The Killing Lessons

by Saul Black

  Xander lived alone in a run-down apartment not far from the warehouse and sometime after their first meeting Paulie found himself there. The two men drank beer (again, Paulie a lot, Xander a little) and watched hour after hour of porn in rich silence. It had started with regular shit, but after a short while Xander had said: Check this cunt out – and brought from his bedroom a DVD in a plain black case. An acned Latina who looked about sixteen getting ass-fucked and cattle-branded by three guys. The production values were non-existent. The sound was raw. There was a moist bare brick wall and a wooden floor and the girl’s legs and arms were blotched with bruises. The ball-gag made snot come out of her nose and one of the guys said, Jesus Christ, that’s disgusting – then wiped his dick in it, which had made Paulie laugh. Xander hadn’t laughed. Just sat there in profile not drinking his Coors.

  The weeks and months that followed were a blurred addiction for Paulie. It was enough for him just to be in Xander’s presence. Xander was the first person he’d met with whom he didn’t feel locked inside himself. With everyone else he was condemned to a claustrophobic privacy, as if he knew that whatever came out of his mouth would sooner or later make them look at him as if he were from another planet. It had been that way his whole life, starting with his mother and father, who could one minute be laughing at something he’d done or said, the next be beating the shit out of him. His father had left when he was small – maybe five or six. His mother had died in a car wreck a couple of years later. It had happened right outside their house in Delaware. She’d been drunk, they said, afterwards, hit a stationary bulldozer in a line of road crew vehicles that had been left there overnight where they were repairing the water mains. His mother’s car had ended up with its nose in the flooded, dug-out trench. Paulie, who’d been sitting just inside the screen door (she left him alone in the house for several hours every day), ran out and looked. Her head was a mess of blood and her arm was bent around the wrong way, like a doll’s you could twist. Her blouse was torn and one bare breast was out.

  After that he’d been shuffled around distant relations for a while, then gone to Child Protection Services.

  When Xander showed him the first girl – not Xander’s first girl, but the first one Paulie got to see – it was as if, in a moment, all Paulie’s muscles and bones came into their right alignment. It was like he was recognising something he’d seen before, something he’d known before, in a time before he was born. When Paulie got laid-off and was between jobs, Xander had put in for a chunk of his vacation and the two of them had taken a road trip. They’d gone all over the country, and Paulie had day by day felt Xander’s aura filling with quiet energy. It vivified everything; the big skies; the wheel of a passing truck; an empty McDonald’s carton.

  Then one night on the edge of St Louis, Paulie had woken in the Super 8 motel and found Xander gone. His gear was still in the room, so he hadn’t gone gone, but still, Paulie surprised himself by feeling not panic but a kind of Christmassy excitement.

  Xander returned the following afternoon with no explanation and told Paulie they had to get going. As in right now. A ripple around Xander told Paulie not to ask. They drove hundreds of miles in near silence, until, long after sundown, Xander pulled the car over. They were on a back road somewhere in Utah. Empty fields on one side, a sprawling woods on the other. Xander had sat with his hands on the wheel. Then he’d said: So, you wanna know what’s in the trunk?

  Paulie remembered the smell of the trees and soft damp soil. His breath going up in clouds. The land had been rained on. It was heavy and fresh.

  Knew as soon as I saw her, Xander said, when the trunk was open.

  There was a moment, just after he’d helped Xander tie her to a tree far enough from the road, when Paulie had a vision of himself turning and walking away back to the car. He saw himself in a pink-boothed diner, sitting at the counter with a cup of black coffee, a matronly waitress with a tired smile. He pictured a bright damp morning framed in the big window, the wet road glistening in the sun.

  Then Xander tore her shirt open and she screamed behind the gag, and Paulie went down as on a roller-coaster drop into his own future with a sweet feeling of recognition and surrender and relief.

  He’d known what to do and what not to do. His every movement was guided by invisible hands. He knew when to watch, when to move away. There was such an understanding between him and Xander. Sometimes the girl looked at Paulie as if she were trying to separate him from Xander because he, Paulie, hadn’t touched her. But his eyes could always slide away when that happened. And when Xander started with the knife she stopped looking anywhere. Just closed her eyes and screamed.

  When Xander had finished, he said to Paulie: I’m going to put the stuff away. Don’t touch her mouth. Just don’t touch her mouth.

  Paulie had seen him shove something in there, though he hadn’t been able to tell what it was.

  I got a spade in the car, Xander said. Don’t be all night.

  Don’t be all night. She wasn’t dead, and Xander had known it was what Paulie had been waiting for. Even Paulie hadn’t truly known it was what he’d been waiting for until Xander had said it.

  This was in the days before he’d started filming it all.

  The days before the money came to Xander.

  That money. Jesus. Why couldn’t it have been him?

  He tossed the iPad to one side, zipped up his flies, got up off the bed. He’d been in his room too long. He had to go and check on Xander. Because he’s sick, he told himself. But of course it was more than that. Always, now, when Paulie found himself quiet and alone, he’d start to get the feeling of the world coming for him. It was in the blades of grass and the colours of a 7-Eleven and someone’s glance at him from a bus window. It was a creeping conspiracy that could only be held off by Xander. Or at least, being with Xander made it easier not to see it.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Xander was deep in a fever. Not that he knew it. As far as he was concerned what was happening to him was just a newly gimmicked version of what had been happening for years. There were periods when he was almost convinced he was in bed at the farmhouse: there was the window with its curtains half-drawn; there was the muted TV (it annoyed him, vaguely, that an episode of Real Housewives of Orange County was beyond his focus); there was the wardrobe’s exposed mirror, taunting him with its not-quite accurate reflection. But every time he started to feel certain of his surroundings the shapes would shimmy, shift away, dissolve, and other realities would take their place. The basement at Mama Jean’s. No window and the shivering strip-light that buzzed. The front yard he was only allowed into on weekends. The crazy tree. The bedroom where they did the lessons.

  Mama Jean was tall and shaped like a pear. She wore her pale jeans high up. The big curve from her belly to between her legs was soft and heavy. Leon had to force himself not to look at it. There was something about it that made him want to press his hands there. Some of the veins in her feet were fractured purple lightnings.

  The alphabet chart had slipped from Xander’s bed. He’d fallen asleep with his hands resting on it, but now it lay on the floor, half unfolded. He remembered the unmeasurable time after they’d found him wandering in the woods that day. How he hadn’t let go of his backpack, the feeling he’d had that if he let go of it something terrible would happen. Then one soft-spoken woman with short blond hair and a smiling face very gently unlocking his fingers’ grip and opening it up. Oh, I see you brought supplies. That was a smart thing to do, wasn’t it? A half-eaten apple. A banana. Potato chips. A jar of peanut butter. His mouth had been too dry to eat, after a while. And what’s this? she’d asked, unfolding the chart, carefully. She’d gone quiet. As if she knew. But how could she? They hadn’t wanted him to keep it. But when she’d tried to take it – for safe keeping, she said – he’d screamed and hit out at her.

  He stared down at it now, while its objects and letters did their maddening dance.

  ‘Again,’ Mama Jean said. ‘Start again.
Just do them one at a time. You’re all jittery. That’s why you keep mixing them up.’

  This was the gentle phase. It always started like this, her voice quiet and low. Leon’s face filling with heat and an ache in his eyes where the tears should be, but never were. The pictures on the chart were in bright colours. The balloon was blue. The apple red. The hammer had a light brown handle and a big silver head. Leon knew it was hopeless. The letters and their names came apart in him. The black lines that formed them fell away from each other and swirled slowly, formed new shapes, fell apart again.

  ‘I know you’re trying,’ Mama Jean said. ‘I can see it in your face. I know you’re scared, too. What are you so scared of?’

  She always asked him this. As if she didn’t know. She sounded as if she really didn’t know, as if this hadn’t happened, in exactly this way, all those times before. Her voice was so gentle and she was so mystified it made him wonder if it really had happened before. Had he dreamed it? It made him look at her, which in turn made her look somewhere else, out the window or into the smoke rippling from her cigarette. He knew looking at her was a bad idea, but he couldn’t stop himself. It was as if it was what she’d been waiting for.

  ‘Now you’re not concentrating,’ she said, her face turned away, sunlight from the window making two coins of her glasses. ‘Now you’re just trying to make me lose my patience.’

  When she said that (Leon didn’t know what ‘patience’ was, except that it was some invisible thing that he somehow made go away from her, like a dog that had caught the smell of something from another room and trotted off to find it) it was the beginning of the end of the soft-voiced phase. She always seemed annoyed by having to stop being nice. She smoked her cigarette as if she were angry with it.

  ‘I don’t know why you have to do this,’ she said. ‘I really don’t. Why do you keep doing this?’

  Sometimes that would be all it took. The wood-framed armchair would crick with the shift of her weight and she’d be on her feet. Other times it went on longer. Like she wanted to make the nice phase last. Or not exactly the nice phase, but the one in which he was making her lose her patience.

  ‘It’s not like I’m asking you to learn Chinese,’ she said, and laughed a little. Leon didn’t understand: Chinese was brownish noodles in cartons she sometimes had. They looked like worms to Leon. ‘It’s just the damned alphabet. Don’t you know if you don’t get this you’re going to be no better than a retard your whole life? It’s no wonder your mother dumped you.’

  But by this time Leon’s mouth would’ve locked and his face gone thick with heat. Sometimes he’d try to focus on the view through the window, the green lawn and the crazy two-legged tree and the blinding white mailbox and the woods beyond.

  ‘You’re not even looking,’ Mama Jean said. Then left a long pause. In which Leon could feel the room filling with what he knew was coming next.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Paulie stood by Xander’s bed, watching him. He didn’t like seeing him like this. Weak.

  Did he?

  A part of him was thrilled. In spite of the terror at what the world without Xander would be like, he found himself having the extraordinary thought that here was Xander, feeble and out of it, and that if he, Paulie, were to now go and get the gun and point it at Xander and pull the trigger and put a bullet in Xander’s brain there would be absolutely nothing Xander could do about it. Or the machete. Imagine that. Imagine the weight of the blade. Lifting it. Xander’s eyes maybe fluttering open just long enough to see what was happening. Then Paulie swinging it down with all his strength. Feeling the neck go. Or the skull split.

  His hands were heavy. The image made him dizzy. He thought: Are you out of your fucking mind?

  ‘C is for elephant,’ Xander said, with a strange clarity. It made Paulie start. He hadn’t felt the solidity of the room’s silence until Xander had broken it.

  ‘Jesus,’ Paulie said. ‘You don’t look good. How’re you feeling?’

  Xander’s eyes were closed and busy behind their lids. Paulie had an image of hundreds of people – police, waitresses, nurses, firemen, office commuters and government officials in dark suits – all watching this and creeping slowly towards him.

  Xander opened his eyes. His face was wet. He was shivering under the blankets.

  ‘It’s his fault,’ he said, looking at Paulie.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fucking idiot. You break the thing. You don’t do it right. Then everything goes. It should’ve been a kite. No, a jug. Goddammit.’

  ‘Listen,’ Paulie said. ‘Do you want me to try’n get you something? Some medicine?’

  Xander slowly and awkwardly pulled his right hand out from under the blankets. It was trembling.

  And holding the gun.

  He pointed it at Paulie.

  ‘It should have been a fucking jug,’ Xander said.

  Paulie felt himself backpedalling. On air. It was as if only the very tips of his toes were touching the floor. Bizarrely, he was also aware of the bright image on the TV screen in the room’s darkness: two incredibly beautiful bare-shouldered women having lunch at a sunny outside table with bright white napkins and the light winking off their champagne glasses and jewellery. The camera cut between close-ups of their faces. Smiles that looked as if they hated each other. Their eyes looked like dark diamonds.

  The wardrobe bumped his back.

  Xander fired.

  Paulie went, briefly, completely blank. Except for a vague feeling of the world being upended, floor and walls and ceiling losing their connection to each other. After what felt like a long delay the sound of wood splintering. A detail embedded in the deafening noise of the gunshot.

  There was no pain. He pieced it together. It felt as if he had all the time in the world to piece it together: Xander had missed. The bullet had gone into the wardrobe.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Paulie heard himself saying, quietly. His body was doing things, trying to move. He was on his side on the floor. His arms and legs were working to get him back onto his feet. But his limbs were wearing dozens of soft weights. Xander’s hand on the gun was moist. His wrist bent for a moment, as if broken, then gradually straightened. He was levelling for a second shot.

  Everything went very still. Paulie felt the room in shock from the sound of the gunshot. The smell of cordite like a scar on the odours of old wood and damp plaster. Death suddenly right there. He never thought about death. Not his own. Not the women’s. There was only the fascination of their warm bodies slippery with blood that he could do anything to, and then afterwards his feeling of crazy sweet electric aliveness, and the open-ended glimmering time between then and the next time, the next one.

  But now something indistinct rushed up to him in a wave of blackness. The thought of dying and going somewhere where it would be worse than the creeping conspiracy of all the people, a place where you’d be compelled forwards through darkness with only a few stars, the last few stars, as if you were reaching the edge of space, towards something that knew you and saw through you, and nothing would protect you from it, you’d be totally naked and eventually you’d see it. You’d see it, and it would see you. And what happened then would last for ever.

  Xander’s eyelids flickered and his lips moved. His sweat-soaked head made his hair look thin. Like a baby bird, Paulie thought. He moved his aim slightly, hand still shaking – then the strength went out of him and his arm dropped back onto the bedclothes. He didn’t let go of the gun.

  Paulie scrambled to his feet and ran from the room.

  He couldn’t think straight. He went downstairs and got the shotgun. Loaded it. The weight and solidity of the thing felt strange. He was breathing through his open mouth. Xander had shot at him. It’s like carrying you on my goddamned back. Xander had shot at him. But Xander was sick. Crazy sick. Fever made you insane. But there was all that shit about the fucking milk jug. Like death, Paulie didn’t think about the objects. They were there; they were at the edge of his
thinking – but he always stopped short. He glanced out of the kitchen window expecting to see the thousands of people closing in, their faces determined. But there was nothing. Just the low outbuildings and the dead cars and the twilit empty land rolling away.

  He went back upstairs, quietly, shotgun raised.

  There was no sound from Xander’s room.

  He stood still at the edge of the open doorway.

  Very slowly inched forward to get a peep inside.

  Xander’s eyes were closed again. His arm lay outside the blankets, relaxed, fingers loose around the automatic.

  Asleep.

  At a friend’s house once when he was very small a grown-up had read them Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack tiptoeing in to steal the harp from the sleeping giant. There was a picture in the book, the giant slumped forward on a vast wooden table. The big hands and dark curly hair. Jack the size of a monkey by comparison.

  You have to get the gun away from him. He’s fever-mad. He fucking shot at you. It’ll be all right when he comes out of it. It’ll be all right, but who knows what the fuck while he’s like this?

  There was another voice underneath the one saying It’ll be all right (saying No, it won’t) but he ignored it.

  Amazed at himself, Paulie propped the shotgun against the corridor wall, bent down, unlaced and removed his boots.

  It felt terrible just in his socks. It felt as if he’d taken all his clothes off. The women, even if you’d got them to stop screaming and wriggling, always started screaming and wriggling again when you tore their blouses and bras, when you tugged off their jeans and yanked down their panties. It was the flesh, bare. It was the exposure. For the first time, Paulie felt a weird, piercing identification with them.

  But it was sucked like a spark into darkness.

  Shotgun as steady as he could hold it, he crept into the room.

  Three paces. Four. Five.

  He was at the bed.

  Every time he tried to picture Xander opening his eyes and raising the pistol – every time he tried to imagine himself squeezing the Remington’s trigger and Xander’s head exploding in blood – the image fizzed and heated and went into confusion. You had to not ask yourself if you’d be able to do it when the time came. Instead he told himself that all he had to do was take the automatic away for now. Then Xander would get better and everything would be all right. Xander would come out of it and everything would be all right and the little bitch in the basement was the prettiest they’d had and he could feel the gooseflesh on her tits and how sweet going into her would be, her body with the fear like a warm welcome.