Novels by Desmond Baiden

I became a magicians dream. I could disappear. Gone. I found comfort feeling invisible to the outside world. Maybe somewhere, someone wondered where I was. Or maybe someone was looking for me. Or wanted to save me. I couldn't save myself, that's for sure. I didn't know who I was anymore, nor did I notice that I was slowly killing my soul and breaking my father's heart. There was always someone that could aid my escape. With a snap of my fingers or a text message, I was so far gone that no one could get me. I was unstoppable. Out of control; out of my body. I was a new person killing all that remained of my spirit. Losing consciousness was such a relief. Regaining it was not nearly as fun. My heavy head is being shaken by hands. They definitely aren't mine. My mouth feels open. The first thing my exhausted eyes find is his worried face. His brown eyes look like they are going to pop off and roll onto the bathroom floor next to my sprawled-out body. He's yelling at me. He'

As many reasons as there are to kill yourself, there are just as many reasons to fake your own death. The reason is the easiest part. Pick one. Losing your job, losing your lover, losing the cap to the toothpaste; they’re all extremely valid reasons to disappear. The why isn't the hard part, the hard part is the where, when, and how. Truly, planning how to kill yourself is certainly more difficult than actually killing yourself. Whether you’re preparing for a wedding or a suicide; the logistics will always be the death of you.For Celeste the where had already been decided. The pristine and fully- furnished  beach house she purchased on impulse with her first series check had been vacant for years and was just begging for a little drama. An hour drive in her cherry-red convertible brought Celeste to the main entrance where she casually entered the gate code and coasted to the semi-circle driveway. The exterior had been repainted twice since she had bought the property. The

I still remember the first day I saw her. It was in English. She had positioned herself at the front of the classroom and I took the seat directly behind her. My friend Rebecca walked in a few moments later and noticing that there was no empty seat next to me, looked confused.Sitting behind Leilani had not been my choice. Natural desire had pushed me that way and it would have burned within me had a decided to sit anywhere else. It might have been the darkness of her skin, compared to the paleness of all of ours that pulled me in. Her lips were stained coral and she smelled like candy. I assumed she did not know perfume and make-up were not allowed. Her hair was a thick sheet of black and it hung over the back of her chair, taunting me. I wanted so badly to stroke it and that longing scared me.             “Excuse me,” she said, turning around. “How much is the Shakespeare collection for this class?”            “I…I don’t know.” Syllabi for all of our c

There’s a town on Florida’s west coast that you’ve never heard of. The people that grow up there never escape. The ones that arrive there, do so to die. You might mistake it for a nursing home gone wrong, heaven’s waiting room if you will.So it shouldn’t be a surprise that after Jason managed to escape this place four years ago, he hadn’t returned. When he meets someone new in Chicago and they ask the obligatory “where're you from,” he gives them the name of the closest city. If it wasn’t for the death of his grandmother, he never would have come back.Admittedly his life in the city wasn’t perfect. His job as a secretary to an unscrupulous attorney was unfulfilling at best. He had hoped it would be a temporary job to pay the bills until an improv troupe discovered him; but he hadn’t been on stage in over a year, his confidence was shaken. Still on those nights when he laid in bed, fretting over a failed audition, one fact managed to soothe his bruised ego, “At least I’m not back hom

The children were gone. Lila, the youngest, had just moved out three months before. Marilyn reached up for the branch of the cherry tree, and the stepladder beneath her fell backwards as she did. Flattening out as it hit the lawn. Marilyn cursed and pulled herself up with one hand. In the other she held a small saw; she needed to prune, top off the branches of the tree, and the tree was too high now to do it from the lawn.She sneezed twice, and cursed again. She had never had allergies until the year she turned forty, and now they hit her every single spring and every fall. It was late April, everything turning bright green, and the tree was covered in blossoms. There once had been several cherry trees in the yard. Jay had practically planted an orchard lining their side road when their daughter Allie was a toddler. He had told Allie it was the Cherry Lane from the song Puff the Magic Dragon, and he used to sing the song to her nightly while rocking her, over and over, and it used to

I put on my makeup in a cracked mirror, and purse my lips: a web of rose-red lipstick against fair skin. Skinny jeans, cold shoulders, a pearl clip, and – a soupçon of Chanel No. 5. The last breath in Nana’s old bottle.I set the perfume bottle down – amidst the salves and rolling change and the unfinished scarf I’ve been working on for what seems like forever – and flit fitfully about the room, looking for my ballet pumps. There! – I took them off when I remembered it had been three days since I’d watered my lilies, and their lugubrious scent was dissipating.I’m sick of shadows.Tonight, I’m going.They’ll all be there. The old gang. Two by two. Andy and Jen, who will be holding court as always – Kit and Joseph and Hector, Morgan bringing along whichever one she’s recently bewitched – Benny and Rob, ambiguously – And he! Finally – finally – on Facebook, with a new photo – and still as bold and handsome and marvelous as a knight springing from the pages of a pop-up storybook.Just li

“He said that?”“He did!”“That’s beautiful.”“Fuckin’ A yes it is! Aquinas was a genius. And that’s why I’m here, so we can listen together to the stream of the river of the core of the artery—of the heart. And we have figured it out, Marvin, we have!”“We have?”“Yes, yes we did! This music, it’s kind of like—it’s really like, like a love song between Schubert and his Maker.”“Huh. How’s that?”“How? How is—it’s because you can hear it. You know what I mean, that feeling that something’s going to happen, right?”“Okay.”“Yeah, and Schubert’s not just giving you a little sip from the source. As you said, he put everything in this one. He’s saying fine, fuck it, you want the sublime, I’ll give you the sublime—and I’m going to show you how I made it, too. So he lays out all the different parts, right? You can see all the pieces. And he lets you listen to him building, building, building towards it—getting close, slipping back, trying again, and you

This is confirmation, Sam. You were meant to be at the truck stop. I was meant to give you a ride.”“Right! Confirmation?”“So last week, I was driving and turning the dial on the radio and just…boom, right there, on NPR, this amazing sound, like nothing I’d ever heard before. It was right at the start of the second part. You know what I’m talking about?”“Yeah—with…the strings.”“Exactly! Suddenly I didn’t even remember where I’m going or what I was doing. It didn’t matter, I just had to hear this. So I pulled over by the side of the road and listened. It was everything I’d been thinking and feeling. Everything. It was the Army, Mattie, my kids, my shoulder, all of it, right there.”“Right, okay, right.”“Listening to it, somehow I knew, something’s going to happen. I don’t know what, I don’t know anything, just something in the music. Got me so excited, chills down my back, even though I didn’t know what I was waiting for.” Sam didn’t either. It had been ye

“No,” Marvin said. “It’s not going to work. Even if I could…be okay with it, MMA’s not big in Seattle, not yet. If it was just me, fine, but with my family—for breadwinner money, you need to be in L.A.—maybe San Diego, they’re coming up.”“I hear San Diego is great.”“But really, ah fuck it.” Marvin shook his head. “I’m fooling myself. None of this matters anymore.”“Wait, why not? Why wouldn’t it matter? San Diego, now that sounds like a great—”“I tell you, man, I’ve been fighting so long. My whole life, the solution to anything that came at me, muscle up.” Marvin suddenly flexed his arms and tightened his grip on the wheel until his forearms quivered with effort. “Bear it, fight it. But this time, this last thing—gotta say, it hurts. And after I gave my whole life to them. It makes me feel like, fuck it, I don’t want to fight anymore. I just want to let go.” Marvin released his grip on the steering wheel with both hands, so that only the lower portion of his

“Yeah?”Meditation, good. Not uncommonly, obvious remedies for what plagued a driver were contained within their confessions. And often enough for Sam, allaying their concerns was as simple as reminding them that they had been wearing ruby slippers all along.“What I realized was, I wasn’t scared of dying or getting hurt. I was scared I was going to lose my soul over there. I’d get cut loose from God and become a monster. So I had this idea, and it seemed crazy, but I knew it wasn’t. So when Mattie was out, picking up the kids, I went to the pet store, bought a cat, brought it home, and I squeezed it to death in the kitchen.”“Oh fuck!”“Yeah.”“Oh fuck. Sorry, I’m just—”“Nah, nah, it’s cool,” Marvin said. “I understand. I know what I did was awful. But I had to. I had to do something evil so I would know what it felt like—or if it wouldn’t feel like anything at all.”“Jesus.”“I did it slowly, skinny orange cat, looking right in its eyes the wh

You grew up doing this stuff? Martial arts?”“Forever.”“Teach before the Army?”“Nah, I started training men the first time I was overseas. It felt like, how could I keep that knowledge to myself when it might save their lives? Any time I wasn’t on duty, I was teaching. It was all bullshit, though.”“How’s that?”“No hand to hand in combat anymore.”“Mmm. Guns and bombs.”“Guns, rockets, missiles, bunker busters. Mines in the middle of the fucking road—not Muay Thai and jiu-jitsu. Military cares about hand-to-hand like they care about CPR training. Doesn’t do shit, but they say it empowers a soldier. Nah, I wasn’t teaching men how to fight.”“So then?”“I was teaching them to kill.”“Oh.”“More precisely, I was teaching men to be able to kill.”“Ah, I get it.”“You don’t. No disrespect. I didn’t get it either. I thought I was hot shit, training guys on my own. Army taught me to teach better—efficiently. Give a soldier everything he needs, but only what he needs. They don’t have years

Amid the industrial grinding, blurting, spasming–where there might have been horns–Sam could hear method; each emission was in its own time, but they met every few seconds on the beat of a plastic drum machine. And then a beeping sound, like a truck backing up, out of place, just another gear for no reason. Finally, a horn blast, an actual horn, or a sample of an actual horn, signaling, drawing the whole mess together for another round. And again. Marvin looked over at Sam and shouted, “Right?”“Yeah!”“You’ll hear it, just wait for it.” Marvin’s eyes were wide as he beat his chest in time with an open hand. “Okay!” he said. “It’s…yeah, here it is!”And there it was: Pachelbel’s Canon, right out of a box, laid over the top of the mayhem like cellophane.“Right?”“Yeah!”It went on for longer than Sam would have expected and moved directly into the next track, even faster, featuring the unmistakable sound of an air wrench and a pounding beat that made every surface of the car tremble,