THE OPTIMIST BOOK ONE: You Don’t Know Jack By Chuck Miller - Chapter Seven

          And go we did, to the place I didn’t want to admit gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies, and made me feel cold and depressed, because it had been the setting for the final act of my life, the play I had not known was a tragedy. I insisted on dropping by a liquor store for fortifications. Dana looked askance at that, but made no comment, for which I was grateful. She remained similarly silent when I slammed back a manly-sized dose of the quart of whiskey I’d purchased, though I could see she was practically strangling on everything she wanted to say.

She must have sensed that I knew what it was, that I’d already heard it a thousand times from a hundred people. For my part, I never understood people’s need to belabor the obvious. I mean, were they under the impression that I thought excessive drinking day and night constituted a healthy regimen? That I was somehow unaware I was killing myself? Might that not be what I wanted, and did I not have the God-given right?

Well, actually, I didn’t  think in those exact terms. Killing myself., I mean Suicide would have been redundant. I had already been killed. My whole life had been ground into mulch and spewed all over the landscape. I was a golem. For just a moment, after I had encountered Johnny’s ghost and received my mission, I thought I had a purpose again. But it was turning out to be just another bunch of senseless, confusing bullcrap.  I was thinking maybe it was time to forget the whole thing, get my trust fund, and finish out my life’s work in relative peace. 

THE OPTIMIST BOOK ONE: You Don’t Know Jack By Chuck Miller - Chapter Six

BOOK ONE:

You Don’t Know Jack

By Chuck Miller

CHAPTER SIX:

Then there was the whole ghost thing. That stunk to high heaven. If the Centipede’s theory was correct, that I flushed him out of hiding so the “Moriarty” could have a crack at him, then I had been played in a most devious and bizarre fashion. Can a crime lord hire a ghost? Or forge one? It might have made sense, if it had made any sense.

I knew ghosts were real because I had encountered them before. The worst by far had been the spirit of Jack the Ripper.  In fact, it was one of the first cases Johnny and I worked after he took me on as his partner. It was a rough one. I may talk about it in greater detail later on, but only if I just cannot avoid it.

Anyhow, we thought we got rid of him, but he came back two more times before we teamed up with Doctor Unknown to cast him out of this plane of existence forever.

So, I could accept the ghost of Captain Mercury as a concept with no trouble. But even if I had seen a genuine ghost, it might not necessarily be who it said it was. There are some ghosts out there who are terrible liars and total assholes, and they’re liable to do anything, regardless of how shitty it is.

The Ripper, for example, had first gained reentry to our world by convincing a gullible spirit medium that he was actually Amelia Earhart. I swear to God. Spirits of the dead pretty much have to be deceptive because they can’t get back into our world without help from the living.

THE OPTIMIST BOOK ONE: You Don’t Know Jack By Chuck Miller - Chapter Five

BOOK ONE:

You Don’t Know Jack

By Chuck Miller

CHAPTER FIVE:

I was a little bit leery, but I got over it quick.

The Centipede's Lair was the stuff of legend. Nobody I knew of had ever been there. It was rumored to be absolutely impregnable. As for the location, that was anyone's guess. Some said it was in the mountains outside of Zenith, others said it was near the North Pole, a few seemed to actually entertain the possibility that it was on the moon.

Therefore, I was nonplussed when he drove us straight downtown and parked in a garage right across the street from City Hall. We exited the garage, walked down an alleyway, and found ourselves at the rear entrance to the Benway Building. This is an art deco nightmare of steel, white brick and blue glass that dates back to an era when people were both prosperous and arrogant and scoffed at the idea of restraint. The architecture was about as subtle as an Egyptian pharaoh's mausoleum, and almost as cheerful. It would have been right at home—though still uncomfortable-- in some hellish German expressionist film from the 1920s. It would have been considered an eyesore if people had any taste at all. Instead, it was a landmark. You can buy snow globes with tiny models of it inside them.

THE OPTIMIST BOOK ONE: You Don’t Know Jack By Chuck Miller - Chapter Four

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BOOK ONE:

You Don’t Know Jack

By Chuck Miller

CHAPTER FOUR:

A Yardstick For Lunatics, One Point of View 

Why was I going to do this? I was of at least two minds about the Johnny’s ghost incident. I wasn’t very interested in revenge, to be honest. The way I felt about Johnny at that moment, I wouldn’t walk across the street to avenge him, much less hunt down one of the most mysterious and dangerous men in the world. But it was a challenge. I  found that I couldn’t resist it. I knew I could do it, but I had to prove it.

I explained the whole thing to Vionna. She listened with great enthusiasm and many questions.

"How do you find a guy like that?" she wanted to know. "You don't know anything about him at all, really. Where do you even start?"

"Nowhere," I replied. "I can't find him. It's totally impossible. An absurd idea."

"Oh."

"I said I can't find him. But if I give him a reason, I bet he can find me."

"Oh!" she said, her face brightening. "Hey, that's good. You just turn it around. That's kinda brilliant, really."

"No, it is incredibly brilliant. I am incredibly brilliant. A genius."

THE OPTIMIST BOOK ONE: You Don’t Know Jack By Chuck Miller - Chapter Three

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BOOK ONE:

You Don’t Know Jack

By Chuck Miller

CHAPTER THREE:

Little To Win, But Nothing To Lose

Whatever it was, it was in costume. Or the ghost of a costume. It looked like Captain Mercury, but it wasn’t solid. I could see through it in places. It was like a reflection on a window pane at night—some lighted object in the room behind you, superimposed over the darkness outside, incomplete but distinct.

The  mother of all “someone just walked over my grave” chills snapped my whole body like a bullwhip. I was waiting for myself to shatter completely, to succumb to a fatal panic attack.

But I didn’t. Oddly, The panic receded and I found that I was utterly calm.

“You,” I said. “Damn. You know who you look like, right? I mean, are you him?” 

“I am his spirit,” it said in Johnny’s voice. It certainly sounded like him, though it was kind of tinny.

“Okay,” I said. “That’s cute. His spirit.” I looked at him. He looked at me. Silence. I studied his face. It was both translucent and masked, neither of which was conducive to making a positive ID. The inside of my head was empty. Or maybe it was too full, I dunno. Finally, I came up with the following:

THE OPTIMIST BOOK ONE: You Don’t Know Jack By Chuck Miller - Chapter Two

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BOOK ONE:

You Don’t Know Jack

By Chuck Miller

CHAPTER TWO:

Dead Kings, Many Things I Can't Define

“All of which, I suppose, makes me a sort of optimist.”

Vionna smiled like a goofy little kid and said, “Then I am too. I’ll be what you are. I always did really admire you.”

“You have good instincts, Vionna.”

“Um. Well, it’s so nice to see you and talk to you. I’ve been… I’ve been really lonely for… There’s nobody to… Say, if I tell you something, will you promise you won’t laugh at me?”

“I can’t promise that if I don’t know what it is. I promise you I’ll try not to.”

“Okay. Well, when I was a kid, back in those days, I used to kind of daydream about you and imagine that you were my big brother. Don’t laugh! I never had any brothers or sisters, and you were always nice to me, and I just really wished that I was your little sister.”

Well. I certainly wasn’t laughing. I hadn't expected anything like that. It confused me. I felt as though an indecent liberty had been taken. Then it made me feel something odd. It had been so long since I was actually touched by something someone said to me, it took me a second to recognize what it was. When I did, it felt like a branding iron. It was unpleasant. I resented it.

THE OPTIMIST BOOK ONE: You Don’t Know Jack By Chuck Miller - Chapter One

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BOOK ONE:

You Don’t Know Jack

By Chuck Miller

CHAPTER ONE: 

VIONNA VALIS

A long time ago, I was something special.

My life, when I was very young, turned bad. It was bad for a while, then it turned good. And it stayed very, very good for a few years. Then it went down the toilet. But during the good part, I was something rare and fine. I did things few other people ever do. I was part of something strange and glorious and ultimately unsustainable. And after that, as I say, came the toilet. I bobbed around in there for twelve years, and then something happened. A dead hand reached out to me from the past. I was so bombed-out and jaded that I might have ignored even that, if the hand hadn’t been clutching money.

I’ve got a story of sorts to tell.

Life being what it is—and what it isn’t—stories don’t really begin or end anywhere. There are things that seem to be more important than other things, and you can focus on those and slice off everything that happened before and  after. Then the whole thing seems to teach a lesson or make a point or offer some kind of closure for one thing or another.

Well, a lot of unusual things happened to me recently, but nothing was really resolved, and I can’t say for sure that I learned any lessons. But I made a bunch of interesting new friends and found, for the first time in many years, something resembling a purpose. Maybe that’s the lesson, then. If so, it’s ongoing, and I am a long way from the jackpot.

Not long ago, I was sitting in a little bar on a side street in the city of Zenith, the place where I was born and where I died. My life had ended twelve years earlier, on a street not far from where I sat.

I was at a table by myself with a drink in front of me. It was one of a very long series. I don’t recall the first,  and cannot envision the last.

I'm a horrible drunkard. That isn't the most important thing about me, but it's one of the most obvious. You need to know it, because it is a part of the context in which everything took place. But it's not the whole thing. It isn’t even the most important.