The Case of the Imaginary Detective by Karen Joy Fowler

Author:Karen Joy Fowler [Fowler, Karen Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141918389
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

(3)

The woman Rima had encountered on the beach and by the car was considerably older than the character in the book, and had made no obvious effort to look the part. Nor had she bothered to look like someone who might at some point in the past have looked the part. Pamela Price was a bottle blonde, a plastic woman with lush curves and a pink complexion. The woman from the beach was gaunt, with bruised eyes and skin so thin she was practically blue.

It seemed to Rima that Pamela Price was an odd character to choose of your own free will to be. She was Ice City’s Miss Scarlet, a tired flirt with an eye for Bim Lanisell. Bim discovered the limits of her infatuation when he tried to use her as an alibi.

Ice City, pages 52–53

That my father killed himself was our new article of faith. Without that, Brother Isaiah was a liar and every one of us was going to die someday. I was the only one with doubts.

So Brother Isaiah sent me Pamela. She began to touch me whenever we spoke. She’d lean against my shoulder, her hair falling into her face. “You should come by,” she’d say, her fingers floating across my upper arm. “I can’t bear to think of you all by yourself. I can always find a use for a big, strong, lonely boy.”

She figures to manage you, my father warned me from his throne inside my skull. Her with her dyed hair.

The truth was, she was frightened of me. All of them were—terrified of what I might do or say that would stop them believing. That kind of power is no good for anyone, much less a young man.

I behaved badly and the results were disastrous. But I chose to believe that my father loved me too much to kill himself, even when that choice cost me my immortal life. I’m not ashamed of that.

“I don’t understand why she’s got you all, even Mr. Lane, eating out of her hand,” I said to Bim one afternoon. We were standing outside the trailers. Kathleen’s laundry was on the line. Her old blue dress billowed suddenly, as if there were a body in it. I’d just heard that Pamela had told Mr. Lane my father couldn’t keep his hands to himself, and I was angry. My father was so uninterested in women my life is something of a miracle.

Bim said that when a woman flirts with you, it’s rude not to flirt back. But he also said that it’s rude for two men like us, two men of the world, to discuss a woman in this way. So he moved from the particular to the general. “Okay, then,” he said. “Some men don’t require imagination. Some men are turned on just by the effort. They don’t ask themselves if it’s real or not, because they don’t care. They don’t see a difference between a woman trying to be sexy and a sexy woman.”

Someone was walking in the gravel behind us.

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