My first look at the library was sobering: long smears of blood were still visible around the mantel. Bare shelves told of the missing books. Several of the photos hung askew, and one had been cracked clean up the middle. To my eye the carpet presented the biggest challenge, given that I no longer had a car. I took down the cracked photo (Alma and her sister on the beach), my unease redoubling by the second. Had I really been this sloppy? While away, I’d told myself that if someone should happen to enter the library, he would see—at worst—the remains of a raucous party. If I’d been so blind as to miss what was right in front of my face, what other, less noticeable, problems had I ignored? How many details neglected? The air stank of death, and I wanted to go back to bed. That was, I thought, the only answer: to sleep, to keep on sleeping until I woke up and found myself in another land, a hundred years hence. There was simply too much to worry about, disaster hovering over me in perpetuity, and all at once I saw, with a kind of prophecy, what I would soon come to appreciate firsthand: that life as I knew it was over, and that as long as I was conscious, I would have no peace.
OPENING THE WINDOW helped dissipate the smell, and I appreciated the bracing cold as I gathered a new arsenal of cleaning supplies. I cut up several of Alma’s old bath towels, and got down to scrubbing, going over the exposed wood in tight circles, sweat collecting at my hairline and following the bridge of my nose to dangle itchily at the tip before falling free and splattering below. Every time I thought I had eliminated one of the bloodstains I would bring my face down close and squint and see it still there, a ghostly pink watermark or thin crimson stripes outlining the junctions between the floorboards, hardly visible to the naked eye but in my mind bold as neon. Would I have to refinish the flooring? Rip it up? A chilling image came to me—blood, acidlike, eating its way down to the foundations, leaving me no choice but to demolish the entire library.... And if that wasn’t enough? If the earth itself retained vestiges of what had happened above? What then? Plow it over? Drop napalm? Cover it in fifteen feet of concrete? What could I do to make myself feel safe, once and for all?
As I twisted around to dunk my rag in the bucket, I placed my free hand atop something scabby. I looked down at a large bloodstain, from whose center sprouted a bristly bouquet of human hairs.
I rose, walked calmly to the bathroom, and vomited.
At two P.M. I carried three sagging trash bags to the service porch.
Though the Science Center was deserted, everyone gone for winter break, I still felt rather reckless that afternoon, standing at a computer kiosk, Googling “bloodstains carpet removal.” (I’d read a few too many articles about men whose wives disappear and whose browser histories are later found to contain searches for “untraceable poison” or “getting rid of a body” to consider doing this at home.) Suggestions ranged from professional crime-scene cleanup to my eventual choice, a recipe calling for water, salt, and hydrogen peroxide.
It worked better than I could have imagined. The blood lifted out, taking a small amount of color with it. One had to admire the collective wisdom of billions of people, so many of them individually stupid. Worked so well, in fact, that I began to wonder if I really did need to get rid of the carpet after all. It was so beautiful, and you couldn’t really tell what had happened to cause the fading. Could you? Then again, I’d driven off thinking the rest of the library looked fine.
My backache flared up again as I pushed all the furniture to the margins of the room. The globe, the easy chairs, one leg of the secretary lifted to free an edge. Perspiring heavily, I opened the window another six inches and rolled up the carpet, securing it with duct tape and lugging it into the hallway. All that plush pile adds up: it must have weighed close to a hundred pounds. Thus denuded, the library felt strangely empty, and I realized that I would have to find a replacement. The music-room carpet was far too small. Nor could I take the living room’s, as removing that would likewise result in a glaring blank space. The decision made for me, I went upstairs to my bedroom.
I’ll spare you the acrobatics of single-handedly extracting a Persian carpet from beneath a queen-sized bed. It took longer than I could have imagined and brought my back to full boycott. And when I finally kicked the new carpet out in the library, it didn’t look right, its intense blues and purples clashing with the green silk around the mantel, the red of the wood. Perturbed, I dragged the ruined carpet into my office, where I shoved it partway under the bed, pending disposal; then, stooped with agony, I hauled the library furniture back into place, closed the window, and went to take some ibuprofen.
AND FOR DAYS I worked. I abandoned Daciana’s vacuum cleaner in an alley. I left the broken floor lamp in a supermarket parking lot. I scoured the hallways, the kitchen, the service porch; I used buckets of water, gallons of soap. In the living room I squatted with a tube of joint filler, fretting over a dent in the plaster caused by the thrown fireplace poker. I laundered the bathmats, stocked the refrigerator with food I could not stomach. Many businesses were closed for the holidays: I had to go all the way out to Brookline to find an open framer, where I dropped off the cracked photo to be repaired. I called in an upholsterer who offered to redo both easy chairs in a fabric similar to the old one at a cost of thirteen hundred dollars. I agreed, and he took them away. I measured the space left by the missing books, then went to Blackbird Used, where they sold by the yard, and asked the clerk for everything they had in German. The glazier who came out to replace the smashed windowpane said he could not reproduce the miniature painting. No one could; that kind of thing was one of a kind, a real work of art. Once destroyed, it was gone forever.
These tasks, however onerous, expensive, and time-consuming, were to me a lifeline. Without them I surely would have had a complete breakdown. The more I occupied myself with minutiae, the easier it was not to think about what I had done, or what might next happen to me. Better to make lists.
It’s not quite accurate to say that I was plagued by fear, as neither word accurately captures the turmoil of those first few days. Not “plagued,” as that implies suddenness, a devastation whose power lies at least partially in its acuteness. Whereas mine gathered slowly: a rumbling, bowelly feeling that crept steadily upward, promising to worsen, and worsen, and worsen ... and not “fear,” either, because what I felt was more a cluster of various emotions, each one coloring and shaping the others, much in the way symptoms constitute a single disease. There was a sense of detachment, and something else I can best describe as mental nausea. The threat of an inappropriate outburst was ever-present, the desire to scream or laugh throwing itself against the gate of my mind as I stood impatiently before a cashier, watching him miscount my change. Often I felt not in my own body, and would find myself staring at my own hand, wondering how it got there, then wondering what would make me behave this way, then wondering about that wonder—i.e., whether I was seeing anything clearly, or whether I was losing my mind ... and so forth and so on ... an enervating and recursive self-analysis that got me nowhere except deeper into my own head, which was exactly the place I needed to escape from most. Everywhere I went I was aware of the impression I made: spacey, shifty, quick to startle, unnecessarily brusque. And knowing this about myself increased my sensitivity to people’s reactions, making me shiftier and brusquer still. I felt them staring at me, everyone staring at my eyes, bloodshot from cleaning fumes; at my hands, wrinkled and chapped and trembling. Staring at my wounded right cheek: an announcement that I was guilty, guilty, my very own mark of Cain. I began putting on a heavy layer of concealer first thing in the morning, in case someone came by. I wasn’t expecting anyone, but better safe than sorry. The makeup irritated the wounds, causing me to rub at them, reopening them ... leading me to feel self-conscious of how I looked ... leading me to hurry home to reapply more concealer before someone else could see me, suspect me, report me.
Can one live like this? Unhinged by every interaction—tethered by the thinnest of threads, and that fraying—can one live like this and n
ot go mad?
I leapt from my bed at the first sign of dawn, fleeing indescribable dreams.
SIX DAYS AFTER I RETURNED from killing two people and dumping their bodies in the New England woods, my doorbell rang. I went to the bathroom to check my face, added a little extra concealer, straightened my shirt out, and opened the front door on a smiling Detective Zitelli. Behind him stood another man, by his carriage and mien also a police officer. Pasty, with corkscrews of red hair and a button nose, he was prototypically Boston Irish, although his extreme height—he had at least three inches on me—suggested a Scandinavian grandparent. He fixed his gaze on me in the most unsettling way, his eyes lingering on the cakey spot on my right cheekbone.
“Sorry to disturb you like this,” Zitelli said. From his coat pocket jutted a rolled-up manila envelope, ominously thick. “This is Detective Connearney. This an okay time?”
I found my voice. “Uh, yes. Please. Come in.”
They stood in the living room like two cops would.
I offered them something to eat.
Zitelli thwacked the envelope against his open palm. “Coffee would be killer.”
Not having made the offer in earnest, I now had to explain that I did not own a coffee machine. Perhaps some tea instead? Zitelli waved no, thanks, but Connearney said, “Sure,” still holding that stare on me, as though I owed him money. I told them to make themselves comfortable and walked from the room as slowly as I could.
With slick hands I opened a kitchen cabinet and grabbed at a mug—knocking it to the floor, where it shattered. I knelt, hurriedly sweeping shards into my bare hand. A warrant. That’s what was in that envelope. The end of me spelled out on paper. Certainly, but there had to be more, much more, to make up that thickness. A series of statements, perhaps, taken from Charles Palatine and Dr. Cargill, attesting to my low moral worth, my avarice and superficiality. Or perhaps eyewitness accounts of every purchase made on December 28 and 29, from the hiking boots to the duvets to the pile of cigarette-ash-laced scrambled eggs at the Luncheonette Jean-Luc. Surveillance photos showing me white-knuckling up I-95, hunched and scooping leaves over her, touching matches to the smoking hem of his shirt. DNA reports on the skin underneath her fingernails, my skin, zested off during the struggle. In the living room the two policemen were talking. Talking about me, of course, speculating about how I would react when they moved to arrest me, planning to overwhelm me, should I resist. Who would hold my arms, who my legs. Who would read me my rights. Would they hog-tie me? Or would it be civilized, with light refreshments and witty banter before we all went down to central booking? I had made their job easy, hadn’t I, being so careless. I looked toward the service porch: I could slip out the side door. Take off running, run until I was free of this freezing-cold hell. I could start my life over again in a small town. I could go—maybe not home but someplace close enough, get a minimum-wage job and change my name. But where? And how? I didn’t belong to an underground network. I didn’t have “contacts.” Everything I had done until that moment had been improvisational, its substance and rationale drawn from movies. In real life it didn’t work that way. In real life the police found you. No doubt they had anticipated me, setting up a barricade at the end of the driveway.... I couldn’t go, not now. I would have to face them. But that, too, seemed equally inconceivable. These two men represented the first genuine human contact I’d had in more than a week, and knowing what I knew, I did not think I could contain myself in their presence. They were the Law. I felt my guilt tattooed across my face; it was tattooed across my face. I needed concealer. I heard Zitelli laugh and choked on my own breath, startled by what seemed to me an abrupt spike in the ambient temperature. I was thinking that I must stop thinking. Must to act. The longer I weighed my options, the fewer options I had. The stovetop clock ticked unbelievably loudly, an inordinate amount of time passing; I had to get the water going. They were waiting; they would suspect me; nobody takes this long to make a cup of tea. I set the kettle on the stove and stood over it, imploring it to boil.
“You know there’s a saying about that.”
Connearney stood in the doorway, his head grazing the lintel.
“So what are my options,” he said.
I said, “Uhm.”
He stepped past me, reaching for the ziggurat of tea boxes on the counter, plucking off the topmost. “ ‘Elderberry Explosion.”’ He looked at me, soliciting comment.
“Fruity,” I said.
He put down the box. “You don’t recognize me, do you.”
I indicated that I did not.
“How about a hint,” he said. “Ready? Here goes: it is not sufficient to do that which should be morally good that it conform to the law; it must be done for the sake of the law.” He smiled. “Any guesses?”
Zitelli appeared. “Party’s been moved in here, I see.”
I said, “Uh—”
“Final answer?” Connearney asked.
I shook my head.
“Kant and the Enlightenment Ideal.” He pointed at me. “You were my TF.” To Zitelli: “He was my TF.”
“What’s a TF?” Zitelli asked.
“It’s what you people call a TA.”
“We people?”
“The great unwashed,” Connearney said.
“This guy ... Seventeen years in law enforcement, I’ve never met a cockier bastard.”
“Ha ha,” I said.
“No bells ringing,” Connearney asked me.
“Wh—uh. When—”
“My first semester senior year. So that’s fall of oh-two.”
“I. I’m sorry. I’ve had a lot of students over the years, and—”
“No worries,” Zitelli said. “It’s not like he’s particularly memorable, giant redheaded Irishman with a tiny penis.”
Connearney laughed.
“Ha ha ha,” I said.
“Was he a good teacher?” Zitelli asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Connearney said. “He was great. The whole class was great. It’s sad what happened to Melitsky, you know?”
“Yes,” I said. Then, sensing that more was expected: “You were a philosophy concentrator.”
“Social studies.”
“Isn’t that like where you look at maps?” Zitelli asked.
“Not at Harvard.”
“Well,” Zitelli said, “excuuuse me.”
“Ha,” I said. “Ha ha.”
Zitelli asked Connearney if I’d given him an A.
“B-plus,” Connearney said.
He smiled at me.
The kettle screamed.
Back in the living room, Zitelli offered me the manila envelope. For a moment I did not move, as though by refusing to accept it I could refute whatever its contents held in store for me. I took it and lifted the flap. Inside was a photocopy of Alma’s thesis.
“I’ll have the original back to you soon as I can,” Zitelli said. “I thought you could use this in the meantime.”
“... thank you.”
“My pleasure. I apologize again for showing up like this. We were in the neighborhood, and I know how it’s going to sound, but I was wondering, if it’s not too great an inconvenience, maybe you could give my friend here a tour of the library. He’s into that kind of thing. Do you mind? Just for a few minutes.”
“Right this way,” I said.
I HAD GONE OVER every square inch at least a dozen times. I had no real reason to believe that the two men were there for anything other than to gawk. I strove—successfully, I think—to project ownerly insouciance. And yet I have never felt so terrified as I did during those twenty-five minutes. Oddly, what made the situation so nerve-wracking was also what enabled me to maintain a veneer of calm: the incongruity of two homicide detectives prancing around a room that had so recently served as a makeshift morgue was, in its own way, incredibly funny, and I kept having to swallow back the church giggles.
“Jesus,” Connearney said, his big foot on the spot where Daciana’s head had lain.
“No shit.”
Zitelli looked at me as if to say You believe this guy?
I smiled back, waiting for him to comment on the swapped carpet, the missing chairs—
“What happened to your friend?” he said.
The floor dropped out. Game over. Touring the library had been a pretext, after all; here came the axe. Your friend. Ha ha ha. Connearney was still pretending to browse, but I knew that he’d tackle me if I tried to bolt. It would happen here and it would happen now and I could do nothing but relent. “Friend,” I said.
The Executor Page 24