by Ford Collins
“Hi, Lowell.”
Lowell dropped his keys to the hardwood floor and stared at the boy.
His brother flung his arms wide and flashed a school picture smile.
“Surprise!”
[Thirty-Three]
“What did you do?” Lowell was rooted to the floor just inside the entrance to his apartment. His strength was waning, and he couldn’t will his legs to move through their exhaustion.
His brother smiled and said nothing.
“Tell me what you did.”
Nothing.
“Now!”
The boy jumped and his smile disappeared.
“Oh, now don’t get all mad at me, Lowell. I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
“Tell me what you did.”
“You don’t have to yell, Lowell.”
“What did you do to her?”
The boy looked shocked.
“Her who? I didn’t do anything to any her, Lowell.”
“Don’t you lie to me. I saw you. I saw you there. I want to hear you say it. Now tell me what you did.”
“I wasn’t there, Lowell. I wasn’t there and I didn’t do what you think I did.”
Lowell’s eyes lost focus and his guts knotted. He reached out for a chair to keep him upright.
The boy didn’t move to help him, but went on, “I couldn’t have done that, Lowell. I’m here to watch out for you.” He was smiling again. His chest swelled with pride. “That girl couldn’t have hurt you, Lowell. You didn’t need my help with her.”
He broke off eye contact with Lowell, knowing immediately that he’d said something he shouldn’t have.
“Help me do what with her? What do you think I did?”
His brother pawed the back of his head with one hand, while the fingers of the other twisted up the fabric at the knees of his pants.
“Aw, c’mon, Lowell. I don’t know. I’m just saying I wasn’t there, is all.”
“Whose blood is that?”
The boy looked down at himself as if he was unaware he was soaked in red.
“Oh. Uh, I can’t tell you, Lowell.”
“You can tell me. Whose is it?”
“You’re gonna get mad, I’ll bet. I don’t want you to get mad, Lowell.”
“I’m already mad. Tell me whose blood that is.”
The boy rubbed his hand down the front of the coat. The blood was dry, and didn’t appear to be anywhere but on his small body and clothes. No footprints, no smears on the couch or anywhere else.
“Lowell, Norman was here.”
All warmth drained from Lowell’s face and hands. He pulled the chair he’d been leaning on out from the table to catch himself and sit.
His upper body drooped, and his head hung between his knees. If he’d had anything in his stomach, it would have emptied on the floor around his feet.
“He was angry, Lowell. He was yelling through the door and saying that he knew what happened. He said he saw you, Lowell, and he saw what you did.”
The boy spoke quickly, gesturing wildly with his hands as he continued. “I know you didn’t do anything, Lowell. I know you still have so much left to figure out, and I didn’t want him to get you in trouble.”
Lowell looked up to see the head and knit cap spinning in small circles. He was losing control of his overtaxed body.
He mouthed words, but the boy couldn’t decipher what he was trying to convey.
“Lowell, I’m sorry I let him in. I opened the door for him. He looked at me funny, probably because he didn’t expect anyone to answer. But also because it was me, too, I guess. I couldn’t do anything in the hallway though, Lowell, so I pulled him in here.”
“Where… Where is…” Violent coughing shook Lowell off the chair and onto the floor.
“Lowell, do you remember when he told you that he didn’t come out and say anything to you at the coffee shop ‘Because I thought you’d finally snapped and I didn’t want to end up folded in half and stuffed in a foot locker in your apartment’?”
The words. The boy repeated them verbatim and in a voice that seemed impossibly lower and more mature than his own. If Lowell had closed his eyes, he would swear that Norman was repeating himself.
His brother knelt over him and placed his hands on Lowell’s chest, trying to sooth the convulsive shaking, and help him focus on the boy’s face.
“Well, you don’t have a foot locker, Lowell. All I could find was a cardboard box. I had to empty some old clothes out on your closet floor, so I’m sorry about the mess. I can pick it up if you want.”
“How did you know about the girl?”
“I just did, Lowell. How did I know about Norman? I just do.”
Lowell’s eyes rolled back in their sockets and reset themselves. His body expanded and contracted slowly.
The boy slid his arms under Lowell’s shoulders and lifted, propping him upright from behind. He reached up and gently traced the line of the gash on the back of Lowell’s head.
“You did a pretty good job, you know. It looks like it’s already starting to heal.”
Lowell spun around onto his knees and grabbed the front of his brother’s coat. “How did it happen?”
“What? Your head?”
“My head, damn it!”
“Lowell, please calm down. I’ll tell you, just… just calm down.”
Lowell’s chest heaved, his eyes were bloodshot and watery. His hands gripped the red-stained nylon.
“Please.”
White knuckles released tension. Lowell fell back onto his backside and let go of the boy’s coat. “Alright… What happened?”
“I don’t know. I just told you I did so you’d calm down. You were starting to scare m—”
Lowell launched himself at his brother and wrapped his hands around the boy’s neck.
“Don’t you lie to me! Don’t you tell me you don’t know! Don’t you lie to me!”
His hands and forearms flexed, tightened, burned.
The boy’s eyes shook and welled up. He never gasped for air. His lips curled up in the same smile they’d worn when Lowell first walked in and found him on the couch.
“Don’t you lie to me…” Lowell increased pressure on the thin, soft neck. His knees were on the floor on either side of the little body’s ribs. His brother’s arms were outstretched on the hardwood, refusing to defend against Lowell’s attack.
“Don’t… you…” Lowell released, and the head fell back with a muted thud. The mouth retained its slight upward curve. The boy’s eyes fluttered shut. An uneven and darkening red band snaked around the tiny neck.
Lowell stood, steadied himself, placed his cap on his head, and walked out of the apartment.
[Thirty-Four]
Legacy, in Lowell’s mind, was a concept relating to all mankind.
It was nebulous in the terms he worked. The words and actions of everyone contributed to an entity that hung over the world like a layer of the atmosphere.
Any person could reach into the sky, pull down the parts he desired, and bend them to clothe his ambitions.
Lately, though, Lowell had started to wonder whether there was a specific aspect of the greater idea that could help to explain the forces dictating individual contributions in a more meaningful and understandable way.
It seemed to him that the insignificance of human life was primarily due to man’s instinct to remain anonymous, while acting in public to the contrary. Those who talk the loudest in public are those who criticize themselves most harshly in private.
Through the conflicting actions and thoughts, there is a balance. They remain ordinary.
With each life that ends imbalanced—the man put to death for murdering his children and wife; the police officer shot down while rescuing a hostage; a child too young to have performed any acts of exceptional good or evil—the excess in either direction is absorbed by the greater legacy of man.
This satisfied Lowell’s issues with the previous disconnect except for one nagging questi
on. Why should the judgment of a life be swayed by the taking or losing of life if individual lives are worthless?
A wind howled and whipped across Lowell’s face and neck.
All the time he’d been thinking, he’d walked mindlessly toward downtown. At that moment, his eyes came back into focus and he realized he was standing in a small gap at the Swan Street and East Avenue corner of the top floor of East End Garage.
The sidewalk warped like a tide rolling by four floors below. Newspapers and plastic bags swirled and hung in the air, then darted away again, rubbish ballerinas leaping and twirling for him, while aluminum cans and sheets of cardboard held the beat, bumping and bouncing down the pavement at ground level.
The sky was packed solid with rutted clouds dyed burnt orange. The air was crisp and clean in Lowell’s nose.
He could fall forward, but what would that have accomplished?
He didn’t stop the defecator from pressing that girl’s head to the ground, true, but his wasn’t the hand pressing her down, either. Twigs in his shoelaces were not enough to convince him of anything beyond the fact that he’d been outside.
So what had he done other than observing and theorizing and judging? What would be his extraordinary contribution?
Nothing.
And for Lowell, this was unacceptable.
[Thirty-Five]
Lowell’s walk home seemed abnormally long, the length augmented by his exhaustion.
His focus was depleted. He walked down side streets that added distance to his travels. It was impossible to keep himself on task, even with his mind emptied of all extraneous thought. And that was before the snow began to fall.
Lowell walked in the wrong direction on Monroe for twenty minutes, carrying himself toward work rather than his apartment.
When he realized what he was doing, he sat on the bottom step of a flight of stone stairs leading to the second story deck of a bar. Pure white flakes danced around him and dropped to their deaths on every piece of his clothing and part of his body they could reach. He watched them come down. He felt the drops of water building together, running around the contours of his face, and gathering at his chin, then the moisture disappeared into the black wool of his pea coat lapels.
When the snow began to collect in the dirt of a nearby planter, he shook himself off and once again headed toward his home.
He wanted to call Lauren, to hear her tell him to come to her.
But Lowell hadn’t brought a phone. Even if he had, he’d never gotten her number. He couldn’t just stop by her apartment. He still didn’t know where she lived.
He thought about the girl who was crushed to death in front of him only because she was in the wrong place at the worst possible time. That was two people in less than a week. He never saw the silhouette’s face. He hadn’t witnessed enough to even give the man a back story, a reason for dying. Lowell couldn’t understand why the murdered man’s other half chose to break away and leave him sinking into the river.
He couldn’t make sense of why his brother returned, only to tease him with riddles and further complicate a life that was falling apart faster than Lowell could put the pieces together again. Why did the boy push him and push him and push him…
He must have known Lowell would snap. He must have.
But as misguided as his brother’s attempt may have been to help by removing Norman, he was doing it in Lowell’s best interest. Or at least what he thought was Lowell’s best interest.
It was Lowell’s anger with himself for losing all control of what he’d so recently been the master of that caused him to lunge at his brother, to attack him.
The boy looked so peaceful on Lowell’s floor. He looked… satisfied.
Lowell wondered whether he told himself this to forestall his return to his apartment, where the small body waited to greet him. He guessed that all of his wrong turns and meandering through side streets he’d never before set foot on during what should have been an automatic navigation were also a product of his lack of desire to look on the boy’s form again, to be reminded of what he’d done.
But, since he’d left his phone lying on the kitchen counter at home, he would have to return there to call the office and let them know he wouldn’t be in.
He rarely looked up from the path directly in front of him on the last leg of his march. His feet sprayed up ever-larger waves of snow and slush from the sidewalk. The gaps in coverage whitened over as he passed by. Heavier snow started to fall in smaller, denser flakes that clung together to seal the city beneath a frozen skin.
Cars trumpeted warnings to Lowell when he appeared in front of them at crosswalks. One had already waited the requisite time before moving through the intersection and needed to get rolling to beat oncoming lines of traffic from both directions. The driver was hopeful that Lowell had seen him and would let him pass. Lowell hadn’t and didn’t. Another’s driver was too preoccupied with her phone to notice either Lowell or the stop sign, missed Lowell by less than a foot, and skidded by him, horn ablaze with panicked fury.
Few other pedestrians kicked up snow on their way by Lowell. One disembodied voice—in a timbre uncomfortably close to the defecating man’s—sang out “Excuse me… Excuse me, sir…” as Lowell swept by a cluster of clothing shops, convenience stores, and cafés, but he didn’t acknowledge the singer.
Lowell had to remind himself every few minutes that Norman wouldn’t be bumping into him on Monroe, springing out of thin air to accompany him downtown. It had happened maybe more often than Lowell had realized while Norman was still around.
He shuffled on, leaving a trail of temporary, alternating dashes in the slush, until he hit Oxford Street. On the corner of Monroe and Oxford, he turned back, looked over his tracks, and watched them fade in seconds right up to the spot where he stood. Lowell thought of his life, in the whole, as being much like the rapidly diminishing record of his present. He’d sacrificed substance for supposition, replaced experience with assumptions. So what would the sum of his life be?
Again, Lowell resolved to do something extraordinary. He would carve his name into the sky, to be someone, something, to deviate the course of memory for all who might follow.
First, though, he had a grinning, delicate corpse to attend to, and perhaps a larger one to unpack from its cardboard casket as well.
[Thirty-Six]
Lowell wasn’t surprised to find his floor empty.
He bent to untie and remove his boots, then took off his coat and hung it near the door. A small, horizontal strip of red on the lining of the garment caught his eye just before he turned away. Folding back one flap of the coat’s front, Lowell reached into the liner pocket and pulled out the blood-encrusted envelope.
Lowell wasn’t surprised to find that either.
The chair groaned as Lowell dragged it out from the table and planted himself in it. He set the envelope on the tabletop and slid an index finger beneath a small gap in the adhesive. It was brittle from saturation and crackled open easily. He extracted the letter and unfolded it. The paper was oddly still a brilliant white. The ink hadn’t diffused into the fibers, becoming a string of gray bruises, as his brother’s letter to him had after Lowell plunged it into the snow in his dream.
It read:
Lowell,
yoo dinnt hav to thank me for stayng with yoo.
i now yoo wernt not ment to be in the rockutt and i wasnn not ment to be there too.
i wasn not nobly and yoo wernt a fool. i love yoo and i only want to tak care of yoo.
that is why i am letting yoo now that i am sorrey for hurting yoor hed too. yoo werr looking at the cofee been piture in the windoe and yoo got funny looking. that is also wher i saw normin too and that is how i new what he sedd to yoo. yoo dinnt say any words wile yoo walked but i new yoo felt bad for me stayng back to help yoo. yoo werr feeln so bad that yoo werr goin to hurt yorself. yoo wanted to hang yorself with a belt at yoor hows Lowell. i tryed to stop yoo but yoo wernt heerng me very good. i had
to push yoo down to stop yoo and yoo hit yoor hed in the rowd and that is how yoo hurt yoor hed Lowell. i pulld you over neer that garbige bin to make shur yoo woodnt get hit in the rowd. i hopp yoo will forgiv me and stil lov me too brother deer.
Lowell dropped the letter to the table and walked to his bedroom. He opened the closet door to find a large cardboard box on the floor within.
The top was cross-folded shut, and the sides bulged.
He swallowed hard and pulled on two opposing flaps. The box popped open as Lowell jumped back a step, prepared for the smell.
It was empty.
He jerked it from the closet and carried it to the living room. The ceiling light just above the front door revealed a circle of crimson on the box’s bottom surface. In the center of the circle, crusted over and held in place beneath the red, was the mosquito.
Lowell carried the cardboard cube back to the bedroom and dropped it near the open closet door.
He sat on the edge of the bed, and buried his face in his hands.
His ribs convulsed, and his head bobbled with each spasm. Every part of him shook as if he was weeping, but no tears would come. He pictured his brother smiling down at him and trying to tell him everything would be okay as the rockets screamed and carried away all those who had foreseen a next act for their world that they wanted no part in. He felt the freezing burn of the snow on his naked hands, the knuckles bursting as they clutched his brother’s letter. He watched as the blackness in the pupils of his brother’s eyes expanded and drew him in, bathing him in the humid darkness before dilating and ejecting him into the grayness of Crossroads Park. There he saw the shadow men mate and birth the ongoing nightmare he’d been living through since then, before repelling each other like two gigantic magnetic twins, north to north. This time he followed the sinking body beneath the surface of the river, and continued beyond the shadow’s mass as it disintegrated into glimmering microscopic particles and dissipated. Further down he dropped, below the riverbed and stone, until his feet once again stood on solid ground. His mouth was wide open, and white noise flew forth louder than the fire sirens that tore by to a burning warehouse three blocks away from his home when he was eight. They scared him to death and he never forgot the sensation of that fear speeding through his body from his center and banging at the inside of his skin to burst out. He would never feel fear like that again. Not even at that moment, when everything had begun to compress and crack inwards. He could hear the shrill popping of the expanding faults through points of weakness in the shield that had protected him from the rest of the world. The transparent plane between Lowell and the universe was too heavy for him to hold up anymore, and broken into too many pieces to gather in his hands. He drew himself in and waited for the impact.