My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart

by Martin Rose

  There was a flush to Lafferty’s cheeks.

  You don’t want to be here, my Id suggested. You’ve seen that smile on her face before.

  She made a face, cinched her mouth and her nose into a button of amusement, to hand the vapor cigarette back to Lafferty, and when she did and he reached to take it from her, she did not let go, and instead they were frozen there, linked hand to hand.

  “You should have told me sooner,” she said. She leaned in, touched his arm. I struggled to remain where I was and watch this final indignity play out, but whose fault was it but my own?

  We have other matters to attend to, my Id whispered and now it seemed so much closer, that voice of my shadow self, of my deepest repressions and all my hungry desires unfulfilled.

  Without the baggage of my physical body, it was easy to fall back at my Id’s suggestion, as though I could feel the press of his rotten hand pulling me away from the fluorescent lighting. I closed my eyes to collapse into the ether, traveling through a whirlwind at the speed of light to see where I would come out on the other side.

  *

  I had no reason to feel betrayed. Yet, the recesses of the heart plumb deep. We cannot always predict what we find there. Mine seemed brand new with ever deepening complications, matters of conscience and feeling. My Id knew what was best for me and folded away that chamber of my heart as one might a book. Put it back on the shelf. Let it fade, let it dim. Think no longer on Niko and Lafferty, that man taking the place you once owned in her life.

  Focus on the real. The case. The facts. Logic. Bury your heart, lest it bury you.

  Before I had a sense of the direction I wanted to go in, the center of my chest expanded like a twister, lifting me up and depositing me; to think it, and then be there, as Lionel had said.

  But my internal compass was muddied and uncertain; I did not know my destination, only my goal. Did Highsmith really believe he killed those people? He seemed certain of it. Was he covering for someone? Had he been coerced to lie? Had there been an agreement between he and Jamie? The questions and motives compounded.

  A clue, a direction, anything, I prayed into the darkness inside myself. Highsmith.

  I spun away into void and darkness until I opened my eyes on the other side.

  *

  I was standing in the Highsmith living room.

  The contrast to my brother’s house was stark. Both were McMansions worthy of the high-powered hedge fund set, with an eye quirked to the day they would sell their house to someone else at a profit in a neighborhood with good schools and low crime. But their good taste ended there. Polly Highsmith’s house stood cold and empty, all of her belongings neatly in place. Everything clean and considered, every object appointed as though by museum curate.

  Polly read a hardcover book with the dust jacket missing. A thumbprint in blue on one side as though this were a volume she returned to over and over again. An empty bottle of Stolichnaya on the table. Her figure small and demure on the oceanic couch. Everything matched in neutrals and beige hues. A world without blemish or color, as though a vampire had sucked the walls and the curtains dry of color.

  If she suffered, she kept it concealed behind her melancholy expression, her somber eyes. Each turn of the page in her small-fingered hand made a whisper until a ring tone broke the silence. Her cell phone, a simple and uncomplicated older model. She set the book down to pick it up with a sigh.

  “Yes?”

  I glided through her living room. A large television on the wall. A stack of past due bills on a shelf. Some had stamps like URGENT across them and I craned my neck to peer at the one beneath, whose letter jutted free of the stack. In a salad of words, I read FORECLOSURE.

  I thought about my sad and forlorn ranch. This mansion house made it look like a shack, and I did not feel so poorly about the unpaid telephone bill and the property taxes. What could she do to keep this house? I suspected very little. Who knows how much money they owed in court cases.

  “I’ll accept the charges.”

  I swung around. If you call from prison and you don’t have money on hand for a phone card, you charge it to the person you’re calling. A blink later and I was beside her, leaning down to match my ear to hers, listening.

  “He visited you? No, I haven’t seen them.”

  The lilt of Blake Highsmith’s voice hummed on the line. A dull roar, fading out to a whining I could not decipher.

  “Stop it,” she whispered and rubbed her forehead. “Stop it, there’s nothing we can do!”

  Blake’s voice again, and her shoulders began to shake.

  “Don’t go to sleep. He can’t find you if you stay awake, you know that.”

  A pause.

  “You shouldn’t have called,” she said. “They’re waiting to see what move you’ll make next.”

  A longer silence followed. Tears ran off her lashes, glanced down her cheeks and soaked the expensive upholstery.

  “I love you,” she whispered into the phone and closed her eyes. “I know. I love you, too. You’re safer where you are. I’ll come see you as soon as I can.”

  She pushed the button and ended the call, set the phone beside her on the couch and stared into the distance. Her lips thinned. I stared at her as though I could divine her thoughts through her eyes. Know her from the language of her face. The curl of her hair by her temple, glossy and brushed out, and her clothes simple and drab as the day I met her.

  “What will they do to you?” I whispered. “What are you afraid of, that you think prison is safer?”

  In my head, Lionel’s voice insinuated its way into my mind: It gives me no pleasure to bring these rogue criminals to heel.

  If our killer was this rogue criminal, what did that make me, exactly?

  The walls around us began to collapse and fade. Polly’s figure becoming diaphanous and intangible, everything bleeding into gray. Like a Polaroid photo, gaining coherency until Polly’s palatial and chilly home disassembled. I stood in the county prison, the institution I had been held at under McSneer’s belligerent watch, the institution also known as the main residence of Blake Highsmith.

  I turned from the cinder block wall and recognized the room itself. Solitary confinement. A single mattress pad covering a hard bench, a tankless toilet in the corner. Endless cracks and fissures in the mortar with which to pass your miserable and unfortunate time.

  Blake Highsmith sat on the edge of the mattress with his head in his hands. He tapped his bare foot against the floor and hummed, toneless and without tune. Without our usual setting, the stainless table bolted into the floor and his wrists and ankles in chains, he appeared smaller. Vulnerable. A man stripped of any reason to act the part of a vain and contemptuous serial killer.

  He looked human. A human being with a heart, a husband to Polly. A man trying to survive and navigate dire circumstances. A surge of compassion swept through me and I was stunned by the impact. Only six months ago, I would have felt nothing, sneered and stepped over him on my way to my goal. But the rules of the game had changed. The eddies here ran swift and deep; and it was not enough to be heartless anymore.

  I approached the man. He could not see or hear me, but I crouched down across from him to my knees, so we could be eye to eye. I stared at him and studied his features, the deep set of his eyes in purpled skin, and he slapped himself. The sound echoed and resounded and red-eyed, he swayed and stilled. His breathing deepened.

  He was trying to keep himself awake.

  “What is it?” I whispered. But I was lost in some unknowable realm without sound now; he could not hear me.

  He struggled with himself, opening his eyes wide, yawning and pinching himself. He did it too hard and wiped blood away on his sleeve with a sigh, reclining back. Surrendering. Tears welled up under his closed eyes as they began to move and jitter beneath the folds of his eyelids, calculating movements like marbles beneath a chamois, and then, they circled and stopped dead center.

  At me.

  “Blake?�
� I whispered.

  He screamed, leaping to his feet to stand atop his flimsy mattress and stare in the place I crouched, one hand on the wall, the other splayed and held up before me, in a universal gesture of calm.

  “You have to leave!” he cried. “You can’t be here when the Inspector comes, do you understand? He can’t find you here with me. Get out of here, now. You find my Polly and you protect her, dammit—”

  “Can you hear me? Blake, tell me—”

  “Do not wait for the Inspector,” Blake hissed, his eyes rolling in his head to their whites. Blind, he reached forward, planted his hand in my chest, and sent me flying back into the ether. “Get out of here, Vitus! It’s not too late for you!”

  *

  The feeling then was akin to being lost in some unknown and inexhaustible, roiling ocean. Stuttering through space like a comet through frozen void; a penny caroming off the edge of a well and into vast deeps. Blake disappeared from my consciousness, something to puzzle over later when the dust settled. I twisted and turned in blackness to find my bearings.

  Without meaning to, my meandering thought must have tapped into an invisible, supernatural river, lost and swirling within, because I was carried off by the current to stand, swaying, in a new environment.

  The winds shifted directions, swept salty and hot off a fermenting ocean. The swelling air, the shifting pressure, and how the leaves of the trees flipped to bare their undersides, hinted at a coming storm.

  What had brought me here to this grove of shadows? The street beyond trapped the sounds of traffic and tourists on vacation. The chain link fence and the barking dog all struck me as familiar. I stood in this dark and derelict corner of property and looked up to identify squares of light coming from the house before me.

  I know this place. Lamplight and shadow undulated and rippled through strengthening moonlight beside me. A form appeared like swirls and eddies in a deep river.

  Elvedina.

  She stared at the house. Everything about her, frozen, her stillness unearthly. I studied her as though I could figure out the mechanics that dictated her intentions and intelligence. Understand if her violence was programmed or original. If she was designed for killing or for something more. Was she sentient? Did she comprehend what a special monster she was?

  Had I, when I had been one?

  Elvedina took a step forward out of the safety of the grove. The barking dog in the distance fell silent and I surveyed the backyard until my gaze returned to the house. Yellow lit windows. I was looking through a bedroom. In that bedroom, a tottering older man rose up from a narrow, hard-backed chair. His mouth open in a dry and chapped circle of lips. White hair like the fuzzy end of a Q-tip. His wiry and many-knuckled hands gripping his cane in a worrisome tic he could not control.

  That’s Lionel, I realized.

  I jolted upright. Elvedina’s long shadow angled up the incline, tracking her way doggedly to the square of light, which was my house, my window, my bedroom, my sleeping form on the bed with the silver cord spiraling from my head.

  As she went, Elvedina withdrew a gun from her side holster and a silencer from her pocket.

  *

  Any illusion of self-control broke. I became taffy gripped from both ends, stretching and disappearing into the throat of a black hole. My hold on the present space interrupted and I could not fix myself beside Elvedina. The world blinked out like a television kill switch. I burst from the other end of the void into the hot confines of the bedroom.

  I deciphered my shape, tinged blue with moonlight and breathing shallow, as though I were drinking and drowning in the air. My eyes half-lidded and seeing nothing, the glazed irises focused on a distant point in the ceiling. Looking at myself sent a tide of disorientation washing over me as though I could disperse and disappear at the barest suggestion, and I looked away. Stitches worming through my center, a topographic map of bruises and ribs.

  My other self faced Lionel. The silver line bound me to my physical self like a kinked water hose, swinging in a brand new direction as I tried to think of anything but the mechanics of this delirious and feverish world I’d entered. Lionel dropped the cane to the floor. Beyond, through the window, Elvedina lingered invisible, leaving her mark with every crushed blade of grass and high topped weed, seed heads dispersing in her path. Could almost hear the machinery moving within her, a toothy lawnmower chewing up every living thing. Relentless. Unstoppable. Eyes glazed in ice. Beyond my vision, I imagined her screwing on the silencing barrel that would muffle the blast.

  Lionel did not see me. He could not hear me. He lurched over to the bed where I slept, my arms flung out and my mouth open to exude sighs and snores. He moved the back of his hand over my face, feeling for my breath.

  Time to return. Elvedina was coming. I had to warn Lionel and brace ourselves for the assault. I ticked off escape paths and routes as I considered how to return. Did I lay down where I was? Or think it?

  With every passing second, our lives hung in the balance. Lionel slid the pillow out from under my head and fluffed it.

  His shaking frame was not shaking any longer. His hands steady when before they tottered and groped and stuttered with the frailty of age. When he moved, latent muscles in his arms flexed with more strength than he had ever revealed.

  He laid the pillow over my sleeping face.

  “Lionel,” I whispered.

  In the many moments at the table, in the prison, back and forth from one room or another, I pictured his slow and agonized gait. Had sympathized with the fragility of age. Wondered if I would assume such a role in a distant future. Deferred to him. Respected him. Handed over a portion of trust, believing we entered into a contract together.

  I stood confronted with a different man. The hunch in his spine disappeared. His eyes, gone from rheumy and jaundiced yellow to livid and atavistic. He planted his hands into the surface of the pillow and pressed his weight down over my face with both.

  He did not tremble now.

  “Lionel!” I cried.

  Lionel did not hear me.

  The world turned upside down.

  *

  I split apart into two places at once.

  One of me stood in the bedroom with my hands at my head, screaming as though to summon wind to swallow Lionel and pluck him up, toss him away to the jet stream. In reality, I was nothing but motes of stardust and air, ineffectual. His white and tonsured hair ruffled and fell still.

  The constricting pull of the silver line snaked me back through an infinite vacuum, through planets and cosmos and bending time as I passed through a layer of infinity and out the other side, back into my own body. My mouth and nose filled with pillow, my lungs burning and my legs kicking. The old man like concrete. The bone in my nose crunched.

  I would die like this. This time, for keeps. No last minute heroes to save me. No feats of science or medicine. No miracles and no prayers. You know how they tell you it was quick, they didn’t feel a thing, they went in their sleep, smothering is pleasant? Bullshit. My chest and lungs ignited with fire, with a thousand megatons of dynamite and dying stars.

  I bucked and thrashed. The weight of my lungs collapsed under an inconceivable suction.

  Dying. My open eyes pressed into the pillow. Everything turned gray. Lights out. First thing that goes in asphyxiation. The brain fades and dies without oxygen. No hand gun. No handy lampshade to pluck off the end table and smash into Lionel’s head. No knife or key or pen, nor anything at all.

  That’s how I die. People do it all the time. It’s ordinary. It’s easy, predictable. Just. Like. That.

  A mental ripcord, jerked from me. I’d become an empty parachute floating on the wind, and I plummeted, plummeted to the bottom until I hit the floor…

  The pillow ripped away.

  I jerked upright, hauling in a ragged and screaming breath. Another scream echoed in harmony with me. Heard the rapturous thunder of the vulture, painting the walls black with the shadows of his massive wings, outstretc
hed and flapping. He held Lionel’s wrist clamped so tightly in his talons, fat drops of blood splatted on the floor like bugs hitting a windshield along an empty stretch of superhighway. Darkness turned the scavenger into a medieval harpy, a gargoyle with his beak open and his eyes a set of crystal balls. Black feathers shook loose and floated in the air. Every bone in my body gone nerveless as I struggled to restore air.

  An inch beside Lionel, a hole punched into the wall the size of a quarter. Followed by another. And another.

  At the window, Elvedina’s face reflected like a mirror. Her jaw jutted out as though the hinge of it were optional, planning to undo it later and swallow us like a snake. Her hand around the gun in a velociraptor claw. The vulture flew into the center of the room, sending each of us moving and falling out of her line of fire. The damn bird had not figured into Elvedina’s calculations and she stared at the screaming mayhem in the bedroom with a blank expression as though all of her algorithms were recalculating and folding in on each other.

  Her eyes met mine through the pane of glass. Her stare sent a trident of lightning through me, grounded through my feet and fathoms deep into the earth. Froze and paralyzed me. Killed the meager breath in my lungs so I was left with nothing but cold and abject fear turning my saliva into ash. Lionel cursing until the vulture relented, flapping down the hall.

  And then she was gone. Fading into the black with her gun at her side.

  PART 4

  CONTRAINDICATIONS

  Astorm came and lashed the coast with jagged spikes of lightning and sent thunder rolling over the pines. I watched it from the police department complex with my back against the concrete. The rain pattered a line beside my boots, leaving the rest of me dry.

  Before I arrived at the station, I’d locked myself in the bathroom. I had broken a pill of Atroxipine apart and ground it down to a powder. Lionel called my name outside, Boy, are you hurt, boy. He cajoled in his gentle, old man’s voice. I had flexed my hand, grinding, grinding as though I were grinding Lionel’s bones.