Mystery Girl: A Novel by David Gordon Page B

toward its mind-blowing catharsis, there came three loud thumps on the ceiling, and Milo, who had been snoring away peacefully on the couch beside me, suddenly stood up, as if called by a distant trumpet. It was Jerry, the boss, who had been dying upstairs for as long as I could remember. I used to see him when he still descended with a cane to take a post behind the counter, a deep well of movie knowledge and LA lore, and an old photo taped up in the back room showed him young and mustachioed, nipple-ringed and chapped, back when the neighborhood was a hardcore barrio and videotape a miracle from the future. Now all of it, everything on the shelves, was part of the past.
    “Going upstairs now,” bleary Milo told Mr. Chan, who whirled on the screen before him.
    “Can I borrow something?” I asked, still not sure I could sleep, or rather, still a bit afraid to climb into my bed alone.
    “Sure.” He staggered toward the back staircase to Jerry’s. I grabbed another Jackie and then randomly chose Serpico on my way out. Seventies New York movies soothed me as well. I pulled the shop door shut and was walking to my car, when I noticed that the light was on behind the papered-over windows of MJ’s now defunct bookshop. Was a new tenant in there redecorating? Was it a thief, a very desperate, unambitious thief, stealing the few remaining books too worthless even to give away? I pressed my eye to a small tear in the paper and peeked—this spying stuff is addictive once you begin—but I couldn’t see anything. Then I heard, in a high sonorous voice:
This is the dead land
This is the cactus land.
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
    It was MJ. Apparently she hadn’t gone home after all. I knocked. The voice stopped abruptly, and a brown eye, bright but glazed with a wine reduction, appeared in the little tear. I waved at the eyeball and it blinked. The door opened. She looked a little off, with a crooked smile and a bottle in her hand.
    “Why are you still here?”
    I gathered from her mutterings that she’d been fighting with her girlfriend, which helped explain her bitter take on relationships earlier in the evening. Drawn by nostalgia, she’d remained in the empty bookstore to drink, recite poetry, and curse womankind, and we ended up moping side by side on the bookstore’s back steps, where her old desk and abandoned belongings had been dumped by the painters. I found such conversations enormously rewarding, being able to rage against my wife, love, and female inconstancy, without threatening my image of myself as a liberated, prowoman type, though I was still too inhibited to refer to “bitches” with MJ’s utter contempt.
    In the end, however, even my anti-life-partner turned on me. “You know what your problem is? How come no one wants to read your books?” She drunkenly poked my heart with her finger. “You can’t tell a fucking story.” Especially when drunk, MJ cursed with the relish of the deeply uptight, savoring the juice of her sin, while a degenerate like Milo, who might ask your aunt to please pass the fucking salt, didn’t even realize he might offend.
    “What do you mean can’t?” I asked.
    “Contraction of can fucking not.”
    “I just told you the whole sad story of my marriage.”
    “That was a goddamn bummer. A boring bummer. A borner, which is the opposite of a boner.”
    “I agree. That’s my point. I choose not to tell stories. They’re borners. Traditional narrative structure seems totally irrelevant to actual experience today. I mean, what in your life has a regular beginning, middle, and end?”
    She shrugged. “How about the part where I’m born, live awhile and die? With blank pages before and after.”
    “OK, point taken. But then what about all those poets you read? They don’t make sense either.”
    “Poems are short. They don’t have to make sense. Like a day at the beach