Apathy and Other Small Victories [Paperback]

Comprising 50% sheer brilliance, 50% distilled cynicism, and 50% coronary-inducing humor, Apathy and Other Small Victories has more life, laughs, and story on every page than should be possible. A heartbreakingly funny paean to supercharged nihilism, it's the best book you'll read in years, and the funniest novel ever. If you don't love it, there's something wrong with you, and if you do, there is also something wrong with you—but you won't care.”—Max Barry, author of Company

"Neilan's wit is a razor that cuts and slashes mercilessly on every single page, in every single paragraph, so that your fingers will bleed even as the tears of laughter soak your face. So basically, you'll be reduced to a bloody, weeping mess, madly reading whole pages aloud as friends and family shake their heads and slowly back away."—Jonathan Tropper, author of Everything Changes

“Neilan spins sparkling comic riffs on the tawdriness and sterility of American life.”—Publishers Weekly

 

The only thing Shane cares about is leaving. Usually on a Greyhound bus, right before his life falls apart again. Just like he planned. But this time it's complicated: there's a sadistic corporate climber who thinks she's his girlfriend, a rent-subsidized affair with his landlord's wife, and the bizarrely appealing deaf assistant to Shane's cosmically unstable dentist. When one of the women is murdered, and Shane is the only suspect who doesn't care enough to act like he didn't do it, the question becomes just how he'll clear the good name he never had and doesn't particularly want: his own.

PAUL NEILAN recently left his mind-numbing job at an insurance company in Portland, Oregon, where he spent most of his time hiding in the bathroom and weeping. Born of this and many, many other humiliations, Apathy and Other Small Victories is his first novel.

I was stealing saltshakers again. Ten, sometimes twelve a night, shoving them in my pockets, hiding them up my sleeves, smuggling them out of bars and diners and anywhere else I could find them. In the morning, wherever I woke up, I was always covered in salt. I was cured meat. I had become beef jerky. Even as a small, small child, I knew it would one day come to this.
 
 
That Sunday I could feel my head pounding even before I opened my eyes. I might have kept them shut all day if there hadn't been two men standing over my bed.
 
"All right partyboy, time to get up," one of them said in a gruff, weary voice.
 
I blinked a few times. I was very confused. I didn't know who either of them were, or what the fuck they were doing in my apartment. They both had their shirts tucked in and the older one, the one with the gruff voice, had a low hairline that started just above his eyebrows and a drooping mustache that hung along his sagging jowls. He looked like a walrus. The younger one had slicked-back hair and squared shoulders and perfect posture. He was smirking like he couldn't wait to show me how cocky he was. He looked like every cop that had ever given me a ticket.
 
"Smells like criminal intent in here," he said, glaring at me.
 
"What?" I said.
 
"I was gonna ask you the same thing," he said, challenging me in a way that I did not understand.
 
The older guy looked annoyed at both of us.
 
"I'm Detective Brooks," he said, "and this is Detective Sikes. We're here to ask you a few questions."
 
"Don't you need a warrant or something? How did you get in here?" I couldn't think of anything I'd done that would get me arrested. If stealing a few saltshakers was wrong I didn't want to be right.
 
"Your door was wide open so we came in, just to make sure you were okay. And we don't need a warrant to ask you a couple of questions. We just want to talk."
 
"Oh." I had my bedsheet pulled up to my chin and I was clenching it with both fists for some reason. It must have been the goddamn vampires again.
 
"Why don't you sit up like a big boy and talk to us," Sikes said.
 
"No thanks, I'm very comfortable."
 
"Where are your manners," he said, smirking. "Rise and shine fancy pants!" and he grabbed the bottom of my sheet and yanked it away from me like my father used to do with my blanky when I was very small, but this time I didn't cry. And I knew that I was finally a man.
 
I was still wearing my shoes and the same clothes I'd been fired in on Friday, except now everything was covered in salt. There was a pile of it on my bed, and I was buried underneath it like the sleeping dad on the beach who wakes up to find that his mischievous asshole children have played a joke on him with their buckets of sand and their cruelty. But these men were not my children, and there were no saltshakers anywhere. Where had it all come from? How had this happened? I had no idea. I have never been able to explain myself.
 
"Bling bling. Looks like somebody had themselves a little fiesta," Sikes said. "What've we got here, coke? H? Mexican chimmy hat?" He stuck his pinky into his mouth and then dipped it in the salt. "You're going away for a long time señor," he said as he jammed his salt-speckled finger up his nostril.
 
"Sergeant that doesn't look like--" Brooks started to say, but Sikes was already snorting. His eyes watered and he started coughing and sneezing in short fast fits like a dog. He blew his nose into his hands and rushed to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. The faucet was on for a long time and he was coughing and spitting and crying.
 
Brooks looked at me strange.
 
"You sleep in salt?" he said.
 
"Sometimes."
 
"Good for your back?"
 
"It's all right."
 
"You famous or something?"
 
"Not really," I said.
 
He considered the possibilities, then decided I was guilty of some undetermined perversion and shook his head. We both listened as Detective Sikes heaved into my sink. I wished the guy in the apartment above me would start fucking his guinea pig again, just to give us something else to listen to, but he did not. Those kinds of wishes almost never come true.
 
When the cocky prick finally came out of the bathroom his face was raw and smeared, his eyes puffy from all the crying. He looked like a burn victim, one who'd been through numerous successful surgeries but still wasn't fully healed. It's tough to ever really recover after your face has been on fire. I stared at him pretty fucking bemused but he wouldn't look at me.
 
"Now that you've cracked the case," I said, smiling at Sikes and his chafed red nose, "I really would like to get back to sleep. I bid you both good morning."
 
"It's two in the afternoon," Brooks said.
 
"No shit."
 
"Like I said, we have a few questions for you."
 
"All right," I said, and sighed.
 
I was still foggy and my head was throbbing, but I could play vice squad with these two for a few minutes. It would make them feel like they were being useful, and it would be an interesting start to my day. I just hoped I hadn't done anything stupid the night before. I didn't remember anything illegal. I didn't remember anything really.
 
"Where were you last night, around 10 p.m.?"
 
"Probably at a bar."
 
"Probably?"
 
"Probably."
 
"What bar?"
 
"The one down the street."
 
"What's the name of it?"
 
"What's this about?"
 
"How well do you know Marlene Burton?"
 
"Who?"
 
"The assistant at Dr. Weinhardt's office. Your dentist."
 
"Oh, deaf Marlene."
 
"She had a last name." Sikes broke his shame-induced silence. "She wasn't defined by her disability. She was a person too you know."
 
I know, fuckhead, I signed in response, working my hands slow for emphasis. I waited for him to react. I wanted to slap away the cockiness that was already creeping back into his blotchy, running face. When it was clear that he had no idea I'd called him a fuckhead in sign language I said, "What about her?"
 
"Marlene Burton was found dead last night."
 
 
My dentist's name was Dr. Weinhardt but I called him Doug. Doug had episodes. He'd flip out and have to lie down and monitor his pulse and breathe slow and in rhythm like a pregnant woman or else he'd faint, which he usually did anyway. He thought iced tea helped, so he kept a pitcher of it in his back office on a table beside his fainting couch, and he carried a monogrammed flask with him wherever he went. The monogram was D.W.I. Douglas Weinhardt the First.
 
"But D.W.I. are the initials for Driving While Intoxicated! And it's a flask but there's no alcohol, it's only iced tea. Get it? And I don't even drive! I take the bus every day! That's funny, right?"
 
"Jesus Doug."
 
He thought his episodes were being caused by a series of brutal attacks he'd suffered recently. This is how he explained it to me:
 
"About three months ago I was getting off a bus downtown when all of a sudden--Psshew!" He smacked both his hands against his ears. "The big folding accordion door closed right on my head! And then there must have been a malfunction or something because it just went Wham! Wham! Wham!" He pressed the air around both sides of his head three times fast with his palms, spreading his fingers and holding his elbows high, like some New Wave dance that was so embarrassing no one even joked about it anymore. "It kept slamming into my head until I fell out into the street. When I woke up there was a crowd of people standing around me and a man was snapping his fingers in my face. The bus driver said he'd never seen anything like it. I couldn't stand up without falling down again. I had to ride home in the back of an ambulance. And then a few weeks later, on a different bus with a different driver, it happened again! It's happened six more times since. I don't even call the ambulance anymore. I just crawl around until my equilibrium comes back."
 
"Christ Doug. Maybe you should see a doctor."
 
"I am a doctor," he said.
 
It would have sounded smug if he hadn't just finished telling a story about getting his head jackhammered by a bus door. It's real hard to come off as even slightly superior when you're living a Tom and Jerry episode.
 
 
Doug had a dental assistant named Marlene. My first appointment I was reclined in the chair and Doug was gouging my teeth and gums with something he called the sharpo. "Just cleaning the plaque out of the gutters," he said as blood drained into the back of my throat.
 
There was a bright light hovering above me like the ones aliens and angels use to trick people into not running away and I was breathing hard through my nose and panicking because I was choking to death on my own blood. Then I heard someone else come into the room, their shoes softly padding the floor. The light steps sounded like a woman's.
 
"Oh there she is. Just in time. Can you hand me the pro-ber?" Doug said.
 
He was speaking very slowly and louder than a normal person should. A woman's hand passed between me and the light. I saw red nails, and I was very impressed with myself. I had always been perceptive. I could've been a detective. I could've been blind and still been able to solve crimes and mysteries. I was almost like a superhero sometimes.
 
"No no, the pr-o-ber," he said way too deliberately, adding an unnecessary syllable. I figured she was either six years old or retarded. If she was that young she shouldn't be wearing nail polish. And if she was retarded she'd better not be allowed to play with the drills.
 
"Thank you. Now can I get some suc-tion? Suc-tion?"