SIMON JACOBS
Palaces
a novel
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| All Rights Reserved | COPYRIGHT → © 2018 BY SIMON JACOBS |
| ISBN → 978-1-937512-67-5 | Library of Congress Control Number available upon request. |
SOME RECOMMENDED LOCATIONS FOR READING PALACES: Alone in a borrowed bed; your friend’s basement; the free verse section in Patti Smith’s cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” repeated ad infinitum; an empty beach after dark; pretty much anywhere because books are portable and the perfect technology!
ANYTHING ELSE? Unfortunately, yes. Do not copy this book—with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews—without the written permission of the publisher. WE MUST ALSO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For John Baren, wherever you are
Palaces
“And who are these?” said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who were lying round the rose-tree; for, you see, as they were lying on their faces, and the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of the pack, she could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her own children.
—Lewis Carroll
CONTENTS
I.
RICHMOND, INDIANA
THE VERGE OF DECEMBER: OUT BACK, AFTER THE show, a late-high school kid native to this town with his ears stretched to the size of clementines, Casey, shrieks and skips back and forth in the middle distance, just slowly and deliberately enough to let each firecracker hit him.
Beyond, skies like you don’t see except in the middle of flat states like Indiana, where the only visible landscape—here, the tops of distant pine trees—is too far back to seem like real life, to be taken seriously, and this kid flickering up from below, a giggling blot on the horizon.
A buddy of yours, I think the frenetic banjo player, offers me a firecracker in the spirit of camaraderie, of inviting a stranger into their midst. “John, right?” he says. I don’t like that he knows my name, that he got it from elsewhere. I hold the firecracker in my hands like a priceless flute.
“Y’all just pull it,” he says. The Southern accent is fake.
Instead, I pass it off to you, unfamiliar at this point but standing incidentally beside me, a presence I haven’t fully processed yet, and shove my hands into my pockets. You take it like a favor and, with a practiced hand, fire away.
It cracks out of your fingers and hits Casey’s bright red leather jacket in a splash of tiny sparks—he yelps and stumbles to the side, the frosted grass crunching beneath his feet. Someone calls out: “Make him dance!”
We watch the display of loud, harmless explosions as your friends let loose, all the ostensible rage and frenzy from an hour before now dispersed into something that seems almost quaint and wholesome, edging on nostalgia. I stand stock-still and feel sweat trickling down my sides, starting and starting.
From that night on, we never stopped running.
II.
MANHATTOSI
A YEAR AND A HALF LATER, IN A CITY TO THE northeast, you catch me easing out the entrance of the museum with my arms wrapped around a human-sized, 17th-century Japanese vase painted in pink and white flowers. It’s early summer and the heat is already trippy and oppressive; we’re awash in sweat and the new thrill of finally having a home base to return to, a domestic excuse for acquiring this artifact.
I’m about to topple from the weight, but suddenly you’re on the stone steps in front of me, skimming your hands over the glossy surface and running through your knowledge of lotus petals and cherry blossoms, the most symbolic of all flowers. I’m staring at the blackening tips of your fingernails, your scalp—the feathery ridge in the center, its tips barely clinging to color, the uneven fuzziness creeping in around it—and thinking about haircuts, about matters of personal hygiene, about showering using a sink.
“This vase is super heady,” you say. You point to a cherry blossom. “Transience”—dragging your finger along a painted whorl toward a lotus—“to resurrection.”
I tell you, distractedly, in the manner of filling conversational space, that the pattern of flowers reminds me of a fourteen-year-old’s idea for a sleeve tattoo, and it takes a second for me to remember that’s basically the design your brother who died in Iraq a year ago had on his arm, and that I’d picked this vase out, specifically, as a sort of memorial to him. I’d stood examining it in the empty gallery, certain that it reminded me