Muntor was going to make a point, wake people up to the opportunity they had been given. Until he had gotten sick, he had exercised twice daily. He wore the same size thirty-two pants he had worn when he graduated high school. And through all the years that followed, he watched as everyone around him got fatter, sicker, and older, victims of their own appetites. Weak, he thought. Every one of them.
His wife had grown enormously fat. She smoked two packs of unfiltered Camels each day, most of them in the house, generating clouds of smoke that floated through the rooms like smog. The thick air caused Muntor to cough all night. Year after year he pleaded with her to smoke outside on the front porch. She refused, citing the weather and the inconvenience. His daughters smoked too, both of them, even though they were in their teens—his wife had permitted it.
He couldn’t prove it, but Muntor was convinced the years of breathing second-hand smoke contributed to his lung cancer. His doctors didn’t disagree.
His few friends had drunk themselves insensible like his father had. They had thrown away their lives, yet he was the one who was dying. He felt like an unwilling Christ, made to pay for the sins of the world, as if all the damage they had done to themselves had been visited on him.
The average American reads five books a year, mostly bullshit recycled pop-psych disguised as self-help, and romance stories. By his own count, Muntor read over two hundred books a year and could have qualified for several PhDs by now. And it was he who was dying. The fat, lazy and ignorant lived on, like cows chewing the cud of the Madison Avenue and government propaganda that had replaced intellect in American life. But he wouldn’t go alone. He would take some of the herd with him. Not as many as deserved it, but he was only one man, and he could do only so much. But he thought it would be enough to make his point.
Muntor dressed in black jeans and a black turtleneck. He made a big pot of coffee, and the aroma filled the small house. He wondered how long it would take for the news frenzy to begin. That would depend on how long it took law enforcement to connect the dots—make the connection between all of the deaths that were to take place within hours, minutes, seconds, of one another.
During the past ten days, Muntor had used his video camcorder and a tripod to film himself at work on his tobacco project. He was making a documentary. A great documentary, he hoped. Perhaps the greatest documentary ever made. And it will show the world that there was more to Martin Muntor than met the eye. Martin Muntor was more than the little boy who played outside as his mother died inside their apartment. Martin Muntor was more than the loser who had to wear hand-me-down clothes. Martin Muntor was more than the loser his father had been, more than his colleagues at the new service were: Martin Muntor was an example of a life well-lived, a life of restraint, care for the body he had been given, and of superior intellect.
This morning, in his living room, while waiting for the first news bulletin to interrupt the all-news station, he wanted to keep himself busy by editing his documentary. Next to his chair were several videocassettes containing scenes of him preparing for the first series of attacks. Earlier, he had reviewed the tapes and decided which scenes to keep and which to discard. He found he could use almost all of them.
As he worked, he kept an eye on the old but functional television he kept on an antique table in the living room. It was black and white, a gift from his mother. It had been rare for him to receive more than a shirt or socks, so a gift of a television, albeit small, was something to cherish. It wasn’t new when he received it. Some teacher, feeling sorry for the family, had given it to his mother.
It was only a matter of time before some talking head broke in with the first bulletin. He could barely wait. Muntor wanted to be sure that he was awake and alert when the first bulletin broke, so he began the exercise routine he had devised decades before to keep his body strong.
He knew he wouldn’t be able to finish even half of it due to his increasing frailty. But it was a ritual he wouldn’t give up even now that treating his body as a temple didn’t matter anymore. He made it through three sets of squats and some pushups before the coughing took over and made it impossible to continue. He didn’t berate himself, for once. He was sick, and even as sick as he was, he had done more to maintain his body today than most of the cows that populated the world did in a year.
Muntor rose to get more coffee. On his way back from the kitchen, he stopped at the printer set up on the dining-room table. The printer had been there for a year. No loss. No one visited him at home anymore, even though everyone knew he was sick now. The kids hadn’t been by for dinner or Sunday lunch in years. From the printer tray, Muntor collected a dozen pages of script he had written as narration for the documentary.
Before settling back into the worn green recliner, Muntor crouched by the VCR and picked up a cassette marked “Paradiso.” He slid it into the slot and turned on the machine. Then he sat down and pressed the mute button on the television’s remote control. He would use his larger, much more modern television, that sat nearby his trustworthy black and white one, so that he didn’t miss the breaking news.
He picked up the portable tape recorder, pressed the record button, and held the microphone in his left hand and the pages of the script in his right.
He planned to read the script aloud, keeping the words in sync with the images that were beginning to appear on the television across the room. Once he finished reading the entire script, which might take days, Muntor intended to dub his tape-recorded voice onto the videotape’s audio track. It would be worth the effort.
This was his documentary, this was his life’s work, and he intended to produce the best record of it he could.
On the coffee table next to the recliner, Muntor’s telephone rang, startling him. It was Lori, his daughter. She almost never called, and he did not want to be interrupted now. He told her he was drying off from a shower and asked politely for permission to call her back later. They both knew he wouldn’t.
Muntor pressed another button on the remote, and an image jumped shakily onto the screen—a close-up shot of a computer monitor. Off-screen, someone typed. Bold, italicized capital letters appeared one at a time, spelling out the title MUNTOR’S LAST STAND. Under it, perfectly centered, a subtitle. “The Greatest Documentary Ever Made.” There were no production credits.
He had considered calling it “Muntor’s Masada,” but he was afraid that the average person wouldn’t understand. Maybe, Muntor thought, he’d put the credits at the end. His one indulgence in his life had been a devotion to film. He had learned a lot from watching them, and more from reading about how they were made. He knew he was going to be remembered as one of history’s great filmmakers. He read the words as they appeared on the screen.
Based on a story conceived and executed by Martin Muntor.
Script by Martin Muntor.
Produced by Martin Muntor.
Directed by Martin Muntor.
The title shot faded, the screen now pitch-black. Muntor turned on the tape recorder and began to read into the microphone in a slow, almost mocking deep bass voice of an announcer.
“It’s payback time… (pause). For hours, those words kept whispering themselves to Martin Muntor as he worked to set everything up exactly as planned… (pause). It’s finally payback time…”
He pressed the stop button on the tape recorder. Click.
Muntor watched the television as an image appeared, an over-the-shoulder shot of a man at a worktable facing away from the camera. Muntor had shot this sequence the Friday before, the day he delivered the seven hundred envelopes to FedEx. For most of the scenes, Muntor had mounted the camera on a tripod set up in the doorway of the room. He had kept a small remote control in his pocket and turned the camera on and off as needed. If the script called for a panning shot, Muntor had done that manually.
He couldn’t be recognizable in those shots unless he panned by a mirror.
As he watched h
imself now, he realized his hair looked shaggy and reached past his shirt collar. When had it grown so long? He needed to get a haircut. And he had lost weight and was thin, too thin. He could clearly see his shoulder blades as they pressed through the white shirt that hung on him as it would a scarecrow. The figure leaned back against a bookcase and folded his arms.
That was Muntor’s cue. He turned on the recorder and again began to read.
“Muntor stood back finally, arms folded, with the calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces. Sunlight and the low rumble of traffic penetrated the Philadelphia row house through open windows as he surveyed the assembly-line setup in his living room. Outside, a few paces beyond a tiny rectangle of lawn, another rush hour had begun to leave its yellow gray smog on Roosevelt Boulevard.”
Click.
He kept a finger at his place on the page, observed the images and waited for his next visual cue.
The previous Friday, an hour before he shot the scene he was now watching, Muntor had laid out everything he needed across the surface of two side-by-side aluminum card tables. It had annoyed him that the dented tables wobbled when he brushed against them. That won’t look good on video, he had thought. Martin Scorsese would never put up with a wobbly table. So he went upstairs into one of the empty bedrooms and found some duct tape in a dresser drawer.
He remembered now how musty the room had smelled.
While up there, a pang of homesickness yanked at him. He walked out into the hallway of the house he had lived in since a year after his mother died. It had been his grandparents’ home, where he was sent to live when his father, arriving home late and drunk one night, had missed the bathroom and wandered into Muntor’s room. The elder Muntor had urinated on his son. The next day, when the teacher took him aside and asked him why he smelled so bad, Muntor embarrassingly told her what his father had done. Following two days in a foster home, the court had awarded Muntor’s grandparents legal guardianship.
His grandparents had tried to soften it. His father had been drunk, they said. It was the alcohol, not him. He didn’t mean it. Muntor knew it was all true, but what he concluded from it was that anyone who gave himself to drink or any other untoward appetite was less than him, maybe even less than human. He knew then what his life would be—an example to others of what a gift it was to be born in a healthy body with a powerful mind.
In the decades after, he had learned that people were too stupid and weak to understand the lesson he presented to them. They polluted their bodies and minds with physiological and intellectual poisons—drink, drugs, cigarettes, ludicrous TV shows, books aimed at the masses. He had hardened himself, become even more of a model of human potential. His body was a temple, and he was the high priest. The more people failed to respond to the lesson he delivered merely by walking out the house each day, the more he became devoted to his mission. In the end, he knew that the cows would never learn.
He knew it was time to thin out the herd.
Years later, he would own the home in which his grandparents had raised him. It had become his sanctuary, his escape from the shabby neighborhood, his escape from his father, the inner sanctum of his faith—a haven of books and an exercise regimen that would shame a Green Beret.
It would also become the home where he had totaled a marriage and tried to raise two girls. This was the house where he now lived and had slept without human company for a decade.
During the divorce, Muntor’s daughters, then seven and ten, had clamored to live with their mother. That crushed him. He had been the attentive one, the affectionate one, the one who encouraged them to eat right, to educate themselves more than their underfunded public school could ever do, to keep their bodies in top shape. He had been what his own father had never been. It was important to him. Martin Muntor’s children had never experienced the wrath of growing up with an abusive father, and they had been given the secret of living a life worthy of the bodies and minds with which they had been gifted. But their mother had turned them against him. She was like all the others—a fat cow that crammed her body and mind with toxins and gave her children permission to do the same.
For years after his wife had taken his children away, he lived alone, until he decided to get a pet, something he had been denied as a child. He chose a cat, the animal that most closely resembled him and his approach to life. Well cared for cats were lean, fit, and clean. They were the opposite of the cows he shouldered his way past when he had to leave the house. Cats seemed to live their lives with purpose.
The wobbly table was just another example of the difference between him and the herd. Most people wouldn’t notice, or, at best, would shove a matchbook under one leg. Instead, Muntor took the duct tape and, for stability, wrapped layers of tape around the offending leg and affixed it to the table’s corner. When finished, he slapped the tabletop with his palm.
“There you go,” he had said, satisfied the table was sturdier.
On the television, the camera began panning objects on the worktables. Muntor glanced again at the clock on the shelf. Five minutes past eleven and still no news bulletin. His eyes returned to the script.
“Today was the day. Muntor knew exactly what to do. He had rehearsed the procedure in his head a thousand times. His first task was to organize all the pieces. He placed the FedEx envelopes, the regular envelopes, and the shipping labels on the table to his left. His computer had printed out the cover letters on counterfeit stationery, and he stacked them neatly on his right, next to the survey forms, pens, a box of paper clips. He didn’t like being cramped. He left plenty of work space in the center.”
Click.
Next to the boxes on a steel typewriter table, Muntor had placed a stoppered glass test tube upright in a wire rack. The tube contained a solution as clear as spring water. Next to the wire rack on a folded bath towel lay a syringe, a portable hair dryer and a box of latex surgical gloves.
The close-up of the gloves was his cue. He turned the recorder on, found his place in the script, and picked up where he had left off.
“No more putting it off. He had to get going. Thinking about what came next sent a shudder through him. Muntor felt the familiar clenched fist of pain behind his breastbone. Whenever he momentarily lost his confidence, that pain would return, reminding him, prompting him, spurring him. He had a purpose—to teach the world about the gift they had been given and that they squandered. No amount of pain would deter him. He was like Jesus on the cross—unbroken.”
Click.
Now the on-screen shot changed. Shooting from the living-room couch, Muntor aimed the camera at the worktables.
He could remember shooting this particular sequence as if he’d done it five minutes ago. Despairing thoughts had come to him while filming. He realized he had been stalling, delaying his project, not working as fast as he could have, finding distractions, exaggerating pain. This dawdling had rung a familiar bell. Muntor had a history of rarely finishing anything he started. The corpses of things he had begun and later abandoned cluttered his life the way trash blows down dead-end alleys and stays there.
He had realized early on that living a perfect life was impossible. There were too many things to work on, too many improvements to make. This had often resulted in him beginning projects that were never finished—books about nutrition, a Guinness World Record for the greatest number of pushups completed, a health-food business. But none of that mattered now. He was older and wiser. Much wiser since the doctor had pronounced his death sentence—and he focused on what he could do: illustrating that the wages of sin were, in fact, death.
When the images on screen panned away from the worktables and moved unsteadily up the carpeted stairs and through the rooms on the second floor of his old house, he picked up the microphone and began reading.
“Muntor had been a quitter, giving up easily and often. One of Muntor’s specialties had been half-painted rooms. But his greatest escapes invol
ved people—an ex-wife, two daughters and countless employers to vouch for his unreliability… (pause). For Muntor, there had always been something else to do, somewhere else to go. There was always another distraction more worthy of that special vein of genius he knew be possessed but had never been able to apply. Until now. Now, finally, it was payback time.”
Click.
On the television appeared another close-up shot of a computer screen. Letters appeared again, typed out one at a time.
7:15 a.m.
Friday, September 29.
On screen, Muntor walked into the shot, steam rising from the hot coffee he had poured himself in the kitchen. He walked out into the living room and sat down, back to the camera, sliding his chair in, his emaciated abdomen against the edge of the table.
His hand reaching up on screen to adjust the magnifying glass was the next cue.
“Muntor began to treat the cigarettes, the most demanding step of the operation. A simple procedure, really, but time-consuming and painstaking. Hours passed while be used the fine narrow blade of an X-ACTO knife to slit open the cigarette packs. He made three slits along the bottom of each pack in order to expose the ends of a few cigarettes. He mangled a half-dozen packs—a casual glance and anyone would have known something wasn’t right—before he found the trick was just to go slowly. Muntor had never bought the ‘be patient’ argument, regarding patience as nothing more than a lesser form of despair. Today, though, he was going to do it right.”
Click.
At that point in the filming, Muntor had turned off the camera, disgusted with himself. Things were going slowly enough and stopping frequently to shoot scenes for the documentary wasn’t helping.
Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge) Page 3