The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel

by Christopher Meades

  “Who would be a nine-point-five?”

  “Imagine Jennifer Aniston in season one of Friends.”

  “Then who would be a seven?”

  “Jennifer Aniston in season six of Friends.”

  “Oh.”

  “From my experience, if two clients aren’t within the same range on the scale, it never works out.”

  Susan leaned forward.

  “So, let me ask you honestly: how would you rate yourself?”

  Henrik paused to think. He started to have another flashback to the image of himself in the mismatched secondhand clothes dancing alone in front of the mirror. He pushed the image back in his mind until it lurked in the cobwebs with theme songs to movies from the ’70s and an innocuous episode of the short-lived Harlem Globetrotters cartoon.

  “I suppose if I’m answering honestly, I’d say I’m about a three out of ten.”

  “Thank you.” Susan turned away from Henrik and logged onto a computer at the side of her desk. The matchmaker clicked around with the mouse and typed on her keyboard for several minutes in silence, the whole while breathing hard through her nose. Henrik could tell by the various picture profiles brought up on the screen and the amount of clicking that she was performing an exhaustive search through her database of female clients.

  Finally Susan turned back from her computer.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  Susan shook her head.

  “If you don’t have any threes,” Henrik said, “perhaps you have someone as low as a one-point-five. I’m willing to start at the bottom and work my way up.”

  “Sorry. The lowest I have is a five-point-five out of ten.”

  “Maybe I was being a little too modest,” he said. “Perhaps I’m closer to a five.”

  Susan stared at him. Henrik looked back at her with a set of puppy-dog eyes but Susan’s expression didn’t change.

  “If I were you, Mr. Nordmark,” she said quietly, “I’d stick with your original assessment.”

  Henrik felt a pang of desperation in his chest.

  “Perhaps there’s some way for me to make up the difference of that point; you know, to go from a three to a four.”

  Susan pulled a piece of cinnamon gum out of her purse and chewed loudly while she spoke. “Are you in line for a windfall inheritance?”

  “No.”

  “Do you drive a nice car?”

  “I take the bus.”

  Susan sighed. “Then I won’t be able to help you.”

  Henrik shuffled anxiously in his seat. “So you’re telling me there’s not one woman in your files who would be a good match for me?”

  The matchmaker paused.

  “Mr. Nordmark, have you ever seen a zombie movie?”

  “Maybe once on television.”

  “Good, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. I’m not a fan of horror movies but my son from my second marriage dragged me to one last week. Essentially the plot involved the last few humans on Earth running away from flesh-eating monsters. It was actually pretty entertaining. But do you know what struck me as the most interesting part of the entire movie? That there are two types of people in this world. There are capable, swift, fast-minded people who can make quick decisions and escape a stampeding horde of the undead. Then there are people like you, Mr. Nordmark. Zombie food. People who, through direct fault of their own, wouldn’t even make it twenty paces before tripping over their own two feet and causing the entire party of fleeing humans to be captured and eaten.”

  “I don’t follow what you’re saying,” Henrik said.

  Susan exhaled through her nose again.

  “I’ll admit I’m basing this all on first impressions, but I have a responsibility to my clients. We’re more of a boutique agency here. And I’m like a chef in a fancy restaurant. I wouldn’t serve something to one of my customers unless I wanted to eat it myself. As a matchmaker, I can’t recommend you to one of my clients unless I see one redeemable characteristic that makes my wheels turn.”

  Susan lowered her voice.

  “Besides, Mr. Nordmark, if I did set you up with a woman and by the grace of God you somehow miraculously convinced her to enter your bedroom, would you even know what to do with her?”

  Henrik gave the woman a look of stunned disbelief. Seven point eight seconds passed, with the two of them, matchmaker and client, staring in each other’s direction but not directly at one another, before Henrik said, “Can I have my hundred dollars back?”

  Susan rolled down the sleeves on her tight leather coat and turned off her computer screen. She stared at the desk for a moment and then looked up. “No.”

  Henrik left the matchmaker’s office with a dark cloud of despair hanging over his head. He walked the streets until he reached a small park where he sat down alone on a bench and stared at the motionless swing set. His mind played the matchmaker’s words over again in his head — if he did convince a woman to sleep with him, would he even know what the hell to do with her? Truthfully, no. Aside from the basic notion of which body part goes where, he had absolutely no idea. Henrik had no prospects, no money, no vehicle and no fornication skills.

  “I must apply logic to this situation,” he said. He decided to look at the complex problem of human mating with objective reason. If Henrik wanted to learn how to sew, he would pay for sewing lessons. And if he wanted to learn how to skate, he would pay for skating lessons. If he wanted to learn how to seduce a woman, logic dictated that he first take seduction lessons.

  Henrik stood up on the park bench and felt the cool breeze against his face. The wind picked up and ruffled the collar of his jacket. A smile curled at the corners of Henrik’s mouth. He hopped off the bench and marched toward the bus stop with a look of determination on his face.

  Henrik was going to find himself a prostitute.

  eighteen

  Bonnie’s hand shook as she inserted her key into the apartment door. Her eyes darted down the hall. Clyde was nowhere to be seen. She turned the key, heard the tiny click of metal inside the lock and edged the door open. “Hello?” Bonnie said. “Hello?” she called again, louder this time. Bonnie opened the door all the way. With one final glance behind her, she slipped inside the apartment and closed the door. Bonnie stood absolutely still.

  At the hospital yesterday, her fight with her husband had spilled out onto the street and Clyde — with the arrow still protruding from his chest — took off before the police could catch him. Bonnie also sneaked away before being arrested, intent on going into seclusion. But first she needed to protect herself. Bonnie scurried over to the kitchen, her high heels clicking on the hardwood floors, and rummaged through the cupboards. There, past the baking supplies and behind a spice rack full of outdated herbs, Bonnie found what she was looking for. She pulled out a three-year-old box of Count Chocula cereal and reached inside. Bonnie’s hand grasped the gun. The metal felt cold against her skin. She pulled the tiny pistol out and brushed off the flakes of cereal dust.

  “I should have used this years ago,” Bonnie said. She cocked the gun and pointed it toward the door.

  The simple truth was that Bonnie would have shot Clyde long ago if she wasn’t so afraid of prison. It’s one thing to hurl your husband down an empty elevator shaft. There’s plausible deniability in a fall from a great height. The whole event reeks of an accident. It’s another thing entirely to pull the trigger and pretend you didn’t do it. What with forensic evidence these days and the proliferation of three or four different CSI shows on television, everyone was an expert now. Even Bonnie, who dropped out of high school to party with frat boys and work odd jobs at the mini-mall, knew about blood spatter analysis and gun powder residue. Had her earlier attempts at poisoning Clyde’s coffee been successful, she could have explained his death as a suicide. But if she shot her husband dead in cold blood, it was likely she would spend the rest of her life behind bars.

  Now she might have no choice.

  Bonnie tucked the gu
n under her belt and hurried into the bedroom. In a frenzy, she packed a bag of her things, grabbed her jacket and fished some money out of the desk drawer before running toward the front door. As she opened the door, she knocked over the umbrella holder. The ceramic unicorn fell to the ground with a clank and cracked right down the center. Bonnie stared at her precious unicorn, the one she’d braved the hideous stench and oily garbage bags to retrieve from the refuse bin downstairs. Everything around her was crumbling to dust. She paused, took a deep breath and stepped out into the hallway.

  And then she stopped.

  There was Clyde, that fiend, the man who had vowed to kill her yesterday, now less than forty feet down the hall. He had just stepped off the elevator, the arrow still lodged in his chest. Bonnie shut the door before Clyde could see her and stood with her back against the wall. A chill ran down her spine; sweat formed a clammy paste on her lower back. In one hand, Bonnie held her bag full of clothes, in the other — the cold metal of the gun. Clyde’s lumbering footsteps were drawing nearer with every passing moment. Bonnie glanced at the window. Their apartment was fourteen floors up and there was no fire escape: there wasn’t even a ledge outside the window on which she could shimmy and hide.

  The footsteps were getting closer, louder.

  Bonnie closed her eyes and pictured the aftermath of a grisly murder in which she’d shot Clyde five times in the chest and was sentenced to life in prison; a life of gray prison gruel and showering with tattooed women who were built like trucks. The wrists of her orange jumpsuit would ride up on her arms. The prison guards would rule by intimidation and make her fight other convicted murderers in bizarre cage matches while they stood by the side taking bets and filming the whole thing for release on the hardcore Vietnamese version of YouTube.

  No, she couldn’t do this. Not now.

  She was flirting with the idea of climbing out the window and dangling from the precipice by her fingertips when she heard Clyde’s keys jingle on the other side of the door. Bonnie gasped. She stepped away from the wall and the sound of her heels on the hardwood floor, conspicuous before Clyde arrived, now echoed in her ears like miniature sonic booms.

  Bonnie took off her shoes and shuffled barefoot across the floor in a desperate search for someplace to hide.

  Clyde slammed the door behind him and heaved a painful breath. “Bonnie!” His eyes cast left and then right. “Bonnie!” The apartment lay absolutely still. Clyde staggered over to the kitchen and reached inside the cupboard. He was famished. He pulled out two Fruit Roll-Ups, one orange, the other raspberry, and bit into both at the same time. Clyde gnawed away on them with his back teeth. Sticky sweet, the blend of sugars was like an orgy in his mouth.

  Last night, Clyde had gone into hiding. It was only now at 10:30 in the morning that he realized he had to act. The police had chased him out of the hospital and Clyde managed to slip undetected behind a row of ambulances. Still unable to remove the arrow from his chest, he’d taken a taxi — the look on the cab driver’s face was one of fearful apprehension — back to the mall, retrieved his Honda Civic and spent the night in his car. As the hours went by, the blood loss caused a faint dizziness to swirl in his head. The tips of his fingers had gone white and two of them felt slightly numb. He had to act now, to kill his wife Bonnie. Before it was too late.

  Clyde was standing in the kitchen, one arm propped up on the counter, trying to imagine where Bonnie might be hiding out, when he noticed the empty box of Count Chocula on the counter. He picked it up and dashed the remnants of cereal dust into the sink. Clyde gazed around the living room and back into the hallway. His eyes shifted, suddenly alert. The ceramic unicorn, Bonnie’s prized umbrella holder, was lying on its side on the floor, a large crack down the middle.

  Clyde spat the Fruit Roll-Ups into the sink.

  “Bonnie?” His hands formed tight fists. “Bonnie, where are you?” He crept into the living room and searched with his eyes. “Sweetheart, I forgive you. Come on out and give your husband a kiss.” Clyde looked behind the television. He searched every corner, nook and cranny of their living room before heading into the bedroom. With superhuman effort, he bent down to look under the bed. Clyde grabbed the quilt in his hand and pulled it back.

  There was no one there.

  The bedroom was empty.

  With pain in his every step, Clyde hobbled into the bathroom. The light was on. And the shower curtain was closed. There she is, he thought. Clyde picked up the hairdryer from the counter and raised it over his head. He took two steps forward and grabbed the shower curtain in his hand. In one sudden motion, Clyde tore the shower curtain open. He swung wildly with the hairdryer.

  As Clyde’s arm lurched forward, he lost his balance and fell over. The hairdryer ricocheted off the shower tiles and conked Clyde square in the forehead. He toppled over into the bathtub and landed straight on the arrow sticking out of his chest. A fireworks display of red hot pain exploded into every extremity in his body. He screamed out loud and then lay there, limbs twitching, emitting a slight moan, face-planted in the tiles. Thirty seconds passed before he turned his torso awkwardly onto its side and climbed out of the tub. Clyde looked in the mirror. His shirt was covered in blood. The arrow jetted two feet out in the air, stuck in his chest like it was set in concrete. And now he had a budding bruise on his forehead to complete the look of disrepair.

  Clyde fumed and grunted. He walked over to the toilet, lifted the cover off the back and flipped it upside down on the counter. There, duct-taped to the underbelly of the toilet lid, was the gun he’d purchased two weeks ago. He tore off the tape and picked up the weapon in his hand.

  In the distance, Clyde heard a siren. It sounded like a fire truck, but he wasn’t sure. Clyde couldn’t take the chance. He took one final look in the mirror and fled the bathroom. Clyde hobbled through the living room and slammed the apartment door.

  He left behind a fear-soaked Bonnie, hiding behind the bathroom door and gasping for air — with a loaded nine-millimeter pistol in her sweat-covered hand.

  nineteen

  Henrik stepped off the bus downtown and immediately began searching up and down the street. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it wasn’t yet four o’clock in the afternoon and the sun was still in the sky, but finding a prostitute proved much more difficult than he had imagined. And even if he were to spot a streetwalker, Henrik wasn’t entirely sure how he would go about approaching her. He still had his rudimentary social graces and wouldn’t dare walk up to a random woman and ask her if she was soliciting sex in the street. What if the woman he approached wasn’t a prostitute at all but rather just a regular tax-paying citizen who had the misfortune of leaving the house scantily clad on the day Henrik went looking for sex? That would be awkward and embarrassing and Henrik was not about to actively seek awkward, embarrassing situations.

  Henrik walked about in a daze for an hour before fate intervened.

  Across the street a beautiful young woman was posting a sign on a lamppost that read “25 Dates.” What luck! Henrik exclaimed. He crossed the street and approached the beautiful woman.

  “How much is it for one of your twenty-five dates?” he said.

  The woman smiled.

  “Have you ever been speed dating before?” she said.

  Henrik had never heard the term “speed dating.” He decided it must be some sort of code the streetwalkers use to avoid getting arrested.

  “I’ve never been on any sort of date before,” he said.

  “Well, it’s about time you threw your hat into the ring,” the woman said.

  “How much is it?”

  “Forty dollars,” she said.

  “For all twenty-five dates?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the dates all with you?” he said.

  “No.” She giggled.

  “So it’s forty dollars for twenty-five different dates with twenty-five different women?”

  “Yes.”

  Henrik pulled his mone
y out of his wallet so fast he nearly gave himself a heart attack.

  The speed dating woman laughed. “You pay when you arrive at the event,” she said. She handed him a card with an address on it and told him to be there that evening at 9 p.m. sharp. Henrik took the card and ambled happily down the street. He was going to have sex with twenty-five different women in one night. He’d never heard of anyone doing that before, not even rock god Ronnie James Dio. Were he able to accomplish such a feat, he would not only make up for a lifetime of involuntary chastity, but he would also be revered by his fellow man. Henrik’s excitement grew. Tonight his dream would come true. He was finally going to be unique.

  twenty

  Abraham Arnold parted his blinds and gazed outside. The fire trucks and ambulances, police cars and lookie-loos assembled around the retirement home gates had mostly dispersed. But the news vans and reporters remained. It was almost 6 p.m., the day after the terrible explosion at the retirement home. Abraham brought his hand to his forehead. He’d done everything in his power last night to keep this quiet. A lockdown was declared. The central phone line was disconnected and orderlies were instructed to intimidate any senior who even looked like they might have loose lips. Abraham had almost succeeded. Had it not been for two tech-savvy grandmas in the south wing texting their family on cell phones, this might all have been swept under the rug. Now Abraham stood in his office picturing the content of tonight’s evening news. The explosion and the partially decapitated grandmother were bound to be the lead story. Abraham knew reporters, he knew how their minds worked. Despite his quick-witted insistence that Roland’s grandmother had been suicidal for months — suicidal and senile, a piteous combination . . . heart-wrenching really — Abraham knew the reporters would turn this into something salacious. They would have a field day with the headlines.