"As Jacques Derrida reminds us [Mémoires: for Paul de Man], 'a title is always a promise'. As such it is characterized by a certain excess, hanging over the text and our reading, as we wait in some hope and expectancy of discovering why the work has the title it has."
- Veering: A Theory of Literature by Nicholas Royle (2011)
What the #@&% Is That?: The Saga Anthology of the Monstrous and the Macabre (2016, Saga Press)
Edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen
* * *
Les trois rois
As to What the #@&% Is That? as a story criteria, I can only say that many horror tales in the last two centuries would qualify. Evaluating each of this collection's stories would require the judgment of someone who has read the book cover to cover.
Reader, I am not that reader.
With anthologies, my first pass is the big name pass: reading stories by the two or three dynamos that never disappoint. (Usually this amounts to Ramsey Cambell and Reggie Oliver). After that, it might be years before I crack the covers and work another layer.
* * *
"The House That Love Built" by Grady Hendrix is a dark high-speed domestic comedy. The narrator lives with two wives. One wife is a ghost; each wife knows she is being haunted. Both blame our narrator, the husband.
At first we think we know which wife is the ghost. Then we begin to revise our understanding of the term. Hendrix dizzies us: pushing dialogue and scene transitions like a carny running a midway merry-go-round.
Karen says the kitchen table is the best place to Ouija since it's in the physical center of the house. The edges of her speech are softened by a beery slur.
"So, now what?" I ask, looking at her over the Parker Brothers board.
"Now we empty our minds," she says, placing her fingers on the planchette.
"Shouldn't be hard for you," I say.
She shoots me the bird. Somehow, I knew she was going to do that. I put my fingers on the planchette and nothing happens. Fifteen minutes of nothing happening later, she breaks out the vodka. I tell her I don't want any.
"Your ghost showing up anytime soon?" I say. "I want to get to a meeting tonight."
"Maybe he's busy," Karen slurs. "Maybe he's hauling a big load of sanctimonious bullshit to his wife in North Dakota."
"Hand me that bottle," I say.
I'll do anything to keep the peace.
Another fifteen minutes pass and nothing happens unless you count getting drunk.
"Let's call it a night," I tell her.
"In a hurry to go hang with your crackhead buddies at AA?" she asks.
"If you're not careful, I'm going to start taking your comments personally," I say.
"Oh, no," she says. "I'd better watch out or the big pussy might actually do something."
We both have a couple of drinks from the bottle while we consider the implications of her comment.
"It's ten o'clock," I say, taking the high road. "We can watch The Daily Show and go to bed. Nothing good is going to happen tonight."
"Is that a Christian thing?" she says. "Early to bed, early to rise?"
"Actually," I say, trying to keep things light, "Benjamin Franklin said that."
"Judge not," she says, "lest ye be judged. And all you do is judge, you sanctimonious prick."
"All you do is drink," I say.
Karen and I sit there hating each other until Angela comes in and freezes in the doorway, purse over one shoulder, keys in her hand.
"What is that thing doing in my house?" she asks.
The vodka's got me foggy, so it takes a minute to realize she isn't talking about Karen.
"I'm just playing," I say.
"Playing, my ass," Karen says. "You've been judging me for years with your AA, your church, all your shit."
"It's a tool of the Devil," Angela says, her eyes glued to the Ouija board.
"What is it you're scared of?" I ask.
"You're changing," Karen says, and the bottom of her eyes get wet. "And when you realize I'm not changing too, you're going to ditch me for another woman."
"You're inviting evil into this house," Angela says.
"That's not on the menu," I say to both of them. "This is the house that love built. We have our problems, sure, but nothing bad is going to happen."
"You've been drinking," Angela says, noticing the vodka.
"You're full of shit," Karen says.
"Come on," I say. "Let's play. Let's play Ouija together and you'll see there's no call to be scared."
Karen makes a dismissive sound and stands up. Angela turns to go. Sometimes, it's more than I can take.
"Sit right down right this fucking minute!" I shout. "You're going to sit the fuck down and play the fucking Ouija with me and we're going to have a nice fucking time."
Karen freezes. Angela stops. They both look at me scared.
"Please," I say. "Sit down."
Angela and Karen sit down next to each other.
"I don't want to do this," Angela says. "Please don't make me do this."
I look at my two wives sitting across the table from me, their four eyes red and wet.
"It's okay to be scared," I say. "But you have to push past your fear."
Putting my fingers on the planchette, I nod at it encouragingly. Karen crosses her arms. Angela raises her hands, then lowers them.
"Don't be like that," I say, then I raise my eyebrows to let them both know I am not to be fucked with right now.
In one of those beautiful moments of synchronicity, they place their fingertips on the planchette simultaneously.
"Now what?" Angela asks.
"Let's ask the spirit if it has a name," I say.
"No," Angela says.
"Spirit, what is your name?" Karen asks.
The planchette slides around the board on its little felt feet and I can't tell which one of us is steering. It stops on A, then it stops on N, then it stops on G, then it keeps on stopping until it spells a name.
"Who the fuck is Angela?" Karen asks.
"How does it know my name?" Angela asks.
"Ask it," I say.
"Who's Angela?" Karen asks.
The planchette burns up the board, and together Karen and Angela spell out two words:
HIS WIFE.
"What the fuck?" Karen asks the board. "What the fuck?" she asks me.
Angela is pale and her lips are trembling. I hate seeing Angela upset. Karen, on the other hand, she can go fuck herself.
"It's just the subconscious mind of the people playing," I reassure them. "That's all it is. You aren't even aware you're doing it, but your subconscious mind spells out what you're thinking with involuntary muscle contractions. So, if you're scared of something, you spell out what you're scared of."
Karen stands up.
"Your fingers are on it," she says. "Your fingers are on it, so why the fuck are you thinking about some wife named Angela?"
I wish she could be quiet for one minute.
"That's not true," Angela says. "I didn't do that. I didn't move it. Someone else was moving that thing."
"Answer me!" Karen screams.
They're talking too fast for me to figure out a response that'll suit both of them.
"It's just a game," I say. "We don't have to play."
"I always thought something was fucked up," Karen says. "What man lives in an empty house with no furniture? What man doesn't have any friends and is either in his truck or sitting on the sofa reading a fucking book all the time? Did you kill Angela? Was she your first wife? Or just some truck-stop whore you picked up? Don't tell me I'm lying. There's a female presence in this house. I been feeling it for weeks!"
"There are no evil presences," I say. "There's no one here but us."
"You invited something in here," Angela says. "Your self-pleasure, and your drinking, and I know you haven't been faithful to me. You let something dark in here with us. You've let a demon of lust and addiction into our home."
These two start carrying on and they have no idea of the pressure I'm under. They have no idea what it feels like to be pulled in two different directions all the time. They have no idea what it's like to watch every word you say.
"Pray with me," Angela says, reaching across the table and gripping my wrists while Karen stalks the kitchen, ranting. "Pray with me. There's something in this house. We'll pray, then we'll burn this thing in the backyard."
"Think I'm stupid?" Karen shouts. "Think I've bought your bullshit? I know you been cheating on me from day one, but so fucking what? I can cheat on you anytime I want. You murdered your first wife? I'll put your ass in prison if you so much as touch a hair on my head. I'll lock you up, motherfucker!"
Finally, it all gets to be too much.
"I didn't kill Angela!" I shout.
And I know I've made a mistake. Angela's face crumples, Karen's eyes light up.
"Why would you say that?" Angela asks. "Why would you say that about me?"
"Then why do you keep talking about her?" Karen asks, and storms out of the room.
I hear Karen slam the door of the downstairs bathroom. Angela jumps.
"What was that?" she asks.
"Wait here," I say.
I check the bathroom door in the front hall, but Karen's locked it from the inside. Angela stands in the living room doorway, watching me.
"It's jammed," I explain.
"It's locked, you bastard," Karen shouts from behind the door.
"I'm leaving this dark place," Angela says.
As the reader approaches the end of "The House That Love Built," identifying spectral protagonists starts to look like navigating a funhouse. The authorial control Hendrix demonstrates is chilling: such competence, we realize with growing excitement, is not a lost art.
* * *
"Mobility" by Laird Barron made me reflect on many things. One is this: Freud, Fort, and Barron might be said to share a theme: We are cattle.
"Mobility" may be a narrative, a case history, or a time-bending mindscrew. For its protagonist, those are the least unpleasant options.
As a child, did Bryan shoot a squirrel with a BB gun? Has he been visited by the shape-changer Mr. Mandibole at different times in his life? Why have Bryan's insides liquified, and why has his body been reshaped into a gangrenous trunk?
Mandibole takes him to a family cottage to recuperate. But:
The house seemed much cheerier by daylight. Its crooked edges were blunted, its remnant shadows less sinister. In some respects, the place reminded him of his childhood home—Mom in her flour-dusted apron, Pastor Tallen on the step wagging his finger, and the serial puppy murders, ritual suicides, and forced sodomy. Reminded him of how Dad sometimes hid under the bed while wearing Mom's nylon stocking over his face, and the homemade blood transfusion kit he unpacked when they played Something Scary.
Bryan is not the first Barron character to grow up with a dad like that.
A dark-haired toddler pedaled a red tricycle into the room. The child wheeled close to the couch and stopped. His shiny hair and plastic features glowed with roly-poly good health.
"I know you," Bryan said in a perfectly clear voice. His breathing came easily. Still woozy, still full of pustulant anxiety (and pus), yet he grudgingly admitted that the compulsory mutilation had alleviated the worst symptoms of whatever disease gripped him. "Yes, you were there. I know you."
"As I know you," the child said.
"Wait. Who are you?"
"But you know. Feel better?"
"Yes. It's a miracle."
"Leeching is good for the soul. You aren't really better. Daddy said it's only temporary. You've got the gang-green."
The putrefaction of Bryan's hands had corrupted his arms to the elbows. He'd done his best to ignore this latest incursion of rot and enjoy the cartoons. Now the meddling kid had ruined everything. "What am I supposed to do? It's in my arms, for fuck's sake."
"Everything must go." The boy rolled over to the couch and handed Bryan a serrated penknife. "Daddy says to do a good job. Bye!"
The sky darkened and clotted and the windows became opaque with purple. Bryan sniffled bitter tears. He gripped the toy knife between his thumb and index finger and made the first, tiny cut. Better still.
Months oozed past. Years. Once his traitorous limb was severed, he dropped the knife and took a few breaths. Yes, better. Lighter. Addition by subtraction made increasing sense with a come-to-Jesus shock of epiphany. The next stage presented a challenge to his transcendence. Not wildly intelligent, but plenty clever, went Bryan's family motto as mumbled by drunk Dad.
Bryan's nightmarish slide into dissolution begins with loss of professional identity, then romantic identity, then the remainder of conscious personality, before his status as Homo sapiens is scrapped. Barron is a genius at showing how tenuous such layers of human veneer may be.
* * *
If I were updating Philip Rahv's 1939 article "Paleface and Redskin" [Kenyon Review, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Summer, 1939), pp. 251-256] for the horror genre today, John Langan would definitely be in my paleface top five. That is not a put-down or dismissal; quite the contrary, since I myself am constitutionally a paleface and a reader of palefaces.
"What Is Lost, What Is Given Away" is an outstanding example of the mode, and one of Langan's best stories. His use of tonal and chronological distancing gives a twice-told flavor to the narrator's account of protagonist Joel Martin's doom. And it's beautifully structured with a high school reunion plot.
When the narrator meets Martin at a mixer the night before the reunion, memories of the man's misfortunes come back.
To my left, a voice said my name. Mood instantly lightened, I turned on my stool, and saw Joel Martin—Mr. Martin, I couldn't help thinking. Junior year chemistry, senior year physics, assistant coach of the boys' junior varsity football and varsity basketball teams. Disgraced in the closing days of my senior year for an affair with Sinead McGahern, one of my classmates, which left her pregnant and him out of a job at which he had been a favorite. He looked terrible. His hair, thinning when I had sat in his classroom, had largely deserted his head, except for a few spots here and there where he had allowed it to grow long. The lenses of his glasses were scratched and scored, opaque in some places. The heavy five o'clock shadow that had always darkened his jaw had thickened to a heavy beard, which he appeared to have maintained without the benefit of a mirror. Never a big man to begin with—I would have put his height at 5'5", his weight at one forty—he seemed smaller inside his shapeless black suit, shrunken. A martini glass, full, stood on the bar in front of him.
I was stunned. In the weeks and months after graduation, Joel Martin's situation had gone from scandal to ongoing catastrophe, ending with him in jail, first in Argentina, then locally. During my first couple of years of college, when I still met some of my high school friends at winter and summer breaks, the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Mr. Martin and Sinead McGahern was among our immediate topics of conversation. As his actions had progressed—or declined—from the questionable to the out-and-out criminal, so had my mental image of him transformed from intense, affable science teacher to something darker, a seducer, a humiliated and desperate father. To encounter him here, looking different, yes, yet more threadbare than sinister, was a scenario I would not have anticipated. Which may have been why, when he held out his hand, I took it. His flesh was gritty, as if he had come directly from the beach without washing. I wondered if anyone else had identified him. Was Sinead here? I wasn't sure. I hadn't seen her, but had I seen everyone?
"How've you been?" he said.
"Good," I said. It was the answer I would have given had any of the people I'd tried to talk to posed the question....
With sudden and uncanny certainty, I knew that the man who had gotten me through both Regents Chemistry and Regents Physics was on the verge of broaching topics I had no desire to discuss. An emotion halfway to panic gripped me. I decided to forego finishing my beer and depart the reunion early. I was pretty much done already, wasn't I? Joel Martin saw me withdrawing a ten from my pocket to cover my drink and tip. His eyes widened, but before he could open his mouth, I said, "I have to go. Have a good night," and slid off my stool....
Recollections of Joel Martin multiply; the next night the narrator recapitulates them to his date Linda, a pal and old flame.
After Joel Martin and his student Sinead McGahern had their son, distance between them blossomed into acrimony, divorce, and more acrimony. To get custody, Joel tried framing Sinead for drug possession and quickly lost weekly visitation of Sean. Joel then decided to kidnap Sean and flee to South America.
Once they reach the reunion, the narrator has another meeting with Joel Martin. The man's desperation, and his need to communicate it to the narrator, are palpable. Ultimately his motive is revealed.
"I guess you heard about my . . . troubles," he said. "Yeah, you did. Who didn't? Especially after they were all over the front page of the Goddamned papers."
He was right; there was no point denying it. I nodded. "I did."
"Do you have any kids of your own?"
"No."
"Let me tell you, once you do, you will not believe you could love anyone that much. You look at this little wrinkled creature, its arms and legs still tucked up from being in the womb, and it is love at first sight. There is nothing you will not do for this kid. Your entire focus shifts from whatever bullshit you thought was important to making sure this child—your child—is okay. All the things you couldn't imagine doing—changing dirty diapers, dealing with spit-up, waking up in the middle of the night to rock them back to sleep—become the order of the day. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?"
"I do."
"Everything I did, every last bit of it, was for my son, to keep him safe, to give him the kind of life he deserved. I have always wanted what was best for him. Always. I never stopped wanting that, even when I was locked up in Argentina, or when I came back here so they could lock me up some more. My son's mother had taken him and left. She didn't leave word where. Didn't ask for child support from me, in case it allowed me to trace them. Was that fair? I ask you, was any of that fair?"
"I don't know," I said. "I guess she felt—"
"It doesn't matter," Joel Martin said. "While I was in prison in Buenos Aires, I met a guy who let me in on something that is going to get my son back and make certain no one takes him from me again."
"I'm not—"
"Do you know who Borges was?"
"The writer?"
"This guy I met was a friend of his. That's what they called him, the other prisoners, the Friend of Borges, el amigo de Borges. He'd hung out with Borges when he was younger, at university. He was a mathematician, into some pretty exotic stuff. There was this one story Borges had written, 'The Aleph'—have you read it?"
"The one about the point that lets you see all other points in space and time."
"Exactly. The guy was fascinated by that story, by the math underlying it. Poincaré theory—how well do you remember physics class?"
"Not at all."
"That's disappointing," he said, "but it isn't important. The conversations with Borges took the guy only so far, but the writer put him in touch with one of his friends at the university, who gave him the name of another person, and so on, until he met with a group who were familiar with the theory underlying the aleph, and a lot more besides."
"Okay."
"You don't get it. That's all right. Do you recall me telling you guys that everything was just math?"
"Yes."
"You thought I was talking figuratively—if you gave it any thought at all. I wasn't. The group the Friend of Borges met understood this. They comprehended it. They were part of a . . . tradition of scholars who had been working with this exotic math for a long time. Like, longer than you'd believe."
"I'm not—"
"These scholars had figured out all kinds of applications for the material they were studying. They had worked out how to employ it, using combinations of words and sounds and . . . mental images, you could call them."
"It sounds like you're talking about magic."
"What you call it isn't important. What's important is that it works."
"Then why was this guy—the Friend of Borges—in prison? Couldn't he just magic his way out of there, teleport or something?"
"He was in hiding," Joel Martin said. "Or, that's not it, exactly. He'd had a falling-out with the other members of his lodge, and he had decided to secure himself within Unit 1."
"Couldn't he have found a better place to hide out?"
"That doesn't matter!" he shouted. "You're missing the Goddamned forest for the trees. I'm telling you I met the modern-day equivalent of fucking Merlin, and you want to know why he isn't staying at the Hilton. Jesus!"
There was no doubt in my mind that my former teacher had traveled far, far around the proverbial bend. I raised my hands, palms out. "Okay. I'm sorry. You met the Friend of Borges, and he told you about this weird math. Did he teach any of it to you?"
"A little. You can appreciate, the conditions weren't ideal for this kind of instruction. What he did was to tell me where I needed to go once I was free to travel again. Which took a while, and I had to work a bunch of shit jobs to save up the money, but in the end, I got there."
I couldn't help myself. "Where was it?"
"Quebec."
"Quebec?"
"Quebec City. That's where the nearest lodge—the nearest school is."
"And they took you in—accepted you as their student."
"They did."
"So now you're one of them, a . . . mathematician."
"Basically."
"But—why are you here? If you have access to the aleph, or whatever, shouldn't you be using it to track down your son?"
Joel Martin's face drew in on itself, to an expression it took me a moment to name: embarrassment. He looked down at his shoes, stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. "There's been a slight complication."
Here it comes, I thought, the escape hatch, the detail that allows the fantasy to exist yet remain ineffectual. "Oh? What kind of complication?"
"I'm imprisoned. The master of the lodge guards his knowledge jealously. He doesn't introduce you to new material until he's satisfied that you're ready for it. I had passed all the basic tests with flying colors. Everyone said I was one of the best students they'd taught in years. They—the master wanted me to wait before studying anything more advanced. I was sure I didn't need to. I was eager—I could feel time slipping away from me. Every day, and my son is getting older, whatever memories he has of me growing fainter. Have no doubt, his mother and whoever she's with are doing all they can to erase me from his life. I needed access to the aleph now. I pressed the matter with the master. He wouldn't budge. Things got heated between us. I made some . . . intemperate remarks. The master invited me to act on them. I did. It didn't go well. When the dust settled, he trapped me in a place . . . It's kind of a place between places. He said if I could figure my way out of it, I might be ready to start learning again."
"You're in prison," I said.
"Imprisoned," he said. "Again. It's more complicated than the other lockups I've been in. There's a limited amount of energy sustaining the cell. I can draw on it, but every time I do, the space constricts. If I had accepted my sentence, I could remain here indefinitely. But I told you I can't do that. I have to get out of here. I tried reaching out to one of the other students at the lodge, someone I thought was sympathetic to me. I was wrong, and I shrank the prison. I decided I had to think more creatively—outside the box, ha-ha. It occurred to me that your ten-year reunion was coming up. I was able to find out the times and locations without making the cell too much smaller."
"Wait," I said. "You're in this cell."
"Correct."
"Yet you're standing here talking to me."
"This," he said, removing his hands from his pockets to gesture at himself, "is a simulacrum. It's as if you're talking to me on a videophone."
"Okay," I said. "Couldn't you appear to your son, then? Why waste time with me?"
"Because I don't know where he is. I was able to draw on your memories—your class's combined memories of me to locate this spot and assemble a version of myself. I reached out to you in particular because we'd gotten along when you were my student. I hoped you would be willing to help me."
"How could I help you?"
"I have a storage unit on Route 9, down by the malls. There are a couple of things in there, a book and—"
"Mr. Martin," I said. "Joel." At the sound of his name, his head jerked, as if I had slapped him. I said, "I don't know what's going on with you, exactly, but I wonder if maybe you need to talk to someone who could help you with all this."
"What do you mean?" he said. "That's why I'm—oh." His eyes narrowed. "I get it. You think I'm delusional. Paranoid schizophrenia, right?"
"It sounds as if you've been under a tremendous amount of stress," I said. "Things with your son—"
"Don't you understand? There are no 'things with my son.' I don't know where he is. As long as I'm stuck in this prison—"
"Stop. You're in the men's room of the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club. You are not in some kind of magic jail."
"You have no idea," he said. "You have no Goddamned idea. This place is a blank. It isn't a place, properly speaking. It isn't; do you understand? It's the white between the letters on the page. Most of the time, it's all I can do to keep myself coherent. And on top of that, it's getting smaller. It may have reached its limit. Any more loss of energy, and it's going to collapse and take me with it. I am not shitting you when I say that you are my last chance. I'm doing everything I can to hold on, but time is running out."
A tremendous pity rose in me. I had been in here much too long. "I have to go," I said. "I'm sorry." I walked toward the bathroom door.
"What? Hey, hang on." He put his hands up.
"Please get out of the way."
"Wait—"
I was expecting Joel Martin to move to the side. If he didn't, I had a good half a foot and probably seventy-five pounds on him. Should it prove necessary, I had no doubt I'd be able to muscle past him.
When his outstretched fingers touched me, however, there was a sound like a houseful of windows shattering. Something like a blast of air shoved me across the bathroom, into the wall. Stunned, I looked at Joel Martin. The air around him appeared to have dimmed. He seemed to have lost substance, to have flattened. As I watched, he began to crumple....
Joel Martin compacts in a flashing cloud of dust particles. The narrator, asthma triggered, flees the scene and is driven home by Linda.
We skip forward fifteen years:
[....]old friends sent me a message asking if I'd heard the news about Sean McGahern, the kid of Sinead McGahern and Mr. Martin. I replied that I hadn't. She forwarded me a link to a story about the tragic death of the young singer-songwriter whose first album, Possession with Intent, had won him critical acclaim and a Grammy nomination. The record chronicled his life growing up as the child of a narcissistic mother, an uninterested stepfather, and a father who appeared to have vanished off the face of the Earth. (I thought about that locker on Route 9, the one I'd considered checking into but never had.) Emotional and psychological difficulties had led him to experiment first with pot, then heroin, to which he had become addicted. For a brief period of time, while he was working on his album, he seemed to have put his addiction behind him. The pressures of touring to support it, however, combined with those of producing his follow-up effort, had sent him back to heroin. He had died of an overdose; there was some question whether it was an accident or suicide.
After closing the link, I had to stand up and walk away from the computer. I had to leave my office, within the buzz of whose fluorescent light I heard another sound, high-pitched, impossibly distant: Joel Martin, screaming—still screaming—for all he had lost, all he had given away.
Langan's nicely balanced use of analepsis and concluding prolepsis (what I would term a slingshot ending) gives the story, and its ending, real emotional force.
What has Joel Martin lost? Career, son, peace of mind, sense of proportion, perhaps sanity, and ultimately life itself. What did he give away? Any chance for a connection with his son when the boy reached adulthood; as parents, it is shocking how easily good sense and patience can go out the window when crises thwart us. Joel Martin epitomizes this.
And what about our unnamed narrator? We get little hints that he has lost something. At the mixer the night before the reunion:
I had changed more than anyone else there. When I graduated, I was six feet tall, one hundred and fifty or sixty pounds if I was wearing a heavy coat. I had gained another sixty pounds in the intervening years, as well as a beard that was the same light brown my hair had darkened to in my early twenties. None of my old classmates had deviated as dramatically from their former appearances, so it was perhaps to be expected that they would not know me. They were not prepared to.
All the same, I found this disconcerting.
The next night:
....After my most recent relationship petered out, Linda had agreed to accompany me to my reunion dinner as, she said, a psychological investigation into the forces that had shaped me.
More than just his "most recent relationship" seems to have petered-out for the narrator. Linda, clearly a woman engaged up to her elbows in life, is curious enough to want to conduct a "psychological investigation into the forces that had shaped me."
After Joel Martin's death, Linda drives the narrator home.
By the time Linda pulled into the parking lot in front of my apartment building, the worst of my asthma attack was over. It had prevented much conversation on the ride back, except for me to say that it had been triggered by something in the air in the men's room. As she handed me the keys, Linda said, "Are you going to be okay by yourself? Because I can stay over if you need me to."
"It's all right," I said. "I'll be fine. Thank you."
"Call me if you get worse."
"I will, but really, I'm fine. I'll use my inhaler the second I walk in the door."
"You'd better."
I did. And since I knew there was no chance of me falling asleep anytime in what seemed like the next several days, I took down the bottle of Talisker from the top of the refrigerator and poured myself three fingers, whose effects I did not feel. I carried the bottle and glass into the living room, where I set them on the side table and found the TV remote. The nighttime channels were full of all manner of weird and pathetic programming, but together with the scotch, they were almost enough to keep me from dwelling on Joel Martin's expression while his prison crushed him, on his calling his son's name, on his final plea for a reprieve that was not granted. Eventually, I drank enough of the whiskey for it drop me into a black, empty place.
The narrator's obliviousness here is noteworthy. Joel Martin's bizarre death, the asthma attack, and Linda's help and solicitude prompt no desire for human connection; instead, the events are blips before an evening ending in self-induced oblivion.
The reader can only shake his head and ask, What the #@&% is that all about?
Jay
5 December 2021
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