Free Know Your Beholder: A Novel by Adam Rapp Page B

same way people who suffer through excruciating toothaches keep extracted wisdom teeth in jam jars.
    We both drank and re-interlaced our hands around our mugs. I think Haggis really appreciated the company.
    “So you chose the attic,” he said. “Cozy.”
    I told him that I felt better having everything going on below me.
    “Like a lordship.”
    “I never thought of it that way,” I said.
    “You’re lording over your subjects, Fran. You’re like a fucking monarch.”
    I imagined actually commanding this kind of status over my tenants. I’d have to start showering and wear jackboots or something. Jackboots and a greatcoat. I could shape my beard into a kingly Shakespearean spade and speak in declarative iambs:
    Come live / with me / and pay / me rent.
    “I dig the stairwell paneling,” Haggis said.
    I told him that I’d been thinking about adding a workout room in the basement. “Treadmill, StairMaster, rowing machine, some dumbbells.”
    “Fitness,” Haggis replied sadly, as far away from the concept of the word as a shipwrecked man from a fax machine.
    I wondered if Haggis was one of those men who doesn’t die a human death, but dissolves like a piece of wood in a barn.
    “Diggin’ the beard, dude,” he offered after a silence. “You’re startin’ to look downright apostolic.”
    Despite his nearly forty years, Haggis hasn’t gone gray and still possesses a boyish, clean-shaven face. His jet-black hair, like my apostolic beard, is wayward and at certain angles looks like a smashed crow clinging to his head. He has the strange habit of absentmindedly stroking his left nipple, over the shirt, in a curiously circular fashion, as if perpetually haunted by a life-altering grammar school tittie twister. His teeth are dim, so dim they’re almost blue. They belie his youthful face and non-gray, unwashed hair.
    Stevie Nicks’s syrupy voice began “Dreams,” the second song on side A but easily the record’s true beginning. I’ve always thought the first track, “Second Hand News,” sung by Lindsey Buckingham, to be an asinine, herky-jerky chest-wiggler better suited for the end credits to one of the Muppet movies. It’s totally beneath the rest of the album.
    “So, Viagra,” Haggis said. “Gettin’ back in the game?”
    “Trying to.”
    “Seein’ someone?”
    I told him I was pretty much just watching Internet porn and whacking off, which was a lazy half-truth. I’ve actually been thinking about my ex-wife and whacking off.
    “I could use a laptop,” Haggis lamented. “When it comes to lovin’ Old Lefty, I have to rely on my faulty memory.”
    “You’re left-handed?”
    “No, but I like changin’ it up. Makes me feel like I’m gettin’ away with somethin’.”
    It gave me hope that a lost man living in his car could still be blessed with wit and ingenuity.
    After Haggis finished his cup of coffee we said nothing for a while and listened to the rest of side A. “Never Going Back Again” into “Don’t Stop” into “Go Your Own Way” into “Songbird.” I have always loved Stevie Nicks’s voice the most, but lately Christine McVie has been winning me over. Her voice is less bewitching and not as haunted with the troubles of the world, but clearer, stronger. You’re not as fooled by it.
    When side A was over, the wind whistled through the cracks of my attic’s finial window, which made everything suddenly forlorn and remote, like Haggis and I were the only two people left in some shack in the Arctic. In a semi-arthritic three-part move, Haggis wrested himself from my corduroy chair and buttoned his capacious loden coat. His calves peeked out from underneath, pale and bald as freezer-aisle chicken breasts.
    “Hey,” I said, “you know anyone looking for extra work?” I figured one of his clients would be desperate to make a quick buck.
    “Not really,” he replied. “Why?”
    I told him I needed someone to come by every few days and shovel the sidewalk and porch steps.