Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  Alone.

  Either in his Spartanly appointed office, for which the rent seemed eternally due, or in his meager apartment populated by yard-sale furniture and a yeoman-class television. Alone, with thoughts which grew increasingly more torturous. He grew to realize it was probably bearable to live only the skeleton of a real life—if you’ve never known any better—but impossible if you’ve ever been on top. Campbell’s tomato soup instead of a rich bouillabaisse? Montgomery Wards after Abercrombie and Fitch? A Ford Fiesta where a Mercedes once purred? And didn’t you just know off-the-rack permanent press slacks didn’t have the feel and fit of custom-tailored worsted wool? But it wasn’t just the money, Frederick knew. It was the entire mindset, the ambiance, the way a man’s trappings served to define him. The way a man perceived himself.

  Frederick slipped gradually down the chute to madness. The worst part of the journey being his almost total awareness of what was happening to him. Reality became increasingly plastic and mutable, all according to the whims of his tortured psyche, and even though he knew it was happening, he couldn’t do a Goddamned thing about it.

  But then, there was something to be done, wasn’t there?

  Not a rectifying, restorative act, to be sure, but a sweet enough substitute for any man exceeding the posted limits on the Oblivion Expressway.

  Frederick accepted his mission with a semi-stoical smile—if there can be such a thing. Revenge is that special chord played out in the mind which has worked through the whole sliding scale of emotional responses and found them wanting. And revenge, Frederick discovered, became his raison d’être.

  In several weeks he’d transformed himself. From ruined orthopedic specialist to a far more romantic amalgam: tactician, private investigator, commando, and most importantly, avenging angel. He watched his prey from close range, studied his habits, made his plans, and when the time was just right, reached for his Gladstone bag…

  …and unleashed the instrument of his revenge. Even in the feeble light of the bedroom, the scalpel shone with a preternatural brightness. As Frederick bandied it gracefully, like a conductor with his baton, before Raczkowski’s bugging eyes, it seemed to grow brighter and shinier still.

  Such a tiny little blade, thought Frederick. Ever since medical school, he’d been amazed at how efficiently a cutting tool it was. Laying its flat surface on the flabby skin of Donald’s shoulder, Frederick let his former patient feel the cold kiss of the steel. He let the moment linger, like a foul odor that won’t go away, in Donald’s mind. The anticipation of the first cut would be worse than the actuality, wouldn’t it?

  Yes, of course it would.

  Then with a simple, confident turn of his wrist, a subtle downward pressure, and the little blade was plunging effortlessly through Raczkowski’s doughy, mole-blighted flesh. Blood seeped at first, but as the capillaries gave way to heavier plumbing, things began to get a little messy. Raczkowski tried to scream, but the Xylothal wouldn’t allow it.

  Frederick smiled. A big, burly asshole like Raczkowski making these wimpy, gaspy little kitten mewlings was kind of funny. Pausing, Frederick peered down at his ex-patient with an expression most psychiatrists would describe as flat. Now what was he going to do about the major arteries and veins? Of course—just tie them off crudely, seepage be damned. That would hold things at least until he’d finished sawing through all those tough tendons and ligaments.

  He smiled and went back to his work, moving the blade with renewed confidence, trying to retrace the scar-marks of his previous work. Raczkowski’s pain levels were red-lining now. Even under the hammer-lock of the Xylothal, the man was managing to give the suggestion of writhing on the blood-soaked bed. If eyes could bulge voluntarily from a skull, his would have long-since left their sockets.

  The pain must have been exquisite, thought Frederick.

  At last, all remaining gristle had been separated, the final shreds of connective fascia flensed away, and Frederick’s work was completed. Raczkowski was beginning to hemorrhage badly, beginning the long slide into terminal shock. Frederick left him to leak away in the cruel moonlight.

  He paused to wrap the arm in a Hefty bag, then wash up before slipping into the comfort of the darkness. Within minutes, Frederick was motoring down the Interstate. It had started to drizzle but he didn’t care. When he was several miles along, he hurled the bagged arm out the window. It landed on the highway’s shoulder and he chuckled at the ironic appropriateness. Oddly enough, though, the great sense of vindication he’d expected remained absent. Oh, of course he was pleased Raczkowski had received suitable punishment for his gross ingratitude, but there was not the expected feeling of completion, of a mission finally ended.

  Worse (or perhaps, better), Frederick discovered something new about himself. In a truly transcendent moment, while slicing through the last remnants of what had been a human arm, he’d realized he liked what he was doing. How odd his life had taken such turns until it now lay at the antipodes of all to which he’d ever aspired.

  White Healer turned Dark Destroyer.

  He smiled. There was a curious, but fulfilling symmetry to it all. Yes, he thought as he gripped the wheel and peered out into the murky pre-dawn, maybe somebody out there needs me? Maybe they need a Good Samaritan…

  There is a very sweet and wonderful couple living in a northern section of Baltimore known as Roland Park. The neighborhood is full of gigantic trees and large Victorian homes, and looks like it fell through a time-warp from an earlier era. Much like the couple themselves—John and Joyce Maclay, are as gentle and warmly intelligent as a husband and wife could be. John has been a writer for as long as I’ve known him, but he and Joyce are also publishers of fine small press books.1 Maclay & Associates has published a variety of non-fiction books about the cultural side of Baltimore, and also an impressive array of horror and dark fantasy anthologies, edited by John and Joyce, and a handful of others in the field.

  When John invited me to contribute to a limited edition anthology he was putting together, to be published by his own small press in Baltimore2, I jumped at the chance to work with him again. Entitled Voices from the Night, it was not a theme anthology; in fact, John was not looking for any particular kind of story. He just wanted his contributors to write a story that was “dark,” I think was his exact word to me.

  When I sat down to do the following piece, I wasn’t sure what I would come up with because I was in the middle of a novel (like, when am I not?), and it is sometimes hard to “switch gears” and downshift to the short fiction mode from all that lengthy exposition of the book-length manuscript. No, strike that from the record—it is always hard to change modes. But I always make the attempt because I love the short story form, and I love the endless challenge of writing them. So anyway, I start staring at my keyboard and I think Maclay, and I think of Baltimore, and I decide to set the story in that city, and my protagonist will write for the Baltimore Sun, and let’s see…let’s make him a real son-of-a-bitch-bastard of a guy…

  1 He and Joyce, in their incisive wisdom, were the publishers of the initial volume of our anthology series, Borderlands.

  2 A metropolis which, in addition to being the home of the Ravens and Orioles, could also claim the title as the Capital City of horror and dark fantasy small press publishing. Jack Chalker’s Mirage Press, Maclay & Associates, Cemetery Dance Publications, and Borderlands Press all created a fabulous array of trade limited editions during the Nineties. Borderlands (that’s Elizabeth’s company) moved to New Hampshire in 1996.

  Jerry Leigh sat at his desk, oblivious to the idiot-thrum of the other reporters in the hive.

  Carved up into half-assed little cubicles with partitions that looked like they’d been upholstered with carpet remnants, the Copy Room of the Baltimore Sun was a kid’s giant maze, or an English squire’s hedge labyrinth, filled with desks and computer terminals. In a far corner of this mess, near one of the rare windows overlooking Calvert Street, sat a stoop-shouldered man of about fif
ty, pounding out his story on a stained keyboard. Jerry’s fingers moved nimbly over the letters, belying his overweight, out-of-shape appearance. This was writing by the numbers, he thought with a wry, lopsided grin. After almost thirty years as a journalist, he knew how to slap together familiar copy the way an old carpenter could make a doghouse with one hand behind his back.

  Sucking on a Pall Mall (did anybody else still smoke the damned things?), Jerry nodded and smiled as he typed merrily along:

  …and a spokesman for the Baltimore City Fire Department stated that Towanda Jefferson did not have a smoke detector installed in her rented home on Baker Street.

  “No shit,” said Jerry, shaking his head, chuckling to himself. “No way you’re gonna spend any of those welfare bucks on something sensible, hey baybee?!”

  “It must be nice to amuse yourself so easily,” said a voice behind him, the voice of fellow-reporter Rick Schmidt.

  Swiveling in his worn chair, Jerry faced a kid of perhaps thirty, handsome in an Ivy League, waspy kind of way. “Don’t you wish, huh Ricky?”

  “That’s the Jefferson fire story you’re doing?”

  “Yeah, what’s it to you?” Jerry tried his best sneer on him. He didn’t really mind Schmidt—the kid had tried to be friends ever since he’d started working at the paper, but lately he’d been getting a little uppity. They all got that way after they’d been here a little while. After they figured there wasn’t anything else to learn from the veterans, from the real reporters…Rick Schmidt shook his head slowly, trying to be dramatic. “I can’t figure you out, Jerry. That woman lost three little kids in that fire. How can you be such…such an assshole?”

  Jerry pushed away from his desk, faced the kid squarely. “You know, Ricky, if I didn’t like you, I’d get up from this chair and bust your face. Matter of fact, there was a time, when I was about your age, when I would’ve done it anyway. Like you or not.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Ricky, you don’t walk up to people you work with and call them assholes. Didn’t they teach you that when you went to college to learn all that ‘journalism’?” Jerry said the last word like it was something distasteful in his mouth.

  “I heard you sitting here in your little warren, your little insulated cocoon, laughing,” said Schmidt. “That’s pretty sick, man.”

  “Oh, bullshit! Why don’t you wake up?”

  “Wake up?! Me? What about you? You make your living writing about people dying! How can you get any humor out of that?”

  Jerry shook his head, pulled a drag off his cigarette. “You ever go down to City Morgue, kid? You ever sit in on an autopsy?”

  “No, I don’t know if I could handle it…” Schmidt cleared his throat. “What’s that got to do with—?”

  “Only everything!” yelled Jerry. “How do you think the M.E. gets through his days, how do you think any of those pathology guys get through all the death business? They have to laugh about it once in a while or they go bugfuck! Don’t you see that?”

  “Paramedics and coroners, even the cops…” said Schmidt. “That’s different. It’s not the same thing at the Paper.”

  “No, Kid, it’s not, and that’s the whole point. You’ve totally missed the point of what the newspaper is all about, and that’s death and dying! Where the hell’s your head been since you been here, Kid? It’s nothing but death and dying. The ‘gooshy stuff!’ That’s why people buy the paper. If you’re a newspaper man, you’re dealing in death, you Bozo! The sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be.”

  Schmidt stood there for a minute, considering everything. You could tell he didn’t like what he was hearing, but he knew there was a lot of truth in it. “I’ve never heard it put like that,” he said finally.

  “Take my word for it, Ricky—a newspaper is nothing if it ain’t about death. It is death.”

  “Well, maybe it is, but I still think you can have a better attitude…”

  Jerry grinned as sardonically as he could. “Shaw wasn’t kidding,” he said.

  “Who’s Shaw?”

  “George Bernard…didn’t they teach you about him at your college?”

  “Of course,” said Schmidt, “and if you’re planning on wheeling out that tired old bit about ‘youth being wasted on the young’, why don’t you just stuff it, okay?”

  “Now you’re starting to sound like a newspaper man, Kid.”

  Rick Schmidt shook his head, turned to leave Jerry’s cubicle, then paused, looked back at him. “You know, you’re not supposed to be smoking in here anymore, Jerry.”

  “Is that why you really snuck out of your cage for? To hassle me about that crap?”

  “It bothers other people,” said Schmidt. “And it’s bad for the computers, too.”

  Jerry chuckled. This kid was such a straight arrow. He still had so much to learn about everything. One of these days he’d realize that all mickey-mouse rules and regs were just more bullshit to keep your mind off the important stuff, the stuff they don’t want any of us really thinking about.

  Jerry took a long drag, exhaled slowly, making sure he sent plenty of exhaust in Schmidt’s direction, then dunked the butt in his Styrofoam cup of cold coffee.

  Jerry looked at his watch. “Jeez, it’s getting late. I gotta get this thing in for the next edition. And you should start thinking about going home to the little wifey-poo.”

  “Jennifer works, too. We both get home around the same time.”

  Jerry scowled at him. Schmidt was starting to bug him now. “Yeah, like I give a shit. Look, I’m trying to be nice, but it’s time for you to make some tracks. You know what I’m sayin’ here: go away, kid, you’re bothering me. You’re outta here.”

  “You know what I think, Jerry…?”

  “I don’t really care what you think.” Jerry swiveled back to his keyboard, dismissing him.

  “…I think you’re a lonely, miserable man.”

  “Yeah, right…so leave me alone and let me be miserable, okay? I got work to do.”

  Jerry chuckled as he reached down and pulled a bottle of Old Granddad from the bottom drawer of his desk, and poured three fingers into what had originally been a Skippy peanut butter jar.

  Schmidt frowned his disapproval, but said nothing as he left the work area.

  Jerry smiled to himself, knocked back the bourbon with one healthy swallow, and forced himself to finish his story.

  ⟡

  “And I’ll tell you another thing,” said Jerry, his words started to slur just enough to make him sound less than serious. “Lawyers are the worst of the lot! Did you know that 75% of all the lawyers in the world—in the goddamned world!—are practicing right here in the U. S. of A.?!!”

  “Get outta here, you’re kiddin’ me,” said Frankie. He’d been the bartender at Alonzo’s for more than twenty years, and he’d heard all of Jerry Leigh’s half-drunk rants enough times to recite them like sixth-grade poetry. But Frankie also knew how to treat regular customers, earning their trust and their tips. So he listened like all good barkeeps and responded at just the right times with just the right words.

  In the background, the drone of an ESPN announcer described the action of an Orioles game; the basic weave upon which ail the bar’s other conversations would be tapestried tonight. Jerry Leigh liked his baseball, but he’d had more highballs in his glass than the Tigers pitcher had been able to get over the plate. The score was out of hand and so was Jerry.

  After he finished with the lawyers, he started in on the dentists and their outrageous prices that they seemed to just pull out of their butt-cracks. Only problem was, he’d already diced up the DDS crowd, and people on both sides of his stool were starting to get weary of his bourbon-fueled tirades.

  “Hey, buddy,” said the long-haired guy next to him. He was wearing a leather jacket, and looked like a refugee from a Bugle Boy commercial. “You’re starting to repeat yourself…how about listening to the ballgame for a while, huh?”

  Jerry looked at the g
uy—probably close to forty, but in good shape, and looking kind of ethnic, Italian, maybe. Odds were he wouldn’t take much bullshit from a flabby coronary candidate.

  But Jerry couldn’t help himself.

  “Fuck you and your ballgame, okay?” Old Granddad had a way of making him do things he later regretted.

  Longhair kind of smiled. “Can I take that to mean you’re not going to stop annoying everybody else around you?”

  The guy was, Jerry realized, giving him one last chance to lurch back in the direction of civilization.

  He chose barbarism.

  “You can take it any way you want it, pal, as long you break it off in your own ass.”

  The guy slowly reached in and grabbed Jerry’s tie. Even more slowly, and with a certain style, actually, he pulled down on it. The effect was to move Jerry’s face inexorably closer to the edge of the bar until his right jowl was polishing the mahogany.

  “I don’t usually bother people,” said Longhair. “But, you, sir, are a menace—to yourself and to the rest of us.”

  “Lemmie go!” slurred Jerry. The guy’s grip was like a vise. “Frankie! Tell this asshole to lemmie go!”

  The bartender approached him. “Why don’t you try to calm down, Mr. Leigh,” said Frankie. “Tommy doesn’t want any trouble…”

  “He doesn’t want any parts of me—that’s what you mean!” Jerry tried to yell with his mouth pushed up hard against the wood.

  “Can’t you get him out of here?” asked a woman’s voice.

  “Frankie, call the cops, why don’t ya?” said someone else.

  “I think it’s time you took a walk outside,” said Longhair Tommy. In one quick, fluid series of movements, like a dance team, Jerry was whirled and spun and positioned off his stool, onto his feet, and facing the front door. He still felt like he was being vise-gripped, and the first suggestion of embarrassment began to rise above his reptilian thoughts.

  “Let’s go,” said Longhair Tommy.