Текст книги "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams"
Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King
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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
‘Well … yeah. Probably. Some of them.’ I was good at snark, after all, and I thought I could probably outsnark Joe Queenan on points, possibly by a knockout. And at least it would be dumping on live people who could fight back.
She put her hands on my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and planted a soft kiss on the corner of my mouth. If I close my eyes, I can still feel that kiss today. She looked at me with those wide gray eyes – the sea on an overcast morning. I’m sure Professor Higgins would roll his eyes at that, but C-list guys like me rarely get kissed by A-list girls like her.
‘Think about going on with the obits, would you?’ Hands still on my shoulders. Her light scent in my nostrils. Her breasts less than an inch from my chest, and when she took a deep breath, they touched. I can still feel that today too. ‘This is not just about you or me. The next six weeks are going to be a critical time for the site and the staff. So think, okay? Even another month of obits would be helpful. It would give Penny – or someone else – a chance to work her way into the job, with guidance from you. And hey, maybe nobody interesting will die.’
Except they always do, and we both knew it.
I probably told her I’d think about it. I can’t remember. What I was actually thinking about was lip-locking her right there in Jeroma’s office, and damn anyone in the bullpen who might see us. I didn’t, though. Outside the rom-coms, guys like me rarely do. I said something or other and then I must have left, because pretty soon I found myself out on the street. I felt poleaxed.
One thing I do remember: when I came to a litter basket on the corner of Third and Fiftieth, I tore the joke obit that was no longer a joke into tiny shreds and threw them in.
That night I ate a pleasant enough dinner with my parents, then went into my room – the same one where I’d gone to sulk on days when my Little League team lost, how depressing is that – and sat down at my desk. The easiest way to get past my unease, it seemed to me, was to write another obit of a living person. Don’t they tell you to get back on a horse right away if you’ve been thrown? Or climb right away to the top diving platform after your jackknife turns into a belly flop? All I needed to do was prove what I already knew: we live in a rational world. Sticking pins in voodoo dolls doesn’t kill people. Writing your enemy’s name on a scrap of paper and burning it while you recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards doesn’t kill people. Joke obituaries don’t kill people, either.
Nevertheless, I was careful to make a list of possibles consisting solely of proven bad people, such as Faheem Darzi, who had claimed credit for the bus bombing in Miami, and Kenneth Wanderly, an electrician convicted on four counts of rape-murder in Oklahoma. Wanderly seemed like the best possibility on my short list of seven names, and I was about to whomp something up when I thought of Peter Stefano, a worthless fuck if there ever was one.
Stefano was a record producer who choked his girlfriend to death for refusing to record a song he had written. He was now doing time in a medium-security prison when he should have been at a black site in Saudi Arabia, dining on cockroaches, drinking his own pee, and listening to Anthrax played at top volume during the wee hours of the morning. (Just MHO, of course.) The woman he killed was Andi McCoy, who happened to be one of my all-time favorite female singers. If I had been writing joke obits at the time of her death, I never would have written hers; the idea that her soaring voice, easily the equal of the young Joan Baez’s could have been silenced by that domineering idiot still infuriated me five years later. God gives such golden vocal cords to only the chosen few, and Stefano had destroyed McCoy’s in a fit of drugged-out pique.
I opened my laptop, typed PETER STEFANO OBIT in the proper field, and dropped the cursor onto the blank document. Once again the words poured out with no pause, like water from a broken pipe.
Slave-driving, no-talent record producer Peter Stefano was discovered dead in his jail cell at the Gowanda State Correctional Facility yesterday morning, and we all shout hooray. Although no official cause of death was announced, a prison source said, ‘It appears his anal hate-gland ruptured, thus spreading asshole poison through his body. In layman’s terms, he had an allergic reaction to his own vile shit.’
Although Stefano had his foot on the necks of a great many groups and solo artists, he is especially noted for ruining the careers of the Grenadiers, the Playful Mammals, Joe Dean (who committed suicide after Stefano refused to renegotiate his contract), and of course Andi McCoy. Not content with killing her career, Stefano choked her to death with a lamp cord while high on methamphetamines. He is survived by three grateful ex-wives, five ex-partners, and the two record companies he managed not to bankrupt.
It went on in that vein for another hundred words or so, and was not one of my better efforts (obviously). I didn’t care, because it felt right. Not just because Peter Stefano was a bad man, either. It felt right as a writer, even though it was bad prose and part of me knew it was a bad thing. This might seem like a sidetrack, but I think (actually I know) it’s at the heart of this story. Writing is hard, okay? At least it is for me. And yes, I know that most working stiffs talk about how hard their jobs are, it doesn’t matter if they’re butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, or obituary writers. Only sometimes the work is not hard. Sometimes it’s easy. When that happens you feel like you do at the bowling alley, watching your ball as it rolls over just the right diamond and you know you threw a strike.
Killing Stefano in my computer felt like a strike.
I slept like a baby that night. Maybe some of it was because I felt as if I’d done something to express my own rage and dismay over that poor murdered girl – the stupid waste of her talent. But I felt the same way when I was writing the Jeroma Whitfield obit, and all she did was refuse to give me a raise. Mostly it was the writing itself. I felt the power, and feeling the power was good.
My first compu-stop at breakfast the next day wasn’t Neon Circus but Huffington Post. It almost always was. I never bothered scrolling down to the celebrity dish or the side-boob items (frankly speaking, Circus did both of those things much better), but the Huffpo headline stories are always crisp, concise, and late-breaking. The first item was about a Tea Party governor saying something Huffpo found predictably outrageous. The next one stopped my cup of coffee halfway to my lips. It also stopped my breath. The headline read PETER STEFANO MURDERED IN LIBRARY ALTERCATION.
I put down my untasted coffee – carefully, carefully, not spilling a drop – and read the story. Stefano and the trustee librarian had been arguing because Andi McCoy’s music was playing from the overhead speakers in the library. Stefano told the librarian to quit macking on him and ‘take that shit off.’ The trustee refused, saying he wasn’t macking on anybody, just picked the CD at random. The argument escalated. That was when someone strolled up behind Stefano and put an end to him with some kind of prison shiv.
So far as I could tell, he had been murdered right around the time I finished writing his obit. I looked at my coffee. I raised the cup and sipped. It was cold. I rushed to the sink and vomited. Then I called Katie and told her I wouldn’t be at the meeting, but would like to meet her later on.
‘You said you’d come,’ she said. ‘You’re breaking your promise!’
‘With good reason. Meet me for coffee this afternoon and I’ll tell you why.’
After a pause, she said: ‘It happened again.’ Not a question.
I admitted it. Told her about making a ‘these guys deserve to die’ list, and then thinking of Stefano. ‘So I wrote his obit, just to prove I had nothing to do with Jeroma’s death. I finished around the same time he got stabbed in the library. I’ll bring a printout with a time stamp, if you want to see it.’
‘I don’t need to see a time stamp, I take your word. I’ll meet you, but not for coffee. Come to my place. And bring the obituary.’
‘If you think you’re going to put it online—’
‘God, no, are you crazy? I just want to see it with my own eyes.’
‘All right.’ More than all right. Her place. ‘But Katie?’
‘Yes?’
‘You can’t tell anybody about this.’
‘Of course not. What kind of person do you think I am?’
One with beautiful eyes, long legs, and perfect breasts, I thought as I hung up. I should have known I was in for trouble, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I was thinking about that warm kiss on the corner of my mouth. I wanted another, and not on the corner. Plus whatever came next.
Her apartment was a tidy three-roomer on the West Side. She met me at the door, dressed in shorts and a filmy top, definitely NSFW. She put her arms around me and said, ‘Oh God, Mike, you look awful. I’m so sorry.’
I hugged her. She hugged me. I sought her lips, as the romance novels say, and pressed them to mine. After five seconds or so – endless and not long enough – she pulled back and looked at me with those big gray eyes. ‘We’ve got so much to talk about.’ Then she smiled. ‘But we can talk about it later.’
What followed was what geeks like me rarely get, and when they do get it, there’s usually an ulterior motive. Not that geeks like me think about such things in the moment. In the moment, we’re like any guy on earth: big head takes a walk, little head rules.
Sitting up in bed.
Drinking wine instead of coffee.
‘Here’s something I saw in the paper last year, or the year before,’ she said. ‘This guy in one of the flyover states – Iowa, Nebraska, someplace like that – buys a lottery ticket after work, one of those scratch-off thingies, and wins a hundred thousand dollars. A week later he buys a Powerball ticket and wins a hundred and forty million.’
‘Your point?’ I saw her point, and didn’t care. The sheet had slipped down to reveal her breasts, every bit as firm and perfect as I’d expected they would be.
‘Twice can still be a coincidence. I want you to do it again.’
‘I don’t think that would be wise.’ It sounded weak even to my own ears. There was an armful of pretty girl within reaching distance, but all at once I wasn’t thinking of the pretty girl. I was thinking of a bowling ball rolling over just the right diamond, and how it felt to stand watching it, knowing that in two seconds the pins were going to explode every whichway.
She turned on her side, looking at me earnestly. ‘If this is really happening, Mike, it’s big. Biggest thing ever. The power of life and death!’
‘If you’re thinking about using this for the site—’
She shook her head vehemently. ‘No one would believe it. Even if they did, how would it benefit Circus? Would we run a poll? Ask people to send us names of bad guys who deserved the chop?’
She was wrong. People would be happy to participate in Death Vote 2016. It would be bigger than American Idol.
She linked her arms around my neck. ‘Who was on your hit list before you thought of Stefano?’
I winced. ‘Wish you wouldn’t call it that.’
‘Never mind, just tell me.’
I started listing the names, but when I got to Kenneth Wanderly, she stopped me. Now the gray eyes didn’t just look overcast; they looked stormy. ‘Him! Write his obituary! I’ll look up the background on Google so you can do a bang-up job, and—’
Reluctantly, I freed myself from her arms. ‘Why bother, Katie? He’s on death row already. Let the state take care of him.’
‘But they won’t!’ She jumped out of bed and began to pace back and forth. It was a mesmerizing sight, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you. Those long legs, ai-yi-yi. ‘They won’t! The Okies haven’t done anyone since that botched execution two years ago! Kenneth Wanderly raped and killed four girls – tortured them to death – and he’ll still be there eating government meatloaf when he’s sixty-five! When he’ll die in his sleep!’
She came back to the bed and threw herself on her knees. ‘Do this for me, Mike! Please!’
‘What makes him so important to you?’
The animation ran out of her face. She sat back on her heels and lowered her head so that her hair screened her face. She stayed that way for maybe ten seconds, and when she looked at me again, her beauty was – not gone, but marred. Scarred. It wasn’t just the tears streaming down her cheeks; it was the shamed droop of her mouth.
‘Because I know what it’s like. I was raped while I was in college. One night after a frat party. I’d tell you to write his obituary, but I never saw him.’ She drew a deep, shuddering breath. ‘He came up behind me. I was on my face the whole time. But Wanderly will do as a proxy. He’ll do just fine.’
I tossed back the sheet. ‘Turn on your computer.’
Cowardly bald-headed rapist Kenneth Wanderly, who could only get it up when his prey was tied down, saved the taxpayers a bunch by committing suicide in his Oklahoma State Penitentiary cell on death row in the early hours of this morning. Guards found Wanderly (whose picture is next to ‘useless piece of shit’ in the Urban Dictionary), hanging from a makeshift noose made of his own pants. Warden George Stockett immediately decreed a special celebratory dinner in the gen-pop dining hall tomorrow night, followed by a sock hop. When asked if the Suicide Trousers would be framed and placed with the penitentiary’s other trophies, Warden Stockett refused to answer, but gave the hastily assembled press conference a wink.
Wanderly, a disease masquerading as a live birth, came into the world on October 27, 1972, in Danbury, Connecticut …
Another craptastic piece of work from Michael Anderson! The worst of my Speaking Ill of the Dead obits were funnier and more trenchant (if you don’t believe me, look them up for yourself), but that didn’t matter. Once again the words came gushing out, and with that same sense of perfectly balanced power. At some point, far in the back of my mind, I realized it was more like throwing a spear than rolling a bowling ball. One with a sharply honed point. Katie felt it, too. She was sitting right next to me, crackling like static electricity flying from a hairbrush.
This next part is hard to write, because it makes me think there’s a little Ken Wanderly in all of us, but since there’s no way to tell the truth except to tell it, here it is: It made us horny. I grabbed her in a rough, ungeeky embrace as soon as it was done and carried her back to the bed. Katie locked her ankles at the small of my back and her hands at the nape of my neck. I think that second go-round might have lasted all of fifty seconds, but we both got off. And hard. People stink sometimes.
Ken Wanderly was a monster, okay? That’s not exclusively my judgment; he used the word to describe himself when he ’fessed up to everything in an unsuccessful effort to avoid the death sentence. I could use that to excuse what I did – what we did – except for one thing.
Writing his obituary was even better than the sex that followed it.
It made me want to do it again.
When I woke up the next morning, Katie was sitting on the couch with her laptop. She looked at me solemnly and patted the cushion beside her. I sat and read the Neon Circus headline on the screen: ANOTHER BAD BOY BITES THE DUST, ‘WICKED KEN’ COMMITS SUICIDE IN HIS CELL. Only not by hanging. He had smuggled in a bar of soap – how was a mystery, because inmates are only supposed to have access to the liquid kind – and shoved it down his throat.
‘Dear God,’ I said. ‘What a horrible way to die.’
‘Good!’ She raised her hands, balled them into fists, and shook them beside her temples. ‘Excellent!’
There were things I didn’t want to ask her. Number one on the list was if she had slept with me strictly so she could persuade me to kill a suitable stand-in for her rapist. But ask yourself this (I did): Would asking have done any good? She could give me a totally straight answer and I still might not have believed her. In a situation like that, the relationship may not be outright poisoned, but it’s probably damn sick.
‘I’m not going to do this again,’ I said.
‘All right, I understand.’ (She didn’t.)
‘So don’t ask me.’
‘I won’t.’ (She did.)
‘And you can never tell anybody.’
‘I already said I wouldn’t.’ (She already had.)
I think part of me already knew this conversation was an exercise in futility, but I said okay and let it drop.
‘Mike, I don’t want to hurry you out of here, but I’ve got like a zillion things to do, and …’
‘No worries, mate. I’m taillights.’
In truth, I wanted to get out. I wanted to walk about sixteen aimless miles and think about what came next.
She grabbed me at the door and kissed me hard. ‘Don’t go away mad.’
‘I’m not.’ I didn’t know how I was going away.
‘And don’t you dare think about quitting. I need you. I’ve decided Penny would be all wrong for Speaking Ill of the Dead, but I totally understand you need a break from it. I was thinking maybe … Georgina?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. I thought Georgina was the worst writer on the staff, but I didn’t really care anymore. All I cared about right then was never seeing another obituary, let alone writing one.
‘As for you, do all the nasty reviews you want. No Jeroma left to say no, am I right?’
‘You’re right.’
She shook me. ‘Don’t say it that way, you monkey. Show some enthusiasm. That old Neon Circus get-up-and-git. And say you’ll stick around.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We can have our own conferences. Private ones.’ She saw my eyes drop to the front of her robe and laughed, pleased. Then she gave me a push. ‘Now go. Buzz on out of here.’
A week passed, and when you’re working for a site like Neon Circus, each week lasts three months. Celebs got drunk, celebs went into rehab, celebs came out of rehab and immediately got drunk, celebs got arrested, celebs got out of limos sans panties, celebs danced the night away, celebs got married, celebs got divorced, celebs ‘took a break from each other.’ One celeb fell into his pool and drowned. Georgina wrote a remarkably unfunny obituary, and a ton of Where’s Mike tweets and emails arrived in its wake. Once that would have pleased me.
I did not visit Katie’s apartment, because Katie was too busy for canoodling. In fact, Katie wasn’t much in evidence. She was ‘taking meetings,’ a couple in New York and one in Chicago. In her absence, I somehow found myself in charge. I was not nominated, I did not campaign, I was not elected. It just happened. My consolation was that things would surely go back to normal when Katie returned.
I didn’t want to spend time in Jeroma’s office (it felt haunted), but other than our unisex bathroom, it was the only place where I could hold meetings with distraught staffers in relative privacy. And the staffers were always distraught. E-publishing is still publishing, and every publishing staff is a nest of old-fashioned complexes and neuroses. Jeroma would have told them to get the hell out (but hey, have a Yook). I couldn’t do that. When I started feeling crazy, I reminded myself that soon I would be back in my accustomed seat by the wall, writing snarky reviews. Just another inmate in the madhouse.
The only real decision I can remember making that week had to do with Jeroma’s chair. I absolutely could not put my ass where hers had been when she choked on the Cough Drop of Doom. I rolled it into the bullpen and brought in what I thought of as ‘my’ chair, the one at the desk by the Thanksgiving poster reading PLEASE SHIT WHERE YOU EAT. It was a far less comfy perch, but at least it didn’t feel haunted. Besides, I wasn’t writing much anyway.
Late Friday afternoon, Katie swept into the office clad in a shimmery knee-length dress that was the antithesis of her usual jeans and tank tops. Her hair was in artfully tumbled beauty shop curls. To me she looked … well … sort of like a prettier version of Jeroma. I had a passing recollection of Orwell’s Animal Farm, and how the chant of ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’ had changed to ‘Four legs good, two legs better.’
Katie gathered us and announced that we were being purchased by Pyramid Media out of Chicago, and there would be raises – small ones – for everybody. This occasioned wild applause. When it died down, she added that Georgina Bukowski would be taking over Speaking Ill of the Dead for good, and that Mike Anderson was our new kultcha kritic. ‘Which means,’ she said, ‘that he will spread his wings and fly slowly over the landscape, shitting where he will.’
More wild applause. I stood up and took a bow, trying to look cheerful and devilish. On that score, I was batting .500. I hadn’t been cheerful since Jeroma’s sudden death, but I did feel like the devil.
‘Now, everybody back to work! Write something eternal!’ Glistening lips parted in a smile. ‘Mike, could I speak to you in private?’
Private meant Jeroma’s office (we all still thought of it that way). Katie frowned when she saw the chair behind the desk. ‘What’s that ugly thing doing in here?’
‘I didn’t like sitting in Jeroma’s,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring it back, if you want.’
‘I do. But before you do …’ She moved close to me, but saw the blinds were up and we were being closely observed. She settled for putting a hand on my chest. ‘Can you come to my place tonight?’
‘Absolutely.’ Although I wasn’t as excited by the prospect as you might think. With the little head not in charge, doubts about Katie’s motivations had continued to solidify. And, I have to admit, I found it a little upsetting that she was so eager to get Jeroma’s chair back into the office.
Lowering her voice, even though we were alone, she said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve written any more …’ Her glistening lips formed the word obits.
‘I haven’t even thought of it.’
This was an extremely bodacious lie. Writing obits was the first thing I thought about in the morning, and the last thing I thought about at night. The way the words just flowed out. And the feeling that went with it: a bowling ball rolling over the right diamond, a twenty-foot putt heading straight for the hole, a spear thunking home in exactly the place you aimed at. Bullseye, dead center.
‘What else have you been writing? Any reviews yet? I understand Paramount’s releasing Jack Briggs’s last movie, and I’m hearing it’s even worse than Holy Rollers. That’s got to be tempting.’
‘I haven’t exactly been writing,’ I said. ‘I’ve been ghostwriting. As in everyone else’s work. But I was never cut out to be an editor. That’s your job, Katie.’
This time she didn’t protest.
Later that day, I looked up from the back row, where I was trying (and failing) to write a CD review, and saw her in the office, bent over her laptop. Her mouth was moving, and at first I thought she must also be on her phone, but no phone was in evidence. I had an idea – almost certainly ridiculous, but weirdly hard to shake – that she had found a leftover stash of eucalyptus drops in the top drawer, and was sucking on one.
I arrived at her apartment shortly before seven, bearing bags of Chinese from Fun Joy. No shorts and filmy top that night; she was dressed in a pullover and baggy khakis. Also, she wasn’t alone. Penny Langston was sitting on one end of the sofa (crouching there, actually). She wasn’t wearing her baseball cap, but that strange smile, the one that said touch me and I’ll kill you, was all present and accounted for.
Katie kissed my cheek. ‘I invited Penny to join us.’
That was patently obvious, but I said, ‘Hi, Pens.’
‘Hi, Mike.’ Tiny mouse-voice and no eye contact, but she made a valiant effort to turn the smile into something a tad less creepy.
I looked back to Katie. I raised my eyebrows.
‘I said I didn’t tell anyone about what you can do,’ Katie said. ‘That … sort of wasn’t the truth.’
‘And I sort of knew that.’ I put the grease-spotted white bags down on the coffee table. I didn’t feel hungry anymore, and I didn’t expect a whole lot of Fun Joy in the next few minutes. ‘Do you want to tell me what this is about before I accuse you of breaking your solemn promise and stalk out?’
‘Don’t do that. Please. Just listen. Penny works at Neon Circus because I talked Jeroma into hiring her. I met her when she still lived here in the city. We were in a group together, weren’t we, Pens?’
‘Yes,’ Penny said in her tiny mouse-voice. She was looking at her hands, clasped so tightly in her lap that the knuckles were white. ‘The Holy Name of Mary Group.’
‘Which is what, exactly, when it’s home with its hat off?’ As if I had to ask. Sometimes when the pieces come together, you can actually hear the click.
‘Rape support,’ Katie said. ‘I never saw my rapist, but Penny saw hers. Didn’t you, Pens?’
‘Yes. Lots of times.’ Now Penny was looking at me, and her voice grew stronger with each word. By the end, she was nearly shouting, and tears were rolling down her cheeks. ‘It was my uncle. I was nine years old. My sister was eleven. He raped her too. Katie says you can kill people with obituaries. I want you to write his.’
I’m not going to tell the story she told me, sitting there on the couch with Katie next to her, holding one of her hands and putting Kleenex after Kleenex in the other. Unless you’ve lived in one of the seven places in this country not yet equipped for multimedia, you’ve heard it before. All you need to know is that Penny’s parents died in a car accident, and she and her sister were shipped off to Uncle Amos and Aunt Claudia. Aunt Claudia refused to hear anything said against her husband. Figure the rest out for yourself.
I wanted to do it. Because the story was horrible, yes. Because guys like Uncle Amos need to take it in the head for preying on the weakest and most vulnerable, check. Because Katie wanted me to do it, absolutely. But in the end, it all came down to the sadly pretty dress Penny was wearing. And the shoes. And the bit of inexpertly applied makeup. For the first time in years, perhaps for the first time since Uncle Amos had begun making his nighttime visits to her bedroom, always telling her it was ‘our little secret,’ she had tried to make herself presentable for a male human being. It sort of broke my heart. Katie had been scarred by her rape, but had risen above it. Some girls and women can do that. Many can’t.
When she finished, I asked, ‘Do you swear to God that your uncle really did this?’
‘Yes. Again and again and again. When we got old enough to have babies, he made us turn over and used our …’ She didn’t finish this. ‘I bet it didn’t stop with Jessie and me, either.’
‘And he’s never been caught.’
She shook her head vehemently, dank ringlets flying.
‘Okay.’ I took my iPad out of my briefcase. ‘But you’ll have to tell me about him.’
‘I can do better.’ She disengaged her hand from Katie’s and grabbed the ugliest purse I’ve ever seen outside of a thrift-shop window. From it she took a crumpled sheet of paper, so sweat-stained it was limp and semitransparent. She had written in pencil. The looping scrawl looked like something a child might have done. It was headed AMOS CULLEN LANGFORD: HIS OBITUARY.
This miserable excuse for a man who raped little girls every chance he could get died slowly and painfully of many cancers in the soft parts of his body. During the last week, pus came pouring out of his eyes. He was 63 years old and in his last extremity, his screams filled the house as he begged for extra morphine …
There was more. Much. Her handwriting was that of a child, but her vocabulary was terrific, and she had done a far better job on this piece than anything she’d ever written for Neon Circus.
‘I don’t know if this will work,’ I said, trying to hand it back. ‘I think I have to write it myself.’
Katie said, ‘It won’t hurt to try, will it?’
I supposed it wouldn’t. Looking directly at Penny, I said, ‘I’ve never even seen this guy, and you want me to kill him.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and now she was meeting my eyes fair and square. ‘That’s what I want.’
‘You’re positive.’
She nodded.
I sat down at Katie’s little home desk, laid out Penny’s handwritten death-diatribe beside my iPad, opened a blank document, and began transcribing. I knew immediately that it was going to work. The sense of power was stronger than ever. The sense of aiming. I quit looking at the sheet after the second sentence and just hammered the keyboard screen, hitting the main points, and ended with this abjuration: Funeral attendees – no one could call them mourners, given Mr Langston’s unspeakable predilections – are warned not to send flowers, but spitting on the coffin is encouraged.
The two women were staring at me, big-eyed.
‘Will it work?’ Penny asked, then answered herself. ‘It will. I felt it.’
‘I think maybe it already has.’ I turned my attention to Katie. ‘Ask me to do this again, Kates, and I’ll be tempted to write your obituary.’
She tried to smile, but I could see she was scared. I hadn’t meant to do that (at least I don’t think I had), so I took her hand. She jumped, started to pull away, then let me hold it. The skin was cold and clammy.
‘I’m joking. Bad joke, but I mean what I say. This needs to end.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and swallowed loudly, a cartoon gulp sound. ‘Absolutely.’
‘And no talking. Not to anybody. Ever.’
Once again they agreed. I started to get up and Penny leaped at me, knocking me back into the chair and almost spilling us both to the floor. The hug wasn’t affectionate; it was more like the grip of a drowning woman muckling onto her would-be rescuer. She was greasy with sweat.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered harshly. ‘Thank you, Mike.’
I left without telling her she was welcome. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I don’t know if they ate the food I brought, but I rather doubt it. Fun Joy, my rosy red ass.
I didn’t sleep that night, and it wasn’t thinking of Amos Langford that kept me awake. I had other things to worry about.
One was the eternal problem of addiction. I had left Katie’s apartment determined that I would never wield that terrible power again, but it was a promise I’d made to myself before, and it wasn’t one I was sure I could keep, because each time I wrote a ‘live obit,’ the urge to do it again grew stronger. It was like heroin. Use it once or twice, maybe you can stop. After awhile, though, you have to have it. I might not have reached that point yet, but I was on the edge of the pit and knew it. What I’d said to Katie was the absolute rock-bottom truth – this needed to end while I could still end it. Assuming it wasn’t too late already.
