by John Niven
Frank went to set the McDonald’s bag on the carpet. ‘Hey,’ Chops said. ‘What you got in there?’
‘McMuffins. Hash browns.’
‘Well, shit, hand that fucken bag over.’
‘Look, whoever you are –’
‘Call me Chops.’
‘Chops. I haven’t eaten since –’
‘Tough titties, pal, I been sitting in this chair for days and you only got basic cable and jackshit in the icebox, so just gimme the fucking food.’
Frank handed over the paper bag. Chops stuffed a hash brown in his mouth. ‘Mmmmm. Right, confession. Go.’
Frank began. He talked about his cancer. About Hauser the rapist. About the dentist destroying his ex-wife. About his wife and son dying. About his daughter dying. About all the men he blamed for this stuff. It didn’t really take very long. Maybe twenty minutes. Chops nodded and ate one-handed, never taking the gun away, occasionally emitting a bark of laughter, or a snort of disgust, or a brief comment like ‘liberal faggot’ when Frank talked about the school shooting or about the overturning of Roe v Wade. Chops was munching his way through the second McMuffin when Frank finished talking. ‘That it?’ he said. Frank nodded. ‘OK then.’ Chops turned off the recorder and stood up. ‘Now listen, son, I don’t want you giving me any trouble on the way in. And I figure I owe you some payback for shooting my buddy all up the way you did. So I’m going to kneecap you with this here .38 …’ He held the gun up, showing it to Frank.
‘No, please …’
Chops stuffed the last huge bite of the breakfast sandwich into his mouth and spoke on with difficulty, chewing his way around it. ‘Now it’s gonna sting some, so you best prepare yourself. OK?’
He levelled the pistol, pulled back the hammer.
‘STOP! I WON’T RUN. You don’t need to –’
‘Ready?’
Chops swallowed. And then his eyes widened as his hands flew to his chest. ‘GNNNUUFF!’ he said. ‘UNNNGH!’
It felt like his heart had contracted, had suddenly clenched into a tight fist inside him.
Oh God, no. Not now, Chops just had time to think.
Frank, shaking, watching, as Chops collapsed to his knees. He was spluttering, gasping for air, his eyes bulging now. He looked at Frank in desperation. Frank stood up. Chops dropped the gun, really panicking now, as he fell onto his back, his knees going up as far as his great belly would allow.
Frank quickly kicked the gun away, sending it clattering across the hardwood floor, as Chops writhed at his feet, turning an alarming shade of purple now. He tried to get up, couldn’t. Must have weighed nearly 300 pounds. He fell back down, face into the rug, clawing, kicking his feet. Frank crossed the room, picking up the gun as he went, and watching, grimly fascinated, as Chops beat his fists on the hardwood floor, making a lot of noise, straining, grunting and banging, as the heart attack screamed through him. Frank reached over and turned the stereo on, getting an Orlando station on the FM, turning the volume up. It was getting light outside, dawn just rising over the lake as his would-be killer fought for dear life on the floor.
Chops rolled over onto his back again, was going blue in the face now. Frank had always thought it was just an expression, a piece of hyperbole meant to express frustration or rage, but here it was – the guy’s huge, sweating face was pulsating, turning the colour of blueberry juice. Finally, with a schlucking, popping sound comparable to the noise a rubber plunger will make when torn off a blocked plughole, a chunk of half-masticated meat, cheese and bread flew out of Chops’s gullet, shooting several feet straight up in the air and falling back down to land on his chest. Frank watched, horrified and compelled. But even with his airway cleared Chops continued gasping for breath as he clutched with both hands at the left-hand side of his chest (his flattened palms, Frank noticed, horribly mashing the regurgitated piece of burger into the front of his plaid shirt), as he kicked his heels against the floor, screeching in agony as the terrible event boiled through him.
It felt to Chops as if his heart had been wrapped in barbed wire, wire that someone was tightening and tightening. ‘P-p-p-’ he stuttered, trying to find the words to beg Frank for help. But no words were coming.
Frank looked down at Chops, the two sixty-something men making direct eye contact, Chops’s eyes wide, panicked, begging, Frank’s narrowed, revolted. He brought the gun up. It would be a mercy killing really. The flesh around the guy’s mouth was starting to turn black as Frank pulled back the hammer on the revolver. Chops was silent now, in too much pain to make any sound.
‘Ah, fuck it,’ Frank said, lowering the hammer again.
He stuck the pistol into his belt, turned and walked out of the room and down the hallway, grabbing his bag and his car keys, heading on out of the apartment.
Chops stared hopelessly at the ceiling, everything getting dark now as his vision started to dim and he began to see himself entering the kingdom of heaven. The light he was moving into more golden than white, warm and forgiving, like sunshine, and in it he felt all his sins being absolved, he felt the Lord’s forgiveness bathing over him. For the Lord did not care about the petty foolishness Chops had sometimes indulged himself in. What did a few boys matter? He had done so much good, stopped so much evil.
He saw himself ascending towards God, God’s hair flying celestially from beneath the red cap, the face of God looking very familiar and Chops feeling no surprise, only confirmation of what he had always believed, that the Lord had indeed made The Chosen One in his own image …
TWENTY-SEVEN
‘Enjoy!’
Frank Brill, on his last night on earth, alone out on the patio, the December evening being too cool for the Floridians, who were all inside, snug behind the thick plate glass. Astonished that his appetite seemed to have returned, but still aware of the events of that morning – and the fact that he was overlooking the Atlantic – he had eschewed red meat (again, a word never used verbally, the editor reflected) and went with seafood all the way: having ordered and demolished a dozen oysters, he was now waiting for the stuffed, baked sea bream.
He had wondered during the course of the day, the return of his appetite … could they be wrong? Maybe it had gone away? Maybe the diagnosis was wrong? Should he have sought a second opinion? Would that be the sick, final twist? Had he done all of this, taken all these lives (at least one of them an innocent life), only to not be dying after all? It didn’t much matter any more. Talking of things that didn’t matter any more, he realised he’d been staring at the wine list for longer than was necessary for someone who didn’t drink. What would it matter? A cold glass of Chablis or Sauvignon with his bream …
Eating alone, it is often said, is a much underrated pleasure. But Frank had been eating alone for so long now he found he had to rack his brains to remember the last time he’d had dinner with someone else. God, that was right, with Brock and his wife, just a few streets from here, nearly two weeks ago.
Rack his brains.
Rockman’s – all across the bedspread. Just four weeks ago he’d never killed anything in his life. Never even been hunting. And now here he was, Frank Brill, killer of seven – nibbling a breadstick.
He had regrets about recent events. He’d only set out to kill five. But the dentist’s lover. He’d never done anything to Frank. Just happened to be there. Or what about the two guys eating with Beckerman? What was their crime? Just working for or with the NRA? Was that enough? He thought back some years, to the early days of the regime, when ‘civility’ was being much discussed. What you could and couldn’t say online, or in public, and about how all that gradually got eroded. You picked a side and anything was fair game. Until one side got stronger and stronger and showed that they were willing to meet civility with abuse. To meet abuse with fist or club. To meet fist or club with rifle and nail bomb.
‘And the sea bass …’ the girl was saying suddenly, sliding the plate onto the table in front of him.
‘Thank you,’ Frank said.
She noticed the wine list. ‘Would you like to order some wine?’
Frank looked at her. ‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’
The whole fish on the plate, slivers of herbs and lemon peeping from the slit down its stomach, the row of cherry tomatoes beside it, their skins black and blistered from the grill. ‘Enjoy!’ she said, marching off. ‘Enjoy!’ Just the way he always used to say it, in his tweets.
‘I will be interviewed on Fox at 10 a.m. Enjoy!’
And for Frank, reaching again for the cold neck of the bottle of mineral water in the ice bucket, smelling grilling steak and fish, it was time to face the central question.
It was sometimes hard for him to believe, but, in his own tiny way, Frank bore some responsibility for everything, in the same way that a microscopic termite bore part of the responsibility for eventually bringing the whole house down. Incredible and breathtaking as it seemed to him now, there was no getting past his involvement. He’d been a floater all his life. He’d cast his first ballot in the 1984 election, putting his cross against Reagan’s name to help give the Gipper his second term, because, well, he came from Indiana and it was Reagan. He’d voted for Clinton first time around but not the second. He’d voted for Obama, twice.
In 2016 he’d been thinking … what, exactly?
He’d never liked her, that was true. Seemed false. Mechanical. Devious. And also – so smug. Like she knew she couldn’t lose. That had irritated folk. It had irritated Frank.
When it came to him, Frank was thinking one thing really. He. Can’t. Win. Not possible. But Washington, the Clintons, the whole machine deserved a good scare thrown up it by seeing this madman get something like 40 per cent of the vote. And then – after the unthinkable happened – Frank thought what a lot of his buddies thought: he’ll just play golf and line his pockets and let the people who know what they’re doing get on with running things. Well, he played all the golf and he lined his pockets all right. But he did plenty else too. And the guys who were supposed to know what they were doing? Turned out they didn’t want to be within a hundred miles of the White House. Frank had never heard the term kakistocracy before. He got familiar with it pretty quick.
Oh, it had been crazy, a moment of madness and all that. He’d lost his job. He’d … Frank had felt like the guy in a bar, getting jabbed in the chest by some other guy who was saying, ‘What you gonna do? What you gonna do?’ It had felt like the biggest FUCKKKK YOUUUU to that guy. It had felt like headbutting him. But this was ten years ago. Frank had no idea what was around the corner.
So Frank never saw it all coming. What had been meant as no more than a middle finger to government turned out to be a gunshot wound. A butcher knife. A kerb-stomping. Frank felt like those young men in Europe and America in the 1930s and 40s, the ones who joined the Communist Party as a means of protest, as a way of saying ‘we believe in a different, a better world’, as a way of saying ‘fuck you’ to their elders. In tiny, minute ways, they had all helped Stalin. Just as in his tiny, minute way, Frank had helped along what happened to America. He’d helped cause all of this: those families sweating on camp beds inside a Texan warehouse, the journalists (like him) who’d ended up beaten and shot, the elderly freezing to death in their homes in winter – in Idaho, in Dakota – because it was pay the heat or pay the medical bills, the journalists, Muslims and homosexuals beaten in the streets every other week now, the Mexican quivering under the thrumming billy clubs, the girl knocked clean off her feet by the snarling truck that mounted the kerb at the protest march, her spine snapped like this breadstick, the kids in the playgrounds screaming for their mothers, trying to hold their guts in while the bullets sang hot around them, his own daughter, falling asleep with a hole in her insides. Frank, and hundreds of thousands like him, had helped all this along. (Wearily, he did the Computations again: If just a few thousand folk like Frank in key districts had gone the other way, he’d never have been elected, and if he’d never been elected, then Beckerman and Rockwell wouldn’t have been able to …)
He closed his eyes and saw himself in the booth on that November day ten years ago, voting for Trump.
So he did not fear his death. It felt well earned.
When you got towards the end of your life, Frank had read somewhere, you had to fill out a kind of ledger, to do with how you had lived. There will be debits and credits. Most of them, it was said, had to do with love, with how well or how badly you had done by love. Frank thought of his affairs, his betrayals, the hurt he’d caused his ex-wives and his daughter, the awful debits he’d racked up. He had come to a conclusion. He was not a touchy-feely person. He had not come to this conclusion easily, or lightly, it had taken the murder of his wife and son and the death of his daughter to get him there, but he’d got there in the end. His actions on that November day, Frank now saw, had been an offence, an affront, to love on a par with his betrayals of his own family. All because ‘I was pissed off. I never thought he could win.’
Well, he was trying to do right by it now, he thought, looking at the little notepad lying there on the table next to him, the personal and the political, four out of the five names crossed off …
Hauser
Roberts
Beckerman
Rockman
Only one name remained.
TWENTY-EIGHT
‘He likes to win, you know?’
Chops was trying to understand the sounds of heaven.
Muted, underwater voices, the hum of some kind of machinery, like a rhythmic whirring sound, distant beeps and bings, a metallic clatter of something like cooking pots. He opened his eyes and looked up, bright lights overhead, figures shimmering around him. Were these angels? No, Chops decided as his senses began to return. Definitely not. One of them was a fucking nigger for starters.
‘Can you hear me, sir?’ The Negro-not-angel was saying.
Chops began to see it all more clearly: the man wore the white coat of a doctor. In the corridor behind him, through the open door, an orderly was cleaning the floor with a polishing machine, the beeping and binging came from the towers of machinery surrounding him, and, over there, on the floor, a nurse was gathering up the cluster of steel trays she’d dropped.
‘Can you hear me, sir?’
‘Trrrrr …’ Chops growled.
‘Listen …’
‘Trrrrr …’
What was going on with his mouth? His jaw? Chops found that the usual business of speaking had been taken from him. It felt like the left-hand side of his face was made of ice and wood, as though he had been injected with a powerful anaesthetic. He was trying to say ‘Yes’, but could only produce this ‘Trrrrr’ sound. He sounded like someone repeatedly trying to start a lawnmower.
‘Mr Birner, we –’
‘Trrrr … Trrr …’ Christ this was infuriating.
‘You’re in Five Palms Hospital. You’ve been here since yesterday evening. I’m afraid you’ve suffered a major coronary event followed by a stroke. You were very lucky the paramedics were able to trace your call and find you when they did.’
‘Trrrr …’ And now he remembered – the telephone lying a few feet away, somehow clawing 911 into it with the very last of his strength. ‘Trrrruuu’ – now this was progress! He was managing to add an ‘uhh’ sound to the ‘Trrrr’.
‘Please, calm down, sir. You’re stable now and we’re waiting for some test results to find out how much damage has been done. Is there anyone you’d like us to call?’
‘Trrrrruuuuuu …’ Chops gave up, managed to shake his head.
‘I’m just going to let the consultant know you’re conscious. We’ll leave you to rest for now.’
The nurse followed the doctor out and Chops was alone in the private room, sensors taped to his chest, a cannula in the back of his right hand, tubes up his nose. A TV set on the wall was tuned to a local news station. He felt groggy and weak but he found that he could wiggle his toes and fingers, his limbs seemingly unaffected in the way
that his face and speech were. What did he remember? The guy, fucking Brill, watching while he choked to death, pointing the gun at him, but too chickenshit to pull the trigger.
Chops tuned into the TV as it switched to a new report: the Florida sun shining across sparkling emerald grass and white sand bunkers. And then a shot of former President Trump, waving to people as he strode along in the familiar chinos, white polo shirt and red KAGA hat. ‘And that’s the former president live right now in Palm Beach,’ the anchorwoman was saying, ‘as he arrives at Mar-a-Lago, where he’ll be playing golf later today.’
‘Still shoots a pretty good game too from what I hear.’
‘That’s right, Bill. He likes to win, you know?’
Chops smiled – or rather he tried to – as he watched his man, now shouting something to his supporters, giving the thumbs up before he disappeared into the grand building.
Suddenly a jolt of pure adrenalin shot through Chops, causing the twining pale blue lines on the monitor closest to him to ratchet up the screen, the numbers monitoring his heart rate shooting up along with them. He’d seen it, in the apartment. A map of the golf course.
Jesus Christ. Brill was going to …
Chops looked at the phone by his bedside and imagined the call. ‘Trrrrruuuu …’ He imagined trying to explain it to the doctors. ‘Trrrrruuuuu …’ No. He had to get there.
He sat up and looked through the glass – no one in the corridor. He stood and took a moment to orientate himself, swaying unsteadily on his feet. As soon as he moved, a couple of the sensors popped off his chest, causing the monitors to start beeping crazily. Chops reached over and turned them off. He crossed to the glass windows facing onto the corridor, drew the blinds and locked the door. Turning to cross the room again he caught sight of himself in the mirror above a small sink – oh dear God.
