I looked out the window and saw Vaughn downstairs on the street. He ducked his head and dashed toward Broadway, probably to catch a bus to the wine shop. No one had taken note of his wonderful production of Hedda. The show had closed after three and a half weeks, its one snippy review in the Times failing to boost ticket sales enough to complete the run.
My morning routine included one luxury, a dark and fragrant cup of coffee from a French press. I was dressed for work, sipping coffee, trying to remember where I’d left my pack of American Spirits, when I heard a knock at the door. I assumed it was a neighbor or the landlord. I pulled the door open and took a step backward, farther into the room.
There was no one at the door. Only a peculiar smell, a smoky aroma like a burned-out campfire. I stood in the middle of the room for a minute, trying to remember what I’d been doing just before that. I couldn’t recall. I pulled on my jacket and went to work.
Tam was as irritable as ever, and as paranoid. She made a habit of reconciling the register and the sales slips twice a day since she’d become manager. It wasn’t only that she didn’t trust me, she trusted no one.
That Friday she was especially wound up, dashing from the counter to the machines and back, checking her watch and swearing. She didn’t even break for a smoke.
The customers were the usual battery of dullards and assholes. Most of them couldn’t figure out how to make a stack of photocopies if their lives depended on it. Despite this we had new competition from a self-serve copy center a block away. Their prices were starting to attract students from Seattle Central and Cornish. Tam was devising a plan to advertise with flyers at all the law firms downtown but I’d heard Xerox was taking over the market with their in-house operators. Pretty soon I wouldn’t even have a job making copies.
On the way home the sky grew overcast. Rain spattered the sidewalk and I was filled with an inexplicable dread, a desire to be anywhere other than where I was. It was Friday. Vaughn probably had a date. No one would be waiting for me at home. I hadn’t heard from Daisy or Eve, not that I expected a call. I just didn’t know how long it would take for the story to appear in the Portland news and get picked up by the Seattle dailies.
I tilted my head back and let the raindrops fall on my face and inside my shirt. I heard a rumble of thunder. I studied the clouds. Across all of the rooftops on Denny and Olive Way shadows went slithering down, cast by clouds and suddenly broken free, sliding onto window ledges and under doors, slipping away into sewer grates with the rain.
Trick of the light, I decided. Or maybe it was exhaustion. I needed to get out of Seattle. There had to be other places where I could get a job as lousy as the one I had, warmer places where people smiled because they weren’t drowning in rain and envy. Maybe I could crash on my mom’s living room floor until I figured out what to do next.
Meanwhile I wanted to sit down. I only had two dollars in my wallet, but I decided it would be worth the price to catch the bus for the last six blocks. The stop was deserted. I sat down on the bench and I must have dozed. When I woke up a bus was pulling away from the curb. I ran and shouted, arms up, heart pounding. The driver ignored me. I was soaking wet and there was no point in waiting for the next bus.
I gave up and trudged the last six blocks, stomped up three flights of stairs to my lousy, cramped apartment. All the while noting the familiar scent of mouse turds and tomato soup, I opened the door and stared down at a dead body. My body, right where I’d left it.
Part Three
“No self-respecting crime fiction writer uses a dead guy for a narrator. Don’t say, ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ because that was a movie and it was satire and if you can’t tell the difference you should get out of my class before you say anything else. And don’t tell me you’re making ‘an artistic choice.’ It’s nothing but a tip-off to the reader that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.” – Lee Todd Butcher, RIP
Chapter Twenty-Four
When I was alive I thought my circumstances couldn’t get worse. Introspection was less maddening back then. Examining my shitty life was easier when I had gobs of it left. Of course there’s still plenty of time but the illusion of moving forward is gone. The fantasy of my existence as a matter of more significance than my non-existence is over.
I’ve made numerous returns to my apartment, watched it become a refurbished condo ‘with vintage appeal.’ I was never socially active and all of the places I frequented are gone or unrecognizable. So it goes with most cities but this one changes with a vengeance. If you love something, count on it being demolished and replaced.
There isn’t any of my life in this universe. There isn’t any of my self in a form anyone who isn’t crazy would recognize.
Certain realities have come to light gradually. What I expected, whatever it might have been, hasn’t come about.
In the moment when there was still blood on the mantel and the scent of perforated skin in the air, I liked to think I had the potential to make sense of what happened. I pretended to be in charge of the moment of my death, if nothing else. What the fuck did I know?
The one thing that made sense to me was the anger I continued to feel toward Eve. She was my nemesis. My confession had been a gift, a chance at redemption. She had failed in her mission, so I decided to kill her. I assumed she had killed me because she hated me. Unable to convince Carl or Daisy to investigate Nate, she bought a gun and made my death look like a Cobain-obsessed suicide. This was the final insult, and one I was not going to forget.
In those murky days immediately following my death, some events were not clear. Others became indelible. Nothing was more obvious than the obsession with which I’d filled my days when I had them to spare, when I thought I had thousands of them ahead of me.
At last I was able to enter the office as I pleased, without incurring the wrath of Carl or the glare of Shelly. Each time I crossed the threshold I was seized with an adolescent desire to wreck things. I would rip open a cushion, unload staplers, leave a rug corner rolled up to trip someone, never staying long enough to watch my pranks play out.
On my first visit I stuck matchbooks under one leg of Shelly’s desk, leaving it with a wobble I knew would drive her mad until she figured it out. Nate was absent from his cubicle. The desk that had belonged to Eve was shoved into a corner with dead plants piled on top of it roughly in the shape of a wreath. Her snobby postcards featuring famous writers and their famous quotes were gone, replaced by Nate’s marked-up calendar and his collection of fan letters.
Of course the most likely place to find Eve was always the same. Rosebud.
I heard the low murmur of small talk around me. I checked the corner table and then scanned the rest of the café. No sign of her.
I knew only the general neighborhood where she lived. The bridge connecting the weedy part of north Queen Anne to Fremont was crowded with traffic. Seattleites drank like fish on the weekend. My guess was Eve would be at one of the bars.
Unlike other neighborhoods, Fremont isn’t on a square grid. It has a center resembling a small heart with arteries and veins branching off toward Ballard, Phinney Ridge and Wallingford. The Fremont Bridge stands east of the massive George Washington Memorial Bridge, which everyone calls the Aurora Bridge. Beneath the north end, tucked under N. 36th Street, there is a massive stone sculpture, its face, arms and hands emerging from rock, left hand clutching a Volkswagen beetle. The Fremont Troll is typical of local public art—humorous and inoffensive, a tourist photo op. (Even the nearby statue of Vladimir Lenin is routinely decorated with rubber ducks and plastic flowers.)
That night I found Eve sitting atop the troll’s right hand. Despite the upturned flask, or maybe because of it, she served as a secondary background feature to the German-speaking family taking pictures. She was wearing mom jeans, a clean black T-shirt, and torn-up All-Stars. The shoes made me wonder if she made a habit of drinking in this spot. Did she scramble over the knuckles of the troll and sit there all n
ight under the glare of his shining hubcap eye? No, I knew she didn’t. I knew she had wandered down the dirt path after she ran out of money at the Triangle Pub. I knew she had every intention of staying, camping out and sleeping on the back of a giant stone hand.
“Crazy bitch,” I said. “You crazy, murderous bitch. I gave you a chance to redeem yourself and you killed me.”
“What’s it?” she said. She groaned and turned her head.
The German family moved along to the next site on their itinerary. The mom was especially anxious to leave, the novelty of the drunken American lady communing with a troll having worn off.
“Now would be a good time to jump,” I said, estimating how many feet Eve would have to drop to fatally crack her head on the ground.
“Fuck you!” She sat up.
“You can see me?” I asked.
“Fuck you, Seattle!” she screamed. Her voice reverberated in the cavern formed by the bridge and dissolved in the roar of traffic overhead.
In the space between the troll’s arched back and the bridge, a thousand pairs of eyes opened. They peered at me but I couldn’t tell whether they could see me. They blinked and began to draw closer together, centering on the spot above the troll’s hubcap eye. Bright dots like fireflies, they merged and drifted down until they covered the troll’s eye. With a sound as quiet as a sigh, it closed.
Eve lay back and sprawled across the troll’s right hand, a middle-aged Fay Wray luxuriating in the company of her oversized paramour. The silver flask rested on her stomach. She drew a shuddering breath and the flask fell and clattered over the rocks. My nemesis had never looked older or more ridiculous, bawling on her back, alternately crying and screaming obscenities to the oblivious night traffic above.
In my new state I understood she was nothing, this woman. She was a figment of her own imagination, cobbled together and barely making it through the day. She had no family, no friends, no allies, no awards, no career, and nothing to believe in. She didn’t kill me. She was the person I might have become if I’d gone to a real university and dribbled my years away editing prestige magazines with a readership smaller than the occupancy of my apartment building, and accepted a job at a weekly paper out of desperation and vanity. She was dying from neglect and loneliness. She wouldn’t last another decade.
I picked up the flask and found it contained another swallow of whisky. I poured the last drop into Eve’s mouth. She let me cradle her head in one hand and press the metal spout between her teeth. She didn’t fight me when I forced the flask deeper and deeper into her mouth until her pupils dilated. I waited and held on while the irises grew dim.
I left her lying there. The woman eating a silver bottle under the eye of a troll would make a good photo for the dailies.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I didn’t give you enough credit, kiddo. I knew you were tough as nails but I thought you might grow out of it.”
I froze. This wasn’t a memory. This wasn’t an echo in my mind. I was sure of it. The voice was real. Lee Todd was following me. If I glanced over my shoulder I’d see him in a suit and tie for the first time. But I didn’t need to look. I knew.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“You killed her,” he said. “Was that necessary?”
“What are you, my fairy godmother?” I asked. “Are you going to follow me around now?”
“You would hate that, wouldn’t you? Some old bastard trailing your ass everywhere, reminding you what’s wrong with you.”
“Great,” I said. “Yeah. Because you’re so wise, you have the right to judge. Fucking loser. You drank yourself to death.”
“I did not!”
“You fucking did.”
“I fucking did not.”
“Read your own obituary sometime,” I said. “I read it.” He grinned. “Only to make sure you were dead. I read it for a laugh. You died in a hospital bed in Seattle with cirrhosis of the liver.”
“You’re not any better than you were in my class when it comes to digging up facts,” he told me.
We stopped under the gray-white arc of the streetlamps. The bridge shone in the background through drizzle and fog. Cars whooshed by. A homeless man shivered under a thin blanket near the overpass. Two 20-something guys walked a wide circle of disgust around him.
“Man, the nights are crap here.” Lee Todd observed.
“Yeah, it’s grim,” I said. “Rain’s a given. I grew up with rain. But the people…”
“Misery on a fucking stick,” he agreed. “You should’ve met the nurse who murdered me.”
“Murdered?”
“I’m flat on my ass in one of those beds they keep adjusting every couple of hours to make the patients ‘comfortable.’ I’ve got an IV in the back of my hand and my skin is swollen and waxy and I can barely breathe.
“All of a sudden, in waddles this mushroom of a nurse, her face and neck like a toad’s, with auburn hair pinned up tight under an old fashioned cap. I should’ve known something was up. Nurses don’t dress like that anymore unless it’s Halloween or they’re part of a dominatrix game.
“Anyway. My abdomen was on fire, burning like Satan’s dick, so they had me on painkillers. This bitch reaches over, pinches the IV and pulls it out, replaces it with another tube. I can see what’s rolling into my veins and it’s light blue, you know, it’s pure as fucking shit.
“This roly-poly twat leans over me. She’s so close I can smell the drugstore perfume between her tits. She stares into my eyes until she can see that I know what she’s doing. And she smiles at me. Shows me her tiny, square, yellow teeth.
“I mean, I’ve heard of angels of mercy but trust me on this, Greta, that bitch wouldn’t have known mercy if it fucked her up the ass. She murdered me in my bed and she enjoyed every second of it.”
I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
“You were dying anyway,” I said and started walking again.
“See what I mean?” he said. “Hard as nails.”
“Why should I be otherwise with you? We weren’t in love or anything.”
I could hear him chuckling, a low rumble. He caught up with me and kept pace.
“You weren’t in love,” he said.
“Please go to hell, okay?”
“Believe me, if that were an option I wouldn’t be here,” he said and lit a cigarette. “Say, who’s that woman you just did away with?”
“None of your business,” I said and then thought better of it. “Can’t you tell? Can’t you look at people and just…tell?”
“Nah,” he said with a shrug. “Who wants to know everything? It’s all crap anyway.”
“I forgot how much I dislike you,” I told him. When I turned to see his reaction, he was gone.
In the weeks following my death the police made all the assumptions I expected. I was just another sad girl, a loser in the City of Losers, a copycat caught in the wake of a famous musician who famously committed suicide. There was no real investigation.
I wasted a few spiteful hours wrecking car batteries at the nearest precinct. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so cynical about Seattle law enforcement if I hadn’t spotted Cobain riding the #39 to Seward Park one afternoon, smiling like a kid at the circus.
Foul play was suspected in the death of Eve Wallace, former editor of Boom Town. (The weekly papers got the name wrong.) Circumstances implied Eve was murdered during a mugging. The German family lost their camera overboard on a ferry to Tillicum Village. Not that the roll of negatives inside would have identified the person who murdered Eve. At this point I was just being mean. The kids cried when they found out their troll photos were gone, and this was fairly satisfying.
Following my conversation with Lee Todd I paid closer attention to the shadows adhering to rooftops and windows and slithering over cobblestones in the alleys outside Pike Place Market. There were times when I could almost say for certain I recognized an outline but it was hard to say for sur
e. The shadows moved in concert with one another, with a mute grace I doubt most of them enjoyed in life.
I spent a lot of time thinking about Eve. Not guilty or wishing I’d done things differently. Wondering why I didn’t feel a sense of completion or a rush of satisfaction, wondering if these feelings were beyond my current state.
I was smoking and pondering these questions on the #7 when the answer occurred to me. First of all, it only took that single glimpse of Cobain to convince me to try the bus again. During non-peak hours seating was great, and I found the warm chugging movement comforting. I realized half the people I’d been ignoring inside the Metro line were just like me. We didn’t acknowledge one another. We simply rode the lines we liked, taking in the scenery and waiting for a chance to trip a teenager or a curmudgeon on the way in or out of the bus. Small pleasures, as they say.
So I was sitting in my favorite seat on the #7, on the left and three rows behind the driver, when I spied a discarded issue of Boom City. On page six Nate had had the balls to write a brief satirical tribute to ‘the fallen women’ of the publication. Eve was portrayed as a mental case, a sad spinster meeting men for illicit public trysts, implying she’d finally crossed paths with someone she couldn’t handle.
My story was pure invention although there were quotes from Vaughn and his friends, no doubt taken out of context, probably acquired with lies about the nature of the article. I was this club-hopping slut who was fired from the paper for stealing another author’s work and couldn’t deal with the combination of professional failure and the death of my grunge idol.
I shrieked when I read the last part. I yanked the stop request cord and stomped off the bus at the next corner. The door folded open and the live occupants only nodded and returned to their sleepy state when they saw no one depart.
“What the fuck?” I yelled.
I Wish I Was Like You Page 21