Cannibals in Love (7 page)

The news reported that the Sniper had been seen fleeing in a white van. Strangers would repeat this to you eagerly. We made a game of pointing them out to each other. White vans were everywhere now. Was this a thing that people already knew, or had the Sniper brought this fact to bear? His was a vehicle chosen for its indistinctiveness. Its ubiquity. Its absence of shape and color. It was astonishing to realize just how many people made their living driving white vans through the city.

As often as not, he was killing in broad daylight, too. People died outside strip malls and parking lots. Places they never wanted to go to in the first place. They were killed in front of gas stations and grocery stores. Running errands and waiting at bus stops. Understandably, the whole thing made people crazy. It became harder and harder not to fixate on the white van. It was the only thing we had to go on.

People wanted warnings. They wanted a fighting chance. They wanted signs that they could see and understand. If only a flock of birds would leap out of the treetops, in the seconds before he squeezed the trigger, we would know to hit the ground. Even just the glinting mirror of a rifle sight could count as something.

As a community, we had yet to produce even one credible police sketch of the killer. Who were we supposed to look for? A man? Someone with a story? A person with a past? We were still just looking for a man now, right? Somewhere among the ten thousand white vans was a person with a gun. Feeling the same heat that you felt, breathing in the same air. I imagined him driving with the windows down, his seat belt left dangling at his side. He was just a blank and smiling face. The only truly carefree man in three states.

The white van itself could never have come as much of a surprise, though. Ghosts have always worn white, traditionally. Flashing in the dark. Floating through walls. In gunfire and bloodshed he was there. In everything else, he might as well have never existed. The Sniper was a terror. A cipher. A blank.

*   *   *

I came home from work to find my brother watching CNN. I could tell right away that he'd had it on all day. Staring back at me with this haunted look. Worse, he was still wearing the tie.

As soon as he saw me, he stood up and started following me through the downstairs of the house, telling me that two more people had been shot in the parking lot of a Michaels Craft Store.

“So what?” I asked.

“So isn't that weird? He keeps shooting people in front of these Michaels Craft Stores. Why there?”

“Why anywhere?” I asked, exasperated.

I told him to stop counting deaths. I told him to turn off the TV and go outside. I told him to go back to school now. To go home. To stop hiding. There was no grand conclusion to draw from all of this. It just was.

“And take off that fucking tie.”

“No,” he said, stepping backward.

“What does it mean?”

“It doesn't mean anything.”

“Do you work at a bank?”

“What?”

“Are you a Jehovah's Witness?”

“Shut up.”

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the so-called Republican Party?” I asked, getting right up in his face.

“Fuck off.”

“Have you ever knowingly
consorted
with any so-called Republicans?”

“It's just a tie!” he snapped as he walked away.

“That's not an answer,” I said. “That's evasion. I'm keeping my eye on you.”

*   *   *

All in all, I had a car. More than a car, really, I had a birthright. The blue Camry had always been a thing that was rightfully mine, and I was hell-bent on keeping it now. I was the eldest son, of course. Mine was a condition beyond reproof.

Plus, it was fun just to drive. Ripping through the city with the windows down and the radio up. I laid on the horn as I rocketed past every white van I could find. Looking up and laughing at all these startled faces. A young man with a car can do whatever he wants. Go wherever he wants. Even with a killer on the loose. This is the stuff of a thousand classic rock songs. I was going too fast to be killed now.

Mike and I hadn't always listened to this music while we worked, though. Back in August, after I'd quit my data-entry job and joined him painting apartments, we were devoted listeners of NPR. These marathon runs with the radio going eight hours a day, until we could practically recite the news breaks verbatim.

This was on the other side of town—at the yellow apartment—before we'd made the hard switch to classic rock. Mike already had the orange one lined up, too, taking us straight through the Terror Alert color wheel. The joke was not lost on me, but I was serious when I told him I would quit before he found a red one.

Unfortunately, it was this yellow apartment that introduced us to the specter of death. Long before the Sniper started circling the city, Mike fell into a period of distraction. A new and brooding silence that coincided perfectly with the midpoint of his girlfriend's pregnancy. We wouldn't even turn the radio on some days.

It was one of these mornings when Mike climbed the roof with a bucket of yellow paint, only to find the top sealed shut. Painted on and baked hard in the sun. Mike tried to pop it off with a knife, but his foot slipped, and the blade jerked, right through his wrist.

“Fuck!” he yelled.

I stepped back to see what was happening, as the yellow paint came rolling off the roof and nearly struck me. WHAM! The metal can hit the ground and exploded all over my legs. Mike was already coming down the ladder, holding his wrist and cursing.

“What? What happened?”

He took his hand away and the blood squirted four feet across the sidewalk. Mike had severed one of the small blue power lines running up his wrist. Clutching it again, as he stared at me. “I cut myself,” he said simply.

“Jesus Christ. No shit,” I said, feeling completely scrambled. “What do we do?”

I walked away, looking for something, anything. I took my shirt off and pressed it to his arm. “Hold this,” I said, as we watched the dirty white cotton bloom with blood.

“Fuck, fuck.” I panicked. “Do we make a tourniquet?”

Mike just smiled dimly and walked away from me, toward his truck. I ran out ahead and opened the passenger side, helping him into the seat. I found the keys in his front pocket and slammed the door closed.

I wanted to call an ambulance, of course, but Mike wouldn't let me. He said that he was fine; he'd insisted on driving, even. He was laughing when he said this to me. That was the thing—the anger was gone, and Mike was nothing if not tickled by the whole situation.

The pickup made a tortured sound and fired right up. With my adrenaline pumping, I found the clutch and scraped it into gear. We lurched forward and I felt insane. I didn't know the first thing about driving a stick shift. I just tried to keep it in a low gear.
Straight lines
, I told myself as I accelerated into traffic. I was terrified of stalling this thing out. I couldn't stop thinking of death. Was I really going to have to tell Mike's girlfriend he was
dead
because I'd never learned how to drive a stick? I mean, Jesus Christ.

Mike leaned forward and flipped on the radio, inexplicably. Van Morrison's “Wild Night” came blaring out of the tiny speakers. Mike smiled and started to sing.

“
The wiii-iiii-iiii-iiii-iiiiiild night is calling! The wiii-iiii-iiii-iiii-iiiiiild night is calling!
” He turned to me then, sounding insistent. “Sing it!”

“No.”

“Sing it, goddammit!”

“Shut the fuck up, Mike. I'm trying to drive!”

“Hurry!”

“I'm going as fast as I can!”

“I'm dying!” Mike screamed theatrically. “Aggghhhh! I'm fucking dying!” He was cackling and going delirious on me. I floored it through a red light, with horns screaming out on both sides. I couldn't even hear myself think.

*   *   *

In the end, of course, we made it. Mike lived. Everything was different after that, though. Mike became suddenly and unremittingly resolved. Resolved in being a father. Resolved in being alive. Resolved, even, in painting this next apartment orange. Slitting his wrist had been some kind of come-to-Jesus moment for Mike. The brooding silences were replaced by stupid jokes. NPR was overtaken by classic rock. He even entreated me to play the name game with him. Baiting me into talking him out of calling his unborn child Michael. One more thing that he was fully resolved about now.

“What about Tony?” I would ask mildly.

“Too ethnic,” he would deadpan.

“How about something modern, like Todd or Chad?”

“What is this, a country club?”

“How about Dave?”

“Too many vees.”

“It's one vee,” I protested.

“That's too many.”

And on and on this way. I couldn't help but laugh with him. I'd started to wonder what kind of painkillers he was actually on. But mostly I resisted the urge to psychoanalyze Mike. I didn't want to think about how the pressure he was feeling had caused him to cut his wrist and almost die. If he said that he was happy now, then I was happy for him. He could play the radio as loud as he wanted, for all I cared. I couldn't even hear it anymore. Classic rock was the sound of orange paint drying.

*   *   *

Slowly, I began to realize that my brother wasn't leaving the house. Not to go back to Maryland, and not even to go outside. He wasn't eating; he wasn't showering. He hadn't even changed his clothes yet. He carried around with him this undertow of dread. You could feel it coming off of him in waves as he stalked from room to room.

“Did you know that the Queen of England is in town?”

“What?” I asked. “Why would I know that?”

He shrugged. “She's here to meet with the president. A state dinner or something.”

“Good. That will solve everything.”

He leaned against the counter and watched me put my groceries into the fridge. Staring at me, in silence. He was waiting for me to speak. He wanted me to tell him something now, I knew. But I didn't even know what he was doing here.

“Here. Drink this. You're freaking me out.”

I pulled a tall can off a six-pack ring and handed it to him. We leaned back against the countertop and drank our beers in silence. I was grateful for the car, of course, but at what cost? Was I really responsible for all of this? And what the hell was this anyway? I mean, how long were we actually going to do this?

“Did you go to school today?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You had my car.”

“You could've taken the subway.”

He didn't answer. Sipping from his beer.

“What did you do all day?”

“I didn't do anything. I watched TV.”

“Did you eat?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?” I asked, feeling exasperated. “What do you do when you're at school? Who cooks for you there?”

“Nobody cooks for me. There's a dining hall.”

“You have a meal plan?”

“Yeah. I mean, of course.”

“Well, shit.” I beamed at him. “Why didn't you say that two days ago? C'mon. Put your shoes on. Let's go eat.”

*   *   *

We drove the twenty minutes out to College Park; my brother in the passenger seat, with his shoulders tight around his neck. He used his ID card to swipe us into the dining hall, and there we were: a meal out on Mom and Dad. They would be pleased to know that we were finally spending some real quality time together.

The cafeteria itself was a veritable Valhalla of salts and sugars and fats. Decadent buffet tables lined with gleaming processed foods. These extraordinary foods that you would never actually pay for in a restaurant. Corn dogs and popcorn shrimp. Soft pretzels and shish kebabs. Mexican pizzas and English muffins. We ate potato skins and pigs in a blanket. There were chimichangas and Denver omelets. And we even ate some vegetables, too.

We stayed for nearly three hours, eating this way, in fits and starts. Feeling sickened and exhilarated in turns. We sat in silence, feeling full, feeling soothed. I watched the girls as they crossed the room, back and forth. These lively, pretty state school girls. This dining hall was teeming with blond and buxom cheerleaders. Former field hockey captains and high school prom queens. It was almost enough to make me give up on the orange apartment and go back to my own school.

“Where is your girlfriend?” my brother asked me out of nowhere. I looked up at him, baffled by the question. “The girl I met when—”

“I don't have a girlfriend,” I said.

He stared at me blankly, before nodding. I looked away again.

“What about your roommate?”

“What?” Where were all these questions coming from? The kid barely says one word for three days, and now he won't shut up.

“Your roommate,” he said again. “I haven't seen him once since I've been there, and I've been there the whole time.”

“Okay?”

“So why hasn't he come home?”

“I don't know why. Sometimes he just doesn't.” This was met with an anxious pause. “Why?” I smiled. “You think he's been killed by the Sniper?”

“I never said he was killed by the Sniper. I just asked—”

“Why did they kick you out of school?” I interrupted.

“They didn't kick me out of school. I told you, they kicked me out of the dorms.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn't do anything.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever you say.”

I turned and tried to keep watching the girls, but my brother had ruined it. “Are you finished? Let's go,” I said, picking up my tray and walking away from the table.

*   *   *

Overnight, it seemed, the city had suddenly become a patchwork of blue and green tarps. Hanging loosely off of awnings. Covering doorways and entrances. Gas stations draped them over their corridors to obscure the innocent pumpers below. This was not diversion. This was an effort made, in earnest, to restore the public safety.