Blaze

Now I’m in sitting in the chum, sitting in the fucking pal, it’s at home but all the clocks of the world are still ringing inside my cracked head and I can’t remember the name of the doll Kamen gave me, all I can remember are boy names: Randall, Russell, Rudolph, even River-fucking-Phoenix. I tell her to leave me alone when she comes in with the lunch I don’t want, to give me five minutes to get myself under control. I can do this, I say, because it’s the phrase Kamen has given me, it’s the out, it’s the meep-meep-meep that says watch out, Pamela, I’m backing up. But instead of leaving she takes the napkin from the lunch tray to wipe the sweat off my forehead and while she’s doing that I grab her by the throat because in that moment it seems to me it’s her fault I can’t remember my doll’s name, everything is her fault, including LINK-BELT. I grab her with my good left hand, caught a break there, muchacho. For a few seconds I want to kill her, and who knows, maybe I almost do. What I do know is I’d rather remember all the accidents in the world than the look in her eyes as she struggles in my grip like a fish stuck on a gaff. Then I think It was RED! and let her go.

I held Gandalf against my chest as I once held my infant daughters and thought, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. I felt Gandalf’s blood soak through my pants like hot water and thought, Go on, you sad fuck, get out of Dodge.

I held Gandalf and thought of how it felt to be crushed alive as the cab of your truck ate the air around you and the breath left your body and the blood blew out of your nose and mouth and those snapping sounds as consciousness fled, those were the bones breaking inside your own body: your ribs, your arm, your hip, your leg, your cheek, your fucking skull.

I held Monica’s dog and thought, in a kind of miserable triumph: It was RED!

For a moment I was in a darkness shot with that red, and I held Gandalf’s neck in the crook of my left arm, which was now doing the work of two and very strong. I flexed that arm as hard as I could, flexed the way I did when I was doing my curls with the ten-pound weight. Then I opened my eyes. Gandalf was silent, staring past my face and past the sky beyond.

“Edgar?” It was Hastings, the old guy who lived two houses up from the Goldsteins. There was an expression of dismay on his face. “You can let go now. That dog is dead.”

“Yes,” I said, relaxing my grip on Gandalf. “Would you help me get up?”

“I’m not sure I can,” Hastings said. “I’d be more apt to pull us both down.”

“Then go in and see the Goldsteins,” I said.

“It is her dog,” he said. “I wasn’t sure. I was hoping…” He shook his head.

“It’s hers. And I don’t want her to see him like this.”

“Of course not, but —”

“I’ll help him,” Mrs. Fevereau said. She looked a little better, and she had ditched the cigarette. She reached for my right armpit, then hesitated. “Will that hurt you?”

It would, but less than staying the way I was. As Hastings went up the Goldsteins’ walk, I took hold of the Hummer’s bumper. Together we managed to get me on my feet.

“I don’t supposed you’ve got anything to cover the dog with?” I asked.

“As a matter of fact, there’s a rug remnant in the back.” She started around to the rear — it would be a long trek, given the Hummer’s size — then turned back. “Thank God it died before the little girl got back.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank God.”

“Still — she’ll never forget it, will she?”

“Well,” I said, “you’re asking the wrong person about that, Mrs. Fevereau. I’m just a retired general contractor.” But when I asked Kamen, he was surprisingly optimistic. He says it’s the bad memories that wear thin first. Then, he says, they tear open and let the light through. I told him he was full of shit and he just laughed.

Maybe si, he says. Maybe no.

A Note on the Type

This book was set in Sabon, a typeface designed in 1964 by the German typographer Jan Tschichold (1902-1974). Sabon, a practical, multi-purpose typeface with non-overlapping characters, is noted for its legibility and grace. Tschichold based Sabon on the type designs of the French typeface designers Claude Garamond (c. 1480-1561) for the roman and Robert Granjon (1513-1589) for the italic. Sabon is named after Jacques Sabon (1535-1580), who cast the type for many of Garamond’s faces.

The display typeface for this book is DIN Schriften Engschrift, one of a series of typefaces created in the 1930s by the German Institute for Industrial Standards for use on road signs. No further history of the face is known because the Institute, in Berlin, was bombed during World War II and its records destroyed.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21