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.
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