John Dies at the End (40 page)

It also turned out the pregnancy was a false alarm but I was spooked after that, found myself backing off more and more, making excuses because, gosh, I gotta get up real early in the morning and it’s gonna be a busy day with inventory and all that and I’m just not in the mood right now, Jen . . .

We slowly went hands-off after that, Jen thinking this had something to do with me not loving her anymore, though the loving part of me and the penis part of me rarely speak to each other. She cried a lot. She slept a lot. We argued a lot. She left.

So I had been off the sex wagon for six months as I stood there at the counter of Wally’s Videe-Oh!, having dragged myself in for yet another unexpected shift on yet another frozen morning. It was going to be a bad day. The hormones come and go like the tide and some days it’s no big deal and some days it’s like being fifteen again. The other night a coworker had insisted I take home a movie called
Ghost World,
which turned out not to be about ghosts at all, but was instead some kind of coming-of-age story about a girl who, I noticed, had a fabulous collection of very short dresses. All I remember from the plot is two hours of Thora Birch’s bare thighs.

But I digress. It had been my coworker Tina on the phone this morning, asking if I could cover her morning because, gosh, even though the roads have been scraped clean she hears there’s supposed to be more snow today and she doesn’t want to get trapped at work, and I’m just the nicest guy ever, she really, really owes me. Tina, by the way, is short and blonde and bouncy and full of cheerleader energy. So I got dressed and drove in, cruising on those few hours of fitful chair-sleep. Tina is also engaged, by the way, with a kid. On days like this, Mr. Penis isn’t big on logic.

How about . . .
now?

I folded up this morning’s newspaper and dropped it in the trash can at my feet. I had scanned it for news of a missing person, a manhunt, anything of the sort. Nothing. The front page was a shot of kids playing in the snow. The person in my toolshed was apparently not noticed missing yet, or they were such a total asshole that the town had gotten together overnight and decided that it was better left unsolved.

Three hours passed without a single paying customer. I looked down at one point and noticed the newspaper had fallen onto the floor. The day before we had put balloons up around the store for a promotion and during cleanup one of my coworkers had stuffed a balloon into the little trash can. Inflated. It literally filled the whole container, so that no more trash could be put in. This fascinated me for some reason. I heard the door open.

Officer Drake sidled in the door the way cops do, still in uniform. He sidled all the way across the floor and desidled near the counter. I found my hands clenching a nearby DVD case.

Tell me, Mr. Wong, you wouldn’t happen to know about a guy from across town who went missing last night? Your name was written on the wall in blood and a pair of your gloves was left behind and we have video of you killing him.

Instead he said, “That’s downright beautiful, isn’t it?”

I had no clue what he was talking about. He turned and looked out the glass doors and nodded. Out there was the aftermath of the ice storm, a world coated in crystal. The little landscaping trees in the parking lot gleamed with branches of blown glass. It was still sort of dark when I came in and I hadn’t noticed.

“Uh-huh. What’s up, Drake?”

“Haven’t been sleeping,” he said. “Neither have you, from the look of it.”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “Eh, probably just need a new mattress, right? Maybe one of those machines that make soothing noises. Like the sound of a waterfall or a jungle, something like that.”

“Jungle sounds?” I said, my face taking on great weight. “I don’t think the jungle sounds would help me sleep. Reminds me a little too much of
Vietnam
.”

Drake didn’t laugh.

“Me, it’s my little girl that’s been keeping me up,” he said. “She’s four. Wakes up every couple of hours, crying about a doll. We come in and ask her about the doll and calm her down. So two nights ago, I’m walking past her room, she’s not in there at the time and I see this doll. I never saw it before, a big china-doll lookin’ thing, the kind with the glass eyes, big, puffy dress, you know. And it’s sitting on the edge of the bed. I figure my wife bought it at a garage sale, because I ain’t seen it before then. Then I walk back by and look in there, not two seconds later, and there ain’t no doll there. Just an empty bed. I ask my wife about it, and she says she’s never seen such a doll. Never.”

“Yeah,” I said, as if that shed some light on it. What did he want me to say?

“You figure out what that thing was, floatin’ around in the Sullivan house?”

“I don’t know any more than you, Drake. Just weird, that’s all. This town, you know.”

“You know there was a cop, a detective that went missing a while back? Name was Appleton? Black guy? Started ranting about the end of the world, then vanished like a puff of smoke?”

“I think I heard about that.”

Drake said, “You know who was the very last person he interrogated before he went missing?”

“Me?”

“That’s right. That’s right. And they never found him.”

Being a cop in Undisclosed is not a path to long-term mental or physical health, Drake. Check the suicide rate. And I’ll tell you something else, too. The look I saw in the eyes of that guy before he went off the edge is the same look I see in yours now.

Out loud I said, “Why are you here, Drake?”

“I need a movie,” he said brightly. “Gonna stay in tonight.”

“Okay.”

“Why don’t you recommend something for me? Something fun.”

I reached over and plucked the first movie off a pile of returns to my left.
Mulholland Drive,
some David Lynch movie I had never heard of. There was no anti-theft tag on the case of this one. Almost like we wanted it to get stolen.

“Here,” I said. “This is a good one.”

“It’s something my kid will sit through?”

“Sure.”

I rang him up and he sidled from the counter. Drake put his hand on the door as I picked up another DVD and let out the breath I had been holding. Then, just as he was stepping out into the cold, I heard myself say, “There wasn’t anybody else reported missing today, was there?”

He stopped, and turned. He let his gaze stay on me for a moment before saying, “No. Why?”

He’s gonna remember you asking when somebody
does
come up missing, you stupid fuck.

“No reason,” I said. I recovered with, “Whatever happened to Amy, I didn’t want it to happen to somebody else.”

“Yeah.”

He waited for a moment, like he had something else to say, but turned and walked out instead. My cell phone rang. Everybody had taken to downloading songs to replace the ringers on their cell phones but me; I just set mine to ring again. One less thing to worry about. I pulled it from my pants pocket and saw John’s name on the display. I answered, “Hello?”

“I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE, VINNY!”

“You called
me,
John.”

“That’s right. Sorry. Have you seen the trees? Isn’t it pretty?”

“That guy came back, John. The guy who showed up in my car last night. He came back and I thought it was a dream but I’m starting to think it wasn’t.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No, John. And thank you for asking me that over a cell phone.”

“Speaking of which, did you find out about the you-know-what in your toolshed? As in, a name?”

“No, the dead body in my you-know-what is still a mystery. I have to get back to work. What do you need?”

“You gotta leave the store.”

“I can’t, I’m the only one here.”

“Close the store, then. Close the store and get outta there.”

“What? Why?”

“You’ll see. Meet me at the safe house. Noon. You’re not gonna believe this shit.”

“
THE SAFE HOUSE”
was our code name for Denny’s.

I arrived and saw John at a far corner booth, a bundle of papers in his hand, a pair of boobs next to him attached to a girl. This wasn’t Crystal, the tall girl with the electric blue eyes and short hair and the peasant skirts, nor was it Angie, the sexy librarian girl with the dark-rimmed glasses and ponytails and capri pants. It wasn’t Nina, with the criminally short skirts and green streaks in her hair, or Nicky the Bitch.

This one was Marcy. Oh, Marcy. Contrary to the wisdom of the gay men who run the fashion industry (who, coincidentally, prefer their female models to look like thin males), the hottest girl I ever saw in real life weighed probably one hundred and fifty pounds. And her name was Marcy Hansen. And she was John’s girl. Rusty reddish-brown hair, about the same color as Molly’s, wide cobalt-blue eyes that looked at you like you were the most important person in the world.

I sat, we greeted each other. Out of the corner of my eye, off to the left of Marcy’s boobs, John waved around the papers and said, “You gotta read this.”

At that moment I realized I was boob-staring and I took the papers from John. Marcy wore tan cargo pants and a skintight T-shirt that said, I
SWAM THE NAKED MILE
! Marcy was one of those girls who seemed to have an endless supply of stories that involved some kind of hilarious sexual misadventure and/or accidental nudity. I took the papers from John’s hand. I studied Marcy’s boobs carefully. I caught myself, again, and held up the papers to obscure the supple swell of her bosoms. The papers were a printout, a log of the chat Amy was on the night she got abducted last time.

“I saw Amy this morning,” John said. “I stopped by to, you know, make sure she was still there. She was pretty freaked out, reading that.”

I read, but didn’t understand until the last third or so and, at that point, everything changed.

This,
I thought,
is the end. One way or another, this is gonna be the end.

CHAPTER 13

The Chat Transcript

* JOHNNY_5 HAS LOGGED OUT *

{faierydust}
asshole

{MustacheGirl}
Still there girl?

{faierydust}
hes banned

{EVLNYMPH}
dialup sux

{amy_sullivan}
still here

{EVLNYMPH}
anybody else lagging?

{faierydust}
this is the creepiest thing ive ever done

{MustacheGirl}
You should look out the window. See if there’s lights.

{EVLNYMPH}
stop with the ufo thing

{MustacheGirl}
Have you thought about getting hypnotized? They can recall memories of those nights . . .

{amy_sullivan}
no

{amy_sullivan}
i don’t even know where ppl go to have that done

{amy_sullivan}
sounds like a good way to get molested

{MustacheGirl}
Almost midnight.

{EVLNYMPH}
iam so freaked out right now i read a book about a navy ship that disappeared

{EVLNYMPH}
they found it latr but the crew was all gone and some guys turned up hundreds of miles awy w/no memory

{EVLNYMPH}
they think it was sum kind of time pocket or somethin

{faierydust}
oh shit

{amy_sullivan}
that was a movie. the philadelphia experiment

{MustacheGirl}
Yes.

{faierydust}
it had tom hanks. the expriment gave him aids

{MustacheGirl}
The movie was based on a true story though.

{amy_sullivan}
molly is staring

{amy_sullivan}
she jumps up on my bed and stares at me til i take her out

{MustacheGirl}
I assume the true story wasn’t as interesting.

{EVLNYMPH}
im putting on music the quiet is freakin me out

{faierydust}
what if its like a wormhole or something

{EVLNYMPH}
bob dylan. you gotta serv somebody

{EVLNYMPH}
serve

{amy_sullivan}
im taking molly outside BRB

{MustacheGirl}
AMY!!! Are you nuts?!?!

{amy_sullivan}
BRB

{EVLNYMPH}
serve

{faierydust}
wormhole. i just got the weirdest picture in my head when i thought of that. ugh. worms.

{MustacheGirl}
Stupid dog. I’m literally on the edge of my seat and she walks away. This is hurting my butt.

{MustacheGirl}
Ew. The cat peed on my bed.

{EVLNYMPH}
serve

{MustacheGirl}
She NEVER does that.

{faierydust}
my science teacher says if all of the worms in the world came up to the surface the world would be buried 20 feet deep in them

{faierydust}
he said there are 100000000000000000000000000 sea worms in the ocean 10 w/ 26 zeros