I loved my daughter. She phoned every month. She grew up to be a smart, attractive kid. She's now a business analyst and lives down in San Diego with her husband. She's the only thing I care about in this world.
* * * *
The next morning, I put on my sunglasses and hat and I walked into the city. My street was right on the edge of town, so in four minutes I was on Victoria Street, the main street in Hamilton.
I located a suitable public trashcan, and I dumped into it a wad of global warming pamphlets. Is there global warming? Hell, I don't know, but I refused to have blind acceptance of it shoved down my throat like I didn't know any better. Least of all, by a young man sporting blond dreadlocks and the insufferable belief that being unequivocally young made him unequivocally right.
I visited the bank, and I retrieved some money. I went to a supermarket, and I bought bananas, apples, eight cans of air freshener, a dozen packets of latex cleaning gloves, a packet of cookies, and a copy of Time magazine, Pacific Edition.
I found a hardware store, and I bought a handsaw and two-dozen replacement blades, together with an eight-inch pair of shears—the kind dressmakers used for cutting cloth. You can't shred clothing with ordinary scissors, it takes forever and gives you blisters.
A noonday copy of the Waikato Times was waiting for me at the bungalow in the mailbox. There was a story on the front page about the kid. His name had been Duncan. Duncan had been in his second year of an information technology degree—Hamilton was a university town. In his spare time, Duncan had been a budding bass guitarist in a band, and a vegan, which I think meant he had only eaten bark.
I assumed a degree in information technology meant he'd been studying computers. I hated computers. I owned a laptop, and I would concede it was convenient as a writing tool, but that was as far as I would go. I didn't own a mobile phone, I didn't have a fax machine, I didn't own an e-mail address, and I'd been on the Internet the sum total of four times in my life. According to the Internet, I had been born in Akron and I was ninety-eight. For the record, I was born in La Honda—I'd never set foot in Ohio—and I am sixty-eight.
Yes, I'd pushed him. I'd shoved him back against the railing. I'd shoved him hard and with enough momentum to topple him right over the edge of it. I had killed between heartbeats. I had indeed seen him fall from the bridge. I had stared down at him as he'd plunged head first into the river.
I had nearly followed after him. My life had ended even before he'd hit the water. In my head, I'd heard screams and angry voices. I'd heard cars and trucks stopping. I'd heard people running in my direction. I'd felt the aggression and hatred of an angry mob descending on me like a hurricane. I hadn't committed murder behind a closed door and in private where no one could possibly have seen what I had done, but out on a public road in the bright light of the afternoon sun.
And then I had realized I was alone. It had been a peculiar twist of fate. There had been no one else on the sidewalk in either direction. There had been no cars or trucks, not even a bicycle. The kid and I had been the only ones on the bridge. I had murdered someone in the plain sight of everyone, only no one had been there for the looking.
* * * *
Detective Shannon was back on the purple sofa. He was back in that casual slouch of his and again twirling his black mobile phone around in his fingers. “We can't find Duncan's phone."
The kid had been holding a mobile phone when I'd pushed him, and he'd dropped it onto the sidewalk. It had been the only part of him that hadn't gone into the river. Stupidly, I'd picked it up and taken it with me.
In crime stories, all bad guys have a problem. They leave a clue, or say something to contradict themselves. Worse still, they're observed by a casual passerby who's in possession of an accurate timepiece and a conceivable reason to note the time. The problem is the villain's downfall, and the kid's mobile phone was going to be my big bad downfall.
The police manual sitting on the table next to my laptop had proudly informed me that New Zealand had been the first country in the British Empire to convict someone solely on the evidence of fingerprints. That had been in 1920. I wasn't dealing with the Keystone Kops down here.
It would have been illogical for the kid to kill himself by jumping, and to have arbitrarily left something behind. Why not the headphones he'd been wearing, or the satchel he had slung over his shoulder? No, the phone looked like it had been dropped ... because it had been ... because he'd been pushed.
I couldn't have thrown the thing in the river after him. Picking it up I had put my fingerprints all over it, and even on the bottom of a river, and even factoring in a week before it was located and retrieved, who could say how long my prints and DNA would have stayed on it? Frankly, I hated the minutiae of microbes. I hated stories that relied on microscopes and goatee-chinned lab coats babbling on about forensic baloney I didn't understand.
"We can't find Duncan's phone,” Detective Shannon said.
"Is it important?"
"According to his friends, he always had it with him."
"Maybe he lost it."
Shannon rubbed the edge of his black mobile phone along the edge of his stubbly chin. “Duncan had arranged to meet his girlfriend at the city library. She was finishing work for the day, and they were going to the cinema."
"Maybe his phone is on the bottom of the riverbed?” I helpfully suggested.
Shannon shook his head.
Detective Shannon was the most laid-back cop I'd ever encountered. It was like we were lounging by the pool, and he was investigating the absence of a cufflink.
"How do you know it's not at the bottom of the river?"
Shannon tapped a bunch of buttons on his black phone. He held it to his ear for a moment, and then held it out for me to observe. A little view screen on the phone was illuminated. It meant nothing to me.
"I just dialed Duncan's number,” Shannon explained. “His phone is ringing right now."
I shrugged my shoulders.
"It means his phone isn't underwater."
"Okay. Where is it?"
Shannon turned off his phone. “We're exploring the possibility there was someone else on the bridge."
"You think he was mugged?” I asked, helpfully inserting a storyline. “You think another kid stole his phone, and then threw him into the river?"
"Duncan had bruising to his abdomen. It's consistent with his having been shoved against the bridge's guardrail."
I picked up the New Zealand Police Manual and nonchalantly thumbed through it. It was a dry tome, with the thickness of the L.A. phone book. They had a lot of procedure in this country.
"Tell me more about what you were doing when you saw Duncan fall,” Shannon asked.
"I'm a writer. I was writing."
We spent the next ten minutes cat and mousing each other about what I had seen. I had seen the kid fall. I hadn't seen anyone else on the bridge. It was all the absolute truth. I would've probably even passed a lie detector test on it, although the manual said they didn't use those here.
* * * *
Last night I dreamt of Rod Serling. He smoked a cigarette and explained to me that it was a man's destiny to be hoist with his own petard. The fact he told me this in Esperanto and wore an afro wig and eyeliner was the tip-off to it being a dream.
I had written a Twilight Zone back in December of ‘59. I had received a letter back from Mr. Serling. He had been encouraging and supportive. It had been my first rejection and it now lived in a frame above my desk in California.
I was truly in the zone now. I had spent the morning chain-smoking at the laptop watching a team of police divers hoover the riverbed. They brought up rocks and stones, car fenders, empty wine bottles, and the remnants of what looked like dinosaur bones.
It was going to be another hot damn day in Hamilton. I went to work with the cans of air freshener—the air was getting a bit whiffy, as they say. Air-con was not a typical household fixture in this country, and the bungalow was a typical househol
d. There was an electric fan in the living room, but all that did was successfully move the warm, damp air from one side of the room over to the other. There was also a dehumidifier. It stood in the corner on wheels and sucked moisture out of the atmosphere. I could have used the machine to run my bath at night. I was emptying its two-gallon bucket on a regular shift. There was honestly more liquid in the air in the bungalow than there was out in the river.
The phone rang. It was a woman from the bank. She wanted to know if I had an MP3 player or something in my safe custody packet in their bank vault because my packet kept vibrating at odd intervals and she was sure she could hear Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile emanating from it.
Thirty minutes later, I was back on Victoria Street and back inside the bank, the magnificently air-conditioned bank. I had no idea what an MP3 player was. A modern version of a Walkman, I figured. I'd never owned one of those either.
I stood alone at the end of the counter and went through the contents of my safe custody packet: passport, four thousand dollars in U.S. and local currency, local work visa and employment contract, and the kid's mobile phone.
There was a message on the phone's little view screen: thirty-seven missed calls. What was I going to do with this damn thing? I buried the phone in the bottom of my pocket and resealed the packet. The woman banker then went and put the packet back into the depths of the bank vault. She wished me a nice day.
I went to the supermarket and I bought a carton of plastic bags, and another dozen cans of air freshener. I arrived back at my street and remembered I was out of cigarettes. I remembered the dairy.
I procured my smoking supplies from a dairy on the other side of the river. It was the point of my afternoon walk. Yesterday, as per routine, I had bought a pack of cigarettes at said dairy ... about thirty minutes before I had sent the kid into the river.
I didn't exactly blend into the local shrubbery. I stood out like a thumb slammed with a hammer. I was American, bald, with a gravel voice, and a penchant for Hawaiian shirts. Had the police not made inquiries? Had the Kiwi bloke behind the counter not remembered I had been in his dairy yesterday afternoon and had bought a pack of American blend cigarettes? Jimi Hendrix launched into a guitar solo in my pocket. Missed call number thirty-eight.
I went back inside the bungalow and studied the kid's phone. I had no idea how to turn it off. God forbid I should try and accidentally put in a call to his grandmother. When would the batteries go dead? And after that, then what? Smash the phone up into little bits and eat it? I went to work again with the cans of air freshener.
I was leaving a long trail of dots. If anyone ever connected them all together, they'd see my smiling mug shot staring back at them. I stripped down to my underwear and I sat back at the laptop. The police manual reported the death penalty was no longer on the books in this country. They had last hung someone in 1957. Lucky me.
* * * *
Just after midnight, I typed fade out, and I saved episode #188 of Humphrey Kemp to a floppy disc. Detective Kemp had once again cracked the case and the bad guy had gone to jail. The clues had been a fingerprint on a golf club, a contradictory remark about a hood ornament, and a parson with a portable sundial. It was two degrees cooler at night. It was the only time of the day I could comfortably strike the keys.
I sat there—sans cigarette—and pondered the logic of episode #188. Television is consumed fast, like a bag of Cheetos in a roomful of preschoolers. The logic of a plot has to be impeccable. There can be no loose ends and everything has to make sense. There can be no leftovers in the story bag.
I glanced at the kid's mobile phone. There were now fifty-seven missed calls. It occurred to me that logic was only required in fiction. You know: Suspension of belief requires a degree of logical believability. But out here in the real world, bubba, anything was fair game.
Wearing gloves, I rigorously cleaned the kid's mobile phone. I spent two hours polishing that little hunk of plastic until I could be sure every ounce of humanity had been scraped off. I then placed the phone into a plastic bag. And along with the phone, I tossed in three neon-colored clothespins and a portrait of Stalin I had snipped out of Time.
I sealed the plastic bag, took it outside, and threw it into the river. The air in the bag kept the package afloat and I watched it sail away in the moonlight.
The phone would eventually be found. It might even wind up in the hands of the police. It would be asked: why was Duncan's phone in a plastic bag with a handful of clothespins and Joseph Stalin? Why were there no fingerprints on any of it?
By the same token, it could also be asked why Duncan had worn his hair in pigtails; or why he'd had metal stuck through his eyebrow, his nose, and the corner of his mouth; or why the satchel he'd been carrying was radioactive green in color and emblazoned with the word cogitate.
No logical conclusion would be found, and where there is no logic, there is doubt. And in doubt is my safety. And in the end, stroking the stubble on their detective heads, they'd boil it down to this: Kids. Go figure.
* * * *
The next day, I laid low, in the bungalow. I spent the afternoon proofreading episode #188 and emptying the dehumidifier. If the dots remained unconnected, I wasn't going to jail. No one had seen me push the kid and maybe he'd gotten his bruises someplace else. You know what kids are like, always getting into trouble.
There was no evidence I had sent him into the river, and not the suggestion I had, and why on earth would I have done? Apart from the one incident back in ‘79, I had a clean police record. Hell, I was a model citizen. I was an elderly gentleman, a professional writer. I didn't drink and I didn't jaywalk. I even gave regularly to charity—animal services.
So long as I didn't lose my cool in this unendurable weather, then I would be, metaphorically, in the getaway car with a full tank of gas—or more appropriately, in the speedboat heading downriver for the open sea.
Self-control—I was going to have to work on that. I was a man ordinarily in complete control who, for a naked moment, had gotten out of control and had lost it in public. There was no excuse. I was not going to lose my self-control in public again. Not ever. No way.
I sprayed more air freshener throughout the house. I had to quit fretting about the kid in the river. I had things to do. I had to start on the first draft of the next episode of Humphrey Kemp, and I had to deal with the kid in the bathtub—the blond dreadlocks.
If you're going to come and bang on someone's door so loud, it scares the holy crap out of him, and he misses his aim with a hammer, don't then get your foot in his doorway and start an argument about saving the planet, leastways when he's still holding the damn hammer.
And I also had to deal with Detective Shannon. He was in the tub along with the blond dreadlocks. The police manual had hit his head like a Louisville Slugger. I hadn't liked the way he had looked at me—there had been a pejorative connotation. And only God knew what I was going to do with his mobile phone.
Copyright © 2010 Stephen Ross
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Fiction: IN IT UP TO MY NECK by Jas. R. Petrin
* * * *
Andrew Wright
* * * *
What do I know about art?
My name is Melvin Hinks and I make my living in this world as a musician. A piano player. Not a pianist, you understand. Not one of those snobs with the Juilliard education, playing in symphony orchestras or at the opera: Take their sheet music and throw it out the window and most of those people couldn't play chopsticks. And not one of those rich pop musicians who are—let's face it—just plain lucky. They manage to make a hit record, then get on a winning streak with hit after hit.
My parents were performers too. They ran a magic show out of the back of a rusted Handi-Van, following county fairs and town festivals back and forth across North America. Their best performance, the one people lined up for, was a disappearing act. Mom would climb into a large silver sack and disappear, then dad would follow her, the sack
would drop to the ground, and they'd be gone. No one could figure out how they did it. But their greatest disappearing act was the day they dropped me off at a kiddies’ playground, drove away, and never came back.
Anyway, I'm what you would call a working stiff. One of those musicians you generally see in cocktail lounges, playing background music for the gangsters and banksters who like to kick back and pretend they're just ordinary joes. Sometimes one of them will request a tune, all smiles, shoving a tip at me. When that happens I feel like throwing the cash back at them. But I don't. I take it. And I play the number.
So this one evening I'm doing exactly that. Playing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” for this stupid woman who doesn't seem to realize I get asked to play that soppy tune at least six times a month. I almost told her about an accordion player I knew once, this guy who worked in a Bavarian restaurant, all kitted out in lederhosen, blouse, and feathered cap, who told me that one day somebody asked him to play “Wooden Heart,” and he went into the kitchen and tried to cut his wrists. But I reminded myself I needed the job and couldn't afford to get sacked by one more bar manager.
The lady put a lousy five dollar bill on the piano. I played the lousy song, cutting it short—most drunks don't notice when you axe a few bars—and I'm getting off the stage to take my break when the guy who is with her steps out of the gloom, grabs my arm, and insists I join the two of them for a drink.
Having been on my way to the kitchen to enjoy a cup of stale coffee with the cook, a glass of scotch at that moment suddenly seemed as if it would go down well.
I stepped over to their table.
"We really, really enjoy your music,” the woman said, flashing one of those smiles well-fixed parents buy for their children with large checks to dentists and orthodontists. She was certainly very attractive, though. It's amazing what expensive creams will do. “I'm Judy Smith and this is Casper Jones. It's very nice to meet you, er ... She squinched her eyes at me.
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