Jon Ureña's Blog, page 12
January 15, 2025
Smile, Pt. 6 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
The tracker shortened its beeping intervals, suggesting that if I looked around, I would spot the ruby-red body of the Ford Thunderbird. I parked in the first available gap by the curb and switched off the beeps.
A swarm of police officers clustered at the entrance to an alley, going in and out. One officer was struggling to unroll a coil of police tape. Between the uniforms, I spotted the ruby-red car and its open trunk. Two men in jackets and jeans were examining the corpses.
I closed my eyes. I folded my arms over the steering wheel, pressed my forehead against them, and let out a growl for about three seconds, muting the Graham Nash song on the radio. Then I lifted my forehead from my forearms and leaned back in the seat.
Two officers standing guard at the alley mouth were chatting with a reporter who thrust out a microphone connected by a cable to a briefcase slung over his shoulder.
If they had arrested Richard Alcala, the news would be all over it. He’d escaped on foot—who knew where. The throng of officers prevented me from getting close to the Ford Thunderbird to search for a clue or to rescue my transponder from under its chassis.
* * *
The cook—a black man with a shaved head and a wiry beard—arrived with my pineapple chicken dish, humming along to the chorus of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” on the radio. But the station cut the song short to talk about the Prowler, causing the cook to swear. When he set the plate in front of me, greasy sauce splattered onto the table, sending a piece of marinated chicken skidding. I pinched it up and ate it. He’d gone overboard with the pepper.
“Sorry,” said the cook. “It makes me sick.”
“No problem.”
“Another boogeyman.”
“They’re everywhere.”
“Every time they need to distract us from prices, from rising rents, from their corruption. They force us to look the other way, to distrust our neighbors.”
He walked off muttering and came back with a crumpled sheet of paper. He held it up: a wanted poster. Two pictures of Richard Alcala, facing front and in profile against a height chart. He was smiling like a Greek statue even though one side of his lips was split, a bump bulged under his right brow, and that eye was barely open.
“Does that look like the face of a man who could do the atrocities they’re accusing him of?” the cook asked.
“What does a killer of two dozen women and girls even look like?”
His features twisted in disgust.
“You’d see it right away in his photo, believe me. His eyes would scare you, his teeth would be rotted. They need a boogeyman. Out of the hundreds of women who vanish, plenty ran away from home or from a marriage and now live hundreds of miles away. Some took a ride with the wrong driver, sure. Others got killed in robberies, random assaults. But a single man skulking through Southern California murdering dozens, like Death incarnate? What a lie. In a week, the news will drop the story. They’ll say the police nabbed somebody, and they’ll stop talking about the Prowler like he never made headlines. And they won’t dig up the corruption they were covering before this so-called Prowler crawled out of the sewers.”
“I hope it ends in under a week, because I wish I’d never heard about any of it. That I’d slept through it for seven days.”
The cook snorted and smiled from a corner of his mouth.
“I could use a rest like that.”
“Are you going to hang up the poster?”
He bristled as if I’d demanded it.
“You heard what I said, didn’t you?”
“Mind if I keep it?”
He shrugged, folded the poster, and slipped it under my plate.
“Guess it’ll make a keepsake.”
“Maybe if I say his name three times in front of a mirror, the Prowler will appear.”
The cook laughed and shook his head as he moved on to another customer.
When I finished eating and stepped into the scorching two o’clock sun, a little boy darted across without looking, and I reached out to keep him from crashing into me. But a woman rushed up to grab the boy’s hand. They headed down the street as she glanced over her shoulder to see if I was following them.
I leaned on the roof of my car, which burned against my forearm. I rubbed my eyelids. The asphalt felt like a current, dragging at my legs. This Los Angeles, baked by heat in the mid-thirties, was losing color, sliding into black and white.
Back in my car, I drove to the end of the street and turned wherever my subconscious guided me. Sometimes I forgot the car was even carrying me. My arms felt weighed down by lead, and I wanted to hide between four walls in the dark.
I understood why I’d left Richard Alcala’s arrest up to the police, but I should have foreseen that even though I told them I was guiding them to the Prowler, they’d doubt me, just like the rest of the world that turns its eyes from the evil roaming around. If I’d shot Alcala in the face and left someone else to discover the corpse, I’d be wandering Los Angeles by now, looking for a movie theater. With the trunk stuffed with first-edition vinyl, I’d be planning which storage unit to rent so that years later I could retrieve all the records I’d stashed. But Alcala got away. I had rescued Cassie June, who now hated me, and drove Alcala straight to his next victim.
On the sidewalk, a few people had dragged out a radio and were seated around, listening to the latest on the fugitive. As I passed by, the volume rose and fell with the Doppler effect. Young skaters were everywhere—long hair, big smiles. Couples walked by hand-in-hand, wearing tight clothes that showed off their tanned skin. On one corner, a man narrowed his eyes and scanned the horizon, his gaze jumping from one passerby to another. A cop stapled a wanted poster to a telephone pole while a middle-aged couple with two teenagers came up, looking worried.
Was Richard Alcala in hiding? He had been killing every couple of weeks. Could someone like that hold back? When the police closed in on him, Alcala had kept himself busy with rape and murder, like an office worker putting in extra hours. On a map of Southern California, the spots where the Prowler had attacked women were scattered like shrapnel after an explosion, with Los Angeles at the epicenter. I doubted he’d gotten on a boat and set sail across the Pacific, but he could have stolen a car and driven off to Long Beach, Anaheim, Riverside, or San Bernardino, or west to Oxnard or Ventura. Nothing indicated he’d revisit the same hunting ground.
A patrol car went by in the opposite lane. The cop at the wheel had his tan arm sticking out the window, tapping the door panel right over the LAPD badge. My reflection flashed in the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses.
Would Alcala revisit the places where he’d left the bodies? Why would he? Sure, I’d made it clear I knew where three of his corpses were. But once he switched cars, he basically handed those bodies over to the police. That alone was enough to lock him up for life.
Sometimes I glanced at the wanted poster spread out on the passenger seat, then swept my eyes over the sidewalks in case the killer was blending in with the pedestrians. Playing the lottery.
My forearms itched every few minutes, and my sweaty palms made the steering wheel slick. I felt like I was digesting a concrete ball. Alcala remained at large because of me. Cassie’s mother’s face floated into my head, her scornful glare. If I were a serial killer who raped and murdered women and girls day in and day out, what would I do?
Yesterday, I’d caught him in the act of sweet-talking that woman. If I hadn’t visited his apartment, he would have met her at five o’clock at the address he gave her. She’d think this smiling photographer was going to jumpstart her modeling career, but maybe she’d have heard on the news that the police were after the Prowler in the area. She might have canceled the appointment. Really? With no way of contacting the photographer? I’d be following the news, but maybe she wouldn’t. Even if she heard about it, would she grasp the danger? Maybe she was dolling herself up right now to head off to a photo shoot.
-----
Author’s note: this is a translation of a novella I wrote in Spanish about ten years ago, that is contained in my collection Los reinos de brea. Regarding that tracker thing, I’m quite sure I lifted it straight from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. No shame in stealing from the best.
The tracker shortened its beeping intervals, suggesting that if I looked around, I would spot the ruby-red body of the Ford Thunderbird. I parked in the first available gap by the curb and switched off the beeps.
A swarm of police officers clustered at the entrance to an alley, going in and out. One officer was struggling to unroll a coil of police tape. Between the uniforms, I spotted the ruby-red car and its open trunk. Two men in jackets and jeans were examining the corpses.
I closed my eyes. I folded my arms over the steering wheel, pressed my forehead against them, and let out a growl for about three seconds, muting the Graham Nash song on the radio. Then I lifted my forehead from my forearms and leaned back in the seat.
Two officers standing guard at the alley mouth were chatting with a reporter who thrust out a microphone connected by a cable to a briefcase slung over his shoulder.
If they had arrested Richard Alcala, the news would be all over it. He’d escaped on foot—who knew where. The throng of officers prevented me from getting close to the Ford Thunderbird to search for a clue or to rescue my transponder from under its chassis.
* * *
The cook—a black man with a shaved head and a wiry beard—arrived with my pineapple chicken dish, humming along to the chorus of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” on the radio. But the station cut the song short to talk about the Prowler, causing the cook to swear. When he set the plate in front of me, greasy sauce splattered onto the table, sending a piece of marinated chicken skidding. I pinched it up and ate it. He’d gone overboard with the pepper.
“Sorry,” said the cook. “It makes me sick.”
“No problem.”
“Another boogeyman.”
“They’re everywhere.”
“Every time they need to distract us from prices, from rising rents, from their corruption. They force us to look the other way, to distrust our neighbors.”
He walked off muttering and came back with a crumpled sheet of paper. He held it up: a wanted poster. Two pictures of Richard Alcala, facing front and in profile against a height chart. He was smiling like a Greek statue even though one side of his lips was split, a bump bulged under his right brow, and that eye was barely open.
“Does that look like the face of a man who could do the atrocities they’re accusing him of?” the cook asked.
“What does a killer of two dozen women and girls even look like?”
His features twisted in disgust.
“You’d see it right away in his photo, believe me. His eyes would scare you, his teeth would be rotted. They need a boogeyman. Out of the hundreds of women who vanish, plenty ran away from home or from a marriage and now live hundreds of miles away. Some took a ride with the wrong driver, sure. Others got killed in robberies, random assaults. But a single man skulking through Southern California murdering dozens, like Death incarnate? What a lie. In a week, the news will drop the story. They’ll say the police nabbed somebody, and they’ll stop talking about the Prowler like he never made headlines. And they won’t dig up the corruption they were covering before this so-called Prowler crawled out of the sewers.”
“I hope it ends in under a week, because I wish I’d never heard about any of it. That I’d slept through it for seven days.”
The cook snorted and smiled from a corner of his mouth.
“I could use a rest like that.”
“Are you going to hang up the poster?”
He bristled as if I’d demanded it.
“You heard what I said, didn’t you?”
“Mind if I keep it?”
He shrugged, folded the poster, and slipped it under my plate.
“Guess it’ll make a keepsake.”
“Maybe if I say his name three times in front of a mirror, the Prowler will appear.”
The cook laughed and shook his head as he moved on to another customer.
When I finished eating and stepped into the scorching two o’clock sun, a little boy darted across without looking, and I reached out to keep him from crashing into me. But a woman rushed up to grab the boy’s hand. They headed down the street as she glanced over her shoulder to see if I was following them.
I leaned on the roof of my car, which burned against my forearm. I rubbed my eyelids. The asphalt felt like a current, dragging at my legs. This Los Angeles, baked by heat in the mid-thirties, was losing color, sliding into black and white.
Back in my car, I drove to the end of the street and turned wherever my subconscious guided me. Sometimes I forgot the car was even carrying me. My arms felt weighed down by lead, and I wanted to hide between four walls in the dark.
I understood why I’d left Richard Alcala’s arrest up to the police, but I should have foreseen that even though I told them I was guiding them to the Prowler, they’d doubt me, just like the rest of the world that turns its eyes from the evil roaming around. If I’d shot Alcala in the face and left someone else to discover the corpse, I’d be wandering Los Angeles by now, looking for a movie theater. With the trunk stuffed with first-edition vinyl, I’d be planning which storage unit to rent so that years later I could retrieve all the records I’d stashed. But Alcala got away. I had rescued Cassie June, who now hated me, and drove Alcala straight to his next victim.
On the sidewalk, a few people had dragged out a radio and were seated around, listening to the latest on the fugitive. As I passed by, the volume rose and fell with the Doppler effect. Young skaters were everywhere—long hair, big smiles. Couples walked by hand-in-hand, wearing tight clothes that showed off their tanned skin. On one corner, a man narrowed his eyes and scanned the horizon, his gaze jumping from one passerby to another. A cop stapled a wanted poster to a telephone pole while a middle-aged couple with two teenagers came up, looking worried.
Was Richard Alcala in hiding? He had been killing every couple of weeks. Could someone like that hold back? When the police closed in on him, Alcala had kept himself busy with rape and murder, like an office worker putting in extra hours. On a map of Southern California, the spots where the Prowler had attacked women were scattered like shrapnel after an explosion, with Los Angeles at the epicenter. I doubted he’d gotten on a boat and set sail across the Pacific, but he could have stolen a car and driven off to Long Beach, Anaheim, Riverside, or San Bernardino, or west to Oxnard or Ventura. Nothing indicated he’d revisit the same hunting ground.
A patrol car went by in the opposite lane. The cop at the wheel had his tan arm sticking out the window, tapping the door panel right over the LAPD badge. My reflection flashed in the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses.
Would Alcala revisit the places where he’d left the bodies? Why would he? Sure, I’d made it clear I knew where three of his corpses were. But once he switched cars, he basically handed those bodies over to the police. That alone was enough to lock him up for life.
Sometimes I glanced at the wanted poster spread out on the passenger seat, then swept my eyes over the sidewalks in case the killer was blending in with the pedestrians. Playing the lottery.
My forearms itched every few minutes, and my sweaty palms made the steering wheel slick. I felt like I was digesting a concrete ball. Alcala remained at large because of me. Cassie’s mother’s face floated into my head, her scornful glare. If I were a serial killer who raped and murdered women and girls day in and day out, what would I do?
Yesterday, I’d caught him in the act of sweet-talking that woman. If I hadn’t visited his apartment, he would have met her at five o’clock at the address he gave her. She’d think this smiling photographer was going to jumpstart her modeling career, but maybe she’d have heard on the news that the police were after the Prowler in the area. She might have canceled the appointment. Really? With no way of contacting the photographer? I’d be following the news, but maybe she wouldn’t. Even if she heard about it, would she grasp the danger? Maybe she was dolling herself up right now to head off to a photo shoot.
-----
Author’s note: this is a translation of a novella I wrote in Spanish about ten years ago, that is contained in my collection Los reinos de brea. Regarding that tracker thing, I’m quite sure I lifted it straight from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. No shame in stealing from the best.
Smile, Pt. 5 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
The man, sprawled on the sofa as if he’d spent sleepless hours watching TV reruns, lifted his eyelids and peeled himself off the backrest. He avoided looking me in the face.
I stood up from my chair, which groaned. Years of running had sculpted the man’s legs, making it hard to tell if he was about to lunge at me.
He sighed and combed through his scalp with his fingers. He gathered his mane of hair as if meaning to tie it at the nape of his neck.
“You’re a pretty entertaining son of a bitch. First time I’ve heard a story like that. Let’s see. You say you come from the future. You found out that yesterday, my yesterday, I kidnapped and killed someone. The little girl on roller skates.” He walked around the coffee table toward the entryway, turning his back on me, and shook his head. “I knew I recognized that car parked outside.”
“You recognize it because you tried to kidnap Cassie, and I stopped you.”
He spun around to face me. His voice had peeled away to that of someone who’d been stuck in traffic for hours.
“You blocked my way, and when I insisted you keep going, you ignored me. You made me late to pick up that girl.”
“You had the oncoming lane free. You could have passed me.”
“And that would’ve been illegal,” he said as if underlining something obvious.
He paced between the record-player cabinet and the opposite wall, while rolling his shoulders like a boxer about to climb into the ring.
“Yesterday you saw me and figured I’d kidnap that girl. You must have heard of the one they call the South California Prowler, linked to at least two dozen disappearances. Assuming that was me, you followed my car to Venice and, I guess, back to my house. You spun some fantasy about coming from the future because you’re crazy, having a psychotic episode triggered by PTSD.”
“I didn’t fight in the war.”
“And now you think you’re some avenger.”
In under forty-eight hours, this man had broken into three homes, raped and murdered the women inside, and attacked two women in separate alleys. Now he was holding off on dispatching the stranger who refused to leave his apartment. Did he believe me? Or was he hung up by the fact that he was dealing with someone claiming to come from the future—someone who had revealed real information?
He stopped next to the record player and leaned one forearm halfway across the Velvet Underground album cover and the smudged lid. He regarded me with weary eyes and pronounced dark circles.
“Regardless of what you’ve heard, the police investigated, questioned me. They booked me and put me on the list of suspects, people they hassle whenever a woman goes missing, while the detectives run around like chickens. They can’t tie me to the Prowler’s victims. You said some employees at other magazines told you about my legal troubles.” He cut off and looked at the ceiling, taking a moment to close his mouth. “They arrested me for sexual assault. When the drugs wore off, the girl regretted having consented. She never told me her age.”
I smiled showing both rows of teeth, making it clear I rejected his lies.
The man bowed his head and rubbed a few smudges off the record player’s plastic cover. He inhaled deeply. He took two steps toward me, though the coffee table stood in the way. He looked at me as if a cold wind were stinging his eyes.
“What are you after, you crazy son of a bitch? You haven’t attacked me the way I expected, with all this crap you’re saying.”
“I’m going to call the police.”
He laughed, a sound like stones clacking together.
“You’ll tell them I was driving behind you when you stopped to pick up a stranger’s little girl, but that you did it because you knew I was going to kidnap her and kill her. You know because you’re from the future. Brilliant. And what if you’re the Prowler, picking up clueless kids in your car? Maybe I should be worried.”
“You’ll never worry that anyone else might be the Prowler.”
The man narrowed his eyes and tensed his jaw.
“Why not stop me, if you’re so sure? Why not try to kill me? Easier than giving me a lecture, I’d think.”
“I’m tired of saving this ungrateful society that staggers around with its eyes closed. Let the police handle it. You’ll remember how you ended up in prison, up until the day they sort out the paperwork and execute you. If you spend decades on death row and some politician forgets your rapes and mutilations and murders, decides that keeping you locked up is inhumane, lacking compassion, or whatever redefinition of weakness and cowardice they come up with, and lets you out, every time you look at a woman, you’ll know I’ll return to wreck your fun.”
He stretched one arm toward the phone mounted on the wall next to the kitchen counter.
“Go ahead. You’ve got no evidence, whoever you are. Your word against mine.” He raised his voice as though slapping me with it. “The word of some whack job who says he comes from the future!”
I walked past the coffee table, and past him, heading to the kitchen.
He stepped back until his spine hit the record player.
“I’ll tell them you refuse to leave my house.”
I took the receiver off the hook, pressed it to my ear, and dialed three numbers.
He swept the apartment with his gaze, from the kitchen to the curtain at the back of the living room, as if taking inventory of his possessions. A bead of sweat rolled down from his hairline and got caught in an eyebrow. He touched the handle of the first drawer under the record player cabinet, but within two seconds his arm jerked back. He tugged at the collar of his shirt.
“You’re really going to do it,” he said in a dull tone. “Call the cops. Jesus.”
An operator announced that I’d reached the Los Angeles Police Department.
“Write down this address,” I said. “Number twenty-four on Ninth Street at Hoffenbach Avenue.”
“Twenty-four on Ninth at Hoffenbach. What’s your emergency?”
“That’s where Richard Alcala lives, the South California Prowler. He’s inside his apartment. In the parking lot, you’ll find his ruby-red Ford Thunderbird. Check the trunk.”
I hung up.
He looked at me as if possessed. Past the sleeves of his shirt, the muscles in his forearms bulged. His nostrils flared, and his face reddened.
“You plan on sticking around till they show up?”
I moved away from the phone and blocked the doorway.
“Till they show up, if you don’t mind.”
He grabbed The Velvet Underground album jacket and wrestled to pull the record free.
“You’ve ruined my day, clown. You pretended you worked for that magazine, but nobody at that office knows you came, and I doubt you talked to any employee at the other magazines about me. Maybe you told someone else about your plan, but I can deny you ever turned up. And you’re not a cop.”
He hooked his index finger into the record’s center hole and slid the sleeve back into his collection. He lifted the lid of the record player. He set the disc on the turntable and guided the needle to the first track. He turned the volume knob and switched on the player. The opening of “Who Loves the Sun” flooded the apartment as if I’d snuck into a nightclub.
I moved near one arm of the sofa while he pulled on the first drawer’s handle. He took out a gun—a 9mm Smith & Wesson semi-automatic with a cloud-gray slide. As he raised the weapon, he froze and stared at it as if surprised to be holding it. He blinked. He extended his right arm, aiming at my chest. His brow creased. Between his parted lips, clenched teeth.
“You going to shoot me or what?” I said.
A drop of sweat slid down his temple. His pupils quivered. He smiled like a shy student posing for his yearbook photo.
“You’re accusing me of killing dozens of women, and you think that the notion of shooting you would bother me?”
“Twenty-something, that we know of.”
“You broke into my apartment. I could say you were robbing me and I feared for my life. You think a gunshot would alarm the neighbors? My neighbor on the right gets home at seven, and the old toad to my left cranks her TV so high I sleep with earplugs. They think I’m a friendly guy. They’ve never complained. Worst case, they’ll think it’s a champagne cork.”
“Then pull the trigger.”
The pistol trembled. He squinted. The artery in his neck was throbbing.
“You told me you took a minor girl home,” I said. “Or somewhere else. Then she later regretted that romantic encounter under the influence of any of the drugs that are all over the place at this time. Quite the euphemism for the fact that one afternoon you broke into a hotel room, where a woman was resting, and you raped her. And that her husband walked in while you were strangling his wife with a lamp cord. He beat the hell out of you. I’ve seen the pictures. You healed without scars. And you stayed out of prison because they refused to travel hundreds of miles to testify. Facing you again would have traumatized them, though less than you traumatized the victims who followed.”
I stooped to reach the open photo album and pulled it closer, onto my corner of the coffee table. He lowered the pistol toward my gut, distracted. I pressed a finger to the photo of a woman with bleached blonde hair done in two pigtails. Naked save for a bra printed with a red-and-yellow pattern. She was perched on the edge of a king-size bed, tilting her head so that locks of hair fell across her tanned features.
“I recognize this woman. Sandra Arras. You cornered her in an alley, I imagine in a way similar to how you cornered a couple of others who managed to escape. You faked having a broken arm under a phony cast. You smiled at her and led her to a van. Why would she refuse to help a friendly photographer? The moment she climbed in, holding onto one end of some piece of furniture, you shut the trunk and attacked her. You gouged out her eyes and kept them, who knows why. I don’t know the other women on these two pages. Maybe you killed them and no one ever found out, or you just took pictures and they lost themselves back in the jungle.”
I straightened. The man raised the gun to point at my heart while staring with a reptilian gaze.
“You loved it,” I said. “Locking them in the dark. Terrifying them. Torturing them. Making them realize no one would save them.”
“You’ve got a mic on. You think I’m going to confess? If I had killed those women, their bodies would be gone. Plenty of places to dump them. No bodies, no proof.”
“They took eight years to find the first one. They dug up Sandra Arras on one of the hills. They found Lisa Redman near Riverside, inside a buried car. Some divers discovered the trash bags holding Annette Warner at the bottom of a pond.”
His breathing came fast as a bird’s, his pupils twitching. He let out a growl that blended with the song’s vowels.
I took a step forward.
“When you picked up the gun, you felt the weight shift. You know you left a magazine in it.”
He hurled the Smith & Wesson at me. I sidestepped. The pistol ricocheted off the stack of books, scattering them, then hit the floor.
He sprinted to the kitchen. Grabbed the hammer. He charged at me, hair flying around with each stride, arm raised stiff as a stretched rubber band. His eyelids had stretched back, revealing the whites of his eyes, and his wet lips were pulled into a grin.
That would have been enough against a helpless victim. As he whipped the hammer at my skull, I blocked his wrist with my left forearm, then slammed a right-handed punch between his eyes. He spat a growl, spraying saliva. He staggered backward. I grabbed his right wrist and twisted that arm behind his back, then I shoved him down until he was on his knees, forcing his elbow as if to snap it. He loosened his grip on the hammer, and I ripped it away. I smashed the hammer into his side at kidney height. He screamed and collapsed.
When I let go of his wrist, he leaped upright. He climbed onto one arm of the sofa, dug a foot into a cushion, tried to clear the other arm, but tripped and went down on his shoulder with a crash. He crawled away, half on all fours like a cave beast, all the way to the closed bedroom door.
I looked for the Smith & Wesson. It had fallen behind me, between the entryway and the bookcase.
The bedroom door was open. The man was gone.
I crouched and picked up the pistol. With my free hand, I rummaged in the inside left pocket of my jacket. I took out the magazine. I slid it into the pistol grip and pressed it with my palm until it clicked.
After I straightened, I aimed at the bedroom doorway and racked the Smith & Wesson’s slide. The man emerged looking dazed. He’d gone pale as if dunked in ice water. He braced a hand on the doorframe and raised his gaze at me, confused.
“The shotgun under the bed,” I said. “I don’t know how much a decent security system costs these days, but you should’ve invested in protection against burglars.”
He hunched his shoulders, tucking his head in, and blinked slowly as though it took effort to keep his eyes open. A dark bruise was forming between his eyebrows.
When I opened my mouth to speak, he lurched at me, fists clenched. I aimed a few inches from his left ear and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed like a drumbeat. A crater of splinters appeared in the bedroom doorframe.
The living room reeked of hot gunpowder. He froze as though he’d just heard a voice call out inside an abandoned house. A loose strand of hair dangled over his left eye, and saliva glistened at the corners of his mouth.
The throb of blood in my ears gradually died down. When he glanced at the entrance door, I heard, faint under the music, someone pounding and, between the muffled words jumbled by the song, I caught the word “Police.”
He looked at me. He stepped gingerly around the space between the coffee table and the record player as if walking on shards of glass. I shifted to aim at him head-on. He slipped over to the entryway, and while the pounding shook the door, he glanced back as if waiting for me to shoot him in the back of the skull.
He opened the door and used his body to block the gap. Over his blond mane I saw the policeman’s cap.
I lowered the Smith & Wesson, flipped the safety on. Slipped the barrel between my waistband and stomach, pulling my shirt over it.
He left the apartment and closed the door. Through the window curtain, I saw two silhouettes move toward the stairs.
I rushed to the record player and shut it off. In comparison, the hum of the fans sounded as if I were floating underwater. I took out the Smith & Wesson again, though I hid it behind my body, and bent toward the window. I moved the curtain a few inches.
Beyond the railings I caught sight of the man and the policeman in the parking lot. The cop, back to me, had his right hand on the holster at his belt. The man—Richard Alcala—wore that grin that swayed anyone who believed in smiles. Except for his messy hair as if someone had shoved him off a bed, and the bruise between his eyes, he could pass for someone who’d just cranked up the music and smoked weed until annoyed neighbors called the police.
The cop’s head bobbed as he spoke, but from up here they might as well have been pantomiming. Alcala opened his Ford Thunderbird’s door and leaned in. He pulled out some folded papers. The policeman wrote on a notepad. The killer glanced over his shoulder at me like I was a ghost peering out a window. The cop nodded and handed back the papers. Alcala dropped them onto the driver’s seat. The officer pointed to the trunk of the Thunderbird. Alcala shrugged and moved his lips. They circled around the car to the trunk. Alcala, on the officer’s right, was smiling as he spoke and turned his key in the lock. When he lifted the trunk lid, both men recoiled. The cop went for his gun, but the killer, snake-quick, clamped onto the officer’s forearm. They struggled.
I yanked the apartment door open and stepped onto the second-floor landing. Shouts rose as both men traded punches like two boxers pinned in a corner. Should I brace my forearms on the railing and aim at Alcala?
At the far end of the landing, a neighbor stared with his jaw slack, a lit cigarette between his fingers. A dozen onlookers hurried toward the parking lot like people drawn to a burning house.
I was halfway down the stairs when a gunshot rang out. I ducked. The policeman had fallen, and clutched at his stomach. His pistol bounced across the asphalt. Alcala slid behind the Thunderbird’s wheel and slammed the door.
After I jumped onto the sidewalk, I tore through the parking lot as the Thunderbird’s engine roared and its tires screeched, smoking. The air smelled of burnt rubber. A cluster of bystanders shrieked and jumped aside while the car lurched onto the sidewalk and dropped onto the road with a squeal of rubber. The edge of the Thunderbird’s nose smashed into the left headlight of an AMC Gremlin, blowing it out in a spray of glass and grinding metal. The Thunderbird straightened and sped away.
I dashed to my rental, fumbling to hide the gun at my waistband. I nearly tripped over the policeman, who was gasping. I reached my car door, hand on the handle.
The Thunderbird had vanished at the far end of the street. The owner of the AMC Gremlin, the one Alcala had hit, shook his head and shouted at the onlookers near his wrecked headlight, as if they were to blame.
The cop groaned. His hat lay on the asphalt. His hair was jet-black and slicked down. He was pressing bloody hands to one side of his guts.
I seethed with rage. I had Richard Alcala in my sights, I could have blown a hole right between his eyes. I should have killed him, even if society stayed blind and other monsters came crawling up. But I’d banked on the police doing their job. Maybe I could track that Thunderbird in a few minutes, following the transponder signals.
The crowd that had seen the shooting was dispersing. The man with the cigarette was still leaning on the second-floor railing, eyeing the cop like he was roadkill on the highway.
Maybe someone had gone to call for an ambulance, but could I trust these people? They were like toddlers crawling around in diapers, babbling nonsense. I slammed a fist against my car door. I turned back to the wounded policeman, who was shaking, and I crouched beside him.
He had olive-toned, sweaty skin and a mustache that was notably thick for someone who seemed to be in his mid-twenties. Blood leaked between the fingers laced over his abdomen.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The officer became aware of my presence and laughed through ragged coughs.
“I’ve spilled enough blood overseas,” he rasped in a shaky voice with a Hispanic accent. “They blew out my subclavian artery. Not looking to bleed out again. But give me a hand.”
“An ambulance, I suppose. Using the radio in your cruiser?”
He nodded vigorously.
“And tell them to put out a BOLO on Richard Alcala. He’s fleeing in a ruby-red Ford Thunderbird, plates number 1DNE049. You got that plate memorized?”
“I read it before.”
I notified dispatch that an officer was down. I repeated the address of the apartment and the name of the Prowler, plus the license plate. I rushed back to the officer. I wanted to check for an exit wound, but I held back from moving him. The smell of brass and diarrhea surrounded us. The bullet must have torn through his intestines. If they didn’t get him to a hospital, he’d bleed out or die from infection. As I started to pull off my jacket, I remembered I had the gun tucked there, so instead I used my bare palm to press against the bullet’s entry hole.
His face was drenched, and he laid his head on the pavement, breathing through his mouth like a woman in labor. Shadows covered us, blocking the sun. The circle of gawkers made me edgy as if they might gang up to beat me.
“Three people,” the policeman mumbled.
“What’s that?”
“Three bodies in that trunk. Decomposed. Three skulls. Maybe he really is the Prowler.”
I had to pretend I was just some citizen who’d called in. Meanwhile, I was kneeling in blood and filth. My shirt clung to my back, and I felt dizzy as if I’d been awake for twenty-four hours, hopped up on coffee. The people around us looked like tall silhouettes against a blue sky, their speech a tangled mass of nonsense.
I’d never stuck around to deal with the police whenever I involved them. I’d go back to my own time and read the articles they wrote about my intervention years before. This cop was suffering, and he might die, because I fucked up.
“You got a tip that the Prowler lived here?” I asked.
“The dispatcher said someone called in, naming him.”
“And they sent a lone officer, a single unit?”
He groaned. He lifted his head off the pavement to glance at the mess around his abdomen, and the skin under his chin bunched up.
“If they sent out most of us every time someone claimed they knew who the Prowler was, we’d barely solve any other cases.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is, predictably, The Velvet Underground’s “Who Loves the Sun.”
This is the translation of a novella I wrote in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in my self-published book Los reinos de brea.
The man, sprawled on the sofa as if he’d spent sleepless hours watching TV reruns, lifted his eyelids and peeled himself off the backrest. He avoided looking me in the face.
I stood up from my chair, which groaned. Years of running had sculpted the man’s legs, making it hard to tell if he was about to lunge at me.
He sighed and combed through his scalp with his fingers. He gathered his mane of hair as if meaning to tie it at the nape of his neck.
“You’re a pretty entertaining son of a bitch. First time I’ve heard a story like that. Let’s see. You say you come from the future. You found out that yesterday, my yesterday, I kidnapped and killed someone. The little girl on roller skates.” He walked around the coffee table toward the entryway, turning his back on me, and shook his head. “I knew I recognized that car parked outside.”
“You recognize it because you tried to kidnap Cassie, and I stopped you.”
He spun around to face me. His voice had peeled away to that of someone who’d been stuck in traffic for hours.
“You blocked my way, and when I insisted you keep going, you ignored me. You made me late to pick up that girl.”
“You had the oncoming lane free. You could have passed me.”
“And that would’ve been illegal,” he said as if underlining something obvious.
He paced between the record-player cabinet and the opposite wall, while rolling his shoulders like a boxer about to climb into the ring.
“Yesterday you saw me and figured I’d kidnap that girl. You must have heard of the one they call the South California Prowler, linked to at least two dozen disappearances. Assuming that was me, you followed my car to Venice and, I guess, back to my house. You spun some fantasy about coming from the future because you’re crazy, having a psychotic episode triggered by PTSD.”
“I didn’t fight in the war.”
“And now you think you’re some avenger.”
In under forty-eight hours, this man had broken into three homes, raped and murdered the women inside, and attacked two women in separate alleys. Now he was holding off on dispatching the stranger who refused to leave his apartment. Did he believe me? Or was he hung up by the fact that he was dealing with someone claiming to come from the future—someone who had revealed real information?
He stopped next to the record player and leaned one forearm halfway across the Velvet Underground album cover and the smudged lid. He regarded me with weary eyes and pronounced dark circles.
“Regardless of what you’ve heard, the police investigated, questioned me. They booked me and put me on the list of suspects, people they hassle whenever a woman goes missing, while the detectives run around like chickens. They can’t tie me to the Prowler’s victims. You said some employees at other magazines told you about my legal troubles.” He cut off and looked at the ceiling, taking a moment to close his mouth. “They arrested me for sexual assault. When the drugs wore off, the girl regretted having consented. She never told me her age.”
I smiled showing both rows of teeth, making it clear I rejected his lies.
The man bowed his head and rubbed a few smudges off the record player’s plastic cover. He inhaled deeply. He took two steps toward me, though the coffee table stood in the way. He looked at me as if a cold wind were stinging his eyes.
“What are you after, you crazy son of a bitch? You haven’t attacked me the way I expected, with all this crap you’re saying.”
“I’m going to call the police.”
He laughed, a sound like stones clacking together.
“You’ll tell them I was driving behind you when you stopped to pick up a stranger’s little girl, but that you did it because you knew I was going to kidnap her and kill her. You know because you’re from the future. Brilliant. And what if you’re the Prowler, picking up clueless kids in your car? Maybe I should be worried.”
“You’ll never worry that anyone else might be the Prowler.”
The man narrowed his eyes and tensed his jaw.
“Why not stop me, if you’re so sure? Why not try to kill me? Easier than giving me a lecture, I’d think.”
“I’m tired of saving this ungrateful society that staggers around with its eyes closed. Let the police handle it. You’ll remember how you ended up in prison, up until the day they sort out the paperwork and execute you. If you spend decades on death row and some politician forgets your rapes and mutilations and murders, decides that keeping you locked up is inhumane, lacking compassion, or whatever redefinition of weakness and cowardice they come up with, and lets you out, every time you look at a woman, you’ll know I’ll return to wreck your fun.”
He stretched one arm toward the phone mounted on the wall next to the kitchen counter.
“Go ahead. You’ve got no evidence, whoever you are. Your word against mine.” He raised his voice as though slapping me with it. “The word of some whack job who says he comes from the future!”
I walked past the coffee table, and past him, heading to the kitchen.
He stepped back until his spine hit the record player.
“I’ll tell them you refuse to leave my house.”
I took the receiver off the hook, pressed it to my ear, and dialed three numbers.
He swept the apartment with his gaze, from the kitchen to the curtain at the back of the living room, as if taking inventory of his possessions. A bead of sweat rolled down from his hairline and got caught in an eyebrow. He touched the handle of the first drawer under the record player cabinet, but within two seconds his arm jerked back. He tugged at the collar of his shirt.
“You’re really going to do it,” he said in a dull tone. “Call the cops. Jesus.”
An operator announced that I’d reached the Los Angeles Police Department.
“Write down this address,” I said. “Number twenty-four on Ninth Street at Hoffenbach Avenue.”
“Twenty-four on Ninth at Hoffenbach. What’s your emergency?”
“That’s where Richard Alcala lives, the South California Prowler. He’s inside his apartment. In the parking lot, you’ll find his ruby-red Ford Thunderbird. Check the trunk.”
I hung up.
He looked at me as if possessed. Past the sleeves of his shirt, the muscles in his forearms bulged. His nostrils flared, and his face reddened.
“You plan on sticking around till they show up?”
I moved away from the phone and blocked the doorway.
“Till they show up, if you don’t mind.”
He grabbed The Velvet Underground album jacket and wrestled to pull the record free.
“You’ve ruined my day, clown. You pretended you worked for that magazine, but nobody at that office knows you came, and I doubt you talked to any employee at the other magazines about me. Maybe you told someone else about your plan, but I can deny you ever turned up. And you’re not a cop.”
He hooked his index finger into the record’s center hole and slid the sleeve back into his collection. He lifted the lid of the record player. He set the disc on the turntable and guided the needle to the first track. He turned the volume knob and switched on the player. The opening of “Who Loves the Sun” flooded the apartment as if I’d snuck into a nightclub.
I moved near one arm of the sofa while he pulled on the first drawer’s handle. He took out a gun—a 9mm Smith & Wesson semi-automatic with a cloud-gray slide. As he raised the weapon, he froze and stared at it as if surprised to be holding it. He blinked. He extended his right arm, aiming at my chest. His brow creased. Between his parted lips, clenched teeth.
“You going to shoot me or what?” I said.
A drop of sweat slid down his temple. His pupils quivered. He smiled like a shy student posing for his yearbook photo.
“You’re accusing me of killing dozens of women, and you think that the notion of shooting you would bother me?”
“Twenty-something, that we know of.”
“You broke into my apartment. I could say you were robbing me and I feared for my life. You think a gunshot would alarm the neighbors? My neighbor on the right gets home at seven, and the old toad to my left cranks her TV so high I sleep with earplugs. They think I’m a friendly guy. They’ve never complained. Worst case, they’ll think it’s a champagne cork.”
“Then pull the trigger.”
The pistol trembled. He squinted. The artery in his neck was throbbing.
“You told me you took a minor girl home,” I said. “Or somewhere else. Then she later regretted that romantic encounter under the influence of any of the drugs that are all over the place at this time. Quite the euphemism for the fact that one afternoon you broke into a hotel room, where a woman was resting, and you raped her. And that her husband walked in while you were strangling his wife with a lamp cord. He beat the hell out of you. I’ve seen the pictures. You healed without scars. And you stayed out of prison because they refused to travel hundreds of miles to testify. Facing you again would have traumatized them, though less than you traumatized the victims who followed.”
I stooped to reach the open photo album and pulled it closer, onto my corner of the coffee table. He lowered the pistol toward my gut, distracted. I pressed a finger to the photo of a woman with bleached blonde hair done in two pigtails. Naked save for a bra printed with a red-and-yellow pattern. She was perched on the edge of a king-size bed, tilting her head so that locks of hair fell across her tanned features.
“I recognize this woman. Sandra Arras. You cornered her in an alley, I imagine in a way similar to how you cornered a couple of others who managed to escape. You faked having a broken arm under a phony cast. You smiled at her and led her to a van. Why would she refuse to help a friendly photographer? The moment she climbed in, holding onto one end of some piece of furniture, you shut the trunk and attacked her. You gouged out her eyes and kept them, who knows why. I don’t know the other women on these two pages. Maybe you killed them and no one ever found out, or you just took pictures and they lost themselves back in the jungle.”
I straightened. The man raised the gun to point at my heart while staring with a reptilian gaze.
“You loved it,” I said. “Locking them in the dark. Terrifying them. Torturing them. Making them realize no one would save them.”
“You’ve got a mic on. You think I’m going to confess? If I had killed those women, their bodies would be gone. Plenty of places to dump them. No bodies, no proof.”
“They took eight years to find the first one. They dug up Sandra Arras on one of the hills. They found Lisa Redman near Riverside, inside a buried car. Some divers discovered the trash bags holding Annette Warner at the bottom of a pond.”
His breathing came fast as a bird’s, his pupils twitching. He let out a growl that blended with the song’s vowels.
I took a step forward.
“When you picked up the gun, you felt the weight shift. You know you left a magazine in it.”
He hurled the Smith & Wesson at me. I sidestepped. The pistol ricocheted off the stack of books, scattering them, then hit the floor.
He sprinted to the kitchen. Grabbed the hammer. He charged at me, hair flying around with each stride, arm raised stiff as a stretched rubber band. His eyelids had stretched back, revealing the whites of his eyes, and his wet lips were pulled into a grin.
That would have been enough against a helpless victim. As he whipped the hammer at my skull, I blocked his wrist with my left forearm, then slammed a right-handed punch between his eyes. He spat a growl, spraying saliva. He staggered backward. I grabbed his right wrist and twisted that arm behind his back, then I shoved him down until he was on his knees, forcing his elbow as if to snap it. He loosened his grip on the hammer, and I ripped it away. I smashed the hammer into his side at kidney height. He screamed and collapsed.
When I let go of his wrist, he leaped upright. He climbed onto one arm of the sofa, dug a foot into a cushion, tried to clear the other arm, but tripped and went down on his shoulder with a crash. He crawled away, half on all fours like a cave beast, all the way to the closed bedroom door.
I looked for the Smith & Wesson. It had fallen behind me, between the entryway and the bookcase.
The bedroom door was open. The man was gone.
I crouched and picked up the pistol. With my free hand, I rummaged in the inside left pocket of my jacket. I took out the magazine. I slid it into the pistol grip and pressed it with my palm until it clicked.
After I straightened, I aimed at the bedroom doorway and racked the Smith & Wesson’s slide. The man emerged looking dazed. He’d gone pale as if dunked in ice water. He braced a hand on the doorframe and raised his gaze at me, confused.
“The shotgun under the bed,” I said. “I don’t know how much a decent security system costs these days, but you should’ve invested in protection against burglars.”
He hunched his shoulders, tucking his head in, and blinked slowly as though it took effort to keep his eyes open. A dark bruise was forming between his eyebrows.
When I opened my mouth to speak, he lurched at me, fists clenched. I aimed a few inches from his left ear and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed like a drumbeat. A crater of splinters appeared in the bedroom doorframe.
The living room reeked of hot gunpowder. He froze as though he’d just heard a voice call out inside an abandoned house. A loose strand of hair dangled over his left eye, and saliva glistened at the corners of his mouth.
The throb of blood in my ears gradually died down. When he glanced at the entrance door, I heard, faint under the music, someone pounding and, between the muffled words jumbled by the song, I caught the word “Police.”
He looked at me. He stepped gingerly around the space between the coffee table and the record player as if walking on shards of glass. I shifted to aim at him head-on. He slipped over to the entryway, and while the pounding shook the door, he glanced back as if waiting for me to shoot him in the back of the skull.
He opened the door and used his body to block the gap. Over his blond mane I saw the policeman’s cap.
I lowered the Smith & Wesson, flipped the safety on. Slipped the barrel between my waistband and stomach, pulling my shirt over it.
He left the apartment and closed the door. Through the window curtain, I saw two silhouettes move toward the stairs.
I rushed to the record player and shut it off. In comparison, the hum of the fans sounded as if I were floating underwater. I took out the Smith & Wesson again, though I hid it behind my body, and bent toward the window. I moved the curtain a few inches.
Beyond the railings I caught sight of the man and the policeman in the parking lot. The cop, back to me, had his right hand on the holster at his belt. The man—Richard Alcala—wore that grin that swayed anyone who believed in smiles. Except for his messy hair as if someone had shoved him off a bed, and the bruise between his eyes, he could pass for someone who’d just cranked up the music and smoked weed until annoyed neighbors called the police.
The cop’s head bobbed as he spoke, but from up here they might as well have been pantomiming. Alcala opened his Ford Thunderbird’s door and leaned in. He pulled out some folded papers. The policeman wrote on a notepad. The killer glanced over his shoulder at me like I was a ghost peering out a window. The cop nodded and handed back the papers. Alcala dropped them onto the driver’s seat. The officer pointed to the trunk of the Thunderbird. Alcala shrugged and moved his lips. They circled around the car to the trunk. Alcala, on the officer’s right, was smiling as he spoke and turned his key in the lock. When he lifted the trunk lid, both men recoiled. The cop went for his gun, but the killer, snake-quick, clamped onto the officer’s forearm. They struggled.
I yanked the apartment door open and stepped onto the second-floor landing. Shouts rose as both men traded punches like two boxers pinned in a corner. Should I brace my forearms on the railing and aim at Alcala?
At the far end of the landing, a neighbor stared with his jaw slack, a lit cigarette between his fingers. A dozen onlookers hurried toward the parking lot like people drawn to a burning house.
I was halfway down the stairs when a gunshot rang out. I ducked. The policeman had fallen, and clutched at his stomach. His pistol bounced across the asphalt. Alcala slid behind the Thunderbird’s wheel and slammed the door.
After I jumped onto the sidewalk, I tore through the parking lot as the Thunderbird’s engine roared and its tires screeched, smoking. The air smelled of burnt rubber. A cluster of bystanders shrieked and jumped aside while the car lurched onto the sidewalk and dropped onto the road with a squeal of rubber. The edge of the Thunderbird’s nose smashed into the left headlight of an AMC Gremlin, blowing it out in a spray of glass and grinding metal. The Thunderbird straightened and sped away.
I dashed to my rental, fumbling to hide the gun at my waistband. I nearly tripped over the policeman, who was gasping. I reached my car door, hand on the handle.
The Thunderbird had vanished at the far end of the street. The owner of the AMC Gremlin, the one Alcala had hit, shook his head and shouted at the onlookers near his wrecked headlight, as if they were to blame.
The cop groaned. His hat lay on the asphalt. His hair was jet-black and slicked down. He was pressing bloody hands to one side of his guts.
I seethed with rage. I had Richard Alcala in my sights, I could have blown a hole right between his eyes. I should have killed him, even if society stayed blind and other monsters came crawling up. But I’d banked on the police doing their job. Maybe I could track that Thunderbird in a few minutes, following the transponder signals.
The crowd that had seen the shooting was dispersing. The man with the cigarette was still leaning on the second-floor railing, eyeing the cop like he was roadkill on the highway.
Maybe someone had gone to call for an ambulance, but could I trust these people? They were like toddlers crawling around in diapers, babbling nonsense. I slammed a fist against my car door. I turned back to the wounded policeman, who was shaking, and I crouched beside him.
He had olive-toned, sweaty skin and a mustache that was notably thick for someone who seemed to be in his mid-twenties. Blood leaked between the fingers laced over his abdomen.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The officer became aware of my presence and laughed through ragged coughs.
“I’ve spilled enough blood overseas,” he rasped in a shaky voice with a Hispanic accent. “They blew out my subclavian artery. Not looking to bleed out again. But give me a hand.”
“An ambulance, I suppose. Using the radio in your cruiser?”
He nodded vigorously.
“And tell them to put out a BOLO on Richard Alcala. He’s fleeing in a ruby-red Ford Thunderbird, plates number 1DNE049. You got that plate memorized?”
“I read it before.”
I notified dispatch that an officer was down. I repeated the address of the apartment and the name of the Prowler, plus the license plate. I rushed back to the officer. I wanted to check for an exit wound, but I held back from moving him. The smell of brass and diarrhea surrounded us. The bullet must have torn through his intestines. If they didn’t get him to a hospital, he’d bleed out or die from infection. As I started to pull off my jacket, I remembered I had the gun tucked there, so instead I used my bare palm to press against the bullet’s entry hole.
His face was drenched, and he laid his head on the pavement, breathing through his mouth like a woman in labor. Shadows covered us, blocking the sun. The circle of gawkers made me edgy as if they might gang up to beat me.
“Three people,” the policeman mumbled.
“What’s that?”
“Three bodies in that trunk. Decomposed. Three skulls. Maybe he really is the Prowler.”
I had to pretend I was just some citizen who’d called in. Meanwhile, I was kneeling in blood and filth. My shirt clung to my back, and I felt dizzy as if I’d been awake for twenty-four hours, hopped up on coffee. The people around us looked like tall silhouettes against a blue sky, their speech a tangled mass of nonsense.
I’d never stuck around to deal with the police whenever I involved them. I’d go back to my own time and read the articles they wrote about my intervention years before. This cop was suffering, and he might die, because I fucked up.
“You got a tip that the Prowler lived here?” I asked.
“The dispatcher said someone called in, naming him.”
“And they sent a lone officer, a single unit?”
He groaned. He lifted his head off the pavement to glance at the mess around his abdomen, and the skin under his chin bunched up.
“If they sent out most of us every time someone claimed they knew who the Prowler was, we’d barely solve any other cases.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is, predictably, The Velvet Underground’s “Who Loves the Sun.”
This is the translation of a novella I wrote in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in my self-published book Los reinos de brea.
January 14, 2025
Smile, Pt. 4 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I followed him inside. The apartment was painted parrot green. Two fans droned away, airing it out. Even next to this individual, I preferred the indoors to the barbecue-like heat outside.
“Small,” the man said. “It’s hard for me to guarantee steady income. But I develop the photos at home and don’t need much else.”
The kitchen had been installed on the short side of an L-shape, whose long side was the living room. The man set his grocery bag on the counter. I wanted to run to the sink and soak my face, or take a ten-minute shower in cold water. On the kitchen table, next to a bowl with milk and cereal leftovers, lay two pieces of plaster, like the cracked shell of a walnut, and a hammer.
“Remodeling?” I asked.
The man stepped toward me, casting a sidelong glance at the hammer.
“I needed to bash something. Arms up, friend.”
I raised an eyebrow. He made a gesture like surrendering to the police. When I obliged, he patted down the underarms of my jacket, searching for holsters. He checked the sides of my belt, then stepped back and rubbed his chin.
I straightened my jacket.
“Your potential employers come armed?”
He moved past me into the living room.
“After they booked me, a guy tried to stab me. You never know.”
He led me to the back of the room, partitioned by an orange velvet curtain with patterns like something that might emerge under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He pulled the curtain aside. On a table, he had left two cameras, three plastic containers for soaking negatives, and a lamp fitted with a red bulb.
The man closed the curtain, plunging us into inky darkness. The fans droned like a generator. My stomach turned, and the hair on my forearms prickled. After two steps and the press of a button, the lamp’s bulb struggled to ignite like an old engine, then bathed us in fluorescent red. His blond hair, skin, and teeth all took on the hue of a cartoon demon.
“I’ve gathered what I need in this nook,” he said. “The magic depends on how you treat women and on framing, and you can’t buy that. People like you just rent it for a while.”
He opened a cabinet. Inside were five albums stacked up.
“Want to take a look at this year’s work?”
“Sure.”
He pulled out the first album. The look on his profile hinted at the pride he took in showing it off. When he opened the album, I glimpsed three rows of photos per page: gorgeous faces peeking out from beneath full heads of hair, voluptuous bodies posed in varying degrees of undress. The red bulb tinted the pictures.
He closed the album.
“We’ll need a different light.”
With the album tucked under one arm, he switched off the bulb, and slid the curtain open. The living room consisted of a coffee table he’d pushed against an old sofa and a wicker chair. He might have bought them from a flea market or rescued them from a dump. Concert posters hung on the walls, including a stand-out shot of Hendrix in a fancy jacket, laughing as he held his guitar. Above the sofa, a poster of Kubrick’s version of Lolita: the close-up of a pale girl wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and licking a lollipop.
I nodded toward the piece of furniture where he’d set up a Thorens TD-125 turntable. In the open space below were about twenty vinyl records in their sleeves. On top of the turntable lay a record sleeve showing a cloud of pink smoke escaping a subway entrance—an album by The Velvet Underground.
“Nice setup for that other hobby of yours.”
“Photography’s my job, but yeah, you can’t live without music. And there’s never been better music than now.”
He set the photo album down on the coffee table. I sat in the wicker chair, which creaked as though riddled with termites.
“You must be surprised,” the man said.
“No. I love music.”
“There’s no TV. My guests always bring it up. They need the box that tells them what to think.”
“That’s a point in your favor.”
The muscles around his eyes helped shape his smile.
“Something to drink? A beer?”
“As long as it comes out of the fridge, anything works.”
He walked off and turned the corner that concealed half the counter, the oven, and the refrigerator. One of the fans rotated toward me, cooling my face. On the piece of furniture opposite the couch, the man had stacked a dozen books. Now that I was calmly looking around, I read the titles on the spines: Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, Parerga and Paralipomena by Schopenhauer, the Bible, Story of the Eye by Bataille, Down There by Huysmans.
I heard a drawer slide open, some utensils clatter, then the drawer slam shut. The man reappeared holding the necks of two bottles in one hand and a bottle opener in the other. He collapsed onto the sofa, in front of the photo album. With the opener, he popped the cap off his beer.
“One of the greatest sounds.”
He took a swig.
“And the best one?” I asked.
He wiped his lips and glanced aside.
“A secret.”
He tossed me the opener in a smooth arc. I opened my beer. When I drank, the bitter liquid ran down my throat and settled in my stomach, cooling them the way flash floods scrub dry riverbeds.
The man opened the album halfway and turned it so we could both see. I studied the photographs, flipping through several pages. A blonde woman with cobalt eyes, nude and seated on a king-size bed, had tilted her face away from the camera in a calculated pose. A woman with wavy brown hair, kneeling on the bed, looked over her bare shoulder as though inviting the watcher; her half-lidded eyes suggested she might have been high. The same woman standing on the mattress or on a carpet, striking ballet poses. A necklace of wooden beads strung on a bronzed wire reached between her pale breasts. Another woman wore a salmon-colored blouse, and the ends of her hair flipped upward, mimicking the style shown in magazines and on TV. She was smiling as if mustering the courage to undress. The same woman leaned against a window that cast back her phantom-like reflection. She had slipped into a dress a size too big, and one strap had slid off her shoulder. Other photos caught this woman mid-conversation, her face suggesting she was talking to a friend. Another woman, her dyed-blonde hair tied into pigtails, knelt naked in front of the camera, looking up with the confidence of someone who knows her beauty. A woman silhouetted against an unlit spotlight had black hair streaked with glints of midnight blue, her gaze roaming the room as though familiarizing herself with her surroundings.
The sun washed out half the face of a little girl who was tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. A nude woman lay on the couch where the man was now seated. Huge headphones covered her ears, and her eyes were closed to listen more intently. A father, a boy, and a girl stood under a spray of water pouring from one of the Venice Beach showers, against the backdrop of the ocean and a lifeguard station. One photo captured a woman from her bangs down to the top of her breasts. She had rested her head on a pillow, and her lips glistened with moisture. A woman dressed as though she were out for a Saturday stroll posed shyly in front of blurred branches resembling a tattered curtain. The pigtailed girl, topless, sat in front of this apartment’s record collection, her hands pressed against her headphones. A series of pictures showed women in wet hair and swimsuits, outlined against water like molten metal where the sun had burned white holes.
I imagined these women living on for centuries. Wearing the same clothes and accessories, their skin immune to wrinkles, their expressions forever fresh. A secret community bound by the knowledge that they all once confronted the same camera lens. Perhaps I would find the bed, apart from the lights that had illuminated many of these shots, in whatever place the man and his aspiring model were heading to yesterday.
The man rubbed his chin as he nodded.
“Fascinating, isn’t it? How everyday life differs from those moments immersed in the ritual. The camera knows. If you saw many of these women on the street, you’d walk right by, but in the photos, they’re goddesses. And they’ll endure until the pictures turn to dust.”
I locked my eyes on his. When he noticed, he raised his brows. He tipped up his beer bottle and drank.
“How many of these women have you slept with?” I asked.
He laughed as he swallowed. After giving himself a thump on the chest, he bent forward, elbows on his thighs, and shot me a roguish smile.
“Trade secret. Pretty unprofessional of you to ask. But women open up to whoever makes them feel beautiful.”
I drank half my beer, swished the bitter liquid in my mouth, swallowed. I set the bottle next to the album and leaned back against the wicker chair.
“How many of these women are still alive?”
He gave me a once-over, imitating the way his future prey had scrutinized me yesterday, trying to figure out if I was joking.
“When they leave my studio, they vanish into the jungle.”
“You really don’t know if any of them dropped dead around the time they met you?”
He soured like a kid who just unwrapped the box for the game console he wanted, only to find socks inside.
“You drop remarks like you did yesterday. I get your perspective, but airing it is pointless. Do you think people want to stay close to someone who dredges up that stuff?”
“I don’t want them close. How many of these women walked into your studio, got photographed, and disappeared? How many families are searching for their daughters?”
His lips parted in a dark slit. His brow furrowed, and his face lost some of that California tan. He stood up straight. From his shirt pocket, he yanked out three fifty-dollar bills and slapped them onto the table.
“Your mind is twisted. I ignored the vibe you were giving off, but I should’ve refused the job the moment I realized who was offering it. Money corrupts—blinds you, blinds me too. Out. Don’t ever contact me again or show your face around here.”
“I’m staying for now.”
He held his breath, closing the fingers of his right hand on his knee so hard that his knuckles pressed white against the fabric.
“You think you can stay when I forbid it?”
“I’ll say what I have to say and then leave.”
The man squared his shoulders. His right fist trembled. A tendon in his neck bulged like a strip of wood.
I primed my muscles, bracing for an attack. While my gaze held his, I also kept an eye on the edges of my vision in case he reached for a weapon.
“Yesterday, July 16, 1977, you followed little Cassie June—doe-eyed Cassie—while she skated home. Maybe you smiled when you offered her a ride to spare her the heat and exhaustion. She trusted you. She got into a stranger’s car because you were kind enough to offer. She was raised to embrace life with a smile, to enjoy the rosy world inside her bubble, before that bubble popped and exposed her to the rancid air of adulthood. Cassie June. She belonged to a dance group with several school friends. Four days a week, she skated. She loved birds and had asked for books so she could learn to identify them. She loved spending afternoons at the beach. Sometimes, sitting on the rocks, she wrote in her journal. She wondered what lay on the far side of that mass of water, and kept saying how badly she wanted to find out.”
The man let one eyebrow drop. His fist unclenched, then tightened again as though trying to recall his anger. I didn’t let the rage quake my voice.
“But Cassie June got into your car. Instead of taking her home, you took her somewhere else. Maybe to your studio, where you shot many of the photos in this album. For two hours you raped her and sodomized her. When you were done, you strangled her until she was nearly unconscious—or with luck she passed out—and then you crushed her face with a hammer. You got rid of the corpse. It destroyed her family, obviously. When they woke up every morning, they remembered the midday they last saw Cassie, a scene that ate at them each night before they fell asleep.”
My red blindness faded as the pounding in my temples eased. The man was smiling like a TV host, a smile that said every hole he had to dodge was already paved over. He knew he had never picked up Cassie June in his Ford Thunderbird just as well as I knew he had—and thanks to me, the evidence for that knowledge was gone.
“You’ve made up one wild story,” he said.
I took another sip. The man did the same, tipping his bottle by fractions of an inch until the last drop trickled into his mouth.
“Those who knew Cassie remembered her as a beacon of joy,” I said. “She signed up for everything. She was inquisitive. Instinctively she got along with everyone she met, without hesitation or fear. The adults in her childhood listened to her, helped her. Whenever she needed them, they were there. People like her, with that innate trust and radiance, can make living in this world worthwhile. But Cassie believed a smiling stranger would drive her home, and that’s why you were able to rape and kill her. California and the West have turned into a hunting ground, open season all year round. If people knew what lurks in the dark, the diet of monsters like you, who would they trust? If Cassie had been afraid of strangers, if she had refused to get into strange cars, would she have been as happy? I don’t think so. Would she have been miserable? Maybe. She would have grown used to fear, to the myriad dangers it signals. But she’d still be alive. What does that mean?”
One fan blew a strand of the man’s hair aside. He looked at me like a blank sheet of paper, wanting to speak but unable to string words together, absently twisting his empty bottle.
“Not long ago, I questioned my role,” I said. “I could crush the trust of people like Cassie, scare them so they never get into strangers’ cars, never walk down dark alleys, never let a slick-talking man with a winning smile charm them. They’d learn they live in a sandpaper world, prowled by evil that would exploit their faith and innocence and grind them to the bone. Or I could keep them from discovering it. I could make sure that evil never reaches them—make sure they get into my car instead of the one behind me. They’d go on dancing, skating, sitting on those rocks by the beach, writing at sunset. Any stray bits of night would remain sedated beneath the anesthesia of their hope. Should I remove monsters like you so that these potential victims can go on living with a smile, still believing this world that almost devoured them is actually worth inhabiting? Is it better to stare into the abyss, or to look away and trust in humanity? Maybe those who see light everywhere must build the world they need, while people like me, the tar-smeared brethren, stand guard around the perimeter, making sure those who’ve drowned in tar don’t choke out that light. I followed that approach for years. And it worked, more or less. It saved thousands. But aside from sparing those people, what good am I really doing? I stand watch at the edges of the darkness, stopping the beasts from slipping into the glow of a streetlamp around which these bright-eyed souls flit. They learn they can let their guard down. They preach that self-defense is a vice or a sin, that monsters can be bought off or cured. I spare them the worst that might happen if they keep wearing those tinted glasses.”
The man reclined on the couch as he rubbed his eyelids, and snorted.
“You see,” I went on, “I found out by accident that this girl existed. I felt lost, torn from where I belonged, all while searching for the albums and classic movies that had bubbled into existence the last time I tangled with the timeline. Then I stumbled upon the news. They found Cassie June’s skeleton in the desert, stuffed in a rusted barrel under a pile of rocks. Usually I steer clear of news like that. The gallons of blood spilled in the darkness as I turn away corrode me, keep me up at night. But I read every article I could find about that girl. They described her life. They interviewed her family—whoever was left. I gathered every fact, every video, the court cases. Most people who heard the story during dinner might have lost their appetite for a minute, but what would that information do for them? They lock it away, forget it by the next day. They accept that the abyss has swallowed another sacrifice and are relieved it happened to someone else’s child. How could anyone keep walking burdened by the weight of so many injustices? Even I manage to let most of these stories pass right through me—otherwise, I might throw myself off a building. But that night, I was drowning in the black tide. Cassie’s murder stabbed me like a lance. I wanted to prevent it, to stop that trusting, life-loving girl from being snuffed out. A window of opportunity had opened, and if I’d refused to step through, I’d have to live knowing I could have saved her but instead swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, crawled into bed, and pulled the covers up to my forehead. I came back to get the job done and avoid Cassie’s ghost trailing after me to my grave.”
I paused for breath, but all the air had fled the apartment. The sunlight coming through the window had dimmed as though a translucent veil had wrapped my head. My body still sank into the wicker chair, but it felt like I was viewing the scene from a few yards beneath it, from the bottom of a pit. I spoke with effort, like cranking up some ancient, forgotten machine.
“It hit me, you know. The lack of meaning. We live for a handful of orbits around this star and then vanish. Some people, whether they deserve it or not, vanish much sooner, before they get to die in a bed surrounded by loved ones. Cassie’s life was cut short when she could have been spared. And that news story tied her to me, this irate beast. Merely annoyances and irritating noises stoke my anger until it boils over, and one day the flames might break out and burn this world to ashes. But my locomotive furnace devours that coal to plow into monsters like you. There have always been Cassies, and there will be more. Anyone you care about can die at any moment—I know that better than most because I live it week after week. It usually comes down to luck. Coincidence. Cassie’s luck was crossing your path. Your luck was crossing mine.”
-----
Author’s note: this novella belongs to a self-published book titled Los reinos de brea (The Kingdoms of Tar), that released about ten years ago. I presented this scene to the writing course I was attending at the time, and those present were disturbed, even the instructor, who is a reasonably famous local mystery writer. I don’t think the scene is that impactful, but I’m glad to find out that I still like it after these many years.
I followed him inside. The apartment was painted parrot green. Two fans droned away, airing it out. Even next to this individual, I preferred the indoors to the barbecue-like heat outside.
“Small,” the man said. “It’s hard for me to guarantee steady income. But I develop the photos at home and don’t need much else.”
The kitchen had been installed on the short side of an L-shape, whose long side was the living room. The man set his grocery bag on the counter. I wanted to run to the sink and soak my face, or take a ten-minute shower in cold water. On the kitchen table, next to a bowl with milk and cereal leftovers, lay two pieces of plaster, like the cracked shell of a walnut, and a hammer.
“Remodeling?” I asked.
The man stepped toward me, casting a sidelong glance at the hammer.
“I needed to bash something. Arms up, friend.”
I raised an eyebrow. He made a gesture like surrendering to the police. When I obliged, he patted down the underarms of my jacket, searching for holsters. He checked the sides of my belt, then stepped back and rubbed his chin.
I straightened my jacket.
“Your potential employers come armed?”
He moved past me into the living room.
“After they booked me, a guy tried to stab me. You never know.”
He led me to the back of the room, partitioned by an orange velvet curtain with patterns like something that might emerge under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He pulled the curtain aside. On a table, he had left two cameras, three plastic containers for soaking negatives, and a lamp fitted with a red bulb.
The man closed the curtain, plunging us into inky darkness. The fans droned like a generator. My stomach turned, and the hair on my forearms prickled. After two steps and the press of a button, the lamp’s bulb struggled to ignite like an old engine, then bathed us in fluorescent red. His blond hair, skin, and teeth all took on the hue of a cartoon demon.
“I’ve gathered what I need in this nook,” he said. “The magic depends on how you treat women and on framing, and you can’t buy that. People like you just rent it for a while.”
He opened a cabinet. Inside were five albums stacked up.
“Want to take a look at this year’s work?”
“Sure.”
He pulled out the first album. The look on his profile hinted at the pride he took in showing it off. When he opened the album, I glimpsed three rows of photos per page: gorgeous faces peeking out from beneath full heads of hair, voluptuous bodies posed in varying degrees of undress. The red bulb tinted the pictures.
He closed the album.
“We’ll need a different light.”
With the album tucked under one arm, he switched off the bulb, and slid the curtain open. The living room consisted of a coffee table he’d pushed against an old sofa and a wicker chair. He might have bought them from a flea market or rescued them from a dump. Concert posters hung on the walls, including a stand-out shot of Hendrix in a fancy jacket, laughing as he held his guitar. Above the sofa, a poster of Kubrick’s version of Lolita: the close-up of a pale girl wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and licking a lollipop.
I nodded toward the piece of furniture where he’d set up a Thorens TD-125 turntable. In the open space below were about twenty vinyl records in their sleeves. On top of the turntable lay a record sleeve showing a cloud of pink smoke escaping a subway entrance—an album by The Velvet Underground.
“Nice setup for that other hobby of yours.”
“Photography’s my job, but yeah, you can’t live without music. And there’s never been better music than now.”
He set the photo album down on the coffee table. I sat in the wicker chair, which creaked as though riddled with termites.
“You must be surprised,” the man said.
“No. I love music.”
“There’s no TV. My guests always bring it up. They need the box that tells them what to think.”
“That’s a point in your favor.”
The muscles around his eyes helped shape his smile.
“Something to drink? A beer?”
“As long as it comes out of the fridge, anything works.”
He walked off and turned the corner that concealed half the counter, the oven, and the refrigerator. One of the fans rotated toward me, cooling my face. On the piece of furniture opposite the couch, the man had stacked a dozen books. Now that I was calmly looking around, I read the titles on the spines: Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, Parerga and Paralipomena by Schopenhauer, the Bible, Story of the Eye by Bataille, Down There by Huysmans.
I heard a drawer slide open, some utensils clatter, then the drawer slam shut. The man reappeared holding the necks of two bottles in one hand and a bottle opener in the other. He collapsed onto the sofa, in front of the photo album. With the opener, he popped the cap off his beer.
“One of the greatest sounds.”
He took a swig.
“And the best one?” I asked.
He wiped his lips and glanced aside.
“A secret.”
He tossed me the opener in a smooth arc. I opened my beer. When I drank, the bitter liquid ran down my throat and settled in my stomach, cooling them the way flash floods scrub dry riverbeds.
The man opened the album halfway and turned it so we could both see. I studied the photographs, flipping through several pages. A blonde woman with cobalt eyes, nude and seated on a king-size bed, had tilted her face away from the camera in a calculated pose. A woman with wavy brown hair, kneeling on the bed, looked over her bare shoulder as though inviting the watcher; her half-lidded eyes suggested she might have been high. The same woman standing on the mattress or on a carpet, striking ballet poses. A necklace of wooden beads strung on a bronzed wire reached between her pale breasts. Another woman wore a salmon-colored blouse, and the ends of her hair flipped upward, mimicking the style shown in magazines and on TV. She was smiling as if mustering the courage to undress. The same woman leaned against a window that cast back her phantom-like reflection. She had slipped into a dress a size too big, and one strap had slid off her shoulder. Other photos caught this woman mid-conversation, her face suggesting she was talking to a friend. Another woman, her dyed-blonde hair tied into pigtails, knelt naked in front of the camera, looking up with the confidence of someone who knows her beauty. A woman silhouetted against an unlit spotlight had black hair streaked with glints of midnight blue, her gaze roaming the room as though familiarizing herself with her surroundings.
The sun washed out half the face of a little girl who was tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. A nude woman lay on the couch where the man was now seated. Huge headphones covered her ears, and her eyes were closed to listen more intently. A father, a boy, and a girl stood under a spray of water pouring from one of the Venice Beach showers, against the backdrop of the ocean and a lifeguard station. One photo captured a woman from her bangs down to the top of her breasts. She had rested her head on a pillow, and her lips glistened with moisture. A woman dressed as though she were out for a Saturday stroll posed shyly in front of blurred branches resembling a tattered curtain. The pigtailed girl, topless, sat in front of this apartment’s record collection, her hands pressed against her headphones. A series of pictures showed women in wet hair and swimsuits, outlined against water like molten metal where the sun had burned white holes.
I imagined these women living on for centuries. Wearing the same clothes and accessories, their skin immune to wrinkles, their expressions forever fresh. A secret community bound by the knowledge that they all once confronted the same camera lens. Perhaps I would find the bed, apart from the lights that had illuminated many of these shots, in whatever place the man and his aspiring model were heading to yesterday.
The man rubbed his chin as he nodded.
“Fascinating, isn’t it? How everyday life differs from those moments immersed in the ritual. The camera knows. If you saw many of these women on the street, you’d walk right by, but in the photos, they’re goddesses. And they’ll endure until the pictures turn to dust.”
I locked my eyes on his. When he noticed, he raised his brows. He tipped up his beer bottle and drank.
“How many of these women have you slept with?” I asked.
He laughed as he swallowed. After giving himself a thump on the chest, he bent forward, elbows on his thighs, and shot me a roguish smile.
“Trade secret. Pretty unprofessional of you to ask. But women open up to whoever makes them feel beautiful.”
I drank half my beer, swished the bitter liquid in my mouth, swallowed. I set the bottle next to the album and leaned back against the wicker chair.
“How many of these women are still alive?”
He gave me a once-over, imitating the way his future prey had scrutinized me yesterday, trying to figure out if I was joking.
“When they leave my studio, they vanish into the jungle.”
“You really don’t know if any of them dropped dead around the time they met you?”
He soured like a kid who just unwrapped the box for the game console he wanted, only to find socks inside.
“You drop remarks like you did yesterday. I get your perspective, but airing it is pointless. Do you think people want to stay close to someone who dredges up that stuff?”
“I don’t want them close. How many of these women walked into your studio, got photographed, and disappeared? How many families are searching for their daughters?”
His lips parted in a dark slit. His brow furrowed, and his face lost some of that California tan. He stood up straight. From his shirt pocket, he yanked out three fifty-dollar bills and slapped them onto the table.
“Your mind is twisted. I ignored the vibe you were giving off, but I should’ve refused the job the moment I realized who was offering it. Money corrupts—blinds you, blinds me too. Out. Don’t ever contact me again or show your face around here.”
“I’m staying for now.”
He held his breath, closing the fingers of his right hand on his knee so hard that his knuckles pressed white against the fabric.
“You think you can stay when I forbid it?”
“I’ll say what I have to say and then leave.”
The man squared his shoulders. His right fist trembled. A tendon in his neck bulged like a strip of wood.
I primed my muscles, bracing for an attack. While my gaze held his, I also kept an eye on the edges of my vision in case he reached for a weapon.
“Yesterday, July 16, 1977, you followed little Cassie June—doe-eyed Cassie—while she skated home. Maybe you smiled when you offered her a ride to spare her the heat and exhaustion. She trusted you. She got into a stranger’s car because you were kind enough to offer. She was raised to embrace life with a smile, to enjoy the rosy world inside her bubble, before that bubble popped and exposed her to the rancid air of adulthood. Cassie June. She belonged to a dance group with several school friends. Four days a week, she skated. She loved birds and had asked for books so she could learn to identify them. She loved spending afternoons at the beach. Sometimes, sitting on the rocks, she wrote in her journal. She wondered what lay on the far side of that mass of water, and kept saying how badly she wanted to find out.”
The man let one eyebrow drop. His fist unclenched, then tightened again as though trying to recall his anger. I didn’t let the rage quake my voice.
“But Cassie June got into your car. Instead of taking her home, you took her somewhere else. Maybe to your studio, where you shot many of the photos in this album. For two hours you raped her and sodomized her. When you were done, you strangled her until she was nearly unconscious—or with luck she passed out—and then you crushed her face with a hammer. You got rid of the corpse. It destroyed her family, obviously. When they woke up every morning, they remembered the midday they last saw Cassie, a scene that ate at them each night before they fell asleep.”
My red blindness faded as the pounding in my temples eased. The man was smiling like a TV host, a smile that said every hole he had to dodge was already paved over. He knew he had never picked up Cassie June in his Ford Thunderbird just as well as I knew he had—and thanks to me, the evidence for that knowledge was gone.
“You’ve made up one wild story,” he said.
I took another sip. The man did the same, tipping his bottle by fractions of an inch until the last drop trickled into his mouth.
“Those who knew Cassie remembered her as a beacon of joy,” I said. “She signed up for everything. She was inquisitive. Instinctively she got along with everyone she met, without hesitation or fear. The adults in her childhood listened to her, helped her. Whenever she needed them, they were there. People like her, with that innate trust and radiance, can make living in this world worthwhile. But Cassie believed a smiling stranger would drive her home, and that’s why you were able to rape and kill her. California and the West have turned into a hunting ground, open season all year round. If people knew what lurks in the dark, the diet of monsters like you, who would they trust? If Cassie had been afraid of strangers, if she had refused to get into strange cars, would she have been as happy? I don’t think so. Would she have been miserable? Maybe. She would have grown used to fear, to the myriad dangers it signals. But she’d still be alive. What does that mean?”
One fan blew a strand of the man’s hair aside. He looked at me like a blank sheet of paper, wanting to speak but unable to string words together, absently twisting his empty bottle.
“Not long ago, I questioned my role,” I said. “I could crush the trust of people like Cassie, scare them so they never get into strangers’ cars, never walk down dark alleys, never let a slick-talking man with a winning smile charm them. They’d learn they live in a sandpaper world, prowled by evil that would exploit their faith and innocence and grind them to the bone. Or I could keep them from discovering it. I could make sure that evil never reaches them—make sure they get into my car instead of the one behind me. They’d go on dancing, skating, sitting on those rocks by the beach, writing at sunset. Any stray bits of night would remain sedated beneath the anesthesia of their hope. Should I remove monsters like you so that these potential victims can go on living with a smile, still believing this world that almost devoured them is actually worth inhabiting? Is it better to stare into the abyss, or to look away and trust in humanity? Maybe those who see light everywhere must build the world they need, while people like me, the tar-smeared brethren, stand guard around the perimeter, making sure those who’ve drowned in tar don’t choke out that light. I followed that approach for years. And it worked, more or less. It saved thousands. But aside from sparing those people, what good am I really doing? I stand watch at the edges of the darkness, stopping the beasts from slipping into the glow of a streetlamp around which these bright-eyed souls flit. They learn they can let their guard down. They preach that self-defense is a vice or a sin, that monsters can be bought off or cured. I spare them the worst that might happen if they keep wearing those tinted glasses.”
The man reclined on the couch as he rubbed his eyelids, and snorted.
“You see,” I went on, “I found out by accident that this girl existed. I felt lost, torn from where I belonged, all while searching for the albums and classic movies that had bubbled into existence the last time I tangled with the timeline. Then I stumbled upon the news. They found Cassie June’s skeleton in the desert, stuffed in a rusted barrel under a pile of rocks. Usually I steer clear of news like that. The gallons of blood spilled in the darkness as I turn away corrode me, keep me up at night. But I read every article I could find about that girl. They described her life. They interviewed her family—whoever was left. I gathered every fact, every video, the court cases. Most people who heard the story during dinner might have lost their appetite for a minute, but what would that information do for them? They lock it away, forget it by the next day. They accept that the abyss has swallowed another sacrifice and are relieved it happened to someone else’s child. How could anyone keep walking burdened by the weight of so many injustices? Even I manage to let most of these stories pass right through me—otherwise, I might throw myself off a building. But that night, I was drowning in the black tide. Cassie’s murder stabbed me like a lance. I wanted to prevent it, to stop that trusting, life-loving girl from being snuffed out. A window of opportunity had opened, and if I’d refused to step through, I’d have to live knowing I could have saved her but instead swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, crawled into bed, and pulled the covers up to my forehead. I came back to get the job done and avoid Cassie’s ghost trailing after me to my grave.”
I paused for breath, but all the air had fled the apartment. The sunlight coming through the window had dimmed as though a translucent veil had wrapped my head. My body still sank into the wicker chair, but it felt like I was viewing the scene from a few yards beneath it, from the bottom of a pit. I spoke with effort, like cranking up some ancient, forgotten machine.
“It hit me, you know. The lack of meaning. We live for a handful of orbits around this star and then vanish. Some people, whether they deserve it or not, vanish much sooner, before they get to die in a bed surrounded by loved ones. Cassie’s life was cut short when she could have been spared. And that news story tied her to me, this irate beast. Merely annoyances and irritating noises stoke my anger until it boils over, and one day the flames might break out and burn this world to ashes. But my locomotive furnace devours that coal to plow into monsters like you. There have always been Cassies, and there will be more. Anyone you care about can die at any moment—I know that better than most because I live it week after week. It usually comes down to luck. Coincidence. Cassie’s luck was crossing your path. Your luck was crossing mine.”
-----
Author’s note: this novella belongs to a self-published book titled Los reinos de brea (The Kingdoms of Tar), that released about ten years ago. I presented this scene to the writing course I was attending at the time, and those present were disturbed, even the instructor, who is a reasonably famous local mystery writer. I don’t think the scene is that impactful, but I’m glad to find out that I still like it after these many years.
Smile, Pt. 3 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
At half past ten the next day, in my hotel room, I spread my jacket out on the rumpled sheets and slipped the ammo magazine into the left inside pocket.
I sat down beside the little table that held the phone. I cleared my throat. I picked up the receiver, wedged it against my ear with my shoulder, and dialed the number.
On the third ring, it cut off. I heard the man breathing against the microphone.
“Richard Alcala,” I said.
“You know who you’re calling.”
“The photographer.”
“My reputation precedes me.”
“I was flipping through some old issues of Black Tux. The photos you shot. These women you framed… if you ran into them on the street, you’d notice moles, asymmetry, maybe slack flesh, but thanks to your touch, they’re competing to be the next Marilyn Monroe.”
“You need to update your references, pal. But I remember those shoots. I was born with the gift.”
“I work for a magazine, and we need your gift. You’d coax the beauty out of a dozen or so women.”
“You tempt me, but a personal project has me busy.”
“It’s a well-paid week of work in Los Angeles. I’m sure you could squeeze it in.”
The line crackled as he crunched on something brittle. I pictured him hunched over bloody dirt, naked, caked in grime, gnawing on a femur.
“Have you talked to other magazines in the field?” he asked, voice turning gravelly.
“Yes.”
“And you’re still calling me? Lately, nobody wants to hire me. I bet they rushed to tell you why.”
“You mean your trouble with the law.”
He pulled the receiver away from his face to clear his throat.
“My trouble with the law, yes.”
“Who cares? You’ll take the shots we need. Your previous sessions prove it.”
He fell silent for a few seconds.
“How much?”
“Money? One fifty up front, three hundred at the end of the week. Four or five sessions, depending on a few variables.”
“Your usual photographers turned it down?”
“They don’t shoot like you. Plus, the women will be dressed in outfits many would call pornographic. In this decade, there are still plenty of photographers with outdated scruples. Listen, we need these women to look like Greek goddesses, not like they’re waiting around a street corner at three in the morning.”
“I get you, pal. Bring the money, and we’ll work something out.”
“I’ll drop by around eleven-thirty.”
“Today? I’m busy all day. Starting tomorrow.”
“I’m afraid I leave for Dallas tonight. You sure you can’t spare a slot at eleven-thirty? You’ll pocket the hundred and fifty, and we’ll iron out a couple details.”
A silence swelled on the line, undone by the ringing in my ears—scar tissue from years of gunfire. I heard him close a drawer or a door. Cloth brushed against cloth.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said. “Bring the money. You know the address?”
“I wrote it down before calling.”
At eleven-ten, I spotted the parking spaces outside the two-story building where he lived. Each floor’s facade was lined with doors and windows. Next to the metal stairs going up to the second floor stood two crooked, half-stripped palm trees like birds with plucked necks. The first-floor windows, right at street level, had iron bars.
They’d left a space free next to the Ford Thunderbird. While maneuvering into the spot, I scanned the surroundings in case he was loitering outside. I parked beside the Thunderbird, trunks aligned.
I switched off the engine and got out. Circling to my trunk, I rummaged in one pocket for both sets of keys—mine and the copy that would open the Thunderbird. I sized up the pedestrians drifting down the street as well as the silhouettes moving behind the building’s windows. I slid my key into my trunk’s lock and opened it. An acrid smell of dirt greeted me. As I lifted the trunk lid all the way, I slipped behind the Thunderbird. I inserted the copy of the key and turned it. The trunk popped open a crack.
I bent over my own trunk, grabbed the gloves from the back corner, and pulled them on. I wedged my forearms under the canvas bundle, held down by two bungee cords. Once I lifted it, the weight yanked at my arms, its lumps digging into my forearms and palms. I crouched, like lowering a loaded barbell, set the bundle on the asphalt, and stood up again.
In the apartment next door to his, an old woman in a robe had drawn her curtain aside. She scratched her nose while surveying the foot traffic and passing cars. Once she moved away, the curtain veiled the interior again.
I lifted the Thunderbird’s trunk. It held ropes, two rolls of electrical tape, a shovel, and a can of gasoline. I took the can out, laid it on its side, and pushed it under my car with my foot, metal scraping on asphalt.
I hoisted the bundle in both hands and placed it in the center of the Thunderbird’s trunk. I unclipped the bungee cords. Covering my nose, I turned my head away, unwrapped the bundle, and let the trunk lid fall until it clicked shut.
A tingling spread across my nape. My ears felt tight. I fully expected a line of passersby who’d pelt me with questions, or a group of cops, or the man himself.
I pulled off my gloves, tossed them into my trunk, and shut it. Then I leaned against the back, pressing my shirt sleeve to the sun-baked metal. If he showed up, I wanted to seem casual as I glanced over the street and the building.
Sunlight warmed my hair. Beneath my jacket and shirt, sweat trickled down my spine, probably making my scalp gleam. I crouched by the car’s side and nudged the half-empty gas can farther in with my foot so no one would notice it. I scanned the Thunderbird’s bodywork to be sure I’d left nothing behind. I forced myself not to check the transponder stuck underneath.
“I hope you’re not looking to steal it,” said a voice to my right.
He was walking through the lot with a paper grocery bag in one hand, two inches of a cereal box sticking out the top. He squinted against the glare, grinning like he adored the neighborhood. He wore a tight shirt striped in brass and peanut tones. The oversized starched collar cast triangular shadows. He had it tucked into flared navy-blue pants cinched with a white belt.
I pretended to be admiring the Thunderbird.
“It’s a beauty,” I said.
He set his free hand on the raised center of the hood, stroking it like a dog’s head.
“Best buy I ever made. A V8 engine with three hundred sixty horsepower. Zero to sixty in nine seconds. Never once let me down.”
When he looked at my face, his features slipped out of his control.
“You’re the gloomy guy from yesterday, on the beach.”
“An hour ago, we spoke on the phone about a job I want to hire you for. Yesterday I approached you about it, but we got sidetracked.”
“So that job was for real, I guess.”
I pulled three fifty-dollar bills from my jacket’s other inside pocket. When the sunlight hit the bills, he snatched them, folded them, and slipped them into his shirt pocket. He smiled.
“Which magazine did you say you work for?”
“Maybe I forgot to mention.”
I pulled out a card and handed it to him. He glanced over it and nodded.
“I’ll show you my gear, and we’ll hash out the details. Let’s go in. I’m getting cooked out here.”
We climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. He pulled out his keychain, letting it jingle. Dangling from the ring was a tiny latex penis. As he guided the key toward the lock, he seemed to pause in slow motion. He propped the grocery bag against the doorframe and leaned over the railing to study the parking lot.
“You drove here?” he asked.
He stared blankly at my rented car.
“I parked at the Dallas airport. Came by taxi.”
He watched the passersby and peered at the windows across the street, as if searching for a hidden sniper. He shook his head, turned around. Still smiling, he fit the key into the lock and opened the door.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published through my book Los reinos de brea, that I wrote about ten years ago. I figured that I might as well translate it and post it here, given that nobody buys my shit. Back in the day, I regularly set stories in places I had never visited, perhaps because I thought that it would make the story more interesting for others. These days, as I don’t expect other people to care, I try to make the places I know more interesting for myself by setting stories in them. Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying this tale to some extent. It’s going to get gnarly soon.
At half past ten the next day, in my hotel room, I spread my jacket out on the rumpled sheets and slipped the ammo magazine into the left inside pocket.
I sat down beside the little table that held the phone. I cleared my throat. I picked up the receiver, wedged it against my ear with my shoulder, and dialed the number.
On the third ring, it cut off. I heard the man breathing against the microphone.
“Richard Alcala,” I said.
“You know who you’re calling.”
“The photographer.”
“My reputation precedes me.”
“I was flipping through some old issues of Black Tux. The photos you shot. These women you framed… if you ran into them on the street, you’d notice moles, asymmetry, maybe slack flesh, but thanks to your touch, they’re competing to be the next Marilyn Monroe.”
“You need to update your references, pal. But I remember those shoots. I was born with the gift.”
“I work for a magazine, and we need your gift. You’d coax the beauty out of a dozen or so women.”
“You tempt me, but a personal project has me busy.”
“It’s a well-paid week of work in Los Angeles. I’m sure you could squeeze it in.”
The line crackled as he crunched on something brittle. I pictured him hunched over bloody dirt, naked, caked in grime, gnawing on a femur.
“Have you talked to other magazines in the field?” he asked, voice turning gravelly.
“Yes.”
“And you’re still calling me? Lately, nobody wants to hire me. I bet they rushed to tell you why.”
“You mean your trouble with the law.”
He pulled the receiver away from his face to clear his throat.
“My trouble with the law, yes.”
“Who cares? You’ll take the shots we need. Your previous sessions prove it.”
He fell silent for a few seconds.
“How much?”
“Money? One fifty up front, three hundred at the end of the week. Four or five sessions, depending on a few variables.”
“Your usual photographers turned it down?”
“They don’t shoot like you. Plus, the women will be dressed in outfits many would call pornographic. In this decade, there are still plenty of photographers with outdated scruples. Listen, we need these women to look like Greek goddesses, not like they’re waiting around a street corner at three in the morning.”
“I get you, pal. Bring the money, and we’ll work something out.”
“I’ll drop by around eleven-thirty.”
“Today? I’m busy all day. Starting tomorrow.”
“I’m afraid I leave for Dallas tonight. You sure you can’t spare a slot at eleven-thirty? You’ll pocket the hundred and fifty, and we’ll iron out a couple details.”
A silence swelled on the line, undone by the ringing in my ears—scar tissue from years of gunfire. I heard him close a drawer or a door. Cloth brushed against cloth.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said. “Bring the money. You know the address?”
“I wrote it down before calling.”
At eleven-ten, I spotted the parking spaces outside the two-story building where he lived. Each floor’s facade was lined with doors and windows. Next to the metal stairs going up to the second floor stood two crooked, half-stripped palm trees like birds with plucked necks. The first-floor windows, right at street level, had iron bars.
They’d left a space free next to the Ford Thunderbird. While maneuvering into the spot, I scanned the surroundings in case he was loitering outside. I parked beside the Thunderbird, trunks aligned.
I switched off the engine and got out. Circling to my trunk, I rummaged in one pocket for both sets of keys—mine and the copy that would open the Thunderbird. I sized up the pedestrians drifting down the street as well as the silhouettes moving behind the building’s windows. I slid my key into my trunk’s lock and opened it. An acrid smell of dirt greeted me. As I lifted the trunk lid all the way, I slipped behind the Thunderbird. I inserted the copy of the key and turned it. The trunk popped open a crack.
I bent over my own trunk, grabbed the gloves from the back corner, and pulled them on. I wedged my forearms under the canvas bundle, held down by two bungee cords. Once I lifted it, the weight yanked at my arms, its lumps digging into my forearms and palms. I crouched, like lowering a loaded barbell, set the bundle on the asphalt, and stood up again.
In the apartment next door to his, an old woman in a robe had drawn her curtain aside. She scratched her nose while surveying the foot traffic and passing cars. Once she moved away, the curtain veiled the interior again.
I lifted the Thunderbird’s trunk. It held ropes, two rolls of electrical tape, a shovel, and a can of gasoline. I took the can out, laid it on its side, and pushed it under my car with my foot, metal scraping on asphalt.
I hoisted the bundle in both hands and placed it in the center of the Thunderbird’s trunk. I unclipped the bungee cords. Covering my nose, I turned my head away, unwrapped the bundle, and let the trunk lid fall until it clicked shut.
A tingling spread across my nape. My ears felt tight. I fully expected a line of passersby who’d pelt me with questions, or a group of cops, or the man himself.
I pulled off my gloves, tossed them into my trunk, and shut it. Then I leaned against the back, pressing my shirt sleeve to the sun-baked metal. If he showed up, I wanted to seem casual as I glanced over the street and the building.
Sunlight warmed my hair. Beneath my jacket and shirt, sweat trickled down my spine, probably making my scalp gleam. I crouched by the car’s side and nudged the half-empty gas can farther in with my foot so no one would notice it. I scanned the Thunderbird’s bodywork to be sure I’d left nothing behind. I forced myself not to check the transponder stuck underneath.
“I hope you’re not looking to steal it,” said a voice to my right.
He was walking through the lot with a paper grocery bag in one hand, two inches of a cereal box sticking out the top. He squinted against the glare, grinning like he adored the neighborhood. He wore a tight shirt striped in brass and peanut tones. The oversized starched collar cast triangular shadows. He had it tucked into flared navy-blue pants cinched with a white belt.
I pretended to be admiring the Thunderbird.
“It’s a beauty,” I said.
He set his free hand on the raised center of the hood, stroking it like a dog’s head.
“Best buy I ever made. A V8 engine with three hundred sixty horsepower. Zero to sixty in nine seconds. Never once let me down.”
When he looked at my face, his features slipped out of his control.
“You’re the gloomy guy from yesterday, on the beach.”
“An hour ago, we spoke on the phone about a job I want to hire you for. Yesterday I approached you about it, but we got sidetracked.”
“So that job was for real, I guess.”
I pulled three fifty-dollar bills from my jacket’s other inside pocket. When the sunlight hit the bills, he snatched them, folded them, and slipped them into his shirt pocket. He smiled.
“Which magazine did you say you work for?”
“Maybe I forgot to mention.”
I pulled out a card and handed it to him. He glanced over it and nodded.
“I’ll show you my gear, and we’ll hash out the details. Let’s go in. I’m getting cooked out here.”
We climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. He pulled out his keychain, letting it jingle. Dangling from the ring was a tiny latex penis. As he guided the key toward the lock, he seemed to pause in slow motion. He propped the grocery bag against the doorframe and leaned over the railing to study the parking lot.
“You drove here?” he asked.
He stared blankly at my rented car.
“I parked at the Dallas airport. Came by taxi.”
He watched the passersby and peered at the windows across the street, as if searching for a hidden sniper. He shook his head, turned around. Still smiling, he fit the key into the lock and opened the door.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published through my book Los reinos de brea, that I wrote about ten years ago. I figured that I might as well translate it and post it here, given that nobody buys my shit. Back in the day, I regularly set stories in places I had never visited, perhaps because I thought that it would make the story more interesting for others. These days, as I don’t expect other people to care, I try to make the places I know more interesting for myself by setting stories in them. Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying this tale to some extent. It’s going to get gnarly soon.
January 13, 2025
Smile, Pt. 2 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I tracked the Ford Thunderbird to a parking lot bordering Venice Beach. I parked six spaces away, past three empty slots, two cars, and a delivery van. In case the man was roaming nearby, I took in the view through the windshield and side windows. Next to the half-buried asphalt of the bike path, clumps of palm trees had sprouted from the sand, some as tall as, or taller than, the shops along the boardwalk. The sun, sinking into the Pacific, bleached white the fronds of one palm, while the rest stood out like green torches. Silhouettes bustled across the wide beach, and at intervals lifeguard towers rose in the distance.
The beeps from the tracker echoed through the car like pinball ricochets. I switched the machine off. I could hear the surf rumbling, waves breaking their stride from the sand; the squawking of gulls; the din of shrieks and laughter from the bathers. The sun beating down on the windshield was browning me like a roasting chicken.
I had to find that man and stop him. I was following the plan like a musical score, but my back stayed pressed against the leather seat, and anxiety was growing in my chest. My subconscious lacked the vocabulary to describe the cataclysm it had foreseen.
I had saved Cassie, who had cried, yet tomorrow she would skate under the sun while her brain boiled and steam blew from her ears. If some grinning long-haired guy asked her to ride in another car, she would hop in before waking up to reality. And these folks ambling around Venice Beach like buffalo in a zoo enclosure, this pink-and-orange horizon—would it matter to them if one day Cassie ended up in the dark, panties gone, while the man on top of her strangled her?
The girl was alive and had learned nothing. Her mother, after rushing home, might have taken out her revolver and imagined forcing me to face the black maw of its barrel. I closed my eyes and saw her face as though draped in dusty cobwebs. Cassie’s mother, hating me. Hate upon hate, from people who refused to understand.
If I spirited the victims away from the shadows, they remained ignorant; if I saved them and they found out, they despised me.
I got out of the car and slammed the door. I wandered the parking lot to stretch my legs while the burning asphalt sucked at my soles. A car honked. I realized I was in the way of someone trying to maneuver into a space.
How long until the owner of that Ford Thunderbird got hungry? Or was he circling around to satisfy the hunger left over from when I saved Cassie?
What if I refused to hunt him? I could hit the nearby theaters in case they were showing Jaws or Star Wars again. I would make a pilgrimage to the record stores and buy first-edition vinyls of Nick Drake, Roy Harper, Karen Dalton. I could dine into the dusk until I emerged into the odd world I’d find.
If that starving coyote went hunting and left another corpse behind, would I even find out? Would I care? Another anonymous woman would vanish. Her face printed on milk cartons. With luck, in several years or decades, some hiker would discover that the femur his dog was slobbering over had belonged to a woman—or a child.
Dozens of miniature black holes roamed the United States, swallowing pretty hitchhikers, teenage runaways, prostitutes. Black holes wandering immortally: when one disappeared, another took its place. The rest of the population kept working, birthing, gathering to celebrate the Super Bowl, filling baseball stadiums, balancing on surfboards, or doing whatever else they fancied in this period of time that blended with all the others like spilled paint in a swimming pool. News of a woman’s disappearance would spoil someone’s snack in between bites of bacon and sips of beer. Most people believed (though they wouldn’t say it) that some sin had condemned that photographed woman to deserve it, or the universe would had chosen someone else to punish. The sacrifice was part of an obscure plan that someday would drain into some blend of justice and harmony. But if I stepped in, the masses would go on smiling in ignorance.
The tension in my neck hurt. How many times had I told myself that every life I saved was worth it, even if it stuffed my mind with skeletons and cadavers, a mounting heap at the bottom of a bloody pit?
Music drifted out from the turntables and radios in the boardwalk shops and apartments. Graham Nash protesting war and the military. Dolly Parton. Hendrix. As if at a concert, different acts played on neighboring stages. A warm breeze carried the scent of incense from the apartments. Dozens of people strolled around. A girl in shorts too tight to crease and a crop top that showed her belly button skated while holding the hand of another skater—a man in his early twenties with long hair and a mustache. On the sand, groups lying on their towels cackled like flocks of birds. They had been born in a cell where some invisible hand projected pictures of puppies, babies, cakes, and tropical beaches onto the walls.
All this laughter and enjoyment while somewhere in this city—not to mention the rest of the world—someone was getting beaten, raped, or murdered. Thousands of crimes went unnoticed, and criminals moved on to their next victim. So many beatings where the battered victim avoided the police, or reported the assault only for no reporter to pick it up. So many rapes where, for whatever reason, the victim stayed silent. In any neighborhood where kids pedaled on tricycles, in the basement of some house with neatly trimmed grass, a man might be exploiting a woman’s body as a semen receptacle the same way he would use a toilet for urine, and when he killed her, he’d dispose of her corpse like flushing a used condom. Maybe that woman never made it onto the list of thousands of missing persons, or she was mentioned briefly in a newspaper, and I would never find out.
I skirted the beach, eyeing every passerby and every group member, just in case I recognized the individual. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I had come out here to hunt. I stopped to look back at those who had just passed by, though some were already shrinking in the distance on their roller skates, skateboards, or bikes.
No matter which era I ended up in, I was surrounded by cheerful voices, smiling groups, couples holding hands. The same actors in different costumes, sporting whatever haircuts each era deemed acceptable. The plumage of exotic birds. In every decade, they believed everything would be fine, that a clear path lay ahead and they only had to look for it. I felt set apart from them, the last member of some other human species clinging to the edge of extinction. What could I tell these people? They would react as though I had blasphemed against their divine maxim that goodness always prevails. But goodness prevailed only because, before they even arrived, I had cleared their path. When I failed to worry about it, evil triumphed time and again.
I watched a volleyball game among a coed group where more than just the ball was bouncing. A figure nearby stood out. The man hovered near the bike path, scanning the beach. Sometimes he hid his face behind a camera and snapped a photo. His voluminous blond mane fell to his shoulders, and from behind one might mistake him for a woman.
When his name and surname flickered at the edges of my mind, I shooed them away. Names were for people unlike these rabid coyotes wandering around, ready to rip off a piece of someone unless the police—or I—put them down.
“I recognize that look. My friend Pete.”
It took me a second to realize the voice to my right was speaking to me. A man of about twenty-five. He was smoking a cigarette. The fringe of his long hair covered his forehead, and the wiry ends curled at his neck. His goatee protruded two inches from his chin. His gaze implied he enjoyed meeting strangers.
“He went from one party to another,” said the man, “loved to play guitar. Plenty of women would hang around for private songs. But he got drafted. When he returned, he threw away his medal. Every couple of months I spot him far off, just standing in the middle of nowhere, looking like you do.”
He drew closer as if to offer me a cigarette, but I wanted him gone.
“Do Pete a favor. Next time you see him, stab him through the heart.”
The man twitched his head like it was a nervous tic. He lowered his eyebrows and sucked on the cigarette filter. I walked away toward the bike path.
When the photographer’s features grew sharper, I stopped. By the look of him, his mannerisms, maybe he had a portfolio of pictures he’d posed in. As if his fishing line had gone taut, he fixed his gaze on a woman in her twenties wearing a black floral-print blouse with balloon sleeves and a triangular neckline. She had tied the blouse at her waist. Her jeans ended where her thighs began.
He held the camera at belt level and followed the woman’s rising and falling hips. That golden hair gleamed like satin. Any film studio would insure such breasts.
As she passed by, he blocked her path. His lips parted, curving along the gingival margin without showing the gums. A toothpaste-ad grin, with prominent canines. The muscles in his cheeks framed the smile like curtains revealing a show. Though I pictured those teeth pulverizing bones, splinters flying between his molars, she matched his smile in a fraction of a second.
“I had to stop you,” said the man. “Tell me, gorgeous. Which agency hired you?”
“What kind of agency would hire me?”
“A modeling one, of course.”
She cocked a hip to one side, and her laughter filled my mind with the urge to drop to my knees at her feet.
“Thanks, but no one’s ever noticed me for that.”
“They probably figured you were already taken by the best, under a million-dollar contract.” He lifted the camera to chest height. “Will you let me be the first to sign you?”
The woman swayed as if gripping an invisible pole, twirling a golden lock around her fingers.
“Do you just wander around the beach photographing girls?”
“I work for some magazines, making any man lust after mediocre girls and the world kneel before beauties like you. So tell me, want to get started? A few studio sessions and you’ll end up in Hollywood.”
Her nipples showed in the blouse like buttons. The man struck exaggerated poses and clicked away. She tilted her head, pursed her lips in a pout, and tumbled into a stream of laughter.
I closed my eyes and shoved my hands in my pockets. I would have preferred to buy a towel, lay it out on the sand, and bake until the sun dipped below the horizon. Tell me, beautiful: why should I bother, why should I sacrifice myself just to prolong your infinitesimal blink of existence, so your years can unfold—at best—for a handful of people who will also vanish? Cities buried under cities buried under cities. I’d save another person who had wandered blind and deaf into a trap, and if she found out I had intervened, she’d blame me for it. But I had to stop this coyote, or else he’d keep killing.
I didn’t know her name. I looked at another face and body I had to accept corresponded to a complex life. I had to assume this woman deserved salvation. But why add another nightmare to my crammed attic? Who would miss her? Whenever she set foot outside, hundreds of men—and some women—imagined the feel of her skin, how her breasts would fall when she took off her bra, how she would look lying in bed, eyes half-closed, face flushed, lips wet, thighs parted, displaying the earnings of her genetic lottery ticket—the product of a generation raised on the streets. But who actually loved her? A mother, a father? A little sister who yearned to see her? A boyfriend who believed she was irreplaceable? How many people would cry for her years from now, when barely any scraps of flesh were left clinging to her bones? Would this retinue of ghosts I was inventing convince me she was worth saving, instead of letting her get lost among the grains of sand formed by billions of forgotten humans?
I had to keep this man from killing her, or tomorrow I’d wake up in a sweat, haunted by the image of the woman talking to the photographer, stuck to my face like a gas mask. I would know I could have saved her but chose not to. I’d save her to spare myself the pain. Whoever she might be was irrelevant. I was just a pillar against the avalanche so that between me and the tongues of oncoming snow, someone might survive.
I approached, focusing on the man, his runner’s physique. I called his name. He lowered the camera and gave me the look of a hyena that, chewing on a carcass with strips of flesh dangling from its fangs, growls at another predator trying to sink its teeth into the entrails. But he rebuilt his grin and nodded at me, like you’d greet a neighbor you share a beer with every couple of weeks.
“How’s it going?”
“You sold several sessions to Esquire and Black Tux.”
His smile slanted, showing that canine.
“My reputation precedes me. You recognize me by my face?”
“I work in the field.”
He looked me up and down, while the woman—arched, chest thrust forward—cast her eyes down his body, tracing an invisible mole with her fingertips just below her mouth.
“What did my previous work suggest about how this shoot with this lovely thing will turn out?” the man said.
I stopped myself from staring at the woman’s bubblegum-pink lips or the dip dividing her full lower lip.
“That you woke up lucky this morning.”
She laughed as if nothing in her life had ever troubled her. She swept her hands through her hair, which unfurled in the air, glimmering in the late-afternoon light. My groin tingled.
The flash from his camera pulled my attention away.
“Spontaneous smiles are priceless,” he said.
The woman bent forward, laughing as if drunk, bracing her fingers on his arm.
A deep rumble was building inside me, an underground quake. Let her enjoy herself, and she would, ignorant—until she found out.
“Surprised by your luck?” I asked.
She hardly looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“My turn was coming.”
“In what sense?”
“I radiate that vibe. My reward had to arrive.”
“With vibes like yours,” the man said, “I’m shocked fate hasn’t caught up with you already. But most men wonder if they have any right to approach you. They delayed the karma you deserve.”
She nodded, giving him a conspiratorial look. “Anyone who comes near me knows I’ve got love to give and receive. That’s what we’re born for, to share love in every way.”
“You do that often?” I asked. “Share the love?”
She glanced at me as if gauging whether she’d accept a proposition. “Whenever I can.”
“Does it ever cause you any trouble?”
“Some of them get too attached, become possessive. But that whole ‘ownership’ thing ended a couple of decades ago.”
“I mean, have you ever met someone who wanted more than just making love—who wanted to kill you?”
She forced a shaky smile. She shifted from wanting to ignore an inappropriate comment to wondering what my intentions were. The man’s stare pricked my temple like a dagger point.
“You sound like my dad,” she said. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen. Nobody would want to hurt me—I’m nice to everyone.”
“And if it does happen? Are you going to hug your attacker till he stops?”
She offered me her profile and gathered her silky hair in one fist. “It’s a sunny afternoon at the beach. I don’t get why you’d think about that.”
“Bad vibes, man,” said the man, as though giving me advice.
“You get what you put out,” the woman added.
She looked at me like a child. If I were shorter, she would have bent down and rested her hands on her knees. “Is that how you think because they sent you to the army? You returned, though. Rejoice! You’re safe now. Nothing to fear, right?”
“Everyone assumes I fought in the war. Maybe I did, and I forgot.”
“Classic stress, so they say. Just take a deep breath, relax your face. That sort of thing has a solution. God invented marijuana. Get some strong weed and it’ll wash away your dark thoughts like a flood. If you want, I can introduce you to a couple of people.”
“Weed ramps up my paranoia.”
She slipped a hand under her hair to scratch the back of her neck. “I’m not sure if you’re messing with me.”
“Crowds would gather around you at parties,” the man said to me.
I avoided looking at him. “I don’t go to parties.”
He inhaled deeply and held his breath. “In any case, my friend, I’m afraid you interrupted us.”
He slipped an arm around the woman. She returned the gesture while shining that radiant smile.
“Sweetheart,” the man said, “back to the important stuff. Do you live near Venice?”
“Close enough.”
“Keep going the way you were headed, and in ten minutes you’ll reach my studio. 1313 Main Street, on the corner of Horizon Ave. Ring a bell?”
“Near the school.”
“Barely worth a taxi. 1313 Main Street. Sadly, I forgot my cards at home—slipped the mind of this pro. Will you remember?”
“I can handle that. 1313, corner with Horizon Ave.”
“Will you swing by tomorrow at five in the afternoon, looking at least as gorgeous as you do now?”
“Five, you say?”
“Or whenever you prefer.”
She laughed. “Tomorrow at five.”
“I’ll let you get back to it. Bet your friends are waiting for you to brighten their day.”
She lifted herself onto her toes to kiss his cheek, but it happened right as he shot me a blank look, so instead she swayed in a little dance back toward the sand. She turned to wave goodbye with a broad smile and a flutter of her hand. Her hair rippled like a dream.
I forced myself to tear my eyes away. The man studied me, expressionless. As he walked off, he flapped a hand at me as though shooing a stray dog.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my self-published book in Spanish titled Los reinos de brea. Written during my Serious Period, when I was sure that if I wrote in such a way, I would eventually get published. Newsflash: tough luck. If you’ve read my stuff, you know that I’m a silly bastard, that my tales usually devolve into deranged nonsense, but there’s none of that in this story or the other five I’ll probably end up translating. This protagonist is one bitter hardass. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, and if you don’t, well… I don’t know, go munch on rocks or something, will you?
I tracked the Ford Thunderbird to a parking lot bordering Venice Beach. I parked six spaces away, past three empty slots, two cars, and a delivery van. In case the man was roaming nearby, I took in the view through the windshield and side windows. Next to the half-buried asphalt of the bike path, clumps of palm trees had sprouted from the sand, some as tall as, or taller than, the shops along the boardwalk. The sun, sinking into the Pacific, bleached white the fronds of one palm, while the rest stood out like green torches. Silhouettes bustled across the wide beach, and at intervals lifeguard towers rose in the distance.
The beeps from the tracker echoed through the car like pinball ricochets. I switched the machine off. I could hear the surf rumbling, waves breaking their stride from the sand; the squawking of gulls; the din of shrieks and laughter from the bathers. The sun beating down on the windshield was browning me like a roasting chicken.
I had to find that man and stop him. I was following the plan like a musical score, but my back stayed pressed against the leather seat, and anxiety was growing in my chest. My subconscious lacked the vocabulary to describe the cataclysm it had foreseen.
I had saved Cassie, who had cried, yet tomorrow she would skate under the sun while her brain boiled and steam blew from her ears. If some grinning long-haired guy asked her to ride in another car, she would hop in before waking up to reality. And these folks ambling around Venice Beach like buffalo in a zoo enclosure, this pink-and-orange horizon—would it matter to them if one day Cassie ended up in the dark, panties gone, while the man on top of her strangled her?
The girl was alive and had learned nothing. Her mother, after rushing home, might have taken out her revolver and imagined forcing me to face the black maw of its barrel. I closed my eyes and saw her face as though draped in dusty cobwebs. Cassie’s mother, hating me. Hate upon hate, from people who refused to understand.
If I spirited the victims away from the shadows, they remained ignorant; if I saved them and they found out, they despised me.
I got out of the car and slammed the door. I wandered the parking lot to stretch my legs while the burning asphalt sucked at my soles. A car honked. I realized I was in the way of someone trying to maneuver into a space.
How long until the owner of that Ford Thunderbird got hungry? Or was he circling around to satisfy the hunger left over from when I saved Cassie?
What if I refused to hunt him? I could hit the nearby theaters in case they were showing Jaws or Star Wars again. I would make a pilgrimage to the record stores and buy first-edition vinyls of Nick Drake, Roy Harper, Karen Dalton. I could dine into the dusk until I emerged into the odd world I’d find.
If that starving coyote went hunting and left another corpse behind, would I even find out? Would I care? Another anonymous woman would vanish. Her face printed on milk cartons. With luck, in several years or decades, some hiker would discover that the femur his dog was slobbering over had belonged to a woman—or a child.
Dozens of miniature black holes roamed the United States, swallowing pretty hitchhikers, teenage runaways, prostitutes. Black holes wandering immortally: when one disappeared, another took its place. The rest of the population kept working, birthing, gathering to celebrate the Super Bowl, filling baseball stadiums, balancing on surfboards, or doing whatever else they fancied in this period of time that blended with all the others like spilled paint in a swimming pool. News of a woman’s disappearance would spoil someone’s snack in between bites of bacon and sips of beer. Most people believed (though they wouldn’t say it) that some sin had condemned that photographed woman to deserve it, or the universe would had chosen someone else to punish. The sacrifice was part of an obscure plan that someday would drain into some blend of justice and harmony. But if I stepped in, the masses would go on smiling in ignorance.
The tension in my neck hurt. How many times had I told myself that every life I saved was worth it, even if it stuffed my mind with skeletons and cadavers, a mounting heap at the bottom of a bloody pit?
Music drifted out from the turntables and radios in the boardwalk shops and apartments. Graham Nash protesting war and the military. Dolly Parton. Hendrix. As if at a concert, different acts played on neighboring stages. A warm breeze carried the scent of incense from the apartments. Dozens of people strolled around. A girl in shorts too tight to crease and a crop top that showed her belly button skated while holding the hand of another skater—a man in his early twenties with long hair and a mustache. On the sand, groups lying on their towels cackled like flocks of birds. They had been born in a cell where some invisible hand projected pictures of puppies, babies, cakes, and tropical beaches onto the walls.
All this laughter and enjoyment while somewhere in this city—not to mention the rest of the world—someone was getting beaten, raped, or murdered. Thousands of crimes went unnoticed, and criminals moved on to their next victim. So many beatings where the battered victim avoided the police, or reported the assault only for no reporter to pick it up. So many rapes where, for whatever reason, the victim stayed silent. In any neighborhood where kids pedaled on tricycles, in the basement of some house with neatly trimmed grass, a man might be exploiting a woman’s body as a semen receptacle the same way he would use a toilet for urine, and when he killed her, he’d dispose of her corpse like flushing a used condom. Maybe that woman never made it onto the list of thousands of missing persons, or she was mentioned briefly in a newspaper, and I would never find out.
I skirted the beach, eyeing every passerby and every group member, just in case I recognized the individual. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I had come out here to hunt. I stopped to look back at those who had just passed by, though some were already shrinking in the distance on their roller skates, skateboards, or bikes.
No matter which era I ended up in, I was surrounded by cheerful voices, smiling groups, couples holding hands. The same actors in different costumes, sporting whatever haircuts each era deemed acceptable. The plumage of exotic birds. In every decade, they believed everything would be fine, that a clear path lay ahead and they only had to look for it. I felt set apart from them, the last member of some other human species clinging to the edge of extinction. What could I tell these people? They would react as though I had blasphemed against their divine maxim that goodness always prevails. But goodness prevailed only because, before they even arrived, I had cleared their path. When I failed to worry about it, evil triumphed time and again.
I watched a volleyball game among a coed group where more than just the ball was bouncing. A figure nearby stood out. The man hovered near the bike path, scanning the beach. Sometimes he hid his face behind a camera and snapped a photo. His voluminous blond mane fell to his shoulders, and from behind one might mistake him for a woman.
When his name and surname flickered at the edges of my mind, I shooed them away. Names were for people unlike these rabid coyotes wandering around, ready to rip off a piece of someone unless the police—or I—put them down.
“I recognize that look. My friend Pete.”
It took me a second to realize the voice to my right was speaking to me. A man of about twenty-five. He was smoking a cigarette. The fringe of his long hair covered his forehead, and the wiry ends curled at his neck. His goatee protruded two inches from his chin. His gaze implied he enjoyed meeting strangers.
“He went from one party to another,” said the man, “loved to play guitar. Plenty of women would hang around for private songs. But he got drafted. When he returned, he threw away his medal. Every couple of months I spot him far off, just standing in the middle of nowhere, looking like you do.”
He drew closer as if to offer me a cigarette, but I wanted him gone.
“Do Pete a favor. Next time you see him, stab him through the heart.”
The man twitched his head like it was a nervous tic. He lowered his eyebrows and sucked on the cigarette filter. I walked away toward the bike path.
When the photographer’s features grew sharper, I stopped. By the look of him, his mannerisms, maybe he had a portfolio of pictures he’d posed in. As if his fishing line had gone taut, he fixed his gaze on a woman in her twenties wearing a black floral-print blouse with balloon sleeves and a triangular neckline. She had tied the blouse at her waist. Her jeans ended where her thighs began.
He held the camera at belt level and followed the woman’s rising and falling hips. That golden hair gleamed like satin. Any film studio would insure such breasts.
As she passed by, he blocked her path. His lips parted, curving along the gingival margin without showing the gums. A toothpaste-ad grin, with prominent canines. The muscles in his cheeks framed the smile like curtains revealing a show. Though I pictured those teeth pulverizing bones, splinters flying between his molars, she matched his smile in a fraction of a second.
“I had to stop you,” said the man. “Tell me, gorgeous. Which agency hired you?”
“What kind of agency would hire me?”
“A modeling one, of course.”
She cocked a hip to one side, and her laughter filled my mind with the urge to drop to my knees at her feet.
“Thanks, but no one’s ever noticed me for that.”
“They probably figured you were already taken by the best, under a million-dollar contract.” He lifted the camera to chest height. “Will you let me be the first to sign you?”
The woman swayed as if gripping an invisible pole, twirling a golden lock around her fingers.
“Do you just wander around the beach photographing girls?”
“I work for some magazines, making any man lust after mediocre girls and the world kneel before beauties like you. So tell me, want to get started? A few studio sessions and you’ll end up in Hollywood.”
Her nipples showed in the blouse like buttons. The man struck exaggerated poses and clicked away. She tilted her head, pursed her lips in a pout, and tumbled into a stream of laughter.
I closed my eyes and shoved my hands in my pockets. I would have preferred to buy a towel, lay it out on the sand, and bake until the sun dipped below the horizon. Tell me, beautiful: why should I bother, why should I sacrifice myself just to prolong your infinitesimal blink of existence, so your years can unfold—at best—for a handful of people who will also vanish? Cities buried under cities buried under cities. I’d save another person who had wandered blind and deaf into a trap, and if she found out I had intervened, she’d blame me for it. But I had to stop this coyote, or else he’d keep killing.
I didn’t know her name. I looked at another face and body I had to accept corresponded to a complex life. I had to assume this woman deserved salvation. But why add another nightmare to my crammed attic? Who would miss her? Whenever she set foot outside, hundreds of men—and some women—imagined the feel of her skin, how her breasts would fall when she took off her bra, how she would look lying in bed, eyes half-closed, face flushed, lips wet, thighs parted, displaying the earnings of her genetic lottery ticket—the product of a generation raised on the streets. But who actually loved her? A mother, a father? A little sister who yearned to see her? A boyfriend who believed she was irreplaceable? How many people would cry for her years from now, when barely any scraps of flesh were left clinging to her bones? Would this retinue of ghosts I was inventing convince me she was worth saving, instead of letting her get lost among the grains of sand formed by billions of forgotten humans?
I had to keep this man from killing her, or tomorrow I’d wake up in a sweat, haunted by the image of the woman talking to the photographer, stuck to my face like a gas mask. I would know I could have saved her but chose not to. I’d save her to spare myself the pain. Whoever she might be was irrelevant. I was just a pillar against the avalanche so that between me and the tongues of oncoming snow, someone might survive.
I approached, focusing on the man, his runner’s physique. I called his name. He lowered the camera and gave me the look of a hyena that, chewing on a carcass with strips of flesh dangling from its fangs, growls at another predator trying to sink its teeth into the entrails. But he rebuilt his grin and nodded at me, like you’d greet a neighbor you share a beer with every couple of weeks.
“How’s it going?”
“You sold several sessions to Esquire and Black Tux.”
His smile slanted, showing that canine.
“My reputation precedes me. You recognize me by my face?”
“I work in the field.”
He looked me up and down, while the woman—arched, chest thrust forward—cast her eyes down his body, tracing an invisible mole with her fingertips just below her mouth.
“What did my previous work suggest about how this shoot with this lovely thing will turn out?” the man said.
I stopped myself from staring at the woman’s bubblegum-pink lips or the dip dividing her full lower lip.
“That you woke up lucky this morning.”
She laughed as if nothing in her life had ever troubled her. She swept her hands through her hair, which unfurled in the air, glimmering in the late-afternoon light. My groin tingled.
The flash from his camera pulled my attention away.
“Spontaneous smiles are priceless,” he said.
The woman bent forward, laughing as if drunk, bracing her fingers on his arm.
A deep rumble was building inside me, an underground quake. Let her enjoy herself, and she would, ignorant—until she found out.
“Surprised by your luck?” I asked.
She hardly looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“My turn was coming.”
“In what sense?”
“I radiate that vibe. My reward had to arrive.”
“With vibes like yours,” the man said, “I’m shocked fate hasn’t caught up with you already. But most men wonder if they have any right to approach you. They delayed the karma you deserve.”
She nodded, giving him a conspiratorial look. “Anyone who comes near me knows I’ve got love to give and receive. That’s what we’re born for, to share love in every way.”
“You do that often?” I asked. “Share the love?”
She glanced at me as if gauging whether she’d accept a proposition. “Whenever I can.”
“Does it ever cause you any trouble?”
“Some of them get too attached, become possessive. But that whole ‘ownership’ thing ended a couple of decades ago.”
“I mean, have you ever met someone who wanted more than just making love—who wanted to kill you?”
She forced a shaky smile. She shifted from wanting to ignore an inappropriate comment to wondering what my intentions were. The man’s stare pricked my temple like a dagger point.
“You sound like my dad,” she said. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen. Nobody would want to hurt me—I’m nice to everyone.”
“And if it does happen? Are you going to hug your attacker till he stops?”
She offered me her profile and gathered her silky hair in one fist. “It’s a sunny afternoon at the beach. I don’t get why you’d think about that.”
“Bad vibes, man,” said the man, as though giving me advice.
“You get what you put out,” the woman added.
She looked at me like a child. If I were shorter, she would have bent down and rested her hands on her knees. “Is that how you think because they sent you to the army? You returned, though. Rejoice! You’re safe now. Nothing to fear, right?”
“Everyone assumes I fought in the war. Maybe I did, and I forgot.”
“Classic stress, so they say. Just take a deep breath, relax your face. That sort of thing has a solution. God invented marijuana. Get some strong weed and it’ll wash away your dark thoughts like a flood. If you want, I can introduce you to a couple of people.”
“Weed ramps up my paranoia.”
She slipped a hand under her hair to scratch the back of her neck. “I’m not sure if you’re messing with me.”
“Crowds would gather around you at parties,” the man said to me.
I avoided looking at him. “I don’t go to parties.”
He inhaled deeply and held his breath. “In any case, my friend, I’m afraid you interrupted us.”
He slipped an arm around the woman. She returned the gesture while shining that radiant smile.
“Sweetheart,” the man said, “back to the important stuff. Do you live near Venice?”
“Close enough.”
“Keep going the way you were headed, and in ten minutes you’ll reach my studio. 1313 Main Street, on the corner of Horizon Ave. Ring a bell?”
“Near the school.”
“Barely worth a taxi. 1313 Main Street. Sadly, I forgot my cards at home—slipped the mind of this pro. Will you remember?”
“I can handle that. 1313, corner with Horizon Ave.”
“Will you swing by tomorrow at five in the afternoon, looking at least as gorgeous as you do now?”
“Five, you say?”
“Or whenever you prefer.”
She laughed. “Tomorrow at five.”
“I’ll let you get back to it. Bet your friends are waiting for you to brighten their day.”
She lifted herself onto her toes to kiss his cheek, but it happened right as he shot me a blank look, so instead she swayed in a little dance back toward the sand. She turned to wave goodbye with a broad smile and a flutter of her hand. Her hair rippled like a dream.
I forced myself to tear my eyes away. The man studied me, expressionless. As he walked off, he flapped a hand at me as though shooing a stray dog.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my self-published book in Spanish titled Los reinos de brea. Written during my Serious Period, when I was sure that if I wrote in such a way, I would eventually get published. Newsflash: tough luck. If you’ve read my stuff, you know that I’m a silly bastard, that my tales usually devolve into deranged nonsense, but there’s none of that in this story or the other five I’ll probably end up translating. This protagonist is one bitter hardass. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, and if you don’t, well… I don’t know, go munch on rocks or something, will you?
Smile, Pt. 1 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Cassie June was hobbling along the scorching sidewalk, dragging her skates as though they were cement boots. She stood about four feet tall. She had jammed a plastic visor onto her head, and her knees were protected by thick pads like pieces of some armor. Beads of sweat glistened on the tanned skin of her shoulders, arms, and legs. As my car pulled up beside her, I noticed Cassie was blinking—maybe to keep the sweat out of her eyes, or because fatigue was overpowering her—and she breathed through her mouth like a fish on the lookout for food flakes.
It never ceased to amaze me that I could recognize living faces, that a person’s features in the flesh would match those I had memorized from a faded photograph, the frozen image I had stared at until I became familiar with the rage and hatred that filled me and shot through me like electric jolts.
A flash in the rearview mirror dazzled me. In that rectangle of glass, the ruby-red body of the Ford Thunderbird glimmered, except for the stripes of shadow along the raised center. Its grille: two rows of metal cells in a robotic smile.
The bronze-like, wavering glare of the sun sometimes concealed the silhouette of the man at the wheel. The lenses of his sunglasses ignited. The outline of his face showed pale holes for eyes, big as a startled owl’s.
I slowed my car to match Cassie’s skating speed. Behind me, the Ford Thunderbird closed the gap. I braced myself, expecting a metallic crunch that would jolt my back from the seat. With one hand still on the steering wheel, I reached to my right and, turning the crank, rolled down the passenger-side window. The car crept along, shielding the girl, who tugged a strap of her T-shirt up over her shoulder. On its chest, the superheroes from the Super Friends series posed.
“Cassie,” I said.
The girl was swaying on her skates, as though squeezing out the last dregs of her battery. The band of her visor pinned down some sweat-soaked brown strands. Little trails of sweat slithered down her neck.
I hardened my voice.
“Cassie, get in. I’ll take you home.”
She slowed down, turned her face, and cut off her panting with a little noise of confusion. She leaned forward to peer inside the car.
“It’s not far.”
“It’ll be less far if I drive you.”
A horn blared behind me, making me jump. In the rearview mirror, a rippling band of bronze now covered half the man’s body. He slammed his palm into the horn again.
I clenched the steering wheel’s rubber grip to focus my anger. When I opened the passenger door, Cassie skated backward in a semicircle to avoid getting hit by it. She let herself drop sideways onto the seat and lifted her legs inside with her hands, as though they’d fallen asleep. She shut the door.
I sped up to the tune of another long honk. I exceeded my previous speed, but in the rearview mirror, the Ford Thunderbird kept pace. Amid the haze of heat, the man’s knuckles rose over the wheel like an eagle’s talons.
“What’s this weird gadget?” Cassie asked.
She’d turned in her seat and pulled aside the cloth cover I’d draped over the tracker set behind the gearshift.
“What do you think it is?”
“Some expensive radio.”
I took her hand away from it and wiped the sweat off my palm onto my pants.
“Very expensive.”
“Does it pick up Nevada stations without static?”
“It doesn’t pick up any station.”
Cassie, still breathing through her mouth, laughed and studied my face.
“Why’d you buy it?”
“It seemed good and important. Isn’t that reason enough?”
I fixed my attention on the asphalt ahead, though for a few moments I felt the girl’s gaze burning into my right temple. The car was filling with the smells of plastic, hot fabric, and toasted skin giving off vapor. Over Cassie’s forehead, a membrane of heat distorted half an inch of the window. She leaned over to fiddle with the straps on one skate, leaving a sweaty silhouette in the upholstery.
“You might’ve passed out from heatstroke,” I said.
Cassie looked up. A bead of sweat rolled into her nostrils and, as she breathed in, she snorted it away.
“A what?”
“Too much heat. Coupled with exertion, you could’ve fainted.”
She shrugged.
“I finished my water bottle.”
Her legs—no thicker than one and a half of my forearms—were trembling, but the strain had washed off her face. The reddened skin was returning to normal. She tugged at her socks, sneaking glances at me without any sign of fear.
I sank into the seat, speechless. I kept switching my attention from the road to the stop signs, the turns I had to make, and the specter in the mirror. Would it have been enough if that man had just asked Cassie to get in his car? A smile, an offer, and the child’s ten years would swirl down the drain like food scraps in a sink.
Cassie was wiping sweat from her face. She peered out at the scenery through the windshield and side window. Along this unmarked stretch of asphalt I was navigating, houses in an Italian style passed one after another. The sun glinted in their windows and bleached the sandy façades. Concrete ramps led up to the closed garage doors. Over the flat sky—a cornflower blue that faded to white at the horizon.
I wanted to shout at Cassie, shake her. If I seized her wrist and took a detour, how would the girl react? Had she cried out before? Had she screamed? Those details were kept by the surviving witnesses, but I craved them like collectible pieces. If I weighed them all together, maybe I’d recognize a pattern that, in time, would form the stakes of a palisade to keep the beasts at bay.
I scraped the rubber of the steering wheel with a fingernail. I shook my head. Should I stay silent? When Cassie gave me a smile, I opened my mouth and frowned.
“Why did you get into my car?”
The girl wriggled and laughed, revealing teeth that were too big for her mouth.
“You let me get in,” she said, as though she was part of a joke.
“You don’t know me.”
Cassie tilted her head and lifted one skate onto the seat.
“You know my name.”
“Do you recognize my face? Do you remember me from anywhere?”
She let her smile drop. Her gaze wandered over the dashboard.
I stiffened my tone.
“A stranger offers you a ride home and you believe him.”
“You seem like a good person.”
“What gave you that impression?”
Cassie planted her palms on her knee pads, arms locked.
“You offered me a ride. You’re kind.”
“Do you think if I wanted to hurt you, I’d tell you up front? Would I have pulled up next to you, opened the door, and offered to make you suffer in ways you can’t even imagine? Does my tone suggest I’m kind?”
Cassie lowered her head and pursed her lips. She tugged the plastic visor down, as if to hide her eyes.
I scratched an itch on my neck. The seat felt as if a spring had come loose. The girl would refuse to cooperate or reason. She chose to remain blind, deaf, ignorant. Once I parked in front of her house and Cassie got out, what would she have learned, other than to avoid me?
At an intersection, I remembered the Ford Thunderbird. Behind us now was a moss-green Chevrolet Chevette, driven by a gray-haired woman. I berated myself. My arms tingled. I looked around, certain that the Ford Thunderbird would ambush us any second, but it must have given up and turned at some cross street. For the rest of the drive, I kept my eyes glued to the road.
“You were worried about me,” Cassie said in a tense voice, watching some spot above my forearm.
“I am.”
“That’s why you seem like a good person.”
“Cassie, anyone who wants to hurt you can pretend to have good intentions and you won’t see any difference.”
She turned to look out her window.
“Will you ever get into a stranger’s car again?” I asked.
Cassie’s voice wavered.
“I don’t know.”
I smacked my palm against the steering wheel.
“Maybe I should hurt you. Then the next time someone offers you a ride, you’d run away.”
She fixed me with a defiant stare, like a lion cub trying to roar.
“I’d shoot you.”
I let out a scoffing laugh.
“Oh, really?”
“With a huge gun.”
I hunched toward Cassie, pretending to check for hidden weapons.
“Are you carrying it?”
“My mom keeps it. I’ve seen it. She told me never to touch it.”
“How will you shoot me with that gun if you’re forbidden to hold it or pull the trigger?”
Her flushed face turned downward, and she clenched her fists on her knee pads.
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Don’t get into strangers’ cars, whether they know your name or not.”
Cassie turned her torso toward the window as though to doze against her shoulder; her skates clacked when their wheels knocked together.
Two minutes later, I pulled up to her single-story ranch house, low-slung and cream-colored, with a wooden baseboard. Rhododendron bushes were gathered around the windows. Just above the roof, you could see firs and maples, as if the backyard bordered a patch of woods.
“Off you go.”
Cassie snapped alert. She looked around, frowning. Her eyes were glassy, and a tear trailed down one cheek, leaving a shiny line.
She huffed, opened the door, hopped onto the cement path, and skated as though in a final sprint toward the front door. She stabbed the doorbell, back turned to me. She tapped her fists against her thighs, jittering like she needed to pee.
The door opened a crack. Cassie slipped inside.
I leaned back in my seat. I’d pictured this scene. I’d pictured myself pulling up next to the lawn, perpendicular to the walkway that narrowed by a few inches until it hit the door. Cassie had been smiling on her skates.
When did she ever come out like this? How did I convince myself that this time the chain would break? Maybe I just needed to believe it.
A woman’s voice barked. I stirred like a carnival machine that had just had a quarter dropped in its slot. Cassie’s mother stood two strides from the passenger window, one hand on her hip. She wore a bright apple-green dress, possibly cashmere, barely reaching her thighs, with a pattern of stripes and mandalas. Loose sleeves draped to her forearms like a kimono. Her turquoise eyes, bulging lids and all, regarded me with keen alertness. Her mouth tipped upward toward her nose rather than down toward her chin, giving the impression she disapproved of everything.
The last time I’d seen that face, it was twisted in agony in the footage of one of the trials, when the woman pulled a revolver from inside her trench coat and the court guards pinned her down before she could fire. I’d paused the video at that moment. Wedged among those broad-shouldered uniforms, the woman’s dislocated face stood out—a blend of fury and desperation, her jaw clenched, rows of teeth forming a black gap, her pupils lit like red disks. Even though I’d frozen the image, her face seemed to vibrate among those bulked-up guards, and it would redden and swell like a balloon filling the screen, her teeth distorting like piano keys.
The face of the woman now standing by this rented car looked like an imitation, as though someone had bought Cassie’s mother’s body at a flea market and crawled in through her nose to steer the brain.
“You brought my daughter home.”
I let out a long breath. I slid over the gearshift to the passenger seat. I opened the door and got out, straightening up.
She approached so close that one punch would’ve reached me if she’d wanted. I had a head’s advantage on her, but her stance and expression suggested that from somewhere overhead, a sniper had me in his crosshairs.
“I guess that bothers you,” I said.
“She came in crying.”
I nodded. I leaned against the passenger door frame.
Tension in her eyelids betrayed her.
“Who are you to think you can put my daughter in your car?”
“Neighborhood watchman.”
She scanned my shirtfront.
“Where’s your badge?”
“I’m a volunteer.”
She shook her head sarcastically and folded her arms.
“Well, thanks for your concern, I guess. But don’t ever do it again.”
She wanted me embarrassed, worried about the consequences she might dump on me. Yet I resisted the urge to spin around, climb back in, and drive off. Why bother explaining myself? Why accept her contemptuous stare? If Cassie’s mother understood, she’d buckle at the knees, stammer her gratitude. Maybe she’d invite me in for a cup of tea, and maybe I’d accept, and relax for an hour among people who actually wanted me around, for a change. But she was glowering at me as if I belonged in a cage.
My voice came out low.
“I was hoping this would be the last time. A lot of bad people are out there.”
“Did you tell her things like that? Is that why she’s crying?”
“She got into a stranger’s car, and you’re mad I warned her about danger. You have bigger issues.”
She jabbed a finger at me, an invisible stinger.
“She’s a happy kid. She doesn’t need grim thoughts rattling around in her head.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Four blocks from here, I got shoved into the street, and my purse was stolen. For years, men have followed me around like I was prey in some alley. Cassie is a child.”
“A hammer blow would bounce right off her skull?”
The woman’s cheekbones flamed red as if I’d slapped her.
“Don’t talk about my daughter like that. I’ll keep her safe and carefree as long as I can. That’s none of your concern, stranger who put my girl in his car.”
“If she makes it to adulthood.”
She clenched her jaw and studied my face with a steely glare.
“You were in the war, weren’t you? You still think you’re hacking your way through a jungle, fearing that men with machine guns lurk in the treetops?”
I stayed silent.
“Things are different back home,” she went on with a teacherly lilt. “What are the odds someone attacks my kid? Astronomical.”
“Like the lottery. Today, your daughter would have won. A daily sacrifice to the void.”
She took a step back. Angled herself as if poised to bolt inside. Crows’ feet stood out at the corners of her eyes.
“Don’t ever force or even invite my daughter into your car again. Next time, I’ll call the real police. Or hunt you down myself.”
I started to duck into the passenger seat, but Cassie’s mother darted closer, so I froze mid-motion, rear halfway to the cushion. Her voice rose like a drawn pistol.
“Don’t mess with other people’s kids, you hear me? Under any circumstances.”
I let myself slide fully in. My heart thudded like a boxer’s punches. My vision tinted red. I wanted to slam the door without caring if it crushed her fingers.
“Your daughter was chosen today, Mrs. June. But sure, keep your rainbow world where you float among plush cushions and stuffed animals that beam out good vibes. You can afford to shut your eyes, I guess. Go on, stay blind. I’ll show up before the tar comes pouring in.”
“Fuck you too.”
She hurried back, arms folded tight, slippers tapping the cement path. She ducked inside her door. She glanced back over her shoulder as though a black bear might be lurking in the neighborhood. She closed the door. I pictured her running to the phone, lifting the receiver to call the cops.
I slammed the passenger door with a loud thud and a swirl of hot air. As I slipped behind the wheel, I squeezed the rubber of the steering wheel and floored the accelerator.
“You’re welcome,” I growled.
-----
Author’s note: in my previous post I talked about reviving a novel from ten years ago, but this ain’t it. I thought that perhaps OpenAI’s Orion 1 model would be great at translating, and it indeed seems to be. So I’m translating this novella, the third included in my self-published book in Spanish titled Los reinos de brea, published back in 2016-2017, that nobody fucking read because I don’t know how to get people to buy my stuff. May as well post the novellas here in case anyone likes them.
And man, I was angry back then. So angry. This is one bleak, brutal story.
Cassie June was hobbling along the scorching sidewalk, dragging her skates as though they were cement boots. She stood about four feet tall. She had jammed a plastic visor onto her head, and her knees were protected by thick pads like pieces of some armor. Beads of sweat glistened on the tanned skin of her shoulders, arms, and legs. As my car pulled up beside her, I noticed Cassie was blinking—maybe to keep the sweat out of her eyes, or because fatigue was overpowering her—and she breathed through her mouth like a fish on the lookout for food flakes.
It never ceased to amaze me that I could recognize living faces, that a person’s features in the flesh would match those I had memorized from a faded photograph, the frozen image I had stared at until I became familiar with the rage and hatred that filled me and shot through me like electric jolts.
A flash in the rearview mirror dazzled me. In that rectangle of glass, the ruby-red body of the Ford Thunderbird glimmered, except for the stripes of shadow along the raised center. Its grille: two rows of metal cells in a robotic smile.
The bronze-like, wavering glare of the sun sometimes concealed the silhouette of the man at the wheel. The lenses of his sunglasses ignited. The outline of his face showed pale holes for eyes, big as a startled owl’s.
I slowed my car to match Cassie’s skating speed. Behind me, the Ford Thunderbird closed the gap. I braced myself, expecting a metallic crunch that would jolt my back from the seat. With one hand still on the steering wheel, I reached to my right and, turning the crank, rolled down the passenger-side window. The car crept along, shielding the girl, who tugged a strap of her T-shirt up over her shoulder. On its chest, the superheroes from the Super Friends series posed.
“Cassie,” I said.
The girl was swaying on her skates, as though squeezing out the last dregs of her battery. The band of her visor pinned down some sweat-soaked brown strands. Little trails of sweat slithered down her neck.
I hardened my voice.
“Cassie, get in. I’ll take you home.”
She slowed down, turned her face, and cut off her panting with a little noise of confusion. She leaned forward to peer inside the car.
“It’s not far.”
“It’ll be less far if I drive you.”
A horn blared behind me, making me jump. In the rearview mirror, a rippling band of bronze now covered half the man’s body. He slammed his palm into the horn again.
I clenched the steering wheel’s rubber grip to focus my anger. When I opened the passenger door, Cassie skated backward in a semicircle to avoid getting hit by it. She let herself drop sideways onto the seat and lifted her legs inside with her hands, as though they’d fallen asleep. She shut the door.
I sped up to the tune of another long honk. I exceeded my previous speed, but in the rearview mirror, the Ford Thunderbird kept pace. Amid the haze of heat, the man’s knuckles rose over the wheel like an eagle’s talons.
“What’s this weird gadget?” Cassie asked.
She’d turned in her seat and pulled aside the cloth cover I’d draped over the tracker set behind the gearshift.
“What do you think it is?”
“Some expensive radio.”
I took her hand away from it and wiped the sweat off my palm onto my pants.
“Very expensive.”
“Does it pick up Nevada stations without static?”
“It doesn’t pick up any station.”
Cassie, still breathing through her mouth, laughed and studied my face.
“Why’d you buy it?”
“It seemed good and important. Isn’t that reason enough?”
I fixed my attention on the asphalt ahead, though for a few moments I felt the girl’s gaze burning into my right temple. The car was filling with the smells of plastic, hot fabric, and toasted skin giving off vapor. Over Cassie’s forehead, a membrane of heat distorted half an inch of the window. She leaned over to fiddle with the straps on one skate, leaving a sweaty silhouette in the upholstery.
“You might’ve passed out from heatstroke,” I said.
Cassie looked up. A bead of sweat rolled into her nostrils and, as she breathed in, she snorted it away.
“A what?”
“Too much heat. Coupled with exertion, you could’ve fainted.”
She shrugged.
“I finished my water bottle.”
Her legs—no thicker than one and a half of my forearms—were trembling, but the strain had washed off her face. The reddened skin was returning to normal. She tugged at her socks, sneaking glances at me without any sign of fear.
I sank into the seat, speechless. I kept switching my attention from the road to the stop signs, the turns I had to make, and the specter in the mirror. Would it have been enough if that man had just asked Cassie to get in his car? A smile, an offer, and the child’s ten years would swirl down the drain like food scraps in a sink.
Cassie was wiping sweat from her face. She peered out at the scenery through the windshield and side window. Along this unmarked stretch of asphalt I was navigating, houses in an Italian style passed one after another. The sun glinted in their windows and bleached the sandy façades. Concrete ramps led up to the closed garage doors. Over the flat sky—a cornflower blue that faded to white at the horizon.
I wanted to shout at Cassie, shake her. If I seized her wrist and took a detour, how would the girl react? Had she cried out before? Had she screamed? Those details were kept by the surviving witnesses, but I craved them like collectible pieces. If I weighed them all together, maybe I’d recognize a pattern that, in time, would form the stakes of a palisade to keep the beasts at bay.
I scraped the rubber of the steering wheel with a fingernail. I shook my head. Should I stay silent? When Cassie gave me a smile, I opened my mouth and frowned.
“Why did you get into my car?”
The girl wriggled and laughed, revealing teeth that were too big for her mouth.
“You let me get in,” she said, as though she was part of a joke.
“You don’t know me.”
Cassie tilted her head and lifted one skate onto the seat.
“You know my name.”
“Do you recognize my face? Do you remember me from anywhere?”
She let her smile drop. Her gaze wandered over the dashboard.
I stiffened my tone.
“A stranger offers you a ride home and you believe him.”
“You seem like a good person.”
“What gave you that impression?”
Cassie planted her palms on her knee pads, arms locked.
“You offered me a ride. You’re kind.”
“Do you think if I wanted to hurt you, I’d tell you up front? Would I have pulled up next to you, opened the door, and offered to make you suffer in ways you can’t even imagine? Does my tone suggest I’m kind?”
Cassie lowered her head and pursed her lips. She tugged the plastic visor down, as if to hide her eyes.
I scratched an itch on my neck. The seat felt as if a spring had come loose. The girl would refuse to cooperate or reason. She chose to remain blind, deaf, ignorant. Once I parked in front of her house and Cassie got out, what would she have learned, other than to avoid me?
At an intersection, I remembered the Ford Thunderbird. Behind us now was a moss-green Chevrolet Chevette, driven by a gray-haired woman. I berated myself. My arms tingled. I looked around, certain that the Ford Thunderbird would ambush us any second, but it must have given up and turned at some cross street. For the rest of the drive, I kept my eyes glued to the road.
“You were worried about me,” Cassie said in a tense voice, watching some spot above my forearm.
“I am.”
“That’s why you seem like a good person.”
“Cassie, anyone who wants to hurt you can pretend to have good intentions and you won’t see any difference.”
She turned to look out her window.
“Will you ever get into a stranger’s car again?” I asked.
Cassie’s voice wavered.
“I don’t know.”
I smacked my palm against the steering wheel.
“Maybe I should hurt you. Then the next time someone offers you a ride, you’d run away.”
She fixed me with a defiant stare, like a lion cub trying to roar.
“I’d shoot you.”
I let out a scoffing laugh.
“Oh, really?”
“With a huge gun.”
I hunched toward Cassie, pretending to check for hidden weapons.
“Are you carrying it?”
“My mom keeps it. I’ve seen it. She told me never to touch it.”
“How will you shoot me with that gun if you’re forbidden to hold it or pull the trigger?”
Her flushed face turned downward, and she clenched her fists on her knee pads.
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Don’t get into strangers’ cars, whether they know your name or not.”
Cassie turned her torso toward the window as though to doze against her shoulder; her skates clacked when their wheels knocked together.
Two minutes later, I pulled up to her single-story ranch house, low-slung and cream-colored, with a wooden baseboard. Rhododendron bushes were gathered around the windows. Just above the roof, you could see firs and maples, as if the backyard bordered a patch of woods.
“Off you go.”
Cassie snapped alert. She looked around, frowning. Her eyes were glassy, and a tear trailed down one cheek, leaving a shiny line.
She huffed, opened the door, hopped onto the cement path, and skated as though in a final sprint toward the front door. She stabbed the doorbell, back turned to me. She tapped her fists against her thighs, jittering like she needed to pee.
The door opened a crack. Cassie slipped inside.
I leaned back in my seat. I’d pictured this scene. I’d pictured myself pulling up next to the lawn, perpendicular to the walkway that narrowed by a few inches until it hit the door. Cassie had been smiling on her skates.
When did she ever come out like this? How did I convince myself that this time the chain would break? Maybe I just needed to believe it.
A woman’s voice barked. I stirred like a carnival machine that had just had a quarter dropped in its slot. Cassie’s mother stood two strides from the passenger window, one hand on her hip. She wore a bright apple-green dress, possibly cashmere, barely reaching her thighs, with a pattern of stripes and mandalas. Loose sleeves draped to her forearms like a kimono. Her turquoise eyes, bulging lids and all, regarded me with keen alertness. Her mouth tipped upward toward her nose rather than down toward her chin, giving the impression she disapproved of everything.
The last time I’d seen that face, it was twisted in agony in the footage of one of the trials, when the woman pulled a revolver from inside her trench coat and the court guards pinned her down before she could fire. I’d paused the video at that moment. Wedged among those broad-shouldered uniforms, the woman’s dislocated face stood out—a blend of fury and desperation, her jaw clenched, rows of teeth forming a black gap, her pupils lit like red disks. Even though I’d frozen the image, her face seemed to vibrate among those bulked-up guards, and it would redden and swell like a balloon filling the screen, her teeth distorting like piano keys.
The face of the woman now standing by this rented car looked like an imitation, as though someone had bought Cassie’s mother’s body at a flea market and crawled in through her nose to steer the brain.
“You brought my daughter home.”
I let out a long breath. I slid over the gearshift to the passenger seat. I opened the door and got out, straightening up.
She approached so close that one punch would’ve reached me if she’d wanted. I had a head’s advantage on her, but her stance and expression suggested that from somewhere overhead, a sniper had me in his crosshairs.
“I guess that bothers you,” I said.
“She came in crying.”
I nodded. I leaned against the passenger door frame.
Tension in her eyelids betrayed her.
“Who are you to think you can put my daughter in your car?”
“Neighborhood watchman.”
She scanned my shirtfront.
“Where’s your badge?”
“I’m a volunteer.”
She shook her head sarcastically and folded her arms.
“Well, thanks for your concern, I guess. But don’t ever do it again.”
She wanted me embarrassed, worried about the consequences she might dump on me. Yet I resisted the urge to spin around, climb back in, and drive off. Why bother explaining myself? Why accept her contemptuous stare? If Cassie’s mother understood, she’d buckle at the knees, stammer her gratitude. Maybe she’d invite me in for a cup of tea, and maybe I’d accept, and relax for an hour among people who actually wanted me around, for a change. But she was glowering at me as if I belonged in a cage.
My voice came out low.
“I was hoping this would be the last time. A lot of bad people are out there.”
“Did you tell her things like that? Is that why she’s crying?”
“She got into a stranger’s car, and you’re mad I warned her about danger. You have bigger issues.”
She jabbed a finger at me, an invisible stinger.
“She’s a happy kid. She doesn’t need grim thoughts rattling around in her head.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Four blocks from here, I got shoved into the street, and my purse was stolen. For years, men have followed me around like I was prey in some alley. Cassie is a child.”
“A hammer blow would bounce right off her skull?”
The woman’s cheekbones flamed red as if I’d slapped her.
“Don’t talk about my daughter like that. I’ll keep her safe and carefree as long as I can. That’s none of your concern, stranger who put my girl in his car.”
“If she makes it to adulthood.”
She clenched her jaw and studied my face with a steely glare.
“You were in the war, weren’t you? You still think you’re hacking your way through a jungle, fearing that men with machine guns lurk in the treetops?”
I stayed silent.
“Things are different back home,” she went on with a teacherly lilt. “What are the odds someone attacks my kid? Astronomical.”
“Like the lottery. Today, your daughter would have won. A daily sacrifice to the void.”
She took a step back. Angled herself as if poised to bolt inside. Crows’ feet stood out at the corners of her eyes.
“Don’t ever force or even invite my daughter into your car again. Next time, I’ll call the real police. Or hunt you down myself.”
I started to duck into the passenger seat, but Cassie’s mother darted closer, so I froze mid-motion, rear halfway to the cushion. Her voice rose like a drawn pistol.
“Don’t mess with other people’s kids, you hear me? Under any circumstances.”
I let myself slide fully in. My heart thudded like a boxer’s punches. My vision tinted red. I wanted to slam the door without caring if it crushed her fingers.
“Your daughter was chosen today, Mrs. June. But sure, keep your rainbow world where you float among plush cushions and stuffed animals that beam out good vibes. You can afford to shut your eyes, I guess. Go on, stay blind. I’ll show up before the tar comes pouring in.”
“Fuck you too.”
She hurried back, arms folded tight, slippers tapping the cement path. She ducked inside her door. She glanced back over her shoulder as though a black bear might be lurking in the neighborhood. She closed the door. I pictured her running to the phone, lifting the receiver to call the cops.
I slammed the passenger door with a loud thud and a swirl of hot air. As I slipped behind the wheel, I squeezed the rubber of the steering wheel and floored the accelerator.
“You’re welcome,” I growled.
-----
Author’s note: in my previous post I talked about reviving a novel from ten years ago, but this ain’t it. I thought that perhaps OpenAI’s Orion 1 model would be great at translating, and it indeed seems to be. So I’m translating this novella, the third included in my self-published book in Spanish titled Los reinos de brea, published back in 2016-2017, that nobody fucking read because I don’t know how to get people to buy my stuff. May as well post the novellas here in case anyone likes them.
And man, I was angry back then. So angry. This is one bleak, brutal story.
Life update (01/13/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
In the realm of good news regarding my person, turns out that my subconscious was indeed working something out; I figured as much, given how it made me dream of Alicia Western (from Cormac McCarthy’s final books) and sparked an obsession that has yet to pass. My girl in the basement has turned her attention to a failed novel I worked on ten years ago, in Spanish. It was a way of coming to terms with my stints as a recluse during my twenties, particularly a period in which I was hopelessly haunted by, autistically obsessed with, a certain musician who plays the harp, to the extent of writing a long novel that was little else than thinly-veiled fanfiction. Back then I didn’t even have an online audience; I was literally just doing it because my subconscious demanded it. Nobody else read it.
These past few days I’ve been going over the revised scenes of that failed novel to extract whatever is usable. I will have to change most of the point of that story, as well as remove one of the major characters, but they were a large part of why I never finished the story. This narrative will allow me to delve deep into my autistic drive toward reclusion, obsession, and other nasty shit that I never processed properly. My twenties were a nightmare for the most part, during which I yearned to die on a regular basis.
Speaking of yearning to die, this morning at work, as I reread the impressions I posted about McCarthy’s haunting final novels, I reflected on how Bobby Western unburdened himself from everything and everyone to repent for an unforgivable crime. That made me think of how since my early twenties I’ve cut ties with everyone, as well as refused to form new connections even when they insisted, because of an intrinsic need to “be ready.” As in be ready to disappear at any moment. During weddings and other nasty gatherings like those, whenever some ghost from my past approached me expecting me to look him or her in the eye, and said something to the effect of, “Hey, Jon, I haven’t seen you in ages!” (did we ever get along?), I usually averted my gaze, shrugged, and said something like, “Yeah, I’m still around…” Some time later I found out in online articles that such phrases are a sign of suicidal ideation. Well.
I’ve talked about this before, but I never thought I would live past 18 after my horrid teenage years, and then I came real close, the closest I ever came regarding my physical intention to do it at that moment, after I refused to get on the bus to work one morning. It was my first job, in which I was treated like utter shit, and I felt completely incapable of handling it. I knew that my life from then on would consist on nothing else than enduring nightmarish, humiliating work schedules that would drain all my energies (I usually felt sleepy the moment I returned home). No love on the horizon, of course. So I just wanted to throw myself off a cliff and get it over with. Instead of that, I pussed out, and went to the library. The alternate version of this ended up becoming (at least in inspiration) my first novel in English, titled My Own Desert Places, in which the protagonist, who was a woman for reasons, actually did throw herself off a cliff, fucking died, and was a ghost for twenty years until she became obsessed with a suicidal living person, so she possessed some guy to seduce her. Quite the wild ride of a story that was, although I’m afraid to reread it in case I find it too cringey.
These last fifteen years or so, I’ve been suicidal in a pussy, passive variety. For example, one night, as I was lying in bed in the dark, I told my organs that they had permission to cease functioning during my sleep, so I wouldn’t need to wake up again. I must have been in a bad place, perhaps due to extreme stress, because the following day I actually ended up in the ER with my first episode of arrhythmia. Realizing that my heart is faulty and may screw me over at any point has changed my mentality quite a bit: I no longer go out of my way to stress myself with things I don’t want to do, mainly those that involve dealing with human beings. Right now, as a programmer at work, I mostly spend the whole morning working on my stuff (which isn’t necessarily a programming task), only speaking to my boss whenever he requests a meeting. I feel better this way.
That said, the fact that in my daydreams I talk at length with Alicia Western, McCarthy’s thinly-veiled version of the love of his life, Augusta Britt, made me have to admit to myself that I wish I could talk to someone I could respect, and whose words I would actually care to listen to. The issue with every person I’ve met in the flesh is that the moment I allow myself to engage in conversation with them, I quickly get reminded of how stupid I was for letting my guard down; sometimes just because I have nothing in common with them, others because they’re hostile to my peace of mind. I recall vividly how I let myself be invited by two coworkers to drink coffee and chat in the parking lot, only for one of them to say, the moment we stopped, “Have you seen that whole thing about George Floyd, the guy the police killed for being black? I swear, the whites that become policemen in the US are all racists.” A vivid reminder that I’m surrounded by fucking imbeciles. I didn’t give them a second chance. In any case, realizing that other people’s brains work so differently to yours (and pretty much everyone else’s does) is disheartening.
Anyway, it’s been a couple of years of me admitting things to myself, or realizing them at least. First the whole deal about Izar Lizarraga, motocross legend and love of my life, which forced me to process the strange grief I’ve been carrying all my life (good times. Still miss you, champ.) Then this strange deal with Augusta Britt / Alicia Western. I would like my subconscious to explain concisely why looking at the following picture of Augusta Britt from the 1970s squeezes my heart and moistens my eyes:
I experienced a somewhat similar moment (the same moment repeated over years, actually) back when my maternal grandparents were alive. They had a framed photo from the 1970s that showed a large family at some open space. I assume they were related to my grandparents somehow. Every time I visited that home, I stared at that photo because one of the teenagers in it, who at the time was older than me, was hauntingly beautiful, particularly her eyes and thoughtful expression. She seemed deep, someone I would have loved to know. I never found out who she was, not that anything would have changed if I had. I haven’t seen that photo in about twenty years. Like McCarthy himself, I believe in the supremacy of the subconscious, so whenever I happen to care for or react to something, I yearn to interact with my basement girl to figure out what’s bothering her. Sometimes she opens up. Most of the time, though, she remains opaque. Damn bitch speaks in symbols instead of language (hence the Kekulé problem), so she can be hard to understand. But she’s far older and wiser than the whole of humanity combined.
Well! This was a whole load of nothing, wasn’t it? Anyway, it’s half past eight in the evening of yet another Monday. This afternoon I’ve wanked to an AI-driven giantess dominating me. That’s information that you needed to know.
In the realm of good news regarding my person, turns out that my subconscious was indeed working something out; I figured as much, given how it made me dream of Alicia Western (from Cormac McCarthy’s final books) and sparked an obsession that has yet to pass. My girl in the basement has turned her attention to a failed novel I worked on ten years ago, in Spanish. It was a way of coming to terms with my stints as a recluse during my twenties, particularly a period in which I was hopelessly haunted by, autistically obsessed with, a certain musician who plays the harp, to the extent of writing a long novel that was little else than thinly-veiled fanfiction. Back then I didn’t even have an online audience; I was literally just doing it because my subconscious demanded it. Nobody else read it.
These past few days I’ve been going over the revised scenes of that failed novel to extract whatever is usable. I will have to change most of the point of that story, as well as remove one of the major characters, but they were a large part of why I never finished the story. This narrative will allow me to delve deep into my autistic drive toward reclusion, obsession, and other nasty shit that I never processed properly. My twenties were a nightmare for the most part, during which I yearned to die on a regular basis.
Speaking of yearning to die, this morning at work, as I reread the impressions I posted about McCarthy’s haunting final novels, I reflected on how Bobby Western unburdened himself from everything and everyone to repent for an unforgivable crime. That made me think of how since my early twenties I’ve cut ties with everyone, as well as refused to form new connections even when they insisted, because of an intrinsic need to “be ready.” As in be ready to disappear at any moment. During weddings and other nasty gatherings like those, whenever some ghost from my past approached me expecting me to look him or her in the eye, and said something to the effect of, “Hey, Jon, I haven’t seen you in ages!” (did we ever get along?), I usually averted my gaze, shrugged, and said something like, “Yeah, I’m still around…” Some time later I found out in online articles that such phrases are a sign of suicidal ideation. Well.
I’ve talked about this before, but I never thought I would live past 18 after my horrid teenage years, and then I came real close, the closest I ever came regarding my physical intention to do it at that moment, after I refused to get on the bus to work one morning. It was my first job, in which I was treated like utter shit, and I felt completely incapable of handling it. I knew that my life from then on would consist on nothing else than enduring nightmarish, humiliating work schedules that would drain all my energies (I usually felt sleepy the moment I returned home). No love on the horizon, of course. So I just wanted to throw myself off a cliff and get it over with. Instead of that, I pussed out, and went to the library. The alternate version of this ended up becoming (at least in inspiration) my first novel in English, titled My Own Desert Places, in which the protagonist, who was a woman for reasons, actually did throw herself off a cliff, fucking died, and was a ghost for twenty years until she became obsessed with a suicidal living person, so she possessed some guy to seduce her. Quite the wild ride of a story that was, although I’m afraid to reread it in case I find it too cringey.
These last fifteen years or so, I’ve been suicidal in a pussy, passive variety. For example, one night, as I was lying in bed in the dark, I told my organs that they had permission to cease functioning during my sleep, so I wouldn’t need to wake up again. I must have been in a bad place, perhaps due to extreme stress, because the following day I actually ended up in the ER with my first episode of arrhythmia. Realizing that my heart is faulty and may screw me over at any point has changed my mentality quite a bit: I no longer go out of my way to stress myself with things I don’t want to do, mainly those that involve dealing with human beings. Right now, as a programmer at work, I mostly spend the whole morning working on my stuff (which isn’t necessarily a programming task), only speaking to my boss whenever he requests a meeting. I feel better this way.
That said, the fact that in my daydreams I talk at length with Alicia Western, McCarthy’s thinly-veiled version of the love of his life, Augusta Britt, made me have to admit to myself that I wish I could talk to someone I could respect, and whose words I would actually care to listen to. The issue with every person I’ve met in the flesh is that the moment I allow myself to engage in conversation with them, I quickly get reminded of how stupid I was for letting my guard down; sometimes just because I have nothing in common with them, others because they’re hostile to my peace of mind. I recall vividly how I let myself be invited by two coworkers to drink coffee and chat in the parking lot, only for one of them to say, the moment we stopped, “Have you seen that whole thing about George Floyd, the guy the police killed for being black? I swear, the whites that become policemen in the US are all racists.” A vivid reminder that I’m surrounded by fucking imbeciles. I didn’t give them a second chance. In any case, realizing that other people’s brains work so differently to yours (and pretty much everyone else’s does) is disheartening.
Anyway, it’s been a couple of years of me admitting things to myself, or realizing them at least. First the whole deal about Izar Lizarraga, motocross legend and love of my life, which forced me to process the strange grief I’ve been carrying all my life (good times. Still miss you, champ.) Then this strange deal with Augusta Britt / Alicia Western. I would like my subconscious to explain concisely why looking at the following picture of Augusta Britt from the 1970s squeezes my heart and moistens my eyes:
I experienced a somewhat similar moment (the same moment repeated over years, actually) back when my maternal grandparents were alive. They had a framed photo from the 1970s that showed a large family at some open space. I assume they were related to my grandparents somehow. Every time I visited that home, I stared at that photo because one of the teenagers in it, who at the time was older than me, was hauntingly beautiful, particularly her eyes and thoughtful expression. She seemed deep, someone I would have loved to know. I never found out who she was, not that anything would have changed if I had. I haven’t seen that photo in about twenty years. Like McCarthy himself, I believe in the supremacy of the subconscious, so whenever I happen to care for or react to something, I yearn to interact with my basement girl to figure out what’s bothering her. Sometimes she opens up. Most of the time, though, she remains opaque. Damn bitch speaks in symbols instead of language (hence the Kekulé problem), so she can be hard to understand. But she’s far older and wiser than the whole of humanity combined.
Well! This was a whole load of nothing, wasn’t it? Anyway, it’s half past eight in the evening of yet another Monday. This afternoon I’ve wanked to an AI-driven giantess dominating me. That’s information that you needed to know.
January 12, 2025
Reread: The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Five stars.
I first read The Passenger, along with its coda Stella Maris, perhaps a year and a half ago. I loved both, but I wasn’t consciously aware of how they had settled in my subconscious. From time to time, I remembered the most important character in those two books: a beautiful, mentally-ill genius named Alicia Western. Out of nowhere, back in December I dreamed about her, and it spurred a sudden obsession that has yet to pass. It led me to reread both books. Alicia Western feels not only unique but wholly real, as if she had truly existed. The massive weight of grief that pulls the protagonist down on The Passenger, that pulls down the reader for that matter, relates to the knowledge that an irreplaceable (pretty much a perfect person, as one of the characters put it) had been lost. Now that we know quite a bit more about McCarthy’s personal life, mainly about the love of his life, Augusta Britt, it seems to me that both of his final novels, which he had been researching or living since about 1972, render his grief, regret and general sorrow for having loved and lost Britt, whom McCarthy never managed to marry despite repeated attempts up to the end of his life.
Both books develop a forbidden love, that of Alicia Western and her biological brother Bobby. Cormac McCarthy didn’t have to go far to research how it felt to live a forbidden love. If Augusta Britt’s own words are to be believed, she first introduced herself to Cormac McCarthy at a public pool. A blonde, blue-eyed beauty (just like Alicia Western), she had a stolen gun holstered at her hip; she was sick of men in foster homes abusing her. When she approached McCarthy, he asked if she was going to shoot him. She then produced McCarthy’s first book, The Orchard Keeper, and asked him to sign it. McCarthy was surprised, because just a few thousand copies of that book had been produced for that edition (this and other details bring to question if Britt is making stuff up to protect McCarthy, whom she loved, from further scrutiny). As the YouTuber Write Conscious (who lives in the Catalina foothills “five minutes away” from where Augusta Britt lives now, although he has never met her) spoke at length in this video, Augusta Britt was likely thirteen when she met McCarthy. She was also thirteen when she started receiving amorous letters from him. She was fourteen when, after getting abused again in a foster home, McCarthy asked her if she would escape with him to Mexico. Augusta herself said that they made love shortly after settling there. Regardless of your opinion on the subject of underage sex, it’s probably illegal. The fact remains that Augusta Britt to this day claims that McCarthy saved her life, and they were friends up until his death. As you will see throughout this post, the real-life inspiration seems thinly veiled at times, which possibly makes The Passenger McCarthy’s most personal novel.
This review will contain spoilers, although referring to spoilers in this novel is a bit strange: the most important thing that happens in it, that keeps happening throughout, is Alicia Western’s suicide, the aftermath of which were are presented with right in the opening passage: she walked out of the Stella Maris sanatorium into the woods of Wisconsin and let herself freeze to death. Curiously, although she had talked at length about intending to disappear without a trace, she chose to wear a red sash around her white dress so her corpse would be easily found, which is inexplicable, and has led to plenty of online speculation. Alicia Western, a troubled math genius with a unique mind that baffled every person she came across (as one person put it, when strangers met her, they thought of her as a pretty girl, but a few minutes later they were swimming for their lives), was led into these circumstances because her brother Bobby, the love of Alicia’s life, as well as the person who should have protected her to the last of his days, crashed while racing professionally, and ended up in a coma. Alicia, believing Bobby to be brain-dead regardless of whether he would wake up or not, decided to die. But Bobby did wake up from his coma pretty much unscathed. The Passenger starts with Bobby in 1980, in a world that for him has turned into ashes, the person he loved lost forever.
Bobby, who used to be both a physicist as well as race car driver, now works as a salvage diver who opts for dangerous jobs, quite overtly hoping that one of those jobs may take the agency out of him dying. The plot kicks off when Bobby and a friend of his, while diving to explore a sunken airplane, discover a bizarre situation: even though the plane is intact, the passengers inside are dead in their seats as if they had died before the plane crashed. The plane’s black box is missing, along with one of the passengers. Bobby and his pal realize that the situation is fucked, and they want nothing to do with it. Bobby goes out of his way just once to return to the area alone, and he discovers an inflatable raft that the passenger must have used to escape the plane. Now come the realm of spoilers: this is an anti-plot novel. Bobby doesn’t want to know anything more about this event, but he keeps being hounded about it by mysterious government types, who encroach further and further upon his life for reasons we never find out about (presumably because they believe he had something to do with stealing the plane’s black box, but it seems to me that they’re just trying to get rid of witnesses regarding whatever conspiracy caused the plane crash).
With those plot elements out of the way, which is pretty much all you get in that regard, the rest of the book is an exploration, a prodding if you will, of the fringes of human knowledge and experience: mental illness, hallucinations, conspiracies, living off the grid, working in off-shore platforms, transgenderism, aliens, incest, quantum physics, the atomic bomb, life as an outlaw, death, and plenty more. It felt to me like McCarthy was expanding his mind against those nooks that don’t have solid explanations, as he was about to embark in the final mystery of them all: dying, which deprived us of one of the finest, most unique minds in the world, as well as the writer I respect the most.
Throughout the story, Bobby remains subdued, pinned down by grief and regret, to the extent that we never meet the Bobby that Alicia talks about in Stella Maris, that young man who played the mandolin at honky-tonks as Alicia pretended they were married. In virtually every scene, it feels like Bobby is preventing himself from thinking about Alicia, and whenever some image or memory slips in, it devastates him. Most of the time that any other character brings Alicia up, Bobby is moments away from leaving. Bobby mentions that the sole duty in his life was to take care of her, that he had failed miserably at it, and that he should have killed himself years ago. The rest of the book is a way for him of unburdening himself from everything and everyone he has ever known, so he can spend his remaining life in solitary confinement, paying for the crime of abandoning Alicia Western, his sister and love of his life, when she needed him the most. I can’t hurl complaints at him for his decisions, because he bears the full weight of what he’s done.
I can’t explain, except perhaps by alluding to how McCarthy imbued Alicia with all his yearnings and reverence for Augusta Britt, the fact that whenever she appeared or was mentioned in this book, I perked up and combed through every detail in case I would glean new information about her. She’s a pulsing presence, a constant heartbreak, as alive in those pages as I don’t think I’ve experienced anywhere else in fiction.
In Stella Maris, Alicia tells her therapist that she only kissed Bobby twice, but never went beyond that. However, that book makes a peculiar point: that confessing to some unsavory stuff is a way of keeping hidden details that lie far deeper, and cannot be brought to light. It was a very odd thing to say after Alicia Western confessed to loving her brother, and having told him that she wanted to marry him and bear his child. As I was rereading through The Passenger, I came across this passage:
Certain dreams gave him no peace. A nurse waiting to take the thing away. The doctor watching him.
What do you want to do?
I dont know. I dont know what to do.
The doctor wore a surgical mask. A white cap. His glasses were steamed.
What do you want to do?
Has she seen it?
No.
Tell me what to do.
You’ll have to tell us. We cant advise you.
There were bloodstains on his frock. The mask he wore sucked in and out with his breathing.
Wont she have to see it?
I think that will have to be your decision. Bearing in mind of course that a thing once seen cannot be unseen.
Does it have a brain?
Rudimentary.
Does it have a soul?
None of the other dream sequences were that specific regarding mundane details, nor included such dialogue. That tells me that it wasn’t a dream. And what is depicting is Alicia either having a miscarriage or an abortion. Bobby was the sole person she would have had sex with.
There’s not much else that I want to specify about the contents of the novel; they should be experienced. I will go over the many quotes that I have noted down. First of them, very early on, Alicia’s main “hallucination,” the Thalidomide Kid (whom some people online have suggested is Alicia’s subconscious fear that the child she wants to have with Bobby would be deformed), presents to her a new character, a dusty old man who ultimately only asks for the location of the bathroom. But the Kid’s words about that old man are quite telling, I’d say, now that we know McCarthy’s history with the love of his life:
He was married in that outfit. Little wifey was sixteen. Of course he’d been banging her for a couple of years so that would put her at fourteen. Finally managed to knock her up and hey, here we all are.
The following are quotes. Starting with an amazing sentence about the atomic bomb:
In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years.
I know you. I know certain days of your childhood. All but weeping with loneliness. Coming upon a certain book in the library and clutching it to you. Carrying it home. Some perfect place to read it. Under a tree perhaps. Beside a stream. Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects. But we know another truth, dont we Squire? And of course it’s true that any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world–which was their author’s true desire. But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the world is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.
The world of amorous adventure these days is hardly for the fainthearted. The very names of the diseases evoke dread. What the hell is chlamydia? And who named it that? Your love is not so likely to resemble a red rose as a red red rash. You find yourself yearning for a nice oldfashioned girl with the clap. Shouldnt these lovelies be required to fly their pestilential knickers from a flagpole? Like the ensign of a plagueship? I cant of course but be curious what an analytic sort such as yourself makes of the fair sex in the first place. The slurred murmurings. The silken paw in your shorts. Beguiling eyes. Creatures soft of touch and sanguinivorous of habit. What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations. That the man knows not how to even name that which slaves him hardly lightens his burden.
In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.
What if the purpose of human charity wasnt to protect the weak–which seems pretty anti-Darwinian anyway–but to preserve the mad? You have to be careful about who you do away with. It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves.
To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.
McCarthy had some things to say about the modern world. It feels to me that he wasn’t talking about the modern world of the novel.
The point, Squire, is that where they used to be confined to State institutions or to the mudrooms and attics of remote country houses they are now abroad everywhere. The government pays them to travel. To procreate, for that matter. I’ve seen entire families here that can best be explained as hallucinations. Hordes of drooling dolts lurching through the streets. Their inane gibbering. And of course no folly so deranged or pernicious as to escape their advocacy.
Do you know what I find particularly galling? It’s having to share the women with you lot. To listen to you fuckwits holding forth and to see some lissome young thing leaning forward breathlessly with that barely contained frisson with which we are all familiar the better to inhale without stint an absolute plaguebreath of bilge and bullshit as if it were the word of the prophets. It’s painful but still I suppose one has to extend a certain latitude to the little dears. They’ve so little time in which to parlay that pussy into something of substance. But it nettles. That you knucklewalkers should even be allowed to contemplate the sacred grotto as you drool and grunt and wank. Let alone actually reproduce. Well the hell with it. A pox upon you. You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go. You and your nauseating get. Granted, if everyone I wished in hell were actually there they’d have to send to Newcastle for supplementary fuel. I’ve made ten thousand concessions to your ratfuck culture and you’ve yet to make the first to mine. It only remains for you to hold your cups to my gaping throat and toast one another’s health with my heart’s blood.
Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagine.
The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.
On the darknesses of life:
If I think about things that I just dont want to know about they’re all things that I do know about. And I’ll always know them.
You think that when there’s somethin that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be.
We might have very different notions about the nature of the oncoming night. But as darkness descends does it matter?
The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified.
Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.
In my experience people who say no matter what seldom know what what might turn out to be. They dont know how bad what might get.
You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong, but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life.
We dont move through the days, Squire. They move through us. Until the last cruel crank of the ratchet.
She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.
People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming. The world is full of people who should have been more willing to weep.
The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.
Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.
A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.
I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost.
The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all of our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy?
On death:
I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not sure that I want to. Know. If I could plan my life I wouldnt want to live it. I probably dont want to live it anyway. I know that the characters in the story can be either real or imaginary and that after they are all dead it wont make any difference. If imaginary beings die an imaginary death they will be dead nonetheless. You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressingtable drawer. But that’s not what’s at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale. As the room dims and the sound of voices fades you understand that the world and all in it will soon cease to be. You believe that it will begin again. You point to other lives. But their world was never yours.
Do you think most people want to die?
No. Most is a lot. Do you?
I dont know. I think there are times when you’d just like to get it over with. I think a lot of people would elect to be dead if they didnt have to die.
Several acquaintances have remarked upon my sangfroid at this turn of events but in all truth I cant see what the fuss is about. Wherever you debark was the train’s destination all along. I’ve studied much and learned little. I think that at the least one might reasonably wish for a friendly face. Someone at your bedside who does not wish you in hell. More time would change nothing and that which you are poised to relinquish forever almost certainly was never what you thought it to be in the first place.
About Alicia:
He crossed along a low wall of sawn blocks opposite the pool and sat as he had sat that summer evening years ago and watched his sister perform the role of Medea alone on the quarry floor. She was dressed in a gown she’d made from sheeting and she wore a crown of woodbine in her hair. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rags and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. She was thirteen. He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.
In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where they would lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?
For all his dedication there were times he thought the fine sweet edge of his grief was thinning. Each memory but a memory of the one before until… What? Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoveled into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies.
What do you know of grief? You know nothing. There is no other loss. Do you understand? The world is ashes. Ashes. For her to be in pain? The least insult? The least humiliation? Do you understand? For her to die alone? Her? There is no other loss. Do you understand? No other loss. None.
Some things get better. I doubt this is one of them. People want to be reimbursed for their pain. They seldom are.
The only thing that was ever asked of me was to care for her. And I let her die. Is there anything that you’d like to add to that Mr Western? No, Your Honor. I should have killed myself years ago.
I dont know what to tell you, he wrote. Much has changed and yet everything is the same. I am the same. I always will be. I’m writing because there are things that I think you would like to know. I am writing because there are things I dont want to forget. Everything is gone from my life except you. I dont even know what that means. There are times when I cant stop crying. I’m sorry. I’ll try again tomorrow. All my love. Your brother, Bobby.
He had gotten out of the habit of talking to her when he was in New Orleans because he’d find himself talking in restaurants or on the streets. Now he was talking to her again. Asking her opinion. Sometimes at night when he would try to tell her about his day he had the feeling that she already knew.
Then slowly it began to fade. He knew what the truth was. The truth was that he was losing her.
When she came to the door of her room in Chicago he knew that she hadnt been out in weeks. In later years that would be the day he would remember. When all her concerns seemed to be for him. He took her to dinner at the German restaurant in Old Town and her hand on his arm at the table drained everything away and it was only later that he understood that this was the day when she was telling him what he could not understand. That she had begun to say goodbye to him.
She wanted to disappear. Well, that’s not quite right. She wanted not to have ever been here in the first place.
If all that I loved in the world is gone what difference does it make if I’m free to go to the grocery store?
When he got back to the windmill it was still dark and he climbed the stairs and sat at his little table. He sat with his forehead pressed into his hands and he sat for a long time. Finally he got out his notebook and wrote a letter to her. He wanted to tell her what was in his heart but in the end he only wrote a few words about his life on the island. Except for the last line. I miss you more than I can bear. Then he signed his name.
He’d no photograph of her. He tried to see her face but he knew he was losing her. He thought that some stranger not yet born might come upon her photo in a school album in some dusty shop and be stopped in his place by her beauty. Turn back the page. Look again into those eyes. A world at once antique and never to be.
Throughout McCarthy’s life, but particularly in the last twenty or so years, he was particularly interested in the workings of the subconscious: its role in the life of creatures, how it did its thing, etc. I believe that the title of this novel, The Passenger, along with how that word is used at times throughout the novel, alludes to the fact that we, as well as every other animal, are driven by the subconscious as much as we’d like to believe we are in charge, and that we’re merely passengers along for the ride. I’ve felt that myself intensely.
I’m certain that McCarthy knew that these two novels would be his last. They feel like goodbyes to the people he knew (many of the characters involved are inspired by actual people from his past). Goodbyes to the woman he loved from her broken youth at thirteen to her senior years at sixty-four. Thank you, Cormac, for every aching truth.
He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.
Five stars.
I first read The Passenger, along with its coda Stella Maris, perhaps a year and a half ago. I loved both, but I wasn’t consciously aware of how they had settled in my subconscious. From time to time, I remembered the most important character in those two books: a beautiful, mentally-ill genius named Alicia Western. Out of nowhere, back in December I dreamed about her, and it spurred a sudden obsession that has yet to pass. It led me to reread both books. Alicia Western feels not only unique but wholly real, as if she had truly existed. The massive weight of grief that pulls the protagonist down on The Passenger, that pulls down the reader for that matter, relates to the knowledge that an irreplaceable (pretty much a perfect person, as one of the characters put it) had been lost. Now that we know quite a bit more about McCarthy’s personal life, mainly about the love of his life, Augusta Britt, it seems to me that both of his final novels, which he had been researching or living since about 1972, render his grief, regret and general sorrow for having loved and lost Britt, whom McCarthy never managed to marry despite repeated attempts up to the end of his life.
Both books develop a forbidden love, that of Alicia Western and her biological brother Bobby. Cormac McCarthy didn’t have to go far to research how it felt to live a forbidden love. If Augusta Britt’s own words are to be believed, she first introduced herself to Cormac McCarthy at a public pool. A blonde, blue-eyed beauty (just like Alicia Western), she had a stolen gun holstered at her hip; she was sick of men in foster homes abusing her. When she approached McCarthy, he asked if she was going to shoot him. She then produced McCarthy’s first book, The Orchard Keeper, and asked him to sign it. McCarthy was surprised, because just a few thousand copies of that book had been produced for that edition (this and other details bring to question if Britt is making stuff up to protect McCarthy, whom she loved, from further scrutiny). As the YouTuber Write Conscious (who lives in the Catalina foothills “five minutes away” from where Augusta Britt lives now, although he has never met her) spoke at length in this video, Augusta Britt was likely thirteen when she met McCarthy. She was also thirteen when she started receiving amorous letters from him. She was fourteen when, after getting abused again in a foster home, McCarthy asked her if she would escape with him to Mexico. Augusta herself said that they made love shortly after settling there. Regardless of your opinion on the subject of underage sex, it’s probably illegal. The fact remains that Augusta Britt to this day claims that McCarthy saved her life, and they were friends up until his death. As you will see throughout this post, the real-life inspiration seems thinly veiled at times, which possibly makes The Passenger McCarthy’s most personal novel.
This review will contain spoilers, although referring to spoilers in this novel is a bit strange: the most important thing that happens in it, that keeps happening throughout, is Alicia Western’s suicide, the aftermath of which were are presented with right in the opening passage: she walked out of the Stella Maris sanatorium into the woods of Wisconsin and let herself freeze to death. Curiously, although she had talked at length about intending to disappear without a trace, she chose to wear a red sash around her white dress so her corpse would be easily found, which is inexplicable, and has led to plenty of online speculation. Alicia Western, a troubled math genius with a unique mind that baffled every person she came across (as one person put it, when strangers met her, they thought of her as a pretty girl, but a few minutes later they were swimming for their lives), was led into these circumstances because her brother Bobby, the love of Alicia’s life, as well as the person who should have protected her to the last of his days, crashed while racing professionally, and ended up in a coma. Alicia, believing Bobby to be brain-dead regardless of whether he would wake up or not, decided to die. But Bobby did wake up from his coma pretty much unscathed. The Passenger starts with Bobby in 1980, in a world that for him has turned into ashes, the person he loved lost forever.
Bobby, who used to be both a physicist as well as race car driver, now works as a salvage diver who opts for dangerous jobs, quite overtly hoping that one of those jobs may take the agency out of him dying. The plot kicks off when Bobby and a friend of his, while diving to explore a sunken airplane, discover a bizarre situation: even though the plane is intact, the passengers inside are dead in their seats as if they had died before the plane crashed. The plane’s black box is missing, along with one of the passengers. Bobby and his pal realize that the situation is fucked, and they want nothing to do with it. Bobby goes out of his way just once to return to the area alone, and he discovers an inflatable raft that the passenger must have used to escape the plane. Now come the realm of spoilers: this is an anti-plot novel. Bobby doesn’t want to know anything more about this event, but he keeps being hounded about it by mysterious government types, who encroach further and further upon his life for reasons we never find out about (presumably because they believe he had something to do with stealing the plane’s black box, but it seems to me that they’re just trying to get rid of witnesses regarding whatever conspiracy caused the plane crash).
With those plot elements out of the way, which is pretty much all you get in that regard, the rest of the book is an exploration, a prodding if you will, of the fringes of human knowledge and experience: mental illness, hallucinations, conspiracies, living off the grid, working in off-shore platforms, transgenderism, aliens, incest, quantum physics, the atomic bomb, life as an outlaw, death, and plenty more. It felt to me like McCarthy was expanding his mind against those nooks that don’t have solid explanations, as he was about to embark in the final mystery of them all: dying, which deprived us of one of the finest, most unique minds in the world, as well as the writer I respect the most.
Throughout the story, Bobby remains subdued, pinned down by grief and regret, to the extent that we never meet the Bobby that Alicia talks about in Stella Maris, that young man who played the mandolin at honky-tonks as Alicia pretended they were married. In virtually every scene, it feels like Bobby is preventing himself from thinking about Alicia, and whenever some image or memory slips in, it devastates him. Most of the time that any other character brings Alicia up, Bobby is moments away from leaving. Bobby mentions that the sole duty in his life was to take care of her, that he had failed miserably at it, and that he should have killed himself years ago. The rest of the book is a way for him of unburdening himself from everything and everyone he has ever known, so he can spend his remaining life in solitary confinement, paying for the crime of abandoning Alicia Western, his sister and love of his life, when she needed him the most. I can’t hurl complaints at him for his decisions, because he bears the full weight of what he’s done.
I can’t explain, except perhaps by alluding to how McCarthy imbued Alicia with all his yearnings and reverence for Augusta Britt, the fact that whenever she appeared or was mentioned in this book, I perked up and combed through every detail in case I would glean new information about her. She’s a pulsing presence, a constant heartbreak, as alive in those pages as I don’t think I’ve experienced anywhere else in fiction.
In Stella Maris, Alicia tells her therapist that she only kissed Bobby twice, but never went beyond that. However, that book makes a peculiar point: that confessing to some unsavory stuff is a way of keeping hidden details that lie far deeper, and cannot be brought to light. It was a very odd thing to say after Alicia Western confessed to loving her brother, and having told him that she wanted to marry him and bear his child. As I was rereading through The Passenger, I came across this passage:
Certain dreams gave him no peace. A nurse waiting to take the thing away. The doctor watching him.
What do you want to do?
I dont know. I dont know what to do.
The doctor wore a surgical mask. A white cap. His glasses were steamed.
What do you want to do?
Has she seen it?
No.
Tell me what to do.
You’ll have to tell us. We cant advise you.
There were bloodstains on his frock. The mask he wore sucked in and out with his breathing.
Wont she have to see it?
I think that will have to be your decision. Bearing in mind of course that a thing once seen cannot be unseen.
Does it have a brain?
Rudimentary.
Does it have a soul?
None of the other dream sequences were that specific regarding mundane details, nor included such dialogue. That tells me that it wasn’t a dream. And what is depicting is Alicia either having a miscarriage or an abortion. Bobby was the sole person she would have had sex with.
There’s not much else that I want to specify about the contents of the novel; they should be experienced. I will go over the many quotes that I have noted down. First of them, very early on, Alicia’s main “hallucination,” the Thalidomide Kid (whom some people online have suggested is Alicia’s subconscious fear that the child she wants to have with Bobby would be deformed), presents to her a new character, a dusty old man who ultimately only asks for the location of the bathroom. But the Kid’s words about that old man are quite telling, I’d say, now that we know McCarthy’s history with the love of his life:
He was married in that outfit. Little wifey was sixteen. Of course he’d been banging her for a couple of years so that would put her at fourteen. Finally managed to knock her up and hey, here we all are.
The following are quotes. Starting with an amazing sentence about the atomic bomb:
In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years.
I know you. I know certain days of your childhood. All but weeping with loneliness. Coming upon a certain book in the library and clutching it to you. Carrying it home. Some perfect place to read it. Under a tree perhaps. Beside a stream. Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects. But we know another truth, dont we Squire? And of course it’s true that any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world–which was their author’s true desire. But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the world is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.
The world of amorous adventure these days is hardly for the fainthearted. The very names of the diseases evoke dread. What the hell is chlamydia? And who named it that? Your love is not so likely to resemble a red rose as a red red rash. You find yourself yearning for a nice oldfashioned girl with the clap. Shouldnt these lovelies be required to fly their pestilential knickers from a flagpole? Like the ensign of a plagueship? I cant of course but be curious what an analytic sort such as yourself makes of the fair sex in the first place. The slurred murmurings. The silken paw in your shorts. Beguiling eyes. Creatures soft of touch and sanguinivorous of habit. What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations. That the man knows not how to even name that which slaves him hardly lightens his burden.
In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.
What if the purpose of human charity wasnt to protect the weak–which seems pretty anti-Darwinian anyway–but to preserve the mad? You have to be careful about who you do away with. It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves.
To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.
McCarthy had some things to say about the modern world. It feels to me that he wasn’t talking about the modern world of the novel.
The point, Squire, is that where they used to be confined to State institutions or to the mudrooms and attics of remote country houses they are now abroad everywhere. The government pays them to travel. To procreate, for that matter. I’ve seen entire families here that can best be explained as hallucinations. Hordes of drooling dolts lurching through the streets. Their inane gibbering. And of course no folly so deranged or pernicious as to escape their advocacy.
Do you know what I find particularly galling? It’s having to share the women with you lot. To listen to you fuckwits holding forth and to see some lissome young thing leaning forward breathlessly with that barely contained frisson with which we are all familiar the better to inhale without stint an absolute plaguebreath of bilge and bullshit as if it were the word of the prophets. It’s painful but still I suppose one has to extend a certain latitude to the little dears. They’ve so little time in which to parlay that pussy into something of substance. But it nettles. That you knucklewalkers should even be allowed to contemplate the sacred grotto as you drool and grunt and wank. Let alone actually reproduce. Well the hell with it. A pox upon you. You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go. You and your nauseating get. Granted, if everyone I wished in hell were actually there they’d have to send to Newcastle for supplementary fuel. I’ve made ten thousand concessions to your ratfuck culture and you’ve yet to make the first to mine. It only remains for you to hold your cups to my gaping throat and toast one another’s health with my heart’s blood.
Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagine.
The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.
On the darknesses of life:
If I think about things that I just dont want to know about they’re all things that I do know about. And I’ll always know them.
You think that when there’s somethin that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be.
We might have very different notions about the nature of the oncoming night. But as darkness descends does it matter?
The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified.
Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.
In my experience people who say no matter what seldom know what what might turn out to be. They dont know how bad what might get.
You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong, but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life.
We dont move through the days, Squire. They move through us. Until the last cruel crank of the ratchet.
She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.
People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming. The world is full of people who should have been more willing to weep.
The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.
Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.
A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.
I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost.
The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all of our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy?
On death:
I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not sure that I want to. Know. If I could plan my life I wouldnt want to live it. I probably dont want to live it anyway. I know that the characters in the story can be either real or imaginary and that after they are all dead it wont make any difference. If imaginary beings die an imaginary death they will be dead nonetheless. You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressingtable drawer. But that’s not what’s at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale. As the room dims and the sound of voices fades you understand that the world and all in it will soon cease to be. You believe that it will begin again. You point to other lives. But their world was never yours.
Do you think most people want to die?
No. Most is a lot. Do you?
I dont know. I think there are times when you’d just like to get it over with. I think a lot of people would elect to be dead if they didnt have to die.
Several acquaintances have remarked upon my sangfroid at this turn of events but in all truth I cant see what the fuss is about. Wherever you debark was the train’s destination all along. I’ve studied much and learned little. I think that at the least one might reasonably wish for a friendly face. Someone at your bedside who does not wish you in hell. More time would change nothing and that which you are poised to relinquish forever almost certainly was never what you thought it to be in the first place.
About Alicia:
He crossed along a low wall of sawn blocks opposite the pool and sat as he had sat that summer evening years ago and watched his sister perform the role of Medea alone on the quarry floor. She was dressed in a gown she’d made from sheeting and she wore a crown of woodbine in her hair. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rags and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. She was thirteen. He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.
In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where they would lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?
For all his dedication there were times he thought the fine sweet edge of his grief was thinning. Each memory but a memory of the one before until… What? Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoveled into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies.
What do you know of grief? You know nothing. There is no other loss. Do you understand? The world is ashes. Ashes. For her to be in pain? The least insult? The least humiliation? Do you understand? For her to die alone? Her? There is no other loss. Do you understand? No other loss. None.
Some things get better. I doubt this is one of them. People want to be reimbursed for their pain. They seldom are.
The only thing that was ever asked of me was to care for her. And I let her die. Is there anything that you’d like to add to that Mr Western? No, Your Honor. I should have killed myself years ago.
I dont know what to tell you, he wrote. Much has changed and yet everything is the same. I am the same. I always will be. I’m writing because there are things that I think you would like to know. I am writing because there are things I dont want to forget. Everything is gone from my life except you. I dont even know what that means. There are times when I cant stop crying. I’m sorry. I’ll try again tomorrow. All my love. Your brother, Bobby.
He had gotten out of the habit of talking to her when he was in New Orleans because he’d find himself talking in restaurants or on the streets. Now he was talking to her again. Asking her opinion. Sometimes at night when he would try to tell her about his day he had the feeling that she already knew.
Then slowly it began to fade. He knew what the truth was. The truth was that he was losing her.
When she came to the door of her room in Chicago he knew that she hadnt been out in weeks. In later years that would be the day he would remember. When all her concerns seemed to be for him. He took her to dinner at the German restaurant in Old Town and her hand on his arm at the table drained everything away and it was only later that he understood that this was the day when she was telling him what he could not understand. That she had begun to say goodbye to him.
She wanted to disappear. Well, that’s not quite right. She wanted not to have ever been here in the first place.
If all that I loved in the world is gone what difference does it make if I’m free to go to the grocery store?
When he got back to the windmill it was still dark and he climbed the stairs and sat at his little table. He sat with his forehead pressed into his hands and he sat for a long time. Finally he got out his notebook and wrote a letter to her. He wanted to tell her what was in his heart but in the end he only wrote a few words about his life on the island. Except for the last line. I miss you more than I can bear. Then he signed his name.
He’d no photograph of her. He tried to see her face but he knew he was losing her. He thought that some stranger not yet born might come upon her photo in a school album in some dusty shop and be stopped in his place by her beauty. Turn back the page. Look again into those eyes. A world at once antique and never to be.
Throughout McCarthy’s life, but particularly in the last twenty or so years, he was particularly interested in the workings of the subconscious: its role in the life of creatures, how it did its thing, etc. I believe that the title of this novel, The Passenger, along with how that word is used at times throughout the novel, alludes to the fact that we, as well as every other animal, are driven by the subconscious as much as we’d like to believe we are in charge, and that we’re merely passengers along for the ride. I’ve felt that myself intensely.
I’m certain that McCarthy knew that these two novels would be his last. They feel like goodbyes to the people he knew (many of the characters involved are inspired by actual people from his past). Goodbyes to the woman he loved from her broken youth at thirteen to her senior years at sixty-four. Thank you, Cormac, for every aching truth.
He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.
January 9, 2025
Life update (01/09/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
I’ve been hired for three months more. Thankfully three more months of programming instead of working as a computer technician, a role I was never properly suited for due to how often it involved people. I can handle programming, so lately I haven’t been dreading going to work. Of course, I’d rather stay home and engage with whatever projects my subconscious wants me to focus on, but, although I hate to admit it, being unemployed or on holiday for too long doesn’t help my mental state: soon enough I start feeling that I have nowhere to go nor anything to do other than lose myself in my obsessions. My life often feels so limited that I think of myself as a prisoner in solitary confinement.
Today I couldn’t go home straight from work, because I had to get an MRI done. Months ago, perhaps back in late summer, during a period of extreme stress, I suffered a medical episode that disturbed me enormously: I suddenly started losing feeling in the right half of my body, particularly my face and arm down to my fingertips. I also smelled something like burned dust. Because recently I had been experiencing “blackouts” in my right eye (sometimes when I moved that eyeball, I saw flashes of darkness), the neurologist, who seemed considerably younger than me, thought of them as a migraine’s aura. However, the flashes continued after the so-called migraine passed, and perhaps a week later, I ended up with a torn retina in that eye. Let me give you some advice: never end up with a torn retina. If you do, hurry to the ER as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the worse the permanent damage. Laser surgery can only contain the mess.
Anyway, the fact that the so-called aura ended up being related to a faulty retina disproved the neurologist’s theory that I had suffered a migraine, and if what I experienced wasn’t a migraine, then a mini stroke could have been a good guess. Ever since, I feel like I’m having more trouble writing (I often confuse the position of letters), reading, and solving tasks at work. But I have such an abysmal memory that I’m not entirely sure if that hadn’t been happening in the time leading to my medical episode.
So, today I finally got that MRI done. I wore an hospital gown for like the tenth time, I lay face-up on a plastic table, and shoved earplugs in. A technician closed a plastic cage around my face, similar to those worn by football players. Curiously, the plastic cage had a mirror on the inside, so that my own eyes were looking straight at me the whole time (presumably only when I stared at them). At times it felt like someone was lying face-down on a massage table set over me. For about twenty minutes, I lay in that enclosed space while the machine produced its strange sounds, shooting noise through my brain. For half of it, I just closed my eyes and escaped to daydreams in which I imagined myself back in the 1970s, in the US, interacting with a blonde, blue-eyed fictional character who killed herself around that time, and who was based on a real-life teenage girl that my favorite author loved, yearned for, grieved about for fifty years.
Even though I’m supposed to be a grown man, my parents still accompany me of their own volition to my medical visits, I suppose in case I need assistance. Unfortunately I have needed assistance in the past, as I’ve ended up in the ER a few times. In any case, we happened to meet a cousin and uncle of mine, who had traveled to the hospital for that aunt’s medical episode. I hadn’t seen this particular cousin since 2008; I remember that date because it was my grandfather’s funeral. Sixteen years had passed, and now the guy was bald and white-haired. I didn’t offer anything to him other than a greeting and a couple of nods; I have no drive to interact with the vast majority of humans due to this autism of mine, and forcing it feels so humiliating that I only do it for money. I also feel no familial connection.
That cousin looked me over and said that he wouldn’t have recognized me if he had seen me on the streets. I suppose I have changed that much. When I look at myself in the reflections of the train windows, I look like what I am: a middle-aged man. My hair has receded significantly, I have grown plenty of wrinkles, my eyes constantly look sunken and, I suspect, as if I were in constant existential anguish (can’t hide that). Seeing that cousin made me remember once again that I’m fucking old. Old and broken. Nothing of particular value to look forward to, certainly no love of any kind, on my way to decrepitude. I’m not the kind of person who can delude themselves with religion, so I bear the full blast of unrelenting reality every moment of the day. Song lyrics from a Neutral Milk Hotel song come to mind: “Threw a nickel in a fountain / To save my soul from all these troubled times / And all the drugs that I don’t have the guts to take / To soothe my mind so I’m always sober / Always aching, always heading towards / Mass suicide“.
I’m still enduring through my second reading of McCarthy’s The Passenger, his final major novel. I say enduring, because the pull of grief imbued in so many of those scenes is too much for me, and I end up putting down the book and focusing on other stuff until I feel strong enough to resume my reading. Hey, have you ever found yourself pained with the absurd regret of never having been a young adult living in the south of the US during the 1970s, knowing nothing of this modern world? Doesn’t it feel like something vital has been lost forever?
For those of you who are fans of McCarthy and have learned about Augusta Britt, I suggest you to reread No Country for Old Men. Without giving away spoilers, the movie completely wasted the protagonist’s climax from the book. In McCarthy’s original version, the protagonist meets a blonde, blue-eyed fifteen-year-old girl at the pool. She’s a runaway who wants to head out to California, but she can’t afford it. The protagonist helps her, partly by giving her a few hundred. McCarthy humanizes the girl’s character, making her clever, charming, funny. Clearly based on Augusta Britt from McCarthy’s real-life descriptions. Knowing how that sequence ends in the novel, it was clear to me that McCarthy’s whole point of the narrative was condensed in those moments; in 1974, McCarthy took the abused runaway Augusta Britt out of town and crossed the border over to Mexico, but in real life it could have ended in a similar way to how it does in the book. It was just a matter of luck. The toss of the coin. “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count.”
I’m just writing down things because I think about them.
I’ve been hired for three months more. Thankfully three more months of programming instead of working as a computer technician, a role I was never properly suited for due to how often it involved people. I can handle programming, so lately I haven’t been dreading going to work. Of course, I’d rather stay home and engage with whatever projects my subconscious wants me to focus on, but, although I hate to admit it, being unemployed or on holiday for too long doesn’t help my mental state: soon enough I start feeling that I have nowhere to go nor anything to do other than lose myself in my obsessions. My life often feels so limited that I think of myself as a prisoner in solitary confinement.
Today I couldn’t go home straight from work, because I had to get an MRI done. Months ago, perhaps back in late summer, during a period of extreme stress, I suffered a medical episode that disturbed me enormously: I suddenly started losing feeling in the right half of my body, particularly my face and arm down to my fingertips. I also smelled something like burned dust. Because recently I had been experiencing “blackouts” in my right eye (sometimes when I moved that eyeball, I saw flashes of darkness), the neurologist, who seemed considerably younger than me, thought of them as a migraine’s aura. However, the flashes continued after the so-called migraine passed, and perhaps a week later, I ended up with a torn retina in that eye. Let me give you some advice: never end up with a torn retina. If you do, hurry to the ER as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the worse the permanent damage. Laser surgery can only contain the mess.
Anyway, the fact that the so-called aura ended up being related to a faulty retina disproved the neurologist’s theory that I had suffered a migraine, and if what I experienced wasn’t a migraine, then a mini stroke could have been a good guess. Ever since, I feel like I’m having more trouble writing (I often confuse the position of letters), reading, and solving tasks at work. But I have such an abysmal memory that I’m not entirely sure if that hadn’t been happening in the time leading to my medical episode.
So, today I finally got that MRI done. I wore an hospital gown for like the tenth time, I lay face-up on a plastic table, and shoved earplugs in. A technician closed a plastic cage around my face, similar to those worn by football players. Curiously, the plastic cage had a mirror on the inside, so that my own eyes were looking straight at me the whole time (presumably only when I stared at them). At times it felt like someone was lying face-down on a massage table set over me. For about twenty minutes, I lay in that enclosed space while the machine produced its strange sounds, shooting noise through my brain. For half of it, I just closed my eyes and escaped to daydreams in which I imagined myself back in the 1970s, in the US, interacting with a blonde, blue-eyed fictional character who killed herself around that time, and who was based on a real-life teenage girl that my favorite author loved, yearned for, grieved about for fifty years.
Even though I’m supposed to be a grown man, my parents still accompany me of their own volition to my medical visits, I suppose in case I need assistance. Unfortunately I have needed assistance in the past, as I’ve ended up in the ER a few times. In any case, we happened to meet a cousin and uncle of mine, who had traveled to the hospital for that aunt’s medical episode. I hadn’t seen this particular cousin since 2008; I remember that date because it was my grandfather’s funeral. Sixteen years had passed, and now the guy was bald and white-haired. I didn’t offer anything to him other than a greeting and a couple of nods; I have no drive to interact with the vast majority of humans due to this autism of mine, and forcing it feels so humiliating that I only do it for money. I also feel no familial connection.
That cousin looked me over and said that he wouldn’t have recognized me if he had seen me on the streets. I suppose I have changed that much. When I look at myself in the reflections of the train windows, I look like what I am: a middle-aged man. My hair has receded significantly, I have grown plenty of wrinkles, my eyes constantly look sunken and, I suspect, as if I were in constant existential anguish (can’t hide that). Seeing that cousin made me remember once again that I’m fucking old. Old and broken. Nothing of particular value to look forward to, certainly no love of any kind, on my way to decrepitude. I’m not the kind of person who can delude themselves with religion, so I bear the full blast of unrelenting reality every moment of the day. Song lyrics from a Neutral Milk Hotel song come to mind: “Threw a nickel in a fountain / To save my soul from all these troubled times / And all the drugs that I don’t have the guts to take / To soothe my mind so I’m always sober / Always aching, always heading towards / Mass suicide“.
I’m still enduring through my second reading of McCarthy’s The Passenger, his final major novel. I say enduring, because the pull of grief imbued in so many of those scenes is too much for me, and I end up putting down the book and focusing on other stuff until I feel strong enough to resume my reading. Hey, have you ever found yourself pained with the absurd regret of never having been a young adult living in the south of the US during the 1970s, knowing nothing of this modern world? Doesn’t it feel like something vital has been lost forever?
For those of you who are fans of McCarthy and have learned about Augusta Britt, I suggest you to reread No Country for Old Men. Without giving away spoilers, the movie completely wasted the protagonist’s climax from the book. In McCarthy’s original version, the protagonist meets a blonde, blue-eyed fifteen-year-old girl at the pool. She’s a runaway who wants to head out to California, but she can’t afford it. The protagonist helps her, partly by giving her a few hundred. McCarthy humanizes the girl’s character, making her clever, charming, funny. Clearly based on Augusta Britt from McCarthy’s real-life descriptions. Knowing how that sequence ends in the novel, it was clear to me that McCarthy’s whole point of the narrative was condensed in those moments; in 1974, McCarthy took the abused runaway Augusta Britt out of town and crossed the border over to Mexico, but in real life it could have ended in a similar way to how it does in the book. It was just a matter of luck. The toss of the coin. “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count.”
I’m just writing down things because I think about them.
January 7, 2025
Life update (01/08/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Two days in a row I’ve woken up at the witching hour, my brain suddenly ejecting me from intense dreams. Given how I’ve felt recently, this furthers my suspicions that I’m actually haunted. Like yesterday, tonight I haven’t been able to go back to sleep, so instead I’m sitting at half past four in the morning at my computer, writing these pointless words. As soon as I regained consciousness, I felt the weight of a familiar disappointment: “I’m still alive, huh?” It seems I’m in one of those troublesome periods of my life.
Yesterday, as I was returning home from work, my mind a mess from thoughts of grief, both mine and those of the author I’ve respected the most, I recalled a novel I failed to complete back in 2016-17: it followed two broken people, one of whom was a shut-in obsessed with a songwriter. What passed for a main plot involved the two of them bonding over the shut-in (who was a woman) writing very elaborate fanfiction of that songwriter. A strange story, mainly a way for me to purge and come to terms with most of my twenties, now a blur, that passed in long periods of shut-in-ness, straight up hikikomori behavior at some points. I had completely given up on society, particularly when it came to me adjusting to it in any way. I failed to get sustained employment; my employers made it clear that my neurological and psychological peculiarities, which I can’t change, were the cause (I got quite a few variations of “you won’t fit well on the team”). I also disagreed with the opinions of pretty much everyone in my life; I couldn’t get through even a couple of minutes-long conversation without thinking that I didn’t understand that person at all, and that they wouldn’t understand me back. So I felt extremely isolated. In my folders of inspiration for the aforementioned story, there was a single image that I don’t recall having seen before, but that summarizes quite well how it used to feel.
Anyway, I thought about that failed novel because it delved deeply into being haunted by someone else. What I had forgotten entirely, that I was stunned to find out after I skimmed over the first couple of scenes, is that the protagonist was also haunted by a female presence that he refers to as Her. There were visions of a past he hadn’t lived, but that still felt very real. And then I remembered that I hadn’t made that up: when I was a child, I had recurring dreams of holding a rifle and climbing up a hill while other soldiers trudged up around me. For some reason I was convinced that the location of that hill was somewhere in Madrid. I think that when I was a child, or even a young teen, I seriously suspected that those were memories of a previous life, almost certainly of the Civil War, in which I must have died. Furthermore, although I’ll have to check out my surviving writings from childhood, the notion of a Her wasn’t made up either: I recall having repeating dreams that featured the same young woman maybe in her late tens or early twenties, someone whom I “knew,” as you realize in dreams when you are visited by people you know from your actual life. Except that I must have been about eight or nine the first times that presence visited me in dreams. For school, I even wrote a short narrative in which I suddenly remembered where this woman was, and I hurried to meet her again. I have to assume this all is some brain malfunction. I was wired incorrectly, therefore autism (or is it the other way around). But it doesn’t change one iota how I feel.
Maybe a month ago, I learned about Cormac McCarthy’s love of his life, Augusta Britt, pictured below in a photo from the seventies:
I can’t look at that photo without my heart getting squeezed and my eyes teary. Why? Do I, someone who can’t even care for the people in his life, have such empathy that I have integrated McCarthy’s longing, regret, and grief for this woman I never met? Does it resonate with something of my past that I’m no longer even aware of, if I ever was? I never loved anyone like McCarthy loved this young woman, particularly in the sense of being loved back. I have no idea what’s going on with me, and it bothers me enormously. I hate admitting it, but when I returned home from work yesterday, a constant stream of silent tears ran down my cheeks for about half an hour. Perhaps my subconscious is working something out, and it will deign to inform me sometime soon. Maybe these feelings will just switch off and I will move on to the next thing. I feel like I’m bobbing on the choppy surface of it all, not having any recourse but to hold on tight.
In less than an hour, I’ll have to start preparing myself to head to work. Back to the grind. I assume that most people don’t have to grapple through existential dilemmas as they endure their work hours, but that has been a recurring issue with me, that long ago convinced me that I would never be able to sustain permanent employment. Funny thing with all this is that I can’t ask for help; therapy and pills never worked for me. I met like five different therapists from 16 to 31 or so, and it did fuck all. Some pills even screwed me up worse. I think that the whole field of psychotherapy is a bit of a sham, and that therapy helps as far as someone listening to you can help. When your brokenness is part of who you’re born as, tough luck. May as well rage-quit and hope that reincarnation is real.
Oh well. Who cares.
---
Author's note: today’s song is “Poor Places” by Wilco.
Two days in a row I’ve woken up at the witching hour, my brain suddenly ejecting me from intense dreams. Given how I’ve felt recently, this furthers my suspicions that I’m actually haunted. Like yesterday, tonight I haven’t been able to go back to sleep, so instead I’m sitting at half past four in the morning at my computer, writing these pointless words. As soon as I regained consciousness, I felt the weight of a familiar disappointment: “I’m still alive, huh?” It seems I’m in one of those troublesome periods of my life.
Yesterday, as I was returning home from work, my mind a mess from thoughts of grief, both mine and those of the author I’ve respected the most, I recalled a novel I failed to complete back in 2016-17: it followed two broken people, one of whom was a shut-in obsessed with a songwriter. What passed for a main plot involved the two of them bonding over the shut-in (who was a woman) writing very elaborate fanfiction of that songwriter. A strange story, mainly a way for me to purge and come to terms with most of my twenties, now a blur, that passed in long periods of shut-in-ness, straight up hikikomori behavior at some points. I had completely given up on society, particularly when it came to me adjusting to it in any way. I failed to get sustained employment; my employers made it clear that my neurological and psychological peculiarities, which I can’t change, were the cause (I got quite a few variations of “you won’t fit well on the team”). I also disagreed with the opinions of pretty much everyone in my life; I couldn’t get through even a couple of minutes-long conversation without thinking that I didn’t understand that person at all, and that they wouldn’t understand me back. So I felt extremely isolated. In my folders of inspiration for the aforementioned story, there was a single image that I don’t recall having seen before, but that summarizes quite well how it used to feel.
Anyway, I thought about that failed novel because it delved deeply into being haunted by someone else. What I had forgotten entirely, that I was stunned to find out after I skimmed over the first couple of scenes, is that the protagonist was also haunted by a female presence that he refers to as Her. There were visions of a past he hadn’t lived, but that still felt very real. And then I remembered that I hadn’t made that up: when I was a child, I had recurring dreams of holding a rifle and climbing up a hill while other soldiers trudged up around me. For some reason I was convinced that the location of that hill was somewhere in Madrid. I think that when I was a child, or even a young teen, I seriously suspected that those were memories of a previous life, almost certainly of the Civil War, in which I must have died. Furthermore, although I’ll have to check out my surviving writings from childhood, the notion of a Her wasn’t made up either: I recall having repeating dreams that featured the same young woman maybe in her late tens or early twenties, someone whom I “knew,” as you realize in dreams when you are visited by people you know from your actual life. Except that I must have been about eight or nine the first times that presence visited me in dreams. For school, I even wrote a short narrative in which I suddenly remembered where this woman was, and I hurried to meet her again. I have to assume this all is some brain malfunction. I was wired incorrectly, therefore autism (or is it the other way around). But it doesn’t change one iota how I feel.
Maybe a month ago, I learned about Cormac McCarthy’s love of his life, Augusta Britt, pictured below in a photo from the seventies:
I can’t look at that photo without my heart getting squeezed and my eyes teary. Why? Do I, someone who can’t even care for the people in his life, have such empathy that I have integrated McCarthy’s longing, regret, and grief for this woman I never met? Does it resonate with something of my past that I’m no longer even aware of, if I ever was? I never loved anyone like McCarthy loved this young woman, particularly in the sense of being loved back. I have no idea what’s going on with me, and it bothers me enormously. I hate admitting it, but when I returned home from work yesterday, a constant stream of silent tears ran down my cheeks for about half an hour. Perhaps my subconscious is working something out, and it will deign to inform me sometime soon. Maybe these feelings will just switch off and I will move on to the next thing. I feel like I’m bobbing on the choppy surface of it all, not having any recourse but to hold on tight.
In less than an hour, I’ll have to start preparing myself to head to work. Back to the grind. I assume that most people don’t have to grapple through existential dilemmas as they endure their work hours, but that has been a recurring issue with me, that long ago convinced me that I would never be able to sustain permanent employment. Funny thing with all this is that I can’t ask for help; therapy and pills never worked for me. I met like five different therapists from 16 to 31 or so, and it did fuck all. Some pills even screwed me up worse. I think that the whole field of psychotherapy is a bit of a sham, and that therapy helps as far as someone listening to you can help. When your brokenness is part of who you’re born as, tough luck. May as well rage-quit and hope that reincarnation is real.
Oh well. Who cares.
---
Author's note: today’s song is “Poor Places” by Wilco.
