He should have been out there, enjoying his temporary time, but that would have been irresponsible, and impossible to explain to Jillian. “She really has done everything for you,” the jar of jam said from the counter. “She’s been very patient. Not everyone would put up with your eccentric behaviour.”
Ed found a sharp knife and stabbed it down into the sweet strawberry goodness. The jam attempted to expound further, but Ed churned the knife blade, eviscerating the aborted speech. He heard the TV go on in the living room. Jillian enjoyed watching a few minutes of television every morning before going in to the office, usually programmes recorded the day before which she fast-forwarded between the more interesting segments. She liked the shows about “real people” the best, a kind of programming which appeared to have completely taken over the airwaves.
A young woman was talking about becoming a professional singer. She said it was her dream and she refused to have a backup plan. Ed felt badly for her. Everyone he knew, practically, had been forced to live their back-up plan, and all too often it was not of their own design, but handed to them. “Here,” the world said. “Go do this instead.”
Someone was trying to talk over the young woman. People could be so rude sometimes, so callous and uncaring. There was even laughter in the background. Then Ed realized it was another soundtrack laid over the first.
“Now would be a good time, Ed,” the TV said. “She’s watching some of her favourite shows, enjoying herself - what better time for her to die?”
“But she has to get to work,” he offered lamely. “She’s going to be late.”
“Do you really think she wants to be at work? Wouldn’t she rather be famous? Wouldn’t all your land much rather be famous?”
“She loves her work. She says it all the time.”
“She’s learned to make do. If you kill her now, it should make the evening papers. Don’t you think she would like that? And if you continue, if you become famous, then she will as well. Famous people, they live for ever.”
“I don’t think she’d rather—”
“You have the knife in your hand already, Ed. Now why don’t you use it?”
Ed looked down at the knife clutched in his right hand, strawberry jam melting off the blade and dribbling on to the clean white tile floor. He backed away from the sound of the television, turned and ran to the back door, jerking it open with his left hand, confused about what he should do with the knife.
The man from the dairy was bent over the milk bottles on the back porch, replacing the empties with full ones of an impossibly white colour, the milk so bright in hue it could only be a motion-picture effect. The man straightened up, his white suit so perfect with nary a wrinkle, and when he saw the knife stained with still-dripping strawberry jam he looked as if he would scream, and if he were to scream Jillian would come out there, and she would miss her shows and be late to work, but most of all she would be so terribly disappointed in him, when all she’d ever done was her very best for him.
The milkman looked down and Ed’s gaze followed. The knife was embedded slightly above mid-abdomen, at an upward angle. And all that red couldn’t possibly be jam. The dairy man fell back against the railing and toppled to the ground.
~ * ~
Ed waited anxiously as Jillian gathered her purse, keys, briefcase, and a compact, fashionable lunch tote with flower designs which looked a bit like eyes elaborated with fanciful make-up. Several of these eyes now looked up at him in despair. The jangle of her keys said, “Do it, do it when her back is turned!” He had a hammer he’d retrieved from the closet hidden behind his back for that very purpose, but he knew he would not be doing it. Not this time.
“I don’t know why these people waste their time on these impossible dreams,” she was saying with a kind of aimless annoyance. “Even if they’re talented, well, what difference does that make anyway? Most people are unlucky, or they lack the connections. You have to know how to work the system, you know?”
Ed was anxious for her to leave, but the conversation had veered so closely to what he pondered each and every day he couldn’t quite let it go. “So how do they learn how to do that? How do they find out?”
“How should I know? Do I look like a success to you? Some doors close, you leave them closed. You can’t re-open them.” She was obviously furious now, and he didn’t know why. She frightened him when she was like this - he couldn’t have swung the hammer at her even if it had been the right time. “I’m just a working girl, remember?”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Just call your doctor, make an appointment, okay? And make a few job contacts today - you can do that for me, can’t you?”
“Of course,” he said softly, also annoyed now, stepping back so she could leave. He could have swung the hammer as she turned, but he would not kill her in anger. No matter what, it could not happen like that.
As soon as he heard her car pull away from the front of the house he returned to the back yard where he’d stashed the dairy man beneath an old quilt. He went to his knees beside the body and started to cry, but then furiously wiped his tears away and began to roll the quilt up with the body inside. He had a little bit of old twine - he didn’t think it would hold - but he wrapped it around the legs and head anyway. Then with considerable strain he began dragging the awkward package toward the garage along the side of the house, the head-end snagging on the edge of bushes and flowerbed fencing, forcing him to stop now and then to wiggle things free! At least the overgrown bushes around the edge of the yard shielded him from the neighbours. Jillian had nagged him for months to trim them back - perhaps he hadn’t gotten around to it for a reason? Could this be working the system?
“Where are you going with that?” the house said.
Ed knew it was the house because of the weight the words made in his head, and because something along the lines of the foundation had shifted and shifted back, even though it hadn’t been visual exactly, but more like a movement between dimensions, like travelling through time. In any case it frightened him, because of the depth of structural instability it suggested.
“I’ll put it into the trunk of my car. Then I plan to drive it somewhere, get rid of it somewhere.”
“Good, I wouldn’t want it just lying around here. Is that Jillian in there?”
“No. No, it’s someone else.” Ed was slightly surprised at the house’s ignorance of what had recently occurred in its own back yard. Was that what happened when you lived longer? Your perspective changed so much you didn’t even notice the daily tragedies?
“I thought the plan was to kill Jillian, and that would open up some doors, some possibilities for you to have a different life?”
“It’s not that cut and dried, but yes, obviously if the life you’re living goes away there’s now room for a different one. You don’t even have to think about it - it will just happen.”
“And yet you’ve killed someone else?”
“It was an accident.”
“You’re avoiding what you know you need to do to get that other life - you don’t want to kill her. You’ll kill everyone else in the world first to avoid killing her.”
“Of course I don’t want to kill her. We have some problems, but I’ve always loved her, still do. But I don’t know what else to do. This can’t be my life.”
“The secret laws of the universe are a conundrum. Why do some get what they want and some do not? The laws mean even less to a house. We are simply here, and then one day you people make a decision to tear us down.”
“I have no such plans.” Ed was thinking he had no more control over such decisions than over anything else in his life.
“You could travel to her place of work and kill her there. It would be most unexpected,” the house said.
Rather than answer (Could he? Would he?) Ed replied, “I have no problem with rules per se - rules, laws, principles, that’s what makes mathematics, chemistry, physics, work, right? And w
ithout those things the world would not function.”
The house appeared to have fallen back asleep, or into whatever meditative state architecture is prone to. Ed did not want to discuss things further anyway, instead busying himself getting the body into the trunk of his car, and his car out of the garage. The vehicle ran sluggishly. Ed had not driven it in weeks.
Body disposal was actually not a topic Ed had seriously considered before. He certainly wouldn’t have tried to dispose of Jillian’s body - you don’t do that kind of thing to someone you love. Although he hadn’t thought it completely through he’d always assumed he’d claim an intruder had killed her, or that she’d fallen down the stairs. Faking grief would have been no problem because his grief would have been completely genuine. In fact he’d always thought that killing her might fall under the general category of natural causes. Anticipated, certainly, but hardly desired.
So he drove around awhile, hoping to see some options. “I thought we were going to your wife’s office,” the car said. “I thought you were going to kill her there.”
“You’ve got a pretty good radio. It’s been a while since I listened to it - let’s turn it on. Full volume.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“There are people at her office. They would see.”
“But have you thought about trying to live in that house after having killed her there? That would be stressful, don’t you think?” Ed hadn’t considered that. “You didn’t think about it because you never seriously thought you would go through with it.”
Ed leaned forward and switched on the radio.
“You’re not going to be able to avoid this,” the car said from the radio and from everywhere else. Ed turned the radio off to kill the echo.
He gradually began to realize that he was in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. It was an older suburb with mature trees, the houses built in the late-sixties, maybe early-seventies. Split-levels and tri-levels mostly. Not very expensive - he supposed they’d be called cheap by some, but very well kept. Perhaps too well. When he considered all the painting and countless specific repairs to old wood and siding and plywood, the effort to keep casement windows usable, all the lawns mowed and hedges trimmed and leaves raked, and the incremental landscaping improvements - the borders and gazebos and fountains and walks and statuary -the time spent keeping up these dolls’ houses, these pleasant appearances, it boggled the mind. Wasn’t there a better way to spend your time than devising temporary facades in order to put the best possible face on your world?
The street was quiet, empty. The kids would be in school, he supposed, the adults off at their jobs. There would be a few retirees, no doubt - this was the kind of neighbourhood some would retire to - the top of the ladder, the end of the chain, the penultimate destination and the final goal. For some, this was what life would amount to.
An older fellow - dressed in a furry rust-coloured sweater and corduroys, a bit warmly for the weather - shuffled down one of the neatly paved and edged driveways toward the street, leaf rake in hand. He didn’t look happy or particularly sad, but there was fatigue in the way he began to rake at the few leaves spilling off his lawn into the gutter. He used short, deliberate strokes precisely overlapped so that every bit of lawn was covered, his almost aggressive focus tiring to watch. Once he got all the leaves into the gutter he herded them toward one particular pile along the curb. For what reason Ed could not imagine.
His property seemed to be the most perfect, the most refined of any of those very refined properties on the block. It must have taken him days, a lifetime of days, to obsessively groom his realm, this relatively tiny area of the universe.
“He’s got it all sorted,” the car said. “At last he thinks he’s got it all figured out.”
“I understand the impulse,” Ed said. “During these spells of unemployment I’d go out and work in the yard. Not just because Jillian nagged me to do it, but because that way I could show all my neighbours I actually had things to do. It was the only time I ever talked to any of them, really. We’d talk about the weather, and what needed to be done, and how good it would all look if we could only get it all done, but we knew we couldn’t get it all done because it was so constant. It made me feel like one of them, but it was depressing. I kept asking myself, ‘Is this what it’s really all about? Is this what a human life amounts to?’”
The car began to roll forward. Ed never could decide if the car did it on its own (surely a car that talks was capable of driving itself), or if he had deliberately put it into gear and stepped on the gas pedal. In fact, he couldn’t even remember if he’d pulled over and parked in order to observe the neighbourhood more closely, or if he’d been driving the entire time, but cruising slowly.
As the car came upon him, the elderly man looked over his shoulder in mild surprise. Not fear, really, and not true surprise. It was the kind of surprise you experience at the moment even though this was something you’d really been expecting all along.
The man went down quickly, and the bump the left front tyre made as it rolled over him was much smaller than Ed would have expected.
Ed drove along in silence for a time, out of that neighbourhood and into another, another still. The car appeared to have nothing to say. Then, as Ed searched for the on-ramp, the car spoke up. “See how easy that was? Quick and painless.”
“We don’t know there wasn’t any pain.”
“I didn’t hear any screaming, did you? You could have done the same thing with Jillian - it could have been finished by now.”
“I don’t think I could handle it if Jillian looked at me the way that old fellow did. His last sight was of me behind the wheel. I’d hate for the last thing Jillian ever sees is me behind the wheel.”
“It’s only a moment. A second. She might even think she was hallucinating it.”
“That doesn’t help any.”
“That old man should have been Jillian. Are you going to kill everybody in this city before you get around to killing your wife? I thought you wanted a different life for yourself. I believe you once said this just couldn’t be your life.”
“I’m going to her office now. We’ll just have to see what happens.”
“You have to choose, Ed,” the car said plaintively. “I know you love her and it’s a terrible thing, but you only get one life. People get trapped because they settle for feeling just a little happy, or being just a little successful.” The car horn blared suddenly, painfully. “Wake up, Ed!” the car screamed unmercifully. “Wake yourself up!”
If he drove the car head-on into the next tree would he feel any pain, and for how long?
~ * ~
He found the on-ramp to the interstate bypass that led downtown, a narrow single lane hidden behind a row of trees, as if this part of town wanted to pretend it was out in the country. The highway was rather full for a Thursday morning, and he found himself veering close to the other lanes, sometimes crossing lines, as he attempted to get a good look at the other drivers, and assess in some way their purpose, their intentions, or at least their mood. Periodically someone would honk their annoyance, and the car would honk back in kind, on its own and independent of Ed’s wishes. It occurred to him that this might be a dangerous strategy, and indeed some vehicles made their own incursions into Ed’s lane.
“Look at all these people with nothing to do,” the car said.
“Some of them drive for their jobs, and some of them have important errands to run, I’m sure.”
“And some are just driving aimlessly around,” the car said. “I’m an expert at this, remember? I can tell when a driver has no business being out on the road.”
“I don’t know that you can say they have no business ...”
“They can’t stand or sit still. They find their own little patch of ground, the area beneath their shadow, an intolerable place to be in. They’d rather do anything than fill their own space. They can’t be satisfied anywhere. If they coul
d jump out of their own skin, believe me they would. Travelling around aimlessly in a car is simply a substitute for jumping out of your own skin.”
Ed had been paying so much attention to the car’s speech he hadn’t noticed their relative position in the lane. He looked out the driver’s side window and saw the man in the next car, just a few feet separating them, as he mimed a performance of the radio’s latest hit single. The man turned his head suddenly, as if now aware of being watched, and stared at Ed with his mouth open.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 6
