Abnormal Occurrences

by Thomas Berger

  “Myra,” I cried. “What are you saying?” To Wonk I hastened to say, “Myra is known for her sense of irony. Let me explain that term—”

  “No need for that,” said he. “It’s certainly one thing we are familiar with: pretending that what everyone knows is true is really false, and vice versa. It was the only way we survived when under the thumb of the Bosses. We could use less of it now they’ve gone, but unfortunately we just can’t seem to shake off the habit, even though it really makes no sense nowadays.”

  “You just let me characterize my own mystique,” Myra said nastily to me. She turned to Wonk. “I was not being ironic. If you want a collection of boneheads, just come to the company for which I work, or go to the nation’s capital or to any state legislature.”

  I had not realized she was such an anarchist. I shrugged and added, “Well, for that matter, how about the factories where they make garments with buttons from which the thread had already mostly unraveled before you’ve worn them for the first time?”

  “Oh,” Myra scoffed, “that’s frivolous. But what about all the thieves on Wall Street, and the people who, though not in need, think it’s cute to shoplift?”

  “Drunken airline pilots!” I shouted.

  “The illiterates who misspell names printed at the bottom of TV screens.”

  “Waiters who are insolent, and then mispronounce ‘crepes.’”

  “Excuse me,” Wonk said in a tone of distress. He had not touched his wine. “I do believe you are bickering. That’s one thing we cannot endure: a conflict of opinions. All of us are always in perfect accord at all times. Perhaps it’s a racial trait. In any event, I thank you for your kindness, which I must say I’d have taken as a symptom of weakness had you not proved our superiors in so many other ways.” He smiled. “I still can’t quite understand why you haven’t given me a good thrashing and then burned the spacecraft. I don’t mind admitting that’s the way we would have treated you had the situation been reversed. I think we might have the moral edge on you, there. What’s the purpose of being strong unless it’s to exploit the weak?”

  He had acquired a look of discomfort. After a moment I realized that he was trying to rise from the chair but was in too close, his thighs under the table. I told him what to do.

  “So many things to remember!” he complained when he was finally erect. “As if the learning isn’t enough.” He beamed at Myra. “Thank you. For a female, you’re quite articulate.”

  He had already forgotten the location of the door by which he had entered, and I had to lead him out of the house. When we reached the yard I remembered I had not seen Bub for a while: the reason for which was that he had stayed on guard against the saucer. Or so I believed until he turned to me with a snarl. Had the space creatures transformed him? ...He sullenly averted his head in a familiar movement. Of course! He was bitter about the false promise of steak with which I had earlier subdued him. “All right,” I said, “I’ve got that coming. But just trust me awhile longer.” Alas, it would have to be quite a while, until the following evening in fact, back in town, for the Briceville convenience store, though open twenty-tour hours, sold cold cuts only.

  “Goodbye, Tony Walsh,” said Wonk.

  “Goodbye to you, Wonk. I won’t wish you well, for in fact I disapprove of your mission. Why don’t you people go back home and buckle down and try to improve yourselves? Study and work hard and make a real effort not to be such jerks. You’d surely improve yourselves significantly. Look what you learned in the short time here: sitting, drinking sardine oil, and so on. And then, once you had acquired self-respect based on accomplishment, you wouldn’t need anyone else to lord it over.”

  He stared searchingly into my eyes, and then, with the greatest good humor, uttered one stark obscenity, after which he plodded to the space vehicle and went up the gangplank. In a trice the saucer rose noisily into the air and whirled away.

  I returned to the kitchen, where Myra sat with the glass of wine Wonk had not touched.

  “I hope you’re not brooding,” I said, “over that tasteless comment of his.”

  She showed a vulpine grin. “Hardly. What can you expect from some fat old freak like that?”

  “I’m glad you came back before they left. I didn’t have a camera.”

  “Don’t think I intend to tell anyone about this,” she said firmly.

  “Are you serious?” I cried, and we proceeded to argue heatedly.

  Finally Myra made a crucial point. “All right, you tell and see how far you get! I have no intention of confirming your account.”

  “You mean you’ll suppress the entire incident just because maybe there’ll be some people who won’t even believe the two of us? But it happened, did it not? I never thought you of all people could ever be accused of a lack of conviction.”

  She gulped what was in her glass and poured herself more Chateau Talbot. I had to pour my own. “As usual,” she said, “you’re barking up the wrong tree... The reason I’ll keep quiet is that the Wurtzels are contemptible trash. Why give them publicity?” She stared into the middle distance. “I say let’s wait for more positive-thinking space visitors. I know they’re out there. Maybe those Bosses will show up, and we’ll have a fight on our hands. But who needs more Wurtzels?”

  I hope I haven’t given the impression here that I don’t admire Myra. We may wrangle, but underneath it all, we invariably end up seeing eye to eye. Except perhaps about wine. This one, with its excess of tannin, was as yet far too young to drink. But, I kept my own counsel on the matter, fearing that were I to mention it to Myra, she might storm out again. And frankly, I was scared to be alone, lest tougher guys appear now that the trail had been, so to speak, blazed.

  Granted Wishes: Wannabe Spousecides

  KIM AND DICK CAVANAUGH had been married some four months when each decided independently to have the other murdered. It was not an easy decision for either, for both had been, at least while living together for two years eight months and then in the earliest weeks of the marriage, in what if it weren’t love, then what? You could have fooled me, said Dick to himself in the bathroom mirror and then amended it to: You did fool me, in fact.

  Kim never spoke to herself, and when she talked with her shrink she habitually lied, which was self-defeating and an awfully expensive indulgence, but she was constitutionally incapable of confessing even to a doctor that she had made the most devastating mistake a person of her sort could make, for if she prided herself on any talent, it was for penetrating the facades of other people to the inner essence underlying all the surface bullshit. Come ON! though she would not have been caught dead saying it, was her implicit slogan. She could not be bluffed by reality. So when she discovered that, married long enough to have moved into a new phase, Dick bore little resemblance to the man he had been as companion or newlywed, Kim’s fiercest rage was directed at herself. Ultimately she came to understand that she had failed in judgment so profoundly that nothing would serve to expunge her error but something like swallowing poison. However, at barely thirty years of age she had much of her life yet to live, with a myriad of things to accomplish and enjoy.

  So the only thing for it was instead to get rid of Dick, who she was certain would be so opposed to the idea of divorce, none ever having occurred in his family (whose members tended to brag about that fact at holiday get-togethers, graduations, weddings), that it would be useless even to bring up the subject. Not to mention that Kim had come not only to love him no longer but positively to hate his guts for precisely those attributes, habits, and practices that she had formerly found attractive: his crooked smile, which favored one dimple; his lank-locked haircut, not so much the work of a barber but due essentially to the awkward contours of his cranium; his use of “with all respect” as a preface to an assertion that would not have been nearly so malicious without it; the faint odor of tobacco that hung about him though he claimed not to smoke (and to be sure she had never caught him doing so; was he screwing some woman who di
d?), a smell which in better days Kim had mistaken for the manly aroma of leather.

  Not finally, for she had scores of such issues, what she had first seen as a charming grace of bodily movement, a quick stride, a gesture of forearm, an angle of neck, a cocking of ear, she suddenly identified as girlish, not homosexual as such—her gay brother was macho as they came—but annoyingly mannered, and it was soon extended to his style even with the steering wheel of a car and, at table, the manipulation of the cutlery.

  For his part, Dick Cavanaugh had developed a distaste for his wife equivalent to hers for him, though unlike her he never considered blaming himself in any way for the unfortunate marriage: it was wholly a case of deceit on the part of Kim, whose idea it had been to ruin a perfectly satisfactory partnership by replacing it with wedlock. She had not been aware that while red hair was acceptable in a girlfriend, it simply did not suit a wife, and since Kim’s was natural she would certainly not have been amenable to dyeing it another color. Her body was very lean, once again just fine for an unmarried young woman who worked out three times per week, but there was something pathetic about wedded couples who piously went to a gym together, yet if they did so independently it seemed too much like visiting a bar alone. (Dick solved that particular dilemma by beginning to work out with a fellow computer programmer named Stephanie, whom he had never known that well at the office but who turned out to be fun, and before long they topped off their sessions on adjacent treadmills with sex at her divorcee apartment on his way home.)

  He might straightforwardly have put the matter of divorce to Kim were he not certain she could never have survived such a defeat, she who was so vain about her status as, in her own estimation, a lifelong winner. He had thought about this a lot, not being one to act superficially in any area of life—he was famous for his perfectionism: “Dicky as a boy wouldn’t touch a piece of meat unless every smidgeon of fat was trimmed away,” his mother was wont to remember—and with all respect concluded that it would be doing Kim the greatest favor to arrange for bringing about her nonexistence by instantaneous means. A shot to the back of the head would accomplish that nicely.

  Of course the problem was how to find someone who would perform the deed. Vicious criminals abounded, but to come in contact with any, if you were Dick Cavanaugh’s sort, would be the unlikeliest of events. Trolling for a killer in certain dangerous parts of the city was to endanger one’s own life: before you could proffer thousands for the crime to come your throat might well be cut for the fifty-four bucks currently in pocket. So much for the sidewalk thug, but what about the professional hitman so familiar from movies and TV, both fiction and documentary? Dick had no idea of how to reach out to one. Apparently there had been a day, as he had learned by television, when such characters offered their services, in none too subtle code, in a periodical for military mercenaries, but once the muckrakers and grandstanding politicians had publicised the practice, it was abandoned by the magazine.

  Kim was at the same impasse. In high school she had known a kid who had the hots for her and who also by her later assessment had been sufficiently sociopathic, with the requisite arsenal, to have anticipated the Columbine massacre by some years. But when she inquired about Baxter on a rare visit to her hometown she learned that, married and the father of four, he was in his second term as reformist mayor, having previously served as incorruptible chief of police. The sole Sicilian-American of her acquaintance was not only of a now lace-curtain family but was her boss at the advertising agency; she could scarcely inquire as to his familiarity with the Mafia.

  Dick deliberated on using the Internet for his quest. Perhaps law enforcement would be too distracted by its pursuit of cyber-sex criminals to identify and trace the spoor of the homicidally inclined, if the latter were delicate enough. There must be some Aesopian language in which to address a professional murderer without alerting the cops. I’m only trying to do the right thing, he said to himself in the mirror. I really deserve a break in this matter.

  Kim would still not come clean with her shrink. Instead she repeated for the nth time her own interpretation of the basic difficulty in achieving a viable happiness: she was too trusting of others. When the doctor asked why that was, she could only, after eons of therapy, emit a baffled murmur. But she could be candid when her truths were privy to no one but herself: she really had a right to get rid of this guy who was poisoning her life.

  Without any overt action of her own, Kim’s wish was granted. A man who billed himself as “Ralph” called on her cell phone one midday when she was lunching at her desk on a container of boysenberry yoghurt.

  “I understand you want somebody whacked?”

  Kim gasped. “Who gave you this number?” she asked, for only a select list of intimates possessed it, among whom was not her husband.

  “Just let me worry about that,” said Ralph. “Let’s set up a meet.”

  Impressed by his command of what sounded like the authentic lingo, Kim agreed—perhaps too quickly, she coldfootedly reflected after hanging up, but then she could always fail to show at the meeting place, a gyro cart just outside a certain entrance to the park, and what could Ralph do about it if she changed her cell-phone number? As a professional killer he could certainly not afford to call attention to himself by harassing her.

  Meanwhile Dick had hardly gone online to enter a chatroom for gun owners when somebody with the designation HIT4HIRE asked, “U need me?” To which Dick prudently replied, “4 wot?” The response was “LOL.” Eventually, after a lengthy exchange of cryptic messages intended to lose any deliberate or accidental monitor, they arranged for a sit-down in Dick’s car, an Xterra SUV of recent vintage, parked in area C of a suburban Home Depot lot, with an opened hatch showing a cargo of attic insulation.

  On meeting Ralph, who had arrived before her, Kim decided he looked exactly like what she had imagined he would: his mouth was ruthlessly tight-lipped, his eyes flinty, his ears small and close to his head.

  “Wanna nosh?” he asked and when she declined they moved to the first unoccupied bench, where Kim gave him Dick’s description and daily itinerary and then inquired as to the cost, for though she earned a decent salary she was up to her tushy in credit-card debt.

  “Hold on,” said Ralph, his stare becoming even more gimletlike. “You must have a good head on your shoulders to hold such a position where you work. Yet the only way you can handle a personal problem is to kill another human?”

  “Humanely,” Kim said in reproach, resenting as she did the implied criticism by a career murderer.

  Ralph winced. “I’ve got to question your values.”

  So, though even further offended, Kim patiently explained why she saw no alternative.

  But when she was finished Ralph shook his head. “Sounds to me like you’ve got a mighty superficial approach to life, based only on comfort, convenience, and a shallow hedonism. You don’t even claim to be in love with someone else.”

  Kim could not put up with any more of this. Despite the several passersby, she rose to her feet in indignation. “You disapprove of me? You murder people for money, and... wait a minute: are you really an undercover cop, wearing a concealed wire or a miniature TV camera disguised as a jacket button?” She sneered. “Okay, take a look at the tape. I haven’t said one legally compromising word.”

  Ralph chuckled. Kim had to admit his teeth were perfect, and the laughlines that now appeared around his eyes softened the grimness of his assassin’s aspect. “You got me wrong,” said he, recrossing his legs in the opposite direction. “With me business always comes first, but I learned the hard way you’ve got to have guidelines. Mine have always included that I don’t whack anybody who wouldn’t whack me if I didn’t get the jump on them.”

  Kim thought about his point for a moment, then asked, “Why did you seek me out?”

  “I was thinking of expanding.”

  She smiled at him. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, Ralph, but there’s something warm abo
ut you that appeals to me. Would you like to go to a hotel?”

  He looked wary. “This isn’t part of the deal, is it?”

  “Oh, certainly not,” said Kim.

  Dick arrived fifteen minutes early at the Home Depot lot, though he frankly did not expect his hitman to appear. In retrospect the chat-room exchange showed all the earmarks of a game if not a hoax, though if the latter, what could be the payoff?

  But in fact the guy showed up precisely on time, opening the passenger’s door of the SUV and inserting himself into the seat. He looked physically fit, but his facial features seemed too soft to be those of a criminal. He initiated a flabby handshake. He had a receding hairline.

  “I guess I’d first like to get some idea of what this is going to cost me,” said Dick. “I’m not exactly wealthy.”

  “Neither am I,” the hitman said genially, a somewhat cryptic response for a killer.

  Dick smirked for effect. “You wouldn’t just happen to be in law enforcement?”

  Once again the hitman’s answer was a surprise. “No. Are you?”

  “Are you wearing a wire?”

  The killer raised his thin eyebrows. “Find the nearest men’s room and frisk me. But watch your hands.”

  “Look,” Dick said defensively, “there are other reasons to get rid of your wife than being gay.”

  “What are yours?”

  Dick thought it really absurd that he should be questioned by a person of this sort as to his motives, but not wishing to offend the man, he explained. “I don’t care for her tastes in you-name-it. I realize now that she had the same ones when we lived together, but I thought then they were just assumed for the purpose of dialogue.”

  The assassin wrinkled his nose. “I don’t have any idea of what that’s supposed to mean. You really are a silly sonofabitch.”

  Dick lost his temper. “Get out!” he cried. “I didn’t come here to be insulted. You don’t seem tough at all. Maybe you’re just a conman.” But when the man reached under his jacket toward one armpit, a frightened Dick revised the speculation. “All right, I apologize.”