Chuck Palahniuk - Doomed

From down the hallway my nana’s voice told the telephone, “I see.” She said, “Yes’m.”

My hands spread the book’s pages like you’d part curtains, and spattered there was a psychology test in dark splotches. Made more or less symmetrical by the book’s being shut, the dark parts looked like a butterfly… or a vampire bat. While my eyes were trying to decide, the rest of me saw the white shape down the middle of the book where the two pages met. There, still white and printed with Mr. Darwin’s thoughts, a longish narrow shape pointed straight at me. Under the moonlight the blotchy black parts you could tell would be red in other light. Tomorrow they’d be blood. The ghost shape in the middle, the void where nothing was, that was an outline.

Still kneeling there beside my bed, I heard a breeze that was really my nana gasping, loud. With the air of that same inhale she told the telephone, “Thank you.” She said, “Give me twenty minutes to get there.”

The shape at the heart of my book was my papadaddy’s dead wiener. As heavy footsteps approached down the hallway, I slammed the book shut. In less than two footsteps I buried my stained shirt deep in the dirty-clothes hamper. In another two approaching footsteps I stashed the book under my pillow and leaped back into bed among the Mom-smelling teddy bears. By the last footstep my eyes were closed and I was faking a deep, peaceful slumber when the truth came knocking at my door.

Gentle Tweeter,

That first night my Papadaddy Ben went missing, my nana had to drive us to the hospital to find out something the police refused to reveal over the phone. Something that I already knew. In her car she lit each new cigarette off the last. She dropped the butt of the smoked cigarette out her window, a tiny meteor flaring orange sparks into the dark. The way a falling star foretells a death. Mostly, back then, it felt weird for me to ride in a front seat next to where a chauffeur should go. Thusly, we followed our headlights into the grim future.

I wanted to impress upon Nana the social stigma of secondhand smoke and littering, but decided to swallow my gripe. This chore-haggard woman was about to become a widow. No doubt the melodramatic reveal would take place in front of a crowd of strangers in the autopsy suite of some medical examiner. Probably she would collapse into a dead faint still wearing her calico apron getup paired with a faded gingham housedress, a smoldering butt pinched between her careworn lips.

Farm fields lined either side of the highway, and our headlights skimmed over an occasional soiled upstate cow garbed in distressed, low-quality leather.

For our midnight foray I chose to wear flannel pajamas, pink flannel, under my junior-size, stroller-length chinchilla coat. The feeling was glamorous, like posing as a Miss Hooky von Hooker, with my bare feet in bedroom slippers made of pink fuzz sewn to look like floppy-eared bunnies with black button eyes. My nana hadn’t given my snazzy ensemble a second glance. Her attention had a ten-mile head start and was waiting impatiently at the emergency room for the rest of her to catch up.

Our route skirted one side of the infamous freeway traffic isle, and as we passed I saw police cars nosed up close to the cinder-block bathrooms, all their spotlights aligned to bathe the squat, ugly building like a stage. The uniformed officers who stood in that glare looked like actors drinking coffee out of paper cups and underplaying the drama of their scene. Papadaddy’s pickup truck with its cracked windshield and patched taillight still sat in the parking lot, but now it was roped off with sawhorses and twisting swags of police tape. People stood outside those barricades and stared at the truck like it was the Mona Lisa.

As we drove past I pretended not to look. My feet didn’t reach the car’s floor. I bounced my pink bunny slippers and tried to resolve the toilet wiener flasher with the Papadaddy who’d taught me how to paint a birdhouse yellow. My memory tried to keep the poopie finger a poopie finger, but keeping a lie alive in my head was wearing me out. It’s exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth. It didn’t help that this was two in the morning.

That holiday in tedious upstate, everyone kept a secret: I’d killed someone. My papadaddy was a restroom lurker. My nana had cancer the size of a cherry, a lemon, a grapefruit, growing inside her like a garden, but I didn’t know that as yet.

Just in case the police found a witness, I planned not to look like myself for a while. That’s one reason I got truly obese: camouflage. Becoming a fatso turned out to be a very clever disguise.

Otherwise it was only my nana and me and drunk drivers on the late-night highway. She motored past the traffic island without a glance. A cigarette puff later, after a couple hacking coughs, she asked, “How are you liking the book?”

I choked back the memory of a squashed, dead wiener outlined in people blood between two pages. That Beagle book, squirted full of some juice I told myself wasn’t sperm. “It’s fine,” I said. “That book is a literary tour de force.” God only knew what she was rambling on about. I reached to turn on the radio, and my nana slapped my hand away from the knob. Just that tiny smack reminded my stomach of the Darwin tome thwacking that wrinkled menacing… whatever.

Now I’d never know how evolution ends.

The way my nana talked, with her lips clamped onto the brown part of a cigarette, the white paper burning part bobbed in front of her face like a blind man’s cane. Red-tipped, even. She was feeling her way along, asking, “Have you got to where the collie dog helps stick up a bank?”

Of course, she meant that The Call of the Wild book. The saga of some animal implanted with radioactive chimpanzee embryos from the Crab Nebula. If I’d chosen that Jack London book we’d all still be alive. Even with my eyes shut I’d picked the wrong option. I told her, “Bank robbery?” I said, “I loved that chapter.”

Nana Minnie’s chin tilted up a little, lifting her eyes off the road a smidge. She stared in the rearview mirror, watching the bright toilet crime scene shrinking from a real place, smaller and smaller, until it was just another night star. She said, “How about the part where the dog sees the crazy person murder the old fella in cold blood?” She asked, “Have you got that far?”

Our headlights zoomed ahead, skimming over a stretch of upstate highway, and I watched the steady horizon without giving her any answer. Instead, I imagined peaches, apricots, cherries, tomatoes, beans, even watermelon pickles preserved in clear glass bottles. Sapphire pink and ruby red and emerald green juices. A treasury of food, this bounty steeped in too much sugar or too much salt, to keep bacteria from setting up shop. My Nana Minnie had blanched, boiled, and canned a long future of meals for her and Papadaddy, and now it was only her. The best way to support her would be to help her eat. Maybe between the pair of us we could justify all those years of peeling and coring.

My nana asked, “You know, I always felt sorry for that collie dog.” She said, “If that dog could’ve just told the truth, you know, folks would’ve still loved it.”

Whatever she was talking about, it was no book I’d been reading. Instead of answering her with more lies I sagged my head to one side on a limp neck. My hands snuggled in my chinchilla pockets. My eyes drifted shut and I made a fast snore like I was asleep, only it sounded more like I was just reading the word snore off a thousand cue cards.

Nana Minnie said, “Everybody knew that collie dog was just defending herself,” but then she had to take a break from talking in order to catch up on her coughing. For my part, the car was jam-packed with everything I didn’t want to say. If my nana was going to be hurt, I wouldn’t be the person to do it.