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Jude had worked his way through a collection of goth girlfriends who stripped, or told fortunes, or stripped and told fortunes, pretty girls who wore ankhs and black fingernail polish, and who he always called by their state of origin, a habit few of them cared for, because they didn’t like to be reminded of the person they were trying to erase with all their living-dead make-up. She was twenty-three.
He was glad for the adoration of the goths. He appreciated the sex even more, their limber, athletic, tattooed bodies and their eagerness for kink. But he had been married once, to a woman who used a glass and put things away when she was done, who read the paper in the morning, and he missed their talk. It was grown-up talk. She hadn’t been a stripper. She didn’t believe in fortune-telling. It was grown-up companionship.
The profane didn’t trouble him; it had made him a good living for thirty years.
She was afraid she was going mad. She was depressed - not fashionably depressed, in the way of some goth chicks, but clinically.
He made melodies out of hate and perversion and pain, and they came to him, skipping to the music, hoping he would let them sing along.
She asked me once if I had a favourite place to watch the rain when I was a kid. What the hell kind of question is that?
Jude wondered that he had not found a way to kill someone in those days. He had possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn’t happen more often.
He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head; that maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places.
Her unhappiness wore on him. It was too much work to help her through her depressions. He had tried, when they were together, given it his best, and his best hadn’t been good enough. It hadn’t panned out ... and still she wouldn’t leave him alone. He didn’t know why he even read her letters, let alone sometimes responded to them; he had wished they would just stop coming. Finally they had.
It was hard to venture back near the place you had been bred without settling into the characteristics of the person you had been there.
When you were a goth, it was important to at least imply the possibility you might burst into flames in direct sunlight.
