Psychos

by Neil Gaiman

  This is the nadir of your relationship. You’ve lost his trust. But if this were a romantic comedy, you’re just one montage and a grand gesture away from happily ever after.

  The dog weighs less than fifty pounds, but Clovis attacks it when you kneel to pick it up. Tearing into the limp carcass like a bag of kibble, he harries you all the way down the hall to the kitchen. His jaws clamp down on one flopping fore-leg and yank with all his might. You shout, “Heel, Clovis! Off! Go to your spot!” Clovis has never shown much interest in puppy games before, but he’s a fiend for tug of war. The limb twists and pops out of its socket. Fur and flesh split open and lukewarm blood sluices down your leg to pool in your new running shoes.

  “God damn it, heel!” You kick Clovis and catch him in the groin. He yips and spins around snarling and for one frozen moment, you’re sure he’s going to turn on you.

  You’ve never hit him before. The regimen of training and discipline ran you both ragged, but you’ve never lost your temper. The sudden change in your relationship strikes you both mute and still. You back away with the corpse, reaching behind you for the sliding glass door. Clovis lumbers off to sit and pout by the front door.

  You lurch across the patio, around the drained swimming pool to the edge of the yard. Beyond, a steep slope, shaggy with coastal scrub and exotic invasive weeds, plummets about two hundred feet to a dry arroyo that feeds into a storm drain. A palatial walled estate sprawls across the top of the next ridge, but there’s no other visible sign of civilization. The San Fernando Valley below is completely obscured by a colorless pall of smog.

  Drop the dog and it tumbles down the slope, almost instantly swallowed up by the brush. You’re not a big fan of poetry, but a line from a Browning poem leaps to mind as you wash the blood off your hands with the garden hose. And yet, God has not said a word!

  You probably can’t just throw him away now, though. Coyotes don’t give their kills first aid. The neighbors are digging a new pool. You wonder how hard it can be, to figure out how to use a Ditch Witch.

  Filled with renewed resolve, you go back into the house when Clovis lets loose a torrent of barking.

  The dog owner is crawling down the hall again. Clovis snaps and growls, but not at him.

  The front door opens.

  A TV weatherman walks in holding a Starbucks travel mug and a big pink box of doughnuts. He looks at you like an unexpected Category 4 tropical storm that he failed to predict.

  “Am I early for the open house?” you ask. “I was walking by and the door was wide open, and I wanted to come right in and make an offer…”

  You maneuver yourself to block Clovis and draw his eyes away from the shambling monster in the corridor to the garage.

  He smiles and nods, trying to believe you. This house has been a bomb on the market since before the recession. “That’s excellent! My wife is the agent, I just schlep the doughnuts…” He drops the bag on the dining room table and goes for his phone.

  “You don’t have to bother her…” “Oh, it’s no trouble, she’s right outside, putting up signs…” He hits a speed dial button and puts the phone to his ear. “So, are you from this area, or—” His face drains of blood, leaving it the pale orange of his bronzing agent.

  “Help…me…” the dog owner moans. “What the hell is—” The weatherman notices that he’s standing in a puddle of tacky blood.

  Clovis tenses, you feel him trembling against your leg. You feel his low growl, like the foundation of the house splitting in half.

  You cower and scream, “Don’t hurt me!”

  Clovis leaps. The weatherman’s travel mug bounces off his head. His muzzle clamps down on the weatherman’s crotch, driving him back on the floor.

  You look around and find nothing useful. Your rod is in the garage. You run into the kitchen and grab every knife out of the block in a big fistful.

  The weatherman is much tougher than the dog owner, and must’ve done a special report about surviving wild animal attacks before. He rolls on his belly and curls in a ball, covering the back of his neck. Clovis circles in a frenzy, biting and clawing and scoring superficial flesh wounds, but nothing the government would call torture.

  This has gone far enough.

  You jab his hands with the knives. They’re cheap Chinese Ikea crap, but the sudden pricking makes his hands fly away from his neck. Before he can flip over, you plunge all five knives into the junction of skull and spinal column.

  He goes rigid, humping the deep pile shag with pitiful, diminishing spasms, then sputtering, winding down, choking on his own blood. It takes a while for his eyes to glaze over. He must have so many questions…

  You sit on his back for another minute, willing yourself not to throw up, you’ve got enough of a mess to clean up. If she ever hopes to clear this abortion, Megan is going to have to recarpet.

  Clovis nuzzles your hand. You absently pet him, moaning, “What am I gonna do with you,” and then notice he’s got a phone in his mouth, and it’s ringing.

  You pick it up. It’s dripping slobber. “Hi, Megan? It’s me, Rowena Merkel, from Encino Re/Maxx?”

  Megan is, to put it plainly, a dipshit. “Oops, sorry, I was trying to reach my husband…”

  “And you’ve reached his phone, hon.” You push the fruity Avon Lady pep into your voice. “I’m here with a really sweet couple who wanted to try to sneak in and see the house early today, and you caught us.”

  “Oh, well that’s great! I thought you were out of showing houses. Are they, you know…serious?”

  “Very, but they’re very concerned about security, and I’m afraid Dan—” “Doug…” “Doug was showing us the panic room, and he locked himself in.” “Omigod. Really?” She giggles. “He’s such an idiot…” “They all are, hon. Is the alarm shut off?” “Yes, it doesn’t go anywhere, but the lock…I have the key and the combo…” You hear the slam of the big door on Megan’s SUV and her chunky wedge heels clomping up the driveway. “Damn coyotes got somebody’s cat or something on the front lawn. I hope that didn’t put them off—”

  “Oh, they’re fucking morons, I can assure you. He’s some kind of TV personality, so be sure to kiss his ass a lot about it.”

  “What a coincidence! Wait, he’s not at Channel 4, is he? Doug hates those guys. You know they stole his idea for the toy drive—”

  She comes into the dining room and sees Clovis, his deep brown coat spiky and stained deep auburn with fresh blood. She bends down and coos to him and blows him kisses. “Who’s a big boy?”

  You don’t even have to tell Clovis what to do.

  “So…do you remember ever not being a sociopath?”

  Out in the living room now, why try to hide? Call any crew of Salvadoran refugees and pay them cash up front to clean this room, no questions asked, and without a moment’s hesitation, they would deport themselves.

  “I’m not a psycho,” you mutter. You’ve been talking to him for a while now, and he’s been so nice, and then he springs this on you…“The dog got out of control.”

  “But you don’t seem to feel bad about what happened.” “Sure I do! You think I wouldn’t rather be doing something else, right now? This is a workday for me. I want my fucking life back, too.”

  “Why deny it? You’re just going to kill me and burn the house down or something, anyway. Make it look like me and Doug were queer for each other, and using this place as a love nest. And Megan found out, and went all Benihana on everybody.”

  “That’s good, I should be taking notes,” you say, but nobody laughs. “What’s your life like?” “What? Mine? Oh, I don’t know. It’s good. Really good. I…work with people to…maximize their potential, and sometimes I’m on TV.”

  He smiles, waving a bandaged flipper to encourage you. “What do you tell them?” “Oh you know, all kinds of shit…don’t give up your dreams for someone else, don’t be a victim…but I give it to them straight, and I tell them what I see. I don’t sugar-coat it.”

  “So you see y
ourself as a…” he winces. “You got any more of those Percocets?” You give him a couple and a bottled water. “Thanks…You teach neurotic people how to be more of a psychotic, to get what they want.”

  “If you have to label everything, then maybe…” “Sure, but what happened today should be a warning sign, right?” “A lot of people pay therapists a hundred bucks an hour because they can’t face up to the fact that they feel exactly the way I do.”

  He nods and smiles at some joke he refuses to share. “What would you tell me to do, in my situation?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He digs in his waistband and pulls out a wallet, fumbles out a wad of twenties. “Go on, I’m soliciting your life coaching skills. What should I do?”

  “Put your money away.” You scoot closer to him on the couch. His face is already starting to smell, and it’s only been, what, four hours? “I would tell you to look at that dog, over there.”

  You point at Clovis, lolling on the love seat across the conversation pit from you. Something about her perfume or the overblown hairdo on Megan drove him wild, and he made a pig of himself.

  “What would he do, if it were his life on the line? He would die fighting, but he wouldn’t pick a fight he couldn’t win.”

  You put a hand on his chest, gently pinning him while running the other hand up his leg. His glazed eyes bounce off yours. “When animals know they’re doomed, they slink off into a cave or under a porch and die. We have to make the world do it for us, when it’s too late to dig out of the mess we’ve made of a life. Have the good sense to let go.”

  “I’m in no shape to fight you,” he says. “I didn’t think you were,” you say, “but that doesn’t mean…”

  Your hand finds a phone in his pocket. Doug’s phone. You dropped it somewhere when Megan tried to jump through the living room picture window into the front yard with her entrails trailing around her ankles.

  “You maggot, you called the cops?” “God no,” he chuckles. “Rich people don’t call the cops.”

  You take the phone away. The last call was to Bel Air Patrol, just over the hill in Beverly Hills. You hit redial and just start talking while you strangle him.

  “Yes, my husband just called, and I don’t know what he tried to tell you…Yes, he is married. We’re very private people, we don’t feel the need to tell everybody everything…Yes, maybe you should update his profile. Anyway, there’s no need for…Yes, he’s quite high on prescription medications from an injury…a dog bite. I understand there’s a false call fee. We’d be happy to charge it to our account. And also, there’s been a lot of break-ins to our neighborhood lately, so perhaps you have a service where a car is parked on our block for a couple hours in the afternoon? It’d mean the world to us, and most of the burglaries have happened during the day, so…Fine, go ahead and add it to our account. You work on commission, correct? Does that make you happy? Very good then, have a wonderful day, bye.”

  You’ve gone and done it, now. You got the last word in, so why do you still feel so empty? Now, he can’t eat his words. But kicking his stupid blue face in still seems a lot more relaxing than yoga.

  Okay, enough. You’ve navigated this situation like a pro. Time to reclaim the day. You had things you were going to do, so do them. If nothing else, a solid trail of work phone calls will establish an alibi. Nobody in the midst of a spree killing pauses to work phones.

  You call your agent. She’s busy, but you call and call until she picks up. “Have you heard anything about the Dr. show?”

  “No, but it’s Sunday and the Daytime Emmys were last week, honey. Nobody’s talking to—”

  “I want the producer’s number.” “Don’t push too hard. They don’t like hungry women. It scares them, and you always—”

  “Give me the number or you’re fired.”

  She gives you the number. You go into the bathroom to look in the mirror and give yourself a pep talk. “You are a star. This is destiny. Nothing else matters, but what you make of this moment.”

  Take out your phone and make the call.

  You smell gasoline.

  A flutter in your chest, like a phone sewn under your breastbone, but this time there is a phone, albeit in your hip pocket. You take the dog owner’s phone out and look at it next to yours.

  You answer his phone and say hello to yourself.

  The doorbell rings. You go to the window and peer through the blinds at a nice Pakistani couple on the porch. The husband looks like a chemical engineer, the wife maybe a lawyer. Behind them, a discreet distance down the driveway, a couple with two-point-three kids, fresh from church, loiter around their SUV, eating Cold-stone ice cream and waiting their turn. On the lawn, and on everyone going down the street, are signs in Megan’s cack-handed block Sharpie capitols: OPEN HOUSE TODAY!

  God damn it, after all your hard work, one bad accident and you’re back in real estate.

  The doorbell rings like every church in Christendom. Clovis jumps and barks at the front door, and then he looks right at you like he’s not a dog at all, before he bolts out the garage side door.

  You’re really losing it, because it occurs to you that maybe there is no Clovis, maybe there never was, and all of this was just you, all along. It’s almost a relief to find you’re not going crazy, when you hear the barking and screams outside.

  You go back into the living room and look around. You blow out the pilot light on the water heater and the stove fixtures.

  Suddenly, it’s out of your hands. You might as well lay down and have a nap. Lay your head on the dog owner’s chest, and your ear crushes a soft pack of cigarettes, and this is what happens, you think, when you lose control. You may as well start smoking again, just to have some control over how fast you blow it all.

  It’s been years, and you’ve built a cult, if not a religion, out of your own legendary self-control.

  Fuck it, you think. Maybe just one…

  You light a smoke and take a drag and remember why you quit. This is not who you are. You’re not someone else’s sordid water-cooler story. You can never go home, but you won’t let the bastards drag you down.

  You drop it on the floor and go out the back, around the pool and over the fence, sliding, tumbling through grasping thorny brush snagging your leotard and ripping off your hat.

  You come to rest in a dry creekbed surrounded by coyotes. They scatter when the explosions and fire split the sky high above, but they circle you, yipping and howling when the sirens come.

  This is how you get control back. You don’t need a dog to define you. This part will be easy. To get back on top, you only have to take out the leader.

  Righteous

  BY WESTON OCHSE

  PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) takes many forms, virtually none of them good. At its worst, it reduces strong men and women—often soldiers with clear minds and nerves of steel—to twitchy, delusional paranoid schizophrenics, unable to function in the world they return to, and in which they no longer belong.

  But trauma isn’t merely a battlefield condition. Sometimes the shit doesn’t really hit the fan till you bring the war back home.

  Weston Ochse brings his military intelligence background to bear in this berserk opus of nebulous vengeance writ large, replete with a neat Son of Sam reference for the serial killer cognoscenti. And a pizza that I would not want to eat.

  They say he never felt a thing. They say when the bomb blew and his lower body evaporated, he died at that moment. But in my dreams he lives for a few more seconds. I see him know that he’s about to die. I feel his fear. Then I feel his pain. And it is like my own legs being ripped from me. Ripped by the strong arms of a vengeful god, too hungry and eager to put us in our place to understand the simple truth that we’re merely humans and have been seeking an eternity for just a little fucking direction.

  I sit behind the wheel of my Buick sedan. I’ve always owned Buicks. My first one was a hand-me-down from my dad, who’d also always owned them. I was going to
hand one down to Brandon when he got back from this deployment. When he was little he called it a Bwik. He’d just started to read and that’s the way he sounded out the letters. ‘Daddy, let’s go to the store in the Bwik.’ ‘Can we take a ride in the Bwik?’ ‘Let’s go in the Bwik.’ It was always about the Bwik. I held back telling him the right way to say it. I loved it when he called it that—the Bwik. But some asshat kid in fourth grade made fun of him and Brandon never called it a Bwik again.

  Except in my mind.

  You’re talking to yourself again, Dude, the dog says, sitting in the passenger seat, his baleful eyes on me.

  The no-account mutt is probably right. That he’s the only one who can hear me makes it okay. I found him on a back Kentucky road. I passed him, then backed up and opened the passenger door. He looked at me as if he knew the entirety of my plan and shook his head. Asshat, he’d said in the voice of my long dead wife. You’re going to need me. Then he jumped into the seat and we’ve been a team ever since.

  Yeah, I used to love this car. I used to wash it every weekend. Now the floor holds the evidence of my vigils: bright yellow, red and orange cups, bags, napkins, and the residue of too many late night trips to fast food restaurants. From the outside it’s hard to tell what color it is. The car hasn’t been washed since the funeral. A thousand miles of road and a sideswipe of a guardrail have changed its complexion. Really, nothing has been done to it except the driving. Always the driving. And like so many nights before, I stare daggers at the place the man sits. Tonight it’s in a booth by a window, he and his wife and young sons eating pizza and laughing like he isn’t a serial murderer by proxy. We’re almost ready to execute this one, too.

  It was a war, Dude. I keep telling you. It was war.

  I can never get over how much the dog sounds like Susan. Part of me wonders if her ghost inhabits the mutt, but another part of me wonders if it isn’t God having a good laugh.

  “It wasn’t the war anyone signed up for,” I say. “What kind of war does these things to our kids?”

  The dog looks at me and shakes his head. “I know. I’m an asshat.”