As I Die Lying (11 page)

Air, its peace broken and cleaved, roared
angrily beneath and around the car. The engine whirred at a frantic
pitch, pistons protesting the extreme stress. The tires were making
contact with the road only as an afterthought. My body
unconsciously braced for a crash, but my mind was unmoved, an
impartial observer.

I looked at Virginia, and
her face was clenched, her eyes perhaps seeing beyond the highway.
Seeing and desiring. The tip of her tongue poked out of the corner
of her mouth and her eyes shone like motor oil in a mud puddle,
iridescent and madly beautiful. I could tell she wasn't showing
off. She was simply
showing
.

Maybe our lives are defined by specific
moments. Perhaps we each have a photograph hanging in some vast
hall in an afterworld, our essence captured for eternity. If so,
that was Virginia's snapshot, hunched in ecstasy, mocking
mortality, straddling the dividing line and ready to roll either
way, into death or further life. But if that was her photograph,
some dismal cosmic curator had to shuffle down the hall and replace
it, because of what happened later.

I was pushed back against my seat by the
invisible hand of inertia. My senses were heightened by danger, the
primitive fight-or-flight syndrome. Nervous sweat collected in my
armpits and along my scalp line. I could smell cinnamon from the
gum wrappers in the ashtray, even over the chemical odor of the
vinyl upholstery. I could smell Virginia's hair, enriched by
expensive shampoo and twice as potent as Hope Hill’s, and
underneath that, the stale honey of her feminine skin. I could feel
dirt under my fingernails and microscopic lice tilling the dust of
my flesh. The virginal stubble under my chin tingled. Bittersweet
coppery death played in my mouth, frolicking around my teeth and
tickling my tonsils, gaily tempting me to swallow.

We hit a small ridge in the road and became
briefly airborne. The gyrating world had thrown us, finally giving
us to the heavens. Six eternities passed, hundreds of stars
consumed the gases of their own bellies and collapsed, galaxies
pinwheeled in reverse until they were handfuls of nothingness, gods
spilled their seed prematurely. Virginia gasped, her cheeks flushed
from simultaneous orgasm with those gods. Then we touched down with
a groan of metal and rubber, back among mortals, the Earth
reconstituted.

Virginia eased off the pedal and we slowed to
a speed that was merely unsafe. Her eyes widened as her system
greedily produced and devoured adrenalin. We crossed a bridge that
spanned a small creek, our slipstream rattling the rusty "Caution"
sign as we passed. The silvery waters underneath swept on to the
Mississippi Delta, unimpressed.

Virginia looked at me to see if I was afraid.
I wasn’t there. I had been replaced. Mister Milktoast was in my
driver’s seat, protecting me. These little pretend games of death
were antique hat to him. After surviving boots, these were
tiddlywinks and jacks, played in safe sunshine.

"That was fun, wasn't it?" she said, her
sultry voice pitched higher in her excitement.

"That's what I like," Mister Milktoast said,
stifling a mock yawn. "Going nowhere backwards."

"Well, I'm a good driver. I might become an
Indy car racer someday."

"What about your career as a biologist?"

"You can only go so far. After you get to the
bone, there's nothing left.” She took one hand from the wheel to
casually brush back a strand of yellow hair.

"I'm not so sure. They say beauty's only skin
deep, but who really knows?"

"And what do you think?"

"About beauty or about your career?"

"Beauty. What does a poet know about anything
else?"

"Okay. Beauty is like pornography. I know it
when I see it."

"Have you seen it?"

"Beauty or pornography?"

She laughed and said, "I guess you can see
both at the same time. But I meant beauty."

"I see it now, with new eyes." Mister
Milktoast loved the sly little play on words. I was the only one in
on the joke.

She glanced at me, still giddy from the rush
of danger. She slowed further and began looking around at the
scenery. We were twenty miles from town, far from the familiar
stomping grounds of our lives, but our lives were relentless
pursuers. We had briefly escaped, but had now been tracked down and
recaptured.

Mister Milktoast gave back my body. Maybe he
figured I’d be needing it.

"I'll live on a farm someday," she said.

"You don't sound so enthusiastic about
it."

"It's so peaceful out here in the
country."

"There's no place for a negative girl. These
hands weren't made to hang laundry and shuck corn," I said,
reaching over and touching her hand, running my fingers over the
pad of her thumb, then holding.

We rode in silence, looking out of our steel
and glass bubble like two goldfish, gaping at a world we could
never enter. Checkerboards of farms spread out in the distance and
the sun was beginning to set, throwing mystical orange light over
the land. Silos stood in silhouette, mute witnesses to years both
fat and lean. Barns sagged, spine-weary from the constant weight of
hay. Dots of brown cattle grazed with enthusiasm, unknowingly
speeding their fate. At farmhouse dinner tables, rough-handed men
were having plates of steaming biscuits passed to them. Through
this lonely country we rolled, silent observers of a land that had
no use for the likes of us.

This land owned people. These flat brown
fields tied people down like scarecrows. More than seed was planted
here. People were planted, too, their roots gripping the soil with
feverish, bone-worn desperation. Generations had scratched in this
dirt, facing withering drought and suffocating snow with
equanimity, reaping their harvests of pain and misery. These were
not our people.

I realized at that moment that I had to
leave. Graduation was only six weeks away. All I had here was
Mother and her bizarre self-torture, the punishment for my past sin
that had spilled onto her, indelibly staining both our lives. And,
briefly, I had Virginia. I looked over at her.

"What are you doing after you graduate?" she
asked, as if she had read my mind.

Her tongue had slipped back out and then in,
like a snake poking out of its den to check the weather. Her high
cheeks were pink with joy. Her ocean-blue eyes twinkled, mermaid's
eyes, as if she knew of secret underwater places. I fell into those
eyes, swam in their crisp waters, bathed myself clean.

"I don't know yet. Maybe go to college, but
not right away. What about you?"

"You mean after my racing career is over?"
She laughed and snapped on the radio, music by Kansas or Boston or
one of those other bands irrevocably tied to their geography.

"I guess that will keep you busy, but I
suspect you're going to need more than speed to be happy."

"Well, you have family here, don't you?"

Family. Mother, the matron saint of bourbon.
Father, long dead, but not nearly long enough. Mister Milktoast,
who would never leave me. Little Hitler, who would never let me
leave him.

"No," I said, unable to explain. "There's
nothing for me here."

"Are you already giving up on us, before
we've even started?"

"I didn't know there was an 'us.' I thought
you drove me out here in the country to scare me to death, then
leave my body in a ditch by the side of the road."

"No, that's only the guys
I
don't
like."

"Which is most of them?"

"Check the ditches."

"Okay, I'm not giving up," I said.

"I've given up. I surrender."

"To me?" I knew my romantic style was lame,
but given my role models, it could have been worse.

"Well, to everything. You know back there,
when we going a hundred and ten? I do that at least twice a week.
And you know what?"

The mirth had left her voice, and her words
were weak with melancholy. I wasn't sure if she was trying to shock
me or impress me.

"What?"

"Every single time, this whole spring, I've
wanted to turn the wheel and go into the ditch. To tumble and roll
until there wasn't enough left of me to fill a Dixie cup."

A hush fell over the car, weighty as a
boulder, and even the tinny rock music couldn’t squelch it.

"Why?" I said, my voice a whisper.

"Because. I have everything I want. All the
money I could ever spend. I've got a perfect sit-com family. Dad
plays golf and Mom's the president of the PTA. Both on the
goddamned school board, for Christ’s sake. They keep telling me
what a bright future I have ahead of me. But I'm fucking
miserable."

I said nothing.

“
What would you do if you
had everything you ever wanted?” she said.

I started to say, “Get laid a lot,” but that
wasn’t the kind of thing you bring up when you’re trying to get
laid. Plus, considering the way I lost my virginity, it wasn’t a
subject I wanted to broach.

She continued. "Tonight, I was going to take
you with me. Get you out here and then wreck us, turn us both into
chopped liver. And I almost did it, too. And I don't even know
why."

A moment of dead silence. Something fell off
a shelf in the Bone House.

"What stopped you?" I finally asked.

"Because it wouldn't be fair. I want to die,
I want to go into the hellfire the minister always threatened me
with. I deserve it. But I don't want to go alone. I'm afraid to go
alone. Isn’t that lame?"

Some dead president once said there was
nothing to fear but fear itself. He died anyway, and he killed a
lot of people on his way to the grave. So fuck that. Be afraid.

"Why do you want to die?" I finally asked,
because there were no other words.

"How could I make you
understand, Richard? You're weird, but a normal kind of weird. I'm
so screwed up all the time, and I don't have anybody to talk to. I
just want to get out of this life, away from the goddamn
voices
."

"Voices?" I swallowed my heart. It tasted
like licorice.

"Nobody can understand. Not even you."

"You can talk to me. I'm your Poet,
remember?"

"You're probably just like the others, just
want to get between my legs for a little horizontal hoedown, then
throw me aside like a cum rag. Why the hell did I think you were
any different?"

Tears squeezed out of the corners of her
eyes, the water of her blue seas spilling hotly down her cheeks.
Women and their tears. And they wondered why men took advantage of
them. She pulled over to the side of the deserted road and pressed
her forehead against the steering wheel. The radio shifted into
something with a bass line that sounded like a march into the
sea.

After a second that seemed a year, I touched
her hair gently and leaned close. What a couple we made, Romeo and
Juliet gone insane, huddled in a dark car in the Iowa twilight.
Crickets fiddled among the cornrows; otherwise, nothing interrupted
the starry silence but noise that drifted from a distant
antenna.

We were two souls reaching out to each other
across a great gulf, tenuously connecting over a pit of despair and
loneliness and bleak imagery. Virginia with her death wish and
false bravado, and me with my headful of little friends and a
thirst for whatever liquid I could squeeze from the moon. The odds
would have been greatly against us no matter the circumstances. As
it was, we had no chance.

Maybe we should have died together. A fitting
end to nothing. But somebody had other plans.

"Tell me about the voices," I said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

"You'll think I'm crazy," Virginia said,
between soft sobs.

"This world makes people crazy. It's a
survival mechanism." I scooted closer to her.

I was disoriented, as if this intimacy was
beyond me, as if it were another doing the touching and I was an
alien butterfly emerging from a black cocoon, fluttering madly
toward the light.

Virginia's tears had stopped, but I could see
the streaks on her face in the lunar glow. Her features were
shrouded in darkness except the glint of her eyes. But as I looked
at her, it was as if I were peering down a long dark hall, removed
from the world of sight and sound. The one looking through my eyes
was hard and cold, the one who moved my arms toward her was not
me.

I had felt this way before, on that long ago
night that I did not want to remember. I could only watch,
horrified yet fascinated, as this new thing, this part of me, this
hidden self tried on my flesh as it were a thrift shop suit. It
liked the fit and gray was always in style.

"I hear voices in my head, Richard."
Virginia's words echoed from across a dead universe, bits of broken
sound. The thing that was me and not me nodded at her in the dark.
"I hear them all the time. I can't make them shut up."

"We all hear voices, Virginia.” His voice was
a shadow of mine, his tone soothing yet flat, almost mechanical.
“Some people just don't listen. Those are the crazy ones, don't you
think?"

Whose words did he say? Mine, or his own?
You’d think after all this time I’d have figured it out, but I’m
still reluctant to choose sides until I know who wins.

Virginia was startled into silence.

"What do your voices say?" we asked.

Chirping crickets. Stupid, four-on-the-floor
FM classic rock turned low. Her breathing, fast and shallow. A
rustling breeze among cornstalks. The hooting of an unseen owl. The
ticking of the cooling motor.

"You believe me?" she asked.

"Why would you lie?"

"To get what I want."

"What do you want?"

"Everything and nothing. Attention. To be
loved. Isn't that what we all want?"