Hungry

by Daniel Parme

  And before he did that, I would pour Hydrocyanic Acid into the bottle in the fridge.

  I dropped the butt of my smoke and stamped it out. “Do you mind if I stick around to give you a hand? I love to cook, and I’m sure you could teach me some new tricks.”

  People want to know.

  They want to know that other people want to know what they know.

  “Sure, kid. You can help out. I can teach you some.”

  We went inside, and he watched me carve up the last body before Virginia.

  He patted me on the back. “All right. I think you ought to be able to handle this on your own now. But here’s the deal. I’m going to lock you in here because if you decided to snoop around the rest of the building – and I’m not saying I don’t trust you – but Walter would kill me. And you have to swear that nobody ever hears about this, that I let you stay in here alone. If you tell anyone, we’ll both be in a lot trouble.”

  I pretended to think it over. “Sounds reasonable.”

  “Good. I’ll be back in around an hour. You ought to be finished by then.” He locked the door to the loading dock and walked out the double doors to the banquet room, locking them behind him.

  I went straight for the refrigerator – enormous, silver, industrial – and found the biggest bottle of worcestershire I’d ever seen. It had already been used and was about two-thirds full, which led me to believe I was one lucky bastard. A full, new, unbroken-capped bottle would have meant I’d have to find a new plan. It was a little late in the game for that. I dumped a bit of it into the sink, went for my bag, and poured the poison into the bottle, making sure not to alter the color of the sauce too much. Just to make sure, I also went after the soy sauce, hot sauce, lemon juice, and the bottle of marsala wine sitting on the counter next to the fridge.

  Then I put a towel over Virginia’s face and went to work.

  Gregor returned to find me covered in blood (apparently bleeding a person doesn’t quite get it all out of there) and tossing the last of Virginia’s flesh into a bowl I’d found in the cupboard.

  “Not bad,” he said. “You feel better?”

  I didn’t say anything, but nodded. The less often you open your mouth, the less often it can get you into trouble.

  “Well then, let’s get cleaned up and get this food prepped. I’ll finish it up tomorrow in the warehouse kitchen.”

  I didn’t help quite as much as I watched. Gregor took a bowl out of the cupboard and emptied the worcestercyanic sauce into it, added a few spices that he took from unmarked glass jars, and stirred it up. Then he took his index finger and dipped it in the sauce. He touched his tongue to his finger and smiled. “This is going to be good.”

  I waited for him to fall over, dead. I waited for him to start vomiting or choking on his blood or gasping for air. But he didn’t. I guessed it took more than just a drop on your tongue. Or, I hoped so.

  He opened a drawer and removed a syringe. “Here’s how you do it.” He stuck the needle into the bowl of death and pulled on the plunger, sucking up the black liquid. “You insert the needle about a quarter-inch into the meat, push down on the plunger a little, stick the needle into another spot, and do it again. You have to try to spread it around so the flavor’s in every bite.”

  He handed the syringe to me, told me to finish the rest, and cleaned up the kitchen behind me, throwing bones and other miscellaneous body parts into Hefty bags. I don’t know what he planned on doing with those bags, but didn’t care to ask.

  We covered the poisoned meat with plastic wrap and moved it into the fridge to marinate overnight. Then we cleaned the rest of the kitchen and went out for a smoke, Gregor locking the door behind us.

  “Not a bad night’s work,” he said, looking at his watch. “I thought we’d be at least another hour.”

  I looked him straight in the eyes, extended my hand, and said, “Thanks for all the help, Gregor. You have no idea how much better I feel.”

  “You’re welcome. And tomorrow,” he put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a little shake, “tomorrow you’ll eat the meal to end all meals.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I really can’t wait.”

  Chapter 44

  I’ve never been much of a dreamer, unless you count starving- and loss-of-blood-induced hallucinations. Erica, when we first met, for some reason thought I would enjoy a dream dictionary. “There’s interesting stuff in there,” she’d told me, trying to defend her gift. “A creative writing major ought to be interested in what his subconscious is trying to tell him when he’s asleep.”

  This was before she’d known me for too long. This was before she’d realized I’m not as deep as all that.

  I kept the book, of course, but only flipped through it every now and again in search of archetypes I could use in some shitty poem or short story. This was when I was still writing. This was before I had more serious things to dedicate my time to.

  This was when I was still the old Travis. This was when I was still worried about getting my dick wet. This was when I’d research sports statistics and the weight limit of dynamic nylon ropes as opposed to serial killers and poisonous chemicals. This was when the only people who knew who I was were my friends. This was before I ate my friends, but not too long before.

  But let’s get back to the dream book.

  It was three-hundred pages of pure rubbish. Water had something to do with cleansing, with purity. A locked door meant you felt trapped. A chicken with a lion’s head meant your desire to get pregnant, or some other happy horse shit like that. The book was crap.

  So, let’s get back to me not dreaming. Or, as the shrinks had corrected me when I told them I didn’t dream, not remembering my dreams. They said everybody dreams, and if you don’t remember them it just means that you’re subconsciously blocking out your subconscious. Whatever.

  Anyway, I remembered my dream Wednesday morning. Part of it, at least. It was Angela, prettier and more like porcelain than she is in real life (although I don’t know how that’s possible, even in a dream), sitting on a deep red sofa, holding a glass of deep red wine, swirling it around the glass and smiling at me, who I couldn’t see, but could feel.

  And that’s it. That’s all I remembered, but it was vivid as I awoke, like it was happening in the space between my face and the ceiling.

  And that feeling – the way I couldn’t see myself but could still feel that I was there – that feeling hung around a while, too. Longer than the vision of Angela and the couch and the wine.

  I think it’s pretty clear that I put no stock whatsoever in dream definitions or meanings, but I’d have loved to see what that stupid little “dictionary” would have had to say about all this. Of course, I’m pretty sure that just about anyone could make a fairly accurate guess.

  I thought about it over a bowl of Apple Jacks, and some more while I sat at the kitchen window, blowing smoke out into the city. I thought about it, this little snippet of a dream, while I was in the shower. I started to think about it after I brushed my teeth, but realized this might be the last day that LT and I would have together, so I spent some quality time with him. (My recent diet had brought him out of his latest funk, and I apologized for ignoring him this past week.) And I thought about this dream as I got dressed.

  I decided that it’s not the images in the dream that are important, it’s the lingering feeling in the morning. It’s like a hangover. It’s like the sore hip and ass muscles you get after having sex for the first time in what seems like an eternity. Those feelings will stick with you the rest of the day. The dream is usually gone after an hour or so.

  And the feeling I had that morning was surprisingly empty considering how much shit I’d been filling myself with recently. I should have been anxious or scared or excited or, at the very least, a little confused.

  But I was calm and well-rested. And really, I wasn’t even calm. I wasn’t anything. Just some sort of vague presence. The afternoon smell of bread
baked in the morning. The itch of an amputated limb.

  I imagine it’s something like what they mean when they say an “out of body” experience, only without watching yourself.

  Hell, I don’t know. I guess I just felt a little weird.

  All day, I felt a little weird. Something about where I was, what I was doing – none of it seemed real. It was just a movie. Or I was just broken, malfunctioning. I was talking to the stars again, even though I couldn’t see them through the blue of the atmosphere.

  One of the ways hydrogen cyanide can kill you is if you absorb it through your skin. It can actually kill you more quickly this way than if you inhale or ingest it. Fascinating stuff.

  As I spent the late morning hours dissolving my stolen goods in boiling water, a fan in the window set to exhaust, a fine particle mask over my mouth and nose, I was a bit dazed, daydreaming, thinking about things from the past that happened to somebody else, but were somehow still floating around in my head.

  It was pleasant, this reel of short films. Days at the pool before you cared what was under all those bikinis. Getting stoned in college, munching on Reese’s Pieces and guzzling a can of generic grape soda. Sex in the hot tub while the girl’s parents were inside, watching Stargate on the Sci-Fi channel.

  The person in all these scenes, he looks a lot like you, but maybe you’re just projecting yourself into them. Maybe you just wish those things had happened to you. Maybe you just envy this person his sense of invulnerability and the way he knows the future is going to be a great place to be. You envy the way he’s so into everything, so involved, instead of just observing.

  You envy him. As you’re cooking up a pot of death, you envy him. He’d never have to do what you’re doing now, and he knows it, this doppelganger inside your head. That lucky bastard. And what happened to that lucky bastard, anyway?

  You can’t let yourself think about that for too long because if you start to remember who you used to be, who you are now becomes jeopardized, and you need to be this new guy. You need to.

  You’re a new man.

  That kid you think about while you’re preparing to do very, very bad things, he’s not real. He doesn’t exist.

  He never existed.

  And you still envy him.

  Chapter 45

  “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

  In college I was thrown out of class by a professor, who’d obviously only gone to college to avoid the Vietnam War, for arguing that Eliot was saying he wished his life had been different, that a crab at the bottom of the ocean would have had a better life than his own. This professor, he wouldn’t hear it, and I wouldn’t shut up about it, so I got tossed.

  North of the city, I was allowed admittance into a secret group of cannibals merely for reciting this line that got me booted from class all those years ago. And the thing is, I don’t know if I was right in college, but that’s what I got out of it, and now, walking down that long hall, preparing myself for what would undoubtedly be a life-defining evening, I wished I was that pair of ragged claws.

  Dick had given me directions to the warehouse. “Walter says you’ve obviously learned enough to know not to cause problems,” he’d said. Turns out the place was in Butler County, about twenty minutes from the summer camp I used to work for. Or, the summer camp that one of my past selves used to work for…

  I was late, but not by much, and I looked excellent in my black suit, the only suit I’d ever owned, a beautiful tailored black thing my parents had bought for me three months before their funeral. It had been the only time I’d worn it. I looked excellent in my suit and red silk tie, in my jacket that concealed a camelback filled with highly concentrated hydrocyanic acid, its hose running down the inside of the right sleeve.

  I used to wear this camelback on long hikes to gigantic climbs in Arizona or West Virginia. I used to drink water from its hose.

  Or, someone used to.

  Tonight, instead of carrying water to rehydrate my tired body, it carried a weapon I hoped I wouldn’t have to use. It was dangerous, you see. Sure, if I needed to, I could pour a little of it into a wine glass or, if I got desperate, I could spray it all over the face of some asshole who was trying to kill me. But if I got it on myself, well, that would be the end of my story. I didn’t want my story to end. I just wanted it to change.

  “Well, well. You clean up quite well, Mr. Eliot.” Synchek offered that weak hand of his, and I shook it, looking him straight in the eye.

  “I figured I should dress the part,” I said as I scanned the room for Angela.

  “Looking for Angela?” He smiled. “She’s around here somewhere. Check the podium. It’s become one of her favorite hideouts.”

  “She hides in the podium?” Actors would call this commitment to a role. I call it being a damned liar.

  Synchek laughed. “She’s a unique girl, what can I say?”

  “I guess she is. I’m going to go say hello to her, if you don’t mind.” I started walking, but he caught me by the shoulder.

  “You’ll have plenty of time to talk to her tonight.” He steered me toward the bar. “For now, let’s get you a glass of wine.”

  After a brief encounter with Conicella and Cansellini concluded with the shaking of hands and two business cards going into my wallet, we made it to the bar, where Devereaux, with his shoulders that made me hate him almost as much as my suspicion that he’d killed Virginia, was pouring himself a drink.

  Synchek began to play the good host. “Travis, I’d like you to meet –”

  “Michael Devereaux,” I cut him off.

  He eyed me, but he wasn’t confused. He knew I knew who he was. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”

  “No. But I think you knew a friend of mine. Virginia?”

  “Virginia. Hmmm.”

  “Bartender at the Lava Lounge. I think she told me you were a detective or something.” I knew he wasn’t going to deny it, but just to make sure, I added, “She went on and on about your shoulders.” Flattery, as they say, will get you everywhere.

  “Oh, right. Virginia. Of course.” He shot a glance to Synchek. “She was, um, friendly.”

  I slapped him on the shoulder. “Oh, come on now. No need to be euphemistic about it. We’re all grown men here. You can say ‘easy’. I won’t be offended.”

  He gave me an uneasy smile. “Oh. Well, um. I guess she was.”

  “I hope you were safe. She’s been with a lot of guys. Come to think of it, I think she was waiting for results from a blood test. I guess some guy she slept with called her, I don’t know, a week or two ago, and told her he was HIV positive.” I couldn’t help myself.

  And man, did he go pale. It took everything I had not to laugh at him, even if his reaction did confirm my suspicion that she’d fucked him and lied to me about it. She’d only lied about it to protect me, though, so I guess it was forgivable.

  After a moment of standing there, jaw dropped and eyes wide, he shook my hand and excused himself.

  Synchek just stood there, and he looked a little worried, so I asked if he was all right.

  “Is that true about your friend? Is she HIV positive?”

  “Why do you ask?” I poured a glass of wine.

  “This might be difficult for you,” he started, and I could tell he wanted to wring his hands, “but she’s, well, she’s dead, unless I’m mistaken.”

  I stayed cool, but gave it a hint of sadness. “I know. I work for Dick, remember?”

  “Of course. Of course.” He still seemed nervous. “Well I think you should know that she’s… I believe you and Dick brought her here the other night.”

  I was impressed by his honesty about it. “Yeah, Walter. It’s ok. I know. And no, there’s nothing to worry about. I was just fucking with Devereaux. See, I sorta had this thing for Virginia, and, well, I guess that was an immature thing to do, but it was just a revenge thing, you know? Just to get back
at him for sleeping with her.”

  He didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was relieved by the way he dropped his shoulders and sighed. “You seem to be handling the death of your friend quite well. I suppose everything went well last night?”

  That was a slip-up on his part, the usually pitch-perfect sonofabitch. Maybe he had something on his mind, something that wouldn’t allow him to keep his lies straight, something that had him spinning a little. Whatever it was, he wasn’t supposed to know about last night. “It went pretty well, I guess.”

  “What exactly was it you were doing with Gregor? Dick mentioned something about it, but we had no time to go into detail. Some type of tribal ritual, I believe?” Now, I could be wrong about this, but the man sounded genuinely interested in, perhaps even concerned with, how my butchering of Virginia had helped me cope. It didn’t sound like he thought I had anything up my sleeve, as it were.

  I told him about the Wari’s funerary ceremony thing. “And I took a little bit home so I could, uh, honor her there. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course I don’t mind, Mr. Eliot. There’s always plenty to spare, which is why we have those styrofoam takeout containers.” He laughed like he thought this was much funnier than it really was.

  I started to laugh, but decided it was not at all funny and that Walter and I were well beyond the point in our relationship where I had to pretend such things. We were, after all, planning to kill each other.

  Of course, I didn’t know if he knew what was on my mind. So I decided to find out. “So Walter, unless I’m mistaken, I think I’ve seen Mr. Devereaux around quite a bit lately.”

  His eyebrows went up – not much, but enough. “Oh?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know why, would you?”

  “Are you certain it was him?”

  “Come on, Walter. He’s enormous. He’s kind of hard to miss, don’t you think?”

  He blinked a few times.