As I Die Lying Read online

  Alone together.

  "Mister Milktoast? Is that you?"

  Whoever, whatever, whichever one of my little friends had momentarily skittered free, I couldn't tell.

  After three blocks of walking, the shiny facades of construction gave way to seedy brick buildings, squat and fat like red toads. In the distance, the tops of dormitories pricked the belly of the sky. A spindly metal crane perched over a tower of beams, guarding the bones of a building in progress.

  I passed a gray laundromat, its front window cracked and littered with pieces of masking tape. An old Hispanic woman stared out at me, her face as impassive as the windowglass and as cracked as the stucco. Loverboy had no interest in her. Withertits, he snickered.

  I passed the abandoned garage that I had slept behind when I first moved to Shady Valley. I had learned that it had been closed by the state Division of Water Quality because of an underground leak in one of the storage tanks. The creek behind the garage still ran rusty and iridescent, even after six years of healing. The lot yawned emptily, broken glass glinting among the blotches of oil.

  Blocks of student apartments lined the opposite side of the street, which had dwindled to two lanes in the older, sadder part of town. The apartments faced irregular directions, as if randomly dropped from the top of the sky to plunge into the earth, a God-child’s abandoned game of blocks. The featureless rectangles were divided here and there by stubborn white homesteads, flanked by little squares of dirt that were dotted with cabbages and bristled with tomato stakes.

  Another one hundred steps and the town became more schizophrenic. The decrepit cinder block buildings collided with the clean corners of Westridge University. The college sprawled like an island, with the town tainting its beaches, flotsam littering idyllic shores. On the right was a weathered structure built into the side of the hill. It had been converted into a coffeehouse, and students clustered at tables near the front window.

  Young faces peered through the glass, watching the street, seeing if they were seen. A nose-ring on one, silver and cruel. There a French beret, oily dreadlocks dangling beneath. A pair of small blue spectacles, framed by thin eyebrows. All that self-conscious individuality washed into a vacuous sameness.

  I wondered what it would be like to be one of them, with their possible futures and choices. Nietzche or Descartes? Phish or the Byrds? Espresso or cappuccino?

  I wondered what it would be like to be normal.

  "Hey, this is normal, Richie," Loverboy said. He came out easily, with none of the usual stirrings and struggles. Lately, it seemed the door was always open.

  Loverboy glanced at the faces in the coffee shop as if he were flipping through a deck of nude playing cards. "Good hunting. Check out that snow pup in the polar fleece."

  Bookworm was on his heels, curious and aloof. "It's not your hunt, Loverboy. This is Richard's hunt."

  Hunt? For what?

  "The outer journey mirrors the inner search," Bookworm answered.

  Oh. You're going to play little mind games, are you?

  "No. Just a warning. From a friend."

  "And with friends like us, you don't need enemies," Mister Milktoast said. He had entered on mental cat feet.

  Mister Milktoast, why does everyone come out so easily now?

  "Richard, you haven't been paying attention. All you think about is Beth," he said.

  Can you blame me for trying to get away?

  "No matter how far or how fast you travel, you can never outrun your own shoes," Mister Milktoast said.

  "Yeah, Dickie darling. Keep in touch," sneered Loverboy. "Because we will. We’ll touch it plenty."

  They left without a trace, back, back into their holes, into the dank rooms of the Bone House.

  I looked into the coffee-shop window. A few people were watching me, including the girl in polar fleece.

  What did they see when looking at the life form called Richard Allen Coldiron? Just an anonymous, bookish square, with tan cotton trousers and a button-up shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. A walking piece of fiction, a star in his own comic book series, a suspended animation. A minor character in his own autobiography.

  I could have been anyone. And I would have loved to be anyone else. If not for Beth.

  But I wanted to love her, despite the potential cost. After years and years, I had found something outside myself worth fighting to gain and keep. Or maybe I was a shellfish oyster, as Mister Milktoast put it.

  I walked on, reaching the center of town. Utility poles stood at random, and wires criss-crossed above in an insane weavework. This part of town had been destroyed by fire fifty years earlier. I had seen photographs of that era, back when the town was just a general store, a feed store, a funeral parlor, and a movie theater. The structures had been rebuilt with cheap clay brick, some painted over with muddy shades of green and gray. The paint curled in a dozen different coats, history lying in flakes on the sidewalk.

  The corner hardware store stood like a mute survivor. The bank on its left had folded and been taken over by a boutique. Clever fabrics dressed the window, the vault now a fitting room. A former gas station perpendicular to the hardware store was now a law office. No amount of landscaping or custom trim could disguise the fact that the building used to be a gas station, and no team of attorneys could ever subvert the immutable laws of change and decay.

  I continued up the street, past the old stone post office. Students bent under the weight of swollen backpacks and stooped old ladies shopping for knickknacks passed like camel caravans. Tourists in bright polyester milled purposelessly, hidden behind the icy stares of sunglasses. Occasionally a jogger huffed past in self-inflicted pain, sneakers flapping on concrete. Outside the door of the pharmacy, two old men in coveralls traded stories. They wore identical Red Man caps that sat on their heads as if they had grown there, as much a part of them as wrinkled skin and gray hair.

  I turned the corner toward the university grounds. The Little People rode as voyeurs, like kids pressing their faces against the car window on a vacation drive. Off in the west end of Shady Valley, bulldozers were gouging red wounds in the Earth where Ralph's Southern Line Feedstore used to stand. A row of derelict tobacco warehouses bordered the demolition, patiently waiting their turn under the blade. The tin on the warehouse roofs caught the sunlight, sending bright spears of reflection into the mountains.

  A restaurant called "The Cadillac Grille" sat against the bank of a creek, its open deck crowded with students soaking up afternoon sunshine and beer. Music poured from the screen door that led to the deck, something cranky and sneering by the Rolling Stones. I scanned the deck with Loverboy's preying eyes, or perhaps he scanned the deck with my eyes. I saw a familiar face at a table of young tan women who were drinking from green bottles.

  The face.

  Who?

  "Beth's roommate, Dickie," Loverboy said.

  She had seen me, but she didn't wave. She lowered her head.

  "Playing hard to get," Loverboy said. "But they don't get no harder than this boy."

  Isn't Beth enough?

  "Well, tickle my dick and paint my balls blue. If it isn't Richie Coldiron, pretending to give a good goddamn? Pretending to actually care for another human being? The sensitive act again. Don't make me bust a nut laughing."

  You cold-hearted son of a bitch.

  "It's not my heart, bro’. That's all yours, every pathetic little beat. My business is down lower. You suck the shellfish oyster but today’s special is the bearded clam."

  Fuck you.

  "I may take you up on that offer sometime, Riddle-me-dick. If pickings get slim."

  My feet led me onto the landscaped grounds of the university. The grass was trimmed close to the ground, like a putting green. Students sprawled on the common and sat Indian style on the open courtyards. People in shorts were tossing Frisbees or lying in the sun, chatting over the noise from loud radios. Solitary figures sat under trees with thick books. I searched. Always searching, we were.
/>   I climbed some steps to a platform at the entrance to the Student Union. I sat at a weathered wooden table. Someone had carved "J.G. + D.R. 4EVER" into the tabletop. The inscription was fresh, a testament gouged in the flesh of wood.

  I looked out over the sea of grass from the high lonely lighthouse of my soul. The lawn was broken by stone boxes containing holly shrubs and red geraniums. The walkways curved with the rises, guided by brick shoulders.

  A long thin girl walked past, and my hunter's eyes followed her. She was wearing a charcoal miniskirt, the fabric so thick that it didn't shake. Her legs, raped by white nylon, descended like sticks into heavy shoes. Her stockings reminded me of Sally Bakken, and a sudden rage tightened my throat.

  Little Hitler? But you weren't there. You didn't come until...later.

  "Your little snitch filled me in, Richard. Makes my blood boil. Revenge—"

  "—is a dish best served as leftovers," Mister Milktoast said. “With a bowl of serial.”

  Mister Milktoast? Did you tell?

  "I never kiss and tell."

  Mister Milktoast.

  "Well...maybe I let something slip. It gets lonely in here, Richard. No one to talk with."

  And Little Hitler is the best you can do for companionship?

  "Misery loves company but it sleeps with whatever it can get."

  The thin girl's carefully wrought curls draped the front of her shoulders, but her hair was too crafted and doll-like. Her alligator eyes were without passion, staring ahead as if in permanent slumber. Even the faint sound of swishing nylon didn't arouse Loverboy. Well, maybe a little.

  But those stockings did something to Little Hitler. He was filled with a desire to break her like bone China, thinking of Sally Bakken and broken promises. I clenched my fists, trying to drive him back inside. I didn't want Little Hitler to hate her. I needed to love, even though loving was possibly worse.

  If there was one theme that emerged while working on this book, it was the same old corny crap you can find in every category romance and Internet porn site and Hallmark greeting card and pop song and every church in the land. But after Mister Milktoast imagined it, Little Hitler corrupted it, Loverboy spewed on it, and Bookworm edited it down to dull powder, precious little love was left. It never had a chance.

  I watched as she headed for the entrance to the library. In the reflection of the glass doors, the bright scene played out in reverse. This backwards view was somehow truer and more vital than the actual reality. She walked into her own reflection and disappeared.

  A round-faced blonde sat down at the table next to mine. She was not Beth. She pulled a cigarette from the pocket of her pink sweater. Her forehead crinkled as she lit it. She inhaled and her cheeks hollowed. A finger of smoke hovered seductively around her head, then was whisked away by the faint autumn breeze.

  She was playing a game with her cigarette, a tiny joke of death. I could see the nicotine death skip across her eyes. The danger was part of her thrill. But this was a death she could control, one she could hold at arm's length, one she could stub out. A slow suicide for someone who thought she had all the time in the world to die.

  "Do you wonder?" Little Hitler asked me. "How would she really embrace death?"

  Don't talk that way. Once was enough. One time was too many.

  "Oh, she loves this long-distance relationship, this cigarette that is like a love letter from the other side. Maybe she would accept a few collect phone calls, maybe even sit with death in a well-lighted restaurant."

  Don't talk madness, Little Hitler.

  "From the lips of experience,” he responded, with echoes of Bookworm or maybe even my Poet days, if he’d been browsing the Bone House bookshelves. “But would she? If death fondled her in a moonlit car, its breath foul and moist on her ear, if death bent low for a soul-tainting kiss..."

  "Now you're talking, Little Diddler," said Loverboy. "Cheap thrills and all that good shit. And you got Richard's poetry crap down pat."

  "...if death opened its black robes to her, if it drew her into its frigid folds, if it sucked her as tenderly as she sucks her cigarette, would she squirm then?"

  "Damn, Diddler," said Loverboy. "You're kinky. I like that in a headmate."

  "I should offer to introduce her. Set up a blind date, perhaps, with my friend Death? Hmm, Richard?"

  No. Never again. Haven't I suffered enough?

  "You? Suffer? What about Mother? What about Virginia? What about what you made me do to Father?"

  That wasn’t me. That was you, Little Hitler.

  The blonde flicked her cigarette butt into the shrubbery and left.

  The white-stockinged girl walked by again, parading flesh. Loverboy let her pass. Little Hitler let her live.

  I basked in the sun, its healing rays bringing life to my crowded flesh, driving the inner shadows deep until I could no longer hear the voices.

  I was ashamed of what they had let me become.

  An hour passed. I didn't see Beth. I began the long walk back to my car, and then drove home.

  There was a typewriter in the Bone House, and we had to put this down before we forgot it all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  This was the point at which I almost quit writing this book, because I have a great fear of confrontation. I was going to dedicate it to Virginia after it was accepted for publication, because I was her Poet and she died young, which is always fashionably tragic.

  But here came Beth and was acting like the kind of woman whose feelings would be hurt if I dedicated my autobiography to another woman. And she didn’t seem like the kind who would conveniently die. Plus, there’s You-Know-Who, the ghostwriter, the hack who wants all the credit but does none of the work.

  I’m sure you’ve heard it before: “Hey, I got this great idea for a book. Why don’t you write it and we’ll split the money?”

  The problem, of course, is that this particular co-author has no need for money. All he craves is a little attention. Why do you think he wants to be the protagonist? But so far I’ve spared you from his nihilistic clichés and self-serving, ideological crap. Hopefully I’ll get this submitted before he finds this version, so forgive me if I type real fast for a few pages.

  I was drifting on a black sea, with the Little People like sharks nibbling away at the rubber raft of my psyche or the pirate captain’s sword walking me down the gangplank or some other lost-at-sea simile. The darkness was no longer safe. I needed an anchor. I needed Beth, for hope and help and all the other selfish reasons people used as an excuse to love one another.

  Love. Speaking of unwilling suspension of disbelief…

  I called her the next night, after a long battle with Loverboy and Little Hitler. Her roommate answered the phone. "Hello?"

  "Hi," I said. "Is Beth home?"

  "No, I'm afraid not."

  "Know when she'll be in?"

  "I think she went out with somebody."

  A date? A bright flame of jealousy roared in my chest. But what claim did I have? None but that of the needy.

  The mellifluous voice on the other end broke the silence. "Uh...do you want to leave a message?”

  "Yes. Just tell her Richard called." Nah, say “Loverboy,” numbnuts, whispered one of my roommates.

  "Richard?"

  "Yes. Thank you."

  "Oh. Faux pas. You're the guy she's been seeing, right?"

  Seeing. Was this sweeping romance for the ages reduced to mere ocular activity? I wanted to slam the phone into the wall. I wanted to blink razors. I wanted to...

  Kill Beth.

  Who said that? Little Hitler? Loverboy?

  Or...

  "I saw you yesterday," said the roommate. Her voice was deeper than Beth’s, huskier.

  "You did? Where?" My throat was tight, as if Little Hitler were squeezing it into silence.

  "Walking down the street."

  "Oh. Uh...were you...?"

  “...the one looking out the window yesterday? The girl at the bar?”
r />   She's just another skinbag, Richie. A sopping camel toe dipped in a desert oasis.

  Loverboy, stay out of this.

  "...I mean, I don't think we've met," I finished, slamming the Bone House door.

  "I'm Monique. I've seen you, you know, bringing Beth home."

  Did I hear her giggle? Was she taunting me? Like Sally? "I've got to go. Do me a favor. Don't tell Beth I called."

  I hung up fast, before Loverboy had a chance to lick his chops and say something I'd regret later. I had enough to worry about as it was. Had some new dark closet opened inside me? Some crack in the plaster that patched over my ego?

  Help me, Mister Milktoast.

  "Come inside, Richard."

  No. Not in there. Not with them.

  "It's safe. It's dark. It's cool."

  But...

  "Come, Richard."

  Don't.

  Want.

  To.

  Lose.

  Me.

  "I'll protect you," Mister Milktoast whispered, in that maternal tone that both comforted and disturbed and ultimately always won.

  Darkness. Something dreamed, something walked. I lost thirty-six hours.

  Because this is my autobiography and I’m writing this in retrospect, I could easily make up a bunch of bullshit about how I went out of town for a hockey game or a rock concert or a camping trip. But if I started making up alibis for my own life, I doubt if you’d stick with me. We’ve established a relationship, you and I. We’ve reached a mutual misunderstanding. If you walked out on me now, closed the book, that would prove you are unreliable and fainthearted. I have faith in you. You’re made of better stuff than that.

  "Did you see the paper?" Miss Billingsly asked me at the bookstore on Wednesday.

  "No, I haven't had a chance. I've been doing inventory on the Harry Potter backlist." Actually, Bookworm had been doing the work, but of course I couldn't tell her that.

  "Some girl from the college has been reported missing."

  My heart flipped, hung upside down. "When?"

  "They're not sure. Could have been a few days ago."

  "Maybe she had enough of school and took off for a hockey game or a rock concert or a camping trip," I said, in Mister Milktoast's reassuring voice. But something inside knew better. I started to sweat, even though the air was cool. No Bookworm could amend this panic, no Milktoast could sop this doubt.