Marxus, Chapter 2

1989

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Every time and place has its details, and they’re sharper when you’re young. You get older—it’s not just the memories that fade. The senses that make memories so vivid, they fade, too.

We were intoxicated—me for the very first time—and I said to him, “Danny,” I said, “how long does this last?”

He ignored me like always. It was a middle day of drunkenness under the sun and I only learned later why people don’t usually get drunk in the daytime, because it makes the colors swim and that just works better in low light.

We hid in the woods that day—sober by evening and me much relieved.

I bring Danny up because he’s important for later, but in order to get you to understand, I have to pull you up through the dirt so you smell it on you, so the particulars of that place stand out and break through that crust you’re wearing, that crust I know well because I’m wearing it too. That day was just the first time I got drunk and that’s why it stands out, that day in 1989.

The rest of the summer was situated there, at the beginning of Bush 1.0 and we didn’t see what was coming, we all being families of farmers who smelled like cow shit and flannel or mechanics who smelled like body odor, beer, and the grease and gas that make all our machines silently find their time. Sawdust and mildew, the strong aroma of pork roast in the oven mixed with porketta too, but I don’t figure if you’re not from there you know what that is—it’s just spicy pork roast and you cook it alongside regular roast because we aren’t people who come from a culture that can handle that much hot all over our tongues, and we were that much more so back at that time. We split the difference and say “Ope!” and we always will.

The world was so much smaller, once. We viewed it through four channels—one was fuzzy no matter which way you cranked the antenna—and Nintendo games and us with our awkward, burgeoning strikes into some sort of wider world discovered through porno mags and skateboards and shitty punk music recorded third-hand on cassettes.

Unrequited. I had a thing—and she just didn’t. That was me at fourteen.

Danny was something different, someone smoother and he got the girls. Only hung out with me when he had to because he’s my cousin, and the bastard is still smooth as glass, but now he uses it for more than getting handjobs from freckled girls with barely tits, and getting him and me three sheets without getting busted stealing brandy from my grandpa.

I ain’t jealous—shit, not anymore. I’ve gotten my own handjobs and besides, all that sort of blurs together along with the years if you don’t let yourself get nailed, right through the hole in a diamond ring to a heap of diapers and regretted, untaken chances.

Anyway, like I said, Danny’s later and comes in and out, but Karl is what was most important about this year. I don’t know if Karl was smooth, at least when he was alive and I guess the hectoring dead can’t ever really be called smooth, though he assured me it was more than just phantasm-like, but also sort of time-travel-ey. I never got more than he said about it, and I was only dumb enough to ask anyone else about it once. Sedation isn’t as fun as it sounds, though maybe now it would be.

All that came later, but it was the night after the first time I got drunk that I met Karl.

He came late that night, because of course he did—he’s a fucking ghost. They aren’t known for keeping normal hours, not that I ever met another ghost. But whatever, he didn’t break any stereotypes for ghosts by choosing to speak with me at 3 a.m. I was too weirded out—not terrified exactly, because I don’t care what anyone says about what the guy was like when he was alive, the man has a calming presence—but that night, I was way too weirded out to know what the hell was happening.

“Where am I? What year?” he asked. He ignored me as I put my hand clear through his shimmery weird-white body. His English had a heavy European accent I’d later know was clearly, and in this case also stereotypically, German.

I was an avid reader—a rare thing in my family and for my gender considering where I grew up. I’d read my Tolkien and my Hicks and various other greats like Asimov and Herbert. Also, much to the bafflement of my peers, I’d been in “extended curriculum” and went to a special classroom for an hour every Tuesday and Thursday where one of the high school teachers came to try to “challenge” us with tasks outside the norm. All this to say, I was articulate, but didn’t yet know that counted against me here.

“Huh?” I said. (It was 3 a.m. Let’s see how you handle a visit from the ghost of a preeminent economic thinker of any century with a hard accent in the early morning.)

“Are you Marcus Greer?”

“Huh?” I repeated.

“Marcus Greer?”

“Yeah. That’s… Yeah.” I nodded.

His smile beamed from somewhere deep within his beard. “Goot. I’m in the right place.”

I looked around my dirty bedroom in the double-wide trailer. No one in their right mind would ever call it “the right place.” I feared I’d die here, though not that night.