Lee Klein: Jrzdvlz

I always assumed he knew I knew about the burial in the woods, knew I only looked a few years older, whereas he was now twice his age. Either his lack of curiosity or his restraint let us be friends. A more inquisitive, active, curious friend would have forced me into back-flipping lies. But he rarely asked about my history, content it seemed to have someone there who was reticent to the point of being almost neurotically unwilling to offer information about his past, allowing Moss thereby to fill in the blanks with anything at all, most likely nothing. Corinne only existed in our conversations as someone he’d do something with on weekends, a fixture of the perpetual near future. The more I knew of her, the more I hoped Moss didn’t turn her away. He was not quite a complete person. Just the fact of Corinne made Moss twice the man he was. Without her, how might he survive? I pictured him naked, shivering, emaciated, gray, sharp vertebrae breaching the flesh of a hunched back.

It was strange to think that Moss and Kirsch undressed with these women—more so, that these women undressed with them. Kirsch’s girlfriend made eye contact when talking with me in a way that made me question the strength and the boundaries of my friendship with Kirsch. Whatever deep beauty there was in him, she’d found it, I suppose. She must have, because otherwise life was deeply unfair. What I mean is: I found her incomparably attractive. Being in her presence was a treat. Her name was Mc-Clain, shortened to Mack since before she could remember. I never caught her first name or thought to ask. But Mack was perfect. She taught at Rutgers, same as Kirsch. Journalism. Like Kirsch, she’d lived elsewhere, mostly in the west, Portland, San Fran. And then Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then she settled for a semblance of tranquility in central New Jersey. She was a little older than Kirsch. It was hard to tell. Maybe a quarter Iranian. Or Italian. Dark, straight nosed, distractingly pale-eyed, dimpled when she smiled, with small, lovely, perpetually coffee-stained teeth. She wrote pieces about the end of the world, or at least the extinction of humanity. Kirsch must have sensed my interest, my bashfulness, my politeness, my inability to look at her. I did what I could to conceal it, unlike Riv, who, since the end with Francesca, had become overtly goofy in Mack’s presence, all too sensitive to the irresistible qualities of her charms.

I sat in the back of the Cherokee, left cheek pressed to the window like a dog, the four of us squeezed in back for the ride to the Pine Barrens. Mack sat next to me. She leaned into me on curves, her elbow dug into my thigh like an armrest.

Not so many years had passed, really, since I’d left. A blip in the grand scheme of things. It looked the same, mostly. In some spots, swatches had been converted to retirement developments, or the land seemed freshly burned. We drove along the outskirts of Fort Dix. Military activities of some sort were underway on the other side of barbed wire fences. Some seemed to involve artificial sand dunes. It was deep into growing season: melons, berries, tomatoes, sweet corn. Vegetable stands along the highway. Elsewhere, we passed one-story businesses long ago ruined, their parking lots overgrown. After an hour, we came to the town of Leeds Point and entered the Jersey Devil Tavern, where we would meet our guide.

This establishment—a dank old roadhouse updated to quasigastropub status—was not here when I was younger, not to mention the T-shirts and bumper stickers it sold proclaiming someone had seen me. Jersey Devil burger was the chef’s specialty. Eight dollars for a filet of medium-rare Jersey Devil served on a bun, a dollar more if you wanted caramelized onions and cheese. Five bucks for a bumper sticker proclaiming sight of the beast. Twenty dollars for a T-shirt decorated with something better suited for the back of a leather motorcycle vest. An industry was based on a legend I did nothing to promote.

We still had about an hour to wait for our guide, a guy named Christian Duven, another profiteer, exploiting a nonexistent natural resource. I made enough as a grocery clerk, but what if I managed to sue for five percent of all proceeds, could I quit my job and devote my time to philanthropy, dedicate a wing to a local library in the name of Larner or Titan Leeds? This could all be exploited for far greater profit. If we all pulled together. If I allowed myself to be seen, the tourist industry would explode.

Why have I spent the last few years so humbly in a provincial college town, hardly able to spend a dollar without worrying about its effect on my finances. I should dream big, live large, make the right associations and work them, start right now by demanding to speak with the manager: The Jersey Devil burger is perfectly fine for the price, I’ll say, but the margins would be better if we went into business together, maybe with this Duven guy, our tour guide for the night. I’d make regular appearances but not too many to ever become commonplace. Just enough to charge the pines with the supernatural. We’d get Mack to write about it. Moss and Kirsch and Riv and even Corrine would sell souvenirs, work on a documentary and then a biopic. And, most importantly, I could once and for all forget about ever trying to be anything other than what I am.

But then I would be responsible for the livelihoods of so many, the children of all our employees, their mortgages and college tuitions, everything would rely on busloads of tourists, the Japanese, the French, and then what if I continued to age and one day found myself as an elderly monster unable to elude a teen hopped up on too much Mountain Dew? But even then, what a sensational end to the story, a centuries old legend, older by almost forty years than the United States of America itself, wrestled to the ground and strangled by an enraged kid who thereafter appears on the cover of every national newspaper. Autopsy reports follow. Biographies. Films. Then silence forever. Or maybe Leeds Point continues to prosper and the tourists continue to come to search for a beast they know is dead, believing rumors about apparitions, a proliferation nightly through the trees, a hoax involving lights and eerie sounds, whatever it takes so happy tourists recommend the experience to friends.

I dreamed of a theme park, then humbled myself, running through the list of Franklin’s commandments as we waited for our food to arrive, a pint in front of me. Moss appreciated the most glaring, least attractive qualities of the décor, the nautical theme, the nets, the plastic marlin, as though the place had been a Red Lobster that closed, only to reopen in homage to me. All commandments converged in this case on resolution: “Resolve to perform what you ought, perform without fail what you resolve.” To perform what you ought was key. But what was I ought?

So far, in so many years, I have done nothing truly honorable. I tried to maintain Franklin’s commandments of silence and moderation, but what else? What could I do without fear of regret, what could I do that would animate me and propel my words as I spoke, possessed by the assuredness that what I did was what I ought— resolved and confident in my resolution?

I scarfed a Jersey Devil burger and fries, observed Franklin’s second virtue of silence, and otherwise prepared for a long night ahead—the shortest of the year, really. Whatever was decided tonight would flourish this summer and bear fruit by October. Jersey Devil Land maybe would become a reality with the help of Mack, inspired by her, doing what I could to impress her, what I ought to do a function of what she wanted me to do. Her will, my command. My only desire and ambition was to please her. She seemed like she’d seen it all and emerged unflappable, assuming that all men were monsters once a layer or two of domestication were removed. I bet she’d shrug if I showed myself to her.