NOS4A2 A Novel

Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania


EARLY IN THE SUMMER OF 2001, THE NEWS REACHED BING PARTRIDGE that Charlie Manx was bad sick. Bing was fifty-three by then and had not put his gasmask on in five years.

Bing found out from an article on AOL, which he accessed using the big black Dell computer he had received from NorChemPharm for thirty years of service. He looked at AOL every day for news out of Colorado about Mr. Manx, but there had been nothing for ages until this: Charles Talent Manx III, age unknown, convicted murderer, suspect in dozens of child abductions, had been moved to the hospital wing of FCI Englewood when it proved impossible to wake him up.

Manx was examined by prominent Denver neurosurgeon Marc Sopher, who described his condition as one for the medical books.

“The patient appears to suffer from adult progeria or a rare form of Werner syndrome,” Sopher said. “In the simplest terms, he has begun to age very rapidly. A month is more like a year for him. A year is close to a decade. And this guy was no spring chicken to begin with.”

The doctor said there was no way to tell if Manx’s condition could partially explain the aberrant behavior that led to his brutal slaying of PFC Thomas Priest in 1996. He also declined to describe Charlie Manx’s current state as a coma.

“He doesn’t meet the strict definition [of coma]. His brain function is high—as if he’s dreaming. He just can’t wake up anymore. His body is too tired. He doesn’t have any gas left in the tank.”

Bing had often thought of writing Mr. Manx, to tell him he was still faithful, still loved him, would always love him, would be there to serve him until the day he died. But while Bing was maybe not the shiniest bulb on the Christmas tree—ha, ha—he was smart enough to know that Mr. Manx would be furious with him for writing, and correct to be. A letter from Bing would for sure lead to men in suits knocking on the door, men in sunglasses with guns in armpit holsters. Hello, Mr. Partridge, would you mind answering a few questions? How would you feel about us planting a shovel in your basement, digging around for a bit? So he had never written, and now it was too late, and the thought made him feel sick.

Mr. Manx had passed a message to Bing once, although by what means Bing didn’t know. A package had been dropped on the doorstep with no return address on it, two days after Mr. Manx was sentenced to life in Englewood. Inside were a pair of license plates—NOS4A2/KANSAS—and a little card on ivory laid stock, with a Christmas angel stamped into the front.

Bing had the license plates in the root cellar, where all the rest of his life with Charlie Manx was buried: the empty stolen tanks of sevoflurane, his daddy’s .45, and the remains of the women, the mothers that Bing had brought home with him after many a mission of salvation with Mr. Manx . . . nine missions in all.

Brad McCauley had been the ninth child they had saved for Christmasland, and his mother, Cynthia, the last whore Bing had dealt with in the quiet room downstairs. In a way she had been saved as well, before she died: Bing had taught her about love.

Bing and Mr. Manx had planned to save one more child in the summer of 1997, and that time Bing would go all the way to Christmasland with Mr. Manx, to live where no one grew old and unhappiness was against the law, where he could ride all the rides and drink all the cocoa and open Christmas gifts every morning. When he thought about the cosmic unfairness of it—of Mr. Manx being ripped away right before he could swing wide the gates of Christmasland to Bing at last—he felt smashed inside, as if hope were a vase that had been dropped from a height, crunch.

The worst of it, though, was not losing Mr. Manx or losing Christmasland. It was losing love. It was losing the mommies.

His last, Mrs. McCauley, had been the best. They had long talks in the basement together, Mrs. McCauley naked and tanned and fit, clasped against Bing’s side. She was forty but stringy with muscle that she had built up coaching girls’ volleyball. Her skin radiated heat and health. She stroked the graying hair on Bing’s chest and told him she loved him better than her mother or father, better than Jesus, better than her own son, better than kittens, better than sunshine. It felt good to hear her say it: “I love you, Bing Partridge. I love you so much it’s burning me. I’m all kindling inside. It’s burning me alive.” Her breath had been sweet with the smell of the gingerbread smoke; she was so fit, and so healthy, he had to dose her with his flavored sevoflurane mix once every three hours. She loved him so much she cut her own wrists when he told her they couldn’t live together. They made love one last time while she bled out—while she bled all over him.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“Oh, Bing, Bing, you silly thing,” she said. “I’ve been burning with love for days. A couple little cuts like these, they don’t hurt at all.”

She was so pretty—had such perfect mommy tits—he couldn’t bear to pour the lye on her until she began to smell. Even with flies in her hair, she was pretty; extra pretty, really. The bluebottles glittered like gems.

Bing had visited the Graveyard of What Might Be with Mr. Manx and knew that if Cynthia McCauley had been left to her own devices, she would’ve killed her son in a steroid-fueled rage. But down in his quiet room, Bing had taught her kindness and love and how to suck cock, so at least she ended her life on a good note.

That was what it was all about: taking something awful and making something good of it. Mr. Manx saved the children, and Bing saved the mommies. Now, though, the mommies were over and done. Mr. Manx was locked-up gone, and Bing’s gasmask hung on a hook behind the back door, where it had been since 1996. He read the story in the news about Mr. Manx falling asleep—into a deep, endless sleep, a brave soldier under a wicked enchantment—and then printed it and folded it and decided to pray on it some.

In his fifty-third year, Bing Partridge had become a churchgoing man once again, had returned to the New American Faith Tabernacle in the hopes that God would offer some comfort for one of his loneliest children. Bing prayed that one day he would hear “White Christmas” playing in the driveway and would push back the linen curtain and see Mr. Manx behind the wheel of the Wraith, the window rolled down and the Good Man gazing out at him. Come on, Bing! Let’s go for a ride! Number ten is waiting for us! Let’s go grab one more kid and take you to Christmasland! Heaven knows you’ve earned it!

He climbed the steep hill, in the smothering heat of a July afternoon. The foil flowers in his front yard—twenty-nine of them—were perfectly still and silent. He hated them. He hated the blue sky, too, and the maddening harmonic of the cicadas throbbing in the trees. Bing trudged up the hill with the news story in one hand (“Rare Condition Befalls Convicted Murderer”) and Mr. Manx’s final note in the other (“I might be a while. 9.”) to speak to God about these things.

The church stood in a hectare of buckled blacktop, shoots of pale grass as high as Bing’s knees sticking up through the cracks. A loop of heavy-duty chain and a Yale lock held the front doors shut. No one except for Bing himself had prayed there for going on fifteen years. The tabernacle had belonged to the Lord once, but now it was property of the moneylenders; a sun-faded sheet of paper in a clear plastic envelope tacked to one of the doors said so.

The cicadas buzzed in Bing’s head, like madness.

Out at one end of the lot was a big sign like they’d have out in front of a Dairy Queen or a used-car lot, telling people which hymn they’d be singing that day. ONLY IN GOD and HE’S ALIVE AGAIN and THE LORD NEVER SLEEPS. DEVOTIONS were promised for 1:00 P.M. The sign had been promising those same hymns since Reagan’s second term.

Some of the stained-glass windows had holes where kids had chucked rocks at them, but Bing didn’t climb in that way. There was a shed out to one side of the church, half hidden back in the dusty poplars and sumac. A rotting cord doormat lay in front of the shed’s door. A bright brass key was hidden beneath it.

The key opened the padlock on the sloped cellar doors at the back of the building. Bing let himself below. He crossed a cool subterranean room, wading through the smell of old creosote and mildewed books, and came up into the big open theater of the church.

Bing had always liked church, back in the days when he still went with his mother. He had liked the way the sun came through the twenty-foot-high stained-glass windows, filling the room with warmth and color, and he had liked the way the mommies dressed, in white lace and heels and milky-white stockings. Bing loved white stockings and loved to hear a woman sing. All the mommies who stayed with him in the House of Sleep sang before they took their last rest.

But after the pastor ran away with the whole treasury and the bank locked the church up, Bing found that the place troubled him. He did not like the way the shadow of the steeple seemed to reach for his house in the late of day. Bing found after he started taking mommies back to his home—a place Mr. Manx had christened the House of Sleep—he could hardly stand to look at the top of the hill anymore. The church loomed, the shadow of the steeple an accusing finger that stretched down the slope and pointed at his front yard: HERE IS A DEADLY KILLER! NINE DEAD WOMEN IN HIS BASEMENT!

Bing tried to tell himself he was being foolish. He and Mr. Manx were heroes, really; they did Christian work. If someone wrote a book about them, you would have to mark them down as the good guys. It did not matter that many of the mothers, when dosed with sevoflurane, would still not admit to their plans to whore their daughters or beat their sons and that several contended they had never taken drugs, did not drink to excess, and did not have criminal records. Those things were in the future, a wretched future that Bing and Mr. Manx worked hard to prevent. If he was ever arrested—because of course no lawman would ever understand the importance and basic goodness of their vocation—Bing felt he could talk about his work with pride. There was no shame in him about any of the things he had done with Mr. Manx.

Still, he occasionally had trouble looking up at the church.

He told himself, as he climbed the steps from the basement, that he was being a ninny, that all men were welcome in God’s house and Mr. Manx needed Bing’s prayers—now more than ever. For himself, Bing had never felt so alone or forlorn. A few weeks earlier, Mr. Paladin had asked Bing what he was going to do with himself after he retired. Bing was shocked and asked why he would retire. He liked his job. Mr. Paladin blinked and said after forty years they would make him retire. You didn’t get a choice in the matter. Bing had never thought about it. He had assumed that by now he would be drinking cocoa in Christmasland, opening presents in the morning, singing carols in the night.

The vast empty sanctuary did not put his mind at ease that afternoon. Just the opposite, in fact. All the pews were still there, although they were no longer lined up in neat rows but had been shoved this way and that, were as crooked as Mr. Manx’s teeth. The floor was littered with broken glass and chunks of plaster, which crunched underfoot. The room smelled rankly of ammonia, of bird piss. Someone had been in here drinking. The bottles and beer cans left behind littered the pews.

He went on, pacing the length of the room. His passage disturbed the swallows in the rafters. The sound of their beating wings echoed, a noise like a magician spraying playing cards into the air.

The light that slanted in through the windows was cold and blue, and motes of dust turned within the bars of sunshine, as if the church were the interior of a snow globe just beginning to settle.

Someone—teenagers, homeless—had made an altar in one of the deep-set window frames. Deformed red candles stood in hardened puddles of wax, and set behind the candles were several photographs of Michael Stipe from R.E.M., a scrawny queer with pale hair and pale eyes. Someone had written “LOSING MY RELIGION” on one of the photographs in cherry lipstick. Bing himself felt there had not been a single thing worth listening to in rock music since Abbey Road.

Bing set the card from Mr. Manx and the printout from the Denver Post in the center of this homemade altar and lit a couple candles for the Good Man. He cleared some space on the floor, kicking aside chunks of broken plaster and a dirty pair of panties—little hearts on them, looked like they’d fit a ten-year-old—and got on his knees.

He cleared his throat. In the vast echoing space of the church, it sounded as loud as a gunshot.

A swallow rattled its wings, gliding from one rafter to another.

He could see a line of pigeons leaning forward to stare down at him with their bright, rabies-red eyes. They watched him with fascination.

He shut his eyes and put his hands together and spoke with God.

“Hey, there, God,” Bing said. “It’s Bing, that old dumb thing. Oh, God. Oh, God God God. Please help Mr. Manx. Mr. Manx has the sleepies, bad, and I don’t know what to do, and if he doesn’t get better and come back to me, I’ll never have my trip to Christmasland. I tried my best to do something good with my life. I tried my best to save children and make sure they’d have cocoa and rides and things. It wasn’t easy. No one wanted us to save them. But even when the mommies screamed and called us awful names, even when their children cried and wet themselves, I loved them. I loved those kids, and I loved their mommies, even if they were bad women. And I loved Mr. Manx most of all. Everything he does, he does so other people can be happy. Isn’t that the kindest thing a person can do—spread a little happiness around? Please, God, if we did any good at all, please, help me, give me a sign, tell me what to do. Please, please, please, pl—”

His face was tipped back and his mouth was open when something hot hit his cheek, and he tasted something salty and bitter on his lips. He flinched; it was like someone had cum on him. He swiped at his mouth and looked at his fingers, now coated with a whitish green crud, a sloppy liquid mash. It took a moment to identify it as pigeon shit.

Bing groaned: once, then again. His mouth was full of the salt-crème taste of bird shit. The stuff cupped in his palm looked like diseased phlegm. His moaning rose to a scream and he pitched himself backward, kicking plaster and glass, and put his other hand down on something damp and sticky, with the soft texture of Saran Wrap. He glanced down and discovered he had planted his hand on a soiled condom crawling with ants.

He lifted his hand in horror, in revulsion, and the condom stuck to his fingers, and he flicked his hand once, twice, and it flipped up and landed in his hair. He shrieked. Birds exploded from the rafters.

“What?” he screamed to the church. “What? I came here on my knees! I CAME ON MY KNEES! And you do what? WHAT?”

He grabbed the rubber and yanked, tearing out a fistful of his own wispy gray hair at the same time (when had it all turned gray?). Dust swirled in the light.

Bing Partridge went down the hill in a shambling jog, feeling defiled and ill . . . defiled, ill, and outraged. He reeled like a drunk past the foil flowers in his front yard and banged the door shut behind him.

It was the Gasmask Man who stepped out twenty minutes later, a bottle of lighter fluid in each hand.

Before he lit the place up, he boarded over the holes in the windows so the birds couldn’t get out. He drizzled most of one bottle over the pews and the heaps of broken wood and plaster on the floor: perfect little premade bonfires. The other bottle he emptied on the figure of Jesus, mounted on his cross up in the apse. He looked cold in his little loincloth, so Bing flicked a match and dressed him in a robe of flame. Mary gazed sadly down at this latest indignity inflicted upon her son from a mural above him. Bing tapped two fingers to the mouthpiece of his mask, blew her a kiss.

Give him a chance to grab child number ten with Mr. Manx, Bing thought, and he didn’t care if he had to gas and kill Christ’s own mama to get the little bastard.

Besides. There wasn’t anything the Holy Ghost had done in Mother Mary’s p-ssy that Bing couldn’t have done better, if he had three days alone with her in the House of Sleep.





Gunbarrel, Colorado


THE CHILDREN NEVER CALLED WHEN SHE WAS PAINTING.

It was months before Vic understood this consciously, but on some level of her mind that existed beneath reason, she got it almost right away. When she wasn’t painting, when she didn’t have creative work to occupy her, she became aware of a growing physical apprehension, like she was standing beneath a crane that was holding a piano aloft; at any moment she felt that the cables could snap and all that weight could fall upon her with a fatal crash.

So she lined up every job she could get and spent seventy hours a week in the garage listening to Foreigner and airbrushing motorcycles for men with criminal records and offensive racial notions.

Vic painted flames and guns and naked chicks and grenades and Dixie flags and Nazi flags and Jesus Christ and white tigers and rotting ghouls and more naked chicks. She didn’t think of herself as an artist. Painting kept Christmasland from calling and paid for Pampers. All other considerations were of little importance.

Sometimes, though, the jobs dried up. Sometimes it seemed she had painted every motorcycle in the Rockies and there would never be another gig. When that happened—when she had more than a week or two without painting—she found herself grimly waiting. Readying herself.

Then one day the phone would ring.

It happened in September, on a Tuesday morning, five years after Manx went to jail. Lou had gone out before the sun came up to tow someone out of a ditch, left her with Wayne, who wanted hot dogs for breakfast. All those years smelled of steaming hot dogs and steaming baby shit.

Wayne was parked in front of the tube, and Vic was squirting ketchup into cheap hot-dog rolls when the phone rang.

She stared at the receiver. It was too early for the phone to be ringing, and she already knew who it was, because she had not painted anything in almost a month.

Vic touched the receiver. It was cold.

“Wayne,” she said.

The boy looked up, finger in his mouth, drool down the front of his X-Men T-shirt.

“Do you hear the phone ringing, Wayne?” she asked.

He stared at her blankly, uncomprehendingly for a moment, then shook his head.

It rang again.

“There,” she said. “There, did you hear it? Don’t you hear it ringing?”

“No, Em,” he said, and wagged his head heavily from side to side.

He turned his attention back to the television.

Vic picked up the receiver.

A child—not Brad McCauley, a different child, a girl this time—said, “When is Daddy coming back to Christmasland? What did you do with Daddy?”

“You aren’t real,” Vic said.

In the background she could hear the children caroling.

“Yes I am,” the girl said. A white breath of frozen air seethed through the small holes in the earpiece of the receiver. “We’re just as real as what’s happening in New York this morning. You should see what’s happening in New York. It’s exciting! People are jumping into the sky! It’s exciting, and it’s fun. It’s almost as fun as Christmasland.”

“You aren’t real,” Vic whispered again.

“You told lies about Daddy,” she said. “That was bad. You’re a bad mother. Wayne should be with us. He could play with us all day. We could teach him how to play scissors-for-the-drifter.”

Vic slammed the phone into the cradle. She picked it up and slammed it down once more. Wayne glanced around at her, his eyes wide and alarmed.

She waved a hand at him—never mind—and turned away, struggling not to cry, breath hitching.

The hot dogs boiled over, water jumping out of the pot and spattering into the blue flame of the gas burner. She ignored them, sank down onto the kitchen floor, and covered her eyes. It was an act of will to contain her sobs; she didn’t want to scare Wayne.

“Em!” her boy called, and she looked up, blinking. “Sumfin’ happened to Oscar!”

“Oscar” was his word for Sesame Street. “Sumfin’ happened, an’ Oscar went bye-bye.”

Vic wiped at her streaming eyes, took a shuddering breath, turned off the gas. She walked unsteadily to the television. Sesame Street had gone to a news break. A big jet had hit one of the World Trade Towers in New York City. Black smoke churned into blue, blue sky.

A few weeks later, Vic made space in the closet-size second bedroom, tidied and swept. She moved an easel in there and mounted bristol board on it.

“Whatchu doing?” Lou asked, pushing his head through the door the day after she set herself up.

“Thought I’d draw a picture book,” Vic said. She had the first page sketched in blue pencil, was almost ready to start inking.

Lou peered over her shoulder. “Are you drawing a motorcycle factory?” he asked.

“Close. A robot factory,” she said. “The hero is a robot named Search Engine. On each page he has to work his way through a maze and find some items of importance. Power cells and secret plans and stuff.”

“I think I’m popping a boner for your picture book. Awesome thing to do for Wayne. He’s going to shit.”

Vic nodded. She was happy to let Lou think she was doing it for the kid. She had no illusions, though. She was doing it for herself.

The picture book was better than painting Harleys. It was steady work, and it was there every day.

After she started drawing Search Engine, the phone never rang unless a credit agency was calling.

And after she sold the book, the credit agencies quit calling, too.





Brandenburg, Kentucky


MICHELLE DEMETER WAS TWELVE THE FIRST TIME HER FATHER LET her drive it. A twelve-year-old girl driving a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith through the high grass in the first days of summer with the windows rolled down and Christmas music playing on the radio. Michelle sang along in a big, happy, braying voice—off-key and off-time. When she did not know the lyrics, she made them up.

Come! All ye faithful! Jiggy and triii-umphant!

Come all ye faithful, sing yay for the Lord!

The car swam through the grass, a black shark slicing through a rippling ocean of yellows and greens. Birds scattered before it, darting into a lemon sky. The wheels banged and thudded in unseen ruts.

Her father, crocked and getting crockeder, sat in the passenger seat fiddling with the tuner, a warm Coors between his legs. Only the tuner didn’t do anything. The radio jumped from band to band, but everything was white noise. The only station that came in at all was distant, crackling, and awash with background hiss and playing that goddamn holiday music.

“Who is playing this shit in the middle of May?” he asked, and burped, enormously and grotesquely.

Michelle giggled in appreciation.

There was no way to turn the radio off or even down. The volume dial spun uselessly, adjusting nothing.

“This car is like your old man,” Nathan said, pulling another Coors out of the six-pack at his feet, popping another top. “A wreck of its former self.”

That was just more of his silly talk. Her father wasn’t doing so bad. He had invented some kind of valve for Boeing, and it had paid for three hundred acres above the Ohio River. They were driving around it now.

The car, on the other hand, really had left its best days behind it. The carpet was gone, and where it belonged was bare, humming metal. There were holes under the pedals, and through them Michelle could see grass whipping by below. The leather on the dash was peeling. One of the back doors didn’t match the others, was unpainted and caked with rust. There was no rear window at all, just a round open hole. No backseat either, and a char mark in the rear compartment, where it looked as if someone had tried to light a campfire once.

The girl worked the clutch and the gas and the brake expertly with her right foot, just as her father had taught her. The front seat was cranked all the way forward, and still she had to sit on a pillow so she could see over the high dash and out the window.

“One of these days I’m going to get around to working on this beast. Roll my sleeves up and bring the old lady all the way back to life. Be a hell of a thing to have it completely restored so you could take it to the prom,” her father said. “When you’re old enough for proms.”

“Yah. Good call. Plenty of room in the backseat to make out,” she said, twisting her neck to look over her shoulder into the rear.

“It’d also be a nice ride to take you to the nunnery in. You keep your eyes on the road, why don’tcha?” Gesturing with his beer can at the rise and fall of the land and the tangles of grass and brush and goldenrod, no road in sight in any direction, the only sign of human existence the distant barn in the rearview mirror and the jet contrails overhead.

She pumped the pedals. They wheezed and gasped.

The only thing Michelle didn’t like about the car was the hood ornament, a creepy silver lady with blind eyes and a flowing gown. She leaned out into the lashing weeds and grinned manically as she was flagellated. That silver lady should’ve been magical and pretty, but the smile on her face ruined it. She had the demented grin of a madwoman who has just pushed a loved one off a ledge and is about to follow him into eternity.

“She’s awful,” Michelle said, lifting her chin in the direction of the hood. “Like a vampire lady.”

“The bloofer lady,” her father said, remembering something he had read once.

“The who? She is not called the bloofer lady.”

“No,” Nathan said. “She’s called the Spirit of Ecstasy. She’s classic. She’s a classic part of a classic car.”

“Ecstasy? Like the drug?” Michelle asked. “Wow. Trippy. They were into that back then?”

“No. Not like the drug. Like fun. She’s a symbol of never-ending fun. I think she’s pretty,” he said, although in fact he thought she looked like one of the Joker’s victims, a rich lady who had died laughing.

“I been driving out to Christmasland, all the livelong day,” Michelle sang softly. For the moment the radio was just a roar of static and whine, and she could sing without competition. “I been driving out to Christmasland, just to ride in Santa’s sleigh!”

“What’s that one? I don’t know it,” her dad said.

“That’s where we’re going,” she said. “To Christmasland. I just decided.”

The sky was trying on a variety of citrus hues. Michelle felt perfectly at peace. She felt she could drive forever.

Her tone was soft with excitement and delight, and when her father glanced at her, there was a dew of sweat on her forehead and her eyes had a faraway look.

“It’s out there, Daddy,” she said. “It’s out there in the mountains. If we kept going, we could be in Christmasland by tonight.”

Nathan Demeter narrowed his eyes and peered out through the dusty window. A vast, pale mountain range towered in the west, with snow-touched peaks higher than the Rockies, a mountain range that had not been there this morning, or even when they set out on this drive, twenty minutes ago.

He looked quickly away, blinking to clear his vision, then looked back—and the mountain range resolved into a looming mass of thunderheads, crowding the western horizon. His heart continued to run a three-legged race in his chest for a few moments longer.

“Too bad you have homework. No Christmasland for you,” he said. Even though it was Saturday and no dad anywhere made his twelve-year-old do algebra on a Saturday. “Time to turn us around, sweetheart. Daddy has things to do.”

He slouched back in his seat and had a sip of beer, but he didn’t want it anymore. He felt the first dull edge of tomorrow’s hangover in his left temple. Judy Garland was tragically wishing everyone a merry little Christmas, and what the f*ck was the deejay smoking, playing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in May?

But the music only lasted until they reached the weedy edge of their property and Michelle laboriously turned the Wraith around to point them back toward home. As the Rolls wheeled in a semicircle, the radio lost what little reception it had and once more became a low roar of white noise, of mad static.

It was 2006 and Nathan Demeter had himself an old junker to fix up, bought in a federal auction, something to play with in his spare time. One of these days he was going to get around to really working on it. One of these days he was going to make the old lady shine.