—And Dráno in saline solution would be incredibly painful.
—Yes, Doctor. That’s why I used it.
The last trace of redness in my vision faded, and a trembling I’d not been aware of in my hands fell still.
* * *
Slipping into Evan’s building was easy. I pantomimed a search for keys while a tenant, smiling, let me in as he left. Yet I didn’t feel the same grace and confidence I’d felt while using a machete to purge the rage with which Molino had poisoned me. I felt fleshy, mortal, afraid. I had a gym bag of clothes bought from the Salvation Army; the nylon handle was damp with palm sweat. I found the building’s basement laundry by guessing its location from the dryer vents outside and washed the clothes. I sat in the far corner, where the floor was littered with balls of dryer lint, and opened a college geology text bought from a used bookstore. I underlined passages randomly. The being I wished to be, the fiendish master of deception whose élan I tried to invoke, knew that the best way to hide is in plain sight. Even when you don’t want to hide.
Under water-stained plaster walls, I waved and said hello to people as they came to use the other machines. They wore stress-lines on their faces like tribal scars as they slid down the social ladder: middle-class exiles who wondered if living in this low-rent neighbourhood and student slum was just a rough patch, or the start of a permanent decline. Evan lived in a very friendly building—the downwardly mobile are always prone to kindness. I wondered what mischief Evan wrought here, what lies he’d used on his neighbours. Maybe he manipulated the manager to get special favours. Who knew?
I washed my load of ratty clothes over and over, hearing Evan’s neighbours chat about how rough things were. Near midnight, I left the clothes in the dryer and walked to the first floor, where Evan’s apartment was. I knew he’d be asleep. His ex-roommates used to complain about what an early riser he was: the one glimmer of truth to the farm-boy myth he’d crafted for himself.
I walked to his apartment along a hallway carpet that’d once been plush, fear cramped my mid-section, as if rubber hands twisted my guts. I stood before Evan’s door, next to an incinerator chute welded shut years ago. Lines of dust on the door’s moulding sat at my eye level. I had a lock jimmy, the thing thieves use. But I didn’t know if it’d work on Evan’s door. It’d barely worked on my door when I practiced at home, and had made a small racket. Even if I jimmied the lock, what could I do if Evan kept the chain on?
I was afraid . . . if I couldn’t kill him tonight, I’d never summon the courage to try again. I owed killing him not only to myself, but to Justice. Yet the power of that higher cause had abandoned me. I couldn’t find within me the poetry I inflicted on Molino, unable to become the metaphor I was driven to inflict. My sick flesh couldn’t cloak itself as the Dark and Shadowy Man, the diabolical figure of such awesome power. Such power had as its basis, and as its foil, the imagined power of the victim: the vanity that can be sundered along with the victim’s sense of security in the fortress of the bourgeois home, made all the more potent in the arrogantly false home space of Molino’s office. Here, in this rickety building, there was no such vanity. There was no smug security that could grant me strength through the act of my trespassing upon it.
People were awake in the apartments nearby. I heard shuffling feet, a shower, a late-night talk show host telling jokes, a Jerry Springer-like crowd chanting, the almost alien screech of a dial-up modem as someone reached through the ether for what he couldn’t find in reality.
A stink like wet dog fur wafted from me as I crouched by Evan’s lock: the stench that leaks from my pores when I’m under duress, when my hands twitch and my stomach digests itself. I swallowed down the panic, took the jimmy out of my denim jacket and raised it to the brass lock. I heard something scuttle on the other side of the door, like the bolting of a cat on a wooden floor, quick, and low to the ground. It had to be a cat. What else would it be? I didn’t care, so long as it didn’t bark.
The jimmy waved in my grip like the prong of a tuning fork. It had been so much easier with Molino . . .
I was too nervous to use the jimmy. I’d have to give this up. Stop with Evan. There was no point going on, naked, with no raiment of other-worldly power. I stood to leave.
And a ridiculous thought occurred to me. I turned the brass knob.
As the door swung open, I clothed myself in the guise of the killer
I needed to be within these shabby halls: a figure of urban nightmare, who can sap will and action, who can forge a microcosm of suffering within the isolation of a city crowd. I moulted the need to be the Dark Man and became the lethal being of this place. My senses buzzed and sang—aware of everything, the beat of my heart, the drip of a sink in the bathroom, traffic on the main street nearby, the taste of fresh air coming through opened windows and the smell of cheap strawberry incense burned hours before. I shut the door and threw the bolt that should have been thrown to thwart my Coming. Reaching for the chain, I noticed it swung slightly. I must have brushed it when I came in. Its dangling reminded me of a noose.
I fastened the chain and searched the living room with a penlight. Evan’s CDs were stacked by the stereo. I put them in my gym bag, careful to turn on the player and take the disc inside. I left the player open, a flag for lazy cops: a sign that a crack addict or dust-head had done this, come to lift easily fenced goods. I clicked off the penlight and walked to the bedroom, in silence that was not mine, dreading I’d step on the cat, make it screech and wake Evan.
Moonlight striped the bedroom, filtering through Venetian blinds that rocked in the cool breeze. Evan slept in a foetal ball on his futon, a pillow hugged to his crotch and chest. He looked like the innocent, fair-haired boy he pretended to be. His eyes darted under his lids . . . thus did a being of TV cliché dreams lay dreaming before me. My last trace of fear quieted. My hands steadied, like those of a surgeon. For I knew this shit had to die tonight. Now. It was right that this sham innocent be expunged from this mortal coil.
With the glass syringe in my left hand and my right on the light switch above him, I woke Evan to the moment of his death.
He howled and bolted upright, jabbering like one possessed or speaking in tongues. In an instant, he was on the futon, whirling. He saw me, spouting debased language as he covered his wounded ear, reddish froth leaking between his fingers. His pathetic body contorted with the pain that whispered into the fleshiness of his mind. The autistic stamp of his feet snapped the futon frame under the mattress. I wanted to explain his death to him, to tell this howling man why I dissolved his life as he fell to his knees in the depression that had been his bed.
I was about to walk away when Evan grabbed my shirt, rose from his knees and screamed the last words of his shitty life: “DEAN!! MAKE IT STOP!! PLEEEEEASE!!”
I felt my eyes crack wide with his shouting my name and pummelled him four, five, six times in the throat, crushed his larynx. As he fell in a gurgling lump onto his bed, I pulled a small canister from my jacket and maced him, thankful I’d thought to bring the spray.
And I enjoyed using it. Like spraying a cockroach.
As I watched him thrash, the reddish froth turned a deeper red, and the rest of the room, the rest of the world, dropped in shadow. As if a spotlight focused on his agony, and nothing else existed. It was the sort of concentration I knew when I stared at the death throes of a legless spider or beheaded ant. Time walked differently in that sweet dome of light—sound and vision became viscous as oil. This was the urban space of suffering, the cupped silence in which Kitty Genovese was butchered, the quiet that smothers the voice of Munch’s Scream.
His pain opera over, Evan wheezed among the coiled, bloody blankets as the rest of the world faded back into existence, as if afraid to intrude. I pitied him, still longing to explain his death and give it meaning to him. I thought to fetch a knife from his kitchen to give him a tracheotomy, so he might live long enough for me to fully enjoy his death.
But time and sight and hearing flowed rudely as they had before. Evan’s neighbours were pounding, shouting at the door. Soon they’d get the manager with his passkey.
I shut off the light, went to the window.
It wouldn’t open more than three inches. Nor would the next window.
Evan had put screws into the window frames, so they could open wide enough to let in air, but not wide enough for a thief to get in, not wide enough to admit the figure of urban nightmare I no longer was.
The pounding at the door grew louder, there were more shouts from neighbours called away from TVs and the lonely quest for cyber-porn. I couldn’t break through the window, not as the mere man I now was. I’d get lacerated; there’d be questions at the hospital, my blood on the broken glass.
Concerted blows thudded against the door.
There was nothing heavy in the bedroom to break the windows . . . the only furniture besides the futon was a beanbag chair in the corner piled with dirty laundry. I could use Evan to break the glass, hurl him through. . . .
A sound . . . a clatter . . . like a plastic bottle on tile. I heard it between thuds against the door. It came from the bathroom.
Clarity. Sudden epiphany. The cat.
The cat had bolted, and knocked something over in the midst of this commotion to get out.
To get out. For the span of a breath, I thought I saw through the creature’s eyes as it escaped: a flash of darkness, and a flight through weeds under the ugly glow of halogen. In the bathroom I saw the shower curtain billowing, and behind it, the horizontally sliding aluminum window above the tub half opened, the piss-light of street lamps glinting off the frosted glass.
I tried opening it. A block of wood had been set into the window slot to keep it from opening all the way. I took it and slid the window open as I heard the hall door splinter. I dropped to the soft dirt, made myself lost in the lot behind the building. I was three blocks away before I heard sirens.
Home, I stripped the clothes I’d worn just for tonight, the purple tie-dyed T-shirt with “Bad Trip” stencilled in black marker, now stained with blood (and perhaps with traces of the brain that had plotted the assassination of my character) where Evan had grabbed me, the John Lennon spectacles with plain lenses I’d found in a head shop for two dollars, the bicycling gloves . . . all the accessories people would remember before they’d remember the face of that young man in the laundry room.
I shoved them in a plastic bag and heaved them into the Dumpster behind my apartment. Evan’s CDs were tossed out, too, as was the geology text. Before I slept, I scraped the three days’ growth of beard I’d raised for tonight, and washed the blond frost from my hair.
The next day, a composite of someone who looked nothing like me flashed on the six o’clock news, just after a piece on how some people are genetically predisposed to not like green vegetables, and a report on counties in California competing to host the Scott Peterson trial.
I wept with relief.
—I have to tell you something, Dean.
Doctor Johansson’s voice changed. This was dialogue he’d planned, a predetermined line he’d waited to deliver. His voice rang clear enough for those in the back row to hear. In following me into shadow, this was his tether back to his world of controlled outcomes, to where his voice wouldn’t sound as it would near a troubled lake. I’ve read that the first true profiler of criminals and killers was Stanislavsky. The thought gave me comfort as I answered his practiced line.
—What’s that, Doctor?
—You didn’t use enough of your poison on Evan to kill him.
Greasy illness trickled the lining of my guts, as I remembered the endings of so many novels in which the supposed murder victim was really still . . .
—Evan isn’t alive, is he?
—No. You killed him when you broke his windpipe.
—Thank God.
The words were flung from me as I embraced the knowledge that Evan had not attained a totemic mask of his own: the maimed-yet-resurrected victim who accuses his thwarted killer.
—Why are you relieved? Isn’t his death now contrary to your vision of Justice?
His lines performed, his expected results gathered, his tone returned to what it had been, as if we spoke under a sky that would drown out our voices with sudden storm.
—I killed him by taking his voice, the tool he used to ruin lives. The
Justice is still there. Just not the original Justice I’d envisioned. It’s the same with Molino. There’s still Justice in his death, even without the mirror. And I’m relieved Evan’s dead because no one, not even him, deserves to suffer as much as he would have after what I’d done.
—You’re sympathetic.
—Shouldn’t I be?
—You’re the one who killed him.
—Because I take people’s lives doesn’t mean I want them to suffer more than they need to.
Doctor Johansson leaned forward, elbows on the desk and chin set on his knuckles.
—You’d think that about Molino? You seem to have truly hated him.
—Passionately. Until after I’d killed him. And as I killed Evan, my resentment toward him drifted away, like morning fog. After I killed Evan I started feeling better about my . . . well victims is such an ugly word, but let’s use it for now.
And it is an inaccurate word, since over a lifetime of victimizing, I’ve had only one true victim.
—How did you feel better about them?
—I started forgiving them. As I killed them, I saw the frailties that made them make me miserable. It was a lack of personal power that drove them to seek power over me. I also started forgiving myself, because as I saw their weaknesses, I saw clearly my own weaknesses, what allowed them to cause me so much unhappiness. I’d given these people power over me, and by killing them, I took that power back.
—But you kept killing, after Evan and Molino. Why weren’t you content with the power you’d gained back from them?
—The power I’d given the people I killed was essentially portions of my life, parts of my being. I want all my life back before I die. I’m entitled to it.
—What about your victims’ weaknesses? Wouldn’t it have been fair for them to regain the parts of their lives lost to weakness?
—In this context, my killing them was their own weaknesses killing them in the end. Tragic flaws collecting their due.
—You’re shirking responsibility for their deaths, blaming the victim.
No judgment in his voice, only in his statement. Even in this realm of wind and shadows and a coming storm, there was catharsis to speak of catharsis, to speak of the sweet obliteration I’d felt while obliterating the lives of others.
—No, Doctor. I killed these people out of a sense of responsibility, to myself and to Justice. We were just speaking in a particular context, not addressing the totality.
—Could your victims see their deaths the way you did? Were they aware of the Justice you dispensed, or know why you killed them? If they didn’t know the ideals you served, then your tasks would remain half-complete.
—The people I killed knew there was . . . friction between themselves and me. That I was correcting wrongs done to me.
—None of them had a sense of your Justice?
I smiled slightly.
—Maybe Brian understood the Justice of his death.
—Brian Williams? he asked, with a glance to a file to his right.
—Not Williams. My former boss at the bookstore. Keene. He approved of how I killed him. He was drunk when he died, and that gave him insight.
Doctor Johansson’s hands touched down on another file he quickly opened and scanned. I wish I knew what his system was. He spoke as his eyes darted.
—You killed him with a bottle because he was an alcoholic?
—There’s more to it than that. His drinking ruined his life. His wife had left him, and he alienated most of his family and friends. The only control h
e had was in that bookstore. So he made his control supreme. In the end, I controlled the bottle and him.
“Hey, Dean. Where’d you learn this interesting alphabet you’re using?”
My first month on the job in this chain bookstore. The pay’s shit, but I have to keep busy while I decide what to do with my life. I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach. Instead of a place of learning, I work in a temple that holds anxiety the way the tight skin over a wasp bite holds venom. The store is an ant-swarming palace that comforts those who believe they are entitled to never worry . . . yet who thrill to worry that such entitlement might be taken away. I hawk medical thrillers to face-lifted suburbanites terrified of bodily decay. Political thrillers about men in positions of power to square-jawed yuppies who are as fascinated by the power exerted over them in office hierarchies as they are by the fake tits on the cover of Maxim. I hawk novels to bird-twitchingly nervous professional women about “liberated women” who flee freedom by running into the arms of fit, wealthy men too perfect to exist save as caricatures played by Richard Gere. These women have the same hungry hurt in their eyes as do the wounded orphans of reality who stare wistfully at the dragons adorning the fantasy novels they buy in stacks each week. I watch worry and comfort waltz in this place, where in the attached café I saw a yoga- mat-bearing mother approvingly stroke the head of her little girl for refusing a pastry because she felt she was “too fat.”
Keene’s question took a moment to register; the lattice of worry-soured gazes in the store slurs human syntax. I crouched low, unpacking boxes of books. Keene loomed over me, a man in his late forties with a great paunch. His grey, iron-stiff hair is pulled back in a tail. I smell liquor on him, and piss-tinged sweat. Customers, junkie-anxious for comfort, turn their consumer-dead gazes to me, longing for the opiate assurance that a hierarchy is about to be reaffirmed. Their gazes trespass . . . and nest like asps behind my breastbone.
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