by Mike Roberts
There was a kindness in her laughter, I thought. Something loose and free from judgment. And, all at once, a spark flashed in my brain. It was Cokie I had been in love with all along, and not Lauren. I had simply picked the wrong girl!
Cokie was talking excitedly now, too, and feeling the wine. She was saying that she wanted to travel, and maybe we could travel together. Yes, I said, not really listening. She was saying that it should be somewhere big, somewhere we would never think to go. I was nodding along, thinking about kissing Cokie; thinking about hurting Lauren. Who could say that Cokie didn’t secretly want to hurt her, too?
“The Middle East,” Cokie said, and I stopped.
“You want us to travel to the Middle East? Now?”
“Yeah, yeah, totally, listen…”
But I wasn’t listening. Even as I saw that Cokie was serious. Talking about flights to Morocco and hitchhiking through Northern Africa. She said we could find jobs as journalists or bloggers, to subsidize the traveling. I was hearing her tell me all of this, and I was trying not to laugh. But this got Cokie laughing, too.
“This all sounds fucking terrifying, Cokie,” I said. “I have to tell you, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” It was making me feel delirious.
“Wait, wait, but no … I’ve actually looked into this. It’s not really that dangerous,” she said, going on about the Zagros Mountains, and an American professor in Tehran whom she’d been emailing. But none of this mattered anymore. I just wanted Cokie. I suddenly wanted her to stay and sleep with me, in my bed tonight. I couldn’t even care that Lauren had told me, in the strictest confidence, that Patrick Serf might have given Cokie herpes that summer. I just needed to kiss her.
And when she stopped talking and turned to me expectantly, I leaned in, in a kind of slow motion. This, not unpredictably, was a spectacular failure. Cokie saw it coming and she dodged my kiss the way you might duck a punch. Moving in and away as she gave me her chin and cheek. She was really very sweet about it, too, almost acting as if it didn’t happen. But it did happen, and I was left sitting there, stunned.
Cokie retreated into the kitchen to find her phone, still talking over her shoulder, sounding unfazed. “Patrick and his friends are at the Raven.”
She ducked her head back into the living room, where I was sitting motionlessly on the couch. “Do you wanna go with me? You should come.”
“Oh,” I said. “No. I don’t think I’d be much fun tonight.”
Cokie smiled sadly and let it go.
We walked out through the front hallway, and I carried her bike down the steps. I could tell that Cokie wanted to give me some kind of parting embrace, but I was far too demoralized for that. I propped the bike between us instead, as we said our goodbyes on the sidewalk. And then I went back up the steps, where I watched Cokie ride out into the night without me. Back into the fun. Gone.
MEN WITH PLAIN NAMES
By October, there was a killer on the loose. Five dead the first day. Several more each day after that. And no one was surprised, either. This was the new normal in late capitalist, pre-revolutionary America.
I was working for a man named Mike, helping him paint a one-story apartment building orange. Working outside on ladders, standing in the open, we were easy targets for a man with a gun. I could’ve been back in school, but Mike really had to be here. It was his truck, and his paint, and his job. Mike had a girlfriend at home who was pregnant with a baby boy they were thinking of calling Michael. Just like his name. Just like my name. I tried to talk him out of this, of course, but it was no use.
As we worked we listened to the classic rock station where they almost never talked about anything real, and certainly not the Beltway Sniper. These were the radio voices in your nightmares. Upbeat. Impersonal. Commercialized. They were not being maudlin or ironic when they played “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” for the third time in a day. This was just part of another all-new, nonstop, workday rock-block.
We knew that our faithful disc jockeys would not condescend to listing off the totals of the dead or mentioning the manhunt. They didn’t pander by offering us any updates or breaking news. They didn’t tell us when the Terror Alert level was raised from yellow to orange to red. They just kept their heads down and played the hits: schlocky, feel-good rock and roll.
* * *
Things were looking up for me, though. I’d actually inherited my father’s car that morning. A blue Toyota Camry. It was just sitting there in front of my house when I came down the steps with my bicycle. I knew the car was my father’s because I could see my brother sitting in the front seat.
“Hello, young man,” I said cheerfully, as he got out, wearing a necktie. “Are you here to tell me about the Bible?”
“Shut up,” he said. “Let me inside the house.”
But I was already out in the street, pacing around the Camry. This car was a beautiful thing to me. It never even occurred to me to ask my parents to bring it down.
“Have you had this here the whole time?”
I knew my brother was around, of course. Right there at the end of the Green Line. My parents had driven him down to the University of Maryland at the end of August. The three of them spent the weekend in a hotel, getting him settled. They drove into the city, where I met them for dinner, twice. And that was the last that I saw of my baby brother.
“I meant to come and visit you,” I said. “I’ve just been busy.”
He nodded cautiously.
“This is good, though. You’ve done the right thing bringing this to me.” I slapped my palm down on the top of the car. My brother didn’t say a word.
“What is all this shit anyway?” I was cupping my hands and peering through the back windows. The seats were filled with boxes and bags. I could see a matte-black stereo and a nineteen-inch television set.
“I got kicked out of the dorms. I need to stay with you.”
“You got kicked out of school?”
“No. Just the dorms.”
“In five weeks? That must be some kind of record.”
“I seriously doubt that,” he said blankly.
I straightened myself up again to stare at him in judgment. Glaring at his stupid necktie. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Why are you wearing that tie, then?”
“Because I want to. Jesus Christ. Are you gonna let me inside the house or not?” I could hear the strain in his voice now. “Three more people were killed last night. Did you even know that?”
“Yeah, sure … I know,” I said absently. I was still marveling at the car. “You’ve really had this here the whole time?”
My brother frowned. Crossing and uncrossing his arms. He was glancing out toward the intersection warily.
“I almost died in this car, you know? I was driving drunk on my birthday and I spun the fucking thing around backward like—”
“Can we please just get off the street,” he asked me for the third time. “Please!”
“Sure,” I said, passing him my bicycle. “Bring this into the house. I’m taking the car.”
“Taking it where?”
“To work,” I said. “Where do you think?”
“Don’t you have school?”
“Don’t you?”
My brother sighed and handed me the car keys.
* * *
There was a killer on the loose. These are the plots of horror films. Or crime thrillers. Or just some bad buddy-cop movie. We didn’t know what was going on, which is different than being surprised by it. We had grown accustomed to a world of sudden, randomized death. Literally anything might happen next.
The news reported that the Sniper had been seen fleeing in a white van. Strangers would repeat this to you eagerly. We made a game of pointing them out to each other. White vans were everywhere now. Was this a thing that people already knew, or had the Sniper brought this fact to bear? His was a vehicle chosen for its indistinctiveness. Its ubiquity. Its absence of
shape and color. It was astonishing to realize just how many people made their living driving white vans through the city.
As often as not, he was killing in broad daylight, too. People died outside strip malls and parking lots. Places they never wanted to go to in the first place. They were killed in front of gas stations and grocery stores. Running errands and waiting at bus stops. Understandably, the whole thing made people crazy. It became harder and harder not to fixate on the white van. It was the only thing we had to go on.
People wanted warnings. They wanted a fighting chance. They wanted signs that they could see and understand. If only a flock of birds would leap out of the treetops, in the seconds before he squeezed the trigger, we would know to hit the ground. Even just the glinting mirror of a rifle sight could count as something.
As a community, we had yet to produce even one credible police sketch of the killer. Who were we supposed to look for? A man? Someone with a story? A person with a past? We were still just looking for a man now, right? Somewhere among the ten thousand white vans was a person with a gun. Feeling the same heat that you felt, breathing in the same air. I imagined him driving with the windows down, his seat belt left dangling at his side. He was just a blank and smiling face. The only truly carefree man in three states.
The white van itself could never have come as much of a surprise, though. Ghosts have always worn white, traditionally. Flashing in the dark. Floating through walls. In gunfire and bloodshed he was there. In everything else, he might as well have never existed. The Sniper was a terror. A cipher. A blank.
* * *
I came home from work to find my brother watching CNN. I could tell right away that he’d had it on all day. Staring back at me with this haunted look. Worse, he was still wearing the tie.
As soon as he saw me, he stood up and started following me through the downstairs of the house, telling me that two more people had been shot in the parking lot of a Michaels Craft Store.
“So what?” I asked.
“So isn’t that weird? He keeps shooting people in front of these Michaels Craft Stores. Why there?”
“Why anywhere?” I asked, exasperated.
I told him to stop counting deaths. I told him to turn off the TV and go outside. I told him to go back to school now. To go home. To stop hiding. There was no grand conclusion to draw from all of this. It just was.
“And take off that fucking tie.”
“No,” he said, stepping backward.
“What does it mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Do you work at a bank?”
“What?”
“Are you a Jehovah’s Witness?”
“Shut up.”
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the so-called Republican Party?” I asked, getting right up in his face.
“Fuck off.”
“Have you ever knowingly consorted with any so-called Republicans?”
“It’s just a tie!” he snapped as he walked away.
“That’s not an answer,” I said. “That’s evasion. I’m keeping my eye on you.”
* * *
All in all, I had a car. More than a car, really, I had a birthright. The blue Camry had always been a thing that was rightfully mine, and I was hell-bent on keeping it now. I was the eldest son, of course. Mine was a condition beyond reproof.
Plus, it was fun just to drive. Ripping through the city with the windows down and the radio up. I laid on the horn as I rocketed past every white van I could find. Looking up and laughing at all these startled faces. A young man with a car can do whatever he wants. Go wherever he wants. Even with a killer on the loose. This is the stuff of a thousand classic rock songs. I was going too fast to be killed now.
Mike and I hadn’t always listened to this music while we worked, though. Back in August, after I’d quit my data-entry job and joined him painting apartments, we were devoted listeners of NPR. These marathon runs with the radio going eight hours a day, until we could practically recite the news breaks verbatim.
This was on the other side of town—at the yellow apartment—before we’d made the hard switch to classic rock. Mike already had the orange one lined up, too, taking us straight through the Terror Alert color wheel. The joke was not lost on me, but I was serious when I told him I would quit before he found a red one.
Unfortunately, it was this yellow apartment that introduced us to the specter of death. Long before the Sniper started circling the city, Mike fell into a period of distraction. A new and brooding silence that coincided perfectly with the midpoint of his girlfriend’s pregnancy. We wouldn’t even turn the radio on some days.
It was one of these mornings when Mike climbed the roof with a bucket of yellow paint, only to find the top sealed shut. Painted on and baked hard in the sun. Mike tried to pop it off with a knife, but his foot slipped, and the blade jerked, right through his wrist.
“Fuck!” he yelled.
I stepped back to see what was happening, as the yellow paint came rolling off the roof and nearly struck me. WHAM! The metal can hit the ground and exploded all over my legs. Mike was already coming down the ladder, holding his wrist and cursing.
“What? What happened?”
He took his hand away and the blood squirted four feet across the sidewalk. Mike had severed one of the small blue power lines running up his wrist. Clutching it again, as he stared at me. “I cut myself,” he said simply.
“Jesus Christ. No shit,” I said, feeling completely scrambled. “What do we do?”
I walked away, looking for something, anything. I took my shirt off and pressed it to his arm. “Hold this,” I said, as we watched the dirty white cotton bloom with blood.
“Fuck, fuck.” I panicked. “Do we make a tourniquet?”
Mike just smiled dimly and walked away from me, toward his truck. I ran out ahead and opened the passenger side, helping him into the seat. I found the keys in his front pocket and slammed the door closed.
I wanted to call an ambulance, of course, but Mike wouldn’t let me. He said that he was fine; he’d insisted on driving, even. He was laughing when he said this to me. That was the thing—the anger was gone, and Mike was nothing if not tickled by the whole situation.
The pickup made a tortured sound and fired right up. With my adrenaline pumping, I found the clutch and scraped it into gear. We lurched forward and I felt insane. I didn’t know the first thing about driving a stick shift. I just tried to keep it in a low gear. Straight lines, I told myself as I accelerated into traffic. I was terrified of stalling this thing out. I couldn’t stop thinking of death. Was I really going to have to tell Mike’s girlfriend he was dead because I’d never learned how to drive a stick? I mean, Jesus Christ.
Mike leaned forward and flipped on the radio, inexplicably. Van Morrison’s “Wild Night” came blaring out of the tiny speakers. Mike smiled and started to sing.
“The wiii-iiii-iiii-iiii-iiiiiild night is calling! The wiii-iiii-iiii-iiii-iiiiiild night is calling!” He turned to me then, sounding insistent. “Sing it!”
“No.”
“Sing it, goddammit!”
“Shut the fuck up, Mike. I’m trying to drive!”
“Hurry!”
“I’m going as fast as I can!”
“I’m dying!” Mike screamed theatrically. “Aggghhhh! I’m fucking dying!” He was cackling and going delirious on me. I floored it through a red light, with horns screaming out on both sides. I couldn’t even hear myself think.
* * *
In the end, of course, we made it. Mike lived. Everything was different after that, though. Mike became suddenly and unremittingly resolved. Resolved in being a father. Resolved in being alive. Resolved, even, in painting this next apartment orange. Slitting his wrist had been some kind of come-to-Jesus moment for Mike. The brooding silences were replaced by stupid jokes. NPR was overtaken by classic rock. He even entreated me to play the name game with him. Baiting me into talking him out of calling hi
s unborn child Michael. One more thing that he was fully resolved about now.
“What about Tony?” I would ask mildly.
“Too ethnic,” he would deadpan.
“How about something modern, like Todd or Chad?”
“What is this, a country club?”
“How about Dave?”
“Too many vees.”
“It’s one vee,” I protested.
“That’s too many.”
And on and on this way. I couldn’t help but laugh with him. I’d started to wonder what kind of painkillers he was actually on. But mostly I resisted the urge to psychoanalyze Mike. I didn’t want to think about how the pressure he was feeling had caused him to cut his wrist and almost die. If he said that he was happy now, then I was happy for him. He could play the radio as loud as he wanted, for all I cared. I couldn’t even hear it anymore. Classic rock was the sound of orange paint drying.
* * *
Slowly, I began to realize that my brother wasn’t leaving the house. Not to go back to Maryland, and not even to go outside. He wasn’t eating; he wasn’t showering. He hadn’t even changed his clothes yet. He carried around with him this undertow of dread. You could feel it coming off of him in waves as he stalked from room to room.
“Did you know that the Queen of England is in town?”
“What?” I asked. “Why would I know that?”
He shrugged. “She’s here to meet with the president. A state dinner or something.”
“Good. That will solve everything.”
He leaned against the counter and watched me put my groceries into the fridge. Staring at me, in silence. He was waiting for me to speak. He wanted me to tell him something now, I knew. But I didn’t even know what he was doing here.
“Here. Drink this. You’re freaking me out.”
I pulled a tall can off a six-pack ring and handed it to him. We leaned back against the countertop and drank our beers in silence. I was grateful for the car, of course, but at what cost? Was I really responsible for all of this? And what the hell was this anyway? I mean, how long were we actually going to do this?