Daniel Taylor: “This is long labor of love, likely destined to be an unrequited love. I began this novel in the early 1990s and have worked on it sporadically ever since, more sporadic than working, putting it through five different drafts. It is likely unpublishable—too much this and too much that. Just too much all around. (And some ‘not enough’ too.)
“I like the premise—a hapless, haunted, bi-polar detective with a mentally disabled side-kick sister looking to solve the murder of a former professor of his. (My wife and I ran a group home full of ‘challenged’ adults with mental disabilities for three years, and one of them is the model for Judy in the novel.) But my execution of the premise (first person narrator, interruptions by multiple personalities, sliding around in time, rants and raves about various things) probably leaves too many readers behind—including my friends who would like to like the novel if they could.
“Nevertheless, I have learned to love the sidekick sister—and her stammering love for her damaged brother—just as I loved many years ago the afflicted woman on whom the character is based.
“I don’t expect this novel to ever see the light of day. And I may or may not work on it anymore. But I’m glad it’s in my drawer.”
“My name is Legion, for we are many.”
R. Barthes, after St. Mark
“I suck most wondrous philosophies from thee;
some unknown conduits from the unknown
worlds must empty into thee.”
Ahab to Pip
“Where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase.”
Folk saying
1
I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing. The photograph of the body showed something sticking out of his mouth, but it wasn’t clear what. Whoever had killed Dr. Pratt wasn’t satisfied just to have him dead. Apparently they wanted to send a message.
I’m better at deciphering cryptic messages than most. A thousand years ago I was a graduate student studying 19th-century American literature. I could crack a deeply embedded poetic symbol like a damn Enigma machine. (Or was it the machine that created the code rather than cracked it?)
I shouldn’t say ‘a thousand years ago.’ That’s hyperbole—aesthetically acceptable exaggeration—and hyperbole is impossible anymore. How can you exaggerate in a world without boundaries? Or credulity? I mean, I say ‘a thousand years ago I was this or that’ and some checkout girl responds, “You too? My cousin Lorraine is a channeler for this 3,000 year old Persian monk.” See what I mean?
Anyway, the only mark on the body was a half-inch wide slit in the throat where he had been stabbed. Right through the Adam’s apple. But the really disturbing part, to me anyway, was the thing in his mouth.
It was a paperback book rolled into a funnel and it protruded from his lips like a megaphone. I couldn’t help but think how sick this killer must be. No, not sick—evil. I’m trying to learn to call things by their name.
I don’t know why the book in the mouth disturbs me more than the slit in the throat. Getting stabbed had killed him, not the book. But I have plenty to be disturbed about. There is no possibility of me being objective about any of this. I knew the victim. Or at least I had known one version of him—a thousand years ago.
I’m not a cop, or even a private investigator. I’m nothing official, almost officially nothing. You might say I’m a researcher, with an emphasis on searcher. I search. I look into things. I don’t probe people–or even events. I collect information. And then I try to make something out of it—a kind of artist of found data, you might say. I try to burrow new tunnels through old information hordes. I marry old facts to new circumstances and see if I can turn data into knowledge. I once hoped to turned knowledge into wisdom, but I was cured of that a long time ago.
I’ve been a searcher all my life, but I started getting paid for it by this lawyer I know. He needed someone to find out all there was to know about the Tet Offensive in order to establish a post-traumatic shock defense for a Viet Nam vet. I was out of work and knew how to use a library. Since then I’ve become an expert on Legionnaire’s disease, universal joints (General Motors and Toyota, not Ford), tempered glass, emotional stress in flight controllers and junior high social studies teachers, recidivism rates for women car thieves, bite rates for chows, flow rates for dams, and insurance rates for epileptics. And expert on a thousand other things I wish I didn’t know. My mind is clogged with a million bits of information, not one bit of which gives me a good reason to get up in the morning.
My job is not the kind that shows up on those career tests they give you. I took one in junior high and they told me I was suited to be a forest ranger. The possibility had never entered my mind, but it was kind of nice knowing there was a niche for me somewhere, if I ever really needed it. You know, say if I was fifty and things weren’t going real well, I could maybe show up at a fire lookout tower in some forest somewhere and sort of casually bring up this test I took forty years back and just sort of see if I hit if off with the rangers like the test said I would. To tell the truth, I’ve found myself thinking of the woods lately. Lovely woods, dark and deep.
Anyway, I’ve been working for this lawyer off and on, and Dr. Pratt’s widow somehow finds out about it. I’d gotten to know her a little when I was a graduate student. You see, Pratt was my advisor—and my teacher. And guru and model and, you could say, nemesis. Mrs. Pratt was young back then—thirty, maybe less. I liked her. She was good looking and friendly, two things you didn’t see a lot among faculty wives. Most of them seemed kind of worn and faintly bitter. Too many years living with men whose first love was books.
Anyway the phone rings and it’s Mrs. Pratt. I know of course about Dr. Pratt’s murder. In fact, I had heard him speak downtown at the Midwest Modern Language Association convention only a few hours before he was killed. I had gone to hear him for old times. I had even planned to try to look him up afterward to see if he remembered me. To tell the truth, I had been a little nervous about it.
When I tell Mrs. Pratt on the phone that I had heard her husband speak that night, she seems a bit disconcerted. Says it was eerie—that was her word—eerie that I had heard him speak just before he died. It didn’t seem eerie to me—hundreds of people heard him speak just before he died. Dying after speaking isn’t any stranger than dying after eating or dying after washing the car. It always comes after something. You know what I mean?
I tell Mrs. Pratt on the phone that I’m not a private investigator or anything like one, that I am extremely unlikely to solve the crime, and that the police will just see me as a nuisance. But she insists that I “look it over,” as she puts it. She says she didn’t expect me to find the killer. She just wants more information.
“I just feel like there’s something there to be seen that the police wouldn’t recognize even if they tripped over it. I think you can help.”
It’s a new concept for me. To be thought capable of helping, by a woman no less. I let the idea roll around in my psyche for a moment. I’m sure it’s the main reason why I say I will think about it, even though the ache in my stomach makes me immediately wish I hadn’t.
2
I don’t decide right away. I should talk to Judy first. We haven’t been back together long and I don’t want to mess things up. I have a long history of making seemingly innocent decisions that ended up deflecting the solar system. My ex-wife called it a gift for the cosmic screw-up. Big Bang-sized disasters that create galaxies of pain and black holes of confusion. It’s true that I have a kind of congenital clumsiness about life that I can’t seem to shake. Helen found it moderately charming when we were dating, but decided it was a different story when you moved in with it.
Anyway, I talk to Judy. She’s sitting across the table from me slowly chewing a hot dog on a fork that she holds in front of her face. She takes a bite and then stares at the end of the hot dog while she chews, slowly but inexorably, balanced between the pleasure of the hot dog in her mouth and the anticipation of the next bite of hot dog to come. A perfect illustration of the now and the not yet—the once and future hot dog.
Actually, Judy does everything slowly. Sometimes it’s maddening, like being stuck in traffic behind a Grandma Moses in a Studebaker when your whole life depends on you being somewhere else. But I’ve decided Judy’s slowness gives her a kind of dignity, like the massive stillness of an iceberg. She is slow the way God is, grinding slowly but exceedingly fine.
Now I know when I say “back together,” you’re thinking “girlfriend.” You can’t help it. We’ve been trained. But think sister instead. If you never thought “girl friend,” I apologize.
Yes, Judy is my sister. She is a small woman. Her hair hangs very straight and thin from the top of her head, as though placed on the crown like ‘pick up stix’ and allowed to fall equally in each direction. He has almond-shaped eyes with sleepy, bulging lids.
Judy takes a certain pride in her shortness. “Good things come in small packages,” she says with a smile.
Only Judy doesn’t say it the way you and or I would. She speaks very slowly. Painfully slow I would have said at one time, glacially slow. Now I prefer to think she speaks carefully, with a stateliness won of hard labor.
She doesn’t actually say individual words slowly, except when she stutters. It’s that she pauses between words, her bulging eyes rolling up into her lids, trying various doors in the dim hallways of her brain, searching patiently for a word or phrase that might befriend the one already on the air. It is important to her that words, like companions, get along.
Judy’s speech patterns mirror the discoveries of quantum physics. The words do not roll smoothly off her tongue in a steady progression. Rather they leap from her lips in interrupted bursts: “Good things . . . I should say, good things come . . . in in in . . . in small packages.” She often finishes sentences in a delighted rush, much as someone crossing a stream on a narrow log hurries the last few steps and then jumps to shore in relief and triumph. Judy often smiles at the end of a sentence, pleased with herself and how well things turned out.
And she repeatedly inserts the phrase, “I should say,” into her sentences, a product of decades of correction and efforts to please. It gives her time to line up her words in a row and affords them a faintly aristocratic air. Judy has a high sense of propriety—what one should say or ought to do. It was drummed into her by our parents and by the nuns at the home. They all lived in the old world of right and wrong, and they passed it on to Judy. If you didn’t know what the rules were, how were you going to know if you doing okay?
“Well, Jude. This woman called and wants me to do some work for her.”
“That’s nice.”
“We could use the money.”
“Yes, we . . . we . . we could use the money. That’s for sure.”
“But it would mean you’d have to be by yourself sometimes. More than now.”
“Oh?”
“Well, I would have to be driving around a lot.”
“I like . . . driving around.”
“And I’d have to talk to a lot of people.”
“I . . . I should say . . . I like talk . . . talking to people, Jon.”
I chew on that.
“Of course you do. What am I thinking? You wouldn’t have to stay here. You could come along, at least most of the time.”
Judy rosebuds her lips, raises her eyebrows and smiles. “I could be . . . I should say . . . your sidekick.”
“Sure my sidekick.”
“Like . . . like the Lone Ranger and . . .and Tonto.”
“Like Pancho and Cisco.”
“Like . . . like . . . like, I should say, like Huntley and Brinkley.”
David Brinkley had been Judy’s first love. She watched him give the news every night back home when she was a girl. “I like his pointy nose,” she used to say. “He’s cute.” Once I wrote a letter to Brinkley and asked him some evening to skip saying goodnight to Chet and instead say, “Goodnight Judy.” It would have delighted her no end. If he ever did, we missed it.
