Selfish Treasure

I will lead, you must follow.

This journal is my story, it contains my secrets and possibly your reward, or possibly your just deserts.

Let us begin with hard truths:

Reaching your destination is far better than enduring your journey, thoughtfulness, not necessity, is the actual mother of invention, and money in point of fact, does solve all problems. Additionally, X does not mark the spot, but venomous snakes and spiders often do, a picture isn't worth any number of words as words are the very substance of living, and time only runs out, it heals nothing.

I started claiming to be a private eye about ten years ago, after I moved into a cargo van. I started wearing a wedding band and one of two fine suits about five years ago. I had learned, by then, that the key to life is suspicion mitigation. When I appear to the world well dressed and married, I absorb and accept all the assumptions that onlookers apply to me, and that acceptance allows me to speed up the tedious social interactions that confront me while I work. Alternatively, when I appear in my modern kilt, anorak, and wearing my big knife on my belt, I may then be subject to different assumptions. Both costumes have their uses when I’m compelled to move among the people.

"You're telling me the whole book reads like this?" Roy feigned incredulity. "I don’t know if I can take much more. What’s a modern kilt?"

"You love it Roy, you love it so much you wish it were yours." Rebecca could read Roy like a lover should never be able. She saw his inconsistencies, his compensations, and she never missed a lie.

Lately, during conversations with Roy, Rebecca saw herself from an elevated camera angle, looking down as she faced out across a vastness of broken things. A dried-up, sepia filtered, wasteland of dead cars and the sounds of the flapping tarpaulin shreds in the dry wind.

"Is it a journal? Some kind of an art book thing?" Roy hoped to call her back from her withdrawal.

"Roy, it’s a little fucking notebook like eccentrics have carried since forever. This one just happens to be more mysterious because the author goes unnamed throughout the journal."

"So, this guy's a genius because he forgot to put his name on his work? That's usually the sign of an idiot child or a person in hiding."

"Whoa there Roy, there you go spraying me with premature assumptions like this is the first five minutes of a prom night hook up."

"You know I hate it when you're gross Rebecca."

"I'm sorry Roy. Do you know I hate it when you blather on like an honest drunk getting a lap dance from an indulgent stripper? I just want you to support your claims that this writer is one, a male, and two, an idiot or in hiding."

"That's great Bec, double down on grossness to show me how independent you are, awesome. What I’m saying is that students are taught to put their names on their papers so they may receive credit. Young people, prone to irresponsible behavior, put their names in their belongings in case they lose them. And that liars hope they will not have to take responsibility for the things they say. Anonymity is usually a bad sign is all I mean."

Rebecca let Roy sit with his statement. He looked proud of himself, the great calm intellectual that he was. She downed her drink and returned the empty glass to the table an almost imperceptible distance closer to him. She carefully closed the little black book. Roy sipped and felt the weight of her silence.

There are unfortunate points in every relationship when one person is reminded that the other is out of their league. On a clear minded morning Roy usually saw himself at about a seven and Rebecca at a seven and a half to an eight. Any well-balanced person should have been able to live with that.

There were dinners with friends and family, usually her friends and family, when Roy felt himself drooping below the rank of seven and Rebecca elevating above an eight. Often it was the company. Those eights and nines seated at their table, riveted by Rebecca’s dry jokes and her enlightened ideas, afforded her that impermanent rank promotion. Reliably, after the wine was drank and everybody was gone, Roy and Rebecca could ease off and settle back into being comfortable sevens.

While running on the treadmill, or during a quiet shit, Roy went over his formula and considered every variable in his mind. He considered a person’s upbringing, family background, education, occupation, physical appearance, personality, fashion sense, and their current spouse in his calculations. He applied the numbers then took their average. A one was a broken home dropout wearing cargo shorts who couldn’t tell a compelling story and showed all the symptoms of late-stage leprosy. A ten was the person who would take Rebecca from him any day now.

Comfortable in the silence she created, Rebecca stared at Roy while he double swallowed the contents of his drink. He had seen men in movies swallow whole liters of beer before slamming down the glass and wiping their mouths with the back of their meaty hands. Roy, lacking esophageal machismo, misjudged the remainder of his glass, and gagged when his last swallow of whiskey was actually two. He began to rise, reaching for Rebecca’s glass, before setting off in search of another round and some time to collect himself. He felt like a six in that moment. Rebecca picked up the little journal gave the table a hard blow that carried with it a cruel laugh that sent cigarette ash and tortilla crumbs flying.

Having traded seduction eyes with a young bar back in the interim, Roy returned to Rebecca with their drinks and his swagger fully replenished.

"Okay,” he said calmly, ”tell me more about this journal. I promise to withhold judgment until asked for my impressions."

"This part is from around the middle of the book,” she began again, “of course, along with no name there are no dates. The guy never even strays from the heavy bold pencil he used to write in the thing. The creasing here,” Rebecca showed Roy where a pencil was clearly folded into the book, "and the fraying at the edges shows that this guy was some kind of wanderer.”

"You said ‘he’. We can agree then that every aspect of what you just read sounds like a man-child, right?"

"You are right Roy, there is a masculine tone to his writing, almost a childish bravado even. But more importantly, his words are written intentionally, probably standing in swaying subway cars and during stolen moments between customers at an all-night gas station. It’s likely he didn’t even care about his audience, either way, he is a guy. We can agree on that. Now listen:"

Your reward will be twenty thousand dollars if you read on and are able to decipher my clues as you journey through these pages.

Roy sounded a guffaw into his glass. Rebecca looked at him above the black notebook expressionlessly and continued to read. Roy reduced his rank by point three for his joke’s failure to play.

It is important that you, my reader, understand that I am not giving you this money as an effort toward my own redemption. This journal and your inexorable natural greed combine perfectly to prove my favorite theory, that statistically, this journal will find its way into the hands of a selfish person, capable of anything, interested in self gain and the adventure.

Rebecca looked up at Roy. He wore a guileless face, one that tacitly agreed that Rebecca was all the things the journal described. An eight had to be cutthroat to attain and maintain eight status. Roy liked to think he had some of that unattractive humanity that held him back among his fellow sevens. Rebecca stared blankly back at his critical face having confirmed in her mind that she was right about not taking Roy with her. There was something too Roy-oriented about him. He just lacked purpose.

Rebecca downed her drink in one big gulp, let out a muffled burp and blew it in Roy's face, “I'm going to take a look at what kind of pussy this place has to offer tonight,” Rebecca packed the black journal into her new bag, and she made her way toward the restrooms at the back of the bar.

The lifted pickup truck rumbled on its new suspension and purred softly through its upgraded exhaust. The headlights were off. It was expertly backed in beside the dumpsters.

Roy, back at the table and still offput by her newfound crassness, was just now considering how much Rebecca has been affected by her hypothetical wandering writer.

Rebecca rested her forearms on her knees while she peed, her hands held her bag firmly in front of her shins.

Early on with Roy, when she had begun some DIY projects and come home with four simple power tools, Roy rolled his eyes so hard she feared for his optic nerve. When she had gotten into chess and showed him the set she bought for them to play on, Roy told her that she should have started with plastic, that marble was for real players.

During that first summer, on a trip to San Francisco, Rebecca bought her first Moleskine journal with a fine pen from a boutique in the Mission District. Roy had asked what was wrong with the pad and pen that came with their hotel room. Later he ruined their first champagne toast by adding to it, “and to whatever kind of story you write about us in your fancy new journal."

Rebecca dripped, wiped, zipped, then slung her bag over her shoulder so the strap accentuated her breasts. She washed her hands and remembered the night she met Roy's parents and had endured the obligatory showing of the baby pictures. Back then she still felt a little nervous around Roy and his family in their big home with the wrap around porch and landscapers working in the raised beds. While pointing to each picture Roy's mom commented on the background. Whether it was a hotel or a beach, a car or a fireplace, the comment was always about where they were, never on who they were with. Roy was the product of a life lived in beautiful settings.

Instead of taking a left past the derelict wall mount where there once hung a payphone, Rebecca took a right. She pushed the sticky service door open to the light of an alley sunset and the encouraging odor of bio diesel exhaust. It smelled like fries, the good kind of fries that ended diets and cured hangovers. Cindy was in the front seat and smiling her sparkle lip gloss lips at Rebecca. Rebecca stepped up into the huge truck to join her selfish treasure on the refurbished yellow bench seat.

"Ready for California?" If a circus clown smile could be sexy, and come to life, it would be Cindy. She asked about California, but Rebecca answered about the rest of her life.

"I'm ready to go."

Cindy slid a black notebook wrapped in velvet ribbon across the truck’s expansive bench seat. There was a hand turned wooden pen clipped to the Moleskine’s black hard cover, "I thought you might like to record our observations and findings."

Rebecca took the gift. She clipped the pen into her shirt pocket. She slid over closer to Cindy, her thigh touching Cindy’s warmly. Cindy pulled the big column shifter down to D. Rebecca leaned over, planted a kiss on her cheek, and spoke quietly into her ear, "you lead, I'll follow."