Stories From the Plague Years (7 page)

I tried opening it. A block of wood had been set into the window slot to keep it from opening all the way. I took it and slid the window open as I heard the hall door splinter. I dropped to the soft dirt, made myself lost in the lot behind the building. I was three blocks away before I heard sirens.

Home, I stripped the clothes I’d worn just for tonight, the purple tie-dyed T-shirt with “Bad Trip” stencilled in black marker, now stained with blood (and perhaps with traces of the brain that had plotted the assassination of my character) where Evan had grabbed me, the John Lennon spectacles with plain lenses I’d found in a head shop for two dollars, the bicycling gloves . . . all the accessories people would remember before they’d remember the face of that young man in the laundry room.

I shoved them in a plastic bag and heaved them into the Dumpster behind my apartment. Evan’s CDs were tossed out, too, as was the geology text. Before I slept, I scraped the three days’ growth of beard I’d raised for tonight, and washed the blond frost from my hair.

The next day, a composite of someone who looked nothing like me flashed on the six o’clock news, just after a piece on how some people are genetically predisposed to not like green vegetables, and a report on counties in California competing to host the Scott Peterson trial.

I wept with relief.

—I have to tell you something, Dean.

Doctor Johansson’s voice changed. This was dialogue he’d planned, a predetermined line he’d waited to deliver. His voice rang clear enough for those in the back row to hear. In following me into shadow, this was his tether back to his world of controlled outcomes, to where his voice wouldn’t sound as it would near a troubled lake. I’ve read that the first true profiler of criminals and killers was Stanislavsky. The thought gave me comfort as I answered his practiced line.

—What’s that, Doctor?

—You didn’t use enough of your poison on Evan to kill him.

Greasy illness trickled the lining of my guts, as I remembered the endings of so many novels in which the supposed murder victim was really still . . .

—Evan isn’t alive, is he?

—No. You killed him when you broke his windpipe.

—Thank God.

The words were flung from me as I embraced the knowledge that Evan had not attained a totemic mask of his own: the maimed-yet-resurrected victim who accuses his thwarted killer.

—Why are you relieved? Isn’t his death now contrary to your vision of Justice?

His lines performed, his expected results gathered, his tone returned to what it had been, as if we spoke under a sky that would drown out our voices with sudden storm.

—I killed him by taking his voice, the tool he used to ruin lives. The Justice is still there. Just not the original Justice I’d envisioned. It’s the same with Molino. There’s still Justice in his death, even without the mirror. And I’m relieved Evan’s dead because no one, not even him, deserves to suffer as much as he would have after what I’d done.

—You’re sympathetic.

—Shouldn’t I be?

—You’re the one who killed him.

—Because I take people’s lives doesn’t mean I want them to suffer more than they need to.

Doctor Johansson leaned forward, elbows on the desk and chin set on his knuckles.

—You’d think that about Molino? You seem to have truly hated him.

—Passionately. Until after I’d killed him. And as I killed Evan, my resentment toward him drifted away, like morning fog. After I killed Evan I started feeling better about my . . . well
victims
is such an ugly word, but let’s use it for now.

And it is an inaccurate word, since over a lifetime of victimizing, I’ve had only one true victim.

—How did you feel better about them?

—I started forgiving them. As I killed them, I saw the frailties that made them make me miserable. It was a lack of personal power that drove them to seek power over me. I also started forgiving myself, because as I saw their weaknesses, I saw clearly my own weaknesses, what allowed them to cause me so much unhappiness. I’d
given
these people power over me, and by killing them, I took that power back.

—But you kept killing, after Evan and Molino. Why weren’t you content with the power you’d gained back from them?

—The power I’d given the people I killed was essentially portions of my life, parts of my being. I want all my life back before I die. I’m entitled to it.

—What about your victims’ weaknesses? Wouldn’t it have been fair for them to regain the parts of
their
lives lost to weakness?

—In this context, my killing them was their own weaknesses killing them in the end. Tragic flaws collecting their due.

—You’re shirking responsibility for their deaths, blaming the victim.

No judgment in his voice, only in his statement. Even in this realm of wind and shadows and a coming storm, there was catharsis to speak of catharsis, to speak of the sweet obliteration I’d felt while obliterating the lives of others.

—No, Doctor. I killed these people out of a sense of responsibility, to myself and to Justice. We were just speaking in a particular context, not addressing the totality.

—Could your victims see their deaths the way you did? Were they aware of the Justice you dispensed, or know why you killed them? If they didn’t know the ideals you served, then your tasks would remain half-complete.

—The people I killed knew there was . . . friction between themselves and me. That I was correcting wrongs done to me.

—None of them had a sense of your Justice?

I smiled slightly.

—Maybe Brian understood the Justice of his death.

—Brian Williams? he asked, with a glance to a file to his right.

—Not Williams. My former boss at the bookstore. Keene. He approved of how I killed him. He was drunk when he died, and that gave him insight.

Doctor Johansson’s hands touched down on another file he quickly opened and scanned. I wish I knew what his system was. He spoke as his eyes darted.

—You killed him with a bottle because he was an alcoholic?

—There’s more to it than that. His drinking ruined his life. His wife had left him, and he alienated most of his family and friends. The only control he had was in that bookstore. So he made his control supreme. In the end, I controlled the bottle and him.

“Hey, Dean. Where’d you learn this interesting alphabet you’re using?”

My first month on the job in this chain bookstore. The pay’s shit, but I have to keep busy while I decide what to do with my life. I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach. Instead of a place of learning, I work in a temple that holds anxiety the way the tight skin over a wasp bite holds venom. The store is an ant-swarming palace that comforts those who believe they are entitled to never worry . . . yet who thrill to worry that such entitlement might be taken away. I hawk medical thrillers to face-lifted suburbanites terrified of bodily decay. Political thrillers about men in positions of power to square-jawed yuppies who are as fascinated by the power exerted over them in office hierarchies as they are by the fake tits on the cover of
Maxim
. I hawk novels to bird-twitchingly nervous professional women about “liberated women” who flee freedom by running into the arms of fit, wealthy men too perfect to exist save as caricatures played by Richard Gere. These women have the same hungry hurt in their eyes as do the wounded orphans of reality who stare wistfully at the dragons adorning the fantasy novels they buy in stacks each week. I watch worry and comfort waltz in this place, where in the attached café I saw a yoga- mat-bearing mother approvingly stroke the head of her little girl for refusing a pastry because she felt she was “too fat.”

Keene’s question took a moment to register; the lattice of worry-soured gazes in the store slurs human syntax. I crouched low, unpacking boxes of books. Keene loomed over me, a man in his late forties with a great paunch. His grey, iron-stiff hair is pulled back in a tail. I smell liquor on him, and piss-tinged sweat. Customers, junkie-anxious for comfort, turn their consumer-dead gazes to me, longing for the opiate assurance that a hierarchy is about to be reaffirmed. Their gazes trespass . . . and nest like asps behind my breastbone.

I felt like a child cowering under the shadow of my father, when he’d stand over me as I played on the floor and he’d look at me as if I’d chosen a spot for the sole purpose of being in his way. Pops of sweat bead my brow. A cold trickle runs from the pit of my arm to where Christ was lanced.

My pulse drums my neck. A learned response from when I would tense, awaiting my father’s kick. Like a shark, Keene bites down for the humiliating kill.

“I told you to stack those books alphabetically,” he says with great fluster as he kneels to my level and reshuffles the piles I’ve made.

“They are alphabetical by author,” I say softly, refusing as best I could to contribute to the scene he crafts. But more gazes from the attached café drift over and strike me with another jolt of unease, shaking my resolve and making me hunch my shoulders as tightness grips my chest. I’m pushed further into the role of a child. My parents brought their wrath upon me for breaking a myriad
rules
they never bothered to explain. At any moment, I was uncertain if I’d be punished for breaking some un-stated law; powerlessness and fear were my watching angels. A situation that made me a tyrant in the fantasy world of play, that made me lash out against the few things weaker than myself.

Keene’s smile slides over nicotine-dyed teeth as he looks in my eyes and sips strength from my fear.

“In
your
special little alphabet, yes. But not in the alphabet we use here. Not in the alphabet our
customers
use.” The booze on his breath plashes my face, making me feel faint.

It was the
Star Trek
books he was bitching about. They were to have gone in a separate pile stacked by author, not by the number of each book in the series. That was all he had to say. But instead, he staged this splendid show for the whole store to see and feed upon, which took five minutes to enact under his taut direction, as opposed to the one minute it would have taken me to correct the mistake if he’d simply told me what to do.

At least one wound-incident like this is inflicted each day, not just on me, but on every employee in the store. Like Typhoid Mary, Keene spreads his shit like contagion. As each day grinds on, and as he slips more covert drinks in the back room, his attacks become more personal and abusive.

My nerves fray, my hands shake regularly. I forgo breakfast, because the dread of going to work has forced me to start the day bent over the kitchen sink with dry heaves. When I come home, I have to wash the oily sweat from under my arms that reeks of the tension I’ve packed within myself. Soon, I’m unable to eat during the day, my innards are so twisted I can only keep down coffee and the odd pastry.

I hate Keene. I hate the job. Yet I never summoned the courage to quit.

Until I was fired.

—
How
did Keene understand your killing him?

—I’m not certain he understood that I was killing him, or that the bottle was. You know,
The
Bottle. All I know is he thought it was funny.

In the storm-heavy space in which I spoke, the thought occurred to me that, as a thing of myth, did I use the poetry of the Bottle for Justice, or did
it
use
me
? The possibility seemed to make a traveling patch of sun through the cloud-dimmed ether.

Hard-packed ice sheeted the mall parking lot, making it a sham frozen lake. Toward the corners of the lot were mounds of plowed snow, scarred with ice-chunks like boulders on steep hills. I hid behind one of these mounds, close to where I’d watched Keene park his car that morning. I wore thick clothes and thermal underwear to make my long wait possible, yet I wore something beneath my skin that kept me warmer than any outdoor gear could. Through
will
, I became what I needed to be. I didn’t wait for the spirit, the avatar I needed, to enter me. I summoned and tamed it, the way Faust would a demon . . . breaking it to suit my needs.

From habit, Keene parked at the far ends of the lot, away from the mall entrance where it was crowded, so he could pull out quickly at the end of the day. On Fridays he forgot about leaving at six and got drunk at what had been in the ‘80s a yuppie pick-up place by the South entrance, where he got a deal as a mall manager on mixed drinks. The place was a relic, with Reagan-era décor that was a vile collision of
The Big Chill
and Planet Hollywood. It had been a matter of time before he parked by one of the snow-banks, far from where the cars of the bar patrons clustered.

At 9:30, I saw him stagger across the ice, looking in his besotted state like a trapper from a Jack London story, trying to reach an outpost in the middle of a long Arctic night as wolves bayed in the distance. Tonight, a different sort of wolf would take him. One with glass teeth.

At his car, he fumbled with his keys, crunching open the rusted door with a maximum of fuss, grunting as he eased his bulk in the driver’s seat. The car’s spent shocks tilted. There was freedom in my so observing him that made me feel lifted from above like a marionette, that let me run over the ice with a sure-footed lack of weight that I knew would not let me waiver as I closed on his car and slipped through the passenger door I’d unlocked with a coat hanger.

His head snapped right, his booze-fogged eyes fixed on me, and with the awareness only fools and drunks have, he knew that I was going to kill him . . . that I
could
kill him. That I embodied the Rambo-esque spectre that stalked the tough-guy fairy tales he peddled to men who embraced Darwinian cruelty as they read books gripped in hands slathered with spa-bought moisturizers.

He jerked up his arm. Booze and his heavy coat slowed him. It was as if a living, twisting weight clung to his wrist. With my left arm, I pinned his shoulder to the seat. With my right, I broke the whiskey bottle I’d brought against the steering wheel and drove it into his neck, where the blood pulses closest to the skin. There was a sound like tearing sandpaper. The Velcro I’d taped to glove and bottleneck let me go deep, to scrape loose the vocal cords that had cut me so many times.