Entropy (12 page)

“By how much?”

“Double.” She reached up and placed her hand seductively around the shape of my neck. Her fingers settled comfortably into the grooves of my throat muscles and she pulled me closer down towards her. I could feel her warm breath collide with my skin.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Jesus Christ!” I said. I pulled away from her and retreated back to the overcast sanctuary of the window's edge.

“It might not have to be for long. Maybe a few months they said, but a lot of it depends on what the next set of results turns out to be.”

I watched the gusting winds push the decomposing leaves that remained on the borders of the property out onto the edges of the street. At the edge of the driveway across the street, an abandoned tricycle entered into the genesis of decay. Recycling bins, overturned by the wind, remained fallen. A school bus flashed its hazard lights across the street. Three children got off the bus accompanied by a police officer.

‘There's something else as well,” she added.

“What is it?”

“There's extensive damage to my reproductive system.”

“Did they say what that means, in the long run?”

“No. They said that it was too early to tell. They want to talk to both of us next week sometime. We have to call them back to set up an appointment. They've scheduled me for an instructional class on infertility so we can completely understand what our options are, and what the next sets of test results may or may not mean. I need you to go with me,” she said.

“When?”

“I know this isn't much notice, but the class is tomorrow morning.”

“I'll go,” I responded.

“Will you stay, here with me? I want you to hold me, just hold me.”

“I can't,” I said. I closed the bedroom door behind me as I left.

Water could teach you how to grieve if you let it.

Did she really need me? Would she suffer greatly without my love, or would she thrive without the intense burden of my hate if I left her? I stood beneath the light rain at the edge of our driveway and waited for the bus, unsure of where I was headed. I knew that if I turned around I would see her pulling aside the long drapes in our bedroom. She had appeared so sad and vulnerable when I left her, the frail material of the pale yellow slip falling across her body.

Images of me running back, forgiving her with violent abandon, pulling her warm body to the distant floor to feast on mine passed in the windows of the approaching bus. There was so much that I wanted to ask her, that I wanted her to ask me: about love, emotion, children, what I had done that had driven her into the arms of another man. As I boarded the bus, the hope that Hannah and I had disappeared in the raindrops on the glass as I sat down helplessly wondering, if lust aside, we would ever be close again, as a man and a woman should be.

***

I looked gloomily out of the bus window, oblivious to the stopping and starting of the bus or where I even was. I looked around. The bus was almost empty, save for three other passengers. I had missed my stop for the hospital and the bus was approaching the end of its route at the bus station. Maybe there I should board the first intercity coach and just disappear. I could start a life in a new place and bury my past with the endless victims who I had pulled from the water. I allowed myself to indulge in this fantasy, knowing that I could never expunge the faces of those children when I closed my eyes at night and during my waking hours, I would always carry that constant visible reminder on the inside of my elbow.

Without warning, one of the passengers, a disabled man stood up from his seat and pulling a gun, raised his arm and fired one direct shot through the top of the bus. The driver pounded hard upon the brakes and the vehicle fishtailed to the right and spun into the center of the street, intersecting both lanes. The man braced himself as the bus came to a halt. Without breaking even for a second, he looked directly into my eyes and pointed the gun at the soft spot underneath my chin. He changed his position while keeping his weapon trained on me. The perspiration from his brow dripped onto my forearm. I wanted to taste the salt on the tanned plains of Hannah's skin more than ever. The man turned his attention quickly but deliberately to the driver, instructing him to put the bus into park and to apply the emergency brake.

“Take the keys out of the ignition. Now toss them out of the window to your right.” Using his gun he motioned towards the driver to move to the back of the bus where he could see him.

“Any attempt to move from your seat, or to try and stop me and I will kill you. Make no mistake in your judgment please, because I am not here for you,” he stated. A beautiful woman near the front crossed her hands in prayer. He stepped towards her, while continuing to watch all of the other passengers, then leaned over her.

“There's no need to pray. Hope and faith are God's lies to us all.”

Water could protect you if you let it.

I just sat there. Looking closely at the gun, I cocked the trigger back and forth repeatedly, like a curious child studying the physics of a toy, wanting to grasp the technical aspects of it, what made certain parts of it function and react the way that it did when it was used. I desperately wanted to study it, concentrate on it with an abject fear and respect, separate it into its different and unique pieces and lay them out on the kitchen table. I wanted to research its history, learn the displacement, the reflex action of the pistol with regard to the human muscle, the specific wind variations that affected its trajectory, and the weight that it would carry in the palm of my hand. I wanted to know everything about the gun so that I wouldn't miss when I had that one chance.

The dimly lit room was empty. The remnants of last night's dinner with my wife sat in the recesses of the sink, ignored. The hot water she ran to wash the dishes in had grown cold overnight, and the foam of the liquid soap was no longer visible to the naked eye. The plug was still fastened over the drain. Even with pieces of food resting at the bottom of the sink, the water looked clear. I couldn't remember why she didn't end up washing the dishes. Tiny drops of wine clung to the side of a tall, ovular glass, like dew against a window the morning after a rainstorm.

My thoughts then moved on to the way she had looked in that blouse last night, the top opened up so I could see the sweetness of her exposed neck; there was a small bead of perspiration lost in the shelter of her cleavage. I stared back down at the gun.

A gunshot fired from a distance of ten feet away measured 166 decibels. The sound that it made when it spoke was deafening; its sonic blast shattered the atmosphere, the world and all consequence transversely, like ripples on a pond. I would be much closer than that, much closer than ten feet. I wanted to be able to feel his spittle scatter across my bottom lip, the look of realization in his eyes.

I looked out the window and listened to the rain splash against the gutters. It reminded me of nails dropping on a concrete driveway. The weather didn't matter. Everything had to happen today.

I turned my right wrist over and rubbed away the discharge that began to form on the end of my nose with the back of my hand, and lowered the weapon onto the table. One of the large, colored envelopes in front of me was still covered in shrink-wrap, my brother's name barely visible underneath on a label in the right-hand corner. I tore the plastic open and removed the contents.

How could he have done this? This man had everything in respect to what I had lost – or perhaps more accurately, had taken from myself through my failed suicide attempt, and the repercussions of the subsequent vehicular manslaughter conviction. The detective who had investigated my case was the same man who had so brazenly approached me this morning.

I had opened my door in response to it being incessantly pounded for several minutes. Despite it being only ten o'clock, he stank of alcohol and stale cigarettes. He was unshaven and had stared intently at me for several moments through bloodshot eyes without saying a word, as if sizing me up. Finally, he reached within his well-worn trench coat and pulled out the packages.

“These concern your brother,” he said awkwardly waving what appeared to be several bulky envelopes.

I stared back at him, confused and speechless. Finally he continued.

“These are copies of files. You won't have time to go through them all but you don't need to. You have a chance to redeem yourself for what you have done. You can't undo the past but you can bring closure to a lot of people … including me.
Everything
you need is contained in these packages. But you will have to act today.”

With that he looked at me with some uncertainty, as if already regretting his decision, turned on his heel and left.

The packets of information that I had been given were now spread open before me: the receipts from various motel rooms; the surveillance photographs; a blurred photograph of what was believed to be his vehicle passing through an interstate exit taken from a traffic camera; information from an undercover federal agent; the statements gathered from witnesses who would no doubt be called upon to testify during a trial. In a second, bulky package, was the gun with its serial number filed off.

Eleven unmarked, recorded conversations from wiretaps were contained in another envelope. They looked like they were digital copies. According to a small index card inside, the authorities hoped that all of this information would be admissible in court.

I had turned off one of the recordings after I heard my brother describe some of the things that he had done. It didn't sound like him at all from what I could remember, although it had been some time since he and I had engaged in conversation. I couldn't think of how long it had been. There had been a passiveness to his speech previously, a kind of naïve uncertainty about relationships, environment and intimacy that was almost childlike. However the tone of his voice on the recording was different. It was mature, evenly controlled and manipulative; darker I guess. It wasn't the familiar voice that I had come to associate with my brother.

There was also a section of a typed transcript some sixteen or seventeen pages long, which detailed part of a recording where he spoke about grooming one of the victims. That was all that was included in the preliminary report to the district attorney and the judge, who were expected to issue an arrest warrant first thing tomorrow. The rest of the tapes were still being transcribed. The notations in the report were concise, pointed and descriptive. The child in question in the recording was a fifteen-year-old girl.

I stopped reading it after the seventh page. That was more than enough. The notes included in the small margin to the right of the report by the initial lead detective described the acts themselves, the strength involved, the bruises, the ferocity and the measured depth of the penetration, the vaginal tearing, the lack of DNA evidence because he had more than likely used a condom. The girl's body had been discovered by examiners in a badly decomposed state in an abandoned farm silo. A medical expert determined, in an included report, that during the violation my brother wore rubber gloves and, most likely, had shaved his entire body, including all of his pubic hair in order to leave as little trace evidence as possible.

It was beyond disgusting.

The transcript trembled in the tentative tips of my fingers. The muscles in my chest contracted heavily and then relaxed. I held onto the gun, ran into the bathroom and closed the door, locking it behind me.

How were they so sure it was him? I had to know for certain that it was, but there was no one that I could contact in the department without compromising the detective who passed the files to me only a matter of hours ago and most likely being implicated in the conspiracy given that the accused was my brother. The window above the toilet was cracked, and the rain started to come in through the small holes in the screen.

I couldn't breathe.

I pressed my face against the window and swallowed the unfamiliar cold air. The thin metal was rough against the plane of my cheek and the grime left streaks across the side of my face. I moved to the sink and wiped away the vomit from the pockets that formed in the folds of skin at the corner of my lips. Cold water collided with the dryness of my throat, and splashed the surface of the glass mirror door of the medicine cabinet. I opened up the door of the medicine cabinet, my fingerprints faded against the small, plastic handle. This simple reflective action caused me to pause. If I left fingerprints at his residence, could the police be able to use them to find me? I decided that it really didn't matter.

I removed a bottle that was a third full from the second shelf and tried to unfasten the cap. The doctors should have replaced the prescription and filled the bottle two or three weeks ago. I held onto it and retreated into the sound studio that was located across from our bedroom, where I was sure that I had others hidden. The thick, glass door closed behind me. I opened several drawers in the desk and retrieved another prescription bottle. I gripped it tightly with my hand. Hundreds of digital audiotapes were stacked against the wall; years of research and sound piled up in no specific order. Scattered shreds of yellow legal paper with physics and logarithmic equations peered out from underneath of a series of photographs and measurements. Discarded books on music theory and composition rested on a dusty, wooden shelf a few feet above my head.

I scanned some of the audiotape titles I had accumulated during my research and employment. There were DAT digital audio tapes with the sounds of a jet engine, chainsaw, shotgun, oil drill, thunderstorm, sonar, waves washing on a beach, a radio, and a head-on collision between two automobiles at seventy-five miles per hour.

Despite all my knowledge, it was still impossible to hear the past coming up upon you.

Having trained as a musician, I held sound in the highest importance: pitch, tone, the logarithmic construction of amplitude, frequency, intensity, and other the other characteristics that were essential for desirable auditory quality. The biology of sound was complicated. It moved in waves, propagated outwards from a fixed point. I felt I could see sound move, drip from the strings of violins and cellos in a concerto like water, or trickling from the golden mouth of a trumpet like honey.

Several instruments sat abandoned in the corner of my studio, scattered patterns of smudged fingerprints poisoning the lustre of their polished wooden surfaces. Rain was blowing through an open window and gathering on the wooden floor in front of them. I pushed myself out of the chair from behind my desk and closed the window. I knelt down and reached out my hand to remove the cello from its wooden stand. It wouldn't settle in the cradle of my palm. It was restless, like a newborn baby fighting to get back to the comfort of its mother's womb.

I flipped open the tape deck of the DAT recorder, removed the tape of my brother's voice and replaced it with a different one from the pile. Satisfied with the one I had chosen, I placed the recorder on the middle of the studio floor and turned up the volume. Subconsciously, I wanted to hear more of my brother's sickening seduction. Being enraged by his emotional savagery would subdue my conscience, therefore making it easier to pull the trigger. But the pages of the transcript now spread across the floor, like sap across the wilted branch of a tree at the onset of winter, was already undeniable proof.

My chest tightened.

Tears trickled down the sides of my face. The chords from a cello, not my brother's voice, filled the room. It was a live recording of my old quartet. I hadn't listened to any of the compositions I had written or any of our performances since the accident. I covered my ears, deafened by the pain and loneliness of the circumstances that had led me here.

The sad composition on the DAT recording ended abruptly in the middle of a piano verse, and I listened intently to a long silence; a break that I did not remember. Perhaps I had previously damaged the tape without knowing. Then there was the wet sound of someone's lips parting. It made me think about the taste of my wife's saliva. I could hear other isolated sounds in the background that I instantly tried to recognize, and then heard the fragmented breathing of a woman. She inhaled repeatedly, deeply, as if wanting to free words that were lodged tightly against the bones in her chest. The pain, the penetrating disillusionment masked by the compassion in her voice overtook the sound of the rain outside.

Can you hear me?

You won't answer me will you, even if you could? Lately, I could be in the same room with you and not even know that you were there, looking over your shoulder at the pages of music on the floor of your sound room. It is as if you are trapped alone on the inside of the glass and I can't break it to reach you, to communicate with you, even if I tried. But should I?

You once said to me, after the accident, that hope was an illusion, a missing accessory in a child's magic kit. I never agreed with that, although I never admitted it to you. I wasn't sure when or if you would ever listen to any of these tapes again, to hear your talented and beautiful past played back to you. There are so many sounds that deafen the world around you, drown out all the harmony you used to create and understand. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I can see you staring at the instruments in that room, sitting there like imported porcelain dolls, or like a glass flower so brittle that one touch would shatter its delicate form. You didn't even notice me. But I didn't make a sound.

Sound. That is the only way I could get you to react anymore; to create some sort of vibration, something audible: a guttural laugh; a broken dish.

As I watched you, I wondered if you were afraid: afraid to succeed again; perhaps afraid to touch me in those intimate places where I first discovered the intensity you possessed but had now almost forgotten. I never thought you were afraid of anything, except perhaps, the possibility of losing me. I thought that the accident would bring us closer. But I was wrong.

It seems that the more you try to hold onto something, the farther and farther away it retreats, always slightly out of reach. All things run away in time, it's just a question of when. Things have changed, and I am struggling to understand what has polluted the soil of our cultivated life together; what has happened between you and I that complicated what was such a simple joy. No matter how much you might not want to, you are still my husband and my lover. But I wonder—no, I hold in doubt—so much of what I once understood to be absolutely certain.

It has become impossible to reach you because you won't let me touch you. I can no longer hold your head in the crook of my elbow and feel that emotional connection. You didn't always have to be the strong one. You carried enough. I could have held that burden for you after the accident. I, like most women have tremendous strength. Underneath all the tenderness of our bodies, underneath the sensuality and the compassion, lies a grace and an integrity that cannot be argued, that cannot be equaled.