He had been trying to get to sleep for over an hour. He used his old tricks: thinking of childhood times and places, thinking of stationary objects like bridges he had known, thinking of flowers—fields of flowers, no wind. How could anyone get to sleep counting moving sheep? But the old tricks didn’t work. And so he embraced the awakeness like a stranger in the room he was somehow forced to talk to.
There was no reason to stay awake. He had killed a person before and slept beautifully. And the other nights. Every time. It couldn’t be that business—that’s what it was, business—since he rarely even thought about any victims again once he was sure all his traces were obliterated. He admitted to himself that other people seemed to have a circuit he didn’t. He saw the premise in movies and TV shows that the killer was tortured by his conscience (or something) and driven to foolish acts by remorse (or something) and often caught by his own inability (or something) to hide his deed. The entire logic of so many movies depended on it: war movies, accidental deaths, greed and revenge killings—so many kinds of killings. He thought: there is only the one kind. The making-someone-dead kind.
Once the initial twist had been made and the doctor properly mutated into fiction, the thing took off. The traffic slowed into stop and go. Like a sentence.
The world was infested by human beings carving out every day more and more miserable existences in caves, under the roots of trees, in sewers—even if all these places were called by the names of the great cities of the world. To him it really didn’t matter at all one more or less. They were alive then they were dead. The formula was simple. He would also be alive, then dead.
That’s how I’d begin it. Listen to that voice for a while. The traffic had me unstuck in a temporal line—going nowhere, needing nothing, helpless. I played on…
Robert was tall and thin and an unlikely looking killer. It was, he felt, a convenience that he looked like a vacuum cleaner salesman, a middle school principle, an accountant. Those movie killers were somebody’s idea of what a “professional killer” looked like. Killing was really just a series of inventions and then the final act. The real difficulties always lay in dealing with whoever purchased the death, making a clean break with the client well before carrying out the deal. He had once waited six months for the proper window and conditions before delivering the promised death. Everybody wanted something right now. That was first in negotiations: Robert must own the time schedule or there was no deal. There would be no timely political assassinations (still the same kind as all the others) in which everything was on a clock. Find someone else for that business. In one case, the customer had insisted that a certain day would be the day, some kind of anniversary, and Robert had refused the commission right from the initial negotiations. The time must be flexible: plans could change like weather, conditions could alter by a flat tire, a stalled bus, a local fire, a case of diarrhea.
The police would admit to a large number of unsolved murders, and lurking behind those numbers an even larger number concealed from the public in the name of civic confidence in the police force. Robert’s favorite made-up plots were two: (1) beaten to death with a frozen leg of lamb and then the murder weapon cooked and eaten (and served to the family in the spirit of the house of Atreus)—a Rod Serling plot, and (2) spears of water frozen and then fired into the victim with compressed air. He thought about all the ways people could die, and still he couldn’t sleep. All those pedestrian accidents that weren’t accidents. The heart attacks, strokes—all chemically undetectable, all acts of God. So God could murder but people couldn’t? Really? Oh, yeah, well there was war, of course. Anyone could murder then in the name of oil, land, revenge for historically located acts, for relieving long pent-up hatred that no one could remember the reasons for. So why couldn’t he sleep? It had been six hours since his last cup of coffee. Could the caffeine stay in his system that long? Hemingway called hunting the “gift of death” for the birds. The gift. The gift. The gift. The gift. And Robert was asleep.
Some of that wandered but was still within range of keeping. And anyway, it was all for a good cause—keeping focus on Dr. S and his now-elusive Rex. I thought of elusive kings in history and went back to the story as the asshole in front of me decided to change lanes though that one wasn’t moving any faster than my lane. My theory is that lane-changers just get bored and do the whole crunch-over thing just to be doing something in the soul-cleaving experience of traffic jams. A siren in the distance again.
The glass and steel of the buildings seemed to amplify the rain, repeating each drop and catching the blow and simmer of the storm. On the street, there were blank pockets of dry caused as the conformation of a building where it broke up the swirling wind and made islands in the flow. Robert stopped in one such dry spot just behind a courtyard piece of statuary almost two stories high that created its own umbrella. The rain fell around him as if he had a charm protecting him, a spell, the finger of God.
All these people walking around. Live people but each one with: (1) a price tag—what are their lives worth? Their deaths? And (2) an expiration date when the live/dead business took care of itself. Shelf life. Sooner or later. The one or the other. There used to be a mac-and-cheese place around here somewhere, he thought. And he walked slowly out of the rain shadow toward a diner across the street that might have been that very same mac-and-cheese place. Never work hungry.
Background. This was the interesting part—invention out of thin air but with a fine, invisible thread that dragged one piece of the story after another through the treacherous scree scattered across the slope of story.
Robert Neff, he had researched the name and it had been pont neuf, and then Ellis Islanded into Neff. He smiled to think his relatives had been disease-free, able to work and of upright character as they lined up to be de-loused as a symbolic gesture: Europeans required de-lousing to become Americans. Let the louse stand for all else that must be killed off, pared away. His father sang to him the last vestige of the family Frenchness: Sur le pont, d’Avignon, on ni danse, on ni danse … and then had shown him the picture of the bridge at Avignon that ended halfway over the river, a bridge good only for dancing, not getting anywhere. Robert loved that his people had written a song about the bridge, but never fixed it.
There were a number of difficulties keeping a female friend. At first he could remain mysterious, what he did exotically distant, and it actually helped with attraction. But very quickly he found himself defending himself against female curiosity about how he made his living. Was he in some secret part of the CIA that wouldn’t allow him to talk about work? Just in general, what kinds of things did he have to do in order to get a paycheck? And then the evasiveness itself became divisive. Don’t you trust me? Love is trust. I would never tell anyone anything. And so he tried paying for female company, very expensive female company: discrete, compliant, prompt to come and go (so to speak). And that seemed to work as far as the body was concerned. He had found one girl—whom he tipped very well—who was almost like a girlfriend on retainer, a convenience of some significance in his life. He liked her out to the powerful edge of what the word meant. He thought about her when she was absent, he was always glad to see her, he found himself trying to make her laugh because when she laughed, he felt good. She canceled with other clients when he called. She filled in his life right up to major holidays and then again after.
This arrangement worked well until the time she canceled on him. And he quickly figured out she had found a better deal, and he had been relegated to second-class citizenship in her world. Idly, he thought of killing his competition but not out of jealously; after researching the concept he didn’t think he felt anything remotely like jealously. But quickly he realized he could just find another girl and that the real proposition had been an economic one—the new guy tipped better than Robert, he made her laugh more, he made more appointments. It was business and if Robert wanted her services he would have to compete at the dollar level. That made sense. And so he gave her
up until the day he had accumulated enough wealth to maybe own her outright—an exclusivity clause. But that would be a while.
Marnie would edit the shit out of that part, for sure. She’d start with an interrogation about owning women. Then on to the forms of slavery, the forms of prostitution, the difference between them. I thought that I probably write stuff like that just to get it edited. She knows the nature of the dross I’ll put in, so that she instinctively knows to take it out.
Robert had come from humble circumstances and saving money toward a goal had been made much clearer to him than, say, the value of any particular life. He had never tortured animals or harmed any person growing up. It just always seemed to him an abstraction that people in movies wept at funerals, an abstraction somehow designed by the moviemakers as a form of hyperbole. Real people didn’t carry on like that. They certainly didn’t in his family. He thought of his mother as a very efficient element in his life, an element that made it easy for him to be alive, go to school, get from one place to another. He had come to a great appreciation of her. He supposed that’s what people meant when they talked about love.
Robert was clearly standing in for a version of Rex at this point, leaving the doc behind. That’s the way this business works. If I ever got another interview with Rex we’d go over some of these points, the empathy stuff, the live/dead stuff and how he “felt” about these. I thought I had probably blown my chance with all my inquiries about trained viruses and charging my iPhone. Shit, we never did get back to world peace. Whorled peas. None of it.
The new job was going to be a little complicated. And the complication, as usual, lay in managing the customer’s idiosyncratic demands. After being clear about the time element, how that parameter belonged exclusively to Robert, the difficulties began with the client insisting that the death be slow or at least as drawn out as possible. It was amazing to Robert how often he had to deal with this request. The customer wanted the hit to be some kind of medieval draw, peel and quarter: open the body, peel the skin off then dip the still-living victim in saltwater and then pull in four directions with horses. While this exact scenario was not possible, how close could he get to having the victim suffer the maximum amount of pain? Would it cost extra? Well, then paying extra would be no problem. And Robert had to insist that exactly the opposite would be the case if he were hired. The person would be killed as quickly, and, therefore, as painlessly as possible. Short of anaesthetizing the victim first and then administering a lethal cocktail of drugs—sort of an assisted suicide—Robert’s form of dispatch would be the next least painless and quickest death. Ah, the gift of death. Why did they always want the long way—he called it the premium-suffering package? Why wasn’t death good enough? Dead was dead. Gone was gone. The pain part would just make it ridiculous. And ridiculous death just seemed sad and stupid. And so Robert had to use a number of strategies he’d worked out to turn clients away from the premium package and bring them to the appreciation of what he came to call the “one bee sting” package. One bee sting and then they’re gone, returned to the earth as fast as flesh yearned to be dust again. Imagine, he said, that they will simply move from being an immense annoyance in your life to being not there, all in one payment. And you must be satisfied with that very significant fact and forget about all the ways you want to see them squirm before dying. Death is the single and irremediable goal, a goal that really engulfs all others.
Robert thought of death as a cleansing, not in the avenging angel sense, but in the tidying up sense. There was something so elegant and thorough about death. That concept was, finally, what he tried to sell his customer: think of a truly extraordinary house cleaning—windows and everything—and you walk into your house that’s fresh and clean to every extremity. That feeling. What’s gone is the dirt and confusion of dirt and the way dirt attracts other dirt. Take a deep breath. See how nice that is? You’re starting over from an elegant cleanliness. Of course, there will be an accumulation of other dirt over time. But think how long the clean will last. And then maybe you’ll learn to live with a little dirt in your life until you need my services again. Clean is a little expensive but certainly worth it. An investment in that exquisitely clean state, even if it can’t last forever. Worth every penny. Robert reined in his salesmanship at this point and let the customer ruminate. And mull. And then ponder, consider, etc. There was no hurrying the process. Once, just once, his customer immediately got to his feet and walked out saying, “No, she must suffer. She must suffer until all the nerve endings in her body are …” and then out the door.
What is Rex’s view of suffering? I know, I think, his view on painting buildings. That feeling of having my head filled as if by cotton candy and words and music all at the same time—I want that again. Writing does it sometimes. The traffic seethed. The traffic stunk and pulsed and then coagulated like old grease.
The mac-and-cheese came hot with pieces of Italian sausage throughout—three cheeses and still bubbling in the casserole. The waitress smiled and said like a big sister, “Hot, hot dish. Very hot.” She held up one finger in warning. And then she left.
One person seeking the death of another person seemed to Robert one of the most common occurrences, every day. People wished other people dead but for the most part were willing to live with the other person simply because of the complexity of having the other person killed: the risk of the illegality (of course), the expense, and then the disruption of life. So most wishes were just that, gaseous abstractions left un-acted upon and accumulating like dust balls in the corners of existence. So how much untidiness could one person stand before he hired someone to come in and clean? People had different tolerances. An acquaintance had said that the hardest part of marriage was the first year in which the two parties adjusted their thresholds for untidiness. For a marriage to succeed the clean freak had to come down, the slob come up. Some people seemed to reach the limits of their tolerance quickly and call Robert. Or they simply had the money to clean up and chose to do it. Once you figured out the commonest difficulties in the negotiations and made accommodations or even headed them off before they arrived, the whole enterprise got easier. The suffering part, the particulars of timing, and then there was matter of payment. Most customers had taken from movies some idea of how payment should be made. The contact with the customers would be dragged out endlessly with the “half-now, half-later” cliché from movies. No one in the business did it that way.
Robert began by mentioning payment before the customer could. That way he could state the conditions of payment clearly and directly following the non-negotiable conditions about timing and quickness of death. They came as a package narration. This is how it will be. This is how it’s done by the people who do this sort of thing. There is no alternative payment schedule, no layaway, no sale price, no amortization. It’s a one-time cash transaction whereby you hand me the money, I count it, and we walk away from each other never to be in contact again. You trust that what you paid for will be done properly because you are here making this transaction based on my reputation for keeping a deal sacred. You get what you pay for, but you pay for it first. It will be done. He’d even tried a joke once announcing, “Thy will be done,” but the look on the customer’s face indicated that Robert had breached the “no-humor” part of the pact. In times of extremis, humor did not lighten the situation; it bred distrust.
So many people came to him already convinced that they would be dealing with a crazy person because only a crazy person would kill other people for a living. And crazy would be fine if only it didn’t manifest itself in flippancy (or any other kind of humor) during the negotiated ghoulishness. Robert made the joke just once. And all subsequent negotiations were as monosyllabic and straight-faced as possible. Robert wore gray: a suit and deep green tie without stripes to keep the stimulus as low as possible during negotiations. If the customer believed he was dealing with crazy to get the unthinkable accomplished, he could at least be as comfortable as possible doing
it.
The traffic’s starting to move a little. You get that traffic thing like a narrative that shoves forward but butts up against something quickly, something you can’t see. And that’s right where Rex is: do I have the story wrong? What exactly is the story? What’s my next move to exhort the story to greater greatness? Rex had escaped the Lucite box and manifested himself as an imperial metaphor colonizing my thinking: fractals, modernism, macaroni-and-cheese, RNA and DNA.
Robert had two glasses of iced tea with the mac-and-cheese: two sugars and squeezed lemon. The waitress asked him how he had liked their special. Robert allowed as it had been as good as advertised.
Robert yawned, the mac-and-cheese concert in his bloodstream singing him to sleep, the iced tea raising a little ruckus to keep him awake. His client had said she’d think about it—all his conditions, she said, all his lecturing. Her eyes darted not side to side like suspicious people, not like lean and hungry Cassius in Julius Caesar, but up and down, up and down pathologically. Maybe she had some neurological damage. She had said she’d have to think it over. And generally Robert never took second meetings: for example, she might change her mind and from some moral high horse call the police to make amends and get into heaven. Robert’s mother had explained to him that each time it snowed when he was a teenager, there was some old lady who couldn’t shovel her walks, and he was to find one for each new snowstorm and shovel her out for free. And then he was sure to get into heaven. Robert liked that his heavenly account book had so many credits, but wondered if the credits held up one to one with the murders or if there was some discount rate. And, alas, every time it snowed, right at the beginning when the first flakes fell, Robert felt a tightening in his gut, and he knew he’d have to shovel one pro bono sidewalk.… And then he sighed and knew he never had to shovel another walk as long as he lived. But his mother had ruined snow for him.
Some Assembly Required Page 8