the right thing can hurt like the dickens! If you want my opinion, you have a great mom.”
I would have laughed again, this time at her Girl Scout’s notion of cursing, but my eyes stung and a thick obstruction filled my throat. A little while ago, I said that two days after my fifteenth birthday I came to understand my mother’s feelings in a way I could use, and this is what I meant. I learned to ask questions about the things that scare you; that doing right could make you hurt too bad to think straight; that once you are you that’s who you are, and you have to pay the price.
2 Mr.X
O Great Old Ones, read these words inscribed within this stout Journal by the hand of Your Devoted Servant and rejoice!
I always liked walking late at night. In a comfortable city like Edgerton, the enormous blanket of darkness cushions even the sound of your footsteps on the pavement. I walk down the avenues, past the empty department stores and movie theaters. I drift down Hatchtown’s narrow lanes and look up at shuttered windows I could pass through in a second, but do not: part of my happiness is in the weighing and measuring of the lives about me. And like anyone else, I enjoy getting out of the house, escaping the captivity of that sty to which I am self-condemned. During my rambles I avoid street lamps, though regardless of the season I am dressed in a black coat and hat—a moving shadow, invisible in the darkness.
Or: nearly invisible. Invisible to all but a deeply unfortunate few, many of whom I admit to killing less from the need to protect myself than out of … pique, maybe, or whimsy. There was one exception.
I subtracted from the world the gangly hooker in stacked, high-heel sandals and a skirt the size of a washcloth who launched herself toward me from a Chester Street doorway, so high on whatever girls were doing for fun that year that she grabbed my elbow to keep from swaying. I looked at the pinpoint dots of her pupils and let her pull me toward the doorway, opened her up like a can of sardines, and broke her neck before she remembered to scream.
I gave more or less the same treatment to the kid wearing a black sweatshirt and fatigue pants who saw me because he thought he was looking for someone like me, surprise, surprise, and the young woman with a black eye and swollen lips who wavered out of a parked car at the sound of my footsteps and tried to get back into the car once she saw me, but it was too late, poor baby. And let us not forget the actual baby I found abandoned atop a Dumpster and assisted in its departure from an inhospitable world by detaching its darling little hands and excising its little outraged eyes.
The baby had not seen me, true. I believe that requires an especially heightened degree of sorrow or misery, loss so irreparable as to make the rest of life an eternal wound, and the baby was merely cold and hungry. But long ago, an untimely arrest and imprisonment kept me from doing the same to another newborn, and anger got the better of me. I never claimed to be perfect.
The noisome, Night Train–reeking dwarf I killed to protect myself had pulled himself upright between the garbage cans in the alley alongside Merchants Hotel and gaped at my approach. All but a few of his ilk fail to see me even when they are looking directly at me, and those few have the sense to back away. This fellow was still too foggy for sense. A ragged shaft of star-shine caught his eye. “Root-toot-toot, fuckin’ Dracula,” he said. He giggled and leaned shakily over the garbage cans to inspect the grubby cement. “Hey, where’d Piney go to? You seen Piney, Drac?” He referred to a more functional version of himself, a shabby outcast of whose existence I had long been vaguely aware.
“Rooty-tooty,” said the wretch, who would have gone on destroying himself without my assistance had he not followed his mantra by suddenly peering at me with a hideous mixture of delight and confusion and saying, “Hey, man, talk about long time no see. I thought I heard … I thought you was … aah …”
He was one Erwin “Pipey” Leake, some thirty years previous a hard-drinking young English instructor at Albertus University