Stories From the Plague Years (6 page)

I paused, wondering how Doctor Johansson could listen so intently with that horrible scratching being made low by the leg of his desk like the teeth of a rodent on untreated pine. The world warped, as it does in my sight when I’m enraged, and know life in the blood-tones and blacks that is called “seeing red.” The sound was
near
, untouched by the heath-winds that enfolded his words. Obviously, he couldn’t hear the scratching or see the rage-light, and if that was the case, I shouldn’t bring them up. He needed to believe every word I said, for my sake . . . and for his, since he’d chosen to follow me into this place of red-tinged shadow.

. . . so skillfully, he dismantled her certainty that the world is a benevolent place. Evan’s lies made a new reality, and she waded into it. Eventually everyone saw what he did. And then they thought about from whom they’d heard all those terrible things about me. Gossip redeemed me, a little. But the damage was done to my dignity and to Karen’s mind.

—But you felt no resentment toward Karen.

—I don’t blame victims. Karen was wounded by me. Evan wounded her further. There was no need to hurt her more than she was.

—Was your killing Evan retribution as much for Karen as it was for yourself? A rectifying of what she suffered?

—I’d never kill for someone else’s sake. That presumes too much karma on the person not doing the killing.

The rage-dusk in my sight deepened.

—That’s very responsible of you.

His voice was steady, still without judgment. The scratching and chewing was steady as well, yet though it was wordless, it still bore a kind of judgment.

—Thank you.

—What happened to Karen?

—Evan desiccated her after six months. He moved on to the next woman: Tina, I think. A beatnik type who dabbled in Wicca . . . pretty sure she got her pentagram necklace from Hot Topic. He did the sensitive artist routine with her. Called himself a misunderstood poet, smeared himself with patchouli and lugged around books he didn’t read. Karen moved back to Michigan. I got Christmas cards from her for a while. Manger scenes on all of them. She got knocked up, married and divorced in the span of a year. Last I heard, she and her kid live with her parents, now.

—Excuse me, please.

Doctor Johansson glanced down, and I thought for a heartbeat he did so because of the teeth crunching by his feet. Instead, he put his pipe aside and opened a file on his desk by his left hand. I’m certain the scattering of files on his desk wasn’t haphazard, that he had a sort of system.

The scratching and chewing fell quiet as he closed the file, and the blood-tinge in my sight itself bled away. I was glad of that. The sounds and red shadows could still get to me, despite the fact I knew the little thing, heralded by the light, that made the sounds better than I knew my own face. How many more reflections could the mirror, our witness, our audience and our stage, endure? With this drama, I wished to relieve my pain, and not recall a relic of punishment from my wounded past.

Doctor Johansson looked up from the file, picked up his pipe.

—You didn’t use
poison
on Evan.

—Metaphorically, it was poison. And it’s metaphor that counts. Especially if you act as a metaphor, if you use the full power of that metaphor to do more than just end a life. Besides, I don’t know toxicology. I couldn’t have known what substances poured in his ear would’ve been fatal, no matter how many hours I spent in the library.

—And Dráno in saline solution would be incredibly painful.

—Yes, Doctor. That’s why I used it.

The last trace of redness in my vision faded, and a trembling I’d not been aware of in my hands fell still.

Slipping into Evan’s building was easy. I pantomimed a search for keys while a tenant, smiling, let me in as he left. Yet I didn’t feel the same grace and confidence I’d felt while using a machete to purge the rage with which Molino had poisoned me. I felt fleshy, mortal, afraid. I had a gym bag of clothes bought from the Salvation Army; the nylon handle was damp with palm sweat. I found the building’s basement laundry by guessing its location from the dryer vents outside and washed the clothes. I sat in the far corner, where the floor was littered with balls of dryer lint, and opened a college geology text bought from a used bookstore. I underlined passages randomly. The being I wished to be, the fiendish master of deception whose élan I tried to invoke, knew that the best way to hide is in plain sight. Even when you don’t want to hide.

Under water-stained plaster walls, I waved and said hello to people as they came to use the other machines. They wore stress-lines on their faces like tribal scars as they slid down the social ladder: middle-class exiles who wondered if living in this low-rent neighbourhood and student slum was just a rough patch, or the start of a permanent decline. Evan lived in a very friendly building—the downwardly mobile are always prone to kindness. I wondered what mischief Evan wrought here, what lies he’d used on his neighbours. Maybe he manipulated the manager to get special favours. Who knew?

I washed my load of ratty clothes over and over, hearing Evan’s neighbours chat about how rough things were. Near midnight, I left the clothes in the dryer and walked to the first floor, where Evan’s apartment was. I knew he’d be asleep. His ex-roommates used to complain about what an early riser he was: the one glimmer of truth to the farm-boy myth he’d crafted for himself.

I walked to his apartment along a hallway carpet that’d once been plush, fear cramped my mid-section, as if rubber hands twisted my guts. I stood before Evan’s door, next to an incinerator chute welded shut years ago. Lines of dust on the door’s moulding sat at my eye level. I had a lock jimmy, the thing thieves use. But I didn’t know if it’d work on Evan’s door. It’d barely worked on my door when I practiced at home, and had made a small racket. Even if I jimmied the lock, what could I do if Evan kept the chain on?

I was afraid . . . if I couldn’t kill him tonight, I’d never summon the courage to try again. I owed killing him not only to myself, but to Justice. Yet the power of that higher cause had abandoned me. I couldn’t find within me the poetry I inflicted on Molino, unable to
become
the metaphor I was driven to inflict. My sick flesh couldn’t cloak itself as the Dark and Shadowy Man, the diabolical figure of such awesome power. Such power had as its basis, and as its foil, the imagined power of the victim: the
vanity
that can be sundered along with the victim’s sense of security in the fortress of the bourgeois home, made all the more potent in the arrogantly false home space of Molino’s office. Here, in this rickety building, there was no such vanity. There was no smug security that could grant me strength through the act of my trespassing upon it.

People were awake in the apartments nearby. I heard shuffling feet, a shower, a late-night talk show host telling jokes, a
Jerry Springer
-like crowd chanting, the almost alien screech of a dial-up modem as someone reached through the ether for what he couldn’t find in reality.

A stink like wet dog fur wafted from me as I crouched by Evan’s lock: the stench that leaks from my pores when I’m under duress, when my hands twitch and my stomach digests itself. I swallowed down the panic, took the jimmy out of my denim jacket and raised it to the brass lock. I heard something scuttle on the other side of the door, like the bolting of a cat on a wooden floor, quick, and low to the ground. It had to be a cat. What else would it be? I didn’t care, so long as it didn’t bark.

The jimmy waved in my grip like the prong of a tuning fork. It had been so much easier with Molino . . .

I was too nervous to use the jimmy. I’d have to give this up. Stop with Evan. There was no point going on, naked, with no raiment of other-worldly power. I stood to leave.

And a ridiculous thought occurred to me.

I turned the brass knob.

As the door swung open, I clothed myself in the guise of the killer. I needed to be within
these
shabby halls: a figure of urban nightmare, who can sap will and action, who can forge a microcosm of suffering within the isolation of a city crowd. I moulted the need to be the Dark Man and became the lethal being of
this
place. My senses buzzed and sang—aware of everything, the beat of my heart, the drip of a sink in the bathroom, traffic on the main street nearby, the taste of fresh air coming through opened windows and the smell of cheap strawberry incense burned hours before. I shut the door and threw the bolt that should have been thrown to thwart my Coming. Reaching for the chain, I noticed it swung slightly. I must have brushed it when I came in. Its dangling reminded me of a noose.

I fastened the chain and searched the living room with a penlight. Evan’s CDs were stacked by the stereo. I put them in my gym bag, careful to turn on the player and take the disc inside. I left the player open, a flag for lazy cops: a sign that a crack addict or dust-head had done this, come to lift easily fenced goods. I clicked off the penlight and walked to the bedroom, in silence that was not mine, dreading I’d step on the cat, make it screech and wake Evan.

Moonlight striped the bedroom, filtering through Venetian blinds that rocked in the cool breeze. Evan slept in a foetal ball on his futon, a pillow hugged to his crotch and chest. He looked like the innocent, fair-haired boy he pretended to be. His eyes darted under his lids . . . thus did a being of TV cliché dreams lay dreaming before me. My last trace of fear quieted. My hands steadied, like those of a surgeon. For I knew this shit had to die tonight. Now. It was
right
that this sham innocent be expunged from this mortal coil.

With the glass syringe in my left hand and my right on the light switch above him, I woke Evan to the moment of his death.

He howled and bolted upright, jabbering like one possessed or speaking in tongues. In an instant, he was on the futon, whirling. He saw me, spouting debased language as he covered his wounded ear, reddish froth leaking between his fingers. His pathetic body contorted with the pain that whispered into the fleshiness of his mind. The autistic stamp of his feet snapped the futon frame under the mattress. I wanted to explain his death to him, to tell this howling man why I dissolved his life as he fell to his knees in the depression that had been his bed.

I was about to walk away when Evan grabbed my shirt, rose from his knees and screamed the last words of his shitty life: “DEAN!! MAKE IT STOP!! PLEEEEEASE!!”

I felt my eyes crack wide with his shouting my name and pummelled him four, five, six times in the throat, crushed his larynx. As he fell in a gurgling lump onto his bed, I pulled a small canister from my jacket and maced him, thankful I’d thought to bring the spray.

And I enjoyed using it. Like spraying a cockroach.

As I watched him thrash, the reddish froth turned a deeper red, and the rest of the room, the rest of the world, dropped in shadow. As if a spotlight focused on his agony, and nothing else existed. It was the sort of concentration I knew when I stared at the death throes of a legless spider or beheaded ant. Time walked differently in that sweet dome of light—sound and vision became viscous as oil. This was the urban space of suffering, the cupped silence in which Kitty Genovese was butchered, the quiet that smothers the voice of Munch’s
Scream
.

His pain opera over, Evan wheezed among the coiled, bloody blankets as the rest of the world faded back into existence, as if afraid to intrude. I pitied him, still longing to explain his death and give it meaning to him. I thought to fetch a knife from his kitchen to give him a tracheotomy, so he might live long enough for me to fully enjoy his death.

But time and sight and hearing flowed rudely as they had before. Evan’s neighbours were pounding, shouting at the door. Soon they’d get the manager with his passkey.

I shut off the light, went to the window.

It wouldn’t open more than three inches.

Nor would the next window.

Evan had put screws into the window frames, so they could open wide enough to let in air, but not wide enough for a thief to get in, not wide enough to admit the figure of urban nightmare I no longer was.

The pounding at the door grew louder, there were more shouts from neighbours called away from TVs and the lonely quest for cyber-porn. I couldn’t break through the window, not as the mere man I now was. I’d get lacerated; there’d be questions at the hospital, my blood on the broken glass.

Concerted blows thudded against the door.

There was nothing heavy in the bedroom to break the windows . . . the only furniture besides the futon was a beanbag chair in the corner piled with dirty laundry. I could use Evan to break the glass, hurl him through. . . .

A sound . . . a clatter . . . like a plastic bottle on tile. I heard it between thuds against the door. It came from the bathroom.

Clarity. Sudden epiphany.

The cat.

The cat had bolted, and knocked something over in the midst of this commotion to get out.

To get out
. For the span of a breath, I thought I saw through the creature’s eyes as it escaped: a flash of darkness, and a flight through weeds under the ugly glow of halogen. In the bathroom I saw the shower curtain billowing, and behind it, the horizontally sliding aluminum window above the tub half opened, the piss-light of street lamps glinting off the frosted glass.