Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

  She really really hated doing it. Erasing him. It went against all her training and most of her beliefs. Some of mine, too. We knew for certain that Allen had had many many victims, most of whose loved ones had no faintest clue what had ever happened to them. Now, because of us, no one would ever speak for all those dead, none of those stories would ever be told, no one could ever bring even that much solace to all those broken hearts yearning for some sort of ending to the story.

  But she had heard that last speech of his just as clearly as I had. Any kind of official involvement whatsoever, and the media would have fallen on the story with squeals of glee, playing it up even bigger than the Pig Farm guy, Bakker the Beater, the I-5 Killer and Ted Bundy rolled into one…which was if anything a monstrous understatement. He’d have ended up as immortal as he’d wanted to be, his posthumous website swamped with hits, his inhuman insights pored over by sweaty creeps the world over. I was quite surprised to find that, for the first time in my life, I now believed there are some things man is not meant to know.

  In the end it was more personal animosity than social conscience that decided us. Retroactive anonymity was the cruelest sentence we could possibly pass on the son of a bitch, and we knew it. And it was about time someone was cruel to him for a change. We tumbled him into a hole and covered him with mud and rocks. We made no attempt to mark the spot, and neither of us will ever go there again.

  Let the Picton Pig Farm remain British Columbia’s most infamous mass murder site. Whistler doesn’t need the business. The Sea to Sky Highway doesn’t need any part of its sky darkened, its sea tainted. Almost everything I’ve told you about the location of Allen’s abattoir was wrong.

  We learned his full name just before we planted him. It had never once occurred to me to ask him. Not for a moment in that whole endless night of horror had I imagined I might ever get a chance to make any use of the information. His last name turned out to be Campbell. That made me smile sourly. In Canada it’s the same as Smith or Jones in America: a name so ubiquitous as to sound vaguely phony.

  We copied down that and the address on his driver’s license and all his credit card numbers and expiry dates from his wallet before we tossed it into the hole after him. Then I found a laptop in his SUV and got his e-mail address out of that, and e-mailed all the information to Zudie. I never doubted for a moment that a math genius at Zudie’s level would know at least one really good hacker, and that in due time every single bit Allen Campbell had ever uploaded to the internet would eventually be located and obliterated beyond recovery.

  Little could be done, of course, about any copies that might have already been downloaded by people competent enough to protect their identities. There you go. “Almost perfect” is about as good as you can hope for in this world, and don’t look to see that often.

  5.

  Nika and I parted with four-hand, deep-eye-contact handshakes, declarations of mutual respect and lifelong friendship, assurances we’d always be there for each other, and firm agreement to get together for a drink just as soon as we’d had time to clean out our heads a little, sort things out just a bit. In the movies, we’d have become best friends. On TV we’d have begun a quirky sexual flirtation that ran the rest of the year and reached boiling point just in time for the season closer.

  We spoke on the phone a week later for perhaps twenty minutes, and that was the last time we communicated with each other in any fashion for over a year. It wasn’t quite long enough.

  What we’d been through together didn’t need, or even want, sharing. And what else was there, really, for us to talk about? Our personalities and outlooks on life were so totally dissimilar, about the only thing we had in common was the nightmare we’d both survived—one we’d both entered unwillingly in the first place. There was no real basis for any kind of lasting relationship, much less a friendship. I wished there was. I felt like there ought to be. But I couldn’t think of one. I did try, from time to time.

  The story did have one last lovely little ironic coda. A little more than a month after we buried Allen by my stream, Constable Nika Mandiç happened to walk into a 7-Eleven on West 10th Avenue to get a bottle of water just as three nitwits were trying to rob the place. Their combined armament totaled a toy pistol and a medium-size wrench. The arrest was largely a matter of remaining in the doorway, blocking the only exit. Nonetheless, Constable Mandiç won a commendation, just as if she’d done something difficult or dangerous like facing a homicidal serial monster without backup, and to her immense gratification she was transferred out of the Police Community Services Trailer detail and onto the streets. Her career began an upward climb that continued for a while.

  Right up until the next time we found ourselves working together.

  I tried to stay in touch with Zudie.

  I tried hard for a week. Repeatedly, anyway. But he wouldn’t answer my cell phone, no matter when I called or how many times I let it ring. He wouldn’t answer my e-mails no matter how eloquent. After a week, both phone number and e-mail address began to list as nulls.

  I rented a small boat with a noisy motor from someone who should have taken one look at me and known better, late one afternoon, and managed to make my way to Coveney Island without enraging too many other boaters. There was one tricky bit: I was startled to learn that, for some reason, barges don’t have any sort of braking system at all. But eventually I got there, and circled the island counterclockwise as close as I dared for an hour or so, while thinking as loudly as I could (if that means anything).

  At first I thought things like Come show me where to land, Zudie, I can’t find a place. Then it was Damn it, Smelly, I’m liable to rip the bottom out of this fucking boat if you don’t help me. A little while later: Zandor, I’m sorry, okay? You shouldn’t have had to do that. You came to me and I let you down. I know. Let me make it up to you.

  And then finally, all in a tumbling flood: This isn’t fair. You can’t leave me under this much obligation. You can’t leave yourself under this much obligation. God damn it, you saved me from clinical depression, now you have to at least give me a chance to try and help you. Zandor, none of this is your fault. It isn’t your fault you can do what you did. It isn’t your fault you had to do it. It isn’t your fault you did it. Because you did it, I am alive. Because of you, Nika is alive. Because of you, the Aristotle of Cruelty is dead. Because of you, dozens if not hundreds of innocent people will not have to die very bad deaths.

  No response. Nothing moved on the little island except branches.

  Zudie, it couldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds from the first moment Allen realized he was in deep shit to the last moment of his life. I don’t know what the fuck it means to die of disbelief in yourself, but okay, I can certainly imagine it must be horrible stuff. Okay, I know it is: I heard that scream. I saw his face as it happened. But no matter how horrible it was, it was over in thirty seconds. By Allen’s own standards, that wouldn’t even qualify as one of the bad deaths. Read my memories of Susan’s dying, Zudie, and believe me: nothing that is over in thirty seconds is one of the bad deaths. You showed that bastard way more mercy than he deserved.

  Nothing.

  He knew all that stuff already, and it didn’t help.

  Or didn’t help enough.

  Zudie, you’ve seen my thoughts. You know what I saw in your eyes, the moment I met you. Forgiveness. You’re the world’s best forgiver. You taught me most of what I know about forgiving. You’ve seen all the darkest corners of this swamp I call a mind, and you forgave me—over and over. More than anything else left to me on earth, I want to help you forgive yourself. Please let me. Please let me at least try. Please!

  I waited. Thirty seconds. A minute. Nothing.

  Coveney Island was in sight off to my right. The sun was low in the sky. No point in another circuit. He probably wasn’t even on the damn island. I steered right and gave it the gun—

  —so I couldn’t have really heard it. Not with my ears. That obnoxious lit
tle motor was way too loud. With something between my ears, then, I heard, as clear as the proverbial bell and as loud as a shout at arm’s length, the words GIVE ME TIME, SLIM.

  I exhaled so hard with relief, I actually made a little moaning sound, like someone expending effort in a dream.

  As long as you need, I thought back. I’m in the book.

  And I booted it for home, and made it nearly all the way there before running out of gas. An hour of jocular humiliation later I was drinking my own coffee.

  Only Zudie knew how much time he needed to heal, how much penance he needed to do. He knew where to find me.

  And me?

  Did I, as a good protagonist should, experience some kind of arc of character development by surviving all that insanity? Did I grow? Have I found redemption?

  Ha.

  Well, maybe. Of a kind. To an extent. In a sense.

  I still live alone. I’m still poor company. My son still hates my guts. My dead wife still hasn’t spoken to me. Allen visits me in nightmares from time to time, though less often as the months pass. Fraidy the Cat is still afraid of me.

  But I regard these all as ongoing, manageable problems. I won’t let my relationship with Jesse slide for much longer. I’m no longer in any hurry to rejoin Susan. She’ll wait for me if it can be done. Instead of being a bitter suicidal misanthropic hermit, nowadays I’m just a solitary cynic who happens to have been granted the kind of peace and isolation it takes to complete a first novel. One of these days maybe I will. Meanwhile—

  Last Thursday night, while I was sitting on the porch steps, scratching Horsefeathers behind the ears with my left hand, Fraidy came edging up, a hesitant step at a time, and for a few glorious seconds allowed me to scratch her behind the ears with my right hand. I did it slowly, with infinite gentleness and care, using my sharpest nails and everything I’ve learned about cat-pleasuring. She tolerated it for perhaps ten strokes, then gave me a one-eyed look that said, sorry, I just don’t get the attraction, and left us. But she left walking, rather than scurrying in fright. I have hopes she might let me try again one day.

  And over across the water, in Point Grey, an upscale neighborhood just east of the UBC campus, a family of four I’ve never met and never will are sleeping soundly tonight. Oblivious.

  That’s enough redemption for now, I guess. It’ll do.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Since he began writing professionally in 1972, Spider Robinson has won three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the E.E. (“Doc”) Smith Memorial Award (Skylark), the Pat Terry Memorial Award for Humorous Science Fiction, and Locus Awards for Best Novella and Best Critic. Twenty-four of his 29 books are still in print, in 10 languages. His short work has appeared in magazines around the planet, from Omni and Analog to Xhurnal Izobretatel i Rationalizator (Moscow), and in numerous anthologies. In 2000 he released Belaboring the Obvious, a CD comprising readings of excerpts from Callahan’s Key, plus original music performed by Spider with legendary Alberta guitarist Amos Garrett and top session players.

  Spider was born in New York City on 3 successive days (they had to handle him in sections), and holds a Bachelors degree in English from the State University of New York. He was book reviewer for Galaxy, Analog and New Destinies magazines for nearly a decade, and currently writes occasional book reviews and a regular op-ed column, “Future Tense,” for The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper.

  He has been married for 28 years to Jeanne Robinson, a Boston-born writer, modern dance choreographer, and former dancer. The Robinsons collaborated on the Hugo-, Nebula- and Locus-winning novel Stardance (included in the Baen volume The Star Dancers).

  Spider and Jeanne met in the woods of Nova Scotia in the early 1970s, and have lived for the last 16 years in British Columbia, where they raise and exhibit hopes.