But still I didn’t speak. How could it ever work with such a story between us? But even once was too many times to speak it.
Larger-than-life
, that story. Larger than anything. Perhaps
neither of us would be capable of climbing from the depths of that story? Weeks passed still, and I didn’t tell it. I began to know I never would. Were the pies, then, a sort of peace offering—an attempt to implant a pleasant memory of myself, to sweeten his mind in favor of me in the inevitable event of my betrayal?
43
As we sat at my kitchen table, my mind would often wander from the conversation, and eventually settle me into a familiar image. It wasn’t a confused or disturbing one, as those of earlier weeks. It contained nothing rotten, nothing undead. It was me, floating on an inner tube in a lake, with him sitting on a dock nearby. He was reading a book, enjoying the breeze, only occasionally glancing up to smile at me. He didn’t seem to notice that I was slowly bobbing away from the dock, but still, I’d just look back at him and wave. The sight of him so content was comforting, but it felt pretty natural, even exhilarating, to drift away. But what was it I wanted to tell him? Bobbing lazily, often I couldn’t quite remember, until the last minute, when I was nearly out of hearing distance. By then, I’d need to shout it, if I was ever going to say it at all. It was that he shouldn’t ask himself later if he should have reached out and pulled me back. He shouldn’t think back and wonder what he might have done differently. He was, in his way, my
white knight
. That I would remember, even if the rest was too hard.
44
I wasn’t sure what I owed him. Or admirers of the Glass Girl, left forever hanging from the tip of her pinky finger. To myself? Self-defense is an act that implies you have something valuable to defend. After the instinct, you begin to wonder. What,
specifically, was I aiming to save? What, beyond instinct, makes life worth saving? This isn’t a question you answer, of course, but you try to remember to keep asking. It is for the sake of that question that I need to get out of here. What is here? The time and place that nearly finished me? The setting of the story that could swallow up everything that might be mine? To be sure, I’m counting everything as here. This desk, where I wrote Brownlow that letter. The apartment where the dead prom queen resides. This city, these faces, this quiet. The whole
ball of wax
.
45
Inevitably, I would have to leave Scout with the rest. I regret this, because if there’s one thing for which I have a
warm spot
here, it’s him. I wish there were a path that included him, but that’s impossible. The day Brownlow chose me was the last day I really occupied this space. He wished to remove me from it, and in a sense, he succeeded. But any losses suffered by either Scout or me are significantly fewer in this version—the one where my elbow slipped and knocked over a glass. This is the best version either of us can probably conceive of, and the only one I care to imagine. Somewhere deep in the layers of remote possibility, there was a version that ended with me telling him, over tea and pie. Instead of this way. But that version won’t ever be.
46
Before the final
wrap-up
, Red, I should explain about your book. But doesn’t this just beat all? I have no idea what happened to it, in the end. We both know now that I dropped it sometime during that twelve-second stretch between there
and here. But after that? Maybe the police found it. But why, then, wouldn’t they mention it in the newspapers? An odd finding, wouldn’t you think? Maybe it still sits there now, in a plastic bag at the police department, in a file drawer. A kind of shibboleth to distinguish the real girl from the hoaxes, should anyone ever come forward. The real girl will know the title of the lost history.
47
But maybe someone picked it up before the police got there, during the cold dawn of that first next day. Sometime at sunup, long after the gurgling had stopped behind the trees, but before the body was found. Someone might have been jogging, tripped over this
softbound
scrap of history, and taken it home, thinking they might just read it. Or it was kicked away—kicked along the path by some kids shortcutting their way to school. Or carried away by a stray mutt and chewed to a slobbery pulp. Somehow shoved beyond the parameters of what would be the crime scene. In any and all versions, it’s out of my hands. After everything, could this be all that it was meant to be? That I would have something to carry with me that day? Did all that history lead me to nothing more than an odd good luck charm? And now that it’s gone, what will I carry with me, from this thing to the next?
48
Whatever I’ll carry, this is what I leave—the explanation, the story I would tell. You told me once that your own stories have no moral, no
subtext
. There is no obligatory response of awe, admiration, gratitude, or pity. That your presence at a certain place and moment was coincidental, and that you’re no better
or worse than anyone for it. Does telling the story, then, make it not so much yours? Not so much your private and singular possession, but a shared object of all who hear it? Something others can hear—or even tell—as suits their particular ear? You’ve said you wish to share history, not possess it. But can it really ever be that way, Red? When the blood is on our hands alone?
49
Seems wishful thinking, but I’ll try it this one time. Since nearly all the words are set now, all that’s left is the telling. Your eyes have told me you wouldn’t be shocked by anything. Your hands tell me you would have killed him yourself. Your voice has always calmed me, even when you talked of the grenade in your foxhole. As I write this, I can almost hear you. You do what you have to, honey. What can I say? And now the telling’s almost over. Just a few more words, then a few more days, and maybe I’ll be free of it. Once the thing is released to a perpetuity of endless words and endless quiet. My own bit of forgotten, irrelevant
subliterature
. Made even smaller, even more forgettable, once hacked to pieces and scattered. Not dust yet, but closer to it. Will it blow away into nothing? Or piece itself into meaningful existence? I will leave that to you—you and your knack for stories. Because this is the only telling this one will ever get from me.
50
“Yeah, Mary Anne,” I mumbled. “Right. As if you don’t still tell this story over in your head every day of your life. As if you could ever stop asking what it means.”
Even if I didn’t entirely believe the finality of her last
paragraph, I appreciated the sentiment. The girl had discipline, I had to give her that. Wrestle it down to fifty paragraphs, call it your “past,” then pack it away in a dusty file.
I poured a shot of gin.
“Good work,” I said. “Good try.”
The citations stared back at me. All I could see was their whiteness. The words blurred in front of my eyes. Anything could have been typed there.
Try
was the operative word here. I gazed openmouthed at the shot I’d just poured. Sure, there was some bullshit in this story of hers. But at least she’d tried.
I held the stack in my left hand and tried to flip through the cits with my right. There was a particular cit I wanted to find.
I didn’t like the last one so much because I didn’t believe in it. What to
do
with the story was not so much what I cared about. Because you never control the story. The story does with you what it will. And each time you try to fight it down to a beginning and end, it dominates you a little more. So she’d gotten it wrong in the end. But there were places in the middle where I thought she’d gotten it right.
I found the cit I liked and laid it in front of me.
“Now we’re talkin’,” I slurred. But there was no sobriety left in me to read it.
I pushed the gin shot away from me, laid my head on the cit, and passed out.
Mona started knocking just after four
. I think it took me about ten minutes to actually reach the door.
“Jesus,” she said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I stepped aside, letting her into my kitchen.
“I was wondering if I’d have to kick some ass to get in here. I was about to.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
Mona gazed at my kitchen table. It was a mess of citations and used glasses. A few cits were stuck to the plastic tablecloth where I’d spilled a little Coke. I needn’t have bothered to hide the gin bottle—I’d left out the rum and the schnapps bottles, and the room stunk of gin anyhow.
“Let’s go to the living room,” I said, feeling exposed. “It’s a mess in here.
“What’s up?” I asked again, leading her to my futon. I flopped down on it, but she remained standing. “I suppose it’s just as dreary in here, isn’t it?”
“It smells too,” she added.
“Yeah, well. Sorry. That’s what happens when you drop in on a bachelor on his yearly bender.”
“Yearly bender?”
“Last one too. Last one ever.”
“That’s what they all say,” Mona said, and sighed, sitting next to me. “What’s a
bender
all about, anyway? Have you ever wondered? I mean, where’s that word come from? What distinguishes a bender from just a regular old drinking binge?”
I shrugged and sprawled on the futon again.
“We could ask George,” she continued.
“Go right ahead,” I said. “I’d rather stew in my own ignorance than stroke that asshole.”
“Billy. How uncharacteristically
unkind
of you. And you’re mixing your metaphors. Who ever strokes an asshole?”
“You know what I meant. I meant stroke his
ego.”
“You know what?” Mona said, ignoring my clarification.
“‘Bender’ is like ‘shit’ and ‘shat.’ It’s not something I wonder about as a lexicographer. It’s something I wonder about as a regular old
person.”
“Pretty soon you won’t even know the difference.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say.” Mona frowned. “So, are you really drunk?”
“Not sure. I think it’s worn off some. And I’ve got a headache.”
She picked up my oldest joke book. It had been wedged halfway into the futon cushion since she’d left it there the night we raided the correspondence files.
“Maybe I ought to find a good one for you,” she said. “Maybe that’d cheer this place up.”
“Don’t bother. I’m offa that shit.”
“You’ve replaced jokes with liquor?”
“No.”
“If I were you, I’d just combine them. There’s nothing like a good joke after a couple of drinks.”
I sat up and faced her. “I want to tell you about the jokes.”
“You’ve already told me. You rate them. Double-plus is
the highest. And you promised to tell me a double-plus sometime.”
“No, I mean, I really want to
tell
you about the jokes,” I said, leaning closer to her.
Mona moved away from me, just slightly.
“I’m not gonna
do
anything. Jesus,” I said. “Just listen. Do you want to hear, or not?”
Mona arranged her lips in a thin, disapproving line. “I guess.”
“I’m trying to tell you that there’s a story behind the jokes.”
Mona nodded.
“It’s about … distraction,” I said slowly.
Mona sighed, but looked me in the eye. “Distraction,” she repeated.
“It’s about what you do when you can’t stand to lie alone in the dark. I started when I was eighteen. I had cancer and my aunt gave me this book called
Laughter: The Best Medicine.”
“You had
cancer?”
“Just
listen
. I thought she was a fucking dumb old biddy for giving me this stupid book. Like a bunch of dumb jokes would fix anything.”
“You had cancer?” she repeated, looking, predictably, like a deer caught in headlights.
“Don’t worry about the stupid
cancer
. I’m talking about
jokes
. Okay?”
She nodded uncertainly.
“One night when there was nothing good on TV, when I was feeling nauseous and pissed, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else, I picked it up and read the whole thing cover to cover. The next day I read it again with a pencil, and rated everything.”
Mona waited.
“It’s distraction. You know what I mean?”
Mona opened her mouth to answer, but didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“When did you have it?” she asked finally. “What kind?”
“They figured out what it was right before graduation. Hodgkin’s disease.”
“That’s so … awful, Billy.”
The word was inadequate, but that wasn’t Mona’s fault.
“Has something happened?” she asked gently. “Is that why you’re drunk? Has it come back?”
“No,” I said. “Just the opposite. It’s pretty much gone for good. It’s been five years. After five years, your chances of it coming back are much lower. Five years yesterday. December twenty-eighth. I celebrate every year.”
Mona thought for another moment.
“So you had, um, chemotherapy?” She looked tentative, as if she might break something by saying the words too loud. “And everything?”
“Uh … yeah. Listen. We don’t need to … you know, it was Hodgkin’s disease. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s a kind of lymphoma. But it’s not as virulent as the other kinds. If they catch it early, the survival rate’s, like, better than ninety percent. So it’s not like … you know. Basically, if they catch it early, chances are you’re gonna live. And I did. Obviously.”
Mona regarded me skeptically, and for a moment, I wondered if she thought I was telling a wild drunkard’s tale.
“Do you always apologize for that?” she asked.
I closed my eyes and ignored her question. A couple of minutes passed before I decided to talk.