The Executor

by Jesse Kellerman

  The first box fits, though you have to wedge it in, and you realize that if you fill up the entire cargo area, you’ll have obstructed your rearview mirror. Under normal circumstances that’s bad enough; in this case, it might be a fatal error. Recalibrating feverishly, you go inside and collect all the plastic bags from your long day of shopping. Indian-style on the kitchen floor, you use a chef’s knife to slice open all your nice, neat boxes, transferring the ruined books from the boxes to the bags, tying the bag handles twice so the contents won’t spill out. You use up all nineteen bags—exclusive of the paper bag from the bookstore, which still holds the map—and take them outside to place them atop the duvet. Now you’re talking. Now it looks like an amateur moving job, the exact impression you’re shooting for. You give yourself a mental high-five.

  You’re still going to have to do something about the ruined carpet.

  But not right now. The stove clock says one ten in the morning. You shower again, don your new cold-weather gear, and pack your (her) duffel with a change of clothes, including one pair of new shoes still in their soft drawstring bag.

  The shovel. The bag with the map, to which you add their phones and both sets of identification. Lighter fluid and matches. Trash bags. Backpack. Soda. Fishing magazine. (Why not?) A flashlight. The knife, seems like a good idea. Put on your eleventh pair of latex gloves for the day and load up the car. The wind throws down snow from the branches. You zip up your parka. The shovel goes under the edge of the duvet, the garbage in back, everything else on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Road trip ready, you get behind the wheel and head north.

  EARLY ON you glance at the speedometer and are surprised to see the needle touching eighty. This is idiotic, given the road conditions. Not to mention the danger of getting pulled over. So you police yourself (hahaha) closely, with the result that the trip drags. Radio stations surface, then sink, all holiday favorites. A cassette sticks halfway out of the tape deck. With some hesitation you push it in, but what pours from the speakers stands your hair on end, a tune you’ve heard her singing before. You eject the tape and throw it out the window. You will have to live with silence. You’ve done it enough.

  The rubbery beat of the windshield wipers.

  Tiny explosions of snow.

  It seems that the air fresheners are making the stench worse, calling attention to what they are intended to conceal. You toss them out, too. But you can’t drive with the smell building up like that, so you lower one of the rear windows an inch. Cold air rushes in behind you, a noise like a pursuing tornado. It keeps you alert, and the smell dwindles to a tolerable level.

  At least the car has four-wheel drive—something you didn’t think about in advance. Luck or fate has saved you there.

  I-95 runs all the way to New Brunswick, but you don’t go nearly that far, stopping north of Portland for food and fuel. The gas station is strung with tinsel. In the bathroom you remove the battery from his cell phone, dropping the phone itself in the trash. The battery you pocket.

  The clerk wears a floppy Santa hat and a look of existential despair. You buy another green soda. So much caffeine must be unhealthy. It sure feels bad. Try not to look jittery as you take out more twenties. Gas alone will cost you several hundred dollars over the course of this trip, and it occurs to you that criminals, just like everyone else, must be feeling the recent increases at the pump. Everybody hurts during tough times, even the wicked. You almost giggle, right there in the middle of the mini-mart, to imagine mafiosi complaining of shrinking profit margins.

  Before leaving town, you place the trash bags in an alley.

  Alone on the road, with nothing to do but stare into the surging snow, you bury or shed or at least suspend the klaxon thought that you, too, are among the wicked.

  For a while you hug the shoreline, running a string of quaint towns whose wreathed wooden homes evoke visions of ruddy-faced lobstermen and plump, jolly wives, everyone gathered round the fire, glugging eggnog, swapping presents, intoxicated with good cheer. Turning inland, you pass a sign for Kennebec County, population 117,114. In the last two hours you’ve seen three other cars, all going in the opposite direction. You toss his cell phone battery clattering onto the blacktop.

  North again, a narrow road unspooling through the forest. The sun has started to send up shoots; iced-over ponds glimmer. That’s okay. You anticipated this. Your goal is a location remote enough that you won’t have to worry about operating in broad daylight. Consulting the map, another westward turn. The forest closes around you like a hand. Stop the car and get out and stand on the shoulder, playing the flashlight through the trees, your breath rising in great white balloons.

  The snow is deep and inviting.

  You should have sprung for the hand warmers.

  Strap the shovel to your new backpack, tighten the laces on your boots. Put the high-tech gloves over your latex gloves. Open the hatch and push aside the books.

  You have your doubts about the strength of her handle. On the fly, you decide to use the duvet as a kind of stretcher or sling by which to drag her.

  This idea fails, spectacularly. After crashing down the embankment (much steeper than it looked; plus you land awkwardly on the shovel handle) you have to spend time digging her out and repositioning her. Even then, she won’t keep straight. The duvet grows heavy, starts to tear. This will never work. You overestimated yourself. You scramble up the embankment with the ruined duvet and exchange it for the knife.

  She has sunk into the powder. You kneel beside her, cutting slits in the tape wide enough to work your gloved fingers into. Lean back and pull and walk backward. She comes. Slowly, but she comes. Okay. Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Your fingers hurt and your back hurts, but you are moving, and that’s enough to power you on through the trees, smearing a trail that anyone could follow. Fifty feet. Your nylon pants make a swishing sound. A hundred feet. Owls low. Hundred fifty. Complexly woven branches render the sky a vast gray rosace. Smell the evergreens, dense stands of eastern white pine. Much better than your air fresheners. You wish you could chop down one of these tall soldiers and hang him from the rearview mirror. There’s less snow on the ground now, most of it clumped in needles overhead, like cotton bolls. Brown needles on the ground. Patches of ice; you slip and right yourself and pull on. Swish swish. Two hundred feet. That’s what they call Maine, isn’t it? “The Pine Tree State.” Your fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Yawkey made your social studies class memorize the state capitals and flowers and so forth. To keep your mind off the difficulty of the task at hand, you run through nicknames. Massachusetts: the Bay State. Vermont: the Green Mountain State. Swish swish. Three hundred feet; four. The only state without “state” in its nickname is New Mexico: Land of Enchantment. Focus on warm places. Florida: the Sunshine State. California: the Golden State. Hawaii: the Aloha State. Five. After Arizona: the Grand Canyon State, you set her down and catch your breath (it comes sharp and clean and electric), unstrap your shovel, and bend to dig.

  Except you can’t. The earth is frozen. You strike at what feels like solid rock, and for the first time all day and night and day, frustration wells up to the point where you cannot contain it. With an animal howl you slam the shovel into the ground, the mud cracking into poker chips. You do this again and again, but nothing. It would take hours to clear even a few feet. What you need is a pickax, and since you don’t have one, you’re going to have to leave her here or else bring her all the way back through the forest, back through the snow, back up the embankment, the thought of which makes you want to surrender. You cast about for salvation and it comes, literally, in a ray of light: there: a hollow log. Go to it. You test it by getting down and crawling halfway in. Yes, it will work. You drag her to it, then cut off the duct tape, heeding the (unsubstantiated but intuitive) notion that she will decay faster this way. You unroll the duvet and out she comes, not reshaped and winged but the same as before, perhaps a little grayer.

  You’re well past the urge to vomit bu
t slipping your arms under her armpits does give you a bad moment. You wrestle her toward the log, smelling the deadness on her, feeling her clay through your gloves. On second thought you might not be totally done with vomiting yet. You get her head inside and then push her by her legs, bit by bit, her knees bending rustily, so slowly it’s going, so slow until at last you get her in up to her waist and that’s enough, enough already, enough, piling bark and twigs and pinecones and rocks and snow over the rest of her and pray that some scavenger gets to her soon, run.

  Run, hobbled, sinking, wanting nothing but to get away from her. Ice in your socks and down your sleeves to your armpits cold and shocking but still you run, run, claw your way up the embankment and fall in the car seizing with terror and cold, calm down. You’re fine. Calm down. You’re hot, is what you are. Your fingers disobey you as you try to unzip your jacket, which is covered in dirt that might be from the ground or might be from someplace on her, you smell like her deadness. She is clinging to you, you must take off your jacket. Get it off. Get it off. Calm down. Your T-shirt is soaked. You can hardly see the road. The windshield is fogged. You cannot see. Calm down. Calm down. Look at the clock. Look. It’s seven in the morning. You’ve a whole lot left to do. Calm down. Calm down. Calm down and start the car. Start the car. Go on, start the car. Do it. Do it now, do it right now. Start the car. Drive. Go. Move.

  Move.

  NINETY MILES SHORT of the Canadian border, a sign for a diner appears. Semis crowd the lot. Despite making what you assume to be a grubby impression, you don’t draw more than casual glances upon entry. Looking around at the clientele, you can see why: it’s all mountain men and long-haul truckers. Other than waitstaff, there is a single woman—fairly robust, as far as women go—eating alone at the counter, her tensed shoulders indicating an awareness that around here, she is not much more than Something to Look At. You’re the only one in the place without facial hair. Has anyone else here read the complete works of Plato? With confidence, you claim that title for yourself.

  The menu is in English and French. You order, then open the fishing magazine on the table in front of you, reading up on the Seven Secrets to Steelhead Success as you sip your coffee. You eat eggs and bacon and toast, and drink yet more coffee, finally rising to move your bowels in a filthy, frigid stall. On the way out of the bathroom you drop her cell phone in the trash, taking the battery with you.

  A LANDSCAPE FLAT, windless, and lunar. The sun low on the horizon. The road badly paved, icy, running northwest-southeast; as far as you can tell, it’s not even on the map. To the south, a frozen meadow; beyond it, the undulant treeline.

  The snow covering the meadow has turned to ice, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he slides. On the other hand so do you, your feet skittering Chaplinesquely. Dig your heels in. What good are these boots? You need crampons. Oversight. Keep going. You pull. The station wagon starts to shrink in the distance. How far have you gone? Not far enough. The hard part is almost over. You should be fine. You will be fine. Go on. Move. Put your back into it. Swish swish go your pants, a steady 4/4. You’ve been working on the railroad, all the livelong day. You’ve been working on the railroad, just to pass the time away. Who would work on a railroad just to pass the time away? What kind of hobby is railroad work? It’s not like needlepoint or tennis, something you pick up out of boredom. Countless people died laying the first Transcontinental Railroad, many of them imported Chinese laborers, done in by brutal winters or accidental explosions. It’s no laughing matter. All those old songs make no sense. Why should you care if Jimmy crack corn? Why should anyone? Keep going. You once audited a course about folk songs and their relation to the unconscious. It’s taught by some imbecile. You should have gone to law school. The trees are close now. Keep pulling. The slits in the tape widen; pull any harder and they risk splitting open. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s nonsense, too, isn’t it? Just like the notion that cheaters never prosper. If this isn’t prosperity, you don’t know what is. Hahahahaha. Twenty-four hours ago he wasn’t this heavy. Your fingers are blistered. The tendons in the back of your hands are ready to snap. Nobody can endure what you’re enduring. You are the overman. You think of Nietzsche and his injunction to remake the world in one’s own image. You think of his moustache. He would have fit right in back at that diner, hahaha. Keep going. Swish swish. Davyyyyyyy, Davy Crockett. King of the wild frontier.

  Once you reach the trees you keep walking backward until the light changes and changes again and you look up and see that you have come to a clearing. Above you the treetops rise like a crown, like the walls of a bottomless pit. You have seen this place before. You have seen it in your dreams, seen it painted on a piece of glass. It is unconcealed to you, now, aletheia. Look around and wonder.

  Where is the deer?

  Where is the hunter?

  Which one are you?

  You set him on fire.

  Smoke rises through the trees.

  Your relief is instantaneous. The pilgrimage is done, the offering elevated, and you would strip naked and run through the snow singing hymns.

  But it’s never as simple as that, is it?

  Because he burns for a few minutes and then, in an instant, he goes out.

  The aroma is of grossly overdone pork, and you hold your breath as you douse him once again in lighter fluid. To speed the process you add handfuls of dry branches and leaves. You drop a match and away he goes.

  This time he burns a little longer before going out.

  The third try uses up the rest of the can and goes for fifteen minutes. You consider abandoning him there and then you hear a sound of approaching.

  No point in running. You take down the shovel and grip it, waiting. Whoever it is, he or she has erred in deciding to walk in the woods this afternoon. Silence. Silence. And you move in a semicircle around the source of the noise, bringing into view, one hundred feet away, a lone, malnourished wolf.

  He grins shaggily at you.

  Hello, he says.

  You take the crumpled duvet and back away. In the distance you see him slink out of the underbrush and crawl toward the smoking pile, sniffing interestedly at the remains.

  AND IN THE SILENCE that follows? You are alone in the darkness and snow. And in that silence? When all that remains is nine hours of road and white noise? You do what you have successfully avoided doing until now: you think. Your thoughts have been held back long enough; they’re not waiting any longer. They’re impatient and want to come in, they’ll take the door off the hinges. Think about his staved skull. Think about her death song. Think about what you automatically did—the way you knew what to do. Who are you? It is you who have metamorphosed, you who have burst from the chrysalis. And if that is the case—if today a process reached its apex—then it must be true that that process began some time ago.

  HALFWAY HOME you stop at a fast-food restaurant. Your clothes reek of smoke, with a base note of burnt hair. People stare. You rush through your sandwich, then put her cell phone battery in the trash along with your untouched fries.

  NEAR THE STATE LINE you pull into a rest stop. A concrete arcade shelters four vending machines. You go around back, where the ground is littered with wrappers and cans, and throw the shovel as far as you can into the black.

  AT ELEVEN-THIRTY P.M. you pull into the parking lot of a mall in Candia, New Hampshire, a suburb of Manchester. You drive around until you find what you’re looking for: a loading dock with several Dumpsters. A sign forbids unauthorized persons from dumping trash. Violators will be prosecuted. You lift the lid on one of the Dumpsters and pour in the contents of all nineteen bags of books, wadding up the empty bags and putting them, along with the duvets, in the adjacent Dumpster.

  AT ONE-FIFTEEN A.M. you arrive in Roxbury, parking in an alleyway about a mile from her home. Normally you’d be nervous—this is one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Boston—but tonight you feel dreamily impervious. You take out the duffel with clean clothes and everything else that b
elongs to you, which at this point fits into the backpack. You swab the interior of the car with baby wipes. It takes a while, but it’s better than thinking. You restore the second row of seats and lock the keys inside the car.

  A QUARTER-MILE AWAY you find a gas station with an exterior bathroom. You change out of your smoke-scented clothing, stuffing it into the duffel. You take the duffel and the backpack and walk out with them, wandering up a residential street where people have set their trash out for collection. Drop the duffel in a can at the end of the block. Go another few streets and do the same to the backpack. Pat yourself down. All you have on you are your house keys, your wallet, and the high-tech gloves. Take them off. Take off the latex gloves underneath. Throw these away, one at a time, while walking north, toward the river, toward the bridge. There are no cabs. The T has stopped running. Walk three and a half miles to Cambridge. It’s four-thirty A.M. Step up your front porch. The neighborhood is quiet. Windows are dark. You’ve been awake for almost forty-eight hours, not counting your nap. Go inside. Shut the door. Welcome home.

  22

  I woke the next morning with something akin to a hangover, which is understandable, given that both alcohol and caffeine cause dehydration, and the enormous quantity of the latter I’d ingested had made it difficult for me to fall asleep, even after the most exhausting two days of my life. What sleep I had gotten had been patchy and ruined by nightmares. In some of these I was doing the same things I had just done: driving in the darkness, or walking through thigh-deep snow. For the most part, though, the dreams didn’t describe any particularly upsetting activity. Nor did they possess any definite narrative shape. They consisted, rather, of static images, or brief sequences in which no other living thing appeared—soundless, fractured dreams, at once ordinary and menacing. I stood in a classroom filled with dozens of unoccupied desks. A foul wind stirred. Stacks of paper whirled around me, and I could not see, and when my vision cleared I stood at my high-school locker, looking at the photos taped to the inside of the door. I had the distinct sensation of being late for class, but before I went anywhere I wanted to see these photos. I couldn’t: they were too blurry. I kept squinting harder and leaning closer, all the while knowing that I was wasting time, making myself even later, and I began to flail about and I was then transformed; I was an infant, squirming against the cold linoleum, naked, silently shrieking, beet-red, my toothless mouth a wet open hole, and I woke myself with my own very much audible cries, arched, panting, the sheets pulled off at the corners and my pillow skinned, mind sodden with dread—a feeling that persisted much longer than such feelings tend to, every surface filmed with unreality. To reground myself, I tried getting up and walking around, forcing myself to focus on the solidity of the floor beneath my bare feet, but I got dizzy, ending up huddled under a blanket at the foot of the bed, rocking myself as I counted down to daylight.