Gun Church

showered and got out of there in less than fifteen minutes. As I walked out the front of Amy’s building, I looked across the street to where I thought I’d seen Renee. She wasn’t there. She had never been there. I wasn’t hallucinating, just projecting: seeing who I wanted to see, hearing what I wanted to hear.

I was losing it. I knew what that felt like. You do as many drugs and consume as much alcohol as I had on a regular basis, you’re going to have episodes when you lose it. Sometimes it blindsides you and you wake up in the psych ward crawling out of your own skin, but then it’s over, like a twenty-four-hour virus, and you move on. It’s far worse when you can feel it coming on, when you’re an impotent witness to your own deconstruction. When you feel the stitches holding the illusion of yourself together begin to stretch and pop, and you can’t sew fast enough to keep the stuffing in. In the end, you just stop trying and let the seams rip. That’s what this was like.

For fuck’s sake, I knew the transition from Brixton back to New York was going to be a difficult proposition under the best of circumstances and these were far from the best of circumstances. I don’t recommend killing a man, even a world-class asshole like Stan Petrovic, the evening before you begin life anew. But that wasn’t all of it, not nearly. Beyond conjuring up the sound of Jim’s truck and hallucinating Renee, there was Amy, and there was me.

Then, as if to put an exclamation point on my tenuous grip on things, a plug-ugly, thick-necked guy got on the train at DeKalb Avenue: Stan Petrovic. Maybe it was the way he hobbled to his seat on bad knees or maybe he really looked like Stan. He sat directly across from me on the near-empty subway car. On closer inspection, as ugly as he was, he didn’t look like Stan all that much. Though his attitude wasn’t far different.

“What the fuck you staring at?” he said to me, menace in his voice.

“Sorry. I was just lost in thought there for a minute.” I walked to the opposite end of the car to wait for my stop.

The entrance to my apartment was around the rear of the house and my landlord was out clearing a path with his snow blower, the whine of its gas motor an unpleasant reminder of the generator we used at the chapel. The blower was shooting out a cloud of already graying snow onto Avenue H. When he saw me coming, he powered down the blower and walked towards me.

“Good morning to you, Mr. Weiler. You don’t look so good. Long night?”

“Too long, yeah. Got trapped in the City. Train ride home took forever.”

“I got a package for you inside.”

“Package?”

“Yeah, my daughter found it on the front porch yesterday afternoon. She brought it up, but you weren’t in. Come, I have it in my apartment.”

I followed him through the door and up the backstairs. He lived on the second floor, his divorced daughter and her five-year-old daughter on the first. As we went, Isaac made small talk about the weather and his wife’s bad back. Apparently, any kind of precipitation made her pain that much worse.

“Wait here,” he said, disappearing into his apartment.

I stood on the landing, the floorboards creaking under my feet. The old place had charm, but it needed a lot of work. The appliances and fixtures in my flat were museum pieces and the paint on the walls so thick, it was thicker than the walls themselves. My house in Brixton was much the same. I wondered how Renee was doing there, alone, and if she was old enough to appreciate charm. Renee, it seemed, was much on my mind lately.

“Here we go,” Isaac said, handing me a yellow nine-by-twelve envelope. It was less than an inch thick and not very heavy. “I got to get back down there and finish clearing the path. I don’t want no one slipping and breaking their tuchus on my sidewalk. Lawsuits, I don’t need.”

As I trudged upstairs, I noticed that although it was a mailing envelope, it hadn’t, in fact, been mailed. My name was scrawled across the front of the envelope in black marker. I didn’t recognize the handwriting. Handwriting! Who handwrote anything anymore? It was no doubt several copies of some document-a foreign rights contract, I hoped-from Meg or Dudek that required my signature. I squeezed together the metal prongs of the clasp that held the flap closed, pulled the flap back, and slid the contents out.

My heart missed a beat for the second time that morning. Bound with a flimsy rubber band, it wasn’t a contract at all, but a photocopied copy of a chapter from a typewritten manuscript. Not only did I recognize the pages as having been typewritten, I knew the exact machine-a portable Smith Corona-on which they had been typed. I immediately recognized the editorial notes as Moira Blanco’s. Although the writer’s name appeared nowhere on the pages, I was intimately familiar with his work. His name was Kenneth James “Kip” Weiler and the chapter was from the original manuscript of Flashing Pandora. There was just one problem, a daunting one at that: the copy of the chapter I was holding couldn’t possibly exist.

I needed to sit down.

All previous indications I was losing it-the sound of Jim’s truck, the faint glow of a taillight, my building a vision of Renee out of a fleeting glimpse of a profile from three stories up through a driving snowstorm, seeing Stan Petrovic’s look-alike on the subway-had been ethereal at best, products of my wishes and worries. These pages were something else again. They were tangible proof I was skating along the razor’s edge, about to fall off. And this wasn’t just any chapter from any book. This was the chapter from Flashing Pandora that Moira had had me completely rewrite, the chapter in which Harper Marx had pulled a Colt Python on Kant Huxley and Pandora outside CBGB. I was freaked and ready to throw my recent Boy Scout behavior right the fuck out the window. Brooklyn didn’t lack for bars. I called Meg Donovan instead.

“Kip Weiler, how are you?”

“A long way away from good, Meg.”

“What’s wrong with your voice? You’re not high, are you?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet! What do you mean, not yet? You promised me you-”

“Did you have a package messengered over to me?”

“Package? What package? No, I didn’t have-”

“How about your assistant? Did she-”

“No, Weiler, there was no package, at least not from us. What are you talking about?”

“Maybe from Dudek?”

“I can check, but he wouldn’t have anything to send you at this stage of things. You know the drill, you won’t get anything from him until you hand in the manuscript and they generate galley proofs. In any case, no one’s messengering anything to anyone in this weather. What’s this about?”

“I think I’m going nuts, Meg.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“This isn’t funny. I’m imagining things.”

“What kind of things?”

“It’s not important. This package is what’s important.”

“We’re back to that again. You want to play Twenty Questions or tell me what’s in the damned thing?”

“Something that can’t be in it.”

“Look, Kip, I’m a fucking agent, not a mind reader.”

“Did you keep a copy of my manuscript for Flashing Pandora?”

“Of course not. You remember how crazy Moira was about loose copies of manuscripts. These days, it’s all done electronically. In those days, Jesus, Moira was always so paranoid about anyone seeing a book before it was ready. But you know all of this, Kip. What’s this got to do with anything?”

“Inside this package there’s a copy of a chapter from Flashing Pandora that Moira cut out of the book.”

“The chapter with the gun, when Harper Marx kills Pandora?”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because it pissed you off to no end. You said you knew Moira was right, but you were a kid genius then and didn’t like being overruled, not even by Moira. It took me two weeks to talk you down from the ledge and to get you to rewrite it.”

“That’s right. I forgot that part. Some kid genius, huh?”

“So what’s the big deal?” she asked.

“Because there’s only one copy of it and it was mine.”