Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  I know the getaway was clean—I have been eating at that place every other day for a few weeks now, so I knew the layout, where to park, and so on. But really, my odds of escape have less to do with my own ability, and more to do with the ineptitude of others. The police are probably still outside the restaurant, positioning snipers and negotiating with a ghost. If the cameras were even recording, all they have is maybe ten or fifteen seconds that shows nothing useful. What I look like now, I never will again. All the bystanders outside saw as we fled was a white man in a baseball cap, carrying a child from danger. I will barely even register in short-term memory. Eyewitnesses? I shot two with phones and the rest ate the floor; anything they have to say is going to be mixed and contradictory. It always is.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Tall, but on the average side.”

  “Hair?”

  “Light black. Is that gray? Gray, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “What color was his car?”

  “Darkish.”

  “What kind?”

  “Average? Mid-size maybe?”

  “Domestic or foreign?”

  “Him, or the car?”

  In the first few hours, they will try to track the phones I took, a chirping, 3G breadcrumb trail for them to follow with their IMSI catchers, but that would only be possible if I was stupid enough to not pop the batteries and destroy the SIMs. Over the next few days, they will scour the scene for forensic evidence, spent cartridges, and stray hairs. They will search their databases and find no match, because I do not exist there. Over the next few weeks, they will look for patterns, but I will not do what I just did ever again. I will not revisit the scene of the crime, no matter what. I am not in this for fame, or infamy. This is what I do. And so I will probably get away. As I have before. And, hopefully, will again.

  Still, a healthy paranoia keeps me checking mirrors for flashing lights, which is how I notice her watching me in the rear view, jagged arcs down her cheeks, dark smears interrupting the current where her hands have tried to wipe it away. Everything is just gray on gray in the evening light, but every time a car passes there is a moment when everything is all lit up in red, like a warning. A vivid reminder that while they might not be looking for me, they will be looking for her. She is a liability. A ticking bomb full of baby teeth.

  We exit at 234 and I migrate south. There is a long light at Lomond, and with two minutes of silence to fill I peek in the mirror. Words, words. Say something. To think this all started over …

  “Ice cream,” I say, a bit too loudly. Her expression does not change. I try again, turning in my seat, halving the distance between our eyes. “You wanted ice cream. Right?”

  I expect nothing, am shocked to get a nod and a sniffle. Something to work with.

  It only takes a few minutes to get to the mall, where I begin looking for a dark spot, quickly finding one beside a van that looks like it has been in the same place for days. Safe bet it will still be there for another fifteen minutes. All I need.

  I slip the car into park and turn off the engine. Consider. The ice cream kiosk is in the center of the mall and we are at one end. I am clean enough, sans trenchcoat, but the girl is not, and despite the fact there are likely more than a few teens in this mall whose makeup looks like bleeding, she would draw unwanted attention. I will have to leave her.

  “Stay here,” I say. “Just lie down. I will be right back with your ice cream. What kind do you want?”

  She declines to answer.

  “You have to tell me what you want. Or no ice cream.” I jangle my keys. I generally dislike idle threats, but they work so well on children.

  “Plain,” she says as the key hits the ignition.

  “Plain? You mean vanilla? There are thirty flavors and you want vanilla?”

  She nods. Briefly I consider arguing the point further, but instead I get out, lock the door, and head inside. She wants vanilla, she gets vanilla. Not that it matters anyway. When I get back, she will probably be gone. And that is probably for the best.

  • • •

  Why did I stay? I have no idea. Not even after all this time. I had every reason to run. He was a stranger, and strangers were bad. Not the kind my parents had warned me about, either, with a van full of candy and puppies. A murderer. How many had he killed? The man at the counter, a few others for sure. Maybe my sister’s friends. Maybe my sister. Maybe me, soon.

  I should’ve run away, found a guard or a policeman or a mother. Anyone, really. Even another stranger. How could they have been any worse than him? Whoever I found, they could’ve saved me and arrested him and then I’d be safe.

  But if he was going to kill me, why was he buying me ice cream?

  Funny … you know, I think it was the ice cream. Blood, tears, noise, and despite all that, all I could think about was dessert.

  I should’ve asked for sprinkles.

  • • •

  For a moment, when I return, I think she is gone; she is well hidden in the shadows. Only her reflection on the window betrays her. I am admittedly a bit shocked, but only just; I did, after all, buy two cones. I like to be prepared for any eventuality, including the unlikeliest.

  Somehow I manage to fumble a key in the lock, open the door, and slide in without tipping the cones. She hardly reacts except to reach up and feebly take her ice cream from my hand. And now she has her vanilla, and I have my orange sherbet, which I can safely eat without dying since it is egg-free. The list of things I am unable to eat is almost as long as the list of people I have killed. Likely longer.

  I turn on the light and watch her little pink tongue carve icy little troughs, trying to think of words. Sentences. Conversation. For a few minutes, there is nothing but licking and the little panting gasps between licks as we catch our breaths.

  “Do you have a name?” I try.

  She does not answer. This will not do.

  “Listen,” I say. “I realize you are scared. I am a stranger. But we have to be able to talk. And seeing as I just bought you an ice cream, I think you owe me a little cooperation.”

  She stops licking.

  “Tell me your name,” I say.

  Words half-emerge through a glob of vanilla ice cream.

  “Swallow first. Talking with your mouth full is rude.”

  “Christian,” she says at last, meekly. It comes out like a sigh, like a dying breath.

  “Odd name for a girl,” I say, wondering if she is lying. No, why would she? Not yet, at least. “Are you? Or are your parents just American Psycho fans?”

  Blank stare.

  “Have you gone to church? Drank blood? Rubbed ashes on your forehead? Told a man in a closet that you felt guilty about being alive?”

  A long pause. “No.”

  “Good. Religion is best avoided. The world is bad enough without imagining some sky person made it that way on purpose. Now, what else? How old are you?”

  “Eight,” she says.

  “Good. And are you …” Conversation, not interrogation. “How about you ask me a question now. Go ahead. Ask me anything.”

  She thinks for a long while, but I do not prompt.

  “What’s your name?” she asks, eventually. Victory. Braver than I thought.

  “I am nobody important. Nobody and everyman. Alpha and omega. I am the egg-allergic man. I am the walrus. Goo goo achoo.”

  I mime a sneeze, make a face, and she smirks. “You’re crazy.”

  “So they say.” They. They do, in fact.

  “Did you go crazy from eating eggs?” she asks.

  “No. Eating eggs would just make me very sick.”

  “Would you die?”

  I wonder for a moment if she is just curious, somehow worried, or plotting my demise. That would be a hell of a way to go.

  “I might die. I have some medicine just in case, though.” I tap the glove compartment, but that is hardly the only place I keep it. I believe in redundancy.

  “Any more questions? Other tha
n those involving my death?”

  She nods her head and begins to speak, but I quickly add, “Or my name.”

  She frowns and gives a little shrug. I sigh.

  “Look, names do not matter past hello, and we are well beyond that already.”

  “Then why did you want to know my name?” she asks, licking her cone.

  Ice cream has mingled with the blood on her cheeks. I do not point this out as it would certainly horrify her, and I do not wish to lose ground recently gained. I just devour the remainder of my sherbet, start the car, and pull out of our spot. I swing directly towards the street, cutting a wide swath across empty parking spaces, spreading a few puddles as we cross insignificant, impotent yellow lines. Thinking, hesitating, second-guessing myself.

  When we reach the street, I stop to wait for a gap in the traffic. I peek into the mirror, and of course she is watching me. Waiting. I lower my eyes, close them, and decide.

  “Edison North,” I say to the dashboard. “My name is Edison North.”

  Then I pull into traffic and leave the past behind.

  I open my eyes a few blocks later.

  In Hot Water

  09/08/2008

  Most people are ignorant on purpose. They studiously avoid seeing things right under their noses: climate change, the beggar at the off-ramp, children being abused. This attitude is not without merit. Knowing about something is useless unless you can do something about it.

  For example, take Man-Portable Air Defense Systems, shoulder-fired rockets that can travel at twice the speed of sound. Some call them the second greatest worry outside of suitcase nukes; the folks on TWA 800 would probably have ranked them higher. They are easily concealed and incredibly easy to operate—any moron can use one. And there are a lot of morons around.

  As I type this, there are about a thousand unaccounted-for MANPADS loose in the world, according to my sources. Does knowing that fact do any good, if there is nothing anyone can do about it? Or would it be better to not know and thus not worry about it?

  In keeping with this philosophy, my neighbors choose not to notice me, just as I choose not to notice that the woman next door sells pot, or that the guy upstairs beats his wife and kids. So nobody notices when I carry a small girl into my apartment. Or rather, they do, and then they tune it out and go back to licking their own asses. Humanity is a vestigial tail on the ass-end of the universe, wasteful and shitty. I live in the litter box.

  This month, home is a two-bedroom shithole in a low-income complex thirty miles or so west of Washington, DC, in a town called Manassas where people are still fighting the War of Northern Aggression. Manassas is close enough to the capital for “work,” but far enough away that there are far fewer security and traffic cameras around. Being a tri-state area (if you count DC), there is a wide variety of license plates to steal. Escape routes are plentiful, too. I am nine hours from Canada, within ten of a few dozen major cities. There are three major airports and an extensive light rail system, not to mention plenty of coastline just a few hours away, and—in a pinch—the Appalachian Trail. I think things are safe for now, but the more options, the better.

  My guest probably wants to run, but right now she is more focused on “fright” than “fight or flight.” I feel it in the way she clutches my shoulder on the walk from the nearby mini-mall where I parked. I see it in her eyes, reflected in my television the moment I lock the door. All those stories are circling in her head. Never talk to strangers. Never take candy from strangers. Never accept rides from strangers. And I am a stranger, and of course I am going to kill her.

  But first, a shower.

  I set the girl down, dump my trench on the back of the couch, and pull off my shirt and holster. The shirt goes atop a pile in the corner, the gun goes on top of the fridge—out of reach of a small child—the two confiscated phones go in the trash. Throughout, she remains rooted beside the door, eyes darting from the shotgun over the window, to the tangle of wires on the kitchen table, to the faint scars that crisscross my back and chest. I would be scared of me, too.

  I take a few steps forward and settle on my haunches, bringing my eyes down to her level. She drops her gaze, but I catch her chin and force her face up.

  “I am going to say this once, so listen,” I say. “I am not going to murder you. I did not go through all of this effort to drag a young girl thirty miles only to hide her body under the sofa. There are no bodies under there. You can look for yourself. See if you can find the remote. If you do, you can watch Nickelodeon. You watch that?”

  She nods, more vigorously this time.

  “Good. So, rules. There are three things I do not want you to do. I am not going to tell you what will happen if you disobey. I am just going to ask you not to. Understand?”

  She nods again. She has the nodding down pat.

  “First, do not leave the apartment. There is food in the fridge. There is television. There is nothing outside you need. There are dangerous people out there. I acknowledge the irony in this statement, but trust me, they are terrible. I live here because this is a bad neighborhood.

  “Second, do not use the phone. Any phone. There are at least six of them. If they ring, you ignore them. No calls, no answers, no texting. You need entertainment, you watch television. Phones are for work only. Later, I will let you go online. You know what that means?”

  No reaction. Perhaps she has no idea. Twenty-five percent of the country has not gone on the Internet once. This is why television gets tech wrong about as often as they get crime wrong. Probably she knows, though. I just have no interest in caring right now.

  “The third thing is no noise. Outside, you will hear shouting, music, dogs—but I am quiet and my neighbors know that. If there is noise they will ask questions I do not want to answer. So, to recap: no outside, no phone, no noise. Understood?”

  She nods.

  “Good. I am going to take a shower. You are on your own.”

  The apartment is smallish. It is exactly ten steps from the front door to the bathroom and my office, six more to the back of the main bedroom. Enough space for her to be alone if she needs to be, close enough where I can keep an eye and/or ear on her. For now it is important that we build trust. This is why I close the bathroom door behind me, leaving her alone. Well, half the reason. The other half is so I can be alone with my reflection. I have questions:

  Why did you do it?

  Why there?

  Why her?

  What does this accomplish?

  What does she think about this?

  There are no answers, not there before the mirror, and not under the hot water as I scrub myself clean for what seems an hour, wash everything down the drain, the water pinking and then clearing and pinking again as I open some old scabs. The blood reminds me that I need to don a new mask, so I grab the razor and get to work, nicking my face in the process and adding to the mess.

  Hair dye? Red or brown? I might also leave it natural, cut it short, and let the gray show. Either or. The specifics are far less important than the fact that there is some sort of change.

  Change. Lots is coming, and someone is going to send the hounds to flush her out. As soon as I finish what I came here to do, we are gone.

  We?

  The hard water hurts my eyes, stings like acid, but I shove my head under the spray anyway and dial myself a hotter temperature, the water tank groaning as I bleed it dry.

  What the hell is wrong with you?

  Why is she still here?

  What the hell is wrong with her?

  The hot water goes before answers come, so I clamber out and towel off. Through the door, I can hear the television, faintly. Good. That should keep her occupied while I write.

  Some people keep diaries. Some have dream journals, madly scrawling images and words when they wake at three in the morning, looking for meaning in the chaos. Others piece their days together with yellow sticky notes, ideas and thoughts on the fridge. I have my chronicles.

  I am
not one of those psychopaths who writes down everything that happens to him, if indeed there are such people outside of Hollywood. My bookshelves are not filled with spiral notebooks full of literal psychobabble. I have a reliable laptop with Microsoft Word installed, and that is more than enough. I catalog the interesting bits, the stuff worth remembering, things out of the ordinary. Things that seem to matter at the time.

  To who, I am really not sure. Me, I suppose. Perhaps a me I am yet unaware of, some future me I am not willing to acknowledge yet. A me who starts to forget and wants to remember.

  I have not had much to write about lately. There is a limit to how interesting life can be, and even the best life has to offer is mostly mediocre. The earth is twenty-five thousand miles around, and in their lifetime, the average person walks about three times that amount. But they spend all of it walking to the bathroom, to and from the car, crawling into bed. Beer and sex, sports and sleep. Walking the dog. These things are all that most people want in life.

  I want more, but I know better than to hope. Hope in one hand and defecate in the other, I know which one fills up first. I know firsthand. It was all too recently, with not much to do, not much to say, for stretches of time which—as I write this now—seem impossible to comprehend. Years. But now I find myself suddenly bothering with a little girl.

  Why? All I am sure of right now is this: I suddenly have a lot more to write about.

  • • •

  Back then I didn’t know what it was he did every night, clacking away on his elderly laptop for hours and hours. Maybe I thought he was talking with someone online. And he was, sort of. Just not online. Everything he wrote, it was all just him. For him. With himself. And each night he’d peer into the depths of his soul, then drag himself out just before the abyss could look back. His chronicles kept him right on the brink, but I’m still not sure which way they were pushing. We never discussed them; I never even dared to knock on the door when he was typing.

  He’d taken his time that night, leaving the TV to babysit me (a reality I was familiar with). His cable box only went into the low sixties before flipping around to the blue nothing of channel AUX, and that night there was nothing I wanted to watch anyway. All that seemed to be on were shows like Prison Break and CSI: Miami reruns, full of carjackings and kidnappings—far from reality TV but all too real to me. Very current events. I had fallen half-asleep as channels dripped by, listening to the white noise as dialog popped in and out, forming random sentences. Like a lullaby. When the bough breaks …