As I Die Lying Page 19

  I could apologize. But every time I had tried, the words set in my mind like wet cement. I sighed, the air of my resignation reaching across the miles, filling the pink ear of the woman who had given me life. The statute of limitations on forgery and uttering never expired.

  “I mean, the Lord teaches forgiveness, doesn’t He?” She said. “You’re supposed to hate the sin but love the sinner.”

  I heard a glass click against her teeth, then she swallowed twice. She waited.

  “Why don’t you move away?” I asked, clipping off the silence as carefully as if it were an ingrown toenail.

  “Where would I go? Got no people left that would have me. Except maybe you.”

  Maybe me.

  A vision flashed in my mind. Mother as part of my daily routine. Mother asking about Beth. Mother filling the cabinets with her bourbon bottles. Mother across the hall at night, terribly close, only a couple of doors between us. Mother coming out of the bathroom after a shower, a towel around her bony chest.

  And Loverboy’s uncontrollable urges.

  And the Insider’s constant craving for pain.

  I didn’t know if I still loved Mother. But I didn’t hate her, at least not enough to expose her to the real me. All of me.

  “It wouldn’t work, Mother. There’s still so much—”

  “I know. It was just a thought. I may be an old drunk, but I’m not stupid.”

  I found myself squeezing Shelley’s tights in my hand. “Well, listen, Mother. I’ve got to go now.”

  “Richard—”

  “I’ll call you back. Or write.”

  A pause, as swollen as beached whale. “I love you, Richard.”

  I gulped, a greasy glacier sliding down my throat. I opened my mouth.

  It would be easy to say, here in a dark room. No one to hear but my eavesdropping little friends. No one to witness but the all-knowing Insider. No one to please but my mother. A little white lie that any god would forgive.

  It would be easy to make a mother happy, to pay back just a little on an insurmountable debt. Three little words that might bring the tiniest spark of joy to a withered heart. Three little words that are all a mother asks in return for the greatest of all pains, for the greatest of all sacrifices, for the greatest of all gifts.

  Three little words that I could never say.

  “Goodnight, Mother.” I softly hung up the phone.

  A tear rolled down my cheek. The stars outside my window blurred. Night bled darkness. Beth’s scent lingered faintly on my pillow.

  The child never existed.

  “Yes, he did,” said Mister Milktoast. “We did. And Mother loved us.”

  “Was that really love?” I asked the one inside my head.

  “Yes.”

  “How can you be sure? She’s like a cavity in my soul.”

  “Abscess makes the heart grow fonder.”

  “So it’s a love that only exists at a safe distance.”

  “That was real. Compare it to everything you’ve known since. Sally. Beth. Virginia.”

  “No one forgets Virginia,” I said, wiping the tears from my cheeks.

  The world outside the window was scrubbed clean by the autumn breeze. A tall maple swayed in the yard. Its arms spread, majestic and gnarled, like a newly dead grandmother paying a visit in dreams. Wanting a last hug.

  “No one forgets Virginia,” Mister Milktoast repeated.

  “Especially not me, Roachrash,” said Loverboy, stepping from the psychic shadows. “Almost got me some that time, till you dicked it up with your numbnut feelings.”

  “A miss is as good as a smile,” Mister Milktoast cut in with a smirk. “Or as good as a mistress.”

  “Hey, I could get a lot luckier if I didn’t have you guys drag-assing around. Every time I get close to a score, one of you comes out and queers the deal.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  “Always quick with the blame, Dickwheat. First it was me. Then Little Hitler. Now you got this otherfucker to heap shit on the pile.”

  Loverboy fell quiet, afraid of that smoldering crater that bubbled like a hot tar pit in the center of my Bone House. The backed-up septic system in an odiferous water closet. The swampy morass of icky horribleness.

  Little Hitler cackled with the stark raving laughter of a hyena whose jaws dripped red cotton candy. “We each have our idea of what love is,” he said. “Yours is wrapped up in the meat, Loverboy. And so is mine, only in a different way. And I, for one, am head-over-shitless that the Insider has taken a room here.”

  “You only love pain,” I said. “And yourself. Or, better, both at the same time. No wonder you lick the Insider’s boots. It gives you everything you don’t have the nerve to take for yourself.”

  “Sure, Richard. And it was me that did in dear old Daddy.”

  “Of course it was.”

  “And what kind of love was that?”

  “The scared kind. The kind that wore boots,” said Mister Milktoast.

  “What kind of love do you expect? My kind of love was brave enough to free Mother from the beatings. You ought to be worshipping me, Richard. After all, I made it so there was nothing standing in the way of you two.”

  Little Hitler was enjoying my pain. Maybe he really was the Insider, wearing the Hitler mask. But that was too unbelievable. You couldn’t make this kind of stuff up and expect anybody to take you seriously. Unless you made a lot of money from it, in which case people called you a genius, though they still crossed the street to avoid you.

  “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Mister Milktoast said.

  Little Hitler and Loverboy’s laughter rattled inside my head like gravel in a hubcap. But what did they know about love?

  Love stomped. Love slashed. Love gouged. Love disemboweled. Love drove its lessons deep. And, at its worst, love mattered.

  Bookworm came out on the ashes of my depression, like the ghost of a virgin sacrifice thrown into a volcano to appease a god that was vacationing in Hawaii. “Love is why we have the Insider,” he said with the simplicity of one who might meet a pieman and ask for a slice.

  I was silent, they were all silent, as we contemplated that cold truth. Fear squirmed like maggots in an open wound, an anthropomorphic metaphor that grew wings and flew away, looking for fresh shit.

  “Love is what attracted it,” Bookworm said. “Pain, perhaps, as well. But what causes the pain?”

  “Looking for love,” I said. “The Buddhists say, ‘Desire is the cause of all suffering.’ And the Taoists say nothing, and they say it a lot. But the Insider says just enough to screw up my autobiography.”

  I caressed the tights and imagined the lingering waft of her perfume. I thought of Shelley as she might have been. Curled up beside me at that moment, spooning for warmth, snoring gently.

  But I never even knew her. What were her fears, her secrets, her favorite candy? What colors did she wear in the spring, when the world begged yellow and sky blue and primary green? What would she have become, if given the chance? What was her purpose besides feeding the Insider?

  I threw the tights into the dark corner of the room. Shelley hadn’t fed the Insider. I had fed it. I had tossed the scraps to my devil dog. It was fat on my grief and weakness and pathetic need to be published.

  I was its meatbag, its Jeeves, its Igor, its Boswell.

  “Bookworm knows something,” I said to Mister Milktoast. “Maybe there’s a way out of this.”

  “Not out,” said Bookworm. “In.”

  In, where the Insider slept, full and content, waiting for me to dream.

  In, where my Little People holed up in their rooms, haunting the Bone House of my head.

  In, where my memories were laid out like a bad hand of Tarot cards.

  In, where monsters dwelled under beds and in closets.

  In, where typewriter keys clattered in the wee hours.

  The first rejection slip arrived the next day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
<
br />   I waited outside Redmon Hall, the building where Beth had her art classes. Black glass squares were set in the stone front of the building. The morning sun reflected off the windows, the silver linings of the clouds dulled by the tint. October was everywhere, as pungent and sweet as a corpse. Oaks shed their brown leaves, blades of high grass bowed under the weight of dewy seed, wind sneaked low through the portico.

  Students smoked cigarettes between classes. I studied the clean faces with interest. I was looking at the shape and plane of cheekbones, comparing the fullness of lips, critically analyzing hairstyles. I shuddered with repulsion as I realized what I was doing.

  I was hunting. The Insider was hungry again.

  I hadn’t called Beth in a week. Ever since the blackout, I was afraid to see her. I knew I was fading, and the Insider was growing stronger. Beth would give it the pain it needed. A perfect recipe, doled out in exacting measurements.

  I stood there in my corduroy jacket with my hands in my pockets, humming The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” It was Mister Milktoast’s choice of music, or maybe Little Hitler’s. At that moment I saw her, just as the clouds fell away and the sun threw its carpet at her feet. Her hair shimmered. She was wearing the brown hat she had worn when we’d first met.

  She was talking to a tall guy with a beard. When he smiled at her, his broad horse teeth exuded steam. I stepped forward.

  “Hi, Beth,” I said, with practiced ease. Far too practiced. She blinked.

  “Richard,” she said, off guard for only a moment.

  “How have you been? I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “Same old,” I said.

  She glanced around, as if looking for some alien starship to whisk me away. “This is Ted,” she said finally. “Ted, this is Richard. He works at the Paper Paradise.”

  I nodded at him. What did Loverboy care? One walking dish of clam dip was pretty much the same as another. Every slice came from the same loaf.

  Ted gave his equine smile and tugged at his beard.

  “Ted’s a graduate assistant,” Beth said. “He teaches etching and woodprinting.”

  “Physical stuff,” I said in mock admiration. “Digging out the truth, right, Ted? Cutting down to the essence. Grooving and moving.”

  Ted dropped his smile and looked confused.

  “He’s just kidding, Ted,” Beth said. “He’s an amateur art critic.”

  “Taught her everything she knows,” Little Hitler said. “Which isn’t much.”

  Beth crossed her arms and glowered from under her blond eyebrows. She looked at Ted and said, “Meet you for lunch, usual place?”

  Ted opened his mouth to speak. His teeth flashed like tombstones set in wet, red mud. Then he thought better of saying anything and walked away after studying me for a moment.

  Go ahead and study, you brush-sucking artiste. As if you’d ever be able to understand what’s going on inside this negative space. Hell, I can’t even keep up with it myself. There are details buried in here that even a hundred acid baths couldn’t bring out. But I’ll put your ass in my book and make sure you come off as an arrogant, navel-gazing jerkoff with goofy teeth.

  Yeah, Ted, in my autobiography, I’ll look much better than you. I can type you in and erase your ass.

  I looked at Beth with Bookworm’s curious and slightly amused eyes.

  “Why are you being such a jerk, Richard?”

  “You haven’t called.”

  “Well, you haven’t either.”

  “But, you said... that morning...”

  People brushed past us on both sides as classes changed, rolling like meat products on a slaughterhouse conveyor belt. Beth gripped my arm and led me to a stone bench. We sat beneath a rusting, jagged sculpture that bore welding scars across its joints. It looked like a sky plow. A brass plate was attached to its base.

  “Sky plow,” I said aloud.

  “What?”

  “What ye sew, so shall ye rope,” Mister Milktoast said. “And leave the audience in stitches. So don’t string me along.”

  “Richard, don’t play games with me. Why were you waiting for me here?”

  “Is that your boyfriend?” I said, watching Ted’s mass of curly hair bob over the crowd like a frayed basketball.

  “So what if it is? Jesus, did you think we’d be going steady or some corny high school crap like that?”

  “I can’t deny my feelings.”

  “Richard, I like spending time with you. I like what we did...what you did to me. I would see you again just for that, if nothing else. But I’m warning you, I’m a player.”

  “Player?” I didn’t want to tell her, but I was a one-man clusterfuck. She could cheat on me without ever leaving the bed. Loverboy and Little Hitler would make sure of that, and the Insider was sure to get its jollies.

  “I like to get around. I told you that. I’m not ready for anything serious.”

  “You said love—no, pardon me, I didn’t mean to use that word—you said good things take time.”

  “I also said good things are worth waiting for. And good things are worth a little risk. And probably a dozen other stupid little things. That’s bedroom talk, you dummy. You should try it sometime, you might get lucky more often.”

  The sun threw shadows from the sky plow across Beth’s face. Her eyebrows scrunched, and her fine cheeks were tight. Something stirred inside me. I hoped, grimaced, tried to fight, but the door opened and Loverboy walked out on the porch and stretched, enjoying the view.

  “The oven’s warm,” he said, working my lips. “Why not let Loverboy be your bakerman and tart your pastries?”

  “Richard, I honestly can’t believe you. I thought you wanted to talk. Can’t we leave sex out of it?”

  “I want to put sex in it,” he said. I could only watch, horrified, from the living room of the Bone House while Mister Milktoast and Bookworm conspired over a pun involving “King Lear.”

  Beth turned away. Loverboy put his/my/our hand on Beth’s knee and squeezed the flesh that spread so temptingly under her denim jeans, sweet as a sausage in its casing or ready-to-bake cookie dough in a plastic sleeve. Beth grabbed Loverboy’s hand and pushed it away.

  “This is getting awkward,” she said.

  “Or aardvark,” Mister Milktoast said. That little fellow needed to get out more often.

  “You can’t change me.”

  She didn’t know that her life had already changed. It had changed the moment the Insider had used Loverboy to lure her into the pasture. She had mistaken the lush green for an idyllic playground. But the fences were closing in, the barbed wire was encircling, the butcher was sharpening its steel.

  Fatted calves, Mister Milktoast noted, seconded by Loverboy.

  “I wouldn’t want you to be anything but Beth,” said Bookworm.

  “Good. Then let me breathe.”

  Breathe. Live. Hope. Yes, do all those things. So Richard can see how human you are. So Richard can feel for you. So Richard can care. So Richard can la-la-la . . . you know.

  It was the Insider, flexing its dark majesty. No longer was the Insider content merely to direct from the wings. Now it wanted to act, to wear its meat, to walk the human stage, the Orson Welles of spiritual possession.

  I cringed as the Insider reached out and brushed a hand under Beth’s chin. It grinned, black and cold, letting me wallow in its cruel dominance.

  Its hunger lingered and tingled, a sweet passion that was all the sweeter for being delayed. And my helplessness hit me like hammer strokes, a thousand Lilliputians crawling my skin, but I seized control of my tongue and spat a Gulliver’s roar.

  “Go away,” I shouted at the Insider.

  “I am, Richard,” Beth said. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

  “I’m sorry, Beth,” said the Insider. “I want you to trust me. I would never, ever, do anything to hurt you.”

  Beth wasn’t sure if she should be flattered or angry. She put her hands on her hips, but didn’t push the Inside
r’s hand away. I was aware of the Insider drinking the light from her eyes and stowing the vision in my memory. It buried the tender moment like a bone, something it could dig up and worry later, work into the book as a descriptive passage.

  “Listen,” Beth said with what Bookworm dismissed as a Nora Roberts sigh. “There’s a Halloween party. Xandria’s band is playing.”

  Hot-diggety-double-dickmeat, whispered Loverboy from the coal shuttle of my brain. Brown and serve, eat ‘em while they’re hot. Just don’t go fucking it up with all that sensitivity crap, Richard. If you say the word “love” right now, I won’t let you jerk off for a week.

  The Insider smiled. I could feel its pleasure, with the warm sun on its face, with the human race at its fingertips, with me to taunt and probe and consume. A rich banquet of emotions to pick through and a host of hosts from which to choose. You’d think an ancient, soul-stealing entity would have developed a little humility along the way. But this bastard was an aspiring writer, after all, so all bets were off.

  “Three days,” I said.

  Beth half smiled. “Sure. Come by and pick me up.”

  “I dream about your brown hat.”

  She laughed. “You dream about head.”

  “Head is where the house is,” Mister Milktoast said, basking in the approval of the Insider, who had set aside his loathing of language and developed a fondness for wordplay. I wondered what games he and Mister Milktoast had been playing in the back room. Scrabble, Boggle, hangman, Russian roulette with a dictionary.

  “You’re funny,” she said. “I guess I forgive you.”

  “Sorry I put the squeeze on you,” the Insider said.

  “No promises.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Beth glanced around at the passing crowd and gave the Insider a quick peck on the cheek. The Insider walked back into the Bone House and climbed the stairs to the attic, leaving me with her saliva evaporating on my skin.