I shifted my stance and crossed my arms.
"Game's too easy. I could lie."
"Why would you lie to me? I'm nobody."
"And I'm not a machine. I feel like everyone else."
"Do ya? When's the last time you shed a tear?"
I had no response, and the fear came to the forefront like a black bird flapping loose in the attic. Weeping was one particular release that helped define the human experience, I knew that, I had certainly read about it, seen it in film, observed it on the news. And though I had never actually come face to face with woe, I just assumed all along that this kind of thing existed in those more connected.
What does sadness feel like? The impact of a difficult moral choice?
You'll never know. It has been fully unlearned and now remains too easy to buy off with your money, more money than God.
I stormed off the golf course. Though it was too early, I retreated to the confines of my second-floor study to fix myself a vodka martini with three anchovy olives.
What am I?
Things I had known about myself were altered in this new tilt of light. Apathy seemed cruel. Lack of emotion seemed evil. Calm, cool, and collected seemed sociopathic. And why did I not just have my butler thrown off the grounds, no more questions asked? He was obviously disturbed.
You knew that from day one. You bought him so you could keep him as property. Now you refuse to let go what you own.
It ate at me all afternoon. It was an unsolvable round-about.
You have enough money to buy off sadness. Enough to purchase souls.
Wide-eyed in the dark, I stared out through my bay windows and searched for feelings of pity about anything. There were none. I did not give a damn about the homeless, not one shred of grief for the starving, not a single crumb of ache for any of the damned living outside of my isolated world.
What am I?
I was going to find out. I was going to scratch up some kind of humanity from deep within. I was determined to prove the accusation false.
***
Those lovely, massive windows.
I aimed high and the first shot back-kicked my shoulder so hard I almost fell on my ass. The large face of the Virgin Mary shattered into a thousand sharp glass raindrops, most of which landed outside on the grass. Others smashed the marble floor before me, skidding and spinning. Morning sun stabbed through the ugly void and the glare lanced off the steel barrel as I cocked another round into the chamber.
My butler followed as I moved behind the display of Persian vases. He was laughing. I went back on my heels, steadied myself against the wall, aimed low at the wide reproduction of The Last Supper and let the buckshot fly.
The second thwack of gunfire seemed louder than the first, but it did less damage. In somewhat of a rage, I grabbed the other shotgun and pumped five successive explosions at the stained glass mural, bursting it out at the bottom in thick sprays of calico shrapnel.
The entire middle section caved and we both dove for cover.
A huge chunk that was most of a thirty-foot version of the fourteen Stations of the Cross toppled inward. I sneaked up a peak and saw it crash down on my antique Ford, mint condition, museum quality. It crushed the roof, blew out the windows, and flattened the tires in a roar of destruction.
Smoke churned in the air and spare tinkles of leftover falling glass mixed with the faint calls of birds outside. I got up and approached the wall that was now no more than a vacancy with jagged edges. My shoes crunched in the glass, my gun dangled down toward the floor.
It was still there.
In the bottom left corner was the little treasure, originally hidden within the larger piece. I had spotted it a day after installation, I do not miss much. It was a tiny, nearly microscopic picture of a woman's head made with fragments. Below it and barely legible without a magnifying glass stood the letters, "Mama, R.I.P."
I brought up my gun and blasted that little piece of history into oblivion. I turned to my butler.
"Clean up the glass, get an exterminator, tell the security company it was a false alarm and make arrangements with a local contractor to temporarily patch the wall until the stained glass can be replaced. Now, you will excuse me. I have a phone call to make."
***
I was convinced his reaction would make me feel regret. The artist. The one who custom-made the stained glass wall piece by piece and spent the next half year of his life installing it.
When I told him of the senseless act there was dead silence.
"Why?" he said.
"I wanted to destroy a piece of your art. And I felt the need to obliterate the testament to your mother. How dare you include that within something I own. She will never rest the same."
"So, why call?" he said. "You want your money back or something?"
"No, I want you to fight for your mother's memory! I took it, and it can't be replaced."
He laughed.
"I'll buy her a park bench or plant her a tree, asshole."
He hung up. I stared at the phone, listened to the silence, then the dial tone.
Art meant nothing; it was merely a way to get paid. The authenticity of memorial was illusory; blind ritual, dumb obligation. The importance of the matriarchal matrix was a mirage and the mother was ultimately meaningless; she performed her function and was easily erased. This was going to be even harder than I had thought.
I told my butler to bring me a deer.
***
I watched.
He drove it onto the south grounds in a horse trailer, ignoring the car path and rolling straight onto the open lawn before the hedge gauntlet. Even through the expansive pantry window I was close enough to hear the animal bucking and kicking within its mud-stained steel prison. Locked in the dark. Frantic.
Don't fret, love. You'll be set free soon enough.
Bowlegged, my butler ambled out of the pickup and went around back to lift the drift pin that held shut the trailer doors.
They blew open.
Headstrong and frenzied, the deer galloped upon the smooth metal bed, slipped and banged down its proud white chest on the tailboard. It jerked up then and lunged out to the grass. Like a statue it froze there.
I raised my Nextel.
"Leave us," I said into it.
The transmission must have been loud on the unit hooked to my butler's belt, for it broke the spell cast over the deer. It bolted and my butler shook his head before driving off. He did not specifically understand and I did not need him to. Yet. All he had to know was that he was shielded if he had attained the animal illegally. Simple fact: through political contribution I supplied the police most of their radar devices, firearms, and computer equipment. It kept me well protected.
But there would be no protection for the animal-thing. The south lawn's forty acres were fenced in, it would not get far.
I palmed the leather grip of my Proline compound bow and ventured out into the sunshine. There were birds in the warm breeze, squirrels in the trees, beings of beauty, God's creatures.
Lower than you on the food chain. Insignificant in the vast scheme of things.
Were they? I thought I had formed an alliance with anything that lived or breathed. Or was that all inbred by the mass media, inserted, incubated, and sculpted over a lifetime in order to form a false system of values? Was I conditioned? Had a mental parasite with an exterior of high morals eclipsed my true being?
I was going to find out. Though my butler was required to provide me bi-weekly instruction on various styles of weaponry, I had always shot at targets. As far as I knew I was against killing for sport.
Really?
The only way to know for sure was to do it. To become involved in the act and gauge my responses. To hope the (power of God) execution brought on feelings of remorse.
Like a traumatized dog that pawed up to lick the boot of the one who kicked it, the deer had circled back to its original point of release. It stood about thirty feet away now with a sheen of nerv
ous sweat blanketing its soft fur. Slowly, I reached and slipped an arrow from under the hood of my bow-mounted quiver.
It was an XX75 tipped with razorback 5, needle-sharp point amidst a cluster of five steel arrowheads all arranged in a circular pinwheel. Straight on, it looked a bit odd.
Like a five-pentacle star.
Odd feather out, I mounted it on the string, careful not to pinch but just hold gently between the fingers. I drew back on the eighty-pound resistance of the pulleys and my butler's voice twanged in my head.
"Let it go easy, don't snap away your finger pads. And go for the vital area behind the front leg. It's the best way to a fast kill."
But I did not want the thing to die quickly. I wanted it to suffer. Carefully, I aimed at its stomach and in my ears the outdoor sounds seemed to magnify behind the drum of my heart.
I let go the string.
The arrow split the air, a silent merchant of doom. It struck the deer flat in the paunch and there was a smooth sound of penetration similar to a hatchet sunk hard into a wet stump. The thing lurched with the contact, sprang high into the air. It was beautiful.
Wrong emotion!
I bit my lip, not willing to face my inner rush of joy as the deer shot across the lawn in its ecstasy of pain and confusion. The arrow shaft stuttered and bobbed from its flank and grass divots kicked up from beneath the blur of its hoofs. The beast tore straight away and then smashed through the pantry window.
Damn. Not in the house.
I drew another arrow and ran to the side door. Upon approach, I heard a riot of clapping hooves amongst crashes of wooden shelves, trays of silver, and stacks of fine china. By the time I entered the fresh rubble of my pantry, the thing was lying by the far wall in a state of jerks and spasms. I set the bow down and stepped forward, trying to fend off the nag of annoyance I felt as a result of the damage done to my kitchen.
The deer died with a guttural moan and I stared into its lifeless gaze.
I felt nothing.
There had to be something: guilt, sadness, anything. There was nothing, and I moved slowly around the dead thing. The fatal wound had spattered green intestinal juices across the ribs and it stank. Were this a two-dimensional DVD presentation my reaction might have been different, might have been, but all I felt was disgust.
What is wrong with you? Look at it!
The blind stare. The tongue hanging out of its muzzle, the rich blood that seeped across my Pietra D'Assisi beige ceramic floor tiles, all visually and intellectually pathetic. So where was the pity? The feelings of shame?
Nowhere. Considering the damage it did to my kitchen and the stench, I was glad I killed it.
I pulled the Nextel from my belt.
"Get in here and clean up the mess," I said.
The tone of my voice barely hid the panic rising up in my throat.
***
I ran past the garden to the yard's south edge. Inside I felt scorched, blackened.
What am I?
I stopped to catch my breath. My nostrils were flaring and I looked down at my shaking hands. They seemed huge, smooth as bone, manicured nails, baby-smooth skin.
Flesh that thinly covers a dark beast whose inner eye just opened.
No! It did not mean anything, couldn't have! Lots of people hunt!
You don't.
I squared my jaw and marched down the grassy knoll toward the building I frequented the least, my butler's tool shed. I needed to see his domain, the castle I had built for him, the cold, hard proof that I had done some good for a fellow human being and blessed him with purpose, time bombs of dark purpose waiting for ignition, that I had rescued him from an existence of despair, purchased his soul, and made him into the kind of man, Devil's henchman, that he wanted to be.
Tool shed.
An ugly word that drew up images of work benches, dirty blue rags, and grease guns strewn across a cracked, oil-stained concrete floor.
Devil's playpen.
A place where men, salt of the earth, reigned supreme and broken machines became female. The frozen hex nut that would not budge was a bitch. That stripped screw that refused to budge was a whore, and the engine that blew an o-ring was dubbed a fucking cunt! For the first time in my life I felt something like lust. The feeling was ice, far from the warm touch of remorse I yearned.
The door was open. Just outside on the grass, there was a scattered array of railroad ties, framing lumber, gas compressors, and high-powered air nailers, as it was my butler's latest project to build a gazebo to be erected abreast the outdoor pool.
The door to the shed stood open. Inside was discovery. A single flood light poured its beam to the floor leaving to the sides a periphery of gloom.
I was hesitant to enter.
I was hesitant to walk between the long shadows of shelved equipment and stand in the spotlight, afraid of what would be illuminated there. My mind streaked to its farthest corners in search of a direction, a guidepost, some testament of how to start and where exactly to begin, a visible cornerstone to dent the steel shroud that lay cold on my heart.
I needed a symbol.
I fired up the compressor as I had seen my butler do, and picked up a large framing nailer. With the hose snaking behind, I bent to set two thick wooden planks at perpendicular. I depressed the gun mouth down and fired a three-and-a-half-inch nail through the beams. It banged through to flush with a sharp pop. I set five more nails into the same general area.
Now I had a huge wooden cross.
I dragged it into the shed, leaned it upright and stood before it, desperate for answers before this vision of purity.
I felt nothing.
No sparks, no quench of enlightenment, nothing.
Instead, I thought of the graphic crucifixion it represented, the vision of pain we had twisted to a commercial science of love. In literal terms, we celebrated the murder of a man, he who was nailed to a cross with a javelin stuck between his ribs. We framed the picture. We propped it over the fireplace, made it into earrings, and hung it off the rearview mirror. A man was nailed to a dirty wooden beam and left to die in shame. The scene filled our minds from our tender beginnings. We were impressionable children looking up with open faces as the violent was reconfigured to translate to the beautiful. I blinked. Suddenly, the cross looked wrong.
Top-heavy somehow.
Of course! I am not the one who has gone numb! I am the one who has come of age, become aware! We have all gotten too used to the image this way! Though the Lord's death must have been ultimately painful, he could have been punished . . . more effectively.
I pushed forward and wrapped my arms around the cross. Careful to lift with the legs, I slowly turned it upside down. I backed off and stared. Now it seemed right, a rack of pure torture as it should have been from the beginning. I pictured the pain of having the ankles spread at bottom and hands, palm over palm nailed overhead like a victim in a medieval witch chamber. This is where sadness could live. This is where woe could be born.
I needed to feel it now more than ever. I was so close, so near to ripped tendons, torn muscle, shattered bone, the pain that resulted from three nails fired straight through the flesh, one step away from the ongoing path of true remorse.
I told my butler to get me a girl . . .
The Legend of the Slither-Shifter
1.
Denny Sanborn was the type who was always in trouble and the grown-ups at school had tried everything on him. There were warnings he ignored and lectures he didn't understand. There were conferences set up with teachers and counselors, but Dad never showed up anyway.
Denny was a pistol. He busted farts in the auditorium during moments of silence and melted crayons on the radiators. He drew on his desk, clapped erasers in the cloak room, called out, made noises, laughed out loud during sustained silent reading, and often fell from his chair on purpose.
He also took the blame for stuff other kids did. Once, Kimmy Watson poured out ten McDonald's salt packs into a last row desk
Mrs. Krill used to coach kids who were slow. When Denny fibbed that he was the one who did it he lost computers for a week, but in return Kimmy gave him a black plastic spider, half a soft pretzel, and a fake barf cushion she won at the St. Mary's church fair. Latif Johnson once dented a hall locker playing pushy-pushy with a fourth grader, and when Denny claimed responsibility for the damage, Latif awarded him with a glow in the dark skull and crossbones pinkie ring.
Everybody loved Denny. They greeted him with high fives and low-down double pump slap-slaps. They laughed at his foolishness. They followed him around at recess and always wanted to know what he was thinking. Denny was a hero, everyone's friend, the class clown, and always knee-deep in hot water.
But Denny didn't really know trouble. He hadn't even a clue what the word meant until that wintry evening two days before Christmas, a week after his tenth birthday precisely at 4:09 P.M. For that is when all hell broke loose.
And what would become this absolute, supernatural terror began with a babysitter, some charcoal sticks, an empty picture frame, and one innocent little ghost story.
Earlier That Day: 2:54 P.M.
With the last buzzer the dented back doors of George Washington Elementary School burst open and children made a scramble for buses. Benjamin Rahim slapped Bobby Nagle on the back of the head and knocked his hat onto the pavement by the 18th Street railing. Three girls squealed and began a game of keep-away. Someone bounced a blue superball into the air and a flock of hands poked up at the gray sky to claim it. A new kid with little white bumps on his forehead hunted on his knees for something while a fifth grader in ripped white stockings and a plaid skirt pulled the girl's hair in front of her. Old Mr. Martin, the school policeman, stood over by the west gate thumbing the handcuffs at his side and jerking his head back and forth for better views. The veins in his neck showed. His fat cheeks and overgrown chin gave him a severe case of puppet-mouth.
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