Entropy (14 page)

I grabbed at my empty shoulder. I once had a prosthetic limb attached to it, a heavy piece of composite plastic secured over my shoulder. It was supposed to augment the healing process, compensate for the loss and, in turn, make me feel more acceptable. I had hated wearing it. The fucking thing felt so oppressive and heavy. I felt like a department store mannequin, artificial and transitory, casually dressed, and moved around from place to place, window to window, never settled or stable.

I struggled trying to open the cap to the painkillers. I always felt measurably out of balance when I was awake, somehow permanently concussed, but I was too weak to give them up. I hardly slept anymore. Fucking childproof caps! I slammed the bottle on the edge of the sink in frustration. I then opened the tap and cupped my hand underneath the faucet, guiding a cold stream of water into my mouth. The freshness slipped between the cracks of my fingers. The anxiety that I felt in my mouth stuck to my teeth like a thick, bitter paste.

I couldn't breathe.

Again, I placed my palm over the cap but I still couldn't open the bottle. I clenched my fist and slammed it against the plastic container, propelling it against the tiled wall. The cap popped off and the pills scattered violently around the porcelain fixture. Some settled in the drain.

The sunken sound of the small, white disciples scattering in the sink were indistinguishable from the pelting rain that was punishing the horrible afternoon. Suddenly, everything became as unsteady as a ship at sea, enraged by the winds of my own vulnerability and emasculation. Pain tore at the fragile seams of my flesh. My hand started to shake. It was the color of a piece of wood bleached by seawater. I made a fist and opened and closed my hand. I had to be able to flex the muscles and utilize my cramped, atrophic joints if I was going to grip the pistol tightly enough. As the winds began to increase outside I thought I could hear a child screaming.

The shutters on the outside of the bathroom window broke loose and began to collide against the brick wall on the outside of our house. I was supposed to fix them last week. The weather worsened. It was now mid-afternoon. I would have to leave soon.

I couldn't wait anymore.

I reached into the bathtub and wrapped my fingers around one of the pale circles and placed it on my tongue. I grabbed the empty cylinder and filled it with some of the loose OxyContin, then stuffed it into my trouser pocket. I opened up the barrel of the gun and double-checked the chamber. When I turned to open the door and leave, the nausea started again. It was something that I had trouble fighting because of the side effects attached to the tricyclic antidepressants. I slumped momentarily against a bookcase in the hallway.

The doctors had hospitalized me for almost eight weeks after the accident, and I endured four agonizing surgeries, all of which left me nothing more than hopeless and incomplete.

I grabbed the map and photos of his house and surroundings, my shoulder bag with the cassette tapes, and some of the other evidence that I had planned to show my brother. He wouldn't be able to deny it then. He would listen to his own hard voice echo around him. I thought about telephoning him, and warning him for some reason. Maybe I wanted him to know that I was coming. I wanted him to be afraid of losing everything.

I wanted him to be afraid of me.

***

I felt the gun pressing against my chest underneath my coat as I boarded the bus on the corner of 18
^th
and Percy. The map had gotten wet in the rain and ink had begun to run down the folds and stain the ends of my fingertips. I tried to remain calm despite tripping past the driver. However no one bothered to look at me, even with my deformity. I didn't even receive slight blemishes of pity.

I wanted to take out the weapon so that I could triple check that the gun was properly loaded. I wanted to sit it next to me, on that ripped, imitation leather bus seat and feel reassured by its presence, fascinated with the abstract, mechanical beauty surrounding its authority, its finality and its power.

The rain was still coming down fairly hard and was streaking against the side of the small, glass panels on the bus. Rain made such different tones depending upon the object that it struck; like the gurgling sound it made as it impacted with other bodies of water, or how it hardly made any sound at all when it collided with the human body. The window beside me was cracked open and water trickled in. I tried, but couldn't force it shut with one hand. The rain caught up in the wind blew in and splashed across my glasses. I pulled them off roughly and rubbed my eyes as the bus edged ever closer to my destination.

There was no going back.

I started to shake again. I looked out of the window at the people passing on the street below. There was a man removing a black and white photograph of one of the missing children, whose body had been recently recovered, from the facing of a telephone pole. The portrait of the girl had been there for months and I had passed it several times. We all did. The man's eyes were flushed, discolored and swollen, seemingly abused by nights of waiting, the horrible anticipation of getting
that
knock at the door; the hollow, vacant sounds of someone, some stranger telling you that your child was dead. The truth was cold, and the truth was definitive. It was never anything else.

I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes. My wife was due to walk through the front door soon. She had wanted me to make love to her last night, to reassure me that I was still desirable. She had slid her body under the black, satin sheets into the pockets of my skin and chest. My muscles had tightened when she positioned my cock into her.

Once she went into the bathroom to change her clothes after her rehearsal, it wouldn't take her long to understand what I would be attempting to do. Spread unevenly across the bathroom floor she would find the remainder of the police files on my brother that I hadn't shoved into the pocket of my coat and bag. She would brace herself next to the bathtub as she saw the photographs of the victims, and the disordered, written words of my brother echoing through her voice as she read them aloud against the Aztec-inspired patterns of the designer tiles.

Since she was so honorable, I expected she would tell the police.

I reached into the outside pocket of my jacket and withdrew a small earpiece that was plugged into the recorder. The recordings were something that I should have left behind, or tossed into the path of the approaching bus. I had lost count of how many stops there were left. Things weren't moving fast enough. Each time the bus stopped and opened its doors in order to exchange passengers, I would instinctively flinch, lean forward and grab the back edge of the seat in front of me, readying myself to stand and flee.

I waited anxiously for something to go wrong.

I tried to distract my thoughts by closing my eyes and thinking of my wife's delicate body and how I wished I had reacted differently to what she had whispered to me last night. Although it was just one of many regrets that I had concerning how I had reacted to Augustina in the past.

I started to listen to a different tape as the bus passed through another intersection and gathered speed, pulling me closer towards an ending that I could easily see coming, but was too weak to avoid. It wasn't my brother's voice that I listened to, but a symphony composed by a pianist in the quartet in which I used to play. He had been killed in a plane crash while touring in Europe, less than a year after my accident. Our bassist had moved to London a few months before, and adopted two children, twin girls. The violinist, with whom I had played with the longest, nearly four years, had moved to California and recorded several classical albums covering Vivaldi, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. That was the last anyone had heard from him.

It was all too apparent that I no longer fitted in anywhere in anyone's life. There was no longer a place for me. I turned the volume down on the recorder and closed my eyes. My wife and I had met for the first time in New York, during a summer rehearsal.

The rain that morning sounded the same as the rain that now fell against the bus windows.

I remembered when I first heard her name and liked the way her name sounded on my tongue;
Augustina
. When she first appeared on stage that day, my legs began to shake involuntarily. To steady myself, I pressed my knees and thighs tighter against the wooden curves of the cello, and felt the dulcet tones of the instrument through the tension and uncertainty that lay beneath my skin.

The outdoor theater was closed for our rehearsal. The rows of seats were unoccupied, a barren field of faded stone and distant applause. Several weeks remained before the theater would reopen for business. Earlier, a quick morning shower had dampened the boundaries of the stage. Water had gathered in small puddles, which had settled along the edges of the concrete in front of the first row of seats. The light shower had eventually given way to intense heat and humidity, which pulled at me as I leaned forward in my chair, trying to adjust the sheet music in front of me.

Though her body was petite, she had power, thrusting intensely from different points of the stage as the structure of the music heightened and the emotion in the piece distended. Strands of long, auburn hair were tied up behind her head and, when she moved suddenly, strands would break free and slip in front of her sage-washed eyes. Her eyes were so powerful, so wrought with conviction, that they absorbed all the color from the surrounding landscape. Everything else was a desolate, blighted wasteland of ash and salt compared with the beauty of her form.

The original composition had been written for a quartet, but our bassist was ill and he had remained behind at the hotel downtown. The chords from the piano, once violent and authoritarian, quietened. The violinist lowered his instrument, and hushed the remaining strings as if comforting a crying newborn. Soon I would be immersed in a long solo, several measures of a musical soliloquy that had been branched in by our composer and her choreographer, so that his new lead could dance alone at the front of the stage.

During an initial pause before the music matured, I loosened the pin at the cello's base and leaned it back deeper into my chest. The bow, under the light pressure of my fingertips, slowly touched the face of the cello, the soft horsehair fibers caressing and depressing the strings. I wondered how her skin responded when it was touched, if its tenderness sank like the feathers of a pillow, if its fragility could be shaped in the same way that sand upon a beach yielded to the winds and tides.

There was a moment during the cello solo where she turned around so that her body facing mine. She was a staggeringly beautiful woman, resplendent, alluring; her clothes clung seductively to her body in response to the heaviness of the air. I felt drips of water strike the back of my neck as I continued to play. An overhanging pipe had ruptured and begun to leak.

Soon streams of water came rushing down upon our heads, and the conductor ushered the other dancers to exit the side of the stage. But I never stopped playing. I couldn't – not while she continued to dance. Nothing else existed in that moment, just the repetitive movement of my hands across the cello, and her grace. She moved slightly and I raised my head. I could see the darkened outline of her breasts through the light blue and white striped tuxedo shirt that clung to her body. I watched her exhale heavily and behold me. I had been completely seduced by her rare and candid sensuality.

The sound of the music and the memory of that perfect moment had lessened my indecision towards what I was about to do. It would be over soon, one way or the other. I thought about pulling out the gun again, tightening my fingers around its body to stop my hand from trembling. Instead, I stopped the DAT recorder.

The last thing I had looked at before leaving the house was a crime scene photograph of a girl whose body was discovered in an abandoned, crumbling barn silo. I think her name was Penelope. In the photograph she didn't look real, more like a papier-mâché model. There were mud and animal feces all over her body.

I had wanted to vomit.

Although the scene was intensely violent, it was also sad and overbearing. Soon I would have a chance to be just as aggressive as he had been, perhaps more vicious and brutal. Maybe I would simply give him a choice, something my brother had never given to anyone else. I reached up and tried to close the partially opened window again. I still could not move the latches.

I slumped back into the seat feeling frustrated and watched the tears that had formed, dance along the reflection of my face in the window. I wished that I could look and see someone else's reflection. I had wanted to see a better man and husband staring back at me with cold, penetrating, disapproving eyes. But it just didn't work that way. There was just nothing else that I could do. I had merely reached an end.

I squeezed the barrel of the gun inside the pocket of my jacket. I thought about pulling the trigger, and dislodging the bullet into my thigh. However, they would be able to get me to a hospital before I bled to death. I deserved to die because of the things that I had done.

The distress, the loss of character and distinction haunted the long steps that I had taken to reach this point. I now had to prepared to become someone else entirely. I looked down and closed the folder. I wanted to break his teeth as I forced the muzzle of the gun into his mouth, to rediscover the temerity that had been destroyed by my deformity and self-recrimination. I reached into the pocket of my coat and searched for a pill. I didn't care which one.

I removed another DAT tape and placed it into the recorder. It started with a few industrial sounds; a log splitter, the assembly of a car engine in a factory in Michigan, the augmented hummingbird-like tone of a military chopper taking off. Nothing was on the tape after that. I changed sides, unsure of whether I wanted to risk hearing her voice again.

I was scared.

She had every right to be critical, to hate me. But I knew that no matter how much my wife convinced me that she loved me, with her patience and her empathy, that I would fracture. Maybe she hadn't left any other recordings as another set of sounds began. I recognized it immediately. It was a car accident. I could hear the automobile gaining speed at a steady rate, reaching thirty miles per hour in a matter of seconds. Forty. Fifty. Sixty. At seventy-five miles per hour the discordant sound of steel, plastic, and rubber colliding … the sound reminded me of when I had murdered the concept of innocence.