Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  When he reached down and shook me, I woke right up, though, and barely managed to hold a scream in. Thoughts of escape must have run through my mind, but I knew it was too late; if there was to have been any getting away at all, it would have been earlier, in the car, alone. Why hadn’t I run? Stupid. Stupid girl.

  When people talk about “fight or flight,” they always seem to leave out the third one, which is “frozen in terror.” Play dead. Lots of animals do it. Don’t move, and maybe they’ll get bored and go away. Problem is, that doesn’t work with people.

  • • •

  “Get up,” I say. “You need to get clean.” She is still dotted with blood, most of it in her hair, and I am not about to ruin my flannel sheets.

  “Hey.” Still no answer. Fine, I decide. We can do this the hard way. I grab the ugliest blanket from the back of the couch and drape it over her, then—hesitating for a moment—reach underneath and pull her shorts down over her legs and feet. The next bit is especially awkward; were she wearing a shirt this would be easier for both of us, but as it is she has on just the swimsuit, so I close my eyes, reach quickly underneath and up to her shoulders, and fumble it off, sliding it down with the blanket and dumping the whole mess into an increasingly large pile of laundry that will require a setting somewhere between “heavy duty” and “crime scene.”

  When I reach back to scoop her up, she unfreezes, whimpering as I carry her towards the bathroom, my eyes tracing cobwebs along the ceiling. Then I realize that if I want her clean I will have to see her, and that is not something I am ready to deal with right now. If ever.

  I divert to the bedroom; I decide I can overlook a little blood on my pillows. I tuck her shivering and naked under the sheets and turn out the light, but even in the dark I can feel her eyes open as I make my way to the door. She expected the worst, possibly could have handled that, but has no idea how to react to this. I am not sure I do, either. I pause in the doorway and address the floor.

  “I know you have heard stories about bad men who take little girls and do bad things. I am many things, but I am not that.”

  She is silent; softly, barely breathing.

  “I am going to sleep on the couch. This door locks from the inside. There is no key that I am aware of, so you are safe. Try to sleep. We have a lot to discuss in the morning.”

  She says nothing, so I lock the door and pull it shut on the way out. For the briefest of moments, I consider saying “sweet dreams,” but she is not that naïve.

  And I know better.

  Breaking Fast

  09/09/2008

  Pizza. Breakfast of champions.

  My guest wakes up halfway through my third slice, which means I am almost finished eating, possibly for the day. Breakfast is not just the most important meal of the day, it is occasionally my only meal. I never know when I might be spending a few hours in a crawlspace, so it is never wise to leave the house on an empty stomach, even if all I have to eat is three-day-old pizza. A dish best served cold, of course—after the second day, reheating pizza just makes it worse, so eating it straight from the fridge offers the minimum amount of suffering possible.

  “Morning,” I say as she wanders into the room, dressed in one of my flannel shirts. She looks like she has been awake most of the night—I know for a fact she was up to use the bathroom, as I sleep lightly. I also know she slept at least some; she snores.

  “Your clothes are in the wash,” I say. “Take a bath. Or a shower. Are you old enough?”

  She nods.

  “There are semi-clean towels and shampoo in the bathroom. Use conditioner. The water is hard and your hair will be like onion straws otherwise. By the time you get done your clothes will be dry, and we can talk.”

  She nods again but just stands there.

  “Go. Unfilth.” Only then does she turn and leave. I sincerely hope this is not how things are going to go or I may have to kill her after all.

  I bite, chew thoughtfully as the water splashes into the tub, too hot, too cold, just right. Then that forever moment between faucet and showerhead, as water changes course and the pipes shudder in the walls, and then spray hits the curtain. Swallow.

  Why is she here? I had thought about it all night long, dreamt about it, and still had no answer. She was an impulse buy, the candy in the checkout line, the magazine, the pack of cigarette lighters—two for ninety-nine cents, what a bargain. If you had never seen it, you would never miss it, but now that you have it, you have to put it somewhere. Perhaps in a kitchen drawer, behind the rubber bands and half-dead batteries. The et cetera of life.

  The microwave trills, telling me her clothing is dry. There are no laundry hookups inside the apartment, so I spend an uneventful few minutes betwixt home and the Laundromat in the mini-mall, briefly checking on the car on the way back. It has not been stolen, although I do discover that some inconsiderate asshole has parked his goldfinch-yellow Camaro across two spots, one of them adjacent to mine. I slip underneath and use a pocket knife to cut through everything not made of metal or hard plastic. I will have to wash this shirt again, but it will be worth it even if I never see the outcome.

  By the time I get back, she is out of the shower and into my robe, as well as the last slice of pizza. Apparently she is getting the hang of this situation better than I.

  “Your clothes,” I say, dumping her things in a pile on the couch. As I cross the room towards her—too quickly, perhaps—I see the food catch in her throat, in that little V where my blue robe splits, but she chokes it down. I sit across from her, pour myself a glass of tepid water from a filterless Brita pitcher. With her there, I am more acutely aware of how messy my table is.

  “Why are you here?” I ask. She is silent, so I add, “Why did I take you? Why are you here? First thing jumps in your head.”

  It takes a while for a kernel to pop. Then: “Money?”

  “Okay. Sure. How much are you worth?”

  She stares into her lap, fingers rasping across the crust of pizza on her plate. She is acting her age, and I am losing patience with her.

  “Listen, you are a bright girl. I am going to talk to you like an adult. If you do not understand something, you ask me. Else I will assume you are ignoring me, and I will get upset. Do you understand me?”

  She nods.

  “Say it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, how much are you worth? A hundred? A thousand?” I grab a crumpled twenty dollar bill from the table and wave it. “Pick a number.”

  “Twenty?”

  “Wrong,” I say, flicking the bill onto the floor. “You are worthless. I am not interested in money, at present. But at least we know how little you value yourself. Try again.”

  She scratches her leg with her foot, shrugs, opens her mouth, closes it.

  “Sex?” I say. She blushes. “Do you know about that? Where babies come from?”

  She nods, subtly.

  “We already discussed that. While there is a distressingly large portion of the population that is evidently interested in small children, I am not among them. I do not do that.”

  “What do you do?” she asks, unprompted. Progress.

  “What do you mean by that? I eat, I drink.” I sip some water. “I want to impress upon you the need for detail. It will save your life. Now, ask again.”

  A pause while she parses, then: “What is your job?”

  “I am a serial mass murderer.” It is the closest term I can think of; I have no résumé. Domestic terrorist is too narrow in scope, and the point is not terror, per se. “I kill people. Lots at a time. I am sure you have watched shows where people get paid to kill other people. Hit men. Anyway, that is … kind of what I do. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes as a side effect.”

  “Why?” she asks.

  They wonder why children kill each other. This is why. They are not old enough to think anything is “wrong,” have not had time to “learn” that it is “bad.” In some states you cannot even be tried for murder if you ar
e under eight. That murder is bad is a matter of opinion, and it is an opinion I do not share with society. Is it murder when a hawk eats a mouse? It is just as premeditated, just as purposeful.

  “Why not?” I answer. “There are plenty of reasons. Some people are doing things that should be stopped. Some need to be moved out of the way. Some deserve it, frankly.”

  “So you kill bad people?”

  “I could not care less about good or bad. Too messy. I hate cleaning up messes.”

  She glances around the filthy apartment, quite damningly.

  “Yes, I know. This is … This is a … tool shed. Those are meant to be messy. I am like a gardener, and the garden is, I guess everything. Out there in the world.” As I speak, I arrange the detritus on my table into neat rows, thinking this will help her understand, at her age. There’s so much to work with: bottlecaps, potato chips, stray pepperoni. My table is filthy.

  “Okay, so there are good and bad plants in a garden. Weeds are bad, right? There are also good bugs, like bees and worms, and bad ones. I take out the pests and the weeds so the garden can grow. I even prune the good plants, sometimes, to make the whole garden better. My job is not good, or bad, though—just necessary. And it sometimes gets messy.”

  I wipe everything but the paper to the floor, then hold up my hands, stained with newsprint. I then proceed to point at various front page stories.

  “Humans are animals. You know that, right? Biology? Filthy, messy animals. They make a mess whenever their zoo gets crowded. America, Iraq, Afghanistan. Africa. Israel. Georgia. It has always been this way. Do you know about the Crusades?”

  She looks confused. I am going too fast. Need to take a step back. I stand up to get some water, and she flinches a bit as I brush past her, but not as much as before. She is like a wild bird in a box, gradually struggling less and less until finally you get it eating out of your hand.

  Of course, the bird eventually dies either way. Best to not get attached.

  “What grade are you in?” I ask. “First?”

  “Third.”

  “Third. Did you learn about the Crusades?”

  She shakes her head.

  “The Crusades were basically white people against brown people. One god against … I guess the same god. Same war being fought right now, over the same tiny rectangle of land. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Canaanites. Everyone claims their god promised it to them. So they have been killing each other for it ever since, well, ever. In the Middle Ages it was a specific set of wars, the Crusades, fought under the banner of your namesake. They even sent children, some younger than you. All killed or enslaved. You can imagine what they did to the girls your age. Boys, too. All in the name of a benevolent god. Good torturer, bad cop, this god.

  “But it never stopped. The wars continue. And there is plenty of room for children in the ranks, too. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front runs ten-year-old girls through military training. The Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army is a third children. Half the Afghani army is …”

  I am losing her again. Ranting, rambling. Deep breath, pull it back. Wrap it up.

  “The point is, imaginary gods and pointless causes have killed more people than I ever will. At least my causes are tangible, even if I happen to be the only one who believes them. My reasons. That brings us back to your question, which was …”

  “Why?” Long pause, but shorter than before. Improvement.

  “Why. Indeed. Let me tell you a story.” I close my eyes. The memory is vivid as ever. I can smell the exhaust. Burnt oil and asphalt.

  “My car broke down one day while I was on a job. I was a bit more than twice your age. No one really had mobile phones then, so in ninety degree heat, I had to walk to a pay phone. You know what that is? Big glass box? Nearest one was several miles away, and when I got there of fu— of course the phone was out of order, like they all are now. I looked across the street, and there was another phone, but between me and it were six lanes of traffic, whizzing by.

  “For a minute, I felt like a cog in … No, you have no idea what a cog is. I felt like … a tiny little worm inside of a big monster, a giant ugly bird. Stuck inside a big belly that just wanted to grind me up and liquefy me. I was nothing. And there was nothing I could do but stand there and get chewed up and digested and eventually turned into shit. Like everyone else.

  “But then I reached out and I pushed the button to cross the street. And everything stopped. Traffic stopped. The monster stopped. The world stopped. Because of me.”

  I jab at the table to emphasize the point, realize I am too close, staring into her eyes from just a few feet away, and so I sit back. I have not let myself get this deep into it in a long time—no use reciting doctrine to a mirror—and I have lacked an audience. Of course she cannot understand. She is a child.

  “Traffic, religion, war, society, politics—all of it is alive. And anything that lives can be killed if you push the right buttons. Not just me, you. We might be trapped in its bowels, but it can be hurt from within. You can choke it as it swallows you, you can tear up its guts while it grinds away at you. And you can bite it in the ass on the way out. The beast has a mouth, but so do you and I.”

  I grab the remainder of her pizza crust from the floor and stuff it in my mouth, expanding my cheeks and nearly choking myself. She smiles, and I note that although her mouth is still half-full of baby teeth, the permanent ones she has are clean, straight and strong. Perfectly suited to crushing, slashing, cutting. Designed for killing, as she might be. Not yet, of course. But some day, with some effort …

  I’m willing to teach, I realize. But only time will tell if she is willing to learn.

  I Live in This Hole

  10/15/2008

  The weeks fly past like stray bullets when one is on vacation, which I am. Have been for months, unless you count the lull before, which makes it years. The “incident” at the restaurant (inasmuch as I hesitate to use that word) was not work. It was …

  I will just leave it at “was” and move on.

  My vacation has not been entirely self-imposed. I get paid for what I do, and I am at the mercy of those who pay. I could “work” now if I wanted—and I have in the past—but that is a lot harder to arrange and the pay unpredictable. Some others use downtime to hone their skills: practice at the range, torture for fun and/or profit, serial kill. I sit tight and suffer through reruns, alternately bored out of my mind and cursed with ideas. Doubts, sometimes. More so recently.

  Having a guest keeps me occupied, but things are strained. There have been some minor victories—she seems to be over the fear that I will try to kill her, and I am over the ridiculous worry that she will walk in on me in the bathroom—but nothing else of note.

  We talk a lot, or at least I do, and I keep little from her, for it has been a long time since I had anyone who found me interesting enough to listen to. Her mind is a sponge, but the thing about sponges is you need to let them dry out once in a while or they begin to harbor unhealthy things. We both need a break. But there is nowhere to go, no need for either of us to leave the house other than my brief forays to the Laundromat. Thirty-some days, ninety-some meals, a dozen take-out menus, hours of games and television and movies. Everything can be delivered now, either by phone or courtesy of my upstairs neighbor’s poorly secured wifi. America is a wretched dystopia and I am glad the worst of it can be avoided, but even I have limits.

  It is just when this routine is starting to stagnate that the call comes in. Brief, a series of digits, and then silence. Sometimes we still do that bit on paper, but now it is mostly burner phones, cheap and disposable. Keeping Radio Shack in business. I disable the phone I got the call on, pick up another, call back. They speak, I listen. I say yes.

  “I have to go out,” I say as I walk through the living room to get my things; it does not take long, since I leave most of the essentials in a bug-out bag by the front door.

  “Don’t you only go out at night?” she asks.

  “I am not
a vampire.”

  She is not so sure.

  “I will be gone all day,” I add. “I have things to do and get. I have a job, in a few weeks.”

  “Can I come?”

  I give her a look. Seriously?

  “Fine,” she says. She looks disappointed. Perhaps I need to lengthen the leash. But not today. Today is a solo flight; she stays in the nest.

  “If you behave, when Twilight comes out—”

  “Really? We can go see it?”

  “If. Be good. No phone. Watch television or play games. But no multiplayer games. I do not like the language those kids use.”

  With that, I grab my trench and walk out the door, convinced, as I always am, that when I return she will be gone.

  • • •

  In hindsight it’s easy to recognize that it had only been about a month since he took me, barely any time at all. But standing there in too-big socks and an itchy thrift store nightgown, strange clothes in a strange place, it suddenly felt much longer. Time seems so big when you’re little. Days last for weeks. A month seems like forever. And it had been about that long since I had been alone for more than the length of a shower.

  Alone. I could leave. I could run.

  Or could I? What if it was a test? “Be good,” he’d said. Running away wasn’t very good. What if he was standing outside, waiting for me to open the door so he could shoot me in the head? What if there was a camera in the TV? An alarm on the door?

  And even if he wouldn’t do any of that, maybe someone else would. If he was a liar, he was trying to trick me and it would be fine if I ran, but if he was telling the truth then there were terrible people right outside the door. I knew for sure there was at least one monster upstairs. I heard his kids crying every night. They seemed about my age.