Burnt Tongues Page 7

  “Dougie, where are your pants?” He grabs for my arm. “You get back here right this instant.”

  But I push him down to the floor and leap over him.

  Melody turns around when she hears the glass door to the building break into a zillion pieces. She puts her left hand into her pocket and pulls out a phone as I run toward her with just my shirt and undies on.

  A car screeches but still hits me. But I bounce off the window and slide from the hood like the champion Tommy Dreamer and just keep running.

  All the while, Mr. Lowder’s screaming from behind, “Come back, Dougie.”

  But the ShopRite—the ShopRite is home base, and when I get there, I don’t even know what to say. So I bear-hug the kissing Driver Man and throw him to the ground.

  Melody screams, “Stop!”

  But I grab dirty Driver Man by his hair and make my big hand into a fighter fist and punch him three times in the eye. Then like The Animal Steele, I put him into a full nelson. I swing my body flat on his and slap my hands down on the pavement three times.

  I win Melody back again.

  Mr. Lowder pulls at me. “You can’t do this. You can’t.”

  Because I know I won—I let loser Driver Man go.

  And now the siren sounds that started far away roar closer, and then the police car screeches right in front of the ShopRite. Two policemen come out from the car.

  I give them a salute.

  One of them asks, “Who is Melody?”

  Snapping my fingers, I point to Melody.

  She throws up her hands and screams, “Get back!” Then Melody tells the policemen, “Dougie just walks around the store in the same brown suit every day. He’s always giving me things. But he’s never been aggressive. He never says a word.”

  I stick my hands under my armpits when Mr. Policeman asks my name.

  And from behind me, Mr. Lowder says, “Douglas Lowder.”

  He always ruins everything.

  He says, “Our Dougie would never hurt a fly.”

  That’s when Mr. Dirty Driver Man moans, “I’m not even hurt. Just keep that gorilla away from my girl, and I won’t press charges.”

  The police, they ask my father where we live, and he points at the apartments across the street. Mr. Policeman, with his radio making voice noises, says, “Let’s walk you both home then so we can take a look around. Make sure you’re not going to hurt anyone else. Is that okay, Dougie?”

  I snap a yes.

  On the way over, Mr. Lowder tells him that my mother wants me to be as free as possible. They rent me the apartment, but they live right downstairs. He tells them I have a job through a special state program.

  Mr. Lowder says, “One of us always follows him around to make sure he’s safe. Douglas may be slow, but his love and kindness are genius.”

  We go up to the apartment with Mr. Policeman.

  He says, “Have a seat, Dougie.”

  He flips through my WWE magazines and takes some Tropical Skittles from the candy dish. I play freeze while he peeks through the windows and around the doors. He stops when he gets to the closet. And I start knocking my knees.

  He helps Melody out of the closet by her hand. She’s wearing her “100% Melody” T-shirt and no undies still. I’m snapping my fingers to Melody’s name now.

  My father bows his head like in prayer and says, “Well, we had to give him something. He was humping all the pillows.”

  Mr. Police Officer just shakes his head and speaks into his radio, “There’s nothing here. It’s clean. Well, sort of.”

  Mr. Policeman holds Melody by a finger. The rest of her hangs bent on the floor. He goes to leave and hands the finger to my father. “Probably want to get rid of this,” he says.

  Mr. Lowder shakes his head and drags Melody away, saying, “Be a good boy, Douglas. Come down for dinner in an hour.”

  When the door closes it’s just me on the couch. Just me climbing out of my suit jacket and spraying the vanilla brown sugary goodness on my wrists so I can rub them to my neck.

  I press the clicker for the TV and put a pillow in front. After too long Wheel of Fortune comes on so I stop digging for boogers. I don’t get any of the puzzles until the bonus round. That’s when I beat the clock. Snapping my fingers to the words—If you love somebody set them free.

  F for Fake

  Tyler Jones

  Most of my life I’ve been pretending to be someone else. I just wasn’t doing it well enough to draw any attention.

  About three years ago I was walking through Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, searching for a limited leather-bound edition of Theodore Arden’s novel Cautioners. An employee was a few feet away stocking the shelves and replacing books that had been taken down and abandoned at various points in the store. I could feel him watching me. At first I was offended, thinking he was making sure I didn’t steal anything, but when I glanced in his direction he quickly looked away, almost as if he were embarrassed. As I tilted my head to read the spines, I saw him staring at me again. This time I was sure he wasn’t suspicious, at least not overtly so; he appeared fascinated, stunned.

  I turned to face him, and he didn’t look away. There was a moment of silence, neither of us willing to speak first.

  Finally he cleared his throat and held out a book. “Excuse me, sir. Would you be willing to sign this?”

  It was a first edition copy of Minor Keys.

  I signed it.

  I signed it the way I’d practiced for twenty years, natural in the way that only signing your name can be. I didn’t stall or put thought into it. He handed me a pen, and from it flowed the long scripted letters of the name Don Swanstrom. It looked exactly like the autograph in a copy of Minor Keys I’d seen on an Internet auction site just a week earlier. The winner was a buyer from Japan whose top bid was nearly twenty thousand dollars.

  I gave him back the book, and his hands were shaking.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said. “I’ve read all your books more than once. You’ve changed my life; you are the one that made me want to be a writer.”

  I smiled and nodded my appreciation. “Thank you. I’m glad you like them.”

  “Can I buy you a drink if you’re not busy?” he asked.

  “Thanks for the offer, but I have to get going, and I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention I was here until I’m gone.”

  I’d written actively since high school, finishing eight novels, forty-two short stories, three screenplays, and one or two intended for the stage. None of them were published. I received the same rejection letters over and over from literary agents. My stories were criticized as being unoriginal and bland. My style was called “a watered-down imitation of Don Swanstrom.” I was accused of plagiarism, and I have to admit that may have been true in some of my earlier novels. I was obsessed with the man—I thought he was a genius, a wordsmith whose work rivaled the brilliance of Shakespeare.

  I read and reread Don Swanstrom’s entire bibliography every year, sometimes chronologically and other times based on what season I first read the book in. For example, I read Steel and Glass during the winter of 1988, the year it came out, and to me it will always be a winter book. I remember sitting in the ski lodge next to a large window overlooking the slopes. My friends were careening down the mountain while I was inside, biting my nails and holding my breath as I turned the pages. I was lost, transported into another world. I couldn’t believe this was the work of a young man—both of us born in the same year—because he displayed a maturity and wisdom that was beyond his age. A part of me was jealous, angry that I couldn’t focus enough to write something even half as good as Steel and Glass.

  During the summer of 1992 I read Paper Tigers twice, right in a row. I finished it, turned back to the first page, and read the whole thing again, this time taking notes. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never had the experience—the unmistakable, life-altering moment when you read a book and realize that someone out in the world ha
s read your mind and put into words all the thoughts and ideas crashing around inside your own head. For me, it was like Don Swanstrom was my doppelganger, a more articulate and self-aware version

  of myself.

  Swanstrom didn’t write plot-based novels with linear timelines. His books were ideas set in an almost recognizable world but one that was slightly off-kilter. One of his biggest criticisms was that his characters never felt like real people, and this is something I loved about his work. Each person in a Swanstrom novel represented a philosophical point of view, a way of processing events and information. When these people spoke it was in hyperintellectual phrases that had virtually nothing to do with who they were. Swanstrom’s characters were simply meant to represent opposing arguments to whatever theme he was exploring. Most of his work involved conspiracies and secret machinations, those hidden wheels that cause the modern world to turn.

  Of all his books, Exit Lights means the most to me, particularly because of where I was in my life when I read it. I was going through my second divorce, and my two children refused to smile or acknowledge my presence, which led me to believe their mother was telling them lies about me. I had been working for a publishing house, writing the summary paragraphs that are put on the back covers of books to intrigue a potential buyer. Working there was like a slap to the face. I thought being in the industry would open doors for me, but I soon learned that everyone was a writer. Everyone had a novel or two under their belts, and it was torture to watch coworkers have their works published and leave the cubicles for the college circuit to read from their self-indulgent novels about wealthy young men chasing drugs and women.

  I watched as my life slowly veered into dissatisfaction. It all felt like it happened in slow motion over a long period of time, but in reality it took only five months.

  First, the publisher downsized in response to the financial crisis, and my job was deemed unnecessary. I couldn’t find work anywhere, and my wife finally decided she couldn’t live with me any longer. Worst of all, I had no energy to write, and whenever I tried it was simply an exercise in futility. A painful reminder of how ordinary I really was.

  Some beliefs die hard, and when they shudder their last breath, it shakes your insides like a million butterflies are trapped in your chest. A feeling like dying, like fear, like falling. What’s left over is who you really are. And when that person emerges, it’s sometimes surprising but more often disappointing.

  Exit Lights was released on Tuesday, January 29, 2008. I didn’t feel like reading it at the time because novels had always been an escape for me, and now that real life was so dramatic I didn’t think I could bring myself to care about something invented. But after the first chapter I was hooked. I read that book in a fury, devouring and ingesting it. I read it the way some people read the Bible—to tell me who I was and what life means.

  It seemed that Swanstrom and I both lost our ability to write at the same time, maybe even at the exact same moment. He had always come out with a new novel every two years, like clockwork. But since Exit Lights, he’d released nothing. I could only conclude that the man was suffering from an extreme bout of writer’s block, and this fact caused me no small amount of anxiety.

  When your life is reduced to nothing more than a series of small defeats, you begin to look forward to any break in the monotonous routine of dragging your weary carcass to and from whatever dead-end job you find yourself trapped in. This is what Swanstrom’s novels were for me. After reading his newest book, I would spend the next year and eleven months eagerly awaiting the next one.

  It wasn’t enough for me to just have the books. I wanted to know everything I could about the man who wrote them. Swanstrom never gave a single interview, so I scoured every newspaper and magazine for profiles about him. Every time he released a new book extensive articles were written about the complex messages hidden in his dense prose. But Swanstrom was always untouchable, just out of reach. You see, Don Swanstrom was the literary world’s greatest recluse. Virtually nothing was known about him beyond a few private letters that had sold at auction for over seventy-five thousand dollars each, and even in those letters he was obviously guarded.

  Only one photograph was known to exist, a candid picture taken during his senior year of high school and printed in the yearbook—he was notably absent in the portraits section, a bold script over the space his image should have occupied saying, Picture unavailable. It was all we had, that one photograph of Swanstrom smiling in the bleachers of what must have been a football game. Though not conventionally handsome, his face has a seriousness that’s present even while he’s smiling. The eyes are deep set, his teeth somewhat crooked. There is no outward indication of the brilliant mind or inexhaustible creativity.

  He looks like anyone.

  The concentration, the devotion required to be absent from the world for so long is staggering. I understand vanishing for a year or two, but it’s been over twenty-five. At that point it takes on an almost religious fervency, a piece of performance art that is as much about political protest as it is about personal disappearance. Like those Buddhist monks who lit themselves on fire in Saigon. It’s a magnificent, terrible, and confounding statement about the world. The only conclusion one can reach is that society is unfit to be lived in; therefore, the physical body must either be banished or exterminated.

  After leaving the bookstore, I was exhilarated. I went straight home to study my facial features in the bathroom mirror. The resemblance was something I had never seen until then, but like they say, you never know how you look to someone else, how they perceive you. I held up the yearbook photograph next to my face and smiled, copying Swanstrom’s smile. It was uncanny how alike they were.

  Maybe the similarities had evaded me because I was never smiling when I looked in the mirror. Whenever I saw myself it was as the broken-down, depressed failure I knew I was, but to see myself through another’s eyes had opened up new possibilities and horizons. Another reason perhaps is because I had built Swanstrom up so much in my mind that I had never before searched for any similarities in our appearances. But when I looked at his picture and my face, it was as though he had aged right before my eyes and was staring at me from behind the mirror.

  Some decisions are like standing at the edge of a precipice with a parachute strapped to your back. It’s doubtful the fall will kill you, but in those seconds before the leap is an imperfect moment of clarity, an understanding that the decision, once made, cannot be undone. This is how I felt as a plan began to take shape at the back of my mind. I breathed slowly in and out, measuring my breaths in time to my heartbeat, hoping that the metronomic quality of one would steady the other. Once I stepped from the ledge into open space, there would be nothing between me and the ground. I would be isolated, suspended like a marionette without strings, hovering above another life.

  To set the plan in motion would require immediate action, no second-guessing. I was bound to fail, but I was hoping that my failure would allow for some sort of auxiliary life, not the one I wanted but better than the one I had, an afterlife of sorts, something taking shape after the death of what I was living. Yes, Icarus fell to earth after flying too close to the sun, but what a glorious fall it must have been. Almost worth the flaming wings tied to his arms, waving helplessly in a shower of cinders and sparks, before beginning the long fall back to earth.

  Staging the “break-in” wasn’t hard. I had an office at my house that was used for all my writing, personal and professional. The room was a paper museum; there were copies of every book I had written a summary for, and after twenty years the total was close to four hundred. There were also the manuscripts of everything I’d ever written, stacked carefully and filed in large boxes. A lifetime’s worth of writing—my heart, my soul, my existence.

  Everything in that room was already listed in my

  insurance documents, and were they to disappear it could be validated that the room did in fact house thousands upon thousands of pages. Wh
at they were, exactly, no one could say, but the irrefutable evidence of lost or stolen work could not be denied.

  I tore through that office like a madman, leaving nothing untouched. I opened every drawer and filing cabinet, dumped supplies all over the floor, pulled my degrees down from the wall, and ripped open envelopes from phone and cable companies. By the time I was finished, the room had been ransacked, destroyed. I took everything of value, mainly the manuscripts and screenplays, to a storage unit on the outskirts of town and called the police to report the robbery. After that I made three more calls—to the insurance company, the local newspaper, and the Channel 6 news station.

  The following day the front page of the Oregonian read, World Famous Reclusive Author Breaks Silence after Home Invasion.

  Within hours my house was surrounded by news vans with satellites spinning atop the roofs, cables and wires snaked across the lawn.

  Men and women covered in makeup stood in the grass, rehearsing their lines while cameramen set up their equipment. Inside, I watched the spectacle on television. Watched what was happening just outside.

  A man wearing a yellow rain slicker with the Channel 12 logo on the breast said, “Reclusive author Don Swanstrom is as famous for his novels as he is for maintaining his privacy. Last night that all changed when his home was broken into by an apparently obsessed fan who made off with years’ worth of work and several uncompleted novels.”

  A woman, trying to keep her blonde hair from blowing into her face, said, “Any scrap of paper with his handwriting on it was stolen. Phone bills and envelopes that bore the alias he had used all these years were taken. Although the loss is tragic, it has compelled Swanstrom to finally come out into the open to plead with the thief to return his work and grant him and his family their privacy once again. We’ll keep you updated with the details as they become available.”