“Mike Hannigan. Who are you?”
“Ronald Jenkins. Why did you do this? Why did you come into my home and...and do what you did to my wife? How could you hurt my wife?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No. I don’t remember doing anything. I don’t even know where I am.”
He lunged at me then and dragged the teeth of the saw across the meat of my right thigh. I screamed in pain, and he looked visibly surprised at my reaction, as if, given what I’d done, he assumed me incapable of any kind of feeling at all. He jerked back and looked down at the wound, which, though not life-threatening, was wide enough for the blood to pool and trickle down the sides of my leg. I clenched my teeth against the pain from both the wound and the rope biting into my wrists.
“I’m not going to accept ‘I don’t know.’ You’re going to explain to me why you did this, and then I’m going to do to you what you did to my wife. And I’m going to do it slowly, do you understand?”
“No, I don’t understand. I wasn’t here, and then I was, and now you’re telling me I did something terrible and I don’t know what it was or how it happened.”
He spent the next ten minutes detailing what I’d done. I threw up twice. Then he rose from his chair and stood before me, that bloodied hacksaw held in a white-knuckle grip. He looked as insane as I’m sure he thought me, and I wondered if this was the moment in which I’d die. There was no calm acceptance on my part. I felt as if I’d awoken into some bizarre dream, some suffocating nightmare, and with each second that passed, I struggled against the reality of it. Ronald had no reason to believe me, so he didn’t. He was a six-foot-tall maelstrom of emotion and he channeled all of it into a broadside swing of the hacksaw that took most of the right side of my face with it as neatly as someone snatching a doily off a mahogany table.
The pain was epic and unprecedented, and I was blessed with the briefest moment of unconsciousness before he slapped me violently awake where the agony was waiting. His face filled my world, his eyes maddened by grief.
“Tell me why you did it.”
“I can’t remember. I swear I can’t.”
He hit me again. My head lolled back. I tasted my own blood.
“Do you not understand that I’m going to murder you? That I’m going to cut you to pieces? Why did you kill my wife? Why? Why? Why?”
Each time he repeated the question he punched me in the face. Again, the pain spirited me away, and again, he roused me with a sharp blow to the face. This time when the room swung unsteadily back into view, all I saw were metal teeth. He had the hacksaw braced a mere inch from my eyes. And he was weeping.
“I will cut them out, you fuck. I will cut out your fucking eyes, I swear.”
“I’m an accountant.”
“What? What did you say?”
“I’m an accountant. I work at Hyam & Grace, a firm in Brooklyn. Call them. They’ll tell you. Or...or Google it. That’s where I work. I was there yesterday, or at least, what I think was yesterday. A man came into the office. Some weird guy. He...there was something badly wrong with him. With his eyes. Cold. Weird colors. I remember feeling...I remember being frightened. He just stood in my office looking up at the ceiling. And his clothes—”
“Why the fuck are you telling me this? I want you to explain to me why you—”
“His clothes...moved. Something about the patterns. There were marks too, designs on his neck and hands.”
He punched me square in the face and the force of the blow snapped my head back. The chair tipped over backward, and my shoulder blades knifed the concrete floor, knocking the wind from my lungs. My vision swam. I saw stars that reminded me too much of that customer’s eyes, and then Ronald was looming over me. I felt pressure on my throat, couldn’t breathe.
“I’m going to give you some time to think, not because I’m possessed of any sense of mercy or pity, but because my daughter’s coming home soon to the worst day of her life. When I come back, you’re going to tell me why you killed my...why you killed my wife. And once you do, I’m going to start taking you apart, piece by piece.”
He pressed his boot down on my throat until the world went black.
✽✽✽
I dreamed strange dreams, of black figures swimming in a deep red sea, of cobalt suns and mammoth creatures shrieking at the stars, and then I was rising back into consciousness. An hour, a day, or a month might have passed. I saw through swollen eyes a pale young girl kneeling before me. She was weeping silently, tending to my injured face with visible sorrow and confusion and hate. I felt myself reaching out to her, the desire to speak, to tell her I was sorry, to touch her, but my body was frozen, my lips stuck together with dried blood, and I could only moan. She jolted as if struck and stared at me, eyes wide. Then she was gone, her footsteps distant echoes on the stairs. Then the door slammed shut, a latch slid home, and I was once more submerged.
“Wake the fuck up.”
The shock of the cold water was enough to summon a scream, but the renewed agony closed my throat. I hurt all over, except for the numbness in my arms. My hands may as well have been dead crabs glued to my wrists. My knee burned; the right side of my face raged as if hot coals had been embedded beneath the skin. One eye was swollen shut, and my mouth felt stuffed with cotton. I raised my head as much as I was able. Ronald had set me upright again and stood a few feet away. Gone was the hacksaw. Now he had a hammer and a box of nails and the sight of them, set so casually next to his chair, filled me with atavistic dread. He set the bucket down.
With great and painful effort, I forced my lips apart, heard the crack of the bloody crust.
“Please...”
“Are you ready to talk now?”
I could only nod, aware that if I didn’t at least try to appease him, I was going to die. I realized my death was an imminent reality, but there was no reason I should hasten it, at least not until the pain grew to be too much.
“I’m sorry for what I did to your wife. Please believe me when I tell you I have no memory of doing it. I have no memory of traveling three hundred miles from my office to your house and hurting anyone. It wasn’t...it isn’t me. I’m just a normal guy. I have a job I hate, a wife I love, a dog who shits everywhere whenever he hears a sound louder than a squeak. I drink a little too much. I haven’t spoken to my parents in ten years. I have a scar and arthritis in my right hand from when I caught it in a machine press back in my teens. I voted Republican for no better reason than I knew it’d piss off my father.”
Seated across from me, Ronald stared with open hostility, but there was something else there too, something I had hoped and prayed to see and thought impossible. It was the tiniest vestige of uncertainty.
“There’s no car outside,” he said. “I walked a mile up the road in both directions. Nearest bus stop is thirty miles away. How did you get here?”
“I have no fucking clue. I don’t even recall leaving my office.”
“Why us? Why my family?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what do you know, because if your mind’s a blank, you’re no use to me and we might as well just get to the business of ending you right now.”
“Like I said, I was at work. That guy I mentioned. He just...I didn’t even see him come in. He was just there, standing in front of me. Real fucking peculiar sort. Like seeing a homeless person in an expensive suit. Nothing about him fit. I remember...I remember asking him what his business was, and he smiled at me. Worst thing I’ve ever seen. I was instantly nauseous, as if when he’d opened his mouth, he’d breathed something foul into mine. ‘I’m a traveler’ he said, as if that explained anything, and he moved toward me. I got up, afraid he was going to attack me or something, and then...”
“And then?”
“And then I was sitting on your couch upstairs and it was you who was attacking me.”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’t know how, but he did something to m
e.”
“You’re a fucking nut and I’m done listening to this.”
“No, look, please, just listen. I’m telling you the truth. I know it won’t change anything. I know your wife is dead and please believe me I am so fucking sorry for that, and I’m not telling you any of this so you’ll let me go, or to torture you by not giving you what you need to hear...I’m telling you this because it’s all I know. If you want to call the police on me, I’ll go to jail and if I really did what you say I did, then I’ll pay for my crimes. It’s not like anyone’s going to believe me. It’s not like I even expect you to believe me. Just please, I beg you, please don’t hurt me anymore.”
He scooped up the hammer and rose. That doubt in his eyes was fading, replaced by the anger that had possessed him since he found me in his house and saw what I did to his wife. And I know I did it. I know I killed her. It’s preposterous to think that I didn’t. It’s preposterous to think that I did. But all the evidence was there. I was found hundreds of miles from home covered in blood holding a hacksaw with a dead body in the tub. Doesn’t take a fucking genius to connect the very obvious dots. But. I know without question that it wasn’t really me. It couldn’t have been. I could never do such a thing to anyone. I’ve never even been in a fight, for Chrissakes.
When I told Ronald this, he answered with the hammer.
✽✽✽
For the next few days, I was left alone but for brief visits from Ronald’s daughter. She tended to my wounds, shoved moldy bread into my mouth and washed it down with lukewarm water. I tried to speak to her, but she never lingered. As expected, she looked like a ghost. I shouldn’t have tried to engage her. I know that now, knew it even then. I just needed her to know I was sorry, but she crammed that food into my mouth so violently, I couldn’t, and she was always gone before I managed to swallow it.
✽✽✽
I lose track of time.
✽✽✽
Another day, another week, I was slapped awake and I looked up to see Ronald standing over me again. His face was a mask of rage, his eyes bulging, and all I could think was, this is it. This is the moment of my death. Either that or he’s going to hurt me so bad I’ll pray for death, but I won’t die. He’ll let me heal and then start all over again until I truly lose my mind.
“What did you say to her?” he asked.
I felt dread at my confusion. All this time he had been putting questions to me that I couldn’t answer, and each time, it brought me ever closer to punishment, and to the end. But there was little I could do to appease him without knowing the answers he sought.
“I don’t—”
“Don’t fucking give me that. What did you say to Sophie?”
“Nothing. She doesn’t let me speak. I tried to tell her I am sorry, but—”
He drew back his fist and I turned away, bracing myself for the pain.
When it didn’t come, I looked back and saw that he had all but fallen into the chair opposite me. He was even paler than usual, his eyes ringed with dark bags. He looked sick, his breathing labored, raspy.
“I think I need to kill you,” he told me, with no emotion at all.
My first instinct was to protest. The plea rushed up my sore throat on a desperate wave. But I caught it behind my teeth as something dawned on me. There I was, in more pain than I’d ever felt in my whole life. I spent most of my days here either passed out, weeping against the pain, or vomiting. My nose was broken, my face destroyed. The girl tried to treat my wounds, but she was not a doctor and it looked as if the wound on my leg was getting infected. I still couldn’t open my right eye and that probably wasn’t normal. I was hungry and thirsty and stinking of my own waste. However it happened, I was a murderer and a prisoner. If, stricken by some incomprehensible moment of charity—maybe the notion that he himself did not wish to become a murderer—Ronald turned me over to the police instead of killing me, what would happen then? I’d go to prison for the rest of my life, become a disgrace, a vile news story that would destroy my wife and parents’ lives forever. And sure, I hated my parents for how they had treated me over the years, but not enough to cause them that kind of pain. What possible good, then, could come from the life for which I was trying to plead?
None at all.
So instead I told him, “I think you’re right.”
He raised his head only slightly and looked at me. “Would you tell me why you did this? As a favor to me? Will you give me that much so someday I’ll have some hope of understanding all of this?”
“I want to. Really, I want to tell you what you need to hear, but if I did, I’d be making it up. I don’t understand how any of this happened. I feel like I went to sleep and woke up on the moon. Something possessed me. That’s all I can think of.”
“We were married eighteen years, me and Denise. She was my best friend. Without her, I don’t know how to go on, but I have to. I have to be there for Sophie. Whether or not I believe any of your craziness, and I’m inclined not to, it doesn’t change the fact that you killed my best friend and left me to raise my daughter alone. And now you’ve broken my little girl too. So you see, if I don’t punish you for it, how do I get to feel like I made a difference? How do I get to be her protector?”
I shrugged as much as I was able. “If it makes you feel any better, your behavior is the only thing I understand about any of this. If someone hurt my wife, I don’t know that I wouldn’t do the same thing you’re doing. Vengeance matters. It’s sometimes all we have left.”
He looked strangely at me then, as if for the first time since he came home and stepped into our shared nightmare, he at last saw me as a human being. It was not what I’d intended, and not a ruse. I was, as I had been all along, only telling him the truth as I saw it. But with this truth, I had essentially just given him permission to kill me, and it rattled him.
He made an odd sound then as tears came in a sudden wave and I looked away as the sobs wracked his body. It was a terrible sound, the grief jolting him like bolts of electricity. From the corner of my eye I saw him fall out of the chair to his knees, saw him lower his face to the floor, grab fistfuls of his hair, and scream into the concrete.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. It had by then become a mantra, but I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m so sorry.”
He cried for what seemed like an eternity, and when he raised his face, the floor was damp beneath him. He stayed there on his knees looking up at me, occasionally wiping his nose on his sleeve. His eyes were red and raw, his face white as a blank page. Then he slowly reached behind him and picked up the hammer.
“I am too,” he said, and shuffled closer to me. When he braced a hand on my knee to lever himself up, it split the wound and I winced in agony. Pus leaked from the encrusted edges. He withdrew with a grimace.
“I didn’t mean to do that. I forgot.”
I almost laughed. “I’m pretty sure I’ll get over it.”
He smiled grimly at the redundancy of his apology, and slowly got to his feet, his hand tightening around the handle of the hammer. Everything seemed very still in that moment, as if we were posing for a photograph entitled “The Moment Before Death.” I closed my eyes and felt a hollow open in my chest at the thought of my wife, of Sarah, who was no doubt already missing me, wondering where I was. It broke my heart to think that she would never know what became of me. She’d report me missing in a few days and the police would find nothing. Doubtless, Ronald would bury me in a field somewhere and there I’d remain, my fate a mystery.
We had so much we wanted to do.
I chose not to ponder the why of it all for fear that I would go even more insane than I already assumed myself. One does not babble about mysterious visitors with blue-sun eyes and swirling coats as justification for murder and not reach the conclusion that there’s something mentally amiss. Other than the tragedy I had caused this poor man and his daughter, this was as it should be. I was the lucky one. In a moment, I’d be free, leaving the nightmare behind for e
veryone else to live with.
“I wish I owned a gun,” Ronald said. “I’d make it quicker. But I’ll do the best I can.”
I nodded my appreciation.
He started to raise the hammer.
At that moment, the door at the top of the stairs swung open with a shriek, and both me and Ronald flinched and looked in that direction.
“Dad?” Sophie called down.
Ronald swallowed, the hammer stalled halfway through its upward arc. “Don’t come down here, honey. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“Something’s wrong, Daddy. Please, you need to come look.”
“Honey—”
“It’s about Mom’s body.”
That froze us both. Ronald’s jaw dropped open at the same time he let go of the hammer. It hit the floor, the claw-end chipping the concrete, and then he was gone, thundering up the stairs as if the house was on fire. I heard him ask Sophie “What do you mean?” and then the door slammed shut behind him.
Though I could not see them, I heard their progress on the floor above me, heard their voices but could not make out the words. I tried not to let hope bloom in my chest. Nothing short of a life-rewriting miracle was going to undo what had been done here. What I had done here. And yet I couldn’t help it. Sophie’s timing seemed rather convenient, like divine intervention, deux ex machina designed to keep me alive a little while longer, if not commute my sentence entirely. But when I tried to imagine what Sophie had meant by her words, my imagination failed me. It’s about Mom’s body. What could possibly have happened to it to justify her interruption of her father’s business with me? She had to have guessed what he was doing. He might even have told her in an effort to salve the all-consuming grief of her mother’s death. Don’t worry, honey. Tonight, I’ll make him pay for what he did.
I listened to the muffled noises overhead until I grew weary, and despite my anxiety, or perhaps because of it, I drifted off.
✽✽✽
“Wake up.”
It was a struggle against a tidal current to do as I’d been asked. I felt mired in mud, my body sluggish, my blood turned to tar. It was as if I had been asleep and bound for months. My body sang with pain.
We Live Inside Your Eyes Page 3