Nausea

by Kurtz, Ed

  Never mind the last meal and throw the switch.

  He cracked his knuckles and went, slowly, back to the bedroom where he killed Nathan K. Cole.

  (Flash, Bam, Alakazam! went the song in his head.)

  * * *

  With the rock grasped tight in his right hand, Nick found himself running a bit lopsided, following the mild curve of the ravine and narrowing his eyes to slits in a less-than-successful effort to keep Hart in his line of sight.

  What the fuck happened to who cares? he thought, heaving breaths and listening for his mark’s feet stamping the dry earth ahead.

  The moral implications of the chase rattled around vaguely in the back of his head, but reptile instinct took firmer hold of him; Nick meant to finish what he started, bringing Hart out to this place. But Hart was gaining ground, moving faster. Nick shouted his name, but he didn’t so much as slow down, look back, or miss a step. Hart just kept running, farther and farther into the flat, arid wilderness that stretched on indefinitely beyond the nascent housing development. The distance between the two men increased gradually, and though Nick tried to pump his legs harder, he felt as though he was only slowing down.

  “Hart!”

  The condemned leaped suddenly, legs akimbo, and upon hitting the ground resumed his gait like it was nothing. Nick made out a patch of low-slung cacti, the needles long and spread out in broad fans. He circled round it, wishing Hart had fallen right into the mess and put a stop to the whole stupid game.

  “What about Anna Lynn?” Nick cried out, his lungs burning hot. “What about Anna Lynn, Hart?”

  “Fuck Anna Lynn,” Hart hollered into the night. “I wanta live, you asshole!”

  Something approaching a giggle followed. Hart sped up.

  “Fuck me,” Nick gasped, and before the last syllable rasped past his lips he pulled his arm back in a poor imitation of Nolan Ryan and catapulted the rock as hard as he could. The missile soared up and then down again in a fluid sweep that ended when the rock collided against the back of Robert Hart’s skull with a muted thud. Hart didn’t make a sound—he just dropped in a heap to the dirt.

  Nick breathed a sigh of relief and caught up, dodging more cacti and scrub brush along the way. He found Hart slumped over his own bent knees, like a supplicant in prayer. The hair on the back of his head was wet and matted with blood. The fingers on his left hand spasmed a little, and Nick thought it looked like he was attempting to air piano. He waited a moment, waited to see if Hart would come to, maybe get hostile. The downed man was still breathing, if raggedly, but far from conscious. Nick edged closer, nudged Hart in the ribs with the toe of his shoe.

  Hart said, “Nuhhhn.”

  “Why’d you run?” Nick asked him.

  “Guh.”

  Nick kicked around for a few minutes, sweeping the ground with his foot until it tapped against the rock. It hadn’t dropped far away. He stooped to retrieve it and felt the tacky blood where it struck Hart.

  “You know,” he said, rising back up again and re-testing the heft of the stone in his hand, “I don’t really give a tinker’s damn what you did that day, or any other day. Maybe this is about revenge, I don’t know. But that’s me, man. I ain’t mad at you. I don’t know you, I didn’t know that kid, and I don’t care about any of it. Bad shit happens every damn day, Hart. Really bad shit, and to really good people. I’m not god, and I’m not interested in trying to even the score or some shit like that.”

  Hart shifted slightly and moaned, “Dunnn.”

  “Don’t? Don’t what? You’re in it, brother. It’s already done. It was done before I ever walked into that damn bar. I’m just the scythe, don’t you get that? Someone else is wielding it. Take it up with them if you come back a ghost. After this, I’m through.”

  Hart whimpered.

  Nick brought the rock down, hard, on the same place it hit before. This time bone cracked, caved in. The second time Nick struck him, the rock got wedged so deeply inside Hart’s skull it got stuck. He couldn’t pull it out again, lodged permanently in the man’s squashed brains. A weird odor wafted up from the inside of Hart’s brain case, putrid and unpleasant. Nick had never smelled human brains before; it was wretched. He wondered if they always smelled that way, but apart from that it didn’t particularly bother him.

  He wasn’t even nauseated.

  * * *

  She was splayed out, as if on display or the subject of one of your filthier men’s mag’s centerfolds, with her legs spread far apart and her lips parted only slightly. Her breasts rose and fell with each measured breath she took. Her lacquered nails dug into the rumpled sheets, clawing at them. Nick paused in the doorway, taking in the tableau. It wasn’t lost on him how first he ever saw her, just as naked and in this same bed, riding a man marked for death within minutes. Now, so was she.

  Lorraine trained her eyes on him and, tentatively, touched herself between her legs with her index and middle fingers. They came away glistening, and she brought them up to her lips. Her tongue darted out, tasted them.

  “Water’s fine, Nicky-Poo,” she teased. “Dive right in.”

  “Don’t be cute,” he warned. “Doesn’t suit you.”

  She spread her legs wider still. He stepped a few paces into the room until he was nearly to the foot of the bed. There, he could smell her sex. But he could also smell the putrefaction of the corpse in the closet—bacteria and enzymes breaking down the earthly remains of Nathan Cole. Nick couldn’t tell which scent was stronger.

  Death and pussy, he thought morbidly.

  His gaze moved from between her legs to her throat, paper-white and free of any marks or blemishes he could make out. It didn’t take much to imagine his hands there, the fingers wrapped tight around her neck’s circumference, thumbs pushing deep into the hollow just beneath her larynx. It wouldn’t be difficult. He’d done it to men twice her size without too much trouble. In a matter of minutes she’d be gradually making her way down to room temperature in the closet with her old fuck-buddy, Nate. United in a way few couples could ever know.

  Though the real intimacy would still be between her and Nick, he remembered. At least according to her.

  It was more intimate than fucking, killing somebody.

  He had already done the one.

  Nick flexed his fingers and sucked in a deep breath through his nostrils. With it came more of her scent, that piquant odor of want. Somewhere in there, he thought, was some of his own.

  “You’re not going to kill me, Nicky.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “I can see it in your eyes. You’re thinking about it, but you’d rather do the other thing.”

  “How do you know my name, goddamnit?”

  “Come here, Nick.”

  He worked his fly open and unbuckled his belt.

  Lorraine said, “Atta boy.”

  * * *

  The only reason he could come up with for dragging Hart back to the ravine, where he was supposed to have died, was a matter of symmetry and follow-through. In short, Nick had his mind set on it and therefore had every intention to see Robert W. Hart sail down to the floor of that small chasm as originally planned. He weighed a lot more than Nick reckoned he would, though he supposed now this must have been what they meant when they said dead weight.

  Upon reaching the initial kill-point, Nick patted down the body in search of identifiables and came up with Hart’s wallet, car keys, cigarettes, and two Trojans with well-worn packages and long-past expiration dates. He pocketed all but the wallet, which he opened to find a driver’s license (the W stood for Woodrow), MasterCard, supermarket rewards card, fourteen dollars in ones, a voucher for a carwash, and a faded photo cut out from a newspaper. This Nick extracted and, sliding the rest into his other pocket, he struck a match to get a closer look. The ink was smudged and paper worn thin, but he could make out the smiling face of a young girl, her smile marked by a dark gap where she’d lost two teeth. She was freckled and pale, her hair light, and Nick knew ex
actly who she was.

  “Not my circus,” he said to the photo. “Not my monkeys.”

  He squatted down then, stuffed Anna Lynn’s picture into Hart’s shirt pocket, and rolled his body over the edge.

  Nick smoked all the way back to the car.

  He felt nothing.

  And that felt good.

  * * *

  Smoking in the Benz with all the windows rolled up, Nick let the carcinogenic cloud envelop him while Johnny Mathis warbled lowly on the radio and his mind replayed highlights from his bizarre date with Lorraine. He hadn’t known what he’d do—what she’d do—when he went in there, but it had been a fairly safe bet the sale on her farm was close to concluding. Instead he got a lecture on the affinity to be found in a good murder and laid twice, which was twice more than any other day in recent memory. And still she lived, doing whatever it was she was doing in there, still stark naked in all likelihood, maybe taunting Cole’s corpse, or worse. She was, after all, certifiable. The psychotic and the sociopath.

  “What in the blue fuck am I doing?” he said aloud.

  All he heard in response was Mathis crooning that it wasn’t for him to say.

  Nick said, “Eat shit, Mathis.” He switched off the radio and started the engine. Cracked the window to let the smoke out. Jerked the gearshift into D.

  The mobile rang in his coat pocket.

  Nick shifted back to P.

  “Yeah,” he said when he answered.

  “Time to quit fucking around and get back to work, Nick,” she said.

  He stammered.

  “Delivery for ya,” she said.

  “Christ Jesus,” he said after the line went dead. “Is every son of a bitch in town watching me now?”

  He kept on grumbling most of the way to the bus depot.

  * * *

  For several long, spiritless days Nick came and went from the room he rented in a dilapidated motor court on the Loop, wandering up and down the main drag, past the state mental hospital and the shuttered sporting goods store, around or through the neighborhood park where black kids played basketball on the crumbling court and bums slept off bad fortified wine binges everywhere else. He ate once a day at a taco truck and portioned out his cigarettes sparingly, having switched to a generic brand called Spheres for some reason he couldn’t fathom. Once he dropped into a dive bar for a domestic, but the joint was filled with hip college kids who sneered at him for being an actual dive bar patron and the beer cost five bucks. Nick picked up a sixer of Old Milwaukee at the Circle K on his way back and decided to just drink at home from then on out.

  The afternoon after the dive bar fiasco, he killed off the last can from the fridge and decided to replace the dead soldiers lined up on the windowsill with a fresh battalion. Sifting through empty packs of Spheres and sundry detritus from the taco truck, he located his room key—but also the extra key from the locker at the bus station.

  24B.

  Picking it up, Nick rubbed the rubber fob with the pad of his thumb. With his other hand he snatched up the room key, with which he locked the door on his way out. At the end of the motor court’s drive where it met the street, he tossed the locker key overhand into the blue Dumpster behind the broken-down Impala that was there when he checked in and was probably there when he was in junior high school. The key banged off the inside wall of the Dumpster on its way into the filth within. Nick put it out of mind and kept walking, of a mind to switch up to Pearl for that day’s sixer.

  On the way back he stopped in the park to crack one open and sip it leisurely while he watched the kids stomp around the court. The hoops had neither nets nor backboards and their shoes were ratty and falling apart, but none of them seemed to care and they played with enough skill and spirit for the NCAA as far as Nick was concerned. At the end of the can he tossed it in the high grass and reached for another when he noticed a bum on a neighboring bench giving him sad dog eyes. Without a word, Nick tossed the beer to the cat, who caught it with a quick hand and nodded his thanks. The two men drank in close proximity and complete silence for a quarter of an hour before the sky started to purple and the kids called it a day, and when the bum wandered off, Nick decided he’d better get going, too.

  With three cans of Pearl left, he went into his fusty little room at the far right end of the motor court and flipped on the TV before collapsing onto the narrow bed. A game show host belittled a trio of befuddled contestants while Nick started in on a fresh beer, and he figured on hitting the hay when the last one was drained, though he was out a quarter of the way through it.

  The bells and buzzers from the show still worked their way into his brain, but merely as background noise while Nick worked his way over a damp, crowded street, something like Times Square at night, replete with blinding neon and flickering bulbs and the odor of hundreds of tightly packed bodies squirming against one another in a mad fight to get to one end of the street or the other. Somewhere in that throng was Misty—Spot—which he somehow knew despite being unable to see her or find her. She was just there, somewhere between one avenue and the next, lost in a single city block. Twice, then thrice, he thought maybe he caught a glimpse of her, the side of her face or the bounce of her hair, but in a fraction of a second she was gone again, swallowed up by the crowd. Nick grew frustrated, pushed and shoved more aggressively, gritted his teeth against the incessant noise of the buzzers and bells. Someone grabbed his arm, tightened their fingers so that they pressed into the muscle, and Nick jerked back, ready to attack. It was Mother, and her face was like a death mask: pale and motionless, like it was made of clay or porcelain. She jabbed her free hand toward him, opened it up to reveal an old-school switch, the sort the Mex kids used to carry when Nick was in school, or so he’d always heard. He took the offering and Mother vanished into the throng, and in an instant the blade shot free, all glimmering and clean and razor sharp on both sides. He thought of old jungle adventure movies, the kind he’d watch on the UHF station in the basement when he was a boy, black-and-white films with Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller, where Englishmen with huge mustaches wore pith helmets and sliced their way through the dense vegetation with massive machetes provided by their native guides. Nick liked the notion, that he was embarking on a great adventure. He started slicing.

  The people came apart like paper dolls. He slashed with broad strokes, halving them, lopping off limbs and heads, opening throats that dribbled like red waterfalls. They were felled one by one, dropping in piles to the wet macadam, opening up the crowd and Nick’s field of vision until at long last, dripping with the blood he’d spilled, he espied her standing in the dead middle of the street in a pink prom dress, her feet bare, looking for all the world like the belle of the ball. She was pure and lovely, sweeter twenty times over than he remembered her, and her expression betrayed fear and loneliness, a need for protection, maybe even love. By then the people comprising the throng leaped out of his way as he went with purpose toward her, thinking vaguely that this—that she—was his destiny. Those who did not move quick enough were cut down, some of them familiar to Nick: Joe and Hana from the Midnight Cowboy died hand in hand, while Robert Hart took the full length of the blade in his stomach and rapidly deflated like a balloon, all skin and no bones. Someone’s voice came in a loud whisper, sandpaper against pine, asking Why?

  Nick realized it was her, it was Misty, though her lips didn’t move at all.

  Why, Lucky?

  “Why the hell not?” he said, and he swept the blade across her neck, severing her head completely, which dropped to the street with a dull thud. Nick took what remained of her into his arms before the body collapsed, and he fell into a fluid waltz, gripping the headless corpse close to his own body, to the rhythm of the game show din that now filled his skull.

  No guilt at all. No regret. All were ants, or smaller still. Even himself, who would doubtless someday get cut down, too. It didn’t matter. He’d killed for love, but the love wasn’t there. He’d killed to save his own skin, a
nd that turned out a much better bet. All of them died the same. Everyone did, in the end. Nick dragged Misty, or most of her, over the asphalt and kissed the air where her lips would otherwise have been. Life, he decided, was neither beautiful nor ugly. It just was, and it was transient at best. A game short-lived, and no one ever really won.

  Why the hell not?

  He woke, in stages, to the late news—the end of it, when they blathered on about saccharine local human interest bullshit—and smacked his lips at the taste of warm beer on his tongue. The tap water at that place tasted like pennies and peat, but he thought maybe another cold Pearl might be the thing for it. First he rolled over, flopping one leg out from beneath the blanket, and smashed his face against something cold and rigid on the thin down pillow.

  The key to the locker.

  He pushed away and looked at it.

  “You got to be fucking kidding me,” Nick said to the key.

  All the key said in reply was 24B.

  He made a face at it, and started checking the room for obvious signs of a break-in. There was nothing, which he expected, and it didn’t matter. What was obvious was that he was being tailed, maybe watched, maybe closely. And they wanted him to open that locker.

  It did not seem a far stretch to him to guess at what he’d find in it.

  But all the same, he rummaged for change until he scrounged enough for bus fare and, once again, after splashing some cold water on his face, Nick made his way back out into the world.

  * * *

  He had all but given up on them. Roundly upbraided himself for letting his focus stray so egregiously, for the wild and baseless shift in his mind and in his approach to his day to day. For the clumsiness and the nausea. The doubt. The overthinking. What was the point in it all? It wouldn’t bring any of them back. And it wouldn’t stop anyone else from getting what was coming to them, either. Even if Nick bowed out straightaway, vanished into the night never to be heard from again, there was always going to be someone else to fill his Testonis. It didn’t take a skilled assassin or ninja to take down someone like Szczepański or Cole or any of the hapless bastards Nick got paid to take off the board. Just a certain philosophy and bills that needed paying. Keep to that philosophy, boyo. Your résumé is a bit sparse if you try to keep it aboveboard, you dumb bastard.