The Last Tomorrow (9 page)

In early December, four months ago now, he did.

They said good night, I love you, and shut off the lights. She swallowed her pain pill in the dark, and they lay together without speaking. He must have known it was coming, for he listened to
the sound of her labored breathing for hours before drifting into sleep himself. By the time the sun came up on the next morning she was gone. He didn’t cry. It simply wouldn’t
come.

The emotion was in there somewhere, he knew it was, but it was walled in.

He moved out of the house the next day, packed a few things and left. He still pays the mortgage, but the house sits empty and locked. He can’t bear to go back. He’s afraid something
there – a photograph, a piece of clothing, a scent – might break the wall around his heart, and now that she’s gone, gone and unrecoverable, he doesn’t want it broken. He
doesn’t want to feel the loss.

He doesn’t want to feel anything.

When Carl told the boy’s mother they were going to have to arrest her son, her face contorted with agony and she called him a bastard and a motherfucker and a son of a bitch, and beat on
his chest and shoulders with her fists. He let her. He simply stood there placid. He let her and he said he was sorry and he said he understood what she was going through and gave her the number at
the boarding house and said she should call if she needed someone to talk to, and she said she’d never call him, never call one of the sons of bitches who took her boy away from her, you
heartless motherfucker.

He doesn’t want to feel anything.

3

He takes off his fedora and wipes his sweaty forehead. The sweat feels greasy. His stomach is sour. He doesn’t know how he’s going to make it through the day. He
might have to visit his connection in the hop squad, pick up a one-dose bindle, something to get him through. It’s become almost impossible to make it clean.

Friedman pushes his way out of the diner and walks to the car. He pulls open the door and slides into his seat.

Carl puts the Ford into gear, pulls it out into the street.

4

Carl walks across the squad room to his desk. He feels much better than he did fifteen minutes ago; he feels nothing at all. He managed to get hold of his connection in the hop
squad, pulled him out of bed cursing and met with him beneath the palm trees in the park just south of City Hall. Then he headed back inside and found an empty room, a janitor’s closet,
locked himself in, and sat alone with a lighter, a piece of tin foil, and a pen casing. After a couple hits he nodded off, tears streaming down his face. When he came back to reality he picked
himself up and dragged himself to a restroom, washed his face of sweat, and dried off with a few paper towels.

He’s a new man.

He sits at his desk. It’s quiet at this hour, the room almost lifeless. His normal shift is eight to four and he’s used to the sounds of talking, shuffling papers, ringing
telephones, but he’s glad those things are absent. The silence of the room echoes against the silence within him, and rings out further and further, making him feel part of a vast emptiness
that stretches to the outer reaches of the atmosphere and beyond.

It’s perfect.

He thinks of the report he has to type up, looks at his notepad, then at the comic book sitting beside it. The corners are bent and torn. A rip across the front cover has been repaired with
tape, yet a rectangle has been clipped from the back, the space undoubtedly once occupied by an irresistible coupon for a Real Sheriff’s Badge or Martian Ray Gun. At the top of the page,
between the price in one corner and the publisher’s colophon in the other, these words:

The cover shows a man lying in a gutter with a swastika carved into his forehead. A uniformed policeman stands over him with his gun drawn. Behind this scene, a row of warehouses,
simple brick buildings with metal roll-up doors. Skyscrapers jut behind the warehouses crooked and malevolent as fangs. The silhouette of a man can be clearly seen flying from one of the
skyscrapers’ windows. Shattered glass hangs around him.

Carl wonders whether he jumped or was pushed. He supposes it doesn’t matter.

Everybody falls in Down City.

He flips the comic open, turns to a story called ‘Little Hitler’, the story the boy said inspired him to carve that star into his stepfather’s forehead, and reads it.

It concerns a man who angrily wanders Down City each night hunting Jewish women. He waits till they’re isolated, then comes up behind them and stabs them. After they’re dead he
carves six-pointed stars into their foreheads. He doesn’t want anybody to misunderstand his motives. He might take their money and their jewelry, but they’re dead because they’re
Jews.

One night while he’s lurking in the shadows, about to attack, a policeman comes upon him. He runs, but instead of getting away he trips over a curb and falls on his own knife, which,
rather improbably, carves a crude swastika into his forehead. Then a truck hauling jars of gefilte fish runs over him as he lies in the street. The policeman stands over him in the last panel,
looking down at the mangled corpse, and speaks the final line of the story: ‘What goes around comes around, I guess.’

Carl closes the comic.

The boy carved the wrong kind of star into his stepfather’s forehead. It wouldn’t have mattered even if he’d done it correctly – he tried to frame a comic-book character
for the murder, and a dead comic-book character at that – but still, he carved a five-pointed star into his stepfather’s forehead rather than a six-pointed star. Somehow that makes it
sadder, more pathetic.

But panic will paralyze your mind. Emotion takes over. You know you have to do something and you do whatever you think of, no matter how strange or stupid, just to keep moving. Doing something
is important, not sitting still is important, far more important than any action you end up taking. It seems that way in the midst of panic, anyway. It’s only later, as you look back on the
trail of destruction you left behind you, like a tornado that cut its way through a city, that you realize stopping, doing nothing, would have been wiser. You’ve only made things worse.

Plus the kid’s thirteen. Carl has seen grown men do poorer jobs of covering up their own crimes, men in their thirties and forties and fifties.

He looks to the typewriter. He might as well do it. He pulls the machine toward him, grabs three forms and slips two sheets of carbon paper between them, rolls the paper sandwich into his
typewriter. After another moment, and an under-the-breath curse, he gets to work, banging hard on the keys to ensure the marks make it through all five sheets of paper.

1

Seymour Markley, in blue-and-white-striped pajamas, pads barefoot across his hardwood floor, down the wide book-lined hallway, through the tastefully decorated living room, to
the thick, hand-carved maple front door. He grabs the glass doorknob and pulls, wondering who could be knocking at this hour on a Sunday morning.

At first he doesn’t recognize her. There’s a part of his brain that knows he should – the short brunette hair; the vacant blue eyes; the full, soft-looking lips – but the
context is wrong, and at first he has no idea who she is. He blinks at her through his wire-framed spectacles, lips parted but soundless. He’s about to say something, yes, can I help you, I
think perhaps you’re at the wrong house, when recognition comes. It comes all at once, like a fist to the gut.

He glances over his shoulder to make sure Margaret is still in bed, to make sure she isn’t standing in the hallway watching this, then looks back to the woman standing on the other side of
the threshold. He believes her name is Vivian. That’s what she calls herself at work, anyway. She works as a B-girl, and sometimes more, at a place called the Sugar Cube. Out on the street
behind her, in a green Chevrolet coupe, sits another woman. He recognizes her as well, but has never heard her name spoken aloud. Or if he has he’s forgotten. The woman in the car appears to
have been crying very recently. She looks at them, at Seymour and Vivian, through the passenger’s-side window. She has blonde hair. Her face is pale. She looks like a ghost.

Or maybe Seymour’s simply been unnerved by seeing these women out of context. He feels slightly dizzy.

‘What are you doing here? How did you find my house?’

‘I’m sorry to bother you at home,’ Vivian says, touching his arm briefly, ‘but we need help.’

‘You can’t be here,’ he says, glancing over his shoulder a second time, ‘you simply cannot
be
here.’

‘But I am here, and I’m not leaving until you agree to help.’

‘With what?’

‘Candice’s boy is in some trouble.’

‘Who’s Candice?’

‘The woman in the car. She works with me.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Legal trouble. Why else would I bother you on a Sunday morning?’

‘What did he do?’

Vivian pauses, looks hesitant.

‘What did he do? You didn’t come here to
not
tell me.’

‘He killed a man.’

‘What?’

‘I know. But you’re gonna help us.’

‘Or what,’ Seymour says, feeling anger start to swell within him, ‘you’ll tell my wife? Do you really think she’ll believe you? You’re just a whore. I can
claim it’s nothing but an attempt at blackmail. Why don’t you get the hell out of here?’

‘Nobody has to believe me, Seymour,’ Vivian says. ‘I have pictures.’

‘You have . . .’ He blinks at her. His eyes feel dry, itchy.

She mimes the taking of a photograph, says, ‘Click.’

Seymour cannot think. There’s a hitch in his mind. All the gears have locked up. Then, after a moment, after that strange mental hang-up has resolved itself, his brain starts working again
and thought returns to him.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But we can’t talk here. I’ll meet you and your friend—’

‘Candice.’

‘I’ll meet you and Candice at nine o’clock. There’s a diner called Fred’s not far from here. We’ll talk there.’

‘Nine o’clock?’

Seymour nods.

‘You better show up.’

‘I will,’ Seymour says, and pushes the door closed.

He turns around and puts his back to it. He looks down the length of the hallway, toward the room where his wife still lies in bed. He knew better than to do what he did. He always knows better,
every time. But something in him, some base part of him, thrives on that knowledge, and rather than stopping him it pushes him forward. Into places where a man can buy anything so long as he has
enough money folded into his wallet. He lets the women lead him upstairs, or to the back room. He watches them undress. He lets them come to him, not at all assertive himself, lets himself pretend
he didn’t know what would happen, what it would lead to. That’s part of the game. Most of the time he has to be so much in control that he likes giving it up on these occasions. But it
also makes him feel disgusting to do what he does. After it’s over he feels sick. He fears syphilis. He fears gonorrhea. He comes home and scrubs his body in scalding water and tells himself
he will never do that again. It’s filthy and he’s filthy for doing it. He avoids his wife for a week, sometimes two, to make sure he hasn’t contracted anything that he might give
her, though it’s less out of concern for her wellbeing than out of fear that he’ll have to explain to her why she must get penicillin shots. But despite the way it makes him feel,
despite the guilt, a couple months later he’s in his car again, driving, telling himself he’s not going where he knows damn well he is.

Sometimes he manages to restrain the urge for as long as six months, but never more. He hates himself for it. Immediately afterwards he hates himself, but the mind is a strange thing, and when
the venereal diseases do not arrive, when it’s clear that God hasn’t punished him for his transgressions, the guilt and shame fade away.

But it looks like God’s punished him after all, doesn’t it? He’s certain he never told Vivian his last name, nor would he ever have told her his job. So how did she find him?
How does she know who he is, what he does?

Don’t be a fool, Seymour. Your name and photograph are in the newspaper on a regular basis. You were elected to office. You’re a public figure who failed to keep his private vices
private.

God didn’t do this; you’ve brought it upon yourself.

He walks down the hallway and pushes into his bedroom. Margaret, in bed, opens her eyes and smiles at him sleepily.

‘Who was it?’

‘Barry. Looks like I’ll have to go into work for a few hours.’

‘But it’s Sunday.’

‘I know. You’ll have to go to church without me.’

2

Candice sits in a diner with a mug of coffee cupped in her palms. Outside she hears cars rolling by, horns honking. Back on Bunker Hill her next-door neighbors keep chickens in
their backyard for eggs, and usually by this time of morning she’s spent the last hour or two listening to their rooster greet the sunrise. Neil hated it, swore he would poison the goddamn
thing, but she’s always liked the rural images it put in her mind: farmhouses and green tractors parked in fields. It reminds her of her youth.

Right now she misses that sound. She misses the comfort of it.

She looks down at the black liquid in her cup. She can’t believe her son did what she knows he did. The coffee is thick as crude oil. She thought she understood the relationship Sandy had
with his stepfather but she had no idea. Steam rises from the surface of the liquid. What kind of mother misses that much hatred, that much pain? If she’d known, if Sandy had told her, she
would have changed things. She would have made Neil move out. She bought the house with her ex-husband, Lyle, but she hasn’t seen him in seven years, and though his name is still on the
papers at the bank, she’s made the last eighty-five payments herself. It’s her house. It never belonged to Neil. If she’d known how bad it was for Sandy she would have done it,
she would have made Neil pack his bags and leave.

She tells herself that, but it isn’t true, is it? Sandy did tell you. Maybe he didn’t tell you in so many words, but he’s only a boy, and in a dozen other ways he let you know
what was happening, and you ignored it. You told yourself it would work out. You were selfish, you wanted Neil around, you needed someone to lie beside you in the dark, so you ignored what you knew
was happening. You pretended what was happening wasn’t.