by Мэтью Квик Q
The target usually surfs the Internet while waiting for feeding time, at which point the target will relocate to the kitchen.
The glow of the laptop screen lights up the target’s face and makes him look like an alien or a demon or a fish in a lit tank, and watching the target’s dead expression illuminated by the screen has also made it easier to visualize killing him—the weird lighting really dehumanizes the target.
I’ve practiced shooting my target from the tree line, using my hand as a gun.
But today I’m going to creep up to the window, shoot the target through the pane at point-blank range, stick my arm through the jagged glass teeth and pop the target six more times—mixing head shots with chest shots—to ensure the target has been eliminated, and then I’ll escape into the woods, where I will off my second target with the last bullet in the magazine before the local cops and maybe even the FBI arrive.
That’s my plan.
All I have to do is wait for my target to flick on his bedroom light, which will be the first falling domino to set the chain of events in motion.
TWENTY-FIVE
It’s cold and dark in the woods and I wonder if this is what it’s going to feel like when I’m finally dead— like a stupid unfeeling unthinking unnoticed tree. I’m hoping to feel nothing. Übernothing. I’m hoping that I merely cease to exist. What dreams may come? Hamlet and Lauren would ask.[53] None, I’m betting. None. Hellfire is not in the plans. Heaven is not in the plans. Cold and dark are not in the plans. Übernothing. That’s what I want. Nothing.[54]
TWENTY-SIX
I’ve been watching the target’s mom framed in the kitchen’s bay window, the soft overhead light making it look like she’s in a film and the bay window is like a drive-in movie screen.
I decide to call the movie Mrs. Beal Makes Her Perverted Son His Last Meal.
It’s a boring picture in the literal sense, but it conjures up a lot of emotions inside me for personal reasons.
I remember Mrs. Beal being really stupid[55] but sweet on the surface when we were kids.
She would always order us a pizza whenever I was over at their house, regardless of whether we were hungry or not. There was always pizza. Pizza was ubiquitous. It’s like that was an official rule in their house—when guests under fourteen visit, there shall be pizza, pronto.
She was also always singing songs from the musical Cats. So much that I can quote the lyrics of many of the songs, even though I have never seen the show, nor have I ever listened to a recording of the musical.[56]
“Memory” was her favorite.
Although she also liked “Mr. Mistoffelees,” who was apparently clever.
It’s funny how I’m remembering all of this right now when I’m trying to use military euphemisms, and it makes me sad, because Mrs. Beal has no idea what a Charles Darwin-type favor I’ll be doing by killing her son, mostly because she has no idea who her son is—what he has done and of what he’s capable.
Not in a million years would she believe what her son made me endure.
She wouldn’t believe it because if she did, I don’t think she’d be able to sing songs from silly musicals while doing housework, and that’s her favorite thing to do in the world, or at least it was when I used to hang out with Asher back in middle school.[57]
I try not to think about her hearing the gunshots, her running into Asher’s room, her screaming, her maybe even cradling Asher’s blood-soaked head in her arms, trying to put his brains back into his skull,[58] and her endless weeping for a fictional boy who didn’t ever exist—the son she never had—because she believes her Asher is an absolute angel.
She never saw him change, or if she did, she chose not to believe it, which makes her just as guilty, just as culpable.
I mean, don’t get me wrong; I could never shoot Mrs. Beal in the face, because she’s always singing songs from Cats and never wronged me personally.
But when you really think about it, she’s to blame just as much as Linda is—and my dad too, regardless of whether or not he’s still alive in Venezuela.
These people we call Mom and Dad, they bring us into the world and then they don’t follow through with what we need, or provide any answers at all really—it’s a fend-for-yourself free-for-all in the end, and I’m just not cut out for that sort of living.
Thinking about all of this gets me feeling so low, and I’m shivering now.
“Come on, Target Asher. Ollie Ollie in come free. Come home so I can finish this once and for all,” I whisper as I watch gray-haired Mrs. Beal pull a small chicken from the oven.
The huge window frames her perfectly as she slices the meat and moves her mouth.
She’s singing again.[59]
TWENTY-SEVEN
There’s part of me—deep down inside—that feels the need to make a confession here, especially before I go through with my plan and therefore will not be able to make any sort of statement ever again.
A few months after we went to the Green Day concert, Asher spent the weekend with his uncle Dan fishing somewhere in rural Pennsylvania—I think it might have been the Poconos. He loved his uncle Dan, who was tall and confident and funny and drove a cool truck and was always taking Asher places—like to the movies and car races and even hunting. Uncle Dan seemed like the kind of uncle every kid dreams of having. I remember liking him immediately when we first met. He really seemed like a great guy, which makes it all the worse.[60]
But when Asher came back from this particular fishing trip—something wasn’t right.
We had this project for school we were working on—about ancient civilizations—and we had picked the Incas. We were putting the finishing touches on a miniature Machu Picchu at his house the Sunday night after he returned from fishing with Uncle Dan. I remember Asher wouldn’t look me in the eye and kept saying “Nothing!” way too loud every time I asked if anything was wrong. Finally he said, “If you ask me what’s wrong one more time, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.” He stared at me—like he wanted to kill me and was capable of doing it too.
I didn’t say anything as we finished creating our Machu Picchu. We had built the skeleton out of LEGOs, had used real sod for the grass, and had been making little cube-shaped papier-mâché buildings for weeks. In my memory, the project looks magnificent—like I’d never made something so beautiful before or since. And Asher had been really proud of it just the week before—excited even. But just as I put the final bit of paint on the last structure, Asher started to smash the project with his fists.
“What are you doing?” I yelled, because we had spent weeks on it.
He just kept punching and smashing, sending down fists from above like some cruel boy-god.
It was so fucking awful to watch—not just because he was ruining all of our hard work, but because I could clearly see he was coming undone.
I tried to grab him and he punched me in the face hard—giving me a black eye.
Then he just started to cry in this really violent way.
His mother came in and saw what was going on. She said, “What happened?”
I stood there with my mouth open as she tried to hug Asher, but he just ran right by her and into his room.
I’d never been so confused.
I couldn’t even explain what had happened to my parents, because I had no idea.
You’d think they would have called Mrs. Beal and asked a bunch of questions, but I don’t think they did, and I remember my dad saying, “Boys fight at that age. Just part of growing up,” to Linda, who was more concerned with how ugly my black eye appeared than the reason for Asher’s freak-out.
Asher didn’t come to school for a few days, and then he just showed up at my house late one afternoon and said, “Can we talk?”
“Sure,” I said.
My dad and Linda weren’t home. We went up into my room and he started pacing like a caged animal. I had never seen him pace like that before.
“I’m sorry I fucked up our project,” he said.
�
��It’s okay.” I didn’t really care about failing or anything like that, but what he had done to me definitely wasn’t okay, and I knew it.
Why did I say it was okay?
I should have said, “Why the hell did you punch me? What the fuck is wrong with you?” But I didn’t.
I wish I had.
Maybe if I had gotten angry . . .
“Something happened on the fishing trip,” he said.
He looked at me in this crazy way.
He looked so desperate.
But then he broke eye contact, said, “Never mind. I have to go,” and walked out of my room.
I was so confused that I let him walk away without saying a word. I know now that I should have chased him, asked again what was wrong, promised to help him, or—at the very least—I should have told someone that Asher was acting weird, but I was afraid of that desperate look. I didn’t want Asher to punch me again—and I was just a kid.
How was I supposed to know what to do?
The next day, Asher returned to school and really appeared to be okay. For a while everything seemed to go back to normal. Our teacher even let us redo our Machu Picchu model for three-quarters credit, which we accomplished in half the time it took us to build the original.
But then Asher started picking fights with kids at school who were small and quiet.
He started to make fun of me during lunch periods—saying crazy weird stuff like he caught me jerking off to a picture of his mom, or that I tried to grab his dick in the locker room—and he was always trying to trip me in the halls and pushing me into lockers.
I didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t say anything.
Why?
I should have said something—not just to stick up for myself, but because I think Asher wanted me to save him.
Like maybe he wanted me to make it stop the whole time and on some subconscious level he was pushing me to get so fucking angry that I would finally tell the adults in our lives that he needed help. I wonder now if all of what happened afterward—the bullying and then the really bad shit—was his way of punishing me for failing to protect him.
When I finally stood up for myself—when he stopped with me—I knew there would be others.
What if I had the power to save both of us—all of us—all along?
I need to take care of what I should have taken care of a long time ago.
I need to make it stop permanently.
TWENTY-EIGHT
My target suddenly makes an appearance in Mrs. Beal Makes Her Perverted Son His Last Meal—there he is on the kitchen’s bay-window drive-in movie screen.
I start to sweat.
Enemy collateral target known as “Asher’s mother” gives the primary target a kiss on the cheek.
Primary target says something before disappearing.
Primary target looks like the all-American next-door boy in the movie—like the kid you’d pick to take your daughter to the prom. The dutiful-son lie plastered all over that drive-in movie screen gets my heart pumping machine-gun blood drops that race through my veins as I turn the P-38 safety off with my thumb and finger the trigger.[61]
Every inch of my skin is slick with sweat, even though it’s probably less than forty degrees out. A minute ago I was shivering, but now I fight an urge to take off my shirt—that’s how hot I feel. It’s like I swallowed the sun.
Primary target’s bedroom light comes on a second later, which is supposed to be my cue to move and put the plan into action, but my feet remain rooted to the ground.
Primary target flicks on his computer and his face glows like an alien.
Kill the alien, I think.
Remember what he did to you.
You have every right.
He’s not human.
He’s a thing.
A target.
Remember to use your military training—what you gleaned from the Internet.
I leave my body and my essence floats up maybe fifteen feet above my head so that I am looking down on the flesh and bones and blood—the matter—I used to inhabit.
I can’t see my expression because of the Bogart hat, but my right arm is outstretched and the P-38 is pointed at the primary target.
My legs don’t walk, but I start to glide across the backyard, through the darkness, light as a ghost.
I look like a rigid lowercase r being pulled across ice.
What’s pulling me? I think as I hover through the stiff winter air looking down, which is when I realize my essence is being pulled too—I’m sort of following my flesh like a helium birthday balloon tied to a little kid’s wrist.[62]
I’m standing in the target’s window now, remembering what he did to me in that very bedroom so many times.
How confused I felt.
How I wanted it to stop.
How he intimidated me.
How he psychologically tricked me.
How he said if I stopped doing what we were doing he’d tell people in great detail all about what we had done together and then everyone would call me a faggot and maybe even beat the shit out of me.
People would believe him and not me, when he said I made him do it.
And how if I stopped doing what he wanted me to do he’d post the video he secretly made of us with his computer camera that I didn’t know was on.
The first time, he said his uncle had shown him how to feel good in a way I wouldn’t believe.
I wanted to feel good.
Who doesn’t?
We were almost twelve.
We were wrestling WWE-style.
Just messing around.
I had this ski mask I’d wear and pretend I was Rey Mysterio.
He was always John Cena.
And then we weren’t wrestling.
We were doing something I didn’t understand—something exciting, dangerous.
Something I wasn’t ready for—something I didn’t really want.
We were pretending—or were we?
Then Asher wanted to wrestle all the time.
I started asking questions—trying to figure out what was happening.
Asher told me not to ask questions—to keep what happened between us, not to think about it too much—and he looked mean when he said it, like someone I didn’t know, not like a friend at all.
The more it happened, the less friendly he got.
It went on for two years.
I didn’t want to lose my friend.
Haven’t you ever done things you didn’t want to do just to keep a friend?
I tried to avoid Asher’s bedroom—being alone with Asher period—but he was persistent, always asking me to wrestle, which became the code word.
Then I just started making up excuses—telling Asher I couldn’t hang out because I had homework, or my mom had grounded me, or whatever. He got the hint quick, which is when he started to threaten me.
It ended with a fistfight—Asher beating the shit out of me because I refused to “keep wrestling.”
He was always stronger, bigger.
I didn’t care about the beating.
And my not caring freed me.
When I made it clear that he’d have to give me regular black eyes—wounds that would get people asking a lot of questions—to keep it going, that’s when it stopped.
Maybe that’s when I became a man.
When my parents asked about the bruises, I told them Asher and I had another fight.
They didn’t ask any follow-up questions.
Maybe because they suspected I was gay.
I think I tried to tell Linda once, but she refused to believe it and changed the subject. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I was probably indirect, because how can you be direct about shit like that when you’re just going through puberty? Sometimes I remember her laughing, like I had told a joke. Sometimes I remember laughing too, just because it felt safer to laugh, although maybe I made that part up. The memory of that attempt to communicate is all fucking blurry, so I don’t real
ly know.
No one ever found out the truth and that seems wrong—dangerous even.
I became a freak, while Asher somehow went on to become popular and well-adjusted and what most people would call normal, at least on the outside.
The bullies are always popular.
Why?
People love power.
Will I become temporarily powerful if I shoot Asher?[63] I’ve been wondering.
But—standing there outside his window—I become that scared little kid again whose parents are oblivious and gone; whose mother doesn’t even say a word when she walks in on her son and his best friend naked one day, but simply shuts the door and pretends it never happened.[64]
But for some reason—regardless of all that—I start thinking about this one summer day, before all of the weirdness started, back when we were just two kids.
It’s the last good memory I have of my old friend.
For no reason at all, Asher and I decided to ride our bikes as far as we could before we were due home for dinner.
We left at nine AM and had to return by five PM.
That gave us eight hours, so we decided to ride in one direction for three and a half hours, and then simply turn around and ride home for four and a half, figuring we’d be tired on the return trip, so it would take longer.
It was a pointless thing to do—the type of plan kids come up with when they are bored to death in the summer. But we had never really left our town before without our parents, we knew we definitely weren’t allowed to do this, and so our hearts pounded as we began pedaling defiantly. It felt like we were embarking on an amazing, forbidden adventure.
I remember Asher leading the way through all of these towns we’d never been to before even though they were close by and I remember experiencing a sense of freedom that was new and alive and intoxicating.
I remember being forced to stop when a red-and-white gate came down, and as we watched a train pass, I noticed Asher’s T-shirt was soaked in sweat. He had us pedaling hard and my thighs were on fire for most of the trip, but they burned hottest then, when we were forced to wait idle.
