truthfront

The woman sat at the table in the empty room, her long blonde hair recently washed and not yet dried. She was younger than I thought. They’d made her dress into some anonymous, large white t-shirt. Bruises pink and not yet ripened into dark blues and blacks set about her eyes and she stared down at the tabletop. I walked over to set an opened pack of cigarettes before her, watching closely, discerning her motionlessness and the subtle calculations therein. The woman said something and I looked over to the translator.

She says she quit, the translator said.

Ask her if she’s thirsty, I said.

The translator asked and the woman shook her head.

I stood for a moment, hands in my trouser pockets.

I’m the investigator, I told her, and sat in the chair opposite her. I said, You can begin whenever you feel comfortable.

The woman stared at the table between us for a very long time, not moving. Her hair hung down brown and clayey and partially hid her face from the light above, a single fluorescent bulb bracketed into its fixture and enclosed in a mesh steel cage, bolted to the ceiling. I imagined that somewhere beneath the table she massaged the soreness from her wrists, thinking about how everything now would be changed, and suddenly she leaned forward, snatching the cigarettes from the table. She fingered one out and put it in her mouth. The translator reached into his pants for a pack of matches and struck one, and the woman inhaled deeply, deliberately. She exhaled and said something.

The translator said, The boy was born in the arid part of the world.

I leaned back in my chair and watched the woman.

Or at least that’s what our predecessors told us, she said through the translator. They said the boy was born somewhere in the arid part of the world and when that boy was born, the very instant the child came into the world, a giant fissure opened in the planet and sheared off vast stretches of land. The fissure caused searing eruptions from the mountain peaks and it caused the planet to shift dramatically upon its axis. Entire regions disappeared into the oceans. Climates changed, social hierarchies were completely overturned. Many people died as a result of this catastrophe.

She took another long pull on the cigarette and closed her eyes. The translator looked over at me and then back at her. There was no ashtray on the table, so the woman tapped the ash onto the concrete floor. Looking down at the table, she slowly resumed her story.

The mother held her newborn son that first night and watched the broadcast news about the planetary shift, the quake and the suffering, but she never guessed it had anything to do with her son. She didn’t feel the tremors nor the aftereffects of those tremors, almost as if she were completely removed from the quake. But she certainly endured the anxiety, the sense of doom or foreboding that everyone else felt.

Our predecessors said the woman had terrible nightmares. Most everyone had dreams back then. No matter where they were from, no matter what they believed. You know, their religious persuasions. They all thought their world was revolting against them, that their time was up, the universe or their gods were finally going to cast them into oblivion. They told us that most everyone thought they deserved it.

She took one last long draw on her cigarette and dropped the butt on the floor.

She said, The woman’s dreams always focused on a single man, someone powerful in stature and always cloaked in a peculiar light. She was terrified. Always a man, faceless and indistinguishable, a beacon of trust and hope for many people throughout the world. In her dreams the man would lead a snaking mass of people either in speech or movement, always trailed by or facing the huge crowd. There were flags, giant flags waving wherever he went. Flags red or maroon and perhaps splashed with designs of white. The mother couldn’t really tell.

The woman reached for another cigarette and the translator lit it for her, leaving the pack of matches on the table. She didn’t raise her eyes, as if the history of her planet resided upon the surface of the table, all of it mapped there in the years of wear, the ridged imperfections. Her eyes were deeply hazel, but I had yet to see into them, to endure their strength or feel their resistance. I wanted her to look at me, but she wouldn’t. She spoke even more slowly.

They said the woman knew the man in her dreams was her son. After he’d grown. The adult version of her baby boy. The thought horrified her. They said she would walk into the baby’s room at night when he was asleep and she would stand there, looking down at him, knowing she had to kill him. In order to save the world from something terrible, something unspeakable in the future, she had to murder her son. But she loved him, she just didn’t have the courage. They said one time she even got so far as to carry the child into the bathroom to submerge it into a full tub of warm water, holding him down to watch little bubbles of air crawl from his nostrils and open up at the surface, but she couldn’t do it, she had to pull the baby back out to safety. They said the dreams got so bad and her apparent guilt so severe that one night she slowly submerged her own self into a nearby pond of water and drowned.

 

This is an abbreviated chapter.

It’s an impressive catalog, really, the chief said. And if times were different, believe me.

He trailed off. I knew it was hopeless. It was the third newsroom I’d visited that day, just the first time I was allowed past reception. Nobody was hiring, nobody needed a writer.

The Web’s changed everything, he said. Looking at these clips, you’re a good writer. Very good, in fact. But that’s all you are, son. Nowadays you’ve got to be more.

You know if anyone in the area might be looking for a writer? I asked.

No, I’m afraid not. Not around here. I’ve got a colleague up in Chicago. A former colleague, I mean. He’s trying to start something up, looking for freelancers.

What’s the content?

I don’t know. You’ll have to talk to him.

The chief thumbed through his wallet and pulled out a business card and handed it across the desk.

Could you, you know, maybe put in a word?

The chief just looked at me.

I’m getting pretty desperate here, chief.

He leaned back in his chair and said, I’ll see what I can do.

I thanked him and left and got a cheap room near the bus station. I slept all through the evening, through the drunken shouts and animated coitus and drug abuse taunting me through the walls, I slept through the honky-tonk clamor and the engines roaring in the avenue below. At midnight I woke feeling refreshed and wrote a few pages in my notebook and then showered and walked back over to the bus station to buy a one-way seat to Chicago.

*

When I wasn’t sleeping on the bus I was meditating on the disarray of my life. I pulled the notebook out of my bag and took up where I’d left off back in the room in Nashville, deliberately revisiting the past year, reconstructing the mistakes, all the wrong turns, trying to figure out where to go next. I went all the way back to the layoff and my trip to Las Vegas when I was on the precipice of destruction, then onto the nightmare in California and Colorado’s magnificent relapse, all the way up to today, chasing down the night to Chicago, running after ghosts of opportunities that probably weren’t even half-real, seeking divine providence or luck or a balancing of the scales, so to speak, because I had no idea what I would do if it didn’t work out in the windy city, I didn’t know what I’d become, running and fleeing and chasing specters as I was. But then maybe it wasn’t so much a question of what I’d become as what I’d always been, only now I was completely unmasked, exposed, free of facade or other agents of deception that I’d learned to cloak about myself. What was I looking for? What would I find?

I faded in and out of sleep, toward and away from varied episodes of depression, exasperation, longing, desperation, self-loathing, loss of identity, fear, grief, regret, and I also would have experienced some degree of shame, had I not pretended that the dark landscape slipping past the window concealed my pained reflection from the rest of that cold and indifferent world I happened to love with a savage bitterness. The self-critical web I’d spun had caught me at the junction of its thickest strands and I remained stuck there for over seven hours on the approach to Chicago.

Nine other people spread themselves out equidistantly throughout the bus and so it was only natural that I also began to wonder about them. What were they chasing? What would they find? What spoiled plans or delusional dreams had they carried with them on this veiled midnight run from Nashville to Illinois? The sun was just about up at the horizon painting its range of promise and I finally nodded off, sleeping more soundly in those final thirty minutes into Chicago than I can remember.

*

I called the number on the business card from a payphone in the terminal. Maybe we could schedule a brief meeting, said the man on the other end of the line. Would just before lunch work for you?

That’s perfect, I told him. I’ll be right over.

I hailed a cab and the driver was a burly red-haired guy full of Cubs talk and crude jokes. I humored him for the duration of my ride and then tipped him generously. Standing on the sidewalk near the epicenter of Chicago my thoughts navigated once again to time travel, to which way I’d migrated to get to this precise point, which direction did time actually travel, did it travel backward and forward or up and down, or was it more of a wave rather than a straight line, and then out of nowhere I experienced a brief but very powerful episode of déjà vu. I shrugged it off and walked into the building and up to the office where a young man greeted me with a handshake in a room that appeared to be under construction.

Look, we gotta make this fast, he said. I’m having some kind of god-awful crisis with the server.

His desk was a dusty chunk of plywood spread over the top of two empty beer kegs.

Have you got any clips with you, or is everything Online?

I have a few, I said, and pulled from the bag two printouts from my last major daily and a printout from the weekly I’d helped start up in San Francisco. He looked it all over in silence and my eyes wandered about his office, the clutter of books and paper, the dirty floor, the bare walls. I wondered how long it would be before he started sleeping there, if he hadn’t yet.

I see you’ve got some experience with science writing, he said.

A little.

So here’s the thing, he said, handing the papers back to me. I’ve got myself and another full-time writer on board, plus a freelancer, and then maybe you. I won’t be able to pay you anything until the money starts coming in. But by then, hopefully, subscriptions will be upward to where we could at least sign you on full-time.

I nodded.

Basically, we’re all taking a leap of fucking faith here. But you’ve been in the game for long enough. You know how it is.

He motioned to the papers in my hand.

You seem to be a pretty good writer.

Thanks.

So what do you say?

He looked around his office, which must have seemed to him at that moment to be some kind of farce. In a flash he imagined what he would have thought if he was in my shoes and what he thought was that he would probably laugh, he would lean back, cackling mad at the ceiling right before he walked out.

I’m in, I said.

Good, he said, rifling through some papers on his desk. First assignment is, there’s a guy out in Aurora, you know where that is?

No.

It’s about an hour east of here, suburbs. There’s a guy out there been calling up radio shows, telling them he’s building a time machine.

I swallowed hard.

He’s been calling universities, asking if he can borrow their equipment, stuff like that. One of our guys called him up and he said he’d talk to us.

I tried to act natural. I felt flushed and feverish.

I haven’t done any background on it but I’ll bet he’s got a record. Probably currently unemployed. Shit like that. Lives with his mother. May not be a story there, but you’d be the guy to write it if there was.

I smiled and said, You got it.

He gave me the address and phone number and said, How about three days. What is today? Tuesday? How about Saturday at noon?

Okay, yeah.

Just use the e-mail on the business card, he said, and stood to leave.

Can I ask you a question, I said.

You want an advance.

Well, no, I said. But I could sure as hell use one.

Here’s a hundred, he said. I can get you more this weekend.

Thanks, I said, and put the money in my pocket. But that’s not what I was going to ask you.

So what is it?

Are we a magazine or a newspaper? Or is it a strictly Online thing?

He sighed, closed his eyes.

A daily or a weekly or what are we?

Well, he said, and chuckled. We’re still working on all that.

He clapped me on the back and said, Right now we’re nothing, brother. But we’re gonna try to be everything.

Do we even have a name? I asked, standing in the hallway.

Just make something up, he said, and closed the door.

Images of my wife’s face haunted me all the way back across those plains fruitless and dark, her eyes burning almond eruptions into my resolve. Shadowed days spilled across the spoiled country and even darker nights alone in naked rooms with no personality save for my own delusional projections upon the walls. It was her brown hair I saw woven throughout the vined yards of autumn, her mouth in crested caresses of Utah and Colorado. Voiceless and erect I pictured her standing next to me as she had at our wedding, dressed not in white but in the silken pink of a Kansas sunset, her Ozark mound of lips to lean in to. The insides of my eyelids captured her olive skin and held it there all through the rigid Midwest rain and while asleep I coaxed myself into loving her harder, loving deeper every part of her, loving her hands illumined by our token stone of love now dulled and waxen but precious still, and waves of guilt slammed into half-remembered images of Gloria, a torn still-life of a memory not even half worth the replacement I had manifested within her. I couldn’t even remember Gloria’s face.

Could it have been different, I wondered. Could I have been more brave in this world, a stronger man in the face of new and novel pain? No, I said aloud. It is not a brave world nor any world at all for brave men. The world is cold. The world is cold and dark no matter where you are.

To read the chapter in its entirety, please buy a copy of the novel upon publication



The country road wound about the pale and gave way to asphalt lined with thick trees dark green and oddly comforting in their claustrophobic evocations. The detective reached to the dash for his brand new pack of smokes, the first he’d bought in ten years. He lit one up. It was like he never quit. He’d never even changed. He was still on patrol years ago wearing blue and knocking on the apartment door of some couple fighting and keeping the neighbors awake. He was still unsure of himself in the subtle anomie, that warm comforting taste in his throat like a glance in the mirror in half-light. He wasn’t driving his police issue Chevy but instead his old Toyota sedan, not north but south, away from his youth and everything he’d ever known, toward a future at the academy, more confidence, with the world and nothing but years ahead of him. He was still out scouting the streets for chicks from his high school, not looking for a fight but not shying away from one, feeling that same comforting sadness in those long crepuscular summer nights. He was still riding his old Mongoose bike, still too big for it, down through the bridge underpasses, looking for answers in the shadows but scared of what he’d probably find. He was still the same, playing baseball in the summer heat, those intolerable humid afternoons, standing in the outfield and making up excuses for why he was the way he was: alone, strong, too smart for his own good. He was still making excuses for why no one ever liked him or why he never liked anyone else and he was still trying to talk to that girl what’s-her-name, not wondering where he would be in fifteen years and the answer he wasn’t looking for was right here, driving through a sudden rainstorm about a hundred miles south of New York, trying to remember what he was doing fifteen years ago.

His brain was a machine, trained, and his body was a vessel, muscle and bone and varied tissues broken down into molecules like simple arithmetic. He was the sum of his parts and his experiences, patient and calculating but also deeply confused about his identity. He wanted to know what it was about himself that had eluded him all these years: the uncertainty, the erratic behavior, his disdain for routine and inactivity—all the things that he believed had made him a good police officer but also markedly incapable in social situations. Was it you, mom? Did I get that from you? For as long as he could remember, he knew he’d never settle into an established order of domestic life, he would never be satisfied with a woman, with a family, with a home, with a house in the suburbs, with himself, with anything, and he considered this to be a redeeming quality, a virtue, if one is indeed tasked with the preposterous notion of growing spiritually, expanding one’s self by building character and sustaining it while the rest of the lot packed it in, sold it off. He no longer had any goals because he’d already achieved everything he set out to do. What’s left? he thought. I don’t have any goals, he said aloud, laughing, and the rain began to pound the car in a torrent of water so that the wipers couldn’t keep up. I’m too fucking young to die, he said, and pulled the Chevy onto the shoulder.

His thoughts returned to Norma Jean, or instead to the young man involved with the case, perhaps the only real suspect, though he wasn’t actually a suspect at all. The detective remembered sitting in this same car outside the young man’s apartment in a rainstorm just like this one, and the young man was very sincere and yet suspicious, though certainly not guilty of anything criminal. The detective remembered there being something intangibly wrong about the whole case, about the way the sergeant so hastily declared Norma Jean’s death a suicide, cut-and-dry, he had said, without following up with the young man and even discouraging any interaction with him. And it was odd how the young man seemed so oddly connected to Norma Jean, how he’d claimed to have visions about Norma Jean and her killer. The detective had always felt the girl was pushed from the summit of Gorgola Hill and she hadn’t fallen accidentally nor had she jumped of her own volition. But the detective was just a normal man, a cop with no influence in the world, and his crazy intuitions were probably wrong. But even if they weren’t he certainly couldn’t do anything about it.

The rain slacked just enough for him to start the sedan again and steer slowly north toward a faceless reflection in the soggy landscape. He saw the image of his father in everything. He cried silently the rest of the way to the airport.

For the entire chapter, purchase a copy of the novel when it’s published.

The eye of the camera panned across a desert landscape, slowly, right to left. A sweeping blue and bone white world lit up by the moon, desolate, a graveyard with no graves. I panned across the desert landscape spotted with black and gray patches of desert flora like the hair on a sleeping giant’s back, waiting for ashen figures to emerge dreamlike from the darkness. The breeze whispered across everything and there were no other sounds save for the occasional slow moan as a lone cloud acned with star clusters sliced across the moon. In the angle of the lens everything seemed primordial. I might have been filming the desert a million years ago and everything would have been the same. Nothing ever changes, really. I stopped filming and put the camera back in its case.

Everything makes sense here, I thought. In a place where the landscape is stripped almost bare, where there are no men or women or machines, no towers or wires or even trees. No noise. Everything makes sense when the mind is submerged in solitude, in unencumbered reflection. The words purity and chaos are spelled in those stars like frozen atoms, I thought. They’re encoded in the warm breeze that ruffles the hair and carries its millions of secrets, bitter on the tongue. The desert is a simulacrum of nothing, and yet there is so much to take in, so much to hold deep in the self and examine, a step backward in confrontation with the primitive self.

Sitting in the back of the Jeep with Harvey, staring into the desert wide open and stark in its command, I had never felt more understanding of Earth, of life and its skeletal message. Something stuck me in the back of the neck and my first instinct was to reach back and smack what was there, kill it, smash it in a bloody slap, but instead I let it sit there and suck my blood, my offering to the desert ghosts and goddess of night. I brushed it away softly with the back of my hand. With my brain lens I panned across the desert landscape again, my mind one continuous electric current pulled taut across miles, across years, across millennia and across death into life just as film into history.

*

That night I slept in the Jeep beneath the stars and the moon watched my face scanning across the desert for coyotes or wolves or any moving shadows, furtive bodies with eyes glowing white or red out there in the cold. Harvey snored in the back atop his blankets and I felt very happy. Everything is an eye, I thought. Everything is looking, always watching. How uncomfortable it makes us feel, knowing we’re being watched.

When I finally fell asleep I dreamed my father had walked across the desert through the day and night, through the emptiness, the unforgiving heat. He walked toward me and even though I was asleep I watched as he approached in the darkness, first just a small speck on the horizon, hardly noticeable, and then a larger spot, a moving shadow growing into the figure of a man or woman, a man that looks very much like my father from a distance, and then he was there, walking up to my driver’s side window, staring wide-eyed and breathless at my sleeping face, and with one bony finger my father reached up and tapped my window, jarring me awake as dawn broke. I looked to the window at my left and of course there was no one there. I said aloud: I need coffee.

*

I stopped at a cheap motel to shave and shower and then I gave Harvey a bath and left a hairy mess in the bathroom before hitting the road again.

I-80 was a graveyard. Or maybe I was one of the dead. There didn’t seem to be many cars on the road and my mind’s eye didn’t have much to scan. I was well into Nevada by the time I jerked out of my reverie or descent into nothingness and realized I hadn’t had the radio on all day. I had planned to drive all the way into Reno but I was tired, I felt lost. I decided to take the Elko exit and rest for the night.

I drove around the town a bit, looking for a decent place to get a room on the cheap. Just driving through I had the odd sensation of eyes watching me, plotting. I immediately felt like the entire town was complicit in some kind of scheme against the visitors and passers-through, a conspiracy anchored by the second-rate casinos dressed up in their finest Sunday suits, the restaurants devoid of their former cowboy charms and painted up in grease, laden with gambling debts of their own, and the cheap motels nestled back from the road and bathed in shadow like dirty secrets.

It was into one of those nondescript motel parking lots where I parked my Jeep and stretched the road out of my bones. I walked up to the office and past a sheriff or deputy or other law enforcement officer on his way out into the night. He touched the brim of his hat as he looked at me and got into an unmarked red sedan in the lot.

*

I set my bag on the floor of the room and washed my face, studying my reflection in the glass. I looked like someone else. Harvey came in to sniff around. The bed seemed clean and I sat on the edge of it, listening. I got up and looked in the bathroom and underneath the bed. I looked in the closet. I closed the shades on the window and played with the air conditioning system. I was certain I was being watched, there was camera hidden somewhere in the walls, the dusty bureau, the digital clock on the nightstand showing the wrong time in big red numbers.

*

It was dark by the time I left the room. I walked toward the casino through the parking lot and down a pitch black back street, feeling pairs of eyes crawling all over me. I shouldn’t have come this way, I whispered, and I could smell the desert out there in the dark, endless, spectral. There was no moon watching. An older model sedan pulled out of the motel lot behind me with its lights off and crawled up the road like a wounded animal. Shit, I said, quickening my pace. No one will ever find me. I wonder if anyone will even know to look. The sedan crept up closer and then it was right beside me. I took one step away from the road and stopped, turning around to see the face of my executioner gleaming like a pale skull through the windshield, but all the windows were tinted black and the sedan kept creeping past me toward the frontage road where it turned right and sped out of sight with its lights on.

*

At the casino I got the buffet special and everything tasted like wood. I went to the bar and ordered a red beer and watched a spring training baseball game on one of the TVs when a stranger walked up and sat at the stool next to me and said, You’re staying at the Ruby Inn, right?

He had a faded Red Sox cap on and he was dressed in all denim—a blue denim jacket faded and worn, matching blue jeans, white denim Converse shoes, and I said: What, man?

The motel down the street, he said. You’re staying there tonight, aren’t you?

I wanted to say, Leave me alone, asshole, I’m not in the mood, I don’t want to talk to you or anyone else, I don’t want to hear about your travels, your life, your troubles, but instead I just said: Yeah.

Name’s Dan, he said, and gave me his hand to shake. I looked at it and thought about it before shaking it. It was warm and moist.

Look, man, I said. I don’t mean any disrespect or anything. But I kind of just want to be left alone tonight.

It’s cool, man, he said. It’s cool. I’m sorry to have bothered you. He stood to leave and then said, I just wanted to tell you that little lady over there wants to buy you a drink.

He pointed behind me to a tall blonde standing between a row of electric slot machines and a fake palm tree. Dan walked away and I looked at the woman and half smiled. She came up and sat next to me at the bar, wearing jeans and heels and a silky looking black tank top.

Hi, she said. Sorry about that. I’m Jade. The bartender came over to us, as if on cue.

The lighting was good on her. She may have been a little bit older, but you definitely had to try and find it. She smelled like baby powder and perfumed lotion and I wanted to rub my head all over her.

I’ll take a red beer, sir, and whatever she’s having, I said.

My mother used to drink those, Jade said, looking at my beer. She had one with her toast every morning.

Sounds like a decent lady, I said, and immediately I felt like an idiot. I was very tired.

The bartender poured our drinks and went back to his corner, eyeing me. Jade looked up at the TV and so did I and both of us tapped a finger on the bar and then looked at each other, smiling awkwardly.

It’s a hot night, she said.

Yeah, I said. There were electronic gambling machines beeping and buzzing everywhere and from a speaker somewhere in the room a Johnny Cash song played quietly, listless, as if he had written and performed it in his sleep.

Listen, she said, leaning toward my face, her lips at my ear. You want some pussy tonight or what?

I coughed. I spilled a little bit of my drink and tried to wipe it up. I’m sorry, I said. Jade smiled.

I’m sorry.

Okay, she said. It’s okay. The bartender stayed in his corner, watching, like a spider.

You know, you’re a very attractive woman and everything, I said. But I just want to be alone tonight. I’m sorry.

It’s okay, she said, smiling. Suit yourself, cowboy. But I was gonna give you the pretty boy discount. She got up from her stool and walked away, and it wasn’t until I saw her in motion from behind that I began to regret my decision. I ordered a cheeseburger to go for Harvey and finished my drink, walking the long way back to my room and thinking that Elko, Nevada was the type of place where nothing good ever happens, where beasts feed upon other beats, gristle flapping in their gums. It’s the type of place where a man could lose his mind and his money in the same place and then find himself dumped in a shallow grave just outside of town.

To read this chapter in its entirety, read the novel once it’s published.