I maintain that perspective for about fifteen seconds. And then reality sets in. Because I just so happen to be the only person to exit a crowded Metro car at one of the biggest and busiest stations in the city less than a minute before everyone aboard dies a horrible fiery explosive chemical death somewhere near the Potomac.
I wish I could but I cannot pin this one on fate or some invisible sky wizard. The lack of a crowd is because of the calendar—they are debarking further down the line (or at least they think they are). And the missed stop is simply my own stupidity—or senility or absent-mindedness. Weeks of preparation wasted. And over what? No, not what. Who.
Why did you take her?
My expression, pace, gait, none of this changes. Internally, though, my mind is awhirl, instincts jumping, noting the position of each guard, each passerby who might remember my face. I note each camera, avoiding each lens even though I know most of them are disabled, not even recording. I do my best, overall, to act normal, just wander on through and try to look like I am simply on my way home from work. Which I am.
The escalators in this station are among the largest in the country, perhaps the world, and it takes a full three minutes to ride to the surface; the elevator is faster, but would still take a full minute, and if something happens and the power cuts out, I would be trapped. Escalators it is.
Fortunately, as the crowd is almost nonexistent, I can jog up at a steady pace without having to push anyone aside, trying to balance speed with a desire to not look as if I am running for my life. As I ascend, I cannot avoid the mental clock ticking in my head, counting seconds since the Metro pulled away from the station. Not sure how much time is left.
I get to thirty-five before the end comes.
Lights flicker, but the escalator keeps moving as the sound hits with a dull, distant thump, an extra murmur in my chest. Other necks turn and look downward, curious, concerned. But not me. Not me. I am concerned only with what lies up and ahead. I forget the girl. I forget myself. I forget everything but this: run.
Always run.
The Law of Inertia
11/05/2008
Life is full of punctuation: periods to mark endings, question marks, the occasional exclamation point that this day has turned out to be. But I like the commas best. The little pauses that come between whatever is just was and whatever is is next. Calms between storms. But no one can prolong the inevitable forever. At some point, the clouds will give way to rain. And it is about to rain here. Hard.
I try to start my car before I do anything else. Strictly speaking, it is not my car, but I have had a key for months. The car does not seem happy about this arrangement, and neither am I, but life sucks. I need a car and I need to be moving before my comma collapses. I have to leave. No. We.
We have to leave.
Right.
After a few more tries, the car starts at last, and I step back out, listening to it mutter. It should be able to keep itself alive for ten minutes. It should be able to remain unstolen for ten minutes. But just in case, I’d better try for five instead. It will be a new record for me.
I rush inside the apartment, grabbing important things along the way, reconsidering what I am about to do right up until I actually do it. Most of what I need is in the back, so I start with the bedroom, which is thankfully open so I don’t have to kick the door in. Not that I am trying to be quiet; she needs to wake up, now. I go right to the closet and pull out some things, tossing them roughly on the bed.
“Put those on,” I say as she groans. “Now.”
She rubs bleary eyes as she slowly sits up, bare feet pushing the blankets down as she wiggles upright. I silently curse her inability to wake up on a dime—for me there is no lengthy “waking up,” only a brief transition between sleeping and awake. Anyway, I have no idea how she sleeps while the man upstairs beats his children with the furniture.
By the time she is more-or-less fully awake, I have gotten a shirt and pants pulled over her remarkably warm torso. She would show up great on infrared tonight. I consider shoes, but this is taking too long. We have to move, and keep moving. I go right for the vest.
“It’s too heavy,” she mumbles. “I can’t move.”
“Kevlar,” I say. “Bulletproof.” Resistant, I mean, but there’s no time for semantics. She is clearly frightened, feeding off my emotion, only fatigue keeping her just this side of panic. I sense tears are coming. I do not have time for that.
“What time is it?” I ask her. I know exactly what time it is—five after midnight, just about nine hours since things literally blew up—but I need to get her mind off what she thinks is happening. She scrambles over the bed to find the alarm clock, which has gotten knocked over. While she looks, I take a moment to peek between the blinds. There is nobody there; they have not found me. But I know all too well that there is a word tacked onto the end of every statement like that: yet. It’s safest to assume they are chasing and you should be running. If you always run like someone is at your heels, you’ll be well ahead before they get close. The theory has kept me alive so far.
“It’s broken,” she says. “It broke.” She holds up the alarm clock, face blank. The cord has come right out of the wall, and I never bothered with batteries. This is among the least of my worries, anyway; the clock is not coming with us. Not much is.
“Not important. I need you to look at me. Can you help me?”
She nods.
“Come here. I need you to go into the front room and stand by the door. You stand there and wait for me. And if anyone knocks, you say nothing; you just come get me. Do you understand? Okay, now go.”
It is time to burn.
It never takes long to do this, so I wait until she is out of the room before I crack open the box in the closet and start cleaning up. No lights; this is always easier to do in the dark. No matter how hard I try, I get attached to things: pieces of clothing, jackets, nice shoes, a book. If I see it, a part of me wants to take it, but with the lights out, all I see are blobs of gray and vanilla, easier to disremember. It is never entirely painless but it gets easier each time.
This is the eighth time, I think.
It only takes a minute or so before fumes are seeping into my sinuses, making me dizzy. When I hear her start coughing, too, I know for sure that it is time to go. I add my laptop to the backpack full of essentials—hers is staying behind, being comparatively unimportant and certain to die in the fire—and walk to the door, handing her the pack.
“Go,” I say as I shove her through and out, down the alley. “Just go. To the white car.” It is quite obvious which I mean; its parking lights flutter as the engine struggles to stay awake, like her. She toddles off uncertainly as I turn and prepare for surgery, pulling on latex gloves topped by leather—not because I fear leaving the wrong sort of evidence, but because I don’t need blood on my hands just before a long road trip. Not a mistake you make twice.
I lock my door from outside, take two steps back and kick, boot catching just above the deadbolt. Twice more, and the frame gives and the door pops inward. I kick the frame again for good measure to make sure it looks like a break-in, brush a few paint chips off my jeans, and reach inside for the shotgun. Then I turn and take the stairs three at a time.
It feels like flying.
• • •
Could I kill people? I wondered as I hopped in the back of the car, smelling the exhaust and pine, already sniffling. Could I do what Edison does? What he was probably doing, right then?
It was easier than it probably seems to think about it like that. Edison wasn’t my first exposure to the concept. Just a year or so earlier, a kid at a nearby school set a record for domestic mass murder. It had been all over the news, and even though it was clear on the other side of the state—and thus, to my young mind, in a different universe—people talked like it was just down the block. At least for a few days. People forget fast; Edison got that right, and a lot more.
But could I do it?
Ex
perts (Edison would no doubt put that in “finger quotes”) say that mass murderers and serial killers share a number of things in common.
First: they are typically young, lower-middle-class white males who have easy access to weapons. That covers a good chunk of the voting population, but not me. So strike one, I guess.
Next: they often aspire to greatness, yet see their hopes and dreams dashed by other people or society. Halfway true for me. I never aspired to greatness. Ball one?
What else: unemployed, lonely, family problems, work problems. Couple of hits in there, but nothing solid. Meanwhile, Edison was hitting home run after home run.
But really, how many does that cover? It could be your boss, or your husband, or your father. Or you, maybe. If mass murderers and serial killers are just like everyone else, what separates the fallen from the ready to fall? The Internet says there are maybe a hundred serial killers roaming around at any given time, but why isn’t it a thousand, or a million? I think it’s the same reason there’s only one president, nine Supreme Court justices, and a hundred senators. The same reason you aren’t your boss, or the pope, or the king of Spain. The position’s already been filled.
But what about the non-serial sort, the people who just blow up one day? What keeps a person from snapping and killing a few dozen random strangers? What’s the deciding factor? Brain malfunction? A tumor pressing on the rage button? Maybe a hormonal imbalance? Exposure to a heavy metal as a child. Lead? Cadmium? Metallica? Maybe an abusive father, or a mom who didn’t hug hard enough?
If you ask me, there’s no such thing as a magic bullet explanation. There’s just retrospect, and guesses, averages and composite profiles. And, in some cases, mayonnaise.
• • •
I knock heavily on my upstairs neighbor’s door. He opens it a few seconds later without asking who it was. A shame; I had such a good answer. I watch his face for a moment as he looks at me, scans me head to toe. The short red hair, the clothes, the scruffy barely-there shadow of a beard. He could be looking in a mirror. But for the double-barreled shotgun.
“What th—”
And then double-ought disintegrates the bottom of his face, and the resemblance ends. He falls, messily twitching as I enter and shut the door. It is the exact same layout as my place so I need no light, just to count paces in the dark as I aim for the screaming in the back, moving cleanly, no time to waste. The clock started running when I booted in my door, accelerated tenfold once I pulled the trigger.
Reek of stale beer. Snack food strata underfoot. The carpet needs a vacuum.
Eight steps and I’m at the bedroom door. Locked, of course, but that hardly matters. It opens with a kick, nearly falls off the hinge. What you get renting from slumlords.
“Shut up,” I say to the screamers. I remove my coat, taking care to keep the shotgun pointed in their general direction. Mom, son, daughter, all crying, all three with matching black eyes that confirm what I’ve been hearing through the ceiling for the past few months. She has a phone in hand and I have no doubt what number she’s dialed, but they will not be here in time, so I let her cling to her security blanket and turn towards her son, the loudest.
“Daddy?” he says, an easy mistake in the dark. I let the shotgun tell him no. Then I reload as the other two whimper; at least it’s quieter than screaming.
“Thank you,” I say, tossing my coat in a heap at the foot of the bed.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” sobs the mother, not knowing what she has to be sorry about. “Please, don’t kill us. Take the money.” She points somewhere behind me, at the closet no doubt; without bothering to look, I shoot her next. That sets the daughter off again, but I kneel down beside and shush her as I pick up the fallen phone and end the call—they’ve heard enough. The girl is the same age as my own (my own?), and for a moment I consider … but no. I am not starting a boarding school.
“Listen,” I say, “I would love to explain this to you. Why, how, et cetera. But to be honest I just do not have the time. The condensed version is this: life sucks, and I am doing you a favor.”
And I do, with my last shell.
I move for the door, thinking too late that the money would be helpful. There is no time to go back, though. No room for second guesses. Instead, I head straight over to the cooling, stinking corpse in the living room, drop the empty shotgun and leather gloves, throw the phone into the drywall, and close the door behind me.
When I reach the car, the windows are only half-thawed, but I cannot afford to wait for clarity. I just hop in and throw the car in reverse, just as the apartment suddenly ceases to be apartment-like, bursting into fast, chemical flame, magnesium and oxidizer and other bad, bad things from my kitchen chemistry lab, from the magic box in the closet. Given the proper fuel, a fire will double in size every thirty seconds, so by the time anyone who matters gets here, most of the unit will be too far gone to do anything about, and the rest will be well on its way. Plenty of flame to destroy everything I left behind. And everyone.
How many this time? I’ll probably never know. Perhaps a dozen, two if they were all home. Not much time to get out. Perhaps a few seconds.
Sometimes you just can’t run fast enough.
As always, eventually there will be rubble, and they will dig, but I’ve long since learned to cover my tracks, not just with fake ID but with fake evidence. And there is plenty within the ash for them to sift through, helpfully dropped in what will be the top layer of strata: a scrap of dirty trenchcoat, fitting a description of that worn by a recent bombing suspect, traces of bomb-making materials matching those used on the subway. Not to mention the shotgun and shells, and the pair of now-bloody gloves—all of which my deceased neighbor unknowingly paid for a month ago, after I signed up for a credit card in his name. People should really learn to shred their mail.
A horrible tragedy, a murder-suicide after a terrorist action. An easy suspect, matching the description. They want an answer, so they’ll take the bait. They always do; everyone knows mass murderers always kill themselves last, just like serial killers always return to the scene of the crime to gloat, and the police always get their man. Law & Order served up hot and fresh every sixty minutes, less commercials. Always and always.
Except for exceptions.
• • •
It must have been an hour before I stopped randomly sobbing for no reason and focused on shivering. The heater was not working hard enough, and I could feel my body gradually numbing itself to sleep despite the too-loud radio shouting election results, intercut with news about the subway bombing. Edison occasionally shouted back, in between angry rants. Fatigue was clearly starting to affect him. On more than one occasion, I think we nearly drove off a bridge into an abyss. The kind that looks back at you all the way down.
“Hey,” he said. “Chir … Chrs … Chin. Hey you.”
His words came slowly, heavy and labored, his mouth dry, his voice raspy and blown out. I didn’t answer. His behavior was frightening me. I hadn’t seen him like this before, pushed to the end of his limits, physically and perhaps mentally. He probably hadn’t slept in nearly a week.
“Nexit is …” he mumbled, watching signs flicker into visibility. Talking half to me, half to himself, so he could keep himself awake. “Frackville. We’ll stop there. For food. Coffee. Next exit. X marks the exit. X for … X for Xtian.”
Ecks-chin, he said. And it wasn’t a slurred syllable this time. It was my name now.
“Where are we?” I asked as he rolled the window down, flooding the car with cold air.
“Pennsylvania.” He said the word like it tasted bad. “Doesn’t matter, Xtian.”
He snapped off his latex gloves and tossed them in the back beside me, little blue bits of bad that I immediately pushed away. Far as I could, which wasn’t far, just over on the floor behind the passenger seat. Which is where he’d put the gun. The one from the night he took me.
I know now that it was an MP5K, MP for Machine Pistol, K for “Kurz�
� (German for “short”). Thirty-round magazine, semiautomatic. Threaded barrel for a suppressor. At just under thirteen inches, short enough to keep under a trench. A favorite of military personnel, SWAT teams, action movie stars, and Edison North.
It fascinated me. It felt like a part of what I was. But lying there in the dark, it seemed like a little forgotten nothing. He had tossed it in the back seat like an empty water bottle, one he would never use again. And it was right then that I figured it out. Edison didn’t need me any more than he needed the gun, or the car, or the blanket keeping me warm. All of it was replaceable. Which is just another word for disposable. The gun had obvious utility. The car, the blanket, too.
And me? He clearly wasn’t done with me yet. Hadn’t left me behind to burn with strangers. He had something in mind for me. I just didn’t know what that was. Not yet.
That night was not about being or becoming. It wasn’t a beginning or an end. It was just one of many commas to come, a splice between one home and another.
It wouldn’t be the last.
BUF
Snow Day
12/02/2010
I knew there would be snow if we came north. I knew there would be a lot more if we came to Buffalo. But I had not expected an epic blizzard after only two years. I am impressed. This storm has kept an interstate highway shut down for twelve hours and counting, but the best I have been able to pull off is about eight hours of delay, jackknifing a tractor-trailer outside Pittsburgh that one time. What is interesting is that there would be no way to know there was a storm by looking out the window; where we are, in the northwest part of the city, the ground has barely a dusting. A mile south, there is a full foot of fresh snow. The lake effect, they call it. Unpredictable when it comes to where it hits and how much damage it causes. I could take some lessons.
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