Started writing a sequel to my soon to be self-published novel Apophenia. It's going pretty well, and it's fun to return to these characters and imagine what would've happened to them in the last ten years. Here's the first chapter below.
Mickey’s got the headlamp on again; he’s shining it around on the
ground, searching rhythmically, his hands carefully tending the bare
dirt like a chimpanzee scooping up termites. I’ve never known
enough about methamphetamine to determine what he’s doing exactly,
but my theories run the gamut from hallucinating to actually
collecting tiny drug crystals that he likely accidentally scattered
on the ground. He searches and searches and then rummages in his
car, moving junk about, and when daytime arrives, the pile will have
grown tremendously while the entrance to his dwelling will have
become even harder to see. It’s a shack with a rotating cast of
characters. I’ve called the city about it and they claim the
building has been taken away from its druggy owners and put into the
hands of a property management firm, but so far, Mickey and his ilk
still haunt the place, moving around like dead men walking. The car
is an ancient Corolla, Christmas tree green, with broken springs and
enough bumper stickers to let you know that its owner is part of
Fuck-You America, and damned proud of it. Come and take-it AR-15
sticker, check. 2020 Steal sticker, double check. It sputters like an
emphysematic smoker when it runs, and Mickey’s always tinkering
with it, changing tires and pulling plugs. He’s probably rebuilt
the entire engine on a drug-fueled binge twice. It’s amazing what
you can accomplish when on meth.
Mickey
himself is of an indeterminable age, though I guess that he’s
likely younger than myself. When he’s working, I can usually see
his underpants, and they are a soiled black shade that tells me he’s
been wearing them for months, if not years. Camo is his favorite
color. From a distance, I can’t tell if he has his teeth.
I’m
out in the dark with my dogs, Sheamus and Lilith, as they fumble
around like fellow degenerates, their failing senses hindering their
quest to find somewhere acceptable to evacuate their bowels. Lilith
is a fourteen year-old pitbull with a face that sags on the left side
due to muscular atrophy. Sheamus is a shaggy black son of a bitch
with long plummage growing out of the back of his legs like
Chewbacca. They are living remnants of another age, another life.
When they go, a piece of myself will follow, and I’ll never get it
back.
I
glance back at Mickey and he’s examining something in his hands
with such scrutiny that I figure he must’ve finally found what he
was looking for all of those sleepless nights. To search and search
and keep on searching. I admire the focus, I guess, even if it’s
misplaced. Life seems to be more or less an aimless collection of
bits interrupted by long sections of ennui. You remember the bits,
however, and reconstruct a narrative that supports whatever
conclusion you’re trying to reach. I don’t know if Mickey does
this shit or not. I doubt it. His existence is likely more akin to an
animal’s. A reactive life, a life lived in a perpetual haze as the
physical circuitry that powers cognition becomes more and more
damaged by daily meth use.
Sheamus
finally notices Mickey and lets out a deep bellowing cry, the call of
his people, an ancient garbage dog howl. Mickey doesn’t stir; he
never does. Whatever powers of concentration his addiction grants him
must be enormous. I give the old dog a tug of the leash but he digs
in his heels and keeps barking. Lilith meanders around, oblivious,
her glassy eyes and clogged ears neither seeing nor hearing any evil.
Why it is my duty and not Arnold’s to take out these senior
citizens I don’t know. Marriage seems to assign chores
asymmetrically, and I’ve received the brunt of the labor. I figure
whoever gets off their ass and actually does the task gets stuck with
it, and such is my making that I’d rather get something done than
sit around and wait for Arnold to notice. Perhaps Mickey’s
relationship works in a similar manner. His baby-momma seldom joins
him in his nocturnal tinkering, preferring to emerge from their hovel
in the mid-afternoon. Like her partner, it’s difficult to determine
her exact age, but from the near distance that I usually observe her,
she seems to be poorly bearing the physical strain of frequent drug
use. Her feet twist abnormally when she walks, as though she had a
corrective surgery for club feet late in life. Or maybe her ankles
were just broken and they never healed right, I dunno. I waste a lot
of time speculating uselessly.
I drag
the dogs back into our one-hundred and fifty year-old house, take
their leashes off, and trot over to the couch, where I collapse in a
tired heap. Arnold is on his computer wearing headphones, editing his
latest video, back hunched, eyes squinting in concentration. He’s a
bodybuilding influencer, a hawker of snake oil, a grifter-entertainer
extraordinaire. When I first met him, he lived in a hovel and ate raw
meat that he caught and killed. Now he does shit on camera for the
interwebs. He makes a decent living, though the hours involved and
the creativity demanded by the one video a week format have put a
strain on our relationship.
“Why
don’t you go to bed, babe?” he says, not peering away from his
monitor
I
don’t want to go to bed. I’m as tired as a human can be, but I
don’t want to sacrifice my night for eight hours of sleep.
“Mickey’s
out there, tinkering again,” I say.
“Why
do you call him ‘Mickey’? His name is meth-head. You’re
humanizing him, babe.”
Well
of course I am. I have an inexhaustible supply of empathy that
seethes out from my body in waves that oscillate.
“What’s
your video about?” I ask.
“It’s
a Arnold Picks Up Random Heavy Stuff
video. Saw an old plow at an apple orchard and asked the guy if I
could film myself moving it. Cantankerous old bastard let me for a
fifty.”
I
watch the video and see my husband giving his comedic monologue to
the camera while rubbing tacky all over his forearms.
“Lemme
tell you something, folks: if you want to beat the man, you gotta out
eat the man!” A cartoon hotdog flashes across the screen and
careens into Arnold’s mouth. “Mass begets strength. If you’re
not prepared to stuff your face like the average American at
Ponderosa’s, then you’ll never develop the sheer power to do
random acts of stupidity like the one I’m about to perform.”
My
husband gets in front of the plow and picks it up by pinching the
blade in between the inside of his elbow joints. His face gets redder
and redder as he drags it across the ground, heading, it seems, for a
big oak tree. Suddenly a hillbilly stereotype rushes for Arnold and
starts berating him, though my husband doesn’t even give him a
glance, he’s so focused on moving the several hundred pounds of
rusted farm equipment. When
he gets it to the tree, he’s drenched
by the spittle that the Goon has sprayed
on him. That’s what I’ve named him: the Goon, for he is a
cartoon-character come to life, a real snaggle-toothed gooferton,
a mulleted moron. When Arnold gets to the tree, he drops the plow,
lets out a triumphant roar, and then socks the Goon right in the
mouth. He goes down like a his jaw is made of the thinnest glass.
“Why did you hit him?” I ask.
“It was planned,” explains Arnold. “Just a little surrealism
for the viewers. I had to slip him a twenty. He was all for it.”
It all seems wrong; the whole performance, the dehumanization of an
imbecile. I give Arnold the look that I often give him when I’m
trying to summon the remnants of his soul.
“Come on, babe, it’s just a stupid video. I’m gonna put a
cartoon “pow!” behind the punch. I didn’t really knock him out.
You don’t think I know how to pull my punches?”
“No, I don’t think you do. I’ve seen you and Dave wail on each
other.”
Dave
is Arnold’s twin brother, a more quiet, sensitive soul. I’ve
often wondered if I married the wrong twin.
“Hey,
you wanna go to the orchard sometime? It’s only like ten minutes
away. Beautiful place. Apples galore. Old rustic farm equipment. You
can really appreciate the subtle degradation of small-town America’s
farms. The trees, you know, they got nice branches. You like
branches, right, Leona?”
Arnold’s being a little manipulative. He knows that I like
worn-out places, areas where the cracks are showing. Dilapidation, in
other words. I appreciate the honesty, the lack of shine. All things
must pass, and all things decay. Sometimes, in moments of clarity, I
wonder what the hell is wrong with me, and then I remember my
upbringing, and I’m like “oh, yeah, that’s why.”
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll check it out.”
I
purposefully omit “we.” Arnold is incredibly busy, not just with
his stuff,
but with the kids. He’s the more natural parent out of the two of
us, which is a fact that I still can’t get used to, despite it’s
obviousness. The man was wild when I met him, a part-time drug
dealer, full-time maniac. Time seems to wring strange qualities out
of people.
“I’m
going to go for a walk,” I say suddenly.
Arnold gives me an appraising glance, shrugs his shoulders, and
turns his attention back to the computer screen.
I put on my shoes, throw a jacket on, and step back outside.
Mickey’s disappeared inside his hovel, and the night’s sky has a
dark clarity to it that ebbs into my bones. I walk, through the empty
streets of our small town, heading by the gas station with its bright
lights, trotting past the covered silos of the weigh station, onward
to the parking lot that lies before the seven-mile path that winds
along the levy. The paved asphalt winds through a narrow path of
trees, with wet lands to my right and train tracks to my left. The
highway isn’t far, but at this time of night, there aren’t many
cars. We’re passing through the tail end of winter, so even though
the temperature is warming, insect life hasn’t returned, so my walk
is a silent one beneath the emergent moon. I’m alone with my
thoughts, and I try to master them rather than let them master me.
It’s bizarre how lonely you can be as a married adult with two
children. There is an existential gulf between people that can never
be closed. Arnold and I can’t share the same head, and he can’t
feel as I feel, and at the end of the day I’m stuck, a prisoner in
my own skull. I process this thought with a dispassionate coldness.
Walking (and fasting) put me in a meditative state, and I nestled
deeper into the protective embrace of the Void.
I
walk over an arching wooden bridge, an inlet flowing beneath me, the
river to my right suddenly, sparkling with the light of the moon.
There’s a clapping noise,
growing louder, feet falling powerfully on the wood, so I move to the
side, closer to the rail to let this approaching passerby go. Just
a man, running in the dark, the details of his visage obscured by a
hood. As he passes, time seems to slow for just an instant as I stare
into the darkness where his face should be, and then he’s off,
jogging into the dark of the woods. I have no knife, no mace, just my
general orneriness and my ability to slink into the shadows like a
specter.
The
bridge takes me to an area where the trees have nearly grown across
the trail, making a tunnel-like canopy. Were I to be assaulted, this
would be a good place, although the underpass up ahead is probably
the best. Even at this distance, it almost looks like there are
shapes lingering about, but I resolve to walk a little further, still
desiring to get some mileage out of the night and my legs. Something
catches my eye, glimmering in the moonlight. There, on a bench, a
little metal cash box. All around the bench are the half-eaten
remains of hedge apples, as though a sasquatch sat there and had its
meal. I stand and look at the box for a minute, transfixed. Gingerly,
I stretch out a hand and feel the cool coldness of its metal
exterior. Without thinking, I pick it up, tuck it under my arm, and
book it back the way I came. It
isn’t until I’m home that I stop and sit down on my side-porch
and open the box. Inside is a large amount of money, stacks of
one-hundred dollar bills three inches thick. There is no one outside,
not even Mickey, but I immediately shut the box and go inside.
I
go up to the attic to count the money. The attic has a triangular
ceiling that is very low, and it’s full of stuff, boxes of holiday
decorations inherited from my mother, plastic totes containing
college notebooks that I haven’t unpacked in over a decade. It’s
a cluttered place, but I like to hide here, especially in the
northwest corner, where my ancient computer sits, waiting for my
fingers to type on its worn keyboard. I
sit down on the green carpet and open the box and meticulously count
the stacks. It’s
one-hundred thousand dollars worth of cash. I think for a moment and
try to contemplate why someone would leave a metal box full of a
fortune in the park, unattended. Did I just rob a senile grandmother?
Was someone being held for
ransom, and I fucked it all up?
“Drug deal,” I say, suddenly.
I
think of my neighbor
stumbling through the park, his headlamp cutting through the night
like the wandering vision of an old dog. There’s
no way this chest was meant for Mickey,
who seems to own nothing of value, and who would likely not have a
clue what to do with that amount of cash. But
what am I going to do with all that money? The
questions hangs in the air like a rancid funk as I wander downstairs
and go to bed.
