by Allen Eskens
“Now that's what you call ironic,” L. Nash said.
“Now that's what you call ironic,” Jeremy repeated. Then he and L. Nash broke into another laugh. I recognized the line from Jeremy's Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It was another one of Jeremy's favorite lines. They were watching the movie together. Jeremy was sitting, as he usually does, in the center of the couch directly in front of the TV, his feet flat on the floor, his back straight against the curve of the couch back, his hands balled up on his lap where he could fidget with them if needed.
L. Nash sat in the corner of the sofa, her legs crossed over one another, wearing jeans and a blue sweater. Her dark eyes flitted weightlessly as she laughed with Jeremy. I had never seen her smile before, at least not beyond the cursory upturn at the edges of her lips as we passed each other in the hallway. But now her smile transformed her, as if she had grown taller or changed her hair color or something. Her cheeks popped with dimples; her lips seemed redder and softer against the backdrop of her white teeth. Damn, she was cute.
Jeremy and L. Nash looked up at me as if I were a parent intruding upon a slumber party. “Hello?” I said, my tone betraying my confusion. What I wanted to say was “Jeremy, how the hell did you get L. Nash into my apartment and sitting on my couch?”
L. Nash must have seen the confusion on my face because she offered an explanation. “Jeremy was having a little problem with the TV,” she said. “So I came over to help.”
“Problem with the TV?” I said.
“Maybe the TV did not work right,” Jeremy said, his face shifting back to his normal flat affect.
“Jeremy hit the wrong button,” L. Nash said. “He pushed the input button by mistake.”
“Maybe I just pushed the wrong button,” Jeremy said.
“I'm sorry, Buddy,” I said. I had made that mistake a few times myself, accidentally switching the internal input from DVD to VCR, causing the TV to explode with a noisy white static, which had to be a personal hell for Jeremy. “So how did he…I mean who…”
“Maybe Lila fixed it,” Jeremy said.
“Lila.” I said, letting the name rest on the tip of my tongue for a bit. So that's what the L stood for. “I'm Joe, and you've obviously met my brother Jeremy.”
“Yeah,” Lila said. “Jeremy and I are good friends already.”
Jeremy had turned his attention back to his movie, paying no more mind to Lila than he did the wall behind him. Like the idiot I was—a condition often exacerbated by the presence of a female—I decided that my next move would be to rescue Lila from Jeremy, to show her a seat at the adult table, impress her with my wit and charm, and sweep her off her feet. At least, that was my plan.
“Are you surprised that I'm not a serial killer,” I said.
“Serial killer?” Lila looked up at me, confused.
“Last night…you…um…called me Jeffrey Dahmer.”
“Oh…I forgot.” She smiled a half smile, and I scrambled to find a new topic of conversation, having missed the mark with my attempt at humor. “So what do you do when you're not fixing televisions?”
“I'm a student at the U.” Her words slid slowly from her mouth to punctuate that she knew damn well that I knew she was a student. We had passed each other on the stairs many times with textbooks in our hands. Yet, as lame as my overture had been, I had to view it as progress because we were having our first real conversation. I often timed my entrances and exits from the building to coincide with hers—at least to the point where it didn't come across as creepy—and I could no more get her to talk to me than I could mix sunlight with shade. But there we were having a conversation, all because Jeremy hit the wrong button.
“Thanks for helping him out,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
“Just being neighborly,” she said and started to stand up.
She was going to leave; I didn't want her to leave. “Let me show you my appreciation,” I said. “Maybe I could take you out to dinner or something.” My words fell heavy to the ground as soon as they left my mouth.
Lila curled one of her hands into the other, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “That's okay.” Her geniality faded like a toy succumbing to a dead battery, her eyes no longer weightless, her dimples gone. It was as though my words cast a pall over her. “I should get going,” she said.
“You can't leave.”
She started for the door.
“I mean you shouldn't leave,” I said, sounding needier than I intended. “Duty requires that I return the good deed.” I moved toward the door, half blocking her path. “You should at least stay for lunch.”
“I have to get to class,” she said, skirting past me, her shoulder brushing lightly against my arm as she went by. Then she paused at the door, or at least I think she paused. Maybe she was reconsidering my invitation. Maybe she was toying with me. Or, maybe—probably—my imagination was playing a trick on me and she didn't pause at all. I, of course, chose to err on the side of recklessness and press on.
“Let me at least walk you home,” I said.
“It's eight feet away.”
“More like ten feet,” I said, following her into the hallway and closing my door behind me. I wasn't getting anywhere with my feeble banter, so I changed tactics and tried sincerity. “I really appreciate what you did for Jeremy,” I said. “He can be a bit…I don't know, childlike. You see he's…”
“Autistic?” she said. “Yeah, I know. I have a cousin on the spectrum. He's a lot like Jeremy.” Lila leaned against her door, her hand turning the knob.
“Why don't you join us both for dinner tonight,” I said, shredding any semblance of subtlety. “Just my way of saying thanks. I'm making spaghetti.”
She stepped inside her apartment and turned to meet my eyes, her face suddenly serious. “Listen Joe,” she said. “You seem like a nice guy and all, but I'm not looking for a dinner. Not right now. I'm not looking for anything right now. I just want to—”
“No. No, I understand.” I interrupted her. “I thought I'd ask. It's not for me. It's for Jeremy,” I lied. “He's not good at being away from home, and he seemed to like you.”
“Really?” Lila smiled. “You're gonna pimp your brother out like that just so you can cook me a meal?”
“Just being neighborly.” I smiled back.
She started to close the door but hesitated as she turned the idea over in her head a couple times. “Okay,” she said, “one dinner, that's all—for Jeremy.”
Janet, the receptionist at Hillview Manor, smiled at me this time when I walked through the front door. It helped that I had called ahead to get Mr. Iverson's eating and napping schedule. She told me to show up around two o'clock, which I did on the dot, anticipating the wall of Mentholatum odor that hit me as I stepped through the door. The old woman with the crooked wig still kept her vigil at the entrance, paying no attention to me as I walked by her. Before I left my apartment, I settled Jeremy on the couch, started his movie, and showed him again which buttons to push on the remote and which ones to avoid. If all went well—and Iverson agreed to be my subject—I might have just enough time to get some background for my assignment.
“Hi, Joe.” Janet stood up and walked out from behind her reception desk.
“Is my timing good?” I asked.
“As good as it's going to be. Mr. Iverson had a rough night last night. Pancreatic cancer is a terrible thing.”
“Is he okay to…”
“He's fine now. Probably a little tired. The pain in his belly flairs up sometimes and we have to sedate him just to give him a few hours rest.”
“Isn't he getting radiation, or chemo, or something?”
“He could, I guess, but it won't do any good at this point. The most that chemo might do is prolong the inevitable. He said he doesn't want that. I don't blame him.”
Janet walked with me to the lounge area, pointing to a man in a wheelchair sitting alone in front of one of the large windows that lined the back of the building. “He sits there e
very day staring out that window, looking at God knows what, since there ain't nothin’ to see. He just sits there. Mrs. Lorngren thinks he's mesmerized by a view with no metal bars blocking the way.”
I half expected Carl Iverson to be a monster strapped to his wheelchair with leather belts for the protection of the residents around him, or to have the cold piercing eyes of a madman capable of doing great evil, or to have the demanding presence of an infamous villain; but I found none of that. Carl Iverson should have been in his mid-sixties, if I did the math right. But as I looked at this man, I thought that Janet made a mistake and brought me to the wrong person. A few thin wisps of long, gray hair dangled from the crown of his head; sharp bones poked against gaunt cheeks; thin skin, tinted yellow with jaundice, covered a neck so skinny and shriveled that I was sure I could have closed a single hand completely around it. He had a serious scar crossing the carotid artery on his neck and cadaverous forearms, their tendons prominent against the bone in the absence of any muscle or fat. I half believed that I could hold his arm up, like a child might hold a leaf up to the sunlight, and see every vein and capillary that ran through it. If I had not known better, I would have put his age closer to eighty.
“Stage four,” Janet said. “It's about as bad as it gets. We'll try to make him comfortable, but there's only so much we can do. He can have morphine, but he fights it. Says he'd rather have the pain and be able to think clearly.”
“How long's he got?”
“If he makes it to Christmas, I'll lose a bet,” she said. “I sometimes feel sorry for him, but then I remember who he is—what he did. And I think about that girl he killed and everything she missed out on: boyfriends, love, getting married and having a family of her own. Her kids would've been about your age if he hadn't killed her. I think about those things whenever I start feeling sorry for him.”
The phone rang, pulling Janet back to the reception desk. I waited for a minute or two, hoping she would come back and provide the introduction. When she didn't return, I cautiously approached what little remained of the murderer Carl Iverson.
“Mr. Iverson?” I said.
“Yes?” He turned his attention away from a nuthatch he'd been watching scamper down the trunk of a dead jack pine outside the window.
“I'm Joe Talbert,” I said. “I think Mrs. Lorngren told you I was coming?”
“Ah, my visitor…has arrived,” Carl said, speaking in a half whisper, breaking his sentence in half with a wheezing inhale. He nodded his head toward an armchair nearby. I sat. “So you're the scholar.”
“Nah,” I said, “not a scholar, just a student.”
“Lorngren tells me…” He shut his eyes tightly to let a wave of pain pass. “She tells me…you want to write my story.”
“I have to write a biography for my English class.”
“So,” he said, raising an eyebrow, leaning toward me, his face dead serious, “the most obvious question is…why me? How do I come to receive…such an honor?”
“I find your story compelling.” I said the first thing that came to my mind, the words echoing with insincerity.
“Compelling? In what way?”
“It's not every day you meet a…” I stopped myself, looking for a polite way to end the sentence: a murderer, a rapist of children? That was way too harsh. “…a person who's been to prison,” I said.
“You're pulling your punches, Joe,” he said, sowing his words in a careful steady pace so as to avoid having to stop to catch his breath.
“Sir?”
“You're not interested in me because I spent time in prison. You're interested because of the Hagen murder. That's why you're talking to me. You can say it. It's gonna help with the grade, right?”
“The thought did cross my mind,” I said. “That kind of thing…killing someone, I mean, well, you don't come across that every day.”
“Probably more often than you think,” he said. “There're probably ten or fifteen people in this very building who have killed.”
“You think that there're ten other murderers in this building besides you?” I said.
“Are you talking about killing or murdering?”
“Is there a difference?”
Mr. Iverson looked out the window as he pondered the question, not so much looking for the answer as contemplating whether to tell it to me. I watched the tiny muscles in his jaw tighten a couple times before he answered. “Yes,” he said. “There is a difference. I've done both. I've killed…and I've murdered.”
“What's the difference?”
“It's the difference between hoping that the sun rises and hoping that it doesn't.”
“I don't understand,” I said. “What's that mean?”
“Of course you don't understand,” he said. “How could you? You're just a kid, a college pup blowing his daddy's money on beer and girls, trying to keep a passing grade so you can avoid getting a job for another few years. You probably have no greater care in the world than whether you'll have a date by Saturday.”
The vigor of this emaciated old man caught me off guard; and frankly, it pissed me off. I thought about Jeremy back at my apartment, a TV remote click away from crisis. I thought about my mother, in jail, begging for my help on the inhale and cursing my birth on the exhale. I thought about the thin edge that I walked between being able to afford college and not, and I wanted to dump that dusty, judgmental prick out of his wheelchair. I felt anger rising in my chest, but I took a deep breath, as I had learned to do whenever I became frustrated with Jeremy, and I let it pass.
“You know nothing about me,” I said. “You don't know where I've been, or what I have to deal with. You don't know the shit I've had to wade through to get here. Whether or not you tell me your story is up to you. That's your prerogative. But don't presume to judge me.” I fought against the urge to stand up and walk out, holding on to the arm of the chair to keep me in my seat.
Iverson glanced down at my white-knuckled grip, then at my eyes. A hint of a smile, more subtle than a single flake of snow, crossed his face, and his eyes nodded approval. “That's good,” he said.
“What's good?”
“That you understand how wrong it is to judge someone before you know their whole story.”
I saw the lesson he wanted me to learn, but I was far too angry to respond.
He continued. “I could have told my story to any number of people. I used to get letters in prison from people wanting to turn my life into something they could make money from. I never responded because I knew that I could give a hundred authors the same information and they would write a hundred different stories. So if I'm going to tell you my story, if I tell you the truth about everything, then I need to know who you are, that you're not just some punk in this for an easy grade, that you will be honest with me and be fair about how you tell my story.”
“You understand,” I said, “this is just a homework assignment. No one's gonna read it except my teacher.”
“Do you know how many hours are in a month?” Carl asked, apropos of nothing.
“I'm sure I could figure it out.”
“There's 720 hours in the month of November. October and December each have 744.”
“Okay,” I said, hoping he would explain his tangent.
“You see, Joe, I can count my life in hours. If I'm going to spend some of those hours on you, I need to know that you're worth my time.”
I hadn't considered that point. Janet thought Carl would be dead by Christmas. With just a week remaining in September, that would give Carl three months to live. I did the rough math in my head and understood. If Janet was right, then Carl Iverson had less than three thousand hours of life left to live. “I guess that makes sense,” I said.
“So what I'm saying is this: I'll be truthful with you. I'll answer any question you put to me. I'll be that proverbial open book, but I need to know that you are not wasting my limited time. You have to be honest with me as well. That's all that I ask. Can you do that?”
I thought about it for a moment. “You'll be absolutely honest? About everything?”
“Absolutely honest.” Carl held out his hand to shake mine, to seal the agreement, and I took it. I could feel the bones of Carl's hand knocking around under his thin skin as if I were gripping a bag of marbles. “So,” Carl asked, “why aren't you doing a story on your mom or dad?”
“Let's just say my mom is less than reliable.”
Carl stared, waiting for me to continue. “Honesty, remember?” he said.
“Okay. Honestly? Right now my mother is in a detox center in Austin. She should be getting out tomorrow, and then she'll sit in jail until her first appearance in court on DUI charges.”
“Well she sounds like she has a story to tell.”
“I won't be telling it,” I said.
Mr. Iverson nodded his understanding. “What about your dad?”
“Never met him.”
“Grandparents?”
“My grandma on my mom's side died when Mom was a teenager; my grandpa died when I was eleven.”
“How'd he die?” Carl asked the question with no more forethought than you give to a yawn; but he had stumbled onto my deepest wound. He had opened the door to a conversation that I refused to have, even with myself.
“This isn't about me,” I said, the sharp tone in my voice cutting a swath between Mr. Iverson and me. “And this isn't about my grandpa. This is about you. I'm here to get your story. Remember?”
Carl leaned back in his chair and considered me while I tried to wash my face of all expression. I didn't want him to see the guilt in my eyes or the anger in my clenched jaw. “Okay,” he said. “I didn't mean to touch a nerve.”
“No nerve,” I said. “You didn't touch any nerve.” I tried to act as if my reaction had been nothing more than mild impatience. Then I lobbed a question at him to change the subject. “So, Mr. Iverson, let me ask you a question.”