Seen Seams

Our eyes don’t narrow.

They can’t. Our eyebrows can lower, lower eyelids can tense, pulling themselves up, but our eyes can’t narrow. Still, in a world where what really is falls secondary to what things seem to be, I can hardly be blamed for noting to myself that Sam’s eyes seemed to have narrowed as I told him that he “wasn’t it.”

“What do you mean I’m not it?”

“That is, in fact, what I said, so I assume it is what I meant.” His incredulous stare didn’t seem to be the lead-in for any statements, so I continued. “Although if you want me to specify, I guess you are it.” His expression melted for an instant, eyebrows lifting. “One of many its, in fact.” The eyebrows crashed down again. “So little separates you from most of the other three dozen people in this room that it’s negligible.” I’m sure he had something to say but, at this point, social courtesy wasn’t high on my list of priorities.

***

My knuckles were still white from clutching the steering wheel through the drive home as I fumbled with the keys to my apartment. Michael could hardly have been less subtle about my removal from the program. Slamming my door shut as soon as I cleared its arc, my dropped keys clattered past their usual resting place on the morning’s mail down off of the stool I used as a table onto the floor. Shoes still on, I made my way to my bathroom for a possibly thirst quenching bath.

As it filled the tiny bathroom faster than the scalding water filled the tub, I watched the steam drift calmly around my bright-red right hand, so engorged from its brief and distracting dip into the faucet’s stream. I sat in the only comfortable spot; on the toilet, with the cover down, staring at my outstretched palm, focusing on the sting of the burn as it masked my anger over being kicked out. Why was I kicked out? Michael did it in the evening, when nobody else was around as I’d been held late, told me to leave, asked for my gun back and...

I focused, again, on my hand; this time noticing the first evidence of the steam’s condescension in my palm, a single drop of water in its very center. I absentmindedly flexed my palm, undulating my fingers as I replayed the conversation with Michael.

I found my hand in a fist.

***

Trunk of the car filled with groceries, I pulled into my driveway. Inexplicably, Sam was standing over the row of garbage pails, still puzzling over them as I got out. He held a small black bag, the sort liquor stores use, in one hand, mostly obscured by his body. “Sam?” I called.

“Hey, could you tell me which of these is non-recycling?”

“What are you doing here?” I slammed my door shut, using far more force than was necessary.

“See that woman over there? The one gardening?” He pointed at my next door neighbor, emphasizing the last word so as to grab her attention. “Well, I was going to ask her, but then I thought it’d be inappropriate to see if she knows where to throw this bag of condoms. So, could you tell me?” Gears shifted in my head as I already made the connection.

“You dirty little…” My arm sliced through where Sam’s head had been a moment ago. He had the advantage the first time; he’d seen me charge at him. My second swing missed his head again, this time diverted by a nudge of his palm. The momentum carried me forward, leaving my side exposed. But Sam didn’t hit me, he just backed away. I was too angry to bother with a fist fight, pulling my gun from within my suit jacket.

“I’d think twice about that. Little Miss Rake over there is watching.” She wasn’t little, was unmistakably past the age to be a miss and wasn’t holding a rake, but she certainly was watching. “Why don’t we go inside?”

***

“Sit there, Sam.” I sat where he pointed, seeing little issue with where he and I wound up, on opposite ends of their dinner table, with his wife in middle, just off to the side, forming a nice little romantic triangle. “How long has this been going on?”

“What unit of measurement do you want?”

“Time. What else?”

“Oh. I was hoping you’d pick abortions, maybe hundred pack condom boxes, there are other metrics, if you’d like.” I didn’t want him to respond to that. “But if you insist, which you will…”

“Which I do.” He almost growled.

“Since we met. Remember that initiation party, when my group was first accepted into the program? That nice little black tie event? Your wife was wearing that nice little black dress? You really shouldn’t have run off on business mid-way through. That was a bad call on your part.”

Realizing that he was at least partially to blame, his voice took a turn for the soft. “Margaret?” Her gaze remained fixed, anchored to the fold in the table cloth in front of her. “Margaret!” came the follow-up, eschewing all softness. Margaret’s head fell further, landing in her opened palms, propped upright on her elbows.

“You never wondered? She must’ve changed her behavior at least a bit. That’s your job, Michael, to figure out what people are doing, what they’re thinking.” I didn’t care if her behavior had actually changed or not. All I needed was for him to doubt her, and, as a result, himself. “And you couldn’t even catch a two year long affair, between one of your students and your wife.”

Margaret managed to squeak through her sobs. “Michael, I, I.”

“Please, Margaret.” I would’ve preferred she not talk. “Michael here needs to process. Why don’t we be quiet for a moment?” Personally, I didn’t have the slightest intention to remain silent.

“I’m sorry, I…”

“Margaret?” A hint of edge in my voice has such an effect on a distraught woman. The resulting silence was, if not comforting, at least relieving.

***

I sat silently, hunched over and fondling the barrel of my gun under the table. The neighbor had seen me pull it out; that was a mistake. She might’ve even called the cops. Either way, I couldn’t risk even threatening with it. Sam had taken control of the situation. In my own home. With my own wife. That was just unnecessarily insulting.

“Processed it all yet?” Sam taunted. He sat across from me, leaning back in his chair, his eyes leaving mine only to dart to my wife, who, sitting to my right, was now rendered silent. He was almost comfortable, as comfortable as one could get in these wooden chairs my wife had picked out. His face wasn’t tense at all, like mine looked. The corners of his lips were upturned, his eyes joining in on the smile. He playfully cocked his head from side to side. His expression was meaningless, constructed to give nothing away.

“Why my wife?”

“Didn’t we already cover this? It was that little black number. Simply ravishing. I thought it’d be appropriate that she be ravished for, oh let’s say poetic symmetry.” I returned to my  silence. There must’ve been more.

“But why my wife, of all the people there? You knew she was my wife, and I’d be your instructor.”

“Well, if you’d like to dig deep, which I assure you your wife very much prefers, I didn’t necessarily know she was your wife, it was only readily visible that she was with you. Could’ve been your girlfriend. Or a hired date. Appearances must be kept up, right? But let’s assume I did know she was your wife, why wouldn’t I? Isn’t that just another layer of thrill? The wife of my future boss, I’d always have something over him, seems like a good bonus to me.” He was grinning by this point.

“Is that why you revealed it now? To get back at me for throwing you out of the program? Well congratulations, you’ve just made sure that you won’t be hired by anybody else either, which was still a possibility.” His smile flickered. “You’ve just ended yourself, and your career. Getting kicked out of the best of the best isn’t the end of the world, but this will be.” I had the upper hand now. “Think spending the last seven years training is going to help you flip that perfect burger?”

***

I didn’t have much time left to flip the tables back in my favor. “No, we didn’t so much as touch upon that precious art. We were taught that photographic evidence is rather useful though, dear teacher.” The color drained from Michael’s face. He knew where this was going. Explicitly describing it would only help me at this point. “Let’s not forget that you’re my instructor here. Or were, at least. And I’m your failed student. How embarrassing would it be for the rest of your department to find out that you missed an affair between your student, one of your worst students, if your analysis is any indication, and your wife? Very embarrassing, I’d bet. I’d go so far as to bet that it’d hurt you more than revealing my insubordination would hurt me. Furthermore, since your recent judgment has ruined my plans of advancement, I have little to lose. You, on the other hand, aside from losing whatever I’ve left of your dignity, will be seen as a failure. You have further to fall.” We heard sirens in the distance; luck was on my side, I didn’t think I’d be able to control the situation any longer.

 “So what now?” Michael knew he couldn’t justify flashing his gun without a good reason for it. Any convincing reason would require my corroboration. Unless, of course, he explained the real situation. I knew he wouldn’t dare.

“Now, you reinstate me. Maybe throw an honor in there, a letter of your most heartfelt recommendations. And we tell the police that everything your neighbor saw was just a training exercise. That’s certainly plausible. Have Margaret go upstairs and get herself together. Maybe pour us a couple of drinks?”

***

I phoned in Sam’s renewed status in the program, citing a previously undiscovered talent for subterfuge. We sat in the living room, Margaret and I on the sofa, Sam in the chair opposite the small coffee table. “If you ever tell anyone, or if I see you here again, you are done for.”

“Tell anyone what?”

“What happened between you and my wife.”

“Nothing happened between me and your wife.”

If confusion were to be a universal human emotion, my face would’ve been the prototype. As it were, my mouth gaped open, my eyes darted back and forth, somehow remaining focused on Sam’s eyes as the rest of my body fell limp into the sofa’s embrace.

“Oh god, I’m sorry, Michael, please forgive me. He told me he had evidence of you accepting a bribe, showed me photos of you with absurd amounts of cash. He said he’d destroy the photos if I did what he said. Just to be quiet for fifteen minutes while he spoke to you, I didn’t know what he had planned, I swear, I’m so sorry.”

“I never accepted any bribes, Marge, never.” I never took money. Making it, on the other hand, wasn’t unheard of. Is that where he got the photos from? If not, he could’ve forged them. Either way, what the photos actually were is irrelevant as long as they served their purpose.

How careful was he? “What about my neighbor?”

“I gave her a couple hundred dollars. Nothing else. Told her to call the police as soon as she either saw a legitimate reason to scurry back into her house or when we walked through your door. She did what she was told.” He was beaming, enjoying the explanation.

“That was sloppy. Had you drawn her out innocently, she would’ve been a better witness. Still, there are a few things you don’t know. For one, you weren’t the only one fired. More importantly, you weren’t fired, you were being tested. Lastly, and most relevantly, welcome to stage two.”

Hear Me Out

Let me humor myself.

Though it’s already grown cold, drink some coffee.

When you write a story, do you read it aloud, to yourself, to hear how it sounds? What about a speech? Do you let the walls hear your speeches as you prepare them? What if they aren’t written, just a lecture, a monologue that flows naturally with no preparation, you certainly wouldn’t draw the line for when it’s no longer appropriate to talk to yourself there, would you? What if it’s a speech that you plan to never allow another person to hear? A dialogue with a silent other, intended to bring order to your thoughts?

Well, in this case, my other was my breakfast. The eyes of yellow yolk, bulbous against their white sockets, were not to be intimidated; they never blinked. The pickle of a nose never twitched. It never furrowed or wrinkled, never showed any emotions. My hunger, a byproduct of my anticipation, changed the ears of sliced turkey into what once was a wreathing mane that grew increasingly sparse with every lull in my speech. Appropriately, the silent other had no mouth analogue.

As it listened, I told my breakfast everything; how I’d finish it off, how I’d go to my job, then how I’d get to work, how I still frequently think of my first time and how I didn’t think I’d be eating a big lunch that day. I walked it through, and I apologize for this sounding too trivial to you for now, the chemical reaction that occurs when I lovingly mix acid with bleach. Puncturing its eye, I reviewed my plans for the day after, which is to say for how you wound up handcuffed to a desk with a coffee cup in front of you.

I suppose my speech then took a turn for the awkward when I confessed, to my breakfast, no less, that I felt lonely. Eggy was, though unwillingly, civil about it, passing over my admission without comment, disapproval or drama. But, rather more than sometimes, I wish that there was some drama, some reaction to my spee- stop struggling, would you?

Anyway, officer, where were we? Oh, I apologize, detective. Now, you’re here to hear what may or may not, I haven’t yet decided, be my confession, partially because I haven’t ever before had a chance to talk about my favorite topic with anybody.

While what I really want to talk about is yesterday, I would, on the chance that this does become a confession, hate to inconvenience you by not explaining my motivations first. It didn’t begin in my high school chemistry class but, as I did mark an occasion yesterday with something I picked up there, I feel like it’s a good enough place to start. My teacher, unremarkable in any way, thought it was best to warn us, chuckling all the while, about how bleach and ammonia, both common household cleaners, react with each other to release chlorine gas, which then interferes with your ability to breathe and, in a timely manner, results in death. He grinned, the class discussed the possibility of a villain that went by the name of Mr. Clean, we moved on to discuss the chemical reactions leading to nitroglycerin and that was that. That, as it happened, was in tenth grade.

Skipping forward to when I really solidified my hatred for ignorant people, I constantly questioned myself over what the point of their lives was, or what it could be. The disgust wasn’t jealously; I wasn’t envious of them as, unlike the world of whimsy clichés, ignorance very rarely actually leads to bliss. It does, unfortunately, lead to more ignorance. Stupidity joins in too, exceeded in magnitude only by how violently it aggravated me. I noticed a dash of idiocy being mixed in, serving magnificently to further justify my feelings. I just couldn’t understand how someone could live life without the faintest trace of curiosity. Could somebody who wasn’t at all curious care about anything? Could they care about life? Did they? Well, my curiosity got the better of me. But that creeping hatred didn’t just spring up all of a sudden of nowhere, it had time to grow and mature and so, when I finally decided to experiment with my beliefs, I didn’t start small.

I had all sorts of silly notions that first time; irrational conditions that I’ve since weeded out, rituals that arose out of fear, weaknesses that, in hindsight, made me not much better than the sort of people I despised. I told myself that I had to build the tools for the task myself. The self-inflicted burden was nothing if not a hassle, justified to myself with the fact that my subjects would be incapable of such work. The process itself was enlightening, serving to reaffirm my conviction. All such self-restrictions did. That’s all they did.

I gave myself criteria, one set allowing for a subject’s consideration and another requiring their exclusion. They had to be willfully ignorant but not have a family. Irrational in their beliefs but not happy. Going nowhere in life but not unfairly disadvantaged. The list I first set forth was endless, with all but these first six criteria boiling away when I realized their redundancy. The experiment was simple: their life would be threatened and, if they cared enough about it, they would live.

The first test subject was a janitor. His occupation had nothing to do with his selection. Eager to satisfy my criteria beyond any possible doubt, I arranged every sort of opportunity. A better paying though not quite as mind-numbing job was turned down on account of requiring too much effort. Debate of any sort was rejected out of apathy. No hobbies, interests or redeeming talents existed. A total lack of elementary knowledge, tested constantly on the off chance that I was mistaken in earlier cases, sealed his candidacy.

I decided on a tool; a muzzle-loaded, spring-powered gun with a barrel as long as my forearm that would fire a single projectile, a single time. The projectile I planned was a small metal ball wrapped in magnesium shavings, another memory from high school chemistry, covered by what was essentially a net, twisted out of wire, intended to help keep the shavings secure in flight. The gun functioned simply; the spring was compressed and locked in place, the projectile was inserted, a jet lighter ignited the magnesium, a minimal amount of air would flow through holes in the barrel to sustain the burning and, finally, the spring would be released. I was reasonably certain that an accurate shot to the head would result in death. Set to burn at thousands of degrees, the blindingly bright magnesium, originally intended as a way to help assure death, became, because of the brutality of its effects, a tool intended for punishment instead.

It was a crude design. Deficient in accuracy, range and power, I not only had but a single shot but I had to be dangerously close to take it. The risk involved was deliberate; if there was a failure on my part or success on his, how was I any better? The experiment itself was just as dangerous. It would happen in the garage below where he worked, in the early hours of the morning. Powerful speakers placed a short distance away from his car would announce that, if he considered continuing to live important, he would immediately leave the garage.

Jerking this way and that in confusion, he didn’t leave. He didn’t hear the click of the lighter as its flame erupted. He didn’t see the scattered rays of light that shined across the garage from the barrel holes as the magnesium ignited. With the bullet embedding itself in the back of his head, directly in his occipital lobe, I doubt he even saw the ground rush up at him. I turned away to shield my eyes and, with the back of his head now a candle, there was no point in staying to verify his state. His death did not make the papers. What was allegedly a police investigation into the matter ended as soon as it began. Nobody could be expected to have an alibi for where they were at half past three in the morning on a Tuesday and nobody cared about the recently.

Yes, detective, that was me.

However, I see now that the experiment was flawed. I know that the subject’s response was a justifiable display of shock and confusion. I nevertheless felt like I had offered a last chance, regardless of how unfair it might’ve been. It satisfied my premise. The second time, minimizing my risk while still abiding by my requirements, I built a gauss gun. Powered by electricity, it’s essentially a magnetic slingshot that can fire nails. More accurate and powerful than my first endeavor, the amount of research that went into its construction made using it all the more cathartic. The symbolic chance of escape I offered the second time was even less likely. By the third time, I skipped the process altogether and used a regular gun. The only remaining constant was that I always left some chance, however slim, for the victim, even when it was fully in my ability to remove all hope.

The last time, yesterday, was tenth in the list and, as such, was deserving of frivolity. A bathroom’s locks were worked on, modified to remain locked indefinitely after being closed once, the handles capable of doing nothing but taunting the one they trapped. Inside, chlorine gas continued to spew forth, filling the air. With the vents closed and the door, while fractionally open so as to not lock, sealed around the edges with a thin layer of rubber, the spacious unisex bathroom let no gas out. I knelt hunched over just outside the door, apparently tying my shoelaces, prepared to wait however long it would take for the only other person remaining in the building to need to use the bathroom. Twenty-three minutes later, I stood up, greeted the victim, mentioned that I thought I smelled a gas leak in the bathroom and drew her attention so she faced me while backing through the door, her hand closing it behind her absentmindedly. It took all of two seconds after the door clicked shut for her to start banging on it.

Which brings us to, well, us, here. There are two reasons for your being here. Rather selfishly, I wanted to, at least once before I die, talk at length about what I’ve done. I can’t exactly share all this with anybody without one of us not leaving the exchange alive and you can hardly expect me to tell my story to the embarrassments I dispose of. The second reason is punishment. Oh no, not you; my punishment for myself. As what I do is, if nothing else, a service, what gives me the right to endanger my future actions by allowing salvation to those I already ascertained as definitely deserving of my intervention? Such grievous idiocy is, according to my own standards, cause for punishment, is it not? These two needs, for my actions to be heard and for them to be punished, they go hand-in-hand, as fair punishment requires an honest account. It being necessary for my audience to also be my judge and, given the scope of my actions, it becomes obvious that my judgment would come at the hands of the authorities.

How to get through to you posed a dilemma; if I came to you, and, rest assured, you specifically are not special in any way, merely predictably convenient, on your playing field then the odds of not being able to trade the promise of a confession for the chance to give it uninterrupted were too high to risk. Alternatively, if I took you to me, it would break my pattern. In the end, the prospect of this speech overruled my principles. Unfortunately for one of us, I didn’t like my speech; I got carried away, it wasn’t nearly as grand as I had hoped for, I'd like to try again and I can’t start all over with you as it’s just not the same thing if you’ve already heard it before. Fortunately, this retelling of mine did redeem itself by bringing a fact I had previously overlooked to my attention; every time, I gave them some chance. And, if I’m basing the necessity of my punishment on the same underlying reason, stupidity, should I not also be given some chance? Fitting with the unlikely escapes I gave others, I gave an appropriately unreliable one to myself.

Detective, while I understand that you have sufficient reason to not trust my coffee, what with only being here because of a sedative in the cup you ordered in an empty café three minutes before closing time, which, as a daily routine, is dreadfully vulnerable, it would have been decidedly to your advantage if you would have done as I said when I ordered that you drink the coffee or, for that matter, had you done so at any time since then. Unfortunately, though I promise I would not have interfered had you tried earlier, I don’t think I don’t think I can let you live long enough to get at the key to your handcuffs that I left at the bottom of the cup now.