Where We Live and Die (10 page)

We talked a while longer, and when the moon and the stars finally peeked out from behind the cloud cover, the temperature dropped. Shivering inside my leather jacket, I told them I had to be getting home. They offered me a ride back, and I accepted. I’m still not sure why. I’m not one to let the public know the exact whereabouts of my home. I use a PO Box and don’t allow friends to post pictures taken outside my home on Facebook. Hell, I’m so concerned with privacy, that I don’t even mention either of my son’s names in public. And yet, quite uncharacteristically, I was allowing these three girls to give me a lift back to my front door.

And when we got there, I let them come inside.

One trip to my liquor cabinet later, and the booze, conversation, and laughter were flowing freely. They admired my bookshelves, which made me happy. They exclaimed over first edition Peter Straub books and rare volumes by M.R. James and Edward Lee. My signed copy of Arthur Machen’s
Strange Roads
elicited a smile from all three, and when I asked them if they were familiar with his work, the brunette said, “Oh, yes. We knew him.” I was buzzed enough that I let the odd response slip by, assuming she meant they knew of his work, even in far-off Boeotia. They’d probably read
The Great God Pan
in high school or something. The girls seemed particularly interested in my books by Hunter S. Thompson, Robert E. Howard, Karl Edward Wagner, Ernest Hemingway, Edward Lucas White, Edgar Allan Poe, and other writers who’d had notoriously rough lives and even rougher endings. The three seemed well-versed and knowledgeable in their works—something that amazed me at the time. It’s not often you meet three college-aged beauties with whom you can discuss what makes Wagner’s “Sticks” the most effective horror short story ever, or the stark, fearful sub-text of Thompson’s post-9/11 “Where Were You When the Fun Stopped?”

I was well into my second bottle of bourbon and the girls were working their way through my tequila, having finished off the last of my Sambuca (a gift from my girlfriend), when we ended up collapsing onto the bed together. Looking back, I had no misgivings about this. It never occurred to me that it was inappropriate. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I felt safe. Secure. That feeling continued as I poured my heart out to them, telling them things the rest of the world didn’t know, things I’ve never even told my friends, truths about myself that have only been told as lies in my fiction. And I was still feeling safe and secure when they retrieved four of my ties from the closet and secured my wrists and ankles to the bedposts. Then they went to work on me with lips and tongues and fingertips, and only once did I resist—a half-hearted protest that dissipated almost before leaving my mouth.

As they swarmed over me, soft hair grazing my skin, raising goose bumps with its passage, they whispered and murmured the truth to me. They told me how my writing was for shit these days, and how I needed to experience pain once again. They spoke of how my best works, the books for which I’m known, stemmed from turmoil and heartache—the death of a loved one, the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a child, struggles with substance abuse and depression. Those things fed and informed my fiction, and I needed to return to those things once again. They teased that I’d grown fat and old and bald and content, and my current output was a reflection of that. I needed to be hungry again. I needed to hurt again.

Their words changed, as did their faces. It felt like I was viewing them from the end of a long, spiraling tunnel. I passed out with their bodies as blankets, and the voices ceased.

When I woke today, my head was numb and my mouth tasted like the inside of a gorilla’s stomach. My first sensation, before even opening my eyes, was an overwhelming sense of guilt. I’d cheated on my girlfriend. I’d callously betrayed her trust for a drunken tryst that I couldn’t even remember clearly. Just what had happened anyway? The ties were gone and my limbs were free. I remembered skin and hair and softness. Security. Had I cried at some point? I think I had, but couldn’t remember why.

Glancing at the clock, I was stunned to see that it was late evening. I’d nearly slept the entire day. I sat up, groaning at the stiffness in my limbs. The girls weren’t in the bedroom, and the house was quiet, so I assumed they were gone.

I was partially right.

I stumbled downstairs to make some coffee, and found my laptop open on the dining room table. The screen glowed softly. My cell phone lay next to it. I picked up the phone first, checking to see if I’d missed any calls or texts, and was alarmed to see several texts sent to my girlfriend from my phone sometime after I’d passed out. I clicked on the texts and groaned. Somebody had taken pictures of me and my visitors, and judging by the fact that each picture showed me and two of the girls, but a different combo in each shot, it had to have been them. Worse, they’d then texted these pictures to my girlfriend—who was either still asleep and hadn’t gotten them yet, or was so distraught that she hadn’t even been capable of responding.

Panicked, I collapsed into a chair and reached for my laptop. I had some vague, terror-driven notion of Googling a way to delete texts that had already been sent, but before I could do that, I saw an open Word document on my screen. It repeated what they’d whispered the night before, of how I needed to hurt again, and of the new works that would spring forth from that pain. The note was signed with love from Melete, Mneme, and Aoide.

I knew those names. They were the names of the three Muses worshipped in ancient times on Mount Helicon in…

…in Boeotia.

“Fuck you!”

The words fell flat in my empty kitchen. I’d meant to shout them, but all I managed to do was croak. I sat there, crying and cursing and pounding my fist against the table. All three gestures were ineffective. Then, stomach churning, I dashed for the bathroom, barely making it in time before the sourness of the previous night’s libations ended up in the toilet. I knelt there, gasping and sweating and puking some more, and almost passed out again. I heard my phone
ringing, but was in no condition to answer it. Eventually, when the tremors had subsided, I crawled to the sink, pulled myself upright, and splashed water on my face. I stared into the mirror and cringed at what I saw staring back at me.

My phone dinged, alerting me that I had a voice mail. I returned to the kitchen and reached for the phone with trepidation, expecting it to be my girlfriend. Instead, it was my oldest son. I held the phone to my ear and listened to his message. It sounded like he was calling me from a frat party, judging by the noise in the background. Amidst the white noise, I heard lilting female laughter—and almost screamed at the sound.

“You’ll never guess what happened to me,” my son was saying. “I’m at this party on campus and I met these three girls. They’re fans of your work. I’m heading back to my place with them now. They’re totally fucking hot. I’m turning my phone off so we don’t get interrupted. You know what I mean. Anyway, just wanted to say thanks, Dad!”

I called him back, but got no answer. I called both of my ex-wives but there was no answer from them, either. Nor my girlfriend. Nor my family members.

I was alone again. Truly alone. Just me and my laptop.

It occurred to me that I should call the police, both locally and on campus. Have them check on the status of my loved ones. Make sure they were safe. Give them a description of the three women. I’d have to be careful not to sound like a madman. I couldn’t very well say that these women were serial killers. That they murdered for their host’s inspiration, killing everything good in the artist’s life until there was nothing left. That they might be going by the aliases of Melete, Mneme, and Aoide, but that they had other aliases, as well, like Nete, Mese, and Hypate, or Cephisso, Apollonis, and Borysthenis. They’d lock me up if I said these women had killed Poe and Thompson and Hemingway and so many others. No. Instead I’d just tell the authorities that these were three disturbed fans of my work, and that I had strong reason to believe that my loved ones were in danger.

And that’s what I intended to do.

But it was important that I write this first.

I’ll make those calls soon.

I just need to write another thousand words or so before I do. I haven’t been this productive in a while…

I shit gold.

It started around the time I hit puberty. I thought there was something wrong with me. Cancer or parasites or something like that, because when I looked down into the bowl, a golden turd was sitting on the bottom. When I wiped, there were gold stains on the toilet paper. Then I flushed and went back to watching cartoons. Ten minutes later, I’d forgotten all about it.

You know how kids are.

But it wasn’t just my shit. I pissed gold. (No golden showers jokes, please. I’ve heard them all before.) I started sweating gold. It oozed out of my pores in droplets, drying on my skin in flakes. It peeled off easily enough. Just like dead skin after a bad case of sunburn. Then my spit and mucous started turning into gold. I’d hock gold nuggets onto the sidewalk. One day, I was picking mulberries from a tree in a pasture. There was a barbed-wire fence beneath the tree, and to reach the higher branches, I stood on the fence. I lost my balance and the barbed-wire took three big chunks out of the back of my thigh. My blood was liquid gold. And like I said, this was around puberty, so you can only imagine what my wet dreams were like. Many nights, instead of waking up wet and sticky, I woke up with a hard, metallic mess on my sheets and in my pajamas.

Understand, my bodily fluids weren’t just gold-colored. If they had been, things might have turned out differently. But they were actual gold—that precious metal coveted all over the world. Gold—the source of wars and peace, the rise of empires and their eventual collapse, murders and robberies, wealth and poverty, love and hate.

My parents figured it out soon enough. So did the first doctor they took me to. Oh, yeah. That doctor was very interested. He wanted to keep me for observation. Wanted to conduct some more tests. He said all this with his doctor voice but you could see the greed in his eyes.

And he was just the first.

Mom and Dad weren’t having any of that. They took me home and told me this was going to be our little secret. I was special. I had a gift from God. A wonderful, magnificent talent—but one that might be misunderstood by others. They wanted to help me avoid that, they said. Didn’t want me to be made fun of or taken advantage of. Even now, I honestly think they meant it at the time. They believed that their intentions were for the best. But you know what they say about good intentions. The road to hell is paved with them. That’s bullshit, of course.

The road to hell is paved with fucking gold.

My parents started skimming my residue. Mom scraped gold dust from my clothes and the sheets when she did laundry and from the rim of my glass after dinner. One night, they told me I couldn’t watch my favorite TV show because I wouldn’t eat my broccoli. I cried gold tears. After that, it seemed like they made me cry a lot.

Everywhere I went, I left a trail of gold behind me. My parents collected it, invested it, and soon, we moved to a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood with a better school. Our family of three grew. We had a maid and a cook and groundskeepers.

I hated it, at first. The new house was too big. We’d been a blue-collar family. Now, Mom and Dad didn’t work anymore and I suddenly found myself thrown into classrooms with a bunch of snobby rich kids—all because of my gift. I had nothing in common with my classmates. They talked about books and music that I’d never heard of, and argued politics and civic responsibilities and French Impressionism. They idolized Che Guevara and Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway. I read comic books and listened to hip-hop and liked Spider-Man.

So I tried to fit in. Nobody wants to be hated. It’s human nature—wanting to be liked by your peers. Soon enough, I found a way. I let them in on my little secret. Within a week, I was the most popular kid in school. I had more friends than I knew what to do with. Everybody wanted to be friends with the golden boy. But here’s the thing. They didn’t want to be friends with me because of who I was. They wanted to be friends with me because of
who
I was. There’s a big difference between those two things.