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Here’s a great description of the new novel from the 33 1/3 series blog:

The novel focuses on the art and punk scenes of the Midwestern city Freedom Springs, where an opportunistic trustfunder named Ben Wilfork starts an all-ages art/show space names Hidden Wheel. Max Caughin, who tags under the name Faze, gets famous quick with a series of paintings on CD covers. His buddy Bernie Reese donates sperm to raise money for a new drum kit so his two-piece noiserock band Stonecipher can record. Bernie’s romantic interest (and former chess prodigy) Rhonda Barrett does dominatrix work by day and paints her life, sixty words at a time, on giant canvases by night. Their fates intertwine in a story reconstructed by William Molyneux, a 24th Century scholar reconstructing the Hidden Wheel scene after a solar flare erases all digital data in his era.

The Band
Dead Trend started as a fictional band in Hidden Wheel, Freedom Springs’ biggest musical export. As I wrote the book, I also wrote Dead Trend songs — short blasts of punk focusing on 1986 topics like Reagan, the Berlin Wall and Chernobyl. Some friends and I put the band together this summer, with me playing drums and doing backing vocals. We have a 7″ coming out soon on Baltimore’s Save vs. Poison Records. In the meantime, our music is available via cassette tape — demo versions of our songs recorded this summer, as well as a live set recorded in Orono, Maine.

Download “Last Orchard” .doc for your eReader (check back periodically — the file will be updated as new installments become available).

Chapter 4

I took the elevator to the fourth floor, bracing myself against the claustrophobic walls. The burnt, grimy taste of coffee swam in my mouth. I was getting a little sleepy.

The building that confined my office to its cement purgatory was one of the last authentically nasty establishments in that section of the city, a historical site of depravity and Prohibition-era vice. Reputedly it was due to be torn down any day now and I didn’t blame whoever was doing the tearing. The Santos Building had once been renowned as a haven for desperate call girls, and the basement, which I’d never dared look at, was said to have been a hub for all kinds of debaucheries.

The hallways of each floor had been gutted of any personality: a chair leaned in a corner, the windows covered with cardboard, pipes gurgling and hopeless under your feet and in the walls. All in all, it was so seedy you had to plant your shoes when you stumbled in.

Adjacent to my stenciled, fogged-glass door was a vacant space I’d never been curious enough about. Sometimes a light was on inside, and I could distinctly hear a man singing in a foreign language, but otherwise, I’d never seen anyone milling around the vacant halls. The landlord himself was just a telephone number that led constantly to a phone being hung up.
My office was unlocked. I hadn’t bothered to replace the knob I’d yanked off on a tortured Monday in the throes of my second marriage. Not much to steal, anyway, unless there’s high demand for peeling wallpaper and bent paperclips. The carpet that covered half the center of the floor was deeply green, paint flecked.

The redhead was already there, seated with her back to me in a chair that, 45 minutes ago, had been behind my desk. I made some noise coming into the room but she didn’t seem to notice. You can figure out a lot about a person by how unimpressed they are with your presence.

I sauntered cooly over and sat on the edge of the desk, made a production of crossing my ankles. She was prim to the point of being blatantly indifferent, hands clenched in her lap as though she were engaged in pondering the squiggles on a Pollock. Up close, her face was too wide and too hard, cheekbones prominent — the face of a film star who doesn’t get too many parts. Her glasses were off now and her eyes were green, wide-set and unyielding; the rest of her attempted to prove them right.

“Remember me?” I asked.

“Do you have a cigarette?” She had a habit of speaking with her mouth compressed, as though she were training to be a ventriloquist.

“At the diner?” I said. “Remember? About five minutes ago?”

“Because I left my pack at home. And it would be kind if you had one so I wouldn’t have to go crazy.”

“Sitting at the counter and you came up–”

“Do you or don’t you have a cigarette?”

“I quit a month ago.”

“That’s admirable of you,” she said, going through the purse between her heels.

“It doesn’t feel too admirable.”

“Admirable things usually don’t.”

Very casually she extracted a plain white envelope that was being used as a book marker in a pamphlet-thin pulp novel. On the front my name had been written in tiny cursive symbols.

“Won’t you lose your place?” I asked.

“I already read it. You know Dominic Early?” she asked.

“Maybe, but for some reason I don’t really think you care what I have to say.”

“Crime writer. He has a lackluster grip on the way people actually behave. Entertaining, though.”

“Let’s start a book club later. What’s this about?”

She batted her finger on the envelope and said: “This concerns my brother Ben and needless to say it’s confidential, if that means anything to you.”

“Information is overvalued,” I said. “Some jerk once defined hell as an infinite stream of details and possibilities. If that means anything to you.”

“It doesn’t.”

She flung the envelope on my lap. It slipped onto the floor and I bent and grabbed it.

“There’s a check inside for eight thousand dollars,” she said.

“I don’t like surprises anyway.”

“Do you like personal checks?”

At that point I would have accepted muskrat hides. I unsealed the envelope with a greedy finger and greeted the digits inside.

“That’s a little insulting,” she said. “I’m good for it.”

“I was simply trying to find out your name. It seemed less superfluous than asking.”

Susan K. Longtree looked at me over the tip of her pert nose.

“Just don’t call me Susan,” she said. “Nor think of me using that name.”

I loosened the knot on my black tie, peering like a creep at her ringlets of red hair held rigid with pomade.

“My brother, Ben,” she started. “He killed himself two weeks ago in a motel up north.” She related it in a mechanical spurt, the way you might tell the plumber that the faucet is broken. Something tugged at her lips now, not tears but the opposite of tears. “Ben was married to a woman here in the city and had a kid with her — a girl, Dot. So what I’m saying, Mr. Jome, is that Ben did not lead a miserable life. He worked as a golf instructor in that club outside of town then quit to take care of the wife and the kid. House. Family. Job.”

“Sometimes all three in collaboration can ruin anyone.”

“That’s very wise,” she said.

“The wife was not troubled by his mental state?” I asked.

“Ben’s wife and I haven’t ever gotten along. For that matter, neither have Ben and I. He was always happier than I was.”

“I take it you never noticed anything foul?”

“Not so much. He was a quiet kid from the day he was born. Like there was something inside of him gnawing away. He loved the lake up at the orchard.”

I let the tension stir the room until she was forced to look at me again. “What exactly, Ms. Longtree, is it you’re here for?”
Sue Longtree looked at me with blank eyes.

“Ben didn’t leave a note,” she said. “Is that strange?”

“Not really. The ones who hope to live are prodigious with their words; all they want is someone to listen. But some suicides believe in the act, not as some stunt to get mommy’s love, but as a serious decision. Believe me, I’ve tried writing in suicidal desperation. It’s all romantic slop and not very grammatical.”

She glared at me, not completely sure whether I was being facetious or sincere. In fact, I wasn’t quite so sure myself.

“So I would like to hire your services for a few days or a week and hopefully find out why Ben did it. Could there possibly be a note somewhere?”

“Is that all there is?” I asked.

“Just like the song says.”

“I feel insulted.”

“You must feel that a lot. The eight thousand is a down payment. Essentially, I don’t care how he died and we weren’t close. I want you to shred his death and use the pieces to solve his life. If a person kills himself for no reason, a sister is likely to get worried. Genes and whatnot. Believe me, I’m not paranoid. If Ben killed himself for a bona fide purpose, all right. As I said before: Find out why. And it’s Mrs. Longtree,” she said. “That’s why I’m not able to research for myself. I’m going through a divorce that ought to be settled in a trench.”

I scribbled in an unlined reporter’s notebook. The shorthand looked like a screwed-up association game, the hasty marks of a messy hieroglyphics.

I poured myself a soda water I’d been saving and asked the woman if she wanted some.

“I’ll take some rum,” she said.

“I don’t have any rum.”

“What do you have?”

“I have some soda water.”

I paced and drank while she talked. The story of her brother wasn’t terribly riveting stuff. Sue and Ben were both born upstate, the only offspring of Daddy and Mrs. Longtree.

“What’s your father’s name?” I asked.

“That’s it.”

“What’s it?”

“His name is Daddy.”

“I don’t think you’re being serious.”

“If he had any other name we never knew it.”

Their father ran a once prosperous orchard four or five hours north. Soon after Sue was born, Mrs. Longtree took the kids to live in the city away from Daddy and the isolation.

“My mother loved the city and my father loves the orchard,” Sue said. “So it caused some conflict. We visited the orchard sometimes. I couldn’t stand the place. Ben and I spent a lot of time together up there when we were kids, sneaking around, ducking out at night.”

“What about Daddy?” I asked.

“He was always holed up at the orchard. Daddy wasn’t anything more than a presence for me. After a while we stopped going to see him because he was getting weird. Nobody really missed him.

The fast crack of Sue’s voice was somehow transfixing, like being punched in the face with a peppermint leaf.

“At seventeen,” Sue went on, “I traveled awhile, thinking myself some kind of itinerant writer. I met my currently estranged husband at a lounge in Chicago. He manages and conducts a big band. They’re called The Boys and the music is so bad it’s demeaning for me to stoop to criticize it.”

“Well, you did marry him,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Marriage definitely is an institution.”

For Sue the rest was lawyers, estate debacles and a third-rate future of uncertainty and reliance in despised money. She glossed over the personal details diffidently, and though there was some pain in her voice it was the suffering of being snapped with a rubber band at close quarters.

Meanwhile, Ben Longtree packed off to university. Before he received his degree in biology, however, he suddenly quit and continued his career as a golfer. He won some high-paying tournaments and was interviewed a few times on the radio. At thirty-five he stopped competing and got himself a job at a country club outside of town. It was there that he met his wife, Carol Bergen, a tobacco heiress. That was five years ago.

“He took his wife’s name,” Sue said scornfully. “Bergen. I don’t understand how he could be so weak.”

“Maybe he loved her,” I offered

Sue scoffed.

“I didn’t change my name when I got married.”

“Maybe you didn’t love him,” I offered again.

“Anyway,” she said.

Ben and Carol had a daughter before they were married, now six years old. Dot, Sue remarked, was silent like her father and mean like her mother. I agreed that it wasn’t a suitable disposition for a child.

“Carol is an abomination,” Sue said.

So Ben Bergen drove north into the halls around Sutter Falls to drop in on their father’s sixty-seventh birthday. A day later was found in his motel room, the radio blaring (the maid recounted), a neat hole through the roof of his mouth, out the top of his head and embedded in the crook of the plaster ceiling. Immediately the slaying was ruled self-slaughter and no one doubted the verdict, especially not Sue Longtree.

“They didn’t so much as dust the door handle,” she said. “It might have been quick, but these are the sorts of towns that have nothing to do except cart away suicides and bargain with housewives not to send two barrels into their husbands.”

“What about Daddy? You said Ben was up there to see him.”

Sue took a long look at her red-painted fingernails.

“Nothing that I know of. We’re a deranged family.”

“And your mother?”

“Dead. She was sleepwalking one night and tossed herself out a hotel-room window in St. Louis.”

“Another suicide,” I said.

Across the room a rat poked its slick head from a fissure in the baseboard. Saw me, froze, and disappeared back into the hole.

“So,” I said to impede the silence, squinting at my chaotic notation. “Bergen leads a fulfilling existence. Underwhelming job, wife and daughter. And so on. One night he just kills himself. It’s definitely not murder, and nothing so far as you can tell is nefarious about the incident. You’d like me to look at the death for any indication that it could be the result of a destructive tendency in your family, some horrifying gene.” I paused, drank, and let the soda water fizz under my tongue. “Okay. Why not do this yourself?”

“Two reasons,” she said abruptly. “One, I’m not close to any of these people. I don’t like any of them. They need a stranger to feel comfortable. Carol won’t even speak to me. Two, I’m actually scared at what I’ll find, that there could some lingering symptom of some kind of … ingrained problem.”

“That’s more than two reasons.”

“The last one is free. And finally, it’s not your job to pry into my reasons. Are you always so nosy?”

“Absolutely. And why should you be worried about why your brother killed himself?” I asked.

“I’ve just noticed things in myself that I don’t want to notice.”

“Like what?”

We engaged in a clean silence that wasn’t very clean.

“There’s one other important thing,” she said. “It could be nothing. But Ben signed in at the hotel under a different name. William Florence.”

“That’s not so crazy,” I said, walking behind her so that she had to twist to follow me.

“Why isn’t that so crazy?” she asked.

I shrugged. “People rarely behave like they should when they’re about to shoot themselves. It probably doesn’t mean anything.”

“So you’ll look into this?” Sue asked.

“I guess so, until it leads nowhere or somewhere.”

“I appreciate that,” she said. She clasped the mouth of her purse and slipped it over her shoulder.

We shook hands; her palm was as dry as a whale bone.

I handed her one of my last business cards. A ring of coffee encircled the upper left hand corner.

“I like your logo,” she said, nodding at the stain.

“I had it specially made.”

“I can’t show any emotion. People tell me that all the time. It doesn’t bother me anymore.”

“That’s okay. Some people are born like that and others have to learn it.

Going out the door, Sue glanced at me in the mirror.

For a while I thought about her artificially red hair; in some sick way I liked her lack of concern and expensive rancor. When you begin to care is when the war marches and the beach guns start.

Gently, I folded the check in equal halves, drooling. I was thinking of nothing but the money and how it touched me just right where I needed to be touched.

I put a hat on my head and flicked the light switch. The hall was soundless and barren, some of the ceiling plaster floating onto the carpet. The rusted grates of the elevator clanged shut, the heap descended and I counted my check in a better light. The paper was crisp and impersonal and modern. The feeling it induced, however, was positively prehistoric.

Chapter 5

After cashing the check and stuffing the fifties and twenties in my pants pocket I went to a pawnshop that specialized in my hocked goods. The metallic guts of the shop were congested with unwanted silverware and thick dust. I purchased back the pistol that I’d brought in a week ago, when my pecuniary status had been drastic. The proprietor was a smart-ass Hungarian with a beard that would have made fungi jealous. He had one of the largest collections of harmonicas in the store, as though a wandering harmonica orchestra had passed through town. The Hungarian wished me a happy death when I was exiting his shop. “Which is all that life is for,” he elaborated.

I wasn’t sure exactly why buying back my weapon was so important, only that I felt bereft without it, a man deprived of his art. Plus, I loved the weight of the .38 in my trouser pocket, and how lovingly it responded to the briefest touch.

The sky was pondering the rain, which was due to last a few days or so. I walked to 20th as excited as a dumb child at a horse race. My newfound cash was rolled into my right fist, my free hand caressing the gun in my pocket. Around 30th I started perusing shop windows, the way saps do when they’ve just received a modest sum of dollars and need to consider how it should be squandered.

At a delicatessen I bought a wheel of cheese and a yardstick of Italian salami. The rain was starting to come down forcefully as I reached 48th Street.

My apartment complex was a series of three plain buildings designed around an uncared-for park. The grass hadn’t been cut in months, the trees gnarled and perishing. No one wanders the unappealing, graffiti-stained path. As for the architecture of the buildings, it could be characterized as frigid Bauhaus in its charmlessness. My neighborhood is somewhere in limbo, a people of no extreme inclinations or ambitions, drifted along by a son of a bitch of a god whose idea of fun is leaving us to writhe and argue and die. Just like anybody else anywhere else and everywhere else.

The mail slot for 201 housed three Chinese take-out menus and a letter that had been there for three years, from a girl I didn’t want to remember and a time I didn’t want to forget. She was a short, dour girl who’d left me in a phone-booth waiting for her for three hours. Later I found out that she’d gone to San Francisco and married a yacht and the guy who owned it. She could have been the only dame I cared anything for.

Inside my apartment I stored the cheese, the salami and the money in the ice-box. It was a little after four.

A row of bookshelves was arranged chronologically on one wall in the living room; mostly the titles were related to late medieval philosophy, Aquinas’ works, the collected essays on magic by Bruno, Eckhardt’s surreal dreams about creepy angels who visited him during the night.

The furniture in the room was sparse, an armchair with a leather footstool, a sofa under the bay window, glass-topped coffee table scattered with shabby magazines. Likewise, the kitchen’s utility was based solely around an oblong table and one oak chair. As for the bedroom, it was a place where I slept. It held a big bed and a closet hung with suits that have not seen a dry cleaner in two presidential elections. It was so practical I could have been denounced as a communist.

I checked on the money in the ice-box, where it was chilled and hardening, the way money should be. I drew a bath and soaked awhile, pondering Sue’s hair and other attributes. Afterwards I ran a razor over my face and sprinkled on some minty lotion. I laid on the crumpled sheets of the bed. A poplar brushed the window sympathetically. Poplars do that.

The unlikely suicide of Sue Longtree’s brother was still a shapeless, random event that had no meaning. I liked Sue Longtree a bit, but probably the more I enjoyed her ruthlessness the less I would enjoy her ruthlessness.

The pillow was terribly inviting and dreams were fitful; in them I died at least twice. I awoke, having slept all of twenty-five minutes.

Later that evening I had dinner in solitude, joined by the sputtering static of a black and white television set rambling on in an idiotic advertisement. I got one channel. Better than silence.

As I polished off a cheese and salami sandwich I flipped the pages of my notebook, decoding the unintelligible script. Very little actual information to go on, but it was enough for the moment.

The heading of the first page was printed: Sue Longtree, client and underneath that:
Ben Bergen (used the name “William Florence”), suicide, no note, motel in Sutter Falls
Carol Bergen, wife of BB, call on immediately
Dot Bergen, daughter, 6
Shady Palm Country Club, BB employed, interview manager (Montero)
Contact Pol. Dept. in Sutter Falls
Mrs. Longtree, killed self in sleep (the immortality of dreams?)
Daddy Longtree, father of Sue and Ben, hermit, BB visited shortly before.

Below that, in the margin of the page, I had misspelled the word Orchard and even when I had it right, the word looked off.

Chapter 6

Early on Wednesday morning I showered and threw on a white shirt, brown suit and black wingtips. I polished the shoes while they were on my feet, spending a good five minutes on each one. I’d owned them since a senior dance in high school, and the area just in back of the toes was as creased as a cutting board. Some Beethoven quartet was winding down on the record player.

In the bathroom mirror my reflection had drastically improved over the past day or so. My hair had changed over to gray when I was twenty-two, a semester into medieval studies, and had not recuperated since. Sometimes it lent a grave dignity to my poor, sullen face. Frankly, I was exhilarated to be working again, and the case fascinated me because it made no overtures to being eventful. I smiled at myself in the bathroom mirror, and the smile was nearly authentic.

I scrubbed the dishes in the sink while my toast burned. Sang off-key at the radio, had a couple bites of cereal. I brought the toast with me into the taxi, wrapped in a napkin. The bald, unhealthy-looking driver scowled at me in the rearview, muttering at the steering wheel in a volley of whispered complaints that I believed were directed at me.

Whole parts of the city were nothing but trash. Clenched in the early rush of vehicles, I looked at the streets heaped with unappealing black bags. People were hurling refuse indiscriminately onto the sidewalk now. Wrappers, beer cans, egg cartons, all manner of comestibles, soaked from the rain and strewn in parking lots and in lawns. Rotting meat was prevalent, its sunset-pink juices draining into the gutter. Some folks had attempted to drive their trash to the public landfill outside of town but were turned back: the big stinking crater in the ground was filled to capacity. Further digging had commenced. They would never be done digging. Maybe that’s the end to all outwardly impressive cultures.

The driver and I made a few snide quips at the extravagant neighborhood. He beat a fast left onto 3rd to outpace a light.
Carol Bergen’s house was near the middle of the wide, poplar-lined boulevard, number 113, with a cast-iron woodpecker for a mailbox. Two brawny bushes guarded the driveway.

I handed the driver fare plus a ten.

“You ain’t got to be cocky about it,” he said.

Compared to the ultra-modern monstrosities that formed the rest of the block, the Bergen residence was almost Victorian. Lattice-work ran the length of the flaking brownstone facade, shoots of vine grappling at the white criss-crossed planks. The walkway was red brick, the air infused with the dense sweetness of wet, freshly-mown grass.

I rang the bell and a dull chime flirted out of tune with a standard hymn. A white, monotonous sky held an airplane. Before I could press the bell a second time a woman had the door ajar, swaying in a liquored, stumbling dance.

“Come on in,” she said, the woman’s eyes puffy, drowsy.

“Mrs. Bergen?” I removed my hat and paused on the mat.

“Come on in,” she repeated lightheartedly. “Whoever you are you can’t be any worse.”

“I might be a little worse. And look at that, you’ve even cleaned up your shoes for me.”

“Do you live around here?” she inquired, emphasizing each word.

I said I didn’t live around here.

“Then you can’t be any worse,” she said. “Something happens to people around here. They get brutally dull and must find petty ways to hurt one another. I’m from Minneapolis originally.”

“Decent town,” I said.

“Is it really?” she asked gravely. “I don’t remember much about it. I lived with an evil aunt who collected these hideous monkey figurines she claimed were from Egypt. Why do you ask?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Why not?”

Carol Bergen was a short, scrawny woman in a white linen shirt that fit her like a drape. Somewhere embroiled in her forties, unmistakably shaken, a person who is born twitchy. The lines in her sallow face were an ideal slope for tears. Her breath was a high percentage and to whichever label it belonged it appeared to be working.

“I’m Harry Jome,” I said.

She pronounced my name familiarly, as though we’d gone to middle school together or had been recent neighbors.

“You sister-in-law contacted me to see what I could make of your husband’s suicide.”

Mrs. Bergen winced at the mention of her husband, muttering only, “Oh,”, and a beat later, “Why?”

“I’m not awfully sure. But sometimes it pays to not be awfully sure. Mrs. Longtree essentially wants to know the reason for his demise, whether it’s in the blood or what it is.” I shrugged. “So, now you know as much as I do.”

Downcast and confused, she offered to take my coat and hat, and when I declined, she insisted on helping me out of my coat and hat and clutched my coat and hat in her bony arms. She tottered into the walls as she led me through a foyer. Blank, faded spots were on the walls, where photographs or watercolors had once been.

The kitchen at the end of the hallway was a cluttered mess of grimy dishes, blackened pots, cabinets disarrayed. Mrs. Bergen plunked my coat and hat on one of the chairs and poured herself clear liquid from an unmarked bottle. Turned, I could see that the seat of her tan pants was patterned in coffee grounds. With her back to me she looked healthy and almost sexy. When she turned and seemed to guess my thoughts I found myself mourning the last eight or so years of her life with her. Every movement she made was desperation disguised as movement.

Her body swayed clownishly as she tried to find the chair that I was positioning under her. She grimaced at me as though she had just swallowed half a decanter of melted plastic. Taped to the refrigerator was a finished crossword puzzle.

“Nice work,” I said, pointing at it.

She slid into the chair inch by inch.

“Ben and I did that the night before, I guess, and by the way what’re you doing here?”

“I’m here about Mr. Bergen — Ben.”

“Ben’s not here.”

“Ms. Longtree sent me over.”

I noticed that Mrs. Bergen’s exuberant brown hair was a wig. It slipped forward over an eyebrow, revealing close-cropped gray bangs.

“Bitch,” Mrs. Bergen mouthed.

“Sure,” I said. “She just wants to know why he did it. Whether it’s a family tic. I suppose that’s not too unreasonable.”

“No, not too unreasonable…. It’s as fucking stupid as a…” she tried to compare it to something but failed and grinned like I was meant to infer what she was alluding to.

“How did Ben act towards the end?” I asked.

“Same as normal. Ben had a fabulous character.” She looked at the tabletop — a swathe of fine cigarette ash — as though it were an hallucination. Her eyes were a triumph of cynicism.

“Let me apologize,” she said. “And pour you a whiskey or gin or something?”

“I don’t drink.”

“What, were you raised by Quakers?” she snarled as though I had just insulted her first cousin.

“No,” I said. “Alcoholics.”

She laughed and hissed at the same time. “I’m better than everyone else in the world,” she said, “except for myself at my worst.”

She blinked and looked confused.

“You’re as fucked-up same as me,” she said.

“Who isn’t, Mrs. Bergen?”

“My husband.”

“Sure he was.”

Instead of getting angry she smiled that belligerent smile, at the point where sobbing is inevitable. She came up close to my face and the smell of booze mixed with a lingering fruity shampoo was a sickening combination. Before I could resist she grabbed the back of my head and pulled my mouth to her mouth. Pulling sloppily from me she said, “I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“You thought I was somebody else,” I said.

“I guess you’re right,” she said. “Excuse me while I go away for a moment to compose myself.”

She oscillated into the next room. My stopping by was worthless and sorrowful. An untoward kindness came over me and I put her glass in the sink, then lifted my hat and coat on. Passing by the living room I saw that she had fallen asleep on the orange corduroy sofa, her restless body twitching in a nightmare that would be right where she’d left it. One of her sad eyes opened and she murmured, “I’m better than everyone else in the world, except for–” and didn’t finish plagiarizing herself.

High above the couch there was a drawing of an orchard that I barely glanced at and would have forgotten had it not been so strikingly out of place in a room with no other pictures. The style was expressionistic and influenced by twilight, similar to a Goya print or a print by a friend of Goya’s.

So far the only thing I knew about Ben Bergen was that he had been alive and now he wasn’t alive.

I shut the front door silently behind me just as Carol Bergen belched in her sleep.

Chapter 7

Considering Mrs. Bergen’s overall condition, it suddenly hit me that Sue Longtree’s inquiry was absurd. What was she expecting me to find out? Why? Did it make any difference if you knew with definitiveness that you were crazy and that you’d been crazy from the start? Plus, Sue didn’t care a lot about the fate of her brother, only how it impinged on her. Still, four grand was a tidy sum I couldn’t pass up, even if I wasn’t too sure what I was passing up and what I holding onto.

I picked up an umbrella for $15 at a corner vendor’s on 10th. The umbrella was red and blue, the vendor telling me it would last through a hurricane. Strong winds were racing in from the east and I had to wrestle with the umbrella all the way to the Santos Building, sweating when I reached the downstairs lobby. As usual, nobody was around. The stairwell was gray and dank, haunted by a scent that was deathly stale. A puddle had formed on the second-floor landing and I hopped over the little pool.

I rummaged through my drawers for nothing in particular. I was anxious, confined; the euphoria of the morning had been beaten to death by Carol Bergen’s pathos. I kind of felt bad for her because I knew what it was like to wage a fruitless struggle against the bottle. And maybe a little affectionate, too. Mrs. Bergen was a pathetic cliche, and cliches are dangerous because generally so appropriate.

In the drawers I picked out a bullet that had been mailed to me by an incapable man in the heat of his divorce; a counterfeit $100 bill; antacid tablets; a candy bar that had liquefied and solidified so frequently that the silver wrapping was more edible; $1.27 in loose change; the degree I’d earned at a stuffy haven of higher learning; one shelled cashew; and nine street maps of the city. A snooping biographer would have all the details he would ever need to write the life of Harry Jome, and then he’d quit and tell his publisher it didn’t amount to much — an article if he was lucky, and could he have a few spare bucks for the work, to keep things genuine, because anybody who would write about me would necessarily be the kind of person who was often broke. I dusted out the lint, replaced the junk, and was squeezing myself into a mild depression when the phone rang.

“You sound a bit down,” Sue Longtree said into my ear. “Must be all the hard work you’re doing.”

“Your sister-in-law is a six-a.m. drunk. There’s not much I can do with her. That’s the big lead I unearthed this morning. She doesn’t know whether to applaud or sob. She even tried to seduce me, I think.”

“What do you mean, you think?”

“She’s a trite mess of a lot of problems.”

“I wonder if she’s still my sister-in-law,” Sue said musingly. “With Ben dead and everything.”

“Would you like me to find that out too?”

“Saying something dumb isn’t the same as wit.”

“Wit is too profound for me. I usually just bounce my head against the wall for kicks.”

Sue cleared her throat.

“You know,” I said. “You haven’t really confided in me why you suspect this preposterous theory concerning your family. What’s actually the point?”

“Both my grandparents were suicides. At the same time.”

“Double suicides are as rare as twins.”

“Just as hard to feed, too.”

“Ms. Longtree, I think maybe–”

“You’re going a little short on my prefix, Mr. Jome. Did I tell you I’m married?”

“I must not have been listening. There was a lot to look at and I might have ignored that knowledge.”

“I have a creeping sense that you’d be slightly intelligent if you thought it wouldn’t hurt your business.”

“There’s no business to hurt. I act this way because I enjoy the bewilderment of others.”

“You must be enjoying yourself a lot.”

I held the phone in the crook of my shoulder and took it for a walk to the window. Another dreary, pitiable day that had no ambition, the kind of sky that made you want to build a better one.

“But you hate your husband,” I said.

“That’s true,” she said, as though she’d just found out. “So you can understand why I’m concerned.I haven’t traced the genealogy far, but what I know is that there is cause to worry.”

“What you need is only someone to let you talk and cry.”

She laughed and it was horrendous. “Everybody has  a shrink nowadays,” she said. “You give him a problem and he gives you some cute little yellow pills.”

I thought of her hair draped lugubriously over the phone. Red hair always bothered me and by that I mean it has never bothered me.

“Besides,” she said. “What would you do if you were me? It’s possible that I’m a threat to myself or other people. If you can get evidence I’ll check myself into the nearest blue ward a second later.”

“Maybe you should think about doing that right away.”

“A happy person does not kill himself is all I am saying, and from what I know my family has a tendency toward killing themselves.”

A taut silence ensnared itself on the line.

“Well,” I said.

“Goodbye, Mr. Jome.”

Sue Longtree was pretty, dedicated, endearingly eccentric. She reminded me of someone I’d like a lot. She was nuts, but she wore it well, and she was also smart, but smart is an acquired trait.

Down below in the rain-puttering street a person shouted as loud as he could, as though the shrill message was intended solely for my edification, and perhaps it was.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Michael Peck lives and writes in Missoula, Mont. Find more from Peck in THE2NDHAND archives or in our 10th-anniversary book anthology, All Hands On, released in 2011. More about it below.

Download “Last Orchard” .doc for your eReader (check back periodically — file will be updated as new installments become available)

Let us practice every imaginable grimace. –Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

Chapter 1

Let me begin before everything got all cockeyed and deadly and confused. Before Sue Longtree and Daddy Longtree and the orchard and Cowper and that bridge out of this despicable city. I blame a lot of this on my tailor, especially on that suave suit he never did finish.

But I suppose if I wanted to go back before any of this began I’d end up starting just after the dinosaurs were hacked to death by the wind and the earth and rotted away into fuel and dirt.

And where do you begin a story, anyway? Do you select some random point, or is there a tangible place that can be flipped over and fingered? “This is where everything started,” you would like to say. But any moment is random. There’s not a definite beginning to anything. The idea of a beginning is a turgid con. There can’t be a beginning when everything is at an end.

I’m not a writer; I’m something more like a transcriber of degeneracy and hatred. Had I any poetic talents I would be talking about something better: Birds in migration, the pleasantries of intoxicated guests at a cottage on the Cape, beautiful women having a picnic on a rooftop, flowers peeling back to let in the morning.

Instead, I’m talking about rotting dinosaurs and wretched people who have built this city with their capricious greed and startling cynicism.

I should say that nothing about this makes any kind of sense: there’s no solution, I don’t really know who’s responsible, whether anything criminal has been committed by others, what my involvement in the Longtree situation really consisted of, or even if it consisted of anything other than a psychotic redhead’s unquenchable love of her own self. And what I remember about Sue Longtree: the wave of her red hair, a smile that had in parted lips a riddle with no punchline, a scent, a stupid hope, a hand grasping my arm at a symphony performance.

“Why’d you do it, Jome?” Cowper says.

I say, “I haven’t slept too well lately.”

And that should have been enough but it wasn’t and it isn’t.

The river is down below like a dark, wavering sheet and the men are closing in for the big squeeze, Cowper leading them, his face a featureless blank in relief against the massive spotlight behind him. I swing a leg over the metal railing, and then the other leg, balancing on the parapet like some mad acrobatic fool. The men’s hard-bottomed shoes pound the concrete behind me and they’re breathing heavily and I can almost feel their arms pulling me back.

It’s funny, but the water below is so flat it looks like I could bounce right off the surface and carom back onto the bridge and find it empty of these animals in uniforms, replaced by daylight and a view of the city that has been erased by the rain. And maybe that’s exactly what I will do, when I am ready.

The river is getting closer, its contours in the night like an approximation of what I imagine the afterlife to be like: black, trembling and not nearly deep enough. I put a foot out and my shoe drops off. I don’t hear it plop into the river.
So where do I begin when there’s nowhere to begin?

The morning I found Sue Longtree in my office I’d spent listening to a record of the adagio from a Mozart piano concerto, and I’d thought to myself that it was the simplest interpretation of innocence I’d ever pried out of the world. That sound — a soft piano fading — would be a halfway decent beginning, except that I’ve forgotten the tune it belonged to.

But anywhere, any place, anybody is at least a halfway good beginning, if such things exist.

Chapter 2

I was at the window looking out over the intersecting bridges spanning the city. Great hulking sculptures of metal and steel, able to withstand the fleeing and the returning with equal ease, layered on top of one another like a crazy staircase. Bridges are the strangest of modern conveniences, a street with no land underneath, a nowhere boulevard that can carry you across seas and lakes and rivers, transporting you to the elsewhere you yearn so vaguely to be. A bridge is the beginning and the end of any journey.

The river beneath the the webwork of bridges was sleek and consoling in its dangerous malaise, condemned to thrash, like all good rivers, against the encroachment of civilization.

A drop of rain struck the glass and eased down reluctantly. A siren yearned and careened three stories below in the street for a while, found its miserable destination and became a loose, fragile memory among a thousand others that one soon forgets. Then another siren joined in from somewhere beyond the first and the duet spun off to opposite fringes of the city, a cacophony of parting goodbyes in a town that is built of them.

It had just begun to rain and the buildings out the window were becoming coated in a slick mirror of water that reflected the fading sky and the buildings within reach. I studied a calendar on my desk, trying to intuit what day it was, but the calendar was from last year and I’d never been keen on math. Or anything else. I sat back in my chair and grimaced at the ceiling.
I yawned, trying to surprise myself.

There was a blue and white marble on my desk that I began to roll back and forth on the uncluttered surface. The ninth or tenth time I was too slow and it bounced against a copy of a dog-eared Dominic Early novel and that I’d been meaning to read. The marble dribbled onto the floor like any other sad, useless thing. I peered closely at the little round speck dreamily, urging it to keep rolling, but my momentary optimism wouldn’t take. I left myself alone.

Sitting in the same position for hours, romanticizing the days you wasted in the gutter, you tend to disremember that the street exists, that there is something beyond the flicking wall clock in the berserk simplicity of a familiar room. That maybe you’re a self-propelling organism with the nerve to feel all right; your body an urban development project and the brain a ticket-window to a carnival that is always vacant, though some silly bastard keeps the hallucinatory rides well oiled and moving along.

I was coming down with the initial chills of a cold is what I’m trying to spell out. Lousiness doesn’t achieve much more in one day.

That morning a middle-aged woman visited my office and offered me $400 to investigate the death of her husband. She was a babbling matron, barely able to subvert a speech defect that slurred her words, with the physique of a sack and lips purpled by wine. The husband was decapitated by a train as he attempted to switch the tracks at some remote outpost beyond the suburbs.

“It was mysterious,” the woman said. “In a week he was going to blow the lid on the Switchmen’s Union and some people — and by that I mean some people — didn’t like the idea much. And so you can imagine what I think.”

“Why was he going to blow the lid on the Switchmen’s Union?” I asked, and the woman must have heard my stultified tone, because she looked like she was going to spit on my desk.

“Roger said something about,” the woman paused, recalling, “black market goods being loaded onto freighters by certain squalid switchmen.”

“What kind of black market goods?”

“He never mentioned.”

She gave a harrowing account of the switchman’s life, replete with dinner routine, the hour his alarm sounded each morning, his Sunday yard work. Finished and breathing hard, gray hair clinging to her forehead, she expostulated some more and fell silent. Perspiration slithered on her exposed skin like she’d just enjoyed a bath of turgid lake water. It was disgusting to me.

“Any witnesses?” I asked.

“Just the engineer.”

“What does he say?”

“He was asleep.”

“So he wasn’t really a witness.”

“He was there,” she spat.

As bluntly as I could I told her that her personal grief was not a good enough reason to suspect assassination. People get in the way of trains sometimes. “Basically I don’t like or trust people who sweat profusely,” I said aloud without really meaning to.

“You have the mouth of a dog,” she said.

“Not every freak death is a conspiracy,” I said. She tore into a plastic bag of tissues. “Stupidity is extremely under-appreciated as a transport to the afterlife.”

“Roger wasn’t stupid.”

“I’m sorry, but anybody who gets his head knocked off by a slow-moving train is challenged in some special way. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I could have taken her dollars and done nothing but sit around and stare at it for a week, then report to her that I’d been unable to uncover anything conclusive. Maybe I was feeling lazy; possibly, I simply did not care. From Malthus one learns that the cause of all evil and crime is overpopulation, and ever since Pinkerton it has been good private policy for someone in my line of work never to meddle with unions.

“I thought you did this kind of thing,” she said, rising with tissues clasped in each hand.

“Honestly, I don’t know what it is I do anymore. It’s not your fault. I’m disillusioned, is all.”

“And it certainly isn’t mine,” she hissed.

She sobbed out to the hallway. As the elevator descended her whelps grew distant and stopped altogether, then resumed through the open window. I watched her hustle across the street against the light.

The office was chilly but I left the window open a crack. I tucked in my once-white dress shirt and propped a suit coat on my shoulders. A year and a half ago I’d nailed a portrait mirror to the backside of the door. Intended as security to inspect every angle of a client, it served mainly to distribute my deflation of vanity. Not a handsome man, perhaps, rather plump and grim under the eyes, the kind of looks certain women appreciate from a distance and realize, on closer scrutiny, they are very mistaken. But I wasn’t out for any woman. I’m sure they’d had enough of me, too.

Well, Harry Jome, I said to myself, stepping into the plank-floored corridor, whose walls were painted in indignant swipes. Let’s you and me get a couple of eggs. It’s about time we had some excitement.

Chapter 3

May was humid so far.

The people walking the streets were dressed too warmly, and a collective grimace was growing wider by the inch, not at all helped by the pattering rain. Maybe it wasn’t the weather but the fact that unhappy people were steadily coming to understand their condition. But at least in the city you don’t have to be yourself 24 hours a day. Crowds of nobodies surge and swallow you in a great gulp, hustle you along to their nowhere, suck you into a civilization of aimless people attempting to appear busy. If I ever decided to long for friendship I could start talking to god or get a membership in a secret society.

At the 12th Street diner all the booths were taken. Eager employees and unperturbed excecutives were hunched together feasting on over-told stories about a certain cubicle, a shady bookkeeper, hoary bosses with a penchant for meanness. Beside me at the counter was a midget in a mustard yellow cardigan with a guitar case leaning on his leg, so that whenever he shifted, which was perpetually, he had to keep a hand on the case to straighten it.

The waitress was a mild teenager with braces and rubber bands in her shortish black hair, long unpainted fingernails and a demeanor so shy it would have made a pimp blush. She got my whole order wrong: the eggs were sunny-side up, the meat was ham. To her credit it was a highly unorthodox order. The coffee, at least, wasn’t ginseng tea.

Next to me the midget had his head in a newspaper and I found myself contorting to read the headlines as I ate. Suddenly he shot me an eye and hopped off the stool, taking the paper as he jumped away. There was nothing so attractive in the headlines anyway: death, mutilation, disease, an escalating crime rate, the subtle menace of germs and defeat, rape, pillage, genocide. It was too dirty to look at.

“I come here every day,” the midget said to me, folding the paper twice. “I sit in the same place and I don’t trouble anybody.”

I chewed my ham, watching him shake his head.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just in the mood for talking. You want to talk?” he asked.

“Talk about what?”

“You know what’s funny?” he said, and answered his question, “Nothing. I can’t think of a single thing that’s funny.” He straightened the guitar case. “Isn’t that funny?”

Depressive inclinations arose as I shoveled sopping egg onto unbuttered toast. At the end of the week I would be losing my office and shortly thereafter my apartment on a sunny avenue in the 4800 block. Letters had arrived from the respective invisible landlords, warning ungrammatically that I was three months behind. If I did not pay by May 15 I would be dragged into a courtroom and divested of my car and whatever else was reputed to have some value.

I was planning to leave town as soon as I could pay for gas. Now I wished I’d accepted the railroad widow’s money and fled, which wasn’t too chivalrous, but poverty isn’t chivalrous either. I scraped the plate clean and dusted off the driblets of food on the formica countertop.

“I mean,” the midget went on. “That’s only the funniest thing anymore. People are different everywhere, though. Some people think I’m funny just sitting here. I don’t know. I guess I am. But everybody’s funny in some way. Do you agree with that?”

“I’ll nod to that,” I said.

“Well, see you later if you come by again.” He grabbed his guitar case. “I’m here every day, so if you’re around I’ll be around.”

Another cup of coffee and a slice of cherry pie. I watched the waitress open a rotating glass case, cut the pie, balance it on a plate, rush it over, slam it down, hurry back, close the glass case, wipe her hands on a dishtowel, start the process anew for some other tired louse.

Before I had a second to lift the fork someone sidled in between the stools, touching my forearm with a bony elbow. In a churlish, clear voice, a woman asked the harried waitress where she could find Harry Jome. I was so taken aback at overhearing my name that I almost fainted.

Brilliant red hair was the first thing I noticed. The questioner was a slightly attractive, narrow-faced woman of around 35 or 40. Big dark sunglasses covered what were purportedly her eyes. In profile she had slightly masculine features that lend themselves gracefully to women of a particular attitude, and she certainly had that attitude. She was in black slacks and a matching turtleneck; the pinkish tint of her skin indicated that she hadn’t been in the sun for a few decades. By her subtle perfume, plush leather tote and air of astute arrogance, she was either wealthy or very wealthy. “Do you know where the office of a Mr. Jome would be? I believe it’s Henry Jome?” she said.

“Who?” the waitress said over the head of a customer at the end of the counter.

“Harry Jome,” I corrected.

“I’m sure it’s Henry Jome,” the red-head repeated. “He apparently has an office nearby.”

“Excuse me,” I said.

The redhead squinted at me from the corner of her frames and said, pouting her lips, “I was speaking to her if you don’t mind much.”

“Yes, and I’m talking to you if it’s not an inconvenience.”

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“You’re asking about Harry Jome?” I said.

“I was asking the girl about Henry Jome.”

“I’m doing you a favor, lady.”

“Well, stop it.”

Once again she tried to flag the waitress’ attention, but the young girl was too busy arguing with the cook to notice. The waitress screamed at the beefy man in white and blushed; she pulled the apron off and hurled it onto the grill. The stench of charred cotton brought scowls among the patrons. The former waitress took advantage of the furor in the kitchen to calmly open the register and clean out the contents.

It was my first smile in nearly three weeks.

“You see what you did?” I said to the redhead.

“I thought maybe you’d like a job.” She was backing away.

“Everybody knows Harry Jome,” I said incredulously. “Try the Santos Building. 3rd floor. If he isn’t in just wait a minute.”

“You his agent or something?” she asked.

“Harry is the kind of guy who doesn’t even need an agent,” I said.

She was out the door. Behind me two paunchy men in matching suits and porkpies were close behind her, pointing and hushing each other. One of them turned and winked.

The chef was cursing madly, his staff wreaking chaos and the diners all filing out in search of another diner. My coffee was drained but for a splatter of half-and-half at the bottom of the cup. I felt lonely.

TO BE CONTINUED…

PECK is among more than 40 writers featured in our 2011 10th-anniversary anthology, All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10. Order via this page.

Download “A Treat…” .doc for your eReader.

My parents held their wedding at home. It was 1979, a second marriage for them both, and their biological clocks were pounding. They lived in a scrappy Chicago neighborhood and instead of a living room, they had a private saloon with a mammoth mahogany bar. Al Green and Blood Sweat ‘n Tears sang through the record player, and the vast mirrors behind the bar reflected the guests as they mingled, sparking up, laughing, dancing, dissolving into stupor.

It was at this homespun wedding that my father’s father asked my mother’s mother for the service of a blow job.

Helen was my grandma’s name. She wore a knit turtleneck dress that night, and a silver owl-shaped bolo tie. She had beauty moles and her hips swooped like a ripe, soft, pear. She saw people’s auras, knew the arcana of the tarot as intimately as her alphabet, and smoked Luckies with a fuck-all verve that many men found magnetic. Helen had been married six times, and now she was about done with the male species.

My father’s father, on the other hand, kept the same sweetie his whole life. He made good money running taverns, and he passed a mighty alcoholic heritage and a liver of steel to all three of his sons. Cletus was his name, and his hair was white as snow. His brain was mildly seasoned from a drag-racing accident many years past. He was the kind of fellow who would walk into the lounge of his favorite suburban supper club just as they opened at 5 p.m., booming “All right, ya sons a’ guns, let’s get this show on the road!” Cletus attended church weekly, but only since his first heart attack, when he had a sudden vision of hell.

His wife was a submissive woman, a casserole baker and a collector of figurines who chose to remain as woozily unaware of his roguery as possible. She was the forgiving kind, the forgetting kind, the kind to sit quietly swallowing vodka until she fell off her stool.

My mother wore a simple cream-colored shift and a string of precious pearls that night. “Never wear a dress that’s prettier than you.” That was always her advice. She looked stunning. She was a chiseled blond sexpot. She was a fiendish reader, a wicked gossip, the kind of woman who would cross the street to give a dollar to a panhandler. She had sworn that day to forever love and cherish my father, a pothead with a healthy salary, a foulmouthed, exuberant man who collected rocks and cried whenever he was happy. She made him cry a lot.

***
In the kitchen, Grandma lit Mom’s cigarette, caught Mom by the small of her back, and reeled her in. If you’d watched her holding her daughter close, you would have noticed Grandma’s huge, honking rings of tarnished silver and speckled turquoise. I imagine her aura at that moment as blazing orange.

“Hey,” she whispered to her daughter. “Your new father-in-law just asked me for a blow job.”

The bride’s blood jumped to her face and then she crumpled halfway floorward with a  seismic laughter, choking on her smoke.

“I was heading for the john,” Grandma said, “and there he was at the door when I turned to close it — ‘how ‘bout you give me a blowjob, babe?’ I just shut the door in his face!”

That bathroom where my grandma was propositioned is exactly the same as it was in 1979, but everything else has changed. My parents made a baby and split up. Helen died of lung cancer. Clete met his maker and ascended to heaven from his adjustable motorized bed.

When I enter that crapper today, I note the golden eagle knocker that’s always hung on the door. The tiles are the same beige and the walls are the same dusty rose. The wood of the cabinets still matches the wood of the toilet seat, and my father still lives here, still a pothead and a rock collector, still a man who cries when he’s happy. When I sit on his toilet, I envision my face in the mirror as a fresh-blooded combination of my various ancestors. I envision my dad’s dad rejected by my mom’s mom, tottering back to the bar muttering, son of a gun, ya used to have to beat the broads off with a stick. I envision my mom’s mom plopping to this very toilet with rolled eyes and a girly snort, murmuring, mmm hmm, still got it. I flush. I cackle. I bang the door open, eagle knocker quivering in my wake, and my dad says: “Whadayou laughin’ at?”

THEY WERE GODS

ALL HANDS ON: THE2NDHAND AFTER 10, A READER

Download .doc version of “Pregnant Monsters” for your eReader.

All of the monsters are pregnant and I want them. I don’t know why they are monsters. They weren’t born monsters. They were born baby girls, infants, and then became toddlers, children, adolescents, adults — and at some point monsters. Usually they became monsters after they got married and right before — or right as — they got pregnant. And once pregnant the transformation became complete: swelled bellies and ankles, bent backs, widened hips, bulging, tired eyes… I don’t know.
Monsters. I love monsters.

* * *
I had wanted to make my wife a pregnant monster, but she wouldn’t let me. She was too smart for that. She’d figured out that life wasn’t worth living. Or really, that life was so worth living — from beginning to end — then why try to share it with a little hairless creature without teeth? Other things are meant to be done: Grand Canyons explored, Italian coasts considered, Icelandic spas stretched out in. Touristy things crossed with adventurous things. An early-21st-century march up the hill of variety and magnificence. Technologically drowned in data, but still resplendent and set in waves. Waves of fear — violence — joy — growth… The tremendous ache of freedom.

* * *
It happened at an X-mas party first. There was a pregnant woman standing in the center of the room. She held a red-plastic cup in her right hand and laughed lightly. She had a swelled belly and a husband in a plaid shirt and dark jeans. She seemed to order him around without words. He circled her like a rogue planet now caught in an intractable orbit. He circled his wife’s belly — and their precious package, growing pink flesh inside an amniotic cocoon.

I was stoned. I crossed my legs and put my drink atop the walnut speaker to my left. The hosts had a turntable too, cool. I looked at my wife. I flirted with my wife. She was dressed in all black, just opposite me. A gothic Christmas demon — just like I’d always wanted. But then here was this beastly woman, this pregnant monster, this strange lady with imperfect skin, a couple of jags taken out, craters on the moon’s surface. I’d gotten close to her. I stood within three feet of her and stared at her astonishing, savage face. She had canines at the corners of her lips. A vague trace of the animal left in her. Her belly was a bowling ball under a denim dress. A dainty denim dress. Who knew denim would give — but this denim was elasticized and enwrapping.

Her jittery husband stood off to the side like a preying hawk. He might swoop down on me with talons intent. But no, he was a mush. He couldn’t handle his liquor. And he wanted to play instruments in a band still. That was a laugh.

* * *
I didn’t do anything. What could I do? I never do anything and never can do anything. I followed the pregnant monster into the more furnished part of the loft and guessed her months along.

“Six?” I said. I was being vaguely harassing, just like women like.

“Almost,” she said. Her smile spread. Her lips were dark red. Her eyes off brown over milky white. She told me she kept thumbtacks in her purse to ward off the wicked.

“How did you know I was wicked?” I said.

“I didn’t say you were,” she said. She shot me a look — a desire to deflower me. To open her pregnant legs and let me hard-on first inside. Then any other body part that might fit: a fist even. Could I fill up that cavern bearing a newly forming fetus? Would my purple head bounce against a trampoliny skull and/or shoulders? Had it turned yet? Probably not. I’m not interested in such short-lived anatomic. I only want the monsters, the mothers, I suppose.

* * *
We stopped talking. Her husband reminded me of a band that wasn’t Nirvana. My wife had taken refuge in the glassy eyes of a middle-age, spiky-hair queer. She knew him, they were catching up, discussing leather products or something. I wandered into the back rooms and found three people smoking, including the large host. He had some artwork hanging in the hallway too. I liked an obscure one filled with dark blunt webs. Strange ones that can cancel the sun and brim the brain darkly.

“How much for the dark-web one?” I asked.

He had a long lumberjack beard and white t-shirt on. Black jeans. Black boots, maybe. “I don’t know,” he said: “But look at this.”

He pulled a smaller canvas, about the size of a NO PARKING sign, from behind a desk. It contained an ink blot resembling a herring human that’d begun to melt into a puddle of self.

“The Disintegrating Man,” he said. “That’s what I call it.”

He passed me the pipe and I inhaled deeply. And deeply again. I saw the lights of night out the opposite window through the bent Venetian blinds. I liked the piece, but didn’t like it as much as the nameless dark-web one. I told him I liked it and I liked the title too. In fact, it’d been title-less. I’d named it “The Disintegrating Man.” I simply inserted the title into the host’s head serendipitously. We’d both thought of it at the same time, but it’d come out his mouth. He gave birth to it, and I stood to the side and laughed over it. I took another hit. Good weed. Good Christmas weed, just like Santa used to smoke.

I left the room before I got overly tempted to play an organ that was there. I was about to flick the switch and start key tinkling. Tinkling without talent.

* * *
Back in the other room with my wife. What would I do with my wife, except love her? Keep loving her. A droll prospect. How can you keep loving? Love’s detonated, not kept. I’d detonate my love — like a bomb. The bomb of love. Here in this room, with my wife, again.

I went up to my wife. I told her I’d wanted her to become a pregnant monster, but I understood she didn’t want to be one. This I understood. I understood also that I was a miserable wretch who should never have children. I couldn’t care for anyone or anything, aside from my wife and cat. My parents and siblings and friends didn’t count — because they were from long ago. I’m talking about loving something new, creating something new, bringing a new being into existence. If it is a new being. If this is existence. If everything is what it seems. If, etc.

* * *
I walked out of the party with my wife. We had to go to another party. It was the Christmas season and parties were detonating all around and we were discharged from one into another.

At the next party I looked again for a pregnant monster, but couldn’t find one. It was a pity. Anyway I knew a pregnant monster was there: she just wasn’t showing yet. I walked round the room, hunched over, and pressed my right ear against the bellies of all the young to just-under-menopause-age women. I even asked a few to lift up their shirts, skirts, aprons, whatever. My wife rolled her eyes and flirted with the tallest, darkest, handsomest man there. He held a bottle of champagne like a bowling pin. I couldn’t decide if he was going to smash it over my wife’s head, my head, or twist his arm into an unorthodox pour. It didn’t matter. I had work to do. I kept resting my ear against the belly skins of strange women. Most giggled, a few cursed, one kneed my mouth, another shoved me off, then begged me to bring her a drink. I obliged but abandoned her when I found out she was menstruating. Not even close, I thought.

* * *
Later in the night, maybe a year later in the night, we were riding the subway home to Brooklyn. My wife had fallen asleep and her head tilted onto my askew shoulder and she slept a shaky, bobbing sleep. I scanned the subway car. A thickset, sad-faced, stark-naked woman sat alone at the end of the car. The corner loveseat. Not a stitch of clothing on her. Just her thickset body, a few folds of flesh, and a curved abdomen protruding as if she’d swallowed a beach ball. Entranced, I dislodged myself from my seat and gently nestled my wife’s head upon the window’s ledge. Meanwhile, my impregnated streaker stoically sat to the side, unfixing her sad face without breaking into smile.

I got down on all fours like a cat without a tail and crawled across the subway car. It was 4:30 in the morning and no one was aboard save the solitary streaker in shock mode. Though clotheless, she wore an Aunt-Jemima kerchief and had off-hue color skin. Something between bare-ass blue and screaming Munch pink. A decimated human being; a precarious pregnant monster. A madwoman.

I crawled along the car farther and came to her crossed feet. They were broad and unsurprisingly soiled at the soles. Her heavy hands crossed in her lap, blocking her wide bush. I stopped mid-crawl and sat up catcher-style on the balls of my feet. In fact, I wish I’d had a catcher’s mitt because, as I crouched, the woman’s water broke and she slimed me. Streaming watery blood and stinking fluids. I looked into her eyes and she smirked. She lifted her hands from her lap, opened her legs and gushed some more. I was half soaked and stranded in an amniotic puddle.

Soon a pale purple head appeared. She hadn’t meant for it to appear, but it appeared. She tilted her own head back and started to grunt and groan painfully. She shimmied in her seat and the purple head undulated out past its ears. Lots of gelatinous ooze slid and slinked down the gray bench seat. After the head flowered, a bare pink shoulder appeared. In a matter of moments the whole tragic birth was done and I sat with the slimy son in my stained lap. I grasped its ankles, dangled it upside-down like in an old obstetrician’s photo, and slapped its muculent ass. It screamed mightily in my face and I almost dropped it.

Though breathing heavily, the woman appeared relieved. She had a gleeful look on her face. A gleeful, lusty look. For a moment, I wanted to mount her messy mound. Dig in to those dewy, bristling pubes and ravage her. But the little living creature was out and she was a monster no more.

* * *
“Don’t tell me your dreams,” my wife says.

“It wasn’t a dream,” I say.

“Your dreams are like a puppet show I don’t want to see,” she says. “That’s another reason we don’t have kids. I never want to go to puppet shows.”

“Neither do I,” I say.

I’m frying eggs at the kitchen stove. The oozing egg whites and bleeding yolks bring back the irreality of my existence. I remember the queen mother of the subway with a bellyful of baby, a wombful of wee one. All come out to catch me. Or, for I to catch it. The livid, brain-colored blood mother like an alien princess of netherworlds and underworlds of ovarian fates.

“How can I be more comforting and supportive?” I ask my wife. She’s toasting some bread on the oven’s grill. Then she’s buttering it as the oil in the pan below me is sputtering and singeing my skin. A singeing like self-flagellation.

“There’s nothing you can do,” my wife says. “There’s everything you can do.”

“Everything and nothing,” I say.

Again and again.

Where are the pregnant monsters? I think. How did I ever get lost in a life without a pregnant monster? Why isn’t my wife a pregnant monster?

These questions and more and more questions and more and more eggs cracked and broken and bleeding.

IN THE ARMS OF TUESDAY WELD

Spring has sprung and host Harold Ray’s thoughts are returning time and again to “The Ballad of Neal & the Nerve Pills,” a truly haggard tale that he will surely have to tell. House-Band Good Evening just hopes old Harold won’t pass out on the railroad tracks again. Chicago’s most Appalachian literary variety show, SO YOU THINK YOU HAVE NERVES OF STEEL? returns to the Empty Bottle for its April installment!: Wednesday, April 11, doors 8 p.m., show at 9. @Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, Chicago. $3.

Featuring:
Part One of a Complex Curtain-Raiser by Johannes Göransson
Rapped Attacks on Crapitalism by Kris De La Rash
Metier Buffalo Sauce Whipped Up by Patrick Culliton

plus: the Microphone Gymnastics of Russ February and Something Weird That Lasts for a Little Bit and Involves Marc Baez

And our house band, the great Good Evening.

Join us.

And check out Baez’s performance at our October 2011 edition, which follows in the vid — in addition to being a great writer, Baez’s a fantastically funny stand-up. Who knew? More vid at http://youtube.com/the2ndhandutube.

Matt Bell (Michigan), Brian Oliu (Tuscaloosa), Tyler Gobble and Christopher Newgent (Indianapolis) are striking out together into the Deep South to get their new books — The Fullness of Everything (Oliu, Gobble, Newgent) and Cataclysm Baby (Bell) — into your hands, or at least to armwrestle you. Get ‘Over the Top’ and diesel-soaked with the lot and THE2NDHAND editor Todd Dills at Portland Brew East on Eastland in Nashville (not the Deep South, as it were) Sat., April 7, early style. Plenty of time to get a workout, then hit the neighborhood establishments for food and refreshment after.

Join us.

Over the Top
Saturday, April 7, 6 p.m.
Portland Brew East
1921 Eastland Ave, Nashville

Order THE2NDHAND’s 10th-anniversary collection, All Hands On, featuring the work of more than 40 contributors.

Download .doc version of “The Wind’s Wake” for your eReader.

“Lookit there…” Derwyn squinted out across the highway, into the Owl Crick Hollow, where a pigtailed child chased after a fat-bottomed rabbit who was, despite his domestic weight, surprisingly nimble. The child’s father reached out and took firm hold of her shoulders, casting a worried eye at a sky gone olive green. The child swirled and wept into his knees, but allowed herself, slowly, to be coaxed back toward the front door.

The father swallowed hard. A relatively young man realizing, perhaps for the first time, that despite his best intentions he might be forced to explain death to his daughter. He closed his eyes as the sirens began. The child cried louder. Derwyn cheered.

“A little respect for the mourners,” Walter muttered, but Derwyn did not hear. Probably just as well, he thought, watching Derwyn tighten the straps on his wind board, testing the give in repurposed ski boots. Among the myriad concepts a backwoods heel like Derwyn could expect to pass through life without understanding, mourning was likely a blessing; for here was a man with much to mourn and to do so at every given opportunity would surely paralyze even the most basic vital functions — eating, breathing, walking — although admitedly walking was shaky at times and hygiene, especially of the oral and nasal variety, was infrequent enough to be in and of itself reason to mourn. No, Derwyn’s unbridled enthusiasm would never know the weight of tears, which quality the television crews had been, no doubt, eager to capture. That there were no television crews taping presently, for example, had not given Derwyn cause to mourn, though Walter was another story.

They’d come representing reality shows for a nature channel; their current project not far along enough in development even to be given a title, but the general gist was silly rednecks exposing themselves to the danger of weather calamities. There would be stock footage of unusual natural disasters: caves collapsing, falling glacial earthquakes, underwater volcanoes, other things beautifully awful and awfully beautiful. And live footage of those insane enough to enjoy the things most mortals feared. Like Derwyn and Walter: Tornado Surfers. Though it was a true hobby for Derwyn alone. Walter had viewed the situation with the tight lips and dumb glare of a scheming Southern businessman. Given a shot at cable television he could surely parlay Derwyn’s entertaining ignorance into a regular program or at very least a viral YouTube clip sure to bring sufficient publicity to open a novelty gift shop off the bluffs of the interstate.

But the winds refused to show and the producers lost interest. Here they were: solo, off the record. For Walter a final hurrah. He’d wanted to bail on this particular opportunity but couldn’t stomach the pained confusion sure to show on Derwyn’s dumb face. And also there was the fact of the folded paper note inside Walter’s back pocket, the existence of which was strictly personal and probably more than a little fruity. A note to the tornado. Had he been drunk when he wrote it? No, but he would continue to tell himself otherwise. He had, in fact, only been emotional, overcome with mourning for lost opportunities, lost youth, lost ambition, loss in general. He couldn’t remember the letter’s exact phrasing and he was too embarrassed to reread it, but it was something to the effect of:

“I know you weren’t here when I wanted you. Maybe you feel terrible for that. I’m sure you feel terrible for lots of other things. People curse you constantly for ruining their homes, their farms, their lives. I understand. Often I too feel terrible. I hope, maybe, today that we can dance together and forget that we are terrible.”

It was Derwyn’s ! yippee ! that pulled Walter from his reflection. And there it was: a funnel cloud larger than a football stadium, sending trees flying like dominoes. Walter felt his windboard pull his feet above his head. He caught sight of the pet bunny rabbit, floating next to part of a shed’s roof. The rabbit was looking at him. He could not move his arm enough to wave, but tried to part his lips and whisper, Good luck.

MY PRETZEL HAS EYES

Download .doc version of “Faith” for your eReader.

–For Rhian Ellis, inspired in part by her novel After Life

Twenty-two years ago, I almost died in a car crash. There was no foul play involved, just bad luck, the other driver momentarily taking her eyes off the road and slamming into me head on. I was in my Honda hatchback while she was in a boat of a Buick, and I didn’t have my seat belt on. My body was launched straight through the windshield like a cannonball, and the only reason I survived was luck. According to the police report, if I had landed just half a foot to either side, my skull would’ve been crushed by the rocks below. But all I’d hit was sand, soft, water-logged sand that cradled me like a mother.

A month after the crash, I was in a convenience store to buy a pack of AA batteries. It was a few minutes past midnight, and there were four people in the store including me. One of them, his face pantyhose-squished, pulled out a shotgun hidden in his trench coat and aimed its twin barrels at the clerk, who emptied the contents of the register into a plastic bag without a word. I’d been at the counter, in the middle of purchasing the batteries, so I handed my purse to the clerk. I remember the hold-up man smiling behind his mask, his lips flattening underneath the nylon to reveal the glint of a gold front tooth. Behind him, the other customer tried to flee. The man turned around and shot her in the back, at which point the clerk pulled out his own pistol and shot the man at point-blank range, but his aim had been off and he took a chunk of an ear. More than anything, that’s what I recall from that night, the man’s frayed ear blooming forth from the constriction of the pantyhose, tatters of bullet-blown flesh flapping like a flag amid a swirl of bloody mist. And then there were two more shots, one from the man and one from the clerk simultaneously, both to the chest. My ears rang hollow for days.

You’d think that after two encounters like that, I would’ve been angry at the world, or God, or whatever else was out there. But I wasn’t. At the time, I thought I deserved every bit of misery, because that summer, the day before we were to leave for our respective colleges, in my backyard, I grabbed a shovel and swung it as hard as I could at my boyfriend’s head. It was morning, the green grass soaked in dew, and he’d been dozing on the folding chair, and now he was slumped on the ground, bleeding out onto the tarp I’d laid out.

* * *
There was an investigation. I wasn’t there in person, since I’d gone off to college in another state, but since the university library had a subscription to my hometown newspaper, I was able to keep abreast of the situation. I’d been questioned by the police before I left, since everyone knew Andrew and I were in a relationship, but I must’ve played the part of the grieving girlfriend well enough. They couldn’t find a reason to keep me.

So each morning before my first class, I read about the case, but a strange thing happened. As I read about the state-wide search and Andrew’s sister’s tears and his parents’ lament and all the names and streets of the place I knew so well, I began to feel less familiar with what was going on, the very act of reading these printed words creating a distancing effect, as if I were watching a movie playing before my eyes.

Perhaps it was a coping mechanism, a way for my subconscious to keep me from dialing the phone number on the business card of the detective in charge and confess. Even though I’d dumped his body a hundred miles from the shore – weighed down with six of the heaviest dumbbells gathering dust in the attic, rolling him off the stern of my father’s motorboat and into the blue fathoms of the Atlantic Ocean – I had a hard time convincing myself that I wouldn’t be caught. It was only in books and movies that people got away with murder. In reality, the police weren’t inept, the criminals weren’t brilliant, and bad people got what they deserved.

But then other information began to surface. That Andrew’s father was involved in a pyramid scheme with shady investors, some with ties to the Russian mob, while his mother had purchased prescription painkillers from an unlicensed doctor in New Mexico. The focus of the investigation spread wider, which was good for me, but for a couple of days this was national news, which didn’t seem so good. And yet in the end, I had nothing to worry about.

Because misfortune has a shelf life. The story of Andrew’s disappearance petered out in less than a month, as the media found more compelling stories to chomp on. The case remained open, but by the time I returned home for Thanksgiving, it was as if Andrew had never lived at all.

* * *
I’m a psychic. That’s how I make my living, by giving people readings of various kinds – their futures, their past, often involving the deceased. I used to be ashamed of my profession, and there’s probably still a part of me that continues to be embarrassed, but by and large, I’ve made peace with it. At parties – not that I can even recall when I last went to one – when small talk turns to people’s jobs, somebody inevitably makes some snide comment. My response: I don’t work in a cubicle, I don’t have a boss, and I make enough money to keep a roof over my head and food on the table.

“So,” says the unbeliever, “what am I thinking?”

“I have no idea,” I say. “I’m looking into your head right now, but you know, I’m not finding much.”

Usually this gets a few people chuckling, but it’s not a joke.

Most people don’t understand that what I do is not a parlor trick. It is real, but at the same time, unquantifiable, like any other art. As long as I have faith from my client, I can deliver.

Doubters will scoff, of course. Why wouldn’t I target the poor folks who already believe in this mumbo-jumbo? That’s why they’re here in the first place, because they’re gullible enough, stupid enough, to swallow my lies.

Except it’s not like that. The relationship between medium and client is closer to coach and athlete, teacher and student, and although shrinks never want to hear this, therapist and patient. One cannot exist without the other; it’s an even exchange, a feedback loop of the most beautiful kind. What I am is a conduit, a vessel that brings out the information that is already contained within the body of the seeker. Everyone has a key, and when they’re ready, I can help them turn the knob and swing open the door.

* * *
I give readings in the furnished basement of my home. The walls are lined with red velvet and the round table where I sit across from the client is made of mahogany, its edge smoothed by two centuries of human touch. I don’t have a crystal ball or Tarot cards; what I do is hold onto the client’s hands, close my eyes, and blank out my mind to concentrate on the faint voices surrounding me.

I’ve heard voices for as long as I can remember. In childhood, they were my imaginary friends. In grammar school, I was often scolded by teachers for my lack of attention, and in junior high I spent a summer in a sleepaway camp that was actually closer to a sanitarium. But by the time I got to high school, I’d learned enough about myself to keep quiet. The only reason I went to college was to get away from home, and after the first semester, I dropped out and started working for Madame Bouvier, who wasn’t the least bit French and who was even less of a medium. What I learned from her was how far you could go in this business without any actual ability. She always looked the part, never leaving the house without wrapping herself in an elaborate shawl, her frizzy red hair perpetually styled to a slight dishevelment, giving her an air of quirky preoccupation.

After a year of apprenticeship, I set up my own practice, and it was here, yesterday, that Andrew’s mother paid me a visit.

* * *
It’s amazing what you can forget, even something as momentous as killing another human being. Many people think it’s the greatest sin, and I agree. More than two decades ago, I held the wooden handle of the shovel, and knowing exactly what the end result would be, I swung. It’s called a crime of passion if you commit it in a blind fit of love, a temporary lapse of reason, crossing over the line between sanity and insanity. My actions did not fit this definition, but there’s no question in my mind that I did it for love. I loved Andrew, and Andrew loved me. Maybe his wasn’t as much or as strong as mine, but that was just because of time. Like a fruit on a tree, love ripens, and mine just happened to be sweeter, juicier, than his.

Before I wrapped him in the tarp, I cupped the indentation in his skull, Andrew’s blood pooling in my hand, and felt the sticky warmth leak through my fingers and I squeezed my eyes shut and told myself to remember this moment for the rest of my life. Because even though what I’d done was right, it was also selfish. I’d taken away a person’s life, and this was never going to change.

For a good long while, I thought of that day every morning. It felt good to remember Andrew’s death right after I woke up, because sleeping was like a death, and each rising sun was a rebirth. But then came a time when I wouldn’t think of him until I was brushing my teeth, and it wasn’t long until I’d skip a day or two until an image from the day returned to me: the dampness of the shovel’s worn handle from the misty morning, the comma-shaped cowlick in his auburn hair, the ebbing warmth and the whorls of smoke from the embers of the fire pit.

It’s just what happens when you keep living while the other person remains dead. Evolution dictates that we shed what we don’t use, and I wasn’t using Andrew anymore. There was no need to, so he, like my menagerie of stuffed animals on the bed of my childhood, receded into the distant shores of my past.

My forgetting of Andrew does not make me a bad person. It just makes me like everybody else.

* * *
There are two types of people who come for a reading: those who believe and those in desperation. Andrew’s mother, Jocelyn, was the latter. Her eyes darted at the darkened corners of the room, and for the duration of her visit, she never uncrossed her arms.

It was shocking how old she’d gotten, her blonde hair gone platinum, a noticeable stoop in her narrow shoulders, but then again, I’m sure she’d thought the same of me. No longer was I the lithe, nubile thing that had been the source of her son’s infatuation. I wouldn’t call myself fat, but I’m most likely headed there. Which is fine with me. It happens to the best of us.

“Mel,” she said, and that was another shock, a name nobody calls me anymore. If I run into a client at the grocery store, they always address me in full, Madame Melody. Every piece of mail I receive reconfirms my grown-up identity. “Mel” embodies my adolescence, and I almost swooned from the strength of its nostalgia.

“Jocelyn,” I said. From the get-go, she’d wanted to be addressed by her first name. She looked relieved.

“For a second, I had the horrible thought that you might not remember me.”

“Now why would you think that.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“That is true.”

She opened a Ziploc sandwich bag and placed a bone in my hand.

“Be careful,” she said. “It’s brittle.”

Andrew, in my hand. I knew it was him. The bone was white and hollow, a curved piece of human resiliency about the size of my pinky, tapered at the ends and shaped like a smile, or a frown, I suppose, depending on how you held it.

“What part is it?” I asked.

It was a rib. After more than two decades, a deep-sea fisherman had found the remains of her son’s body, his hook catching on the rib cage. As years passed under the ocean, Andrew’s jaw had fallen into the cavity where his heart had once been.

Enough of his teeth were still attached to make the identification against dental records.

“Did you bring the rest of the bones?”

“No,” Jocelyn said. “They’re in a casket.”

“And you came to see me because…”

“Well,” she said, squeezing her arms even closer to herself, “you knew him.”

“I did.”

“I thought it might help, that you knew him.”

“For what?”

For the first time, she looked like the woman I used to know. She had a temper; Andrew used to tell me how everyone was afraid of her.

“Why are you making this difficult?”

And here I told her my usual speech, that I needed her to believe. If she wanted for me to communicate with her son, then she was the one who had to do it.

She said nothing for a long time. We just sat there, in the dying hours of the afternoon, a shard of sunlight from the curtained window splitting the tabletop.

“Will it work?” she finally asked.

“If we both want it to, then yes.”

“I want to know what happened,” she said, “what happened to my baby.”

I laid my hands on the table, palm side up, and she slipped her hands into mine, her skin as delicate as tissue paper. When she leaned closer, I could smell the same peachy perfume she always wore.

I listened, but I had trouble concentrating because for some reason, I had to pee, even though I’d hardly had anything to drink all day.

“This is embarrassing,” I said, “but could you excuse me for one second?”

Jocelyn nodded, and I hurried up the stairs.

I had to shade my eyes from the living room walls, glaring like blank billboards on a sunny day. I ducked into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet without turning on the light, and it was as if the Hoover dam broke, my pee just going and going.

So far, I thought I was managing this situation. The mother of the boy I’d murdered was in my house, and she was asking me to get in touch with him. The circumstances were unusual, but not impossible. In fact, on a logical level, it made absolute sense. I’d known him before I killed him, and because of my line of work, why wouldn’t his mother enlist me for this purpose? There was no one else better for the job to recall her dead son to the plane of the living.

But it wasn’t like I hadn’t tried before.

I’m not the same person who’d snuck into the tool shed and removed the blue tarp from the shelf, grabbing the shovel on the way out. I hate it when people ask the question, “If you had to do it all over again, would you?” Of course I would. That’s why I am who I am.

I killed Andrew because I never wanted him to leave. I know that sounds crazy, but back then, it seemed sensible, even practical. I couldn’t imagine being so far away from him, and this way, he’d always be by my side. Every day I was speaking with the deceased, from a pair of twin uncles on my mother’s side to a six-year-old boy who’d lived two houses down before the Great Depression, so I was confident, I was young, I was stupid. My belief in my abilities was so strong that it didn’t even occur to me that I could fail, that when the rusted head of the shovel struck Andrew, when the vibration from the impact of metal striking bone ran all the way up to my collarbone, it would be the last time I’d feel him.

Back at the table of my reading room, when I’d held Jocelyn’s hand once more, there was nothing I wanted more than to feel Andrew’s presence.

“Is he…here?” she asked. Those three words of hers carried such vulnerability, the barest skein of hope, a sliver of frailty that pierced the very center of me.

“Yes,” I said.

Sometimes I lie to my clients. I don’t enjoy this part of my job, but there are times when it has to be done.

“Why?” she asked. “Can you please ask him why?”

I opened my eyes.

“Love,” I said.

* * *
The funeral is like a high school reunion, all the familiar faces of my youth congregated on this grassy hill. Time has been cruel to just about everyone equally, the men with swollen bellies and receding hairlines, the women wearing too much makeup in an effort to conceal the obvious.

I don’t even like driving by cemeteries, because for me, they’re as loud as a convention hall. I hum a tune to fight the overwhelming gaggle of conversations inside my head, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair,” the last song I heard before arriving here.

Nobody pays me any attention, not even a glance, which is just fine by me. I was Invisible Mel back in the day, the weirdo with the Ouija board in her backpack, so it’s no surprise that I continue to be shunned.

“I’m glad you made it,” Jocelyn says. She’s wearing black like all the other women. I feel a little self-conscious with my burgundy dress, but it’s the darkest thing I own.

“It’s good to see you again,” I say, and it’s true. I’d forgotten how much she’d meant to me until I saw her again. With the amount of time I’d spent in their household, she was like a second mother.

She leads me to a row of seats on the other side of the grave, opposite from where her husband and daughter are sitting.

“You don’t want to be with your family?” I ask.

“They need their space,” she says.

Once we sit, I see not only see Andrew’s headstone but another one adjacent to it:
JOCELYN SUMMERS: 1943-2011

“I didn’t know you were dead,” I say.

“Death is life, and life is death,” Jocelyn says. “Just the flip side of the same coin.”

“You don’t look dead.”

She smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“I should’ve known you were dead. It’s my job to know.”

Jocelyn lays a hand on my shoulder. “We’re not perfect.”

It’s been a long time since I cried. So long that I can’t remember the last time. And now that I’ve started, I’m not sure if I can stop. Jocelyn offers me a handkerchief, and I deluge it with my tears.

“I was sure I’d be reunited with him once I died, but that’s not how it works. He’s still lost to me.”

I want to tell her that it was me, I did it, I was the one who brained her baby, but even now, I can’t do it. It’s one thing to know the truth in yourself, but to say it to another – it’s like you’re giving it away, and I don’t want to do that. The actions I’d taken those many years ago belong to no one else but me.

“The funny thing about being dead,” Jocelyn says, “it’s not that different from being alive. Isn’t that just awful?”

Across from us, her husband and daughter are clutching each other as the minister reads a passage from the Bible.

Jocelyn rises, and I rise with her. She reaches for me, and I grab her cold, cold hand, and we walk down the aisle of the grieving living, and leave this verdant sadness together.

Order THE2NDHAND’s 10th-anniversary collection, All Hands On, featuring the work of more than 40 contributors.