With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer

by J. R. Hamantaschen

  And when he made it to Northern Boulevard and saw that, yes, it was still Northern Boulevard all the way out here — with its car franchises and blaring traffic — he had to fight the urge to turn around, as if this was some bullshit errand at a crowded Duane Reade.

  He walked up the 112 block of Northern Boulevard, doing his best to guesstimate the right address. He tried his luck at the only lot that wasn’t a car park or dealership.

  It was a squat industrial unit – a factory, maybe, although he was conditioned to believe there were no factories in the boroughs anymore. All that shit had been torn down and turned into condos. Shit, he hadn’t met anyone who worked at a factory, maybe not in his whole life.

  There was a man standing outside wearing a tight black shirt, a double-breasted jacket over it, and blue jeans. He was white, about 6 foot, good shape. The fact that he was a white guy doing security out in Corona gave Vernon pause. The brief reverie, of forgone factories and old timers and tourists and the hood politics of Corona and East Harlem … the jarring presence of that white guy ….

  “Hey,” Vernon shouted, no longer thinking. His brain was no longer acting in sequence, his lungs and heart on overdrive, marinating in adrenaline.

  “Yes sir, how can I help you?” the man asked, flatly.

  This was crazy, the part of his brain concerned with survival told him, through the electric jolt of nerves, frisson and nausea. You can still go home, forget all this.

  “What kind of building is this?”

  “It’s a factory, sir.”

  “Yeah, a factory? What kind of factory?”

  “Do you have business here, sir?”

  “Yeah, man. I’m an interested customer. I heard about this place and I’m interested.”

  “Yeah? You need 1,000 aluminum cans? Do you normally solicit from businesses you don’t know about?”

  Vernon had no idea why he felt that this man should be more deferential.

  “I’m here to see some people who work out of here. One of them is a tall, bald guy, from The Netherlands. He’s from a place called ‘You-trekt.’ That sound familiar to you?”

  Maybe the man’s face hardened. If it did, it was by a matter of degree unknown to the human eye, but detectable to Vernon by some other, unknown sense.

  “Yeah, and what do you want to see this man for?”

  “That’s my business. Is he here? I want to see him.”

  “Yeah? That so? You know man, you’re pretty lucky, if ‘lucky’ is the right word.”

  “Yeah? Now what makes me so lucky?”

  “Well, you’re here, somehow. You don’t seem too bright, though, if you don’t mind my saying. I’m surprised it’s gone this long with you, really. Really, I am.”

  “Is that so? Okay.” Vernon turned around and mugged like he’d brought a crew that was lying in wait for his signal to strike. As he fidgeted and shifted around, he tried to lean in and get a look of what lay behind this guy and the entrance. He couldn’t get a good look at anything, just the outline of a corner.

  “So can you bring him up here?”

  “Nah, he’ll call you, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t even have a phone.”

  The man guffawed. “Oh really, no phone?”

  “Nope.”

  “Look at you, the man with no phone. Real mover-and-shaker here.”

  “Yep.”

  And they talked over each other, temporizing, Vernon insisting he be let in, or be allowed to speak to the Dutchman, his answers becoming more-and-more bowdlerized, not even monosyllabic, just grunts and huffs and sounds, as if they had a hypnotic, entrancing power to lull him into doing what he came here to do. This man wasn’t moving, wasn’t relenting, convinced of the power of his position.

  “So you really not gonna move?”

  “Nope. And I’m not going to tell you again, either.”

  “You not? Show me, what’re you gonna do to stop me?”

  And at this the man laughed, and looked around quickly like he, too, had a crew he was impressing, even though it was just the two of them. Like, ‘can you believe this guy,’ two men, weaned on movies, acting as if they were in one.

  “Well, since you asked,” the man said in a low voice, and moved his hand closer to his double-breasted suit jacket, and the man delayed again, looking around.

  Vernon took out the .22, backed up, extended his arm, and must have caught the man off-guard because he saw only the attitude drained from his face, his skin drawn, and Vernon fired directly into the man’s neck, one shot.

  The goon’s throat split and he fell back, his head smashing the ground, hard. Vernon heard low gurgling but didn’t look further. He waited thirty interminable seconds. The sounds of the street were the same as before. The man wasn’t moving.

  He planned on frisking the body and checking his neck for a pulse, but the sight and touch of the gore derailed it, brought the experience into another realm.

  Vernon put his back to the entrance, gun low but at the ready, and slowly, as stealthily as he could muster, made his way into the building.

  The ceiling was high and the lights were low. He didn’t know where to go, where to move, the dimensions of the building or how far back the building went. He couldn’t hazard a guess. He walked carefully, in a crouch, about ten yards, keeping close to the walls and the shadows. There were no clanging machines, no gouts of smoke, no industrial manufacturing, not that he was really expecting that. There was a row of three, long wooden tables that reminded him of a school cafeteria. Shapes on the tables, papers perhaps, hard to see in the unrevealing light.

  A door opened behind him. He ran in a loop, around a bend for cover.

  He saw a white man, tall, light hair, in a dark sweater. The color and bulk of the sweater, along with the dim lights, left much a mystery. Vernon made sure there was no one else with him, and he ran up behind him and drew the gun to his head.

  “Don’t move or I’ll kill you, okay?” He butted the front of the gun as gently as he could against the back of the man’s head. The gun hit him harder than Vernon had anticipated.

  The man’s neck craned backward, flinched in a surprise, but didn’t say anything, just put up his hands.

  “The Dutchman, you know him?”

  “Which one?”

  “Tall, bald, knows how to fight, from You-Trecht.”

  The man’s hands high above his head (make him lower his hands, doesn’t look good, Vernon thought quickly to himself), lowered and pointed a single finger. Pointing back behind Vernon, to the door he came from.

  Vernon turned, taking his attention off the man, which he knew was moronic, but he had to. There were three men there, two in the doorway, the other right behind them.

  “Fuck.” Vernon pulled the trigger without looking. He felt the spray back on his hands and clothes but didn’t care, just ran forward, taking a moment to spin back around and fire another shot, where he saw the fallen man flailing and heard him screaming, lost control of himself and twirled to the floor, caught himself and kept running straight.

  He barreled through the door at the end of the hallway and tumbled into a man in a dark suit. From the velocity and impact, the man hadn’t been opening the door in any hurry, and the sudden collision splayed him across to the other side of the tight, narrow room. Vernon turned around, found that the silver knob had a lock, and engaged the lock. Click. No windows to this room. Good. Small. Almost like a classroom, something like a chalkboard but digital, a small learning nook, maybe.

  He ran to the man in the dark suit and shook him, put the gun to his chest, looking to grill him, now on a full blown rampage. The man grabbed Vernon’s wrists and pushed, doing his best to get himself level while throwing Vernon off balance. It didn’t work. Vernon fired four shots directly into the man’s gut. It was like slow-motion: firing at point blank range, firing
while capturing the man’s grimaced, stilted reaction; firing at the man splayed back against the outer wall, limbs akimbo; firing as the man slid down it. He shot him again, this time in the head, because he knew head shots killed and maybe shots to the gut didn’t.

  Vernon turned around, heart heaving, and faced the door.

  There was another person here, in the corner. A man (all men here, he felt safe in concluding), but this man he recognized. The sloppy, chubby one from the lunch meeting. The one who looked like he didn’t belong. He was sitting in the corner, again looking like he didn’t belong, like he wanted to be anywhere else. He didn’t look as disheveled, but still, more like a backend employee. Not someone client-ready. He wore a suit that fit oddly, too tight at the neck, too tight at the waist, a plain white button down, no tie.

  “You should just kill me, then yourself. I’m telling you. Not as a threat. Kill as many of them as you can, but kill yourself after. You can’t get out of here alive. It’s better to be dead. Not for them, they’re all true believers. I’m … someone who made the wrong decision.

  “But kill yourself. Kill as many of them as you can, let them kill you. They’ll kill you quickly, just die in the gunfire. Don’t escape, because then they’ll send something after you. You’ve probably heard and seen enough to believe anything, but you won’t believe the influence they have, the people and … things that are beyond people that they work with. Their clientele, if you will.”

  Vernon stood there, panting. Again, pregnant silence, momentary calm, maybe he was safe here, had time to think. Unlikely. He sensed a bulk behind the door.

  “They know you’re here. I’m sure they heard the gunshots. How many bullets do you have left in that?”

  “I - enough.”

  “You don’t need to intimidate me. I’m not trying to stop you. Kill me, if you want, but that may be a waste of a bullet. If they kill you, I’ll do my best to take your gun and keep killing them.”

  Vernon nodded. He wasn’t ready to believe he’d found a partner, needed to keep his guard up.

  “Are they, are you a prisoner here?”

  “Something like that, I suppose. I have some uses for them, I guess. I sold my services to protect someone. It’s just the way it is. If I die, they won’t go after her, no reason to. I’m already gone, vanished.”

  Vernon signaled toward the dead man against the wall. “Was he, he a bad guy? I mean —” he was panting and beginning to cramp up, which wasn’t good, despite all the survival instincts he should be feeling, his shins were shaking and aching, his innards cramping, keep it together. “He wasn’t like, a janitor or something. He knew what was going on here?”

  “Yes, he knew what was going on here. Everyone here, honestly, knows what is being done. Not a lot of people here today. All over the City.”

  There was a loud rapping against the door and the presence of many bodies outside it.

  “We know you are in there, Vernon,” he heard through the muffling effects of the thick door.

  “Back the fuck off, or I’ll kill both of the guys in here. You know I’ll do it.”

  In sotto voce: “There some exit here I don’t know about?”

  The man in the corner shook his head. “No. This is a classroom of sorts, unfortunately. Only exit is the one you came in from. Trapped. Do you have a second gun?”

  “No,” he said, and the man in the corner didn’t question him, could tell he was telling the truth. He should have frisked that guard outside but had gotten spooked. Stupid. Not that it mattered, really.

  “That Dutch guy ever here? The one from the lunch in Rego Park?”

  “More than one Dutch guy there, but I think I know which one you’re talking about. The bald one.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, I think so. It’s your lucky day. He’s rarely here, but I talked to him earlier today, actually. He was here.”

  “What is this place, anyway?”

  “It’s a lot of things. They do a lot, run some legitimate operations, I guess, all in support of that one underlying … agenda, I guess.”

  He paused a beat, then continued in a sotto voce monotone. ‘There’s no God, at least not in the way we conceive of it. Or at least, there can’t be the relationship with God we always sort of take for granted. It’s not possible. I know that sounds strange to say, especially now, but it’s true. Trust me. I’ve conversed, of sorts, with living things beyond our knowledge and intelligence. Perhaps they are gods, of sorts, in the sense a man seems a god to a lower animal. But not extraterrestrial. Just, different.

  “But it’s not possible for them to exist and for us to exist in the relationship with God that we learned about our whole life. Perhaps that’s what motivates them, this group. They are obsessed with evolutionary psychology. Very mechanistic, very logical, very confident. Perhaps, knowing what they know, that makes sense. They know more of the workings of the world than perhaps almost everyone else.

  “I don’t know if that makes you feel better or not. I just thought, maybe you should know that. Maybe that takes some of the pressure off. Makes you feel better, I don’t know. Less guilty. I don’t know. Even knowing that, knowing what’s true, you still can’t shake the old feelings.”

  Vernon didn’t respond and kept his gun drawn at the door.

  “His name is Finn, by the way, if that’s what you care about, killing him. I understand. His name is Finn.”

  “Finn!” the man in the corner yelled, now facing the door. “Finn, you out there! This guy is here to see you.”

  “I’m out here,” he heard someone yell back, someone that sounded like the Dutchman. “I can’t wait.”

  “So, he’s out there,” the man said to him, again in his resigned register. “Kill him if you can. But, there are a lot of Finns out there, so to speak.”

  “Ok. What’s your name, by the way?”

  “What does it matter? … Alex. My name is Alex.”

  “Vernon.”

  “Glad to meet you, Vernon. I admire what you’re doing.”

  “Thanks.”

  And more moments passed as he stared at the door. For how long he didn’t know, both him and Alex sitting breathlessly, not talking, until a shot rang out from the hallway through the door. And then another, and another.

  Vernon fired two shots at the door, now five separate holes. Shots aimed at the lock and then a solid kick against the door, which staggered weakly, and another solid kick which warped the door drastically, only a couple more kicks and it would fold completely like prey being overtaken by a dominant animal.

  He fired more and more bullets and heard a grunt and saw the shadow of a body fall to the ground, and fired again at just the right time, after the door was kicked in, and got someone in the shoulder.

  He fired and fired and never had to hear the click of an empty gun. He felt at his head and there was no left ear there anymore, knowing he put his fingers into a disfigurement of gore, couldn’t really see anymore and his relationship with the physical world had altered. He was sliding down, fired, took out another body, felt at his stomach and touched a texture reserved for his insides, and that brought him back to reality, his impending death, and funny he could still feel the burning in his shins.

  The world was an explosion of red hues, everything was a red hue, dripping exuberant yet dull brick-red paint, drenched, heavy drainage, emptying out, hot, heat, red, alarm bells ringing, knowing this was an end, to brace himself, filling his mind only with images he knew represented his son and of the conviction that his life could have gone in many different directions, but he pulled it together at the end to die fulfilled.

  “It’s Not Feelings of Anxiety; It’s One, Constant Feeling: Anxiety”

  “So, this is the little guy. This is the reason you only had one drink.”

  “Yup, here he is. Craig” — Miles pointed to his burbling baby s
on, gently bouncing on his wife Miranda’s knees — “meet Henry.”

  “I like how formal you are with him already.”

  “All business, even at an early age.”

  Henry said his pleasantries to Miranda and crouched to address Craig, the first entry into the Klahnsman-family clan.

  “Hey little man, how are you?”

  Craig Klahnsman’s eyes widened and a bubble of a smile appeared on his face. It was enough that somebody new was in front of him, someone with a friendly, funny voice. At this age, every new encounter tickled his pleasure center.

  Henry waved his hand floppily. Craig did his best blubbery, uncoordinated pantomime.

  “Look at those motor skills!” Henry said.

  “I know. His future is already laid out for him. He’ll be a surgeon.”

  “Motor skills don’t run in your genes. Are you sure he’s yours?”

  Henry heightened the delivery with a supple turn and smirk while Miranda kicked out at him in jest.

  “Ummm, I can certainly flail my arms and be just as uncoordinated as he is. Haven’t you seen me ever, I don’t know, try and fix anything?” Miles offered.

  “Actually, no, I haven’t,” said Henry.

  “That’s right. There’s a reason for that. I’ll know for sure if he’s mine if that’s how he tries to shoot a hoop in fifteen years, or throw a baseball.”

  Henry laughed about how in fifteen years Craig would be about sixteen or seventeen, and that’s when he’d first try shooting a hoop or throwing a baseball? Their comic riffing had lost nothing in the two years since Miles and Miranda-plus (the term Miles had adopted for Miranda while she carried their child) had left Chicago to return to Southern California.

  Henry spent a couple more minutes playing the usual baby-games, mimicking Craig’s movements and repeating words and giving him little high-fives.