Entropy (24 page)

However I didn't want to talk.

Instead I fumbled my lips over her naked body and touched her breasts playfully. It was quiet except for the soft sound of her gentle moans. More than once she guided me inside her, trying to keep me safe from my own vulnerability. When images of Penelope being raped began to rush in, Noemi enveloped the structure of my body, tore at me with tenacity and violence, but without understanding. When she paused, I pleaded with her again and again:
Don't stop.
I licked the prone places on her stomach and bit at the warm flesh on her hips. She moved to her knees and I held her hands tight at the wrists behind her back. Noemi begged me to be forceful.
Harder. Harder.
I gave in and penetrated her, as Penelope had been, with complete disregard and hate. I wasn't even sure who I was: Jonathan Levin or her husband. I didn't even know or care if I was hurting her.

“You never done that before,” she said as she licked some of the perspiration off of the small of my back. I could feel her heart pulsating through my bones.

“What?” I asked. I was questioning what she would think of me, doing that to her.

“Been rough like that,” she said, reaching her hands underneath of my body and lightly rubbing my cock. I closed my eyes quickly. I was going to say that I was sorry but I didn't because part of me enjoyed what had happened. And so had she. Noemi pressed her breasts firmly against the curves of my back. She leaned closer behind my head and whispered into my ear.

“Fuck me again,” she said.

We never really learn anything about ourselves throughout the course of our lives. Actually, that's a lie. We do, but what is learned isn't always redeeming. Our natural tendency is to repeat the agonizing mistakes and endure the same painful lessons. There's no getting around it. The men that I had become had changed me. It was an inevitable conclusion. The colors on the canvas of existence will blend or fade over time. They don't turn out to be as bold or shine as brightly as once promised. No one loves as hoped, nor respects as earned. In the end, betrayal of self was the one constant, a lover that was always there the next morning.

I wished that those men had just gone off in the middle of the night, hoping to avoid the awkwardness of the morning when I would simply watch them walk away, unsure of what exactly to say. I thought about it when I let William McCoy be taken to bed by a sadistic arsonist. I thought about it when I took Noemi as Jonathan Levin. It wasn't the carnality or the passion of the act, but the way that it happened.

“It won't happen again.” That was all I wanted her to hear.

“Why? I'm asking you to do it again,” she said.

“I can't,” I said.

“Can't or won't?”

“Don't ask me again, please.” I slid out from underneath her body. “It made me feel uncomfortable,” I added.

“Is there someone else?” I reached up and held my hand to her cheek for several minutes. The directness of her question startled me.

“No,” I assured her.

***

Hours had passed and we were both still naked atop the sheets. The sea air was intrusive but soothing. There were dimples on her skin. I covered her legs and stepped into the bathroom. It was late, but I retrieved a razor from my luggage and shaved. In the action I hoped that I could step from the unrecognizable into a creature of familiarity. I leaned over the sink and washed hot water over my exhausted features. When I went back into the room, Noemi was out of bed, standing naked in front of the window. I went to drape a sheet over her body.

“No, don't,” she said. I stood behind her and kissed the top of her shoulders. I pressed my body deeper into hers. She said she wanted to take my photograph. Noemi turned to look at me and touched the side of my face. Her hands traced the full contours of my body, trailing along the sides of my waist, and descended across my legs. It felt like she was seeing me naked for the first time, acting as an unfamiliar lover. My body appeared written in Braille. Noemi's fingertips tapped the muscles in my abdomen before massaging my cock, which became rigid under her caress. I watched her sit on the edge of the bed and secure her camera. I stood with my back to her where she had just been, and stared out into the water. I wanted to turn around and ask for her help, to plead for her forgiveness. She told me that she loved me. I told her that I was disfigured. She told me that I was beautiful. It would be the last time that she would say that to me.

“God, you are so beautiful,” she said, her voice trailing off behind me. The shutter on her camera opened then closed. The moonlight dripped from the ceiling and onto my body. The graphic images of those children I had watched being violated appeared momentarily in the dimming bursts of light from her camera. Noemi moved to my right and took another picture in profile. I must have looked defeated, because she stood in front of me and licked the patch of skin under my lower lip.

Noemi adjusted her head, nestled against my frame and whispered effortlessly into my ear. I couldn't bring myself to repeat what she had said. While I struggled with the decision what to tell her, she stood back from me and depressed a button on the front of the camera. I wasn't ready to live with the weight of the consequences if I told her. The small corona from the flash lingered in the room before being smothered by the dark. I closed my eyes.

When she developed the negative I wondered who she would see, staring back at her in reversed and achromatic perspective; a burglar, an arsonist, a pedophile or a husband? Each characteristic, each individual, pressed down upon me to the point of suffocation. I struggled just to breathe, let alone be who I was supposed to be. For a brief moment she put the camera down on the edge of the bed and went into the bathroom. The light flipped on and I listened to the pipes cough before the water jetted in the shower. It wasn't long after when someone knocked at the door. I covered up and opened it. On the floor in the hallway was a newspaper. I pulled it back inside and unfolded it. There was a note inside. They had found another body.

The leaden feeling in my stomach lifted after a few minutes and I sighed with a sense of resignation. There was little I could do to help right at this moment.

Soon after, Noemi came out of the shower and lay upon the bed. I could smell her shampoo. The scent was in the water that beaded on her skin. It dripped across her shoulders and through her hair as I stretched my fingers and untangled her curls in between them. But her skin felt unfamiliar, foreign. She leaned her head back against my chest. Our bodies appeared delicate and still, but mine churned continuously underneath the surface. I never imagined that she would have been comfortable in our intimacy if I ever told her what I did. Noemi rubbed my legs and pulled them across her lap. Her index finger traced circles around the gunshot wound across my leg.

Who was I?

Peter McDonnally, small-time con artist and serial bank robber. Wanted for questioning in the attempted theft of over $125,000 in jewelry in Los Angeles. Also has an arrest warrant issued in Florida for his participation in the hold-up of an armored car. Current whereabouts unknown.

***

The latest victim was discovered in a pond on a large farm. The photographs of the crime scene that were emailed to me were hard to analyze. The accompanying reports stated that a pounding rainstorm had enveloped the area, making it difficult to determine the point of entry, and to collect physical evidence that wasn't compromised. The streaks of rain coming through the temporary spectrum of light blanketed the tall stalks of corn. It was a mess. Forensics had already been instructed to go back once the weather broke, but it would probably be futile. There was a photograph of the victim as she had been found, naked and face-up on the water. Usually, sexually motivated crimes resulted in strangulation, a lurid closeness to the victim, a twisted, encompassing embrace. However in these murders, each victim had been mutilated or violated, by an instrument causing death. It didn't fit the expected profile.

Although Noemi and I had been sitting in the bathtub, my mind was not focused on the romantic surrounds. My musing was interrupted by Noemi reaching for the faucet. The hot water rushed out into the bathtub and I felt the warmth slide through the spaces between my toes.

“What's happening?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said. I began to cautiously tell her about what I had been investigating, but I still concealed most of the details from her. Noemi read the papers, but never visualized the brutality, the disgusting details of each murdered child. I never told her about Penelope, or the other images in some of those photographs. It would have disturbed her to realize that I had imagined being aroused by such depravity. And if she had seen that I had taken her in the same way Penelope had been, I would have lost her, and all the things we had accomplished so far would have faded as quickly as her moist fingerprints on the ceramic tiles. She stood up out of the water and nudged in behind me. I wanted to reach out and stroke the inside of her shimmering thigh, but I didn't. I felt her drip water across my back as she ceaselessly touched the scar below my shoulder blade.

“Did it hurt?” she asked. The therapist I had seen asked me that same question. The department maintained highly motivated counselors for its employees, especially those who were affected directly by tragedy. Most of the time their discussions were with people who had to discharge their weapons. Apart from the internal investigations, to see if proper procedure was followed, employees were also subjected to emotional investigations as well. Decades of exceptional performance could so easily be overshadowed by the emotional remains left behind. Unfortunately, William McCoy's collateral damage was attached to my body, and I carried it with me wherever I went. There was nothing I could do to get rid of it.

“No,” I said. “Most of it was already dead tissue.”

All of my body was becoming necrotic and diseased. My skin was now nothing more than broken-down layers of epidermis, rough and unforgiving, like the husk of a dried fruit. I was a desert. Even the subtle caress of her lips across my flesh would leave her dying of thirst. Noemi told me to turn around and face her. Through the graying water I could see the dark shadow between her legs. She held my damaged hand. The chemical burn covered a large portion of my wrist and forearm.

“What happened here?” she asked. I tried to pull my hand slowly from hers, but the movement only strengthened her embrace. She closed her eyes and rolled my imperfections across the side of her moist neck.

“The winds were high and some of the accelerant I was using became ignited,” I said. The memory of my arm raging in pain in amber shades in the drenching rain made me flinch.

“So, they were burning down abortion clinics?”

“Yes,” I said. Noemi kept looking at my hand, and for a brief moment, I thought I detected pity in her tender fingers. It wasn't for me, I thought, but for the questions it raised. When I told her about William McCoy I tried to leave out opinions, or discuss the politics involved. It was my job to believe them, whether I actually did or not. But I still lied to her. Part of me realized that I probably always had lied to her. It was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between what was fact and what was part of the elaborate fictions I created. I hadn't just blurred that line, I had become a part of it. It existed in me. Noemi just kept staring into the water.

“I have to ask you something,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

I could tell by the way she dropped my hand back into the water that uncertainty had gripped her. I watched her close her eyes as she struggled to find a gentler way to say what she felt she had to ask. She didn't ask what I most feared to answer though.

“Did you ever have to kill anyone?” she said.

The surface of the water rippled. Her hands were shaking. I grabbed her hands and held them, helping them float to the top of the water. Small ovules of tears swept their way down across the smooth contours of her face, and cascaded into the water. No matter what I told her and even if I could explain why I did it, from that moment onwards I would become something else to her; an animal and a violent creature that was unconscionable and threatening.

“Yes. Once,” I said. “But it wasn't what I had intended to do,” I continued. I lied to her again. I knew exactly what I was doing that night, and exactly what it would lead me to become.

“What happened?” Noemi stood up from the bathtub and wrapped a towel tightly around her torso. While she looked into the mirror and brushed her hair, I stood and pressed against her. The calluses and bulk of my body contrasted yet complemented her delicate beauty. It was as if each layer of our skin had been placed atop one another and forged into one, a creation constructed by a skilled smith, a man who had spent a lifetime abusing his hands, his brown knuckles resembling the petrified roots of a tree that had ruptured the surface of the ground. Instead of brushing off the grim of toil, he would merely rub it into the strength of his palms. And it would take the determined strength of such an individual to tear apart what Noemi and I had.

However what would have taken the skilled smith years to deconstruct, had collapsed in the eight minutes it took for that fire to rage, and the eleven minutes it took for me to find that woman in that rain-swept field. Noemi moved closer to the mirror and our bodies shifted slightly. In that truncated moment my anatomy seemed to have changed. No longer did my body quite fit inside the dark contours of her back and shoulders.

Who was I?

William McCoy, arsonist and murderer. Wanted for the arson-related deaths of two people in Mississippi. Was last seen staying at the Clark Motor Lodge. Wanted for questioning in connection with the discovery of a body found in the woods less than six miles from an arson-related fire. The coroner was uncertain how long the body had been there …