“Really?”
“Really. I told him I didn’t want to arm wrestle and that we should talk about the job. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He said he doesn’t respect a man without the gumption to arm wrestle him and that he’d never hire a man he doesn’t respect.”
“So what did you do?”
“I arm wrestled him.”
“Right there in the meeting room?”
Mason nodded. “Yep.”
“Did you win?”
“No,” Mason’s voice changed. “That old guy’s really strong. He beat me in three seconds flat. When it was over I asked him if I got the job and he said no. He said he might have given it to me if I’d had the guts to challenge him to arm wrestle and not the other way around.”
Roland looked at the office; his eyes drifted down the hallway where the interviewer had gone to the washroom.
“What should I do?”
Mason glanced back at the office door. “If it were me, if I had to do it all over again,” he said, “I would walk right in there and challenge him before he even had the chance to challenge me. That would show him you have balls of steel. He would hire you for sure if you did that.”
Roland churned his jaw and squinted a little.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“It’s up to you.” Mason walked toward the exit. “I already know I’m not getting the job. If I were you, I’d do everything in my power to show this guy you mean business.” Mason left the interview area. The room was quiet for a few seconds before the interviewer returned from the washroom.
Roland immediately started sizing up the man’s forearms.
“Let’s get this over with, shall we?” the man said.
From the moment they entered the office and sat down around a small table, this man’s demeanor told Roland he had absolutely no chance of getting the job. Roland swore he could see the man’s eyes turn upwards and to the left — a classic characteristic of deceit. He also noticed the man’s arms were limp and that he only looked Roland in the mouth and jaw, not in the eyes. This man was completely disinterested and had no intention of hiring him. Roland felt a twinge of panic in his chest. When the man spoke, all of Roland’s fears were realized.
“So, tell me about yourself,” he said.
This was an unqualified catastrophe. The man drawled out the word So as if he didn’t even want to start the conversation, as though he was thinking inane thoughts about breakfast and bacon and pancakes. The way he enunciated the word me was even worse. He broke sharp at the M and spent very little time on the E — the hallmark indication of apathy toward a self-referencing pronoun. This was bad. Very bad. The interview was barely eight seconds old and already it was an out-of-control locomotive steaming off the tracks. Roland had to do something to right its course.
The thought popped into his head: What would Regis do?
He placed his elbow firmly on the table and lifted his hand up in a 45-degree angle. “Let’s arm wrestle,” Roland said. “You and me. We’ll see which one of us is the real man here.”
Silence.
The interviewer’s eyes grew wide. His expression morphed from ambivalence to confusion and then outrage, all in the course of a few seconds. Meanwhile, Roland’s arm hovered precariously in the air. The interviewer took off his glasses and locked eyes with Roland.
“Boy — what in hell do you think you’re doing?”
Roland’s arm deflated to the table.
“But . . . but I saw you flexing your bicep. Mason reached out and touched it.”
The interviewer leaned forward. He seemed to be growing angrier with each passing second. “That young man and I work out at the same gym,” he said.
Despite pleading with the man and practically begging for a second chance, Roland was ushered out the door and into the street. He mumbled to himself and replayed the embarrassing incident in his head. Could anything have been more humiliating? More demoralizing? Mason was going to get the big promotion and travel around the world while Roland was destined to live out his days in his dreary gray cubicle. And he wouldn’t just have to share it with Mason, who for all his ill wit and bad haircut was a diabolical trickster, but most likely with someone even more crafty and cunning. Roland groaned out loud and headed back to the office.
At the time, he could have never known that the very next day, his fortunes would change.
four
Bonnie, the woman Henrik bumped into at the lottery booth, left the marketplace and entered the apartment building three doors down from the market: a home she shared with her husband Clyde. Ten years ago when they met, Bonnie and Clyde were immediately taken with one another when they realized their names matched those of the famous movie couple. They based their entire relationship on this interesting, if somewhat irrelevant, coincidence. To Bonnie, it wasn’t just coincidence but rather a twist of fate. She fell in love with Clyde because the moon and the stars above told her to fall in love with him. Over the past decade, she’d gradually become disillusioned with Clyde’s rampant gambling and his womanizing ways. Moreover, he had an outright disrespect for her job. Bonnie’s job was of the utmost importance to her. Her parents and friends supported her. She couldn’t understand why her husband didn’t support her.
From their wedding day, Bonnie’s love for Clyde deteriorated. Very quickly, she started to dislike him. This dislike developed rapidly into severe loathing. Twelve months ago, Bonnie phoned her parents up in tears. She wanted a divorce and she wanted them to pay for it. She couldn’t live with this man anymore. Not for another day. Bonnie was shocked when her father not only refused to pony up the cash, he insisted no daughter of his would be getting a divorce. “Not within my lifetime,” her father said. “We might forgive your lifestyle and accept some of the choices you’ve made, but you made a commitment to that young man and we expect you to live up to your obligations.” Bonnie pleaded with him, cried for hours, and when that didn’t work she appealed to his logical nature. Bonnie’s father wouldn’t budge. The right and left sides of his brain were in equal parts resolved. Bonnie couldn’t litigate her way out of this in a courtroom filled with attorneys and statutes and men in suits.
So, for close to a year, Bonnie had been trying to kill her husband. She would place arsenic in his soup and even left a tuberculosis-infected needle she snagged from the hospital under his pillow. Despite her best efforts, Bonnie’s attempts always fell short of their mark. True, Clyde had gotten sick a few times. And there was a promising three-week stay in the hospital a few months ago. That showed some real potential. But as time went by, she started to believe that Clyde was entirely indestructible. She couldn’t kill him no matter how hard she tried and his resilience brought her to a state of misery and despair. Lately, she’d suspected Clyde knew she was attempting to kill him and had been using his wiles to avoid being murdered.
Clyde, for his part, was completely oblivious to the fact that Bonnie was trying to kill him. He’d been far too busy trying to kill her to notice. Clyde wanted his wife dead for an entirely different set of reasons. Over time, the years had faded on Bonnie. Her beauty, incalculable in her youth, had curdled like warm milk left in the afternoon sun. Though she had once been glamorous and alluring, her constant cigarette smoking ravaged her body, left her with a persistent incurable cough and cast a lifeless sheen over her now leathery skin. Bonnie had changed in spirit as well. Clyde would think back to when he met her; the words he used to describe her on their wedding day were beautiful, sweet and joyful. With each passing year, Clyde replaced each of those with a new adjective — unpleasant, callous and mean. Whereas once she smelled like cotton candy outside on a spring day, her liver had started to turn and the harsh, yellow-scented perfume she used to cover up the overpowering aroma of old smoke forced a gagging sensation to swell up to the base of his throat every time Clyde sat next to her.
For a brief while, Clyde had also thought about dissolving the marriage. He even approached a few attorneys
last year to discuss fees. But the cost of a long, drawn-out divorce would be catastrophic, considering his low salary, and in the end he could never let it happen. No matter what she’d become, Bonnie was his wife and no one else’s. Clyde could never let another man have her fully and completely. But he couldn’t live with her either. Late at night after his wife had erupted into a vodka-induced snore, Clyde would roll off the bed and sit on the floor, crying and wishing for a peaceful end. He had to kill her. If he didn’t, he would kill himself.
So far Clyde had made three unsuccessful attempts at ending Bonnie’s life.
Attempt One: At her cousin’s bungalow, Clyde dropped a heavy cinderblock on Bonnie’s head from the rooftop fifteen feet above. He’d spent weeks planning the specifics of the attack. Nothing was left to chance. The width and length of the block, the distance to the ground, the relative trajectory of the object. Wind resistance. Clyde had thought of it all. The attack would be as systematic as he was methodical in planning it. The only problem was that Clyde never expected the block to be so damn hard to move. It must have weighed 130 pounds and for the life of him Clyde couldn’t imagine how Bonnie’s cousin got it up on the roof in the first place. As Bonnie approached, he tested the wind with his finger and then tried to push the block off with his boot. It wouldn’t budge. He started kicking it now. Bits of cinder dust scattered in the wind. Finally he knelt down on one knee just as he’d done for his bride years before and shoved the stone slab over the edge. Alas, the cinder block barely grazed her temple and Bonnie spent only three days in the hospital and required no more than a dozen trips to rehab.
Attempt Two: Following a rehab session, as Clyde assisted Bonnie in through the back door of their building, he pointed out a large ceramic unicorn sitting in the far corner of an open garbage Dumpster. Bonnie, who had an infatuation with tawdry velvet murals and ornate keepsakes, immediately got excited and vowed to return later that evening to fish it out of the debris. When she came back a few hours later, Bonnie climbed into the garbage bin only to discover someone had rigged a string around the unicorn’s leg. The moment she pulled on the unicorn, the garbage bin lid slammed shut and trapped poor Bonnie inside. Clyde, the mastermind who planted the mythical creature in the bin, had intended to starve or suffocate Bonnie to death. Only his plan proved ill-conceived — there was not only a wide crack in which his wife could suck in air, but the Dumpster was used by a local restaurant, giving Bonnie piles of edible garbage on which she could feast for weeks on end. Much to Clyde’s chagrin, less than an hour elapsed before a maintenance worker heard her screams and released her. The ceramic unicorn now stood as an umbrella holder in their front hall.
Attempt Three: Bonnie was severely allergic to peanuts. At dinner with Bonnie’s parents one night, under the pretense of being silly, Clyde tossed a peanut into Bonnie’s open mouth. His aim was true and good fortune was on his side as the felonious nut ricocheted off her tongue and bounced straight to the back of her throat, where it lodged squarely in her esophagus. She gasped and gagged as Clyde pretended to try to save her. It was all going incredibly well until an insolent young man ran out from the kitchen and pulled the peanut from Bonnie’s throat using a pair of salad tongs.
Bonnie, for her part, had yet to notice Clyde was trying to murder her; she’d been too busy trying to kill him to notice. And this is how the two of them had lived for several months, with homicidal intent in their souls but without the cleverness or proficiency to pull off their respective crimes. During this time, neither of them gave any indication that something was wrong. They still kissed one another in the morning and chatted about their days when they returned home from work.
Twenty-four hours after the incident in the marketplace, Bonnie sat down to read her morning newspaper. She checked the lottery numbers and sighed a little when she saw that hers hadn’t been picked. Bonnie’s numbers were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. She chose them based on the assumption that since six numbers are picked randomly, the sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 was equally as possible as the numbers that won this time — 4, 15, 22, 33, 35, 48. Bonnie never realized that there were at least a thousand other jackasses across the country who routinely picked 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and made the same silly assertion. Were she ever to win, the four million dollar jackpot would be split a thousand ways, still winning her a sizable sum of money, but a patently demoralizing amount once she came down from the euphoria of thinking she’d hit the true jackpot.
Bonnie reached inside her purse and pulled out the lottery ticket she’d bought at the market to check it just in case. To her surprise, the numbers on her ticket weren’t in sequence. The cashier had handed her the young man’s ticket by mistake. A smile spread over Bonnie’s face when the first number matched. Then the second number matched as well. Bonnie stared at the ticket in staggering astonishment. Her eyes shuffled back to the newspaper and then the ticket again. All six numbers were the same. This ticket — the one with the numbers the young man had picked — was the winner. Bonnie had just won four million dollars!
From the next room, a set of footsteps sounded. Quickly, Bonnie hid the ticket back in her purse. Her husband Clyde wandered into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Good morning,” she said.
Clyde looked at her out of the corner of his eye but didn’t respond.
“Big day planned?” she said.
Clyde gave her that same look. “I told you the other day, I think I’m giving up caffeine,” he said and poured his coffee into the sink without even taking a sip. It was a good thing. The cup was laced with arsenic.
Clyde noticed the expression on his wife’s face.
“What’s up?”
Bonnie could barely contain her excitement.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
Clyde threw his jacket over his shoulder and kissed his wife goodbye. Bonnie kissed him back. She even opened her mouth a little more than usual.
“I’ll see you tonight.”
“I’ll miss you,” she said.
Clyde left the apartment and Bonnie pulled out the ticket again. She checked the numbers one more time. The euphoria burned in her chest. With one final glance, she tucked the ticket back in her purse and thought about Clyde. There was no way she was going to share the money with him. Maybe if he respected her job a little more, if he’d shown the occasional burst of encouragement or congratulated her on her promotion, she might be inclined to give him half. But no. He was an irrefutable fiend and he had to die.
Bonnie would have to double her efforts.
five
Henrik Nordmark had spent the past twenty-four hours experiencing a rollercoaster ride of emotions. He set out to redefine himself — or rather to define himself in the first place. For hours on end, he tried everything he could think of and when he felt himself about to give up, he remembered Ronnie James Dio’s prophetic words at a 1981 Black Sabbath concert (which Henrik had accidentally stumbled upon while in search of a flea market) — “If you want to be successful, you have to be unique.” If Ronnie James Dio said it, it had to be true.
Henrik started by stripping off all his clothes and standing in front of a full-length mirror. He held his gratuitous pot belly in his hands and gave it a good shake. Perhaps, he decided, physical fitness could be his unique characteristic. Henrik had once seen a bodybuilding competition at a local fairground in which the gargantuan men on stage all had rippling, pulsating muscles. The men would flex their giant biceps and the crowd erupted in applause. They squeezed their toight buttocks and heard a chorus of lamentations from the women. Some of their muscles, like those triangle-shaped ones on their backs, Henrik wasn’t even sure he had. Nevertheless, he was undaunted. The regular man could become physically fit. And it didn’t even have to take that long. The Jamaican woman who worked the security night shift had recently lost thirty pounds on a program called Body For Life, which promised to give you the body you’ve alw
ays dreamed of in three months or less. Henrik even overheard her telling one of her friends how great she felt. He decided that he would feel great as well. Henrik fell to the floor, stark naked, and set about doing sit-ups. He accomplished three partial crunches before his back began to ache and he felt a dull pain in his abdomen. Henrik didn’t understand. He was supposed to feel great. He most certainly did not.
After a strenuous attempt at a fourth sit-up, Henrik gave up on exercise. He decided there must be other ways to manipulate his appearance and make himself more noticeable. Henrik hastily put on his clothes and headed over to a nearby secondhand clothing store, where he purchased the most garish items he could find on the rack. Back home, he pulled on a pair of super-tight velvet bellbottom pants. Henrik laced them up underneath his belly and then wrapped a skull-printed headband around his forehead and pulled a fluorescent yellow, half cropped Menudo-era T-shirt over his chest. Henrik stood in front of the mirror. He looked like an insane person.
Perhaps some music will help, Henrik thought. He walked over to his cassette deck and pressed play. The only cassette he owned was the Flashdance soundtrack. A woman at a yard sale had thrown in the cassette as a sympathetic bonus when Henrik purchased her old, non-functioning Ikea lamp. Henrik pressed play and the first few synthesizer sounds of “What a Feeling” emitted from the stereo’s fuzzy speakers. Henrik did interpretive dance moves to the slow portion before shaking his arms wildly and breaking out into full maniacal movement.
Henrik stopped himself before the song finished. He looked like an idiot. The point was to be unique and distinct, not downright ridiculous. He stripped off his clothes and tossed them in the trash and then flopped in front of the television.
His old black and white television received only three channels: the weather network, a religious station and NBC. On NBC tonight there was a Dateline special — To Catch a Predator. For an hour, Henrik watched as countless men were busted for soliciting sex from minors over the internet. He found this show to be infinitely fascinating. Each felon followed the same script. They would spend days, sometimes weeks, flirting with a teenage girl in an internet chat room before finally arranging a live, in-person meeting in which they were supposed to have sex. Only what they didn’t know was that the teenage girl they were flirting with was actually a middle-aged police officer named Frank who had a moustache, a gut three times the size of Henrik’s and, from the look of him, most likely some sort of foul stench emanating from his armpits. The predators would show up at a designated house expecting underage sex but instead they were accosted by Chris Hansen, a courageous reporter with a full head of excellent hair and rampant moral superiority. For some strange reason, when confronted by the handsome Chris Hansen, each and every one of the predators admitted exactly why they had come to the house, then once they found out they were going to be on national television, they cried, begged for forgiveness and left the house, appearing somewhat surprised when there were police officers standing outside to arrest them. To be fair, some of the predators didn’t cry. But they all looked like they were about to cry and in Henrik’s mind, that was as good as crying.
The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel Page 3