Death Before Facebook

about other friends?”
    “Well, he did have a male friend.” Her nose wrinkled, as if he stank. “Layne something, I think.”
    “Maybe we could look in Geoff’s address book if he had one. Did you say he had a job?” Skip knew perfectly well she hadn’t.
    “Well, yes. He—uh—worked at a video store. Mondo Video, down by the Riverbend.”
    Skip wondered if it was a porno place—judging by Marguerite’s embarrassment, that didn’t seem out of the question. Impulsively, she said, “Do you have a picture of Geoff?”
    “What for?”
    “I’m just trying to imagine him.”
    “Could I ask why?”
    “I’m curious, that’s all.”
    “I don’t think you said why you’re here.”
    “Something came up that we needed to investigate; just covering bases. You know how it is.” Again, she smiled, using her smile as a shield:
No more questions, Mrs. Terry. Okay?
    Marguerite looked uncomfortable. “I don’t really know where the old photos are.”
    “That’s okay, it was just a thought. I wonder if I could see Geoff’s room.”
    Marguerite looked at her quizzically. “Of course.”
    His room was just to the right of the mudroom, his window almost directly beneath the section of roof where Marguerite said the cat had been. “Excuse the mess,” Marguerite said.
    This would have struck Skip as funny, considering the condition of the rest of the house, if it hadn’t been so sad looking at the prized possessions of someone who no longer existed, piecing together the story they told.
    The story itself was sad, Skip thought, of a piece with the cracked plaster of the house, its icy dormancy. A gray cat, Mosey perhaps, slept in a hollow of the bed, the saggy spot that indicated Geoff had been overweight, or that no one ever bothered to turn the mattress, or both. She wondered briefly if they had been close, the man and the cat, or if in some feline way, it sensed that he had died coming to its rescue, or even if it was somehow attuned to his spirit.
    Skip didn’t believe in spirits, or anyway, didn’t tend to dwell on them.
    This place
, she thought.
It’s creeping me out.
    Yet other than the ghostly cat and the sagging bed, the room was perfectly ordinary. But it was a boy’s room, not a man’s, so obviously the room of a boy who still lived with his parents. Makeshift bookshelves lined the walls. A desk had been made from an old door and on it rested some sophisticated computer equipment. There was also a television, VCR, and shelves of videos along with the books. A lot of them were science fiction, and so, she saw, were most of the books. But there was lots of nonfiction, too—computer books, some quasi-science and actual science, history, all volumes that dealt in facts except for two or three on self-hypnosis.
    That fits,
she thought. E
verything else in the room induces some sort of trance. Why not skip the middle step and go straight for it?
    They intrigued her, these books. She clung to them. Only they and the cat were outside the all too obvious stereotype presented by the rest of the room’s furnishings, the cat because it was a warm, living being, the books because they were non-rational. People like Geoff, like the man she imagined him to be, though they lived in a fantasy world, a world of time travel and other galaxies, had no time for inward journeying. They spent their lives either devouring facts about the rational world or trying to escape it.
    She felt she could probably describe Geoff. He must have been overweight, soft around the belly; but he had never accepted the fact, or else had so little sense of himself that he simply wore T-shirts a size too small without giving it a thought, T-shirts that gapped over his white and hairy belly, mostly black ones bearing skulls and Judas goats and the names of death-rock bands—Napalm Death, perhaps; Controlled Bleeding—odd, violent symbols and words that didn’t fit with the gentle, unkempt man who wore them. He had a short, roundish beard and limp brown hair that always needed shampooing. He wore glasses. Running shoes. Jeans that rode low, displaying the crack of his butt, which was flat. He had once played
Dungeons and Dragons
and maybe still did. He was the very personification of “nerd,” a bright young man turned inward, poorly socialized, who felt so little kinship with his own planet that he routinely traveled to the ones invented by his favorite authors, who thought of that secret, dreamy place his computer took him to