Entropy (16 page)

I love you.

I have never stopped loving you, even if you have stopped loving me.

Please always remember that.

I wonder when you listen to this if it will be raining. It was when I followed you into the backyard that morning, but it wasn't very heavy. It was sort of peaceful, like the rain that falls along the beach in the middle of the night or the rain that filters through a forest canopy. The ground was saturated with water from the night before. You had dragged the cello out with you, determined to get rid of it, and told me to leave you alone.

But I never will, and you should know that.

I implored you to just take a hold of the cello. Tears, mixed in with the falling rain streamed down my cheeks. I wanted to reach you. I was surprised when you sat down on a landscape boulder and started to play. The constructed bow must have felt unfamiliar to you because you did not play for too long. Despite it only lasting a few minutes, in those stunning moments I was carried away by the notes that emanated from you. I wanted to dance and replay the moments of when we kissed for the first time. You seemed so nervous when I first touched the side of your face. Yet within moments I found myself tearing away at your body.

Minutes after you stopped playing, when I had turned my back to you, the cello went up in flames on the grass. As I turned, I watched aghast, as the strings curled closer together, and became illuminated. The stain seemed to drip from the base and pour into the grass. It looked like oil. It was cold outside, but I could feel the intense heat from the instrument scorching the atmosphere. I started to cry helplessly. I beat my palms against your chest repeatedly. You never flinched, even as I struck my hands hard against your neck and face. I kept pummeling you, harder and harder, around your face and chest, and was shouting, screaming at you ...

I called you a selfish cripple.

Exhausted by your unwillingness to defend yourself, I dropped to my knees and sobbed. I cried harder than I had ever cried before in my life. We both sat there in the sodden grass of our backyard. Although I cried, you remained stoically silent. The only time your lips parted were to kiss me slightly below my chin. I was sure that you tasted my tears. For a moment, I wished that they could have poisoned you. The wood of the instrument darkened and after a few minutes the flames died out.

I never asked you why you burned the cello …

My attention was suddenly distracted. Through the front window of the bus, I could see flashing lights. Some hundred yards up the road, I thought I saw a police barricade being put in place. I tasted bile in the back of my throat. I struggled to clutch the gun, feeling a mixture of fear and aggression. I finally pulled the gun out from the inside of my coat, held it between my legs and exhaled heavily. I lowered my head and momentarily tapped the barrel of the gun against the floor of the bus in front of my seat, from side to side, mirroring the metronome my wife used to count out a rhythm when she danced. I briefly thought of how she used to dance for me; how she gracefully moved her body with unparalleled beauty and agility.

I wondered if she was out there somewhere, behind the men in ponchos at the barricade, hoping to talk to me. But someone else, most likely a trained negotiator, would try to make contact. They would try to identify with me, gain my trust and convince me to give up.

If only they could help me.

A part of me wanted them to come on board the bus, and to take my hand. I wanted them to comfort me, and to try understand the torture involved with a man's determination. I wanted them to understand my fragility, and how when everything else has been stripped away, how easily we can all fracture. Maybe the negotiator would speak to me of hope. Birth was full of hope. Religion was full of hope.
Please come onto this bus and convince me that there was hope somewhere.
However I knew that it was not that simple.

I had to succeed with my plan.

I stood up, raised the gun above my head and pulled the trigger.

***

It all happened as quickly as Augustina and I had fallen into the brilliance of one another's love.

The sound of the gunshot ripping through the roof still echoed loudly after the bus had shuddered to a stop. I wondered if my brother heard the gunshot as it exited from the chamber and punctured the roof of the bus. Thick black smoke from the scorched tires scraping across the blacktop, was still drifting into the distance. It passed over the top of the police cars that had gathered on a side street, and disappeared towards the horizon. It wasn't supposed to happen like this.

I had gotten so close.

I still had my gun trained on one of the male passengers. I was sweating profusely.

Something moved around the edges of the street. In a small clearing I could see several armed men moving from behind a house. Where can a man go when he reached the end of everything that he knew to be right? What does he do when he stands in the coldness of his own existence, saddened and frightened by the violent truth that he has failed? I imagined her coming home and seeing the files that I had left behind.

I wanted to tell her I was sorry.

I wanted to tell her why I burned the cello.

Instead I instructed the driver to kill the engine and to throw the keys out the window. I immediately regretted that rash decision. I had just tossed my only means of escape out the window too. I angrily moved towards the front of the bus. The sole female passenger was clasping her hands in prayer. Spitefully, I told her that hope and faith were God's lies to us all. Instantly I regretted my outburst. What had this woman done to me? She was now yet another victim of my failings as a human.

I told the passengers to move towards the rear of the bus, and to sit away from the emergency door. Moving closer to a window I pressed my face up against the glass and surveyed my surroundings. I squeezed the handle of the gun and pressed it against my chest. It was difficult to get an accurate picture of the situation. I calmly told everyone to hand me their cellular phones and any other electronic devices.

The driver was struggling to move. It was obvious that he had some serious medical condition. Sweat was pouring along his neck and was soaking the front of his shirt. His breathing was very erratic and quick. I told him to stop. The man turned slowly, his eyes a mixture of anxiety and aversion. The gun was still pressed tightly against my chest. Leaning towards to him, I told him to go. It wouldn't matter what he said once he was questioned. Despite not wanting anyone to see me, I couldn't cover up any of the windows inside the bus. I would soon be recognized and identified.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do.

If I were to surrender, I might have a chance to begin again, to resurvey the embattled landscape that I had crossed. Inwardly, I wished that I could step off the bus and plead for help, for someone to understand, not just to listen with pretend empathy. However, this would action would only add to my catalogue of failure. Dishonorable amnesty felt as menacing to me as a loaded gun.

I watched the driver move around the right side of the bus. An emergency medical technician ran up to him, wrapped a blanket across his shoulders, and ushered him away. The man sat down on the back of an ambulance and was given oxygen. A police officer walked up beside him while he was still struggling to breathe, and started talking to him. No doubt he was asking him questions about what had happened.

A sniper would be stationed behind a tree, on the roof of a house or perhaps underneath a car; wherever he could be certain of a clear shot. In the eventual dark, he would remain there, nameless, faceless, soulless and patient, like a personification of death itself. It was what I should have been, resolute and assured.

The silence I usually loathed and rejected, embraced me, giving me a transitory sense of community. Momentarily I belonged to its quiet spectrum, the small pockets of time where no one spoke. I wished I could have remained in this space indefinitely, but I soon brought myself back to my current situation.

I tucked the gun into my belt so that it was against the small of my back. I then reached up and removed the light bulbs from the ceiling of the old bus starting at the rear. I paused beside the young woman on my way back towards the front. I couldn't help but notice that she was very beautiful. In her trembling hands, she was holding an art catalogue.

***

It had been less than an hour since I pulled the trigger. I moved my jacket to the seat in front of me and began tearing through its pockets, desperate for a pill. There had to be some left. Eventually, I found one and placed it against my tongue. My mouth was so dry. While moving the jacket, I dislodged some more of the damning information about my brother, some photographs and a surveillance tape, which dropped to the floor. I struggled to reach over and pick them up. I stared at a series of black and white images of the different crime scenes. Everything about each of the locations appeared bleak and repressive.

Once, things used to be beautiful before the rot and decay had set in.

The hardened, dispassionate crimes of my brother weighed heavily upon my consciousness. I remembered some of the hypothesized motives and reasons from one of the files. They had been provided by a criminal psychologist who had been brought in to develop a profile. A pedophile was a disordered person with intense urges and fantasies, involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child. The person is often intensely distressed by images of arousal and intercourse. The report hypothesized that he had engaged in these behaviors for at least six months, but probably longer. However, not all child molesters or pedophiles murdered and butchered their victims like he had. My brother appeared to specifically choose children whose emotional fabric he thought had been torn by a fragmented home or social environment.

I personally understood how easy it was to manipulate someone through trust, promised hope, seduction, and those moments of intimacy and privacy. And in time, how easy it was to use all of this to then damage and hurt them.

I had been beaten down by the barbarity and the tenacity of the human spirit, the individual, the union of man and woman, of children deprived of their innocence, strewn together by passion and coincidence, hate and consequence. When trust and intimacy were stripped away, when a man was broken, you were doing him a favor by killing him. Everything after that just became a disparaging choice of externalism. We were both murderers. My brother and I were solely responsible for the slaughter of an infinite and incalculable number of innocuous dreams.

When I listened to those wiretaps, I was sickened by their ominous contents, and chilled by the very tone of my brother's voice. I knew that it had to come to an end. The voices were all labeled as unidentified except for his. I had heard at least two others and it was difficult to understand the specifics of their dialogue. But I knew that it was about a little girl. But none of the markings on any of the transcripts had said which one.

Suddenly, I saw one of the male passengers at the rear of the bus stand and come towards me. I pulled out the gun and pointed it at his head. When he started to speak I cocked the trigger and told him to sit back down. It was my intention not to keep them here any longer than was necessary. And unless someone tried something very brash, no one would be injured. None of this had anything to do with them. It would all be over soon. I lowered the gun when he turned around.

***

I was pacing the aisle of the bus, waiting for them to call again. It had been about an hour since the initial contact from a negotiator. There were so many questions that he asked me, and I never really gave a clear answer to any of them. I said that no one was injured and no one would be as long I was given some time and space. What I really wanted was another driver and access to the main highway. But I knew that they would never let me leave with anyone else on board. I had thought about telling him to bring my brother here. However, that too was never going to be a possibility. He asked me to release the rest of the passengers, or perhaps just the woman. I said no.

I sat down next to the still fallen pile of evidence. I pulled out another tape from my shoulder bag, put it in the recorder and pressed a button. The harsh sounds of construction penetrated my head. Suddenly, there was a break. It was Augustina again. She had been crying. I could hear the subtle, delicate differences in her breathing, the unevenness in her resonance. Normally it was usually so calm, so enduring. I used to say to her that her voice could rid the world of famine and violence; that it could bring water to the thirsty, and comfort to the diseased and dying.

I know you will understand the significance of recording over sections of sound from this construction site. It was the first job that you were assigned to when you believed, for the first time, that your past was truly behind you. It was about four and a half years after your accident when your sponsor found you this job. It made sense to have you study sound, to find better ways to keep people safe, as your music had kept me from harm for so long. Of course, I wanted you to play again. But as I have said before, I never wanted to push you.

I know that it was the first time you wore the prosthetic out in public. I watched you from a distance, pulling the resin plastic against your shoulder. It was so hot that day, but you still wore long sleeves. I thought you did it to cover your arm. But it was not until when I watched you walk out of the house to catch the bus one day in a thick shirt and jeans that I realized why you went to such lengths to cover up your arm. It was because of what that woman had said to you when we went away to the beaches near Long Island for one of my performances.

At the time when you said that you would go to the party after my performance, I was kind of surprised. You didn't really know any of the people there, and I thought that you might have been more comfortable if you had stayed at the hotel. You seemed to be a little reclusive, hiding behind groups of people, using them as a shield for your body. But I thought that outfit you wore looked so good on you, the light colors really brought out the enticing color of your eyes. And then that stupid, ignorant woman set fire to all the confidence that you had mustered to come out with me that night.