Excerpts from an Instagram essay, by Jeff Sharlet. See part one.
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Ryan is working. He has brought out into the night—Minneapolis, a neighborhood called Dinkytown—a trash bag of packing peanuts, a cup of water so he can stick them to windows, and a portable loudspeaker with a microphone. “There’s always going to be obstacles to loving your child,” he broadcasts. “You must destroy them.” // He’s wearing a sombrero, beneath it a wig of yellow curls. Also, a toga, or maybe a muumuu. A garment of his own devising, yellow and green batik, tied tight around his chest, just below the nipple. He knows what he looks like. It’s a job, he says. “Being crazy.” Social security, ten years. // I’m interested in the window. “I think he’s telling the truth,” says a woman named Laura, who’s been helping him stick peanuts to the window of this cafe. “I’m a mother,” she says. // “I’m crazy,” Ryan says, “but I’m a great dad.” // His wife works here. Their daughter is named K___. “For a friend who committed suicide,” he says. Her middle name’s Nirvana, after the band. His wife has custody. “She told the court I came into the coffee shop and threw water at her.” False. “I was throwing water at somebody else, and she got splashed.” // Laura says, “Kids like water.” // “It’s discrimination,” Ryan says, “because I’m insane.” // “I have to go now, Ryan,” Laura says. “My baby needs me.” Her boy. He’s turning eight on Sunday. // Ryan’s working on the next window. He’s writing his baby girl’s name. K___. “It’s pretty, right?” he says. He smiles. “She loved me.” Past tense. “I’ll probably never see her again.”
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Motorcycle, needs to be moved, 3 a.m. Jonathan’s job to move it. Can’t wait? “Nope. Right now.” Buckle it down. “No more calls, I’m hoping.” Long shift. “Started at noon.” 15 hours? “I’m the night shift manager.” So why noon? “Yeah, I know.” That’s the shift? “It’s just working.” Call’s worth $125. Who pays? “Owner. He made the call.” Must be an easier way. “I don’t know,” says Jonathan. “I don’t have a motorcycle.”
* * *
“Killing time,” Tracy says. She was playing when we arrived, and now it’s last call. Which is two a.m. at the Green Mill, a sports bar in Minneapolis. Must’ve been a crowd earlier—Vikings-Packers. Packers, in a rout, and nobody’s talking about the game. Hardly anybody here but Tracy. I ask her if she’s winning. “It’s Photo Hunt,” she says. “You just have to find things.” I thought she was gambling. Video poker. “Oh, no,” she says. “It’s just”—she finds what she’s looking for. “Now,” she says, “I’m looking for a shield.” She finds her shield. She’s not a regular, she says. “I just come here all the time.” Because it’s easy. “My boyfriend’s the bartender.” Big man, I’d noticed his shirt—Vikings, taut across the shoulders. Looks like he played. A kind face. I want to ask him for his picture. Twenty years on Tracy at least. // That’s not him, Tracy says. “I mean, he used to work here.” Now he’s at Chino Latino. She works there, too. Tonight’s his shift. He’s closing. She’s waiting. It’s last call. “He’ll be here soon.” She smiles, looks up from Photo Hunt, points out the door. “He lives right there.” Across the street. “It’s convenient.” // Later my friend Joan says, “Twelve seconds.” Twelve seconds for Tracy to mention her boyfriend. “I wasn’t—” I say. “Doesn’t matter,” says Joan. “Mention of boyfriend; someone’s expecting you; mention of proximity.” I say, “I didn’t mean to—” Joan says, “It’s not about you.” “It’s true,” says T, Joan’s boyfriend. Joan says: “ ‘I have a boyfriend. He’ll be here soon. He’s close by.’ You do it without thinking.”
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My friend T drives an ambulance, so he wasn’t really interested when we came upon a city block taped off for an accident. He’d seen it before, knew nothing good comes of seeing it at all. He had other things on his mind. It was close to midnight, kitchens were closing, T wanted to eat. But the cop at the end of the block drew me in. Drew me in by turning away. Whole block taped off, just one cop. Fat guy drinking Diet Snapple. Leaning against his SUV. Bit of a chill in the air. Decided to sit inside. // So there was nobody at the tape, nobody on the street. Like a movie set, after the shooting. T’s girlfriend, Joan, and I walked down the middle of the road. Nothing to see but police tape. Tape on both sides. Tape around cars like presents wrapped in yellow ribbon. Tape around trees. // Then, middle of the block, the crash. No bodies, no blood, no people. Just cars, or what had once been cars. Now they were beyond such categories. Beyond physics, it seemed. We studied. Like we’d been given a problem to solve. We couldn’t solve it. (“You’d be amazed at the ways bodies survive,” T told us later. He said he’d seen bodies—people, alive—pulled out of arrangements like this one. “So, you know, maybe,” he said.) // After a while, a cop—he must have been a cop—told us to leave the “crime scene.” // T had been right. About the kitchens. We missed them by minutes. So we drove, looking for late night in Minneapolis, because T and Joan had driven down to the city to visit me, I was on a flight home in the morning and this was what we had for a social hour. Around 2:30 we found ourselves, by accident, back at the crime scene. The tape had disappeared. A few banged-up cars sat slightly askew from where their owners had parked them. There’d be surprises in the morning. The main characters were gone. Only chalk outlines remained. A drawing for each piece. I looked at T. Something about this felt different than gawking. Maybe. I took a picture: there was a wheel here, and part of an axle. You’d be amazed at the ways bodies survive.
* * *
“I think it counts as a church,” she says. One story, red brick, looks like a dentist’s office. Letters on the glass door, Institute of Religion. Latter Day Saints. Hillary left when she was 18. But the Church, she says, always remembers your name. // Hillary remembers her baptisms. Plural. Baptisms for the dead. A Mormon practice: saving the souls of those who’ve already died. Hillary was the proxy. There was a television screen beside a basin perched on the back of 12 carved oxen. She doesn’t remember what she wore. “Maybe there was a zipper.” And there was a man. He’d read a name off the screen, and dunk her. Read another name, and dunk her. “A guy I didn’t know, touching me, dunking me underwater.” Some people panic. “It’s kinda like being drowned.” // There were a dozen, maybe 15 baptisms. But there was only one name: Maria Salome. A dozen, maybe 15, Maria Salomes, 16th century, she thinks, she can’t remember. And one Hillary, age 13, going under, and under. // She’s 30 now. She’s moved around. She’s back in Minnesota. Working on a novel. Five, actually. A series. 1061 pages so far. Unread. She’s thinking of giving some pages to the man she lives with. The man and his wife and his two boys; Hillary lives in their basement. Old friends, there for her when money isn’t. She lives in their basement and she comes up for meals, she plays with the boys, and then around 11 she goes down and she writes, until 3 or 4 in the morning. She works hard. No romance. Just writing. Friends, occasionally. Her friends play Dungeons & Dragons; she watches. They play Magic, the card game; she asks them how. // In the book, which has no name, there’s a girl, 17, and a man, 25. Something bad has happened to the girl, but we don’t know what it is. There are scars. There are dark forces. She doesn’t want to give it away. // The last volume will end on July 16, 1999. “That was the day,” she says, “when I first knew I was going to die.” She was on a river, she remembers the water, it was gentle. “You couldn’t drown,” she says. She remembers everything about July 16, 1999.
* * *
No story, just the dead, in their tidy rows. Seen from a plane banking over a cemetery, on my way home.
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Jeff Sharlet’s books include The Family, and C Street, and Sweet Heaven When I Die. He’s an associate professor of creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College. Read more of his Instagram essays at http://instagram.com/jeffsharlet
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