by Brett Savory
Alone. Always.
An apology to the world.
THE COLLECTIVE
Black dress shoes slapping wet concrete. A train whistle, gun shot, dog bark, police and ambulance sirens wailing. None of it registers. Only the slapping of the shoes on the pavement, and now the little white darts of hatred nestling, writhing, dreaming of release behind the eyes.
Brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, orange eyes, pink eyes—it does not matter. It is anonymous. Crimes perpetrated by The Collective.
And now there is a gun in my mouth.
I look up into the face that is attached to the neck that is attached to the shoulder that is attached to the arm that is outstretched and attached to the hand that holds the gun that is in my mouth. It is a fluid connection—one that I make in my mind over and again.
I blink sweat away; my forehead is a broken dam.
The man who holds the gun so steadily, unflinchingly in my mouth is no one I know, yet I know many people like him.
I have done bad things in my life. I have been alive twenty-seven years and I have done more than twentyseven bad things. I have done more than twice that many bad things. I wonder if this man who holds the gun in my mouth knows about any of these things or if he just happened to randomly pick my sweating face to cram his weapon into.
Perhaps he does this every night of the week to someone different. Maybe he does not like his day job very much. Maybe someone there makes him feel out of control.
Staring into his eyes I see that he does not recognize me; I see that he does not hate me in particular, and that he has no idea about the far-more-than-twenty-seven bad things I have done in my life.
I think he hates doing what he is doing right now. I do not believe he enjoys holding guns in people’s mouths. So I wonder what his motives are. I wonder why I am on my knees in a puddle in a basement garage next to my car, the keys still clenched in my hand, listening to the overhead broken water pipe dripping, listening to the police and ambulance sirens—the police who won’t get here in time to stop this, and the ambulance that will be useless because of it.
This man is a member of The Collective. The Collective isn’t dangerous, only its members are. You tend to think more about society’s ills when you have a gun in your face.
When this man finally pulls the trigger, I know it will not hurt; there won’t be enough time between the act of pulling the trigger and my death for there to be pain. So it is not pain that I am afraid of.
Since I have done awful things in my life—some worse than what this man is about to do—I know I have this coming to achieve at least partial balance in the cosmic scheme of things. I am not afraid of death. I think—now that I am down on my knees in a puddle waiting to die and have some time to reflect on it—that I have been waiting for it for many years.
What scares me is the fact that this man’s face will not tell me why he’s doing it. I am scared of not knowing why I’m going to die. If only there was a twitch in his cheek muscles, a shifting of his focus, something, anything to give me a clue . . . But there is nothing. He bores straight into my skull with his glare, and I feel his pulse throbbing in a vein at the back of my head.
Maybe he does not know the exact things I have done, but I think he may know the kind of man I am. I do not think I can hide that. I do not think any man can. You try to mask it, but some people see right through you, no matter what you do.
And really, I am very stupid—I should have seen this coming. Someone, somewhere is always watching you, and with a network as immense as The Collective, I do not know why I thought I would be different.
There is no such thing as a random act of violence.
I peeled the skin off a man’s face once. It was not anything like peeling an orange. It was disgusting, but not disgusting enough that I didn’t do it again to another man, in a different apartment. I told myself that he was enjoying it, that he was screaming with pleasure.
That was one of the bad things I did.
Another time, I thought about ramming my cock down my niece’s throat. That felt worse than ripping off a man’s face. That made me feel dirty on the inside as well as the outside.
So many things that I should not have done, and now I have a gun in my mouth. The man has cocked the weapon and is muttering something under his breath. I cannot make out what he is saying. Whatever it is, it must be about me. Everything is about me. I am the center of my own, this man’s, and everyone else’s universe.
This is the way everybody thinks.
Time is slowing, winding down to the point where, when I lift my eyes to the dripping water pipe, I watch the droplets form and it seems to take an hour. Each one is one full hour, its descent is twice that, and when the third one finally hits the puddle beneath it, I hear the report of a gun. Suddenly I am lying on my back and I can feel that my face is gone. The man has pulled the trigger. I cannot see him anymore.
For a moment I wonder where he went. Then I hear his black dress shoes slapping the wet concrete, walking away.
The back of my head is opened up wide. The concrete is cool and makes me think of ice cream.
The man must have known those things I was thinking about my niece. If so, I wonder why he only shot me once.
Now I’m back on my knees, watching the ripples from the last drop of water edge out from the center of the puddle. I blink sweat away and take a deep breath.
Not dead, just daydreaming.
I wonder what the man from The Collective will do with my corpse when he finally does pull the trigger. Is there a special cleanup crew that comes around to dispose of Those Who Could Not Be Collected?
Though I have done more than twenty-seven bad things in my life, I think, perhaps, this man has done more.
I would really like to scratch my chin. It is itchy. But I do not think the man will let me.
If I could do everything over again, I would do four times the bad things I’ve done. This man with the gun cannot change that, though I think maybe that is what he is trying to do. He thinks I will waste these final moments wishing I could take back those awful things. He does not know me as well as he thinks he does.
I would only like to take back one. And you already know what that is, so I won’t say it again.
The itch under my chin is getting worse, and I am nearly to the point now where I might risk asking the man from The Collective if he wouldn’t mind scratching it for me.
Drip-drip. Itch-itch. Insanity is repetition.
I’ll bet he wants me to beg. That must be it. He is waiting for me to cry and grovel. He wants me to confess, come clean. Purge my soul before he stamps my ticket. God will forgive me for everything. Detail it all, lay it out in black and white, paint me a picture, spill your guts, let Jesus take the pain away, tell me how you love to watch people die, the lights winking out one by one by one by one in their eyes, so many lights, dampened, candles in the wind, and how you’d peel my skin off and boil it if I gave you half the chance, because oh, yes sir, most certainly I would, and how I thought about my cock in my niece’s mouth, and how I need a shower, only the dirt never comes off when you think things like that, it sticks and makes you itch and itch and you can’t scratch because you look up into the face that is attached to the neck that is attached to the shoulder that is attached to the arm that is outstretched and attached to the hand that holds the gun that is in your mouth.
It is a fluid connection—one that you make in your mind over and again.
But I will not confess.
Not to you, Jesus, or anyone else. What I have done is mine. The Collective cannot take it from me, even though I do not deserve to have it. I hold onto it because it defines me. Death has no scythe as long as I am defined.
We judge ourselves and live life accordingly, then let others clean up the mess. But the cleanup crew might miss a spot and I’ll be forever imprinted, stained, given my own star on this cement walk of fame as the brightest and boldest
of his era. Asmudge will mark my place, and no one will ever know what I have done. My secret will become me.
So I hope the man from The Collective’s purpose is not to make me confess, because if it is, I will be on my knees and he will be on his feet until we both ache in every muscle. He will wish he was home, reading the newspaper in a nice, soft chair; I will wish I had been the one who had made his chair for him, and who had written all the stories in the newspaper he was reading, created the ink the words were printed with, the paper they were written on.
I do not want to be a smudge. I want to redefine myself through this man. I want to become a part of his organization. I want to join the herd. If The Collective is every one of us, then I am already part of it; I am already doing what it wants me to. These thoughts are no longer my own, and I cannot know if they ever were.
I am a shiny star and I am about to die.
The man’s trigger finger is perhaps as itchy as my chin now. My ears twitch and I hear the stiff, tiny tendons in his finger creak as he starts to gently squeeze the trigger.
And I know I said it before but there is no such thing as a random act of violence. This is what I deserve. Twenty-seven times twenty-seven times twenty-seven times twenty-seven and I am judged. There is no way to take any of it back.
If I am—by my own will or not—part of The Collective, then this man should know my thoughts. So listen to me: my atrocities define me; your gun and your judgements cannot change that. I am exactly who you need me to be. Though you may deny it, you created me, so you are intrinsic to my definition.
The barrel of the gun slides backward; the sight gently knocks against my top row of teeth on its way out, and my mouth clicks shut.
The man walks away. Black dress shoes slapping wet concrete.
I stand up, listen to my knees snap and pop, blink once, and wipe at my forehead with my coat sleeve.
Feeling the keys in my hand, I open the driver’s side door and get in. I turn the car on, flick on the windshield wipers and watch them for awhile, then drive home, counting to twenty-seven over and again until the numbers mean nothing, until the words that make up the numbers mean even less.
By the time I get home, I have forgotten what numbers and letters are altogether. I need a new way to communicate. I want to show The Collective that I understand. Now that I know the language of the organization, I am confident in my abilities to get my point across.
I am certain they will understand what I mean.
I walk in my front door, drop the keys on the hall table, go to the desk in my office, retrieve the pistol, sit in my office chair, review once again in my head exactly what is that I want to tell them, slide the barrel between my teeth.
And begin to speak.
THE TIME BETWEEN
LIGHTS
Sometimes it’s hard to see clearly. Sometimes things just slip right by.
There is a time between lights—that time when the light of day has failed, and the streetlights have not yet come on—when things go unseen, unnoticed, unknown. Everything seems somehow quieter. The world becomes slightly muffled. Not only the sounds but the sights, as well. More things hide in the time between lights than in full darkness. Not a lot of people know this.
The only reason I know this is that I’m one of the things that hides.
It’s really not that hard once you know how to do it. You just stick close to the walls and the ground. The twilight seems to join things. I’m sure there’s some sort of scientific explanation for it, but I’m not interested. Besides, not everything that goes unseen in the time between lights can be explained by science.
When I first hid between the lights, I didn’t see anything that you wouldn’t see. I saw people, buildings, cars. The next few times I hid, it was the same. But the fifth time, I saw other people. People I knew didn’t belong there. And they saw me, too. They were the only ones who could see me. I didn’t know how they could because by that fifth time I had become rather adept at the art and felt very confident in my abilities to remain hidden.
I was hunkered down in an alleyway, waiting for someone, anyone, to fuck with. Stuffed behind a big blue garbage bin, I watched the street, phasing myself between the lights. It was fun to play like that sometimes. People walking by who chanced a glance down the alley would occasionally do double takes, thinking they might have seen something—a piece of paper or a candy wrapper blowing in the breeze, perhaps—flitting around the garbage bin, but when they looked closer, there was nothing there. A bit confused but logically convinced it was a “trick of the light,” they walk on, the incident completely forgotten by the time they reach the next block.
Let me assure you, though: the light plays no tricks. Everything between the lights is very clear, once you’re inside.
New York is the best place to play between the lights because there are so many alleyways—the drawback is that not many people willingly venture into them, which spoils the game somewhat. I’ve played in other cities— Toronto, San Francisco, Chicago—but New York is the most fun, so I decided to stay and perfect the art here.
Awoman walked by while I flitted about the garbage bin. Tall, slender, blonde hair, business suit. Miss No Nonsense, you could tell by her gait—probably on her way home from some high-powered corporate job. That’s another thing: you become quite an observer of human behavior once you watch things from between the lights.
Things you would normally never notice about someone are projected to the forefront. Most of the time, these things are important to the game. It’s easier to scare them, confuse them, when these personality cockroaches are pushed out into the light.
The woman turned her head quickly to the right and scanned the alleyway. I settled back down beside the garbage bin and quickly phased myself in and out twice, just enough to catch her eye during her scan. She did the double take, her step faltered, and then she did something people don’t usually do. She actually stopped.
Maybe I was losing my touch. Could she see me?
I made sure I was completely hidden, then studied her where she stood. Her brow was crinkled. She was motionless. But now that I was looking closely, I could see she wasn’t looking at me. She seemed to be looking over my right shoulder. I turned my head, following her gaze. That’s when I saw them for the first time.
Two men, standing near the back of the alley. One was framed by the door that led into the kitchen of the Sun-Lee Chinese restaurant; the other squatted at the standing one’s feet, back hunched, one arm resting on his knees, the other dangling at his side, knuckle dragging on the littered ground. But they weren’t looking at the woman, they were looking at me.
They wore long, black wool coats, and their limbs and bodies were severely elongated. The standing one must have been seven feet tall, his hands coming down to his knees, and the hunkered one would likely have been even taller than his counterpart when standing up. Their eyes were little white marbles. Faces expressionless.
When I looked back to the woman, she was gone, presumably walked on hurriedly, frightened. I turned again and looked to the two men. They were walking toward me. Now I saw their boots, their stretched feet. The marbles in their heads tracked me as I stood up. I backed out into the street, bumped into a passer-by who swore at me when I slipped out of hiding. I struggled to keep from phasing myself into the streetlights. I craned my head up and saw above me that they’d just come on, their hum making it harder for me to hide.
I glanced back to the men in the black wool overcoats. They were flitting like strobe lights, and my tenuous grasp on the time between lights faltered with their every step. One of them smiled wide and I saw inside his mouth. There was nothing. No teeth, no tongue, just gaping emptiness. Lips stretched and curled up at the corners, wrinkles under the marbles—but still merely an inference of a genuine smile.
Then they were gone, winking out like stars on the cusp of dawn, and I was suddenly standing in plain view of everyone on the street. Someone e
lse nudged me as I fully appeared. I stumbled and leaned against the nearby light post . . . and felt something whisper through me.
I shuddered and walked home, sticking close to the streetlights.
When I went in again, this the sixth time, I saw more of them. A different alley, but the same kinds of people. Same black wool coats, same white marble eyes, same hollow mouths. Walking the streets, noticing them everywhere, I forgot about my own childish games, and began to wonder about these twilight people. Was I intruding on them? Did they see me as some sort of interloper? Was the time between lights supposed to be theirs and theirs alone?
By the tenth time I phased into their realm, I was seeing more of them than of ordinary people. It was as though the regular people were blinking out one by one, being replaced. This suspicion was confirmed one day when I watched a group of teenagers slowly fade away right before my eyes, while behind me a group of the black-coated men appeared and began walking toward me. I shifted out of phase and swore to myself I would stop doing it, would just forget about this mystery and exist wholly in my own world with my own people. But just as I shifted and the glare from a streetlight shone through my spectacles, I caught the whisper of a word: “Eleven.”
I had to go in one more time.
The next day, I chose some deserted docks, waited for the sun to slip beneath the tops of the skyline, and phased myself between the lights.
The moment I dropped through, the men in the black wool coats surrounded me. Every one of them had their vacant mouths open, their marble eyes trained on me. Some of them wore black top hats. I had never seen this kind before—all the others just had slick black hair pasted to their heads.
One of the ones with a top hat stepped through the crowd, parting his brothers gently. He stood in front of me, reached a foot-long bony hand to my face and caressed my cheek. He smelled of burnt leaves and charred wood. When he spoke, the blackness writhed inside his mouth.