The Death of Wendell Mackey

by C. T. Westing

  Wendell pulled back from the window.

  “Just two guys,” he whispered, “just two guys talking rental space or something. It’s nothing.”

  It’s something. Of course it’s something.

  Wendell left his bedroom and went into his mother’s room to get his t-shirt, which he pulled on, tearing a sleeve in the process.

  “What am I tasting?” He licked his lips. Whatever it was felt like moss on his tongue.

  You know what it is, he thought.

  He walked into the kitchen and stood in front of the sink, moving his tongue around in his mouth, not wanting to think about it but feeling forced to do so, to picture him, slumped in a dank pool of his own parts.

  “Not that. I didn’t do that.”

  So what am I tasting then?

  It all tasted rotten, his tongue, lips, gums, like they were covered in a fetid film. He leaned into the sink, turned on the faucet and lapped up the water like a dog, but the taste persisted. He rubbed at his tongue with the rag he had been using as a sponge, poured borax onto it and rubbed harder, fraying the rag on his teeth, but nothing changed.

  “Didn’t do it, not that, didn’t do it, none of it went in my mouth,” he said, trying to convince himself, sputtering and spitting water onto the counter.

  Fangs, claws, hooves, and now wings. Of course he did it. He remembered how the man’s leg was twitching when he left the alley, like it was the last part of him to die.

  Wendell spat, and turned the water off.

  Something told him that it was there to stay, that taste, as permanent as those things coming out of his back, or his hands, or those god-awful headaches. And it would most certainly get stronger if he gave in, if he did what he didn’t want to do but somehow needed to do.

  “No, I didn’t...”

  But he couldn’t convince himself. He turned from the sink and sat down at the wooden table.

  “I didn’t, but I’m sorry for…” There was no easy way to finish his thought. He just waited—waited and hoped—for a rumble of thunder, some lightning, something to tell him that he was being heard, perhaps even forgiven. But in the end, remorse was for humans. Animals didn’t care. He had merely done what his new instincts told him to do: defend, attack, crawl back into his cave and hibernate. The institution had sent him backwards, reducing him to a brain stem and adrenals. Subhuman. Inhuman. Beyond God.

  “Carve ‘em up,” he said, “all of ‘em.”

  He curled his fingers into rakes on the table and dug the tips into the wood, pulling them back to peel the wood away in little furrows. There was no longer a need for the gun. He didn’t need those military men to tell him he was a weapon; there was a line of dead bodies to do that. He pulled his fingers up, the digits hard and black, like segments of an insect exoskeleton. The curls of peeled wood fell from his fingers to the table.

  A knock came at the door.

  And then, “Wendell?” It was Agatha.

  He sat bolt upright.

  “Wendell?”

  “Who’s there?”

  “You know who it is.”

  “Did you come by before?”

  “Yes. And you were in there, I know it.”

  “I was…”

  “Avoiding me.”

  The gloves were still in the coat’s pockets, and the coat was still bunched up on the kitchen counter. Wendell stood up, put the coat on and pulled the gloves out of the pockets and slipped them on. He saw the sneakers still sitting next to the kitchen sink, picked them up and slowly pulled them over what was left of his feet.

  “I’ll be right there,” he yelled over his shoulder.

  He walked to the door and removed the chair from its place wedged under the doorknob. Without even looking through the peep hole he opened it.

  She looked smaller, as if time had fast-forwarded, aging her too quickly. Or perhaps his eyesight was going, corroded by whatever was causing the headaches.

  “You’re here now,” she said.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Well, it’s clear you weren’t sleeping. You look awful.”

  “I’ve been getting sicker.”

  “Wendell, I’ve been thinking about what you told me on Thursday. About that place, where you said you were kept.”

  He said nothing, and just stared at her.

  “I was thinking about it, and…” and she paused, cocking her head. “Your face looks much worse,” she said. “But you haven’t been…”

  “No, no drugs.”

  “You get that question a lot.”

  “I’ve got bad skin.”

  “Cracked skin, like you’re coming apart at the seams. They didn’t have a dermatologist at that institution?”

  “Part of the whole thing.”

  “The whole thing?”

  “The sickness, the stuff they did, the—”

  “Yes, about that too. Come with me,” she said, reaching out for his arm, “we’ll go over to my place, sit down, have some tea.”

  “I better just—”

  “There’s no no, just yes.” She took his wrist, gently, but he knew she wouldn’t let go of it easily. “Come with me.” She pulled him out of his apartment, allowing him only enough time to make sure the door closed behind him, and led him into hers. She gestured to her kitchen table. Wendell sat and Agatha closed her door, joining him at the table.

  For a moment, each just stared at the other.

  Agatha started: “If you’re sick, then why haven’t you gone to the hospital?”

  “It won’t do any good.”

  “Let’s go together and just see.”

  “They don’t have an answer to what I’ve got.”

  “So you’re beyond the whole medical profession?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “That’s rather bold. Arrogant even. You don’t strike me as the arrogant type, Wendell.”

  “I’m not. But it’s true.”

  Agatha folded her hands in front of her and pursed her lips, like she was sucking on something sour.

  “I was at Mass this morning, taking the host, and I was thinking about our conversation a few days ago.”

  “The host?”

  “The wafer. The body. The body of Christ. So, I was kneeling at the front, and—”

  “You go there every day?” Wendell asked.

  “Yes, every day. At St. Jude’s. Maybe you’ll come with me one day.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’re going somewhere?”

  “Yes.”

  “With them?” she asked.

  He looked up at her and nodded.

  “So where were you yesterday?” she asked. “I knocked, but…”

  In his mind he saw the blood, and the knit cap being carried away by muddy water towards a storm drain.

  “Sister, please, don’t.”

  “Don’t what?” Agatha leaned towards him. “You’re going to burst if you don’t let it out. Please, Wendell. I just want to help—”

  “You said you couldn’t help.”

  “That’s not what I said. I’ll do whatever I can.”

  He tugged on his gloves.

  “I want you to understand,” he said, “I need you to understand, that it wasn’t always this way.”

  Agatha watched him curiously.

  “It was different,” Wendell said, “a long time ago, different. When I was a kid, I remember we had this big old knotted beech tree in the back yard, something that had been there for decades. It was almost like the house—the whole neighborhood even—had grown up around the tree, and not the other way around. The old guy across the street would tell my dad the same story about seeing it as a sapling, and watching it grow into this giant with octopus limbs. I doubt that; that thing was probably older than him. With all the shade that it gave, grass had a hard time growing back there, but I loved it. It had these roots like stairs, and I was always begging my folks to get a tire to hang from one of the limbs. It was one of those defining things
, you know? The tree defined the house. Even though it was in the back yard, it was so big you could see it from the front, so ours was ‘the house with the tree,’ not the yellow house, not Number 47 or ‘the one with the little kid.’” Wendell paused, remembering how, from the front of the house, its top limbs seemed to jut out from the roof like an uneven crown. “But apparently it got some disease, some fungus, and the thing began to die. Limbs would get brittle and break. One fell and took off part of the back gutter. So even though we had to move, the tree had to come down or the house wouldn’t sell. My grandma had died, and left my dad a little money, so after paying some creditors, we used the rest to hire the crew to cut it down. It took five guys all day to do it. There was sawdust like snowdrifts.”

  “Wendell, why are you telling me this?”

  “I just thought you should know how things were. I looked out the back window of the car when we left, hoping it would still be there, wanting things to be like they were.”

  “But that’s not how it works,” she said.

  “Nope. The world’s moved on. And we do too, come good or come bad. So, I don’t need to worry about what I did, do I? I mean, I’ve moved on, I’ve changed.”

  “Wendell, what are you talking about?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Don’t do that Wendell.”

  “No? Okay then. I’ve done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “It. The worst of the worst.”

  “Wendell…”

  “Drake was me, all me. Not that he didn’t have it coming, Sister.”

  “Wendell, Drake was a gang thing. Some feud carried over from prison—”

  “But it was this last guy, with the knit cap.”

  “Did you hurt someone?”

  “You ever go over to Brewster’s Market?”

  Agatha nodded.

  “Just past there, and you’re bound to see police cars. Look Sister, I think I…I think I…”

  “You think you what?”

  “I know I killed him, but I think I—I’m scared I might have…eaten some of—”

  “Stop it Wendell.”

  “What, were you there?”

  “Were you?” she said, placing her palms down on the table. “Wendell, you say you’re sick. Is it possible that the sickness is…well, that you imagined this?”

  “That I’m crazy?” He huffed. “You know what I would give for that to be true? You know how much I want that? But that’s not what’s happened. That’s not who I am.”

  Agatha leaned back in her chair. “So who are you then?”

  Wendell looked at her. “No. No more questions. I’m tired of all the—”

  “No, Wendell.” It was sharp, spoken with an insistence that must have come in handy with her former students. “You come here, to this building, you’re shy and secretive, threatened or even a little threatening. And you start to unroll this story—and I’m not calling you a liar, not at all, even though it sounds crazy—you unroll it, like it’s the red carpet unrolled and leading into…something dark. And dark I know, dark I’ve specialized in, for a long time. And you’re as dark as they come, from what I’m seeing. Crazy? I don’t know. Truthful? Not sure about that either. But you want me to believe this story about you, yet you’re evasive. So I’m lost here, wondering who you really are.”

  So is this opening up? Wendell thought. Dr. Harbison’s persistence never resulted in Wendell doing that, no matter his pleasant demeanor and subtle promptings. “It’s safe,” he would say, “to open up, Wendell.” And then would come that therapist’s smile, almost apologetic, with a warmth neither feigned nor real. Practiced, Wendell thought, as if it were taught to him during medical school. But opening up—and Wendell assumed it meant opening the inner recesses of the human heart, of what made humans human—implied having something worthy of being revealed, something more than the murmurs of a demon drum that he felt, that he knew, were in him. That was not something for the light of day. No matter what Agatha had seen, she hadn’t seen anything like him.

  “Darkness I can do,” Agatha added, like she knew what he was thinking. “Horribly unpleasant, but I can take it. Part of my mandate, I suppose. But with you, compounding it all is this blindness. I’m trying, trying Wendell, but you won’t let me see it. The horrors you were telling me about, like your dad’s death, your brutal mother—and believe me, you don’t need to tell me that she was a horrid woman—or this institution and whatever it…” and she trailed off, and for what particular reason Wendell didn’t know. Perhaps she was hesitant to stir any more emotions in him. Or perhaps she didn’t believe any of it.

  “This blindness,” she continued. “It’s hard for me to get a sense—and I’m starting to think it’s the same for you—of who you are, Wendell,” she said, pointing at his chest.

  “What.”

  “What?”

  “What I am.”

  “Imago Dei, Wendell. The image of God. I know what you are. Created by him, in his image, just like—”

  “I’d love for it to be that simple.”

  Agatha sighed. “Okay Wendell, then I’m wrong. But you’re still not spelling it out for me.”

  She didn’t get it. They were on different planets.

  Then Agatha’s face changed, looking resolute. “But I never accept this ‘I’m a broken man, I’m a nothing, I’m a ghost’ nonsense. That’s what you’ve believed for years, I’m sure. But there’s something there, Wendell,” and she pointed at his chest again, “there always has been. Something in there.”

  He began to retort, but stopped himself, struck by something. What he felt wasn’t as much a denial of what she said as it was plain confusion. If she was correct, that he was a something rather than a nothing, then it added significance to a past seeming devoid of any, at least as he had always seen it. But significance in suffering? It seemed to give it all some sort of transcendent quality, which was frightening to someone who had already endured so much. Only a nun could be so bold, he thought.

  “I’m not blind.”

  “I didn’t say you were, Wendell. It’s just that attached to you is this big question, monumental is more like it, this unanswered puzzle just sitting there, waiting. And you haven’t bothered with it.”

  “But that doesn’t change anything,” he said, his voice momentarily high and shrill. “It’s like you want some spiritual quest out of me, but none of this,” he said, planting his thumb into his chest, “is gonna change. Nothing’s gonna change.” He slapped his hands onto the table and stood up.

  Agatha watched him, unfazed.

  “You want to know who I am?” he said. “I’m like firewood, fuel for whatever fire’s burning. Necessary but nameless. Just one in a pile. So as a kid I kept the family going, just smoldering, but something’s gotta burn, right? Any warmth, any survival those two people had was because of me, because I kept that godforsaken family fire going. So then that fire burns out, and here I go, tossed on another. Feeding some scientific bonfire. Hey, they needed a pile of guys like me, dry and cracked and cut up, me and whatever other creatures they made in there. They needed people like us, brainless pieces of kindling, for the same reason that my mother needed me: something needed to die to keep those engines going.”

  Agatha folded her hands on the table, hooking her thumbs together tightly, carrying her tension there, and not in her face. She wore a hint of a smile, almost sly. “So, why are you reacting at all? Why escape? If all you are is fuel, then there is no point. You’ve been burned up. Chewed. Digested. You’re nothing.” She looked around the room, gesturing to all with a sweep of her hands. “Yet, here we are. The fuel speaks. It reasons. Shows emotion.”

  “Don’t play with me. Don’t joke about this or—”

  “Or what, Wendell?”

  “You’re an old lady. So don’t.”

  “Because I’ll end up like Drake? I’m not worried.”

  On any other day, it would almost be sweet, he thought. She’s trying
to care, because she thinks she knows. She thinks this all matters. The trouble was, even with his attempts to brush her off, Wendell wanted her to continue. This silly little nun, this discarded urban anchoress in her little rented cell, was becoming addictive. That’s what they do, they get themselves hooked in so they can’t be ripped away. Still, perhaps she was right. Perhaps. It was all a stretch, but monstrous as he was, he might still have value, at least in her eyes. Was it ridiculous? Yes. But so was the peeling skin, the claws and hooves, the teeth, the wings. And in this ridiculous world was this nun, unkempt, wrinkled, ugly, but speaking with a certainty far larger than her tiny frame, and without fear when, if she really knew what was happening, she would be afraid.

  “I’m not a therapist,” she continued, “I’m not a self-help guru here to tell you that it’s all okay, as long as you believe in yourself. I’m not here to wallpaper over past pain. Too often, life is pain, Wendell. And yours is no daytime talk show, half an hour of pain. It’s black horror. And you’ve been alone, all these years, suffering alone. But you’ve made it all worse, the more you’ve bought into this narrative that you’re meaningless, or only meaningful in the context of some sort of bigger machine, and nothing else.”

  “So you don’t believe me.”

  “No, just stop Wendell. I didn’t say that. In fact, Santos went out to Industrial Parkway at my request last night, and you’re right about some sort of building out there. So there’s that. Santos is doing some more digging for me. But you’re missing the bigger question of who you are.”