by Mike Wehner
The fallen mess of dots glared back at me from everywhere like sperm under a black light. I sat beside the pool, combed it back and forth in my fingers. I imagined John lying there on the carpet, consciousness closing like a moving picture vignette. Arms flapping, swaddled in a warm blanket of freshly beaten blood that was to be the vessel to carry him home. Then it was the cold trickle of water down his chest right before his heart gave out.
I fanned the thick red sludge back and forth, my pinkie the rudder in an ocean of imaginary gore. I slapped and gestured until it was an imperfect bloody angel in the doorway, one with too long a skirt and mismatched wings. What would Erin see when she scrubbed it clean? A bloody visage or a blessed miracle?
I wondered if she thought about the men who had cleaned up her mess. Not only the men who brought soap for John’s carpet. All manner of men. With shovels for digging and pens for rationalizing and even someone with string. String to tie around John’s teeth to keep his mouth shut while we stood over him with his mom, looking for holes and saying our second to last goodbye.
I closed my eyes and saw his holes again. One in the head, one in the hand, and four in the chest. A six holes but five shots riddle I’d probably seen in a police procedural. This was the number one with a bullet, a warning shot over her bow. The bloody angel in the carpet soothed the devil in my heart. I stood over it with heaving breaths but steady hands. At the sink I scrubbed the glass with bits of tomato squished between my toes. I fell asleep with my nose buried in the back crack of the couch and my hands prayer-clasped, stuffed between my thighs.
Grief Journal
DAY 377
Charlie and I shared the same corner booth for lunch the first day of Erin’s trial and all ten days thereafter. It was in a Greek family restaurant where most of the food wasn’t Greek. Places like this always have textbook menus and servers with bad attitudes. It takes forever to dig through all the options and figure out which one is scratch-made by the family matriarch with a hairy mole on her chin. Or I could get popcorn shrimp.
You have to be careful with what you order at these places, wipe down your utensils. There’s usually duct tape on the seats and mold in the pie case, but I’ll still eat there if the lemon rice soup is good—especially if it comes with fresh bread instead of sleeved crackers. I filter each spoonful through my teeth, sifting for cartilage so I know the stock was made with whole chickens. They wouldn’t strain it properly so the nasty bits let you know it’s made right.
“This case seems straightforward, you’re smart, what are our odds?” Charlie said. He sped through the menu, flipping page after tacky page. Sweat fell down his head and made a darkened dimple on each side of his collar. He’d come from the gym and the top side of his arm was a webbed array of veins that shuttled fresh blood around to repair whatever damage he’d done.
“We have good odds, but I don’t think it would pass the airplane test,” I said. There was a browned picture of tzatziki in the left margin, I hoped it was bad lighting and not what they were serving with the French fries.
“What do you mean?” Charlie said.
“How low would the chance to crash have to be for you to board a plane? One in a hundred? Thousand? Million? It isn’t one-hundred percent, that’s all I am saying.”
Charlie gave me a blank stare that eased into a gaping maw; his lips flapped the moment a thought came into medium focus. ”Even though she said she killed him she could get set free?” Charlie sucked soda through a straw, hands in his lap, with the lowered eyes of middle schooler trying to hide a fart.
“Murder isn’t defined as killing someone, people kill other people all the time,” I said, “murder is killing someone with no legal justification.”
“So this psycho bitch is trying to say what she did was legal because it was self-defense, but that can’t hold up. You saw how crazy she acted in the interrogation video. She’s fucking bananas.” Charlie asked the waitress if he could have a banana and I gave him a dirty look. “What? I need carbs,” he said.
The video he was referring to was taken the night of the murder. The cops left Erin alone after two hours of questioning and she was seen on camera singing to herself. High and sweet as an angel, in a white wool sweater flecked with blood and black leggings that probably were too. She sang church hymns and danced herself slowly around the room repeating hal-le-lu-jah.
Charlie and I began the trial with hope it would be quick and painful for everyone, but mostly for Erin. The next thing I knew I was showing Charlie clips of Erin’s lawyer painting John as a psychopath. How he belittled her. How he demeaned her and looked down upon her middle class roots. How he threatened her. His prescription drug abuse. How he manipulated her. His violent sexual tendencies. He loved to suck her toes he said. In an angry way. I snorted at this because it was irrelevant and silly. How John loved mixed martial arts and knew how to execute a rear naked choke which didn’t leave a mark. It sounded sexual but wasn’t Charlie told me.
I set up an old PC to record a live stream of the trial and sent clips out nightly to our friends. Erin didn’t take the stand until day nine so I spent a lot more time studying her back than her front.
Each day Charlie and I came together to prod our food, wishful think and distract ourselves by hypothesizing every iteration of John propositioning a girl to suck her feet. With his gentle demeanor asking if it would be alright if he sucked on their toes but then he would offer fair warning: it wasn’t going to be pleasant. Pulling on her toes with his mouth like he was trying to get the last drops of milkshake out of the bottom of a foam cup. Twisting the toe around like a straw, searching for one last taste.
We decided The Duke didn’t suck toes, it was beneath him but he might let you suck his. You would need to do so as a lady and if you dribbled on his feet The Duke would not be happy.
“I always thought if John had a weird sex thing it would involve his hair,” I said. After a week of meeting in the same place the waitresses nodded at us from a distance to confirm yes, we wanted the same thing as yesterday.
“John made me sit and listen to him have phone sex once,” Charlie said, “he wanted me to sit on the bed with him but I sat in the computer chair. He told her to pull his hair like five times.”
That fetish made sense. John kept a barber mirror and shears in his car. When he went out of town to visit friends he would take a hair kit and if there was a lull he would slip into the nearest bath and give himself a trim. You might find a bit of his head under the sink or behind the toilet and wonder what the fuck happened to the cat or ask your roommate if she had any strange men over who had shaved.
“If it comes back not guilty what do we do?” Charlie asked this question every day. He’d throw it out there so I’d coddle him with certainties of her guilt. As the trial beat on and Charlie watched the warring sides disparage each other he got more forceful and I needed clarification.
“What do you me by do?” I asked.
“You know exactly what I mean.” Charlie crinkled up his forehead which doubled his age. “If the court does what it’s supposed to then evil is punished, but she can’t get free. She gets the cage or the ax and I’ll need your help.”
It was his heart saying these things and not his brain. I didn’t believe he meant it, even when his eyes were half full of tears and I was counting the seconds before they overflowed like waiting for a red light to turn green. One, two, three, four, cry (green). He was too emotional to kill anyone, even if he meant to. He’d get arrested on the way, shooting wildly into the sun and screaming apologies to the wind for what he was about to do. Compressed and volatile, Charlie was capable of terribleness in immediate bursts. Sprinters don’t run marathons.
“Have faith in the system, Chuck,” I said but didn’t believe it. “We know she’s guilty, it’ll be ok,” I soothed him. “Now and forever, everything is going to be fine.”
I was full of platitudes. Charlie thought I was smart because I could tell people with broken electronics to
unplug it and plug it back in, only I said power cycle. The knowledge I did have was used to build things that built things that nobody needed. People used to build great libraries to symbolize man’s quest for knowledge, now we have the Internet which is both more powerful and wonderful. The men who used to get their information from the library were considered scholars but the men who get their information from the Internet are considered idiots, or worse, thieves.
“I know, Alex,” Charlie said. “I’ll give up my life for John. The two of you are the best friends I’ve ever had.”
“The two of us, Charlie, there’s only the two of us now.”
The rest of the trial did little persuade us that Erin wasn’t guilty. We watched as she took the stand and raised her right hand promising to tell the truth. Then she adjusted the microphone with her left, cleared her throat and lied. Erin’s lawyers tore John’s life apart. They twisted his mild anxiety into paranoia. They flipped his intellect into evil calculation. Everything he was became everything he wasn’t. The calculated hand of a magician in a cheap suit. Look over here jury, at the sloppy knot of my tie while the facts are twisted into the sloppy not.
The jury deliberated a few hours at most, the media swarmed. Huddled masses with different station IDs buzzed outside the courthouse led by the head of a microphone boom like a carrot on a stick. Chef puts down knife and fights abuse with real steel the headline maybe read, I avoided the tabloids. John’s mom addressed the media after the verdict came in. His dad slumped next to her, in his eyes I saw that he wasn’t mourning the loss of his son but also his grandkids and their kids. His mind so tired from churning the modal coulds and shoulds that it had no energy left for posture.
The truth didn’t matter, from the outset I had a feeling it would go this way, that she would be set free. I knew it the first time I saw her. When she walked in the courtroom through a side door for a bail hearing a few days after the funeral, dressed in thick black and white prison stripes. Her jumpsuit wasn’t faded and worn like a turn-of-the-century prison break, color-safe bleach kept each stripe in sharp contrast like the walls of an art deco motel. Cuffed, she shuffled out with a prison ponytail and even though I knew she was a killer I thought she doesn’t look like a murderer. She had kind eyes. She angled her head and tossed smiles to people around the room as she sat there with her lawyer who wore bitchy, pointed shoes. Erin’s cheeks were puffed and reddened from swiping away tears.
When the verdict came back John’s parents tipped into one another, their heads touched to form a peak. Lily and her brothers collapsed in upon themselves, like an old casino after the plunger was pushed by two sets of greased hands. The courtroom gasped. I took a breath so deep my back cracked three times, bottom to top.
When I heard the verdict I wasn’t ready to hurt her, both my hands still clutched the ledge of reason. I remember that first breath, the way it bent my back and pushed my sails. I knew Charlie wouldn’t kill her, but I wasn’t convinced I had to either. I needed one last thing to stomp my fingers, to make me let go and fall free where I’d reach a terminal velocity and as I passed the sonic boom I’d know that I needed to end her life.
Ten
DAY 960
It took three shifts at Essen to understand the mixtape beat of restaurant life. Morning prep was the up-tempo kick drum of modern pop, repetitive and predictable, the best part of the day. Midday swerved and screamed like a movie soundtrack, moments of silence followed by violin shrieks of hurried lunch goers. Dinner wasn’t cooking, it’s reheating at two hundred and twenty beats per minute—thrash metal. Peeling two quarts of garlic was the most fun I’d ever had, though it made it hard to pet the dog when I got home.
Erin scrawled a crooked prep list across the white board each morning in jagged cursive, all of her Ls were different heights which was suffocating to look at. I duck-slashed sharp check marks next to each finished task and then looked around to make sure nobody saw me fixing one letter at a time, a little treat I gave myself for doing good work.
Today Erin was serving rouladen. One of my prep duties was to slice flank steak, cover it in plastic wrap and pound it razor thin. The pages of meat are used like tortillas to wrap up a mixture of pickles and mustard and pork. It sounds disgusting, it looks disgusting, but it’s really good.
My family had their own version rolled with far less precision than was expected of me. The mustard smeared beef made me think of Grandma’s stained oxygen tube and the inappropriate way she told me the color of every person when telling a story. Grandma wasn’t all that nice and I hated the way she shoved food in my face while complaining I was too skinny. A wrinkled exterior with a sour pickle core, Grandma was a rouladen.
The cook next to me, Tommy, had fat black gauges in his ears and was burdened by existence. His station was a mess and his work uneven but he mowed through tasks at twice my speed.
“That will go faster,” Tommy said, “if you beat it down with the bottom of a cast iron pan.” I ignored him and kept pounding on the meat. Tommy’s knees and elbows were two inches too far from his body, he looked like a Plastic Man doll after a few weeks with a manic toddler.
I tamped the steak down three times and rolled it out with a pin. Three times and rolled. The meat buckled and waved down the table, knotting if I hit a tuft of fat.
“But it won’t be even,” I said. The plastic wrap protecting me from splatter bunched up and I fought to untangle the mess. I kneaded and kneaded at it, making it worse.
“Alex, what the fuck are you doing?” Erin yelled from the stove top, a pan in each hand. The microwave cawed at me with finished bacon inside.
“Preventing raw meat from flying around the kitchen.” I pulled at the stuck film, she huffed over and yanked the wrap out of my hands.
“I think he’s on the spectrum,” Tommy said. Erin laughed and I seethed. Mise en place. Everything in its place, right where it should be. My penchant for order wasn’t getting over.
Once the meat was rolled out I filled the center with bacon and mustard and whatever else had been laid out, like making cinnamon rolls on Sunday morning. Each finished hotel pan went into the oven and I circled back to fan out more meat. It felt good. Predictable. Satisfying. I liked preparation.
“Does anyone know what that European plum liquor is called, looks like a genie bottle,” Erin said over my shoulder, “those need a sauce.”
“Slivovitz?” I said. “It’s brandy.”
“Yeah, that’s the clear one?” Erin scribbled in a little notebook.
“Right.”
Slivovitz was fixture in the homes of post-war immigrants. I heard stories of it being used as a cough remedy, antiseptic, even a cleaning solution. Whenever we went into the city to see my grandparents I’d have to drink some. When we arrived Grandma told us to take off our shoes and Grandpa followed with a sterling silver tray that had a bottle of plum brandy and a collection of mismatched shot glasses. Dad waited for Grandpa to turn around and then poured his into the rubber tree plant on his way to the kitchen. “This plant needs it more than me,” Dad once told me, “it has to be around them all the time.”
“Do you think they sell it around here?” she asked, ticking her pen on the pad.
I slid a finished pan out of the oven and set it on the stove top. “Yeah, get the fat round bottle, the Polish one, it’s the least horrible.”
Done rolling, more pounding. Chicken this time, the most basic jobs were left to me–the low man in the kitchen. Chicken thigh for schnitzel. Erin served traditional mushroom gravy on top but I preferred a simple slice of lemon. She crinkled her face to wall back obscenities when I told her this, telling her how to cook was a button I could push any time I wanted to see her uncomfortable and I did it every chance I got. “That’s how Emily likes it, think about that,” she said.
Erin and I perceived food differently. She saw portabella with pan drippings, I saw fungus with meat run-off and flour paste. The lemon tasted better and then the dish didn’t look like it was c
overed with liquid shit.
Peel, slap, chop. Boil, roast, glaze. The best part of the day.
When morning prep was finished and my station clean I went over to the bar to check in with Erin. She sat on a tufted barstool angling the corners of freshly printed menus into the holders stacked up on the bar.
“Chef?” I said and slid between the stools.
“Erin, you mean,” she flipped a gray rag between us and dug at the dried food stuck on the corner of a holder with her chewed fingernail. I called her chef because that’s what they did on TV. It dehumanized her and let me enjoy the job, even if it was pretentious and stupid. Stew, fry, sear.
“Lineup is ready for you to taste,” I said, “I need to run out and get a new phone charger.”
She didn’t ask what happened, I’m sure she knew it was stupid and probably dangerous. Kitchens get childish in a hurry, like a middle school locker room with slightly less nudity.
The front of the house is a prim facade that hides the lunatic engine in the back. Cooks need distractions to avoid thinking about the heat and steam breaking down their tendons, the beating every joint takes lugging freezer crates of meat, the ten tasks that need to be executed perfectly in the next eight minutes with a fogged brain that’s had too much booze and not enough sleep. Then a waitress comes begging for her food which reminds you that she’ll get twice the tip the more you sweat.
That morning the newly anointed sous chef, Tommy, made a slap bet with me. He claimed he could identify any dried herb blind, so I put him to the test. He shut his eyes and I tossed a pinch of green into his mouth and scurried back to my charging phone. Wild-eyed, he sauntered over to me and screamed MARJORAM then slapped me as hard as he could. He grinned a mouthful of herb spattered teeth while I rubbed my cheek. The phone flew out of my hand and ripped the charging cord in half.
“Before you go,” Erin paused, “this is awkward, but you know my sister?”