from Chapter One
Here’s what it must have been like for Joe:
As he began to stir, his chest heaved and his breathing quickened. His eyes fluttered open, and he felt a momentary panic as he realized that he was still the same worthless piece of shit he was when he fell asleep. This passed because, in his twenty-one years, he’d learned to accept it.
Then he felt awkward. He seemed to have his legs stuck in his blanket and part of his pillow in his mouth. And what was he doing sitting up?
Panic chilled him as he began to realize that he was not harmlessly and accidentally stuck in his blanket, but securely and deliberately bound to a chair. As the implications of this settled onto his brain, he struggled with the bonds, desperate to defy them—to defy reality itself.
But he quickly reached the limit of his struggle. He had been sitting here too long, and his muscles had grown stiff. His limbs and joints ached with the effort, and now a new realization crept into his skull: someone was doing this to him for a reason, and that person was probably watching him at this moment.
He forced his eyes to search the room, to resolve and understand shapes. It seemed to be early morning. The light was gray, the room a misty kind of dark.
Then he saw me, sitting on the edge of an easy chair, watching his struggle with a look of cold determination on my face. He had to have known, right then, that he was in very serious trouble.
* * *
You were never supposed to read this. No one ever was. I banged out the first draft of what has become this book many years ago, on a manual typewriter, by the light of a bare bulb in a secret room, while I was confined to the Arizona Insane Asylum. I wrote it for myself, as a way of trying to find meaning in the disaster that had become my life, and the details were too salacious, too raw, too honest to ever share.
After I got out, I didn’t look at the pages for a long time. The manuscript languished in my closet for several years, then went to a box in my friend Macy’s house when I went to live in the desert. By the time I looked at the pages again, I was a different person. I had come to think of that part of my life as an epic embarrassment, but when I reread the manuscript, I recognized that, though my actions at the time were perhaps more than a little brash and naive, they were courageous and, more than anything, honest. I don’t think anyone else involved in the whole drama can say that, and that gives me a certain pride.
With a little more time, I realized that I had to share it. Everyone thinks I was crazy, and this is the only proof that I was not. In fact, it’s the only whole truth that’s ever been told about what happened.
I cleaned up the text as best I could; it looked like what it was: the raving of a lunatic in an asylum. I took out some of the ranting and some of the history details that no longer seemed to matter even to me. But I left every word of it the truth.
My name is Jack Trexlor, and I’ve come to realize that this, more than anything else, is my story.
Though it seems much bigger, this is the story of only a few days, a stretch of time barely bigger than a week. In that small space, though, everything changed forever. A series of mistakes and failures came together in the right combination to turn me into a fireball so big that everyone in town could see the mushroom cloud, so intense that even bystanders were scorched. I was at the center, enduring every moment of searing heat and at times throwing gasoline on the fire. Though perhaps it didn’t destroy me, it surely must have scarred me for life.
The events of those days seem to form the preeminent turning point of my life, dividing it between childhood and adulthood, between having everything and having nothing, between sanity and madness. In those few days, a kaleidoscope of alternate futures spun away from me. For a few fleeting instants, I was able to see glimpses of what might have been, and then they were gone, dispersed like smoke in a hot summer breeze, leaving me to wallow in the product of my own best intentions, and some, I must admit, that may have been less than noble.
Enough. The time has come to stop endlessly reconsidering the story and to set it free. I’m done with it, and I leave it to you. Maybe you’ll find something in here worth reading, but more probably you won’t believe it, won’t like it, won’t like—me. That’s okay. I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it for me. And I’m very happy with it.
It shows I was right. I was right all along.
And not crazy!
