With that, I was out of ideas. Maybe John’s thing would pan out. Or maybe he would destroy half the town again. I was cold and achy and wanted to go back to bed. My wet clothes were sticking to every part of my body. I sighed and made my way over to the shelf of signed editions, some of them in a scuffed Plexiglas case, some sitting out, depending on whether or not the author was still alive. I started to get a sinking feeling when I spotted a signed hardcover copy of Fear Nothing by Dean Koontz for $100. Next to it, a signed Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman for $125.
I stared at the price tags and thought, Why don’t you fucking kill yourself?
I have that thought a lot, actually. Hey, did you know that people making less than $34,000 a year are 50 percent more likely to commit suicide? I looked it up. Did you know that number shoots up to 72 percent for the unemployed? I heard a guy on talk radio go on and on about how people on food stamps are living the good life off the government teat, and all I could think was, Yes, it’s such a party that sometimes we blow our fucking brains out rather than get humiliated by another government aid employee.
A little while back, John and I had gotten drunk on the occasion of our ten-year high school reunion. Oh, we didn’t attend the actual reunion—we had just started drinking after coming to the realization that it had been ten years and that we had made virtually no progress in our lives. “You know what it’s like?” John had said. “The Rapture. Like from the book of Revelation, when all the souls of the righteous get sucked up into Heaven.”
What he had meant was that there had been a point several years ago when everybody we graduated with were all equally poor. College kids, people working shitty customer service, the unemployed ones still living at home—all of us twentysomethings were all doing the same stuff for fun, going to the same parties. We had nothing, but we were young and thin (well, not me) and nobody expected anything from us. But then, one by one, the smart kids, the ambitious kids, the kids with rich parents—they all ascended. They got their degrees and careers and babies. Most moved away, and the ones who didn’t, stopped hanging out. Until it was just us, the rejects. Left behind, the faithless and doomed, the broke and the broken. Ever since he’d said that, I couldn’t stop thinking of it that way—that we had been cast out as heretics to the western world’s one true religion.
My resume is worthless—it turns out that managing a now-defunct video store in your twenties while solving monster crimes qualifies you for absolutely nothing else. Society just doesn’t need me—I’m that extra screw you have left over after you’ve put together an Ikea desk. Maybe you throw it in a drawer, thinking it’ll eventually become obvious what it was for later on. Then, a few years down the road, you come across it while cleaning and just toss it out.
So, now I’m standing here birthday shopping for Amy, who at the moment, is the only one of us with any kind of a stable income. Using our joint account for this is basically taking money out of her purse to buy something for her that she may or may not even want. How do you set your price limit in that scenario? Spending too much isn’t generosity, it’s forcing her to work overtime next month to make up the difference. “Here, baby, for your birthday I stole another autumn Saturday from your life that you’ll never get back!” Oh, and she’s also having to pay for some of her prescriptions out of pocket, due to the cut-rate health insurance at the call center. She has back problems, and spaces out the pills so that a thirty-day prescription will last sixty. So, now I also have that cross to bear: my inability to learn a useful skill equals Amy’s actual, physical agony.
Why don’t you fucking kill yourself?
I mean, I do have a rare skill, but being able to piss a stream of turkey feathers is also a rare skill—“rare” does not equal “lucrative.” Not that there aren’t ways to cash in on being a freak show—we get offers. But charging a fee to do what we do—to free somebody’s home from what they think is an evil spirit, or whatever—automatically puts you in some very shady company and the scammers will always take most of the business. After all, they’re just telling the customers what they want to hear. I’m, uh, not good at doing that.
I browsed the shelves, the titles seemingly arranged in random order. The copy of Hitchhiker’s was still there, in the glass case.
It was $275.
Amy would not be getting this book for her birthday.
And she would be fine with that. She knows the situation, she tells me not to worry about it every chance she gets. We have a roof over our heads, she says, we have food, we have electricity, we have each other. By medieval standards, she points out, we’d have been considered rich. Don’t beat yourself up over an ideal dreamed up by a bunch of marketing jerks on the coasts whose BMWs trigger cocaine-sniffing dogs from six blocks away. It’s fine, she says. You’re doing important work. Remember that I love you.
Why don’t you fucking kill yourself?
John
Loretta said, “About two weeks ago, Maggie spent hours running around the house with a flyswatter. I thought it was some game she had invented, stalking flies, swatting them. Then a few days later, she brings me this shoebox full of dead flies and says, ‘Do I have to eat them all now?’ I ask her what she’s talking about, and she thinks I told her to do that. I thought it was a dream she’d had. I made her throw them away, and she didn’t understand. Is there … something wrong with her? Is that what happened? She became confused and wandered away?”
“I don’t think so, but I don’t want to eliminate any possibilities.” John sipped the woman’s surprisingly good coffee and studied the drawings. “This church she kept drawing, is this your church? Is church a big deal to you guys?”
“She’d never drawn it before. The one Ted took us to is that biker church, they hold services in that old motel. It doesn’t look anything like a traditional church. In her drawings, it always has that steeple and that cross in the same spot.”
“There is a church like this in town, do you know it? It’s next to a pond? And a haunted coal mine?”
“No.”
“Maybe she went there with friends?”
“It’s possible. What do you think it means?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I’ll go check it out either way.” John stood. “I’ll leave you be, you’ve been a big help and I know this has been hard for you.”
She stood, meeting his eyes.
“It has been hard. I’ve just been so lonely here, Ted coming back from the war and breaking things off like he did, now Maggie going missing … do you know what that’s like? To have a hole in your life so big that your life is nothing but hole?”
“I think we all feel like that, at times. Those of us who are lucky, we have someone we can cling to in those times when life feels, as you said, like one big butthole.”
“That’s all I want, sometimes. Someone to cling to, if even just for a moment.”
She dropped her robe. She was naked underneath.
John looked her up and down. “I’m in the middle of a case, miss. Time is of the essence. Your little girl’s life could be at stake.”
She stepped forward, running a finger down his chest. “I promise I won’t be long.”
“I can promise I will be long.”
John let his pants fall. “I’m telling you right now, this won’t cure your loneliness, or replace what your husband took from you when he fled. At best, all I can do is diminish his memory by giving you something far beyond what he ever could.”
“That will have to do.” She lay back on the bed. “But maybe even that is asking too much. You see, my husband was quite the—OH MY FUCKING GOD!”