privileged to have such resilient readers.

  Now, at forty-two, I live on the second floor in the central court of this two-story apartment complex. In order to reach my apartment door, I have to walk up the outdoor stairs and past my neighbor’s door. In the long summer my neighbor, Vernon, will be sitting in a sturdy wrought-iron chair, one of two that preside over an infirm iron table, small and round, that someone has painted white with a brush (Vernon?). Vernon will sit there reading the newspaper, smoking a cigarette, and/or spooning something food-like into his mouth from the pot it was cooked in. He never deviates from his dress code, which consists of blue flip-flops and tiny cut-off jeans. His immense belly eclipses his vestigial shorts, and I can’t be the only person who assumed on first encountering Vernon that I was in the presence of an extremely sweaty nudist practicing the tenets of his sun-worshipping religion.

  Vernon’s primary activity is surveillance. He studies the courtyard below, with its mimosa trees, its sidewalks, and its rectangles and circles of grass, which, despite the sprinkler system, have turned a mottled yellow and brown as the result of a record drought. He searches the courtyard for signs of life, generally people although I have seen him address a lone cat or dog with considerable animation. He is always talking, which is an edge he has if you are hoping to dart past him. When a resident or maintenance person or postal worker comes within range, Vernon can easily address that person (already having, as it were, a running start).

  In the history of humankind, those members of the tribe who could not utter an interesting sentence developed other ways of stopping and holding their fellows. Vernon has all the inherited moves of this evolutionary byway. He can speak at great length without pausing to breathe. He can fix you with his eye, he can call upon your sympathies as a fellow human being, he can ask questions that require a response. If the recipient of his discourse attempts to flee, Vernon can raise his voice, instinctively gauging the exact number of decibels required to compensate for the increased distance, which suggests to the reluctant listener that flight is futile. And, of course, Vernon has the gift of obliviousness, the belief (shared by academics and members of 12-step groups) that his thoughts are inherently interesting.

  I have come to terms with Vernon. I have learned to race by, to feign talking on a cell phone, or—if time is not an issue—to peer from between my mini-blind slats, waiting until he makes one of his brief but frequent retreats into his apartment.

  I don’t want to hurt his feelings. And I don’t want to enrage him, to antagonize him in any way. I’m not sure what he is capable of, really.

  Now where did that come from? I wasn’t expecting that sentence. Maybe this free-writing stuff is like fooling with a Ouija board. Time to get back to the real story.

  * * *

  The rain stopped and the last watery light departed with the clouds and left a residue of stars. The car rolled on and Mark slept, not wholly lost to his physical self but maintaining a shadow sentry, a psychic construction similar to the created self he could summon under interrogation. He was aware of the driver, the girl and her longman as gray shapes on the other side of his dream. Well. Not his dream.

  It was a bequeathed dream, one of his father’s memories, filled with such love and rage that it left no room for private dreaming.

  In the dream he was kissing her, his fingers lost in her black and bloody hair: this rough and terrible kiss, with its need to hurt, to invoke a scream.

  But the dead are mute.

  He lifted his head, blinking up into the cold light that came from the tunnel’s painted walls, a varnish of glowing life, part of the outlawed orgtech that the rebels took for their own. He turned his gaze back to the pale face cradled in his hands and panicked. Her left cheekbone was oddly sunken, her bruised eye a red and angry slit beneath a purple lid, her other eye beautiful and terrible and abandoned. “Mother,” he whispered, and in that word was also lover, wife, warrior, comrade.

  A strong-fingered hand clutched his shoulder, and the longman’s voice, eroded by the narcobugs that slept in pirates’ lungs, croaked in his ear: “Easy. Don’t spook! What generation are you anyway? Could be you’ve been copied one too many times.”

  Mark said nothing, feigning stupor.

  “Let’s stretch our legs,” the longman said, stepping out of the car. Mark followed, prepared for an assault, perhaps even welcoming such, for he had been reduced to confusion and disquiet by the dream, and a fight’s present tense would be bracing. How often in the course of his training had he been awakened by some physical confrontation? As the teachers were fond of saying, “Sleep deep and you may sleep forever.”

  The car had stopped in a pool of moonlight beyond which pine trees presented a monochromatic wall. The rain was elsewhere, only recently departed and leaving in its wake an echo of its passing, the patter of raindrops still ticking amid the trees.

  The man called Solomon walked away from the car, down the side of the road in the direction they had come, not looking back, and Mark ran to catch up. They walked until the car was out of sight. The wind pressed at their backs, a cold ghost, its breath sour and importunate. Above them the pale moon floated like something that had recently drowned and owed its buoyancy to the gases of decomposition.

  “You are leaving that girl in the car,” Mark said. “Isn’t that unwise? The LC could be nearby.”

  Solomon stopped. He turned and smiled his moon-sparkled smile. “They could be. Life’s no picnic anymore, unless you live in a rich fief where all the cooterments of civilization make for a nice dream. On the road, it’s dangerous, although the LC don’t have the patience for an ambush. I’m not over-worried about Mary. If something comes along, she’ll waken and deal with it. Don’t underestimate that girl, boy. You’d be no match for her in a mix-up.”

  “Is that what you wished to say to me
beyond her hearing?” Mark said.

  “No. I wished to show you something.” He was still holding the folded umbrella in his right hand and with a flourish revealed its role as a flashlight. The wide beam illuminated a tangled wall of dwarf oak and thorn-laden jacketbush.

  “Here we go.” The pirate took a long stride into the trees, and Mark followed. A path had been machine-burned, leaving a flat wall of vegetation on either side, truncated branches, everything split and blown away by brute force, and leaving an odor Mark knew—“blood-and-razors” his brothers whispered. His heart sped up on the insistence of some dead soldier’s encounter with this same stink. An LC trail, but old enough to allow the surrounding woods some tentative regrouping, a toadstool here, a burst of yellow-green ferns leaning out and looking both ways, some small reckless purple flowers raggedly running across the path toward the safety of the other side.

  Mark hesitated, and the longman turned and said, “Let’s not be coy. It’s what you came for.”

  Mark shook his head. “No. I sought a ride to George Washington City. That is all.”

  “My friend, I don’t wish to call you a liar, but the alternative is to call you a fool, and I don’t think you are short on brains. We are all rolling along on the tracks our masters fashioned. Let’s make the best of it. I suspect you were sent here to see this.”

  Mark thought this might very well be true. He could not see the whole design. No one could.

  “All right,” Mark said, “Show me what I am destined to see.”

  Solomon laughed. “That’s the spirit!” He turned and set out again, Mark following.

  * * *

  So Lethe’s Children are vicious little child-like creatures with a single day’s worth of memory and very mutable swarm behavior. What the reader doesn’t know is how closely Mark is related to these goblin-like children. These creatures were created to repair a damaged earth, to terraform it, and their common father is Andrew Cory. Mark Cory doesn’t know that these creatures are kin.

  And Mary Constant is my wife—or rather the ghost of my wife and this is not something the reader needs to know. It is something I need to remember.

  Just thinking out loud. It has been a few days since I last wrote anything. What have I been up to? I don’t know how it is with other writers, but writing often feels like the only time I have a self that can answer that question.

  Growing up in Virginia, I had a friend, Artie Modine, whose father was considerably older than the parents of my other friends. Artie’s dad always wore a suit—that’s how I remember him, in any event—and was losing his mind in spectacular ways. “He got hit with Al’s Hammer!” Artie would say and laugh. Artie and his dad weren’t close. One time, Artie told me, he and his sister and his mom were waked in the middle of the night by a racket (glass breaking, metal screaming, a big hollow booming). What the fuck?! they all wondered (or maybe just Artie), and they followed the noise to the basement and there was Artie’s dad, squatting in his underwear and watching the dryer spin. He’d stuffed it full of soda cans and bottles and coat hangers and trash and turned it on, and he was grinning like he’d won the lottery.

  Not long after that, Artie’s dad went into a nursing home. Artie said that after his dad lost his mind, his dad was always punching buttons, flipping switches, working the remote on the tv without any plan. “Like he just wanted to make the electricity do something, anything.” Artie had a theory about this: his dad had lost control and maybe thought he’d punched a wrong button somewhere, like when you accidentally change the television channel and can’t get cable anymore so he was trying to push a button that would set everything right again.

  That’s sort of what writers do, isn’t it? They try to restore order via narrative.

  If you happen to say, “I try to restore order via narrative,” in front of a bunch of people (say, during a book signing) you will immediately be identified as a pompous asshole. Just assume your book isn’t great literature. It’s going to be hard to avoid puffing up, and I suppose you could forgive yourself because you are, after all, only human—although, is that a good excuse? Hitler was only human. Charles Manson was only human. Every day humans are doing really awful things to other humans. So “only human”: not a good excuse.

  I’ve been thinking about this because my latest novel, Heat Rash, is now in stores, and BookPeople, a large independent bookstore that has always been welcoming (one of the staff even feigning knowledge of my series) arranged a signing. There were maybe twenty people in attendance; I recognized some of them from a writing group I sporadically attended.

  I am proud to say that I did not talk in an exalted way about this humble comic crime novel. Heat Rash takes place in the midwest in the whacky world of little girl beauty contests. A tiny Madonna-pretender is murdered by an equally petite Lady Gaga imitator, or so it would seem. But the whole setup rubs my sleuth, Hoyt, the wrong way, and since he is already in the midwest (see: Wasted in Waterloo) why not take the money that the diminutive Lady Gaga’s wealthy parents press upon him?

  I read the part where Hoyt wonders about kid beauty contests and how such events might attract pedophiles, and he gets a brutal beating for thinking this out loud in a local bar. Hoyt gets beaten up at least once in every one of the books, and some insight always arises in the aftermath of a beating.

  I signed six books, which isn’t bad, although one of the books I signed wasn’t written by me. I didn’t have the heart to tell the woman that I wasn’t Lawrence Block. I signed it “God Bless you, Larry Block.”

  I wound up getting cornered by an older gentleman who said he was writing a memoir and didn’t read any fiction because life was short. Not short enough, I was thinking by the time I escaped the harangue.

  Now that I had signed all the books—BookPeople buys a bunch, and if you sign them all they can’t send them back—I wandered around the book store. I can’t go into a book store without looking around—and buying a book. In these digital times, these ghost times, every lovely artifact, every physical book with its analog soul should have someone who will cherish it.

  In the philosophy section I saw a book that had been dropped on the floor. I picked it up and recognized the title: A Savage God. The book was written by A. Alvarez, and I remembered reading it in college. Its subject was suicide (Sylvia Plath being a sort of template for that) and, as I recalled, it discussed suicide as a legitimate choice as opposed to most modern thinking in which depression, a result of unfortunate brain chemistry, is the engine that drives suicides.

  Since I had found the book on the floor, I felt obliged to honor its in-my-path significance. I bought it. In college the paperback had probably cost me a couple of dollars at a used bookstore; the reprinted trade paperback cost $13.95 and, as was often the case, I suspected it would wind up on a shelf without being read again.

  * * *

  I didn’t feel like going back to my apartment, so I drove north on Lamar, then over to Guadalupe and The Drag. Every university town has something equivalent to The Drag, a four- or five-block ecosystem for young people of the college persuasion. I like the energy, all these kids heading somewhere with backpacks, iPods, tattoos, exclamatory hair, smartphones and bottles of purified water (including smartwater®, recommended, perhaps, by their smartphones).

  I ogled the co-eds and may have been guilty of a thought crime since some of these kids were no doubt underage (although a skilled thought-policeman would surely be able to read the nature of my thoughts and see their essential innocence).

  I was thinking about what a world with thought-police would be like when a cluster of homeless people caught my eye. The last of the day’s light was being consumed by street lights and neon signs, but these folks were illuminated by the light from a sign advertising vinyl records (the latest thing: like big, two-sided cds). There were plenty of cars on The Drag so I was moving at about five miles an hour, and I had ample time to ascertain that my mind wasn’t taking some vague likeness and photoshopping it into so
meone I knew.

  A skinny guy with a guitar hanging from his neck by a rope was leaning forward, eyes squinted to improve his concentration, a sort of fierce hunger manifest in every angular bone of his weedy body. Two ragged teenagers, a girl and a guy (both with exploding hair, geysers of hair) were sitting on the concrete with their legs pulled up, chins resting on their knees, backs against a wall covered with faded posters advertising defunct bands. Their mouths gaped open as though they had just witnessed a spectacular fireworks display.

  I saw an ancient man whom I had seen all around Austin (sleeping on a bus stop bench, moving with a steady gait across some armageddon of a construction site, shouting with his head thrown back under a sky the color of a dead catfish), a man with a long brown beard and a wrinkled overcoat and the high seriousness of a prophet born at a time too narrow and petty to contain his truth. He too was entranced, his eyes wider than I’d ever seen them.

  What was it that held their attention? What mesmerizing event was this? Who was so riveting?

  Vernon.

  Yes. My neighbor Vernon was speaking to them. He wasn’t wearing his stay-at-home outfit. He wore khaki overalls and a long-sleeve grey garment that might have been the top half of winter long johns. It was 95 degrees, starting to cool down, but he was still over-dressed. Aside from his disorienting attire, he was the Vernon I knew. He stood still, his arms at his sides, somehow robbed of all vitality, while his mouth shaped words and loosed them into…well apparently into the enraptured minds of his indigent audience. When I listened to Vernon, did I have some equally entranced expression? It seemed unlikely.