No. He couldn’t commit to this right now. Henrik shook the man’s hand and left the employment office. He had to start work in less than two hours. Henrik ambled down the street, headed for a bookstore, completely unaware that in less than an hour’s time, he would take his first steps along the journey to becoming utterly unique.
eight
Roland sat down on the bench outside his office building. He reached inside his Battle of the Planets lunch box and pulled out a peanut butter sandwich, a mixed-berry juice box, two cheese sticks and a bag of Doritos. Roland steadfastly refused to eat in the cafeteria where lately the talk had been all about shifting corporate paradigms and Regis Philbin’s ties. Instead, for the past two months when lunchtime came around he would sit on this bench and wait for the girls from the marketing department to walk by. Two of the six women were actually pretty cute and one of them usually wore a tight skirt. Some days Mason would join him but on this morning Roland’s officemate was conspicuously absent from his cubicle. Roland could only imagine Mason had received the promotion. He set about reading yesterday’s newspaper and waiting for the marketing girls to walk by.
As Roland opened his bag of chips, he flipped to the second page to check the winning lottery numbers. His heart lurched up into his throat and for a moment the world stopped moving. The winning numbers — 4, 15, 22, 33, 35, 48 — were the same numbers he’d played every week for years. Roland had just won four million dollars! He screamed out loud. Random passersby on the street gave him a curious look but Roland didn’t care. He screamed again. The cute marketing girls exiting the main doors also gave him a funny look, but Roland couldn’t stop screaming.
In a fit of euphoria, he searched his wallet for the ticket. A moment of panic almost overtook him when he couldn’t immediately find it. Then Roland remembered he’d tucked the ticket into the back pocket of his jeans the other day. He ran straight home.
Roland’s apartment was located on the ninth floor in the building directly above the marketplace where he’d purchased the ticket. He entered his bedroom and headed straight for the closet where he pulled out the pair of jeans. Delicately, with the tips of his fingers, he tugged on the piece of paper in the back right pocket. A quarter inch of paper jutted out. There it was: the blue and yellow lotto emblem at the top of the ticket. He pushed it back in and rolled his jeans into a ball. As fast as his legs could carry him, Roland ran to the bank where he placed the jeans in a safety deposit box. He never even bothered to pull out his ticket and take a look. Somewhere deep down, an irrational fear sprouted that were he to remove it from the pocket of his jeans, he might somehow lose it down a drainpipe or the oil from his skin might cause the numbers to run, thereby invalidating the ticket and stripping him of his winnings. Roland glanced at his watch. There was no reason to return to work today. He left the ticket and the jeans in the safety deposit box and planned to return for them tomorrow.
Roland headed off joyfully down the street, already planning the details of his new life. Things were going to change. Big things were going to happen for him.
But first, all of those corporate bastards at his work would have to pay.
nine
Bonnie’s plan came to her as a sudden revelation, a bolt of lightning that finally struck after years of rumbling thunder. A week ago a sign posted in the lobby of her building informed the residents that the elevator would be out of order for two full days. Bonnie immediately pictured Clyde — that bastard, that fiend — running in a full sprint toward the open elevator doors only to find a bottomless pit in its place. Clyde would careen down the elevator shaft while Bonnie stood safe and victorious at the top, dragging on a cigarette with cinematic light silhouetting her golden hair.
Right before Clyde finally landed fourteen floors down, she would utter a clever, poignant line, perhaps a little more clever than poignant; the kind of line film stars say in the second-to-last scene of an action movie the moment after they’ve vanquished their evil arch-nemesis who speaks with a foreign accent. Bonnie had considered several lines. Most of them were quite juvenile and contained phrases such as “die, you bastard” and “see you in hell.” Still others were variations on famous movie lines: “hasta la vista, asshole” immediately came to mind.
Last night at work, it finally came to her. “You’ve been shafted.” Clyde would have just long enough to hear her well timed quip and appreciate both how clever it was and how he’d gotten his just desserts before he made a horrible splat at the bottom of the empty elevator shaft.
Using euphemisms and a thinly veiled analogy, Bonnie explained the scenario to one of her coworkers as if it was a scene from a movie she’d seen on cable. “Get it?” she said. “He’s been shafted, as in he fell down an elevator shaft.”
Her friend didn’t seem convinced.
“But the bad guy in the movie — he’s a real jerk, right?”
“Of course he is.”
“Well, if he deserves what’s coming to him then he’s not really getting shafted. He’s just getting what he deserves.”
Bonnie scratched her head. Her friend clearly didn’t understand quite how cinematic this would all be. Perhaps she needed to be more sinister and vicious. Instead of Clyde accidentally happening upon the open elevator doors, Bonnie could bully her husband around, drag him by his hair and hurl him into the vacuous pit, the whole while emitting nothing but a primal scream. No, Bonnie said to herself. Her plan was solid. It was sound. She ignored the unhelpful advice and resolved not to tell anyone of her plans until they were carried through.
On the day the elevator was scheduled to be repaired, Bonnie could barely contain her excitement. She kissed Clyde goodbye as he left for work with a big smile on her face and extravagant plans to spend her lottery winnings in the back of her head. The sky was the limit. At last Bonnie could afford to purchase her dream car, a red 1969 Camaro convertible with lightning bolts painted down the sides. On a whim, she could log on to eBay and bid on all of the rare imported Hall & Oates albums money could buy. Most important of all, she could finally pay for the removal of the tattoo she’d received after a KISS concert twelve years ago when Gene Simmons — standing outside of a tour bus and wearing a baseball cap and cowboy boots — signed her left breast with a Sharpie. Less than an hour later the tattoo artist’s ink was dry. Bonne’s regret lasted much longer.
Her mind was swirling with all of the possibilities when Clyde gave her a hug and walked out the door for work. He had no idea his demise was less than ten hours away.
One can only imagine Bonnie’s horror when she awoke from her afternoon nap to find the elevator fixed and running as normal. The maintenance crew had come by as she slept and resolved a minor mechanical issue. There would be no open elevator doors, no well timed one-liner slipping from her lips, no vacuous pit in which to throw Clyde.
Bonnie almost burst into tears. She flopped defeated on the couch and watched an old Foghorn Leghorn cartoon until Clyde came home.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” he said.
Bonnie dreaded the idea. She groaned and said, “To where?”
“We can walk over the Fraser Bridge.”
Bonnie’s ears perked up. The bridge rested two hundred feet above the Fraser River. Next to three lanes of traffic there existed only a narrow walkway on top and anyone who traversed it dangled precariously over the two-hundred-foot drop. Perhaps tonight wouldn’t be a total loss after all.
Bonnie leapt off the couch and rooted around in the closet.
“Your jacket’s on the chair,” Clyde said.
“I’m looking for my hat,” Bonnie said. She found her wool hat but continued rummaging in the back of the closet until she located Clyde’s fishing kit. Bonnie removed a thick wooden stick with “The Clubber” emblazoned on its side and hid it inside her jacket before following Clyde out the door.
The married couple chatted as they walked toward the bridge. Clyde hated his job. Bonnie loved hers. Clyde was worried about money. Bonnie prete
nded she was too. In truth, the ecstatic glow never left her face. Clyde seemed to sense something was up. In the past twenty-four hours, he’d asked her six times if she had anything to tell him.
“You know, your father never understood you,” she said.
“Thank you,” Clyde said emphatically.
Bonnie smiled. It never failed. Any time she wanted to change the subject, particularly during an argument, all she had to do was mention Clyde’s father. Clyde would immediately forget what they were fighting about and start listing every unfortunate incident from his childhood. Clyde’s father — who looked like Clyde in every way, from his small nose and flaky brown haircut down to his long arms and slight shoulders — was a master beekeeper and like any master in his trade, wanted nothing more than for his son to follow in his footsteps. Clyde however, had neither an aptitude for the tiny creatures nor the desire to spend his adult life at constant risk of being swarmed. The science of it was all too much for him. His father would launch into a rage anytime Clyde was unable to remember the minute intricacies involving the invention of the Movable Comb Hive. Nor could young Clyde keep track of Colony Collapse Disorder and what it meant for a hive to be without a queen.
“He insisted I get stung once a day, every day so I would get used to it. Imagine the welts on my arms. Just think of the swelling. If only my father had listened to me, if only he understood me more as a person, I might have become something. Worst of all, he never encouraged my music.”
“Music?” Bonnie said. This was a new one.
“I played the clarinet in eighth grade. And I was pretty good at it, my teacher even said so. But my father didn’t care. While I was practicing, he would storm into the house wearing his white beekeeping outfit and his mesh mask, stray bees trailing him in the air, and demand that I stop my infernal racket because the queen bee didn’t like my music. He threw my clarinet in the trash can behind the beehives. Then he forced me to get stung again.”
“That’s horrible!”
“I know,” he said.
As they approached the bridge, Bonnie kept her hands in her pockets, the right one gripped tightly around The Clubber while Clyde ambled along beside her, alternately muttering about his father and humming the tune to an old heavy metal song he’d heard in high school. In the song, the boyfriend hurls his girlfriend off a bridge because he thinks she might break up with him. Clyde had no illusions that Bonnie would break up with him. Despite how callous and mean she’d gotten over the years, she seemed quite committed to the relationship. He looked over now at those gorgeous eyes that had once made his legs weak with puppy love. The rest of her might have changed, but the eyes, bright green and wide, were still the same.
Clyde almost felt bad that she had only minutes to live.
As they ascended the bridge deck, the last vestiges of sunlight streamed across the horizon, the light cut by ripples in the water. The sky changed from orange to purple and the clouds formed a tattered blanket through which the sun struggled desperately to shine. Bonnie took her hand out of her jacket and Clyde reached over and held it. Together they walked hand in hand toward the center of the bridge. The cars passing in the middle lanes were few and far between. They found themselves alone, husband and wife, holding hands and watching the sunset.
The purple light eventually faded, its hazy aura morphing into a delicate amethyst as night overtook the day. Clyde let go of Bonnie’s hand and looked down at the water below. As black as night, the thick river water surged a little. Clyde started counting down in his head.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Beside him Bonnie’s free hand found the thick wooden club. She gripped it tight and looked up into the sky where the marbled clouds had dispersed to reveal an ocean of stars. She was momentarily overwhelmed by the enormity of it all.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Bonnie took the stars in fully. She thought of her lottery winnings and how she would soon be standing next to a giant check with four million dollars and her name on it. Bonnie’s imagination got the best of her and she started picturing the minutiae of the presentation. How the photographer would remind her to look into the camera. The solid handshake of the man from the lottery office. The emotional gambit she would run between jubilation and glee. Looking into the fading sky, what she was about to do seemed all wrong. True, Clyde was a ruthless cad, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a deceitful bastard if ever there was one. And he deserved to die. Of this Bonnie was certain.
But it was such a perfect evening.
Bonnie let go of the club and put her hand on Clyde’s cheek. She brought him close and kissed him on the lips.
Clyde returned Bonnie’s kiss but didn’t stop counting.
Four.
Three.
Two.
“Hold me tight,” Bonnie said and cuddled into her husband’s coat. Clyde felt her chest press against his. Bonnie tucked her head under his chin and breathed in a long, comforting breath. Clyde knew he should ignore her. He knew he should pick her up and toss her into the black water below. It was his plan. It was her destiny. Yet despite every fiber of his being screaming at him to throw her over the edge, he couldn’t bring himself to count to one.
The two of them stood on the bridge deck wrapped in each other’s arms until the air grew cold. Eventually, without a word spoken, they headed back the way they came. Each of the lovers was thinking the exact same thing.
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
ten
Henrik stared at the magazine rack until his eyes hurt.
A bookstore employee tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, sir. May I help you?”
Henrik shook the cobwebs out of his head.
“No, thank you,” he said.
The bookstore employee gave him a perturbed look and walked away. Henrik waited until the nosy employee was out of view and then grabbed six magazines, including one in a plastic wrapper from the back shelf, and walked into the coffee shop attached to the enormous bookstore.
A woman with blond highlights and chubby ankles was ahead of him in line.
“I’ll have a venti iced caramel macchiato, add one and a quarter pump white chocolate and six pumps vanilla, go easy on the sixth pump, with two whole packets of Equal, no whip, cream foam and three dashes of cinnamon, one to start and two on top.”
Henrik looked at her as though she was insane.
The barista called the woman’s order and looked at Henrik to make his.
“I’ll have a cup of coffee, black,” he said.
“What size, sir?”
“Regular.”
“We don’t have size regular.” The barista pointed up to the list of prices on the wall. “We have tall, grande and venti.”
The barista, a young woman of no more than nineteen, with short black hair, thick-rimmed glasses and an eyebrow ring protruding from a slightly infected patch of skin, shifted her stance from one leg to the other and glanced over Henrik’s shoulder. Henrik looked back as well. A lineup had formed behind him. From the general look of displeasure on their faces, the six customers waiting in line seemed to be growing impatient.
It can’t be this hard, Henrik thought. It’s just ordering coffee.
“Whatever is the smallest, most regular size. That’s what I’ll have,” he said.
Now the woman looked at him as though he was insane. She called out for a venti, charged him for a grande, and sent Henrik on his way.
Henrik sat down at a table by himself and flipped through the magazines. Sports Fishing? Didn’t interest him. Mobile Home Enthusiast? It didn’t catch his attention either. Henrik opened a martial arts magazine and read an article on the art of attacking a person with nunchucks. In the side panel were some truly awesome photos of a man dressed up as a ninja delivering a series of bone-shattering blows to his would-be attacker. The ninja was wearing a tight karate outfit that concealed everything except his eyes, while the attacker was dres
sed like a biker with a frayed jean jacket and a long goatee. Henrik noticed, and not for the first time, that bad guys in martial arts magazines and television programs typically have some sort of sinister-looking facial hair.
Henrik thought perhaps he could grow some facial hair, something to accentuate his woolly sideburns. A long ZZ Top–like beard or a Fu Manchu moustache might go a long way in setting him apart from the rest of society. It would have been a perfect idea if not for the fact that Henrik could barely grow much more than a few gray whiskers at the bottom of his chin. His lack of hair growth — promoting testosterone was something of a blessing as Henrik wasn’t really a facial hair kind of guy and besides, he’d long been annoyed by guys with goatees and backward baseball caps and didn’t really want to look anything like them.
He was more fascinated by the man in the ninja costume. So fascinated in fact, that for approximately seven minutes, Henrik seriously considered taking up a martial art of some kind; not all nine disciplines one requires to become a full-fledged ninja, but perhaps a single martial art such as kickboxing or ninja star throwing — something that would involve less physical contact than judo. He pictured a scene from a movie involving an aerial overhead shot in which he, Henrik Nordmark, would dispatch a series of jean jacket–clad villains one by one. Some of his assailants would fall to his high-flying kicks and formidable punches. Others — those holding chains and two-by-fours with nails protruding from their ends — would drop to the ground clinging to their wounds, casualties of his astoundingly accurate ninja-star throwing. Yes, this all sounded great to Henrik.
His enthusiasm faded as he read the magazine further and learned that martial arts wasn’t so much of an activity as it was a lifestyle and as un-athletic as Henrik was, he wasn’t about to commit to starting an active lifestyle he knew he would most likely abandon in less than three weeks.
The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel Page 6