by Brian Hodge
“You steered into a tree?”
“Just about.”
He asked her how much sugar, how much creamer, and watched her while he stirred. Kimmy had dark, straight-as-a-stick hair that was just long enough to get in her way. She kept pushing it behind her ears with swipes of her hand that looked, to his eye, unconscious. She had a long, narrow nose and brown eyes that still brimmed with fresh disappointment from having been forced to question the fundamental unfairness of life. While waiting for someone to say something—or for the cat to twine out and make its debut—he considered that life in a townful of vivacious ski bunnies, 99% free of deep thoughts, must be terribly difficult when you walked around looking as though your chief ambition was to evade your own mortality by whatever means necessary.
“So I sold my skis, my boots, my poles,” she said. “Gave away my latest can of wax. Traded in my jacket and snowpants so I could switch over to a long, flappy winter coat that isn’t remotely aerodynamic—just one less temptation, you know. I even traded my gloves in for mittens without powder cuffs. A clean break.”
He brought in the mismatched pair of mugs and handed her one, sipped from his own. Pointed to the window. “So what’s up with the view?”
“Yeah, it might’ve been smarter to get something facing a brick wall. I suppose I wanted to torture myself with it for a while.”
She guided him back to the tight cluster of furniture in what passed for the living room, had him take the sofa while she settled on the edge of a chair. Shoved her hair behind her ears again and gave him a look that practically begged for reassurance that she wasn’t alone.
“Surely you had to give up something too,” she said. “Something that didn’t seem worth the risk anymore. You can’t have just gone on life as usual—nobody does. Nobody could.”
“Leaving bars with strange women—it really cramped my style there.” When he noticed that she wasn’t laughing, not even a smile, he tipped his head to one side in a gesture someone once told him was disarming. “Joke.”
“A lousy one, too.” She circled a fingertip around the rim of her mug. “Umm…I thought this was going to be a good idea, meeting in person, and maybe it’ll turn out that way, but…I don’t know what we’re doing here, I don’t know what you expect out of this, I don’t know what I even want out of it, and for sure I don’t know what you’re thinking right now. You know, we never exchanged pictures and it seemed like the right idea at the time, this pure way of going about it, to base our expectations on something other than our looks, but now that you’re here I keep thinking what a disappointment I must be in person, I was stupid to think it didn’t matter. I mean—I’m a mess most of the time, if you want to know the truth.”
It felt that he was losing her right where she sat. Better salvage this fast.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “None of it matters. I’ve told lots of lies in my life. I’ve had to. But this isn’t one of them: There’s nothing that changes how glad I am to be here. The only possible thing that would’ve been disappointing is if you’d never opened the door.”
Now she smiled. Better. Much better. He wanted to reach out, touch the tip of her chin to seal the deal, but didn’t think it would be appropriate—that she might retreat, regard it as too much contact too soon.
“It cuts both ways,” he said. “Maybe I’m not what you were expecting.”
“There is one thing…” When he gave an encouraging nod, she told him: “You look a lot more like a jock than I would’ve ever thought. This guy living upstairs from his sister—I was picturing you as skinny because you didn’t eat much, pale because you didn’t get out much. Wrong. Obviously. You look a lot more…umm…together than I thought you’d be. Than I feel, usually. It’s kind of a relief. Kind of intimidating, too.”
“Don’t give me too much credit,” he said. “You don’t know half of what’s on the inside.”
“I guess not. You shared some of it, though. Maybe getting it out of your system that way works better for you than it seems to for me.”
“Online chats only take you so far. I needed to be here. I need you to help me understand what’s…happening.”
“You’ve been living with it years longer than I have, Andrei.” She rolled her eyes and, although Kimmy was sitting, her balance seemed to waver a moment. “I don’t know how much help I could be in that way.”
He looked at her mug, saw that the coffee was nearly gone, along with the heavy dose of GHB he’d stirred into it along with the sugar and creamer. “How did you die?”
For the first time in his presence, Kimmy looked puzzled. Sleepy, too, but it was time to expect this. “I’ve…told you that already. It was one of the very first things I told you. Way before you ever told me about the river.”
He gave her a lopsided grin and looked at the floor, a gesture that someone had once told him made him look embarrassed, shamed by his limitations. He cataloged such expressions like an actor’s repertoire, practiced them in the mirror so they would seem like natural extensions of his face, plausible mimicry of things he did not feel, was perhaps incapable of feeling at all.
“Sometimes my memory plays tricks. It turns loose of things that I know should be there, but I can’t reach them. There’s no pattern to it.”
“Poor bear. I never heard of that happening with this. At least not what anyone on the board has admitted to. But I’ve never met any of the others face-to-face.” She turned apologetic. “It wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic as yours. Maybe that’s why you forgot. I, umm…had a reaction to the knockout juice while I was getting two wisdom teeth pulled…and my heart stopped…remember?”
“No. But maybe it’ll come to me,” he said, and started to plan in earnest. Looked at the wall again, that sturdy knotty pine wall. Move some of the framed photos and the bookcase and the lamp table, and there really was a lot of possibility here. “Do you have any candles?”
* * *
If there’s a name for this, I’d like to know what it is.
That’s why I’ve decided to start writing things down. It seems like the best way to start making sense of who I am…the real me, the me that nobody sees unless it’s right before they die.
I’ve seen enough news reports to know how work like mine always gets labeled, and maybe that’s even accurate most of the time. Except I can’t see that it applies to me…all the sexual perversions that usually go along with it. That’s not what I am. That’s not what I feel. Even if sometimes I wish it was as simple as that.
Instead, the thing is, the way it feels down deep inside where you can hear the whispers in the middle of the night, is that I’m playing for a team I never asked to be on, or even tried out for. Which is hilarious when you think about it, because of how the coaches always used to end up looking at me with that disappointment in their faces and telling me I wasn’t a team player. They were so glad to get me at first, too. It didn’t matter how many miles they made us run, or how many scrimmage drills they put us through, or how many squat thrusts they gave out when you lipped off. I never got tired. They loved that. They might pretend to be pissed off over it, but you could see their eyes light up with the possibilities. A guy who didn’t get tired. I was glad for the chance to try, and their teams seemed as good an outlet as any, but I’d come out of the showers listening to all the other guys piss and moan about sore muscles, and pretty soon all they were to me was a bunch of pussies I didn’t want anything to do with.
So the verdict came down: “You’re just not a team player.” Except they’d say it like they expected me to feel BAD about that, instead of taking it like a badge of honor. Like never in a million years would they understand why I might ask what use did I have for a team that couldn’t keep up with me on my worst day.
Besides, they weren’t even right, not completely, not if they would’ve stopped to look at the situation from a different perspective.
Early in the season my sophomore year, before they started leaving me on the bench most
of the time out of spite, we were in a game against the Morrison Wildcats. They were killing us. By the third quarter we were down 44-17, something pathetic like that. It was all offense. They had a quarterback that could’ve put the ball through an open car window at 60 mph. But then their game plan fell apart for one perfect moment and three of us got past their linemen at the same time to sack the quarterback. I hit him low. I aimed, might as well have had a laser sight on my helmet. I can still feel that leg fold backward at the knee and hear it snap the same way you break boards when you’re a kid and think you know karate.
The feeling I got out of that wasn’t anything new. I’d done worse already. It wasn’t a revelation. It was just another opportunity seized. But it proves an important point: When my own needs and the needs of the team coincide, everything can work out fine.
Just my luck I had to end up with coaches who cared about bullshit concepts like good sportsmanship.
Awhile back I read about a coach of a tee-ball team who paid one of his best players twenty dollars to bean his worst player in the head during warm-up so he wouldn’t have to field the bad kid in an upcoming game, because the league rules said every kid gets to play. Both kids were eight years old, and the second one was a lousy player because he’s mentally retarded.
Once word got out, things turned predictable: a townful of parents screaming for the coach’s head, along with everyone else who heard about it. There probably wasn’t a sports radio call-in show in the country, least of all mine, that didn’t echo with the sound of spit hitting the phone over the incident.
Everybody had an opinion about the coach. But I don’t think I heard anyone say a word about the first kid, the kid who said, “Sure, coach. I’ll throw that ball. I’ll throw it real good. Just watch me.”
But I thought about him a lot, and wondered what kind of charge he got when the ball connected, how he felt hearing the crack of the retard’s skull and watching the kid drop to the ground. Because that could’ve been me, if not for one thing: The little shit confessed. Which means he probably got a thrill out of it at first, then started to feel guilty. Not like me at all.
Here’s what I would’ve felt:
Nothing. Zero. Absolute whistling emptiness. Except maybe the satisfaction of accomplishing something that needed to be done.
Which makes me wonder if I wasn’t trying out for another type of team all along, starting at a very young age, and just never knew it…or about the team, either, for that matter.
* * *
Even though he’d taken plenty of time at the pine wall—he would not have rushed things even if he could’ve—he knew he had a long wait before Kimmy would rouse. Tricky to guess exactly how long, though. The dose of gamma hydroxy butyrate that he’d given her was enough to deliver a knockout blow within ten minutes, and if he could trust the source from which he’d bought it, the stuff should wear off after three hours or so. Although the seller’s experience with GHB—one of the more reliable date-rape drugs—was limited to slipping it to somebody while she was drinking alcohol, not coffee. The rest of the equation was, he feared, all actions and opposing reactions: the GHB’s potency versus the caffeine and the adrenaline that her body was no doubt producing, balanced around a further possible X-factor: the large amounts of Novocain he’d shot into various areas, as well.
Regardless, he was here for the duration.
He was determined to use the time constructively, returning to Kimmy’s room and its tiny computer workstation—cheap particleboard with a walnut veneer—nestled into the corner. There he found her laptop, and took it back to the living room, settled onto the couch and skimmed through her e-mail, her files, the bits and pieces of her inconsequential life. The main thing of interest was the text that she had saved from her many chat sessions with her pal Andrei, and after…everything up until last night, a quick chat before his flight from Atlanta. She’d conducted that last handful of sessions under the assumption that she was still corresponding with her friend in Pittsburgh.
He still couldn’t begin to understand how it had happened, what peculiar chain of circumstances had conspired to put him here. If her archives shed no light on that—and he doubted they would—then they would at least help him know what he was coming to regard as his enemy.
No, scratch that—not an enemy, for they had neither the wit nor the will to oppose him. They weren’t his quarry, either; the last thing he was here for was sport. They weren’t even vermin. They were…
What—loose ends? Stains upon perfection that needed to be expunged?
Something like that.
Back in her bedroom, he printed out the archive of online chats and ended up with a stack of pages nearly an inch thick. That finished, he returned to the living room, gave Kimmy a status check—still out cold—and turned his attention to her computer again, deleting all the direct evidence of the chats that she’d conducted with him. The program’s log file? Gone, and not merely deleted. He’d brought a security utility on a bootable CD-ROM that overwrote the drive sectors of deleted files, erasing them beyond recovery. Anything pertaining to Andrei, he left intact, signposts pointing back to Pittsburgh.
Even if he’d left it all untouched, there was no chance that investigators could trace anything back to him. It wouldn’t even matter if they got a warrant to examine her Internet service provider’s records. As soon as Kimmy Matteo’s path had crossed his—however this had happened—he hadn’t done anything from home. He’d set up an anonymous web-based account that he could access from anywhere, and handled e-mail and chats alike from public terminals at a couple of coffeehouses in Atlanta’s Little Five Points sector, places he had never been before and now would never go again.
His instincts for self-preservation were just like that, and always had been, and complemented what he could only describe as an uncanny knack for passing unseen when it mattered most.
Blessed, one might say.
He sat in the living room near the picture window and immersed himself in her conversations by the waning light of day, as the sky and clouds swirled into blue-gray murk and the sun began to drop behind the peaks. He tensed once, when the phone rang. Her machine caught it and somebody identified herself as Lisa, not bothering to hide her annoyance that Kimmy was late for her shift again, and if she hadn’t left yet, could she get her ass in gear, because this Lisa person was really getting sick of covering for her, and may even have believed she was sticking the knife in by reminding Kimmy that everybody’s got problems.
When the message terminated in a high-impact slam, he relaxed. There wouldn’t be any complications from this.
He no longer noticed the smell of blood, and he read until Kimmy uttered her first groan, greeting this brand-new world into which she was awakening.
* * *
Seventy-two hours ago he’d never heard of Kimmy Matteo, had never heard of people like her, but all it took was one more morning for everything to change.
He’d gotten up when the sun was high. Went through his usual mid-morning routine, shaving as soon as his eyes were open and padding his heavy barefoot tread down to his building’s lobby for the day’s mail, then it was back upstairs for e-mail and there they were: other people’s lives in his In Box, an entire exchange amassing while he’d slept.
He’d almost zapped them as junk, but paused with his finger on the Delete key. The same senders, back and forth, Andrei Lepik and Kimmy Matteo, first one and then the other—it simply didn’t have the whiff of spam.
He clicked. He opened.
I’m emailing instead of IM’ing you, Andrei had written, because I want to give you time to think if you need to. I don’t want to put you on the spot. Anyway…would you want to meet? As in for real, face-to-face? No pressure. I’d just like to see who it is that’s been on the other end of these past few weeks.
Her reply seemed as wary as it was succinct: R u sure this is a good idea?
A quick inspection of the e-mails raised more questions than it answered. Th
ere appeared to be no way these should ever have gotten to him. They were addressed only to their intended recipients; no additional addresses, no CC’s. He jumped to the menu of his program and had it reveal the stray messages’ headers, strings of codes and labels tracing their path—meaningless to him, although he didn’t have to understand much to realize that nothing appeared to pertain to him. These had gone astray by no means he could spot, what in the paper world would have been an act of carelessness, copies left with him by an errant hand…except by now the thing he understood above all else was that there were no such things as accidents, not where he was concerned.
I don’t know if it’s a good idea or a bad idea, Andrei had responded, I just know I’ve been up all night and right now I don’t think I could sleep if I wanted to, not until I say what I have to: that I need to get out of this room, out of this house, out of this city, out of this pathetic cycle that I’ve let fear reduce my life to, even if it’s just for a couple of days. Right now I can’t think of any act more defiant or daring than getting on a plane and if it crashes, then it crashes, and if I die again, I die again, and God has got me. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather go except to see you. Who else is going to understand these things except you?
So it started to make a kind of sense…if not how, at least why he might have received these: I die again, and God has got me. There appeared to be work that needed to be done. But the kind of work he did—the real work, the true work—for that, there were no mentors, no supervisors to query when duty seemed vague. There was only a deep wellspring of impulse and instinct, which he had known as far back as he could remember. There was the placid sense of rightness in what he did, when blood spilled and all of Heaven smiled. There was the nod of approval in the way he seemed never to be seen, or described in terms that remotely approached accuracy.