The Innocent (Abridged)

by Harlan Coben Narrated by Dylan Baker

Overview

A gripping new thriller from Harlan Coben, author of the instant New York Times bestsellers Just One Look, No Second Chance, and Tell No One.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Demonstrating remarkable virtuosity and range, Vermeersch here assumes the contradictory mantle of the prophetic, post-apocalyptic poet, and the poems suitably offer a paradoxical mix of cynicism and hope." — Quill & Quire

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169241761
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/10/2004
Edition description:	Abridged

Related Subjects

• Awards
• Mystery & Thrillers
• Thrillers
• Thrillers - Other
• Marshall, Elizabeth (-1964)
• 2006-2007 Texas Tayshas Reading List

Read an Excerpt

Don't Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something

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By PAUL VERMEERSCH

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Paul Vermeersch
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-222-4

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CHAPTER 1

MAGOG

I do not look at the rocks and trees, I am frightened of what they see. — Ted Hughes, "Gog"

Revelation 20: 7–8

    1

    Remember the old ones — absent fathers
    of the blankety blank, of the Olde Tyme abyss —
    scaly fathers, horned and half human?
    Bedtime prayers still vie for their attention,
    but they linger in the gungy bars of Magog.
    They have withdrawn to their game rooms,
    their refuge of churchy Sabbaths, but
    suppose it all remained in their hands:
    unmodified strands of something more
    than elemental. Would we be elevated too?
    We dreamt they loved us; all was clover.
    But we woke to a cough, and the rude birds,
    silky and distant in their aerial world,
    were clearing their throats for no one.


    2

    So our world is remade. What remains, relieved
    of itself, waits tolerantly for the garbagemen.
    We fear no more reusing. We fear the old ones
    will never return, renewed, from their hidey-holes
    beyond the asteroids. Remember when
    the leaves would stir up on the paths
    behind us? Remember when the rocks and trees
    quivered and shared in our adrenaline?
    There was a great togetherness in that.
    Relieved of ourselves, we wait for our collectors.
    O naked, woolly fathers, o mountainsides, o
    nameless rattlers in the wood! Through such
    unexpected doorways they'd loom and startle.
    "Don't move" and [your name here], they'd whisper.


    3

    Their replica tongues would lick the palsy
    into your limbs — remember that? —
    would enter you and cause "that thing"
    to grow, deformed, inside your body. They
    are gone now into their pisscoffins, lip-
    syncing their hoarsest sacre bleu, coughing
    deeply into the beer gardens of Holy Nowhere.
    They've gone shakily into Chronic Fatigue (or
    so they say), and further into Amnesia, into Coma,
    where they travel with the coldness of squid.
    Their universe is never rational. They cannot
    do the math. Instead, they sweep the books
    from the table/forbid the rudimentaries, and
    their absence scuttles, crablike, all around us.


    4

    Now the animal is dead. [Jelly-wobble.] Scabs.
    Nobody knows what it is anymore.
    The head removed, the dark fur matted,
    the red ribs spread to freeze the sun in their array.
    [A frost sets in.]
    Burn it for the hundred-handed fathers
    of the ruined world.
    Offer them this sacrifice.
    For the god of the goat herds
    with his breasts and eternal erection,
    arrange its bones around a round rosette.
    For the many-headed dog god, scrape clean its skin.
    Even the dog god must be fed.
    The ______ gods are ______ . And we want their love.


    5

    Because they can't be seen, we see them
    with the heads of horseflies, the heads
    of catfish, barbelled in the mud of our sleep.
    They hide there with their wealth, with
    their divine wives, each grand dame
    wreathed in a necklace of our ears. It's not
    their place to hear our prayers. Instead,
    they heed the prayers of shrikes, and the shrikes'
    saviour is a mouse impaled on a thorn, and
    the Messiah of the mouse is the unsweepable
    crumb, and the god of that crumb is the ant,
    delving in spongiform pathways, scissor-faced
    and legion. They thrive in our narcolepsy.
    They wolf our thoughts. And we want their love.


    6

    Now when the old ones adore you, dear heart,
    they are locusts and lost money.
    They thwart, infect, and require — Gimme-gimme!
    So you, beloved of White Sands, face
    with no mouth, this is how the old ones love you:
    swinging the hairbrush and grunting
    our true names. And you, beloved of Wounded Knee,
    come. Crawl out of that pit and take back
    the rifle you paid for; sleep with it under your bunk.
    And you, beloved of Srebrenica, o they are wicked
    when they love you. Listen to their killing,
    then drink the whole sludgy Lethe.
    I swear they're tenderer in their absence.
    Our silence numbs their sting like antivenin.


    7

    You, beloved of White Castle, this is how
    the old guard loves you: with sound-offs
    and cymbals, with soft drinks and monkey drill.
    Look away! Look away! Look away! Look away!
    They stomp in step with the songs of our fattening.
    Under spinning beach balls punched aloft,
    they march! With smokers' tooth polish,
    with scratch-and-win! Beware! Beloved
    of Zippo and Bic, isn't this what you wanted?
    A marching song to make the hawk-faced
    fathers come marching home? O sing it
    to the convenient bones! Sing it to the rocks
    and trees, for a thousand years to the sands
    of the sea, but please, look away! Look away!


    8

    And you, beloved of the derelict school bus
    in the wilderness, this is how the shaky ones,
    the trembling ones, love you: eyes pecked out
    by birds. Beloved of email, this is how
    the missing-poster swaddles your tidy
    bones in absentia, how your suitable bones
    are massed in the shallow grave of you, how
    the ashy bones of the legionnaires are massed
    in the air conditioning, how the baby-soft bones
    of the newborns are massed outside the fallen
    walls of Troy. O beloved of Neverland, get real!
    O beloved of Whitechapel, of Downtown Eastside,
    where are your boozy, woozy, floozy bones?
    O police morgue! O pig farm! [Exeunt.]


    9

    So why, then, should we starve for Magog?
    We are dust, they say, but when the old ones
    boycott the river, the river quenches us.
    So there. If the old ones ignore the strawberries,
    the slugs will do the same. And if the slug-faced
    gods decline to breathe our air, so be it!
    The air won't pine for them. It's not so bad
    in the lower atmosphere; we like the quiet,
    but when the old ones love you, they are lions
    roaring, they are man-o'-war! O why
    build a warship in a bottle? Without them,
    we are solar flares, are we not? Are we
    not Electrolux? We are dust, they say.
    So what? The dust shouldn't give.


    10

    And when the killing starts, the old ones
    arrive, finally. We hear them handing out
    snacks and pea whistles to the children
    while we are placidly igno(ra)ble. Look,
    weapons grow in the shade. From the coolness,
    cut a switch, a cudgel. The toolshed brims
    with novelties: garden weasels and gasoline,
    air horns and octopi. Go team! But which side
    are we on? The children eat their raisins, clap
    their sticky hands while singing "Red Rover!
    Red Rover!" on the playground. They blow
    their pea whistles like little cops. Their songs
    curl up in our mouths like tooth-rot. Our teeth
    fall out in shitty dreams. And we want their love.


    11

    Magog is where the milk teeth of the whistle-
    blowers, still gleaming with their song, are
    stockpiled, forged into arms. A tooth-
    studded club to break the jawbones, and
    small enamel arrowheads to pierce the music.
    When the killing starts, the music will excite
    the loved ones in attendance, a thousand
    neighbours robed in the sportswear of their
    butchers. When the killing starts, the rude birds
    will cackle on the power lines. It is a music
    to betray your neighbours by. Whenever
    we hear it, we act as one. We feel each other's
    bones cracking. We feel our soles slapping
    the earth in time with the tambourines.


    12

    Meanwhile: the music plays, and the hoar-
    faced fathers — their mouths crowded
    with brownest ivory — must be somewhere
    in Magog applauding the millennial encore;
    our centipedal fathers dancing on feathery,
    eyelash feet, wearing kidskin undershirts
    in the backyards of sunburn country, summoning
    the phlegm of their divine work from rusty,
    bug-zapper lungs. Thus, it begins
    in the tent of the sulking ones: a little ditty
    that grows, that spills out over the red teeth
    of their casualties ... over a new kind of blindness
    in R&D ... over the timid, synthesized voices
    that wheeze and spark within us.


    13

    These old ones, givers-of and withholders both,
    were never home. Not strictly. Not firmly. Not
    in the way that we wanted. But they taught us
    to play with matches and were tortured for it.
    And then they taught us metaphor, and we
    were tortured. And now, above us, their skywriting
    sells an antihistamine. They promise to dry our eyes
    in the stratosphere. A crowd gathers to read it,
    but a blonde girl sobs among them. She knows it will
    give them ideas. Give who? The old ones are losing
    their shape. Their words puff and spread illegibly.
    Our eyes water. The rocks and trees are smug,
    swaddled in their allergens. But the crowd
    disperses with the letters, and the message is gone.


    14

    No matter what we do, the rocks and trees
    will fade, and the horizon too, and the blonde
    girl will crumble like sugar where she stands,
    and a breeze will carry her away, glittering.
    No matter what we do, her sobbing will fade,
    and then what? The leafy fathers of the wood
    remain at a distance. It makes them appear
    softer so that we want them back. "Yo-delay-
    hee-hoo!" we sing because we want them back.
    O fathers of flatworms, o sons of Krypton, o
    genii! O smallmouthed ones, o axolotls, o "Ollie-Ollie
    oxen free," we cry! But they do not budge. They
    lie down in darkness, and we want them absolved.
    They lie down in darkness, and we want them alive.


    15

    So we lie down. So we join them in darkness.
    A darkness pregnant with fetal galaxies. A
    darkness that sometimes forgets its name.
    A darkness with the rasp of raspberries. A
    darkness in the bishop's shoe. A darkness
    that swims along the lakebed beneath
    each minnow, moving within but indivisible
    from the darkness surrounding it. A darkness
    hammered into the finest breastplates
    against the barbs of the moon. A darkness
    spread out like the fantail of some monstrous
    bird. A darkness that feeds on the absence,
    that outlives the message. A blind, ignorant
    darkness to supplant the darkness by design.

CHAPTER 2

THE REDISCOVERY OF ARCHITECTURE

    GEOMETRIC MECHANOTHERAPY CELL FOR HARMONIC ALIGNMENT OF
    MOVEMENT AND RELATIONS

    Dragged through the neighbourhood,
    it's meant to act as a communal
    paroxetine. Dead eyes follow it
    the way dead eyes follow
    sheet music. It's meant to equalize.

    But it fails. Fists and backs
    clench and get up. Honeyspats
    clog the works. Another pipequake
    signals something stuck, something
    contractual lodged in the chute.

    The cell jutters as the pressure
    builds in the black plastic
    digestion apparatus. It fails,
    but how else to choke back the lungshadow
    when the machine can't heal you?

    Beethoven! Beethoven! Elk ... Ethiopian ...
    Nothing matters. Or seems to.
    The backlog of disappearing objects
    lurches in the cylinder and goes
    nowhere, but it's the thought that counts.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Don't Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something by PAUL VERMEERSCH. Copyright © 2014 Paul Vermeersch. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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