by Paul Griner
hahahahaha thought that wa a dream
Why did you say you wanted to go to Vermont?
I hadn’t answered. The second was shorter and more cryptic:
1 time i aked my dad if he wuz virgin.
After that, Lamont sent a picture of him sitting on a couch reading to a young Latrell, Latrell tucked under his arm. Life was simply wonderful with my boy.
Then he asked a question.
You’ve got secrets, Gandhi. Who’s Kate?
Had I told him, in my inebriated state? Shown him her videos? My palms tingled when I read that one, and the next.
It’s okay that you don’t answer. Got secrets of my own.
Eating Life, Drinking Time
APRIL 17, 2019
Was Crumpacker real? I wandered downstairs to the bar in the early slanting light. Sparrows pecked at cigarette butts in the empty gravel parking lot. Palmer’s gravel, Palmer’s gun. Did she really need it? Did anyone? Maybe I could borrow it.
The dim, empty bar smelled of spilled beer. The bartender poured boiling water from a teapot onto a long, thin silver tray in the sink and steam curled up around his handsome face where a spray of midnight blue stars arced under his left eye, like the constellation on the baker at Silver’s. Had that become a thing?
Hey, I said, were you working any night this last couple of weeks?
Sure, Mr. Barnes. He put the teapot aside and wiped his hands.
I’m at a disadvantage here, I said. When we met, you were probably sober.
Darian, he said, and shook my hand. Bourbon mostly, but also gin.
Ha! I said, No. I was wondering if you saw me talking to anyone, especially one guy, beefy and broad and leafing through an atlas at the bar.
No, Darian said, playing with the black gauge in one of his ears. I don’t recall him at all. I’d remember anyone who came in here with a book.
I sighed.
Want a drink to drown your disappointment?
He already had the Boodles ready, another bad sign. I declined and offered the bass instead, with instructions to hold it until Andy Garland arrived to pick it up. Better here, I thought, than meeting a deranged musician in my apartment. One of us might survive that, and the way I felt now, it wouldn’t be him.
Phone Calls
APRIL 21, 2019
My phone lighted up and I pushed aside the penciled drawings for the cheese mock-ups, but I didn’t answer. I was trying to reset before things spun apart again and I needed the freelance money. After running on hatred so long I was hollowed out and sluggish, my skin made of paper, my blood like tar, and Nash would never be about happiness, at least for me. Besides, he’d call May if he had information and I’d hear it from her anyway. The phone went dark.
Self-protection was a good thing, some of my therapists said, others that it was self-defeating. I’d listened to both and moved on. Years and years. But if I was going to get better, it wouldn’t be sitting across a desk from them, though they were good people and tried to help, and perhaps they had. Work was the thing now.
I’d inked in half the lines before Nash called again. He didn’t leave a message so when May called I picked up. She never mentioned Nash. Instead she talked about a note I’d written her years before.
This is what you said when I had my first presentation at Medtronics. When I was going for my job. You must have sent the email when I was on the road and knew my phone would ding while I was driving and that I wouldn’t check it.
That sounds about right, I said. We’d had this conversation a few nights when she’d been drinking, so I knew my role, though I wondered about a call during daylight hours. I put my phone on speaker and resharpened pencils as I listened. That smell of pencil shavings never gets old. Maybe she was working up to the news Nash gave her by telling me this; that would be like her.
She said, You know, when I heard that ding, I got flustered because I thought it was them canceling the meeting, because they were no longer interested in me or had hired someone else.
I didn’t know that, I said.
A pause. I wish they had.
Ah, I thought, and knew where this was leading: if she hadn’t gone back to work, we’d never have moved for her job, and Liam never would have been in that school. She rallied and said, But’s that not why I called. I called because I wanted to read you that email.
You wrote: I know the meeting is going to be a mess. You will walk into the room dressed in that blue and white dress and they will all forget everything they meant to ask and be prostrate at your feet. It’s your brains they saw on the resume and no doubt they’ve already called all your references and know you are spectacularly good at your work, but it’s everything else about you that will slay them upon first meeting. I almost feel sorry for them you should ask for a salary of a million dollars.
She said, That mattered to me so much. But I still wish I could go back in time to change things.
May, Medtronics didn’t lead to Liam’s shooting.
No, she said, and cleared her throat. Back in time, before then. Before I ever met you. All the way to high school.
High school? Both of us had gone down many avenues of guilt over time but this was a different one we hadn’t yet explored and I wondered where it would lead.
Yes, she said. I never told you this. In high school, my best friend Linda had a boyfriend who had a friend and the four of us drove out to Letchworth State Park, which was where we went to drink and get stoned and, if we were lucky, to have sex. I so wanted not to be a virgin.
A cop rolled up behind us and I dropped my beer and remembered my dad’s dictum about putting a penny on my tongue if the cops wanted to give me a Breathalyzer, since it skewed the reading, but I didn’t have any pennies and there wasn’t time to ask and I didn’t want to get in trouble since I was only seventeen, so I dipped three fingers in the ashtray and sucked off the ashes, just able not to gag.
One cop took me to the car while the other stayed with the other three and put me in the back seat. I must have looked the most likely to crack.
Here, he said, before he told me to sit down. Breathe on me.
What? I said. I was holding on to the open door, trying not to shake.
Breathe in my face, he said. I want to see if you’ve been drinking.
I just about asked if he was serious but thought it might lessen the ash so I did and his face paled.
You sure smoke a lot for a seventeen-year-old, he said.
I laughed because I thought the story was funny.
Don’t laugh, she said. That was when it all started.
When what started? I asked, though I suspected I knew.
Our life. Us. You and me and Liam.
I said, You didn’t get retroactively pregnant, May.
No, I didn’t. But that’s when I changed. A second chance, you know? Started doing better in school. Became a star in college, and got my first job and then the next and met you and got another job and then the interview at Medtronics. Maybe everything would have been better if I’d just been caught.
I tried to pick up where I left off with cheese but couldn’t get back into the rhythm of work. Instead I found myself drawing maps of the world, like the one I’d stenciled on Liam’s wrist his last day of school. That I’d wanted to draw on his wrist again after he’d died but didn’t have the courage to ask. And I remembered Homer Brannock, how he’d put his phone on the map, how startled I was by seeing that, by imagining that the map continued on through the phone.
As always, I started with the Eastern Seaboard. Liam had asked why, once, standing beside my drawing table as I worked.
It’s the one I’m most familiar with, I said. From my own childhood. So it helps me get the proportions right.
What will happen if you don’t?
Everything will look strange.
Why don’t you draw that? Liam said. The strange world? On here, he said, putting his hand on the part of the map I always left blank. I’d like to know about that,
he said. To see it.
Lying in bed later, I wondered about May’s call again, why she wanted me to know that about high school, what was about to happen. Her guilt was as ghostly as ink in water, spreading back through time. That was bound to lead to trouble.
Jonesing For My Groove
APRIL 2019
The curtains lifted into the room with the breeze and light spilled over the map. I straightened it on my drafting table with my thumb, admiring it. Not the work; its existence.
That map made me feel like I’d finally corralled blood that had been leaking from my veins and now had it running again in its proper channels. The painful surge of it down my arms and legs, the warmth as it radiated through my chest. If I could smell my blood, it would smell of iron. This must be birth, I thought, imagining leaves unfurling in the spring sun, and in my veins. New life. I wanted it to last, I wanted to be green again. Wasn’t that the elixir I’d sought in the bottom of all those bottles?
Not a second chance, a third and fourth one. Sometimes they come in unexpected packages and sometimes they lead to good things and sometimes to Medtronics. But you had to try.
I had to try.
The curtains lifted again and I spread my palm on the map, on Liam’s world, and closed my eyes and pictured him, humming as he picked apples. I hummed too, keeping up.
With Contrite Heart and Humbled Spirit
APRIL 29, 2019
Dear Mr. Brannock,
This is a belated apology. By now perhaps you know something of my history. If not, allow me to say that I met you during a particularly difficult anniversary, and I was not at my best.
But my offer of creating work for you, work that I hoped would make your life a little more profitable, a little fuller, was genuine, and I am including a range of mock-ups here, so you can get an idea of what I’m thinking.
I worked for a long time on these, but did so happily rather than dutifully; large parts of this project remind me of my boy, Liam.
That’s neither here nor there, of course. While I was in your shop, I noticed your love of old maps and sailing ships, and have incorporated those into the drawings. Your beloved dogs too. The idea is that these drawings, and the website you might create, will help promote your business, and that you will find the way I’ve taken the work pleasing, informative, and helpful.
If so, please let me know, and we’ll figure out together how to make it work. If not, please do accept my apology, and know that I regret being so rude.
Sincerely,
Otto Barnes
Filched
APRIL 2019
HOAXED.com posted a hacked excerpt of Detective Sawyer’s redacted grand jury testimony. Once I saw it, my Homer high disappeared.
US Assistant District Attorney Claudia Pepper:
1.
Q
You never checked his computer?
Detective Sawyer:
2.
A
Well, he hadn’t yet posted a threat online. He was over-heard threatening to shoot people at his school. That’s all.
3.
Q
A thorough investigation, then.
4.
A
Is that a question?
5.
Q
You wrote a report about your house visit in September of 2013?
6.
A
October. Yes ma’am.
7.
Q
And after the shooting, were you ordered by your DA not to tell the press, parents and investigators about that initial visit and report?
8.
A
Yes.
9.
Q
And were you asked to deny that the initial visit ever took place? Even to the FBI?
10.
A
Yes.
11.
Q
Redacted.
12.
A
Redacted.
13.
Q
And do you know what happened to that report?
14.
A
It’s missing.
15.
Q
Was there ever more than one copy?
16.
A
There were four.
17.
Q
And all of them have gone missing?
18.
A
Yes, I believe so, ma’am.
19.
Q
Is that unusual?
20.
A
Yes ma’am.
21.
Q
How can you explain that?
22.
A
I can’t.
23.
Q
And did you wonder why you’d been ordered to deny you’d ever made the visit or written a report?
24.
A
Of course.
25.
Q
And did you think that was wrong?
26.
A
Yes.
27.
Q
And yet you followed an order you clearly thought wrong?
28.
A
Well, it was an order.
29.
Q
Did you ever think it was an illegal one?
30.
A
From time to time, sure.
31.
Q
How do you live with yourself, detective?
32.
A
Redacted.
33.
Q
Redacted.
34.
A
Redacted.
The Comforts of Home
APRIL 27, 2019
Tired from a day of cold calls, from driving across the state to get my mail, from realizing while driving that I’d forgotten to check the car for a GPS locator, I came home to find my apartment front door closed but unlocked.
I pushed it open and called, Hello? The rooms were filled with the lingering scent of bacon.
No one answered, which didn’t surprise me; the stillness told me that no one was there, the creak of an old house settling, but nothing else. My newspaper had been brought in and put on the table, the chairs pushed in flush, not a way I ever left them, but it seemed nothing else was amiss, aside from three overripe bananas in the kitchen that hadn’t been there when I’d gone out.
My landlord, I decided, bearing gifts as cover, allowing him to make sure I didn’t have pets. Otto—rare to find someone with the same name—had been adamant about that, his allergies to cats, and was fussily neat, hence the chairs. Even so, I put a chair in front of the door after I locked it while I took my shower and was surprised that I had to clean Vaseline off the doorknob. Off all of them; someone hadn’t wanted to leave fingerprints behind.
The next morning, beginning work, I discovered that one of my Homer Brannock mock-ups had been vandalized, a thick red cross sprayed across it.
A Gift for May
LATE APRIL 2019
May texted me.
Stay away from Lamont. He was arrested again. Road rage.
Which didn’t surprise me and explained why I hadn’t seen him recently, though it was what she didn’t mention that worried me: neither the filched grand jury testimony nor whether she was going to buy a gun. Nor Kate. She might not have seen the testimony—it was on the web, and not widely circulated—but Kate and the gun were telling. So I texted back.
It starts with vandalism, I wrote, to no response.
This kind of irrational response to slights or wrongs committed by others, this ongoing anger and rage. Still she was silent.
Then graduates to violence. We’ve seen the results in our own lives. Don’t do it May. Just don’t. Crickets.
I rarely ventured to her front door—our front door—because of pain, and because I might be followed by hoaxers, who somehow
didn’t seem to understand that May still lived there even though I’d moved out. Not a surprise, really; as a group, despite having the unbridled confidence of the truly ignorant, they’re a few clowns short of a circus, but in general I tried not to leave them extra clues.
I leaned the Forever War collage against the screen, which was rusty, and needed replacing. The collage was a plea, a prayer, a warning, given in the hope that it might deter her. And maybe me.
I Do the Math
MAY 2019
But pleas and prayers are never enough. Why did May want a gun? More guns meant more gun deaths, I knew that, but I needed to prove it to May, and to myself; I wanted one now too. I bullet-pointed the figures for visual impact.
Research is overwhelmingly clear: No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.
• States with the lowest rate of gun ownership have the fewest gun deaths; states with the highest rate of gun ownership have the most deaths.
• A 1% increase in gun ownership correlates to a 1% rise in the firearm death rate. This is true for homicides, suicides, domestic violence, and violence against police.
• The US has 6 times the gun homicide rate of Canada, 7 times that of Sweden, and 16 times that of Germany. Canada: 1 gun for every 3 people; Sweden: 1 for every 4; Germany: 1 for every 5; the US: 2.0 per person.
• Across all industrialized nations, 6.3% of crimes are violent. The US clocks in at 5.5%. So, we are, in fact, less violent than Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK.
• Instead, the US has more lethal violence—due to the prevalence of guns.
• Every study shows that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns is followed by a drop in gun violence.