“Besides,” I said, “you’re looking at this the wrong way…”
“How so?”
“The point of canvassing, at least the way I do it, isn’t to find your suspects, Molls. Suspects are rare creatures, not easily found. All we’re trying to do is get a sense of his natural habitat.”
That earned me a long, appreciative look, but little else.
We parted ways with the awkward sense of unresolved matters. I caught a glimpse of pale abdomen as she raised her arms in a faux yawn, noted the twining of green rising from the rim of her blue jeans: barbed wire.
I thought about the way tattoos seem to peek from every feminine hemline: the plunging decolletage, the sagging sock, the T-shirt tag, and of course the hip-riding orbit of their pants and shorts. Little mementoes to mysteries unseen. Bruises to a glimpse. Invitations to a gaze.
If men were going to stare-and let’s face it, they were going to stare-then you might as well give them something to read. The best candy comes with labels-all the rest is bulk.
“Good night, Molly.”
“Night.” I’ve heard people say their brains are stuck between radio stations enough to know that it’s a popular metaphor for the kind of mental static the Forgetful are prone to when they’re stressed or burned out. The feeling I get-or I should say, the feeling I live with-is nowhere near as linear. It’s more like being stuck between a// channels simultaneously, cable and satellite, military and commercial. I’ve been asked by friends and researchers whether it gets worse as I get older and the reel of my memory gets fatter and fatter, and I want to say, “Yes, definitely,” but the fact is, I really don’t know. It’s kind of like treading water in the middle of the ocean that keeps getting deeper and deeper-more and more abyssal. You have this sense of drowning depths yawning ever more profoundly below you, but still, there you are, bobbing like a cork, peering this way and that, trying not to hum the theme to Jaws.
Anyway, one of the things I love about my post-conversation reveries is the way they silence the multi-dimensional rumble. In my case, the best way to avoid drowning is to flee the dappled surface and swim down, down into the cerulean dark.
Follow the sparks of the past as they dwell within me.
I was never meant for the Now-I know that much. I sometimes think I’m a creature of the Ages, shoehorned into the slot you call waking life. As mangled and twisted as oversized mail.
Amazing, really, the way they’re all still in there, in me, the voices and the people. More than a little spooky, the way they never stop talking, saying what they said over and over and over and over and over… Makes me feel like a cannibal, sometimes, the eater of momentary souls.
Lying on my bed, I sorted through channels looking for a baseball game. Baseball, I find, is far and away the best sport to not watch on TV. Since pretty much nothing happens outside what you see on SportsCenter, you can be an expert without seeing a single game. The ability to pass judgment without work or research has got to be the coolest consumer good since the invention of philosophy.
I closed my eyes while a vacuum-tube voice recited statistics-when everything’s slo-mo, you have plenty of time to measure and tally. The world somehow faded away without really going anywhere. I was stretched out, my clothes soaking up the air-conditioned cool, and I was standing on yet another porch in Legoland, raising an arm to wipe the sweat from my cheek and brow…
“Yeah-yeah. We heard about that. We’re brand spanking new. ”
This was Jill Morrow speaking at around 2:38 EM. She was an attractive-ish woman in her mid-thirties who lived at 371 Edgeware Street-a white-brick bungalow with a real estate sign swaying in the hot-sun breeze. I really wasn’t surprised that she had found her way to the front of the queue. I had already decided I would call Nolen later that night, suggest he drive out to interview her.
She and her husband Eddie had moved to Ruddick just a couple of weeks previously, something which, what with the empty boxes, the bare walls, and my estimable powers of deduction, I had failed to realize until she told me. The thing was, when I handed her the flyer with Dead Jennifer’s image in the top left corner, she recognized her.
This marked Molly’s one and only verbal intervention. “Really? From where?”
This was when it dawned on me how much it had helped having her tag along. I don’t sleep well, so I generally have this perpetual brooding, strung-out look. And even when I dress like a prep, there’s something about me that just doesn’t wear Christian clothes well. If I were a television show, I would sport a transparent box in the corner containing L N V D. Language, Nudity, Violence, Disturbing content-you name it.
Molly, on the other hand, was pure PG.
Not only had Jill and Eddie seen Dead Jennifer before, they had seen her the night she disappeared, walking down Highway 3, the road that led out of Ruddick proper, through the industrial park, toward the Framer Compound-sometime around twelve, she thought. Apparently they were coming back from seeing old work friends in Pittsburgh: Eddie Morrow was a former program component designer-which meant he got paid to jerk off to internet porn, or so I assumed. Jill had taken a job as a high school administrator in Ruddick, which was why they had moved.
She became progressively more anxious the longer we talked, especially after I told her that she needed to talk to the Chief. The time had come to go.
“Whatdid you do after?” I asked her on a whim as Molly and I retreated from her foyer.
“My husband dropped me off. ”
“Ah, where did he go? ”
A momentary hesitation, pretty much inexplicable when you considered how forthcoming Jill had been otherwise.
“He’s at a conference in Pitt. Software design thing. ”
“No, I mean after he dropped you off.”
Blank look.
“To grab some cigarettes from the Kwik-Pik.” A nervous shrug. “Smoker… You know. ”
I could tell I had pushed too far with my questions. The last thing you want to do, I’ve learned, is ask people questions they themselves have buried. No one likes the living dead. Wives especially. There’s a reason they always decide to go to bed when the zombie movie starts.
“Sorry,” I said. “I can be a nosy prick sometimes. ”
Then I was back in my room, blinking to the noise of the baseball game. Crowds roaring. Some guy with a massive ass had just belted a home run. With thighs that thick, I imagined his dick must look small.
Eddie, I thought. I needed to dust the snow off Eddie Morrow. If I were to be terribly honest, which I rarely am, I would have to say that I prefer talking to people this way-after the fact, in the humid terrarium of my mind. There’s a power to it that sometimes strikes me as almost authorial, the way I can freeze-frame and fast-forward, pause and replay things like the juicy bits of a porno. It’s a kind of TiVo, only without the monthly fees. TV you can really crawl into.
Of course, I can’t change anything that gets said, but I can lance it with angle after interpretative angle, squeeze it until it gets inflamed with multiple meanings or dries up and heals.
And then there’s those 558 women… All beautiful, even the ugly ones.
The harem that is my soul. Every curse has its upside, I suppose. The second person in the memory queue was Tim Dutchysen. He was the kind of kid I had seen in the mirror a thousand times before the army muscled me up and straightened me out. Twenty-two or so. Skinny, possessed of a kind of bodily insecurity, limbs devoid of a resting position. Eyes that bounced like India rubber, especially when he was agreeing with something. Good teeth. A grin too clownish not to be 110 percent sincere. Even when he stood absolutely still, he seemed to be moving-as if he were too thin not to be running from fat all the time.
And he was a real talker, the kind of guy who was always more honest than he planned, especially when he was full of shit.
“The guys all call me Dutchie. ”
“Dutchie it is then, Tim. ”
He worked at the local Kwik-Pik-an assistant manager, no less. Not only had he been at Legends the night of Jennifer’s disappearance, he openly admitted to watching her with his friends…