Where We Live and Die (2 page)

But I digress, new diary. As I was saying, at forty-one, I’ve thought about my own mortality a little bit. I don’t like to, but I really don’t have any choice, do I? After my Dad’s cancer battle and the fact that I’m a father again—it makes a guy think long and hard about things. I’ve led a pretty hardcore lifestyle. That shit takes a toll on you after a while. Sooner or later, it catches up with you.

In truth, I always figured it would be my past that killed me—the booze or the tobacco or the era of loose sex all seemed to be likely candidates. Or maybe a slick road combined with a high rate of speed and some heavy metal blasting from the speakers. Or maybe I’d go out like Dick Laymon and my Grandma Lena did—a quick and sudden heart attack. Or maybe I’d get gunned down at a book signing by some crazed fan. “Here ya go, zombie guy! Let’s see you come back from the dead!”

Click click, bang. Curtains close, and…scene. Type ‘The End.’

None of those would be pleasant. Especially cancer. I’m scared to fucking death of cancer. I can’t think of anything more horrifying than dying of cancer. I’d rather drown or burn to death than die of cancer. But losing my mind terrifies me even more than cancer does, because if I lost my mind, I wouldn’t be able to write anymore. Losing my voice wouldn’t impact my writing. Neither would losing my legs or my sight or my hearing. Even if I lost my hands, I’d still be able to write. There’s voice recognition software and other methods I could use. The only part of my body I couldn’t write without is my brain, and apparently, my brain has decided to declare war on me.

That’s why I’ve started writing this manuscript. Diary. Whatever the fuck it is. I’m writing it to help me work out this shit on my own. I mean, let’s be realistic. It’s not like I can Blog about it. They make fun of Whitley Strieber for saying he was abducted by grey aliens possessed with a disturbing fascination for his bunghole. Imagine what they’d do to me if I said in public that I was being haunted by a teenaged girl who likes to hang out on my porch and send text messages on her cell phone and talk to my nineteen-month-old son and occasionally scare the shit out of my dog—even if she’s not probing my ass the way Whitley’s aliens do.

I can’t talk about it online, and I can’t tell my friends about it, either. It’s hard times right now, especially for writers. Tough financial straits. You’d think that people would buy more books during a recession, but apparently, it’s quite the opposite. J. F. (Jesus) Gonzalez and Tim Lebbon and Tom Piccirilli and Jim Moore and everybody else I know are in the same financial situation that I’m in, and I don’t foresee the President or Congress giving us a corporate bailout anytime soon. My peers have problems of their own. They’ve got enough on their minds. They don’t need one of their best writer-friends confiding in them that he might very well be going crazy. And if I told my inner circle—John Urbancik, Geoff “Coop” Cooper, Mike Oliveri and Michael “Mikey” Huyck—I’m pretty sure they would try to set up some kind of intervention for me, and who needs that shit, right? I’m still pissed about the last time they tried to do that to me.

I could tell Cassi, I guess. I mean, she’s my wife. I’m supposed to tell her everything, but for some reason, I haven’t told her about this. To be honest, I think she already suspects. She’s commented a few times over the last couple of weeks that I seem out of it. And she’s right. I am a bit out of it. But I can’t tell her everything yet, because I don’t want to scare her. If I start crying or something—if I break down—it will really frighten her, and right now, with everything else that’s going on, I have to be the strong one. For her. The baby. Our friends and families. All of us.

So I’m telling you.

Dear new manuscript that I’m typing on my laptop:

My name is Brian Keene and I am either losing my mind or I am being haunted.

Or both.

That’s a start. Feels good to type it, though. This can be like my own little private blog. I’ll break the entries up into chapters. Maybe include a few footnotes. It will feel just like any other manuscript. Maybe then I can get at the truth. We’ll call it meta-fiction or gonzo—the blending of fact and fiction, the inserting of the author into the narrative. If it’s good enough for Hunter S. Thompson and Tim Powers and Stephen King (who inserted himself as a character into the
Dark Tower
series) then I reckon it’s good enough for me, too.

More tomorrow. Got up at 5:30am this morning. It’s now 11:07pm and I’m frigging exhausted. Been working on that novella for Cemetery Dance all day (the weird western novella that I still don’t have a working title for—I’m considering calling it
An Occurrence in Crazy Bear Valley
). Joe Lansdale, who is the man I’d most like to be when I grow up, once told me that he writes two to four hours a day. That’s what I aspire to. That’s what I hope I’m doing when I’m his age. But I’m not. And to pay the bills, I put in long hours at the keyboard every fucking day, writing about zombies and ghouls and satyrs and giant carnivorous worms. Anyway, my point is that I’m tired (you can tell, because I have a tendency to ramble when I’m tired). I’m gonna finish this cigar, have a glass of Basil Hayden’s while I walk the dog, and then I’m going to bed.

Hopefully, I won’t dream about her tonight. 

ENTRY 2:

No dreams last night, at least, none that I remember. Cassi didn’t mention that I’d woke her up by having nightmares either. There was one weird thing last night, though. I’d gone to bed after typing that first entry, and I was just starting to drift off—in that weird state where I wasn’t quite asleep but not quite fully awake either—and then I heard an electronic beeping noise, like somebody was typing a text message on a cell phone. It was coming from the bathroom that’s adjacent to our bedroom. Do you know what’s on the other side of that bathroom wall?

The outside of our house. Specifically, our deck and the porch glider.

I’d like to think it was my imagination. I’d like to chalk it up to the fact that I’ve been thinking about all the weird shit too much, and now I’m starting to conjure up strangeness myself when nothing else is happening.

Except that this wasn’t the first time I’ve heard it.

Okay, back to work. Finished this week’s free internet serial installment of
Earthworm Gods II: Deluge
but need to spend the rest of the night working on this frigging Bigfoot novella. Damn thing is kicking my ass, which pisses me off, because otherwise, it’s been a lot of fun to write.

ENTRY 3:

It’s been a while since I worked on this. Ended up buried in deadlines—finishing the Bigfoot story and working on
A Gathering of Crows
, a Superman Halloween story script for DC comics, and a bunch of other stuff. Some of it will bring us money, which is good because we could really use it right now. The economy has gotten worse and the apocalypse is now upon us, at least as far as the small press goes. Once-reliable publishers are now either late with the royalty payments or simply ducking my calls and emails (and the calls and emails from others whom they owe). Thank God or Cthulhu that my mass-market checks are still arriving on time and that I’ve got comic book work and my temporary gig as an adjunct professor at York College to round out my income, because I suspect the days of the mid-list, working writer are coming to a close. We are a dying breed.

Dying. Death. Christ, I’m a cheery little fucker, huh? That’s me. I’m Mr. Sunshine. I’m all about shiny happy people holding fucking hands and singing “Kumbaya.”

It’s not lost on me that I seem preoccupied with death and dying lately. I don’t know why. Like I said earlier, maybe it’s because of all the recent health scares in my family. But we’ve had health scares before and they didn’t impact me this way. I don’t know. I have to wonder if this is some sort of mid-life crisis type of mind-fuck. Certainly, I’m no stranger to death. I’ve known people who died. One set of grandparents, my great-uncle Hobie, several extended family members, Navy buddies, friends from high school, homeys from my days living on the streets, co-workers, Dick Laymon.

The three babies Cassi and I lost…

But I wrote about the babies already. I’ve been known to tell reporters that “writing is cheaper than therapy” and I always grin when I say it, to show that I’m just joking around, but the fact is I’m not fucking joking. Let me tell you something. There are many reasons why I identify with the fictional character of Tony Soprano—enough that I could write an entire book about it. One of the reasons is we have similar views on therapy. I’ve been to therapy, and therapy is bullshit. Yes, it works for other people, and I’m not belittling its overall value—but I’m telling you that it doesn’t work for me. What works for me is to write about what’s on my mind. Write about the shit going on in my life.
Dark Hollow
was me writing about me and Cassi’s loss. Readers don’t know that, but I do. Readers think it was just a fun little book about a satyr in suburbia, but I know that chapter two was the closest fucking thing to an autobiography I’ve ever written. Hell, the whole book was autobiographical.
Adam Senft = Brian Keene. His doubts about his manhood and feelings of inadequacy because of his inability to save his loved ones was something I was intimately familiar with at the
time. It was a hard novel to write. No, wait. Scratch that. It was an emotionally harrowing and utterly brutalizing novel to write. I went to a very dark place for that book, and I didn’t come out again until I’d dredged up everything and vomited it out onto the page and bared my soul and almost killed myself in the process. Writing books like that one—pouring your personal shit into a novel or a short story—that’s like confession and an exorcism and six months of therapy all rolled into one. I don’t need Prozac or Lithium. I have a laptop and a publishing contract.

Shit. Now I’m rambling again. My point is this: I’m no stranger to death. We’re old friends, he and I. At the very least, we’re acquaintances. We recognize each other at the party and perhaps we nod in passing. I’ve watched people die. I’ve held them in my arms and had my hands turn sticky from their blood and felt the warmth drain out of them.

So why is it bothering me now? Why, after all this time, am I dwelling on it?

Anyway, enough about that.

My son, who is nineteen months old, looks at the top of our driveway and waves to somebody who isn’t there. He always greets them with “Hi.” Then he smiles. Occasionally, he giggles—the same little laugh he does when Cassi and I make faces at him. When I turn to look at who he’s talking to, the driveway is empty.

I am not crazy.

ENTRY 4:

I guess I should start at the beginning. That’s the only way I’ll make any sense of this. I went back and re-read the previous entries again tonight, after I was finished looking for a short story I could let Stephen Jones reprint for an anthology he’s putting together, and what I’ve written so far is nothing more than the incoherent, self-indulgent babblings of a madman. That won’t do, especially since I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m not insane.

So...

In the beginning, I started making enough money as a writer that my wife and I were able to move out of our small home on Main Street in Shrewsbury, and buy a place out in the country instead. I like our home very much. It reminds me of the type of area I grew up in, and those kinds of places aren’t very easy to find anymore. Everything is suburbs now—suburbs marking the distance between the next cluster of Home Depots and Walmarts and Burger Kings. Everything is sidewalks and homeowners’ associations and McMansions and housing developments with names like Whispering Pines that don’t have a single fucking pine tree, whispering or otherwise.

Our place isn’t like that at all. It is distinctly old school. We have three acres of rural land. There are lots of tall, old-growth sycamore trees growing in our yard, and at the far end of our property, there is a swift, cold trout stream about twelve feet across and knee-deep in most places. In the spring, the creek often floods. We’ve got a neighbor on one side of our property. We share a driveway with him (the driveway is important and we’ll come back to it in a minute). The other side of our property borders a vast marsh. Beyond the swamp is four miles of state-owned game land—a lush, thick wilderness that, by law, can never be developed or forested. Beyond these woods lies the Susquehanna River, which our trout stream also feeds into. There’s an old logging road that runs from the edge of our property and through the woods, all the way to the river. Once, when Tim Lebbon was visiting, I took him for a walk back through there. He proclaimed it one of the most beautiful places on earth.

And it is.

A brief aside. I just cheated. It’s late and I want to shut this laptop off and go to sleep, so I took a shortcut. I copied and pasted the description of the house from my novella
Scratch
into this document, and then changed the tense and a few other things. That’s because the house in
Scratch
is this house, and their landscapes are the same. Both are beautiful, and I love this place as much as the character of Evan in
Scratch
loved his. That’s why it concerns me that Cassi has recently floated the idea of buying a house somewhere else. I’m not sure what has prompted this desire. It makes no sense, certainly not in this economy. I have to wonder if she’s seeing some of the same things I’ve been seeing. I know that in at least one case, she has, but I wonder if there’s more. Perhaps she’s keeping secrets from me, just as I’m keeping them from her. Maybe she’s seen and heard more than she’s letting on. Maybe I’m not crazy. Or maybe she’s just as crazy as I am.