As I Die Lying by Scott Nicholson Page A

wheel and go into the ditch. To tumble and roll
until there wasn't enough left of me to fill a Dixie cup."
    A hush fell over the car, weighty as a
boulder, and even the tinny rock music couldn’t squelch it.
    "Why?" I said, my voice a whisper.
    "Because. I have everything I want. All the
money I could ever spend. I've got a perfect sit-com family. Dad
plays golf and Mom's the president of the PTA. Both on the
goddamned school board, for Christ’s sake. They keep telling me
what a bright future I have ahead of me. But I'm fucking
miserable."
    I said nothing.
    “ What would you do if you
had everything you ever wanted?” she said.
    I started to say, “Get laid a lot,” but that
wasn’t the kind of thing you bring up when you’re trying to get
laid. Plus, considering the way I lost my virginity, it wasn’t a
subject I wanted to broach.
    She continued. "Tonight, I was going to take
you with me. Get you out here and then wreck us, turn us both into
chopped liver. And I almost did it, too. And I don't even know
why."
    A moment of dead silence. Something fell off
a shelf in the Bone House.
    "What stopped you?" I finally asked.
    "Because it wouldn't be fair. I want to die,
I want to go into the hellfire the minister always threatened me
with. I deserve it. But I don't want to go alone. I'm afraid to go
alone. Isn’t that lame?"
    Some dead president once said there was
nothing to fear but fear itself. He died anyway, and he killed a
lot of people on his way to the grave. So fuck that. Be afraid.
    "Why do you want to die?" I finally asked,
because there were no other words.
    "How could I make you
understand, Richard? You're weird, but a normal kind of weird. I'm
so screwed up all the time, and I don't have anybody to talk to. I
just want to get out of this life, away from the goddamn voices ."
    "Voices?" I swallowed my heart. It tasted
like licorice.
    "Nobody can understand. Not even you."
    "You can talk to me. I'm your Poet,
remember?"
    "You're probably just like the others, just
want to get between my legs for a little horizontal hoedown, then
throw me aside like a cum rag. Why the hell did I think you were
any different?"
    Tears squeezed out of the corners of her
eyes, the water of her blue seas spilling hotly down her cheeks.
Women and their tears. And they wondered why men took advantage of
them. She pulled over to the side of the deserted road and pressed
her forehead against the steering wheel. The radio shifted into
something with a bass line that sounded like a march into the
sea.
    After a second that seemed a year, I touched
her hair gently and leaned close. What a couple we made, Romeo and
Juliet gone insane, huddled in a dark car in the Iowa twilight.
Crickets fiddled among the cornrows; otherwise, nothing interrupted
the starry silence but noise that drifted from a distant
antenna.
    We were two souls reaching out to each other
across a great gulf, tenuously connecting over a pit of despair and
loneliness and bleak imagery. Virginia with her death wish and
false bravado, and me with my headful of little friends and a
thirst for whatever liquid I could squeeze from the moon. The odds
would have been greatly against us no matter the circumstances. As
it was, we had no chance.
    Maybe we should have died together. A fitting
end to nothing. But somebody had other plans.
    "Tell me about the voices," I said.

 
     
    CHAPTER TWELVE
     
    "You'll think I'm crazy," Virginia said,
between soft sobs.
    "This world makes people crazy. It's a
survival mechanism." I scooted closer to her.
    I was disoriented, as if this intimacy was
beyond me, as if it were another doing the touching and I was an
alien butterfly emerging from a black cocoon, fluttering madly
toward the light.
    Virginia's tears had stopped, but I could see
the streaks on her face in the lunar glow. Her features were
shrouded in darkness except the glint of her eyes. But as I looked
at her, it was as if I were peering down a long dark hall, removed
from the world of