He didn’t like my laugh. He beat me for it. He beat me hard and said not a word while doing it. But I kept laughing. I’d been through it all before with Shot. What did I care from beatings.

As he beat me senseless, at least one of us had begun to understand that history would wash over us indiscriminate, like the gray-green, the green-gray dawns and dusks. That so little would matter. That my laughter was, unknown to me, for the future.

In the early morning, I regained consciousness. Hellmouth Jack was gone from the mountainside, as if he had never existed. The rope on my wrists magically gone, too. As if I’d made him up to goad me forward.

Except he’d left me a pack of cigarettes. For which I was thankful, in the end. Sitting there waiting for the rain. Waiting for the next thing.

I never saw him again.

[99]

I wrote letters back to my mother for a few years. This was before I had the job as a security analyst. My college years were hit or miss academically. I drank a lot and thought it didn’t matter because I’d built up so much muscle mass. If I’m honest, I dropped out of bodybuilding competitions later because I wasn’t disciplined enough. As much as anything else.

The dread of those envelopes from her. How they smelled of her hand lotion. A soft, gentle lilac. While the contents were a kind of violence. I’d be in the dorm, on my bed, just staring at the latest one, while my roommate chattered on about how much she hated classes. But I’d always open the letter. Receive whatever lurked there. Whatever beast. Along with news of Ned.

Such detailed storytelling: that I was a cocaine addict in a specific neighborhood or a failure as a fisherman or had jumped off a cliff on an island she’d always wanted to visit. Kidnapped or murdered or worked as a custodian in a shopping mall. Lived at home, on the streets, in a halfway home, in the basement we didn’t have.

Most of the time, I was older in these scenarios. Sometimes as old as Mom. Sometimes I had the same symptoms she did and was ancient. It frayed my nerves. But I had to read them to find Ned again and to push back, to provide the antidote particular to her delusion. It helped me sleep.