As I Die Lying (25 page)

“
Maybe so,” Brittany said.
“You don’t look so hot.”

But you do,
senorita,
Loverboy said.
Hotter than a two-dollar tamale and tighter than
a Mexican mouse’s ear. Let me go south of your border and do a
little cha-cha-cha.

“
I think I’d better go
home,” I said, forcing myself to turn from her, trying not to dwell
on the soft secrets under her clothes.

Miss Billingsly let me leave
early since it was Tuesday, one of the low-traffic days. Pulling my
Subaru into my driveway, I wondered what my neighbors had been
doing two nights ago. I wondered what
I
was doing two nights
ago.

No one saw
us
, Mister Milktoast said.
Nor ax us. Not at awl.

“
Sharp,” I replied. “What
were we doing that no one saw?”

The thing that didn’t happen.

Shelley.

I opened the door. A faint rich smell in the
air, ripe with the promise of dirt. It reminded me of the dead cat
I had poked with a stick when I was a kid. I opened the door to the
basement and stood for a minute, looking down the dark stairs. I
knew terrible truths waited there. I needed to find out for myself.
There could be no trusting the Little People on this one.

Why was “truth” so sacrosanct? Why was it
held above all, with nations built on its principle and lives lost
in its pursuit?

“
Because you need to
understand,” came that deep, chilling voice I hoped I’d never hear
again. The voice that I wasn’t sure I had heard the first
time.

It commanded me down the stairs. I would have
gone anyway. Bookworm’s curiosity throbbed bright and velvety
behind my forehead, Little Hitler perched on my shoulder like a
drug monkey.

The Insider taunted me with each step.

“
You need to know,
Richard…the plot thickens…see what I can make you do…if you don’t
tell my story…so I can live forever.”

On the bottom step, I was struck with a
vision of such intensity that I was nearly driven to my knees.

Shelley is looking through an aquarium, and I
watch her face from the other side. Her features are swollen by
refraction, her gray eyes wide and watery, her cheeks bulging in a
distorted smile. A few faint freckles lay in sprinkles on her
cheeks, but they are somehow obscene. Her eyes follow a yellow
angelfish that is floating on its side at the top of the tank. Its
fins are ragged and mossy. She laughs, coughing blue smoke into the
room.

Behind her head, a Magritte print hangs on
the wall. A faceless man in a suit holds an umbrella.

“
I can give you all the
flashbacks you need,” said the Insider, and I was back in the
basement, sweat drying beneath my eyes.

I stepped into the cool stale air. I felt the
Little People morphing and dissipating. I felt...Shelley’s hair,
soft and reddish brown, maddeningly fine. We are on my sofa. A
Talking Heads CD is playing, and David Byrne’s panicky voice fills
the room, singing something about babies. Shelley is giggling, a
quiet, intimate sound. My hands are on her knees. Her dress has
been pulled down a little at one shoulder, and the sight of
alabaster skin brings Loverboy out, with Little Hitler right
behind, and we reach up and caress the smooth gleaming moon of
flesh...

The darkness surrounded and swirled, a threat
and comfort.

...the flesh is everything you’ve wanted,
Richard. Everything I’ve MADE you want.

I turned on the basement light, but still the
darkness swarmed, the shadows crept, the eternal night held its
breath in waiting. Across the cold concrete my feet moved, feet
that marched to an odd and evil drum, the sound echoing off the
cinder block walls. A cobweb that Mister Milktoast had overlooked
hung in a corner of the ceiling. The trash can beckoned.

I had to know, I needed to see if I’d finally
lost, if what I’d suspected all along was really true: that there
was nothing left of Richard Coldiron, that others had finally won,
that Little Hitler and Mister Milktoast and Bookworm and Loverboy
and the Insider were all real, and I was just some dream they had
suffered on a feverish winter’s night, just some bit of metafiction
crammed in the crumpled, handwritten pages of a yellow legal
pad...

Because if I did breathe and walk and hope
and ache, then I would never...

“
...never make you do
anything you don’t want to do,” I say to Shelley. Even though I’m
drugged on passion, I know something is wrong. Beth’s face keeps
flashing in my mind, Beth’s words keep repeating themselves, Beth’s
laughter plays its music.

“
I’m not looking for a
prince,” Shelley says, her breath hot and close and moist on my
neck.

Her arms are around me, pulling me hungrily
toward her, but I am being pulled by my own hungers. Loverboy? He
throbs impatiently. Little Hitler? Peering from the dark with
squinted eyes. Bookworm? Curiously aware, analyzing sense and
senses. Mister Milktoast? Watching the darkness behind, guarding
against—

Against the Insider.

“
I’m not usually like this,”
I say, but my words are thick and distant, muffled in my own
ears.

“
Shut up and kiss me,”
Shelley says, and I am lost, I am Loverboy, then we’re both gone,
swept away by a black current, and we watch as the new thing we’ve
become...

“
Present tense for present
tension,” said the Insider, as I reached my fingers toward the
trash can lid. The stench was stronger now, overripe and
corrosively sweet.

I muttered through tight teeth, “No. That
wasn’t me, that—”

“—
that couldn’t have been
you. Yes, yes, I’ve heard it all before, a thousand times. I’ve
been in here, Richard. I know. Do you honestly believe this is your
only heap of garbage? I’ve rummaged through your life, kicked
through the closets of your memories, dusted off your broken toys,
flipped through the ragged pages of your scrapbook. It’s never been
you, has it? You’ve always been lucky enough to have someone to
blame. And here I am. Your savior.”

I wondered whose hand would lift the lid. The
Insider answered my unspoken question.

“
Knowledge is power, my
loyal host. You need to know. Bookworm wants to know. And Little
Hitler wants you to see.”

“
And you? What about you,
you black-hearted bastard?” I screamed. Mister Milktoast tried to
hush me, but I didn’t care if the neighbors heard. “You’re the one
who talks the big game, who says humans are the ones who brought
evil into the world. You’re the one who sits back there all smug
and superior, like some great dice jockey in the sky, telling me I
deserve exactly what I roll in this life.
You’re
the one who needs to judge
guilt or innocence, as if you’re beyond judgment. Ancient psychic
predator, my ass.”

The Insider laughed, a booming, rolling
thunder of mirth that rumbled through the labyrinth of my back
rooms.

“
Oh, Richard,” it said, its
laughter finally dying away, leaving a dull ache in my temples.
“Richard. Richard. Richard. You still don’t get it, do
you?”

“
I only get what I deserve,
right, Shit For Brains?”

I touched the lid handle, my fingers
tingling. I tried to lower my arm, but the muscles were locked and
beyond my control. The Insider continued filling my brain with its
slithery voice. “Let’s reason this out, Richard. You trust your
Mister Milktoast, don’t you?”

“
How do I know it’s him, and
not another one of your tricks? I mean, how do I know I’m not just
fooling myself? You might have gone back to the beginning, mixed
things around, made him up from scratch for your own plot
purposes.”

“
Some things you have to
take on faith, Richard. You humans put such stock in your
faith.”

My head throbbed, as if a bucket of hot ball
bearings had been dumped in the veins of my temple and rolled
through my cerebral cortex. Or like cold dice in a cup. Or—fuck, I
wish this book would sell so I wouldn’t have to keep coming up with
this stuff.

“
Richard?” said Mister
Milktoast.

“
Is that you, Mister
Milktoast? What’s happening? Is it true?”

“
I tried to warn you,
Richard. I tried, but it’s so strong. And it knows how to hurt
us.”

My hand was on the lid handle, its cold hard
plastic miles away beneath my fingers. Whose hand, whose meat
mitten, whose raggedy-man phalanges?

“
Then it’s no joke,” I said,
and the last scraps of hope fell away like rotted cloth, as if I
were extending the scarecrow metaphor. I was naked in the deepest
night, staked in a field of fallow earth.

“
It hurts us, Richard. In
here, while you’re away. The Insider has little punishments for
each of us.”

“
Don’t cry, Mister
Milktoast. Remember, we’re survivors. We can get through
anything—”

“—
b-but the boots, Richard.
The Insider wears the
boots
. It knows about Father, it
knows about those bad memories. It finds them in here and makes me
watch, over and over. It makes me feel the boots again. And all the
fear that came with them.”

“
Fear,” said the Insider. “I
am what you feed me.”

Mister Milktoast was gone, pushed away
inside.

“
And I’d like to share my
dinner,” it said. “Just like a polite host should.”

Damn. Here comes another flashback.

I look over Shelley’s shoulder as we embrace,
I press my nose into the meadow of her hair, I inhale the vapor off
her clean skin. My eyes are far away, watching the angelfish’s
corpse as it circles and circles the top of the tank like a dead
moon chained to a lost planet. No hope of escape. It has been too
long, too many years.

Shelley’s lips are on my cheek, her hands in
my hair, then down lower. I loom over Shelley, impatient, urgent,
hungry. I reach under the sofa and pull out the long kitchen knife,
I grip its wooden handle and I shudder with pleasure. At long last
I live again.

“
Lift the lid, Richard,” it
commanded, and I trembled with tears stinging the corners of my
eyes.

“
Yessssss,” it whispered,
voice low and dark and ecstatic and sounding so much like me.
“Knowledge is power.”

I raised the lid and the Insider made me
look, smell, hear. I vomited and collapsed onto the cold hard
floor.

I should do laundry more often.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The telephone rang, its electronic gargle
breaking the night. I had been almost asleep, or as close as I
dared get to dreams. I fumbled for the receiver on the nightstand,
and my hand brushed against soft nylon.

Shelley’s tights.

Once filled with warm, moving flesh. Now
lying shed like a snakeskin. Awareness rushed in on a red tide.

I picked up the phone and pressed it to my
ear. The night sky outside the window was clear and studded with
starlight, little dots of hope in a black abyss. The room smelled
of soapy steam from the shower I had taken, hoping to wash the
self-loathing from my skin.

“
Hello?”

“
Richard?”

A female voice, slightly slurred, as if the
speaker’s tongue were swathed in cotton. Cracked like an old cup.
Or maybe like a Jesus plate.

“
Mother, why are you calling
at this time of night?”

As if I had to ask. In Iowa, her private pity
party was probably not yet at the midway point. She was probably
still on her first pint, because she could still punch the big
buttons on the phone.

“
Just wanted to talk to my
only son,” she said, breathing heavily in the mouthpiece. The last
word came out as “shun.”

“
How are you, Mother?” I
felt as stretched and empty as the tights I gripped in my left
hand.

“
Okay, I guess. I got your
letter.”

“
Letter?”

“
Yeah. Telling me about this
new girl, Shelley. You really think it might get
serious?”

Who had written that letter?

“
Uh. . . sure, Mother. But
who knows?”

“
Sounds like she’s really
something special.”

“
She’s okay.”

“
She must be more than okay,
since you took the trouble of sending me a lock of her
hair.”

No.

That couldn’t have been me. Never me.

“
I miss you,
Richard.”

I miss you,
too
. I almost said it without thinking, the
way you do when you’re supposed to love someone but don’t. I
swallowed the words. They burned like miniature suns. I couldn’t
lie to my own mother, could I? Or was it Loverboy who wanted to
blurt out that needy confession.

“
What’s going on back home?”
I asked, hoping, praying that she wouldn’t mention Father,
wondering if the letter the Insider had sent was stained. Or,
worse, sealed with a kiss.

“
They’re tearing down the
garage next door. Been hauling off them old junk cars. Gonna put in
a row of shops, I hear.” Her voice fell, wistful. “Remember when
you used to play back there?”

The past. She should have known better.
Neither of us wanted that, but the past was like genital rash. Even
though we knew that handling it would only slow the healing, our
fingers couldn’t stay away.