Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  “I’m really glad we found each other,” I said.

  And I’d meant it.

  “I’m really glad, too,” she said with a smile. Her cream complexion glowed in the soft reflected red of her flannel shirt. “But if I hadn’t found you, I know God would send someone else to take care of me.”

  And in that Moment, I knew that my friendship was just commodity.

  That I was capable of profound self-delusion, that maybe all the friendships I’d ever known had been hollow charade.

  How many other roles I’d played were just delusion? To what extent had I only lived for the sake of others? What life did I have of my own?

  —If you and Karen were just friends, why did Evan have to steal her from you?

  His words had the quality of being spoken near a lake of white-capped water. The wind and shadow that cloaked my perceptions and the hail-burdened sky all changed his voice. If this was due to how he spoke or how I heard him, I can’t say.

  —Because I was there. Evan saw me as Karen’s protector. That was the mantle I’d taken, sure. But he saw me as a bad protector. A Svengali. Or maybe he coveted my role as protector, or wanted to become a Svengali himself. Karen and I moved ourselves like ritualized puppets. Like the ones in Indonesian shadow plays. We were afraid of who we might really be and made ourselves into tropes. Evan didn’t want just a lover, but someone to make him feel more than the skinny goofball he was. Karen the trope could be that for him. So Evan vilified me. Or he made the trope I was into a villain. He convinced Karen, her family, her friends, everyone we knew that I was a monster, a control freak playing mind games with poor Karen. He was so good at twisting half-truths that within weeks I was alienated and adrift. That cut me, because I’d felt safe for the first time since Molino booted me. And I lost a friendship that could’ve become a thing to treasure. All because Evan looked on Karen as a trophy to be snatched from me.

  I moved away from Karen after the Moment, terrified of what she wanted me to be and what I needed her to be. She could have become a permanent emotional crutch for me, and I’d become at once best friend, brother and father to her. So I dropped the trope I’d been, freeing her and me from the role I played.

  I tried not to hurt her as I put distance between us, giving her the standard excuses of needing space, more time to study and all the rubbish so convincing in a life full of youth-tainted melodramatic rubbish. Karen wasn’t stupid, and saw there was more to my absence than what I’d said.

  There was a lesser moment that inflected the legacy of the Moment. It happened while Karen spoke through my ancient answering machine. Her voice sounded lost through the static as I watched the cassette spindles turn. “You there, Dean?” The sigh she exhaled into the receiver made a deeper whisper of itself under the cotton-wool sounds of the dust-furred speaker. “Call me. Please?” The click of her hanging up made a sharp echo in the vestibule of my one-room apartment.

  I had faith things would work out. That in a month or so, she and I would pass through the crucible better friends than we’d been. In the meantime, I had fun with my newly rediscovered youth: drinking with friends from the program, going to live music shows. I savoured those ember-moments of my early twenties, eager to have a rich life despite Molino’s dismissal. These were times of playful debates about serious topics, conducted late at night over cheese fries and coffee in the student union.

  Then Evan chose to strike.

  No. “Strike” implies the honest swiftness of a cobra. More like a boa, Evan dropped and slowly squeezed. I found out what lies he’d used to entrap and degrade me, when I’d wished him no harm, and held him no malice.

  “Dean never thought of you as just a friend, Karen. You know that, don’t you? If you heard the ways he talked about you, you’d know. . . .

  “Maybe Dean isn’t spending time with you because your relationship wasn’t going the way he wanted it to. . . .

  “Look. We know Dean is a dishonest person. Was he honest with you about his feelings for you? How do you really know he’s not angry with you? You know what kind of a temper he has. . . .

  There was sudden belligerence between Karen and me I couldn’t fathom. A resentment that filled me with a heavy guilt that I’d dismissed her unfairly, without explanation. The melancholy of her echoed sigh in my vestibule metastasized in my thoughts.

  Rejection withers the soul. I’d choked on it when I was young and had been banished from the love of my parents. I’d choked on it as I backed away from my parents’ table, my dinner half-finished, as they told me with silent stares I wasn’t welcome in their sight while they ate. Hungry, I’d spend hours in my room, staring at patterns in the cracked paint of the ceiling, wondering why I was so wretched that my parents shut me out of their lives. Karen deserved better. But I wasn’t certain how to explain myself to her. I went to Evan for advice. Who else could I turn to, but the most unspoiled farm boy I’d ever known?

  Evan was more Iago than Claudius. I realize that now, though I’m no tragic figure great as Othello. Evan was a scrawny little man who had to conquer me, a nobody, so he could feel a great and tawny lion. I confided with him over beer what had been happening. He seemed aware I was out of sorts, a good and smiling pal to talk to while the chips were down. God. When I think of the triumph he must’ve felt while we talked in that dark bar . . . triumph over a guy who wasn’t his enemy. Now that he’s dead, I can stand to remember that night clearly. While he lived, whenever I thought of his good buddy advice, the memory warped to a bank of fog-grey, and a roar of shame crowded my hearing. Only details like the glint in his eyes would resolve into tangible recollection. Even so small a crumb of memory as that twisted my guts with fury at my own stupidity and his shit-soaked guile.

  “Dean,” he said, shaking his head and smiling after a manly gulp of the Lite Beer he was so fond of. He looked around at the pub that was “our place,” even though generations of college kids had claimed it as “their” place before us, as would generations yet to come. He breathed in the “authenticity” of the pub, generated by the Manchester United soccer paraphernalia on the walls and the “vintage” Guinness ads from the ‘40s and ‘50s that bore copyright notices from just the year before. “It’s obvious what you’ve got to do,” he said. “You’ve got to be honest with Karen. Tell her why you’re in the state you’re in. Sure, things’re rough. But you’re friends. Nothing can change that.”

  He changed that. Oh, how I wanted to make my friendship with Karen a healthy thing, not a waltz of mutual dependence. I sipped the poisoned cup of his advice, spoke to Karen. It was a meeting he’d been grooming her for with sensitive-guy pep talks. It was a meeting he’d lured me to with a happy-go-lucky turn of voice and a wink.

  Karen admitted me to her apartment, backing from the door as I entered, eyes wide and fearful.

  An hour after my arrival, we were screaming at each other.

  An hour after that, it seemed impossible we’d speak to each other again.

  When I got home, I shoved aside my shirts and coats and tested the heavy dowel in my closet, to see if it would support the strain of my belt looped around my neck.

  —Evan couldn’t spread such vicious rumours about you without slipping up. There must have been things he said that people knew weren’t true.

  The lake-echoed, wind-tossed quality of his voice may not have come from how he spoke, or how I heard him . . . the mirror may have changed his words. The thought that our silver-eyed audience could so intrude frightened me for reasons I can’t name.

  —After a while, not everyone believed him, especially after he remade Karen into what his ego needed her to be. He wrote me into a tool with which he could rewrite Karen. Karen was hollowed. She used to have such a sureness about her place in the world, thanks to her good Lutheran upbringing, but Evan manipulates people so skillfully, he . . .

  I paused, wondering how Doctor Johansson could listen so intently with that horrible scratching being made low by the
leg of his desk like the teeth of a rodent on untreated pine. The world warped, as it does in my sight when I’m enraged, and know life in the blood-tones and blacks that is called “seeing red.” The sound was near, untouched by the heath-winds that enfolded his words. Obviously, he couldn’t hear the scratching or see the rage-light, and if that was the case, I shouldn’t bring them up. He needed to believe every word I said, for my sake . . . and for his, since he’d chosen to follow me into this place of red-tinged shadow.

  . . . so skillfully, he dismantled her certainty that the world is a benevolent place. Evan’s lies made a new reality, and she waded into it. Eventually everyone saw what he did. And then they thought about from whom they’d heard all those terrible things about me. Gossip redeemed me, a little. But the damage was done to my dignity and to Karen’s mind.

  —But you felt no resentment toward Karen.

  —I don’t blame victims. Karen was wounded by me. Evan wounded her further. There was no need to hurt her more than she was.

  —Was your killing Evan retribution as much for Karen as it was for yourself? A rectifying of what she suffered?

  —I’d never kill for someone else’s sake. That presumes too much karma on the person not doing the killing.

  The rage-dusk in my sight deepened.

  —That’s very responsible of you.

  His voice was steady, still without judgment. The scratching and chewing was steady as well, yet though it was wordless, it still bore a kind of judgment.

  —Thank you.

  —What happened to Karen?

  —Evan desiccated her after six months. He moved on to the next woman: Tina, I think. A beatnik type who dabbled in Wicca . . . pretty sure she got her pentagram necklace from Hot Topic. He did the sensitive artist routine with her. Called himself a misunderstood poet, smeared himself with patchouli and lugged around books he didn’t read. Karen moved back to Michigan. I got Christmas cards from her for a while. Manger scenes on all of them. She got knocked up, married and divorced in the span of a year. Last I heard, she and her kid live with her parents, now.

  —Excuse me, please.

  Doctor Johansson glanced down, and I thought for a heartbeat he did so because of the teeth crunching by his feet. Instead, he put his pipe aside and opened a file on his desk by his left hand. I’m certain the scattering of files on his desk wasn’t haphazard, that he had a sort of system.

  The scratching and chewing fell quiet as he closed the file, and the blood-tinge in my sight itself bled away. I was glad of that. The sounds and red shadows could still get to me, despite the fact I knew the little thing, heralded by the light, that made the sounds better than I knew my own face. How many more reflections could the mirror, our witness, our audience and our stage, endure? With this drama, I wished to relieve my pain, and not recall a relic of punishment from my wounded past.

  Doctor Johansson looked up from the file, picked up his pipe.

  —You didn’t use poison on Evan.

  —Metaphorically, it was poison. And it’s metaphor that counts. Especially if you act as a metaphor, if you use the full power of that metaphor to do more than just end a life. Besides, I don’t know toxicology. I couldn’t have known what substances poured in his ear would’ve been fatal, no matter how many hours I spent in the library.

  —And Dráno in saline solution would be incredibly painful.

  —Yes, Doctor. That’s why I used it.

  The last trace of redness in my vision faded, and a trembling I’d not been aware of in my hands fell still.

  Slipping into Evan’s building was easy. I pantomimed a search for keys while a tenant, smiling, let me in as he left. Yet I didn’t feel the same grace and confidence I’d felt while using a machete to purge the rage with which Molino had poisoned me. I felt fleshy, mortal, afraid. I had a gym bag of clothes bought from the Salvation Army; the nylon handle was damp with palm sweat. I found the building’s basement laundry by guessing its location from the dryer vents outside and washed the clothes. I sat in the far corner, where the floor was littered with balls of dryer lint, and opened a college geology text bought from a used bookstore. I underlined passages randomly. The being I wished to be, the fiendish master of deception whose élan I tried to invoke, knew that the best way to hide is in plain sight. Even when you don’t want to hide.

  Under water-stained plaster walls, I waved and said hello to people as they came to use the other machines. They wore stress-lines on their faces like tribal scars as they slid down the social ladder: middle-class exiles who wondered if living in this low-rent neighbourhood and student slum was just a rough patch, or the start of a permanent decline. Evan lived in a very friendly building—the downwardly mobile are always prone to kindness. I wondered what mischief Evan wrought here, what lies he’d used on his neighbours. Maybe he manipulated the manager to get special favours. Who knew?

  I washed my load of ratty clothes over and over, hearing Evan’s neighbours chat about how rough things were. Near midnight, I left the clothes in the dryer and walked to the first floor, where Evan’s apartment was. I knew he’d be asleep. His ex-roommates used to complain about what an early riser he was: the one glimmer of truth to the farm-boy myth he’d crafted for himself.

  I walked to his apartment along a hallway carpet that’d once been plush, fear cramped my mid-section, as if rubber hands twisted my guts. I stood before Evan’s door, next to an incinerator chute welded shut years ago. Lines of dust on the door’s moulding sat at my eye level. I had a lock jimmy, the thing thieves use. But I didn’t know if it’d work on Evan’s door. It’d barely worked on my door when I practiced at home, and had made a small racket. Even if I jimmied the lock, what could I do if Evan kept the chain on?

  I was afraid . . . if I couldn’t kill him tonight, I’d never summon the courage to try again. I owed killing him not only to myself, but to Justice. Yet the power of that higher cause had abandoned me. I couldn’t find within me the poetry I inflicted on Molino, unable to become the metaphor I was driven to inflict. My sick flesh couldn’t cloak itself as the Dark and Shadowy Man, the diabolical figure of such awesome power. Such power had as its basis, and as its foil, the imagined power of the victim: the vanity that can be sundered along with the victim’s sense of security in the fortress of the bourgeois home, made all the more potent in the arrogantly false home space of Molino’s office. Here, in this rickety building, there was no such vanity. There was no smug security that could grant me strength through the act of my trespassing upon it.

  People were awake in the apartments nearby. I heard shuffling feet, a shower, a late-night talk show host telling jokes, a Jerry Springer-like crowd chanting, the almost alien screech of a dial-up modem as someone reached through the ether for what he couldn’t find in reality.

  A stink like wet dog fur wafted from me as I crouched by Evan’s lock: the stench that leaks from my pores when I’m under duress, when my hands twitch and my stomach digests itself. I swallowed down the panic, took the jimmy out of my denim jacket and raised it to the brass lock. I heard something scuttle on the other side of the door, like the bolting of a cat on a wooden floor, quick, and low to the ground. It had to be a cat. What else would it be? I didn’t care, so long as it didn’t bark.

  The jimmy waved in my grip like the prong of a tuning fork. It had been so much easier with Molino . . .

  I was too nervous to use the jimmy. I’d have to give this up. Stop with Evan. There was no point going on, naked, with no raiment of other-worldly power. I stood to leave.

  And a ridiculous thought occurred to me.

  I turned the brass knob.

  As the door swung open, I clothed myself in the guise of the killer. I needed to be within these shabby halls: a figure of urban nightmare, who can sap will and action, who can forge a microcosm of suffering within the isolation of a city crowd. I moulted the need to be the Dark Man and became the lethal being of this place. My senses buzzed and sang—aware of everythi
ng, the beat of my heart, the drip of a sink in the bathroom, traffic on the main street nearby, the taste of fresh air coming through opened windows and the smell of cheap strawberry incense burned hours before. I shut the door and threw the bolt that should have been thrown to thwart my Coming. Reaching for the chain, I noticed it swung slightly. I must have brushed it when I came in. Its dangling reminded me of a noose.

  I fastened the chain and searched the living room with a penlight. Evan’s CDs were stacked by the stereo. I put them in my gym bag, careful to turn on the player and take the disc inside. I left the player open, a flag for lazy cops: a sign that a crack addict or dust-head had done this, come to lift easily fenced goods. I clicked off the penlight and walked to the bedroom, in silence that was not mine, dreading I’d step on the cat, make it screech and wake Evan.

  Moonlight striped the bedroom, filtering through Venetian blinds that rocked in the cool breeze. Evan slept in a foetal ball on his futon, a pillow hugged to his crotch and chest. He looked like the innocent, fair-haired boy he pretended to be. His eyes darted under his lids . . . thus did a being of TV cliché dreams lay dreaming before me. My last trace of fear quieted. My hands steadied, like those of a surgeon. For I knew this shit had to die tonight. Now. It was right that this sham innocent be expunged from this mortal coil.

  With the glass syringe in my left hand and my right on the light switch above him, I woke Evan to the moment of his death.

  He howled and bolted upright, jabbering like one possessed or speaking in tongues. In an instant, he was on the futon, whirling. He saw me, spouting debased language as he covered his wounded ear, reddish froth leaking between his fingers. His pathetic body contorted with the pain that whispered into the fleshiness of his mind. The autistic stamp of his feet snapped the futon frame under the mattress. I wanted to explain his death to him, to tell this howling man why I dissolved his life as he fell to his knees in the depression that had been his bed.