Life on the Preservation, US Edition Read Free Page A

covers the whole city, and you can see through it a little bit. Like you can see the buildings and water, but everything is all wavy and dim, like looking through thick green glass.” He held his empty beer bottle, bottom-up, to Kylie’s eye. “Kind of like this. Kylie, there’s a reason I want you to come with me.”
    “Because you love me so much?”
    “Yeah, sure. But–”
    She pushed the bottle aside. “I couldn’t leave my mom, Billy. She’d be all alone.”
    “She’s as frightened as everybody else.” Billy swung his feet to the floor, fumbled for the clicker and turned Tombstone off. “But Kylie, I have to go – and soon. We both do, before Jim gets your neighbors whipped into a real mob. And everybody being afraid of the world outside Oakdale can work in our favor.”
    “They aren’t a mob ,” Kylie said, deeply distracted now, looking around the room to make sure the blinds were all closed; the thing she had seen without registering was coming closer. She could almost remember.
    “They aren’t yet,” Billy said. “But it’s only a matter of time before– What’s wrong?”
    Kylie stood up. The thing had finally come forward. In the bedroom’s black glass mirror window: a bed, a candle, herself... and behind the reflections a face swam into view, and Kylie caught her breath.
    “I think Father Jim is outside.”

 
    THE NOBLE CORPSE
     
     
    T O BECOME HIMSELF, Travis Dugan had to leave himself. At age twenty-three he started by leaving his name, then his family (who after all had already left him, his mother weeping and his father stone-faced in the cyclone wind of Travis’s coming out politically and sexually), and finally Chewelah, Washington.
    He shed ‘Travis Dugan’ like a dun-colored humpback carapace he’d been forced to wear his whole life, a name that defined him in the schoolyard pecking order and the expectations of small-town gossips. His new name was Charles Noble, who had been a minor character in a minor French novel. A Spokane County superior court judge signed the necessary document, the clerk stamped the paperwork, and Charles Noble was re-born in the real world.
    But Travis was not reborn out of his isolation. Twelve years later, modestly prosperous but alone, Charles remained a minor character in his own life, the carapace invisible but intact, shielding his truest identity from the world – and most especially from one Curtis Sarmir, proprietor of the bookshop next door. At 10:30 in the morning of October fifth, 2012 on a shabby by-street of Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, in the small apartment in the back of the art gallery he owned, Charles removed his clothes and hanged himself.
    It wasn’t the first time.
    But it was the first time the act proved fatal. Charles Noble’s corpse swayed forward on its knees, the noose buried in its fleshy neck, the rope stretched taut behind it, knotted to a three-foot bar of doweling in the open closet. The corpse’s tongue, swollen and purple, protruded like a fig from its pale lips.
     
     
    L ATER THE CORPSE opened its eyes and sat back on folded legs, making the rope go slack between the noose and the closet doweling. The noose glowed briefly, blackened, unraveled in wisps of smoke, became a ring of ashes and flaked away. Noble’s strangled airway swelled open, drawing air into collapsed lungs. The body heaved, chest expanding, tendons cracking, then fell heavily forward, a fading red circlet around its neck. Neurons sparked through the brain, chemical transmitters re-activated, and dead matter became enlivened. The heart muscle labored, then discovered its accustomed rhythm. Arterial circulation resumed. Livid bruises caused by pooled blood faded, were gone.
    What had been Charles Noble stood up and got dressed.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
     
    SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012
     
     
    R EPEAT. T HEN GRAB a cup of Joe.
     
     
    I AN P ALMER CAME to himself at the kitchen counter of his studio apartment in Seattle’s Capitol