The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2016 by Joe Halstead
ISBN: 978-1-944700-31-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960490
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
For Molly
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ON A TERRACE IN GRAMERCY, Jamie Paddock took an arrowhead from his jacket pocket and ran his finger along the thin arc of the blade. He looked back at the dark apartment, at the unfamiliar people—mostly NYU students and they all looked the same: polyethnic twentysomethings barely old enough to drink, blank looks in their eyes, same toneless voices—and wondered if he was starting to look like them. Heading back inside, he returned the arrowhead to his pocket and then said hello to a few people he recognized while nodding to others he didn’t but who seemed to recognize him. He ate some mushrooms and lost track of everything but a premonition that people were going to talk about him, and then he sat motionless in an armchair and everyone was familiar looking even though he didn’t know them. The fashion design student whose parents owned the apartment asked him questions that he answered in a monotone and she responded by giving him a shot of Patrón. His eyes wandered over to the girls cuddling a vase of flowers, girls wearing Coach bags and sharing a bottle of red wine, half-empty baggies of weed everywhere, a place he didn’t really belong. He was by far the poorest of the group, though it wasn’t for principled reasons, and these were people who would’ve never spoken to him outside the apartment, but there, at the party, they loved him more than he thought possible.
You might be poor, but you don’t stink, he repeated in his mind.
He walked into the living room, cautiously, to look for Jo, the sad girl he’d come with and whom he’d made happy by lip-synching Cher. Someone was crushing coke into powder and spreading it on a cocktail table, and when she offered him a bump he snorted it and the thought of familiarity or that familiarity was even a thing that existed had vanished. His only thought was the overpowering desire to have sex and that seemed to happen when he was thinking of death, which he’d been doing since his father stopped his truck on US Highway 19—five days ago—about twenty miles south of his home, on the New River Gorge Bridge, and climbed over the railing and stepped into the air.
Later, he was feeling sick, so he went upstairs, and when he caught his reflection in a mirror his face was a skull and there was dried blood crusted above his eye and the eyelid itself badly bruised. Before the party, he’d fallen into a cab door and smashed his head on the handle and forgotten by the time they were all packed into the cab. Rihanna, or maybe it was one of those Adele songs, was playing from an MP3 player and he was dizzy, and even though he knew, not from the intensity of it, but from the fact that everyone at the party seemed to agree, that he was having déjà vu, so that he could almost remember each screenshot of time as it passed, he couldn’t do anything else but focus on the millisecond at hand.
He went to the bathroom and locked the door and then went to the sink and stared at himself in the mirror, wiping away the blood there on his eye. He turned off the lights and lay down on the bathmat, breathing carefully until he finally felt relaxed. There was a little light in the room but where it was coming from he couldn’t tell, and then something flashed in the darkness again. It was an iPhone glowing, illuminating a girl’s face. He turned on the light and looked at the girl in the tub. She was wearing a denim Levi’s skirt and a wifebeater that showed her nipples, and her hair, which was burnt orange, looked like she’d just ridden in a convertible. She wasn’t ugly; in fact she was fairly pretty, but she seemed like a squatter, which gave him a bad vibe. She looked at him and said he didn’t belong there. He’d come with Jo, he wanted her to understand. The girl nodded and he noticed as she rested her calves on the tub that she was wearing a red thong. She was smiling, maybe wasted, maybe crazy. They talked and she told him she liked his hair and he said, “Well, thank you,” and then she asked where he was from and he said, “I’m one of them West Virginia boys; you know, ‘Country Roads,’ coal mines, other side of regular Virginia?” She looked at him curiously and said, “Really?” and laughed. She asked him if he wanted her to clean his eye with her tongue and he thought, WTF, and then said, “Sure,” and she did. She stroked his face and kissed him and then sat on the toilet, and she was playing with his hair and he slid her thong to her
