One needs to start somewhere. It has to have a beginning. Like Adam and then Eve, a clear concise beginning. Things however, have many beginnings, they do not comply to the standards of a prototype as old as mankind itself. I think, "Otis was alone for four days in an efficiency apartment." That's a good place and I say to the couple across from me in Ray's living room, "I buried him up there on High Lonesome." They said their old dog was on the shelf in their living room, most likely in their manufactured home on some property and in the middle of nowhere. It begins there too. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
I caught a snippet from them of their blind son, like getting a whole cold from a little breath from a stranger on a train. On the way home, driving past High Lonesome, I have a feeling that...no...not a feeling. It's more than a feeling because those are subjective. It's a fact and now I know it, it is considered knowledge. The fact is (and when people say that, it is considered knowledge and aspires to become common knowledge)..the fact is, people want you to know what is going on. They start to allude to a bit of this and a bit of that. They hope you will catch on and offer them a bit of your energy to something they have obviously worked quite hard on. Hard work to understand it, to accept it, to share it, whatever. It is an offering, it is an act of special charity going both ways. They don't always flag it like you would in a study guide but the way they interject it almost too casually in even smaller talk, they absolutely want you to know: our son is blind. There's a reason for that. It all boils down to ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It's on their mind. Constantly. As Otis is, on my mind. That's his real name but the other names now, will all be false. They don't matter in the simulation. They just don't. He's the pin on the board, he is the road out west near High Lonesome. He's the bones in my garage that I found outside that one's final place of rest. All very good coordinates on the map. I counted the miles from the shallow grave on the odometer, six. I still remember, it was six miles not counting the short distance to the highway. I'm sure all murderers (for lack of a better word here) do the same thing when concealing their crimes. They mark and measure, they often return and they take mementos.
Let's restart it there. Mementos. I saw mementos in Paris. We'd been held up there overnight because of a delayed flight between Paris and DC. I was still drinking then or rather, I restarted to drink after a week of being dry. I'd cut my wrists in Paris and they glowed in the dark at the Smithsonian under the black lights there and several days after the stone-cold adventure at the Muséum National d'histoire naturelle where we took a picture of a skeleton belonging to Siamese Twins who were joined at the heart, where we all are joined but are seldom as acutely aware of it as I was then.
We take mementos, we mark our stories and sometimes we say, "This is it, everything goes on from there." But it doesn't really except in rare cases like Adam and Eve and that is because a story, an important story must start somewhere. We as a species, a whole group of related things that share proteins comprised of code made out of 21 amino acids are so specific as to type as to have our own "species", our species has such a regard for death that even our murderers need to retain a memento of the death and it occurred to me while in a state of shock over Otis' solitude for those four days, that perhaps the death sequence creates a heightened state of awareness in the continuously breathing souls that remain behind, that the killers get a high off of the event. It's unfortunate that they don't know the real path to the sensation of grief, the one you wait for, knowing one day it will be yours and they'd be better off waiting their turn. Grief is miraculous. Truly miraculous. And it isn't always because there is a death. It could be the anticipated loss of a leg the day before the surgeon starts his saw. The remaining leg even. No legs left to walk on. A Cat Stevens song goes that way, thanks for making me blind so better to ignore you with my dear, says the Big Bad Wolf that consumes the little girls, talk about dark.
Let me start somewhere else if it makes it easier. The detectives ask certain questions. You should be ready for that. These are like people who drop casual information about blind sons but before the son went blind. They are like soothsayers and know the son will go blind. But they want to know how. I asked her, the relatives of Otis, "How did he lose his sight?". The professional in me doesn't say, "How did he go blind?" Because he didn't go blind, he didn't go anywhere. He lost something but maybe gained something else.
The detective will always ask, "When was the last time you saw such and such or so and so?" It is unnerving. Such a simple thing but it is truly unnerving. You wrack your mind to come up with a reasonable answer because you saw her handwriting the day before yesterday. You saw it right there where you pinned up the card. Or you talked to her last April or May and avoided talking to her because it would have been too long of a conversation. In this case, you knew if she was dead, there'd be no point in calling but if she wasn't, it would be a long ordeal and late in the night, you had to choose otherwise. I did and I said so. Honesty is always important but never more so in a death investigation which is where we are now on the map. Next to High Lonesome where his bones were retreived many years ago and above the fridge door where the last bit of Clair's DNA might lurk, I'm not good at names but Clair is a nice one and her real name was nice. An old name, one that I like alot because I've known some with that name. Not that their name made them nice but their name gave off a nice aroma like certain flowers do, a powerful one that cannot be mistaken for anything but that kind of flower. This is a Clair, this is a Henry. That one over there is a Mister Ham. Mister Hams are great because they live next door to everyone. Clair lived next door and underneath two other apartments, beside a tennis court and next to a place where my own child lived for a short bit of time. She lived close to where she was found. I studied her pretty well. I study them all pretty well. You have to. They want you to. It makes it easier than having to drop all those hints and answer long questions when they are feeling poor. I learned how to skip over and return to things like a detective. That's how I know how they think. Detection is human nature but most of us ignore it because when we detect, we must do more work to investigate and that is time consuming. Below most of our payscales.
