Shelf Monkey (6 page)

I’ll have to stop there for now. Need to organize my thoughts. My fingers are tired, and my hands are shaking from seven caffeine refills.

Yours truly,

Thomas

From Canadian Press

WATERLOO — Canadian author Eric McCormack contacted RCMP yesterday, saying that he was in possible contact with Thomas Friesen, one of several missing suspects in the ongoing Munroe Purvis investigation.

McCormack, a past nominee for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for his novel
First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, reports he has been contacted by Friesen, who “seems desperate to tell his story.”

“Friesen is living off borrowed time, and he knows it,” said Detective Amanda Daimler, a criminal profiler with the FBI who has been assisting the RCMP. “I believe his mania is forcing him to try to build himself up some good will, a myth to sustain him. He sees himself as a glamorous criminal, like Bonnie and Clyde.”

FBI and RCMP are currently working to determine how best to use the information McCormack has provided them. Detective Daimler admits, “For now, the investigation has slowed considerably. We need to examine this new information, see where it takes us.”

When reached for comment, Dr. Lyle Newhire, a psychiatrist and former therapist of Friesen who has been working closely with the RCMP, told Canadian Press, “I don’t understand for sure why Thomas has contacted Mr. McCormack, other than he apparently feels there exists some sort of kinship between them. Thomas suffers from a deeply ingrained sense of inferiority, coupled with near-paralysing bouts of manic depression. I think he fancies himself to be misunderstood, in the vein of the classic antiheroes of fiction. I only hope that this can all be resolved soon.”

Dr. Newhire is currently preparing an account of his time with Friesen, to be published by Knopf some time next year.

Dear Eric,

I’m tempted to leave a simple “Go fuck yourself,” but the ingrained conscientious objectors of a hundred generations of Mennonites tell me to be more polite. How about “Suck it!” as an alternative? Too pithy? Well, I am a lapsed Mennonite. Let’s leave it at “Fuck you.”

You don’t mind if I call you Eric, do you? I mean, we’ve gone through so much together already, you and I. I’m chagrined to discover that you’ve opted for police involvement so early in our relationship. What, you think I don’t read? The papers print a very favourable portrait of you, playing you as a Clarice Starling to my Hannibal Lecter. Don’t fret, I’m not going to go all Tom Harris on you. No taunting. No riddles. No mysterious clues as to my whereabouts as I continue to wreak havoc, sending ticking packages wrapped in brown paper to Montel Williams and Regis Philbin. None of that James Patterson shit. I just wanted to tell my story. I’m a little hurt, that’s all.

I suppose I should send out hellos to everyone else, as this is now presumably a mass e-mail. Hello, all! Hi, Detective Daimler. Look behind you!

Just kidding. I’m a little stressed. As I’m sure you’ve learned from acquaintances and co-workers, I have a tendency to make jokes under duress. Seriously, Detective, you may want to look into your staff for a possible leak. I don’t think you’d have voluntarily tipped your hand to the press so soon.

I just Googled myself. You know how many hits I found? Three hundred seventy-one, omitting multiple search results. Just for fun, I ran Descartes for comparison purposes. I won, if not in complete matches, at least in terms of actual Web sites devoted to either of us. I exist on the Web, therefore I am. What I am precisely, I don’t rightly know just yet. I have sites devoted to my capture, tracking my every move through newspaper headlines, television updates, and just plain old rumour and innuendo. My
name pops up regularly in association with Bin Laden, Arafat, Hitler, Kazinsky, Dahmer, George W., and others of that ilk. In other words, scum of the basest order. You’d think I’d firebombed a school bus full of pregnant war widows or something. Of them all, www.thomas-friesen-must-be-drawn-and-quartered.com is my favourite. Agnes Coleman is a regular contributor.

There’s more out there, and I think maybe that’s what got people scared. Hell, I’m scared myself. The idea that a subsect exists that seeks to emulate me gives me hope. And fear. And a niggling sense of nausea.

I suppose I should just stop and disappear, but where’s the fun in that? I don’t know how much longer I can stay underground anyway. Contrary to reports, I do not find this at all glamorous or exciting. Being a fugitive is hard work. I wish I were being paid for this.

READ
, as I’m sure you all know by now, is the newest mega-box-hyper-super-huge bookstore, a massive expanse of novels, textbooks, music, DVDS, and book-related paraphernalia. Fields of fiction. Whole square kilometres of history. Leagues of health, science, pets, gay issues, religion, politics, gay politics, movies, sports, women’s studies, and more. A nirvanic potpourri of the “eloquent,” “fast-paced,” “unforgettable,” “breathless,” “thought-provoking,” “rib-tickling,” “heart-stopping,” “eye-popping,” “hair-raising,” “award-winning,” “expertly crafted,” “Kafkaesque,” “Bosch-like,” “Hemingwayian,” “delightful,” “sensational,” “menacing,” “gripping,” “inspirational,” “emotionally engaging,” “astoundingly beautiful,” “immensely readable,” and “stuff nightmares are made of” —

Oh, God, it’s Heaven.

— “bitter,” “wise,” “exhilarating,” “poetic,” “stylistic,” “probing,” “authentic,” “dazzling,” “supercharged,” “explosive,” “brutal,” “brutally funny,” “incendiary,” “sensational,” “magnificent,” “tart,” “eerie,” “perfect,” “near-perfect,” “passionate,” —

I’m drowning, going to asphyxiate from accolades.

— written by “a storyteller in the grand tradition,” “a star on the rise,” “a grand master,” “an old pro,” “one of his/her generation’s
most gifted authors,” “a superb stylist,” “a terrifying visionary,” “a sensitive poet,” “an undiscovered treasure,” “a hitmaker extraordinaire,” “a consummate satirist,” “the winner of the Pulitzer/Pen-Faulkner/Booker/Hugo/Nebula/Giller/Orange/ Nobel Prize”—

Throw me a life preserver.

— with the monikers Austen, Naipal, Davies, Findley, Shakespeare, Munro, Huxley, Capote, Hunter, Kinsella, Jin, Ishiguro, Vidal,
et al
, all for your reading pleasure, and many at forty percent off the regular cover price.

People flock to it by the thousands, astonished by low, low prices and wide variety. There is one copy of everything, and if they don’t have it, they’ll get it for you, no sweat. That
READ
has all the architectural charisma of a wedge of rancid feta makes no difference. It’s heartening in its way, that so many people would herd themselves into a bookstore. It’s verifiable proof that books fill some rudimentary need, even if it’s only the latest
Garfield
collection or
Chicken Soup for the Crack-Addicted Abused Mothers of Disenfranchised Teenaged Runaway Hitchhikers’ Soul.
I will admit,I myself was not immune to its wholesale charms.

There were worse places to work, I was sure. I’d always wanted to work in a bookstore, free reading material at my disposal. And I couldn’t afford to be particular; my savings had now dried up into government-issued dust, and bill collectors were threatening to make themselves known on a face-to-face basis with me. While I don’t as a rule use my thumbs
every
day, I have grown rather fond of the opposable little guys.

There was no way I was going to mess up this interview. In the bag. Slam-dunk. This is what I told myself as I stood in the cold outside
READ
’s front doors, fighting to subdue a rising tide of panic. I had a shelf of pills organized by dosage and side-effect lined up in my medicine cabinet for just such occasions, medical marvels designed to relieve anxiety and stress at the moment of conception. One is enough for an average-sized man, two would give a raging bull elephant pause, and three pills could remodel King Kong’s New York rampage into a scholarly debate between man and giant ape on the dietary merits of a banana-rich diet.

I took three, figuring Kong had nothing on me. Dry-
swallowing the pills, relishing the chalky aftertaste, I took a deep breath, then another, and walked confidently through the doors.

An enormous head attacked me the moment I entered.

I wish that were a metaphor for something.

Massive teeth pinned me to the doorframe, wedging me between a trash can and an incisor the size of a four-slice toaster. Pale bloodless lips pressed up against my chest in an obscene parody of a kiss. Moustache bristles the width of pencils scraped against my neck, exfoliating me against my will. I screamed, lashing out wildly, my fists connecting with flesh, one entering a nostril, the other plunging into a fleshy cheekbone, feeling for all the world like I had thrust my arms into a barrel of slugs. Sucking sounds joined the chorus as I extricated one hand, hollering with revulsion. The head shifted, slid down, giving me a glimpse of enormous eyes, dead yet sparkling with maliciousness. I began to hyperventilate, my breath shallow with panic. The world darkened. My knees buckled, the head pushing me down with its weight, my arms hugging it to my face, clutching as if it was a life preserver. Fireworks suffused my vision, the behemoth smothering me into unconsciousness, no doubt as a prelude to devouring me, a no-longer-squirming tidbit, a noontime snack.

At least I didn’t bathe this morning, I thought as a pitch-black hollowness beckoned.

Choke on me, motherfucker.

“You okay, friend?” The head was trying to converse with me

“Man that looks weird.” These are the last words I’ll ever hear?

Then, blinding light, as the face was pulled off mine with a loud
schtlup!
My pupils constricted in fear, and I staggered about blindly, feeling hands grab my shoulders as I walked into a wall.

“Head,” I said, looking about, colours and shapes congealing before me. “Big head. Big.”

Voice to the left of me. “Yeah, that’s one big head, my brother, I’ll give you that.” The speaker turned me around to face him, filling my vision with a broad blur. “Sorry ’bout that, friend, it got away from us.”

“Wha?” That’s all I could say. I thought I’d made my point. My hands began frantically shaking, trying to rid themselves of what I was positive were boogers the size of biscuits. “Away? Head?”

“Shit, he’s really out of it. Warren, help me get him into the back.” Fuzzy angels took hold of my arms, leading me through a maze of corridors and swinging doors, finally plopping me down on a leather sofa.

I moaned in terror as fingers rudely snapped themselves before my eyes. “C’mon, friend, focus. Back to reality.” The blur gradually began to coalesce itself into a solid mass of definable shape. What that shape was, was still a mystery.

“Do you have an angry octopus on your head?” I asked it.Laughter from behind it. “He’s fine, Aubrey. And an acute observer.”

The Aubrey-blur grunted, shifted, came into focus. “Christ!” I blurted.

“That’s a new one, he thinks you’re Jesus.”

The blur was a thin young man, darkly intense, sporting what I at first took to be a member of the mollusc family but was in fact a prodigious amount of dirty blood-red dreadlocks. “Jesus never had hair like this, I reckon,” he said, grinning down at me. “Try again, dude.”

I hazarded a guess. “Great Cthulhu?”

A look of pleased astonishment arose on his face. “A Lovecraft reference?” he asked. “And here we just met. You and me, we’re going to be good friends, brother.”

“Wow,” I said, held in thrall by the hairy squid atop his head.It must have taken him decades to achieve such an ungainly mass.“Damn, that’s some hair.”

“You know, I get that a lot,” he said, helping me to my feet.“You’ve got quite a bump there, you remember anything?”

I replied the only way I could. “Big head.”

He laughed, echoed by the large man I could now see standing behind him. “Yes, big head. Very, very big head.”

“I didn’t imagine it?”

“Nope, no sir.” he said. The dreads shook with his laughter. He walked past me, absently brushing his shoulders. “C’mon, let’s go see what almost killed you, if you’re up to it.” I followed him toward the front doors, meekly rubbing my scalp.

“What the hell is that thing?” I exclaimed. It lay where it had fallen, a lopsided leviathan with a deranged rictus grin. The hollows
where I had pummelled it had magically filled themselves in.

“What, you don’t recognize him? Warren, give me a hand here, willya?” Aubrey and the large man I surmised to be Warren lifted the head off the ground, balancing it on its chin. I fearfully took a few steps back, disguising my trepidation as the need to gain perspective. From a distance, and without the elements of surprise and horror, it was easily identifiable.

“Munroe Purvis, right?”

“On the nose, very good,” said Aubrey. “We’re putting him up on the wall to the left there. He’s just a little slippery.” Warren grabbed the face by its nose, lifting it easily over his head, and set it flush against the wall above a set of display shelves. It rebounded slightly with a meaty thump.

I took a closer assessment while Aubrey and Warren finished with the hanging. The visage was composed of a polymer of some kind, squishy yet firm, layered in disturbingly lifelike hair. I experimentally poked the cheek, watching my finger sink effortlessly into the flesh. The feeling of rampant slugs on my skin returned and I withdrew the finger hastily, quivering. The
schlepping!
noise of boots stuck in mud arose as the hole slowly filled itself in.

“It’s grotesque,” I said finally. “It’s like something out of
The Wizard of Oz.
”