Mondo Crimson

by Andrew Post

  He knew who he was, unequivocally. That shape had a sharp edge. He was not afraid of the man in the mirror, or the one who’s not so easily seen, the one that only shows himself when the lights are out. They are all me, all yours are all you. There is no reason to be afraid of them. They’re always with you so if you grow to know them, introduce yourself and make their acquaintance, you will never be alone because, whether you know it and whether you want to believe it, you contain multitudes, all shades; you are stratum.

  Somebody who says, ‘I can’t ever imagine doing something like that’, just has a bad imagination. Anybody is capable of anything. All you got to do is try.

  Anyway.

  The game had finished reloading and Skyler set about putting the same bullets in the same enemy soldiers again, remembering to circumvent the sniper this time by staying behind cover.

  Slowly and silently, Merritt shifted his weight to release the pinch in his hip. But something was still gnawing at him. Though bodily comfortable, his mind felt like it had something stuck in its teeth it couldn’t dislodge – which was frustrating because he wanted to enjoy tonight’s session before Skyler turned in at his usual time on school nights, eleven, and it was currently a quarter till.

  He thought about Felix because thinking about Felix often helped Merritt feel better. He’d probably be in prison if it wasn’t for Felix. Felix understood Merritt, knew what he needed, knew how to not only give him an outlet but pay him for his time. Imagine that, getting paid to do what all men, deep down, really want to do, what they were built to do. Maybe there was some benefit to being a megalodon amid pollywogs, even if he had yet to meet a woman who could appreciate the inherent appeal of that.

  And, also, if everybody seemed so determined to go on and on all the time about how everything needs to be inclusive and how we need to stop pigeon-holing people, wouldn’t saying somebody’s a Peeping Tom, to throw their own buzzword back at them, be somewhat problematic? Merritt had met numerous female observers online. How was that inclusive? How was that fair to everybody? Well?

  So easily turning their logic back on itself, Merritt had to laugh – and slapped a hand over his mouth.

  He’d forgotten where he was and what he was doing. You fat moron. You’ve gotten too comfortable, too confident. What if Skyler didn’t have those massive headphones over his ears right now? He would’ve heard you. One thin sheet of glass between him and you, that’s all.

  Before those words – he heard every self-admonishment in his father’s voice – got too loud, Merritt decided to surrender any hope of gaining any relaxation from observing tonight and slowly shuffled backward on hands and knees away from Skyler’s window. He reached back into the shrubs to retrieve the foam pad, and moving hunched, scuttled across the Carmichaels’ lawn to the sidewalk.

  There’d been a brief warm spell which had melted most of the snow, thus why he was doing an observing session tonight. He rarely had the opportunity in the winter because of the string of tracks his size fifteens would leave.

  Most of the houses on their street were empty, some for sale and had been for some time, real-estate signs leaning or having fallen over never to be righted. The neighborhood used to be full of life. Every window in every house lit up at night. Now it was like a graveyard. The implosion had taken so many away. Merritt was glad that the house he and his mother shared was paid for.

  He paused at the curb to watch the windows of his own home, watching for lights coming on, fearful of his mother’s hunched shadow.

  But not a creature was stirring.

  Except for the man who was missing the majority of his head standing across the street from Merritt. Arms at his sides, the occasional thin ribbon of steam rising out of the raw, red crater of his neck, standing in such a way that if he did have a head he’d be looking right at him.

  And Merritt looked back at him. Not in the least surprised to see him again.

  Neither said anything. Just took in the sight of each other, out here in the middle of the night.

  The truce didn’t need to be addressed out loud.

  You saw me and I saw you and that’s all there is to it.

  Merritt continued across the street, trying to ignore him even as he could still see him out of the corner of his eye, turning in place to track, though sightless, Merritt’s progress.

  At six feet ten inches and two hundred and eighty-eight pounds – though this may’ve changed since he’d stopped looking at the bad news the scale kept telling him some time ago – Merritt Plains wasn’t the stealthiest thing on two legs, but he entered his yard, went around to use the back door (it was farther from Mom’s room than the front and made less noise), and returned inside the house.

  After wiping the fog from his glasses with his shirt, he hung the foam pad up in the mudroom where he’d found it and passed into the kitchen. He did not realize how cold he had been until he was back in a warm house again. His fingers and ears were burning. Eyes stinging in the harsh, stuttering light the fluorescent halo threw off, he flexed his hands until they had regained feeling.

  He stopped with one hand out toward the refrigerator’s door handle, and sighed at himself. The thing was, he didn’t like to think of himself as someone who suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder but more like he just had routines. One of which was, whenever he was out, even for a short spell, he had to check the cache in the basement upon returning home.

  So, he turned around and went back out into the mudroom and, having memorized which basement step would creak when he was even younger than Skyler, Merritt descended and approached the back corner of the cellar.

  At the top of the foundation wall, there was a foot-tall gap between the stonework and the rafters of the house’s underside, the cavity packed with yellowed, crumbling insulation. Knowing which section to draw out, he reached behind and felt around inside for the handles of the bag. Finding it, he gently worked the maroon vinyl duffle out from the gap and had to use both hands to transfer its weight over to his father’s workbench. Merritt’s workbench, really, because he was the only one who used it anymore, but it still required reminding sometimes.

  Inside the duffle, as he’d left them, was his XXL flak vest, a chopped break-action double-barrel, a ten-inch combat knife with a nasty serrated edge, an Interdynamic MP-9, a Beretta .45, a cleaning kit, two silencers for the .45 and the MP-9, two boxes of .45 cartridges – one hollow-points, the other standard slugs – two boxes for the MP-9, three boxes of twelve-gauge buckshot, and one box of twelve-gauge rifled slugs which were originally designed for SWAT teams to breach doors, the ends of which looked like a kitchen tool you’d use to make yourself a fresh cup of orange juice that often left whatever you shot them at – like someone’s head – looking just as ravaged and misshapen as a juiced orange. He thumbed open each box of ammunition. Scanned the cartridges in their neat rows within. Every firing cap was smooth. Not a one had been dimpled by a firing pin.

  Check and check. All was well.

  Outside the basement window stood a pair of worn work boots, a Pollock of bloodstains on the steel toes. The headless man, again.

  Merritt tugged on the chain to kill the light and went back upstairs.

  In the living room, he could not see the picture in the frame hanging on the wall because of the glare from the streetlight coming in through the window, but he could see his own shadow in the glass. He knew what picture was there, he remembered when they’d gone as a family to Sears to have it taken. His father, his mother, his brother, Winston, and himself, in clothes typically reserved for funerals since they weren’t a churchgoing family.

  Funerals.

  Half the people in that picture were gone now, but the family photo remained where it’d been hung, an open wound gaping on the wall. He saw it every day. Saw himself looking down at his future self every night – joined by the flat stares of his brother and father, the accusation p
robably, again, just his imagination but still palpable.

  Exposure to a thing, in this case, did not breed acceptance. Whenever he was in the living room, even now, he was conscious of the dead eyes of his brother and father. He dreamed of the day his mother passed away and the house would be his and he could take that picture down and put it away somewhere out of sight, out of mind. But he feared, after having seen his father and brother so often – knowing them, at this point, longer as photographs than living three-dimensional people – that he would still see that picture on the wall every time he sat down to watch television even if it was no longer there, an unliftable stain on his reality. But maybe not. He’d just have to wait until Mom died to test the theory.

  He wouldn’t hold his breath. He imagined her sharing her Virginia Slims with the cockroaches, asking them if they were aware of how fat they were getting, while in the background rivers ran green and every tree a barren, blackened stick.

  He opened her bedroom door only far enough to poke his head in. Ruffles, his mother’s diabetic British shorthair, sat on his mother’s chest, riding each slow and struggling rise and fall, twisting around to scowl at Merritt, the intruder, like the imp in Fuseli’s The Nightmare, gold eyes glowing from the gloom. The cats never liked him. Neither this one nor the countless others buried out in the backyard.

  Funerals.

  A few cats that’d been dead the longest had been Merritt’s doing. Perhaps that kind of act sticks to a person, lets a cat know they’re in the presence of a subtractor of their kind. He always washed his hands after completing a work order, same as how he always washed his hands after doing things before Felix was paying him to do them, but maybe some stuff just doesn’t rub off.

  His mother was attached to the machine that helped her breathe by the ribbed hose and a clear plastic mask, making her look like she was losing a fight with an octopus. He watched his mother’s face, the trenchwork of lines on her brow deepening even now, and what he could see of her mouth inside the mask tightened to this repulsed twist. He wondered if the black river of admonishments and criticisms that flowed out of her while conscious didn’t end just because she was asleep.

  Looking at her, he let the daydream build itself. After backhanding Ruffles off the bed, he’d grab up one of those CPAP hoses, lift Mom high enough to get it behind her neck, and just start wrapping the hose around and around and pull until he heard the hollow click of her throat collapsing. From there, he might drag her to the bathtub and cut her into pieces or he might, after severing it, hold her head in his hands and make her look at him as he took bites out of her hateful face, devour her like a softened, rancid apple. And having to confront such a glut of possibilities, like always, made the daydream come apart like wet cardboard.

  With a full-body twitch, he was back inside himself again, standing in her doorway in the dark, holding the doorknob, looking in at her, unharmed beyond what time had done to her.

  The first time he imagined killing her, that he could remember anyway (though for all he knew he might’ve been imagining her dead before he’d even exited her), was when he was about five years old. Like the cartoons he watched every day after school, he imagined pointing an oversized six-shooter at her and with a puff of smoke she’d go rigid as a board and fall over, soot-faced and cross-eyed. Naturally, the scenarios grew in detail as the years went by and he’d become familiar with what people will look like and things they will do and the smells they will produce when they die. Face turning from red to purple then gray. How beautiful and large the resulting silence is, both from the freshly dead and the thing inside him, now sated.

  He entered his bedroom and closed and locked the door. Like the rest of the house, the room had not changed much since the last attempt toward contemporariness in the late 1970s, a lot of browns, a lot of oranges. The television set was modern, but otherwise it was the same room Merritt had known since he’d been Skyler’s age. His shelf of collectibles: every troop that’d made up the original run of GI Joe and his father’s Nikon F that had gone with him to Vietnam and returned Stateside full of images worth at least a thousand words apiece. The stereo that could play not only records but eight-track cassettes. The well-thumbed issues of Penthouse and Hustler he and his brother had stolen. Merritt had kept them because of the good memories associated with them, and kept them shoved far under the dresser where the invading nose of his mother’s vacuum could not reach. Gene Simmons sticking his tongue out from a sun-faded poster, Adrienne Barbeau’s bosom heaving from another. His mother had reluctantly permitted Merritt to move his brother’s bed out of the room, but Winston’s clothes, this many years later, remained occupying his side of the closet’s hanger rod, minus the suit in which he’d been buried.

  Funerals.

  He looked at them now, how much bigger one of Merritt’s shirts was compared to one of his brother’s. He wondered if they’d be equally husky now if Winston had lived past twelve, or if they’d even get along. Things had been good for a while when they were kids. Then there was tension and competition. Then Winston was gone.

  Lying down carefully so his bedsprings wouldn’t make too much noise, Merritt opened his laptop and rested it on his mounded belly. After connecting to the VPN, he opened the browser, waited for it to confirm his IP address was successfully masked, and logged in to his email. Not the account by which he received updates about work events and AARP spam, but the account he only used for discussing work orders with Felix.

  One new message. It’d come in just an hour ago, its subject Minneapolis.

  Merritt couldn’t click fast enough.

  I hate to do this to you, Merritt, but the Minneapolis work order is going to be filled by someone else. Schedules just worked out better this way. Blah, blah, blah.

  Merritt only skimmed the rest.

  It had to have been Brenda Stockton. She probably got wind that Merritt was up for the job and decided to pull the rug out from under him. Felix didn’t try to hide the fact she was his favorite. Sometimes, when thinking about this, and how Brenda didn’t deserve to be Felix’s favorite, it’d made Merritt so angry he’d feel like he might pass out. He had a general contempt for all women, but it was a largely unspecified, one-size-fits-all kind of loathing; but when it came to Brenda Stockton, his hate for her had no margins, it framed her exactly.

  And this news was also insulting because only a few days ago Felix had said in an email that Merritt would be perfect for this work order and how the minute the price had been agreed upon, the job would be his. Just hold tight, bud, Felix had said, I’ll let you know as soon as I get the green light.

  Merritt had held tight, only to get handed this news?

  His thick fingers flew, saying how this was such an insult, how he deserved – all caps – to not have work dangled in front of him only for Felix to rip it away and hand it off to someone else who was undoubtedly less qualified and why Felix shouldn’t even mention a work order to him if Merritt wasn’t going to be the one to fill it.

  Noticing he’d written fucking bullshit for the third time, Merritt stopped and held down backspace until the screed was gone.

  He did not want to consider his life without Felix Eberhardt in it.

  I’m sorry to hear that, he wrote. No hard feelings. Keep me posted for the next one though. My schedule is always flexible for you, Felix.

  Too needy. Backspace.

  I’m sorry to hear that. No hard feelings.

  Backspace.

  I’m sorry to hear that.

  Polite enough, to the point, and its brevity would convey his frustration.

  Send.

  Merritt lay there a while looking at the inbox, not expecting to get a response or a follow-up apology from Felix, but he still waited for something to happen, some magical reason to appear that’d make him have to put in a time off request form at the grocery store, a reason to go down to the duffle bag not to humor hi
s OCD and check its contents but to take that bag out to his car and take it somewhere to put those items to use and put himself, his true self, to actual use.

  But none came.

  He had absolutely nowhere to be but here.

  He imagined himself lying on this bed for so long he’d grow into it like a tree absorbing a rail fence, fusing to the mattress until it became impossible to ascertain where he stopped and it began. And then from there, the bed attaching itself to the floor and then the wall, then the ceiling, and soon he would be the house, unmovable, an idle and useless mass of unfulfilled, unrealized potential.

  His hand moved and the cursor on the monitor obeyed. He had a few sites saved to his favorites. Each one had a splash screen that asked in bright red if the visitor was absolutely sure they wanted to enter.

  Merritt didn’t need to think about it. He wanted to see.

  If he, himself, couldn’t work, at least he could live vicariously through someone else, watch others who were familiarized with their stratum in all its layers and shades do what they do best.

  He put on his headphones so the screaming wouldn’t wake his mother.

  Chapter Six