Soon after I had the weapon in both hands I heard the door open, the music getting momentarily louder and then being muffled again. The band playing over the speakers was Boston. Being played in the city of Boston. Weird. The last song this guy would ever hear.
I followed the sound of his footsteps on the tile as he passed by my stall and entered the open one next to me. I heard his belt unbuckle, pants drop. All normal bathroom sounds.
I gave him a second more, then put a foot up on the toilet, no lid, only a U-shaped seat. Kicking in the door to his stall was an approach I’d considered, but it was loud, would make the space cramped, and then left the kill on view for the next visitor when the job was done. To get to him while the door was still locked meant he wouldn’t be found until the cleaning crew after last call.
I raised up slowly and peeked over the top, my feet balancing on the plastic toilet seat. From what I knew about this guy, he’d probably like being spied on while he dressed in women’s panties. If there was a glory hole between these two stalls, I bet I could get him to blow me.
I saw the top of his head and a pronounced bald spot. There was a ring of sweat stain on the back collar of his white shirt. His head was down as he pulled on the lace number Bricks had given him. I reached over with the loop of wire and aimed it at his neck.
As the thin piano string passed in front of his eyes his head jerked up and I yanked. Before he could turn his head up and see me, I had him in a noose of metal. I pulled hard, getting my elbows up to the top of the wall between stalls. He was thrashing now, his legs kicking in stunted half-kicks since the panties were around his ankles.
His fingers dug at his neck, searching for the wire and an inch of space he could wedge himself into to ease the pressure, but there was none to be found. The wire dug deep in the folds of his neck, swallowed by flesh and starting to cut. I gave an upward jerk, sweat forming on my face as I grimaced with the effort. I realized I had been holding my breath and I let out a loud exhale. Only after I did it did I realize what a mocking gesture it was—loudly showing off all the air I could get in and out of my lungs.
His elbows banged the metal walls between our cubicles. Sputters of the last air in his throat and mouth burst out. Then I was falling.
My foot was wet. My wrist screamed in pain. I’d let one foot slide off the toilet seat and land in the bowl. My right arm was stretched out, my wrist painfully wrenched over the top of the stall as I held onto the loop of wire for dear life—and to end his.
I lifted my foot out, only to have my other foot splash in its place. Looking down I could see in the gap under the stalls that his feet had left the ground. My body weight falling had lifted him.
I rescued my other foot and had to step down onto the floor to reposition myself. My arms ached as I strained to keep hold of the garrote. Blood began pouring to the floor on his side of the wall. The wire had broken through.
The Swiss man’s struggles stopped almost immediately. The blood came down quickly, like he was pissing away a night’s worth of beer and missing the bowl.
I stood on the toilet seat again, easing up for a second on the wire. His body slipped and his feet touched ground. By the time I stood tall and tightened my grip again I realized I was holding dead weight.
I didn’t hear the door open, but the music got louder. “More Than a Feeling.”
“Hold on, I gotta take a wicked piss.”
So I knew he was a local. Good news was he sounded alone. I slid as far back to the tiled wall of the bathroom as I could to keep my arms draped over the divider out of sight from the man headed for a urinal. I didn’t want to let the Swiss man drop. The sound would be a giveaway, plus he might slip a leg out from under the stall door or something.
The muscles in my forearms burned. First from the strangulation, now the holding of a two-hundred-pound carcass of prime Swiss meat. Sweat dripped into my eyes but my hands were clawed onto the wooden handles of the wire loop and couldn’t help me.
Piss hit the porcelain basin of the urinal outside the stalls, and this was indeed a wicked one. He kept going and going like he hadn’t seen a bathroom in a week.
I grunted. Couldn’t help it. Still, not entirely out of place sound in a toilet stall.
The fountain of urine outside continued to fall.
My foot slipped again. I splashed into the bowl a third time. He had to have heard it, even over the sounds of his racehorse piss.
“Jesus, buddy,” he said. The beer might’ve been leaving his body, but it had already made its way to his brain. He sounded drunk and had to laugh at me.
“Don’t get the chowder,” I said, though I skipped trying to do the accent—chowdah. He laughed at that too, then started to wrap things up quickly, I assumed to head off the massive cloud of stink he thought would soon be emanating from my stall. Score one for my slippery foot.
He set off the flusher and left the room without washing his hands, and for that I was grateful. As soon as the music settled back into the pillow-over-the-ears muffle, I let the Swiss man fall. The sound of his body collapsing, banging against the toilet bowl, echoed off the tile and mirror walls.
I sat down on the toilet and panted for breath. My hands were frozen in a claw-fingered grip. I’d let one side of the wire loose and the other end dangled from my left hand, the wire slick with blood. On the tile floor between the stalls the pool of blood had found its way to the drain set in an indent in the floor, there to catch piss from those too drunk to aim well.
I bent down and gave his legs a shove, pushing his body into the stall so no part of him hung out. I evaluated my work. Not good enough. If someone bent down to look, they’d see him in a heap. Probably see the blood too.
I took off my jacket and hung it on the little hook there. First time in my life, I think, I’d ever used one of those things. I got down on the floor and slid under, hurrying since I knew there was more than one guy in the bar with a wicked piss in him.
My shirt got streaked with blood as I passed from one stall to the other. Fresh blood was probably not the worst thing my shirt picked up under there. Working fast I got him seated on the toilet and balanced so he’d stay. Up close, I saw the damage my wire had done. A ragged line was torn across his neck, blood and strings of flesh like the torn hem of a garment. His eyes were a maze of burst blood vessels, his tongue swollen and purple, wouldn’t fit in his mouth. Worst of it all were the little black panties he wore.
I slid back under, coating more of my shirt in blood and urine, who knows what else. The door opened again just as I got under into my own stall. I stood, wiped sweat off my forehead with a wad of toilet paper, and pulled my jacket on over my bloodstained shirt.
I unlocked the stall door and almost forgot to flush. Gotta keep up the illusion.
I, too, left without washing my hands.
Outside I found Bricks waiting in a cab, as planned. I slid in next to her and it took her a second to realize all had not gone smoothly.
“What the—”
“Don’t ask,” I said.
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Here is a sample from Grant Jerkins' Abnormal Man …
Note:
All epigrams and extracts—as well as this book’s title—are taken from the Bureau of Education Circular of Information No. 4, Abnormal Man, Being Essays on Education and Crime and Related Subjects, by Arthur MacDonald, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1893. In addition, the author is indebted to the Sub-Sub Programmer who kept dark hours alone with her loupe and logarithms to amass, correlate, scan, and furthermore write proprietary code to digitally capture le mots justes contained therein—the very phrases that would illume, limn, and inform the following narrative. She did this on the author’s behalf, requesting in return, only anonymity. Fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub.
For the convenience of those who are interested in questions concerning the abnormal classes—including their moral, intellectual, and physical education—the author presents in book form a num
ber of his writings...In doing this the author has temporarily taken the point of view of the subject of each study, avoiding criticism, so that the reader may gain a clear insight...
BILLY
The Moon.
You keep swallowing and you’re not sure why. You can feel your Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, up and down, over and over. Your eyes are closed, and there is a diffuse white glow bleeding through your eyelids. A pleasant, welcoming light. Not the sun. No, it is not the sun. It is the moon. Yes, the moon.
When you were still just a little kid, you believed—certain, you were absolutely certain—that the moon followed you. You can remember being in the backseat of your father’s restored Chevelle SS, driving home from a vacation in Gatlinburg, and watching the moon through the blue-green glass of the side window.
The moon stays with you. It follows you. No matter how fast the car speeds down the highway, that magnetic white disc keeps up with you, never lagging behind.
At first you think it might be some kind of optical illusion, some trick you aren’t yet old enough to understand, so you test the theory by looking away from it for a little while. Maybe it just seems like the moon is following you because you never take your eyes off it. A clock’s hands can only be seen to move if you take your eyes away from it for a little while. It’s only when you look back later that you can tell the hands have changed position. Maybe if you ignore the moon for a little while, maybe when you look back at it again, you will be able to tell it is really getting farther away. That it isn’t really following you after all.
So you look up front at the silver, rectangular radio buttons. They are the old-fashioned mechanical kind that you have to stab with your finger to make the dial physically turn to the preset station. The green radium-like glow of the dashboard instrument panel bathes the car’s interior, like being in a submarine. Sixty miles an hour. The car is moving at sixty miles an hour. Your daddy’s face does not look sinister in that green glow, but instead it looks warm and safe. You didn’t know it then, but he was your real daddy. Your true daddy. Not the son-of-a-bitch replacement. And your mama reaches back over the seat and scratches your knee with her long red fingernails and says your name real soft. “Billy? You awake, sweetie?” But you don’t answer her. Just let her think you’re asleep. And you watch her take her hand away and rest it high on Daddy’s leg, nestled in the crotch.
And it feels good seeing that. You feel good. Because you have no way of knowing that she will be dead in nine years.
And it has been long enough to test your theory. To see if it is real. You turn your head and look back out the side window, holding your breath in anticipation. And it’s true. The moon is still there. In the exact same place. This car is rolling down the road at sixty miles per hour, so the moon should be far, far behind you, but it has not slowed down one little bit. It’s following you. You.
For the rest of the trip, you continue to test the moon. When the car stops, the moon stops too. It waits right there in the sky. It waits for you to get moving again. And when the car turns, the moon turns with it. Sometimes it ends up following you from the other side of the car, but it never stops following.
It is following you.
Your name is Billy Smith and that is not a special name. It is common.
But the moon follows you.
And that makes you special.
You are special.
You haven’t seen the moon—or the sun—in more than three months. But still, all these years later, you know it is out there, waiting for you. You can feel it. Throbbing with gravity, pulling at you. Waiting for you.
There are no windows in this place, only fluorescent lights that stay on all day, all night. This place is not a prison, but really it is. The Grierson Holding and Processing Facility for Violent Offenders. Not a prison.
You ask yourself: How did it happen? Can you really be responsible for this? And you look around yourself and realize that every decision you have ever made in your life has brought you to this time, to this place. You are where you are supposed to be.
You are eighteen years old.
Was there a choice? Was there ever really a choice? Or was this all preordained? From the moment your head crowned from between your mother’s splayed legs, had all of this already been decided for you? Written down? Or was it chaos?
No. It was choice. Of course it was. Of course. A never-ending series of decisions. More choices than there are numbers. Every step was decided upon. Chosen. How could you have not realized that?
It was all a choice.
Swallowing. You keep swallowing. Why? Is it nerves? Anticipation? The light that surrounds you is too warm and intense to be the moon. The blunt white light that bleeds through your closed lids is implacable. Waiting patiently for you to open your eyes. And you do. You swallow one last time and open your eyes.
You are staring into the dead flat eye of a video camera. Static. It is waiting for you to speak. There are three softbox lights on tripods angled around you, lighting you for the camera.
The woman’s motorcycle helmet rests on the scratched and dirty table here in the not-a-prison interview room. The helmet is black, an impenetrable orb. And on the back, in red spray paint, the anarchy symbol. The letter A bursting through a ragged circle that can’t contain it.
The woman is staring at you. Her camera is staring at you. You can hear it humming, waiting. The fuzzy black boom mic is pointing at you, accusatory. You like the woman, and you have agreed to speak to her. To be in her movie. Her documentary. About you.
You want to tell her about how when you were just a little kid you used to think the moon followed you. In fact, you open your mouth and you are about to say that very thing, but you don’t. Because it would be a lie. The truth is that you still think that the moon follows you. And you always will.
JAYMES
You wonder why someone would name their baby girl Jaymes and then be upset when, years later, she announces that she’s a lesbian. It’s like they prearranged it. Jaymes. What kind of name is that to saddle a child with? It is the name you give your daughter when what you really wanted was a son.
You are eighteen years old, and when you left your parents’ house this morning, it was for the last time. You are never going back. You have your motorcycle—hello, Dad, your daughter is named Jaymes and she rides a bad motorscooter. Wake up—you have jeans, T-shirts, underwear, socks, comb, and a toothbrush crammed in your backpack. No makeup, obvious clue number three. The clichés just keep piling up. And you have your digital video camera. The camera is the only reason you stayed there as long as you did. That camera cost you every cent you ever made asking people if they wanted to supersize that order.
You look at the boy sitting across from you, and you realize that is all that he is. A boy. He is eighteen years old, same as you, but he looks like he is about twelve. Thin to the point of emaciation. Skin like dirty chalk. He is pitiful. You have never felt a maternal impulse in your life, but you are overwhelmed with a need to grab this boy up and hug him and cover him in kisses. If you gave in to such a ludicrous temptation, you would need to be careful of your razor blade earrings. The kid has the complexion of a hemophiliac.
The kid. His name is Billy, and you have been following his story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, on CNN, the Faux News Network, and the various blogs that have erupted around Billy Smith and what he has done.
You do not know why your interest in the case rose to the level of obsession, but it did. It seemed to somehow mirror the arc of your own life. The snowball effect of bad choices, choices that often weren’t choices at all. The mocking echo of a life out of control.
You are eighteen. An adult. You have been making films your whole life. Films about yourself. You have chronicled your life. And posted your images and rants online. But now you are ready to turn the camera around. Now you are ready to do something real.
BILLY
“Another two hours of shrugging isn’t going to he
lp me.”
You shrug again. The camera intimidates you. The girl doesn’t, but the camera does. You think the girl is kind of cool. You like the pink stubble like a neon nimbus around her head, the piercings. The tattoos. Her tattoos are not like Frank’s. You can tell hers were professionally done.
You lift your hands to your mouth and chew a hangnail on your thumb. You have to lift both hands at the same time because they are cuffed together. They allowed you to do these interviews, but only with certain conditions. Like the guards standing in the corners. And the handcuffs.
Not-a-prison.
“I’m sure it’s nice to get out of population and chew on your hands for two hours, but, you know what? You’re wasting my time.”
There is nothing to say. What can you say?
“A lot of people care about this.”
She is not looking at you directly, but watching your image in the monitor.
You speak.
“I’ve always been with Frank.”
BILLY
It is science class and you are looking at a Canadian travel pamphlet while the teacher speaks. You do not remember when you first became fascinated with Canada, but you are. Everything in Canada is green. Or cold and white and pure. You really do not even remember where you got the stack of Canadian tourist brochures that you carry around with you in your backpack. You have had them for so long that they are wrinkled and corner-bumped and the glossy photographs are missing thumbprint-size hunks of color.
There is a loud crack, like a gunshot, and your head jerks up. It was the sound of a book hitting the floor.
“Who remembers Newton’s third law of motion?”
A girl raises her hand and says, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
No Happy Endings Page 15