I didn’t kill him for her. I don’t think.

The parts I know are real:

I was still living at home, but the year escapes me. After high school, but before I moved out on my own to a new city. Maybe within the first year or so of college. She started off as somebody I’d seen in the courtyard before classes. We had none of the same classes, teachers or friends, but we shared a seat in front of an old Mac. It was hers first, then mine after her class ended. I planned those transitions well, the switchover from her intro to my intermediary, the shifting of curriculum and bodies from the room. I’d make sure I was there before she left her seat. I was over zealous, but I liked to think she was too by taking her time.

We wore the same band shirts. That was the extent of it at first.

Two months later, we’re speaking and eating burritos at lunch. It’s potentially a phase of early romanticism, but I’m terrible at such things and eventually she starts talking about other people she’s sleeping with.

Then she went away. Over a year passed. Then she called. There’d been drama, a breakdown, but everything was fine now. Our vibe was different this time. I was no longer potential Love Connection. She had selected me for something though, that was clear. As I was given a tour of her life it became apparent she had made changes. Contact with most of her friends had been severed, some of them harshly and not without cruel words.

For months I’d been calling only to be given progressively stranger and stranger pretexts from her sister as to why she couldn’t come to the phone. She isn’t here became Oh, you just missed her became She’s having a conversation with my mother, it’s important became She’s locked herself in the bathroom became I think she’s working at Toys R Us tonight became I haven’t seen her since I was fifteen to the phone just ringing and ringing. But after her return, and drafting of me into service as her only friend, I saw those calls from the other side. Her sister would wink at me, with same shaped eyes as my friend, as she gleefully blew off the party on the other end.

Part of me felt elated to be on the right side of it. The other part felt hurt I was duped the first time around.

One of the jilted few didn’t handle it well. He took to leaving souvenirs on her windowsill. They were nothing of consequence or merit, just simple objects that no doubt had some sort of coda to things their friendship had experienced. It made me think of what I’d leave on her windowsill if the winds changed on me. I decided on a sticker, the logo of our favorite band that we both wore shirts for. It was on the nose. His gifts of ebony turtles, Jack Chick Tracts and expired bus passes clearly symbolized something deeper than what we had. Naturally I was jealous.

Our relationship was conversations. For several years most everything we did was a conversation. There were some clubs, some shows, movies, meals… but mostly we had things to discuss. Ideas of what we’d do next. These conversation took time and were detailed. At first, they were on the floor of her room, but we were too noisy and her sister complained to her mother. So every night we’d drive from one end of town to the other. That’s how long our conversations required. We had destinations at four corners of the city. My home in the north, an overlook to the east, a similar overlook in a park to the west, and her home in the most southern of suburbs. We’d stop and drink at various holes along the way.

By summer we’d taken to sitting in her driveway at night. It was sloped, easy to recline against, hidden amongst the myriad of cars her father liked to work on. The sister came tearing up the drive once, almost running us over. It was funny. I didn’t see you she’d said.

And oddly, that’s what got me thinking.

The gifts were still being left on the windowsill and I’d found one leaving one night. The jilted whatever he was had come while I was there, a plastic ring from a fast food children’s meal. It was code, obviously, and I didn’t get it. I was jealous, despite the glaringly obvious fact that I wasn’t interested in her sexually and that she’d literally ceased contact with her entire circle of friends and started over with me. We had no code.

The sister hadn’t seen us, almost crushing my legs with her VW. But the jilted whatever had seen us. He’d probably watched us doing the nothing we did.

One night, in the driveway, I was drunk. I was convinced there were UFOs on the horizon. There were lights in the sky, she agreed with me. I said they were moving, just very slowly. More or less at the exact speed the Earth was rotating, because in retrospect, they were stars.

We heard something behind us, that noise clumsy killers and thieves make in the darkness. The scuffle of a foot on cements or a knee bumping into something. Back there was the carport, her mother’s car filling it. It was too dark to see anything, but I could feel somebody standing there. She felt it to. We saw nothing and no one, but he was there, we were both sure of it. She stood behind me, clenching the back of my shirt in her fists, pulling me close to shield her.

We can totally hear you dumbass, come on over. I was trying to be tough I think, it was meant to sound more like a threat or the preamble to throwing a wicked punch, but instead it sounded like a friendly invitation. Whatever we weren’t seeing was moving toward us now. Again, I couldn’t see or hear it, but it seemed like at any second something would come forward and hit the light thrown from atop the carport that hit the driveway.

The parts I’m not sure about:

Feeling a corpse in your hands isn’t what it looks like in movies. It’s not an actor pretending to be dead and being limp when the camera is looking. A real dead body is unwieldy, like a large amorphous sack of wet sand. You hook it under the armpits and expect to be able to just hoist it up, but the arms simple roll up  and then its slipping away, falling against your chest. If you try to pull it by an arm it seems like it might snap off in your hands, even if it’s only been dead for a short time.

We think of the human body as a solid. They tell you in science we are bags of mostly water, but we knead our muscles when they ache, we bruise our skin when we fall, we feel concussive impact when we run. In life, we seem as solid as can be. But in death, we’re liquid. Feeling the body in my hands, trying to grip it by any means, it becomes apparent the moving a body of similar weight and size as your own is nearly impossible. You resort to pushing and rolling it along the ground like a great amount of dough. How you’d get it off the ground, into a car for example, would take at least two people and a considerable amount of time.

Then there’s the smell, another detail left to mystery on the screen. I’ve been cursed with allergies my entire life. I acquiesce to periods of having no nose. It seizes up, closes off, refuses to participate, leaving me looking like a mouth-breather for weeks at a time. But when my nose does work, I seem to smell things no one else can. I came upon a scene once where a dog had attacked a cat. The carnage had passed, the animals removed and all that remained were tufts of fur and spots of blood. No one I was with smelled anything out of the ordinary, but to me, the gamey stench of iron hung thick in the air. Blood had been spilled and it was a hot metallic cloud only I perceived.

Even worse, I’ve had ears pierced for over twenty years, and they are obviously healed– but sometimes, when I turn my head too fast there’s a stench. It’s fetid, wet and musty. There’s no infection, no blood, no pain in my ears save for the 4 seconds the day I pierced them– but the smell is there on a microscopic level: rot. The insides of the human body are putrid. The metallic odor of blood, the sickly scent of pus and bile, the bitter acrid tinge of urine, the gag-triggering aroma of shit– these are things the healthy living body is replete with. When all those things come out into the air together you know you’re literally smelling death.

The liquid feel, the death smell, I know them, but I don’t know how.

I can see the jilted whatever he was, folded in a steamer trunk I had found at an antique story years ago. I can remember worrying about the smell and the liquidity. Eventually he’d swell and burst. Eventually he’d rot, and he would smell. The trunk was old. Large and lockable, but old. It couldn’t possibly be airtight.

That’s how I know I’m dreaming.

Just because I remember stuffing him inside of the trunk, that wet-but-not feeling on my fingers that had turned from wet sand to rotted fruit in a rubber casing, and catching those nausea inducing smells as I closed and locked it doesn’t mean it actually happen. I could have dreamed them. After all, I moved a few times since leaving home. The trunk had to come out of the closet at some point.

And even though I know that smell, I don’t think it ever permeated my house. My mother never quested to hunt down a peculiar odor. Yes, the trunk was in the back of my closet, buried under boxes, old clothes and bags of and bags of things I thought I needed to save but were really just garbage. But the smell would have cut through that. The seepage of a rotting corpse would have leaked out of the trunk, through the floor and started dripping into the basement.

But why did I move a bookcase in front of the closet door? And when I moved all those times, why didn’t I take the trunk? Why did I decide to put it in my grandmother’s basement where there were still things buried from decades before I was born? Why do I remember my friend telling me how no one would ever question the jilted whatever he was being gone? That he was often on drugs and his parents were used to him vanishing for months at a time. That he had no friends and no one but her had really given a crap about him. And why did the offerings on the windowsill cease?

Those are the questions that come to mind, here, a decade later when I’m in my grandmother’s basement. She’s died and the house is being cleaned out and my mother asks me if there’s anything I want and I fly home to take stock and see the trunk hidden behind stacks of old National Geographics. My son is with me and he loves the trunk. He’s sure he can fit inside and my first thought is Hey, if I can stuff a corpse in there a six year old won’t have any trouble at all.

There’s a long list of items I have always intended to save that just vanish from my life. Most things we catalog and keep track of. I know what’s in my garage. I remember which moves trigged purging of what items. The key to the trunk is not on that list, it vanished long ago. The trunk is locked, and if I really want to determine once and for all if I’ve dreamt this or not, I’ll have to pop the lock. It occurs to me that trauma is equally likely to be blocked out as it is remembered in horror.

So what I’d like to know, before I do pop this lock, is when I turn my head and catch that whiff of rot, is it really just the decades old but unhealed holes in my ears? Or has Death been hovering over my shoulder in the absence of any memory of guilt over what I may have done?

Each sat in the middle of a block, innocuous.

They only used the outsides of them anyway you say, jaded by the filth and hooker supply depots in Hollywood. I am still slightly nostalgic for something. I wasn’t from Los Angeles, but screen memories from summer drive-ins reminded me of real ones. Like walking the irrigation canal that cut through my grandmother’s small farm town. A town that, while thousands of miles away, could have been in the Los Angeles suburbs if it had palm trees. And here, everywhere you look is déjà vu.

We return to nap, and the regret over choosing a hotel in Hollywood sight unseen was oddly gone. We catalogue our souvenirs from the Valley, props for own documentary, pieces of our childhoods we never lived. Found footage we could insert ourselves into later. We argue whether this climate is desert or Mediterranean. Then you sleep. I do too, but not before wondering if they know back home where we’ve gone.

The day before we’d gone to a theme park. It’s fantasy architecture employed “forced perspective,” which is to say its size is an illusion to the eyes. That’s what the tourist guides say, but we know the truth. The forced perspective was just more nostalgia for things we never experienced. We walked amongst the crowds, pining for our non-existent good ol’ days in the old west or turn-of-the-century South. We spend money. More souvenirs…more counterfeit memories.

We wake sweaty and hungry, which happens when you drink and nap during the day. Time to explore again. Lower Sunset is an endless stream of transitions. Hollywood to hipster to Chinatown. Over Dim Sum I annoy you, telling you how this isn’t the real Chinatown. The city relocated the Chinese in 1938 when they stood in the way of Union station’s construction. The land it sits on now, was actually the original Little Italy. I don’t know where the Italians were moved to.

I notice the waiter frowning at my foster father’s credit card. He’s the first to suspect. The first person in the entire city to realize that we are actors too—but not the way they are. I shouldn’t have ordered a beer. I should have paid cash. There’s only three days of summer left. Three days for us to complete the fiction. Three days and we both turn sixteen. The new year doesn’t start in January, for us it begins the first day of fall.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I lied to you endlessly and joyfully about who I was and what I did. It was a game at first, but I found myself searching you out more than I’d expected to. Save for my endgame— to make as much money as I can now so I can just vanish from the world for the rest of my life, I kept up the lies for appearances. Eventually, of course, you saw around them. I never apologized, but you don’t seem to care.

The Revenuers must be on a different mountain… but we don’t take any chances.

We spend the night in an old Antebellum mansion. Here on these back roads time stands still, life the same as it was 25, 50 or even a 100 years ago. The plantation hasn’t seen life in ages outside of us. We sleep on straw-filled mats I keep in the back seat, pressed flat from the crates of mason jars. The dusty, dark wooden floors creak as we settle in, and we share visions of ghostly billowing curtains over the tall broken windows and glimmering crystal chandeliers.

You’ve snagged a mason jar from the back seat, but I let it slide: I only have one scratchy woolen blanket to keep us warm and the liquor in the jar will help out. Normally I’d drive all night, but you’re sleepy and on edge and I feel like we need this.

You take a sip from the jar and wince, then take another. We pass it back and forth, letting it heat our innards.

The smell of burning, wet leaves hits my nose and you say something about a fire.

It’ll bring moths and cops, I say.

You shrug, liking the danger. This is why you never cared that I lied.

That night I dream that we’re in Mexico, though I’ve never been and have no idea if their beaches are white sand or not. I sit on the shore and watch you bob in the waves, well past the safe breakpoint. I realize then, even if we were retired, you’d still taunt death… you like the way it feels. You like that feeling of ol’ Charon looking over your shoulder cause without it, how would you know if you were living?

When I come to, it’s still night. I reach out to see if you’re there, or if you’re dancing in the late moon that’s risen. I’d caught you doing that once. Prancing all Pagan in nothing but my workshirt, grinning like I’d caught you stealing pie from a windowsill. But tonight, you’re still on your mat, curled under the blanket into a ball. I wake you by tripping over the empty mason jar as I stand.

I tell you I want you to see the moon, but we both know I want to get back behind the wheel.

From the distant hills, no one will see us, blazing down the road with our headlights turned off— but for us, the moon shines the way, giving us a perfect view of the road south.

…which is why I am so good at picking out people who liked to be urinated upon. Sexually, I mean.

Derek
My name is Derek. I’m 28 and I’m a life guard. I’m into surfing, rock climbing, kickin’ it with my friends. I’m down for whatever, you know. I go where life takes me, you know what I’m sayin?

William
I’m Willie. Friends called me, Cutter. Notice I use the past tense, cause I haven’t seen them in awhile. I work for the US Postal Service– in the sorting room. I collect guns, knives and boots. I like to run my model train set for fun. Watch some of the TV. And of course kickin’ it. And when I say IT, I mean “dogs.”

The Random Martyr, supplication in the Holy War no longer necessary.

Hero
Hong Kong all stars and and and colors and and kung fu and asdfasdfgljkh!!!

Gigli
2 minutes of a bad Taiwan bootleg and I had a tumor.

Bone
Yaffet Cotto is fucking hardcore.

Wisconsin Death Trip
I like documentaries where things are pretty.

Zombie (Zombi2)
Zombie vs. Shark.. HAHAHAHAHAHhahaha.

How to Murder Your Wife
(takes notes)

I, Fuckbot
Blade Runner owns you Wil Smith.

Just Looking
Two forks can have sex and it is funny.

Road Warrior
I want a nuclear war cause I want to drive like a motherfucker.

Repo Man
Open the trunk.. DOOOOON’T OPEN THE TRUNK!

Mystic River
ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZ

Day of the Dead
Helllooooooo… is anybody out there…. HELLOOOOOO…. damn it, what song sampled that?

Monster
Thought it was brilliant… then I looked up the real woman it was based on and decided to go from thinking it was brilliant to feminist propaganda.

COWBOY BEBOP THE MOVIE
Better than any Star Trek movie ever made… well except for Wrath of Khan.

Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan
Even if you aren’t a Trekkie, this has to be one of the best sci-fi films ever made.

Ocean’s 11
One of the very FEW remakes that surpasses the original.

Ocean’s 12
I take that back… wtf.

True Romance
Tony Scott’s glossy action movie directing plus Tarrantino dialog make for an odd, but fun mix.

2001
HAL used to give me bad dreams… that red eye staring and politely apologizing as he killed me with robot pinchers.

North by Northwest (for the 342134th time)
Fastest… ending.. ever…

Bad Santa
So this is what shocks the main-stream and counts as irreverent?

Gleaming the Cube
I wish I was 14 again and living in the OC.

12 Monkeys
God damn it, SOMEBODY give Gilliam the support Tarrantino or Kevin Smith get, this movie is so yaay.

Spider
When Cronenburg doesn’t flaunt his orifice obsession I feel disenchanted.

2010
How can a movie be a sequel and continue the same story, and yet feel completely detached?

Shining
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA… those fucking twins.

Spacehunter
Road Warrior+Star Wars… I love 80′s sci-fi.

29 Palms
Wow… an indie film that doesn’t use smash cut editing!

Summer of Sam
She said “pussy-juice…”

Star Trek: Nemesis
Sigh… oh well.

Windy City Heat
Bobcat KILLED me with: “AAAAannnnd… ACT!”

Thomas Crown Affair
Turned it off after the god sanctioned nude scene.

Fallen Angels
Chris Doyle is self-taught and it makes me want to die.

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Well, now I know where Tim Burton got all his shit… AWESOME movie.

Drugstore Cowboy
Well, now I know where Requiem For a Dream got all its shit… AWESOME movie.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original)
Well, now I know where Blair Witch got all its shit… AWESOME movie.

Blade Runner (for the 1341234th time)
Well, now I know where Matrix got all its shit… AWESOME movie.

Giant
Fuck Texas… but the movie was rad.

Return of the King
Yay for slow motion hobbit hugging for an hour… nice ending, assbrains.

Big Fish
Nice try, Tim– but I’m STILL not forgiving you for Planet of the Apes.

Triplets of Belleville
What the hell, why aren’t my subtitles working… OH WAIT, this entire movie was done with out dialog FREAKING BEAUTIFUL GENIUS.

Coupon the Movie
I saw the shit out of it.

King Arthur
Ohhh.. special screening… OF CRAP THAT IS NOTHING LIKE THE HISTORY OR MYTHOLOGY OF ARTHUR!

Excaliber
This is more like it, YES LIKE LIGHTNING!!!!!

Yojimbo
Samuai’s kick so much ass, dude takes on an entire town.

Fistfull of Dollars
Holy crap, it’s same movie as Yojimbo!

21 Grams
Holy cow, I’m going totally out of order, and yet if I was in order I wouldn’t be interesting except for Naomi Watts boobies!

Last Samurai
And to this very day, Japan has honor thanks to the white man.

Comic Book Villians
I’m a wacky guy with a gun movie, no, I’m a geek movie, no, I’m a drama, no wait I dunno what the fuck I am!

Wickerman
I was promised 70′s bush and saw none. Next time get Director’s/uncensored cut.

The Rundown
Gravity and physics are for faggerts!

Matrix: Revolutions
Next person to say that I didn’t like it because I didn’t get it is getting beaten down with my copy of Simulacra Simulacram and is going to choke on a paperback edition of Neuromancer.

Dawn of the Dead
Fuck zombies and raiders– the mall has EVERYTHING.

Dawn of the Dead (Remake)
Fuck zombies and raiders– the mall has EVERYTHING… EXCEPT GUNS! WTF, ANDY!?!?!

Ghost Story
I saw this at a young age and it was the first time I saw a penis in a movie– now I am just excited as all fuck by how spooky things can be just by being cold and foggy.

Heavenly Creatures
Teenage lesbianism, Kate Winslet, collective hallucinations, matricide, Peter Jackson.. nuff said!

Run Ronnie Run
But.. but… Mr. Show was so funny!

Down With Love
“Gee, I thought you were all anti-romantic and cheese,” well I am; but this script was pure genius and I spent my childhood watching Doris Day movies with my grandma, and if you haven’t seen those, you probably don’t get why this movie is so good.

…or maybe it’s classic Americana–white picket fences, dad out front watering the lawn, two-story A-Frame with shutters and dormers next door–you’re just waiting for The Beaver to wander on out an head to the dead-end of the block and take the path there down to the creek…

…or maybe it’s part of a great suburban sprawl–wide ranch homes laid out in a grid on the outskirts of town, color being the only thing that sets the homes apart, the road ending against the berm of a cement irrigation canal…

…or maybe it’s in the heart of the city–an old block of solidly built Victorians that have stood for a hundred years that ends against a freeway retaining wall…

…or maybe it’s the heart of a small midwestern town in the middle of nowhere, a combination of old and new homes set along the edge of a cornfield…

…the point is, no matter where you go in America, there’s always a Maple Street. And there’s always a body.