by Paul Griner
Half a bottle of gin later, I check my email to find that Alicia P. Hader has written back. We don’t give out the names of our actors. We take privacy concerns very seriously, and we hope you understand.
I do, I write back. But in one of them she claims that my child who was shot was never born and I want to know who told her to say that. The idea is offensive.
I don’t hear back from them after that, even though I send the same message eleven times and call a dozen more, and I wish I had more money from the Victims’ Compensation Fund, so I could go down to Phoenix and camp in front of their offices until they tell me. I know exactly what Ms. Hader looks like, and I could accost her on the sidewalk. Do you like causing pain?
Even to me, that sounds creepy, so I won’t. But I do have more gin, so I crack open another bottle of that Sapphire smoothness.
Extra Loudly Rumbling Engine Wakes Me at Dawn
Pink and red chevrons zigzagging the horizon, then the sky patch-worked with pastel blues and grays as the neighbor’s boy arrives home after a long night out. Seventeen or eighteen, habitually anti-horological, his unmuffled Mazda a rip-roaring Fuck you! to the working world five straight weekdays at six a.m.
After a gin-fueled night of binge-watching Liam’s favorite movies and shorts, then my new favorite The Equalizer, I want to yell Fuck you! back, but my head hurts too much for that kind of effort, so I press my face into the leather couch and clasp the pillow over my ears until the noise stops and drift back into a semblance of sleep, telling myself to dream of Kate.
She’s invaded every facet of my waking life, after all; maybe chasing her in my dreams will help me catch her at last.
The Symbolic Will Have Its Say
THE IDES OF APRIL 2019
In the midst of drink and food deliveries, I zip down to the bar to retrieve the bass and walk in front of the drunk throwing darts without incident, either invisible or invincible. At the booth in the back my knees and palms stick to the floor, but I persist, and recovering the bass earns a drink. At the bar a lumpy middle-aged man in a lumpier beige suit stoops over a broad, open Civil War atlas, looking at coastal Virginia. I think of fisherman Homer, awaiting my mock-ups. He will have received my drawing by now and I order a second bourbon in celebratory guilt. To Civil Wars, I say, and raise the glass.
Light flashes off his wire-rim glasses. How’d you know what I was thinking?
What were you thinking? I raise my empty glass, to signal I need a third.
Of the Civil War drowned, he says. How completely we’ve forgotten them.
Something stirs inside me. Are you a boatbuilder? I ask.
No, he says, and runs a loving hand over the expansive blue ocean. I’m a food executive. A job I was fated for since birth. He sips his drink, some pink affair, and carefully puts the glass down on the damp coaster. My name is Eugene Crumpacker.
That makes me laugh. I say, This must be fate.
Yes, he says. He turns his glass. Everything’s fated. Especially us meeting.
I climb the narrow stairs to my rooms with one hand pressed against the bumpy plaster wall for balance, lugging the bass in my other, and open the unlocked door and stumble to my drawing table and fish out paper and pencils and draw.
Three straight days without a shower, ignoring my buzzing phone.
Well-Meaning but Stupid, One
APRIL 9, 2016
Cheer up. Liam wouldn’t want you to be sad.
He wasn’t a pet and yes, he would. He cried at every funeral he had to go to. Only one, but why should I tell that to this stranger in thigh-high black boots and a too-short dress?
He’s in a better place.
No, he isn’t. He was a boy, and he loved exactly where he was. Her heavily mascaraed eyes go wide in the ensuing silence.
Cherish all of the wonderful memories. They will bring you peace.
It was just his time to go.
So, how ’bout them Red Sox?
I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now.
Try.
Death is a gift.
One that takes more than it gives. He walks away without another word, his ill-fitting suit shiny with wear. A cop, I think.
Be strong, you’ll get through this just fine!
When we die, we’re met by our spirit guides, pass through a tunnel, and are greeted by loved ones on the other side with warmth and love and light.
He wasn’t met by me or May.
I’m so glad to be here.
Everything happens for a reason.
To the first person who said that, one of his teachers with a kindly face, I replied, Really? What’s the reason? What if it isn’t for a good reason?
To the second person who said that, a stranger I suspected of being a hoaxer, I replied, If you say that again I’ll punch you in the face. And there’ll be a reason for that.
We’re not having a funeral, we’re having a celebration.
You shouldn’t be attached to the body.
You know he was “saved,” right?
All part of God’s plan.
Could you tell me what that is?
God never burdens us with more than we can handle.
Liam’s burden was a .45 bullet and some shotgun pellets and eventually they killed him. If I meant to silence her, it didn’t work. Well, she said. God needed another angel.
God wants to make you stronger through this.
God.
God.
God.
At least you’re young enough that you can have another child.
Belated Gift to Shooter’s Mother in Response to Her Letter Years Before
Letters
Kate’s back! She has proof!
You went on a date with one Palmer Sketchy and told her you didn’t have kids. Couldn’t keep the secret in the end, could you? A guilty conscience, or did you just fall for the honey pot?
Kate knows.
Kate knows everything.
That’ll be it, I think, when I read this one. If she’s back, I can track her down.
It’s raining, but I go for a walk to calm myself, the only one without an umbrella. Black umbrellas, white umbrellas, black-and-white umbrellas, one bright umbrella colored like a beach ball. Soaked, I turn back.
Rain, puddles, birdsong, a bicycle bell, and the wind shaking water from the new green leaves of the pin oaks. The smell of wild onions, a ponytailed man rollerblading in the rain.
Track her down, track her down, track her down.
I will.
Well-Meaning but Stupid, Two
One or two of those were me, at other funerals, in earlier times. The stupidest ones, really.
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
I try to remember that.
Bass Player Hunk Mail
MID-APRIL 2019
Dear Mr. Garland,
Yes, I got your emails and letters and phone calls.
And yes, you may have your instrument back. We never should have taken it. Of course, you never should have hit me. But I suppose you have sort of apologized for that, haven’t you? I think somewhere in all those threats was an apology, but I could be wrong. Recently, my reading skills have regressed.
So, here’s the map, which details where it is. I know you will find it useful. I certainly have. When I forgot where I put it recently (your bass, not my map), I used it to find it once again.
Good luck with it!
You strike me as someone who is always early but never prepared, but even with one arm in a cast, you should be able to follow it.
Your faithful servant,
Otto Barnes
Holy Spirits
MID-APRIL 2019
I woke in the light, I woke in the dark, I woke to snow blowing sideways, colored pink by the bar sign. At last, I woke in the dark to the dark ghost of May.
Behind her stood rank upon rank of other dark spirits with their dark eye sockets, a fellowship of the suffering, and their excruciating pain pierced my skin like need
les and my own dark spirit left my body to stand among them. When at last I blinked and opened my eyes again, I heard a collective sigh—fifty souls leaving their bodies at the same time, and one to come—and there was only May.
I sat up and pinched her. Hey! she said, and let out a yelp.
Sorry. I thought you were an apparition.
She turned on lights and picked up food wrappers and take-out containers and dirty clothes, the former into one bag, the latter into another. It shamed me, but not so much that I got up to help her. I was glad I had on a shirt, rendering the tattoo invisible. Let me guess, she said. You felt like everything was falling apart.
No. I felt like everything was coming together. I’m not so sure now. But enough about me. You’ve put weight back on. It looks good. Healthy. I like your hair.
Riding the bike a lot, and eating regularly. Cooking. For myself, and for Nash. And I’m thinking about buying a gun. She knew how I felt about them. A hoaxer was here, she said. Someone jumped him after a meeting, beat him with a bat.
I wouldn’t talk about it. I said, I’m eating too. Then I shrugged. Have been.
Disappointed, she toed the trash bag. I wouldn’t really call this eating.
Sustenance, I said. Meanwhile, I’ve been attending to my spiritual needs.
I see, she said, and scooped up empty gin bottles. But, about the gun, she said. It’s not just the hoaxer. It’s Craigslist. She handed me a sheet of paper.
I read it over. What does Nash say about this?
Not much he can do. Lots of people have the same name. Besides, she said. You’re the one who said we should do something.
I didn’t mean buy a gun. I didn’t tell her that I’d thought of buying one myself.
She shrugged and lifted the bass from the floor. Taking up music now?
In a manner of speaking.
She got on with her cleaning. The legs of my jeans stood open like stovepipes from continual wearing. She sniffed them and said, Were you fishing?
No, I lied, not wanting to discuss the trip.
When she came to the paintings she paused. The first was of two men looking at a three-masted schooner. She said, I thought you’d be this way.
And yet you came. Meant to be debonair but it sounded cutting.
You know, she said, her businesslike voice masking her pain, I don’t understand how two people who came through so much ended up this way.
I said, Maybe we didn’t come through it.
No, she said. I don’t think you have. Me either, at times. Though we’re still here, the two of us, together and apart. You’re better than this, Otto, she said.
You want me to be better, I said, realizing she had been disappointed in this too, without losing belief in it. Not sure I am, I said.
Well, she said, is this your new work? She tilted it into the light. We Remember Them As They Were Before Our Forever War. There was another about hiding a bass. Around them were yellow legal pads and other scraps of paper I’d done the preliminary drawings on.
Morbid, she said. Who are these two? she asked. Kate and Fenchwood?
A minister. My version of what he might look like, if he lives to be older.
Which minister?
You didn’t read about my little outing?
Oh, Otto. What did you get up to now? Was it something with Lamont?
I resent that, I said. I’m perfectly capable of getting up to trouble on my own. When she didn’t even smile at my joke, I moved my tongue around in my cottony mouth and said, Nothing criminal. Just got tossed from a church.
Public drunkenness? Otto, your reversion to adultolescence is hard on us all.
Public anger.
And this Kate? And Mr. Crumpacker? Who’s he?
His parents gave him his name, I said, ignoring her question about Kate. At least, I think so. And I think he’s real, though I could have dreamt him.
Hallucinated, more likely, she said.
Semantics, I said, thinking of the spirits I’d seen behind her in the dark. Maybe he didn’t happen. Maybe my unconscious mind pushed him to the surface.
Or maybe it was Liam, she said.
I nodded my agreement. Someone has shown me the way to the maps.
She had no idea what I was talking about, which was okay; that wasn’t why she’d come. I didn’t have to wait long. She cleared a chair of all its food wrappers and sat. Are you trying to kill yourself?
Music drifted up from the bar. The moon showed over her shoulder, and I remembered driving up and down those rolling Vermont hills, lights off, windows and sunroof open, how surprisingly alive I’d felt, and how much I’d wanted to die.
Finally, after a long bass line that Lamont would have appreciated, I decided to tell her both truths, that I wanted to live, and that I wanted to die. Worst first, I thought, and said, I’ve been trying to be brave enough to kill myself.
Stop it, she said. That’s not courage. That’s just cowardice about life.
Tough love, I said.
I don’t believe in tough love, she said. Just love.
The quiet became embarrassing; I thought about getting dressed. Then she said, And you have to live for Liam.
I’m putting together a book for him, I said. The Book of Otto and Liam. An erasure book. An old text we found together. His drawings, mine, cutouts, stickers, letters, texts, lists, poems. The old into the new. If I die, you’ll still have that.
Not if you don’t complete it first. And the way you’re going now, you don’t stand a chance. You don’t have to change the world, Otto. Just yourself. That’s enough for me. And you have to stay in this world to do that.
Okay, I said, and sat up. I have to find her, I said. That’s still my quest.
Find who? May asked.
I realized I shouldn’t have spoken aloud, but also that, having done so, I couldn’t go back. I sorted through my paintings and drawings, the work I was supposed to have done but hadn’t completed, until I found my phone, where I ignored the piled-up text messages and called up one of Kate’s bookmarked videos.
May watched it silently. She seemed to get bigger, like bread, rising in a hot oven. More music from the bar, and gusts of laughter. When she did speak, her voice alternated between flat and caustic and she’d grown still as a tombstone.
Why do you want to meet someone who lies about our son?
I put my pants on and said, I have slain the dragon of drink and the dragon of anger, thanks also to your help. But I have yet to meet the witch or the maiden. Once I do, and once I know which she is, I’ll know how the book ends.
Will you kill her?
I suppose, I said, shocked equally by her question and by my answer. I fumbled with my belt and processed that. That or pardon her, I said, walking it back.
She fiddled with my phone.
What are you doing?
Sending myself these videos. Are there more?
Lots more. They’re all on there. All the ones I have. A file with her name in the pictures, another file with her information in the notes. But why are you sending that to yourself?
The tip of her pink tongue poked out of her mouth while she concentrated. Done, she handed me the phone and said, Because some things in this world are beyond pardoning, Otto. I’m no longer a sad bitch in a bath. You keep that in mind if you ever meet her, or bring me along if you don’t think you can.
Kate
An email came from Bob Williamson, a former classmate I’d never really been friends with, an invitation to a party after our upcoming high school reunion. Go Barons! He wanted me to RSVP.
It felt a little off, but I wrote back saying that I’d come. Would love to relive some of those days. Remember the night we got drunk on pumpkin shots and filled a tree with construction cones and tried to toast frozen tortellini?
Sure do! he replied within minutes.
Sounded like a good party, but it had never happened, so I knew it was a hoaxer, a follower of Kate.
That night I dreamed of sautéing o
nions and cooking pierogis for Bob and Randy Choate, another classmate I was never friends with. After we ate, we lay outside on the grass side by side, talking, until they rose up in unison and began beating me with their fists and elbows.
When they were done, they said, Stand up and cheer! and I tried to, but it was hard to catch my breath, and I couldn’t lift my arms.
In the morning, I had a text from May, Call me, but I knew I wouldn’t. And that I wouldn’t tell her one more thing about Kate. She was mine, not May’s.
Letters
Why did you send plainclothes detectives to my house who knew all about me to tell me to back off or something bad would happen when all I did was lawfully exercise my freedom of information act by asking questions? What kind of sicko are you?
I’m going to make sure you don’t get to heaven, because you’re not a benevolent person.
Stop Signs
After two weeks of obliteration, my brain returned to its socket. Among my texts and emails was an alert from Uber; the unlikely Mr. Brigadoon had given me a single star.
Picked Otto up at appointed place.
He asked to change his destination. From his apartment, to a certain bar.
I said, That’s the same address.
At least he didn’t throw up in my car.
Lamont hadn’t come by, or if he had, I didn’t remember the visit; perhaps he’d left some food, but no calls from him, which was unusual. Wondering if I’d said anything to piss him off, I sorted through my texts.
Hey can u pcke me up im to drnuk 2 driv
nvrmnd im home
His reply: Yeah I knew that I dropped you off
oh gud lest id idn drive
No, I drove. You steered a pie pan and made motor noises with your lips.