Pittsburgh Noir

by Kathleen George

  We killed him

  Mark you fucking killed him

  Instantly the current that had brought him here seemed to desert him, to drain away in a final roar and expose an underlying quiet that he had not known he had not been hearing, the ever-present quiet of the dirt and the stars and their bodies quietly alive. A barge lowed somewhere on the water. They swung the body blindly into the river and left, scared as hell, and no one saw them. Afterward no one suspected them. It was only later that Mark began to gain a crude understanding that the current had not left him at all; it had only merged into a larger course, one in which he was no longer an active mechanism but a thing powerlessly adrift, too small and too integrated to perceive what engulfed him as anything separate from the carriage of existence itself.

  He was driving the company truck toward the South Side after work, last week’s snow still shrinking on the edges of the road. The heater was rasping. It was an old pickup of an indeterminate grade of black, a rattling, smoking steel thing with a busted radio and cracked vinyl seats and faded lettering on the sides. The windshield was cold and sunbrushed with the last of the slanting daylight. Normally he took the bus home, but today he had volunteered to close the shop, then taken the truck out when the others had gone, with hardly a thought given to consequence or purpose.

  He drove now with the half-formed notion of going to a bar, but was thinking of Levi’s murder and seeing everything around him, the entire world as he knew it, as what the murder had left behind in its wake. One of his science teachers, who had liked to tell Mark that he could go far in life if he only applied himself, had once said that the course of the universe was like a cosmic game of billiards. And Mark was thinking of this now, of pool balls ricocheting again and again in endlessly multiplying accident. Thinking, He’s dead Mark you killed him. Thinking of Abigail, how they had broken up soon after, how she had then ricocheted until she had become engaged to Zacharias, how Mark had thought her ricocheting had stopped then. Thinking how the ricocheting had now killed Zacharias too, and knowing now that its reverberation would never cease—that it would one day become unattributable to the murder, but only because it would exceed the limits of human calculation and memory.

  As he neared the East Carson bars, he found himself turning onto the narrow street on which stood UPMC South Side, where Zacharias was lying somewhere, brain-dead. He found a vacant spot by the curb and, from the idling truck, gazed up at the building’s turreted façade without intention, only thinking in a mild stupor that this was where the Gorski family would finally be blotted out. He was recalling the classic illustration of human evolution, the monkey uncrouching by increments toward the apotheosis that was man, and in his mind he pictured the Gorskis’ ancestral line in the same way: the descendents springing up one after another through dark millennia in an unbroken and resolute linear procession, only to be suddenly extinguished by the repercussive force of his own trivial and incredulous hand. Permanently annihilated. There would be whole branches of people who would now never come into being, whom the world would never even know to miss. The idea was almost unfathomable to him in its simple desolation.

  When a few minutes had passed, he twisted off the engine and sat in the violently ensuing silence, sensing the tiny clustering of the oncoming dusk, the near-imperceptible way it began its purple bloodying of the air. He continued to stare up at the hospital, as if by staring enough he might see Zacharias. At any moment he expected to restart the engine and drive to the bar, but his expectation was devoid of will, as though the decision to leave would be made by someone other than himself.

  When she came out, he did not immediately recognize her. She was just another figure emerging from the building, small in her puff of a white jacket, like something blown out onto the sidewalk. There was an air of relief about her, something he had noticed in others who had exited, some registering of freedom, but in her it somehow seemed intentioned, the exhalation exaggerated for her own witnessing, as if by feigning it, the actual relief, and then the actual freedom, would follow. He tracked her absently as she walked in his direction, but it was only when she stepped in front of the truck to cross the street that he recognized her as Abigail. He watched a few moments longer, unmoving and unthinking, before abruptly quitting the truck and walking after her.

  She was proceeding hurriedly, cutting toward the next block through the small sitting area opposite the hospital, and he followed as if pulled by the slipstream, not calling out, not knowing what he would say when he caught up to her. They had not remained close after they broke up those years ago. Their affair, which had lasted maybe seven months, had seemed a thing of real substance by high school standards, the first convincing romance for both, and perhaps would have continued had it not been for the murder. He remembered it as a sustained flash of heat against the cold, beginning in the waning warmth of late late summer and fizzling in the spring, in full bloom only in fall and winter. It had seemed to have its own unspoken logic, by which their fierce rifts were graced with the same intimacy as their tenderest moments. Their arguments in the halls had reached levels of violence that bordered on parody, taking on the air of staged teen dramas in which they were secretly witting actors; on campus they became as famous for their public fights as for their public affection. Their theatricality—the cheek both burning from a slap and imprinted with lipstick—had made itself the trademark of their relationship, seemed crucial to its continuing survival, and this may have set the precedent for Mark’s brutal response to Levi’s offense, because between them there had never been any room for the middle ground.

  They had broken up soon after. As he followed her now he was thinking of how they had never spoken over the years, seeming almost to realize it for the first time. She had become a neighborhood fixture to him, someone he saw with inevitable regularity around Carrick and East Carson, and in the process she had entered that strange realm of once-familiar things that have fallen into conspicuous obscurity. He had heard through friends about her father’s brain cancer—a bad headache one morning, buried five months later—and her engagement to Zacharias, but had otherwise rarely thought about her directly, instead remembering Abigail and that segment of his past as a single crude impression of vivid color and heat. He followed her for another short block, muted by the years. There were stretches of the sidewalk still crusted over with ice, but she moved quickly, incautiously. At the corner she crossed the street to the first available bar, a dingy corner dive with a white shingled overhang, and pushed through its palm-smudged door.

  He stopped, lingering on the opposite side, but in a minute Abigail reappeared, clutching a weighted paper bag with both hands. She saw him standing across the street then and quickly looked away as if she hadn’t, as had been their custom. But now he held his gaze, unmoving as she crossed back to his side, the beer bottles clinking in her bag, and finally she looked back at him when it could no longer be avoided, her expression hard but unable to fully conceal her incredulousness. “Mark,” she said ironically. He had not looked at her this closely in eight years, but he felt no tug of old emotion, only a defamiliarized recollection of intimacy. While most people he knew, including himself, had gained some heft around the jaw since high school, Abigail had grown bonier, shedding the shapeless skinniness of her youth for a thinness that seemed lighter and frailer and more severe, giving an impression of bones growing hollow. She was not wearing makeup today, and her face had that raw scrubbed appearance of women who are rarely seen without it.

  “I heard,” he said. “About Zacharias.”

  She studied him for a moment without speaking. He had not been friends with Zacharias, who was two years older and had been away at college at IUP when Levi died. Nor had Mark decided upon an explanation for his sudden appearance on this empty corner, still in his work clothes, his pants and boots splotched with dry paint. But she showed no intention of asking, instead seemed to be trying to deduce it from his face. Her tone was even and empty of sarcasm when she res
ponded: “So you know I’m engaged to a vegetable then.”

  He shifted uncertainly. “I was thinking maybe I could see him,” he said then without thinking, unsure whether he asked because he could think of nothing else to say or because this was the reason he had come.

  She gave him a strange look. “You wanna see Zach?” But then the look passed from her face, as though she had decided that her wondering was not worth the effort. She looked back at the hospital. “Well I’m having one of these over there first. Then if you still want, I’ll take you up to see him.”

  He carried the bag for her as they returned. The outdoor sitting area was empty. She chose one of the maroon benches farthest from the street, then pulled two bottles of Yuengling from the bag and handed one to Mark. They sat and drank from the green bottles as the light began its slow fade, their breaths steaming and cooling in the air. For a while neither spoke, just sat looking at the hospital entrance as Abigail peeled the labels from her bottle and flicked the pieces onto the ground. The silence gathered between them in stealthy accumulation, first incurring a palpable weight, then growing fat with character, until it seemed to ape the chronic silence that had broken their romance years ago, to echo the abrupt silence that had announced Levi’s death by the river, to imagine the unknowable silence that now whirled in Zacharias’s head, until at last the silence grew too heavy to continue, seemed to collapse upon itself, and Mark spoke reflexively as though responding to physical law.

  “I remember when I went to his brother’s funeral and Zacharias went up to the coffin.” He was not looking at her, but he continued to speak. “Up till that point he was rock-solid— you know. The big brother back from college, shaking hands with everyone and taking charge. But when it was his turn to go up to the coffin and look at Levi’s picture, it was like the whole thing just crumbled. He was just standing in front of it for a second or two, but then his hands went up to his face, he almost slapped himself, and suddenly he was all hunched over and shaking. And we were all just sitting there watching him. And after a while his dad had to take him away, and we never saw him again.”

  She said nothing for a few moments, letting his words grow strange in the air. “Well,” she said finally, “I don’t know why you ever went to that funeral anyway.”

  Mark hesitated, took a slug of beer.

  Then her tone softened. “Let’s not start this, this kind of talk, the dead mourning the dead. Not yet.”

  “All right.”

  “I mean, you didn’t even know him,” she said, her voice stirring again. “Or Levi, really. God, I haven’t even seen you for years.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked at her now. “I see you around all the time.”

  “Maybe you saw someone else,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

  “You saying you didn’t notice the Chinese guy hanging around Carrick?”

  She let out a familiar sigh. “I’m not saying anything, Mark.” She finished her beer and stood up, and in the fading light he recognized some agitated kink in her stance that for an instant seemed to telescope the past eight years into something graspable. “You still want to see him or not?” she asked. He downed the last of his beer and followed her inside, leaving their bottles sitting empty on the bench.

  When they reached the room that contained Zacharias, Abigail took the paper bag from Mark and set it down in the hallway by the edge of the open door. Then she motioned him in. He entered to find Zacharias’s parents and grandfather seated in a row of three chairs along the wall by the bed, on which Zacharias lay as if asleep. They looked up at him when he came in, the grandfather’s expression one of foggy incomprehension, something distantly savage in his decrepitude, and the parents reflexively smiling the feeble and exhausted smile that they had been practicing together for days, perhaps mistaking him for one of the hospital staff. They looked small and supplicant in their chairs beside Zacharias, whose substantial figure was stretched across the bed, seeming the size of the three of them combined. Abigail appeared behind Mark but lingered in the doorframe, saying, “This is one of Zach’s friends.” The parents nodded feebly at him, still smiling and saying nothing.

  Mark stepped toward the bed. He had been this close to Zacharias only a few times, and only by accident, brushing past him in the halls between classes, or later vying with him for the attention of a bartender at Mario’s. His head was almost comically bandaged, the gauze baring what seemed a niggardly amount of face, from the eyelids to just below the lower lip. But even on this meager stretch of skin the shattered windshield and fatal trauma were fully manifest: his face was like a random side of a bruised pear, finely lacerated and discolored, softly misshapen, his closed eyes swollen and seeming sealed over with wax. A pair of tubes ran from the machine to converge in his mouth, force-feeding vital gases.

  “Who is that?” the grandfather roared suddenly to no one, his jaundiced eyes seizing upon Mark in what appeared a kind of vague terror. The mother patted his hand and murmured, “A friend of Zach’s.” The grandfather grunted.

  Mark glanced back at Abigail, who was leaning against the doorframe. She was not looking at him or anything else in the room. Instead her gaze was fixed on some faraway point beyond the walls, and her foot was steadily tapping the floor, betraying impatience. But framed within the doorway she appeared almost serene, and would have been a portrait of female serenity had she been painted in this moment, with her tapping foot stilled by the fixed colors. When she met his eyes her face grew rigid, breaking the illusion. She shot him a look demanding they leave.

  He looked down again at Zacharias, taking in once more all of that mortal irreparability, seeing him now—a dead lump of living tissue—as the blunt implement of the Gorskis’ final erasure. Then Mark stepped away. The grandfather peered at him as if seeing him for the first time, blurting again, “Who is that?”—the dusty, fading patriarch, registering in perhaps only an intermittent glimmer the totality of his posterity’s irreversible failure. This time no one answered him. The polite feeble smile reappeared on the parents’ faces when they saw that Mark was leaving, and suddenly he felt sickened with some mixture of guilt and pity and scorn and revulsion. It was a shiteating smile, he realized. It was a smile of shiteating surrender, a sick swallowing-and-grinning expression of utter powerlessness, of private, implacable misery. They continued to smile gruesomely, smiling beside their dead son, and Mark retreated after Abigail, muttering some goodbye.

  Outside, the night had been consummated. The stars shone cold and clear, almost ringing to Mark with some deep familiarity, some deeply familiar mystery. They went to sit inside the truck to drink the remaining beers, and Mark turned on the ignition to run the heater. The truck stammered intransigently, then fired on with a massive metal roar, then fell into its steady idled shuddering. They sat in the dark, drinking.

  Abigail pulled her feet up onto the seat and hugged her knees. “I can’t take it anymore, just sitting there staring at him,” she said quietly, almost to herself. “It’s like we’re trying to stare at him till we stop seeing anything there.”

  “Yeah,” said Mark, his mind elsewhere. How impassively the stars had witnessed the murder, those stars that night by the river. And I remember those stars, he was thinking, knowing that they had been clinging to that same black sky for eight years unchanged.

  Mark are you fucked in the head you fucking killed him

  Throw him in the river we have to

  Grab his legs

  Hurry

  He did not understand the science behind the scrolling map of the sky, but he knew that the stars above the hospital now were not the same ones from that night; he did not recognize them. He was thinking, I remember the stars from that night and they are still there only because I remember them. If I forget them they will cease to exist.

  He and Abigail sat in the truck, quieted by uncertainty. He knew that when they finished the six-pack there would be no more reason for them to remain; Abigail would leave the truck to go become
a widow, and Mark would drive the truck back to the shop, maybe stop by a bar to get drunk, and to him this seemed incomplete, though he could not have explained what he was waiting for. But he made no move to alter this course, only sitting and thinking quietly, And if I exist in the memory of those stars as they exist in mine, if they can remember me only because I remember them. And if I cease to remember them. Finally thinking, Yes, if I cease to remember them then they will have to cease to remember me. Then it will be as if that night never happened. As if I had not killed him.

  And then something was quietly activated in him. Wordlessly he shifted the truck into gear and pulled out into the street in a disembodied decision to simply drive. Abigail did not ask where they were going, consenting with reciprocal wordlessness, and when he turned west onto East Carson she gazed out the window as if she had not seen the strip a thousand times before, as if she were new to town, all of that exclusive tangled neon slung low on the buildings, brazen and eye-catching and aloof. For a while the pink light permeated the truck with something sentimental, a soft electric intimation of lapsed time and lapsed memory. Then it seeped away as they cleared the strip, and the night seemed to reemerge all around them. The road angled northward, and soon they were driving parallel to the Monongahela, and when they drove past the confluence, both gazed out at the Point as they always did here and would continue to do for the rest of their lives: the sight of the whole city, at the will of the rivers, converging in a crush of architecture into a single spew of water. And then it passed behind them, the city darkening like a heap of embers dying, and then they were driving along the Ohio River under black sky, the stars fanning, and soon they were separated from the water by only a bare set of railroad tracks.