Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

Here and there I saw a picture, in the margin or in the middle of a page surrounded by text, just an arrangement of a few lines, all identical: a girl’s face, broadly similar to the younger face Thistle had shown the world on television, eyes downcast. The same face, over and over, eyes always down. A couple of times she had drawn a hand in front of it, fingers spread, as though in the first stage of reaching for something, some item nearly forgotten. Sometimes the spiky words slashed through the face. But it was always looking down at something.

Circling the drain , she’d said.

Silently begging Thistle’s pardon, I opened the oldest of the books and began to read.

… a hole somewhere you can’t see, not one of the holes that everyone has that let out the bad stuff but a secret invisible hole thats just for good stuff, that lets everything good leak away, whatever there was that had light in it and could change, and the hole just drains all of it until theres nothing left except the body and i have to do what the body wants, give it what it wants and then go away until it wants more and then give it more until i almost die and that’s what i call sleep now .

There was a picture of the girl’s face, eyes downcast.

and i stay asleep wherever i was when it took me away and then the body wants more and it wakes me up so i can go out and get the thing for the wanting and

Those were the final words in the first book, and they set the tone for everything that followed. Doc had called it Planet Zero, and he’d been right.

I flipped through the rest of them, looking for a section that had names, addresses, phone numbers, anything that might tell me where she’d be likely to run. In the next-to-last book I’d found a kind of list of short lines that mixed letters and numbers but it was unreadable, in some sort of code:

lnl0:2091643688

lnl1:7076725414

Half a dozen entries in all. The number strings had ten digits, which qualified them as telephone numbers, but the area codes were certainly not local, even if I could read the names. Both area codes were sort of middle-California: two-zero-nine belonged to Turlock and Modesto, among others, while seven-zero-seven was up near Sacramento. Among the strings of numbers I didn’t see a single area code within three hundred miles.

Which meant that I had to scan the pages to see whether there was something there that would unlock the code.

They were difficult to read in every possible way. The writing was cramped, the letters elongated and jammed together, as though the pages were made of something elastic, and had been stretched out while she wrote. Now they had returned to their original size, and the words had become collisions of letters, crowded so closely they almost seemed to resent it. And when you got past that, you had to deal with whatever structure she’d built with the words on whichever page you were looking at, and once you’d solved that , there were the words themselves, and reading them was like walking barefoot on sharp rocks.

… not like lissa, jesus lissa just opened up like a window and let herself show and that was enough because of what was in there and that was why she could do it all day and every day and i never opened anything i was just a bunch of reflecting surfaces so if lissa was a lighthouse i was a disco ball and i didnt have any light of my own so why wouldnt mine leave and why wouldnt lissa’s stay forever like it did. Why would mine stay with me no one else has stayed with me except daddy and he died to get away from her and sometimes i think she punched the hole in me, the hole that meant i had to reflect light instead of showing my own like lissa could and i hate feeling sorry for myself but if i dont who will and who gives a fuck anyway .

There was something familiar about the name Lissa , but I couldn’t find it in my memory.

I looked at my watch and was surprised to find it was almost three, which meant I’d been there more than an hour, dragging my eyes across something no one in the world should have read.

… and the dope it orders me around like in that movie where the computer orders the astronauts around and tells them lies the same way the dope tells me lies, like this time it’ll be different because you’ll get that click that means you finally got enough and you never do, you can just keep filling yourself with it until you die and the dope doesnt care just like the computer didnt care when the handsome dumb guy Gary something was caught outside the airlock, it just locked the door and let him drift away waving his arms like a baby and getting littler and littler and everything else was black except for stars and what good are stars anyway. do stars give a shit, look at all the blood and guts that gets poured out on the dirt down here while the stars just float around up there jerking off while kids and women and even men get stabbed and shot and drowned and fill themselves with poison and tell each other lies and say i love you i love you i love you and mean gimme gimme gimme .

The computer had to be HAL, the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey , a movie I’d never liked, because if human beings were that cold, who cared what they got transformed into? When I saw it, I’d found myself rooting for HAL as he attempted to get rid of the space ship’s crew.

And I knew what Thistle meant about stars. I’ve always hated the buggers myself. Unattainable beauty ties me in knots.

There were a lot of references to Lissa, whoever Lissa was, but Thistle seemed to have reserved most of her love for her father, who had died, according to what I’d read on Google, when she was eleven or twelve. About her mother there was almost nothing.

… the thing about daddy was that he was clean like most people arent if you could shine a light straight through him it would have been all white and clear on the other side because there wasn’t anything he was wrapped around that was dark and secret and hated the light or was ashamed of it like most people have, whatever they look like on the surface some of the most beautiful people are as poisonous as pepper trees as poisonous as rat bait but, daddy was daddy all the way through …

I found myself wondering what Rina would write about me. Was I clear at the center, or was I dark at the core? Was I forcing her to love me in spite of who I really was?

… the same way lissa was lissa all the way through and the camera could see that, and the best thing i can say about mommy is that she was rotten on top and rotten clear down to the middle and at least she didnt pretend to be anything except rotten. i dont know why i didn’t know she wanted to be me and hated me because she wasn’t me, she always thought all the cameras and the lights should have been pointed at her all the time and i had stolen them from her. But daddy just loved me and he would probably even love me now. Probably

All pretty awful, but getting me nowhere, at least in terms of figuring out where Thistle might have gone. Although the references to the cameras reminded me who Lissa was: she was the actress who had played Thistle’s mother on “Once a Witch,” the one who had stood aside to let the child shine. But figuring things out wasn’t reward enough to force me to read any more of this than was absolutely necessary. Maybe the thing to do was read the very last entries, the ones in the book she’d barely begun.

… tomorrow will be different because i’ll make it different because i have to make it different because this movie thing even if it’s just junk or some kind of art movie nobody will see maybe it will bring her back maybe she’ll feel the lights and all the people looking, waiting for her and she’ll come and help me do something that surprises them all and makes them applaud and love me and want to see more, but she won’t come back if theres no room for her and now everything is filled with all this shit all these pills that someone keeps giving me and that i take like some machine that needs oil oil oil but today has to be different and so does tomorrow because it’s like i have to make a room for her to move back into someplace thats got some light and air in it and that’s not full of bugs and ratshit, i mean a place i can be proud of. Inside me, but i dont know if can and even if i do she might not come back, why would she come back nobody ever comes back but look i’m in a movie again and maybe that will bring her back if she’s missed being …