This part Carl wrote about in great detail. He wrote about taking Laurette’s temperature with a thermometer, now one hundred flat, as though the experience of loss had broken her fever. By some miracle, she was letting him care for her. He made her a cold compress for her head and put ice packs around her body on the couch, put some soup on the stove, warmed the broth so it was just barely hot, and spooned it through Laurette’s dry lips, and pulled the blanket to her chin, and sat down next to her. Laurette was small, and they could fit on the tiny couch together without even touching, Laurette lying down, legs stretched out all the way.
“Are you here to kill me with poisoned soup?” Laurette asked, and Carl explained that no, he couldn’t take two lives in one night, it was bad for his constitution, and bad for the world, and since he’d disposed of her sister’s body, for all anyone knew, it was Laurette who was killed that night and not her sister, and no one ever had to know about this discrepancy, especially not the people who had hired Carl to kill Laurette, and Laurette could go on robbing banks and no one would ever on their lives suspect a lady, this lady, she who according to the facts was already deader than dead.
Laurette stayed silent for a bit. Then, “Who hired you to kill me?”
Carl wasn’t supposed to reveal information like this, especially not to the people meant to be murdered, but he was in a revelatory mood, and he considered all those movies where the villain tells the captive the entire evil plan before executing said evil plan, and so maybe there was a tradition, a precedent that allowed for such bravado, and of course in this scenario they were both villains, a fact Carl and Laurette had each come to terms with in their own way, in their own time, long, long ago.
“The banks hired me,” Carl says.
“But the banks hired me to rob the other banks!” Laurette said. “And then the other banks hired me to rob the robbing banks in retaliation!”
“Maybe the banks are all the same bank? Just one big bank,” Carl hypothesized, and Laurette let this idea sink in for a minute: Maybe the banks are all the same bank. Maybe the people are all the same people. Maybe I’m my sister and my sister is me, and in this way, living is also a state of mourning. She noticed she was feeling a little better, sweat shining on her forehead. She helped herself to a sip of soup, and then she remembered her sister again, and a different fever set in. She remembered when they were little girls playing cops and robbers, and no one wanted to play the cop, so they asked an actual officer of the law to join them in their game, both for the sake of verisimilitude and necessity, and he played at being himself, and he trained them real good in justice and law enforcement and how to do the opposite, and he contributed to their future in ways he probably hadn’t expected. They all learned a lot that summer.
And then Carl made more soup. And then he and Laurette watched the Bonnie and Clyde documentary. And then they talked shop, their chosen professions, their jobs, no, their careers, for they found solace in this necessary work, and how when every other door had closed to them, these doors had opened, and beggars can’t be choosers, and isn’t that just the way you find your purpose sometimes, by looking into the last available option and meeting your sorry self, standing there at the end of the line?
“Can you take me to her body?” Laurette asked.
“Sort of,” Carl said, and he wrapped her in a quilt and led her through the city and past the harbor and down to the public beach, where the waves slipped forward and back and over the sand. I was waiting nearby in the murder shack, preparing cookies and chamomile, not knowing Carl stood just outside the door with the woman he was meant to kill.
“Your sister’s out there with the rest of the bodies,” said Carl, waving his hand toward the ocean.
Laurette stood by the grave and wept for her sister, for the other people Carl had murdered, for the people murdered by people other than Carl, for the people who murdered each other, bang, bang, for the people lost at sea, for the people on planes who crashed from the sky and into the water, for the people who were supposed to be on those planes but who changed their tickets and were spared, only to end up on different planes, still crashing into the water, crashing into icebergs, crashing into the people who stayed home from work and weren’t crashed into by planes, but who then tied bricks to their ankles and threw themselves to the bottom of the sea and crashed into other people crashing to their deaths, for the exploding cruises and the wayward sailors lured by sirens, for the people who lived in places where once upon a time there used to be cities but now the cities were completely underwater, and then an image came into her mind of the bodies drifting in the ocean like so much debris, detritus, the dead, the flotsam and jetsam floating together like magnets, like a giant buoy of bodies, like a bridge, irresistible, like the original land bridge that led Earth’s ancestors across the ocean, like a new kind of land that washes together into a new kind of continent, forming new kinds of mountains and new kinds of fields and a geography the likes of which we’ve never seen, a desert that looks like a torso and a forest of trees that look like heads of hair, and the bodies unite to form a rare kind of matter with enough continental drift, with enough momentum, with enough coverage to cover the entire world, replace it clean and fresh and new, and so in this way, Laurette thought, maybe we can finally start over.
Carl eventually asks me to join him on a kill. I’m sitting on my cot and he’s sitting at his desk. I’ve felt this moment coming for a while now. Initially I thought it was romance, but we had our long, soft kiss, and I put that memory in the bottom of my purse for a rainy day, and that romance between us turned into something else. What I’m experiencing here isn’t hearts and roses, but the romance in the promise of a shared skill. Carl has taken to instructing me on the grip one grabs around a knife, the way to lift a sledgehammer from the knees and not the shoulders, the respectable application of poison. One doesn’t want to be gauche when administering poison, Carl says. Don’t overdo it. It needs to look pleasant, accidental.
And now, he says, I’m ready.
“Are you sure about this, Carl?”
“I know you’ll be aces!” he says, slapping my leg. “The perfect sidekick. Just picture it!”
“I need to think,” I say. I think about whether or not I can do this with my bare hands, then return home and touch my bare hand against my favorite boyfriend’s cheek, put my bare hand in my pocket, use my fingers to flip through every memory I have, changing the memories with each murderous swipe.
“Usually,” he says, “I wear gloves.”
Does that change anything? Maybe it does. Planning a killing is one thing, but the execution is a different story.
“It’s not like you don’t have any experience,” Carl says. “Give yourself some credit, golly. After all, you decapitated the imposter Pearl on the pirate ship. All by yourself, no less! I won’t soon forget that legendary kill. No one will.”
“Very true,” I say, and I’m disturbed by his crystalline memory. Has he recorded my legendary kill in his book of kills? I feel dread rising in my throat. I remember hoisting the alleged Pearl over the side of the ship and slipping a life preserver around her waist.
I try to find comfort with lying every day, practicing mostly on myself.
“Was that your first?” he asks, and the question takes me by surprise.
“Yes, of course it was.”
“I never presume to know,” Carl says, and he leaves me to consider his offer.
I’ve been reading up on Carl’s murders, and frankly, I don’t know if I have what it takes. It takes a lot for me to admit my hesitation, and I don’t take it lightly that I might not be cut out for certain kinds of work. This is a hard truth for a temp to face: I just might not be cut out for the life that comes with killing.
In Carl’s murder journal, there are specific descriptions of the deaths, diagrams, details. Blunt instruments and burst eardrums, knives stuck through eyes and out the backs of heads. Sometimes a woman will request the prospectus for a murde
r and make suggestions to Carl based on what she knows will cause the victim additional pain. Torture isn’t a thing I’d considered. Sometimes a man will request the prospectus for a murder and make suggestions to Carl based on what he knows will cause the least pain possible. Sometimes the murders are merciful and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes a man will add a detail that doesn’t become pertinent until the end of the crime, like when Carl is instructed to reveal a daffodil right before he stabs the exposed gut, and the daffodil is a mystery to Carl, but a look of recognition washes over the victim’s face at an appropriate interval, timed to coincide with death.
I sit on the boardwalk spooning my shaved ice, weighing the pros and cons. I used to stay up late making pro/con lists with my insurance salesman boyfriend, who practiced risk management on the side, balancing and testing every important decision. With hardly any prompting, the lists quickly devolved into nasty bits of literature about the other boyfriends—which one snores too much, which one drinks too much, which one might be the kind of boyfriend who someday marries me, which one might be the kind of boyfriend who someday hits me, which one might be the kind of boyfriend who someday gets eaten by his cats, which one has the biggest apartment, which one has the biggest hole in his heart. We would fall asleep on a pile of papers and I would wake up with a headache and a stomachache and a bitch hangover, which is the kind of hangover you get in the morning after spending the whole night talking shit, saying crap, acting like a huge and massive jerk, allowing all the horrible things in your head to somehow make their slimy way out of your mouth.
Today, my pro/con list is a short one. Under the pro column: learn the new skill of murdering. Under the con column: whoops, now you’ve murdered. And I haven’t really described Carl’s full murder journal, the extent of it, the volumes, the pages and pages of imagery written with bright, inky pens, and most of all, the pages at the center of the book with nothing on them at all; actually I cannot say what was and wasn’t written there because those pages have been ripped out. All that remains: a frayed, jagged seam peppered with torn paper dust. I scour the shack for the missing pages, and every time, I come up short, convinced they have long ago been turned to ocean pulp.
Carl says I won’t have to do any of the dirty deeds at first. I can just do the administrative duties. Watching the door. Holding the bag of weapons, at first. Looking malicious, at first, then later, Carl says, eventually, demonstrating true internal malice. Carl wants my answer by the end of the week.
When Carl goes to eat an artisan panini with Laurette, I grab his journal and make haste toward the prison. I walk past the harbor and along the public beach, turning into the center of the city, walking through the city until the city fades into a copse of trees, a forest, and I haven’t visited the forest before, not yet. I cross a stream and pass through a clearing, through several gates of wood and wire, through a metal detector and an intrigue detector and a sorrow detector and a new kind of detector that detects schemes, patent pending, and I sign the book with a fake name, and I say I’ve come to visit Carl’s buddy, who is serving some serious time.
“I’ve come to visit Carl’s buddy, who is serving some serious time.”
I want to ask Carl’s buddy about the missing pages.
“What can you tell me about this?” I ask him, and I open Carl’s book.
“Carl won’t like it,” he says, “you looking at his book.”
“Tough.”
“Tough is right. Tough like me. I looked at his book too.”
For the first time I smile, and he smiles, then a guard comes over to our table.
“We don’t encourage that,” he says, and we put our smiles away, and the guard goes away too. I put a pack of cigarettes on the table for Carl’s buddy, to sweeten the deal.
“Those were the pages about me,” Carl’s buddy says, taking the cigarettes, and he strokes his beard with his thumb. “He destroyed the evidence. Shortened my sentence by ten years.”
“I see.”
“Protecting me forever, as best he can. That’s Carl.”
“All right.”
“So now you know what I know. We both know the same knowledge. You know?”
I do know.
I leave Carl’s buddy and wish him luck and hold my breath through the scheme detector, patent pending, the sorrow detector, the intrigue detector, and the metal detector and walk through several gates, through a clearing, and over a stream, through the forest I’ve now visited, back into the center of the city, past the harbor, and along the public beach, walking straight into Carl and Laurette on their way back to the shack, finishing their artisan paninis.
“Okay, Carl,” I say. “I’ll do it.”
“Okay,” says Carl, and he nods to Laurette, and Laurette nods back, and we’re all standing there nodding in a small cluster of yes.
And so I agree to the murder less for murder’s sake and more out of respect for Carl’s loyalty, for his sturdy nature, in honor of his friendship with his buddy who is serving some time, because let’s face it, that kind of friendship is worth killing for, worth serving time for, to say the least.
“OK,” I say. “I’ll do it. Who do I have to kill?”
And Carl says, “First, we train.”
“And does she work with us now?” I ask, pointing at Laurette, the politest point I can muster. “Like, permanently?”
“Maybe,” says Carl. “Is that OK?”
“Not for me to say, but probably it is. Sure, why not!”
Laurette gives me a sweet look from the other side of the shack, where she’s making Carl’s bed differently than the way I make it, with hospital corners and tight folds. What she doesn’t know is that Carl likes to let one foot hang off the edge of the bed, untucked. Those sheets will be a mess by morning.
What Carl means when he says “First, we train” is that I’m going to shadow him for a time. I’m going to stand behind him and copy his motions, his emotions, his expressions. I’ll be as silent as a shadow, dressed all in black, and Laurette lets me borrow a turtleneck and trousers to wear with my stolen boots.
“Looking good,” she says, and I believe her.
I shadow Carl when he buys his artisan panini, taking shadow money from my shadow pocket, placing the payment on a shadow counter that sits just beyond the real counter. Afterward, sitting on a shadow bench behind Carl’s bench and spreading my legs, spreading my shadow panini with a packet of shadow mayo and not even using a shadow knife, I shadow eat my shadow panini, but it tastes more like a plain old sandwich, full of shadows such as it is. Carl opens his mouth really wide, so I open my mouth really wide. He takes a big bite, so I take a big shadow bite. And were the bite not a shadow, it would be the kind of bite to make my mother say, “Small bites, or else you’ll choke.” Then Carl pulls a piece of lettuce off his lip, and you can call my shadows anything you want, but they certainly aren’t messy shadows, so I skip the lettuce part.
We walk home under the setting sun, and Carl’s actual shadow stretches long and thin and falls over my shadow face.
This goes on for some time. I sleep every night in a sleep shadow of Carl’s sleep, which is just fine, because Laurette has claimed my cot for a while. My dreams shadow his dreams. I’m locked into the shadow life I’m leading. Sure enough, as predicted, Carl’s foot pokes out from his sealed-up sheets, and I poke my foot out from beneath my shadow sheet, lying on the floor next to Carl.
One morning, he is standing over me as I’m just starting to wake. “Stage two,” he says. “Now you’ll be my mirror.”
It’s a more personal exercise, and there’s nothing more personal than doing my job. Eye contact and staying close together. We work around the shack, timing our movements, learning to move the same way. I wash my hair in the shower watching Carl wash his hair in the shower. He washes everything else watching me wash everything else, and we have different kinds of everything else, but otherwise, the mirror is perfect. Sometimes we touch bellies or elbows, the way you touch a
mirror and are suddenly touching yourself, and I feel a shock go through my whole body, and I remember that soft, long kiss and feel pulled into a current, and one night Carl kisses his mirror, and his mirror kisses back while Laurette sleeps on my cot nearby, and the whole room vibrates like a reflection on a piece of billowing plastic.
“Hi,” he says, and so do I.
This goes on for some time. I’m happy and bursting, and I have an excuse to look at Carl twenty-four hours a day, if I can stay awake that long, and Laurette just stands off to the side making us lasagna for the company we keep in our own little mirror world. We start to speak in unison, with varied success. I can’t seem to keep my sentences in sync. Carl is understanding. “Let’s switch to weapons,” he says, and we swipe swords at the wall, spill poison in even pours, fastidious with the cleaning of our hands and scrubbing of other exposed surfaces.
Then it changes. I wake in Carl’s bed and Carl is gone. He comes back later that day, hardly says a word to me.
“Carl?” I say, and Carl says nothing. I think I hear him give a short, clipped laugh, like a scoff, like a burp with resentment around the edges, but I can’t be sure.
He goes for a walk with Laurette, and I pace the shack like a person gone mad. Maybe he knows I went to visit his buddy who’s serving some serious time. Maybe he knows I read his journal. Maybe these things are unforgivable.
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