Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  I lit a cigarette to kill time as I watched her place and collected myself . . . as I collected more than myself into myself. The cigarette was an icon, potent as the caduceus of a healing god: a symbol of danger, the smoke of which I drank into my lungs to steady the nerves of the secondary body surrounding me, so that it could take the power I’d need to intrude on Catherine’s home with my presence before I intruded on her body with a blade of near-impossible fineness.

  I don’t smoke, of course. But I had to try as many new things as possible in the weeks I had left. It made the ritual act of watching richer, gave the flavours of October air a new depth, like the essence of heat-aged cedar. The iconic danger of the cigarette rose up to dance with the breath of a time of reaping, when sheltering darkness gives its grace to those who are blessed to walk within it.

  October has always been like a mistress to me. I love the new sublimity of the weather, the first frost, the painted sunsets, the decorations for Halloween. Everything becomes a mystery.

  To stand and watch, during a season when masks and all their terrible power are themselves masked as child’s play, made the deep-water shadows on the street seem like velvet, made the stone fences and oaks more solid. The neighbourhood was a tomb to the dead middle classes that had lived here. The disappearance of the people that had defined the place made it seem haunted, like land that had belonged to mound-building Native Americans. Absence made the reality here worn as the sole of a cracked boot. I could walk more easily through fiction and myth tonight than I could on any other night on which I’ve killed. The geometry of the street (with its once-sturdy single-family homes and duplexes cut into condos and high-end apartments with fire-code ugly stairways of steel) was made fragile as a light-sleeper’s dream by what October whispered upon it.

  I was going to miss October.

  I heard the shuffle of feet through leaves.

  No one was there. October air changes sound. It was a kid on a side street, or a cat chasing mice through mist-damp piles of yard cuttings. Let it stalk. For that was what I now did, enrobing my form as the summoned demon of the vindictive ex-lover, the dangerous Phantom who possesses women, who is the monster lurking within facile love songs about “making you mine,” the stalker who terrifies through his harnessing the Deadly Sin of vanity. A different vanity than that which makes homes sanctuaries that Dark and Shadowy Men can violate. It is a deeper vanity than that, and much more potent.

  As I finished the cigarette, ceremoniously throwing it in the gutter, I scanned Catherine’s five-unit building that had been a two-family duplex, making sure my escape routes were viable as I remembered them should Catherine have time to scream. It would be easy to swing from her balcony to the fire escape grafted to the side of the once house-like house. Depending on the situation, I could go down to the street or up to the slanting roof. From the roof, I could jump to the next building. If I missed the jump, what did I lose? Six months? A year of medical bills I couldn’t afford?

  I went to the front door and rang her apartment.

  She buzzed me in. Like old times. Only now, I didn’t enter with a bird’s-nest lump of dread in my craw.

  She lived on the top floor. The foot of the stairwell touched a unit in which I heard people yelling and crying with the deep, rich pain of loss. Their pain hurt to hear. But in a way that shamed me, I knew their cries would create distraction, should I need it. On the second floor I went to the apartment just below Catherine’s and touched my ear to the door.

  Absolute quiet. No newscasters. No laugh tracks to the misadventures of Chandler, Phoebe, Ross and Joey. No talk radio. Just the shade-still heartbeat of a vacant living space.

  I’d cased Catherine’s building over these last few months of my existence, waiting for the people below her to go on vacation before calling her. It wouldn’t do for the thud of her body and what it would leak through floor and ceiling to alarm anybody. Evan’s death taught me how troublesome neighbours can be.

  I took it as divine providence when the people below moved out, letting the turn of events melt on my tongue as a Catholic would a Communion wafer. I made an appointment with the building manager to view the apartment while Catherine was at work, and asked for an application to fill out in private. While he was gone, I unlocked the window closest to the drainpipe that ran down the southeast corner of the building. If Catherine made an aria of our reunion, I could shimmy down the pipe outside her window and hide in the vacant apartment, assuming I didn’t shatter my limbs on the alley below trying to get in, and so let floating bits of marrow join my tumours in their revolt against my body.

  I climbed the stairs, drawn by Catherine’s siren-call she didn’t know was hers, because its notes were so deeply buried in the self-love at the core of her being—the self-love that punished her body for its disobedience in not bending to her focus-group-defined will. The tantric urgency in my flesh was changed by her song as I became the killer she sought: the stalking lover, the thing of myth that drew its strength from the voyeurism and narcissism of women such as Catherine, who make pretty and vicarious myths of empowerment and melodrama out of the plight of women who truly are stalked. Women such as Catherine . . . who longingly see victimhood as an opportunity for personal growth, to shine through adversity, and so perhaps meet a smoky-dark and handsome cop/protector. Victimhood wormed in their imagination as a chance, like multiple sclerosis or cancer or spinal injury or any other dramatically severe illness worthy of a made-for-TV movie, to will yourself to become better than you were, to not let adversity beat you, and so spit in the face of the truly stricken and afflicted.

  I reached Catherine’s door. I knocked on the barrier that my passage through would finalize the bestowment of power, the vindictive actualization, I had begun by watching.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Dean.” Who else?

  I heard the rattle, the clank, the rumble of locks being undone. Catherine’s protective barrier against all evil in the world. The throwing of locks was precise as the noh-play rigid dinners and conversations and lovemaking we’d shared, for the door was not the barrier that made her feel safe, but her control over it, her mastery of it through the manipulation of locks and bolts from one state to another.

  She opened the door, relinquishing her control, admitting me to the imaginary safe space of her home as a mythic being that, like monsters out of folklore, can only harm upon being invited in.

  When I saw her, my resolve to kill her faltered. She smiled the way people smile only for dear friends. She kissed my cheek, and it felt so very nice. I thought of Sarah, how we’d reconciled. Maybe Catherine and I could end on good terms. My mythic state, coursing within me, flowed into a warmth I could share with her, that could call from our hearts what had been good between us and save it, like a small thing pulled from a burning home. Maybe with understanding, not blood, we could quell my deep anger for her.

  She blew her chance.

  As she locked the door, controlling it and the entire world beyond by turning three throw-bolts and setting the New York T-bar that braced the door, she asked, “Are you okay?”

  “For now.”

  “You look okay.”

  A long moment as I took off my jacket and dropped my bag carefully, so as to not make a clatter. The silence stood by intrusively, counting the seconds of its own duration.

  She blurted, “Do you want coffee?” As soon as she asked, I saw the same flash of regret that darted behind her eyes when she asked me one night to light the red candle she liked lit when making love. As I struck the match, I saw that the candle had been melted down much farther than it had been two nights before, when I’d last been to her place. I felt her gaze on my back as I lit the candle, wondering whom she’d fucked the night before. I felt her hunger to start a fight or to slight me, so she could control the moment and deflect any chance of discussion. I heard the flap of her turning down the sheets. She said matter-of-factly, while I stared at the new flame
cupped in the diminished candle: “Barbara thinks I should break up with you.”

  Though how coffee could inspire the same flash of regret in her gaze, I couldn’t fathom.

  “Tea’s fine.”

  She spun and walked her nervous springing step through the realm of her possessions and the three-decades-old “elegance” she treasured to the kitchen, past the uncomfortable couch where she made me wait on so many occasions. She’d lost weight since I’d last seen her. She looked like a ghost, or a fault in the negative of the lifeless catalogue photo her home resembled. Her hatred of her body had grown more passionate.

  I rested my book-bag by the fortified door, opened the top zipper a fraction of an inch, followed her to the kitchen as I heard the faucet shut off.

  “I wanted to call you earlier,” she said as she set the kettle on the stove.

  “Why?” I asked, when what I wanted to ask was, “Why didn’t you? And why bring it up, now?”

  “I wanted to see if you wanted dinner tonight.”

  “I have to watch what I eat.”

  “Oh.”

  A pause of a second or two as I smelled fresh coffee, turned and saw the lone espresso she’d made for herself, the still-life with demitasse, book, and lemon rind she’d placed on her fine table to show me that I was not worthy of her making a second cup. I glanced to her espresso maker. It had been cleaned and wiped and shoved into the corner by the fridge where she stored it; the coffee grinder was not to be seen, and the counter was still damp and streaked from the sponge that had erased any trace of spilled grounds. Even the paring knife used to cut the lemon rind rested washed and shiny in the drainer by the sink. Her offer of coffee had been a mistake, a loss of her sacred control to fill the silence by the entryway, just as her asking me to light the candle had been a blurted loss of control. I stared at the espresso, at the demitasse that bore no mark of her lip on the rim, the perfect twist of rind that would be the envy of any barista, the book that had been so carefully placed. I felt Catherine’s eyes on me, touching my back as they had while I stared at the melted red candle.

  I waited for her slight.

  “I crossed out your number in my book. That’s why I couldn’t call.”

  “I’m listed, Catherine.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I turned as she laughed a pretty little laugh, her almost translucent hand covering her mouth like a geisha’s. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Before, this coffee tableau and verbal exchange would have set my teeth grinding and flurried my guts into self-digestion. Her little attack, her reduction of me to nothing more than an inky smear in her address book . . . a new and living ink, changing color as the red cells within lost oxygen, would be a justified blot to give in return.

  We spoke blithering small talk a few moments as the kettle heated, then, in mid-sentence, she walked toward me and took my hand . . . her fingers gently, sensually, caressing my palm. She kissed my lips. Her left hand touched my cheek as she said, “It’s really nice to see you again, Dean.”

  “It’s nice to see you, too.”

  And then she went to her cupboard, to take down the vacuum-sealed bags of tea.

  I know her too well.

  This whiff of erotic interlude is bait. I smell it. She wants me to want to sleep with her. She wants me in the whining role of the ex-lover, back for one last meaningful night, so she can have the control of saying, ‘No, Dean. We shouldn’t ruin this.’ While we were lovers, she’d told me about the others she’d turned away like that. It would be her way of having the last word. Before I die.

  I know her too well.

  Her teakettle is glass. With a rubber fixture on top like a stopper. A hole in the fixture whistles when the water boils.

  The water started to boil, a corona of bubbles forming where flame kissed the glass.

  It was time. I became what I had to be in that moment. I let it glow out from my bones, with the taste of the cigarette painting my mouth, and the taste of her kiss on my lips.

  “Catherine, I have medications in my bag I should be taking now. I need to go get them.”

  She smiled sweetly. “All right.”

  I went to the door and fetched my clanking book-bag, which smelled of formaldehyde from the place I’d gotten its contents. As I walked to the kitchen, my path knifing through the lies of her home, I pulled the shades of her living room windows. People from the building opposite could see into the kitchen at an angle if a flash of metal or spray of red caught their eyes.

  I went to the kitchen doorway and unzipped the bag.

  The kettle started to whistle.

  Now, God-dammit, now, while she faced the stove to turn down the heat.

  The rest you know.

  —Dean, I believe that just as you outgrew Piggy, you outgrew the need to murder. We should consider the possibility that you didn’t kill Sarah because your need to kill was weakened.

  So did he begin to end our Second Act, with a revelation he thought would have a profound impact, the sort of shift intended to make audience members eager to get back to the Third Act after lavatory breaks and smokes under the marquee. A new iteration of Stop me, before I kill again. He insulted me by saying my choice to kill was a gauche and animalistic need.

  —If that’s your professional opinion, it should help my lawyer. Will you be paid a stipend, by the way? I’d hate to think you’d waste a day in court for nothing.

  —Dean, part of you wanted to be caught.

  I had this coming . . . cloaking myself as an archetype, I subjected myself to clichés culled from the fictions that shaped the myths I used. Part of me wanted to get caught? A way to give me, a monster, a dusting of pathos. Too bad no beautiful and pure-hearted girl who could have been my salvation had been in my life at the time of my capture, to give my tale a hand-wringing whiff of the tragic. Even if such a Tess Trueheart had been in my life, the hard little stones of rogue cells in my testicles would have made our requisite night of tenderness awkward. And painful.

  —Which part wanted to be caught? The part with cancer, or the healthy part?

  —The part that orchestrated your capture.

  There are moments in theatre, like that in which Macduff states that he was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped, when a wave of silence spreads from the stage over the audience. Such a moment should have washed over my senses in that moment. Instead, I glimpsed a silence in my sight, as all traces of Doctor Johansson’s phantom pipe smoke refracted out of visibility.

  —Have you considered therapy, Doctor?

  —You ensured you’d be seen killing Catherine, and that the police could get to you.

  I had a violent insight to what Keene must have felt as broken glass arced into his neck: the imposition of a fiction that I didn’t write over my reality.

  Doctor Johansson read the doubt in my face, reached for a file, opened it. If he did so for the sake of having another prop to hold along with his pipe, I can’t say.

  —It’s here, Dean. About the cat and the dog you killed, the window you. . .

  —What cat and what dog?! I’d never kill an animal!

  I’d crashed back down when the inches of slack on my chains pulled taught before I realized I’d shot up my chair. The glass-sharp geometry of Doctor Johansson’s clinical reality snapped, and the room took an iron solidity, so harsh and unyielding that my sight cracked on it.

  Doctor Johansson went on, looking to the police file . . . the talisman of papal infallibility, of unimpeachable expositional fact that challenged me to throw my sanity against it.

  —There are the shades you left up so you’d be seen killing Catherine, the door you cracked open so the police could get in easily. I can use all this to your advantage, Dean, if you’ll admit doing these things.

  My twin’s gaze pressed on me, as if I stood on stage (playing the role that would one day be his) and had forgotten my lines. The urge to ask him for prompts from the wings t
witched in my throat, even as the lens that was his surrogate eye fed on me.

  —I’ve admitted murder to you. What I’ve told you will get me lethal injections in most states. If what you say made any sense, I’d admit it.

  —The police were in the building when you killed Catherine. You brought them there by killing the pets of the couple in apartment 103. You left a kitchen knife with your prints on it. . . .

  My lungs felt full of wet sand.

  —Why would I waltz into a building to kill someone while there’s a cop car in front?

  —You wanted to be caught. And even if the sight of the car would have driven you away, the car could have, should have, pulled up while you were in Catherine’s apartment. The police were a few blocks behind you. You timed it that way. You knew when that couple would come home and find their pets. You knew their routine. The building manager recognized your mug shots. He’s certain you’d been casing the building.

  —That’s not what happened. Not that way.

  My simple statement was like a small verse in a whirlwind. I’ve been telling the truth to this man and now he tries to entrap me? With a facile twist on the good cop/bad cop treatment? Or was I mad? Were the fictions that defined Doctor Johansson’s world corrupting my existence and my mind? In their training, forensic shrinks and profilers such as he use novels and drek thrillers as textbooks. Men who look for the leakage of sadistic fantasies in the behaviour of those whom they hunt and treat themselves have intellects shaped by fantasy. Were Doctor Johansson’s fantasies, the ways in which he read them, the ways in which they sculpted his mind, crushing the reality I’d crafted out of the same stone?