by Brian Hodge
Loaded? Check.
Hammer back? Check.
Barrel in mouth, aimed up and back at your soft palate? Check.
You peer cross-eyed down the length of it at the notched rear sight. Down and to the right, your thumb flexes—it’s awkward, wrist twisted back toward your face, but you won’t have to hold it steady for long.
When you pull the trigger, the metal snap conducts through bone, all the way around back and up to the crown of your head.
You try it again, again, again, rotating though each chamber…and none of them fire. Bucking odds like these, maybe you should be playing the lottery.
You bought the box of fifty bullets thinking you’d need only one. Just reload, then—surely one of the remaining forty-four will cooperate.
But when you open the box, you find the note sitting atop the rows of shiny brass and copper-jacketed lead.
Through good times and bad, my friend, you are my responsibility, it says. And I’ll always be one step ahead of you.
*
It’s only when he’s around that you remember what he looks like, as though he has a face made to be forgotten during the in-between times. You’ve come to suspect that this is part of him, as central to his ways as his unerring knack for showing up at the deepest crisis points of your life. It’s not your memory that loses its grasp on his appearance. Whatever else is wrong with you, your memory isn’t at fault. To the contrary, it works too well, holding on to a pressed-flower collection of all the things that can go wrong with human bodies, human relationships, human careers, human aspirations…human lives.
The dream, then, the highest goal, seems simple enough: You don’t want to be human anymore. How about…a cat. Cats seem to have nice lives. And if they don’t, well, it’s all over in a fraction of the time.
Or, if human it must be, what about Down Syndrome? You’d gladly trade it all for that. Like the kids that bag your groceries at the supermarket. They seem happy. You’ve never heard them complain. They hug you sometimes, and you hug them back, wishing you remembered how to love this freely, this spontaneously, even if only for five seconds at a time.
But with your luck, Down Syndrome is too good for you. The latest diagnosis: fibromyalgia. It’s localized itself like an excruciating bolt of frozen lightning that shoots from the left side of your jaw down your neck and halfway up your head, and so far nothing seems to be able to alleviate it.
Please, anything other than human, you pray. Anything at all.
A horse would be good. Horses in far less pain than this usually get shot.
It’s the humane thing to do.
*
The fifth time you forget about the idea of privacy, not caring if anyone else ends up traumatized: Go ahead, leave a huge mess.
You’ve come early, the transit schedule committed to memory. You’ve made sure to stake out a prime position on the platform, up front, before the real commuters straggle in and vie for position. You peer down the tracks until your patience is rewarded with the rush and clatter of the oncoming train.
Just as you flex your knees, on the verge of springing, you feel his hand on your shoulder, toppling you off balance and back against his unyielding form. You would find such preternatural solidity comforting, in a fatherly way, if it didn’t seem to be aligned against you, and what you want most in the world.
With a knowing smile, he grips your arm and you can’t even figure out where he came from. You were watching the platform, too. Sneaky bastard.
For the next several moments, you and he and the train are the only things not moving. Everyone else rushes past, getting on and getting off, slaves to their timetables. The doors slide shut and the train glides away, another opportunity lost.
You wait until the platform has emptied, the two of you standing alone under a blue sky with just enough clouds for character: “Why are you doing this?”
“Because it isn’t your time yet,” he tells you.
“No. Come on. I’m—“ nobody, you almost finish. Can’t decide between nobody and nothing and end up saying neither. “Doesn’t what I want matter? Who gets to decide a thing like that?”
He demurs with a smile, such a tiny thing to suggest so much. “Who indeed.”
“So I’m meant for better things, that’s what you’re saying?” You nearly spit the question; meant for it to come out sounding hopeful but it’s not even close. “I’m supposed to fit into some…some bigger plan, is that it?”
“Would it be that hard for you to accept it if you were?”
You give it some thought, want to answer honestly. “No,” you finally say. “What’s hard is the waiting. What’s hard is believing it could be worth all this.”
“And would that be any easier if I were to promise you that it will be?”
Only time can answer that. You keep to yourself what’s easiest of all: wondering why it has to be you, why it can’t be someone else.
*
By the twenty-ninth time, you’ve developed some strange notions about your situation. Maybe you shouldn’t try to kill yourself at home anymore, or within a convenient three-block radius. Maybe that’s his turf. His patrol zone. Maybe he’s tied to it more than to you, and can’t follow. Or maybe he knows your patterns, and to be rid of him you need to sever yourself from them. Maybe, as your guardian, he has grown complacent because you’re so geographically predictable. Throw him enough of a curve and maybe you could be gone, gone for real, before he catches up.
Which is why you take the job house-sitting for people you’ve never heard of, in a neighborhood you’ve never visited.
They aren’t even twenty minutes into their extended trip before you’re following up on your cunning plan.
The twenty-ninth time is carbon monoxide. Maybe the fact that you’re using somebody else’s car will help you succeed this time.
In the driver’s seat, engine running, windows open, breathing deeply. Check. You’ve brought a photo and taped it to the steering wheel, because what if this really is the one? It’d be a shame to check out without reminding yourself that, once, life worked the way you’d always hoped. Evidence that life had relaxed its caustic grip and allowed you to be deliriously happy.
As fumes fill the air you’re content to stare at the photo, at those two smiling faces. You smile back at them. You have to. And it feels good smiling.
Until, right on cue, he arrives. The door to the inside of the house opens. He looks at you from the doorway, exasperated, as though he’s ready to shake his head and sigh. Instead, he raises a remote control. Motors whir overhead and both big garage doors grind upward.
With a sigh of your own, you switch off the car’s engine. At this point you’re only wasting someone else’s gas.
He strolls forward and uses the bumper to step up onto the hood, then sits down inches from the glass so he can stare at you through the windshield.
Lately, you’ve developed some strange notions about him, too.
“Really, now.” He sounds peeved. “How many more times until you give this up?”
This time you’re ready for him: “I could ask you the same question.”
“For me, the answer’s easy. There is no giving up. I would think you’d have learned by now: This is what I do.”
You don’t back down, looking at him the way he always looks at you. It isn’t that you dare to dream of turning the tables, unnerving him with the hint of everything you suspect. It’s more that you’re trying to place him, really place him, fighting the tendency of his face to reject recollection.
“But this isn’t all you do, is it.” You’re not asking. You’re telling. “Every time you show up like this, I’m too messed up to think straight and remember where I might’ve seen you before.”
Years ago, you used to endlessly watch a collection of video footage, taped off local newscasts, about your parents’ murder-suicide. As though, if you went through it enough times, you’d hit some magic number and it would turn out differently. And, eventua
lly, it did—the tape finally broke. You were nine when they died, ten when the tape gave up the ghost.
He was there that awful night on the other side of the cordon, wasn’t he, mingling with neighbors and onlookers. In the background, nobody you would notice unless you’d watched the thing a thousand times and pored over every detail. Just another face in the crowd, although instead of staring at the house and the broken, blood-spattered front window that hinted of how much worse it must be inside, he was staring at the camera, as though looking through time, daring you to recognize him someday. Or maybe daring you to suspect something other than the official explanation for what happened at home that evening you went ice-skating with friends.
It all started then, this life of yours.
If you don’t count the leukemia when you were four. Or that uncle you never wanted to see again. Or…okay, so you really don’t know when it started. Maybe that’s a question better left to a hypnotist.
You just know that you’re sitting in a stranger’s car and the most constant presence in your life is sitting on the hood, and you’re staring at each other through glass and years, and after all this time he hardly looks a day older, and you’ll probably forget this, too, by tomorrow.
“’Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it,’’’ you say, an old passage from some lit class coming back to haunt. “I used to think you were my guardian angel…something like that. But you’re the opposite, aren’t you? You not sparing me so I’ll be around for some greater purpose one day.” You rub at the electric bolts of pain shooting from your jaw. “This is the point.”
He smiles, and you try, and fail, to find malice in it. Somehow that seems worse. “It’s always entertaining when they think they’ve got it all figured out.”
“I don’t claim that,” you tell him, even though, okay, you sort of hoped you had. “But I know you fucked up once. There was a time when you let something wonderful slip through your net, or your destruction zone, whatever it is, and into my life.”
He raises an eyebrow, so you peel the photo free of the steering wheel and hold it up for him to see.
“Robin,” you say. Maybe there’s a little smug triumph in it. Three years the two of you were together, and if it ended in tears, still, nobody can take those years away from you. You had them. You lived them. You have the pictures that they existed.
He squints at it through the windshield, then shakes his head and taps the glass. “Too much glare,” he says, and reaches around toward the window. “Let me see it.”
You start to give the photo to him, then think better of it and snatch your hand back. You’re not falling for this one. “You’ll just rip it up in front of me, won’t you?”
He shrugs. “Hey, now—that’s one for you, isn’t it.”
“Because that’s what you do, right? Rip lives apart?”
He waves the photo away. “Keep it. With my compliments. But don’t insult me by insinuating I don’t know how to do my job.” Now, with a scowl: “You may not like what I’m about to tell you, so remember, you brought it on yourself.”
You don’t like the sound of this already. You lower the picture into some illusion of a safer zone. Tuck it next to your heart.
“You quoted Doctor Faustus a minute ago? Great. You just didn’t go far enough. You cherry-picked. You left out the next line. Are you ready? Here it is: ‘Thinkest thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joy of heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?’”
Oh. God.
“That’s why Robin,” he says. And you thought you were smug? “So hang onto it. I hope you remember every minute of it. I hope they were all good. Because, as you must’ve figured out by now, you’re not ever going to have anything that good again.”
No, he’s the champion of smug.
“And, since confession is good for the soul, I did lie to you about one thing. A couple of years ago, on the train platform…remember how I promised you that you’re meant for better things? You’re not. Before the end, you’re meant for so much worse.”
*
And, god help you, he was right.
Over the years, diseases and maladies abound, invasive enough to damage and disfigure, but they’re never terminal. As the arthritis twists your left hand into a knotty claw, you endure. Dermatitis comes and goes in red, blistering waves, and you endure. Viruses find their way to the air you breathe, bacteria to your food. And those are the good days.
Bureaucracies lose or mutate your identity. Insurance companies find loopholes to deny your claims, cancel your coverage. Errant keystrokes across town or a thousand miles away inflate your bills, adding zeroes to the left of their decimals. Whatever credit rating you once had is in ruins.
Pets don’t last long. Dogs run off, cats die of kidney failure soon after you take them in, fish turn belly-up within a week. Soon after you locate them, support groups receive anonymous messages, or so you’ve come to suspect, because you can’t think of any other reason why their doors should suddenly be closed to you.
Whoever, whatever, he is, he seems to be working overtime on you.
But he has, however inadvertently, given you hope to hang onto. Before the end, he said in that stranger’s garage, and the words throb in memory like a recurring echo. Before the end. He’s admitted the weakness of the lifelong conspiracy aligned against you: Someday it will all be over. If not by your own hand, then according to some unfathomable timetable.
It’s a challenge, then. See how much dignity and nobility you can muster in the face of everything thrown at you. People can endure almost anything as long as they can anticipate its end. Maybe it’s a contest and you’re the fulcrum, same as the biblical story of Job, and once it’s over, like that beleaguered patriarch who scraped his boils with potshards, you will be given back everything taken from you, many times over.
Just the same, every now and again you can’t help but try to advance the schedule on your own.
*
The two-hundred-and-sixty-fourth time you’re back to guns again.
It’s been years, maybe decades, since you attempted suicide with any hope of succeeding. It can’t be done, and you know it. Somehow, through some means, many of which have been downright miraculous, your guardian always manages to intervene. Instead, you do it for sport now, sport and spite, just to see how he’ll thwart your latest inventive effort and pull your fat from the fire one more time.
This one should make him work. Suicide by cop, you’ve heard it called—really, officer, I don’t want to hurt anybody, I just want you to put a few bullets into me.
It’s one of those days when the air is so clear and the sky so pure that it seems nothing can go wrong. You wander into the plaza, with all its life and laughter, holding both hands in your pockets.
But is it entirely true that you don’t want to hurt anyone? Haven’t you, on your worst days, against your better nature, resented them, all of them, for the happier lives they’ve led?
You wander as far as the fountain, crystalline arcs and curtains splashing the nymphs and satyrs. The round pool is littered with coins, winking at you through the ripples. More than once, when times got tight, you went wading in to scoop up as many as your pockets would hold. Briefly, you reconsider today’s plan—just throw yourself into the water, instead. But why bother? One more failed attempt at drowning would be so passé. You’ve watched It’s A Wonderful Life—watched it with naked envy—enough times to know that much.
From your pocket, you slide your hand, the good hand, the hand that’s been left alone for things like this. You aim at the first white sweater you see and pull the trigger. No good reason why you chose that one, just anticipating the color contrast.
And now that you’ve grabbed everyone’s attention, you really do some painting.
How must you look to them now? For a very long time you’ve been the kind of person other people no longer see, that they work hard at not seeing, such a glaring re
minder of how so much can go so wrong.
You take your time, aiming at exposed backs and bobbing heads, and you’ve been able to reload three times—with an arthritic hand, no less—before they show up: blue uniforms, your deliverers, or whatever they are since you have to factor your guardian into the equation.
You take a lazy shot at one of them, and as they return fire, you almost yawn, waiting for the miracle.
It comes. It’s just not the miracle you expected.
Two-hundred-and-sixty-fourth time’s the charm, apparently.
All that time you spent wishing you were something other than human? You’re closer now than ever, as they cut you down like a dog.
You slump against the side of the fountain, looking down at the blood, all the blood, all of it your own, then you scan for a glimpse of that face you know so well—elusive to remember, but you always know it when you see it. And it’s such an odd mixture of emotions that washes over you: You’re glad it’s finally come to this, although after all this time you thought you’d be happier. Unaccountably, right now you’re feeling a bit betrayed.
What’s different about it this time? you wonder…and to your shame, your disgust, your sorrow, you quickly realize what it is. I never…
Now that you’re down, down and dying, the crowd begins to materialize again, creeping out of storefronts and from behind barricades. You scan them, survivors all, one to the next to the next, and—ah. There. So good to see a familiar face.
He blends into the background, nobody you would notice unless you’ve seen him a thousand times already. Just another face in another crowd, although instead of staring at you with shock, with revulsion—or playing to the camera as he did all those years ago—he offers you a slow nod of approval.
You know what’s made the difference this time, and he knows you know. And if he knows, too, that you would give anything to turn back the last five minutes, that you would suffer another thousand years to turn them back…well, that would be just like him.