My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart

by Martin Rose

  “Who are you trying to convince? What’s the real reason for this song and dance? Who’s pulling your strings?”

  “Who’s pulling yours?” Highsmith snarled. His fingers clawed the air inches above the table.

  “All talk. All bluff. You want to keep up with this tired old lie, then let’s see it through. Prove it to me. Kill the old man. Shouldn’t be that hard. His ticker probably doesn’t have that many punches left, does it?”

  “Vitus,” Lionel whispered. His voice pressed the limits of concern and real fear. Lionel flinched and trembled and took up his cane with both hands. In another lifetime, it would have been a rifle, a bayonet; time takes everything from us. He shuffled along the concrete, making his slow and methodical way to the door, as though in fear Highsmith would indeed strike him dead.

  “Go ahead,” I said and gestured to Lionel. “Have at it. Someone with some real fucking skill could probably take care of him in the time it takes to have a power nap. Come on, Highsmith, what’s stopping you?”

  Highsmith swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed. His entire body crooked and tensed and every muscle convulsed upon itself. He closed his eyes. As the minutes passed, his effort to strike Lionel dead with the immense power of his psychic abilities only became more pathetic and sad.

  “That’s what I thought,” I hissed. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  I needed my pills. I tasted their memory in my gathering saliva.

  Nothing could be more clear: Highsmith was a fraud. If he truly possessed the power to commit murder through some psychic channel, he would have done it by now; and when called on the spot to show evidence of his abilities, he could not demonstrate it for the simplest of reasons: because he couldn’t do it, period.

  Highsmith was not our killer.

  This opened up new possibilities and sent my logical train of thought expanding outward to understand how this changed everything and altered the course of the investigation. So we hit a snag, I admitted, but we drum up suspects and go on until we find the one that fits. Except—

  My Id, ever in the background, grinning. You sure it’s all as it appears?

  Inside, I felt the familiar sting of anxiety, the creeping realization that the entire hunt for a killer—this investigation, and all the other monsters I was meant to investigate after this, one by one—served one purpose: keep me busy. Keep me from—

  From what?

  Now, my Id purred, that’s the thing that should keep you up at night.

  *

  We left Highsmith at the prison, but for myself, I carried the prison inside, around me. Different rooms in my own house brought my convict experience crashing back. Like the bathroom, for instance.

  It nested inside the bleached walls and the tiles with moldy grouting. Lafferty’s wheel tracks striped the door jamb, and the mirror was peppered with black spots like coffee stains, rendering my reflection mottled, a texture reminiscent of my pre-deceased past life. A thin and vanishing memory of my nephew stared back. The young man I knew as Amos Owen Adamson arrived in my life on the cusp of his twenties, hale and hearty.

  Now, my burning corruption consumed this new body from the inside out. My failure to care for myself, or care what I do to myself, evident in the pale lines of my hollowing cheeks. Forgetting to eat, skipping meals, drinking more than I should. Puffy and heroin-chic eyes red rimmed, veined. My hair in need of a cut and all the other grooming that comes with cells that regenerate and die on a regular basis.

  Now, in the privacy of the bathroom back at the house, I was about to make it all so much worse.

  Lionel’s cane tapped out his progress across the living room floor, to the kitchen, and then back down the long hall. We’d returned hoping to discover Lafferty waiting for us and arrived at an empty house instead. I’d ducked into the bathroom and sat on the toilet lid with my head in my hands before I finally brought out the pill bottle.

  I held it up to the light. Pills like insects caught in amber. Deep down, I still hoped I would find Niko here. Niko, who seemed to bring with her all the promise of transformation and change. This titillating bravery. What lady would I ever know who wasn’t afraid to touch a corpse or a falling-apart man, if not Niko?

  And finding neither friend nor lover here meant only never. Never Niko, never again.

  I licked the back of my teeth, ran my tongue over and over. I uncapped the bottle. The pills rested cool in my hand.

  It’s different this time, the Id conceded. Before, your addiction was predicated by your condition. Now you’re healthy. There’s no reason to do this to yourself.

  But I could feel the mental processes reducing back to normal speed. The synapses slower than before. Sluggish to make connections. Being on Atroxipine opened up a kaleidoscope of hyper-speed thinking. Sharper. Faster. Atroxipine amplified everything into a dizzy euphoria.

  My hand moved to my mouth before I could stop. Licked the pills out of my palm with a mewl and swallowed.

  “Vitus!” the old man called.

  I stuffed the bottle into my pocket, raked the hair back from my forehead, and attempted to look coordinated, aware. Not a man anticipating a supernova high.

  Satisfied, I left the confines of the bathroom. With each step I grew lighter, my anxiety fading to be replaced by the pleasant hum of my beating heart. Down the hall, Lionel stood in the center of my bedroom.

  Once, this bedroom had been a crime scene. It used to house the king-sized mattress my wife and I had conceived our child on. Later, it would be filled with blood. All gone. Replaced with new things, furnishings Niko had brought and given me to make my transition to human easier, without the crime-scene trappings of my old life.

  And now, Lionel stood in the center of it. His cane in one hand. Covers on the bed pulled back, as though someone were readying to sleep there. The shades and the windows pulled shut. The vulture roosted on the headboard, his beak shoved into a wingful of black and dusty feathers. One rheumy eye peeked above, opening to regard me as though we held a secret congress with each other before closing like the seam of a scab and returning to his slumber.

  “What’s this?” I asked. “We should be heading out to find Lafferty at the funeral home.”

  Lionel turned to face me. Whirls of dust drew patterns in the dimness, fractured his face before he resolved out of it, the same old and tottering man.

  “Indeed, we could do that,” Lionel said and set the cane against the wall. “Or you could go. Just you.”

  He gestured at the bed with the covers pulled back, the vulture sleeping overhead as though this were not a bed at all but a grave, breathing in grave dust.

  “From here, Vitus. Go to see him from here.”

  I laughed, and then saw he was serious.

  “Lay down. Sleep. And leave your body.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “Could you not discover the truth on another plane of existence, in an alternate reality, if you would just give it a chance? Could you, Vitus? Will you?”

  The entire thing still struck me as a fantasy designed for the gullible.

  I could not wring the memories of the past from my mind. In the wasted landscape of my life, many fell to hopes and illusions that had never been real to begin with. Out-of-body experiences. Horoscopes. Alien abductions. Tabloid headlines. Was I to sweep all these penny dreadfuls into a rubric of possibility and chase the tail of conspiracy forever? Where did it end? If I believed in this fiction, would I have to think about all the other mythologies, heaven and hell, God and the devil?

  Lionel remained upright. Lost in these ever-winding thoughts, under the influence of Atroxipine, churning my mind ever faster into every philosophical and occult direction. I culled fragments of evidence out of the air. Lionel approached with his frail gait, touched my arm. With a gentle push, he sent me to the bed.

  I sat heavily and realized I had made my entire interior monologue into a public diatribe—talking aloud. Lionel nodded and laid the back of his hand to my b
listering forehead. He tugged at one side of my shirt and lifted it, and before I could protest, pulled it over my head.

  “What—”

  “It works better with less barrier between you and the flesh,” Lionel said.

  He dropped my shirt to the ground. He planted one rough and age-calloused hand into the center of my chest and pushed me down onto the mattress. Another version of me without Atroxipine would have protested and cursed but I fell back onto the mattress, compliant and acquiescent.

  The picture I’d found in my father’s study resurfaced. The naked man on the cot, and the shadow hovering above him with the silver cord connected like a line of frosting in a layer cake.

  “Listen to my voice, Vitus.”

  Everything in me bubbled up from my prone chest, my fingers spread on the rumpled sheet. Thoughts flitted through my mind, broke coherency to ramp up speed again until all of this became extraneous and silly. Highsmith never killed anyone. Wasn’t that obvious? Case closed. Everyone can go back home.

  “That’s not good enough, Vitus,” Lionel said. I’d spoken aloud again. “We need to know what Jamie did. Maybe Highsmith didn’t kill anyone, that’s well enough. But if not him, who did? We need to know. We need to find this culprit.”

  Atroxipine lit every section of my brain and my body. I could levitate. I didn’t need to leave my body. I was everywhere. Living in every mote and molecule. I needed to either smoke this stuff or mainline it. I wondered if Jamie had ever taken it by himself. The bastard never shared.

  “For what purpose? What’s the point?” I asked.

  “Don’t be trivial, Vitus, this is serious, I need you to concentrate.”

  The euphoria shifted into a lightning crack of rage; the fury summoned up from a thousand steeping memories. I catapulted off the bed, bare feet gripping the floor as if I would be thrown up into space if I didn’t, my hands balled into fists and my spine one rigid exclamation mark.

  “Why do you need to find them? What will you do when you find him, whoever he is? Huh? You get commission on this kind of thing?”

  “No,” Lionel said. But his eyes were wide, his brows marked northward, wrinkles deepening. He licked his lips with one dry tongue, so dry it was gray instead of pink. “No, Vitus, I don’t make commission, and it gives me no pleasure to bring these rogue criminals to heel.”

  “That’s not much of an answer. You bring dogs to heel. Not people. So what does that mean, exactly? You kill them?”

  “No, don’t be silly.”

  “Don’t they go to trial?”

  “That’s even more ridiculous,” Lionel scoffed. “There’s no court in this land in which we can air what Jamie did to the public.”

  “Because it’s criminal. So if you can’t bring them to trial and you don’t kill them, what do you do with them?”

  “Vitus,” Lionel sighed.

  “Answer me! Why are we doing this in the first place? Isn’t this my splendid conscience at work? Your fucking humanitarian mission to ‘humanize’ me? Well, now you have to answer for it. I want to know.”

  Lionel lifted one hand. It pawed the air, shook an invisible maraca—and then I realized he was trying to direct my vision to an object behind me.

  “Look, Vitus. Look.”

  I spun in place and staggered, catching myself with one hand on the edge of the mattress.

  Looking back on the bed, I saw myself—lying there and snoring with my head tilted back and my mouth open. My hands beside me with the fingers lazy and relaxed. The starved rack of ribs fading into my belly and then my hips. I could make out the line where the belt of my pants had dug into the flesh and left a red line of pressure. Above it, the nest of stitches in the single sideways slice where Elvedina opened me up and disemboweled me with the edge of a knife.

  And out from my belly, a long shimmering line surrounded by a hot white corona, glowing with St. Elmo’s fire, twisting through the air and fading into a place I could not see, a place behind the back of my head and into the stem of my brain.

  *

  “Look closer, Vitus, and understand that with a great deal of time to study the mysteries of the universe, one day you too will be an old man. An old man, watching people turn themselves into ghosts.”

  “You can see me?”

  “Not quite. But I can hear you,” and Lionel tapped his temple, his faded eyes examining the room when I realized he was looking through me, at undefinable space beyond where I believed I was standing. “And there are… shimmers. Disturbances in the atmosphere where you are moving. With the right application of skill and medicine, a great panoply of experiences are at your disposal. But that is for masters, not fledglings, such as you are. You can go anywhere. All of the world is your domain now, Vitus. Nothing limits you but your imagination alone. Now, you can ascertain those things so much more difficult for us in life. You want to know if Lafferty found Niko, and if they are safe? You need only close your eyes, and imagine it, and you will be there. Want to know where Highsmith is at this very moment?”

  “That’s it? It’s as easy as that?”

  “Let’s not talk about when it stops being easy,” Lionel said.

  The vulture looked upon us, his head cocked. He stared at my prone and sleeping body and flicked back to me where I stood before Lionel. The bird, puzzled and bored by it. He opted for sleep once more, stuffing his head back into his feathers.

  “Can I be killed?”

  “If another engages with you on this level, yes—but no one knows you are here, doing this, and what are the chances of you running into another? Let’s be reasonable. What happened to your bravado and your devil-may-care, anything-to-get-the-job-done attitude?”

  “If you want to manipulate me, you’ll have to do better than that.”

  Lionel laughed. “The rules of this game are easy, as long as you keep them easy. Don’t over think it. In this space between worlds, you need only think a thing for it to become real.”

  “Aren’t there other things out there? People, like me?”

  “Like I said—don’t over think it. Don’t pay them any mind. Most of them are fathoms away, asleep in their beds. They’re dreamers. They’ll wake tomorrow and all they’ll remember is a fantastical dream in which they were flying, free falling, or riding an ice cream truck. Whatever it is people dream of. Just think of it like this—you’ve been doing this all your life, Vitus. It’s as natural to you as breathing. You’ve just never remembered it before. Now you can. Now, the world is at your feet to be explored and penetrated.”

  Lionel leaned forward with his hand on one knee, eye cocked to me so I could see every white hair forming his lashes, note the scaly pattern of skin pulling across his scalp.

  “Are you really waiting for me to tell you what to do?”

  I drew in one long and shuddering breath and closed my eyes.

  No more than a second, and in that space of darkness, my stomach became hinged on an elastic band and was hurtling through an elevator shaft, down and down with the flow of gravity until I opened them again, and when I did, Lionel was gone.

  The room and the house and all its contents vanished.

  *

  I stood in Pleasant Hills Funeral Home.

  It was as though I’d entered a secret door within myself and it led me here; returned me to the lobby where guests at the funeral home pass on their way to the final service of a loved one. Beside me into the opening hall was the old and ancient armor I’d once stolen and used for my own purposes. It looked to have been restored. Someone had cleaned the blood and gore from it.

  New dings and scratches revealed the fresh gleam of restored metal in the familiar patina. The ominous helmet with its hungry slit. I nodded to it as though he and I were friends of old, and passed on through, refusing to think too hard about the mechanics of walking, if this were real or imagined. If I thought too hard about it, I feared it would fall apart, and the entire world around me would disintegrate and wobble and—No, don’t think about it.
>
  Through a window, the cement lot expanded in shades of blue and gray, dotted with grave stones beyond. Parked up against the building, the shape of Lafferty’s motorcycle, resplendent in flames and chrome. How he had gotten from machine to door was a mystery, but I was beginning to realize there were depths and levels of independence to my friend that I had never thought possible.

  The pungent fungicides. The mentholated air as delicious to me as any perfume. Formaldehyde. All of these were inseparable from Niko as I passed into the mortuary room. I heard her, making sounds as she put down surgical tools, moved jars of fluid like an alchemist. Her voice echoed subdued laughter and the scene appeared in full as I turned the corner and hovered in the threshold.

  A body of an elderly woman arranged on a gurney, covered with a sheet and shrouded, a lock of silver hair escaping. Curiosity compelled me to stand over her and search for signs of a hovering spirit, if such a thing existed, but she remained inanimate and bereft of vitality. On impulse, I reached out to touch her and found my fingers made contact with nothing, slipping through her cheek and into the unseen confines of her skull. I registered a sensation of cotton candy against my fingers but nothing moved—she did not move, unaffected by my presence—and I realized all things I dared to touch felt like this, insubstantial and dissolving under pressure. I could affect nothing while I was set loose here, but that did not allay the desire to grab and hold, to open closed doors or move aside objects in my way. Instead, I must become malleable and work around everything else.

  Niko stood with her back to the deceased elderly woman. Beside her, several feet shorter, Lafferty smiling with his hands loose around the arms of a borrowed wheelchair with the name of Pleasant Hills Funeral Home along the back, his hands reaching down to play along the spokes like a nervous boy and staring up at her with envious eyes. His vapor cigarette in her hands. I made out each fingernail she painted a blue-black to match the color of her hair. She inhaled off the end of it.

  My own vision faltered and stuttered as I realized that was where Lafferty’s mouth had been, where she so elegantly curled her lips and let unfold a cloud of flavored air until she began to choke with laughter. And there was Lafferty, laughing with her.