The Considerate Killer

by Lene Kaaberbøl

She lay on her side, probably so the weight of her head would not put pressure on the shaved area on the back of her head and the damage that was hidden under a white gauze compress as large as a standard sheet of paper. A raw and crusty abrasion covered most of one cheek, and the hollows of her eyes were so bruised and swollen that the eyes were just greasy slits. A bit of clear fluid leaked from one nostril and dripped down onto the flat pillow under her head, where there was already a damp spot.

  Søren was relieved to see that she was breathing on her own, but otherwise there wasn’t much to celebrate.

  “Nina, damn it,” he said quietly, without any hope that she could hear him. “What have you gotten yourself in to now?”

  At that instant he recognized Morten’s anger and understood it completely. Nina had probably never had the occasion to force a kitchen knife into her ex-husband’s chest, but she had undoubtedly made him feel a similar pain every time she had thrown herself in front of an on-rushing catastrophe without considering the consequences. There had to be limits to how many stabs of that knife one could survive before one started to protect oneself.

  And Morten was not alone. He had Ida and Anton to consider.

  Søren hesitantly touched Nina’s hand and hardly knew himself whether it was to caress it or to register her symptoms. Chilled, he observed, but not ice-cold. Not the cold that comes when the blood is retreating from the body’s outer extremities because the inner organs are fighting off death.

  Stable, they had said. Not critical. She had been hit twice; the first blow had landed quite high and had bounced off the skull to a certain extent, but the second was of more concern—it had gone in at the base of the cranium, and the full unblunted force of it had made the brain slap hard against its bony case. And, yes, there was a crack. A fractured skull was now the official diagnosis—a so-called basilar skull fracture.

  “We can see a bit of fluid from the nose and the ears, so there must be a lesion in the brain membrane,” a helpful intensive care nurse had explained. “Usually it stops by itself, but we have to keep an eye on it. And we’d like to see signs of consciousness soon. If you could just sit and talk to her, that would be very helpful. Hearing is often restored long before any of the other senses.”

  He obediently sat down, but at first could not get a word out. What was he supposed say? Should he scold her? Reassure her? Tell her that he “was here,” as if that circumstance alone would suddenly make all the horrors go away?

  “Nina,” he said quietly, “it’s me, Søren.” He felt like a complete idiot. But if the nurse was right and it could in some way help Nina to hear his voice, then so be it. “I . . . came to see how you’re doing. So I’ll just sit here and . . . talk a little. So you know that I’m here.”

  THE PHILIPPINES, FOUR YEARS EARLIER

  It meant nothing. The interview. It was a formality of the kind that no one seriously worried about, except maybe his father, and of course Vincent himself. But his father had always doubted God too much, or so his mother said, and what Vincent was feeling was probably just a kind of stage fright. His place in medical school was as good as certain.

  “You are gifted,” said his mother. “And your scholarship comes from the church. That means that you are both gifted and of good moral character. God will help us.”

  Vincent tried to hold on to that thought. His mother, God, and the fact that that all previous applicants with the St. Joseph’s Church Scholarship had been accepted and had passed with distinction—white coats, families bawling with happiness.

  Nothing could go wrong.

  Vincent sat in the sweltering lobby of the university, trying not to fidget.

  It was one of Manila’s finest universities, and graduating from it practically guaranteed a job—perhaps even an international one. But the decor was far from fashionable. The broad stone staircase to the auditoriums on the second floor was scratched and dull, and the paint on the bannister was peeling. Portraits of the school’s previous presidents graced the beige walls: men and women in suits, wearing serious smiles. The school’s current president wasn’t up there yet, but Vincent had heard that he was both a doctor and a professor and that he appreciated proper dress. Vincent’s mother had provided him with an ironed white shirt and newly pressed dark pants for the occasion, and on the entire trip in the jeepney, the open truck-bus from San Marcelino to Manila, he had stored the unfamiliar outfit neatly folded in his suitcase along with shorts, sandals, a couple of clean T-shirts and the present for his cousin Maria. Later he had changed his clothes in the restroom of a bowling alley.

  Now he sat as motionless as he could manage in the costume, his arms held away from his body so the sweat stains wouldn’t become too noticeable. The pages of the book he was attempting to read were damp from contact with his hands.

  Two hours ago there had been more guys sitting or standing around. Dark pants, white shirts, and glistening foreheads. There had been girls too, of course—most in business suits and skirts, but also a few in expensive-looking jeans, sneakers, shirts and discreet makeup. Not a single one had looked a day over eighteen, and Vincent was willing to bet next semester’s allowance that they were all fresh from high school with top grades, because you needed those to get in, but also with money. Rich kids, most of them, respectable and well-connected, from Manila or the wealthy suburbs. And they had all been called in before him.

  The only person left besides himself was a giant of a guy who sat a few empty seats away, reading the Manila Times while he calmly chewed his way through a bag of cashews.

  “Would you like one?” he asked when he noticed Vincent’s look.

  “No, thanks.” Just the thought of the salty, dried nuts made his throat constrict even further.

  The guy just nodded.

  “Victor,” he said and stretched out a large hand. He could comfortably reach across the empty seats.

  “Vincent,” said Vincent and offered his hand.

  Victor’s grip was soft and dry and without any macho attempt to demonstrate his strength. Vincent wondered how his own hand felt—damper than usual, definitely, but could his panic be detected?

  Victor did not seem to notice anything. He just offered him another small nod, as if this was merely another item on some inner to-do list: say hello politely—check. Vincent was envious of his apparent serenity.

  He wished it was over and done with. He knew that they would ask him about “his motivation for becoming a doctor” and about his “personal character,” as had been somewhat vaguely indicated in the letter from the faculty. What kind of personal characteristics they were hoping to find, he had no idea, even though he had had plenty of time to think about it lying awake the night before.

  He had always been told that he was gifted and that he worked hard. He had studied so strenuously for his exams last week that you would have been able to wake him up at any point in the night to make him recite the properties of the elements, explain the Coriolis effect, and demonstrate differential equations. But whatever being of “good moral character” meant, it seemed less tangible, and all he had to go by were Father Abuel’s injunctions to keep sex inside holy wedlock, honor your parents, and so forth.

  He was a virgin, which could not be said to be entirely his own doing. Bea was the one who had kept cool for them both on the rare occasions when they had been alone together and had kissed for so long that everything had gone up in flames. He was not sure he could credit those bonus points to his own moral account.

  And there were those damnably autonomous nightly erections followed by just as damnable ejaculations, with or without his own active intervention, a sin that according to the church was almost as severe as sex outside of marriage. If purity and fidelity were counted as a subject, he was not at all sure he would pass, and he shrank from confessing such embarassments to Father Abuel. The priest had taken a vow of silence, of course, but it still felt as if the sinful
words might somehow leak from the confessional and find their own way to Bea during the Sunday mass in San Marcelino. Also, it was Father Abuel who had written the recommendation that finally had secured the St. Joseph scholarship for Vincent. It did in fact say that Vincent was “of good moral character” and that he pursued “a Christian way of life.” After that, Vincent had stopped going to confession entirely.

  As far as honoring your parents went, he was doing better. Quite respectably, in fact. He did what he was told. It wasn’t really that difficult. Any idiot could do homework until ten every evening. It was easy. Or had been in elementary and high school anyway, with his mother providing a newly ironed school uniform, clean T-shirts, and three meals a day.

  So he was, when he summed it up, hard-working and quite intelligent and he honored his mother and father, as it was written in the Bible. He could not think of any other positive personal characteristics. There wasn’t really anything to hold on to, he thought, other than the information on his identity card. Vincent Bernardo. Twenty years old, engaged to Bea; son of his parents and big brother to Mimi. Not poor, but far from rich. Whether this was enough to get him accepted into St. Francis College of Medicine, he had no idea.

  “Hey!”

  Vincent jumped.

  The heavy, dark door to the street had been opened and a young man stepped into the hall. His face was narrow and boyish, and his body had not yet found its mature proportions. Still, he did not look as if he was Vincent’s age. It was his posture, Vincent decided. He carried himself with the confidence and weight of a grown man who knew his own worth.

  He looked directly at Vincent and raised his chin impatiently.

  “How long have you been sitting here?”

  Vincent looked at his watch and quickly did the math. Five sweaty hours had passed. According to the letter from the university, he had had an appointment at one, but apparently all the other candidates had as well.

  “Crap,” said the newcomer explosively.

  He let himself drop into the chair next to Vincent, fiddling restlessly with a cigarette. He was wearing two gold rings—one on the ring finger and an extra wide one on his thumb. While that in itself was not so unusual, still there was something unmistakably sleek, something of the dandy, about him. A kind of natural arrogance in the way he folded his slender arms behind his neck, his legs slightly apart, and in the restless boredom he exuded.

  “I hate waiting,” he said. “Every minute we spend in these chairs is a goddamn waste of precious time. Waste of life. If you live to be eighty, you have about forty-two million minutes to use, and that may sound like a lot, my friend, but if you’ve been sitting here for five hours, that’s three hundred of them just gone out the window. Poof. Time swallowed by nothing. As if it weren’t bad enough that we have to spend five years of our lives in this place afterward. Insult to injury, I tell you.”

  He jerked his jeweled thumb toward the glass door to the auditorium on the other side of the lobby and smiled. And it was a smile that lit up his features irresistibly, warm and wide in the narrow face. Vincent could feel his usual defenses melting away. The guy would have been a shoo-in for a Philippine remake of Dead Poets Society. His sparkle, his energy, his upper-class confidence. Carpe diem, seize the day and all of that. Vincent knew his Latin from church.

  “I’ve been reading,” Vincent said, holding out his book, a primer on pediatrics, borrowed from the library back home in San Marcelino. Despite his secret uncertainties about getting in, he had attacked the first year’s curriculum with his usual diligence; the required reading ran to a daunting number of pages, even for him.

  The guy grinned even more broadly, though Vincent would have sworn that wasn’t possible.

  “You’re the type who worries too much,” he said. “We’re not even in yet. Are you nervous?”

  Vincent shrugged. “A little,” he said and carefully dried his palms on his pants. His cheap shirt felt glued to his back.

  Actually nervous wasn’t the right word. Waiting for the interview, or rather, for the letter that would arrive in a few days, was like standing at the top of the tower on Mount Samat, gazing across forested slopes and luminous green rice fields out to sea, where the container ships floated under a sky grey as dust, far out in Manila Bay.

  If he got in, this whole world would still exist, and look the same.

  If he was rejected, it would disappear in the blink of an eye. He was to become a doctor. He had always been going to become a doctor. Any other future was literally unimaginable.

  The carpe-diem guy ran a hand through his longish black hair. There was a bit of European or perhaps American in him, Vincent guessed. His nose was big and had a slight hook like the beak of a bird of prey, but his skin was dusky and his eyes dark, narrow and sparkling with hidden, friendly laughter. He didn’t seem nervous. Just a bit restless. To judge by the knife-sharp pleats in his pants and the bright white, newly ironed shirt, he hadn’t been waiting for five hours.

  Vincent smiled politely, leaned forward and returned his attention to the part of his book that he was studying—a chart showing normal blood pressures for children ages zero to fifteen. There were a lot of numbers, but he could memorize them if he read the chart a few times, wrote the numbers in his notebook and practiced by closing the book and repeating them to himself.

  It didn’t come easy, that kind of thing. Learning things by heart took several passes; he had to work at it.

  “So you want to be a doctor? Why?”

  Vincent looked up at Carpe Diem and felt momentarily confused. This was not the same as being asked by the board about his “motivation” and coming up with some appropriate phrases. The man seemed genuinely to question why Vincent wanted this. He had never been asked that before, not in that way. It was the kind of thing that didn’t need an explanation because it was so obvious. It was a good job, you earned a lot of money, and you were . . . respected. His parents had saved for his education since he was a little boy.

  “I . . .” Vincent cleared his throat. “That’s always been my plan.”

  The guy nodded as if he had said something really wise.

  “I think I know what you mean,” he said. “It’s that thing about helping others, right? To make a difference? That’s what I want to do too. There are way too many people here in the Philippines who only think about money. I have a . . . girlfriend, who is studying here. We want to work for Doctors Without Borders, and so on.”

  The guy rotated the unlit cigarette again between his fingers and sighed deeply.

  “Aw, fuck it,” he then said. Dug out a lighter, lit the cigarette and took a couple of intense, deep drags.

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke here,” said Vincent and pointed to the sign above them. The guy sent him a searching gaze. Kindly.

  “It’s nice of you to worry about me,” he said. “Do you smoke?”

  He dug around in his pants pocket, pulled out a package of cigarettes and gave Vincent an encouraging nod. He had a tattoo on the back of his hand. Something written in exquisitely drawn Arabic letters.

  “You can just take one for later if you don’t want to smoke here.”

  Vincent shook his head.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  The guy jumped up from his chair and strode with light steps across the floor, his cigarette still hanging from the corner of his mouth. The blue smoke drifted up toward the badly functioning air conditioner and disappeared.

  “Very sensible,” he said. “I should stop too. I dive, you know. Free diving without oxygen. It’s the coolest thing in the world. Better than sex and drugs. Have you tried it?”

  Vincent shook his head while he followed Carpe Diem’s restless wandering with his eyes.

  “What a waste of time,” the guy sighed, kicked lightly at a couple of chair legs. “I’ll buy you a beer afterward, okay? For every minute we spend
in here, we need to spend at least three on cigarettes, whiskey, and naked ladies. That’s the only way to bring the universe back into cosmic balance. I’ve studied astrology for several years to reach this conclusion. I’m not kidding. This is precious knowledge I’m sharing with you.”

  Vincent couldn’t help laughing, which made the guy jump up on a chair and spread his arms. Ash from his cigarette sprinkled the floor.

  “I’ll wait for you after my interview, okay? At the Cabana Bar on the other side of the street. We’ve got to celebrate this, damn it.”

  The big guy, Victor, had followed the exchange without saying a word. Now he got up and stretched to his full height. It was only at this point that Vincent fully understood how enormous he was. The man was at least 190 centimeters tall, but his height was less impressive than his bulk. Everything about him was wide and looked as if had been built with three levels of reinforcement. His forehead was wide, his chest was wide, his wrists were wide and his calves so powerfully muscular that they were the size of Vincent’s thighs. His hair was cut close to the dark skin.

  “I’m in,” he said and crumpled his snack bag. “I’ll need a beer after this.”

  “A beer?” The carpe-diem guy whistled, clearly impressed and with eyes slightly narrowed against the smoke. “You look like it’ll take something a lot stronger than beer to get you drunk. You’re built like an ox, damn it. But . . . perfect. What’s your name?”

  “Victor.”

  “And you, my rule-following friend?”

  Carpe Diem looked questioningly at Vincent, and he had time to think that he didn’t know what they were celebrating, but that this was completely beside the point. The guy’s energy was infectious here in the middle of the boring yellow-and-beige front hall, and why shouldn’t he have a beer? His exams were over and he wasn’t going back to San Marcelino for a few days. With complete disregard for the fact that he had not yet actually been accepted into the medical school, his mother’s cousin Maria had promised to help him find a room while he was in Manila, but the house hunting wouldn’t start until tomorrow. For once he could actually permit himself a break from textbooks and expectations.