Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  I couldn’t run. But if I didn’t, I might never get the chance again.

  All the emotion, everything I’d bottled up for the past month, came out there and then. Fear and frustration. I cried, as I did so often back then, though as I remember it, not long enough. Tears are pointless if there’s no one around to see them. I learned that long before I met Edison. I quickly got into sniffling and then boredom. What should I do? What would he want me to do?

  “Be good,” he’d said.

  In my previous life, “good” meant being quiet, staying out of the way, and doing chores. I’d already been doing the first two here, with him. Maybe it was time to do the third.

  For sure, the place needed it.

  The kitchen was a mess as ever, sockbottoms sticking on food-stained tiles. The sink was the worst, full of sweet-and-sour mold and eternally full of dishes. Clearly it needed to be washed, but there was no detergent to be found, so I explored below-sink, fascinated by how different it all was from my old home. Our cupboards had been perpetually on the verge of empty, but Edison’s were full of stuff: kerosene, ammonia, moth balls, aluminum foil, drain cleaner. Random, useless things, to me at least. The bathroom was also a bust at first—iodine and peroxide might be good for cuts but wouldn’t help with the dishes—until I remembered the shampoo, which sudsed up nicely, the smell of White Rain quickly overpowering the gagging reek of mold.

  There was no dish rack to speak of, so I washed, rinsed, dried, and stored as I went, walking on top of the counter to reach the higher cupboards as I tried to make some sense of it all. Canning jars were stored beside light bulbs, duct tape alongside lighter fluid. Vinegar and corn starch were stored in the same place as charcoal and propane, behind jars of salt, flour, baking soda, and—of all things—anise, vanilla, and almond extracts (which he’d forbidden me to touch for some reason).

  The fridge made no sense either. There were the predictable boxes from several different pizza delivery places, but beyond that it defied all logic. Whipped cream, herring snacks, off-brand diet cola, condiments, expired eggs. The freezer was more mysterious, filled with things I’d never seen him use, like vodka, first-aid ice packs, and several unlabeled metal canisters I knew better than to tamper with. There was also a carton of vanilla ice cream, which I ate half of, once I found a clean spoon.

  Through it all I kept looking over my shoulder and I couldn’t figure out why at first. I realized after an hour or so that it was because I kept expecting to get punished for getting into things I had no business getting into. It felt strange to not be yelled at. It didn’t feel like home.

  At least, not the one I was used to.

  My mother had worked at a diner. She didn’t make a lot of money, so she worked at night sometimes, too, dressed up extra fancy, and of course now I know what that was. Those were the nights my father would get especially drunk, and when Mom came home they would argue. They didn’t try to hide the yelling, and sometimes not the hitting, but it didn’t bother me much. I saw worse on TV. Mom mostly slept in my room on those nights, for some reason preferring me to my older siblings. Maybe just trying to limit the damage to one room of the house. We’d lie there afterward on wet pillows with matching bruises, and she’d whisper how it would all be better tomorrow, and we’d both fall asleep like that. At the time I thought the whispers were for my benefit, but really they were just for her.

  My father didn’t make a lot of money either, which I guess is why they fought, struggling to fill five mouths besides their own. He couldn’t fix his own problems, so he worked extra long hours at a garage, fixing other people’s. Then he’d stop off at the bar on the way home to forget his own. I almost preferred him drunk—it seemed more honest. Sober, he always looked at me strangely. Not like that, though. I mean, in retrospect there were plenty of awkward moments between bathroom and bedroom, and it makes me wonder about my sisters … but he never touched me. From what I figure, he never touched my mom either, not after I was born. Maybe that’s what the weird looks were. Disappointment. After my brother died, a few years before I was born, they tried again and again for another boy, for what my father apparently saw as perfection, failing in each of five attempts to tie X to Y.

  I was the last mistake he’d ever make.

  We weren’t poor really, I guess, but there was never quite enough. The recession had hit us hard. So in addition to their incomes we lived on the cast-off kindnesses of others: a noisy old PC, used clothing, leftovers. There were days, weeks when we didn’t spend a single cent, licking the teeth of friends and neighbors, but it kept us alive. Bills got paid, clothes got bought, and no one went hungry. Going out for ice cream was a big deal, but no one starved.

  I even had friends—though mostly I shared my sisters’—and I had a puppy until I left the front door open, and I had books and dolls and a jump rope and sugar and spice and all that. In short, I had a typical, lonely life that was sinking from lower middle into upper lower class as the economy got worse. And there was nothing we could do about it. It’s no wonder they didn’t try harder to find me. No news, no search parties, no Amber Alert. Nothing.

  At home, I was always underfoot, and always getting yelled at, and never alone. Here I was alone, and it was quiet, and I didn’t feel unwanted. Maybe it was for the best I did get taken, I thought. Maybe they were doing better without me. And, come to think of it, I without them.

  Once the kitchen had exhausted its mysteries, there wasn’t much left to explore. The desk in the hall was just a mound of paper and empty takeout containers, and the living room was already known to me, little more than a couch, a table, a TV, and stacks of games, DVDs, and books, all of which I’d been devouring over the past few weeks. I swept the rug, fluffed a few pillows, and called it a day. The bathroom was as clean as it was going to get, and the bedroom had been relatively organized since he’d given it over to me. That left just one room.

  For all the times he’d snuck in and out, always careful to shut the door behind him without offering me so much as a peek, he’d never once explicitly told me not to go inside his office.

  Was it where he kept his dirty stuff? I doubted it; I don’t think he ever owned dirty stuff. Joy of Cooking, maybe; Joy of Sex, no. Maybe weapons? Or maybe he had cash in there, piles of stolen moneybags with cartoon dollar signs. Was there something he didn’t want me seeing? Maybe he was testing me? Maybe he’d see me going in, maybe he’d be recording me, and when he got home he’d kill me for going in there.

  Ultimately, logic slapped fear aside. Opening a door he’d never told me to keep shut would certainly not lead to anything worse than a scolding, and I’d gotten worse in the not-too-distant past. The door was open before the other half of my brain could argue, and I was inside looking around before it occurred to me that it hadn’t been locked.

  I was immediately disappointed. One half of the room was filled with tall stacks of empty boxes. The other half held a small desk, a wooden chair, a desk lamp, and an antique laptop, tethered to the wall by power cords and gray cables. Beside it, a pad of yellow paper, jagged strip across the top where he’d torn the last one off. No dead bodies, no weapons, no drugs. Nothing but a boring screensaver and, after I bumped into the desk, a login prompt on the laptop. It didn’t even occur to me to mess with it; its mere dullness was security enough. I turned in disgust and shut the door behind me.

  I’d been abducted by the most boring murderer in the world.

  I played games for a while after that, eventually falling asleep on the living room floor. I woke up hours later on the bed to the sound of angry mumbling, drifting about in half-sleep until finally the door opened and someone came in, surrounded by a smell like gasoline. Someone had been, was still saying something. Probably him, maybe me.

  “Huh?” I mumbled. I peered up at a stranger named Edison, not entirely sure I wasn’t still dreaming. He had gotten a close-cropped haircut—nearly military—matching a clean-shaven face. Everything dyed red, now, the color of blood. Different clo
thes, clean. His eyes looked different, too, and now I know it was because of the blue cosmetic lenses he’d put in to complete the change. Every day with him was going to be like Halloween.

  But there was more. Something intangible had changed. He seemed more coarse, patience worn thin from his time out among the natives. Something in his voice cut through the fog even as I struggled to fall back asleep—it was a tone of acceptance. I was no longer a rent-to-own; he had purchased me outright.

  I mumbled again, and he repeated himself for the third time. This time I heard him clearly.

  “I said, never put foil next to the drain cleaner.”

  For some reason this made perfect sense as I dozed off again. It made even more sense a few years later when I learned why. But at the time his statement was just a mystery, like counting sheep backwards, nonsensical yet purposeful. With that in mind I fell asleep, dreaming of whipped cream and gasoline, wondering idly—just before I drifted off for good—why there were eggs in the fridge if they could kill him.

  I think he thanked me for cleaning before he shut the door, but it’s probably just wishful thinking.

  Words of the Prophet

  11/04/2008

  I have only just reached the Ballston station when the last call comes in, instructing me to take the next Red Line towards Metro Center. I only have a few seconds to wait—excellent timing. The idea of spending any amount of time in such close proximity to this number of people makes certain things in the back of my head run screaming for the shadows of my unconscious. So when the car arrives, and the door slides open, I immediately step across the threshold, eager to get this over. Just me, my briefcase, and a bundle of high explosive. Of the three of us, only one will be getting back off.

  I had not thought it possible for the Metro to be more irritating than it has been this past week, yet it is; I would chew off my own skin if I thought it would ease the pain. It is not that it is crowded, but rather the nature of the crowd, a tangle of freaks swaying back and forth in the belly of a motion-sick beast. I somehow manage to find a seat, and as I settle in for what will hopefully be a short, uneventful ride, I cannot help but take inventory of the zoo. They are all of them animals, albeit animals who can vote. It may as well be an ark, and a redundant one at that, because there are more than two of each kind on board.

  The woman closest to me is clearly one of the cows. Not because she is overweight—she is, but that describes most of the passengers—but more her docile, laconic nature. She exists to serve. Good breeding stock, someone might say: broad hips, large breasts. White stockings, white dress. A nurse, perhaps. Or a wet nurse. Do they still have those?

  Beside her is one of the many pigs. Short, bewhiskered, round. Brown and gray all over, head to toe. Face in his phone, one of the new iPhone 3Gs, no doubt wallowing in some Internet mire. He chortles, tries to show the screen to the blonde-haired mare next to him, but she ignores him, staring blankly at her own device, vast, vacant blue eyes, an uncaring goddess of nothing. She knows she is better than him. He knows it, too. We all do.

  This being DC, there is plenty of cold blood on board as well. The snakes are most plentiful, pearly white teeth practically dripping with venom. Lobbyists, mostly. Lawyers too. Brown and blue and gray, their scales the only differentiator. You get the occasional intern or junior congressperson mixed in, but they are easy to spot by the flag pins and the Blackberries and the foolish optimism that has not quite been crushed out of them yet.

  There are whales, there are dogs, there are rats-a-plenty. There are insects and cephalopods and slime molds. And filling in the cracks and crevices is a vast assortment of lesser beings that fall outside of the animal kingdom entirely, not even worth my notice, only relevant to me in that they are occupying space that might be put to better use. Wasting my oxygen.

  In years past I might have also complained about the noise, the incessant chatter, but the only sound is that of the Metro rambling along, occasionally asking passengers to make room for others to crowd aboard. That, and the children, of course. But the crying does not bother me. Children are built to cry—it is their purpose to remind us that life hurts. The problem is their uncaring parents, faces buried in magazines and mobile phone screens. They should be forcibly spayed like dogs with a rusty knife so they can no longer spawn. Or, failing that, should be killed in whatever manner might be most expedient. I wonder if my little guest had horrible parents, too. Probably. I did.

  As terrible as my childhood was, things used to be better, or at least more innocent-seeming. I remember streets safe enough to walk down at night, sidewalks covered in chalk instead of urine and shit, lawns peppered with divots from tackle football rather than blued with cancer-causing chemicals. When children played outside, and a president actually resigned from office (eventually) when faced with possible impeachment for his misdeeds. It was still a time when there was more to be afraid of, yet for all that, people were less afraid. And more human.

  When I was the same age as my current house guest, I lived in Maryland for a time, and there were twin girls who lived two doors down about the same age. For some reason they would play hopscotch in our driveway—possibly because it drove my father mad, possibly just because our driveway was the only one both consistently empty and relatively flat. Every weekend, one or both of them would be out there with their cherry cola hair, freckles, and blue jeans, drawing squares and throwing stones. And this would last for a few minutes or an hour and then my father would come out with the hose and chase them off before rinsing the driveway clean.

  I never even considered I might make friends with them. Such a word was not part of my vocabulary. At the time, we only lived in any one place for a few months, and then my father would “transfer,” and we would hop to another neighborhood or another state. I had even begun tracing the journey on a US map, my own little grid of Metro stops, stretching from the Carolinas north to central Pennsylvania. Red and blue and green. Then one day I came home to find my father holding the map. He asked me what I was thinking. Then he asked me again, with his belt. He asked me that a lot, that night. Over and over. And later, when he had finished asking, he watched as I fed the map into the fireplace, blood on the flagstones and tears in my eyes.

  We moved a week later, and I forgot about the map, and the fireplace, and the girls. And a lot of other things. But I did not forget the pain. I make a conscious effort to remember that. It keeps me alive.

  And now here I am, what … thirty-six years later, and of all the things I should be thinking of at a time like this, it is those girls. No doubt because of the new girl. She looks nothing like them, is nothing like them, but my brain has made a connection anyhow. And I think I know why.

  I am wondering how long it will take to forget her, too, once I leave her behind.

  But there is something else, too. Something in the back of my head, lost temporarily behind memories of chalk. It lingers there until the Metro woman chirps about the doors closing, then leaps into my conscious mind as the car starts moving: I have missed my stop.

  I double check the map on the wall, compare it to the one in my head, but I already know. I am sure. I have ridden this line multiple times over the past month. Practice runs. That station was Courthouse, and I was supposed to get off there. And the next station, Rosslyn, is three minutes away. For a normal person, on a normal day, during a normal commute, this would not really matter. I happen to know, however, that something bad is going to happen to this train in a few minutes. And I would really rather not be on board when that happens.

  My pulse quickens, my face flushes, my ears grow hot. Useless chemical reactions. Where am I supposed to run? Nowhere. Not for two-and-a-half minutes. I consciously force myself back into more useful patterns of thinking. For starters, I stand up and leave my briefcase under the seat, where no one will notice it, then begin to make my way down the length of the car. No sense rushing—the doors are not going to open any faster, and I know I have at least two minutes until hell
literally breaks loose. I’m just not entirely sure how far beyond two, so I may as well get some more bodies between me and the case.

  There are plenty of bodies, too. Disgusting sweat boxes. I have little choice but to slip along between them, feeling their stink, tainting myself. It feels like watching evolution in reverse as I go. Suits giving way to jeans and T-shirts, party hats and placards. Crowds heading to the Mall, to celebrate or protest. Dogs and cats and sheep. Mediocre, all of them. Impotent and repugnant.

  But despite loathing them, I want to laugh. Because I know the one thing they all want to know, deep down. I know when they will die. They have filled their days with nothing and spent their nights lying awake wondering how much longer they had. And I know the answer: not very long. This is what separates us, no matter how close my flesh gets to theirs. I am an actor, they are the acted-upon. I will act, they will react. Not consciously, of course. Perhaps it’s better to say that they will be part of a reaction. Chemical in nature.

  I do this not because of any hidden agenda—certainly this act alone is too small to make a difference, too weak a specimen to incite a true reaction from society other than the most localized swelling and mild discomfort. If there is an end to this, I do not care. I am simply a means to an end and happy to be it. I do this because I am locked in their cage, and it will be a more comfortable prison without them. They are trapped by their mediocrity, by their failure to strive for something more, and I will free them, and be free of them at the same time. Win-win.

  Or, if I fail to get off the Metro in time, lose-lose. I will know in a few seconds.

  The car slows and shudders to a halt, and I quickly step down through the door and onto the platform, first one out the door. I have done this a dozen times in a half-dozen countries. Step off the train with the crowd, blend in, and I am gone, and they will not catch me, as long as I am smart enough to never go back, never do it that exact way again. And they can check hours of videotape, they can ask witnesses for testimony, they can bring dogs, but they cannot stop me, because they do not know who to look for. Sure, they can find someone. They need someone to be responsible. But that will not be me. Not today.