The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“Maybe I miss you,” she says.

“I missed you too.” I did. I always do. Could I go? Pile my stuff in the car, drive down a highway, following a line of trailers, campers, spend days and nights in a chlorinated dunk tank, and come back in six months, dirty, gaunt, and lonely. No, not now. We’re just shy of the 24th and Enola’s here. It feels too coincidental. “Why’d you come home now?”

“Rose’s was coming by anyway. I asked Thom if I could take time to see you. I thought maybe we could talk.” We watch waves grind sand until mosquitoes start in at us. She smacks one. “I do love you some.” Some. It’s what she’s always said, but the way she says it is better than if she’d said she loves me wholly. Those years we were alone, maybe I didn’t do so badly. We pick our way through brush and poison ivy to the path leading to the house. Her hands slip back into her skirt pocket and I hear the slide of paper against paper.

A beaten-up yellow car sits in our driveway—not hers. A lean form stands by it, arm propped on the hood. The figure could not be more striking. Serpentine and crawling with unknown potential.

Enola breathes deep like a diver, shrieks, and takes off running. “Doyle!” Unrestrained joy. Then she’s in this person’s arms, looping her legs around his body. Her shoulders block his face. All I can see are two skinny—tattooed—arms around her waist.

He twirls around, back to me, and she is up against his car. I jog over. Without looking, Enola says, “This is my brother, Simon.”

“Hey. Heard a lot about you. Don’t worry, it’s all good.” A voice made of casual and surf. His hands stay on my sister’s hips. He spares no glance my way, allowing me to stare at a line of tattoos that creep up the side of his neck, over his shaved head, ending in dark green tentacles that wind along his jaw.

“Simon, this is Doyle.”

I say I’m delighted to meet him. I’m not sure what else I say, because I can’t stop staring. Nobody gets a tattoo like this unless they’re actively courting gawkers. The ink slithers as he talks, tentacles writhing over skin. I feel sick. They pull apart.

“Long drive,” he says and stretches, sleeves sliding up to reveal more ink, more tentacles. Does it cover his entire body?

“I didn’t know you were coming,” she says.

He nuzzles her neck, unmindful of my presence, and mumbles something about needing to “siphon the python” and heads into the house. Enola trails behind him, almost skipping. I catch up and put a hand on her shoulder, stopping her short.

“Who is he?”

“Told you. Doyle.”

“And what is a Doyle?”

“A Doyle is a guy who drove a really long way because I told him I was going to see my brother. Be nice,” she says and follows him. Over her shoulder she adds, “We fuck.” There are few things with more visceral power than the sudden awareness that your sister has sex. The image of tentacled arms is too much. It is a full five minutes before I can go inside.

*

Doyle is sprawled across my sofa, my bed. I pull my chair into the middle of the room and sit in front of him. Yes, there are tentacles crawling up his arms and face. I can see the fine lines of each elliptical sucker. Enola shuffles pots around in the kitchen. For the moment Doyle and I are alone. There’s a shiftiness to his pointed features. If I turned on the lights he’d skitter behind the couch.

“Wild place you got, man. Wild,” he says. “Your house is pretty much hanging off the cliff.”

“Erosion. It’s a problem around here,” I say. We fuck, she said. This thing copulates with my sister.

“Yeah, yeah. That’s right,” he laughs. A lazy half wheeze. “I’m shit at remembering stuff like that.” He makes a twitching gesture. His hand is also covered with tattoos. Squid? Octopi? “Slept through earth science.”

“So you and my sister.”

“Yeah. She’s a down chick, you know? Real cool.”

I stare.

Enola returns with a box of cookies I’d forgotten about. She flops on the couch, draping herself over Doyle. Neither minds that they’re in my bed. She feeds him a stale cookie and asks if we’re getting along. Of course we are. Just beautifully.

“How did the two of you meet?”

“In Atlantic City, on the Boardwalk,” she says. So this is the one.

“Yeah. She had her cards out and I thought, man, that’s a sweet little bird.”

He might not see the murder in me but Enola does. She puts her arm around his shoulders and the pale underside of her wrist attaches itself to his tattoo’s suction cups. I ask what he does.

“I’m the Electric Boy.” The lightbulbs in the back of her car begin to make sense.

“What exactly is the Electric Boy?” I lean back in my chair, almost tipping it. I know what’s coming.