Keene’s question took a moment to register; the lattice of worry-soured gazes in the store slurs human syntax. I crouched low, unpacking boxes of books. Keene loomed over me, a man in his late forties with a great paunch. His grey, iron-stiff hair is pulled back in a tail. I smell liquor on him, and piss-tinged sweat. Customers, junkie-anxious for comfort, turn their consumer-dead gazes to me, longing for the opiate assurance that a hierarchy is about to be reaffirmed. Their gazes trespass . . . and nest like asps behind my breastbone.
I felt like a child cowering under the shadow of my father, when he’d stand over me as I played on the floor and he’d look at me as if I’d chosen a spot for the sole purpose of being in his way. Pops of sweat bead my brow. A cold trickle runs from the pit of my arm to where Christ was lanced.
My pulse drums my neck. A learned response from when I would tense, awaiting my father’s kick. Like a shark, Keene bites down for the humiliating kill.
“I told you to stack those books alphabetically,” he says with great fluster as he kneels to my level and reshuffles the piles I’ve made.
“They are alphabetical by author,” I say softly, refusing as best I could to contribute to the scene he crafts. But more gazes from the attached café drift over and strike me with another jolt of unease, shaking my resolve and making me hunch my shoulders as tightness grips my chest. I’m pushed further into the role of a child. My parents brought their wrath upon me for breaking a myriad rules they never bothered to explain. At any moment, I was uncertain if I’d be punished for breaking some un-stated law; powerlessness and fear were my watching angels. A situation that made me a tyrant in the fantasy world of play, that made me lash out against the few things weaker than myself.
Keene’s smile slides over nicotine-dyed teeth as he looks in my eyes and sips strength from my fear.
“In
your
special little alphabet, yes. But not in the alphabet we use here. Not in the alphabet our
customers
use.” The booze on his breath plashes my face, making me feel faint.
It was the
Star Trek
books he was bitching about. They were to have gone in a separate pile stacked by author, not by the number of each book in the series. That was all he had to say. But instead, he staged this splendid show for the whole store to see and feed upon, which took five minutes to enact under his taut direction, as opposed to the one minute it would have taken me to correct the mistake if he’d simply told me what to do.
At least one wound-incident like this is inflicted each day, not just on me, but on every employee in the store. Like Typhoid Mary, Keene spreads his shit like contagion. As each day grinds on, and as he slips more covert drinks in the back room, his attacks become more personal and abusive.
My nerves fray, my hands shake regularly. I forgo breakfast, because the dread of going to work has forced me to start the day bent over the kitchen sink with dry heaves. When I come home, I have to wash the oily sweat from under my arms that reeks of the tension I’ve packed within myself. Soon, I’m unable to eat during the day, my innards are so twisted I can only keep down coffee and the odd pastry.
I hate Keene. I hate the job. Yet I never summoned the courage to quit.
Until I was fired.
—
How
did Keene understand your killing him?
—I’m not certain he understood that I was killing him, or that the bottle was. You know,
The
Bottle. All I know is he thought it was funny.
In the storm-heavy space in which I spoke, the thought occurred to me that, as a thing of myth, did I use the poetry of the Bottle for Justice, or did
it
use
me
? The possibility seemed to make a traveling patch of sun through the cloud-dimmed ether.
Hard-packed ice sheeted the mall parking lot, making it a sham frozen lake. Toward the corners of the lot were mounds of plowed snow, scarred with ice-chunks like boulders on steep hills. I hid behind one of these mounds, close to where I’d watched Keene park his car that morning. I wore thick clothes and thermal underwear to make my long wait possible, yet I wore something beneath my skin that kept me warmer than any outdoor gear could. Through
will
, I became what I needed to be. I didn’t wait for the spirit, the avatar I needed, to enter me. I summoned and tamed it, the way Faust would a demon . . . breaking it to suit my needs.
From habit, Keene parked at the far ends of the lot, away from the mall entrance where it was crowded, so he could pull out quickly at the end of the day. On Fridays he forgot about leaving at six and got drunk at what had been in the ‘80s a yuppie pick-up place by the South entrance, where he got a deal as a mall manager on mixed drinks. The place was a relic, with Reagan-era décor that was a vile collision of
The Big Chill
and Planet Hollywood. It had been a matter of time before he parked by one of the snow-banks, far from where the cars of the bar patrons clustered.
At 9:30, I saw him stagger across the ice, looking in his besotted state like a trapper from a Jack London story, trying to reach an outpost in the middle of a long Arctic night as wolves bayed in the distance. Tonight, a different sort of wolf would take him. One with glass teeth.
At his car, he fumbled with his keys, crunching open the rusted door with a maximum of fuss, grunting as he eased his bulk in the driver’s seat. The car’s spent shocks tilted. There was freedom in my so observing him that made me feel lifted from above like a marionette, that let me run over the ice with a sure-footed lack of weight that I knew would not let me waiver as I closed on his car and slipped through the passenger door I’d unlocked with a coat hanger.
His head snapped right, his booze-fogged eyes fixed on me, and with the awareness only fools and drunks have, he knew that I was going to kill him . . . that I
could
kill him. That I embodied the Rambo-esque spectre that stalked the tough-guy fairy tales he peddled to men who embraced Darwinian cruelty as they read books gripped in hands slathered with spa-bought moisturizers.
He jerked up his arm. Booze and his heavy coat slowed him. It was as if a living, twisting weight clung to his wrist. With my left arm, I pinned his shoulder to the seat. With my right, I broke the whiskey bottle I’d brought against the steering wheel and drove it into his neck, where the blood pulses closest to the skin. There was a sound like tearing sandpaper. The Velcro I’d taped to glove and bottleneck let me go deep, to scrape loose the vocal cords that had cut me so many times.
Arterial spray painted the windshield; steam from his sundered throat filled the car with summer-moist humidity. I nearly retched with the sweet-copper stink of blood and the booze on his breath. Yet I felt a strength, a satisfaction that I at last had power over him, as I’d once gained power through violence as a kid so long ago. Keene made noises like a pig makes as the butcher’s knife slides. I thought he tried to speak, then realized what bubbled from his sauna-warm throat was laughter. This pleased me. Irony unshared can be flat and lifeless.
In a few moments, the flow of steam from his split double-chins stopped. But I thought I still heard laughter, like the soft giggle of a child.
I took his billfold, careful to rip the buttons of his coat as I groped into his suit jacket. I took his watch, careful to mark its passing with scratches on his wrist. I broke his ring finger, where his thick gold wedding band was. I don’t know why he wore it. He did nothing but call his ex-wife a cunt.
Then I got out of there. I took off the thin vinyl jacket, like a raincoat, that I wore over my parka. I’d bought the jacket at a hardware store out of town . . . it was what some companies require workers to wear when they spray pesticides. Keene’s blood had dribbled off it in streaks. I let it drop to the ground, then took a plastic garbage bag from under my coat and wrapped it.
I rubbed out my prints in the snow, invisible to the ice-caked security cameras mounted on the lampposts, invisible to any who might see me, blending into shadow as a wilderness-hardened killer, the kind invoked in banal myth-novels by the short-hand “crazy vet” or “rogue agent”—a creature forged of cultural guilt for the betrayal of ex-soldiers. The power of that figure didn’t let my cancer-riddled body know thirst in the cold, dry air, didn’t allow me to shiver, or feel weak. I threw the bag in a trash can by a Burger King, took a bus home.
No one gave me a second glance.
—Did you think Keene’s death was funny?
Doctor Johansson’s voice took a clarity from inside the patch of light that seemed to have become still within the bank of cloud-dark shade.
—No, Doctor. I don’t think death is funny.
Doctor Johansson set down his pipe, leaned back, hands behind his head. It was a position I’d have taken myself, if it weren’t for my shackled arms and legs; the metal links were silver-shiny against the orange jump-suit I wore. The jumpsuit had no belts, buckles, laces. Silly precaution. I wouldn’t hurt anybody. Yet, like the hunter’s costume I wore the night Keene died, my vestments had iconic value I welcomed, despite my aching shoulders. The metal chair the links looped through was very uncomfortable, too. Yet if this throne were meant to accompany the ceremonial robes I wore, so be it.
—And you were able to forgive Keene?
—There’s something tragic about a drunk. Maybe that’s why so many clowns look like tramps. Keene never looked so pathetic as he did when he bled.
—How did this allow you to forgive yourself?
—I realized I pitied this boozer whose life had turned to shit. And that’s why I took his abuse. On some level, I knew he couldn’t help it.
—But you don’t regret killing him.
—If I hadn’t killed him, I wouldn’t have this insight, and he wouldn’t be at peace. Forgiveness is part of the Justice I sought. Justice comes from art, and art works on many levels. The forgiveness of the deaths, for the victims and for me, is just one level of this art.
—Art is subjective. So is Justice. And in this context, so is forgiveness. If each of those you kill can’t understand what you’ve done, then your service to Justice is one-sided.
I admired his lifting my rhetoric, to throw it back to me. I’d like to see what a linguist would think of the transcript of this day’s session, because it seemed that Doctor Johansson was, consciously or not, stealing my speech patterns. Did I pick up his? As part of the fabled
degree absolute
, from the days when psychology was less science than it was medicine show? Since I’d taken my cold steel throne today, the Second Act of our play had shifted from interaction like fencing to something like shadow boxing. On our stage defined by our reflections, his voice was itself a mirror . . . which would be a great tool if the point of our sessions were therapeutic.
—Forgiveness can be undertaken by one person without the knowledge or participation of the one being forgiven. Death, Justice, art and forgiveness . . . they’re facets of the same thing.
—And how did you . . . realize that? How did you come to that notion?
The shadowed and wind-swept reality trespassing on my nerves tore. A clarity pealed through my hearing and my sight, taking the light of mundane spectra. In an act of contrition, to myself, to him, to the Justice to which I’d devoted myself, I offered him the truth I wasn’t certain I wished to offer.
—It was Catherine who taught me. Forgiving her was especially sweet.
—Because you loved her?
—I love her now.
—What about when she was alive?
—I loved her. Maybe. But I didn’t know it at the time.
—If there was love between you, how did she hurt you to the point you needed to kill her?
—Catherine hated herself. Everyone near her suffered for it, because she had to alienate herself to prove she wasn’t worthy of human company. She wounded me so many times, I couldn’t see the pain she was in.
—Could she see the pain you suffered?
—She saw that very well.
Dinner with Catherine is ritual. The place mats, wine glasses, napkins all must be laid out perfectly. The meal must be eaten slowly, while the classical music station plays in the background. Catherine never comes to my place. All must be done in her domain, lined as it is by shelves of the self-help books, biographies and novels that nurture the traumas and scars she uses to define herself. I’m comfortable in this place of ritual. Because as with my parents, I don’t understand what rules I’m to follow, nor am I permitted to be certain. Catherine, I think, doesn’t understand the rules she lays down either, and uncertainty shared is doubly comforting.
A sip of wine, the glass held daintily in her long narrow hands. Faint lipstick traces on the rim of the glass. Candlelight touches the prints of her fingertips above the stem.
“Claire told me I should sort out my relationships.” Claire is Catherine’s psychologist.
“What did she say?”
Catherine never speaks directly about herself. All must be channelled through the divine authority of Claire. Catherine’s sessions with Claire are a purchased commodity, brought forth to be admired along with the pinewood-themed décor of her home. I think of her expensive coffee and espresso set, and how she called me on the day it was delivered and told me to come witness her unpacking it.
“Claire said I have to refocus how I stand in relation to the important people in my life. I have to see myself in a stronger position in relation to my father, and my mother. And she said I should sort out my feelings about Steve.”
Steve is her ex-boyfriend who used to treat her like shit. He thinks himself a writer, and his way to be a writer is to drink a lot and pretend to be Hemingway. He grew a beard and left town some months ago to rent a cabin in Maine and finish the Great Novel he’s been working on for five years. As far as I can tell, the man’s gotten nothing but form rejections. Like the meal we’ve just eaten, Catherine has taken Steve into herself. Like all she ingests, she regurgitates him from time to time, so her forced definition of her earthly existence can be maintained.
“What else did she say?”