Don't Disappoint Ch. 22

by Martin van Cooper

Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next week and a half, we’ll finish serializing the remaining chapters of Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

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Bushmaster is the colloquial term for subspecies of pit vipers indigenous to the American south. Lachesis muta. Candy had built a contraption in their garage that allowed the gun to be essentially stood on end with the barrel pointing up and the butt secured to the bump stock on the ground in a position that allowed one to stand over the barrel and lean forward to discharge the weapon by placing the soft part between the thumb and index fingers onto the trigger. The contraption had a holster like thing on the ground where the gun butt fitted with bump stock rested and she had welded to it—as part of the stand of sorts, that positioned the rifle up from the ground at a 60 degree angle—a metal rod with a 2 inch diameter pipe welded onto the end, into which the Bushmaster’s barrel was inserted, allowing movement along but not off the 60 degree axis during discharge. Bushtit, apart from being another glorious—yet unclaimed—nom de guerre in the adult film industry, is a songbird native to the American southwest that builds elaborate, asymmetrical nests that if stumbled upon appear tumorous and unsettling. Psaltriparus minimus.

Like you’re the guy waiting in the surgery recovery room for his mistress, Frank is saying to Jason. You’re there waiting for your mistress to come out of emergency surgery for something and realizing that you may be the only one in the room contemplating the upsides of a bad outcome. Did she leave a diary that could be used to out you in such a scenario? Routine surgeries often had major complications unrecognized by the general population. Leave the cyst in thank you very much if I have a 1% chance of dying from the operation. Who fucking cares about a cyst. My cousin had to be resuscitated when things went awry in a gall bladder removal. It also helps, a lot, that most people have absolutely no concept of statistics. He felt the need to distinguish between thick headed caveman types that had affairs and horsed around just because they couldn’t not horse around, versus him, who was sought after for his high intellect and charm and humor, which women chose to access through his drawers.

Jason could not relate to this. He found himself mourning the loss of people that never existed, the children he never had with women he once knew that he left because of some book he’d read, some song he’d heard or some social slight he’d suffered. That any single specific person exists is only in defiance of impossibility. No one has the right to be here, statistically speaking. If the truth cannot be known, then everything is a lie. Was it J.R.O. who drove home the day they had figured out nuclear fission and wondered to himself why man wasted time and effort continuing to build bridges and buildings and mow lawns and pay taxes and go to school? Once the bomb existed, didn’t it make more sense to just huddle in a circle with your wife and children and just hold them until it ended? Jason found himself thinking about the benefits of nuclear apocalypse vis-à-vis not having to read another 20 essays comparing/contrasting 1984 and Brave New World first quarter, Ordinary People and Catcher in second and Macbeth or Hamlet and take your pick in the third. Fucking SFO, someone is saying. I mean what the fuck. Yeah, but I mean two hours. That’s just plain ridiculous. I don’t know where its coming from. It’s always the same with fucking SFO. There’s no reason we should be delayed two hours, tee time is 7 am. Get up early and catch breakfast. The plane took off and he drifted off.

We walked along an empty highway through some underpasses and met halfway through. He was reciting something Jason had read before and immediately recognized and he started to anticipate the next lines. It was not his work but something saccharine, prescriptive, self-helpy and uplifting in a wearisome way. Like the last pages when HDT was wrapping up and went full didactic. Castles in the sky. Like something from an after school special but with better grammar, a few better word choices and flawless elocution. His appearance was changing from the dust jacket images first to shorter ‘90’s skater hair dyed blond and then to Justin Timberlake high fade gelled comb over with peroxide faint goatee. On inspection even his eyelashes were blond, almost white and his eyes blue. I read that one too, Jason said to him, after he finished and somehow his finishing intimated a different present where he was still alive. Identification. I identify. But then they were chasing us and he ran alone into a two-story condo that Jason somehow knew connected to her condo. They’re coming he said and I need to get through and was granted passage—was understood—identified with. She sat alone downstairs and was applying red lipstick. She was without joy but clearly not sad. The two cats came up to him, both with transparent skin on their faces that made possible clear observation of the arteries and veins, red and bright blue like in class, feeding the eyes. They had large hard transparent blisters next to one eye that seemed fragile and foretold pain and trouble although felt to the touch like amber. She stared ahead and didn’t speak after he told her why he was there and down the stairs a light green plastic cup tumbled as though accidentally kicked and a man he didn’t know, who could be an imposter of his future self, came down the stairs. I wasn’t here for that, he told him, by means of clearing the air. He is getting up to leave but he didn’t answer and instead shared with her some unspoken understanding that registered in the way their postures shifted when in the same room. She didn’t turn to look at him as he left out the door. He heard him recognized as he entered the neighboring space—they knew each other, of course…don’t they all know each other—and the door shut behind him.

Rather than producing a single shot, Candy’s 105 pounds propped in this manner against the trigger managed to discharge, Frank surmised from the marks in the ceiling, 12 shots in probably 1.5 seconds through what no longer had any business being referred to as his wife’s head at that point. When he was the first person to happen upon the scene. That she did this in the garage where it was certain he would be the first to find her and the fact that she did it without warning and while intentionally masking any outward psychic decline and with a method so grotesque and complex made inescapable to Frank the message she clearly meant to send him: There.