The next file loaded and started playing. The timestamp jumped back to eight twenty-three. The men entered the platform. The video was eight minutes long. Each of these videos was eight minutes long. Marsha slowly led out her breath. She thought of the man with the red umbrella. The kiss he had blown to the camera two days ago. She understood now what it meant. She had hoped it meant he liked her. She had been afraid it meant goodbye. But it meant something else. Something completely different.
It meant thank you.
Thank you for your cooperation.
William Kamowski
William Kamowski is Professor of English at Montana State University in Billings, where he has taught writing, literature, and mythology. His recent publications include a novel, Buckeye’s Ballet. “Last Thoughts” is his first venture into crime fiction. Find him at williamkamowski.com.
Last Thoughts
William Kamowski
The resemblance was almost too fitting. Much alike in many ways, the three girls were likewise subtle, silent in their agreement to shape their deaths as he had suggested. None had said, “I’ll do it now.” They simply followed his scripts into their last thoughts.
So each story—Spark’s drowning on the first page of the local section in the Seattle Times, Cobbie’s “fall” reported a month later on the same page, and today, Ivy’s two-paragraph obituary announcing her “unexpected death in the garden she so loved”—came as a light, warm surprise with his midmorning coffee.
For all his time on the screen with them, Timothy preferred to read the final news in the paper. On the screen, even at the most intimate turns of conversation in their many email exchanges—about butterfly strokes and point shoes and growing rue—there was that distance, safe though a little frustrating, comfortable though cool. Somehow, too, that distance was necessary, like the detachment of therapists from their confiding patients. Yet now, with all three gone, he wanted to be near them again, and the newspaper seemed to close up the space, especially Ivy’s obituary, apparently written by the family she had never mentioned.
The idea of talking them out of their sad lives had come in fragments over a month of half-tipsy musings at Rottweiler’s Tavern and Tugboat Andy’s. These were cheap bars where he would not have been a regular drinking three-dollar happy hour drafts if he had not been driven, finally, to underpaid freelance consulting on small business PC systems. He had lasted just a month, despite the good salary, processing the endless data at Digital Warehouse; before that, just two weeks selling laptops to cyber illiterates at Better Deal.
If he had had the cash to retain a lawyer to begin with, he would never have quit LoveOverFortyOnline. He would have bought it. The owners had snatched the copyright on his program LoveFortyMatchPoint, and it was now driving their website for older hopefuls in internet mating—stolen from him by a couple of second-tier leeches who couldn’t write a program and didn’t know the first word to say to an older woman.
For that matter, what did they know about older men? Only twenty-two himself, he had fleshed out the program’s romantic details from his mother’s and aunt’s open discussions about recharging their love lives in their forties. Mom and Aunt Lennie had run the range of “hard-copy” strategies in the aging singles world. He just translated their strategies and quests into online adventure.
At times, family could be a real resource.
Yes, he could congratulate himself on a few other successes in design as well, and confidentially with friends if he’d had any. He was particularly pleased about cracking into Trader Troy’s organic health foods site where he had inserted sensuous pictures of puffed cheese worms, beer-battered bacon logs, and the all-in-one deep-fried dinner (his own creations). To the Toyota dealer who had gouged him for transmission repairs on his aging Celica, he meted out a harsher treatment with the same bit of pride: a jamming field that blocked the keyless starter systems on an entire lot of new cars. And hacking into Jefferson Behavioral Health Clinic’s receivables to “adjust” his therapy bill to “paid” was really quite the coup—less entertaining perhaps, but the level of the challenge …Well…
It was a little painful being unable to claim the achievements publicly.
The same with the girls, though he was a bit worried about that brief slip in Rottweiler’s to the belligerent gamer who played Offed and Dead Maidens online and kept droning on and on about his picking up girls as easily as the animated belles in Snatchem.
It wasn’t actually a slip, then, because there was no truth or motive behind it at the time. Without forethought about his reply to one-up the boastful gamer, but with that straight, honest face that always worried his mother, he’d told the game-junkie-ladies-man, “I do better than that in chat. I drop some suggestions tuned to whatever the girl is feeling at the moment—excited, happy, insecure, sad—sensitive sounding things like how she might dress for a wedding, or how she might let down a hopeful fellow gently, or how she might land the next guy with a bit of talk about a little tattoo in just the right place. That girl went out and got inked with a set of cherubs circling her navel. They come round.” And then the idea came round, though it seemed a bit of a surprise at the moment: “Hey, I could sketch out the scripts for the sad ones’ deaths and they’d follow my directions.”
“You couldn’t sketch the circuit for a vibrating dildo, or land a girl who’s horny enough to use one,” the gamer had said.
Timothy had been a bit drunk too, but, unlike the gamer, he let offenses slide by when he glowed. So in response he simply muttered “gamer” a little under his breath, just loud enough to be heard, and dismissed him with a half swivel of his stool. Why belittle a guy who was just a slopwork janitor in a research lab? Just a gamer, not a programmer. He’d stifled a silly urge to return to the subject of LoveFortyMatchPoint where the doomed boasting exchange had begun. Instead, he’d pocketed his Visa card, signed the standing credit tab for his drafts, and slapped the ballpoint on the tab to punctuate his exit before Gamer Boy grated his ear again about picking up chicks.
But next evening, in Tug Boat Andy’s, where the essence of the air was beer, and the exception cheap cocktails, he picked up—well, was picked up—by Shala, twice his age and half her former charms. The pub was full and she asked to share his booth until a stool came free at the bar, but she never took that stool.
It was awkward. He slipped up badly on the first go-round, but she didn’t seem to mind, kept him all night in her high-rise studio, until he’d gotten most of it right—or, to her liking anyhow. “Don’t worry…don’t get discouraged…we’ve got the whole night. Unless you want to go home early.”
He knew she was using him, but he didn’t mind much. Wasn’t he using her, too? It was only his fourth time since high school. But he didn’t know how much of a use until he returned to Tugboat Andy’s two nights later and sat himself in the booth where they’d met, hoping she’d return. As he sat there, alone in his musings, he heard the voices of two women, out of sight in the booth behind the stained oak partition to his left. Shala was talking to a friend.
“So if you see him here, just befriend him. He’ll come home with you. He won’t get it right on his own, but he does anything you ask, and he follows directions like a dream.”
Katie was the same as Shala—his mother’s age, but never married, a lonely, needy lady in a vintage one-bedroom on First Hill. Speaking of needy, he told himself, the old cliché “Beggars can’t be choosers” might be revised to “Beggars choose beggars.” And he smiled in realizing that he’d begun a bit angry during his night of compliance with Katie, though he had not asked to go home early.
But he was half their age and he would do better. They had not done better and were not going to. And then it all came together: he’d seen Katie and Shala many times before, only twenty years younger and vulnerable, on all the My Faces and My Places and the gush-blogging and bleed-out sharing sites that offered so many ways of saving face or, really, losing face, without knowing it in the deceptive comfort
s of self-revelation.
With that thought, whatever anger he had felt over Shala, Katie—over his own incompetence, his fawning performances with them in bed—warmed into a confidence he was more accustomed to. What Shala and Katie really needed was his help twenty years ago. They didn’t have to become what they had become.
They didn’t have to become…anything.
He knew he could do this, better than anyone, and without the blatant violence of those lowlife predators who occasionally made the news, but more often the TV crime shows. It was simple enough on any of the social media platforms to locate the needy ones who lived around Seattle, especially the girls who used their real first names. But even the careful ones eventually dropped a clue about location.
The swimmer was too easy—went for long workouts in Lake Washington—and the shoe girl shopped in the upscale Chaucette’s downtown. The gardener girl (actually, she was twenty-eight but looked younger) finally mentioned a specialty nursery she ordered from in West Seattle.
As easy as it was to locate subjects nearby, he had lost quite a few cautious ones at first. He should have chatted a little more before suggesting the email. He had planned a fatally drugged wine in one of her mock masses for “Just Mary,” who, at twenty-one and on her mission to become America’s first female Catholic priest, had been newly denied admission to the seminary.
He had envisioned a tragic vertical cartwheel from the scaffolding to spoil the season’s opening home game with “Plain Pam”—imagine calling herself that—who rediscovered daily on social media that she hadn’t the looks to make the basketball cheer squad at UW.
Then there was “Cheddar,” who ate thirty pounds of extra sharp cheese a week for breast enhancement. He had lost her before he had quite worked out how the cheese might be pleasantly tainted.
Sure, he had expected some losses—not hard to see why they might mistake his hasty intentions for harmful. Relax, listen, then chat.
That lesson learned, he recalled another lesson from his favorite psychology teacher. Professor Grissley had emphasized that the “longings” in those who fail socially are sometimes disguised as odd ways to gather attention, recognition, or even companionship. Spark, Cobbie, and Ivy were all guarded in that way, masking their needs in their quirky, self-involved postings.
A little legwork in the concrete world complemented the internet searches, learning a few things about them that they hadn’t posted: a favorite latte drink at Starbucks, the best cozy mysteries at Barnes & Noble, the choicest seafood at Pike Place Market. Without letting on that he knew their favorites, theirs became his and supplemented the rest of his own fiction: he was Wayne Pastern, a forty-year-old Portland fitness trainer with greying sideburns, who turned up in a dozen planted references when googled. That, too, was fitting for gaining the confidence of a swimmer, a girl who grew up with ballet, and a botanist who raised herbs and naturopathic medicinals. To each, he barely mentioned his Portland job and dropped his “name,” figuring they’d look him up and find he was “legitimate.”
Playing to their caution and indirection, he patiently, gradually fashioned softer suggestions to “talk” by email, which eventually secured Spark, then Cobbie, then Ivy. Mail was better than chat because it could unfold slowly, gradually, carefully. It gave them the time they needed to think.
Besides, the mail could actually “sound” more like caring conversation than chat, which too often slid into self-promoting cleverness and repartee. And he’d absorbed enough of such caring conversation—from the mutual supporters, the ego-savers at the cosmetic counters, and outside the fitting rooms at Penney’s and Nordstrom’s, where friends flattered friends, and where he pretended to shop for gifts. Such unbelievable crap it seemed at first. But almost always that talk seemed to bolster the needy.
“I’m not just friending you, I’m befriending you.” It was a terrible line, painful, and he knew it. Credible only to the credulous. But they didn’t seem to think so, or care.
Yes, pretty poor stuff, but not traceable back to him behind his spoof email address, behind the unregistered desktop—self-assigned compensation from Better Deal—in the basement storage unit, and behind the Trojan Horse in the teacher’s upstairs apartment on Queen Anne Avenue. (Yes, he admitted reluctantly, the scam-spam fellows had something to teach him after all.)
With the first one, Spark, the swimmer, he came to realize that if he asked just so—just a little meekly, or even a little sheepishly—to meet her, she’d turn him down easy without cutting him off. She’d feel more comfortable, more secure having said no to him, still more comfortable thinking of him as mail from two hundred miles away in Portland, and she would never, then, ask to meet him. The learning process was a delicate challenge.
“I understand,” he replied to her kind refusal. “You’re right. That’s the beauty of what we do: we keep our own space. To meet would be an ending.” Another dreadful line, but…
“Yes, and my swimming is my space, a place to be alone.”
Despite his careful, acquired patience, he broke his own new rule with Spark by going to watch her swim out into Lake Washington the next day at Madison Park Beach. Yet it was for the best that he went there. He hadn’t noticed on her posts, and couldn’t in her email, but at the beach he could see immediately what was wrong: the swimsuit and the cap, so unattractive, so neutering, like those on the Olympic swimmers, sleek and fast, yes, but inelegant, off-putting. She wore only what was expected of her by her team, by her coach, by her mother, by training, training, training. So he nudged the conversation toward her suits as if he’d only seen them on her posts.
He convinced her to visit a Victoria’s Secret where, too quickly, nervously, she picked out a beach robe, charged it in an awkward moment with a shaky screen signature, and left in a flustered hurry, as she admitted to him later. Good enough for now. A week later he doctored an address label on a Victoria’s Secret swimsuit flyer and left it in her mailbox on top of Swimmer’s Monthly (she’d think she made the mailing list with her credit card purchase).
“…You can’t swim off like this. Let them know you were pretty all along. Let them know how pretty you are now. Let the suit be slow, slight, elegant, for your last swim. There’s no hurry. Let your hair drape and trail…”
She never mentioned the mailer, but told him she was planning to go back to the mall for a suit.
“…let your hair trail slowly with a ribbon waving through it. There shouldn’t be any hurry. There’s only the water that’s been your comfort, your home all along.”
The shoe girl, Cobbie, was a bit odd in a different way: all that money, and she bought her only happiness in shoes, mostly at Chaucette’s, and only when the young man with the soft hands was on shift. She lived alone in a sixth-floor apartment on Mercer Island, drove through the tunnel and downtown to Pioneer Square to buy shoes, then uptown for a walk about Seattle Center or Lake Union, on the pavements or the docks, whichever best set off her shoes of the day—and all of them posted on her wall like a Macy’s website.
With Cobbie, he thought he had miscalculated from the way she signed off so quickly in her last message to him. But the quickness must have been to keep the resolve that they had worked on together: just “Bye.” And two evenings later she had “fallen” as he had imagined it to her.
It did seem especially right, since she had done most of the talking, dropping ideas to him in her typing flurries:
“…and I saw this stupid ad: ‘Clothes make the man, but shoes make the woman.’ Then I realized that it wasn’t so stupid in another way. I mean, we always talk about being in other people’s shoes, don’t we, and why not? So I buy shoes that are not me and I slip into them and they’re like me and not like me and I like that …”
“I’ve noticed when you talk about all the different shoes on your page you have a little different style for each pair, like a writer shifting voices, just small subtle changes that seem so right, so genuine…”
“…but the high heels
really change me. They’re really, really not me. I’m flats and sandals, but I’ve learned to walk in all these heels better than anyone I know. The downstairs neighbor complained a few times about my practicing, but not anymore. I glide. I do, as gently as I used to in a pas de bourrée.”
“You should post a video, show how it’s done. So many women make heels an awkward exhibition—walking peg-legged on stilts and clomping like horses.”
“…and my foot’s that perfect size 8B, not too large or clunky, not too small to notice.”
And so he replied, when she let up and let him, that flats, especially sandals, showed a person’s most natural side.
“Thanks, you are a friend, not just some blab-blog post-it-all person that friended me. You befriended me.” She said it as if she had discovered that turn of phrase herself, as if he had never written it to her.
Coming upon the silver sandals in Banana Republic was a bit of luck. He sent them to her, size 8B. Just a symbol of her own true nature, he said in the gift note and repeated in the email, the last to her. Yes, he was afraid he overdid it there—not to mention his talk about Mercury, the airborne messenger of the gods with the winged silver sandals, and her own mercurial nature that could slip into the style of others—but apparently not. From her, just “Bye,” and two days later she let herself go.
The botanist’s posts were a case study in pathos on her best mornings, bathos on an average afternoon, and agonizing embarrassment, even for the readers, on her worst evenings. She called herself Ivy, pretty corny for a gardener, except that the name was short for Ivory. Her wall was an endless scroll of plants with human names: Mario for marigold, Daphne for daffodil, Mindy for mint, Sandra for pachysandra, Drake for mandrake, Camille for chamomile.
The Best Laid Plans Page 18