A pedestrian hid behind the “A” pillar of my car as I turned the corner from Hospital Street onto Main by the Thai restaurant. I nearly hit him. Miranda and A.A. were in the back seat like I was a chauffeur. Snow had piled up in dead zones on the sidewalks where the city workers had carved paths for people hurrying to and fro. Shop owners were mad at the city DPW for making it difficult to transit. Frozen slush at the crosswalks, exhaust and the smell of gasoline and cars in the night air. I always felt like we were in Russia or some Eurasian city where cars sometimes didn’t start and people froze in alleyways.
Miranda was listless and sick. She was anemic. A.A. had met her when they both went to Binghamton to go to a witch seminar. How to be Wiccan. Miranda’s dad was apparently a murder cop and so she leaked all kinds of stories about investigations to us that she probably shouldn’t have told us about. Oylesburg was a middling city but it had its share of murders.
“So the headless waitress was found by the train tracks by some crackheads,” Miranda said. “That was two years ago and they never solved it. But my dad put it together with some assaults about eight years ago. Somehow he figured out that the murderer was probably a tourist in town for the Hall of Fame Induction weekend. Like he comes to the area for the Baseball Hall of Fame during big years and lets off steam by attacking women in Oylesburg. Two years ago he got one.”
“I asked J. if it was him once,” A.A. said from the backseat.
“I’m not a tourist,” I said. “Plus do I look like I’m fuckin strong enough to cut a woman’s head off?”
“It’s not that hard to do,” Miranda said.
Main Street was full of traffic, people scrambling for some reason.
“Your dad must see some shit,” I said to Miranda.
“He’s been a cop for years.”
“Doesn’t that ever get, you know, hard for you?” A.A. asked. “Like coming home late, don’t you get interrogated?”
“I’m in a blind spot for him. He doesn’t ask me questions too much lately. So you want to hear about what they found when they caught him?”
“Definitely.” A.A. was a fiend for this kind of thing.
“He had his family staying at one of those summer camps for baseball kids. You know.”
“Yep,” I said. The place was choked with baseball tourists in summertime.
“While the kids were playing the dad would go out to the cigar store with the porno mag kiosk and buy magazines. He took them back to his bungalow and cut out heads of the models in the pages of these magazines, ladies making O-faces, and he would sit in a circle of these decapitated heads and do yoga. Like he would meditate. And he threw away the heads but he made a mistake. Somebody saw one of the cut out paper heads in his rental SUV when he returned it. This porno actress with her eyes rolled back in her head. My dad’s co-worker, another homicide detective, told me about that detail and my dad got really mad at him. They hate each other. There were a bunch of other clues that led the police to the guy. My dad said he was the most normal baseball tourist dad you could imagine. They linked him to a bunch of other assaults of women in the city over like eight or nine years that never became murders. The guy couldn’t follow through enough to kill them, at first.”
“You should do a podcast,” A.A. said. “We could do it together.”
“My dad would love that. He’d never speak to me again.”
We went to Moggie’s Diner on the east side on the other side of the canal. Not far from the hell-mansion where A.A. lived and we had sex all the time and had our epic fights. Moggie’s Diner was famous for having walls covered with display cases with miniature dollhouses in them. All kinds of odd tableaux. They sold miniature furniture, miniature people, miniature everything. Moggie’s was all old people and when we walked in there were a lot of heads turning because I looked pretty normal but the two ladies with me looked like maidens of death. Miranda with her elbow-length velvet gloves and raccoon eye makeup and shredded black clothes. Under her tattered winter coat she was wearing a black t-shirt with her boyfriend’s shitty death metal band GETHSEMANE DELUSION written in illegible white tendril script. A.A. had thick blond Viking braids coiled up and was likewise all in black.
I was on the lookout for people to ask the question of the week for the newspaper. I needed to find six people and I’d already bothered A.A. one too many times and Miranda Belliotti was always a flat no. Whenever they’d bring some of their friends around I always latched into them like a parasite to get an answer and a photo. Moggie’s might have some people who were willing to get a stupid little crumb of urban fame in the paper. I always felt like an exploiter and a botherer but it was part of my job.
Neither A.A. nor I had ever met Miranda’s father the homicide detective. I was a little worried about how A.A. might react. Would she be tasteless and start quizzing him about murders in the city. I just assumed that he probably wouldn’t talk about it with us. Maybe the two women should do a podcast. Although Miranda was just out of high school and trying to figure out what to do next. Her boyfriend Chance was a total loser and I don’t know how the dad ever sat still for that. I got the impression that he was an oddball guy, if he’d given birth to a creature of the night like Miranda. She told us stories about how before joining the police he’d been an art student and a dyed in the wool freak in his college days. He must have had some big 180° reversal sometime in the 90s to lead him to become a cop. Luca Belliotti was his name. Miranda had a scrapbook of news articles about cases he’d worked on. She seemed kind of proud of him and yet I got the impression they had serious differences at times and they clashed a lot.
A weird thing happened where I was sad when Miranda would leave A.A. and I alone and we’d have to sort through our feelings for each other for the 1,000th time. I didn’t really want to fully admit that Miranda was more appealing to me than A.A. and I would certainly never tell that to her although she point blank asked me “Is Miranda prettier than me?” several times and I had to swerve around the truth. I was always doing that with my girlfriend. Besides, A.A. was more in my age range and made more sense in that way. This time period sounds more logical when I write about it this way instead of how it really was in that city of fog. The subject of her killing me in my sleep after an argument was often on my mind. And, as a kind of perverse annex to all that, was also the feeling like I was already dead so death at anyone’s hands — hers, my own, some killer’s wandering the streets of Oylesburg — would be a mysterious seamless transition that would turn perception of time into a frustrating möbius strip impossible to explain to anyone else. Never graduating to a folie à deux.
***
The above piece of fiction is just two separate stories reaching out tentacles to each other and intertwining into a trunk within a novel that is taking shape. I’m trying to write the story of A.A. and her relationship with the protagonist as well as the story of Miranda Belliotti whose father is a homicide detective in some mystery novels I’ve written (well, one novel and some fragments). Maybe it doesn’t work but I’m just trying to get some things going and just write. It’s weird to try to write something more literary and have it be engulfed with old genre styles and themes. I’m going to just go with it. People who have read my novel Blood Trip might recognize the city of Oylesburg. I guess I’m just going to write things set there from now on?
I listened to these two YouTube videos while writing recently. I am really interested in learning more about Corporate Park and any of the industrial music in that vicinity, as well as the 80s French “cold wave” of Asylum Party and that musical vicinity.
THE SUBJECT OF HER KILLING ME IN MY SLEEP
I like this. Keep writing it, it's very good.