Entropy (19 page)

The sounds on the tape stopped abruptly.

I don't know what to say anymore. Honestly that's a lie. I do know what to say, but I grow weary of saying the same things over and over. There are only so many ways that I can tell you that I love you and honor you, before they start to sound vacant, like these industrial recordings. Most of them are just so hollow and penetrable, lacking any sort of life or biology. My dear husband, they are lonely. And so am I. I have stood by you when others have not. But instead of loving me more deeply and more intensely, you have pushed me away, stacking my warming and nurturing sounds on one of your shelves, and forgetting about me.

I recently spoke to the family of that boy. I know you wouldn't have wanted me to, but you need to understand that even they forgive you, and that they even offered to help you. But they said to me that you refused to talk to them. I wish that you could forgive yourself for what happened.

Last night, on my way home from the studio, I walked past the second-hand music store; the one where people donate their old pieces and where most of the instruments go to the local schools, to help out struggling, underfunded arts departments. In a display window, there was a violin for sale. It was once played by the same man that left your quartet; the last one to abandon you. He was your partner longer than any of the others. You respected him so much and tried so hard to convince him to stay on. But the day that the two of you were supposed to meet, he never showed. It was as if he had just vanished, disappeared into a selfish vacuum of distance and apathy.

Less than a year later, we were in a music store together and you noticed his recordings. He had joined another quartet in California, but never had the intestinal resolve to say anything to you. What he did wasn't fair. The level of disrespect he showed you was unconscionable. After everything that you had helped him through, his battle with alcohol, his very public divorce, this was how he repaid you, by walking away without so much as a conversation or even a letter.

I could never understand why people never told you the truth about things …

Or maybe I do …

After all, I am speaking into this microphone and am just as afraid to tell you the truth as much as they were. Outwardly, what those men did never seemed to bother you. You gave so much of yourself to other people, waiting just once for someone to give back to you.

By the time anyone did, including me, it was too late. And you compartmentalized all of that anger and hurt, and had tucked it away into the recesses of your heart and your mind. You buried it under layers of loneliness and doubt. You thought that by ignoring it, it would simply pass, decay and rot.

Instead of destroying it, you have allowed it to slowly destroy you ...

I let the DAT recorder continue to play and tucked the gun into the front of my waistband. The earpiece dropped to the floor as I stood up and walked slowly towards the rear of the bus where the beautiful woman was sitting. I grabbed the handle of the gun and pulled it from my waist. I pointed the gun into her unforgettable face and eyes and told her to get up. It was the only time during all of this that she looked scared, uncertain. When she did finally stand, she nearly collapsed but I held her up. The barrel of the gun pressed lightly into her skin.

We turned around and headed back towards the front of the bus. I stood close to her as she stared nervously through the pane of glass that made up part of the door. Sheets of rain dripped along the hinges and leaked a little onto the floor. The gun moved gently across the small of her back. I leaned closer to her and whispered that I should have let her go hours ago, and that she had been through enough.

Unfortunately, I had only just recognized her. It was her daughter that the police had found first, floating in that pool. There had been some photographs of her broken family included in the files on my brother. Initially, this woman and her husband were treated as suspects. It mentioned briefly that her husband had recently left her, and that he blamed her for what had happened. That was just a lie, a fabrication created to suppress guilt and sorrow. The same tumult had crippled me, ensuring a vacant and inaccessible existence. Moreover, I had undervalued a woman who I should have championed.

I said nothing more to the woman but I should have.

Suddenly, the man who I had struck above the eye a few hours ago charged from the rear of the bus and reached out for the gun. The gun discharged as I fell backwards and struck my head against the steering column. White balls of light streaked through my eyes. Even with my eyes shut for a moment, I could see the reflection of the floodlights outside cascade against the back end of the bus, penetrating the imperfections in the broken glass, and interrupting the solemnity that I had so desperately tried to maintain.

But that kind of unbroken innocence, that kind of honest concord never lasts. People suddenly started moving along the edges of the street, and the sidewalks of the houses surrounding the intersection. I couldn't hear them. Nor could I hear their voices telling me that I should surrender, and that I should save myself, and that there was nothing to gain.

All I could see was an auction house catalogue highlighting a man's paintings on the floor of the bus.

It was covered in blood.

The piercing, red trail of the sniper scope suddenly materialized and danced methodically along the edges of the ceiling, dripping down the edges of the bus and onto the floor next to me. In that brief moment of tranquility before the inevitable, I remembered what her voice sounded like on those tapes; how her lips never wavered in uncertainty as to what words would arouse the tender hairs at the edges of my ears. She had tried so hard to save me but not even her beauty, her love and her passion could halt the decline and rot.

I closed my eyes and waited for the gunshot to tear into my forehead or rip open my chest.

I wondered what sounds I would hear then.

I glanced up at the cracked face of the clock above her dresser. She would be leaving for the lawyer's office soon. After that I would need to catch the next bus to the terminus. What happened after I boarded would leave me with minimal contact with anybody, even her. That's the way that it always had to be. The department would have a handler in Massachusetts. Once we made contact that would be it. I would be isolated and alone. That man would be the last person to understand or have any knowledge of who I really was - or who I thought I had once been. I opened and shut my eyes a couple of times. I wasn't used to the contacts that I was using to alter the color of my eyes. They needed to match the identity that had been created for me. Details mattered when it came to going undercover.

It was difficult at first, pretending, lying; living the truncated biography of a person who never really existed outside of a room of specialists and criminal psychologists; never having a real address or a legitimate social security number. I couldn't be honest or revealing, even with her. I wasn't supposed to be. Most career criminals were cautious, not indecisive and aggressive. And once an arrest was made, that person I had become, that facsimile, would slip into an unmarked folder and be locked inside a file cabinet. Sometimes I would be the same person again and again and again, until his identity was breached and he became a liability. Then he would simply “disappear.”

No matter who I became, even when being a husband, in the end, I always vanished, leaving hardly any evidence that I had ever been there.

I stared at the maroon quilt that had covered her body when I heard the handle of the bathroom door begin to turn. The silence thundered across ruffled sheets and the dimmed track lighting. I didn't know what to say after what had happened. She and I hadn't made love like that in over a year. But it seemed abhorrent, seething of contempt and hate, instead of compassion and ardor. The door opened and I could see her reflection in the long mirror against the wall. It still hadn't been hung, nor painted. There were a lot of things that we hadn't finished. Certain spots on the wall were still covered with dried Spackle. The hopelessness of our situation echoed softly.

I watched her come out of the bathroom fully nude, beads of warm water rolling down the inside of her thighs, glistening like morning dew on her pubis. She brushed past me, her body smelling of vanilla. It was probably the last time that the light from our bedroom would descend along her unparalleled shape, and I would see the seductive way that the silver beams clung to her like mercury, afraid to let go and become lost in the rawness and uncertainty of the dark.

“I feel like a whore,” she said, pulling her intimates over the subtle curves of her hips. The taste of the skin just underneath her armpits at the sides of her breasts was still present on my lips.

“I never treated you like anything other than my wife, and I have never stopped loving you, regardless of what you think of me,” I said.

“I'm not sure that you ever gave me the regard that you should have … so, tell me, which one of you did I fuck this morning?”

Who was I?

William McCoy, convicted arsonist, responsible for the deaths of seven people in a row home fire in Philadelphia. Graduated with a degree in chemical engineering. Arrested for the first time in 1997, for immolating a building housing an abortion clinic. It was vacant at the time. Released in 2005. No living relatives. His only distinguishing feature is a long, patterned scar on his back from a second-degree burn caused by his mother when he was nine. He believes he is doing God's work because the mark resembles the Virgin Mary when looked at in the reflection of a mirror. He is believed to be working with other men and women responsible for setting fires to several other women's clinics, and at least four other government buildings. He has been labeled by the Federal Government as an extreme anarchist and domestic terrorist. Currently being sought for questioning in Washington, Montana and South Carolina in connection with several fires.

“Don't talk like that,” I said.

“Don't what? Tell the truth?” she responded quickly.

“Please don't disgrace it like that, make it sound so goddamn cheap,” I pleaded.

“Disgrace what, our marriage? Fucking you?” she asked, stepping quickly into a beautiful maize sundress. “Everything that's happened between us is damaged. Maybe it always has been, and I just couldn't see it for what it was. I tricked myself. I hate it every time I let you stick your cock inside me.”

“Then why do it?” I asked.

“Because I've been alone here for so long that I needed to feel something,” she said.

“You knew what I was, and we both knew what could happen,” I said calmly.

“You were never honest with me about who you were, and what you did! Were you really giving me a way out all that time, and I was just too fucking naive to take it? Or is this your way of putting all of the guilt onto me?” I wanted to reach out and hold her, but fought against it.

“It's nobody's fault,” she said after a minute, her tone more subdued. She looked too exhausted to argue, rubbing the back of her neck and allowing her shoulders to lose their rigidity. I moved closer towards her and reached out to zip up the back of her sundress. When my fingertips brushed against the small of her back she pulled away.

“Don't touch me,” she whispered.

I started carefully towards her as she watched the rain gathering strength outside our bedroom window. Her shoulders tensed when I touched them, but she didn't pull away this time. I wanted to lick the ebony flesh of her throat. She leaned her head back, as if to allow me access and then spoke.

“I'm leaving. When you come back from wherever they're sending you, I … I won't be here,” she said, her voice breaking slightly as she tried to suppress the emotion in her voice.

“Why?”

“Because I can't do this anymore.”

“What? Love me?” I asked, kissing the side of her face.

“Yes. I can't love you like this anymore,” she said. “What I once felt for you is now bordering on hate. It's not right and you know it.” She gently touched the back of my hand. “Somewhere, underneath of all the layers of all the people that you are, you know I'm right. You're gone for months at a time, and no one at that fucking place tells me anything about you,” she said. “I've started to find what you do to be selfish, arrogant and cruel, instead of noble,” she added.

I rubbed her chest, her nipple expanding underneath her dress. I reached inside her bra and cupped her bare breast. “You once told me you knew everything about me,” I said.

“I'm not sure that I ever did. At times you're a stranger to me, someone who speaks to me as if they know me, but I don't recognize anything. You've become just a soft voice, but it feels unfamiliar and cold. I was wrong when I said that I knew you,” she said closing her eyes.

“No, you weren't,” I whispered.

“We've been through this so many times. I can't break now,” she said. “I just can't. You have to let me go.”

“Don't do this,” I said.

“Please don't make me,” she responded, taking my hand and passing it along her dress. Her lips parted slightly as she guided me across her abdomen and in between her thighs. She was beginning to moisten, and I wanted her to reach back and massage my stiffening cock.

“Don't go,” she whispered. “Wherever you're supposed to go, take me with you. Make me into someone else with you.”

“Do you want me?” I asked. She raised her right leg higher, giving me permission to place my fingers into her, molecules of sweat were forming along her throat and the curve of her neck. I squeezed her left breast tighter.

“No,” she said, with no real emotion. “Not if you don't stay.”

“I can't. But I love you,” I said. Tears slipped down the right side of her face, that angelic face, and became lost in the small hairs on the back of my arm. She removed my hands from her body and pulled away, opening the bedroom window. The rain lightly touched her face. She was quiet for a few moments. She was so calm and placid that I wasn't sure that she was even still breathing. I watched her as she finally turned without looking at me, grabbed her coat and walked out of our bedroom.

I followed behind and watched her open the front door, the rain overflowing from the rusted gutters, and drowning the annuals she had planted when we first moved into this house. Most of them were dead, wilted stems rotted and heavy with burden. She didn't turn around as she continued walked down the driveway, evening her stride, a briefcase brushing against the side of her thigh. She was scared, but I couldn't get her to admit it because she wanted so desperately to leave, and not allow herself the opportunity to weaken, to vacillate.

Without an umbrella she waited at the edge of the sidewalk, her shoulders and hands trembling. I couldn't tell if her reaction was because of the bitterness in the rain, or if she was crying. But I couldn't necessarily expect her to grieve because of me. Not after what had happened. It was debilitating, understanding that my wife would never look at me the same way again, the endearment that once existed in the rustic color of her eyes suffocated forever.

I stood in the open doorway and did nothing, surrounded by landscapes and images embraced by entropic hands. I watched her touch the sides of her face, then hide them deep into the pockets of her pea coat. I tried desperately to remember through the rain, the smell of the skin below her throat, and the way her laugh transcended through my entire body when I licked her slightly above her windpipe.

A few minutes later, a cab pulled up in front of the house. She was far from an assailable woman, but I would never see her look as vulnerable or as alluring as she did when she turned around and dropped her wedding ring into a puddle at the end of the sidewalk. The drops splashed up and touched the surface of her left ankle. The bracelet I had given her was also gone, no longer clinging effortlessly to the structure of her delicate bones. The rear door of the cab shut quietly.
Don't. Please don't leave me here, lost in a storm of inadequacy and misfortune, alone and incurable.
The earth choked in nearly complete deafness. All I could hear was the sound of running water. Hope had no place in the daily lives of the imperfect.

I walked out to where she had been and sat down on the jagged edge of the curb. Although the water soaked through my clothes, I could feel nothing. Some of the early fall leaves that had fallen from trees that overhung the street and had been stamped into the pavement, looked like puddles of dried blood from a crime scene. I thought I heard the bell of a child's bicycle ringing out in the distance. If I looked close enough into the street I thought that I could see the faded chalk outline of a hopscotch board. I thought I heard the laughter of a group of children playing tag and the hollow bounce of a playground ball banging against the pavement. However when I looked around I saw no one else, just a wasteland of debris, damaged toys and opportunities lost. The wind twisted through the branches of the trees, speaking in barely audible whispers that I didn't recognize.

Who was I?

Jonathan Levin, repeat sexual offender and documented pedophile. Arrested in 1994, for the sexual assault of a 9-year-old girl in Wisconsin. Molested his first victim at the age of 16. Arrested again at the age of 21, for the assault of a college student in California. Incarcerated in a mental hospital until the age of 27. Two months after his release, he was arrested again for the attempted assault of another 16-year-old girl in Iowa. A repeated violator of Megan's Law in several states. His current whereabouts is unknown.

The local police department was having difficulty in breaking a case that had been going on since the end of last year, involving the brutal sexual assault and subsequent murders of several children. Their sex and age range varied, as did the resulting levels of violence. That was the part that at least to me was the most disturbing aspect; the inherent lack of a pattern in the murderer's processes. After discovering more bodies and less evidence, someone at their department contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Violent Crimes Division requesting assistance.

Locals didn't always appreciate federal interference and tended to be suspicious of outsiders when there were a series of unsolved murders. Therefore as I was already a local, I was selected for the case. The town was fairly isolated, and had fairly a sparsely populated community. The demographics were comprised of largely lower middle-class farmers and aged steel workers. It was a town suffocated by a depressed economy, unemployment, and a lack of industry and technology. A good portion of the population either commuted to a different part of the state, or crossed the border for work.

It used to be a beautiful drive, that stretch of highway which led into town. Dairy cows and livestock grazed on the fertile grass. Olive green stalks of immature corn stretched for miles, with barns and silos built into the hillsides in the distance. Now, the largely abandoned farms and dilapidated buildings only served as a reminder that all things, no matter how durable or unyielding they might first appear to be, break.

***

No one appeared to be at fault for the failure to arrest someone or at least identify a suspect in the murders of those children. There were no simple answers. Cases went cold. It was sometimes the natural order of things. Then the decision was made behind closed doors to involve someone with undercover experience. The initial concern was the possibility of compromising one of my other identities. But I had experience with sex crimes involving adolescents, and was entrusted with all the evidence that had been collected. Further, a large part of tracking sexual predators could be done on the internet through chat rooms, website sharing and photographs, rather than direct contact.