by L. A. Fields
Ray is already lounging against the Kaplan family obelisk when Noah arrives exactly on time. Ray rises to stand over Faye’s grave with him. Noah is staring down at the stone. Ray is not.
“You know, if you want people to visit your final resting place, you should really install a bench. I think I’ll mention that to my dad, it’s a good idea.”
“What killed her used to be called Bright’s disease.”
“Hmm. There was nothing bright about it.”
Noah looks up, looks around, and sighs. “The name Rosehill for this place was an accident. A man named Roe would only sell the land to the city if they named the whole place after him, Roe’s Hill, possessive. Some secretary wrote it up wrong, and I bet no one’s sorry about that; the dude was being kind of self-important.”
“Delusional, too. I don’t see any hills around here, do you?”
Noah snorts. Ray can always make him laugh, even when he’s in a very fateful mood.
“I’m going to Europe this summer, and Harvard in the fall.”
“Jesus!” Ray says with an impressed whistle.
“Why would you call on Jesus in the Jewish section of the cemetery?”
“Because I’m that surprised,” Ray says. “And he was Jewish himself, you’re the one who told me that, aren’t you?”
“I’m pretty sure I taught you everything you know.”
“Though certainly not humility,” Ray says, nudging Noah out of his stiff posture.
“Certainly not.”
“Let’s take a walk.”
They ramble through the grounds of the bury patch, pausing at interesting grave markers like the leafless stone trees and glass-protected statues to keep the punishing weather away. Eventually they come to a cannon, a war monument with a pyramid of heavy ammunition beside it, and Noah finally says what he came here to say.
“Let’s do it,” he tells Ray, watching his face carefully as he receives this news. “The ultimate crime, the most dangerous game . . . I’m in, I’ll do it with you.”
Noah expects sunshine to figuratively burst from Ray’s face, but he doesn’t believe it yet.
“Why? What makes you want to do this when you don’t have to? Just can’t stand all your success? Trying to sabotage yourself?”
“I’m trying to stay true to myself. If I’m an atheist like I say, then there’s no moral reason not to, and seeing my mother’s grave reminds me of that conviction. No loving God would exchange her for me in this world, but that’s what happened. And if I’m really a subscriber to Nietzsche, there’s no logical reason not to. ‘One must not avoid one’s tests, although they constitute perhaps the most dangerous game one can play,’ that’s a direct quote.” It’s a line followed by cautions about what not to cling to in an effort to avoid the tests that reveal one’s true character. Cling not to king or country or science or even one’s own freedom: Not to cleave to one’s own liberation, to the voluptuous distance and remoteness of the bird, which always flies further aloft in order always to see more under it—the danger of the flier. So Noah can’t let the possibility of getting caught and going to prison stop him either.
“So, it’s all an intellectual exercise for you? You can’t think of a reason not to, so you might as well?”
“I have a reason in favor of it, too. Another wise man said, ‘the realization of oneself is the prime aim of life, and to realize oneself through pleasure is finer than to do so through pain.’ This would give me pleasure because it would give you pleasure, and certainly I’m the only one who would go so far to make you happy.”
“I see.” Now Ray smiles, not the cocky one he usually has, but hopeful and giddy. “I’ve got one, I’ve got a Nietzsche quote, and it’s really fitting too: ‘What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.’ Isn’t that right?”
“Right. I mean, correct.”
“Two rights make one wrong!” Ray shouts in victory, holding up his hand for a high five. When Noah obliges, Ray lets out a whoop so loud, it scares a small dole of mourning doves out of a nearby tree and away into the sky.
1
RAY’S CRIME OF A LIFETIME begins with a daytrip to Lake Michigan, to people watch and brainstorm about ideal victim demographics. Noah resists it every step of the way.
“I don’t know who you think we’re going to see at the lake in winter, wouldn’t this idea work better in spring? In summer?”
“You’re leaving this summer, we’re doing this now, and I’m sure there will be people out there, but the point isn’t to pick one today, it’s to speculate on all the different kinds of people who live in this city, and which ones are the most convenient to . . . include in our plan.”
Ray is being discreet because they’re still on the train—green to red (not the best omen in that transfer) up to Sheridan, for a short walk out to the shore. For some reason the wind off the lake isn’t half as bad as it seems to be when it cuts through the buildings and tries to shove one into icy road traffic.
They drag themselves out to the beach with a blanket, a thermos of hot cocoa spiked with vodka, and they sit down in tense, balled-up postures, huddled into themselves for warmth.
“See, there are people out here,” Ray says.
One old dude is in the actual water, in a full-body wetsuit. There is a couple with a dog, all three of them wearing sweaters and running around to stay warm. There are people out walking on their lunch break, but most of them stay on the pavement and don’t come down onto the mealy sand. It’s like a big mess of cold grits out on the sand, that’s how a frat brother of Ray’s from some Southern state described it. Ray keeps that simile to himself though, since it would only put Noah in a shittier mood.
Noah sighs, already tired of an adventure just begun. He starts speculating first, at least.
“That dude in the water is too tough to try and kill, if even the temperature can’t do it. You could probably kill that dog if you caught it after a day like this, when its energy’s been run out. It still might fight hard though; animals are always ready to be vicious when threatened.”
“People are animals like that,” Ray observes.
“Not all of them, and not all the time. Psychology plays a large role in that, just think of Stockholm syndrome, or the Milgram experiment, or the Stanford prison experiment.”
“I don’t want to think about any of that, I want to think about a victim I can overpower if things go wrong.”
“The dog then,” Noah says, pulling his knit cap down further over his ears—they’re furiously red because of the cold.
“At least no one could believe the dog’s word over mine.”
“I’d believe a dog over you,” Noah mumbles, blowing out another sigh from so deep within that it creates a dense cloud of vapor.
“I was thinking it’d have to be a young girl, or a child. Someone so small that even if they fight and kick, I can still force them around.”
Noah rolls his eyes towards his forehead a bit, and nods as he pictures it. His eyes are awfully gray and colorless on most days, but this wintery shore is putting a stormy slate tint into them. They almost look as troubled and queasy as this lake does in December.
“You know, if you want to kill a girl, we could rape her too, then we’d both finally lose that pesky virginity.”
“I don’t believe you really want to do that,” Ray says. Noah’s sexuality seems difficult enough with a schedule and a contract and a complacent male partner, he wouldn’t be able to stomach a fight with a girl. They’d have to drug her before he could even try.
“Well, do you want to do it? You like the idea of having sex with women, this would be your chance to go all the way. It’s what they say in baseball, right? Fourth base, a home run?”
Ray laughs. “Hey, you finally got it right!” Now they’re both smiling, and maybe Noah will actually join the party he’s already RSVP’d to, if Ray phrases it right.
Ray turns to Noah, and would probably take his hands if he weren’t clutching t
heir thermos and leeching its heat, that would make him listen more closely.
“Look, that isn’t the crime I want to commit, let’s not muddy the waters with that mess. You’re thinking of this like it’s a chore, but don’t, okay? Think about the sense of accomplishment you’ll have if we plan this right, plan it neatly, and get away with it! Think about what a rare specimen you’d be then, nobody does that.”
“Well, nobody we’ve heard of, if they really got away with it. I mean, by definition—”
“Shut up, Noah. You’ve agreed to this, and because you’re not a liar you’re going to do it, and if you’re going to do it, then why not do it right?”
“That’s a fair point,” Noah says.
“Thank you,” Ray says, turning back to look out over the water. “I think it’ll have to be a kid. And probably not a girl, since what you just said is the first thing people will think, and they’ll look for her too hard.” Ray sighs contentedly. He has a victim to picture going forward; now he just has to build a crime around that unidentified boy.
Noah stays quiet.
“Okay,” Ray says, knowing it’s time to reward Noah, since Ray has what he wanted from this trip, an idea to start with. “So tell me about pelicans or seagulls or whatever water birds you’re thinking about right now.”
“Those are salt water birds, this is a fresh water lake; I hope you know that and are just joking.”
“Maybe.” Ray probably did know that, but he doesn’t often bother to think before he speaks, it’s too time consuming.
“They’re salt water birds, and so are terns and petrels.”
“Turns and petrol, okay.”
“And so are cormorants.”
“That sounds like a rank in the army to me.”
“Not in our army, unless you’re confusing the word with colonels.”
“Commandant?”
“That’s closer, but a cormorant is still a bird.”
“Any other salt water birds you want to tell me about?”
Now Noah turns to Ray, the closest expression he has to a smirk on his face, which means he looks like he’s about to spit out a marble.
“Penguins.”
They both start chortling after that, and Ray says, “That’s funny because it’s so cold.”
“It’s funnier because we’re about to experience a polar vortex in Chicago.”
“You should quit murder after this and go into comedy.”
“That’s funny because the aim is actually ‘to kill’ in both professions.”
“You’re killing me right now,” Ray tells him, standing up and wobbling as the spiked cocoa makes its presence in his body known. “Let’s get out of here before we freeze to death.”
2
“HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THE method of apprehension?” Noah asks. He doesn’t really want to prompt Ray at this endeavor, but it is fascinating to watch his mind fail to work up to the most obvious problems. They’re spending a bright winter’s day in the International Museum of Surgical Science because when the weather’s nice, museums are empty. Plus, Ray is on a mission to completely desensitize himself to the horrors of the human body. “Because if you want to kill someone without a gun,” Noah continues, “you’ll probably have to be close to them, and in a private place. Wait, do you know how you want to do it yet?”
“Not a gun,” Ray says. “Too loud, too easy, and I doubt those birding pistols you have could kill a person.”
“If you shot them right through the eye, aiming at the brain,” Noah points to a replica skull of Phineas Gage for illustration, “you could do it, probably. If not kill, then certainly maim.”
“Yeah, see, failure is not an option. I read somewhere that people even screw up suicides with guns, though I don’t know how.”
Noah motioned to the plaque under Phineas as something of an answer itself, and says, “Nobody knows exactly how, the brain is a mysterious thing. But suicides could go wrong a hundred ways, like I know at least one case of a man living through a self-induced shotgun blow to the neck.”
“Okay, how the fuck? Don’t shotguns spray?” Ray made a gesture, trying to illustrate the expansion of buckshot from a cartridge. It looks like he’s auditioning for Chicago the musical: jazz hands!
Noah explains. “Think of how long a shotgun is, how hard it is to reach the trigger. So this guy wanted to blow his head off, and he put the muzzle, which is a cute word for it, right here.” He reaches over to Ray’s neck, to touch the spot where a medical professional might take a pulse. Ray tries to dodge him a little, but the room, the whole museum, is as dead and empty as every surgical mishap they’ve seen today, so Noah insists, and touches Ray’s neck with his first two fingers, and pokes them in hard. “He pushed the barrel in so far that he shoved his windpipe to one side and his jugular to the other, and when he pulled the trigger, all he did was paralyze himself.”
“Damn,” Ray says, swatting Noah’s hand away now that the point has been made. “Do you think he’s documented in here some place?”
“He’s probably not that rare. Stupid people attempt suicide all the time, I bet a lot of them screw it up.”
“You disagree with suicide?” Ray asks as they walk into a room with bladder stones the size of softballs under a glass box.
“Not morally, but it seems weak. If you want to die, all you have to do is wait long enough.”
Ray laughs, they realize the rest of the room is full of awkward portraits of Caesarean sections, and they move to the next room.
“I’ve thought about it,” Ray says. “Sometimes life almost bores me to death, literally. I might think about it again if this next crime goes wrong, and
people find out.”
“Don’t lie to me, you’d love being famous for murder.”
“I don’t want to be famous for botching one though, so no gunshot survivals, and no mistakes, otherwise it’ll have to be pathetic, weak Suicide City for me.”
Noah smiles and quotes, “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.”
“Nietzsche died in an asylum with nobody to mumble at but his Nazi sister, he should have chosen suicide on one of those dark nights, there’s got to be more dignity in that than a bunch of strokes.”
“Maybe,” Noah says. He has yet to really consider suicide himself, since he doubts his mother ever did, and she had a lot more reasons than both Noah and Ray put together.
“So what, we’ll have to kidnap the kid first, that’s what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know a better way to stay unseen during all this.”
“So we swoop down and snatch him into a car or something?”
“Not a car owned by us or anyone we know, in case someone remembers it being in the area.”
“That’s going to be a pain to figure out.”
“If it was easy everyone would do it,” Noah says. Now they’re in a room with a seated skeleton festooned with veins, illustrating the human circulatory system.
“I think it’ll be worth it,” Ray says, crouching down to get a close look at this exhibit, fogging the glass with his breath. Noah doesn’t say anything until Ray looks up at him with that peaceful face he gets when he’s got something to genuinely look forward to. If only he could feel like that his whole life, his pretty face would never wrinkle. “Don’t you think so?”
“I must, right? Since I’m doing it with you.”
Ray claps Noah’s calf lightly before standing up. They’ve got more knowledge to gain.
3
RAY IS THE ONLY GROWN SON home for the holidays this year, so he gets to put the menorah topper on the Christmas tree, an honor always reserved for the oldest kid around. Poor youngest, Tommy, has never even touched it.
Ray and Tommy get the most generic matching gifts—the same design of sweater, one big and one small; new leather wallets with their initials embossed on them, RAK and TAK; hundred-dollar gift certificates so they can buy whatever they actually
want themselves online; stockings stuffed with the same amount of matching candy. Gift giving is over in less than ten minutes. Ray gives Tommy all his candy sight unseen, which actually makes the boy feel rich indeed. Ray is old enough to find his brother’s youth charming, so eighteen years really does make an adult.
Watching Tommy obsess over his sweet loot that evening—watching him hoard and organize and even stash some of it for rediscovery later—gives Ray the best gift of his life: a shimmering new idea for the ultimate crime.
Ray dashes from the house so fast on Christmas day, his shoes are untied and his jacket is only half on, but even the dry smack of Chicago’s winter air doesn’t bother him. He could survive naked on Mount Everest for the distance between his house and Noah’s, and it just makes his time inside the front door faster. He knocks and enters without permission, calls out a hello to Mr. Kaplan and identifies himself as he steps out of his shoes and flings his jacket at the coat rack. He didn’t even bring his keys or his wallet with him! He’s in an ecstasy of excitement. He almost trips trying to run up the stairs three at a time, an act of physicality that should only be attempted by Olympians, not a frenzied member of the civilian class.
Ray grabs Noah into a spinning hug as he emerges from his room to investigate all the noise. Ray waltzes a surprised Noah back into his room before he whispers the word right into his ear: “Ransom!”
“Really?” Noah says, pleasantly surprised enough by getting carried over a threshold that he isn’t criticizing Ray’s idea yet, he’s just hearing it.
“If we’re already going to kidnap and murder,” Ray says as quietly as he possibly can, his voice shaking with the effort not to shout this latest epiphanic thought everywhere. “Let’s try for a ransom! I mean the problem with kidnappings for ransom is a still-living victim who can escape, remember your face or voice, all kinds of shit, this would be the perfect crime. It would even lead the cops away with motive, right? Because they’d be looking for people who need money, junkies or gamblers or whatever, never at guys like us.”
