by Matt Ruff
The door wouldn’t open, even after I remembered to unlock it. Something—one of the porch chairs, probably—had been jammed under the knob on the other side.
Behind me, another board creaked: he was coming down the hall. I whirled around and raised the gun, even as his silhouette filled the kitchen doorway.
The NC gun doesn’t make any noise when you fire it. I didn’t realize that at the time, though, because just as I pulled the trigger, the lightning came again, striking so close behind the house that there was no pause before the thunder. The kitchen filled up with sound and light, so bright that the janitor himself seemed to glow like a real angel, an angel with a flaming dagger in one hand and a sparkling wire halo in the other. I screamed, and he screamed too, and by the time the brightness failed he was already falling.
In the dark I heard his body hit the floor. I lowered my aim and pulled the trigger again, but this time there was nothing, not even a click.
The rain stopped. The thunder and lightning moved off, and after a while the power came back on. I could see him, then, sprawled on his back in the kitchen doorway, not moving. He was just a man now; his eyes were glassy, and he had a new expression on his face.
He looked surprised.
Now, this next part may be a little hard to believe.
Really.
You know normally, if you shoot an intruder in your house, especially a serial killer, the first thing you do afterwards is call the police.
Right.
Or just run like hell to the neighbors’.
Right.
Right. But I didn’t do either of those things.
What did you do?
I got sleepy. I mean, the guy was dead—I kicked him a couple times to make sure—so it’s not like notifying the cops was urgent anymore. And now that I knew I was safe, I just really felt like lying down for a while. I thought, my aunt and uncle will be home in a few hours, and we can deal with the aftermath then.
So I went upstairs to my room. I barricaded the door with my dresser—just in case—and lay down. I slipped the NC gun under my pillow. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, it was morning. My bedroom door was wide open, and I could hear my aunt making breakfast in the kitchen. I got up and went downstairs, and stood in the empty doorway where the janitor’s body had been.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” my aunt said. “Would you like bacon with your eggs?”
The porch door was open too, and I could see my uncle out back, walking around the remains of a lightning-blasted tree.
“Hold off on the bacon,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I ran upstairs and looked under my pillow.
The gun was gone too, wasn’t it?
Yeah. But there was something else in its place. A coin. A gift from the pistol fairy, maybe.
It was the size of a quarter, but thicker and heavier. It looked like gold. It had the same image on both sides, a hollow pyramid with a glowing eye inside of it, you know, kind of like the capstone from the pyramid on the dollar bill. Running around the rim of the coin was a three-word slogan: OMNES MUNDUM FACIMUS.
My Latin is rusty. Mundum means “world”?
Yeah. I got a Latin dictionary from the school library and worked it out. Omnes is “all of us,” and facimus, that’s “create” or “make,” so omnes mundum facimus is like, “We all make the world.” That’s how it translates; as for what it meant, though, that was trickier. It was a puzzle, see? A sort of aptitude test, like the hidden message in the crossword, only much harder, so it took me a lot longer to get it.
How much longer?
Twenty-two years.
white room (ii)
THE NEXT TIME THE DOCTOR ENTERS the room, he’s carrying a second file folder, thick with evidence.
“Checking up on my story?” she guesses, as he deals the folder’s contents into three neat piles on the table.
He nods. “I don’t like to confront patients, but in prison psychiatry I find that taking an aggressive tack early on can be very useful.”
“For separating the con artists from the genuine head cases?” She looks amused. “So what’s the verdict on me?”
He offers her the first of his evidence piles. “This is a report filed by the Madera County sheriff’s office in October 1979. A man named Martin Whitmer was found dead in his van in a roadside ditch outside Fresno. Whitmer had worked as a janitor at a rural high school, but quit his job after an unidentified student accused him of being the Route 99 Killer.”
“Well there you go. It’s just like I said.”
“Not quite.” He flips to a page near the bottom of the pile. “There’s no mention of a bullet wound in the autopsy. Mr. Whitmer died of a coronary.”
“Yeah, I know. I told you, I shot him with an NC gun.”
The doctor thinks a moment. “NC stands for Natural Causes?”
“Right. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.”
“The gun shoots heart attacks.”
“Myocardial infarctions,” she says, tapping a finger on the cause-of-death line in the autopsy report. “MIs. And the CI setting, that’s for cerebral infarctions. Heart attack and stroke, the two leading killers of bad monkeys…” She smiles. “So what else have you got?”
He pushes forward the second pile, which consists of just two sheets, printouts from a newspaper microfilm reader. It’s a story from the San Francisco Examiner, with the questioning headline ANGEL OF DEATH HANGS UP WINGS?
“‘Sixteen months after the Route 99 serial killer claimed his last victim,’” she reads aloud, “‘state police are beginning to hope that the so-called Angel of Death—whose identity remains a mystery—may have gone into retirement…’ Yeah, see, I told you the cops didn’t believe me about the janitor. So even after he turned up dead, they thought the Angel was still out there.”
The doctor points to a circled paragraph farther down the page. “Keep reading.”
“‘Thirteen-year-old David Konovic, the boy believed to have been the Angel of Death’s eighth and final victim, disappeared from a Bakersfield gas station on December 12th, 1979…’”
“December,” the doctor says. “Two months after Whitmer was found dead.”
“Are you sure the newspaper didn’t screw up the date?”
He slides the last evidence pile across the table. “The sheriff’s report on David Konovic’s abduction. The date matches. And when the boy’s body was recovered, he was found to have been tortured and strangled in the same manner as all the other Angel of Death victims. So what does that tell us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Jane.”
“You want me to say that Whitmer couldn’t have been the Angel of Death, is that it?”
“Doesn’t that seem like a reasonable conclusion?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was the Angel of Death.”
“Well if that’s the case, how do you explain this last victim?”
“I don’t.”
“You mean you can’t.”
“It’s a Nod problem,” she says.
“An odd problem?”
“A Nod problem. You know, the land of Nod, east of Eden? In the Bible?”
“I know the reference, but…”
“Cain kills his brother Abel,” she says, “and God sets him wandering in the wilderness as a punishment. Cain ends up in Nod, where he settles and gets married. Which is a problem, logically, because Adam and Eve are supposed to be the first people on earth, and as far as we know, Cain and Abel are their only children. So where did this wife come from?
“Now, people who don’t believe in the Bible tend to think the Nod problem is a big deal. Like for example, there was this guy my mother dated one time for a couple months, Roger, who was this totally rabid atheist, and he used to pick on Phil—”
“Your brother was religious?” the doctor asks.
“In a little-boy kind of way. My mother was
raised Lutheran, and even though she didn’t really believe, she took us to church because she thought it would be good for us. I stopped going as soon as I was old enough to say no, but Phil really got into it. Said his prayers every day, the whole bit. So along comes Roger, and he’s constantly razzing Phil about inconsistencies in Scripture. ‘Hey Phil, it says here in the Gospels that Judas hanged himself because he was sorry for betraying Christ. But it says in Acts that Judas wasn’t sorry, and he died when his stomach exploded. How come there are two different versions of the story?’ Or, ‘Hey Phil, if all the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, how did Matthew know what Jesus said in his prayer?’ The Nod problem, though, that was his favorite: ‘Hey Phil, it says that God put a mark on Cain to warn other people not to harm him. What other people, Phil? His parents? The same ones who didn’t listen when God told them not to eat the fruit?’”
“And how did Phil respond?”
“Well like I said before, Phil was a big-time nitpicker himself, so at first he kind of got into it. He tried to play along, only Roger wasn’t playing. Roger would shoot down every explanation Phil came up with, until finally Phil had to admit he didn’t have an answer, and then Roger would say, ‘So does that mean you’re going to give up this Bible nonsense?’ and Phil would say, ‘No,’ and Roger would say, ‘That’s because religion makes people stupid.’”
“What did you think of that?”
“Oh, I definitely think religion makes people stupid,” she says. “But Roger was still a hypocrite.”
“Why a hypocrite?”
“Because the Nod problem didn’t have anything to do with him being an atheist. If the Bible had been perfectly consistent, he still wouldn’t have believed a word of it. His mind was made up, and pointing out contradictions was just a way of being smug—and meanwhile, he completely missed where Phil was coming from.
“Phil did believe in the Bible. Part of believing that the Bible is true is believing that any problems in the text have solutions. Actually knowing what those solutions are isn’t important. It’s like, just because I can’t tell you what killed the dinosaurs doesn’t mean they aren’t extinct. And so to Phil, looking at it from that perspective, it was Roger who was being unreasonable. So Phil didn’t know where Cain’s wife came from. So what?
“And it’s the same with this.” She waves a hand at the papers in front of her. “Don’t pretend this is some kind of objective inquiry for you. You’ve already decided what you believe. All you’re doing now is looking for a club to beat me with until I agree to see things your way.”
“Jane…”
“But that’s not going to happen. I know my story is true. If something about it doesn’t add up for you, we can discuss it, but don’t try to blow a little discrepancy out of proportion. It’s just a Nod problem.”
“Well, you’re putting me in a difficult position,” the doctor says. “If I can’t question inconsistencies in your account—”
“You can question them. I just said we can discuss it.”
“But you’re unwilling to entertain any real doubt.”
“Which makes us even,” she says. “Just like Phil and Roger.”
The doctor frowns.
“Sorry to spoil your game plan. Does this mean you don’t want to hear any more?”
“No, I still want to hear the whole story.”
“Good. Because it would make you a liar if you didn’t. I mean, you’re already a liar for saying you’d keep an open mind, but if you bailed on me now you’d be a double liar.”
“Well I wouldn’t want to be that,” says the doctor. “So after you killed the Angel of Death, what happened next?”
We All Make the World
I GREW UP.
I lived in Siesta Corta until I turned eighteen. It wasn’t supposed to be for that long, but my mother refused to take me back, and not even my aunt and uncle could come up with a way to make her.
Were you upset about not going home?
No. Before the incident with the janitor, I would have been, but after…My perspective on pretty much everything was different.
I can understand that.
I’m not sure you can. I mean yeah, I’d been through a life-and-death experience, I’d killed someone, but in hindsight, it wasn’t the shooting that most affected me. It was hearing that voice say my name on the phone. It’s like, imagine if God called you up one day, not to give you a message but just to let you know He existed. Imagine how you’d feel right after you hung up.
You thought the voice on the phone was God?
No! But it was like that: like I’d been in contact with something big and mysterious, and the fact that it was out there made the whole world more interesting.
So it was like a conversion experience.
I suppose. Only not bullshit—it really happened, and I had the coin to prove it. And that was another thing: the fact that they’d left me even that tiny bit of evidence told me it wasn’t over. I’d be hearing from them again.
You saw that as something positive.
Sure. Why not?
I think many people, having been through the experience you describe, wouldn’t be eager to repeat it.
Well yeah, but those people wouldn’t have even gotten the first phone call. Not everyone is cut out for Bad Monkeys, and that’s OK. But for me, once the initial shock wore off, of course I wanted to go again. I mean, Nancy Drew with a fucking lightning gun, what’s not to love?
So with that to look forward to, living in Siesta Corta wasn’t such a drag anymore. You can wait for a bright future pretty much anywhere, right? And while I was waiting, just in case it mattered, I cleaned up my act. I never became a model citizen, but I did cut out most of the bad-seed crap. I gave up trying to outsmart my aunt and uncle, and at school, I actually applied myself—enough so that when I finally graduated, I was able to get a scholarship to Berkeley.
So you ultimately did go back to San Francisco.
Yeah. I almost didn’t, I mean I thought about not taking the scholarship, but Phil convinced me I’d be an idiot not to.
You were in contact with your brother?
By then, yeah. The first couple years in Siesta Corta I didn’t hear from him, but on his thirteenth birthday he came out to see me. He stole a page from my old playbook: told Mom he was staying at a friend’s place for the weekend, then hitchhiked out to the Valley. I came home from working at the store one afternoon and found him playing with the cats on the front porch.
At first I was pissed about the hitchhiking: “Do you have any idea what kind of psychos are out on the road, Phil?” But he just laughed and said I was the pot calling the kettle black, and anyway he was big enough to take care of himself. And the truth is, he was; he’d gone through this major growth spurt, so even though he was barely a teenager, he had the height and weight to make a bad monkey think twice.
It ended up being a good visit. The same time he’d become more like me, I’d become more like him, so we were able to sort of meet each other halfway. Turned out we actually liked each other. So from then on we kept in touch, and when he could he came out to see me. He had a knack for showing up when I needed advice, like about the scholarship.
What about your mother? Did you and she ever reconcile?
No. I thought about going to visit her once I was back in S.F. I talked to Phil about it—I figured he’d be all in favor—but he thought it was a lousy idea. “You know you’ll just end up fighting with her, Jane. Why would you want to do that?” So I put it off. When she died in ’87, I still hadn’t seen her.
I’m sorry.
No, Phil was right. There was no love lost there, and no sense pretending, either.
Tell me about Berkeley. What was your major?
Christ, that question…Which one do you want to hear about first? I had like five.
You had trouble deciding?
I didn’t think I needed to decide. Look, there are basically two reasons people go to college. Some peo
ple actually go there to learn something, something specific I mean, a trade or a vocation. Other people—like me—just go for the experience. I was like one of those starving-artist types, people who convince themselves back in grade school that they have a destiny to become actors or musicians or writers. For them, college is a place to mark time until their destiny kicks in.
And you believed that you had a destiny…to become Nancy Drew with a lightning gun?
See, when you say it that way it sounds crazy. It was never that explicit. I didn’t even know what the organization was at that point, so it’s not like I ever thought to myself, “One day I’m going to join the fight against evil, and here’s how.” It was a lot more subtle than that, just this general sense that I was covered—I didn’t need to make a plan for my life, because the plan already existed, and eventually it would come clear to me.
But the wait got long. When I left Berkeley after five years, my destiny still hadn’t kicked in yet, and suddenly it didn’t seem so smart that I hadn’t studied anything useful. To survive, I ended up doing what the starving artists did, taking jobs that even a high-school dropout could get: waitress, pizza-delivery girl, liquor-store clerk…Name an occupation with no entry qualifications and no future, and I probably tried it at least once.
So I was poor, and living in one shitty apartment after another, but I was young, and having fun—too much fun, sometimes—and I still felt like I was covered. And then one day I turned around and I was thirty years old. And like I say, my destiny, I never thought about it that explicitly, but on milestone birthdays, you do think about things, and the day I turned thirty it occurred to me that it had been a really long time since I’d seen the coin. I decided I needed to see it, to hold it in my hand and remind myself, you know, omnes mundum facimus, we all make the world, whatever the hell that meant.
But I couldn’t find it. I trashed my apartment looking for it. And it was no surprise—I’d moved so many times, it was a wonder I hadn’t lost more stuff—but I was still very upset. So I went out and got really fucked up, and to make a long story short, my birthday ended with cops and an ambulance ride.