The King

by Steven James

  You could get a gun like you were going to use in high school. Or use pills like Mom. Or jump from a bridge or a railroad trestle. A cliff. There are plenty of—

  Another voice inside of him shouted, Stop it!

  Drowning? Tying a weight to your feet and jumping into Allatoona Lake? Suffocation? A plastic bag over your head?

  He considered those last two options for a moment but realized that to him, the thought of drowning or suffocating was simply too disturbing.

  A blade, yes.

  A knife really was the best choice.

  But not slitting an artery. Something more honorable.

  He could stab it into his abdomen—yes, yes—lean forward onto the blade like samurais did long ago. But he would need to make sure the blade was long enough to angle up into his heart. He didn’t know much about stab wounds, but he’d heard enough to know that if he ended up stabbing himself just in the abdomen, it would take him a long time to die. And it would not be a pleasant death at all. He would make sure that he didn’t—

  Why? Why are you even thinking this?!

  Because you’re a corpse in the making, Corey. Just like everyone. But you have control over the moment when you reach your destiny. And unlike most people, you have the courage to make it happen today. Right here. Right now.

  How do people live with the knowledge that they’ll be gone so soon? How do they go about their daily lives, watch their movies, sip their cappuccinos, birth their babies, and go to school or work or church with the knowledge that they might stop breathing any second?

  Denial.

  Constant denial.

  It’s the only way.

  Unless there’s something better waiting for you after death, Corey.

  Yes, unless.

  He returned to the kitchen, went to the knife block, removed the longest one, and walked to the living room.

  Not all of us succeed in this life, but there’s one thing everyone who’s ever been born has succeeded at—dying. And the world simply twirls on, the universe forgetting we were ever here.

  Corey went to the living room, where he could have a view of the forest outside, the woods opening wide and full in the spring. There’s nothing like spring in Atlanta.

  He would die looking at the blossoming trees.

  With each moment the question of why he was doing this felt less and less pertinent, like a blurry memory someone he used to be was having.

  Free will.

  Free to live, to choose.

  Free to die, if we desire it.

  Kneeling, he drew his shirt up and positioned the tip of the blade against his stomach just below the sternum.

  Like mother, like son.

  Get this right. You need to get this right or it’s going to be a long and messy, messy death.

  When the decision finally came, it was almost a reassurance that finally, now, things could move on, just as they were meant to, a man passing away into his destiny in the grave.

  He let out a deep breath to relax the muscles in his abdomen so the blade would slide in easier, then he tightened his grip on the knife’s handle so it would go in at the proper angle.

  Corey closed his eyes.

  And with a swift, smooth motion he drove the blade high into his abdomen aimed at his heart as he leaned forward and then used the force of impact with the floor to bury the knife in up to the handle.

  He fell limply to the side.

  There was less pain than he expected.

  At first.

  But based on the position of the handle he guessed the tip had found its mark.

  The pain began as a tight circle of warmth unfurling through him, turning hotter and brighter with every passing second until it felt like a strange companion, as if it were something he’d always had close by, but had only now, in this moment, begun to experience fully.

  He wasn’t certain he’d hit his heart, but it must have been close, because with each heartbeat, the handle quivered slightly, as if it were choreographed to do so, somehow programmed to move in sync with the arrival of his death.

  That’s when the pain began convulsing through him, and that’s when the questions came.

  He wondered if hell was real, if that’s where he would go for doing this, for taking his own life—for this self-murder—or if heaven awaited him, if he’d ever done enough to deserve it.

  A preacher’s words came to him from a sermon he’d heard on the radio one time while driving through central Georgia: “It’s not about what you have done for God, brothers and sisters, but about what God has done for you. Amen?”

  So, had he believed in that enough to receive it?

  Your mother—is she in heaven? Did she go to hell for the things she did to her children on those days when she’d had too much to drink? Will you see her again when you die?

  Just seconds after he thought that, he heard the front door click open.

  Confused, Corey turned his head toward the hallway, but with no clear view to the front of the house, he saw nothing.

  However, he did hear footsteps coming down the hall: two people, he thought, but it was hard to tell, because sound and light were merging with the pain rushing through him, the pain that was engulfing every one of his senses and then blistering apart inside of his chest.

  Reality itself was becoming fuzzy around the edges.

  All so confusing.

  And it hurt. It really, really hurt.

  He grasped the handle to draw out the blade, but as soon as he moved it even just slightly, a new shot of pain ripped through him and he had to let go.

  He drew in a weak breath and watched the handle quiver as he did.

  The footsteps drew closer.

  “Who’s there?” He tried to speak loudly, but the words were so soft that he was certain no one could have heard them—not even if they’d been in the room with him.

  The pain grew tighter and sharper with each breath. Dying wasn’t turning out to be at all like they made it seem in the movies. This was no gentle escape into the unknown, this was more like a terrifying descent into a scream you’ve tried your whole life to hold back inside of you.

  “Help me, I . . .” This time the words were even softer, barely louder than a breath—

  A voice came from the hallway, strong, masculine: “He’s in here!”

  A woman and a young man whom Corey didn’t recognize entered the living room and strode toward him. He wanted to tell them that he hadn’t meant to do this, any of this, that he just hadn’t been thinking clearly and had made a terrible mistake, and if they would only help him, he would be okay and—

  The man knelt beside him and pressed a pair of fingers gently against the side of Corey’s neck to check his pulse. “He’s still alive.”

  The woman watched silently. “Give it a few minutes. It shouldn’t be long.”

  A cold gust of fear swallowed Corey.

  The man moved back to his partner’s side.

  No!

  Corey tried to cry out for help but ended up making no sound at all.

  And that was the last time he would try to speak, the last time he would try to do anything at all, because after that everything that happened was natural and inevitable and no longer a matter of the will. Nature ran its course, the universe claimed its next life, and at 5:57 a.m. Corey Wellington died in strangled, wet silence as the clock just above him on the wall ticked off the seconds, edging its way into the minutes and hours and years that might have been his to enjoy if only he had not chosen to murder himself.

  The couple stood by until his chest was no longer moving. At last the man, who was twenty-five, blond and well built, checked Corey’s pulse again. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” the woman said. At thirty-six she was still in stunning shape, had short, stylish light red hair, distinctive green eye
s, and a steely, unwavering gaze.

  The man stood. “Do you ever wonder what’s going through their minds when they do it?”

  “I don’t think that’s something you would really want to find out.”

  “No. You’re right. I . . . I just . . . I wonder sometimes.”

  She turned from the corpse. “Check the medicine cabinet. I’ll look in the kitchen and the bedroom.”

  “Right.”

  After they’d retrieved what they’d come here for, as well as the two cameras that had been hidden in the home, the man asked his partner, “So, what now? Up to Boston?”

  “No. We won’t be visiting there until next Thursday. First, we need to get back to Chennai—pay a little visit to the people at the production factory.”

  “Back to India? I thought we were going to go to—”

  “The time frame has changed.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Now you do.”

  Without another word, she led him outside to the car, and they left for the airport while Corey’s still-warm corpse lay on the living room floor soaked in blood, less than an hour after he’d awakened expecting to head to work for another ordinary day at the office after his shower and customary cup of strong, black, morning coffee.

  1

  36 hours later Friday, April 5 6:01 p.m.

  “Of all the animals I would rather not be,” my eighteen-year-old daughter, Tessa, said reflectively, “I think a bird poop frog is at the top of the list.”

  I glanced across the picnic basket at her. “A bird poop frog.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not even a real animal.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “You’re telling me there’s a species of amphibian out there that some scientist actually named a ‘bird poop frog’?”

  “I’m not sure what the official scientific name is, but yeah, it’s commonly called a bird poop frog.”

  “You’re being serious?”

  “Look it up.”

  I processed that. “Well, then I’d say being one of those would be almost as unfortunate as being born an albino chameleon.”

  She gave me a slight head tilt of approval. “Actually, that was not a bad line, Patrick.”

  “Thank you. I study under a world-class witticist.”

  She knew I was talking about her and looked pleased. “I wish that actually were a word: witticist. It should be. I like it.”

  As she took a sip of root beer, a swoop of her midnight-black hair fell across one of her eyes and she gently flicked it back. Today she had on her bloodred fingernail polish and dark eyeliner, and wore canvas sneakers, skinny jeans, and a faded gray T-shirt with an electric guitar splayed across the periodic table with the words METAL IS ELEMENTAL imprinted below it.

  She was never the pink skirts and hair bow and bubblegum kind of girl. More tattoos and death metal and Kierkegaard. With her pierced nose, eyebrow ring, and the line of straight scars down her right forearm from her cutting days, she’d channeled a little of her inner emo.

  However, when you threw in the PETA and Amnesty International buttons she wore, her hemp bracelets and the canvas messenger bag she used as a purse, and the cigarettes she sometimes snuck out, you could see she’d managed to merge it with a Greenwich Village, artsy vibe. She had a paradoxically hard-edged innocence about her, a bristlingly sharp intelligence, and a heart that had already seen too much pain.

  “So what made you think of that?” I asked.

  “Of what?”

  “Bird poop frogs.”

  “Just what happened to your sandwich a minute ago when you were texting Lien-hua.”

  I stared at the sandwich on the picnic cloth. It looked clear of bird poop. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Possibly.”

  I investigated the sandwich carefully to make sure, and it looked fine, but I covered it with one of the plates just to avoid any actual incidents.

  Despite the placid clouds and the fresh taste of spring in the air, only a handful of people were in the field on this end of the park—a young woman of Middle Eastern descent, early twenties, slight limp in her left leg, pushing a baby in a stroller on the path west of us; a Caucasian male, medium build, brown hair, mid-thirties, tossing a Frisbee to a border collie; and a college-aged couple about eighty meters away who, over the last few minutes, had become less and less interested in their own picnic than in staring longingly into each other’s eyes. Dinner did not appear to be on their minds any longer.

  Five kilometers of walking trails wove through the woods beyond them. In February, a woman’s body had been found a hundred meters from the trailhead. Metro PD had asked the Bureau for help and I’d worked with them on it, but the case was still open. No suspects yet.

  Scavengers had gotten to the corpse before it was discovered. I thought of that now, of seeing the disarticulated remains, and I tried to shake the images loose so I’d still have an appetite for supper.

  I glanced at the incoming text on my phone, and Tessa’s eyes followed mine. “So, is she on her way?”

  “Just parked. Looks like she should be here in a couple minutes.”

  My fiancée, Special Agent Lien-hua Jiang, was a profiler and one of my coworkers on the Bureau’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, where I split my time between consulting on cases nationwide and my teaching responsibilities at the Academy.

  Tessa set down her root beer, touched her hair back again, and quietly studied the cumulus clouds piled soft and high in the sky above us. I knew her well enough to guess that a poem about the sky, perhaps its contradictory qualities of tranquillity and ferocity, was already forming in her head.

  We’d met when she was fifteen and living with her mother, Christie Ellis, the woman I was seeing at the time. Christie died tragically and unexpectedly of breast cancer five months after we were married—less than a year after we met. Tessa’s dad had never been in the picture, so I ended up with custody of her, and at thirty-five, I’d suddenly become the sole caregiver of a teenage girl I hadn’t raised and barely knew.

  In the wake of Christie’s death, Tessa, who kept her mother’s last name of Ellis, had become withdrawn and started cutting. I was clueless as to how to connect with her, and things were really rough between us for a long time. Fortunately over the last year or so they’d improved, and now she wasn’t just the girl I’d ended up with when her mom died, but the daughter I fiercely loved, would do anything for, and couldn’t imagine living without.

  Over time, the “step” part of stepfather and stepdaughter had disappeared from our vocabulary, and I wasn’t upset about that at all.

  She took a deep breath and then steered the conversation in an entirely different direction. “So anyway, our assistant principal, you know, Thacker? He asked me to write something for graduation.”

  “Write something?”

  “Yeah . . .” She hesitated. “Sort of like a speech.”

  “What does that mean: ‘sort of like a speech’?”

  “A speech.”

  “Ah.” Earlier this year she’d thrown up in her speech class just getting up in front of a dozen classmates. I couldn’t imagine how speaking in front of a thousand people would work out. “And does that mean write one or give one?”

  “Well, both. But there’s no way I’m gonna give a speech, and there’s no way I’m gonna write one that I’m not gonna give.”

  Over the winter we’d moved here to DC from Denver, and although her stellar GPA had transferred, according to school policy, since she hadn’t attended here at least one year, she wasn’t in the running for valedictorian. However, her near-perfect SAT score was something the administration couldn’t ignore.

  She’d found two grammatical errors while taking the test (a missing comma and a misuse of the past tense of “lay”) and had pu
rposely gotten those two questions wrong as a way of protesting “having to proofread their stupid test for them.”

  She could’ve gotten a free ride at nearly any college in the country, but she still had no idea where she wanted to go and still hadn’t applied anywhere. As more application deadlines slipped past, I’d been pressing her to at least send out some applications, but she was procrastinating and it’d become a sore spot for both of us. However, for now, I left all that alone.

  “How did that go over, then? When you told Thacker you weren’t going to write it?”

  “Well, I haven’t. Exactly.”

  “You haven’t.”

  “Not exactly.

  “So, not at all.”

  “Um, yeah.” She let out a breath. “Thing is, I was gonna do it on Monday—tell him, you know? But . . .”

  She waited a long time, and finally I said, “But?”

  “But there’s someone who I think . . . well, there’s this extenuating circumstance.”

  “You mean there’s a guy.”

  She looked at me incredulously. “I thought you were supposed to be the one who’s always gathering all this evidence before drawing any conclusions? Aren’t you the guy who says we’re never supposed to assume, but ‘hypothesize, evaluate, test, and revise’?”

  “So it’s not a guy?”

  “No, it is, but that’s not the . . .” She sighed with her eyeballs. “Never mind.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what the connection was between a boy and her doing the speech, but I took what she’d just said to mean that in some way writing it might impress him. “Is this the guy you were telling me about last week, by any chance? Aiden Ryeson?”

  She was quiet.

  Normally she went for guys three or four years older than her, and I was actually relieved this boy was in her class. “He’s that cute, huh?”

  She shrugged. Then suddenly her eyes grew huge. “You so better not do a background check on him. I seriously hate it when you do that.”

  I’d only done a few of those on her potential boyfriends; it wasn’t like it was a habit or anything. “You know I have nothing against you dating respectable guys,” I told her somewhat evasively.