by S. J. Maher
She cheerfully explains it all to me while I enthuse, which takes some doing, since I hate her stupid business and her.
“I’ve put a lot of time and money into it,” she says. “Thank goodness your friend was able to boost my sales. Otherwise, I would have lost money on the whole thing, and on a teacher’s pension, you really can’t afford to lose money.”
That lets me segue to poor Candace.
She offers me—thank goodness—a cup of tea, and as she puts the kettle on in the kitchen, I sit down and start to explain my misgivings. She looks confused as I lay out the case for the defense.
I tell her I believe Candace was set up by her boss, Alvin Beaconsfield, who sexually exploited her and then framed her when he realized he was going to be caught. What happened at the subway was a terrible accident.
Irene listens patiently to all this as she pours our tea and sits down across from me at the kitchen table, but it doesn’t mean anything to her.
“I only know what I read in the news,” she says. “You said in your message on Facebook that I might be able to help clear it up.”
“It’s possible,” I say, sipping my tea. “Let me explain. It’s just a bit complicated. Do you think I could have a glass of water?”
Of course I can. She gets up and goes to the sink.
Roofie time.
78
A body hitting the front of a moving train makes a big noise, a terrible thump, even above the racket of the steel wheels on the track.
The train was going so fast that, thankfully, there was little gore to stick in my mind, but for an instant I could see the impact, when Jess and Wayne stopped moving backward and started moving sideways and sort of flattening, molding themselves to the train.
They must have been dead within seconds, which is a comfort to me. I don’t like to see anyone suffer.
We all must die. It isn’t unjust to die before your time, since, as of the moment of death, you no longer exist. How can someone who doesn’t exist press a claim on the living? They can’t.
This is an error at the heart of our social order, our justice system, the so-called crime of murder.
Life is for the living. The dead have no interests. They are gone. That’s why we make wills. The dead can’t own anything. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past few days, as I made my desperate calculations, and I am at peace with the deaths that I caused.
I was not in peace at the moment it happened. I’d sat, in a terrible daze, on the platform, for a few seconds. Then the fight-or-flight instinct kicked in and, without thinking about it, I scrambled to my feet and headed up the stairs, up to daylight.
Few people saw what happened and nobody reacted as quickly as I did. An older woman cried out as I started for the stairs.
“Stop her!” she shouted, pointing at me. “She pushed them.”
Most people didn’t see it happen, though, and nobody grabbed me, and the old bitch was too fat to give chase.
So I made it up the stairs and out into the street and sunshine and I quickly lost myself in the crowds. I think I wandered aimlessly for an hour, because there’s a blank spot in my memory.
When I came to my senses, I was walking by the Hudson. I’d decided I wanted to escape. I realized that I had to get rid of my phone, which was surely tracking my movements more closely than I had been for the past hours.
I swore that I wouldn’t let myself be trapped, either by whoever it was who drove me to my current desperate situation or by whoever might falsely blame me for the death of my sister and her lover.
According to the half-literate hacks at the Post (can you imagine what a horrible bunch of mediocrities must work there?), security video from the subway shows me pushing Jess and Wayne into the path of the train.
That’s one reason why I can never turn myself in. I knew as soon as I read that that I couldn’t. There would be no justice for me, not with the Post calling me the Hipster Killer. And I never want to watch the video. They would make me watch it, in court, and I won’t. Period. I’d rather die. And I’d rather kill than die.
I was friendless, reviled, smeared, reduced to hiding in a storage closet and peeing in a bowl. Who could blame me for doing whatever it took to stay free? And if someone blames me, tell me, why should I care?
79
Irene, who isn’t that smart, can’t figure out how she might shed light on poor Candace’s legal troubles no matter how I try to explain it to her.
I have twenty minutes to kill while I wait for the roofie to kick in. I tell her she has the key to proving Candace’s innocence.
“But I only know her through a few phone calls,” she says. “I don’t see how I fit into this.”
“Let’s listen to the messages, and we’ll see if I’m right.”
She goes to her office to get the recorder and plunks it on the kitchen table.
“What do you think is on this?” she says. “I listened to them after you messaged me and I don’t see how our conversations could be connected at all with what happened.”
I smile and try to look like a kindly young woman trying to explain a new technology to her grannie.
“Look at it this way,” I say. “If it hadn’t been for her work for you, she wouldn’t have gotten herself into trouble.”
“I’m not sure I agree.”
“Well,” I say, letting a little annoyance creep into my voice, “the police say she got into trouble over a list she used for your business. So you profited from her trouble. How much revenue did you get from all those conversions? It must be, what, five thousand dollars?”
She laughs nervously, but I see she’s not stupid enough to tell me how much she made.
“I don’t know if it was that much,” she says. “And I had no idea there was any mischief involved.”
“I suppose not,” I say, smiling again, lest I frighten her. “How would you know?”
“And the cheese business had nothing to do with what she did to that boy in New Jersey,” she says. “I found that very disturbing, what she did to him.”
“Some people think that what he got is too good for rapists,” I say. “Maybe you don’t think so? You think it’s okay for disgusting men like him to rape young women?”
There’s a slowly dawning realization, a rising tide of dread in her old eyes. She suddenly sees that she had made a mistake letting Linda into her house.
Unfortunately for her, I have timed it right, and she’s showing the early signs of the effects of the Rohypnol in her bloodstream.
“He wanted to rape Candace,” I say. “He put a roofie in her drink. Do you know what that is? It’s a drug, a powerful sedative. He was going to take her home and fuck her while she was drugged. Would you like it if somebody did that to you?”
She stares at me dully, her eyes flickering nervously.
She disgusts me. She doesn’t care about rape. She would do nothing if her husband abused her daughter. She would likely pretend she didn’t know about it, even if the signs were everywhere, even if her daughter came to her, confused and hurt, and explained it.
She is making me angry.
“Nobody would want to rape you, of course, but Douchebro wanted to rape Candace,” I say. “She outsmarted him, and switched their drinks, and I’d say he got what he deserved. And Candace got what she deserved, or some of it anyway. She cleaned out his bank account.”
“I want you to leave,” she says after a moment. “I’m sorry but I’m tired. Tired.”
I smile and stand up.
“Sure,” I say. “Of course. No problem. I’ll be on my way. Just one thing first. I need the money that you made off Candace. It should be about five thousand dollars. She needs to start a new life and she needs that money.”
She stares at me. She doesn’t understand.
I go to the counter and pick up her purse and rifle through it. She has one bank card and $130 in cash.
“You need to tell me your PIN,” I say. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”
>
I am glad that she tells me the number without too much trouble. I don’t want to use the knife on her like that. She is an old bitch and deserves what she gets but she doesn’t deserve to suffer like Douchebro did.
I feel comfortable with her death, and with the deaths of Simon and Karine. They didn’t suffer. I don’t think they felt anything more than a brief twinge when I opened the ulnar artery, carefully slicing a straight line from the forearm down to the wrist.
Neither Karine nor Simon even knew what was even happening to them.
Maybe Simon did, because he was so overweight that he metabolized the drug more slowly, and I didn’t like seeing his futile struggle to stanch the wound as his blood leaked out onto the mossy forest floor, but into every life a little rain must fall.
80
I’m writing this in a charmingly dowdy English pub on the waterfront of Kingston, Ontario.
It was Canada Day yesterday, so everything is covered in flags, even me. I bought a cheap Maple Leafs T-shirt, the better to blend in.
It’s nice here: boring but clean and much more prosperous than Clayton. There are a lot of college kids, and they are pleasantly exuberant, like puppies, bouncing around and chattering and getting drunk, not like the too-cool-for-school Brooklyn kids. I like being around them. I know I am more woke than any of them, unlike in Brooklyn, where I lived in fear of using the wrong pronoun or failing to be sufficiently outraged by whatever trendy cause was supposed to outrage us that week.
I am in an excellent mood. For the first time since the subway accident, I feel that I am finally a sufficient number of steps ahead of the people pursuing me.
I have a new lease on life. I feel good, even great. I find myself smiling for no reason, except that I am free to order a pint of beer and a shepherd’s pie and read the boring newspaper that somebody left at the bar.
I even flirt with the bartender. I might let him take me to his place. He’s big and handsome and has the kind of dim-witted Canadian earnestness that nobody could fake. I like his forearms. And he is shy with me, flustered, which, yes, I think, Why not? Also, I need a place to sleep tonight.
I have been trying to get to this place, with the police far behind me and no immediate prospect of unjust incarceration, and now I am here, and it feels good. The sense of loss that I had feared would become more acute—the saying good-bye to my past—actually has faded.
I will miss Francis, and Mom, but Francis will cope, and Mom, well, she wasn’t there for me when I needed her, so it’s hard for me to worry about her feelings too much.
Mostly, I feel like I deserve to relax a bit. I have been very careful, learning as I went, and I took a lot of calculated risks, but they all worked out and I am free and liquid and ready for my new life.
What am I talking about? I’m already enjoying my new life.
81
After I got the PIN from Irene, I put on one of her old lady hats, drove to an ATM, and cleaned out her account: $3,080, which brought my escape fund up to $3,790.
I ditched the Volvo in downtown Clayton, with the keys in the ignition and the door unlocked. I hope by now some local loser has stolen it.
Then I made my way to the river, where the sun was setting over the water. I went to a waterfront tourist restaurant, had a Caesar salad, and watched the boats come and go on the river.
When it got dark, I walked down to the boat museum dock, where the kids had left their dinghies tied up. I tossed my bag into one of them, untied it, and pushed off.
I had been nervous about sailing again. I hadn’t been in a boat since my father’s second heart attack.
We had just sailed from the yacht club in his Shark out to the mouth of New Haven Harbor into Long Island Sound, where the wind was so strong that some of the waves were crested with whitecaps. He was full of beer, as usual, sitting on the high side gunwale, while I steered.
We were kind of arguing, and then he shook his head, rejecting my point of view without even saying anything. He leaned way back out over the water. Then I think he must have had the heart attack because suddenly I was alone in the boat. It was a nightmare getting back to the yacht club by myself, not knowing what had become of Dad, but I usually can keep my cool even when terrible things happen.
I hadn’t been in a sailboat since that difficult day, but I had no choice now, so I raised the little mast and dropped the centerboard and the boat started to move out into the river in the light evening breeze.
That was when I was most vulnerable, as I sailed away from the dock, but nobody noticed me, and I was able to sail out of the little harbor and into the broad river, where the wind was stronger, blowing from the west, making choppy little waves that slapped at the boat.
The wind was scary, but it made the boat go fast, and I had the GPS and compass to guide me, and I wasn’t going that far. It was a straight run north to Gananoque, an Ontario resort town.
It was colder than I expected and I hadn’t thought to bring gloves, so I was shivering when I finally managed to nose the boat into the muddy Canadian riverbank.
I climbed into the long marshy grass and looked around. My hands were cramped but I was otherwise fine. In the distance I could see the headlights on the highway that runs between Kingston and Gananoque.
When I was sure that I could walk to my new life from there, I let go of the rope on the bow and watched the boat drift slowly out into the current in the middle of the river.
Please, I thought. Please. Let this be a new start. Let all of my pain, all of my mistakes, all my sadness, my old life, let it stay in the boat. Let it float slowly but surely away from me, leaving me clean, innocent, and deserving of happiness.
82
I walked, exhausted, into Gananoque as the sun came up, gaping red-eyed at a perfect blanket of mist sitting still on the gray water of the river. I found an empty Tim Hortons coffee shop, and sat in the back corner, waiting for the library to open, drinking green tea and holding Irene’s recorder to my ear.
The first recordings were intensely boring: two conversations with a lawyer concerning the disputed will of Irene’s aunt. There were also half a dozen conversations with a pension management company call center and a few calls with utilities. I skipped through them all before I got to the good stuff: Craig pitching her on SoSol, talking fast about the explosive growth potential of unexploited niches, the market you can unlock with laser-guided social media targeting. He gave her his bullshit and then tried to get her to say yes and get off the phone. She asked repeatedly if there was any way she would have to pay. He kept saying no. Then she finally agreed and he signed her up.
I sat up and gulped the last bitter dregs of my huge cardboard cup of tea when the next call started. It was Candace, in happier times, two weeks and a lifetime ago, calling Irene to say hi. I impatiently listened to the strained conversation, which was boring the first time, with chipper Candace trying to suck up to overbearing Irene.
Then Irene asked whether she might get stiffed and Candace passed the phone to Rebecca.
As Rebecca soothed her, in the background, the recording captured a faint but clear conversation about phones. I listened closely, rewinding and replaying it. New phone okay? Did I transfer everything over? Am I done with the old phone?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Then I could hear him ask me, quite clearly: “Can I get the old one back from you?”
“Here you go,” Candace replied.
I stopped the recording and looked around the coffee shop. I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply and exhaled.
I knew, at last, who did this to me. It was like waking up from a nightmare and realizing that it was Christmas morning.
It came back to me. I gave my old phone to Kevin. He had it. He had the phone that was used to schedule the social media postings that destroyed my life.
If I hadn’t been so busy knifing pimps, roofieing losers, and avoiding the police, I could have figured it out sooner. Of course. It was him. It was Kevin.
He too
k the phone, unlocked my life, and played with me.
I put it all together.
When he gave me the new phone, he had installed snooping software that allowed him to track my movements, read my messages, and eavesdrop on my every utterance, including all my conversations about him.
He stole Declan’s laptop at Alvin’s party, downloaded the data files, baited me with them, pretending to be Declan, playing me like a fish on a hook. He posted my pictures, sexually harassed me, fucked with me six ways from Sunday.
Every time I gave him my phone, he pretended to wipe it but gave it back to me, still compromised. I kept changing passwords and he kept seeing me change them. And I never thought to check the apps I had authorized, so he was able to use SocialBeast to post to my accounts. It would have been easy for him to convince the company that I did it all from my second phone, which he had with him all along.
It’s amazing to think he did all this because he wanted to creep on me. Mission accomplished, loser. You creeped on me so thoroughly that you basically destroyed my life.
If he is @BlackPillForever, and I am sure he is, then his motive is spelled out clearly in his disgusting tweets. He can’t get laid and so he hates the women who reject him, including me.
How ridiculous. I was brought low by a thirsty freak, a perverted misfit who couldn’t accept his pathetic lot in life.
The thought of it makes me so angry. Someone like that, someone so marginal, shouldn’t be able to even inconvenience someone like me, but he had. He separated me from my social media life, stripped me of my networked self, which is like a kind of death sentence. What kind of a life is a life without social, where we can’t share, can’t connect? Because of Kevin, I had suffered a social amputation, and I am every day living with the phantom pain.
He had driven me to low, desperate places. He would pay for that.
I have learned a lot since he phished me, though. I have gone through hell, but I have resurfaced, and I feel like I am fully myself in a way I hadn’t been before. I know my capabilities, and they are . . . well, he will see soon enough.