MARRY, BANG, KILL

by Andrew Battershill

  For about a year she stayed in her parents’ basement, working in a call centre and going to indie rock shows and doing a ton of MDMA. On a rainy fall night, smoking and trying to even out beside the doors of an Empathy Pig concert, Greta found her career. The stairwell outside of Grumpy’s Tavern had flooded in the rain, so Greta was standing on a milk crate, poking the dwarf statuette above the door in the nose. A woman’s voice emerged from the doorway, the existence of which Greta had forgotten as she looked into the cracked paint of the wooden dwarf’s eyes.

  “Excuse me, can I get the fuck out of this bar now?”

  Greta suddenly remembered that the true purpose of the milk crate was not to allow one a better vantage on Grumpy the Wooden Dwarf, but to let people move in and out of the bar’s flooded stairwell. She felt a depth of contrition that was, perhaps, exaggerated and she reached out to touch the sound of the voice as she apologized.

  “I am so sorry. You want to go outside into this beautiful rain that makes you remember childhood and I’m on this crate andandand oh man, have you talked to this dwarf? He has soulful eyes and a nose that could sink a battleship.” Her hand was already unimaginably deep into the woman’s hair, which was thick and wonderfully complicated. “You have fantastic hair, my hand is lost in it like in a forest, except my hand won’t die of hypothermia and people do that when they get lost in the forest, even though being lost in a giant forest must be a sweet feeling until you start getting cold. All those trees and mosses and air.”

  The woman was laughing and gently pushing Greta’s wrist out of her hair. “Greta?”

  Greta wiggled her fingers around in front of her face for a moment before looking past them and realizing that the woman was actually Karen, whom she’d known in grad school. “Karen! You have a really strong grip.”

  Karen gently guided Greta to a dry spot that was all the way under the awning. “How are you doing?”

  Greta allowed a happy shiver full sway over the length of her spine. “Super-good! I mean, shitty normally, but super-good right this second! How are you? Are you on vacation? Where did you find such a textured shirt?” Greta’s hand, having stopped wiggling, had found its way into Karen’s open coat and was now running up along both sides of Karen’s red corset-style top.

  Karen laughed and once more gently guided Greta’s hands to a less personally invasive location. “I am super-good too, and I’m only in town on business for like a week. Do you want a smoke?”

  Greta found herself severely lacking saliva, and was also trying not to grind her teeth, so she nodded instead of speaking and twisted her head around in a completely unsystematic attempt to find her drink. Karen reached over Greta’s shoulder and handed her the glass, which was now mostly full of rainwater. Greta finished the drink in one swallow, and as she turned around, a lit cigarette was placed smoothly between her lips. The smoke tasted metallic and sharp, and Greta tried to focus on the blooming feeling in her chest. She looked down at Karen’s rainboots, a small repeated black-and-white headshot of Elvis Presley covering them.

  Greta exhaled straight up into the doorway. “What do you do for work? I call people on the phone and ask them if they’ve had cancer and things like cancer or if they’re happy with the community college they went to. Those are different surveys, though.”

  The smoke from Greta’s cigarette was floating back down in thick wisps, shrouding Karen’s hair. Karen held her non-cigarette hand out into the rain, letting the water run down her arm. “I kill people for money.” She slowly pulled her hand back in, reached through the smoke and poked Greta, wetly, on the tip of her nose.

  Greta giggled and wiped her nose aggressively. “You would be perfect. Who would think the cute girl with a massive lady-boner for Hieronymus Bosch is there to kill you? You’d be like a wolf in a sheep’s hairdo.”

  Karen grabbed a piece of her own bangs; she pulled it out slowly, watching the strands of her hair curl back towards her head one by one. “The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, all day, errday. And you’re absolutely right, they don’t. They wouldn’t expect you either.”

  Greta was a little busy exploring the ice cubes remaining in her glass, but she listened to Karen. Greta felt a strong desire to sound like a woman talking to another woman in a novel written by a woman using a man’s name. “These days, my dear, nobody expects a thing of me.”

  The two women slouched closer together, threw aside their cigarettes, and held both of each other’s hands. Karen said: “You shouldn’t be by yourself playing with dwarves outside of bars.”

  “I came with my friend, but she’s having a skinny-jean-covered penis folded into her in one of those booths now . . .”

  “You shouldn’t be working a shit job and feeling like a loser. Listen, I’ve got a job. And I can get you work, if you want really, really strange, fun, uber-fucked-up work.”

  Greta took a long, fluttery breath and relaxed her neck, leaning back into the wall and feeling all the bumps and drops of paint with the back of her head.

  “So tell me about it.”

  Ø

  Greta had learned very early on that there’s no point having a preconceived idea of what someone will look like when all you’ve done is stalk them on the internet and search their apartment and paint in what could easily be blood all over their living room. Nonetheless, as a small person who saw things through the eyes in her own small head, she was never fully prepared for people to wind up huge, especially not people who do jobs that tiny people can do just as well.

  Bill was about six-foot-four, wearing thick glasses and a T-shirt that just as easily could have been any of the prog-rock album covers decorating the walls around him, tri-toned beard sprawling off his face like a suburb. He made it all the way into the living room before he saw the wall, and he saw Greta only in the panicked glance he shot around the apartment right after.

  The hitman waved in a friendly way she actually felt. From looking at him and searching his apartment, this was a guy she could imagine making class-friends with in a second-year history course and genuinely liking until he invited her out for a coffee that was definitely actually a somewhat awkward date and then never seeing him again. “Hi. I’m a person with a name you will never learn. Your name is William Harbough and your mother lives at 2427 Foul Bay Road, basement suite. I broke into your apartment, there’s a catch bolt on your door, so when you closed it behind you it locked, and now only I can open it.” The guy was staring at the painting, shaking already. This was going to be an easy one. “I see you looking at this really quite bloody-looking mural that I painted on your wall. So, first, some words on the piece: I’m calling this one Gimme! That’s the title, and yes, before you ask, the medium is very human-blood-like substance on drywall. And yes, this is a painting of a pipe.” She turned back to admire her work, then nodded back at Bill. “It is not the ‘this is not a pipe’ Magritte pipe, or not-pipe. That’s a fine painting. Does it deserve to be the most famous of the famous? Probs not, but that’s a matter for scholars of that movement. This is my own pipe, that I drew and thought of myself. It’s an original. Plus, Magritte was a pussy and did his with paint, not with a mysterious human-blood-like substance that I’d be curious as fuck about if I were you, Bill. You go by Bill, right? But I won’t tell you if it’s blood, Bill. And if it were blood I wouldn’t tell where the blood is from, Bill, because that’s the last thing anyone cares about, where the blood came from. I’m just going to tell you that I’m here about Tommy Marlo and the last computer he stole. And I broke in here, used that fancy equipment to lock you in, and then I, painstakingly and with the love of a talent never quite mastered, painted a passable picture on your wall to get your attention about this very serious matter with Tommy and the computer he jacked from a young girl. I’m not going to be a hack and threaten you or anything, I’ll let you connect the dots — hey, paint your own picture — and think about how seriously me and the people paying me many, many dollars are taking this.” She took a long pa
use that she kept from being pregnant by half humming, half breathing a bouncy tune she had come up with when waiting for a bus some time ago. “So we’ll go through all your computers in there, then we’re going to have a chat about Tommy.”

  Six huge, heaving breaths later, his glasses totally fogged over, Bill found his voice. “I don’t have the computer.”

  “Why not? You’re Tommy’s fence, right?”

  Eyes still locked on the pipe, “I’m his fence, but once we saw what was on the computer he didn’t want me to . . . He took it himself. In case he could . . .”

  “Use it as a chip to deal with the cops or the club.” She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “We’ll see how that works out for him. Where is he?”

  Bill was feeling his oats now, his eyes flicking towards her behind the fogged glass, setting his weight in his legs almost as if he wanted, or had any idea how, to fight. “He’s my friend. I . . . I won’t do that.”

  Greta smiled genuinely. “Okay, so here’s the scene, my dude. You’ve got at least a buck forty-five on me, weight-wise. The tippy top of my steady head standing on my tippy-toes doesn’t reach your collarbones. I’ve got nothing in my hands. And I’m standing three feet away from you in your living room telling you, right now, that you’re going to give up your boy. I’m not telling you to give him up. I’m informing you that you will. See the difference?”

  She took a step closer to him, placed her head gently into his chest and moved him surely back until he fell onto the couch. She leaned over and tapped his nose with her index finger.

  “Smile button!” His upper lip trembled, but not because he was fighting a smile. “What I’m trying to say to you, Bill, is that you should look at this as a favour, right now. That’s the way to see this thing. You live in the internet; you know the deal. This is a world of unceasing subjectivity. A world of opinions. But right now, right this very second, I’m giving you the gift of living in fact. There’s no two ways to see the world right now. There’s no choose-your-own-adventure end to this little scene we have here. There’s one ending, and it’s up to me, not you, how we get there. I’m letting you exist in the presence of hard truth, for just a little while. And I think you should appreciate that.” Greta gracefully flung her leg above her shoulder and used the momentum to flip onto the couch, settling with her legs crossed on the armrest and across Bill’s lap. The lower angle let her see the thick line of wetness creeping down his jeans. “Plus, you can probably get a lot out of this, jerking-off-wise, later. A really shameful, sharp, humiliating load. I hear those’re all the rage these days. So take a deep breath and try to bank this whole scene. You’re going to be okay.”

  It’s true of cats and it’s true of people: if you really want to train them, you can’t just shout and hit them, and you can’t just give them treats and hugs. They won’t hear one note, no matter what that note is. Pet, pet, slap. Do that once, and they never, ever forget it. The hitman popped over onto her other hip, uncrossed her ankles, and slammed a short, sharp, barré kick into Bill’s face, not breaking his nose, but bending it with a light cartilagey crunch at the end. His watering eyes stayed looking away from her as Greta swung around and sat upright.

  “Man, you need a new couch. This shit is about to swallow me. Need some life in your cushions, dude. So I’m going to let you chill a minute, fire up that Volcano for us, and we can vape a nice leisurely bag together while you tell me where I’m going to find your friend.”

  Ø

  Sergei agreed to meet at Greta’s favourite brunch restaurant, a loss-leader and passion project supported by the (mostly) BDSM sex store on the first floor. The owner, a friendly man sporting leather chaps and a handlebar moustache, brought her a full pot of coffee as she waited, and then he complimented her shoes. She saw Sergei take the stairs two at a time. He nimbly swung himself into the restaurant and settled down across from her with a flourish, like someone’s father in a European film musical.

  “Hello! You have worked quickly and beautifully and had a long and troublesome day and night, I trust.”

  “You trust right.”

  “Indeed, it is my greatest gift. You look perturbed.”

  “Well, it got a bit messy. I assume the cleanup crew comes out of my end.”

  Sergei tilted his head to one side, thinking, then he shook the head. He gathered his fingers with a loose twiddle. “Not this time. Your other work has been excellent. And that cost has been spared, following your little mishap with the janitor, as it affords us the opportunity to lay the blame on Mr. Thomas Marlo and further damage his credibility, should he be apprehended and attempt to barter with the police.” He flicked the edge of the menu then twiddled his fingers. “The breakfast, they serve it all day, yes?”

  “You really want something out of this one, hey? As long as you have the cash, I’m good.”

  “So you are confident of his destination, our idiot thief?”

  “Yep. I’m heading to a northern Gulf Island. So’s he.”

  “How pleasant.”

  Greta had not been to bed and was in a species of mood that had been hitting her more frequently lately. “Not for anyone I meet along the way.” She looked back into her coffee, which was dark black with small currents swirling around in it, like oil in a barrel.

  Sergei theatrically spread the menu out to its full size. “Now that the vulgarities of business are behind us, we must eat.” He paused as he read the menu and then quickly closed it and looked deeply into Greta’s eyes. “I will have the Big Bear Breakfast.”

  Greta laughed into her coffee. “Serge, do you understand what bear means in this context?”

  “Of course. It is a large omnivore who lives in the woods.”

  The corners of her mouth pulled into a smile. She put her coffee cup down, rested her hand firmly against the hot metal pot, and closed her eyes. “I burn hotter than the sun, and I’ll live twice as long.”

  Sergei clapped his hands together. “You speak nothing but the truth, dearest girl.”

  Greta relaxed into the scalding heat.

  10 Quadra Island, British Columbia

  By the time Mousey woke up, Grace and the last of his cash nest egg were gone, and he was ten minutes late to meet his drug dealer, who was already lurking at the top of his driveway.

  Mousey had been (barely) allowed to punch his twenty-year ticket from the Chicago PD mostly because senior police officials and mid-level political hacks were terrified both of the things he knew and of the people he was willing to tell. Mousey had spent a year as a criminal defence investigator, burning whatever bridges he had left, and after the last exposé dropped in the Tribune, had left Chicago, retired at the age of forty-three, firmly blackballed from the only city and profession he’d ever known.

  A tall contractor and a tiny old man with a giant backhoe had spent a year clearing his land on Quadra and building the house that his ex-girlfriend, who was now a professor of architecture in Muncie, Indiana, had designed for him. All told it had cost him about half the money he’d saved from work and bribery and stealing, and he’d moved in a year ago but had been on the island for just nine months of that time.

  A lovely bike trip down the Amalfi Coast, a three-city wine tour with a group of his lawyer friends, and a solo train trip to Germany had taken up a couple months. He’d also flown down to Chicago to speak at a slumlord’s parole hearing and turned that into an emotionally intense Vegas trip with a woman he’d met on the internet.

  His retirement was, in its material niceness and its harsh, lonely barrenness, not one Mousey would ever have imagined for himself — waking up every day with that feeling of having gone to bed in a hotel in a different time zone and continent and culture than the one he’d woken up in, and sometimes hungover and already ten minutes late to meet his drug dealer.

  Once, a very long time ago, Mousey had asked the Most Disgusting Man in Chicago how it was that he (the Most Disgusting Man in Chicago) had been able to get away with all the disgusting thi
ngs he’d been doing for all the disgusting years he’d been doing them. Mousey had asked the question in a way that, looking back on himself now, he found charmingly genuine. He had asked because he really wanted to know — not because it would help him manipulate the suspect or gain information about potential accomplices; just out of simple curiosity. And the Most Disgusting Man in Chicago had seemed to like the question, the way one likes being asked questions one has imagined answering. The guy smiled, looked Mousey up and down, and told him.

  The way to avoid being seen is to be something no one wants to look at. You can’t try to be a thing nobody wants to look at, because you’re a person, not a thing. You can’t turn yourself into a thing on your own, from inside. Nobody has that power. You just have to be it, from the start.

  Every time he bought drugs from Glass Jar Jeffries, Mousey thought about that conversation. He thought about people who were only things, and he thought about the way the Most Disgusting Man in Chicago had thrown the words out in his usual downcast way, as if trying to ping-pong them across the table. How certain he’d sounded. Then Mousey would think for an even quicker second about how odd it was that he could think about what the Most Disgusting Man in Chicago had said, think about the Most Disgusting Man in Chicago’s posture and his odour and his tiny creepy hand movements, without thinking about all the terrible bodies and terrible weeping relatives the Most Disgusting Man in Chicago had made him see and touch with a latex glove on and smell and talk and listen to. The way everything could be separate and far away and still just as weird and specific as reality always is. Of how years that felt like decades and decades that felt like seconds could be managed and stored and swept away. And by the time Mousey was just starting to get a little sad, Glass Jar would usually have splayed his way across the gravel of Mousey’s driveway to hand him the drugs and collect his money.