NOS4A2(58)

He slouched back in his seat and had a sip of beer, but he didn’t want it anymore. He felt the first dull edge of tomorrow’s hangover in his left temple. Judy Garland was tragically wishing everyone a merry little Christmas, and what the f*ck was the deejay smoking, playing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in May?

But the music only lasted until they reached the weedy edge of their property and Michelle laboriously turned the Wraith around to point them back toward home. As the Rolls wheeled in a semicircle, the radio lost what little reception it had and once more became a low roar of white noise, of mad static.

It was 2006 and Nathan Demeter had himself an old junker to fix up, bought in a federal auction, something to play with in his spare time. One of these days he was going to get around to really working on it. One of these days he was going to make the old lady shine.





New York (and Everywhere Else)


HERE IS WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT THE SECOND SEARCH ENGINE BOOK in the New York Times Book Review, Children’s Book section, Sunday, July 8, 2007—the only time any of Vic McQueen’s books were reviewed there.

Search Engine’s Second Gear

By Vic McQueen.

22 pages. HarperCollins Children’s Books. $16.95. (Puzzle/Picture Book; ages 6 to 12)

If M. C. Escher were hired to reimagine Where’s Waldo?, it might look something like Ms. McQueen’s fascinating and deservedly popular Search Engine series. The eponymous hero, Search Engine—a cheerful and childlike robot who resembles a cross between C-3PO and a Harley-Davidson—pursues Mad M?bius Stripp across a series of dizzying impossible constructions and surreal mazes. One confounding puzzle cannot be solved without placing a mirror against the edge of the book; another mind bender requires the children to roll the page up into a tube to make a magical covered bridge; a third must be torn out and folded into an origami motorcycle so Search Engine can continue his pursuit at full throttle. Young readers who complete Search Engine’s Second Gear will find themselves faced with the most terrible puzzle of them all: How long until the next one?!





FCI Englewood, Colorado


NURSE THORNTON DROPPED INTO THE LONG-TERM-CARE WARD A little before eight with a hot bag of blood for Charlie Manx.





Denver, Colorado


THE FIRST SATURDAY IN OCTOBER 2009, LOU TOLD VICTORIA MCQUEEN he was taking the kid and going to his mother’s for a while. For some reason he told her this in a whisper, with the door shut, so Wayne, out in the living room, couldn’t hear them talking. Lou’s round face shone with nervous sweat. He licked his lips a lot while he spoke.

They were in the bedroom together. Lou sat on the edge of the bed, causing the mattress to creak and sag halfway to the floor. It was hard for Vic to get comfortable in the bedroom. She kept looking at the phone on the night table, waiting for it to ring. She had tried to get rid of it a few days ago, had unplugged it and shoved it into a bottom drawer, but at some point Lou had discovered it there and plugged it back in.

Lou said some other stuff, about how worried he was, about how everyone was worried. She didn’t catch all of it. Her whole mind was bent toward the phone, watching it, waiting for it to ring. She knew it would. Waiting for it was awful. It angered her that Lou had brought her inside, that they couldn’t have this conversation out on the deck. It shook her faith in him. It was impossible to have a conversation in a room with a phone. It was like having a conversation in a room with a bat hanging from the ceiling. Even if the bat was asleep, how were you supposed to think about anything else or look at anything else? If the phone rang, she would yank it out of the wall and get it out to the deck and throw it over the side. She was tempted not to wait, to just do it now.

She was surprised when Lou said maybe she should go see her mother, too. Vic’s mother was all the way hell and gone back in Massachusetts, and Lou knew they didn’t get on. The only thing that would’ve been more ridiculous was suggesting that Vic go see her father, whom she had not spoken to in years.

“I’d rather go to jail than stay with my mom. Jesus, Lou. Do you know how many phones my mother has in her house?” Vic asked.

Lou gave her a look that was somehow both distraught and weary. It was a look, Vic thought, of surrender.

“If you want to talk—like, about anything—I’ve got my cell on me,” Lou said.

Vic just laughed at that, didn’t bother to tell him she had pulled his cell phone apart and shoved it in the garbage the day before.

He took her in his arms, held her in his bearish embrace. He was a big man, glum about being overweight, but he smelled better than any guy she had ever met. His chest smelled of cedar and motor oil and the outdoors. He smelled like responsibility. For a moment, being held by him, she remembered what it had been like to be happy.

“Got to go,” he said at last. “Got a lot of driving to do.”

“Go where?” she asked, startled.

He blinked, then said, “Like, Vic . . . dude . . . were you listening?”

“Closely,” Vic said, and it was true. She had been listening. Just not to him. She had been listening for the phone. She had been waiting for it to ring.

After Louis and the kid were gone, she walked through the rooms of the brick town house on Garfield Street that she had paid for with the money she made drawing Search Engine, back when she still drew, back before the children in Christmasland started calling again, every day. She brought a pair of scissors with her, and she cut the lines leading into each of the phones.