who didn't cross over. My books feature Derek Chainer of LAPD's Homicide Special (unhappily converted into Father Chainer for aforementioned flop). In them, pain causes white bursts before the eyes and anger makes the head throb with rage. What my books don't do is capture the feeling of seeing your ex-fiancee's mutilated body in crime- scene photos. Or how hard it is to scrape dried blood from under your fingernails.
I'd thought I knew this world. But I'd known only the outside of it. Once I got in the belly of the beast, once the digestive juices went to work on me, I discovered I knew nothing at all. I'd been merely a tourist on the dark side, watching through binoculars as the creatures stalked and feasted.
My gaze drifted across the room to the row of my titles hardcovers, paperbacks, foreign editions and it struck me how I'd overestimated even the minor importance I'd ascribed them. I felt abruptly ill-equipped to take the world at its word, hard-pressed to believe that there was any fundamental merit underlying its designations of failure and success. My yard-sale chair, solid and comforting beneath me, seemed invaluable. But my name, embossed on five glossy spines? One day I'd be a faint reminiscence, me and other low-grade celebs, joining the dusty ranks of brush-with-famers past. Years hence, some blowhard grasping for conversation at a dinner party would have his memory tripped by a turn of phrase. And others might nod their heads and lie kindly. Andrew Danner. Rings a bell. Remind me.
And what would be our blowhard's response? A mystery plot retrieved from the thickets of senility? A response sensitive to legal intricacies? Or a simple tabloid reckoning? He was a murderer.
As always, I had difficulty keeping my fingertips from my head, from that ridge of hardening tissue, the one known entity I'd carried out of my amnesic fog. The scar where they'd dug into my brain rose straight from my left ear just behind the hairline, then curved slightly toward my forehead. By now I'd memorized each millimeter of the pink seam by touch, as if its bumps and edges held answers written in Braille.
I turned on the TV just to get away from myself, but there I was. My shell-shocked reaction when the verdict was intoned. A Brady Bunch split screen of DAs and victims'-rights activists and Alan Dershowitzes. An interview with my seventh-grade teacher. The same old helicopter footage of Genevieve's house. A witty cable anchor had Photoshopped courthouse pictures to depict me miming the see-no, hear-no, speak-no monkeys.
I had achieved some success as a novelist, but fame had come to me as a killer. Squeaky Fromme, Johnny Stompanato, O.J., the Menendez brothers. I was one of them now. A tale of fate and shame, bent to a classical model. Another modern slant on an ancient story from those funny people with olive laurels and knobby knees. Silly Pandora couldn't keep her box closed. Crazy dude, whacked his dad and humped his mom. Did you hear the one about the guy, woke up and didn't even know he'd killed his ex? I was Starbucks chatter, Jamba jive, a drive-time- radio punch line.
I clicked off the TV and sat in the piercing silence.
What would I think if I didn't know me? Motive. Means. Opportunity. How's gut instinct stack up against those?
What had I said on the stand? I believe that anyone is capable of anything.
But, unfortunately, I was my own unreliable narrator. What I needed were some hard facts to slap on the table beside the sour mash and that handsome tumor of mine.
The neighbor's kid, a chubby, bespectacled tyrant out of a Gary Larson sketch, was at it again with his trumpet, practicing 'Whistle While You Work' off tempo and key. And CHEERfully toGETHER we can TIDY up the PLACE.
I rose and padded around the house, reacquainting myself. On the wobbly kitchen table, beside two grocery bags filled with mail, sat my block of Shun cutlery, sealed in a clear evidence bag. It stopped me cold. A welcome- home gift from the prosecution or the cops, calculated to throw me in case I was entertaining any thoughts about getting my life back to normal. The forged stainless-steel set had been a passive-aggressive gift from Genevieve, a tenfold upgrade on my sorry plastic-handled Target crap. The same expensive set she owned, a perfect match. My knives had made a cameo appearance in the trial, a nice bit of theater. See, jury, he has a set just like hers, all shiny and bristling, and a present from the victim herself! The inspiration for the crime!
The boning knife from Genevieve's set had been a key piece of evidence. It was what I had been told I'd plunged into her abdomen.
I got scissors from the drawer and sliced the bag open. With odd ceremoniousness I transferred the block to its place on the counter. I balled the evidence bag and threw it away and then leaned against the counter for a moment.
I tried to refocus, to remember how to care for myself. The last thing I needed was a postoperative seizure, so I fought my pills out of my pocket and popped a Dilantin, washing it down with a handful of water from the tap. What a pathetic homecoming.
In the sink rested an empty glass and a white bowl holding a dried orange paisley incontrovertible evidence of cantaloupe. Breakfast, September 23. The last concrete presurgery event I remembered. The dishes carried the weight of archaeological relics. I rinsed them out and put them away, then trudged upstairs, toting the bags of mail and my tumor, and down the floating hall my Realtor referred to as a catwalk.
More industrious cheer from next door put ON that GRIN and START right in to WHISTLE loud and LONG.
My office has the best view in the house. The soundproofed French doors that let into the master were now closed. My chair lay on its back, toppled over; it drew into view eerily, like a body, as I came off the stairs. I stared down at it a few minutes before righting it. Knocked over by a cop during the search? An intruder? Yours truly, lost in my brain-tumor blackout?
Crumpled in my office wastepaper basket were a faxed offer from an Italian publisher, stubs from Dodgers tickets, and a few pieces of junk mail. Remnants of an ordinary day in oblivious progress. I checked my PalmPilot, clicking backward through all the appointments and meetings I'd missed, until I arrived at September 23. The screen was appropriately blank. As I reseated the Palm in its cradle, I was hit by the bizarreness of investigating myself. I was an intruder in my own house.
I tapped the speaker button on my telephone and reached to dial, figuring I should order takeout in case my appetite ever returned, but after three digits realized that no tones issued forth. I dug through the grocery bags, unearthing a handful of disconnection notices. My other services, fortunately, autowithdrew from my diminishing checking account, like my cell phone dutifully charging on the file cabinet. I stuck my headset into my Motorola and dialed.
As Pac Bell's hold music competed with Snow White, still squalling from next door, I retrieved my e-mail. Expressions of support from friends and readers, a few nastygrams from others convinced of my guilt, a surfeit of Viagra and penis-enlargement offerings that I elected to regard as spam rather than targeted marketing. When I scrolled down to the days around Genevieve's death, I was simultaneously disappointed and relieved to note nothing unusual.
I logged out of the e-mail account and stared at the blank screen. The thought of writing anything soon or ever again, for that matter was daunting. Nothing like a little old-fashioned trauma to bring the self-indulgence of my job to the surface. The impracticality, too. I wished I had a surgery to scrub in for or, failing that, an orphan to mend. Something aside from confronting a monitor and pretending that what I could think up would be of interest to hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom performed jobs that were actually useful.
Serge finally came on the line asking how he might provide me excellent service. I explained that I'd lapsed in paying my phone bill but would do so now, and that I needed my service restored. After he finished lambasting me with outstanding penalties and reconnect charges, all of which I contritely pledged to pay, he sighed with disappointment and took down my credit-card number.
'Can I keep my phone number?' I asked, anxious to retain anything familiar.
'Your service wasn't disconnected, just interrupted,' Serge said, 'so yeah. We'll send a guy out to reconnect the line.'
'When?'
'By next Thursday.'
'Can't you get anyone here sooner?'
'Maybe. But next Thursday's the first we can guarantee.'
This didn't strike me as excellent service.
'Listen,' I said, 'I can't not have a phone right now.'
'Then maybe it was a bad idea to ignore your bill for four months?'
