by Rick Dakan
“Well, I don’t know about that. She doesn’t seem the domesticating type.”
“What’s she like?”
“I didn’t realize they were together at first, but I should have guessed. She’s totally his type. Slim, African American, with these tight, short dreadlocks. She was wearing this clingy little black tank top and jeans with paint all over them. Her name’s Kym and she’s got a bit of an accent. Bahamian maybe? Those things in your ears that, like, stretch the hole. Not ear rings, but more like plugs… ”
“I know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what they’re called. Not ear plugs though.”
“She had those. Pretty eyes. Seemed nice enough.” Conrad ate some more chicken and took a swallow of sangria. “She seemed more surprised then either me or Shelby that we’d run into each other.”
“Did you give him shit for not calling us before he left? Or even figure out why he left at all?”
“I tried to ask, but he just kind brushed it aside and I didn’t want to press him. Mostly we talked about the house they’d bought. It’s out by the interstate. He said it’s on like two and a half acres of land and they got it at a tax auction for a great price but that it needs a lot of work. They had a bunch of paint in their cart, and he said they were redoing the entire interior.”
“How much did he pay for it?” I asked, wondering how Shelby, who’d never held a real job in his life as far as I knew, could afford any piece of property in Sarasota, much less two and a half acres. I was gainfully employed and couldn’t have afforded to buy my townhouse if it came on the market today.
“I didn’t ask,” said Conrad, but I knew better. No realtor can resist knowing how much a friend’s house is worth.
I pointed a wagging finger at him, smiling. “I know you went home and looked it up online.”
“One point two million.”
“Jesus! How on Earth… ”
Conrad sighed and leaned back in his chair. “It actually is a really good price for what the got. According to the listing, it’s five bedrooms plus an attached guest suite. I wish I’d been at that auction.”
“Still, where’d he get the money?”
“I don’t think he did. The place is in both his name and the name of some company from New York, but I’ll bet you ten bucks it’s Kym’s money.”
“Ahhhh, Shelby’s found himself a sugar momma.”
“Or her family has money maybe.” Conrad shrugged. “She seemed pretty young to have made her first million. Especially since she said she was a ‘freelance ethnographer,’ whatever that means.”
“So Shelby’s habits haven’t changed too much. He still likes ‘em young and smart.”
“Well, she’s no college co-ed. Mid-to-late twenties I would guess. Did seem smart though.”
“That’s a step in the right direction, anyway,” I said. I liked the idea of Shelby settling down into a more normal mode of life, like Conrad had. “Did you get his number? I want to give him a call.”
“Said he doesn’t have a phone. Neither of them have cells and they haven’t gotten service hooked up at the house yet.”
“We never heard from him the whole time he was away, maybe he got used to not talking to us.”
“Except that one e-mail he sent me,” Conrad corrected.
“What e-mail?” I asked. I’d never hear about this.
“It came last summer? I know I showed it to you.”
“I don’t think you did,” I said, searching my memory for any hint of a message from Shelby.
“Maybe I didn’t. You’d remember it. I’ll forward it to you when I get home. I can’t believe I didn’t show it to you.”
“When was this?”
“Last summer,” Conrad repeated. “I’m sure I… ”
“It must’ve been when I was in Germany working on the hackers book,” I said, as realization hit me. “I was too security conscious to check my e-mail while I was hanging at all those hacker spaces, and when I got back I know I just ignored a bunch of mail that had built up.”
“That would explain it,” Conrad said, finishing off the last of his chicken. “I’ll dig it up and send it again. You’ll get a laugh out of it I’m sure. It’s really strange.”
We moved on then to other topics, including the difference (or lack thereof) between good and bad flan. Conrad went home to his wife and I strolled around downtown for an hour or so before returning to my computer. I went through my old e-mails and found nothing from Shelby that dated from after his departure. There were plenty from before of course — hundreds of random links to weird stuff he’d found on the Web or invitations to parties or just general ramblings and diatribes about the state of the world. Shelby was a powerful, effusive, and talented (if undisciplined) writer, and it was a pleasure to reread some of those old messages. Ever since I met him in middle school, Shelby had looked at the world from a different point of view, taking delight in the strange and weird. He had an encyclopedic memory for indie music (pre-1993 only) and cult movies (pre-1983 only) and could memorize dialogue and lyrics after just one or two hearings. He also loved comic books and video games almost as much Conrad and I did. It was these geekier sides of our personalities that bound the three of us together.
He and I had met on his first day at middle school when he’d seen my beaten and bruised copy of the second Elfquest graphic novel sticking out of my Trapper Keeper. He fairly ripped the thing out of my hands he was so excited. He’d read the first book but couldn’t get a hold of part two, and he was dying to continue the story. I agreed with some alarm to let him read it during lunch, but only under my close supervision. He thanked me and then thanked me again by giving me his chocolate milk to enjoy while he read the comic. Shelby blew through the pages in the half-hour we had, racing to get to the end. Maybe he was afraid I’d change my mind and take it away from him. The next day I brought in book three and let him take it home overnight.
He was part of the group then, my little clique that was coming together that year and would persevere into high school and in some cases beyond. Conrad came into school the next year, joining me, Shelby, Paul, and Greg in our nerd corps of gamers and comics geeks. But Shelby’s family kept a tight grip on him outside of school, so most of our time together was at lunch or recess or stolen during classes. We filled pages of notebooks with notes written during class consisting of weird little word games we’d play, like telling a story one word at a time as we passed the paper around while the teacher’s attention lingered elsewhere. Paul and Shelby were the best at this game, always adding unexpected words like “tintinnabulation” that were particularly difficult for the rest of us to follow up on.
It was ironic that Shelby, who’d so chomped at the bit under his family’s rules, was the only one of us who never ended up leaving Sarasota for more than a few months at a time. It took Shelby seven years to graduate from New College, the nationally ranked (as every piece of promotional literature for the school reminds one, ad nauseum) four-year public college here in town. Even with the school’s reputation for independent study and design-it-yourself degree programs, this was considered a long time. But trips to India and Peru and Australia and a summer following the Grateful Dead on what turned out to be their last tour before Jerry died all ate up the time. My own rocky journey through university seemed easy and straightforward by comparison, and Conrad’s straight shot through English at U of F to MBA at USF to realtor was as predictable as the changing of the seasons, even including his brief and unsuccessful foray into radio. Still, when Shelby and Conrad and I got together, the differences all melted away and it was the same three people talking about games and girls and politics and dime-store philosophy, same as always.
I smiled in appreciation as I looked over one of Shelby’s rants against the War in Iraq from 2004. That seven-year philosophy degree had at least imparted to him some very formidable logical reasoning skills. He’d send these “sermons” as he called them out to scores of people on his friends list.
A thought occurred to me then and I went back and started to search through my junk mail folder. I use Thunderbird as my e-mail program and I save everything, even all the junk. I’m sort of anal when it comes to discarding any kind of information, as the seventeen bookcases spread out through my townhouse attribute to. I sorted by name at first and found nothing from Shelby, but then I sorted by date for the time I was in Germany and there it was: an e-mail from someone named S.T. NEMO — the S and T being either an abbreviation for “saint” or Shelby’s initials and Nemo meaning “no one.” Saint No One. That sure sounded like Shelby.
The message was part of a Blind Cc mass e-mailing from a Hotmail account I didn’t recognize. No wonder my spam filters had sucked it up. I wondered who else Shelby might have sent it to besides me and Conrad. I was certain that I’d never seen it before because, as Conrad had suggested, the contents were quite memorable:
I’ve been wandering in the hills. Not the hills that have eyes mind you, but just these New England rough and tumble foothills. No degenerate mutants or murderous mountain folk menacing me, no siree. Not me. Not anyone else either, unfortunately. To be honest, it’s all boring as fucking fuck, wandering these hills by myself. I’ve been away now from you all for some time, and I suppose the best way to explain why is to tell you about this dream I had the other night, here in the lonely New England woods.
I dreamed of a great city by the sea. Straight out of Nostradamus, that is. A city by the sea with a place for you and me. An old, decrepit, degenerate, despised and decried aquaticos metropolis where old, calloused-handed fishermen putt putt putt their boats out before dawn and return each evening with belly’s full of cephalopods tied into knots and ready to be auctioned off at market. And every evening, as the sun was setting we’d all come down to the waterfront (yes, yes, I was there too) and place our bids, eBay style, for the freshest and bestest of the day’s tentacular catch. I personally favored the octopus while my better half went for the squid. There were other things in there too, of course. Dream things with too many tentacles that grew too large and too smart for someone like me to fry up in a pan. Who wants to eat a talking tentacle anyway. They’re too chewy.
And every night we’d take our catch, once the final bids were in and the last-minute lurkers had shown their true fiduciary intents. Most nights I came away with just enough, which was, by definition, all I ever really needed. But before I could get home I had to run the gantlet of foul-mouthed harridans who had a thing or two to tell me about how best to roast, fry, or boil my slimy appendages. My bag of mollusk feet. They’d yell and scream and the only way to shut them up was to take a tentacle, grab them by the scruff of the neck. Grab these loathsome madmen with their spewing maws. Grab them with the left hand and a tentacle with the right and shove that right as far down their pie holes as possible (mind the teeth!). Make them eat their words. Raw. And I always had just enough. Just enough to shut everyone up and not have to listen to them screech and scream while I carefully diced up my sole remaining (and invariably smallest) tentacle. A fine dice with a sharp, sharp, sharp steel knife. Diced into cubes. Is that where the word dice comes from (as in alea iacta est kinda dice)? From dicing. I have to look that up, or e-mail if you know. Pick up the cubes with tweezers one by one and plant them carefully in the center of an agar-filled pot. Two inches below the surface, no more, no less. And then sleep on it. When I awake, the tentacle sprout has emerged. One little suckered sucker, waving in the pot, just a couple inches high. But my how they grow. Quicker than weeds. And now I’ve got a garden in my home in the ancient waterside city. A garden of tentacles that fill almost every free space, chattering away to one another. Sometimes they sing.
Is it weird that I have this dream like, every night? Well, every night this week. Since I came to these New England hills and started sleeping under the stars. Fuck I hate camping. I wish I had some money.
OK, the librarian’s looking at me funny. I think I might have been talking to myself. I’m going to see if the soup kitchen’s opened yet.
Take it easy,
Shelby
Shelby never wrote anything like this before he left. His normal e-mails rambled for sure, but never this taste for dreams and the surreal. I was actually glad I’d missed it when he sent it out before, as the lines at the end about soup kitchens and needing money would have set me to worrying about my old friend. The rest of the nonsense about dreams and tentacle gardens would have just rolled off me as meaningless babble, as it did that night when I first read the message. I’ve of course read it over and over again since then, searching for some explanation as to how Shelby’s transformation might have started, and there are plenty of hints there, but nothing definite.
I knew Shelby had family on his dad’s side (the side he still talked to) in the northeast somewhere. Connecticut if memory served. I assumed he might have been staying with them at the time, although he’d never spoken very highly of them. I guessed that perhaps he had sought refuge with them and found the whole experience too incredibly bourgeois and boring for his insatiable tastes. A week in the woods might have been all he could afford in the way of an escape. I pictured him stumbling into some rural public library, stinking from days of showerless hiking, sitting down at one of two free computers and creating a new Hotmail account rather than leaving his personal data on this public machine. Maybe the nosy librarian looking over his shoulder and seeing some hint of his insane-sounding dream story. I’m sure Shelby enjoyed every moment of being the day’s (or week’s) spectacle at the library.
On impulse I decided to take a shot in the almost dark and reply to Shelby’s e-mail. I told him I’d heard he was back in town and doing well and that I’d love to see him and catch up sometime. I sent it off into the Internet ether and went to bed. No dreams that I can remember.
Chapter 3
I never got an e-mail back from Shelby, and after a week I’d stopped wondering if I ever would. Other concerns, like hitting my publisher’s deadline and keeping my blog up to date, occupied my time and energy. I was working on a new non-fiction book about anarchist-run businesses around the country. I’d finished up all my research a month ago but was having a hard time beating the facts into some sort of compelling narrative that someone besides a hardcore leftie like me would actually want to read. It was slow going. As was often the case with my non-fiction work, the research was a hell of a lot more fun than the writing, and the words were coming slow. I was wishing I’d spent more of my week at the anarchist publishing company in Oakland taking notes and less time drinking and trying to summon the courage to flirt with punk chicks ten years younger than me.
So it was a more than welcome distraction when I found a letter from Shelby in my mailbox — a real, live, actual letter in a creamy, parchment envelope that had a wonderful heft to it. It had no return address but bore a Sarasota-Manatee postmark. I tore it open and found a single piece of matching paper inside, covered in large, flowing black cursive letters:
Dear Rick,
I hope this letter finds you well. As I’m sure Conrad told you, I have returned, this time for good I think. Things have changed for me quite a bit since we last spoke. Some rather interesting developments. My future remains embryonic for the moment, but all signs point to a bountiful crop of dreams fulfilled. If you have some time and are willing, I want to bend your ear on a matter or two that you might find interesting. I’ll be in Arlington Park at noon on the sixteenth. By the duck pond. I hope to see you there.
Blood and kisses,
Shelby
P.S. What do you remember about H.P. Lovecraft?
I reread the letter a second and then a third time, looking in vain for some return address or phone number to which I could RSVP. Apparently Shelby didn’t want me to be able to contact him directly but rather wanted to meet in a park in two days. It seemed at once both archaic and presumptuous to make a date and not offer me a chance to check my calendar to see if I was free. But of course I was free, and as a writer w
orking from home I had about as flexible a schedule as one can have.
I had to call Conrad right away and tell him about the letter. We both laughed briefly about the strangeness of it all and wondered what Shelby was up to. That evening, Conrad called me in return and we started to see that handwritten letters and prearranged meetings seemed to have become Shelby’s new signature move.
“I got a letter today as well,” he said as soon as I answered the phone. “He wants to meet me under one of the beach pavilions at sunset on Sunday.”
“Near the drum circle?” I asked. Every Sunday a large group of drummers, dancers, and onlookers gathered at Crescent Beach for the sunset. What had started as a small, almost sacred undertaking for some committed and talented drummers had grown over the decade into an ad-hoc tourist attraction/spectacle and sort of creepy pick-up spot. I hadn’t been in years.
“Yeah, weird huh?” said Conrad. “Last I heard Shelby hated what it had become — you remember he helped start the original circle.”
“Or at least he claimed he did. Did he say what he wanted to talk about?”
“Not much. Most of the letter is about getting together and catching up, although in the P.S. he asked if I knew of any good warehouse spaces for lease.”
“Warehouse spaces?”
“Yeah. Maybe whatever house or condo he and his new lady friend are fixing up is too small for all their stuff or something. I’ll bring him some listings though, why not?” Conrad paused, his voice drifting. “This market is slow right now. I’m dying out there.”
“You’re not,” I said with what I hoped was an encouraging smile.
“No, I’m not. But it’s slow, slow, sloooow.”