by David Beers
Knock, knock.
Harder this time. So he hadn’t imagined it.
“John, let me in.”
Harry knew that voice! John’s father! What was his name? Scott, that’s right.
John’s father was here?
Where exactly was here?
Mexico, that’s right.
Why would John’s father be in Mexico?
Harry stood and walked to the door, without a single clue what to do when he opened it.
That’s okay. I’ll figure it out.
* * *
John looked down at his hand and saw it grasped a door handle.
What happened? How did I get here?
He turned around, not letting go of the door, but wanting to find Harry. He should be here. “Harry?” he called.
No answer came back. No light on in the bathroom.
“John, it’s me. Let me in. I know you’re in there.”
John’s eyes widened faster than a bullet leaves a barrel. His father was on the other side of this door. How was that even possible? How had he gotten here?
“Dad?”
“Yes, John. It’s me. Open up.”
“What are you … what are you doing here?”
John looked down to his hand and saw the blood on it. Blood he didn’t remember putting there. Blood that he should have wiped away a long time ago.
“John, it’s okay. I know. I know everything. Your mom … she told me.”
“What?” John kept staring at his blood stained hand but he wasn’t focusing on it any longer. His hand didn’t matter, could have been cut off for all he cared. He heard his father’s words over and over in his head, echoes banging off huge caverns that seemed like they might never end.
Your mom.
She told me.
I know everything.
John suddenly felt like he was ten years old again, a child scared that someone might find out this secret—that he wanted to hurt things, wanted to watch things die. He built a life around no one knowing, especially not his father, and now Scott stood on the other side of this door—
“John? Are you there?”
—Saying that John’s mother told him. She died fourteen years ago. She couldn’t have told him anything, wasn’t possible.
Where was Harry? He should be here. John needed Harry to tell him what to do, how to handle this. He looked around the room again, his eyes scanning frantically for any sign of his dead friend.
Nothing.
No one.
“I’m not leaving. If I have to kick the door down, I will, though I’m not sure how well my body can handle that … let me in, John. Let’s talk about options.”
John shook his head, blinking absently as he stared at his hand still clasping the handle.
Everything you’ve built. It’s all falling away. You thought you created a fortress, but it wasn’t even a fort. You built a sandcastle and the waves are rolling in now. Waves without thought, without emotion, without the ability to care about what you thought stood on their beach. They’re coming to sweep it all away because the sand never belonged to you. You only borrowed it. The waves own it and they’re here to take everything back.
John turned the handle. He wouldn’t keep trying to rebuild the sandcastle as the waves washed each handful back to the ocean. Why waste time?
* * *
Harry watched. He watched John hold the door knob and he watched John’s thoughts.
Harry understood this situation perhaps even less than John.
He stayed back, hidden in the shadows of John’s room, so that he couldn’t possibly be seen. He could think better now—not exactly plan, he would never be capable of that—but his mind wasn’t just a ramble of images colliding together.
Harry didn’t know what he wanted to do here, but he understood on some very deep level that a precipice was approaching. One that, if crossed, could never be crossed back.
He watched as John opened the door.
* * *
John stood in front of his father, the sun going down in the distance and casting an orange glow over the world.
He didn’t try to close the door, didn’t move at all. Just stood there, blood speckled from neck to shoes while his father looked on.
Scott was the one that moved, pushing in and shutting the door behind him.
“Jesus, John. Someone’s going to see you.” He moved to the blinds, putting his hands on them though they were already closed. He looked at them for a second and then lowered his head. He remained like that, hands pressed against blinds and his head bent.
“She couldn’t have told you,” John whispered. “It’s not possible.”
“She did. She told me when she was dying. I never believed her.”
“That was too many years ago. Why now?”
“I don’t know why now, John. I only know what she told me. She wanted me to look in a notebook and for fourteen years I kept it hidden away in my attic. I never dared go to it. Until this time, when you started acting differently. Even then ….” His father shook his head. “Even then I didn’t read it all. I couldn’t. I was too goddamn scared. There’s just so much to unpack … things I pushed away.”
He turned around and looked at John. “I’ve never seen you drunk, son. How are you an alcoholic and no one in the family has ever seen you drunk?” His father smiled, his eyes full of tears that made them look hazy. “She loved you. God. I always knew you were special to her, but this … it’s almost unbelievable … and the guilt she carried? Lord, I can’t imagine.”
His dad’s eyes went to John’s body for the first time and John felt an intense shame—akin to what Adam and Eve must have felt as they stood naked before God. He had nowhere to run, though. He couldn’t go clean this off. He imagined that the stains on his hands might wash away, but he would never be clean again. Especially not in his father’s eyes.
“What have you done?” he said, his voice shaking, but John didn’t necessarily hear judgment in it. Fear, yes. Shock. But his father didn’t hate him—at least he didn’t sound like it.
“I don’t know … I don’t know.”
“Christ,” Scott said as he went to the bed and sat down. “What is it, John? What is this? I don’t understand. You’re standing here looking as if you’ve been slaughtering animals all day and my whole life I had no clue. None.” He paused for a moment. “But I should have. I should have known what she did couldn’t be whitewashed.”
John said nothing, tears in his own eyes blurring everything. What was he talking about? Guilt, from John’s mother? Too many words all flying at the same time and John couldn’t keep up.
“What is this?” His father was pleading, begging, and a tear ran from the middle of his eye down his lined cheek.
“I don’t know,” John said. “I’ve never known. No one ever told me.” And his own tears came then, rolling down his face without any chance of stopping them. He fell to his knees, just like he had so many times before, except before, it had been a dead person lying in front of him. Now the only thing dead was his soul. “What do I do, Dad? What do I do?” The words were hard to make out, sounding full of water and snot. John cried as a child would, without any idea how to get out of the hole he had dug.
Scott walked to his son, John’s head at waist level. He paused, his hand hanging in midair. It remained like that for a few seconds, but finally, Scott pulled his son to him, putting his hand through John’s hair as he sobbed into Scott’s leg.
* * *
The precipice had arrived.
So beautiful.
So goddamn beautiful. Harry could barely stand it. All his work, all the time and dedication to get to this point, and here, like Moses at the promised land, he saw where all his work led.
Right here as John sobbed on his father’s pants.
Harry didn’t know what would give him more joy, killing Scott or watching John kill Scott.
Can you get him to do it?
That question gave him the an
swer to his other question: which would bring more joy? Harry loved John with all his heart—how could he not? Harry had no one else. Yet John always had to be pushed, from the moment Harry arrived, he showed John what was needed. And this, right here, was needed. God in heaven and his host of angels, could there be a better kill?
Harry stepped forward, out of the shadows.
“Kill him, John.”
John raised his head from his father’s pants leg, salty tears staining his face.
“What?” The question was full of disbelief, no understanding in it.
“John, don’t you see? It’s perfect. It’s what we’ve waited for. Him. Now. What would your mom say?”
He looked at Harry through pain filled eyes that said he finally understood how far down hell went.
“No,” John said. “No, no, no.”
“She never stopped you, did she? She simply protected. Did she ever once say, ‘Not this person, John’?”
John closed his eyes and shook his head, and Harry knew he wanted to block all this out. To ignore what Harry said. He stepped closer so that he stood right behind Scott. John looked up again, his eyes pleading.
“No, Harry. Not him. Anyone but him.”
“You know you want to. You know you were made for this. All we’ve done and now, look—he’s here and there’s no one to stop us.”
“I love him, Harry. He’s my fucking father.” The last two words were a mush of language, nearly unintelligible.
“You hurt those you love, John. It’s what you do, what you’ve always done. Show him you love him.”
John stared forward, looking past his father and Harry. Harry couldn’t tell what was going on inside John’s head, but he saw an emptiness in those eyes, a gray area that—
And then Harry was inside John. Not taking over but with him.
He saw the world as John saw it.
Go, he said. Go.
And then, perhaps as they were always meant to be, Harry was John and John was Harry—if only for a brief time. But they both had always wanted this. Unification.
John moved with a relentless speed that his father couldn’t hope to overcome. John’s hands could have been born of steel and oil, a combustion engine running them instead of his heart. He was on top of his father, his grip a vice on Scott’s throat. Harry and he watched as his face turned red, a huge vein standing out on his head like some kind of disgusting, pulsing worm. Spittle spewed from Scott’s mouth as he tried to beg. Perhaps tried to understand what was happening. John and Harry didn’t stop, though—couldn’t, in fact. The blood rushing to Scott’s face, the small, strangled cries escaping the dying man’s throat—all of it like the most beautiful woman lying nude in front of a lusting man.
What could they do?
And so, John killed his father. He cut off the airflow until Scott’s face was a swollen, purple mass.
Scott looked a little like Harry, lying there with his son’s hands wrapped around his throat.
10
A Portrait of a Young Man
John didn’t understand how he could keep that life separated from this one. He couldn’t grasp how he separated Harry from Cindy. The two worlds existed side by side; indeed, they even intertwined. Yet, in John’s mind, Cindy and Harry couldn’t be further apart if they existed on different planets.
He stared up at the ceiling, darkness covering he and Cindy, both of them silent.
John thought about these two separate lives, wishing he could cut one away and keep the other forever.
“What are you thinking about?” he said into the silence. His heart was finally slowing, his breath returning to a normal state.
“Nothing,” she said. He felt her hand land gently on his chest. “Nothing at all.”
He believed her. It had been short, their sex, but, for John at least, perfect. He could still see her eyes wide with pain as he leaned into her; pain but desire too. He went slow, leaning in and kissing her, hearing her slight moans, full of longing, yet knowing at least part of what he did hurt her.
And now they lay in the after.
“Do you feel awkward?” John said.
He felt her body move, turning to her side and stretching her arm across his chest as she moved closer. “No. Not at all,” she whispered. “Do you?”
“No. I thought I would, but I don’t.”
“Why did you think you would?”
“I’ve never been that … close to someone before. I don’t mean physically, but I could see … I don’t know, this is going to sound dumb, but I felt I saw some of your soul. I’ve never seen that before and I thought knowing each other that deeply would change things.”
“Did it?” she said.
“Not for me.” He rolled to his left, putting his arm around her thin waist. “I love you, Cindy.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding though she couldn’t see it in the dark room.
“I love you too, John Hilt.” She leaned forward and kissed him; he could feel her smile as she did. Such a beautiful smile.
“Will you always love me?” he said, wondering if he sounded as stupid as he thought.
“Is that what you want?” Cindy said, her lips so close to his that he felt them move as she spoke.
“I don’t ever want to lose you. I’ve never felt like this before and I don’t … I think I might need you.”
“You might not need me after you meet my parents,” she said with a laugh.
“Oh is that what’s next? I thought you met the parents before sex?”
“Because you’re the expert now, huh? I’m serious. Will you meet them?”
John nodded. “When?”
“Next weekend. I already told them you were coming.”
“You’re kidding. What if I had said no?”
“I would have just found another boyfriend named John.” She smiled and kissed him.
11
Present Day
John pulled his hands away, his fingers stiff with pain from how hard he …
“No,” he whimpered as the words finished in his head. Gripped my dad’s throat.
He had felt the same thing as Harry, a union—unholy and disgusting, but right at the same time. Harry and he became one and all the bloodlust he’d felt his entire life, what he’d tried to fight so many times, always failing, was finally the only thing that mattered. As it should be. As he always wanted it.
“No,” he said again. “That’s not true.”
The tears that flowed from his eyes to his father’s pants legs now lay dried on his face, salty streaks tracing their path. He still straddled his father, one leg on either side of his chest, as he looked down at the dead face. His father’s eyes stood open, glazed and empty. The vein on his forehead hadn’t receded, but remained stretched against his old skin as if trying to escape his body.
“Why? FUCKING WHY, HARRY!”
He knew Harry was gone. Not forever—never that, but no longer here in this room. He left as he always did.
John fell down on his father, cradling the dead man’s face in his hands. He kissed his cheek, over and over, the spittle from his father’s last gasps mixing with John’s own.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
He said the words over and over as if somehow his apologies might raise his father from the dead like Jesus did Lazarus.
“Why? Why? God, why?”
God didn’t answer, though.
John fell asleep on top of his father, his mind finally unable to cope with life. It shut down on him and in that darkness, John found the only peace that could exist for him anymore.
Sleep was death’s cousin after all.
* * *
Harry opened John’s eyes and saw that he lay next to a graying body. Not the face, that still looked as purple as a grape, but the rest of Scott’s body was quickly losing color, appearing more and more like a dead body and less like a live human.
Harry didn’t jump away or try to move immed
iately. He stared at Scott; he had known the man almost as long as John.
They had killed someone long ago, someone important to John, and even though Harry couldn’t remember details, he didn’t think anything they did in the past trumped what he saw before him. John’s dead father.
Where’s John?
The question was a curious one, not something Harry normally wondered, but yet there it was, floating around his head like a lost butterfly.
Where was John? And, what was this new experience? Harry was in control again and John had somehow left. How many times had that happened so far? Harry didn’t know why he asked the question, though; he couldn’t remember something like that. Yet, he knew it had happened before.
This was probably for the best, at least right now. He couldn’t deal with John’s wallowing and depression. His raw anger alone would keep Harry from going forward, because he couldn’t convince John of a goddamn thing when John really grew determined.
So John was gone, but Harry was here.
What did Harry want to do again?
Images flooded his mind, bullets and knives mixing with the strangulation he just witnessed. With a herculean effort, Harry managed to shove the images aside. He couldn’t go there yet, not if he wanted to goddamn remember what the next step in the plan was.
Think. Think. Think, you great looking guy.
Okay, down to business. John. He was the center of all this, of course. So if Harry focused on him, he could get back to the place he needed to be.
John.
John’s pops was dead.
Buuuuuut, John still had a wife. He still had a sister.
And who else? Who was Harry fucking forgetting?
The cop! Detective Dickface! Oh, mercy, how had Harry almost left out the good detective? That in itself would be better than anything else, perhaps ever. Not just ever for Harry, but ever in the history of the world.