Silent Echo

by Rain, J. R.

  I did not know that I would spend my last days on this earth chasing my brother’s killer. I’d thought I would be wasting them away at The Coffee Bean or, worse, dying alone in my bedroom. Then again, with Numi around, I am never alone now, am I?

  So, with the cool wind in my hair and the eucalyptus trees swaying in front of me, doing their damnedest to block out the Los Angeles night skyline, I again go through the last day I saw my brother. The last minutes, in fact. I do this often. And why wouldn’t I? It was the last time I saw him alive. The last time he would have been happy. Before I failed him. Before life failed him. Before God failed him.

  I’m also thinking about last night. I don’t want to, but I do. Numi had broken the “bathroom rule” when he’d insisted that I take a bath with baking soda and Epsom salts—a combination he’d insisted would draw toxins out of my degenerating shell of a body and allow my skin to absorb the important minerals. I did not argue with Numi. I knew better. Anyway, he’d done his best to give me privacy—even holding up a towel so that I could undress with what dignity I had left.

  Turns out it wasn’t much. I nearly fell over and Numi caught my naked body before I hit the towel rack next to me. The impact surely would have done some serious damage. I didn’t thank him. I yelled at him for distracting me and ordered him out of the bathroom. He said nothing, merely nodding, and waited just on the other side of the door in case I should need him.

  I’m a dick sometimes.

  The concoction worked, amazingly. After forty minutes of sitting in the stuff, the water turned a darkish, muddy gray. I felt like shit for chewing out Numi, and so, after I’d showered and had plenty of water to drink, I apologized to my friend. He said no problem, cowboy, and helped me into bed where he tucked me in. I was asleep before I could feel weird about being tucked in by another man.

  I awake in the middle of the night to find Mary next to me.

  This doesn’t make sense. I went to bed alone. Surely, I am dreaming. But no… my reaching fingers are rewarded by something very real and warm. Numi must have let her in. My bedroom door is closed and I can hear Numi snoring lightly in the living room.

  They are both here.

  Keeping vigil over me.

  I know this can’t be good. Yes, I am feeling weaker than ever. Yes, I should probably be in the hospital somewhere. Or a hospice. But Numi is my caregiver. And now, so is Mary. And I have made the decision to die at home. It’s my right. It’s anyone’s right.

  Yes, I have been feeling weaker than normal, but not so weak that two people have to keep vigil over me. As I gaze upon her bare shoulder, as she sleeps quietly facing me, her hand resting lightly on my inverted stomach as the ambient street light touches her upturned nose, I know that I am close.

  Very, very close.

  Now, as I lay with the warm wind on my face and the traffic sounds rising from below, thinking of everything and nothing, I close my eyes and fall into a deep sleep, knowing that Numi, even in sleep, is watching me quietly from my living room.

  Always watching me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Like my thoughts these days, my dreams are also scattered, incoherent, and borderline hallucinogenic. Hell, I might as well have scavenged the local parks for some wild mushrooms.

  Maybe I have. Maybe this is all one, long mushroom-induced nightmare.

  But I’m not so lucky. I really did contract AIDS. My AIDS really did help spread the cancer within me. The connection between HIV/AIDS and certain cancers is not completely understood, but the link likely depends on a weakened immune system. The cancer cells are within me, flamed to life by the HIV. I must have really done something to piss off God.

  And I don’t even fucking smoke.

  Yes, I know what I did to piss God off. I did the unforgivable. I’d allowed my little brother to be slaughtered. I deserve to burn in hell. I look forward to burning in hell.

  My dreams…

  The images come and go. Scenes come and go. Most don’t make sense, some do. Few do. People come and go. People I know. People I don’t know. People I have long forgotten. And there is the small shadow in the background, watching me.

  Always watching me.

  My brain, I suspect, is giving me a lifetime of missed dreams, condensed down into just a few last crazy nights. When I awake, I do not feel rested. I feel exhausted and dizzy and closer to death. And cold. So damn cold.

  Numi is standing over me, shaking my shoulder. “Let’s go inside, brother. It’s too cold for you outside on the chaise longue. Too cold for someone with not a lot of meat on their bones.”

  “Screw you.”

  Numi grins and pulls me gently to my feet. It takes me a few seconds to blink away the craziness of my dreams—and to realize that Numi really is standing over me, really is talking to me, that he’s not a figment of my chaotic mind. I take a moment to feel the wind on me, colder than before. The branches of the eucalyptus tree sway and swish before me. My partial view of the city below opens a little with the swaying branches, and I see that the wind has blown away the smog. The city lights sparkle and shimmer, like Christmas tree lights.

  I don’t dwell for very long on the fact that I will never again see another Christmas. Instead, I let Numi guide me into my apartment, where he helps me over to my preferred seat in the overstuffed chair.

  Numi isn’t patronizing. Nor does he make too much of a fuss, which I appreciate. He helps me when I need the help and leaves it at that. That I need more of his help these days is less of an indicator of his fussiness, and more of an indicator of my rapidly declining health.

  “You should go home now,” I say, feeling a sudden need to be alone. “It’s late.”

  “Going is not an option, cowboy.”

  “You don’t have to be here.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, I’m politely asking you to go home. I’m fine.”

  “And I’m politely declining, and adding that you are a stubborn honky.”

  I laugh, despite myself. “Just let me die, Numi.”

  “I can’t do that, kemosabe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re not dying, boss. Not today. Not for a long time.”

  “You do know you sound crazy.”

  “No crazier than you, honky.”

  I laugh again, until I realize that laughing sucks what little air I have in my lungs. I briefly struggle for breath while Numi grips my shoulder tightly. Numi is in denial, and it’s most certainly not a river in Egypt. It’s his own demon that he must face. He believes he can will me back to good health. Unfortunately, he cannot will away the hate that God feels for me.

  I say, gasping the words, “I hate to burst your bubble, my friend, but—”

  Numi drops to his knees before me, gripping my knees in his two powerful hands. I open my mouth to cry out. My knees are so narrow now that he can nearly reach around them. His eyes are wide and seem to hover in the darkness of his face. “There are no buts, cowboy. You are getting better.”

  His grip on my knees centers my thoughts, focuses my mind, jump-starts my lungs. Numi’s will is powerful. If he could heal me with it, I would be long healed by now. That I am still alive when I should have been dead months ago is because of his will. His love for me. I cannot tell him that I know I am dying. I cannot look into those urgent eyes and let him down.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’m getting better.”

  “Say it again.”

  “I’m getting better.”

  “Say, ‘I’m getting better every day, every hour, every minute.’”

  I do what he asks, although it exhausts me. Finally, he releases his grip on my knees and stands. There are tears in his eyes that he does not bother to wipe away.

  “Damn straight, you’re getting better. Get some rest, cowboy.”

  At the easels again, with Numi snoring lightly on the couch next to me, I attempt to focus on the case rather than try to sleep. Sleeping is worthless anyway, right? A waste of my precio
us hours.

  So, with Numi nodding off next to me, I study the grisly facts before me. By now, I’ve become numb to seeing my own brother’s mutilated corpse before me. Numb, yes, but no less horrified, no less traumatized.

  No less fucked up.

  I close my eyes and see my brother in the park that day. I hear him laughing and playing, asking where the ball went to. I remember waving him off. Too preoccupied with the pretty girls to concern myself about my brother’s safety. Had the bastard been waiting in the bushes? Had he lured my brother away by pointing to a spot where the ball had gone? Had the bastard grabbed him instantly, covering his little mouth, even while my brother kicked and fought and tried to scream?

  I rub my eyes again. Something I have done all my life.

  Whoever took my brother also took much from me, from my mother, from my family. From my very belief in goodness.

  There is no good. Not with this fucker in the world.

  And not with me in the world, either.

  When I’m done rubbing my now-wet eyes, I find them resting on the latest victim. The teenage, overweight Latino boy with the creamy goo oozing from his mouth. I shudder at the image but don’t turn away.

  Never turn away, I think. Ever.

  “You should be asleep,” says Numi. I hear him sit up.

  “And my brother should be alive and celebrating his thirty-first birthday.”

  “I’m not sure one relates to the other.”

  “It does,” I say, “to me.”

  “You are not much use to anyone unless—”

  “Unless I rest, I know, Numi. Except I don’t feel like resting. I feel like finding this motherfucker and tearing his goddamn throat out. Then I can die happy. And, yes, Numi, I am dying. But not until I find him. I am going to stay alive just long enough to watch him die.”

  Numi says nothing. I hear him breathing evenly, easily. His lungs are perfect. His lungs work as lungs should work.

  “Are you hungry, Mr. Man?”

  I laugh. “You always do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Say just the right thing to talk me down.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Never mind. Yes, I’m hungry.”

  “Not too many places are open,” he says, “in the middle of the night.”

  “Fred 62 is open,” I say. I look at the dead Hispanic boy again. “I’ll take some cherry cheesecake.”

  Numi looks from the crime-scene photos to me, and then shrugs. “Whatever floats your boat, bossman. Be back soon.”

  He leaves me alone with the dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Angel,” I say to myself.

  It is the name of the Hispanic boy. Angel Trujillo. Pronounced in Spanish, it would be Ahn-hell. Much like the original name of Los Angeles. La Ciudad de Los Angeles.

  The City of Angels.

  Lost Angels, I think.

  And Angel Trujillo had been an angel, by all counts. So why in the devil would the killer stuff cheesecake into his mouth? Was he mocking the boy about being overweight?

  And what does this clue have to do with the others? My kid brother had an “8” carved onto his chest. Olivia had a pepperoni in one hand and a square carved in the palm of her other. The fact that the dimensions of each side of the square were exactly the same hadn’t escaped me.

  No, the only thing that had escaped me was what it all meant.

  Then again, could the killer be insane?

  No, I think. He’s telling a story here. What that story is, I don’t know. But the clues are here. The clues to his identity are here. I know this deeply within me. I have been in similar situations before. Faced with clues, with patterns, it’s only a matter of time before the answer seeps into my forebrain.

  In fact, I am a firm believer that my subconscious already knows the answer. Has already solved the riddle.

  Tell me, goddamn it. Tell me before I die.

  One thing I am certain of is that this is a game intended for me.

  For me and me alone.

  Jesus.

  Outside, through the sliding glass doors, I see the branches of the cursed eucalyptus trees sway. Somewhere in my apartment building, I hear a child crying. Or maybe I’m imagining the crying. Truth is, I can’t entirely trust my senses these days. Truth is, I’m not entirely sure that I’m not steadily going crazy. My brain seems to be suffering from a lack of oxygen, but that could be my imagination. Other than the lamp next to me, the darkness around me seems suffused with light particles that dance and morph and boogie.

  Yes, I’m going crazy.

  There is also a buzzing in my ear. A new buzzing. It wasn’t there a few days before. But now it is here, and it sounds like a small bug is burrowing its way through my eardrum.

  Dying sucks, I think.

  I close my eyes and the dancing light particles are still there. The buzzing is still there. I can’t escape my own dying body. I also see the luminescent shadow—yes, an oxymoron, but that’s what I think of it as—of the small shadow standing at the periphery of my mind’s eye. Standing in the shadows… waiting. For what, I don’t know.

  In my mind’s eye, I also see the clues. But here, I can turn them around, rearrange them, superimpose them.…

  I do that now, hoping a pattern emerges, hoping that I see something that I had previously missed, that this new perspective shines a new light… but nothing.

  But I can’t hold the images for long. Soon, they morph and swirl into other people and objects, and soon they are nothing more than splintered light racing through my mind.

  I am not just dying but deteriorating, breaking down. My brain no longer functions as it used to. I suspect I am not giving it enough oxygen. I should be on a ventilator. Or, more accurately, an oxygen cannula.

  Then again, I should be out there hunting down this guy. Chasing down clues and witnesses. Not sitting here in a chair, dying, commanding my oxygen-starved brain to make sense of something that seems entirely nonsensical.

  I fall asleep with the images of the dead in front of me, and with my own mind so scattered and gone that I am not here, not in this world.

  Sleep is a blessing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “This is all I could find, cowboy,” says Numi.

  I’m still sitting in the chair. Still propped up by the cushions. I come back to this earth slowly, regretfully, emerging back into this diseased, dying body… unwillingly.

  Numi has returned with a Sara Lee cherry cheesecake. It takes me a while to fully return to the conscious thought of replying to him. I stare at him a long moment, wondering briefly where I am, who the tall black man is before me, and why there are dead people lined up on easels before me.

  It does all come to me, and I rub my face and try to sit up until I realize that I do not have the strength to sit up. I give up and fall back into the chair. Numi sets aside the cheesecake and comes over to me. He slips two strong hands under my armpits and lifts me to my feet. I am surprised at how easily he seems to do it. I am aware that I have lost weight, perhaps more than I realize.

  “Sara Lee?” I say as he guides me into the kitchen.

  “No one had cherry cheesecake, kemosabe.”

  Knowing Numi the way I do, I suspect he looked everywhere for the damn cherry cheesecake, probably growing more and more frustrated as the night wore on. Except he would never show his frustration, not with me. Still, I see the concern crease his forehead. He didn’t like being away from me for so long.

  “Besides,” he says, “how do we know the killer didn’t use Sara Lee cheesecake?”

  “Good point,” I say.

  We are standing in the kitchen. Some of us are more sure-footed than others. I’m swaying slowly. Without Numi’s hand on my lower back, I would have fallen a dozen times over.

  “I’m worthless,” I say.

  “No,” says Numi. “You just white. Not your fault.”

  “Ha ha,” I say. “And what’s with all the racist jokes t
hese days?”

  He shrugs. “I know they make you laugh.”

  The hour is late now but time doesn’t matter, not anymore. Numi guides me to a kitchen bar stool, sits me down, and then sets to work on the cheesecake. He opens the box, peels away the plastic wrapper, and finds two plates and two forks and a knife. I watch my friend meticulously slice two wedges. He uses the knife and fork to balance each wedge onto the plates.

  He sets my slice before me and waits. He is wondering, I know, whether I need to be fed or not. I might be weak, and my mind might not entirely be here, but I sure as hell can still feed myself. I do so, digging my fork into the delicious but toxic dessert. Toxic, at least, to me.

  Numi says, “You think by eating this cheesecake you will get closer to solving the case.”

  “Yes.”

  “Any closer, cowboy?”

  “No. Give it time, or another bite.”

  Numi shakes his head. “You sure this isn’t a ruse to break your diet?”

  “I’m sure,” I say. I think of the image of the boy with a similar cake shoved in his mouth and my stomach turns. I set the fork aside.

  Numi holds up his fork. “Where I come from we call this a pie.”

  “They have cheesecake in Nigeria?”

  “No, but we have pies. This looks like a pie. It’s shaped like a pie, got crust like a pie. Definitely not a cake. I think you Americans are confused. Then again, what’s new?”

  I’m about to grin and I’m about to take another bite when I pause, my fork hovering halfway to my mouth.

  “What’s wrong, cowboy?” says Numi. He sets down his own fork.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Just thinking.”

  “Your thinking nearly gave me a heart attack, boss.”

  But I’m not listening to Numi. His earlier statement has triggered something within me, awakened something within me. Or, more accurately, my subconscious is letting me know that there’s something here.