As I Die Lying (14 page)

No, I hadn't. Loverboy was the invader.
Always someone else to blame.

"What I mean is...I'm sorry, Virginia."

"Don't be. At least you were honest. Showed
me right up front where I stood with you. I guess I ought to at
least thank you for not stringing me along."

She had risen to sarcasm.
Maybe that was a sign of healing.
A sole
to heel
, Mister Milktoast whispered.
If you foot the bill.

"I know you're mad at me and probably
disappointed,” I said. “But I hope you don't give up on us.”

"Us? It takes two to make an
'us,' and I thought there was only
you
. You and whatever you
wanted."

"Please try and understand. I never wanted to
hurt you."

"Understanding is just one of your little
word games to get in my pants. I'll bet you were laughing on the
inside the whole time. God, what a fool I was to even think
somebody cared. And that word ‘love’..."

Her tears broke loose, found fresh paths down
her smooth round cheeks. She turned the car into the parking lot
where I had left my Valiant. She stopped and we sat without
speaking.

A distant siren wailed, a punctuation mark on
the desolate night. "I guess there's nothing else to say," she
said, finally.

There’s sackcloth in your
closet
, Mister Milktoast whispered.
And ashes in your hearth.

"I'll see you tomorrow,” I said, and The Poet
groped for that one final stanza. “And, Virginia...I am sorry."

If only I had known there was no tomorrow.
Many times in the years after, I replayed that night, that parting,
as if it were a decent Bogart film, and in my mind I tried a
thousand different lines, a thousand different last chances. All
films, like all memories, become scratched and worn, foggy with
age. But the images fly past in the same sequence, over and over
again, unchanged. In the end, there's only the words "The End."

“
The end is the chief thing
of all,” Aristotle once wrote. And here I am, still in the middle.
If heaven exists, and if I ever make it there, I’m going to find
Aristotle, rip off his fucking robe, wrap it around his scrawny
Greek neck, and squeeze until his eyeballs pop.

I got out and stood in the moist April air,
watching her drive away. I walked numbly to my car. I stared at the
lights over the football field, stared without blinking until my
eyes burned, stared until my tears blurred the lights, making them
into fat shiny stars.

I wondered why we had to live in a world
where everything was somebody's fault. Somebody had to be sorry.
Somebody had to be wrong. And somebody had to pay. Virginia.
Mother. Father. Sally Bakken. Loverboy. Mister Milktoast. Little
Hitler. All the people who had touched my life. Who had squeezed at
it, picked at it until it was an open sore, raw and
gangrenescent.

I burrowed under a pile of dirty clothes in
the front seat of the Valiant, trying to worm myself into sleep.
The soft velvet curtain of slumber teased me, gamboling around the
edges of my consciousness. But when I reached for it to wrap myself
in its black-fibered folds, it danced away, leaving me with the hot
electric currents of my thoughts. Finally, the thoughts fractured
into nonsense and scurried into the corners of my consciousness,
and the curtains of the Bone House drew closed.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Surrounded by a mist backlit and imbued with
fluorescent shades of lavender, aqua, and chromium yellow, the
colors of madness shimmering in an obscene parody of a rainbow.
Formless, weightless. A brighter but unwholesome radiance,
flickering among the malchromatic ribbons, summoning. I must go
there.

Discordant music, a haunting melody turned
inside out, the sound of shadows made merry, ominous droning bass
at the threshold of reason underlying lilting notes played on
impossible instruments, scherzo chaos in the wings, brazen bridges
leaping unjustly to piercing heights of altissimo, invisible
strings vibrating at random, all rising to an impotent
crescendo.

The radiance swells, hovers, absorbs, a
bloated luminescence. Among its ethereal wisps, a shape.
Monolithic, primitive matter. Changing. Weaving itself from
amorphous threads. A chimera taking human form. Virginia.

She comes to me, swathed only in elegant
vapor, crossing the insubstantial landscape. Her arms upturned,
yielding, inviting. Face glowing with rapture, eyes glittering
specks, ashen hair fluttering in the directionless wind.
Approaching without motion.

Her skin is effervescent, writhing as if
unseen creatures are wriggling underneath and animating her flesh.
Her mouth opens, an impossible black cavern between the twitching
arc of her lips. Inside, things darker than black flit and slither,
entwining in a sinuous coalition that becomes her tongue.

She is close now, leaning, and I cannot run.
My legs are fused to the unseen landscape. I am both stage prop and
star in the drama.

Her hands reach for the side of my face,
fingers splayed in mocking tenderness. Her fingers caress me, crawl
lightly over my cheeks like lithesome snakes. Her touch is ice,
frozen, dead. Her wrists are gaping like her mouth, a red slit in
each, and grotesque creatures are fluttering in there as well.

Her lips are on me, her breath putrid and
foul, rich with decay. The elusive kiss is finally mine, given with
feral and relentless passion. The black thing inside her mouth that
is masquerading as her tongue enters me, probes me, squirms in
violent intercourse. The tart acid of tomb dust violates my taste
buds. I feel a small hot ember of desire in my soul, a desire
beyond flesh, a yearning deeper than lust and earthly sin.

Please, no, but oh, yes,
don't...stop...don't...don't stop.

Her trout-skin tongue ejaculates cold and
vile fluids, darkness made substance, flooding me with glaciers,
and I welcome the penetration, I shatter and become whole.

I am aloof, blissful, as Virginia withdraws.
The glitter of her eyes fades, their crazed illumination dying like
sunken suns. Her flesh unwraps itself, and she is absorbed into the
swirling iridescence. She is etherealizing, her limbs and then her
torso merging with the mist. Last to dissolve is her eyes, which
hover for a thick, fleeting eternity. The onyx dots of her pupils
expand into the blue irises and then over into the milky white
sclera. Her eyes become black orbs, dead stars, then nothing, only
a coiling tendril of darkness that wends into the uncoordinated
bands of rainbows and then disappears.

I lunge into the mist, chasing her, I fight
the colors that have become solid and play over my skin, embracing
me, binding me, choking me...

I awoke in a cold sweat. The old clothes that
served as my blankets were tangled around my arms. My journey
through a brief stream-of-pompousness interlude to denote a dream
sequence was a little clumsy, but I crawled onto the shores of
consciousness all the same.

I opened my eyes, saw the incomplete darkness
that was only night. I saw electrical light and stars through the
windshield that were only radiant energy. I saw the fog of my
breath that was only water vapor. I saw that I had flesh that was
only flesh. My throat burned with infection. My head pounded as if
my skulltop had lifted like a roof in a hurricane and had been
nailed back into place by a hundred hammers.

I closed my eyes again, searching for a place
between sleep and dream, beyond the insane reach of either. Somehow
the night passed.

The next morning, I went to school. It was a
mechanical act, as if I were too numb to make decisions. I was a
robot, programmed to routine. The dream followed me like a bad case
of Mexican-food gas.

I searched the halls for Virginia, needing to
talk to her before classes started. Perhaps the damage wasn't
irreparable, and if I could explain myself in the light of day, my
behavior wouldn't seem so horrible. I desperately looked for her
face among the crowd, afraid she would be too ashamed or disgusted
to come to school that morning. My classmates seemed to be evading
me even more than usual, as if this were the day I might be packing
a semiautomatic.

Brickman stepped out of the gabbling masses,
Brickman the peddler who sold oregano joints to the freshmen.

"What's up, Coldiron?" he said, slapping me
on the back so heartily it hurt. A few of his dull moronic friends
gathered around, friends he had bought with stolen beer and porn
magazines. "Surprised to see you here today."

"What do you care?"

"Hey, is that any way to talk to a
friend?"

"I don't have any money, so there's no use
threatening to beat me up."

The attention was unusual. I had a reputation
for being a loner, for being so unpredictable and perhaps dangerous
that I escaped harassment. There were easier pickings walking the
gray and scuffed tiles of the school corridors. What could I have
that Brickman and his gap-toothed disciples wanted?

"I'm here to help you, man."

"Fuck off."

A silence fell as the gang waited to see how
Brickman would respond to the challenge. He warmed to the spotlight
and swelled his chest a little. "I was just offering my comfort in
this time of sorrow."

"Sorrow? What the hell are you talking
about?"

"Your hot lady friend. The one you been
hangin' around with."

"What?" Had she told him, confided in this
monster somehow? Impossible.

"Haven't you heard?" His pimply face broke
into a black grin. I wanted to drive my fist into his vacuous
mouth.

"Heard what?" I said.

"She killed herself last night."

Time stopped as his words hung in the air,
words that dripped with glee. My heart stopped as well, caught
between beats.

Brickman's voice came from
somewhere far away. "Slashed her wrists, man. Painted the town red.
Fucked herself up but
good
."

Even through the veil that was dropping
between me and the real world, a gray gauze that both swaddled and
bound, I understood what Brickman wanted. Not money. Money was all
around, money could be taken. Brickman wanted what he and his ilk
treasured above all else. The currency of pain.

I elbowed him in the stomach and broke
through the crowd, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of my
tears.

He shouted after me as I ran
down the hall. "Hey, man, I fucked her
twice
."

His greasy pack of jackals howled with
laughter as I burst through the doors, the sound swelling to a roar
that filled my ears and compressed my skull, crushed me to
charcoal.

When awareness returned, I was in the
Valiant, driving toward the horizon, racing into the sun. I glanced
in the rear-view mirror and Ottaqua was shrinking, its decrepit and
rundown buildings becoming golden stubble on the landscape. It had
never looked so beautiful as it did while disappearing.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror,
looked at the person that had lived my life. I looked behind my
glasses into the dirt-brown weeping eyes that looked then beyond
themselves into invisible faces. Faces that laughed and cried and
mocked and smirked and stared back with black determination. The
ones inside my head who had no intention of being left behind.

The Bone House grew wheels and the Little
People were along for the ride.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I thought only of Virginia as the states
whirred past under my frantic tires. I had driven across the flat
prairies of Illinois and Indiana, each mile of straight ribbon
highway the same as the one before, with only the Mississippi and
Ohio Rivers to mark my progress. I slid through the soft hills of
Kentucky while the sun set like a fat orange dime dropping into the
slot of a broken pay phone. In the darkness, the Appalachian
Mountains guided me up and on, as if in on some cosmic joke and
anxious to see the punch line. Shady Valley, North Carolina, opened
its crusty eyes in the morning to find that I had perched on its
shoulder like a weary nightbird.

Under the new dawn, I drove through the
narrow streets of Shady Valley, past the silent sleeping brick and
the small dirt squares of garden. Tops of dormitories sparkled
through the dewy oaks. I was too young to remember Westridge
University from my first and only visit, but I had read of it. Old
wooden houses with creekstone bases huddled near the road, their
outbuildings camping under brown-blossomed apple trees. I wondered
if one of those tired lonely houses had been Granddad's.

My eyes were puffy from a night of peering at
the sweeping broom-edge of the headlights. The Valiant groaned, its
pistons sick of thin oil and its joints creaky with automotive
arthritis. I pulled behind an abandoned gas station, wrapped my
head in dirty shirts, and slept. No dreams or inner voices rang
their tinny bells.

I lived there for weeks, sleeping in my car,
with only an ashtray full of coins keeping me from starvation while
I tried to figure out my next step. Suicide was an option, of
course, but maybe I wanted to hang around to finish my life and
start this book. Sometimes you don’t know the reason for things.
Some clowns say you have to let God take control, but fuck that
fucker. Any sonofabitch who’d let a man rape his own little girl
had no control and sure as hell didn’t deserve to meet me before I
was ready to bitchslap Him back to the Book of Genesis. This called
for spiritual cross-training, more forging by fire, beating soul
plows into swords.

I found a bookstore called the Paper Paradise
down on the main highway. I began spending my days there, drinking
free coffee and haunting the aisles, finding comfort in the
borrowed imaginations of books the way I had done as a child. I
believe that was where Bookworm was born, squirming into the light
of my consciousness, as I turned those pages and met Jung and
Freud, Dante and Homer, Mohammed and Buddha.