by Brian Hodge
She was about to formulate a rebuttal, but he broke in: “Do you believe in cancer?”
She flubbed her first try, flustered. Have to edit that out later. “Of course. Everyone knows someone affected in some way by cancer.”
He nodded. “And do you believe in rats?”
She didn’t like this track of inquiry. “Of course I do.”
“So you’ll acknowledge the cause-and-effect relationship between them.”
“Rats cause cancer?” Her voice was incredulous.
“No, that’s backwards. Cancer causes rats.”
“You’ve lost me with this, Darryl.”
He hunched forward, toward Sandra and camera one. “Cancer’s out there. It’s out there. Feeding on people. All these food additives and chemicals and crap in the environment? Cancer has a field day with that stuff. For cancer, it’s like rocket fuel. Now. You got all these labs everywhere, right, scientists looking for new drugs to fight cancer? Places breed all these lab rats just for experiments. That’s all the rats are good for. They wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for cancer.” A deep breath, reloading. “That’s the way it is between you and me. All this crap wrong with cities today, and small towns, the world at large? You people are like cancer, feeding on it with your cameras, poking your mikes into it, stirring it. Pretty soon, you just have to expect rats like me popping up to give you more to work with.”
“There’s nothing cancerous about meeting the public’s right to know. You’re making a perversity out of something inherently noble.”
“Keep thinking that, if it helps.” He chuckled. “Do you think pharmaceutical companies want to cure cancer? Not in a million years. They won’t wipe it out because of economics. Get rid of a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry? All they want is to cure some individual patients … and keep the hope alive in everyone else.” He settled back in his chair with a grin. “So save the self-righteousness. I may disgust you, and you may hate me. But your job would never be the same without me.”
“And how do you feel about the continuing cycle of murder? By now you must know about the copycat killer who started imitating you last month.”
Darryl’s forehead creased. “I feel honored,” he said slowly. “I influenced a stranger’s destiny.” A broad, dawning grin. “For once, I was the inspiration. The growth cycle continues.”
Fifty minutes later, once the interview was concluded, Sandra hurried to the nearest bathroom and hung over the toilet with dry heaves. She’d eaten nothing all day, but the rejection reaction was the same.
The following week — after editing, rearranging, splicing, and redubbing — the five-part series on Darryl Hiller was shown on the eleven o’clock news.
And drew the largest audience in ActioNews 8’s history.
November is the cruelest month, but ActioNews 8 weathers it well. They’re top of the heap in a nine-station market, no small thanks due to Sandra Riley and her considerable drawing power. She’s now a weeknight anchor with a hefty salary kicked up into six figures, and management’s only cause for fretting is that her agent would contract her new position for no more than a year. She has to be free to jump when those inevitable network offers start to materialize.
The copycat Tapeworm gives them a body every few weeks. It’s not the original rapist-murderer; the DNA evidence he leaves behind proves that. Of the original, no one knows. But Tapeworm is as Tapeworm does, and the public tunes fearfully in, dreading another dose of reality, enthralled when they get it. Sandra anchors the footage shot in the field by a younger protégée who idolizes her, and every time, Sandra dies a little more inside. Remembering her role. But her makeup never runs.
The package arrives via courier one afternoon, brown paper wrapper, neatly handlettered and marked to her attention at ActioNews 8 studios. No return address, but the paperwork was done across the country on the west coast.
She pops it into the VCR in her office — a larger one now, with windows — when she gets a free moment on this blustery November afternoon. She presses PLAY and sits.
The amateur filmmaker has rigged up a cheerful title card, reading Sex, Death, and Videotape 2. Sandra sits straighter and bites down on a knuckle as her eyes widen
and there he is, Darryl Hiller seated on a stool with nothing in the background but stark white. Medium close-up, chest and head and shoulders. The camera doesn’t move, as if tripod-mounted.
“There was so much I wanted to tell you before I left last June.” He gazes directly at her without blinking. “But you understand the situation. I know you do. You always do.
“There was a lot I didn’t understand when we did our interview. Not that I was wrong, I haven’t been wrong in years, I was just … incomplete. When I told you I had to go beyond to the next level, I had no idea. No idea. Remember how you asked me how I felt about inspiring someone to follow in my footsteps and I said it felt good? I found out it meant more than that. It meant there’d been a change in me. I wasn’t just a rat anymore, because I’d created something in my own image. He wouldn’t have existed without me. And that meant I’d just been upgraded to cancer.” He starts to grin, the only one who gets the joke. “That’s how I got away at the sentencing. They escorted me right out of that bathroom and took the cuffs off me themselves. Poor, poor Reggie Blaine. Innocent bystander. All I had to do was break one guy’s face and tell one lie.”
Sandra forgets to breathe, begins to comprehend. Recalling the footage of Reggie Blaine, Victim, forced to wear jailhouse orange. Except there was only one set of clothes all along, she knows this now. Knows it as surely as she knows she was a midwife for an entirely new aberration. She dies inside all the more for it. But her blank-faced shell sits, watching
as Darryl Hiller’s face contorts ripples rearranges. Pudgy cheeks, red hair, she has seen it before, weeping for the cameras along marble corridors. And then it’s gone, replaced by a new face that could easily belong to the boy next door. But the voice continues:
“You see, I became the cancer —”
new faces, leering at the lens
“— and I’ll be back to see you very very soon —”
a rogue’s gallery of anonymity
“— but you won’t see me —”
lifting a roll of vinyl tape to the camera eye and peeling a strip free to lick its sticky underside
“— because I’ve learned the one fundamental trick of cancer:”
his last word on flashcut repeat, a different face speaking with every flick of the editing console
“Mutation/Mutation/Mutation/Mutation/Mutation.”
Fade to black.
Some Other Me
After the day we first moved in, it was months before I saw his face.
I must’ve been nine years old when we moved into that second floor apartment, the five of us, my parents and me and my little brother and even littler sister, who was still just a baby. Neither my mom nor my dad ever called it anything other than home, but as I look back from the more critical perspective of adulthood, I now realize that our building was something less than an apartment building, if only in semantics. It was a tenement.
We lived in a tenement and all that it implied, and at the time my brother and sister didn’t know enough to feel ashamed, but I felt it, that something had changed and while maybe this new place wasn’t wrong, exactly, it wasn’t right, either, not as right as where we’d come from.
I remembered the house we’d lived in before my dad lost his earlier job, and all the grass and the trees where I used to play with friends I never saw again. There wouldn’t be any more treehouses, ever again, because there was no place to build them. We lived in a tenement now, and no matter which window I looked out of there were no trees to be seen, and very little grass for that matter, just scrubby, weedy patches that grew up around cans and bottles thrown onto plots of ground that someone had forgotten to pave. People dumped trash there as though to cover the plots entirely, as though they couldn’t bear the taunting sight o
f something they had so little of.
We all lived in tenements, and it was months before I saw his face.
Out back, near the dumpsters, and on the stoop, and coming or going along the stairway, and at the mailslots in the vestibule, it wasn’t long before we recognized most of our neighbors. We might not know anything more about them than what we could see in passing, but we knew their faces and the sounds of their voices, whether they were friendly or gruff or if it depended on the weather; if they, like us, seemed struck down by a run of bad luck and spent part of each day trying to figure out why.
His name was Mr. Cavanaugh, and it was months before I saw his face.
When we moved to the tenement it was late fall, winds already icy, and so whenever old Mr. Cavanaugh left his apartment on the first floor, all anyone could see of him was a straight, narrow figure in a tattered coat that hit him around the knees. He would turn up its collar, wearing a hat with the brim pulled low. He would pull his head into this shadowy niche like a turtle in its shell, and off he’d go.
He was old, but he wasn’t slow. Even when he favored one leg, even when he stumped along with a pair of crutches under his arms, he didn’t slouch, didn’t shuffle. I’d watch from our window, or hidden across the street, watch until he’d stumped out of sight. He moved like a man with a mission, and his mission was to do his errand and get back inside his apartment as quickly as possible.
I had no idea what lay behind most of the doors in those four floors of apartments, but only Mr. Cavanaugh’s held any mystery, because he never opened his curtains. Even on those rare, cloudless days of late autumn and winter when the sun shone bright as jewels, his curtains remained drawn. I’d walk home from school and see that every window would have its curtains flung wide to the warming light except for his, like eyes blinded by cataracts.
But some days the curtains would waver in the middle, and I’d catch a glimpse of fingers retreating through the folds.
My parents didn’t seem to give him much thought, but that was only because they’d already started going blind themselves, not in their eyes but in their imaginations. They’d lost the power to realize whatever he was doing in there, it had to be awful.
I could hear him coughing, you see.
We lived in a tenement, but it was old and solid, and it took a lot of sound, or a very special kind of sound, to carry through the walls and floors. He lived below us, and there would be times I wasn’t doing anything special, just lying on the floor or couch, when the sound of his coughing would burrow through the barrier and fill any room I was in. There was no getting away from it, a thick, wet, strangulating cough that sounded as though he were wrestling it, forcing it up through a windpipe that could hardly contain it. He hacked and moaned and cursed, this creature with a face like a cruel, hidden smudge, down there in the dark where I was sure he spent the rest of his time clanking around with chains and the gnawed bones of kids nobody would miss.
Sometimes you could hear it while on the stairway, the sound coming from behind his door. As the months went by I guess I grew used to it, because I’d pause to stare at that door, curiosity getting the better of my fear, wondering what could do that to a person yet still leave him alive for so long.
Finally, one cold day in January, the law of probability won another absurd victory of awe and revelations. We were coming down the stairway, my mom and I, Saturday afternoon ruined by her need to find shoes that I might not outgrow for a while, when the knob of Mr. Cavanaugh’s door scraped loudly enough to fill the stairway with its shriek. His door opened, and he stood there as though caught in some unnatural act, hidden in his usual garb, but that wasn’t what mattered.
I’d been granted a rare look beyond. I saw past him, into a slice of what must’ve been his living room. There were no chains, only a cramped den of furniture dulled with the need to be dusted, and wallpaper and air the color of dried tobacco leaves.
But then my attention was caught by that other thing, half-blocked by the edge of his doorway, so I couldn’t see how much of the far wall it covered, but it was enough to fill me with dread and curiosity that prickled from groin to throat, because here was something I hadn’t anticipated.
My blind mother had me moving again as she gave Mr. Cavanaugh a cheerful hello, and out on the stoop, before he could follow into earshot, she chided me.
“Don’t stare at him,” she said. “He’s just a poor, sick old man who doesn’t have anybody in the world.”
My brother turned six years old a couple of months later, as spring threatened to return any day now, but hadn’t quite made it, as though its cloak had caught on a nail and it could only tug in futility. We still called him Paulie but he was starting to chafe at that, a kid’s name after all, and while I called him Paulie twice as often now, I secretly welcomed this new maturity. In our old neighborhood he’d been a pesky dwarf, but here he was showing signs of being a real person and so far I hadn’t made any friends.
He was determined to solve the mystery of Mr. Cavanaugh with me, and that April I could tell him to sit by the front window and watch until he saw the old man moving down the street, and he’d do it, just the most diligent little sentry you’ve ever seen.
Paulie would come get me then, and for the benefit of either parent who may have been watching, hold his nose high with his neck as limp as a dandelion stem, wobbling his head so anyone could tell he was bored silly, with nothing to do, half-dawdling, half-zooming to inform me that our chance had come. Again. We’d bundle ourselves against the stubborn chill and creep outside.
“Maybe he left his curtains all the way open,” Paulie would say, every time. “Bet you he did.”
Alongside the building’s foundation, I’d lace my fingers into a stirrup and give Paulie a boost up to window level. He’d cup his hands around his eyes and try to peer through any gap between or beneath the curtains, and a few times there was cause for hope.
“I can see them!” he would report in a squealing whisper, but he couldn’t furnish any details I didn’t already know, so I’d let him down and brace him against the wall, climbing onto his bony back and chinning up to the window to look for myself.
I wouldn’t manage any better than Paulie on details, but this stolen sight was more captivating somehow, more ripe with terrible promise, than the view I’d had through Mr. Cavanaugh’s open door. With the street sounds so near, this was like peering into another world, another time, silent and mysterious.
On a rack of shelves that reached across one wall stood many dozens, if not hundreds, of jars. Some were tall and narrow, others wide-mouthed and squat, and while my view of them was gauzy through the window and screen and dim brown light, none seemed empty, but I couldn’t make out what they held.
In some, things floated in cloudy liquids, or had sunk to the bottom. Others wouldn’t have seen moisture in decades, that’s how old they looked, whatever they held as dry as a desert. There were labels on most, curling at the edges, the paper and brittle tape gone the same yellow as I imagined the old man’s toenails to be.
I would stare as long as I could, clinging to the windowsill until Paulie began to tremble under my weight, or, less often, a loud insane woman in the adjacent building threatened to call the police on us, and then we’d either walk away or run, depending.
Then we’d hide ourselves, and laugh and shudder and speculate on the contents of those jars, proposing new theories or repeating old favorites. We never ran out of ideas. The jars came from all over the world, inspired countless grotesque scenarios. They would invade our sleep. In the room we shared, one of us would awaken with a start and make sure the other was still breathing, whenever we weren’t trying to cause a heart attack by plopping wet socks on each other’s sleeping faces, like something escaped from its glass prison.
And now, many years later, I’m glad we had this shared dread to bring us together, because Paulie was my brother and it’s only in our fears and dreams that anyone truly comes to know the real anyone else. I k
new him better because of it, even though he was just six years old, and never saw seven, not even six-and-a-half.
Even today I find myself wishing that Paulie had gotten sick instead, that he’d lain in a bed and the rest of us, even my tiny sister Lindsey, who was learning to walk, had clustered around him and fallen wailing into each other’s arms after his last breath.
That way, we might’ve steeled ourselves for it, and yes, the anticipation would’ve been torture, but there’s no less cruelty to the survivors in the terrible abruptness of accidents, and maybe even more. We could’ve told Paulie we loved him, one last time. We could’ve stood together in our rage. We could’ve blamed God.
Instead, they had me.
The next day my mom told me she was sorry, she hadn’t meant it, and by then my dad had already told me the same thing, in case she never did I guess, but I couldn’t believe them now, not a word they said. You can’t look into your mother’s face and see it that tear-stained, that frightened, that maniacal with grief, and believe anything other than what she’s saying are the truest, most unfiltered words she’s ever screamed.
What did you think you were doing up there, answer me, you had no business up there, answer me, you might as well have taken him and thrown him off yourself!
It hadn’t seemed that way at the time, but once she got me thinking about it, I knew she was right.
Because it was spring, finally, genuinely, and we’d no longer needed our heavy jackets. We still missed the trees, but realized maybe we could make do. We didn’t have trees. But we had roofs.
We climbed the fire escape on the back of the building, which had long been a particular temptation, but the frozen winds had made it less inviting, while now the warm breezes seemed to push us right to it. We carried a ball up with us.
