by Jake Hinkson
And someone broke in after you left? Just happened to break in and kill Lynn Byers in the same bed? That’s what you’re trying to tell us?
They wouldn’t believe me, but I didn’t have anything else to tell them. They would find me. They would go to the bar, talk to the bartender, find out who she was talking to, check the debit card receipts. They could be at my house right now, but they’d see I wasn’t there. They’d find out that I failed to show up for work today.
Next stop, I thought. At the next stop, you get off this train and get on one to take you to the cops. Get this thing settled.
***
I bought her another Stella and had one myself. The bartender went back to his limes.
“I’ve tried out for all kinds of things,” she said. “TV shows, reality shows, plays, talent searches. Never got anywhere.” She shrugged. “No talent.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that stuff,” I said “but isn’t rejection a part of the game?”
“Sure, and that’s what I told myself. But you have to face facts sooner or later, right? You tell yourself, everyone who ever hit it big got the door slammed in her face at some point. Then you think, well, so did all the people who never made it.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Yet everyone is always telling you to follow your dreams.”
“I guess.”
“Thing is, most dreams never become reality. So okay, Kelly Clarkson had the dream of being a world famous pop star, and now she’s a world famous pop star, but the other ten million people who tried out for American Idol had exactly the same dream, and for them it was all just bullshit.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. She was right, but I didn’t want to let her wallow in it. If she got drunk and depressed, I’d be going home alone.
“Well,” I said, “most people can’t sing well enough to be famous. No shame in that. You’re probably good at other things.”
She ignored me. “Think about the night sky. Seems full of stars, but most of the sky is just a big empty nothing. In fact, that’s what makes a star shine so bright, all the nothing around it. There’s only a few stars. Most of us are the nothing.”
I glanced up at the bartender. He didn’t look at me, but I could tell he was listening. I bet he heard a lot of sob stories.
I looked back at Lynn, and now she was staring at me.
She laughed.
“The hell with it,” she said. “You want to get out of here?”
***
When the train stopped at Fort Totten, I slid off and sat down on an empty bench. It was good to sit down and breathe in some fresh air. Rain tapped against the uncovered portion of the platform, and I sat there watching it, waiting for the next train.
A lot of people had exited the train with me and most of them walked to the escalators.
It seemed like one guy didn’t, though. People milled around on the platform—kids in Catholic school uniforms, men and women in business attire carrying satchels and briefcases, a guy in military fatigues—but something told me that one of the people who got off the train with me hadn’t moved very far.
While I glanced around like I was looking at the trees and apartment buildings in the distance, I scanned the people on the platform. In a glance, though, there’s nothing special about anyone.
After a minute, a train barreled up, opened its doors and released some passengers, and then all of us who were waiting got on. I glanced around to check out faces.
You’re being paranoid, I thought. No one is following you.
No one unusual. No one familiar. Just people. An old man took out a hearing aid and messed with it. Two girls—one white, one black—held hands and shared the headphones on an iPod. Some people read the paper. Some people stared out the window. No one looked at me.
No one in our car.
But when I glanced at the back door, I saw that someone was watching me from the next car. He looked away when I saw him, but I’d seen his face for a good second or two.
The bartender.
***
I smiled. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
I waved the bartender over. He was short and blocky, with a smooth, bland face and prematurely gray hair.
I motioned at our glasses. “I need to settle up for both of us,” I told him.
Lynn laughed. “Aw, you don’t have to do that,” she said, nudging me.
My dick got hard.
“Easier this way,” I said, nudging her back. “You can get the bill next time.”
She said, “I’ll tell you what—you know the liquor store down the street?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I live next door.”
“Really? Wait a second! The little green place with the big bathtub out front?”
She laughed. “Yep, the big bathtub full of flowers. Don’t ask. It was there when I moved in.”
“It’s cute,” I said. “I always wondered about the bathtub house.”
She smiled and put her hand on my forearm. “Wanna see it up close? I can buy us a bottle on the way there.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
The bartender handed me the bill. He didn’t say a word. As I dug out my wallet, he just looked at Lynn.
***
My thoughts bickered while I tried to figure out what the hell do to.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. Couldn’t be.
I glanced at the window again, but he’d moved away.
How long had he been following me?
Why?
The train slowed and came to a stop at New York Avenue and people got off. Others got on. I stayed where I was and watched the platform, but I didn’t see him.
We pulled away from the station, and I switched seats to get a look at the next car from another vantage point.
He was there all right, wearing a non-descript brown coat and blue shirt. He stood by the door trying to blend in. His face was as smooth as a child’s, but his hair was nearly completely gray. When he caught me looking at him, he flinched and moved to another seat. We stared at each other through the cars for a moment, but I was the only one who was frightened.
I opened the doors between cars walked in and sat down next to him. People glanced at us and then glanced away.
I said, “Why are you following me?”
“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” he said under his breath. “Next stop, we’re getting off. Just so we can talk.”
I took a deep breath and something odd happened. I thought of Lynn. I thought of the way she’d screamed in her sleep. I would never know what her nightmares were about, and I would never want to know how horrible the waking nightmare had been when this man crept into her room and murdered her, but in that moment I felt an anger rising that dissipated the fear.
My hands steadied. They went dry. My entire body seemed to cool. I turned to him.
“Why her?” I asked.
He glanced around at the other people on the car. No one was paying us any attention.
“Why?” I said. “Why Lynn?”
The train began to slow, and he turned to me and jerked his head at the sliding doors. “Get up. Let’s go talk about this somewhere.”
“There was no reason, was there? You just wanted to hurt somebody. You saw her, and you wanted to hurt somebody, so you decided it would be her.”
“I told you to get up.”
“What’d you do, follow me home that night and then go back and kill her? If you were smart you’d just let the cops pin this on me, but you didn’t think of that, did you? You’re too much of a sick fucking psycho. You just wanted to hurt someone.”
The train lurched to a stop.
He pulled a gun from under his coat long enough to show it to me then put it in his pocket. “Get up now,” he whispered “or I’ll start shooting. I’ll kill everybody on this train, starting with you.”
I got up and he followed me to the doors. A crowd waited impatiently on the platfor
m, and we had to push our way through them. He kept one hand on my back and one on his gun, but I spun around suddenly and grabbed his wrist and shoved it deeper into his pocket. I rammed my knee into his balls. “Gun!” I yelled. “He’s got a gun!”
The place erupted. Everyone seemed to move at once. People around us heaved through the train doors trying to scramble inside as the people inside the train tried to rush out. Then the gun blasted a hole in his pocket and everything barreled into a roar that echoed down the darkened tunnel. As people stampeded us, I kept my hand on his wrist. Some guy grabbed him in a choke hold and then other people—men and women—piled on him. It was chilling to see a horde descend so quickly on one person. The sheer power of the group surged like an undercurrent dragging a hapless swimmer down. Blood pounded through my veins. I could feel the blood pounding in the crowd around me. I thought we might trample him to death.
Soon enough, though, the cops pushed their way through. Hands tightened around my arms and shoulders. Someone pulled me off of him.
***
Bloodied and nearly crushed, he was taken away on a stretcher once the EMT guys showed up. I was hauled in for questions, but when they found his gun, along with my address scribbled down on the back of my debit card bill, they pieced it all together. After a few hours, they took my statement and let me go home.
That night, I rode home on the Metro in a daze. People bustled around me, but nothing seemed quite solid or connected. When I got off the train, I staggered home like a drunk man.
Even though I was exhausted, it took a while for me to fall asleep. At three the next morning when I finally drifted off, I dreamed that Lynn was lying in bed next to me. I knew she would scream, that whatever had scared her would come back, and I wanted to tell her she’d be okay. I wanted to say that this time I wouldn’t run away.
But I couldn’t. I had no mouth, just a deep, thick scar where a gash had sealed shut. All I could do was lie next to her in the darkness. Her breathing grew erratic. I couldn’t breathe at all. When she screamed, I jerked awake.
D INNER WITH FRIENDS
Maggie liked the Bannermans, but I wasn’t too fond of them. Nathan Bannerman was a wrestling coach at his son’s junior high school. He was a five-foot-two tower of insecurity, and when I stood next to him I always got the faint impression he was trying to size me up for a leg sweep and a choke hold. When I was with him, we talked about sports and traffic, and I amused myself by thinking up different ways to kill him with whatever happened to be nearby. Nancy Bannerman was a profoundly overweight woman who kept putting on pounds in new areas of her body. Her chin had disappeared into her neck, which in turn had disappeared into the fleshy sphere of her torso. Because she relied so much on the charity and tact of other people, she was effusively nice. But I felt the Bannermans were both secretly shallow and boring. If they were thin, attractive, and successful, I think they would have been unbearable. Still, Maggie and Nancy were cousins, so a few times a year I had to endure a dinner with them.
We were sitting at a seafood restaurant one night listening to Nathan Bannerman rattle on about some unruly eighth grader, and I let my mind wander back over the day. That afternoon, I had killed a man named Art Thomas in a spacious loft apartment in lower Manhattan, within walking distance to the man’s job in the financial district. I don’t know what he did for a living, but he must have been good at it to afford such a swank place that close to all the money in the world.
Nathan Bannerman leaned over to me, “I told that little bastard, ‘I’m a grown man. You’re an eighth grader. Got me, buster?’” Bannerman stared at me, eager to see if I was impressed.
“Whoa,” I said. “What’d he say?”
I knew that would elicit a five-minute reply, so while Bannerman yammered on, I thought about Art Thomas. He had been a pudgy gray haired man with wire rim glasses and when I saw him today, he was wearing a thousand-dollar pair of pants.
He came up his stairs, unlocked his door, and was sorting his mail at the kitchen counter when I walked out of his bedroom and shot him in the back of the head. He hit the counter and slumped to the floor, and I shot him twice more in the back of the head. By that point, there wasn’t much left to shoot.
The piece had come from Thomas’s bedroom closet. I left it at the scene, and shoved my latex gloves into a large McDonald’s cup. I carried the cup downstairs and over to Broad Street where I dumped it in the trash before I caught the subway uptown.
Maggie and Nancy laughed at something Bannerman had said. I chuckled and slapped him on the shoulder.
The waiter came over and suggested dessert, and before I could say anything, my wife asked to see the menu.
“Oh, I shouldn’t,” Nancy said.
“Oh, c’mon. We’ll spilt it,” Maggie suggested. If history were any kind of teacher, though, she’d have to race Nancy for the last bite.
Bannerman asked me how the business was going.
“Pretty well,” I said.
“Maggie said you went up to Connecticut today.”
“Yeah. Had a meeting with a guy.”
“Yeah, I had some meetings today, too.”
Bannerman was incapable of asking two questions in a row. It was simply too much time spent away from the subject of his own utterly banal existence. He seemed to feel he was losing ground if the discussion wasn’t about his shitty job, his dreary personal life, or his uninformed, backwater political views.
He finished a beer—his fourth—and I thought about smashing the glass over his nose and slitting his throat with a shard of the breakage.
Bannerman sighed. “Yeah, I don’t know. Those people up there at the school, they’re a good bunch. They try to be, anyway. But they haven’t been the same since old Dale Hudson died.”
That stopped me.
“Dale Hudson died?”
“Yeah. Last year.”
“Last year,” Nancy affirmed.
Maggie looked at me. “Who’s Dale Hudson?”
“He was the principal,” I told her.
I’d attended Edward Q. Brooks High School the year my father died. My mother had married a man from our church within a few months of my father’s death, and we had moved to another town to live with him and his two sons. The boys, both of them a little older than me, were never very nice to me, but they mostly left me alone. When I started attending school with them in the fall, they kept their distance from me in the halls and the cafeteria. I suppose it was lonely, though it could have been worse.
Dale Hudson was a tall, gray-haired man with a paunch and a seemingly endless supply of short-sleeved white shirts. The kids mostly either mocked him or hated him, though I don’t recall him being particularly absurd or cruel. He was just a bored functionary, a man going about his job. I hadn’t given him any thought in twenty years.
The waiter brought the dessert menu and the girls chose a cheesecake. Bannerman ordered a crème brûlée, pronouncing it “cream brew-lee,” and asked for another beer to tide him over until it got there. I had coffee.
“Dale Hudson died,” I said.
Maggie watched my face.
“You seem fascinated by that,” she said.
I smiled. “I just…I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. It’s odd to hear that he died.”
“He was an old man,” Bannerman said. “I hope I’m going strong like him in the end.”
I said, “I hadn’t thought of him as being old. I guess I thought he was still fifty-whatever years old, still schlepping the halls of Edward Q. Brooks, telling kids to get to class. I hadn’t thought about his life still, you know, still going on when I wasn’t there.”
Nancy’s bulk shifted beneath her tent-like green dress, and she said, “I think that’s as many words as I’ve ever heard you speak at one time.”
The three of them laughed, and I smiled.
Bannerman said, “I think that’s about as many words as I’ve ever heard him speak at one time, too”—which was his way of s
tealing his wife’s line. He did that all the time. If you said something interesting or funny, Bannerman would repeat it like he’d just thought of it himself. Insufferable little shit.
Still, as the dessert arrived and the conversation moved back to what it had been all night—Nancy’s commentary on the food and Bannerman’s commentary on himself—I stared at the little man and wondered what he did with his days.
It’s not too much to say that I lack some seemingly essential component of human compassion. I’m not sure why that is. I’ve thought about it over the years. I have two theories.
One, I’m an anomaly, a freak of nature, an exception to the rule. If there’s a god—which seems unlikely—then he or she or it made me what I am. Nature just made a mistake, like a baby born without arms. My lack of compassion is a genetic defect.
My second theory is that I’m nothing particularly special. Wars have been fought every year for as long as we’ve recorded history, and most of the people who killed each other in these wars had no good reason to do it. Sadists kill because they get off on human suffering. Mothers sometimes snap and drown their children in the bathtub. Sometimes men lose their jobs and strangle their ex-wives. Gangbangers shoot each other because they’re too stupid to do anything else. And on and on.
But sometimes people decide to kill someone else just to make life a little easier on themselves—to free up some cash, or to enact a revenge they themselves are not capable of following through on. Then they talk to someone who talks to someone who talks to me. And I take care of it.
My only virtue—and it’s not much of a virtue I’ll grant—is that I’m as cold as Pluto. I’m not a sadist or a psycho. I’m not out to rule the world or get my kicks from watching people die. I’m coldly indifferent, yes, but I don’t think I’m at all unique in this indifference. It’s just that most people are acceptably indifferent to the pain and suffering of other people. It’s okay not to care about people dying in other countries, or even down the street, because you don’t know them. An utter and complete lack of compassion is acceptable in a macro sense. I just feel that in a micro sense.
