The Killer Is Dying (2 page)
WHEN WAYNE PORTER’S THROAT WAS SLIT, he was thinking about the time he and his friend Joe Weidinger played hooky from Sunday school to climb into the church steeple. They had pushed a table underneath a door in the ceiling of an unused room, put a chair on the table, and climbed into a honeycomb of passageways. The steeple, when they got there, like so much in life, was a disappointment. Bare fiberboard on the interior walls, a
lot
of pigeon shit. And not even a bell, just some electronic gizmo the size of his mom’s kitchen radio.
Interestingly, there was no pain, just the sudden gush of warmth, then a feeling as though his body were floating upward, floating away, before the world went dark around him.
Where the hell did
that
come from? Jimmie thought as he woke, heart pounding, to realize that he wasn’t breathing. And who was Wayne Porter? His hand had gone instinctively to his throat. He took a breath, looked around. He didn’t usually have dreams, and when he did, they were smoky gray and edgeless, washed-out like old movies, not vivid like this. He could remember every color, every angle and surface, every sound. That sensation of sudden warmth across his chest, eyes opening, the face above him already turning away.
Shadows climbed up window and wall as a car passed slowly by.
He’d never been like other children, afraid of the dark, always expecting the world somehow to move subversively against him. He understood that he was simply another object in it, like a rock or a tree. The world didn’t care that he was there, and most of the people in it would never know, which was exactly what he wanted. What he needed.
Nor was he in any manner frightened by
this
. But the dream was … interesting.
The book he’d been reading last night lay facedown and open on the floor by his bed.
Cities: A Survival Guide
. The cover showed a man in safari khaki peering out from a shower curtain upon which were orange, blue, and green representations of oversize tropical flowers and tall buildings. Intrigued by the title and blurb, he’d ordered the book online, as he did almost everything except food. Not what he’d expected at all, but he had kept reading, his interest modified but still piqued. Over the years he’d read many survival texts from alternative-lifestyle and libertarian publishers. This book wasn’t like those, wasn’t a survival guide at all, but a how-to to the ways of the city, how to find the best affordable restaurants, where to buy quality clothing for less, access to health care, employment tips—a user’s manual to a life he could barely imagine and would never be a part of.
In the bathroom he let the water run till warm, then washed his face. A moth beat at the inside of the window, and as he waited, he eased the window open on its latch to let the moth out.
In the kitchen he filled the small saucepan with water and set it on the stove to boil, rinsed one of the mugs and spooned in sugar, grabbed a tea bag from the open box.
In the front room he stood looking out the window at passing cars, then, with the water at boil and tea brewed, sat at the table. He was up, wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep for a while, didn’t feel much like reading. Might as well put the time to good use.
The bills slid all together out of the manila envelope where he kept them in the order they arrived. He turned the stack over and, righting them one by one, began writing checks, duplicating without conscious thought the signature he had worked so long and hard to master. Mortgage, power, gas, water, credit cards. On each invoice he printed check number, date, and amount paid. The third or fourth time he entered the date, something caught within him and he thought: It’s been a year now.
At first he had simply waited, living off what remained in the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets, assuming that someone would show up to question the car being gone, lack of activity around the house, his absence from school. By the time he’d run out of food it was clear that he had somehow slipped through society’s cracks. One day he walked past the laundry basket into which he’d been throwing the mail and realized there were certain things to which he would have to attend. He pulled the bills, long overdue, out of the bundle. In a hall closet he found a box of checks. In the lockbox under the bed he found papers—the deed to the house and insurance papers among them—with his father’s signature. Painstakingly he set about teaching himself to forge the signature—at which point he recalled that it was his mother who had paid the bills, and started over.
For a time, all had gone well. Then a check, the monthly mortgage check, of all things, got returned for insufficient funds. Following initial panic, he’d gone online to the local newspaper’s commercial site and managed to sell his father’s pride and joy, the ’55 cream-over-mint-green Chevy that never left the garage, the last thing he’d have thought his father would leave behind. There was a tense hour or so when the elderly man came to buy it. He told the man that his father, a nurse at the hospital, had been called in unexpectedly to work, and produced a receipt, signed by his father, for the amount agreed upon online. Wasting no time once the man had left, he ran check and deposit slip to the bank’s ATM site at the grocery store six blocks up Central.
He sold a few more things that way, furniture, his mother’s silver dollars, but he knew it was a dead end and that soon enough, one way or another, he was bound to get jammed up. So without preconceptions he took to skulking on eBay, Craigslist, and a dozen or more local Web listings, keeping an eye out, hopscotching back and forth, buying tentatively, selling quickly at low profit. Misfires and grief early on, but then he had it.
Toys.
Every once in a while some other collectable, lunchboxes in particular, but mostly toys. The market was widespread, huge, and absurd. One day he sold a two-level garage and service center made from tin for $1,200. Pickaninny figures and items linked to TV shows from long before he was born routinely brought in hundreds apiece. Someone in the UK paid $326 for a plastic ukulele that, though in perfect condition, looked as though it had been left out in the sun too long and begun melting.
Prices, though, had been rising steadily, as had (he surmised) the number of those like himself troubling the waters. Already he was looking to sidestep. And while he wasn’t sure of the market yet, still sounding that out, he was thinking hand tools. Adzes, awls, planes, levels, reamers, miter boxes. Woodworker’s tools.
He wrote the last check, entered check number, date, payee, and amount in the ledger, slipped the last check and payment slip into the envelope, sealed it. Then turned the stack of envelopes faceup and stamped each one. Also on each went a sticker from a thick roll:
James & Paula Kostof
1534 Dalmont
Phoenix, AZ 85014
The bills went back into the manila envelope, which he marked with the date. He noted again, as he always did, that the ampersand, that &, was the largest figure on the sticker.
Still, he wasn’t sleepy.
He brewed a second cup of tea and stood at the window. Never much traffic out here after eight or so. A battered truck, white gone gray, swayed by on bad shocks,
Food for the Soul
painted in an arc of rainbow letters on its side with, below that, pictographs of a bowl of steaming food and a Bible.
Sitting at the table beside the window, he clicked on the computer to run his Greatest Hits.
Like Downer Loads with its ever-changing headlines: “Secret Love Nest Found in Abandoned Warehouse,” “Sadistic Skipper Drowns Parrot,” “Thalidomide Victim Becomes Concert Violinist,” “Water Will Kill You.” Or his all-time personal favorite, “Coyotes Protect Alien Baby.”
Like The Great Illusion America, flogging books, pamphlets and DVDs about the new world order, conspiracies that spiraled back thousands of years, Marines awakening from comas with memories of covert actions on Mars, simple sources of free energy, obtaining New Zealand citizenship, and releasing the secret power inside you.
Like The Real Triangle, which explained how we are being poisoned by the sea of microwaves washing over us: transmission towers (“500 in L.A. Alone!”), Wi-Fi, cell phones. Put an egg between two cell phones, the home page suggested. Use one cell phone to call the other. Within an hour the egg will be fully cooked.
All of them sites he’d stumbled across one way or another, and now visited daily.
Sometimes as he sat looking out the window, looking into the screen, it occurred to him that he collected the sites—puerile at best, possibly pernicious—the way others seized on Hopalong Cassidy lunchboxes, toy garages, and plastic ukuleles. He didn’t understand their attraction, why these sites drew him, but they’d become a refuge.
The best, he always saved for last.
Traveler’s comments had started appearing five years before. At first, they seemed just another blog: current events, oil supplies, immigration, foreign policy. Nothing, though, of the entertainment gossip, personal opinions, and political teeter-tottering that filled most blogs. Rarely much about people at all, in fact—just events. Jimmie had checked out the archives, followed the trail backward.
Then things Traveler had spoken of hypothetically—gas shortages, an election debacle, a flood in the Midwest—actually occurred. As the site became progressively more predictive than discursive, Traveler’s anonymity moderated as well.
We
, then
I
, came into use, hints were dropped, passing comments that over time coalesced to confession: she was a soldier sent back from the year 2063 on a mission she could not divulge. Interspersed with an oddly impersonal memoir, the predictions continued, some scarily on target, others wildly amiss. Three years to the day after the first blog, following shortly upon an entry headlined “I Haven’t Much Time Left,” Traveler stopped posting.
Others had kept the Web site going, so that it was now a vast beehive of commentary, speculation, testimonials, exegesis, and silliness accrued about the original postings and growing day by day, even to the point of a biography cobbled together from Traveler’s entries, on-site “scholarship,” and, it would seem, an imagination spawned of early and ongoing exposure to
Star Trek
.
Jimmie scrolled down the line of recent postings, clicking on those whose blurbs caught his interest, reading a sentence here, half an entry there. Many had quotations from Traveler’s entries as epigraphs in smaller typeface above their own.
When I found Traveler, I was really messed up, stupid, and hopeless. I’m still messed-up, but that’s just one out of three. I keep hearing all this “Give something back” and “Make a difference” crap, and all this stuff about how something changed your life, and mostly that’s what it is, crap. But it seems to me that Traveler really did give something back, and made a difference. She sure did for me—and my life doesn’t look much like it did before.
Truth is something you catch only out of the side of your eye; look straight on, and it’s gone.
When I was 16 I went to my parents and said I had something to tell them.
“O my God, you’ve got little Alice pregnant!” my mom said.
“No.”
“You’re gay,” my father said.
“No. It’s worse: I want to be a writer.”
That same sense of purpose, that I’d discovered my place in the world, my direction, came to me when I found these writings.
I came home last night and burned the bed. It’s no good without you in it.
The firemen are here now.
I was a great disappointment to my folks. They had always assumed I’d take over the funeral home that had been in my family for six generations. Instead, I became a doctor. Worked emergency first, then went back and certified in pediatrics. Now I take care of newborns. Some weigh a pound—you can fit them in the palm of your hand. My wife calls them frogs. “How were your frogs today?” I look at them sometimes and wonder what these tiny bodies will turn into (the ones who live), what kind of burdens and disappointments their parents will carry around.
“I looked over in the bed where my best friend used to lay.”—Willie McTell
Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative.
He scrolled back to a headline he’d passed up before:
Something had been coming from a long way off for a long time. I always knew that. Then one day I woke up and there it was.
“Ride the devil, boy, or it’ll ride you.”
Intrigued, he tracked through a slurry of pointless anecdotes, embarrassingly candid memoirs, quotations from popular songs, a half acre of bad journalism and worse psychology, to the original post.
The first kill, you never forget.
About rabbit hunting, as it turned out, how the writer and his old man used to go out together in “black Texas woods,” how it had made a man of him, but Jimmie was left with aftershocks of the tremor that surged through him on reading that initial sentence.
The sudden gush of warmth, then a feeling as though his body were floating upward, floating away, before the world went dark around him.
