Penny Dreadful Read Online Free PDF Page B

personalities. Don’t freak out but I’m pretty sure I have them. Not a clinical thing, not a disease. But a distraction to be sure. There are maybe six or seven pretty concrete versions of myself knocking around in here and I mean it gets fucking crowded when everybody is drunk or talking at once.
    And every so often the opportunity arises to assume another identity, to take another name and every time I want to run like hell, I want to run away from Phineas like his ass is on fire. Because I need a little personal space between him and me.
    Distance. I need distance from the others.
    But the other people I become are never strong enough. Or fast enough. Because Phineas wears them down in the end. He’s relentless.
    Early morning freak-out. I passed a construction site. Abandoned. Looked like someone was tearing a building down and then ran out of money. Their permit was revoked or something and the building was left half-standing and you could see this exposed brick wall that fifty years ago was an exterior wall but the building had been added onto and the wall was covered. There were old advertisements painted into the bricks, the kind that still said cigarettes were good for you. And rust marks in the wall shaped like the skeleton of a fire escape and windows. A few of the windows were boarded up and plastered over. But the boards were rotten by now. Rotten and the plaster broken through. And through a few of these windows I saw people moving around. Combing their hair and drinking tea and reading the newspaper and these weren’t homeless people. They weren’t crackheads or squatters. They were just people. They all had that sweet laziness about them, that oblivious air of someone who is watching television alone in a hotel room in his underwear and has no idea he’s being watched.
    Thought I must be dreaming. Thought I must be deceived by the light but they were in there, I’m sure of it. And you know what? When I see something like that, all the other versions of Phineas scratch their asses and pretend they didn’t see a thing.
    Fuck them, right. I sat with my feet in the gutter and peered through the iron gate into the black space below, looking for dead birds and lost skateboards, rotting pumpkins. I scribbled in my notebook and tried not to lament my lack of cleverness. The cars flew past me and I felt more and more like an alien. I was the only creature in sight without a bright, metallic shell. It had occurred to me that Moon might not be so thrilled to see me. But I had no one else to call. Crumb would offer me tea and an amusing story about a guy who came in complaining of stomach pains, who believed he had an ulcer when in fact he was carrying a bullet and was too drunk to recall being shot. I didn’t need tea. I needed a job or a place to sleep. I needed a new pair of shoes, I needed a cigarette, and now Moon pulled up in a gray Taurus. The passenger window slid down and Moon stared out at me, his sour mouth twitching with amusement.
    Jesus, he said. Get in the car.
    Fortunately, Moon had cigarettes. And he seemed more than willing to drive around in forced silence for a while. His radio was broken, or so he claimed. We circled for a while, as if lost. It was a peculiar day. The sky was moody, inconstant. The light seemed to change violently from one block to the next and on one street it was actually raining. I shut my eyes and remembered driving across Nevada maybe ten years earlier. An empty stretch of desert, the highway glittering like a rope of black silver. The sun unblinking and the sky flat and silent as a stone. Peripheral vision fuzzy around the edges. A migraine, I thought. A hawk dropped suddenly from nowhere, swooping over the roof of the car and crashing into the luggage rack. In the rearview mirror I saw a brief windmill tumble of shredded wings, gray and white. As if the bird had exploded. And then nothing but my own face in the mirror and I had been baffled to see myself crying. How