Recollection (eBook)

Jeremiah Beck (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
524 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-9914-5 (ISBN)

Infos

All his secrets have led to this moment. Jeremy Peoples remembers everything. But it's more of a 'terrible condition' than a 'gift.' Even still, he's a radio DJ on the verge of stardom, orchestrating a tell-all interview with the murderer responsible for a killing spree in his hometown. He's also harboring secrets. Scarred by survivor's guilt and desperate for forgiveness, Jeremy confesses his sins... live on the air. The killer-Mason Reynolds-brushes aside Jeremy's plea for mercy and instead delivers a cryptic message. As he loses control of his live show, another shocking revelation lures Jeremy back to the small Wisconsin town where he lost everything. Home in Sugar River, the past is inescapable. And even worse: his perfect memory starts to fail at the worst possible time. He can't see the danger he's brought back with him... until it's too late. Fans of domestic suspense from Mary Kubica and Charlie Donlea will love Recollection. Stylishly written, this twisty debut novel is fraught with tension and heart-felt themes offering unexpected depth. Recollection is simply... UNFORGETTABLE.

Jeremiah Beck is a radio personality with 25 years behind the microphone. Born and raised in Wisconsin, he's garnered rich experiences and met fascinating people while traveling to 49 states and 11 countries, and has since settled in New Orleans. Recollection is his debut novel.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

The first mass shooting at a school in America happened at my high school in 1992. Everyone blames the shooter as the sole monster responsible, but the truth is deeper and darker: the murders are my fault.

Raw guilt eats holes through me but every effort to unburden my soul falls on deaf ears. People around me—a collection of acquaintances and strangers I force into the spaces where friends and family should be—take turns looking solemn, struggling uncomfortably to listen or find the right words. They nod knowingly, disagree gently, and console me out of ignorance.

It’s not your fault, they say. You’re wrong, I say back. I know I’m culpable. I was there. I caused it all.

Drug-induced stupors and drunken blackouts bring momentary relief, but I’m spiraling out of control. It’s a manic cycle. The depression is darker, the descents steeper, the despair deeper, my recovery times are shorter. And everything’s picking up speed. I’m barely functioning.

My therapist strives to convince me that it’s survivor’s guilt, post-traumatic stress, a martyr complex, and any number of other syndromes and illnesses that populate her textbooks and notepads. Dr. Darby Grover is wonderful. She listens carefully, talks patiently, and believes she can heal me. I love her too, but she has so much faith in her education and experience that she believes it’s only a matter of time before I’ll experience relief.

She’s wrong.

I know it’s hopeless; I’m hopeless, a lost cause. I’ve seen too much and done too much that can’t be undone, and I’m too undisciplined to follow a treatment schedule of regimented medicine and ineffective advice. However, she doesn’t patronize me, so I keep most of my appointments because she’s smart and sexy and I have tiny moments of peace after talking with her. It’s not her fault that she can’t help me. I’m hiding secrets and I lie to her face. And the memories won’t stay where they belong.

(blood’s in my mouth and the smell of cordite is in my nose and everything is cold and wet and her dead eyes are pleading for me to help but she’s already gone)

I’m guilty, but no one believes me, and I can’t find forgiveness. My grief is a toxic, boiling cauldron of regret, helplessness, and rejected excuses. I don’t want a pardon. I want to take responsibility. I don’t want a pass. I want to pay the price. I don’t want a coronation. I want condemnation. I want to fix the permanently broken parts. I want the impossible and I’ll try anything. I want the relief that comes to a criminal when he’s finally caught and collapses from exhaustion and sleeps because the chase is over.

I want someone to fucking blame me.

I dream about it. I’ve become myopically obsessed. I can barely think of anything else. I’ve been trying for years to bury images I can’t forget, and shoulder a burden that everyone says isn’t mine to carry.

Nothing I try is working. I can’t keep it up.

My chest constricts with a suffocating heartache when I’m quiet. I hate to be alone and I’m terrified in crowds. I scream into whatever pillow I find in whatever bed I wake up in. I cry while I’m driving. People stare but I stopped caring. My stomach churns. I’m pitted against myself. I’m suicidal and feeble. I’m an addict and a drunk.

And I’m the host of the highest rated nighttime talk show in Washington DC.

I’m sick of living a lifetime of lies. It’s why I set things up the way that I did.

Tonight’s show is a two-hour long Hail Mary.

Because tonight…I’m going to interview Mason Reynolds, the man serving nineteen consecutive life sentences for murdering seven of my classmates and wounding twelve others.

I’ll ask Mason to forgive me—live on my radio show—as a therapeutic stunt I’ve been promoting for weeks. A New Year’s Eve show, from 10 p.m. to midnight, that is supposed to propel me out of the bleakness of my past and into a better future.

Hopefully. Probably not. But hopefully.

In the first hour, with the promise of anonymity and without judgment, I’ll put anyone on air who wants to confess to anything: people who’ve cheated and stolen and lied for years and worse, and need to come clean. No sin is too big or too small. I’m here to listen, and if they hesitate I’ll tug on the threads of their story and pull them toward clemency for the benefit of the show.

And then in the final hour, culminating at midnight, I’ll confess that I’m the secret antagonist in the infamous Sugar River Shooting, and seek absolution from Mason. I perfectly recall each detail leading up to the murders and each second of that fateful day, unfailingly.

(she’s stretching out her hand, begging and pleading and crying, and the confusion and the violence and paralyzing panic is flooding my body with adrenaline and I’m shaking—)

Afterward, no one can argue that I’m a victim, or my memories are confused by trauma and time. It’s all going to be exactly validated because of a gift I was born with, a curse that I can never break.

My memory and my emotions are perfectly and completely autobiographical.

I remember and feel every moment of my life with painful, exacting precision.

Dates, times, events, meals, conversations, anything I’ve seen, said, heard or read, from the mundane to the dramatic, are stored in my mind for easy access or random, anxiety-inducing spontaneously triggered reappearances. I can’t forget anything unless I’m in a stupor or unconscious. When I sleep—which is infrequent and comes in short bursts or extended disappearances—I have recurring nightmares. My dreams are vivid, terrifying, and incapacitating. I wake up disoriented and exhausted.

I talk to myself constantly, narrating the present to minimize confusion with the past.

I’m always reorienting. The past and present are permanently intertwined, the Now with the Then.

I’m lost in it.

Nothing fades. Time moves on and the world moves on, but I do not.

I cannot.

How can I be expected to heal when I can’t forget anything?

Everyone else loses their acute pain, regret, and betrayal to The Great Forget. I don’t.

I’m paralyzed by these unforgotten remnants. Of everything. Of her. Of Sarah.

How can I ever love someone else when I can’t let go and there’s a ghost who doesn’t let go of me? I don’t want to be alone anymore, but I don’t want to share my life with anyone other than her. There are no words to say, no compelling argument to bring her back. I’m smothered by idealized memories and an imagined future that died when she did.

(my face is in her auburn hair and it smells like the purple and white lilacs blooming in her backyard and she laughs and I feel that she loves me—)

Every so often I need to look around, blink, and remember when I am. If I don’t consciously bring myself into the current moment, I disappear into the undertow of memories and madness. Dr. Darby is helping me learn to will myself from Then into Now, to separate reverberating emotions from my current feelings. It’s daunting and exhausting and feels impossible and unsustainable, but it’s all I know. So just like Dr. Darby suggested, I focus on what’s in front of me—the pictures on the wall, taken during my meteoric rise in radio.

Dozens of photos, none of my family. They’re all of me with people more famous than me. I’m shaking hands with politicians, musicians, actors, and comedians. I’m swaggering on stage and in bars and at award shows. I’m behind a microphone, scowling or grinning smugly, from my early days in radio back in Madison, Wisconsin, up through these last several months in Washington, DC on Hot Talk 690 WTMI.

The sign on the door, now closed, simply reads, The People’s Talk Show.

There’s a stack of black-and-white, glossy photos of me dressed how I want the audience to picture me: smirking through beard stubble. My straight black hair isn’t long enough to pull back and falls where it wants to. I slick it back, other than one spear that dangles above my left eye. I’m wearing a white V-neck t-shirt under a black leather blazer, which is what I’m wearing tonight, too. The camera caught the expression I get seconds before I wink, like I’m sharing a secret joke, but I’m exasperated that no one’s figured it out yet. My green eyes are distant. I struggle to make eye contact because I know I’m guilty. The day of the photo shoot, it gave me the appearance of focusing on something off in the distance.

I’ve scribbled my signature across each glossy with a silver Sharpie so it pops. Jeremy Peoples. Big looping J, humps and stabs; big swooping P, loops and a flourish.

Jeremy fucking Peoples. The People’s Talk Show. It’s YOUR show, people. But it’s MY show, too. I’m Jeremy Peoples. My audience calls themselves “The Little People.” We love each other, mostly.

It’s 9:47 p.m. on December 31, 1999. The biggest moment in my professional life is in minutes.

Radio personalities, and me especially, obsess over time. Our lives revolve around it. The clock...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.8.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-9914-7 / 1667899147
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-9914-5 / 9781667899145