Helen Keller Really Lived: A Novel

"I’d say I have too much time on my hands, if I had them."

Helen Keller Really Lived 187 I’d say I have too much time on my hands, if I had them. Which doesn’t mean I’ve been jacking off. For one, I can’t. For another, my new hobby is not just a hobby, but a scholarly enterprise as I boldly go where no academic has gone before, collecting cultural artifacts from the other side. Publication could be a problem, but at least I won’t perish in the effort. Still, with all the hours I spend each day (even if I am not, strictly speaking, bound to diurnal existence), recording, archiving and editing, I have more than enough time to think of you. An eternity, króshka. You’re always on my mind, this free-floating epiphenomenon , this phantom hovercraft without a landing pad. You’re 188 Elisabeth Sheffield always on my mind, for lack of a better term, even as you continue to pretend that I’m not on yours. So one thing I’ve been wondering is how a smart cookie like you could get mixed up with a sneaky súka like that. OK, you explain… the maze of rural byways, the ambush of postmodern architecture, the switchblade. You were addled, embattled, in fear of your life and behind on your rent. But surely your whore’s sense told you the deal was Trojan, and I’m not talking about condoms. If I could’ve warned you, I would’ve. But after the divorce proceedings, not to mention the death, I was out of it. Really out of it. What people don’t know about dying is that it’s not just an out of body experience but also out of mind. The mind simply isn’t for a while. For while energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can be converted from one form to another. Imagine, Selinka, our phantom hovercraft disintegrating into fairy dust: then throw a sparkly fistful into space and watch it disperse. In other words, one is no longer one, as the glitter of self diffuses into all. And then gradually the entity, so to speak, drifts back to being, in the mental if not physical sense. I won’t attempt a technical explanation of the process—I can’t (I was a medical doctor, goddammit, not a particle physicist). But if it helps, consider the truism “old habits die hard.” Finally , mind is just a rut (forget the hovercraft analogy) that memes stumble into. It should be noted that some of us return more completely than others. I won’t pat myself on the back (I can’t), but I will say you’re lucky I’m not one of those half-baked bolváns perseverating about bloody hands, money beneath the bedroom floorboards, and tools missing from the shed. They’re worse than Alzheimer’s patients. You can’t dump them in a nursing home—the dumb fucks will only come back to haunt to you. Helen Keller Really Lived 189 Yeah, you’re a lucky ducky, that I’ve got all my marbles (memes?). Sure, I can’t keep you out of jail. I don’t want to: the image of you in an orange jumpsuit, your sweet meat behind bars, is just too delicious. But maybe I can help you make sense of the whole mess—the savor of understanding is something we can both enjoy. So why did you get mixed up with Fritzi? Sure you smelled money. At the same time money doesn’t smell the same on everyone, and your olfaction was more acute than most. What did money smell like on Fritzi? What did it smell like on me? Let’s start there, détka, with the hope of tracking the one scent to the other. What did money smell like on Timor Zinkovsky? Bury your nose in the engram of my armpit, in the pine-sol forest of American deodorant, and tell me you couldn’t smell the piss-resined scaffolding of Brighton Beach boardwalk beneath. Not to mention the small reek of Odessa, like a rat scurrying into the dark. Be honest, you won’t hurt my feelings, though there’s no need to gag. You can’t hurt my feelings . Like my baba said after the Fritzis (no wonder I don’t like that woman) schnitzled her man and then krauted her kin (did I ever mention my...