I blinked. I looked towards the window, then down at my issue of Southern Rifleman. “Um…they were black—African American, I mean.”
“Tall, short, fat, skinny? Thick lips, thin lips, big noses, small noses, scars, facial hair, who are we talking about, here? If you hadn’t shot them, if they’d run off into the woods, what would you have told the police to differentiate them from any other black guys?”
No one had ever asked me that before. What did they look like? The police hadn’t asked, because they’d seen the bodies. The reporters hadn’t asked, Allie and Abby hadn’t asked, Craig Montero hadn’t asked, Tom Spicer hadn’t asked. So I hadn’t considered it. As many times as I’d re-lived that shooting in my mind, I had never examined their faces. I hadn’t needed to.
But now Dr. Koenig wanted me to describe them and I drew a blank.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t see their faces. I’m sitting here trying to remember and I just…can’t. I can see bodies lying in the hallway, I can see myself shooting at them, but no faces. What do you think that means?”
He recrossed his legs.
“You tell me.”
I looked at the window. Outside, the sun shone down on a concrete bench, the kind you see in graveyards with nobody sitting on them. The bench stood between two adolescent trees. Dogwoods, I thought. Or Eastern redbud. Without flowers, I couldn’t tell which.
“Why don’t we do a little exercise?” Dr. Koenig asked.
“What kind of exercise?”
“Why don’t you tell me what you do remember?”
And so I did.
“I was down in the basement,” I began, “watching the Carolina-Virginia Tech basketball game.”
8.
Get up.
When I first regained consciousness, I perceived only pain. Fresh agony detonated in my head with each heartbeat. Lightning bolts flashed across my skull, only unlike real lightning, these struck in the same place every time. When they did, the colors on the backs of my eyelids pulsed and changed.
My first thought, in my own voice: I’m blind.
The second, delivered in Bobby’s: get up.
I can’t, I thought. I’m blind.
Open your eyes and get the fuck up. There’s no time.
To my surprise, I could see. I lay on my side, wedged in between my coffee table and the beige sectional that once dominated the living room of the first apartment that Allie and I lived in after we got married. Too large for the apartment, it fit just fine in my man-cave, down here with the flat screen television and all my other fantasy furnishings. I felt the hard footrest, retracted inside the frame, pressing against my skin through my Carolina tee shirt. My ass felt it through my jogging pants.
Despite what it had witnessed, the television kept playing.
“SCORE! Another three-pointer by Harrison Barnes, the freshman from Ames, Iowa!”
The game. The one I was watching right before…
The ceiling creaked above my head with the pressure of feet on the floor upstairs. I blinked at the acoustic tile I had paid a man to install last year in order to hide the unsightly ductwork and utility lines. The speckled pattern came into focus as my brain continued reassembling itself.
There are men in my house, I thought.
Oh, yeah, Bobby said through the thunder in my skull. Dangerous ones. Move your ass, Swanson.
I blinked, closed my eyes and felt my skull. Right there at the back, where my father used to slap me for one insolent comment or another, a baseball-sized lump rose from bone and skin. It screamed when I touched it, a shout so powerful that it stole my breath and dropped my jaw in search for more air. When I opened my eyes again, they fixated on the foot of the stairs, where someone had haphazardly dropped the aluminum softball bat that had smashed into my skull. It didn’t belong there; it belonged in the back, with the pool table, resting against the wall by the short staircase that led up to the backyard, where I’d leaned it after my last softball game a year, year and a half ago. They’d cracked me over the head with it. They’d left me for dead.
But you’re not dead. Game on, motherfucker, you need to move your ass right now.
I forgot the door, I thought. I didn’t lock the…
Fuck the door; doesn’t matter now how they got in. It only matters how they get out.
I got up, staggered three steps, and collapsed on the far end of the sectional. My balance. They’d knocked the balance clean out of my ears.
I said get up, you sorry sack of shit, get the fuck up and handle this!
So I got up again. On the wall, the 2010-2011 University of North Carolina men’s basketball squad stared at me in their coats and ties above a calendar showing the month of February. Smiling, happy, excited. They’d had a full view of the back door but hadn’t said a word to me. My eyes zeroed in on Harrison Barnes, he of the recent three-pointer.
Why didn’t you warn me?
Barnes didn’t answer.
I almost touched my head again but caught myself. My stomach balled up around the beer and summer sausage I’d been eating when I turned around and saw the two men I didn’t know standing right behind my goddamned sofa in the moment before the one on the left swung the bat.
The police. I have to call the police.
My heart pumped white-hot adrenaline into my legs. They quivered and almost dumped me again, but they held. Instinctively, I looked down at the coffee table in search of my phone. I didn’t find it there, or on the entertainment center, either, or on the pool table or the bar or any of the other places I usually chucked it without giving the first thought to the possibility that it might become vital to my survival. I’d left it…
Upstairs on the kitchen counter, in its charger. Up there with them.
You’re on your own, Devil Dog, Bobby said. You’ll have time to dial the 9 and maybe a 1 before they realize you’re not dead yet and they come to finish the job. It’s all you, Swanson.
“And it’s a foul by Virginia Tech! Tyler Zeller goes to the line!”
On the wall, the junior from Washington, Indiana took to the free throw line in the Dean Dome in Chapel Hill. His stadium. His court. His home.
I took to the line. I rounded the edge of the sectional and headed for the bar, where the gun safe stood beside the glass-fronted liquor cabinet.
Move your ass, Bobby hissed again. Move it fast. You don’t have much time.
I blinked at the combination dial on the safe’s narrow rectangular door. The combination itself leapt to the front of my mind easily enough-05-24-77, Allie’s date of birth—but the numbers themselves presented a challenge. The dial divided in two, three, two before my eyes, their focusing mechanisms knocked loose by the impact of bat on bone.
Hurry!
I reached for the dial. My hand held it still. “I’m trying,” I whispered aloud.
Try harder. Maybe they’ll look around your living room for a few minutes or poke around in the office, sack your drawers and grab the laptop. But then they’ll go upstairs. And they’ll look in the bedrooms.
Zero. Five. Two.
These motherfuckers have overrun your perimeter. What do you think’s going to happen when they find your wife sleeping in her underwear?
Four. Seven.
MOVE YOUR ASS!
“I am!” I whimpered now, tears streaming down my cheeks as my trembling hands worked the dial. On the final seven, the tumblers clicked and I twisted the handle, pulling open the fireproof door. On the top shelf, my and Allie’s life insurance papers shared a file folder with our wills. Documentation of Abby’s college fund, the deed to our house. Account numbers, passwords, the entirety of our financial lives on paper. Two boxes of Russian surplus 7.62mm cartridges. Standing on its stock against the green velvet interior, the Kalashnikov.
Come on! Man up!
I took the thirty-round banana clip from its resting place beside the box of bullets. The cartridges, copper-coated stingers crimped into the rocket of the brass casing, gleamed
in the dim light over the bar. The magazine contained ten rounds; Bobby had said to always keep a loaded magazine, always, because you won’t have time to prepare one when the shit hits the fan. Load ten so you don’t stress the spring. Change to a different magazine every month, two months. Leave any magazine loaded too long, the spring will weaken and your weapon will jam.
I hadn’t changed the magazine in two years.
Too late now. Lock and load!
I tapped the magazine on my thigh to align the rounds, as Bobby had shown me. Holding the rifle by the pistol grip, I slipped the mag home just fore of the trigger guard, feeling it slide into place. I pulled the charging handle and released it. It slammed forward with a metallic click, pulling a round from the magazine and seating it in the firing chamber.
“Locked and loaded,” I whispered.
Safety off.
My right thumb reached up and flicked the switch.
Game on, bitch.
“Game on,” I repeated.
The door stood partially open at the top of the stairs. They hadn’t thought enough of me to even close the door on my body. The light over the stove peeked through the foot-wide space as I mounted the stairs and began my slow climb. I kept the AK-47 trained on that light. The wooden stock rested in the pocket of my shoulder, my trigger finger extended and ready beside the trigger guard No prisoners, Bobby said.
“No prisoners,” I murmured.
My stairs were wood, plain pine board, but I had paid to carpet them in the basement renovation. The carpet and the pad beneath it muted the creaks from the wood as I moved my weight over it. The men would not hear me. They couldn’t have heard me, not over the creaking of the floorboards. Not over their furtive whispers, which grew in volume as I neared the top of the staircase.
“Sure he’s dead?”
“I split his fuckin’ head. ‘Course he’s dead!”
“Go down and check.”
“I ain’t checkin’ shit!”
Only dimly conscious now of the pounding in my head, I pushed the door open with the rifle’s barrel. The door creaked softly on its unoiled hinges. I stopped.
Home Invading Bastard Number One: “You hear that?”
Home Invading Bastard Number Two: “Hear what?”
Home Invading Bastard Number One: “Door.”
Home Invading Bastard Two: “I ain’t heard a damn thing.”
I couldn’t shoulder through such a narrow space. I’d have to push the door open at least another foot, foot and a half. When I did that, the hinges would scream. Their voices put them in the hallway that shot off the kitchen and led into the living room. They stood right beside me; just inches of studs and drywall separated my right ear from their knees.
There they are, man, Bobby said. You need to bust up in there like Jackie Chan, homeslice. Don’t give them time to react.
I won’t, I thought.
Don’t hesitate.
I won’t, I said again.
Engage the enemy with extreme prejudice.
I will. And at that, I charged the door.
The door hinges screeched as I hit the wood. I covered the last three steps in a single leap that launched me into the kitchen. The AK-47 held out before me commando-style, I rocketed past the breakfast nook and collided with the edge of the counter. I spun on my feet, running backwards now. I stopped when my ass slammed up against the kitchen sink.
There. In the hallway. Two men dressed in dirty winter coats and black jeans, one carrying a bag. Skull caps. One right behind the other.
Blurry faces.
“Fuck,” said the first one.
Game on, bitch!
I pulled the trigger. Then I pulled it again.
The AK-47 barked, and in the muzzle flash I caught sight of the blur that constituted the man’s face. Although I couldn’t make out his features, I knew in my heart they showed shock, surprise, fear and astonishment. Something in the darkest part of my soul sang with glee. His body jerked like a paper target as bullets tore into his chest. Two to the chest, one to the head, the Mozambique drill that Bobby had shown me, because the recoil will automatically align the barrel with the enemy’s face after round two and…
My trigger finger curled again, quick but controlled. The man dropped.
Shell casings ejected from the semiautomatic action and pinged off of the Wolfgang Puck cookware Allie had hung from the ceiling rack. Ping ping ping, like a demon playing the triangle. The first man dropped, but his partner staggered backwards, blood and brains on his chest. I charged forward, bringing the barrel down for another Mozambique drill, two to the chest, one to the head. Lightning flashed in the kitchen and sent shell casings skittering across the travertine floor. Two to the chest, one to the head. The last bullet struck him between the eyes—pure luck, because my aim sucked even under the best conditions—and his head jerked backwards, the cap flying off just before the backside of his skull disappeared in a shower of bone and brain that splattered the portrait of Allie and I on our wedding day. The body fell.
Acrid gun smoke permeated the kitchen. It smelled nothing like the smoke of Allie’s candles, firewood in the wintertime or cigars on Bobby and Kate’s back porch. Sharp, ammoniac, chemical smoke stung my nose and sinuses and made them ring like my ears. I thought I heard yelling somewhere far off, but I couldn’t identify the voice because the gunfire had momentarily deafened me. I heard now only that ringing in my ears and popular song from the radio in my law school days.
Let the bodies hit the floor
Let the bodies hit the floor
Let the bodies hit the floor
Let the bodies hit the floor
Drowning Pool, I remembered, a song called, appropriately, “Bodies.” That lead singer had died. Drug overdose, car accident, plane crash. Something rock-worthy.
Ears clearing slightly, I identified Allie screaming upstairs. “Kevin? Kevin?”
“I’m okay!” I shouted, advancing into the hallway. “Stay where you are! Call 911!”
“Oh my God, what happened?”
“Get Abby!” I yelled. “Don’t let her come down!”
The danger, I knew from the silence and utter lack of motion, had passed. Still, I didn’t want my daughter seeing this mess. I looked at the wall. My lovely wife, her strapless wedding gown displaying the tanned shoulders of a movie star, smiled at me from the last decade. She held a bouquet of flowers in that picture, but I couldn’t see them now because a piece of somebody’s skull was sliding down the glass on a snail trail of blood.
I felt strangely detached. Shock, perhaps; a surreal quality to my surroundings made it difficult to fully process things like the red goo all over Allie’s wedding portrait. I saw it, but my brain didn’t fully implement its presence. I had two dead guys in my hallway, blood everywhere and pieces of their heads all over my family’s pictures, but this didn’t bug me at all.
I stepped into the hallway and looked down. The complete lack of give-a-shit I felt in the kitchen changed not one whit with a closer look. The second body, the one whose head had so spectacularly disintegrated, stared up at the ceiling. With the back of his skull gone, the front had lost the structural support it needed to keep his face lined up, and it had flattened. It looked not like a human face now, but rather a mask—stretched, rubbery features, sightless eyes painted into the sockets. And it was a mask, really. A demon had put it on just before breaking into my house.
I looked down at the dead man and his partner, both of them unrecognizable as human beings.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” I asked.
The body didn’t answer, but I felt like turning the rifle upside down and smashing the butt into the rubber mask anyway. I wanted him to be alive, if only so I could kill him again.
Good job, Bobby said. For real, that was some serious class-A work. You’re a hard son of a bitch, Swanson.
I smiled. I didn’t know what I looked like, but I knew this would horrify my wife and child in a way a couple of dead bodi
es could never do.
“Good to go,” I croaked.
9.
I told Dr. Koenig everything. Including how I felt about it.
He said nothing for a very long time. His sharp features remained blank, the workings of the mind behind it veiled and undetectable. When I finished, he just adjusted his glasses, rested his face on his open palm and stared.
When he finally spoke again, he said, “That is an incredible story. I’m sure I said that before, but I have to say it again; it’s absolutely incredible. On a number of levels.”
“It is. That’s why it’s news. You don’t get a writeup in Southern Rifleman for buttering your toast.”
“You stood over the bodies and looked straight down and you still don’t remember their faces.”
“There’s nothing to remember. I mean…have you ever seen a face with no bone behind it? It’s skin. That’s all it is, skin—that’s why I remember a couple of Halloween masks, because that’s all I saw. My bullets took off the backs of their skulls. Their own mothers wouldn’t have recognized them. So if you’re going to run down a theory like I can’t remember their faces because I don’t want to confront my feelings over having taken two human lives, you’re not going to get anywhere. I can remember their faces because by the time I got a good look, they didn’t have any faces for me to remember. And I think I have a bigger problem than that.”
“Which is?”
I leaned forward. I had curled my issue of Southern Rifleman into a tube, and now I let it unroll into a halfpipe. I set it down on the frat-boy coffee table.
“It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “What happened. I’m not sorry at all. Actually, when I get anxious or worried or upset or anything—like when I think about this Bald Man maybe showing up at my office one day to confront me—I think about those two dirtbags hitting the floor, and I’m like, I did that. And I feel proud. What do you call a guy who not only feels no remorse, no revulsion, no anything over killing somebody but rather revels in it?”
“Psychopath,” he replied.
“Exactly. I think some of my issues relate back to that. On a significant level, I’m worried that I might be a psychopath.”
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