The Parallel Apartments (42 page)

“You're getting weirder, April, I just want…”

Murphy backed out, shutting her door behind him. The apartment building began to vibrate from a royal bitching.

Finally at home, Murphy shut the blinds, shed his tennis shorts and tighty-whities and T-shirt stained the color of Mountain Dew at the armpits, set up his card table, and placed upon it his diamond whetstones, his homemade calfskin strop, and the titillating box that loopy April had kept hidden from him, the whore.

He fetched a large, shrink-wrapped ham from the refrigerator, unwrapped it, and placed it on his futon. It sweated and dripped in Murphy's humid efficiency.

If the dagger was made of really good steel like SlicenDicenJulian said, then it should hold a nice edge. Murphy's plan was to sharpen the point and edges to Oriental keenness, then stab and slice at the pork ball—the very best simulacrum of the human corpus—over and over and over.

He began to carefully open the box; no point in tearing it open—he had all day to savor his new toy. Besides, he'd hang on to the box—he might be able to recycle it, if ever he needed to mail a severed limb to the FBI.

Murphy extracted a long object wrapped tightly in Bubble Wrap.

It was not a Nazi dagger. It was a Japanese sword.

He put it down. He stood up. He paced. Back and forth, from futon to potty. Then he stopped, lay down on the floor, and,
sotto screeche,
began to curse. “Liar. Cheat. Thief. Die.”

He jumped up, sat down at his computer, and wrote a hate letter to SlicenDicenJulian. He left libelous feedback.

He linked to SlicenDicenJulian's other items for sale. He still had half a dozen Nazi daggers for sale, and he'd lowered the Buy It Now price to
$24.95. Murphy shouted at his iMac. Spittle dotted the screen, leaving it decorated with tiny, colorful buttons.

But SlicenDicenJulian also had another Japanese sword for sale, just like the one he'd sent Murphy. It was $1,299.95.

Murphy paused in his fury. Perhaps there had been a Bank Error in His Favor.

Murphy considered his sword. It was heavy. The hilt was sturdy, and wrapped in what looked like silk cords. It slid out of its sheath soundlessly. A beautifully wavy bevel line ran to the tip.

He tested the edge with his thumb, which opened up immediately; blood ran down the steel and dripped onto the stale, gray carpet. It had happened so quickly and painlessly Murphy thought it might be a joke, a self-detonating squib. But a closer look verified the red smile of a deep, oblique cut.

Murphy wasn't sure if he was going to be squeamish about the blood of others—he hadn't succeeded in actually killing or even harming anyone yet—but historically he was definitely squeamish about his own. And so he fainted.

When he awoke, he was lying next to his new sword. He did not look at his thumb, which complained with a deep laceration's particular, nauseating thump. He crawled into the kitchen, found a dish towel on the floor, and, with his eyes closed, wrapped up his thumb.

He stood carefully. He drank a pint of half-and-half. He ate six Advils. He ignored the blackening stain of blood his torted thumb had left on the dish towel. Okay. It would be okay.

He picked up his sword. Very carefully, he touched the edge with his other thumb. It opened up like the first one. He fainted again, woke up, found another dish towel, and bound up the almost hemophilially dripping gash, downed a pint of kombucha mushroom juice, and ate ten Advils.

He picked up his sword again. He could barely hold it without the use of his opposables. This time he just looked at the edge.

“The chosen people.”

He moved one of his thumbs the tiniest bit, causing a sub-dermal tectonic shift. He nearly fainted again. It wouldn't do to fall on his sword.

He went to Porifiro's and kicked the door. Porifiro answered, looking peeved. Tom Mix barked and barked and barked.

“What're you nekkid for?”

“Look, help me put on my shorts and drive me to St. David's. I
need stitches.”

“What happened?”

“I cut myself on the sword I'm going to unman you with if you don't take me to the ER right this minute.”

“That was a sword in that box?”

“You were watching me?”

“Yeah, man, that's my job here.”

“It's sharp as a laser. Now c'mon!”

“I can't take you on my trike. You'll bleed on it.”

“Get the keys to my Chevette, duh. They're next to the computer.”

“You gonna owe me,” said Porifiro, beginning to giggle.

Murphy was going to shout after him,
Don't touch my sword!,
but Murphy thought better—maybe Porifiro'd cut himself, too.

“Weren't you here a few weeks ago?” said the doctor or nurse or whatever the man examining Murphy's left thumb was. “You look familiar.”

Murphy
had
been to the emergency room a couple of times in the last few months. This was his third visit, all for career-related injuries. So to speak.

“Concussion,” said Murphy. “Twisted ankle.”

“Right, right, you fell and hit the back of your head. Trying to kick something, right?”

Murphy had been trying to kick an old lady in the temple, but there had been an issue with precision, which sent Murphy to the linoleum in the old lady's kitchen.

“Yeah,” said Murphy, staring flatly at the doctor's hypodermic needle. “Is that gonna hurt?”

“Pinprick.”

He injected some kind of -caine into the meat of Murphy's thumb.

“Haah. Aah.”

“Needle stick,” said the other medical person, on his right. She stuck a hypodermic needle into his other thumb.

“Meeyi,” said Murphy.

“I remember him now,” the left medical person said to the right. “Maxine, remember, he was here the same day as the lady with the weird snelled dart in her ass?”

“Oh. Yeah.” said Maxine. “That was the gnarl. I don't remember this dude here, though.”

Murphy looked at his right thumb just as Maxine was lifting up the parabola-shaped flap, revealing flesh with the subtle marbling of toro sashimi.

“I'm going to throw up.”

“What'd you cut yourself with? Fuck, there's no ragged edges at all. Buddy, what's
that
sharp?”

“Do not call me Buddy,” said Murphy, swallowing his nausea.

“Not talking to you, dude,” said Maxine, forcing a threaded semicircular needle into the parabolic flap.

“Only thing this sharp,” said the other medical person, Buddy, “is an obsidian knife, like the Aztecs used to use to remove beating hearts from teen virgins. And maybe, maybe, some very special Japanese swords. Sit still. Both your cuts are almost identical. You some kind of performance artist?”

“Gon' barf.”

“Come on, pal, you're completely anesthetized.”

“Feel tug… tug… tugging. Tugging feeling.”

“Wait a minute,” said Maxine. “I think I remember this guy now. Is he the one who was in for a bumped funny bone? Yo, I checked the records afterward—he's the only person ever to be admitted for that.”

“It was severely painful,” said Murphy.

It had been. A few weeks earlier, late on a warm night, Murphy'd been perched up in a magnolia tree just outside the second-floor open apartment window of a woman named Jan Bardee whom he'd found on MySpace and had been following for two months, his homemade bamboo blowgun with its batrachotoxin-tipped dart perfectly trained on her sleeping body, enjoying his moment of truth, when his target unexpectedly woke, got out of bed, and began to walk out of the room. Afraid he wouldn't get another chance, Murphy quickly blew a dart; it stuck neatly into her left buttock.

Murphy had not been prepared for the magnitude of Jan's scream. It, in confederation with the tiny recoil of the propulsive blowing action, proved sufficient to tip Murphy backward off the magnolia branch and into space. His trip to the ground was fairly short but still ended in a great agony almost exclusively focused in his right funny bone, which he'd hit on a defunct, half-buried sprinkler head.

It turned out that the poison dart frogs Murphy'd bought at Herpeton,
and from which he'd harvested his “poison,” had been raised in captivity and had thus manufactured no toxins at all. They were merely dart frogs. Murphy had introduced no poisons into Jan's buttock, only harmless frog sap.

It had been his fifth murder attempt, and fifth failure. He was not a serial killer, but a serial failure. But there would be no more. Failures, that is. His new sword would assure the world of
that.
His sixth attempt would succeed. He would spend at least six months finding, researching, and stalking her.

Maxine finished her stitching and started to wrap up his thumb. Then she put on a splint and wrapped that up, too.

Buddy was still tugging at his needle and thread.

“Aieee,” said Murphy.

“C'mon, now.”

“I have a low pain threshold,”

“Tell me about it,” said Maxine and Buddy at the same time.

Buddy finished up, wrapping his right thumb up as Maxine had.

“How
is
that old funny bone?” asked Maxine.

“Fine,” said Murphy. Truthfully, it still hurt sometimes, and the last two fingers on his right hand always felt buzzy.

“That's wonderful,” said Maxine. “Keep your thumbs elevated. I'm gonna write you two scripts: for pain and infection. Be careful now. Don't want to see you in here for a brain freeze.”

Maxine and Buddy laughed. They both patted Murphy on the back.

“Take care, little guy,” they said.

Assholes. They'd obviously never had a really serious brain freeze.

In the waiting room Porifiro was asleep in a chair. Murphy kicked him in the kneecap.

“You look like a man on a runway directing planes with orange flashlights,” he said.

“Shut up. Take me to Walgreens.”

Back at his apartment, Murphy contemplated the ham on his futon. Flies had already found it.

His hands throbbed. He took a couple of codeinated Tylenols, and waited patiently while they took effect. He began to feel light and confident. He pulled the sword out of its sheath. With both hands he raised it over his head. He would've preferred to be able to bring it down with the force of a
Tudor executioner, but he couldn't, with his thumbs in the state they were in. So he just let the weapon fall.

It slipped through the marionberry-julep-smoked H-E-B bone-in ham like it was an aspic, quailing the accumulation of meat flies, which promptly settled again on the two halves. The sword had sunk into his futon, down to the beechwood frame, where it lodged. Murphy worked it out, carefully wiped it clean on his boxers, and sheathed it.

“I shall call you Zordmurk,” said Murphy, kissing his sword.

He lay down on his futon with Zordmurk and the ham.

He should've thought of the sword method sooner. It was so much more elegant than a stupid blowgun. Or any of his other serial-killing attempts.

The first “victim,” a lawyer named Peter Bradley who specialized in Chapter 11 (farmers) bankruptcy and who, a month's worth of tailing would reveal, liked to hire plump, red-haired hookers to visit him at work after hours. He had opened his office door one evening, probably expecting to see his escort, but had instead beheld Murphy, dressed in black, fully balaclavaed, and armed with a halberd acquired at a Renaissance Faire in Buda. Murphy, similarly, had not expected Peter Bradley to answer the door fully chain-mailed, with the exception of a hypnotically tumescent, cobra-like penis sticking out of the chain-mail's fly. For a moment or two, both men regarded each other in curious silence. Then Murphy jousted, but Peter's heavy, tight-linked mail repulsed the replica halberd. Murphy ran away; behind him, Peter, furious, screamed something about “recent surgery.” Later Murphy read, in
News of the Weird,
that an Austin lawyer who'd donated a kidney and then suffered a near halberd stabbing, damaging his remaining kidney, had successfully sued to get his old kidney back, rendering the former donee dead. Though through Murphy's actions a man had died, Murphy could not smell the coppery glory of the slaught; he smelled only the familiar halitosis of utter failure that so befouled every single goddam thing he tried.

Murphy's second intended victim, a collector of math texts, had approached Murphy at his booth at a book-and-ephemera fair asking if he happened to have a copy of Volume 141, No. 3 of the
Annals of Mathematics.

“With Wiles's proof?” said the collector, a little old lady of the gentian-violet-haired tribe. She clasped her hands in antiquarian anticipation.

“Does it
look
like I carry math magazines?” Murphy said, gesturing at his
stock of modern fiction. “I have only perfect copies of the very best literary firsts, MacLean, Crichton, Crouch, Bach, Ros, Waller, etc. Math is neither literary nor collectible, no offense. Go ask one of the many minnow-mongers stinking this book fair up.”