The Canal

by Daniel Morris

  And then came the real bums -- men in handcuffs, dopes who had turned themselves in.

  "Why did you do it?" says Alan, doubting.

  "Why did YOU do it," say these losers, these fugitives from common sense.

  "How did you do it?"

  "How did YOU do it!"

  "Get this clown out of here."

  "Get YOU out of here!"

  And so on. And so forth. And etcetera.

  Meanwhile, as the calls and answer-beggars and decision-needers and look-at-me'rs pinned him down, the greater mess, the mess dome, problems number 1 through all of them, the whole fucking thing, continued to hover precariously over his head. And the dome thrived on time. It murdered the hours en masse. Stunned them with the jabbing second hand, battered them with the long reach of the minute hand, and did them in, finally, with the wide, cleaving blade of the short hand.

  Until the clock, rather implausibly, thought Alan, now read 9:26 PM.

  No, wait...9:27.

  That's what this place did to you. A whole day -- where had the time gone?

  Certainly, some time had been lost in the bathroom. Alan was returning there now. He had made a number of visits throughout the day, and every time it was the same ritual: water, soap, scrub, rinse, and then, if he wasn't careful, wasn't monitoring himself, he'd immediately reach for more soap, ready to repeat.

  This time though, Alan had a different mission. Before the bathroom mirror he pulled up his beleaguered shirt and at last confronted the peninsula of pain. It was a cosmos colored bruise that ran from his armpit to his underwear. The terrain there was varied and interesting. It and his knee and his ankle were clearly keeping close contact, attempting to form a debilitating alliance. The audacity of the lavender and teal skin dared him to touch. It hurt tremendously.

  This was the kind of day that you had to let pass. Let it turn to trash and stay there. There would always be these days, hopefully not many, but when they came, you gave them wide berth. You went home, you vacuumed, and then you went to sleep. You woke up the next day, clean, renewed, refreshed, and then your brought down the fucking hammer. You brought it DOWN. You gave your enemies the English, you handed them the business. You made them pay for this day, making sure that they never gave you another.

  Yes, all he needed was tomorrow. Then there would be hell to pay.

  Alan replaced his shirt and emerged back into the hallway. There was a bit of commotion there. Commotion? He didn't want to know about that. He had plenty of problems as it was.

  "There you are! Alan!"

  This commotion seemed to be a station-wide thing -- as if this big, snoring beast of a building has finally been prodded awake -- although the noise was most acute in the unit's office. There were others waiting for him. They were very loud. Go home, counseled a sage inner voice. Get some clean clothes. Yes, the present moment seemed to call for immediate and monumental ignorance of whatever was brewing.

  "The canal," was the next thing Alan heard. And from there it only got worse. "Another body." Another corpse. Skinless. Beneath the bridge.

  The peninsula hurrahed.

  Now...now this was a mother of a problem. Problem #8: huge. Or was it #583? Alan couldn't keep track of them anymore. Not knowing what else to do, he scowled, mostly for the benefit of those gathered. Then he allowed a very majestic, very authentic profanity. And it seemed to Alan, in that moment, that something deep in the bedrock of his brain, something that should have been a permanent fixture -- something was starting to break apart.

  *

  At night the brownstones turned gray, or, in the shine of a streetlight, an unhealthy eggplant. Alan nervously sped past them, the whole rotting patch, leading a small caravan to the bridge. At least three squad cars trailed behind him, and more, seen through peeks in-between the avenues, followed parallel streets.

  Alan's car squealed around a corner, doing a roller coaster dip through a pothole, and came fast onto the bridge. He mashed on the brakes and brought the car to a sliding stop. Others began slotting in around him, the street was loud with the whine of brakes, the disappointment of defeated momentums.

  Alan opened the door: then instantly closed it. Jesus. Holy mother of. Everywhere there was the pop of hastily recalled doors. One car over a pair of cops stared back at him wide-eyed, stunned, locking themselves in. Alan let the window down, just a millimeter, just to be sure...yes, it was for real. The canal had reached critical mass. It had cooked up an entirely criminal species of stink, an olfactory Gorgon that froze boogers into solid marble. It was so bad you smelled it with your eyes. You smelled it with your hair, your mouth, your fingers. You even smelled it in your soul -- out across the trans-dimensional plane your celestial essence was retching into a bag. Alan's nostrils sputtered like a pair of blown-out speakers.

  Outside a few policemen were already headquartered on the street; more were reluctantly fanning across the bridge. The same barge that had called in the previous body sat upriver, winged insects rioting in the spotlights.

  Nobody was bothering to wait for Joe this time.

  Alan gave the door another try. Again the stench heckled him with its immense talent. It wasn't just the reek, it was also the terrifying scale, how it ruled the atmosphere with mocking impunity. There was no other recourse: rather than fight, Alan had to surrender. He got out and humbly fell in line behind the death march, a shuffling train of patrolmen staggering toward the river. He borrowed a flashlight and mounted the bridge railing, sliding over and then climbing down into the gravel patch.

  Alan went to the water's edge. The corpse was in the same location as the last one, at the far end of the bridge. The same position too, save for one skinless arm that was tucked instead of hanging. One thing about it though, it was still gooey, still wet, still fresh. If Alan had to guess he'd say the victim had only been dead for a few hours. The first corpse had staled, turned brown and hard, this one was luminous, the chunks of red still glistening vibrantly in the light.

  The water was casually contemplating Alan, an enormous liquid lens. He was supposed to make this gone. And now here it was, all over again. How was this possible, he wondered. Not just the corpse, but also the river. Here was Alan, in the midst of his city, inside the citadel walls, confronted with this canal, this unruly deformity. Such a thing shouldn't be. Why hadn't it been attacked with chlorine, paved over and a plaque stood in its place, "Here Lies the Enemy?"

  Your literal wilderness -- your actual wilds, your swamps -- well, there was hardly such a thing anymore. It had been taken care of -- all the woodland animals had been bagged, tagged, and assigned a work shift. Forests were now parks, mountain ranges were now preserves, and any stupid acre of heathen mud was now roped off for recreation, admission to be paid and paths to be stayed on. So far so good, right? But everyone was so busy clapping themselves on the back, thinking that the war was over, that mankind had won, when that just wasn't the case. Nature wasn't one to roll over so easy -- it hadn't been vanquished, it had just gone guerilla. Its evil was no longer out there, out in the country -- now it was inside. It slithered its watery way right down the middle of your neighborhood. It moved into abandoned tenements. It made beasts of men.

  And how was this evil faring? Had its campaign been successful? A day ago, Alan would have said no. He'd have said it with the blissful conviction of a man without doubt. But now. Oh buddy, just look under the bridge.

  Had he...was it possible...could Alan have underestimated? Could Alan have misjudged? Because right now, he was wrecked, he was burned. While the canal, it pranced. Chaos, it ruled. The hammer had been brought down, not by him, but on him, HIM, Alan D'Angelo.

  Alan made his way back up to the street, a funeral procession of one. Womack's hand latched onto his, helping to haul him over the top.

  "Thanks," mumbled Alan.

  Womack's hair was infested with humidity, inflating from beneath into a kind of bunker shaped pompadour, a bouffant like a melted record. Vincent sulked a few feet away,
dodging Alan's eyes.

  "This is some picnic," said Womack, swatting at his neck and killing a fat bead of sweat. "How's the damage?"

  "Same as yesterday," said Alan. "Almost word for word. I can't believe they slipped it in right under our noses. You sure nobody saw what happened? Weren't any of our guys posted?"

  Womack shrugged. "Guys are here and then sometimes they're not. Or they're looking in the opposite direction, I guess."

  "And the building. All day and neither of you saw anybody?"

  "Some foreman, from a warehouse down the street a ways, he said he'd sometimes seen people there. Like you described, unclean looking. Mostly he thought they came and went at night. But all day today and up until a few minutes ago, forget it. Quiet as the grave."

  Alan abruptly swung toward Vincent. "And what's your problem?"

  Vincent twitched. "I don't have a problem."

  "Go on and tell him," goaded Womack, his strange hair billowing. "See, Vincent's got this idea. It's real great -- he thinks it's a cannibal that did it. Laid it all out for me on the ride over. What'd you say? 'I've seen a man eat -- no, 'I've seen a dog eat a man,' what was it? 'And it ain't like this,' he told me."

  "Shut up," hissed Vincent. "What I said was, 'I've seen an animal eat.' I mean, it was a dog, but a real dog, not the sit and fetch kind, a wild one, real just...they go full in, there's no carefully peeling back the...the upholstery." He described it with his hands. "They go ears deep. It's not an animal that did this, nuh-uh no way. It took decision and control. It takes a mind."

  "Oh man," said Womack. "You're one strange nut, you know that Vince."

  The pair were squaring off for some kind of mountain goat showdown, something skull on skull. Alan tiredly tramped into the space separating the two.

  "Take a fucking pill," said Alan. "Look, the autopsy. The dentist -- when are they going to know for sure about those bite marks?"

  "They said soon," said Vincent.

  "So in the meantime, don't make any conclusions. You've got no basis. And until we know for sure from the scientists, I don't want to hear another word about it."

  Cannibals, thought Alan. So what? That said it all, really: so what. Cannibal or animal, so what? Be they fire bug, fleecer, flasher, hoser, brawler, tranny, nanny, skeev, flim-flam, peep creep, saddlebag, jailbait -- SO WHAT. It didn't matter the name because they were all the same in the end -- they all picked at the fabric of order, they all clawed at its gleaming and golden suspenders.

  The three of them stepped aside as a police van nudged its way onto the bridge. Alan waited for it to pass before pulling Vincent's and Womack's faces down to his level and whispering, "Joe's been keeping information." He felt strangely guilty as he said it, tattler's remorse. Alan briefly described his episode with the squatters, leaving out the more sensational details, and mentioned his talk with Kozar. His tongue tripped when he got to the words "Joe's wife."

  He turned to Womack. "I want you to go get him. Joe. Try his apartment. If he's not there, I don't care how you do it, just find him and bring his ass down here."

  "Roger that."

  "And Vincent--" Alan paused. Vincent was gazing intently past Alan's head. Something in his expression was profoundly unsettling. The anxious set of the eyes, the held breath, the guise of rapt attention. Womack quickly followed suit. The men around them, everyone stopped what they were doing, grew quiet, unfurled to full height. They all grew while Alan shrank. He knew what was coming, the onset of superior rank. And already he could sense its pressure, its wrath.

  "Better let me handle this," he uttered. Wordlessly, Vincent and Womack hastily backed away into the hot night. Rather too hastily Alan thought, and without their presence he felt utterly exposed, like a right and proper target.

  "D'Angelo."

  It came from behind, the voice remarkable only in its pitilessness. Alan slowly turned, and there he was, Lieutenant Bob Bleecker. His nostrils were curled in perfect affront. Alan received a brief and demoralizing view up one snout -- Bleecker had hairless nostrils. Hairless. Fucking bald. Fucking shaved.

  "It's a toilet out here," he announced. And another thing about the Lieutenant -- he'd changed, as in his clothing. At some point since the morning he'd replaced his entire outfit, trading darks for tans, wing tips for oxfords, impeccable for immpeccabler. And for contrast there was Alan's own shirt. That poor fallen dove, once so free and clean, now forsaken, laid low by BB and decaying on a park bench.

  "We have a problem," said Bleecker. His eyes rumbled toward the canal. "I thought we were going to nail this scumbag."

  "I've got leads," announced Alan, hoping it was true. "Solid ones." Alan began talking at length about tramps and how they steal and squat and subvert. About their rituals and their voodoo. He talked about the autopsy. He talked about the skin. And when there was nothing else to tell, he mentioned how he'd seen a real animal eat, going ears deep, and it wasn't like this...

  Bleecker's mouth tightened to a straight line. "Sounds like horseshit, D'Angelo." He leaned in close to Alan's face. Alan found himself enveloped inside an impenetrable perimeter of cologne. The air there was impossibly cleaner, drier, and temperate. Alan's shirt was suddenly overtaken with something like static electricity, pressing flat against his chest -- painfully along the peninsula -- yet in the back it lifted, pulled away, ballooning out as if...as if the filth there were being repelled. By the Lieutenant.

  "Joe has some involvement," Alan said. "He's connected to this--"

  "You think I'm stupid?" sneered Bleecker. His face began filling with blood. "Look here, asshole, I took you into my confidence. I made you my go-to guy. And you give me what? You give me Joe? Who I'm not even seeing? Why the fuck am I not seeing him, D'Angelo? Why isn't he here? Is...is he shutting me out? He's pissed about Kozar, isn't he? Prick's feelings got hurt, and now he's shutting me out!

  "I swear, I can't tell who's more incompetent, you or him. Actually, no, you're incompetent, and he's merely disgusting. Actually, you're both disgusting. Fuck!"

  Bleecker unholstered one of his fingers, bringing the singing nail a mere centimeter from Alan's eye. "Two bodies in two days. News vans are already barricading the fucking block. This story's going national. Downtown's going apeshit. And I gotta stand here and pretend like I got confidence in a couple of dickheads."

  Yes, he was actually touching Alan's eyeball now. He was seriously squishing it inside the socket. "Grace periods over. Next time we talk, you and your buddy Joe better be making an arrest. You better have some bastard up against the wall and in cuffs.

  "Don't fuck this up, Alan. Don't make me regret trusting you. Because otherwise I swear I'll do everything in my power to make you..." his voice went breathy and cool, "suffer." He capped it with a smile, a purely clinical one, strictly a muscle exercise.

  "There's worse things than being fired, Alan. Things worse than death, even. And I know them all."

  Bleecker took a step back and suddenly Alan was out in the heat and noise, back among the bustle, with all the other barn animals.

  "A goddamn toilet," said Bleecker. It was rumbled rather than voiced, spoken how a founding father might say it, in rich, self-important tones, as if even that crude jewel could stand as the opening stanza for a new Constitution. "I'll be in my car." And it wasn't just filth that Bleecker repelled, it was everything -- people, airborne fuzz, even automobiles -- all parted, leaned, or yawed as he passed.

  But Bleecker only got about ten feet before stopping. Without warning, he spun around and pointed that finger, the very finger so recently acquainted with Alan's now throbbing cornea, and clearly and without question, specifically referred to Alan's shirt via a vicious, twisting, stabbing motion.

  "SHAME ON YOU," he snapped, teeth bared, the loathing wafting from his words like steam. "SHAME ON YOU!"

  And that, Alan felt, was deserved.

  >> CHAPTER TWELVE <<

  According to Susan's newspaper the heat wave was dying. Low pressures, jet streams, off-shor
e flow -- they'd colluded against the climate, sapping it of strength, drawing off its life force. Oppressive, overcooked clouds had pounced in the morning, reluctantly lurching in from the west and loudly advertising rain. It was near evening now and they had yet to make good on their promise.

  From behind the glass sliding door she watched Eugene. He was in the yard, leashed. He had tired of his laps and was now resting cross-legged at the center of his territory, tasting grass. It was unfortunate, but more than just the heat was dying. We were all doing it -- even little Eugene. Certainly not as quickly as Susan, and definitely not as quickly as Alan, who would, she was confident, go before them all. It might sound cruel, but that's all living was, really. It was dying. Even the planet, it was dying. Even the solar system and the universe, in all their limitless entirety, they too were dying. Just biding their time, like the rest of us. Waiting to catch that bus.

  Susan went back into the kitchen, taking the bag of leftovers from the refrigerator. It was ready. The bag bulged with filets, the various strata combined and colored to Saturn-like effect. As you delved through these layers -- a timeline of the past week, a historical record of night-before-lasts -- heading southward through time, the breadcrumb skin became fragile, sloughing off to reveal the dull meat, yellowed to a tartar hue, until at the most distant bottom lay a paste of bread crumbs, liquefied into a starch-based crude that kept the deepest filets dubiously damp.

  The freshest additions were supposed to have been Alan's dinner from last night. But for a second night in a row, he'd come home late, this time almost five in the morning. Again a murder -- she'd seen it on television, a Breaking Alert, and again this morning in the Times. SERIAL SKINNER, it had said.