Kill the Next One

by Federico Axat

  One cold afternoon before Christmas, Justin was trying to concentrate on an essay for his creative writing class. Kurt Cobain rasped in the background. Ted had already finished his study session: half an hour of lying on the bed with his calculus, statistics, and God knows what other textbooks, flipping through all the pages at once, like a studious octopus. Watching Ted “study” was enough to make anyone lose heart. Now Ted was about to head for the sixth floor, where the poker games went later and later every night. Ted said the other players were improving; in addition, he knew for a fact that a couple of them had concocted a stratagem to hurt his chances by joining forces and using subtle signals, which he had already deciphered. When your winnings consistently outpaced your losses, you came to expect a backlash sooner or later. He could manage it for the time being, or so he hoped. There was always the option of steering clear of the cheaters’ table, or of finding another poker venue, even if it was off campus.

  But he had time to kill before the sixth-floor games, so almost as an afterthought he asked Justin a question that he suspected his friend had been waiting for him to ask. Justin always talked about his mother, never his father, and this afternoon Ted saw that he could barely concentrate on his homework: he kept looking out the window, pacing the floor, bouncing a tennis ball off the wall. So Ted went ahead and asked the question he had held off on for so long. He suspected Justin’s father was dead or had abandoned him when he was little, but it turned out he was wrong.

  Justin’s father was alive and kicking, living in Deerfield with Mrs. Lynch and their other son, but Justin felt a deep contempt for him. Another coincidence!

  “We hardly speak,” said Justin. “Nobody knows why not.” He put on his Mass State hoodie and opened the window. An icy breeze chilled the room in a moment. He sat on the sill and lit a cigarette. He did all this mechanically, wrapped in a cloud of smoke and focusing his eyes on the past. “My father doesn’t even know why not—can you believe it? I never told him. Maybe someday I will.”

  Ted sat on his bed. The poker game could wait.

  “I’m with you. My father’s an idiot, too.”

  Justin nodded, his face turned to the window, defying the cold.

  “He thinks it’s my age, that I’m in a rebellious stage and I’ll grow out of it. My mother thinks so, too, though I act completely different with her, or at least I try to. The guy is so dumb, it never occurs to him that he might have done anything wrong. When I was little we were inseparable. My father was my idol. I wanted to be just like him. He was perfect.”

  Justin finished his cigarette and quickly shut the window. He rubbed his hands and stood by the radiator to warm up.

  “My father and I are like two peas,” he said with resignation. “We look like clones. If I showed you a picture of him from thirty years ago, you’d think it was me, except for the aviator glasses and the bell-bottoms. Anyway, I guess that had something to do with how close we were, or maybe not. I don’t know. There was a special connection. It wasn’t the same with my brother, for example. Do you have brothers or sisters?”

  Ted shook his head.

  “Sorry I’m talking your ear off like this. You’ve got to go.”

  “Don’t worry about it, man. Go ahead—get it out.”

  “My father’s an electrician. His own boss. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait for school vacation to come around so I could go with him in his van. We’d drive all over, buying materials and doing jobs. He used to tell me I was his helper and one day I’d be just like him. That was all I wanted to hear, I swear. Whenever anybody asked me back then what I wanted to be, I said an electrician. No hesitation. Like that.”

  Justin snapped his fingers.

  “There were three or four stores my father shopped at regularly. A couple of them had these salesgirls my father always flirted with. Then they’d joke around with me and tell me I shouldn’t tell my mother anything. Of course I never did tell her, ever. When we went to a house to do a job and a woman let us in, it was more of the same. He’d tell me things like, ‘Don’t say anything to Mommy, Justin, because you know how she is: she’ll be sad if she finds out.’ He said it didn’t mean he didn’t love her, that we men liked to flirt with other women—crap like that.” Justin shook his head. “I know it sounds kind of stupid now, but I was convinced it was true, Ted. My father would say things like, ‘Did you see that salesgirl staring at my biceps? I flexed it on purpose, so she’d notice.’ If a good-looking woman came on TV, if my mother wasn’t watching, he’d point to her and make faces at me. And I was eight years old! He was like that all the time. Except by the time I turned twelve, he wasn’t just flirting. He had occasional flings with several of those women.”

  Ted was listening as closely as he ever had to another human being. He was thinking about all sorts of things, among them that he was almost certain this was why he and Justin had ended up sharing a room. The housing office people had definitely done a masterful job.

  “You know what’s worse?”

  “What?”

  “When I turned sixteen I started acting just like him. Because I was convinced men were supposed to behave like that. I think of myself as a smart guy, Ted. Not so smart as you!” Justin laughed. “But not stupid. And let me tell you, I never questioned what my father had taught me. It was as if his words were handed down by the gods, like they were the truth. By then I had realized that my mother, who is no fool, either, had some pretty strong suspicions, maybe more than suspicions, about my father’s running around. And I really do love my mother, more than anyone in the world. How was it that I never questioned something that could hurt her?”

  “Well, you realized it in time. That’s the important thing.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Nevermind had stopped playing at some point. Now it was as quiet as it ever got on a Friday night in a student dorm. The noise policy was pretty strict, but on weekends everybody loosened up quite a bit.

  “It’s funny,” Justin reflected. “I’ve never told anyone about this. The closest I came was mentioning in my college application essay that my relationship with my father was a disaster, but that’s as much as I said. I’ve never told anyone why I despise him.”

  Ted didn’t know what to say. He was deeply moved, or so he thought.

  “At first he didn’t understand why I wanted to distance myself from him,” Justin went on. “Not like he understands it now. It’s just that he’s come to accept it. But he keeps making these pathetic attempts to get closer, and he almost always does it by trying to talk to me about women. He thinks that’s the easiest way for us to connect. It’s so sad. Last year I brought my girlfriend home. The first girl I’ve introduced to my family. Her name is Lila—I think I’ve mentioned her.” He pointed at her photo on the wall. “You can see, Lila isn’t exactly…a knockout. The thing is…”

  Justin jumped up, his head in his hands.

  “God, what’s gotten into me? I haven’t stopped talking. You must think I’m…”

  Ted stood and put a hand on Justin’s shoulder.

  “Not a problem. Someday I’ll make you listen to me griping about my father,” Ted said, though he had no intention of revealing his own story. “It’ll be a hard-fought battle of the idiots, I swear. So what happened with Lila?”

  Justin stood frozen in thought.

  “After Lila went home,” he finally said, “my father came over and told me I could do a lot better than her. He winked at me and smiled. Can you believe it? I met Lila by chance, through a friend, and you know what? One of the first things I imagined after Lila and I were introduced was what my father would say about her. And that was exactly what he did say. That’s how well I know the son of a bitch.”

  “Maybe that’s why you fell for her.”

  “Maybe so. The truth is, Lila and I don’t have much in common.”

  Justin laughed.

  “Our conversations have been sort of cold lately. And living so far away—I really don’t know.” He sud
denly stopped. “Don’t you have to run upstairs and start ripping off those twits?”

  Ted shrugged.

  “I’m giving them the day off,” he replied. “I made plenty yesterday. You want to go have a couple of beers? I’m buying.”

  “Sure!”

  Ted put on his leather jacket and a cap with earflaps. Justin left room 503, the Box, and Ted followed. It was too early to be certain, but he was starting to think he was developing a genuine friendship with Justin.

  A genuine friendship. For the first time in his life.

  59

  1994

  The harsh winter of 1994 marked a turning point in Justin Lynch’s life. He broke off with Lila in a short phone conversation and his academic efforts took a nosedive. One event didn’t cause the other, though both had the same origin. He was starting to realize that the only reason he was at college was because he didn’t want to be a fucking electrician like his father. Getting a university education was another means of punishing him, of acting in a way that he found incomprehensible. Lila was more of the same, though her case was more transparent. He had picked a girlfriend who he knew his father, the Casanova of Deerfield, would never have chosen for himself or for his son. Justin’s college career was more of the same. It was all bullshit. His father had become a black hole, pulling everything near him down into a bottomless pit. Whether Justin did things to please his father or to earn his hatred, the universe still revolved around him.

  Justin began to consider—a little late in the game, he felt—what he wanted to do with his life. Did he really want to study English lit? Reading was one of the few activities that awoke a glimmer of redemption in him, like a distant glimpse of beauty in this gloom-bedimmed world. What he wasn’t so clear about was whether he was willing to submit to the requirements for the major, not to mention the rhythms of university life. And the exams! One way to avoid the issue was by allowing his academic career to slowly founder while he immersed himself in compulsive extracurricular reading: Kafka, Melville, Borges, Lovecraft. The poetry of Sylvia Plath, who grew up in Massachusetts and went to college just down the road from Deerfield, and who suffered from depression for most of her life and ultimately committed suicide, captured his attention almost to the point of obsession. This was, of course, not an optimal reading list for someone who was slipping nearer, day by day, to the mouth of the abyss.

  Ted witnessed Justin’s slide and was the only one who tried to help him. He did what he could, from keeping an eye on details, such as urging Justin to shave or take a shower, to tackling bigger things, like walking him to his classes and giving him advice. He wasn’t having much luck at it.

  Justin started keeping a diary of sorts, into which he poured out his thoughts, half-baked poetry, and dense paragraphs brimming with despair. He carried that notebook with him everywhere. At night he would take long walks around campus, lie down somewhere, sometimes even fall asleep on a park bench. His nocturnal habits got him into trouble with campus security. Sometimes Ted, who had to work the sixth floor harder and harder to cover his costs, would come home in the early hours of the morning and find that Justin had not yet returned.

  One of those nights Ted lay in bed exhausted, staring at his friend’s empty bed. He couldn’t remember doing anything meaningful for another person since he was a kid, and tonight he decided he really wanted to do something. Something to shake Justin out of his downward spiral. He got up and dressed. He had a pretty good idea of where his roommate went on his nightly walks, and in less than an hour Ted tracked him down. He found Justin sitting on a bench in an unkempt, poorly lit corner of campus, in back of the library. If it hadn’t been for the lit cigarette, Ted probably would have missed him in the dense darkness.

  He sat next to Justin without a word and put his hand on his shoulder for a moment.

  “I guess I’ve become predictable,” Justin said. A puff of white flew from his mouth. The cold was intense; it would snow at any minute.

  And now, for the first time, Ted allowed himself to talk about his father. It wasn’t a detailed report—just the minimum necessary to let Justin know that he, too, understood what it was to have a father who shat all over his family. Ted spoke briefly of the trips to Miller’s house for chess lessons and the double life his father had led. Justin seemed quite struck—not by the story itself, but by the fact that Ted would open up and talk about such personal matters. Until this moment, Ted’s entire life had been an enigma.

  “I hate him, too,” Ted said, “and I’m not going to try and convince you that life isn’t a crock of shit, because it is. And if guys like your father or mine are the guilty ones, well, so are the slackers I sit down to play poker with night after night. And the spoiled frat boys. Pricks. They’re all responsible. You know how I know? Because I feel it, too. That emptiness. I feel it, too.”

  Ted fell silent. They both sat awhile without talking.

  “They’re responsible for that gaping hole,” Ted said, more ominously now. “The question, you know, is what we should do about it.”

  “I don’t know. I’m sick and tired of lying to my mother. I’m thinking about dropping out.”

  “That’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. Because then they win. Can’t you see? That’s what they want—to shove you into the shithole. I know it might be easier to give up. Believe me, I know. But you have to find a way to make things work out for you. I’m going to graduate from this fucking university, I’m going to get married, I’m going to have kids and a big house, maybe even a weekend house. I’m going to be rich!”

  Justin smiled.

  “I wish I had your confidence, Ted McKay.”

  “Look, Justin. Sure, I’m good at memorizing the damn textbooks. I have that in my favor. Everybody has his strong points. And don’t tell me I don’t know yours. You should put them to use, find a way to feed the beast, learn to live with it.”

  “You make it sound simple.”

  “It is! Believe me, it is. This darkness is…like an awful parasite that will always be with you. You can’t let it eat you alive.”

  Justin ground out his cigarette under his boot.

  “Who was that girl you were telling me about?” Ted asked. “The one in your creative writing class.”

  “Denise Garrett.”

  “Right. What’s new with her?”

  “I don’t know. We talk sometimes. But I haven’t shown up there much lately.”

  “Invite her to dinner or a movie. It could be the start of something.”

  Justin nodded.

  “And now let’s get moving, because I can’t feel my ears anymore,” Ted said. “I forgot my hat, damn it.”

  They walked back to the Box, talking in a more relaxed tone, laughing and rubbing shoulders while never taking their hands from their pockets.

  “So I’m a slow learner,” Justin said. “At least I’m good-looking.”

  “Precisely. I was afraid you wouldn’t get it.”

  “Prick.”

  “But a prick who cares, asshole.”

  60

  1994

  Things seemed to be looking up with the arrival of spring. Justin buckled down with his schoolwork and forced himself to spend a certain number of hours studying every day. He also got a job working two days a week at the library. He still hadn’t asked Denise Garrett on a date, but he would do so anytime now. Ted himself was going out with a girl from one of his classes, and seeing them together encouraged Justin, though he had a feeling that Denise was in a relationship already; she hadn’t said so directly, but she’d hinted at a boyfriend back home. She behaved strangely with him, especially in the classes they shared, as if Justin’s presence made her uncomfortable somehow. Ted told Justin not to worry, that there was a list of girls interested in him as long as his arm.

  But Justin didn’t feel completely out of the woods yet. He was still reading Sylvia Plath and filling his notebook with apocalyptic notions; he also continued taking his solitary night walks, though at least
now he felt as though he had things under control, as though everything else in his life were moving forward. Maybe Ted was right after all. What had Ted told him that freezing night? That he had to feed his inner beast, and if he did, everything would turn out okay. And he was right about it. Of course he was! Ted was a fucking genius.

  But then on April 8, 1994, terrible news rocked the campus of Massachusetts State, and the world.

  Ted was in the dining hall. Today he was on dishwasher duty, a task he loathed, though it had the advantage of letting him work while wearing headphones and plugged into his new Discman. He’d been doing that for the past hour, steering clear of talking to his fellow workers, with whom he rarely interacted. At some point a group of them congregated in a corner of the huge kitchen. They seemed worked up about something, but Ted couldn’t care less. If the supervisor had anything to tell them, he’d come and talk to them directly. Ted was humming along with a Soundgarden album when Justin showed up, looking excited or upset, and grabbed him by the shoulder. Justin never went looking for him at work. Ted took off his headphones and set down the glass he was drying. Justin told him the news that had been making the rounds. News that had just been confirmed.

  Kurt Cobain had shot himself to death at his Seattle home.

  As might have been expected, several versions of the story circulated during those early hours, but the suicide story was the most common. It was later determined that Kurt had escaped from a detox center and had taken this drastic step after spending several days alone and out of contact. A letter he left behind made a huge impact on MSU students, and on Justin Lynch in particular. That spring Kurt’s songs were heard more often in the rooms of the Box than ever before.

  A week after the tragic news, Ted went to the movies with Georgia McKenzie, the girl he had started going out with a few weeks earlier. Things were going quite well between them. Georgia was pretty and uninhibited, a middling student who couldn’t understand her new boyfriend and who may have fallen in love with him for that very reason. She wasn’t the demanding sort, one of those girls who want their boyfriends’ lives to revolve around them. Ted and Georgia would get together for a couple of hours on the weekend—bed-creaking included—and would meet on an occasional weekday to kiss and do a bit of studying side by side. That was all.