King of Joy Read online

  Praise for King of Joy

  “This novel is transfixing: an imaginative meditation on emotional survival, isolation, and the beauty and limitations of human connection. I love Chiem’s writing.”

  —MELISSA BRODER, author of The Pisces

  “What a funny, fresh, bittersweet masterpiece—there is no one else in the world writing like Richard Chiem. From the sentence-level wizardry to the racing plot, I feel smarter just having read this. Every page brings a new set of wonders.”

  —ALISSA NUTTING, author of Made for Love

  “King of Joy is a perfect rendering of that feeling of dark and hopeful closeness with loss I’ve always known but could never put to words.”

  —CHELSEA MARTIN, author of Caca Dolce

  “Richard Chiem writes like someone whispering in your ear. He’s insistent and methodical, and you want to hear every word he has to say. King of Joy takes Chiem’s unparalleled voice and carefully amplifies it, ratcheting the tension until you’re not sure where he stops and you begin. It is a brilliant, tender examination of the unholy magnitude of trauma. It shows how pain can simultaneously destroy and preserve a person. Most of all, it is just goddamn beautiful writing.”

  —KRISTEN ARNETT, author of Mostly Dead Things

  “In King of Joy, Richard Chiem shows us what it is to live in the immediate, day-to-day song of forever grief. Each sentence is masterfully written and equally afflicted by the one craving that affects us all, which is the desire to belong. This book turns pain over and over in its raw mouth, exposing what it is like to feel longing in its deepest, most hidden form, and teaches us more than we could have ever hoped to learn about pure love, loss, and the hard work of accepting the human condition.”

  —ELLE NASH, author of Animals Eat Each Other

  “What did I just read? I don’t really know, but it was just a little bit mind-bending. Chiem’s writing is mesmerizing and perfectly suited to a skipping narrative full of strange and disturbing things (there are porn movie sets and hippos and a very good dog). I can’t wait to see what he writes next.”

  —ANTON BOGOMAZOV,

  Politics and Prose, Washington, D.C.

  Praise for Richard Chiem

  “Considering how much I love Richard Chiem’s writing, and given how its uncanny snare and sweep of life’s especially agile, prompt, messed, lithe, sharp, and heartbreaking things leaves me stiffed of summarizing words, I think I’ll just nominate his work for immortality.”

  —DENNIS COOPER, author of The Marbled Swarm

  “Richard Chiem writes of all the weirdness and ooziness and tenderness of young love, with such lucid specificity.”

  —KATE ZAMBRENO, author of Book of Mutter and Green Girl

  “[Richard Chiem’s] words have brains that have bodies that wake you up in the way waking can be the best thing, like into a warm room full of good calm remembered things that feel both like relics and new inside the day.”

  —BLAKE BUTLER, author of

  Three Hundred Million and There Is No Year

  “Richard Chiem captures the mundane depravities of being young and alive with lucidity and a touching, weird grace. Everyone should live in his world for a little while.”

  —KRISTIN IVERSEN, NYLON

  “[Richard Chiem]’s swiftly becoming one of our great chroniclers of urban melancholy.”

  —ZYZZYVA

  “Richard’s stories are as generous as he is. They are the quiet, electric moment between the lightning flash and the thunder rumble. And they have the same odd light.”

  —MATTHEW SIMMONS, Hobart

  ALSO BY RICHARD CHIEM

  You Private Person

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by Richard Chiem

  All rights reserved

  First Soft Skull edition: 2019

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Chiem, Richard, 1987– author.

  Title: King of joy / Richard Chiem.

  Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York: Soft Skull, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018040349 | ISBN 9781593763091 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.H5468 K56 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040349

  Cover design by salu.io

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  Published by Soft Skull Press

  1140 Broadway, Suite 704

  New York, NY 10001

  www.softskull.com

  Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Frances

  I would never rest again: I had stolen the hunting horse of a king of joy. I was now worse than myself!

  CLARICE LISPECTOR

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Dead Man

  Part One: Wanting Oblivion

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two: Life with Perry

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Three: All Gold Everything

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Thank You

  PROLOGUE

  DEAD MAN

  There were months where I did the same things for weeks at a time. Meals were interchangeable, my outfits moved on and off me, and there were days I had no opinion, my mind blank, walking home alone following palm trees overhead. I remember looking around during different parts of the day: leaving the apartment complex, cruising around the grocery store, reading at a bar after work, having a smoke. Everyone was having a different conversation than I was. All the strangers, everyone was moving quickly in and out of the rooms we were in together, anxious to be somewhere in the future. I was watching and imagining I was away from here: I was gone, walking around with Corvus in Paris, going somewhere to be with friends. I don’t know why it was always Paris in the rain.

  There were months I felt as though I had no head, or I did the same things for long stretches of time, and it became surreal. Days were less and less about anything. People often refused to make eye contact with one another or looked spaced out. I pretended I was indestructible to pass the time, painting house after house or taking whatever odd job I could find, working seven days a week, and sleeping defeated in bed when I was exhausted. I watched wall clocks and digital timers. Sometimes I would change positions in bed to try something else. My foot would be where my head was, and my head where my foot was. I slept every way I could in my sweet bed, creating solitude from malaise.

  I would walk in the daylight without wincing, thinking about Corvus. It was my favorite activity, repeating routines, in uniform or in transit, until I would be closer to her. When we were reunited, it felt so good it was as though I had survived some sort of trauma or natural disaster, being away from her. Although there were days I felt nothing, I could go as cold as nature to the awful things around me. I could be quiet in a room and feel alive.

  The building could collapse onto me and I would still tell you I needed to get back home to her.

  Tape recorder clicks off.

  PART ONE

  WANTING OBLIVI
ON

  CHAPTER 1

  IN STORY BOOKS, IN MOVIES, AND IN POP SONGS, CORVUS has always loved the stubborn characters the most: the grim warrior fighting impaled with a sword in her abdomen; the lost dog running from state line to state line to get back home to her owner; the loser getting kicked in the teeth and choosing to smile, mouth full of blood, instead. Still, having not eaten all day, Corvus thinks, What am I doing here? There’s a fucking tree on fire and no one is doing shit.

  Outside, half-naked girls are popping open champagne bottles, shooting corks high into the trees and screaming into the night air. They laugh and run in circles around the trees. Clouds of hot breath. Minutes earlier, the one with blond hair approached a tree with a burning torch and, unblinking, set the leaves on the lowest branch ablaze, feeling the heat against her face as the tree caught fire. Everything is foggy and dark except for the burning tree and the girls dancing in the shaking light of the falling cedar.

  Corvus lights a cigarette. She smiles at how scary it is here and laughs at herself. But she has always loved proving a point, that nothing will ever kill her. Nothing kills me, she thinks.

  The phone rings and trembles on an oak table in the middle of the large room, an old library on the third floor of the house, as Corvus looks out the window, watching the other girls dance. She blows smoke against the glass, leaning arms crossed against a cold pillar. Tim is the only one who ever calls this line, she remembers.

  Corvus answers, Hey. She gives the impression she’s been through this routine before although she’s new here.

  Tim says, I need you downstairs in about five minutes, okay?

  She says, Why do I know your carpet?

  What?

  The carpet in here, the library. I know this carpet from somewhere.

  Tim says, I should have fucking never brought you here.

  What? she says.

  The carpet is everywhere in the house, right?

  Corvus nods but doesn’t say anything. She takes another drag with no face.

  Tim asks, Have you ever seen the movie The Shining? The carpet under your feet, and everywhere in the house, is exactly like the carpet in The Shining.

  Grief is an out-of-body thing, the worst secret you can have. You live in one terrible place trapped inside your head while your body lives in another terrible place entirely. Corvus is tired in a way that feels like there’s no going back; like everything from this point on will be brand-new, full of things she has never seen before, moments she has never wanted before. It’s like when you’re finally eating after a long day of not eating and not knowing how close you were to killing someone or collapsing from how starving you were. She can feel it in her bones: there is no going back.

  When she lost everything, she had Tim’s phone number to call; he offered her a way out of the hole. She wouldn’t have to think about money, she wouldn’t have to think if she didn’t want to think, he said. She could just disappear into the woods, he said. Make a movie. Get drunk, get high. Make money far away from the evil city. There is magic and healing in the woods, he said.

  The pay phone in the middle of the tall grass is ringing, causing all the women to turn their heads in unison to look and stare for a moment. Corvus holds the phone to her ear and watches the reflection of the empty library behind her, a spinning ceiling fan and rows and rows of hardcover books, before she returns her focus to the movements outside. As horrible as things are, she can always sing a song quietly to herself. She loves songs about real love and tragedy: the best pop songs ever are sad songs.

  Another tree catches fire from embers in the wind. Some of the girls are in the grass, six or seven of them, some others are running deeper into the dark woods. Some are screaming, Money, money, money! We are going to get paid!

  The blond girl runs over to answer the pay phone, her bare feet trampling the tall yellow grass as she makes her way through. She knows exactly where to look toward the house, finding the window as she picks up the phone.

  Even from this distance, Corvus feels a small chill of fear when they suddenly lock eyes, and the blond smiles with the torch still burning in her other hand.

  She answers, Hello, this is Amber.

  Corvus says, Hey.

  What are you doing?

  Corvus says, Not burning a tree. What are you doing?

  You should come down here and have some fun with us.

  Corvus asks, Why is there a pay phone out in the middle of nowhere?

  Tim likes the phone here. This isn’t the middle of nowhere, don’t say that. Amber says, I don’t know, I think it’s really fun.

  The burning tree finally falls down and shakes the earth but Amber doesn’t look away from Corvus. Amber keeps her hand on the phone and waves the torch in a dead way. She says, Please come down here.

  Corvus says, The burning tree fell down. Why did you start that fire?

  Amber drops the torch from her hand and it stays lit on the spare gravel around the pay phone. As though meditating, the girl never breaks her stare, secretly digging her toes into the little rocks and pebbles, undisturbed by the cold. Although she can’t quite see it, Corvus can feel Amber’s face change from one thing to another. It starts to rain then pour. Freezing tiny droplets fill the giant window.

  She says, Corvus. Please, come down here.

  Three days earlier, Corvus walks through baggage claim aimlessly, still feeling the ghost of the airplane vibrating all around her. Airports secretly thrill her, she feels as though she is somehow closer to death or another realm here, walking in slowness from escalator to escalator. She has a favorite sweater with her, one she wears when she’s really depressed or behaving strangely, because it makes her feel like no one could fuck with her, a long wool sweater that reaches her knees, with soft hanging sleeves and a big collar.

  There is a boy outside arrivals and departures waiting for his ride who offers Corvus a cigarette. He lights it for her while she sits on her suitcase, staring at her reflection in his sunglasses. There is some reckless abandon there and a calm face. She smiles and says she’s new to California and he says, You’re a natural already.

  Easing her tensed neck against his shoulder, Corvus watches a plane disappear behind clouds and readies her body for anything. She has the makings to detach herself, to endure pain with nonchalance, drifting almost to sleep, jet-lagged with this new stranger. His ride is a Jeep with a driver who looks exactly like him, and they look so uncannily alike it briefly scares Corvus. She has found twins. They offer her a ride to the house in the woods where Tim is waiting.

  Impulse begetting impulse, she looks at her phone and decides to let Tim wait a little longer before she enters her new life. On the highway, her heart races with suggestion, and for the first time in over a year there is no one she wants to call, there is no one in the world she wants to see or talk to. Suddenly, she wants to do all the brand-new things. Anticipation is so much better than real life, she thinks, and I need a drink. Corvus breathes as though she’s swimming, taking in small pockets of air and holding her breath at the same time, her hair flying everywhere in the backseat of the fast Jeep. She wants something outside of her body.

  Corvus asks the twins, Hey, what are you doing right now? Can we do a detour? I would love a detour.

  They take her to a nice hotel, leading her into a small room, their hands on the small of her back. She says what she wants, leaning back for leverage. They both come at the same time and Corvus watches the miserable expressions on their faces, finally not identical at all. When they ask her to stay, the two of them naked together on the bed, she says, I can’t. I really can’t. I’m here for business, not pleasure, but thank you, boys, that was nice, and she leaves the moment, walking down the narrow hallway, not looking back, as though she owns every floor in the building, as though she can move all the elevators in the building with her mind. All her limbs are stronger now and everything is brighter.

  Alone, waiting for the elevator, her body aches with the slightest memory
of being pulled apart. It is a little past four in the morning. The smallest things take courage and weirdness and sometimes complete blind effort, she thinks.

  Corvus enters the hotel kitchen, steals a muffin off a white plate on the counter, and leaves through the back door, gently shutting the latch behind her. Outside, she looks for the main road with the address to Tim’s house in the woods memorized by heart. In the surveillance tapes, Corvus walks with a muffin in her mouth, a bloodied sweater tied around her waist. She drips unknowingly behind her as the camera turns. She shivers like no one would ever know.

  Corvus answers the phone still vibrating in her hand, discovering a dozen missed calls. She quickly glances at the screen before saying hello.

  The voice says, You weren’t at the airport.

  Corvus says, I know. But I’m here now. I want the job, she says, feeling something like pain somewhere on her body, but it’s not quite pain.

  There are scratching noises outside the door, the light pulsing underneath. Corvus washes her face with her hands and smiles for a breath before holding the door ajar. For a moment, she doesn’t see anything, only the same narrow hallway and weird carpet. There are paintings of a single landscape repeated along the entire length of the wall, what looks to be simple rising ocean waves and jagged rocks and a girl standing out at the edge of a cliff. The sound is a drone coming from outside, the muffled screaming of disembodied happy girls. For a second Corvus almost forgets she isn’t alone here.

  Then, at the end of the hallway, she sees a pack of brown pit bulls treading in rhythm, each lively and muscular, heading for the stairs. One immediately senses Corvus, and runs back down, jumping in the air to her open door. It slams mindlessly against the hinges, crashing into her right side. Corvus leans down, using the door like a shield. She spends a few minutes convincing herself that her hand is not broken, shaking her hand in sharp pain.