flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 57
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Or so I think. But Amy nds out—how, I still don’t know, for all Iknow, she was staking out my apartment. But … shit …”“Take a drink.”We both took a swallow.“Amy comes over to my place one night—I’d been seeing this other girl like a month—and Amy comes over, and she’s all back like she used to be. She’s got some bootlegDVD of a comic I like, an underground performance in Durham, and she’s got a sack ofburgers, and we watch the DVD, and she’s got her leg opped over mine, and then she’snestling into me, and … sorry. She’s your wife.
My main point is: The girl knew how towork me. And we end up …”“You had sex.”“Consensual sex, yes. And she leaves and everything is ne. Kiss goodbye at the door,the whole shebang.”“Then what?”“The next thing I know, two cops are at my door, and they’ve done a rape kit onAmy, and she has ‘wounds consistent with forcible rape.’ And she has ligature marks onher wrists, and when they search my apartment, there on the headboard of my bed aretwo ties—like, neckties—tucked down near the mattress, and the ties are, quote,‘consistent with the ligature marks.’ ”“Had you tied her up?”“No, the sex wasn’t even that … that, you know? I was totally caught o guard.
Shemust have tied them there when I got up to take a piss or whatever. I mean, I was insome serious shit. It was looking very bad. And then suddenly she dropped the charges.Couple of weeks later, I got a note, anonymous, typed, says: Maybe next time you’ll thinktwice.”“And you never heard from her again?”“Never heard from her again.”“And you didn’t try to press charges against her or anything?”“Uh, no. Fuck no.
I was just glad she went away. Then last week, I’m eating my Thaifood, sitting in my bed, watching the news report. On Amy. On you. Perfect wife,anniversary, no body, real shitstorm. I swear, I broke out in a sweat. I thought: That’sAmy, she’s graduated to murder. Holy shit.
I’m serious, man, I bet whatever she’s gotcooked up for you, it’s drum-fucking-tight. You should be fucking scared.”AMY ELLIOTT DUNNEEIGHT DAYS GONEI am wet from the bumper boats; we got more than ve dollars’ worth of timebecause the two sun-stunned teenage girls would rather ip through gossip magazinesand smoke cigarettes than try to herd us o the water. So we spent a good thirtyminutes on our lawn-mower-motor-propelled ships, ramming each other and turningwild twists, and then we got bored and left of our own accord.Greta, Je , and I, an odd crew in a strange place. Greta and Je have become goodfriends in just a day, which is how people do it here, where there’s nothing else to do.
Ithink Greta is deciding whether she’ll make Je another of her disastrous matingchoices. Je would like it. He prefers her. She is much prettier than I am, right now, inthis place. Cheap pretty. She is wearing a bikini top and jean shorts, with a spare shirttucked into the back pocket for when she wants to enter a store (T-shirts, woodcarvings, decorative rocks) or restaurant (burger, barbecue, ta y). She wants us to getOld West photos taken, but that’s not going to happen for reasons aside from the factthat I don’t want redneck-lake-person lice.We end up settling for a few rounds on a decrepit miniature golf course.
The fakegrass is torn o in patches, the alligators and windmills that once moved mechanicallyare still. Je does the honors instead, twirling the windmill, snapping open and shut thegator jaws. Some holes are simply unplayable—the grass rolled up like carpeting, thefarmhouse with its beckoning mousehole collapsed in on itself.
So we roam betweencourses in no particular order. No one is even keeping score.This would have annoyed Old Amy to no end: the haphazardness of it all, thepointlessness. But I’m learning to drift, and I do it quite well. I am overachieving ataimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the leader of a gang of heartbrokenkids, running wild across this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from thebetrayals of a loved one. I catch Je (cuckolded, divorced, complicated custodyarrangement) furrowing his brow as we pass a Love Tester: Squeeze the metal grip andwatch the temperature rise from “just a ing” to “soul mate.” The odd equation—acrushing clutch means true love—reminds me of poor smacked-around Greta, who oftenplaces her thumb over the bruise on her chest like it’s a button she can push.“You’re up,” Greta says to me.
She’s drying her ball o on her shorts—twice she’sgone into the cesspool of dirty water.I get in position, wiggle once or twice, and putt my bright red ball straight into thebirdhouse opening. It disappears for a second, then reappears out a chute and into thehole. Disappear, reappear. I feel a wave of anxiety—everything reappears at somepoint, even me. I am anxious because I think my plans have changed.I have changed plans only twice so far. The rst was the gun. I was going to get agun and then, on the morning I disappeared, I was going to shoot myself. Nowheredangerous: through a calf or a wrist. I would leave behind a bullet with my esh andblood on it. A struggle occurred! Amy was shot! But then I realized this was a little toomacho even for me. It would hurt for weeks, and I don’t love pain (my sliced arm feelsbetter now, thank you very much).
But I still liked the idea of a gun. It made for a niceMacGu n. Not Amy was shot but Amy was scared. So I dolled myself up and went to themall on Valentine’s Day, so I’d be remembered. I couldn’t get one, but it’s not a big dealas far as changed plans go.The other one is considerably more extreme. I have decided I’m not going to die.I have the discipline to kill myself, but can’t stomach the injustice. It’s not fair that Ihave to die.
Not really die. I don’t want to. I’m not the one who did anything wrong.The problem now though is money. It’s so ludicrous, that of all things it’s money thatshould be an issue for me. But I have only a nite amount—$9,132 at this point. I willneed more. This morning I went to chat with Dorothy, as always holding a handkerchiefso as not to leave ngerprints (I told her it was my grandmother’s—I try to give her avague impression of Southern wealth gone to squander, very Blanche DuBois). I leanedagainst her desk as she told me, in great bureaucratic detail, about a blood thinner shecan’t a ord—the woman is an encyclopedia of denied pharmaceuticals—and then I said,just to test the situation: “I know what you mean.
I’m not sure where I’m going to getrent for my cabin after another week or two.”She blinked at me, and blinked back toward the TV set, a game show where peoplescreamed and cried a lot. She took a grandmotherly interest in me, she’d certainly let mestay on, indefinitely: The cabins were half empty, no harm.“You better get a job, then,” Dorothy said, not turning away from the TV. Acontestant made a bad choice, the prize was lost, a wuh-waaahhh sound e ect voicedher pain.“A job like what? What kind of job can I get around here?”“Cleaning, babysitting.”Basically, I was supposed to be a housewife for pay. Irony enough for a million Hangin There posters.It’s true that even in our lowly Missouri state, I didn’t ever have to actually budget.
Icouldn’t go out and buy a new car just because I wanted to, but I never had to thinkabout the day-to-day stu , coupon clipping and buying generic and knowing how muchmilk costs o the top of my head. My parents never bothered teaching me this, and sothey left me unprepared for the real world. For instance, when Greta complained thatthe convenience store at the marina charged ve dollars for a gallon of milk, I wincedbecause the kid there always charged me ten dollars. I’d thought that seemed like a lot,but it hadn’t occurred to me that the little pimply teenager just threw out a number tosee if I’d pay.So I’d budgeted, but my budget—guaranteed, according to the Internet, to last me sixto nine months—is clearly off. And so I am off.When we’re done with golf—I win, of course I do, I know because I’m keeping scorein my head—we go to the hot-dog stand next door for lunch, and I slip around thecorner to dig into my zippered money belt under my shirt, and when I glance back,Greta has followed me, she catches me right before I can stuff the thing away.“Ever heard of a purse, Moneybags?” she cracks.
This will be an ongoing problem—aperson on the run needs lots of cash, but a person on the run by de nition has nowhereto keep the cash. Thankfully, Greta doesn’t press the issue—she knows we are bothvictims here. We sit in the sun on a metal picnic bench and eat hot dogs, white bunswrapped around cylinders of phosphate with relish so green it looks toxic, and it may bethe greatest thing I’ve ever eaten because I am Dead Amy and I don’t care.“Guess what Je found in his cabin for me?” Greta says. “Another book by theMartian Chronicle guy.”“Ray Bradburrow,” Jeff says.
Bradbury, I think.“Yeah, right. Something Wicked This Way Comes,” Greta says. “It’s good.” She chirpsthe last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or Ididn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good orbad.
Like a hot dog.“I read it when I rst moved in there,” Je says. “It is good. Creepy.” He catches mewatching him and makes a goblin face, all crazy eyes and leering tongue. He isn’t mytype—the fur on the face is too bristly, he does suspicious things with sh—but he isnice-looking. Attractive. His eyes are very warm, not like Nick’s frozen blues. I wonder if“I” might like sleeping with him—a nice slow screw with his body pressed against mineand his breath in my ear, the bristles on my cheeks, not the lonely way Nick fucks,where our bodies barely connect: right angle from behind, L-shape from the front, andthen he’s out of bed almost immediately, hitting the shower, leaving me pulsing in hiswet spot.“Cat got your tongue?” Je says.
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