Читать книгу West Virginia - Joe Halstead - Страница 10

4

THEY TOOK SOME OF HER Klonopin and he poured two glasses of wine. His iPhone notified him that a serial killer had strangled a runner in Central Park, so they talked about serial killers and looked some info up on their phones—Charles Manson, how he was from West Virginia (or had lived there); Ian Brady and his weird face; Dennis Nilsen, how he sort of looked like Mads Mikkelsen—and then she grabbed her iPad and they watched several episodes of Forensic Files on Netflix. She put her head on his chest and he thought it’d be nice to sleep with her, but that it would’ve fucked them both up and possibly their working relationship as well.

“I feel like my life’s a failure,” Laura said. “I feel incredibly scared about that.”

“Why?” he said. “You should be president.”

“It’s just that I’m so scared sometimes and I think maybe—I mean maybe I’m next, maybe I’ll just be running through the park and that guy, or some other guy, or an out-of-control taxi, will come up behind me, and what will my life have been for? I don’t have a family, or children—I’m nearing thirty. It’s easy to make a joke out of what happened to that runner because it didn’t happen to us, but—”

“It’s OK,” he said. “I understand.”

He hated when people got dramatic, so he started scrolling through her Instagram on his iPhone and saw pictures of empty rooms and animal heads.

“So,” he said, “where’re you from?”

She laughed. “Adelaide—south Australia. I really miss it. I’ve thought about going back. You’re from Virginia, you said? Like Charlie Manson?”

“Yeah. Well, not exactly. West Virginia, same as Manson, so…”

“Scary. Do you get back much?”

“Couple times.”

“Since?”

He shrugged this time. The last time he went home was for a long weekend to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. The scene came back to him: eating steaks at a sports bar with his father, the empty pitchers on the table, the particular way they had of addressing each other. Jamie said, “How’re things down here,” and his father said, “Place ain’t changed since last time,” and Jamie said, “And Mom?” And his father said, “Usual.” He said, “What’re you writin’ now?” and Jamie told him, “Nothing really, not at the moment.” And his father said, “You write some of the prettiest things,” and Jamie couldn’t really remember what else he’d said, but it was obvious he wanted to say a lot of things—the most important one being something about home—and his father sighed and said, “You’re gettin’ the feeling you want to move, right? You’re realizing that you need to come home but now you’re wonderin’ if you can, right?”

Quicksand in one of them old Tarzan movies.

“You don’t think you should go see how your family is?” Laura said.

“I was like completely taken aback by it, y’know? And I haven’t been there in so long.”

“Well, then, you just have to decide if it’s worth going back to.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time and he heard the sounds of the endless traffic outside, and he realized there were too many things he didn’t understand the meaning of anymore and he felt worlds away from all that shit. He smoked some of a cigarette.

“Say you could live in any time and be anything, what would you be?”

“What would you be?”

“Someone normal.”

She asked him what was the worst thing he’d ever done.

And so he told the story of the dog.