They cut only one CD, Invert 96, before falling back into the dark. There wasn’t a bad cut on the album and anybody who hears it now wonders what happened. Why aren’t they huge now? Where did they go? Was it drugs? Was it men? Women? Who knows? They came, they took a shot, they fell off — same old story. But they made some great music and, of that great music, “Epochsy” was the best cut of all.
“Follow me down,” it goes. “Follow me down the way.
Follow me through the ghosts of woe. Follow me through the day.”
And there’s the slow guitar underneath it, hinting of small-town Texas back roads, decaying honky-tonks, and shots of whiskey drunk after-hours.
I’m one of the few people who actually owns Invert 96. One of the only people who knew I had it was Jenny. As soon as I saw it on the list I knew it was a clue to something. Now it was ringing cathedral bells inside me. And inside India too, from the look on her face.
“Love,” she said, though I think she was really talking to herself. “Jenny never felt like she got enough. Or it wasn’t the right kind.”
“Never is,” I said.
She laughed a little at that. It was the first honest sound that had come out of her since I’d been there. “That’s true.”
“So she didn’t get it and she was looking for it,” I said. “And the lists were part of that?”
“Sure,” she said. “Of course. Obviously.”
It wasn’t obvious to me and I said so. They were just random collections of other people’s art. Sure, Jenny put them together according to whatever theme struck her at the moment, but that was it. I was supposed to believe that all of that random stuff was actually part of some master plan of Jenny’s?
“Of course, you don’t want it to be true,” said India. “You want Jenny to be some kind of waify little sexpot, right? Something to smile about when you’re drinking your lattes?”
“I just want her to be alive,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Well. She’s not. And she wasn’t what you thought of her either. She was relentless.”
“You said she did the list thing with you and me only?”
India nodded.
“And she played with you first?”
Again she nodded.
“So, what, you failed?”
“I screwed up one of the lists,” said India, dropping the words like little pebbles from her mouth.
“Which one?” I had an idea forming that I didn’t much like. Everything she said made sense as long as you stuck to the lists. But they weren’t all lists, that was the thing. One of them was something else. “Which one did you screw up, India?”
“Same as you, Book Boy,” she said. “Only she didn’t give me a second chance.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I never dropped one of them.”
“Yeah,” she said, looking into my face. Her eyes were like penny candles shining through the lattice in a priest’s confessional. “You did.”
“Which one?”
“You found the dragon, didn’t you?”
“I was supposed to find the dragon,” I said. “She gave me the directions.”
“You sure about that?” said India.
I was. I told her so. She laughed. It was an ugly sound, bitter, that had nothing to do with humor.
“I can’t believe she thought you were the one,” she said.
I was really uncomfortable suddenly, wanting out of there. “So, just tell me who you think pushed her off that landing and I’ll go find them.”
“And what?” she said again with the strange, flickery light in her eyes. “What will you do?”
“You point me to whoever did Jenny and I guarantee nobody else will have a reason to point that way again.”
I watched her chew it. I watched the million little clockwork gears she kept running in her head spin and click. The process took all of two seconds.
She brushed past me, heading for the nearest of the little mahogany end tables she had all over. She opened the drawer and pulled out a small metal frame. I was expecting a picture, some kind of candid photo of people at a party, one of whom would be Jenny’s murderer. Maybe he’d even have a bull’s-eye drawn around his head in India’s burgundy lipstick.
She came back to me and held the thing up so I could see it clearly.
“That’s him,” she said.
It wasn’t a picture she was holding in front of me, framed or otherwise; it was a mirror.
By the time my brain started working again I was out of her place, back on the street, running in a direction I didn’t remember choosing.
India’s words were still in my ears, making me so sick I knew if I stopped running it would only be to empty my stomach onto the pavement.
“You killed her, Book Boy,” they said. “You failed and you killed her.”
I remembered screaming at her that it wasn’t my fault about Jenny. All I’d found was what she wanted me to find. I’d run her stupid mazes like a lab rat, like there was treasure waiting for me at the end instead of that hideous, beautiful, ravenous monster squatting, almost alive, in the city’s guts. But somehow, according to India, I’d spiked it. Somehow finding the dragon was the wrong answer to the puzzle I hadn’t even known I was supposed to solve.
My head was splitting. My brain was still working on the whole big mess — list after list, map after map, book after book, song after song — all of it adding up to some kind of test, some way Jenny expected to sift out the gold from the world she lived in and leave behind the dross.
The puzzles were her way of pushing me to see if I was the one who would know her.
The one who could love her.
And the sick bit, the awfulness that wrenched my guts, was the realization that I did love her.
I was so full of murder for her killer, so ready to make whoever the sonofabitch was that pushed her take that last step down to the dark ugly places where meat and bone make hash of each other. But that whoever-it-was was me. I had failed the test. In failing that one, I’d failed them all.
Jenny worked it all out, had her picture of how it should be, and we’d kicked the thing to shreds. We failed Jenny, but she was the one who lost. She would never be seen. Never be known. Never be loved the way she wanted. Never. Ever.
Faced with that, who would want to stick around? Not me, man. Definitely not me.
Eventually I found myself back at the shop. The distance between Ex Libris and India’s loft was just a watercolor blur. The time between was a ghost.
I was in a panic — what my mother would call a state. I could barely get the keys in the lock. The door whipped open with a harsh click and I was a hurricane moving through to the back rooms, the places where I kept my bed and my kitchen and all the things that were important to me in the world.
I don’t remember tearing into my closet, shoving the boxes and winter coats aside. I don’t remember the desk drawers screaming as I tore them off their tracks. I only remember the storm of paper floating around me as I sat in the eye, looking at the little note.
Jenny’s directions.
Simple. Straightforward. Barely even a code once you understood what the notations meant.
Out (my front door), L2n (two blocks up to Doyle), R6 (six across to London), 1/4 around the Knight, L6 (up to Stevenson), R4 (to Poe), Down 2.
Simple. Simple as stepping off a curbside into the street.
But somehow I’d got it wrong.
It hit me as I was locking up again. Just as I was turning the key in the front door I realized my mistake. I’d planned to retrace my steps to see if somehow I really had misunderstood the whole thing. Maybe I’d missed a hidden alley or side street and turned or climbed too soon.