Wesley turned over his hand in the moonlight, gingerly fingering the cut on his palm, which had stopped bleeding. “If you could have any food right now,” he said to no one in particular, “what would it be?”
Everybody but me chimed in—here was a topic they could drum up some enthusiasm for. Chad wanted a pupu platter, minus the egg rolls, substitute extra beef teriyaki. Jack had been dreaming about the Coca-Cola brisket sandwich they used to serve on Wednesdays at the Bodega Bar. Allen missed his mother’s lasagna, thick with ricotta and onion and three kinds of meat, topped with shingled slices of provolone that crisped at the edges as the dish slow-cooked for most of the day.
“Oh shit, her lasagna was awesome,” Chad said. “Can I change my answer?”
Run, Leo, I thought. Run like the wind, buddy.
Just after midnight a perfect circle, clear like glass and vaguely rainbow-hued at its edge, formed around the moon. An autumn chill settled into the valley, silencing the frogs and chasing us inside. We left Cole where he sat and lit fresh candles to replace the ones that had burned down.
“Leo’s gone,” Rick said when he returned fifteen minutes later. He placed an unopened Pabst on the coffee table and leaned over with his hands on his knees, still trying to catch his breath. The sides of his feet were scuffed black, punctuated with spots of startling pink where blisters had formed and torn open.
“Meaning what?” Wesley asked.
“Meaning he got away,” Rick said. “I went clear across town to the industrial park. Must have run ten miles. He’s gone.”
“Fucking coward,” Wesley said. Chad grumbled in agreement.
“Doesn’t matter,” Rick said. He stood up straight and kneaded a stitch in his ribs. “I’m going to drink a beer real quick. Then we’ll draw straws again and get this done.”
“I think maybe we should forget the straws and just decide who’s next,” Wesley said, looking pointedly at me. “Before anyone else gets cold feet.”
Rick popped open his beer and took a long swallow. “Having second thoughts?” he asked me.
I watched him for a moment, then figured what the hell; either way I’d most likely end up dead. “Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
“Want to talk it over?”
“Will it make a difference?”
He sighed. “Probably not. But let’s do it anyway. Outside.”
I followed Rick through the mudroom and onto the porch, trying to ignore the rhythmic clink of the gun butt against his retro-hip Heavy Equipment Operator belt buckle. He pointed to Cole’s body, which sat cold and smelling faintly of shit in the moonlight.
“He do that himself?” Rick asked.
“Yes.”
“Good old Cole. Cast-iron balls to the end.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he was just miserable and scared, like the rest of us.”
“And bored,” Rick said.
“That too.”
We were quiet for a minute. Then Rick said, “We both know I’m nuts, right? We’re in agreement on that?”
I glanced again at the gun in his waistband and said, “Is this a trick question?”
“No.”
“Okay. Then, yeah. No offense, you’re still my friend, and I love you. But you’re batshit crazy, man.”
Rick smiled sadly. “Right,” he said. “But what you don’t know is I went nuts a long time before all this shit started. First semester last fall, to be exact. Was the first time I realized I wanted to kill someone.”
I said nothing.
“It went like this. A couple of guys at school asked me to go camping with them one weekend. I’d just started organic chemistry and had a ton of reading to do, so I sat in my room debating whether or not to go. Drinking a Heineken Dark. I remember it so vividly. Sunlight coming in through the blinds, the smell of pot and incense from the guys across the hall. So there I am, weighing three hundred pages of reading against this camping trip, and out of nowhere I think how easy it would be to kill those guys, up in the mountains with no one around. I’m looking at this class syllabus, right, but what I’m seeing is these two guys lying under the trees with their throats slashed. For no reason at all. I liked them. We chummed around campus, worked out together, drank together. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded.
“After that, I gotta tell you, showing up for class on time and studying hard and waiting tables to keep myself in beer money didn’t seem so important anymore. I wasn’t that person, to say the least. An instant transformation. And it got worse. I’d bring a girl back to my room and imagine strangling her even as I rubbed her shoulders and kissed the back of her neck. Do you have any idea how terrifying and—really, it sounds funny—depressing it is when all you want is to be a normal nineteen-year-old guy and have sex with some semi-anonymous but very pretty and sweet girl, to smell her and taste the sweat on her lips, but even as you’re doing it, even as you’re going carefully through every motion, all you can think about is killing her?”
I nodded. I’d done the very thing he described—brought girls home with me from a party, made love, and woke up in the morning with the sun on my face, feeling happy and spent and bloated with possibility. It was a wonderful thing, and I could imagine how terrible it must have felt to be excluded from it.
“So that’s what I did for the next year,” Rick said. “Went through the motions—school, work, friends, girls, feeling scared and sick and murderous, barely under control. It’s like an open circuit, just keeps coming and coming no matter what you do to try and turn it off. I thought about how when you act normal and look normal people just give themselves up to you. I thought about how the law is only after the fact. So that by the time they told us God was dead and all hell broke loose, it seemed like kind of a blessing to me. Because I had this horrible awareness now. I understood those guys who climb clock towers or walk into a McDonald’s with guns blazing. I felt more like them than the people who stand around after the rampages, crying and asking why, why, why. Because I understood there is no why. There’s the impulse, and the act. But nothing else.”
And in that moment, listening to him, I felt within me a shift as sudden and irrevocable as the one Rick described. I was, in the parlance of my generation, over it. Utterly fucking so. I wanted to be shut of this stupid caricature of a life, in which my mother was dead, my hopes razed, and my best friend a melancholy lunatic who had no idea why he’d become such a monster.
“It feels really good to finally admit this to someone,” Rick said. “Well, not just someone. I mean, God, I’m glad it’s you, man.”
“God,” I said. “Ha.”
Rick leaned in and examined my face. “Are you crying?” he asked.
“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s get on with it.”
Wesley insisted on being part of the next pair, so we drew straws for the other half and Chad came up shortest. The two of them faced off in the living room, and on the count of THREE pulled their respective triggers without hesitation. By now a mood of grim impatience had set in, and we removed the bodies from the living room even before the smoke dissipated. We didn’t bother going all the way outside, just dragged Wesley and Chad by their ankles into the mudroom and left them to bleed out on the slate tile like freshly slaughtered hogs.
In all the falling and flailing that had occurred in the moments after they shot each other, one of them had knocked over the coffee table, and the straws rested, barely visible, in a pool of blood the exact color and consistency of molasses. Since there were only four of us left anyhow, Rick said what the hell and told Allen and Jack he’d made an executive decision, and they were next. No argument from them. Without any further prodding they stepped to the center of the room, lifted the pistols from the floor, and waited for a count.
One…two…THREE.
Another roaring flash. Something warm and wet hit my face hard, like raindrops driven on a gust of wind. I’d stepped too close to Allen, and my ears were ringing like Notre Dame,
so I barely heard Rick mutter “Son of a bitch” in disbelief as Leo and a cop, standing together in the entryway, came into view through the smoke.
The cop had his service revolver drawn and pointed in our direction. Beneath a week’s growth of beard his face was nearly as round and smooth as ours, and his eyes, taking in the scene, flashed with fear and uncertainty. His uniform was rumpled, the blue shirt untucked and stained darkly under the arms, the badge conspicuously missing. From across the room I could see his hands tremble as he struggled to summon the command presence they’d taught him at the academy.
“What have you boys done?” he asked.
Rick smiled. “How old are you, twenty-three, twenty-four? And you’re calling us boys?” He reached for the pistol Jack had used, on the floor near his feet.
“Don’t do that,” the cop said. He pointed his revolver directly at Rick. “Hey. Don’t.”
Rick called his bluff, hoisting the pistol and holding it steady at arm’s length. The cop swallowed hard.
“Rick,” Leo said. “C’mon, man.”
“Leo, what are you thinking?” Rick said. “Hello? Hey, you changed your mind? Fine. Don’t want to die after all? Definitely understandable. Not very cool, you know, everyone else stuck to the bargain, but understandable. And then you go and pull this shit.”
Leo drew a ragged breath and broke down in the sort of uncontrolled weeping that embarrasses everyone within earshot. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Jesus,” Rick said. “Get yourself together, man.”
The cop adjusted his grip on the revolver. “Drop it,” he told Rick.
“I don’t want to be alone,” Leo sobbed. “That’s all.”
“Well, you know, I was pretty impressed when you took off like that,” Rick said. “I mean, for the first time I can remember, you grew some balls and made a decision for yourself, Leo. Except you fucked it all up by coming back.”
“Last warning,” the cop said, not all that convincingly. He licked his lips. “Put the gun down.”
Rick turned his attention back to the cop. “You I don’t really understand,” he said. “Why are you wearing that uniform? It’s not like there’s much left to serve or protect, bud.”
“I’ve still got a job to do,” the cop said. “And don’t call me bud. Maybe I am only a few years older than you, but I’m still your elder, and on top of that an officer of the law. So I’d appreciate it if you’d show the proper respect and address me as Sir or Officer Bates. Also, if you’d put the weapon down.”
“Fucking Boy Scout,” Rick said. “So anyway, here’s the deal. One way or another I’m going to die tonight. It doesn’t really matter if you shoot me, or if my buddy here does it.”
“I’m not playing your game,” the cop said.
“Hate to be the one to break the news, Officer Bates, but you already are,” Rick said. “The rules are pretty simple. I give a three count. On three, we shoot each other. Got it?”
The cop wiped one hand on his pants and said nothing.
Leo looked at me. “Please,” he said.
I shrugged.
Rick had only reached TWO when the cop shot him in the shoulder. The bullet spun Rick a quarter turn to the left, but he stayed on his feet and took aim again. The cop had time to fire a panicked second shot, missing high, before his throat exploded in a mess of blood and cartilage and he went down gurgling like a clogged pool filter.
Leo leapt away from the cop’s thrashing and pressed himself into the corner.
“Rick,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Leo,” Rick said, wincing as he examined the wound in his shoulder, “you really ought to go now.”
“I’m sorry,” Leo said. “Listen, I’m really sorry, I just—”
Rick pointed the pistol straight up and squeezed off two rounds. By the time the report from the second shot faded, Leo was gone into the night for good.
Rick sank to the floor and leaned against the arm of the sofa. His hair was speckled with chips of yellowish ceiling plaster. A few feet away the cop kicked weakly, expelled a last, wet, whistling breath through the hole in his throat, and was still.
I plunked myself down on the sofa and let my head loll, staring at the twin holes in the ceiling. “Why’d you let him go?” I asked.
Rick turned his head to the side and spit on the floor. “That’s the funny thing,” he said. “I never want to kill when I’m angry. It’s strange. You’d think that would be the time I’d feel most like offing somebody.”
“You’d think,” I said.
“Fuck,” Rick said. “This hurts.”
By now you’re thinking I must not have gone through with it. Here I am, telling you this story, using the past tense, so it follows that I must have slipped quietly away after Rick got woozy from blood loss, or else just finished him off myself and gone out to join Leo. I must have changed my mind, flaked, chickened out.
But that’s not the case. I went through with it. I honored the agreement we’d made.
So how is it, then, that I’m still here, a man approaching late middle age in a world restored by the CAPA to a reasonable facsimile of its former self? A man with a nine-to-whenever in a design firm he co-founded, with a wife and a teenage daughter, a late-model Saab, and a three handicap? A man who sees less and less of the boy he once was when he contemplates his face in the bathroom mirror?
It’s easy to understand when one considers that the pistols we used that night, a twin set of Desert Eagle XIX .50 calibers belonging to Rick’s father, held clips of seven rounds each. And that one of the guns had been fired four more times than the other—once by Cole, and three times by Rick when he killed the cop and frightened off Leo. So that when Rick and I sat side by side on the floor in our friends’ blood and he put a hand on the back of my neck and pressed our foreheads together and called me by a childhood nickname I’d nearly forgotten, one of the guns was empty, and the other, the one in my trembling hand, still held four rounds.
False Idols
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
—Exodus 20:3
Mrs. DerSimonian sits across from me, wringing her hands so roughly that they’ve mounted a protest in the form of alternating red and white splotches. Mothers generally have a tougher time than fathers, but Mrs. DerSimonian has a worse time of it than most. This is due in part to her nervous disposition, and in part to the mothering philosophy of Armenian-Americans, which encourages doting and fussing. She sweats. Her hands flutter in her lap. She applies great gleaming swaths of lip balm, over and over, until the whole office smells like strawberries.
Today’s exercise is Delusion Jettison. Pretty rudimentary stuff, it’s true, but in the two years I’ve been seeing Mrs. DerSimonian the ratio of progression to setback has been poor. Mostly, I came to realize, because of inadequate reinforcement of lessons learned. So we go back over the easy stuff a lot.
“Mrs. DerSimonian,” I say. “Come on, now. Tell me how wonderful your son is.”
She won’t meet my gaze. Like spooked squirrels her eyes dart to her boy, Levon. He sits in the cage by the window, warmed by the afternoon sun, content with a coloring book and a box of Crayolas.
“Levon is fine,” I tell her, my voice gentle but firm. “Granted, he’s making a mess of that rabbit, giving it pastel green fur and coloring all outside the lines. But he’s fine. Now tell me, what’s so special about him?”
Her eyes come back in my direction but focus on the wall behind me. “You’re just going to shoot me down,” she says. “Tell me how wrong I am.”
“That’s the process,” I say. “It’s for your benefit, Mrs. DerSimonian. For everyone’s benefit, especially Levon’s. You know that.”
She draws a deep, shuddering breath, closes her eyes, and puts a hand to her mouth. “I don’t know if I can, today,” she says through her fingers. “We had a scare earlier, and I’m still quite upset.”
“Tell me about it,” I say.
She opens her eyes agai
n. Her gaze falls on the sign hanging on the wall behind me, which bears, in embroidered calligraphic letters, the motto of the Child Adulation Prevention Agency: Children Are Like Any Other Group of People—A Couple of Winners, a Whole Lot of Losers.
“I stopped at the store to buy a coffee,” she says. “I skipped breakfast because I didn’t get up until quarter to eight and Levon has his swim class at eight-thirty on Monday mornings.”
“Now right there,” I say. “A swim class for three-year-olds? Three-year-olds don’t need classes of any kind. He should be in the backyard, splashing around in a mud puddle.”
Now she looks directly at me. By her expression you’d think I suggested she give Levon a chain saw to play with.
“Do you realize how dangerous standing water is?” she asks. “Absolutely teeming with pathogens. Just last week, a boy died in Florida after swimming around in floodwaters. Leptospirosis.”
Like a lot of parents these days, Mrs. DerSimonian makes it her business to know all the things that could kill her son, by name and in detail.
But I wave this away. “Go on with what you were saying. This morning. Coffee.”
“Oh, God.” The hand flies to her mouth again. “I’m getting all shaky thinking about it.”
She falls silent once more. I wait. She looks at me, looks away, and continues.
“So I got out of the car and left it running with the air-conditioning on for Levon. Normally I would never, ever leave him in the car by himself, but I was only going inside for thirty seconds, and it just didn’t seem worth it to open the hatch on his fireproof pod and undo all the straps on his car seat and take off his crash helmet. Especially the helmet. He hates it so much he goes into these screaming fits whenever he sees me coming at him with it. So I locked the car and left it running and went in for my coffee. But when I came out I realized I’d left my spare key at home.
“I started crying,” she says, and now her eyes blossom with fresh tears. “I called the operator to have her send a signal to the car to unlock the doors, but I was crying too hard and she couldn’t understand me, and meanwhile there’s Levon, trapped inside, so close and yet I couldn’t touch him or hold him, and he saw how upset I was and he started crying. Eventually the operator got the gist of what I was saying and unlocked the doors, but by then she’d called the police and fire department and they all showed up, two cops, an ambulance, and a fire engine, and there I was feeling terrible, just terrible, for putting my son in danger and bothering these good people, all for a coffee I never drank because I dropped it on the sidewalk in a panic.”
God Is Dead Page 5