The Absence of Mercy

by John Burley

  Is that right?

  Yes, that was right. They could lay out all of the circumstantial evidence they had in their possession—make whatever wild accusations they wanted. They would not make him doubt the innocence of his own son. They would not.

  Because you know your boy. You know what he’s capable of. And what he isn’t.

  Damn right, he knew his boy. After almost seventeen years, he ought to, by God. If his son were involved in anything remotely close to what they were suggesting, Ben would know about it. Wouldn’t he?

  Sure, the voice said. How could you not? After all, you’ve been through so much with him—with both of them.

  Yes, he had. Susan, too.

  Like the stint Joel spent in the hospital after falling over the rail of the upstairs balcony. Times like that.

  Of course. Times like that.

  Right over the rail, he went. An accident.

  Yes. Such a terrible accident had a way of bringing a family togeth—

  Because it couldn’t have happened any other way—right, Ben? The boy couldn’t have… been pushed… or thrown, for example.

  Thrown? That was ridiculous.

  Because you were right there. You saw it all, and you would’ve known, wouldn’t you? You would’ve known if something like that had happened.

  But he hadn’t seen it. Not the entire skirmish. All he’d witnessed as he ascended the staircase was Joel’s body falling to the floor below.

  And that’s it, right? Nothing else. Nothing you might’ve caught in your peripheral vision and chosen not to see?

  No, nothing.

  Because you know your boy. You know what he’s capable of.

  Yes. He did. Didn’t he?

  He looked up at them. They were watching him, all three of them, waiting for him to deny it again. From the look in their eyes—Even Sam? Yes, even his friend Sam—he could tell that the question was already settled in each of their minds, and that the only fool in this room… was him. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to accept what they were alleging. None of it made any sense to him. None of it at all.

  “Call, Susan,” he said finally. “They’re visiting her parents in Arizona right now. Call my wife, and she’ll tell you just how crazy this all is. Call her. You’ll see.” And he gave them the number.

  50

  The desert sun beat down on the metallic hide of the automobile as the car tracked its course across the barren landscape. In the rearview mirror, another vehicle could be seen cresting the horizon. She found it hard to resist the urge to accelerate. Instead, she allowed the cruise control to do its job, keeping them at six miles per hour over the posted speed limit. She couldn’t afford to get pulled over. Not now. And yet, time was short, wasn’t it? How much time did they actually have? She didn’t know—couldn’t know for sure. Not knowing made her want to place her right foot on the accelerator and floor the motherfucker, and again she resisted the urge. If she panicked, it would all be over.

  Another thought occurred to her, a saner thought: Stop. Stop now, either here or at the next exit (wherever that might be in this veritable wasteland of sand and sporadic scrub brush). Stop now and put an end to it before a horrible situation became much, much worse. In the backseat, two children slept—one hardly qualifying as a child any longer. If she took the next exit, found a gas station or a convenience store—anyplace with a landline (there’d been zero bars on her cell phone for the past forty minutes) and maybe another human being—she could make a phone call and just stay put. Allow it to end. She could allow herself to choose the only reasonable course of action.

  Which was diametrically opposed to what she was doing now. She could try to convince herself that she was somehow protecting them, but… was she, really? She had known for a long time, she supposed, that this would end badly. She had known ten years ago, when he was six, when he would simply sit for long periods of time—hours, sometimes—watching them, his small face devoid of expression. It wasn’t normal; she didn’t need to be a child psychiatrist to know that. The thought had occurred to her that perhaps he was experiencing some type of seizure—absence seizures, they called them. But his eyes, intelligent and aware, suggested differently. To be absolutely certain, she’d taken him to a pediatric neurologist. “Why does he do that?” she’d asked, but after a half-dozen tests and a few thousand dollars in medical bills the specialist had deemed her son healthy.

  “Nothing wrong that I can see,” he’d tried to reassure her. “He’s an intelligent, curious child. These episodes”—he’d shrugged, getting up from his seat and placing one chubby hand on the exam room’s doorknob, apparently eager to move on to the next patient—“are just part of his development. He’ll grow out of them. Something else will take their place.”

  And Thomas did seem to grow out of them, too—for a while, anyway. She had taken comfort in the fact that his general demeanor, as well as his interactions with others, had seemed to normalize over the next two years. And while his affect was never what she would consider completely normal, at least he had seemed more willing to engage in the world around him. It was around that time, however, that she’d discovered the wood rat.

  Ben had installed a small shed in the back of their yard the year before. He’d needed just enough storage space for the lawn mower, a few sawhorses, some planting pots, the circular saw, and a couple of shovels and assorted hand tools. It wasn’t a big structure, but it had a roof, four walls, and a sliding aluminum door with a latch that her husband usually kept locked.

  She’d been working out back in the garden one late spring afternoon when she’d noticed that the door to the shed was standing slightly ajar. Normally, she wouldn’t have thought twice about it; but they’d been having some trouble with rodents getting into the trash lately, and the sight of that partially open door had brought with it the thought of what an absolute mess she’d have on her hands if the rats got in there and decided to chew through the four bags of topsoil she’d purchased last week. She went to the shed with the intention of simply closing that door and, as an added measure of caution, perhaps to pause for a quick inspection of the interior to ensure that no critters had taken up residence inside. When she arrived at the door, she threw a quick look inside and then started to slide the door closed on its plastic track. Then she paused, for an unpleasant stench seemed to waft through the structure’s open doorway. Oh, God. Something has found its way in there, she thought, and has probably died in the process. She wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about going in after it, either. But Ben—the usual cleaner-upper of such disgusting, odiferous delights—was out of town for the weekend and wouldn’t be back until Tuesday. God only knew how nasty that smell was going to get between now and then.

  She reversed course and threw the door wide open, letting in the maximum amount of light to illuminate her ensuing inspection. She’d hoped, perhaps in vain, that the enhanced flow of fresh air would also dissipate most of the offensive odor. What she saw inside the shed amid the flood of sunlight was, in essence, unremarkable. Tools leaned lazily against the corrugated aluminum walls in their usual positions. The lawn mower sat dormant, patiently awaiting her husband’s return. Even the bags of topsoil appeared unmolested, their white bodies congregated in the corner of the shed like a small crowd of curious onlookers. Nothing seemed out of place, and there was no dead animal lurking in the recesses that she could see. Still, the smell was as pungent as ever—even more so now that she’d stepped inside.

  She made her way to the back of the shed’s interior, allowing her nose to guide her rather than her eyes. It was here that the smell was most powerful, and she got down on her hands and knees to inspect the corners of the small enclosure, to push the bags of topsoil aside.

  She found nothing.

  Susan returned to her feet, hands placed squarely on her hips, as she continued to scan the inside of the shed from top to bottom. The stench was so noxious that she was forced to pull the front of the her T-shirt up over her nose, the smell o
f her own sweat and—yes, let’s be honest here—body odor preferable to the alternative olfactory assault. No matter how hard she looked, however, she was unable to identify the source of the odor.

  Well, I’ve given it an earnest try, she told herself. This would be a job for Ben when he returned. It was one of the divisions of labor in their marriage. She had carried Thomas in her intractably expanding uterus for nine months, and was now three months pregnant with her second child and repeating the process all over again. She had been plagued by frequent episodes of nausea and vomiting during the first trimesters of both pregnancies, and by varicose veins and intermittent lower back pain at the end of her third trimester with Thomas. She had already pushed one child’s enormous head out through the smallest of orifices, and her body had been permanently altered by that experience in ways she would never feel completely at ease with. Now it would be her husband’s turn to retrieve dead things from the tool shed. It still wasn’t exactly a fair division of duties—he was getting off much too easy—but right then she was more than happy to cash in on her investment in their nuptial arrangement.

  Susan exited the shed and slid the door closed behind her, glad to be free from whatever fetid thing still lingered inside. She was on the verge of crossing the lawn and returning to her gardening—perhaps, in retrospect, it would’ve been better if she had—but the obnoxious smell still hung in the air, even with the door to the shed closed and latched, and she remembered thinking to herself, What if it’s not inside the shed at all, but behind it?

  Even then, she’d considered letting the matter go. It wasn’t her responsibility to go on a half-day scavenger hunt looking for this thing. The days that she truly had to herself, with her husband out of town and Thomas off with his friends, were few and far between. She ought to be enjoying the day, not traipsing around the yard searching for clues like some veterinary medical examiner. The hell with it, she decided. I’m going back to my goddamn garden.

  And yet a moment later she found herself peering around the rear corner of the shed. The front of her shirt was once again pulled up over the bridge of her nose like a bandana, as if she were more intent on robbing a stagecoach than exploring her own backyard. That was when she spied it, the source of the odor. At first, she wasn’t quite certain what she was seeing—the mass of flies swarming around it was so thick. She took a step forward and shooed them away with her hand. The majority of the airborne insects retreated a short distance, although they still loitered in the area, waiting for her to depart and leave them once again with their prize. At her feet lay a large Tupperware container, its underside pointed toward the sky. It sat in a small patch of dirt behind the shed, facedown on a two-inch-thick section of lumber, which completely sealed the container’s only opening. Along the edges on all sides, a series of nails had been driven through the container’s plastic lip and deep into the wood beneath.

  Condensation had accumulated on the inside of the chamber, making it difficult to clearly make out the details of the amorphous form inside. Its dark outline was perfectly still, its body nearly filling the confines of the small compartment. There was no doubt about one thing, however. Whatever had been purposefully imprisoned inside the container was quite dead. The reek of its decomposing corpse wafted up through multiple punctate holes in the plastic, obviously created with one objective: to allow the passage of air in and out of the container so the animal could breathe. And that was where her eyes kept returning—to those small air holes designed to prevent quick suffocation. Obviously, the animal had been meant to die. But it had been meant to die slowly.

  She’d backed away in revulsion, moaning slightly. In doing so, she managed to trip over her own feet, and she sat down hard in the grass a few yards from the makeshift death chamber. If there had been an upturned nail in the grass, she would’ve sustained a significant enough injury to land her in the emergency department, but she was lucky in this regard—all of the available nails had been used for other purposes. The flies took this partial retreat as a sign to resume their swarming, and they did so with new enthusiasm, desperate to get inside. One of them flitted onto her forearm, and she swatted it away in a spasm of disgust. She pushed herself backward along the ground, crab-walking away from the pitiful shape in front of her as fast as her adrenaline-laced appendages could carry her. All the while, her eyes kept returning to the air holes.

  Die slow, thing inside. Die slow. The thought sloshed around inside her head like a rotting jellyfish, and suddenly she turned clumsily over onto her hands and knees and vomited in the grass. The stink of it mingled with that of the dead creature only a few yards away, and the axis of the earth seemed to tilt unpredictably as she vomited again, abdominal muscles clenching each time the spasms passed through her bent frame. Small beads of sweat broke out on her back, her shoulders, her forehead. Her hands balled into small fists as she clutched the grass, afraid that if she let go now her body would simply slide away from the earth and into the blackness that surrounded her. She remained that way for a long time: eyes shut, fingers dug into the soft dirt for purchase, flies buzzing in her ears, the ground shifting dangerously beneath her.

  When the worst of it was over, she simply lay motionless in the grass, waiting to recover. A rogue fly landed on her calf, and she twitched it away. She wasn’t certain how long she lay there. She had the place to herself, and no one came out to ask if she was okay. During that limitless space of time, she thought of many things, but mostly she thought of Thomas. She thought of her strange, dark boy staring at her from across the room at the age of six. She did not wonder whether he had done this, for in some deep, primitive part of her brain she knew with a mother’s simple certainty that he had. Instead, she wondered about the insignificant details: Where did he get the hammer? From the shed, of course. Where is it now? She was fairly certain that if she went back to look for it, she’d find it hanging in its usual spot on the wall. He returned the hammer, but left the animal. What does that mean? Why didn’t he try to hide it? The question made her want to cry, for what it meant to her was that her son was broken in some deep, irreparable way. She thought of the neurologist, with his thick-rimmed glasses, bow tie, and doughy body: “These episodes… He’ll grow out of them. Something else will take their place.”

  It had. Something else had taken the place of those vacant stares. And the question before her was, What now? She asked herself whether she should confront him, and if so, how. Should he be punished? Perhaps punishment was too mild a response. Should he be hospitalized? What does a parent, or a physician for that matter, do with a… with a sociopath? For that was what she was dealing with here, wasn’t it? Normal people do not nail animals inside of a Tupperware container to watch them die. What’s more, normal people do not do something like that and just walk away when it’s over without shame or guilt, without hiding the evidence.

  She allowed the analytical part of her brain to work it through. Medical school had provided her with enough basic knowledge of psychiatry to know that sociopaths—the more correct term these days was antisocial personality disorder—are essentially unaffected by all attempts at treatment. The fundamental problem was that they lacked the basic human ability to identify with others. They were unable to mentally place themselves in the position of another creature, be that a person or an animal. It wasn’t that they necessarily didn’t understand right from wrong; it was simply that they lacked the ability to care. Eating an apple and torturing an animal carried with them the same level of unrest within the conscience: none. In fact, it was as if the conscience—the ability to care about right and wrong—were anatomically absent from the brain. The same was true for the absence of mercy—not because mercy was something such individuals chose to withhold, but because it was a faculty they simply did not possess. The condition couldn’t be medicated away or repaired by psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, any more than those treatments might be expected to regenerate an absent arm or leg in an amputee. Over the centuries, medical treatment
had become quite adept at fixing parts of the body that were broken: a shattered bone, or even a shattered mind; but it had never been very good at creating something, especially something as amorphous as a conscience, in situations where it never existed in the first place.

  Likewise, from a rational point of view, the idea of punishing her child for this atrocity seemed somewhat pointless. Perhaps punishment would at least teach him that every action has its consequences. But if he had no ability to appreciate that the action was wrong, reprimand was unlikely to keep it from happening again.

  What other options did that leave? Sending her son somewhere to be locked away? Following him around every moment of every day to ensure that this sort of thing—or worse—never happened again? Impossible. She sat in the grass, legs crossed in front of her and arms wrapped protectively around her knees. She sat there for a long time, some ten yards from the dead wood rat in its plastic cell, and searched herself for an answer. It wasn’t a situation she’d ever imagined encountering, and now that it was here she had no idea what to do with it. She could still smell the stench of the thing: its furry body bloated and rotting in the sun, tiny feet torn apart and matted with blood from useless attempts to claw its way out. She felt another hitch in her stomach and turned to the side to retch once again. This time nothing came. She had emptied herself completely.

  She wiped her mouth with the back of one dirt-grimed hand and stared at the container nailed to the board with its respective cloud of flies. The sight of it repulsed her, made her want to distance herself from it as much as possible. And yet, she realized now that it was also a part of her. She owned it as much as her son did, for wasn’t there an inseparable connection between mother and child? From the moment of conception, the two are linked by body and blood, and that visceral intimacy continues well beyond childbirth. It becomes a part of who you are, as indissoluble as the color of your skin or the tempo of your heart. She was vaguely aware that it was somehow different for fathers, who seemed to be able to disconnect themselves at times from the lives of their children, or at least to compartmentalize their thoughts and feelings in accordance with their various duties and responsibilities. She’d never been able to accomplish that degree of mental separation. She was a mother above all else, and for better or worse, she felt inherently tied to the lives of her children. She had difficulty describing it any more clearly than that, but understood it perfectly and without reservation. And what it meant was that the thing in the container was hers as much as it was Thomas’s. And now she was responsible for taking care of it.