I could tell he wanted to see me read it, so I sat back in my chair and opened the folder. The first few pages contained a police report listing the names and addresses of everyone involved. The first responding deputy’s narrative; the detective’s narrative. Neither contained anything I didn’t already know. But my eyes hovered for several moments on one particular statement the deputy made.
Mr. Swanson allowed me into the residence, whereupon I observed the bodies of two males lying in the hallway.
My statement; Allie’s statement; Abby’s statement. The detective’s summation of the evidence. A memorandum from the District Attorney’s Office concurring with the detective’s opinion that I had acted in defense of home, self and immediate family and shouldn’t be prosecuted for murder. My criminal background history, blank except for the single speeding ticket I incurred my sophomore year at Carolina.
The criminal backgrounds of both Pinnix and Ramseur: blank.
I frowned. I flipped from Pinnix to Ramseur, Ramseur to Pinnix. The implications of what I was seeing loomed above me like an approaching iceberg. My throat began to tighten in fear. “What the fuck is this?”
“What the fuck is what?”
“This!” I poked my finger at Pinnix’s empty criminal background history. “Their records! They’re squeaky clean! These guys broke into my fucking house with a knife and handcuffs and I’ve got a longer rap sheet than they do! Craig, they’re thirty and thirty-one years old! Thirty and thirty-one years without so much as a parking ticket and the first crime they decide to pull off is a B&E and rape-murder? How does something like that happen?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
I flipped past the records and saw photographs. The first one showed a reprint of my driver’s license, but in the next picture my haggard face stared back at me from its position above the collar of the tee shirt I’d worn the night of the shooting. Another shot showed my hands, another the bloody back of my head. The AK-47 leaning against the wall in the foyer. Various shots of the hallway and the bodies lying there.
Pinnix and Ramseur. Their faces bloody and shattered, their features unrecognizable. Their DMV records offered no pictures of what they looked like before I got a hold of them, because they’d never bothered getting driver’s licenses in North Carolina or anywhere else. I flipped through the rest of the photos—shell casings on the floor, various shots of my basement man-cave, two cards to a video store in Durham—and shut the file.
“There’s not a single picture of what these guys looked like before,” I said. “Not so much as a yearbook photo. No records, no pictures. Is this the real file? Did somebody monkey with this before they gave it to you?”
“It’s all there,” he said.
I rocked in my seat. I bit my lower lip. I said, “It’s like they just walked in out of nowhere. It’s like they didn’t even exist before that night. How can not one but two guys like this make it into their thirties without getting pinched for anything? Without a driver’s license?”
Something else occurred to me, and I froze. When my gears unstuck, I snatched the file off my desk and flipped through it frantically.
“Where’s the car?” I asked.
“What car?”
“Exactly! What car? My house is way out in bumfuck, but when you read through this thing it’s like they want you to believe they fucking walked there. Why is there no information about the car in here?”
Craig shook his head again. He didn’t have any answers for me. Because there weren’t any.
“If you take this at face value,” I said, “then these two guys appeared out of nowhere.”
Like ghosts, I thought. Or demons.
Or creatures conjured from dust and dirt.
“I agree,” he said, “that there are a couple things that bother me about all this.”
He reached forward and tapped the top corner of the file. “Know what else is missing?”
“What’s that?”
“Go through that file and tell me how the cops figured out their names.”
I flipped through the pitifully small collection of papers. I focused on the photocopies of the membership cards to Ryan’s News and Video. “Video store cards, I guess.”
“Negative. That’s an adult video store, a porn store. They don’t use names or credit cards. You get a membership number and post a fifty-dollar deposit; you fail to return a video, they keep your fifty bucks and you keep the video. They have no record of names. They don’t know who their customers are. So the question is, how do the police know?”
“How do they?” I asked.
“I don’t know. And they don’t know, either. I’ve talked to every cop in Burlington and nobody can answer that question for me. Everybody thinks somebody else told them, and you go talk to that somebody else and they’re like no, Joe told me. You talk to Joe, and Joe says Steve told me. But Steve’s the one who told you to go talk to Joe in the first place. It’s all fucked up.”
He chuckled then at something in his head and shifted uncomfortably in the chair. He touched a finger to his lips, supporting his chin in the can opener created by his thumb and index finger. His dark brow wrinkled.
“I say these things to you,” he said. “just as I said them to the police. I asked them about this, and they all get the same weird smile on their faces. I ask, who are these guys, and they say, these guys? They’re dead, that’s who they are. I say no, who are they, and the cop’ll say, who cares? Old Kevin Swanson took care of that problem for us. They smile and they change the subject. It’s like…”
He trailed off, shaking his head. But I finished for him.
“Some kind of Jedi mind trick,” I said. “Like they’ve all been brainwashed. Questions they should be asking…they’re not.”
“Precisely.”
I closed the file folder and set it down atop the mess on my desk. I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes. What is going on, I asked the backs of my eyelids. They didn’t answer me, so I opened them again and looked at Craig.
“Why is nobody concerned about this?”
He shrugged and shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. But, you know, when you sit here and think about it…really, who does care? These guys got what they deserved. Who cares where they came from? Who cares who they were?”
I pursed my lips, staring down at the manila folder.
“I do,” I said.
18.
The rising body count didn’t bother Allie. We made love that night, but of course I couldn’t come. After twenty minutes, Allie asked me, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I gasped, sweat dribbling down my face.
“It’s staring to hurt.”
Crazily enough, it started hurting me, too. My hip muscles rumbled with sedition. On the verge of revolt, they threatened to cramp up on me at any second. But I wouldn’t give up. I’d never given up before, and I wouldn’t give up now. What did some of those posters say?
Determination. Perseverance.
I began flipping through the Rolodex of pornographic images in my brain. I found the one from our first night in this house, down in the kitchen amidst the boxes and newspapers and dishes that hadn’t found their home yet—gourmet kitchens, I discovered that night, were like Spanish Fly for upper-class white women. I envisioned Allie bent over the kitchen table, her hair falling in a golden brown waterfall over her shoulders, her pajama bottoms puddled around her ankles and…
She put her lips up to my ear and whispered, “Come on.”
…the Rolodex began to flip on its own. It buzzed like a playing card in the spokes of my bicycle when I was a little boy, and when it stopped flipping it came to rest on an entirely different image. Pinnix. Or Ramseur.
Or a bald man. I really couldn’t tell.
Rough hands on her hips, hairy legs slapping against the backs of her thighs. Her gasps of pain. The pool table, not the kitchen table, and a belt buckle rattled on the basement’s cement floor, metal scraping the concrete as
the table itself groaned in rhythm with every violent thrust.
A face. Smiling, laughing, because this was funny to him.
Right then, I knew: this was one of my nightmares.
Say it, you bitch.
And she did, only her voice shook and broke.
Fuck me harder, she whimpered.
My legs seized up and my erection vanished. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“Kevin? Are you okay? Kevin!”
I was most certainly not okay. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever being this not okay in my life. I rolled off abruptly and lay beside her, gasping for air. “I’m fine.”
“Are you having chest pains?”
Where in the hell had that image come from?
“No chest pains,” I said, laying my forearm across my eyes. “I just…I don’t know. I think all this shit’s been getting to me.”
The furnace kicked on and added its low hum to the whoosh of the ceiling fan. Somewhere down the hall, the pressure change forced a door closed and pulled another one open. I wiped sweat from my face and rolled over on my side to look at her. Large brown eyes blinked at me in the dark. A blue satin sheet followed the rise of her body as it crested at her hip and plunged into the trough of her waist.
“I thought you girls liked a guy who could go forever,” I said.
“Oh, that’s great in theory.” She sat up and hunted on the floor for her underwear. When she couldn’t find it, she rose and walked naked to the bureau, where she fished out a pair of bikini underpants and slipped them on. I stared at her from the bed, taking in every flex of smooth muscle. Only the Caesarean scar on her flat belly anchored her image in reality. “Not so great in execution. Like many things.”
She climbed back into bed and wrapped her arms around me, burying her face in my chest. I buried mine in turn in her hair. I took long ki breaths in which I inhaled deep lungfuls of her scent and tried to forget those claws digging into her hips.
The enemy overran my perimeter, I thought, and he’s still here.
No, he’s not, Bobby replied. That’s just your fucked-up mind playing sick tricks on you.
“What are you thinking about?”
I didn’t answer her for a long time.
“I think I remember one of the dreams,” I said finally. “One of the bad ones.”
“Want to talk about it?”
I pondered that. Then I said, “Not particularly. It involves you…and another man.”
I paused. She said nothing.
“You weren’t exactly a willing participant,” I added. “That’s what I’m carrying away from it, anyway. When you started talking dirty to me there, it was like a switch flipped and suddenly, there it is.”
I sat up, shaking my head and holding it in my hands.
Be a man, Bobby admonished, and handle your own shit.
Handle my own shit. Yeah. I’d been doing a great job of that.
“I talked to Craig today,” I said, changing the subject. “About the mugger. And Pinnix and Ramseur.”
She waited.
“Nobody knows who they are,” I said. “Three guys, no positive ID. After talking to Craig, I’m not even sure the first two were named Pinnix and Ramseur at all. According to him, nobody knows where those names came from.”
Ki breath.
“The guy on the phone,” I said, “the one I call the Bald Man, he threatened me. That guy I stabbed said his name, he said Bald Man right before he died. I’ve got this idea that…I don’t know…maybe the Bald Man made him.”
“Made him?” She asked. “Like a golem?”
“What’s a golem?”
“An old, old Jewish folk tale,” she answered, rolling away from me and propping herself up on one elbow. “A creature made from mud, or dust, or dirt, or whatever. It’s supposed to be a man, but it isn’t a man because God didn’t make it—someone trying to be like God made it, so of course it falls short. Men create golems to do their bidding. Sometimes they’re bad.”
That picture of the Bald Man in his dark room again. Conjuring. Creating. Making.
My mouth went dry. Golems; holy shit, that was it. Motherfucker was sending golems after me. The idea clicked so loudly that I almost jumped.
“Pinnix and Ramseur and this asshole who tried to mug me are…golems.”
“Probably not. Golems can’t talk.”
She paused, studying me.
“You know I’m kidding, right?”
I didn’t answer.
“The mugging was a coincidence,” she said. “The fact that nobody knows who these guys are means nothing, because when you exist on the periphery of society not only does nobody know who you are, but nobody cares who you are. And as for this little vision of yours, these dreams, they’re nothing more than a product of the anxiety you’re feeling over your perceived inability to protect me from harm. It’s completely natural.”
I remained silent, thinking.
“Your brain,” she continued, “understands now that the world isn’t as safe as you thought it was. So, it says, I have to train. Practice. When you dream, it’s actually practicing the skills necessary to get you out of those situations. So that if they ever happen again, it can react automatically.”
“You think so?”
“I do. I’m just surprised your therapist hasn’t brought this up with you. Any psych undergrad knows these things. Please tell me you’re not going to walk around thinking you were attacked by a couple of Jewish fairy tales; I don’t want to have you committed.”
I laid back down and covered my face with my hands. I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.
“You know what I’m starting to think?” She asked, laying back down.
“What’s that?”
“Maybe this Dr. Koenig isn’t such a great therapist after all.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m starting to wonder that myself.”
19.
I had come to doubt Dr. Koenig’s effectiveness as a therapist. But I kept my next appointment.
“I really dig this time of year,” I told him. “You can’t go to the beach or anything, but I think I like it even more than summertime.”
Thanksgiving had yet to arrive—the turkeys had begun stuffing the freezers at every grocery store, but no one had bought one. Although it was still only mid-November, the air had turned cold this morning with an abrupt snap that I almost heard as I lay awake staring at the ceiling, eyes bleary from too little sleep. Sleep deprivation notwithstanding—along with the very real possibility that a supernatural being with the ability to create bat and knife-wielding golems was after me—I felt a familiar tickle of enthusiasm and pleasure at the apple cider chill I smelled when I first stepped outside.
“Why’s that?” Dr. Koenig asked, sitting down in his leather chair and removing pad and pen from his Italian leather briefcase.
The cover of Southern Rifleman was coming loose—I’d need to tape it up when I left here so that it didn’t disintegrate. I had developed a habit of slipping a hand into my own briefcase and fondling it as I waited in court or talked on the phone or completed any number of other tasks that comprised my day. I gently laid it on the coffee table that had no business in an atmosphere of sophistication and luxury—and laced my fingers between my knees.
“Allie and I started dating in September of 1994,” I said, “pretty close to the beginning of our freshman year. But it took a few weeks for her to really fall for me the way I fell for her, so I spent all of September and most of October staring at the underside of my roommate’s bunk and wondering how long it was going to be before she dropped me.”
“I thought it was love at first sight.”
I straightened up. “For me, yeah. Of course. But for the first couple of weeks, it was kind of touch-and-go on my end. I didn’t know what I was doing—I’d never had a girlfriend before. So I felt pretty sure I’d screw it up. Throughout September and into October, anyway.”
“What happened in October?”
&n
bsp; “She just warmed up to me,” I said. “Suddenly it wasn’t just me calling her anymore, or me sending her letters to her campus mail box or me coming up with things for us to do together. She started to…participate. And that happened about this time of year.”
I looked out the picture window at the bare dogwood trees flanking the bench. I stretched. Dr. Koenig stared down at his notepad, decorated with scribblings from our last session.
“Speaking of Allie,” he said.
I tensed.
“Where is she?”
I sighed. “She didn’t want to come.”
“Why not?”
“Burlington Women’s Club is serving dinner to the homeless at Loaves and Fishes tonight. She’s helping set up. You know, peel potatoes, boil potatoes, boil pasta. Chop up cabbage. I asked her to come meet with you and she said she’s too busy. She asked me to help her feed the homeless and I said I’m too busy. Guess we’re even.”
Bullshit. Allie would indeed help out at Loaves and Fishes this evening, but not until four this afternoon. I simply hadn’t asked her. The idea of seeing her in here with Dr. Koenig bothered me, and it wasn’t just a reluctance to show her too much of my vulnerability. Things, I had realized, were getting worse for me, not better. I didn’t want him getting under her hood, too; he hadn’t helped me worth a dime.
Yet here you are, Bobby observed.
Because I’m a narcissistic prick, I replied, and all we do in here is talk about me.
“I find your fixation on getting my wife in here a little misplaced,” I said. “There’s a lot going on with me that I think we need to focus on. Especially now.”
“Such as?”
“Pinnix and Ramseur. And that guy I whacked the other day, the one who tried to mug me.”
“Yes. When you suddenly transformed into Kevin the Ninja Lawyer.”
“Right. Notice I don’t know his name.”
Dr. Koenig nodded once.
“I don’t know his name because the police don’t know his name. No record, nobody recognizes the guy. I can understand that, now, but you know what else? Nobody knows who Pinnix and Ramseur are, either. We’ve got these names for them, but nobody in the police department could tell Craig exactly how they figured out those names. Because the only ID either one of them carried were membership cards to some adult video store in Durham. And those cards have only numbers, no names.”
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