by Susan May
Benito reluctantly turned from his work, the sound of the growing flames music to his ears. Closing the door, he walked down the empty hall. The pale green walls needed paint; scuff marks crawled along and up their surface, giving the appearance of pale tiger stripes. Soon, the wall would require more than paint.
He walked to the very end of the hall and turned toward the fire escape, pushing open the door, which complained loudly in the silence of the hour. He took the stairs, two at a time, downward to the first floor, the sound of his steps unnaturally loud, like tap shoes on the concrete.
Exiting on the first floor, he turned left. The cafeteria lay to his right, but someone could be in there at the food dispensers or the coffee machine. He’d leave there until last. Left would do for the moment.
The matches felt heavy in his pocket; tiny pieces of innocuous wood, which held such potential. Just like him. He was ordinary, but he would change the destiny of the world. Even though he couldn’t remember why, that knowledge was within his soul. He knew it as a certainty.
He entered Mr. Jacob’s room. Age eighty-two. Dementia.
Yes. Mr. Jacobs would do very well.
He moved through the darkened room to the bathroom, switching on the overhead light as he entered. The light flickered alive, the sound of buzzing electrons filling the air.
Minutes later, he’d gathered the wastebasket from the bathroom and filled it with paper. He spilled lighter fluid over it from the small tin he’d carried in his jacket pocket. Back in the room, the sound of Mr. Jacobs’ loud snores rhythmically breached the black silence like a homing beacon.
He placed the wastebasket on the floor near the bed and held a match above it. Now, the match must do its work; the sound of the strike, a thrill to his fingertips. A sizzling flare filled his sight, causing him to squint, until it settled to a bright white flame.
He casually dropped the match into the receptacle. To him, it took forever to fall. Once among the paper, it began to quickly consume the waiting fuel. Benito moved the crackling, flaming, metal bucket beneath the bed. Better this way. Mr. Jacobs wouldn’t understand, though he felt certain the elderly man would be happy knowing his death would have meaning.
Turning back toward the door, a twinge shot through his neck. Again he stretched the muscles, turning his head, as he extended them first to the left, then to the right.
At the exit he paused, watching the flames lick hungrily beneath the bed of the sleeping man. To Benito it appeared a work of art, a beach bonfire, good memories, distant and untouchable, as though they were no longer part of his history. Something blocked them, held them hostage.
The voice urged him: Complete the mission, stay straight and true.
He pulled the door shut and walked across the hall to Mrs. Simpson’s room. She was blind. He pitied her. The flames were really something to see. He had a vague memory of helping Mrs. Simpson with flowers and changing her bedclothes. Then the images vanished.
This time, he wouldn’t use the electric lights; he knew the layout of the room. A sliver of moonlight marked the floor allowing just enough light to see. He walked through the gray darkness, his body slicing through the space as though he was made of sharp edges. She had no light, so neither would he. He honored and respected these people who would shortly die for a noble cause.
One foot after the other. One match after the other. One victim after the other.
Benito opened the bathroom door, but the wastebasket wasn’t there. Frustratingly, this forced him to flick on the lights. There was the basket, behind the door.
He picked up the wastebasket and rifled through the contents. Yes, enough fuel there. Inside, a folded newspaper and scrunched up toilet paper with fruit peel scraps scattered between.
Now where?
He’d used curtains; he’d used a bed; where else could he place his work of warm art? He moved to the bathroom doorway and stood at the threshold between the small, lit room and the darkened bedroom.
Reaching into his pocket for the matches, the resonance of his hand against the fabric of his pants was of a rushing wind before a storm. The sound meant he was on the right path.
“Who is it there?”
Mrs. Simpson’s dry, raspy voice stopped him. Her eyes would be open but unseeing. A shame this beautiful sight stolen from her.
“Is that you, Sophia? What time is it, dear?”
Benito left the bathroom to stand by her bed, the wastebasket clutched in his hand along with the matches. They itched in his palm to be struck.
One moment. One more moment.
He stood, listening to her struggling breath.
“What are you doing there? I can’t see.” Her voice was cracked and hesitant from age and sleep.
The dark felt pleasant on his skin, creeping inside him, filtering through his pores and into his cells, filling him with desire to strike the match and illuminate the room.
Benito placed the basket at the end of the bed, nestled between the folds of the bedcovers. Mrs. Simpson’s frame, so shrunken from age and decay, took up only half the bed. Her mind was good but cell-by-cell time had whittled away her body.
Her voice, more urgent now: “What’s going on? I was asleep. You woke me!”
Somehow she sensed this wasn’t normal, that something was wrong. If he spoke, she would recognize Benito’s voice, the cadence of his accent, although he’d lived here all his life. His father was from India; his mother met her husband there on a sabbatical in her twenties.
Now the match.
Oh, God, the match would be such a blessing. He struck the beautifully shaped wood, so perfect for the task, the design unaltered for centuries. The sound came again, the stinging hiss, a roar, then a warm glow. Magnificent. A tumult of beauty licking into the darkness, wearing away at the darkness. So small. So delicate. So perfect.
He dropped the glowing match into the basket to meet its paper partner. They began their mating dance. The flame rushed along the paper’s edges, digging in deep, looking for more, its hunger for fuel insatiable.
“What’s that s-s-sound?”
Mrs. Simpsons’ voice came out a hiss. She smelled it now and began to understand. This wasn’t a visit to check her vitals or tuck in her bedclothes. This was a visit by a friend, come to take away the pain, take away the blindness. The view was achingly beautiful. Tiny shreds of golden-white and orange licked gently upward.
Benito pulled the bed cover across the basket, careful to leave a gap, so as not to stifle the flames. He dipped the material’s edge in so it could catch like the wick of an explosive. The fire liked the bed cover. Cotton breathes and burns. How it burned. In magnificent, leaping flames, travelling quickly up the bedclothes, it burned. Benito backed away toward the door, never taking his gaze from the vision.
Mrs. Simpson began to scream, so he couldn’t stay.
One more.
The thought traveled through his mind. One more. Just to be sure. Just to seal the deal. Four people dead meant something important. A necessary number.
He exited the room. A squealing fire alarm suddenly filled the air, earsplitting and annoying, a relentless rhythm. As though the sound was suddenly muted, his focus returned to the mission, and it became just a sound in the background.
Someone was in the hall. Andrea almost slammed into him hurrying past.
“What’s going on?” she yelled, through the screech of the alarm. “Is that Mrs. Simpson screaming?”
Andrea, two kids, a single mom always volunteered for night shift, because it suited her lifestyle. “What life?” she often said, to which Benito always nodded, not truly understanding her meaning.
She stared at him, awaiting a reply. When there came none, she shook her head and hurried past him into Mrs. Simpson’s room.
Before entering, she stopped and turned back. “Benito, are you okay?”
He couldn’t answer, wouldn’t answer anyway, because the need for one more pulled him away. He needed to keep moving. Strings of thought
s attached to his will. He couldn’t resist them. Didn’t want to resist them.
Benito turned from Andrea to travel up the hall, as he imagined her running toward Mrs. Simpson in her room, running toward the screams. It would be too late. Even these few minutes would have given the flames all the time they needed to find their way. The flaming bed in the deep darkness would greet her with its beauty and life. And death.
Someone else ran past: a middle-aged nurse. He didn’t look at Benito, didn’t stop. The man was new, only starting last week. Benito couldn’t remember his name. Now he would never know his name.
The buzz sizzled into his spine, travelling through him, under his skin like a wave. It was a vibration in his teeth and in the membranes of his eyes. This time it hurt. He stopped and gathered himself, resting his palm flat against the cool, smooth wall. Then, in the beat of a second, the buzzing and sound were gone. He looked around, his head swinging from side to side, suddenly surprised. His gaze fell on his hands as he held them up. They didn’t look as though they belonged to him as if he was an alien inside his own skin. Fear shimmied through him. Something was wrong.
Should he be here?
How had he gotten here? And why? He couldn’t remember. His last memory, a wisp of a thing, was of the end of his shift, saying goodnight to co-workers, then heading off for a meal before home.
“Goodnight Mr. Berry,” he’d said to a long-term resident in the lounge playing solitaire. Mr. Berry always had a game or two before bed. “Helps me sleep,” he would say.
“Goodnight, Carol.” He liked working with her. She got his jokes; her laughter brightened his day.
“Goodnight, Jack Backer,” he’d said, as he passed the octogenarian’s room. A sweet old guy. WW2 veteran. Always good with a story. Man, those guys suffered.
“See you tomorrow, Alan,” he’d said, after handing over the shift’s charts to his colleague, high-fiving him on the way out. He’d reminded Alan who to check on and who to leave sleeping. There’d been talk of promoting him to assistant supervisor, so he showed even more care than usual.
“Goodnight—.”
They were gone. All thoughts of before vanished, as though a veil came down like a theatre curtain. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear them anymore.
Goodnight everyone. Goodnight.
He knew every one of their names, Jack Backer, Mr. Berry, Mrs. Wales, Fred Day, all of them, the sixty-two people in his care—joint-care with the other nursing home workers. They all worked diligently to ensure their charges were comfortable. Comfortable and happy until they died.
He couldn’t feel them anymore. Suddenly all he felt was alone. The voice and him and the mission that must not fail. This was all he had. Straight and true was all he had.
The supply room was to the right. He jiggled his key in the lock and the door sprung open. Five wooden shelves, beginning at waist height, worked their way up the three walls. Below, standing at attention, were three buckets with mops. He wondered if the metal in the handles would color the flames.
He pulled the mops from the buckets, resting them against the opposite wall. From the shelves, he pulled cloths and paper towels, scrunching them together into small balls and shoving them into the buckets.
They would be here soon. He must hurry. Benito shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out the matches. He would never use all of them, the shame that it was. The muscles in his neck screamed at him again. He tilted his head, attempting to ease the burn now inside his tendons. Ten more minutes were all he needed.
Plastic containers of blue and green liquid perched in neat rows, along the shelves. Would they burn a different color? He pulled one of the three methylated spirits bottles from the shelf and twisted open the lid. He moved the container to his nose, drawing in a deep, long breath. The noxious smell sharpened his anticipation.
Quickly, he upended the bottle into the first bucket. Fumes filled the room, hitting his olfactory glands with the sweet smell of peril and possibility, sweeter than if roses filled the room.
Afraid he’d lose himself in the exquisite potency, he covered his mouth and poured the remaining two bottles into the buckets. The liquid turned the balls of white paper dark vanilla.
Reaching for one of the mops, he shoved it inside the bucket and pushed down the paper. The bucket’s wheels gave way with the pressure, skidding the container against the door.
Benito leaned forward to pull back the bucket as though it were an eager dog he needed to heel. He was ready to go. Clasping the silver metal door handle, he pushed the door ajar, allowing the bucket to move to the edge of the threshold and nestle there. It would hold the door open.
Benito turned and reached for another bucket. With the mop sticking out, it looked like a potted tree, naked of foliage. He stepped behind it, grasped the handle tightly, and pushed against it, wheeling it forward. Benito passed by his little metal partner still holding the door and swung his bucket into the middle of the hall.
Since he’d entered the closet, people had filled the hall. Cries of help came from all directions. Elderly, bewildered patients wandered lost as though they’d never before traveled outside their rooms. Confusion and fear filled the air, along with the scream of the alarm.
Benito ignored them as he wheeled the bucket along the scratched, shiny floor. To everyone he would be simply an employee sent to clean up another resident’s bodily fluid mishap.
Next stop, the lounge, two doors down. A coffee table in there perfectly suited his needs, calling to him through the building’s walls. The room would be empty thanks to the alarm.
A few minutes later, he was proved right—indeed empty and waiting for him. He didn’t hesitate, trundling the bucket to the table; where he discovered a problem. The bucket was too high to fit under the table as he’d originally envisaged.
Straight and true.
The thought echoed in his head.
Then: Let nothing stop you.
Yes, nothing would stop him. He understood his destiny. His mission.
Benito moved to plan B, upending the contents of the bucket onto the floor. He shoved the pieces under the table with the mop; the smell intoxicating, a sensory overload of perfume joy. A magazine rack by a threadbare, blue, sofa, overflowing with ancient reading material and two-week-old newspapers, caught his attention.
That would work. Dual action.
He hurriedly pulled out the contents of the wooden rack, bundled them onto the sofa, and began stuffing them between the cushions and around the curved wooden legs. The sofa now resembled a giant pincushion. The few remaining newspapers he crammed in the remaining space beneath the coffee table.
The matches prickled in his palm. For the fourth time tonight, he tore along the coarse side of the small cardboard box and watched as the match flamed to life. Standing over the sofa, he held out his hand as though he were a maestro conducting an orchestra. Steady and careful, he touched the flame to several rolled up pieces of paper, wanting to clap as each one flared alight. Now the chair was a glowing pincushion.
Benito turned to the coffee table with its decoration, above and below, of soaking wads of paper. With a flick, the match leaped from his fingers to land squarely amid the mix. This time, the paper did not come gently to life, but erupted, in what seemed to Benito a sonic boom. Circles of blue-green light spread quickly from the epicenter.
The sofa was now fully alight; already the flames reached several feet in the air. He stood, gaping at his handiwork for minutes. Yellow. White. Red. The colors perfect against the blue of the chair.
How he wanted to stay and watch.
But, more work needed doing.
He exited the lounge and returned down the hall. The door to the closet was closed, his other bucket-partner still waiting, hiding inside. Benito yanked at the door, slipped in, and seized the bucket and mop, then reentered the corridor and wheeled his prize to the center.
The hall now resembled a busy bus station, people milling everywhere, confused, lost an
d panicked. The sounds of distress, people shouting, and the alarm layered upon each other creating a surreal, slow-motion image.
Two nurses ran up and down, shouting and banging on doors. The throng grew by the second, the terror rising like a temperature gauge on its way to overload. Pajama-clad residents shuffled down toward the exits, assisted by each other or a nurse or orderly. Several used canes; Mrs. Best moved achingly slow in her Zimmer frame.
Then the overhead water sprinklers exploded.
More screaming erupted as though the downpour of water had accelerated the scene. For Benito, the alarm volume grew in his head until it was all he could hear. Like a sword through his ears, it entered and speared his brain. He wanted to put his hands to his head; the agony more than he could bear. He couldn’t. He wasn’t finished yet. The voice had said, was still saying, Straight and true. Straight and true.
“Yes, I will,” he replied, in his mind. And, somehow felt he was heard.
The water from the sprinklers made the polished-smooth floor wet and treacherous for uncertain, aged feet. One resident slipped and fell in his haste. Then another. Both were helped up, but one of the old men now leaned against a wall crying like a baby. Something was broken, judging by his contortioned face.
Benito watched, unmoved by their plight. They were part of a great plan, worthy of their sacrifice. Nobody noticed him. His five years of work here made him invisible. He pushed at the bucket, using the mop as a handle, and patiently waited as two octogenarians, Eli Kahn and Bill Baster, hobbled past him, arms entwined, moving faster than he’d ever seen them move before. He pushed the bucket in front of them. They stopped, puzzled, their mouths quivering, as they looked at him.
“Fire, Benito. Can’t you hear the alarm?”
An idea occurred to Benito, an idea that would work perfectly. He reached into the bucket, where he’d placed a container of methylated spirits on top of the cloths and paper. The contents slopped inside as he raised it up. Unscrewing the lid, he smiled back at the men.
They even smiled back.
He shook the bottle’s contents at their feet like it was ketchup. The liquid splashed their worn slippers and the bottoms of their striped pajamas. The beautiful, pungent smell came again. Even the sprinkling water couldn’t douse its perfume.
