The Ax (17 page)

One strange advantage to this miserable experience with Marjorie is that I no longer have to tell her where I’m going. We aren’t talking to one another that much any more. This morning, after breakfast, I simply got into the Voyager and drove away.

Not having to make up destinations and job interviews and library research is a great burden lifted. Not the greatest burden, of course.

Driving homeward, I can’t help but contrast KBA and his wife with Marjorie and me. It’s true he hasn’t been out of work as long as I, and he could have a much thicker financial cushion. His resumé didn’t mention children, and I saw no sign of children around the house, and come to think of it, that togetherness of theirs is something I associate with childless couples.

Children are the great expense in life, or one of the great expenses. If KBA and his wife have no children, and if they have a bigger nest egg, and I know he hasn’t been jobless as long as I have (and he’s still under fifty, the son of a bitch, as he likes to tell us), then naturally he’ll be calmer about his situation than I can be, he’ll be more patient, less worried. It won’t affect his marriage as much, not yet. But wait till he’s out of work for two or three years,
then
see how much togetherness they show.

Well. We won’t be testing that, will we?

I can’t sleep, at first, tonight. Marjorie and I are polite with one another now, even concerned about one another, but neither of us has much to say. We watched television together this evening, and at ten o’clock there was some sort of talking-heads special on about the millennium, which we watched by unspoken mutual agreement, but neither of us made any comments during the program, as we always used to do.

I missed that, the little disrespectful remarks about the TV show in front of us, and I’m sure Marjorie missed it, too, but there was no hope that either of us could break through.

Being in bed together is grim. We don’t touch. We don’t acknowledge each other’s presence. The lights are off, and because today’s cloud cover has continued, the night is very dark, and we lie here next to one another like parcels to be delivered, and for a while I can’t sleep. I don’t know if Marjorie’s dropped off or not, I only know that I am awake, and my mind turns this way and that.

I think about many things. I think about the job to come, in Arcadia. I think about killing the boyfriend, when I find out who he is. I think about the circumstances that have led me here, to this thorny place. And I think about the millennium.

Strange, that. I’d never thought about it before, that the simple arbitrary numbering of years could have an effect on us, but it turns out to be so. Having the number of the year change from 1 to 2, which will happen just two and a half years from now, has a great effect, it seems, on people’s minds and actions, and on society itself.

It’s ridiculous, of course. There couldn’t be a more arbitrary number in life than the number of the year. The one we use is dated from the birth of somebody who possibly existed, and if he did exist his birthday was either four years or six years earlier than the date chosen when the year was being worked out. So even if you go along with Jesus Christ—yes, he’s God, yes, he was born, yes, we number our years from his birth—even then this can’t be 1997, the way we think it is. No, it has to be either 2001 or 2003, and the millennium’s already gone past, so it’s too late to worry.

The Chinese think the year’s a different number from us, and the Jews go with yet another number. But none of that matters. The generally accepted idea in
our
society is, the world is going to reach the magic number two thousand very soon now, and therefore people are going a little nuts.

It happened last time, a thousand years ago, as the program explained. Strange religions came along, mass suicides, strange migrations, all kinds of milling around, pushing and shoving, all because the year 1000 was on its way.

Even the hundred-year anniversaries have an effect, the same way the full moon is supposed to. But the thousand-year marker is the big one.

One reason, the program said, is that it seems that many people, even intelligent, educated, sophisticated people, believe way down inside themselves, down at some instinctive level, that the millennium is the end of the world. They believe somehow the world is going to blow up or vanish or melt or spin out of the solar system or do
something
cataclysmic. That’s why there’s more and more religious fanaticism at the moment, and more and more strange cults, and more and more group suicides. The millennium is shaking us up, the way a high-pitched tone shakes up a dog.

Lying here, unable to sleep, in the darkness, I find myself wondering if that’s why I’m out of a job. They didn’t suggest this on the program, it’s my own idea, which I’d never thought of before, but what if that’s what’s happened? All these hard-nosed executives, all these tough businessmen, making their brutal decisions, firing people from healthy companies, stripping everything down, ignoring the human cost, ignoring their own humanity, what if, without their knowing it, without their even being able to accept the idea, what if they’re doing it because they believe the world is coming to an end?

2000; and it all stops.

Maybe that is what they’re doing. It’s as good an explanation as anything
they’ve
offered. They’re trying to make everything neat and perfect for the end of the world. When the hammer crashes down, when everything comes to a dead stop, they want to be in the very best position possible.

This kind of business management that has never been seen in the world before, trashing productive people from productive careers in productive companies, is happening because of the millennium. Because of the year 2000. I’m out of work because the human race has gone mad.

On that thought, I fall asleep. It’s only later that I wake up to terror.

I get a late start, having had trouble rousing myself this morning, after last night. But I’m on the road finally a little after nine, and make the turnoff to Footbridge Road at quarter to ten.

Last night. After the trouble I had getting to sleep, with all those thoughts circling, suddenly I woke up in the middle of the night, in pitch-black darkness because of that cloud cover—which is still here today, but not as though it’s going to rain—and I woke up into that blackness with a sudden feeling of terror.

At first I couldn’t imagine what it was that had me so terrified, and I lay there rigid, on my back, staring up at black emptiness, listening to the tiny inhabited silences of the house, while my brain tried to find its way back from panic, tried to sort out what the problem was. And when at last it did, and I figured out what it was that had so frightened me that it had driven me up out of sleep, what I was afraid of was me.

The boyfriend. Somehow, in my sleeping mind, the boyfriend had appeared, or I mean the
idea
of the boyfriend; I still don’t know who he is. But that thought, the idea of the boyfriend, was circling in my sleeping brain, along with the idea that I was going to kill him when I found out who he was, and how easy that idea was, how unlike the angry way that people say, “I could kill him!” or “I’ll kill that guy!”

Mine hadn’t been like that. What I had said, in my mind, calmly, was, “Oh, okay, he’s a problem, so I’ll kill him,” and I had absolutely meant it. Absolutely.

And that’s why I woke up in terror, thinking, What am I becoming? What have I become?

I’m not a killer. I’m not a murderer, I never was, I don’t want to be such a thing, soulless and ruthless and empty. That’s not me. What I’m doing now I was forced into, by the logic of events; the shareholders’ logic, and the executives’ logic, and the logic of the marketplace, and the logic of the workforce, and the logic of the millennium, and finally by my own logic.

Show me an alternative, and I’ll take it. What I’m doing now is horrible, difficult, frightening, but I have to do it to save my own life.

If I kill the boyfriend, it will be something else. Not exactly casual, but
normal
. As though killing has become a normal response for me, one of the ways I deal with a problem. Simple; I murder a human being.

The untroubled
ease
with which I’d thought that thought—kill him, why not—is what’s frightening, what scares me. I’m harboring an armed and dangerous man, a merciless killer, a monster, and he’s inside me.

That’s another reason why I have to get through this process very soon, I can’t let it drag on. It’s changing me, and I don’t like the change. The sooner this business is
done
, and the sooner I’m in that job in Arcadia, then the sooner this new change can start to bleach away, like the most recent fat melting off when you first go on a diet.

Which is why I just can’t accommodate the Asches’ togetherness forever. They’re going to have to move apart from one another soon, or else. I have a horror of killing the wife, very like the horror of that decision to kill the boyfriend, but my greater horror is in staying in this swamp too long, being changed permanently by it, becoming forever somebody I wouldn’t be able to stand to be around.

So I’ve come to that decision this morning, as I drive toward Dyer’s Eddy. It wasn’t an easy decision, a blithe decision, like deciding to kill the boyfriend, but it’s solid, and it’s unswerving. If those two insist on living together, every second of every day, they’ll just have to die together.

Footbridge Road. I make the right turn, and drive slowly up the easy slope, and the first thing I notice when I reach their property is that the Accord is gone from the driveway. Have they driven off somewhere together? Will they be out all day? Damn; I should have got an earlier start.

I continue to drive upward, slowly, and there she is, the wife, in the garden, in a pale yellow T-shirt and white headband. She has a clipboard and seems to be doing a drawing. A chart of the garden, I suppose, to show where everything is.

She’s there. The Accord is gone. He’s in it. Damn, damn, and double damn, if only I’d been here earlier, when he left.

The nursery. It comes to me in a sudden leap, an immediate understanding. The garden nursery down there in the mall, across the parking lot from the Italian restaurant where I ate yesterday. He’s there, I know he is.

I make my U-turn at the same place as yesterday. I drive more rapidly down the hill. It won’t do me any good to meet him coming back. If I’m ever to come across him on the road, it will have to be when we’re both traveling in the same direction, so I can pull up next to him and shoot him. Not to meet him head-on.

I certainly can’t do what I did to Everett Dynes in Lichgate, with the car, if KBA is in a car.

Traffic delays me at the turn into New Haven Road. Why does it have to be a left? Cars come from one direction, then cars come from the other direction, then back to the first direction. There’s never quite enough space in between for me to get out there, and I expect at any second one of those cars coming down the main road from the left will be a black Honda Accord.

No. A space at last, and I take it, jerking out into New Haven Road, swinging to the left, then running along in convoy with all these other cars. What is it about Friday around here?

It’s another left turn into the mall with the nursery, and again I have to wait. I’m punching the steering wheel with my right fist. I
know
he’s in there, I know it as surely as if I’d seen him drive in. And now, in my mind’s eye, I can see him paying for his purchases, coming out to the car, getting in, driving out, making that easy right turn over there while I sit
here
, stuck.

Another break; I lunge through it, make the turn, drive into the mall.

It seems as though most of this mall is parking lot, fringed with a collar of low buildings. The nursery is at the front left, so I drive over there, slowly cruise the aisles. I know his license number.

And there it is. The black Honda Accord, sitting there, waiting, not far from the entrance to the nursery. I knew I was right, I knew it.

There isn’t another parking spot near his, but I see a heavyset woman stuffing packages into a green Ford Taurus, one row over from KBA and about three slots to the right. I drive around there, and now she’s being a good citizen, slowly waddling her shopping cart back to one of the collection points. Most people don’t do that, lady. Most people leave the goddam cart where it is, and get into their goddam automobile, and drive
away
.

I can see the Accord over there, just the top of it. Still there. KBA isn’t near it. Not yet, he isn’t.

She comes back to her car, and for a second our eyes meet. I nod and smile, to let her know I’m waiting for her space, and she continues ponderously on, with no reaction, in no hurry. I wait while she finds her car keys in that great horse’s feedbag she has dangling from her shoulder. I wait while she arranges herself behind the wheel just
so
, and the feedbag on the seat beside her just
so
, and the rearview mirror just
so
, and by now I’m ready to shoot
her
and come back to get KBA tomorrow.

I have plenty of time to think about this, waiting for her to get the hell away from here. What if I were to do such a thing, kill a few of the more obnoxious people one comes across? Then, when I kill KBA, it will just seem like more of the same. And if they draw any connection between KBA and my first resumé, Herbert Everly, it’s just the work of a random killer. The famous serial killer.