Scott McClanahan: The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. I

Man comes into the small white room where you are sitting and tells you he has a gun. He is of medium height, nearly clean-shaven, wearing a seersucker suit that fits his shape. He has a look in his eyes like light is being strangled and he likes it, but you don’t see any gun. You are seated on a small metal chair beside someone you used to remember, used to like or know in some way beyond just being, though now it doesn’t seem like either of those are so much true. You had not meant to be here today. You feel as if you have been shrinking for several years. Before you can think any more about that or about the gun or what is coming through the windows framing the far wall, the man pulls out the gun and holds the gun up at you and shoots you in the face. The sound is loud and silent at the same time. It is over before it ends. You aren’t there to see your blood hit the light and hit your flesh and hit your friend who was no longer such a friend as he had been. It splashes on the fine seersucker suit of the man before you who has shot you and whose expression has not changed, he is standing still in the white room with his skin there and he is raising up his hands, he is beginning to speak aloud in a voice that comes not from inside him but from almost on the air itself, the air with your blood inside it, where you had lived once. No one is moving in the room. Whoever’s there, the name and number of bodies of which you will have no recollection, having seen this man now shoot you point blank in the face, they don’t seem shocked or weird at all about it, they have not moved at all in how they stand, they are looking up straight ahead into the wide eyes of the man who killed you, from which the voice now raises in the room, moving through the space with rising volume in the air where you have died. The voice fills in along the space where there should have been someone in you there to hear and take the word, the word you’d heard on lips before but not like now all dead as fuck, in the voice of the man covered in your blood some as he moves forth and begins to vibrate slightly, in the sound around you filling space, in this room you had come today to walk around in and drink beer in and make small talk and touch hands, and now cannot because you are dead and you are being filled with sound, with the voice of the man who killed you and his voice is larger than the shot had been somehow and the sound is winding through your lungs, as if you, the dead one, are also speaking, though you can’t remember already who you were, and in your voice are several hundred other voices you do not remember holding, you can’t feel the fields where in you the word has stitched itself inside your space and legs and lungs, and yet it feels light, it feels like bloating open in a hole overflowing with white ash and whiter milk, and in the room around you everyone is raising up their arms to match the raised arms of the man who killed you, who is shouting, and they are shouting too though they don’t move, the sound instead is winding all around them, and the man is grinning, or is he laughing, he spreads his fingers like a scout, he smells like fires lit years later, he’s lifted slightly off the ground, his arms above him at the ceiling as if to touch something above the room where he has killed you, the gun now just ridges in his hand, the air where you are not and never had been but had tried to live and be a friend, and in your lungs the voice is wearing all your other voices, and in the dark you open wide and you stand up.

The last time I saw Randy Doogan was just a couple of years ago. It all happened after I left home and was working as a telemarketer in Huntington. One day I went back home to visit my parents for the weekend and the phone rang. I went over to the phone and let it ring one more time like people always do, and then I picked it up.

“Hello,” I said and there was this voice on the other end that sounded familiar.

“Hey Scott. This is Randy.”

It had probably been ten years since I last heard this voice, and all that I’d heard about Randy for the past couple of years had been bad.

He was on methamphetamine.

He was married to a girl named Catfish.

He was divorced.

His life was falling apart.

It was strange too because he was always the cool guy in high school. He was the older guy who told us all about sex in the first grade. He was the crazy guy. He was the guy who quit the basketball team in the middle of a game so he could go have sex with this older woman he met in the gym that night. He was the guy who showed up the next day wearing her panties and walked around the locker room like there was nothing unusual about it. This was the guy whose brothers used to break into houses, get sent off to prison, and come back with stories about soap on the rope.

So I knew if he was having problems to be careful about talking to him.

I said, “Oh yeah. What’s been going on?” in a voice that was already looking for a reason to get off the phone.

But Randy’s voice just quivered all nervous and he finally said, “Now I know we haven’t talked in a long time, but I’ve just been having a real hard time lately.”

I already thought, “Oh God, he wants to get some money off of me.” That’s exactly what he wanted all right, as he started in on how hard he had it and how this girl named Catfish had ruined his life. Then he said he wondered if my folks were still living where they used to live (I didn’t tell him they moved because I didn’t want them to get robbed). Before I could make up a lie to tell him, he went into how he completely understood if I didn’t want to, but he needed to borrow fifty dollars.

I knew it.

So I started thinking up excuses of why I couldn’t give it to him, of how I was broke, it’s late, the bank wasn’t open, you could probably find someone else, etc., etc. But then he told me the real reason why.

He told me, “I completely understand if you can’t, but my brother James was killed in a car accident this morning. He was killed in a car accident in Delaware and I need the money to get up there and go to his wake.”

I knew it was wrong of me, but inside my head I was still wondering if this was all a lie. I was wondering if he needed the money to get high and he was using it as an excuse. So I told him it was late (it was), and if he still needed the money to call me in the morning and I’d get it for him (I thought he would find someone else he could hit up for a fix).

But then…he called me up the next morning and said he still needed the money.

“I’m sorry Scott, but if you could I’d really appreciate it.”

I knew he wasn’t lying. I went down to the bank as soon as they opened, thinking “Scott you shouldn’t be so damn judgmental. Here was somebody you’ve known since childhood and all he needs is a little help. I mean for fuck sake his brother was just killed.”

So instead of getting him fifty dollars, I took out seventy-five. I figured if he was going to Delaware fifty dollars wouldn’t get him much of anything. I met him down at Go-Mart because I still didn’t want him to know where my parents lived. When I pulled in, he was waiting for me in the back of a rickety old car that was covered in rust spots and full of people. I stopped the car and walked over to them, and Randy squeezed out from behind the back seat. When I saw him I stopped because he looked so different than before. He had a pot belly now and skinny legs, and the wiry thirteen-year-old boy mustache, which made him look so much older in junior high just made him look dirty now. We shook hands and I couldn’t get over how different he looked. I gave him the money.