by Chris Knopf
He looked down at his gun, as if surprised to see it in his hand.
“Oh, you mean, like, why am I sitting in your living room with this gun? Why indeed.”
“He told me you’d be killed if I didn’t come with him to the house,” said Florencia. “I only know him as an appointment. A life prospect.”
“A life prospect,” said the man. “There’s your irony for you.”
Florencia’s hand tightened on mine. I wondered if I could move fast enough to grab the gun before he could shoot me. Not only if I was fast enough, but if I had the strength to overcome him. The baggy overcoat hid his physique, which could have been far more formidable than mine.
As if to settle the question, he picked the gun off his lap and pointed it at my chest.
“I’m here to perform a simple transaction. You’re both professional people. You know transactions are best made efficiently with a minimum of back and forth.”
He reached into an inside pocket of his overcoat and pulled out an envelope.
“Actually, in this case, I simply give you this piece of paper.” He handed the envelope and a pen to Florencia, who picked the items gingerly out of his hand with her long, elegant fingers. “You read it and fill in the blanks. Or I shoot you. I already know one of the answers, so if you like risking your life on one in five odds, go for it.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“That’s only for your wife to know,” he said. He looked at Florencia. “You tell him and I shoot him in the balls.” He lowered the gun to underscore the point.
The flap of the envelope was unsealed. Florencia pulled out and unfolded a sheet of paper and started reading. I wanted to look down, but I’d already been warned. I didn’t know enough to test the boundaries.
After a sharp intake of breath, Florencia asked, “And if I don’t?”
“The usual,” he said, then reached the gun across the divide between us and flicked the muzzle across her right breast. “Maybe after you and me have some fun and games. You like fun, don’t you gorgeous?”
I wondered again about the probability of reaching him from a sitting position, wrestling away the gun, and holding him powerless until the police arrived. I must have telepathically communicated this, because the man reacted by shooting a hole in my left thigh.
“Jesus Christ, Forgiver of Sins,” he said to Florencia, “do I have to wait all day for you to fill out that motherfucking thing?”
A second after hearing him say this I was consumed by monstrous pain. I yelled and cried, and wept with fear and agony. I clutched at the wound and watched blood rush out between my fingers. Florencia’s hand clutched alongside mine, until the man tapped her in the face with the muzzle of the gun and told her to sit back in the sofa.
“Do it or I put a few more holes in the dumb fuck,” said the man.
“He’s not dumb. He’s brilliant,” said Florencia. “You just don’t know that, you stupid bastard.” Her hand holding the pen raced across the paper, which I tried to read with no success.
Florencia handed it back along with the envelope. The man folded the sheet along the creases and put it back in the envelope, which he stuck in his inside coat pocket. I saw all this through a liquid veil, my eyes gushing tears, my brain barely able to comprehend what was happening.
The man sat back in the chair, making himself comfortable.
“We need to call him an ambulance,” said Florencia, in a calm, measured voice. “I did what you asked me to do.”
“You did,” said the man. “I gotta give you that.”
Then he shot her in the forehead.
I felt the spray of blood and brains splash across my face. I yelled, I think, though I don’t remember for sure.
“No hard feelings,” said the man. “That ‘stupid bastard’ thing aside.”
Then he shot me in the head, too.
CHAPTER 2
Being indifferent to life gives you a fresh perspective. I didn’t mind that I faded in and out of reality. In fact, I welcomed the lush euphoria of semi-consciousness, where I could note the staggering destruction that had been done to me without feeling its effects. My sister later explained that this was the morphine talking, which she administered cautiously, negotiating that devil’s deal—irrational bliss versus possible addiction, detachment versus horrible pain and crushing grief.
Consciousness, however incomplete, came to me after I was moved to her house, so there was no recollection of the hospital, the operations or the coma I fell in and out of for months, both natural and artificially-induced to prevent the swelling in my brain from killing me before the neurosurgeons had a chance to repair the damage. As best they could.
I remember someone telling me, soon after I became aware again of my own existence, that I was lucky to be alive. That was the most debatable statement of the century.
It wasn’t my sister Evelyn who said it, though she could have. She was a doctor, and also Florencia’s best friend. Her first statement to me, sadly repeated a few times until it stuck in my memory, was that Florencia had been killed instantly. I would have been killed, too, but for a lucky (that word again) turn the bullet took when it struck the right side of my skull, mostly bypassing the frontal lobe, then cutting a shallow tunnel through the parietal and exiting the back of my head.
The two holes in my head were very tidy, indicating a small bore round, like a .22, with a heavy charge. There were any number of other combinations of bullets, powder and weaponry that would have had a much more catastrophic effect. Which meant I was only near death for part of a year and not completely dead like I should have been.
We’d been found by a neighbor, whose cat I was feeding while she and her husband were on vacation. She saw our cars in the driveway, and when we didn’t answer the doorbell, she walked around to the patio at the back of the house. She looked through a pair of French doors and could see the tops of our heads over the sofa, and when we didn’t answer her knocking, she called the cops, who got there before I’d completely bled out. Another bit of dubious luck.
I LEARNED this in fragments as my consciousness, hearing and limited motor skills slowly returned.
Apparently my eyes opened before I could process what I saw, triggering an hysterical response from the nurse on duty. In no time the room was filled with anxious, inquiring faces, gentle prods and sheets of paper with hand-lettered messages. None of it made any sense, and finally weary of it all, I closed my eyes again and puzzled over the groans of disappointment.
Sometime after that a version of my sight returned, enough to make eye contact and respond to signals. I know now that this was an important step, but at the time I was merely annoyed at all the ridiculous celebration.
THE LAST thing to come back was my voice. And the first words I croaked out were, “Did they catch the guy?”
“Another country heard from,” said Evelyn, sitting at my bedside. “They don’t tell me much, but I’d know if they had.”
“Any idea why?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“I need to talk to the police,” I said. “I can identify the killer.”
“I told them, and everyone else, that you were in a persistent vegetative state, and would likely stay there forever. That’s the story that ran in the newspapers. The only people who know it isn’t true are Dr. Selmer, the neurologist, and Joan Bendleson, the visiting nurse who was here when you opened your eyes.”
“Why the deception?” I asked.
“You said it yourself. You can identify the killer.”
I tried to ask her more questions, but had trouble getting the words out. She patted my arm, and held her mildly sympathetic expression, using all her meager bedside skills to mask her deeper feelings. She told me the aphasia was obviously clearing, but I shouldn’t tax my voice box. She said to let it rest for another day, and we’d try to catch up again. She had to go back to the hospital, but Joan wo
uld keep an eye on me, and then she left.
Two weeks later, my voice was still impaired, but my mind, nearly free of painkillers, approached the functional, or at least that’s what I thought at the time. As a researcher, I’d been trained to resist jumping to conclusions with insufficient data. Though I’d also learned that certain determinations could be made based on a small set of data points, assuming they were consistent and powerful. Powerful data is what I had, and some important decisions to make.
The first was to be or not to be. I’d never had a suicidal thought in my life, though now the life I’d had, the one I loved, was effectively over. So choosing to finish off the mangled remains was an entirely rational option. Especially when I tried to imagine a return to normalcy. I played a series of scenarios across my mind, but they were equally repellent. Nothing would ever be normal again.
A vast and fathomless sadness engulfed my mind. An impossible agony of grief. I understood for the first time how black black could be. I felt my heart descend into a snarling well of irredeemable anguish. It was there that I relinquished claim to the hopeful, loopy possessor of inevitable good fortune who once defined my world view, and contemplated what was left.
Then I snarled back and embraced the beast.
WHEN FEELING lost its grip on my heart, logic and reason took over. The first logical conclusion was that I couldn’t live in this world, even if I wanted to. Not as long as I shared it with the man in the trench coat. The man who likely had the answer to the only question worth asking in this barren reality into which I’d emerged.
Why?
Until that was answered, all other deliberations would have to be postponed. With that decided, I started to block out the necessary methodology, running if/then scenarios. Aside from two hours of uneasy sleep, I worked on this until Evelyn showed up again the next day. So I was well prepared to exercise my recovering speech.
“I want to be dead,” I said to her when she walked in the room.
“I know, Arthur,” she said, sitting on the side of the bed and gripping my arm. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t. I want to be declared dead. Not actually be dead. All you need to do is sign the death certificate,” I said. “I’ll take it from there.”
“Take it where? You can’t walk.”
“I can’t walk very well. Not yet. You keep telling me my leg will come most of the way back.”
I’d made my first wobbly journey to and from the bathroom the day before, with lots of help from Evelyn and the nurse. My left side was much weaker than my right, compounded by the wound in my thigh, and my future mobility was yet to be determined, but I felt instinctively sure of adequate recovery. My vision was also clearing, slowly, though everything looked a little off, as if I’d awoken into a parallel, but slightly reorganized universe.
My gut was gone. The deflated skin hung around my waist, but I was forty pounds less of a man than I had been before.
“I still don’t understand what you’re getting at,” said Evelyn.
“I want a psych evaluation,” I said.
“You think your mental functions are impaired?”
“That’s what I want to find out. I want to know which ones are and which aren’t. For example, I don’t sound like myself. Is that because my voice has changed or my hearing’s been damaged, or my brain is interpreting what it hears differently?”
“Okay,” she said. “I can arrange that. And about your voice, you have a slight slur, which I think will correct itself over time. The bullet clipped the somatosensory cortex, so you could have a slight reordering of your sensory perceptions in general, which could explain the voice change.”
“My eyes aren’t working as well,” I said. “Things look different.”
“That’s probably permanent. But you’ll get used to the change, unless there’s a more profound spatial distortion than we’ve had a chance to determine.”
I’d been trying to look at her while we talked, but the warp in my peripheral vision became too much to bear. I looked up at the ceiling.
“I need to know all that. And a complete accounting of my financial resources.”
“You’re fine there,” she said. “Damien Brandt, Florencia’s comptroller, is managing the day-to-day at the agency. He’s reporting to Bruce Finger, a friend of mine who just retired after twenty years as corporate counsel for a big carrier. Bruce tells me potential buyers are already lining up, but he won’t even discuss it if I’m not interested. Am I?”
“Sure, but not now. Though a valuation would be helpful. Beyond that, when you get a chance, give me a breakdown of all my assets, in particular anything liquid. I’d do it myself, but I can’t read.”
“You’re running out ahead of me, Arthur. Come on back and tell me what’s actually going on.”
She’d been saying things like that to me since we were children. Evelyn was eight years older than me, and clearly more intelligent. But she tended to think in a more linear, methodical way. She liked to go deep into a handful of subjects, like her specialty, cardiology, whereas I was an omnivore, racing like a water bug across the surface of whatever topic caught my eye.
“I need to permanently disappear.”
“We’ll be getting you that psych evaluation ASAP,” she said.
“Your part in this is essential,” I said, “and I apologize from the depths of my heart for what I’m going to put you through. As soon as I leave, you need to declare me dead. I’m thinking hematoma, but you’re the cardiologist, I’m sure you’ll pick the right C.O.D. The harder part will be coming up with a corpse, which will need to go straight to the crematorium before the cops have a chance to order an autopsy, mandatory in a homicide case. When the corpse is ash, you get news of my sudden death out to the media, then tell the cops. They’ll be pissed. I suggest you act dumb. The good doctor, brilliant in cardiology, but naïve in matters of the law. I’ll need my original birth certificate and both current and out-of-date passports. I’ll tell you where they are in the house, which you’ll need to sell when I’m officially dead, along with the cars. You’ll need to collect on the life insurance, which is another legal threat, so I suggest you put the payout in a secure escrow account. I need some time to figure that one out. Since Florencia had no family left, you’re the sole heir and will inherit all the money. I’ll need you to advance me a stake until the estate clears probate.”
She took all this in with a look that also went back to our childhood. One of annoyed disbelief.
“This isn’t funny,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing that’s happened to you, but of course you can’t do this thing you’re saying you’re going to do.”
“Do you see me laughing?” I said, more coldly than I should have. I caught myself, and gently laid it out for her in the linear way she could best absorb. “Number one, since they didn’t catch the guy in the first forty-eight hours, the odds of catching him have decreased to zero. Two, he’s a professional killer, in my untrained opinion. They almost never get caught. I’m sure he knows I survived and will assume I can identify him. Three, though he likely believes I’m a vegetable, it’s only a matter of time before he comes back and finishes the job, just to be on the safe side. He’s just waiting for more convenient circumstances. The only way to get some breathing space is to be officially and conspicuously dead. This follows your logic, by the way. It’s why you told everyone I was in a coma, probably forever.”
“What you’re talking about is illegal. You could end up in jail.”
“Not if I don’t get caught. And if I do, who cares.”
“I do,” she said.
“I know. You love me. I love you, too. And I’m deeply grateful for everything you’ve done for me. But I’ve got to get out of here, because every day I’m here intensifies the danger to both of us.”
Evelyn did love me. She virtually raised me, since our parents managed to conceive me when they were in their mid-forties, exhausted and prematurely aged by the harshness of their blue co
llar, uneducated lives. Earnest and good-hearted, they never knew what to do with either one of their precocious children, especially since we were precocious in nearly opposite ways.
Evelyn was an indulgent semi-parent, though I rarely gave her cause to discipline me. I was a pudgy and dreamy kid, so she frequently had to protect me from nerd-bashers and benighted authority figures, like gym teachers, den mothers and check-out clerks. This was her greatest test.
“What about the investigation?” she asked. “Without your testimony, the cops have nothing.”
“Tell them I’ve just come out of the coma, and I’ll talk to them. But ask if we can keep the coma story going, for safety’s sake. How long before I can move around on my own?” I asked.
“Not less than four weeks.”
“Let’s make it two. And keep the visitors coming. We want lots of traffic in and out of the driveway.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Sorry. Can I borrow your cell phone?”
She reflexively patted around her jeans pocket, then stopped.
“What for? Who’re you going to call?”
“Gerry Charles. He’s in Amsterdam. I’ll make it quick. I’ve got his number in my wallet. If you could get it for me, that’d be great.”
I told her she could stay while I made the call, but she took the high road and left me alone. Gerry answered, which I was very happy about. I didn’t want to leave a message.
“Hey, Gerry, it’s Arthur Cathcart,” I said when he answered. “I haven’t been by your place in a bit—been laid up—but the last time everything was in order.”
“Thanks for the update,” said Gerry. “But you don’t sound like yourself. You okay?”
“I’ve been better, but I’ll be okay,” I said. “The other reason I’m calling is your guitar collection. Are you still interested in selling?”
“You bet. Which one do you want?”
Gerry Charles designed and built studio furniture in a shop carved out of an old clock factory. He’d flown to Europe a few weeks before I was shot, leaving me the keys to his shop so I could check up on things while he was away. He’d stopped the mail, but there was always random stuff showing up on the loading dock and in the mailbox hung on the outside wall. The shop also had a small living space—complete with single bed, toilet and kitchenette—which he used when in the throes of creation. And a garage, open to the shop, big enough to fit a Chevy Astro van in which he hauled lumber in and furniture out.
