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Chapter Twenty-Eight
There are days when you question what the hell you are doing with your life. Those are special days.
Every day, we wonder about the little decisions we make: Did I buy enough Italian bread? Should we take the minivan? Should I let Harry’s mother take our bed, or should I insist she use the pullout couch?
These decisions, while having a definite effect on our daily lives, really are meaningless. Regardless of how we approached them, our general well-being would be unaffected and life overall would continue status quo.
Then there are the special days. It is during these times that our mettle is tested. These are the decisions that form, shape, and determine our lives.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Our lives are shaped by happenstance too: a freak lottery win, a car accident, etc. But as far as our control over our own destiny is concerned, some decisions far outweigh others. I can remember three such special days in my life. The first was the day Jill died. I wondered where I’d go from there. The second was when Cristen met her fate. I wondered where I’d go from there. The third and last was when I met Darien for the second time, in that forest. I wondered where I’d go from there. As so often happens, the decision was not made based on any occurrence; rather it was the result of a little thought and a lot of alcohol.
I got very drunk that night, and pondered my fate.
As proof of my inebriation, I had a campfire lit. This is not typically the recommended course of action for on-the-run felons who are still at large in an area where they’ve committed some or all of their crimes. It was certainly a mean feat to start the fire in light of the recent rain, but I’m a trouper. I persevered and found wood that had been protected to some degree. Even so, my fire popped and crackled from the wetness of its fuel source.
I am a weak man. I knew it then, just as I Page 124
know it now. I had also been incredibly lucky to that point. Considering the magnitude of my crimes, it was shocking that there wasn’t more pressure upon me. I suppose there are a lot of criminals out there. I imagined that the sporadic nature of my crimes and my constant moving didn’t help the police any. After all, it’s tough to track a murderer who has no motive known to mankind. Who the hell kills for the sake of genetics?
Nonetheless, I knew time was growing short. I couldn’t depend on randomness to protect me for long.
For all I knew, there could be a dozen officers staked out in the woods around me even as I sat beside my campfire polishing my gun. I could no longer settle for these haphazard one-hitter crimes. It was time to get serious.
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Chapter Twenty-Nine
We rarely notice nature. Normally she’s a light breeze off of the Atlantic or a rainy spring day that helps the flowers reach full color come summer. Once in a while, though, she gets really pissed. It’s usually when she’s been ignored. The Nor’easter from out of nowhere that piles literal feet of snow on unsuspecting mountain hamlets. The son-of-a-bitch hurricane that ravages the coast, leaving people homeless and helpless.
The tornado winds that shoot cars off the road as though they were toys. Nature is both beast and bitch, and she’s best left alone.
Now I was a part of Her. I was sure of this now.
I was slowly losing my humanity and becoming part of a larger force. My soul was being enveloped, and not in the foul Madison Avenue way. It was as if I was plugged in to a new source of power. I had been given so much by Her that now I felt it was only right that I should represent Her as accurately and honorably as I could.
As I said, it was time to get serious.
Suddenly, out there by the campfire, I wished for a better job. I’m not talking about higher paying or more creative or any of that Earthboy shit. Advertising had done well for me, as I’ve said. Besides, none of that mattered anymore. What I mean is, I wish I had held a job that provided me more. .access to do as I felt right.
Nuclear physics would have done it. Or chemistry.
I could poison a waterway. That would have been dandy. An engineering degree would have made for some very interesting, if time-consuming, possibilities.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to accomplish anything in the name of the natural world by coming up with creative catch phrases and drawing clever cartoons. Good copy doesn’t exactly make anybody shit their pants or anything like that.
Still, I had to do something. The facts of my situation were sobering. No doubt I would soon be taken in and booked. Not long after that, I would be Page 126
sentenced. It’s not as though I had gone to great lengths to conceal my crimes or hide evidence. I had just taken care to run far and fast after each one. Well, until the latest rash, that is.
Yup, I’d be sentenced. The thing is, my crimes came in, well, unforgiving states. I was in the land of capital punishment, and there would be men out there who’d love to see my head fry like an egg.
I thought about that for a moment. I would be somebody’s Jeffrey Simons. Me! Oh, if only they knew I was acting for good. Suddenly a terrifying thought entered my brain. What if Jeffrey… No, he couldn’t be.
I dismissed that thought. I dismissed it not because I knew the man was beneath the position. In fact, I know very little about his life before the murder spree, let alone about his skills and intellect. What convinced me that he was not a one-percenter was his victim: Jill.
There was no explanation in the world which would convince me that her genes were bad.
Still, the thought lingered in my head.
Maybe he, Simons, wasn’t a one-percenter.
Let’s assume that to be the truth. Is there any other reason, other than self-defense, that is a viable excuse for murder? Or for nine murders? Nine remorseless, cold-blooded murders? I was sure I couldn’t think of one. But I felt differently still. What if I was missing something? What if there was something I couldn’t comprehend? What if Simons was on a mission of his own? No, I decided.
He was nothing more than a creepy little twisted fellow who hadn’t found his natural place in the world.
Sometimes people are just plain mean. I concluded I had no reason to forgive Jeffrey Simons for what he had done to me, to us.
It wasn’t an easy sleep for me, nonetheless.
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Chapter Thirty
When I awoke, I felt listless. Whenever I felt badly, I tried to think of something funny. I thought, in this case, of the way old-timers refer to the turn of the century years as aught-one and aught-two. This one was always a rib-tickler for me, even before the hum and the buzz and the droning started. Even before I felt the calling the day I spilled the grape soda.
So what could I do? I hadn’t access to large-scale weapons. I lacked the knowledge necessary for chemical play. How many options were left me?
Finally, I decided to do it in blue-collar fashion.
I had tried to avoid such a situation; it’s messy and dishonorable. But time was running short, and messy and dishonorable was still better than never happened at all. I loaded my weapon, left the woods for what I imagined would be the last time, and headed out of town to the west, right along the roadway. I figured I’d let fate decide. If I were wrong in my decision, if I had somehow erred in all of my thoughts concerning life on this miserable rock, let me find out now. Let a police officer pull me over and throw me in the back of his cruiser with the siren blaring to announce my presence to the world—his world. Better yet, let some 16-wheeler slip on the pavement and crush me into a form unrecognizable to man. If I’m wrong, I want to know it. There’s too much namby-pambiness in the world today. If I was a sinner, let the whole world cast me out at once in a loud, unfaltering voice. Grasp your stones and deliver them my way.
Once I get down that road unscathed, however, once I get down that road unscathed, fair warning to anyone or anything that crosses my path, for I would then be Master of my own domain.
Don’t fuck with Mother Nature or her bitches.
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Chapter Thirty-One
It took me a long time to get to where I was going, which isn’t surprising when you consider I didn’t know where that was. I decided on the way to my fate I should take the opportunity to see and do the things I wanted. Fate owed me that, at the very least.
I pissed off of a high canyon bridge. That was fun. The urine traveled a long way down, and I certainly couldn’t hear its splash through the surface of the water. As I was pissing, a bird flew overhead. I took my gun from my pocket and shot at the bird. I missed horribly. Apparently my aim hadn’t improved much as I had thought. Then again, it’s not easy to shoot with a dick in your hand. Birds: nature’s little clay pigeons.
Hey, maybe that’s where they got that word. All right, I admit it. . I’m a little slow.
After pissing off the bridge, I came to a small town with a lot of cops. I felt leery, so I stayed only long enough to buy some licorice. I always loved black licorice. I believe I’m in the minority, and I prefer it that way. Y’all can keep your cherry suckers and your pops. Anise is the way to go. It’s a man’s candy. After pissing off the bridge, I came to a small town—Ha!
Yup, I wrote that already. I just want to show you who has the power here. Don’t you fucking forget that, slack jaw. And keep that fucking thermometer away from me. I don’t need people like you going anywhere near my ears or my mouth or my ass. Who would take such a job? Medicine is so overrated. No, I don’t like your type, Doctor; it is certain.
I am reminded, now that I think of it, that we often see the past through rosy spectacles, as if the world used to be perfect. The time between the flappers and the hippies. But that’s just not true. The world was not always so kind to women, to foreigners, to gays. Maybe we’re growing as a species.
Travel was not always so safe. Try crossing the states in a covered wagon, and your minivan will never seem so bad again. There were always wars Page 129
and rebellions. There was always tragedy. The only difference is, now we hear about it all the time. All our goddamn technology keeps us informed. It brings us together, sure, but it also scares the crap out of us. The world has lost all of the mystery and intrigue of the past. So maybe it wasn’t a better place back then, but it sure feels like it. Today’s bad feels somehow worse.
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Chapter Thirty-Two
I wanted to do something grand, even if it wasn’t all technologically advanced and whatnot. I wanted to leave the media in a whirl of confusion, and maybe even shock some people. I wanted to teach the world a lesson. But the cops back there, they scared me. I’m not the type to get edgy, but they made me. .leery. I was leery. I was afraid for my trigger finger. If I lost that, I’d have to find another way. It wasn’t as if I was scared, mind you. I would have had the balls to pull it off any which way at this point. I wasn’t some newbie anymore. I was Edward P. Caine, Renaissance Man.
It was a time of rebirth if there ever was such thing. A time when men’s hearts were invested in the market and their souls were buried in the bottle. The Earth was dead in the new Millennium; that much is sure. So I wasn’t afraid of doing it another way. But what other way was there? Poison was the only other way I knew, and I’ve already explained to you that I’m not a chemist. I’m tired of having to repeat myself, Jill.
My God, I hope she’s looking down upon me now. I need all the help I can get.
I need a pill now. Sometimes they help, sometimes not. But they’re the only friend I have in this world.
I took two. Just now. Real time, as the techno-geeks put it. What a bunch of horseshit.
I walked past a barn, an old textile mill, and several minor strip malls. I realized that as long as I waved this gun, wasn’t nobody gonna push me off of the sidewalk. Maybe I couldn’t walk down the center of the road, but the shoulder was mine. I stuck out my thumb, just to feel All-American. I didn’t really want a ride, and I’m not sure what I would have said had someone stopped to offer me one.
Nobody stopped. I can’t say I was surprised. And me being so pretty and all. Sometimes I like to stand in front of the mirror and stroke my hair, imagining myself as a pinup from the ‘50s. But don’t go telling anyone that, or I’ll blow your fucking skull apart.
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Finally, after hours of walking, with the pissing bridge and the textile mill and the strip malls well behind me, I came upon a fabulous sight. There in front of me was a little beach. That might not even be the right word for it, actually. It was an inlet or one corner of a lake or something. Rocky sand led up to its shores, and it really wasn’t much of anything at all.
But you couldn’t tell that by looking at the faces of the kids around it. Kids are precious, ain’t they? They had a sparkle in their eye that day, as if this beach were all they cared about on the whole entire Earth. I wouldn’t have blamed them if it was.
I suddenly realized I was receiving quite a few stares in my direction. It wasn’t for my taut physique; that’s for certain. Actually, I thought at first they must know my face from the evening news. For a moment I felt fear, which is ridiculous now that I think of it. After all, I had the gun. Who cared if they recognized me?
Then I realized there would be no recognizing the clean-cut man in those photos on television. My clothing was ripped and my facial hair was unkempt. I looked rather like a bum, and come to think of it, I guess I was a bum.
Of course, to you that means I’m also unfit for living. Time to take the old dog out back and put it out of its misery. Pa, grab your rifle. It takes one fucked-up society to look at someone down on his luck and see a villain. One fucked-up society indeed. And I used to be one of you.
Yup, it really bothers me. I used to sidestep the panhandlers as though they were shit on the sidewalk.
Those are days I am not proud of.
So I was taking their stares, and I didn’t care. It was a beautiful blue-gelatin day, and the sand reflected the sunlight. The birds were chirping, the water lapping.
A man with his nose painted white with sun block sold ice cream and frozen candy bars from an insulated chest. There might have been fifty people there that day, about half of them under the age of twelve. There were a couple of old-timers, real grizzled-like. There were also some teenagers necking and jostling for blanket Page 132
room. The adults scoffed at them, and it was difficult to judge whether they were scoffing at the necking or at the loud music streaming from their radios.
To the right, a softball sailed lazily through the air. Two kids—I took them to be brothers—were having a catch. They were close to the same age, but it was clear that one of them had by far the better arm—the blond. He liked to show it off by tossing the ball high in the air. The other boy was pretty good at catching it, too. Sometimes the sun would get in his eyes and the ball would skip off his forearm or chest. It pained him for a moment, and then he was at it again. “Here’s my curve ball,” he shouted before letting off a toss not unlike any of the others I had seen him throw. It was one of a thousand games of catch they had shared, I was sure. The ice cream man still shouted his mating call.
“Ice cream bars. Candy bars. Three dollars. Frozen candy bars. .” Three dollars. What a rip-off. I decided to take a swim. I walked toward the shoreline and removed my shirt and shoes. I delicately, stealthily, removed my gun and wrapped it in the shirt, placing all of the items about ten feet from the water’s edge.
The lake was very refreshing. I felt for a moment that I was in Mother Earth’s womb, ingesting her goodness through some large umbilical cord. I felt the breeze hit the back of my neck, which was now wet. It was scintillating.
From this vantage point, the whole human race didn’t seem so friggin’ bad after all. All of the mind-numbing hours spent waiting in line, taking orders, being pushed through the crosswalk—none of that seemed to matter anymore. I knew I had crossed a plane and that I would soon understand the state of things well beyond my years on Earth.
Even then I was
feeling ideas I had never felt before. And I do mean it like I wrote it. I was feeling ideas. That’s the only way to describe it. All of the ass-clenching we are taught here on Earth fades away, and emotion is the new prom queen. It’s like nothing else you’ve ever experienced. The trick is to learn to harness and control those emotions—to feel your way through Page 133
life like a blind man does a hallway.
An insect landed on my forearm. Rather than swat it away as I would have in the past, I allowed it to roam. I wanted to see what it would do, where it would go. It enjoyed the landscape for a minute or two, and then it lifted its wings and fluttered off into oblivion, leaving my arm unaffected by its presence. There was a real lesson in that, and I found myself admiring that tiny bug more than I ever had any human other than my wife.
Sometimes I wonder at night what it must be like to be normal. You know the type. They are born at seven and a half pounds and don’t need to be delivered through the trap door up top. They just slide right out like buttered shrimp. Some kids even need to have bones broken to get their shoulders through. It’s true.
Especially before the C-section went and got so popular.
What a way to enter the world. “Sorry, kid, you’re too big.” Crack!
Normal people have a talent like baseball or painting. They go to the Prom with someone! They play lacrosse in college. Normal people get jobs in normal fields and have two children, all healthy. If God’s feeling pissed, maybe one of them will sport a cowlick. They are respected to the grave and beyond. Normal people eat corn-based cereal.
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