“I bought you this, Mom,” I said.
I took the drab green tarp off the big cage holding two of my messenger pigeons.
“Doves,” my mother said with real joy in her voice.
“Messenger pigeons, Mom. They have these little clips on their left legs and here”—I handed her a tiny sheaf of flimsy papers—“you can use these to write me little notes. The birds will come home to my loft when you let them go.”
My mother, who often smiled but never laughed, grinned broadly for me.
“Oh, baby,” she said. “This is the most wonderful thing you ever give me.”
* * *
SIX MONTHS AFTER Bron decided to spare at least a part of the human race I still had not been given a mission. I slept no more than three hours a night. Every time I dozed off I’d come awake suddenly with the image of masses of corpses heaped up on the streets of New York.
I communicated with Bron almost every day. We talked about his home and hundreds of other planets he’d visited with his mind. I told him how much I loved the messenger pigeons.
Almost every day Liam and I would drive the birds farther and farther away from the loft; a different direction each day. They always made it home; most of the time before we did. I was up to fifty miles in half a year.
Bron asked me questions about the birds. Some of these were revealing of his alien nature.
Do they speak to you, friend Hogarth?
Do you mean like you and I, Bron? Like us putting down words on this computer screen?
Words?
Yes. Words.
I do not know what words are. Are you using words to communicate with me?
How do you express yourself to me, Bron?
I think into the last wisp of light from the Stelladron that once embraced my people. It translates my ideas to your device.
When you communicate with InfoMargins haven’t you had to understand the concept of words?
I don’t communicate with them the way I do with you, brother. I simply give directives.
How do you do that? I mean why would they listen to you?
The reason all humans listen … the potential to acquire value.
Money?
Just so.
But how did you get money here on Earth?
I imagined it existed and it did. Your machines are wonderful things. They hum a simple song that I can sing along with.
How much money did you imagine, Bron?
I have a mission for you, brother. Tomorrow you will stay at home and receive a cardboard box. You will take this box to a Union Express delivery service office and have it delivered to the address that will come in an envelope with the box.
What’s in the box, Bron?
Nothing of any importance, friend Hogarth.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING THE BOX CAME. The man who brought it wore gray overalls with no insignia. He had a swarthy complexion that could have come from anywhere. He was a decade past handsome but his salt-and-pepper mustache was stylish and his eyes were dark.
“Where’s this from?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer.
“Who sent it?”
He smiled apologetically. Either he didn’t speak English or he was told not to.
Bron didn’t say for me not to open the carton and so I slit the binding tape with a serrated kitchen knife. The box contained twelve clear bottles made from thick glass. The bottles were separated from each other by wrapping bubbles and filled to their metal tops with clear liquid. The address was a post office box in St. Petersburg, Russia. I dithered around for three hours and then called Liam to take me to the Union Express office.
“Liam,” I said on the way to the delivery office.
“Yes, Mr. Tryman.”
“How long have you been driving limos?”
“Ever since I got out of the army. I was a commando you know.”
“Where?”
“All over the world but I was in the U.S. Army,” he said easily, his mild brogue in evidence. “They don’t know a foot from an arse but they have good weapons and muscle to spare.”
“When you were a soldier you took orders, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you ever, ever disobey?”
He pulled the car to the curb in front of the delivery service office and sat there obviously considering my question.
“No,” he said. “But then again I did things that I would na do again.”
“Do you regret things you’ve done?”
He turned around putting his elbow on the back of his seat. He was wearing a yellow suit and a pale green shirt that day.
“Regrets are the easy way out. You shed a tear but the children who seen ya shed blood on their own land still suffer.”
I thought he was going to say more but he didn’t.
If I was at home I wouldn’t have sent those bottles off. But there I was at the service already. I got out and sent Bron’s package.
* * *
THAT NIGHT I SAT UP WORRYING about those bottles, about the poison they no doubt contained. Would wiping out a city in Russia somehow save jellyfish off the coast of Africa?
At four in the morning I messaged Bron.
What was in those bottles?
Water.
I don’t believe you.
I am not lying, friend Hogarth.
Okay. I’m sorry. I just. I’m just worried.
Do not worry. Tend to your birds. Enjoy your wealth and your friends.
I said okay and good-bye but I didn’t believe my friend. For the next week I looked up St. Petersburg on the Internet a dozen times a day. After that I expanded my search through all of Russia and then in the rest of the world looking for sudden deadly contagions. Nothing showed up.
After twenty days of little to no sleep my fingertips began to go numb.
All this time I went on with my life, losing weight constantly, seeing my few friends, and tending to my birds. My pigeons were mostly snow white. A few had markings: a black feather or a peacock blue collar. They also had personalities and other subtle differences. My favorite was Dodger. He evaded me for the first few weeks when I tried to grab him and put on his message clip. But after a while he’d come to me cooing and cocking his head to look me in the eye.
I had gone on four dates with Marla. We went to the Bronx Zoo, Sag Harbor for an afternoon, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and finally to the Blue Note to hear the fabulous bassist Ron Carter. We always took public transportation or cabs wherever we went. I didn’t want Marla to know the extent of my newfound wealth. I just wanted to be normal with her.
During a break between sets at the Blue Note Marla reached across the table and took my hands. I could barely feel the touch due to the growing numbness.
“How come you never kiss me, Trent?” she said.
“I…”
“Don’t you like me … like that?”
“I didn’t want to be forward,” I said. But that wasn’t true. I had sent twelve quarts of deadly poison to Russia. What right did I have to kiss anyone?
“Can we go to your place after the music?”
I nodded, unable to speak, and Marla smiled. Maybe she thought I was shy. I had been timid before but that was all washed away. I was a mass murderer now. I was on the verge of becoming the greatest villain in the history of the world.
* * *
“IT’S OKAY,” MARLA SAID when it became obvious that I could not achieve an erection. “You’re just nervous.”
I hadn’t had an orgasm in weeks. I hadn’t slept or eaten well or laughed or cried. All I could do was to wait for disaster. I put my arms around Marla’s reassuring dark body and held her.
“You’re cold,” she whispered. “Maybe you’re sick.”
* * *
WHEN MARLA HAD FALLEN ASLEEP I got up and walked around my new apartment, the one Bron bought from Ralph Moore. The architect had taken out most of the walls of this upper unit and installed huge picture windo
ws. The small bedroom and the toilet were walled off but the rest of the vast apartment, which took up the whole upper floor, was open, airy.
I wrapped myself in a terry-cloth bathrobe and went up to the roof.
My birds cooed for me and I relaxed a moment. I took out the special food Bron helped me acquire that helped the birds develop superior strength and intelligence. I climbed into the loft with them as they slept and jostled. I sat for hours among my birds shivering in the cold.
When the sun began rising I went back down to the apartment.
Marla was still asleep. One of the reasons she had asked to come to my place that night was because she didn’t have to go to work the next day.
At 7:14 the doorbell rang. A delivery man brought in a box exactly like the one containing the bottles I had sent off to Russia.
This man was black and old, maybe seventy. He walked with a stooped-over gait.
“Tryman?” he asked after setting the heavy box down.
“Yeah.”
“You should get a elevator in this building,” the old man said. “It should be against the law not to have no elevators over three floors.”
“Who sent this?”
“I don’t know. I work for Dunster’s Delivery. They got this box and said for me to take it with no paperwork. I asked them if that wasn’t against the Patriot Act but they said they knew the guy.”
I gave the man a ten-dollar tip and then put the box into the closet across the way from the front door. This box would not go to Bron’s destination.
* * *
“TRENT!” MARLA CALLED OUT as I slid up behind and entered her with my bone-hard erection.
I was so excited that it felt as if I couldn’t stop bucking back and forth, in and out of her. I couldn’t speak either.
“Do you have a condom on, baby?”
“Yeah,” I huffed, stiff from my neck to my toes.
“Let me see!” She pushed back and then pulled away getting up to her knees.
I stayed on my side moving back and forth.
“You do have one on,” she said, surprised.
“I want you,” I said.
She pushed my shoulder and I was on my back; thin as a rail and straight as one too.
“Let me see it,” she said.
Marla rolled the bright yellow condom off my black erection. She smiled holding her hands out around it, not touching me, seemingly amazed that it stood up on its own.
“You like me, Trent?”
I nodded and she brought her hands together around my cock. The moment she touched me I began ejaculating.
“Dog,” Marla said. “Damn.”
I kept coming, crying out for her to grab me hard but she just smiled moving her fingers gently against the over-sensitized skin.
“Does it feel good?” she asked.
I couldn’t answer. I reached to hold myself but she held my hand back.
“You don’t need no help with that, Trent.”
I moaned then.
“You always come this much?”
“I’ve been thinking about you,” I said.
“You must’a been thinkin’ all mont’.”
* * *
IN THE NEXT THREE MONTHS I received six more cartons. Each one I stacked in the closet. Marla and I developed a relationship but I managed to keep her from finding out about my job. I didn’t let Liam drive me to work any longer and I told R.G. to keep an even lower profile.
I almost never slept.
I raised my birds and talked regularly to Bron but he never asked about the boxes after the first one and I never told him that I did not send them to Bamaco, Dijon, Galveston, Hong Kong, Jakarta, and Lima, Peru.
The sex I had with Marla was the best I’d ever known. I don’t know how she felt about it. She would laugh at me after I’d come.
“Why do you laugh?” I once asked.
“You just get so excited,” she said. “Sometimes I get worried that you might be havin’ a heart attack or sumpin’.”
“That makes you laugh?”
“I’m just happy you like me so much,” she said, and then she kissed me.
* * *
THAT WAS A CRAZY PERIOD in my life. I had gone from fat to skinny, from traitor to my race to humanity’s last hope, from data entry to VP. I think that it was Liam who turned me from Bron’s Mission. The sadness in his voice and his refusal to wallow in regret …
In the end I was too small to contain the Mission to save God. Between my birds and my lover, Liam and R.G., Miguel and Hugo and Dora, I had become another man, a lesser man in many ways.
When I had made the decision to kill off humanity I felt big. I was more than anyone. I was willing to do something that no other villain had ever even imagined. I would kill everyone. I would do to mankind what they would do, albeit unawares, to uncounted dimensions.
But then I lost heart.
The boxes of poison stacked up in my closet. I didn’t know what danger they posed so I couldn’t throw them away or pour them down the drain.
After a year had passed, and boxes were stacked up to the closet ceiling, I never slept at all.
My vision was askew. Sometimes I’d stumble when walking.
“Why don’t you sleep, baby?” Marla would ask when I’d be sitting up in the bed at night.
“I’m going through a transition at work,” I’d say.
After a few nights of her pulling me down next to her I became good at pretending to sleep. I’d lie there listening to her gentle breathing, trying to figure out how it was that Bron planned to trick me.
Every night I would lay in bed, with or without Marla, my body thrumming from the lack of sleep and nutrition. I lived on candy bars and French fries. I should have gained weight but my body refused to digest the food. None of this bothered me. I’d accepted my fate. I was going to die and die soon but first I would figure out Bron’s plan and, somehow, stymie him.
But even here there was a contradiction—I still loved the Stelladren. I had only seen them once but their beauty was beyond anything I could imagine. They weren’t life like I was. They were a coming together of all sentience, far beyond the petty mucus of human potential. They were raised above me like Jesus stepping over horse dung.
But for all the love I felt for the Stelladren I could not kill Marla and Miguel.
My mother sent me brief messages of love and religious sentiment every other day and I had Liam return her pigeons.
I gave pigeons to all my friends and we communicated regularly with Liam running back and forth, returning the birds to their owners for future messages.
I asked Miguel via pigeon to get me a pistol. We never spoke about it. He just brought the gun to school one day, put it in a company pouch, and had it sent by interoffice mail to my desk. It was a .38 pistol, loaded and ready to fire.
I had come to think during my long nights of vampirelike repose that Bron must have needed me for some specific reason. He had all kinds of power without me. He controlled businesses and the lives of thousands. If he could deliver the bottles of poison to me then he could have sent them to their destinations around the world.
Maybe the bottles were a distraction. Maybe he had something else in mind. But regardless Bron had chosen me for a reason. He had put me in place so that I would do something to ensure his plans against humanity.
It came to me on a Wednesday that my death might be the only way to halt Bron’s machinations. He seemed to want to keep me alive. I had a bodyguard and a driver. Maybe if I killed myself at some important juncture I would be saving the human race.
* * *
LIFE FOR ME was like a beautiful and terrible dream for most of that year. I was rich and powerful, thin and protected. My lover believed that she knew me … and she did—except for my relationship with Bron. I went to work every day and saw Marla four nights a week. I told her everything about my life up to Bron’s intervention. Then I only made vague references to a small promotion for years of service.
> I communicated with Bron almost every day. Our talks were meaningless—I knew. I was torn up inside over my betrayal of the Stelladren. They were magnificent beings, conduits to God. Their ultimate deaths would accompany my own I knew. This knowledge was the only reason I had not yet taken my life.
* * *
ONE NIGHT I SAT UP, suddenly aware that my birds were part of Bron’s plan. He had asked me to get them; that was his first request after agreeing to let some portion of the human race survive. At three in the morning I went up on the roof with a butcher’s knife planning to kill all of Bron’s messengers of death. I reached in and grabbed my favorite, Dodger, by his neck. He squawked but I just pressed his beak up with my thumb and slit his throat with a deep thrust. A drop of hot blood spurted out onto my cheek and the bird fluttered wildly for much longer than I would have thought possible.
After Dodger died I stood there on my roof paralyzed with a dead pigeon in one hand and the murder weapon in the other. My fingers and feet and face were all numb. I could feel the blood moving painfully in my veins.
When the sky began to lighten I went down to my old apartment and rooted around until I found a packet of note cards that my mother had given me many years ago—before I went to work for Shiloh Statistics. They were cream colored with my name printed in blue across the top: HOGARTH TRYMAN. The only printed evidence left of my real name.
Dear Marla,
It is because I love you that I cannot see you again. I am a very very bad person. I have done terrible things. I have murdered and covered it up. I have betrayed everyone. I have plotted against my fellow man and I can no longer live with it. I love you and I always will in threads of light from a dark dark sea.
Trent “Hogarth” Tryman
I sealed the note into an envelope, placed a stamp upon it, and addressed it to the diner. I took the pistol from a drawer and put it in my pocket.
I mailed the letter not three blocks from my apartment planning to kill myself then and there. But instead I started walking in the dawning light. I was going to kill myself on the street so that everyone could see me. Bron couldn’t get at me if I was dead, maybe then his plans would be undone. I was weak and staggery, tingling, numb, thrumming, and deeply rueful over the murder of Dodger and the fate my decision would have across the planes of existence.
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