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backdrifterThe “monkey suit” was pretty slick, he had to admit. Black wool, slim cut, with a neat white shirt and a skinny black tie.
“I feel like you’re going to cut off my ear,” Horace said with a laugh as Respa sauntered out of the dressing room, taking poses in front of the triad of mirror.
“Your ear—what?” The reference sailed over his head.
“Nothing,” Horace said, laughing again. He came up to him and straightened his lapels, looking proud. “You look good.”
“I think this is too nice for my boots, though,” Respa commented as he admired the outfit in the mirror. For a moment he thought that maybe he could take a job modeling, before his eyes flicked up to his face and he was reminded of the crooked nose, which in turn reminded him of his myriad of scars, and the dead fingers on his hand. He put it out of his mind.
“Your boots?” Horace said, with a look of both horror and disgust. “Rez, I threw those out.”
“You did what?”
“Well, you were wearing your Chucks because it’s summer! So I threw them out. Come on, they were gross. They were barely staying together and they were covered in old dirty glue.”
“Then I’ll wear my Chucks with this, I guess,” Respa said, looking himself in the eye resolutely.
“No, I’m going to get you new shoes.” Horace looked just as resolved, crossing his arms.
“What am I, your project? It’s a good look anyway, right? Sneakers with a suit?”
“Not for an interview, it isn’t! Do you want this job or not?!” Horace shouted, taking a heavy step forward as his arms came up.
“Of course I do!” Respa retorted. “Of course I want to…join society. All that.” A deep breath. “Of course I do. I want to be normal, Horace.” He glanced at the shorter man. “Like you.”
Horace sighed. “You’re not a charity case, okay? Consider this my way of getting you back on your feet. Or on your feet at all, since I’m not sure you were ever on your feet,” he said with a little chuckle, although Respa recognized he wasn’t being made fun of. Somehow.
“Alright.” He turned back to the mirror, tugged pointlessly at the lapels as he thought again what a sharp figure he cut. “Alright.”
The suit rang up somewhere in the triple digits, not counting the change, and the shoes (leather, black, an almost-appalling size 12) were well over a hundred dollars, which was more or less where Respa’s brain stopped counting money off the clock.
The next day, Horace steered him by the shoulders to his computer, a cheerful-looking apparatus encased in white plastic. A bitten apple that meant nothing to him decorated the front of it.
“You need a resumé,” Horace stated as he pulled up an extra chair to the computer.
“Is this a joke?” Respa asked, staring at the white keyboard blankly. His very few forays into typing had been slow and frustrating. Like trying to talk while drowning in honey. “A resuwhat?”
“A resumé. You know, a list of jobs you’ve held in the past.”
Respa stared for a moment, wondering if Horace had given up and decided to just mock him all day. “…Jobs.”
“Yeah, um, you know, like even if you just worked at McDonald’s when you were in high school.” He stared back. “Have you never had a job, Respa?”
Respa shrugged. “If the one I had when I met you counts.”
“Oh.”
“So, what, if I don’t have a resuma—“
“Resumé.”
“—Whatever—then I don’t get the job? I don’t get any job?” Rocking idly in the computer chair.
Horace sighed, pulling his short fingers through his hair and rolling his neck. “It’s not that you don’t get a job, Respa, it just makes it hard. I can recommend you, but…” He looked at Respa. “How much are you willing to reveal?”
“Rev—I have to tell my life story?” He scowled. “To get a job as a paper pusher?”
“No! I just—“ The fingers flew faster now, and short blond hairs floated to the floor, one landing on Respa’s bare toes. He bit his lip, and stood to take hold of Horace’s wrists. Horace looked up at him, an almost bewildered look on his face.
“Look, you just tell them whatever you think they need to know,” Respa said, his best attempt yet at maturity. “Don’t they have some kind of form thing to fill out, so they know I’m not a robot?” He let go of Horace’s arms. “Now stop pulling out your hair.”
And so the next day Horace brought him a job application, two double-sided sheets of paper with boxes waiting to be filled. Glancing over the information the boxes asked of him, he despaired; where was he supposed to find “three business references” and “three personal references?” He couldn’t even bring himself to think about the section asking his highest education.
So he filled in his name.
“Thomas?” Horace asked with a note of surprise, reading over Respa’s shoulder. “Your name is Thomas Wilkins?”
“Yes,” he muttered, filling in his birthday next. Oh-four for April, 12 for the day, and then a double loop-de-loop of 88 for the year.
“I just…Wilkins?” Looking perplexed, Horace leaned on the back of the chair, his other hand coming to rest on his hip.
“My dad was white,” Respa said distractedly, tapping the paper with the end of the pen. “I don’t know what kind of white, just white.”
“So where did you pick up a name like Respa?” Horace asked, moving again to stand behind him. The tips of his fingers brushed behind Respa’s ears, and then along the nape of his neck, drawing his hair back into a ponytail that only lasted a few seconds. Respa shivered and waved his hands away, though it was pointless by then. “We should get you a haircut again,” Horace murmured.
“I picked it in Juvie,” Respa said, tapping ever faster. “What’s my social security number, how the hell am I supposed to figure that out? Is it some invisible number tattoo they put on babies’ asses?” he asked, cranky.
“Your parents would have your social security card, I guess,” Horace said, crossing his arms and leaning them on the top of the chair, so his chin hovered above the crown of Respa’s head.
“Well that’s helpful,” he snapped. “Can I just not have one?”
“We’ll figure it out later,” Horace said, reaching out to still the tapping pen. “How’d you pick your name?”
“I just wanted something Egyptian-sounding, I guess. My mom’s Egyptian, I think first-generation American. I know like, nothing about her side of the family.” He put the pen down. “It’s not like I had the resources to look up a real Egyptian name. I was just tired of every stupid kid calling me random Arab names.” He glanced again at the application, irritated. “I don’t know most of this information, Horace. This is pointless, I can’t even apply for this job.”
“Just don’t worry about what you can’t fill in right now, Rez,” Horace said, his hands moving to Respa’s shoulders. “I’ll deal with that, okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” he muttered, pushing the application away.
“Do you ever think,” Horace sighed, “that maybe you’re just afraid? That maybe that’s why you keep rejecting things like a place to sleep, a job?”
“The fuck are you talking about, afraid?” Respa snapped, shrugging Horace’s hands off as he looked up at him. “Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of domestication. Of being tamed.” Horace didn’t replace his hands, though his fingers twitched like he wanted to. “The gilded cage, so to speak.”
“Don’t be stupid.” He leaned forward on his elbows, staring sullenly at the wall. “Who’d be afraid of a better life?”
Despite Horace’s reassurances that he’d take care of it, though, the job application didn’t work out. He had no social security number, no references, and moreover no experience. He was outside the system, so the system didn’t want him. Respa tried not to be surprised.
Back to square one—jobless with no chance of employment—Respa took to watching the news while Horace was out at work. He watched New York One the most, since it ran all day. CNN ran all day, too, but CNN seemed specifically aimed at old men who cared about little else but money. World affairs meant nothing to him. When Horace came home, Respa would parrot back news items that had caught his interest, in an effort to not be totally useless. Horace would smile, half-listening, say things like “Uh-huh” and “Oh really?” Respa sensed he was being patronized, but it was still a better feeling than being a lump on Horace’s couch.
At night, Respa started thinking a lot about what Horace had said about a fear of domestication. He would look over at Horace, asleep on the other side of the mattress—no funny business, just as promised, though there were nights when he had to peel Horace off his back—and envy him his straightforward life. He had no issues being comfortable with being comfortable, because comfort had (seemingly) been his to have since day one. He slept spread-eagled, wearing the poodle-printed pajama bottoms that he’d probably picked up for himself at Target while shopping for the blue damask sheets currently fitted to the bed. Respa’s life was as foreign to him as his was to Respa’s.
He dreamed, ever since it had happened, of Tanya’s death often. Some nights, she stayed dead, but others she pulled her zombie corpse up and onto his body, her arms encircling him like an anaconda. These also tended to be the nights Horace spooned him in his sleep, but only once had Respa’s shouting woken him; Horace was a deep sleeper. Horace had been panicky upon waking, asking what was wrong, and Respa had explained it away as a falling dream. Unfortunately, Horace believed in the meaning of dreams, and he’d pulled out a decrepit dream encyclopedia while looking at Respa with a measure of concern. Respa remembered groaning and going back to sleep.
“Oh, Pat Kiernan,” Respa sighed, finding himself once more stationed in front of the TV. “You’re too funny for me.” He sometimes wondered if they meant for Pat Kiernan to look more like a Ken doll than any other male news anchor, and then wondered exactly how much product was smeared into Pat Kiernan’s hair. Kiernan’s eyes flicked down and then up again as he launched into the Weather on the Ones, and Respa settled deeper into the cotton-covered couch. He was feeling downright comfortable, listening to the rain pattering on the window and the squeak of the overhead fan.
Pat Kiernan’s lilt was suddenly cut off, and Respa sat up attentively. A disembodied hand pushed something toward him on his desk, and they murmured something to each other. Kiernan glanced down at the paper, and his brow knit only briefly before he cleared his throat and turned back to the camera.
“Ahh, I’m receiving word right now that Ryan Kamizaki,” he said, and Respa’s heart stilled, “is dead.”
If his heart had stilled before, then it dropped to the pit of his stomach, now. It twisted, it writhed, it dissolved within him.
Someone was screaming. Screaming loud and almost shrill, though the voice was clearly a man’s, and he wanted to reach out and twist shut the throat producing it. This was no time to be screaming.
Ryan Kamizaki is dead.
He realized, finally, that he was the one screaming, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. He pressed his hands against his own neck, and the scream devolved into horrible, throat-rending sobs that robbed him of his strength.
Ryan Kamizaki is dead.
“Kamizaki had apparently been abstaining from his medication, and stockpiling them in his room,” Kiernan continued, looking shocked himself, “and then used them in his suicide.”
Suicide? Ryan Kamizaki wouldn’t commit suicide. Suicide was so beneath him, something so emotional and human. If there was anything Ryan would never have admitted to being, it was human. No, someone had killed Ryan. Some nurse with an agenda, some doctor with a relation on Ryan’s kill list, someone had poisoned him. Tipped arsenic into his water, salted his steak tips Portobello with cyanide. Somehow. Or even less obvious—given him the wrong medication. Something powerful meant for patients on the brink of death, something to make his heart explode quietly in his chest.
Ryan Kamizaki wouldn’t kill himself.
Ryan Kamizaki is dead.
Pat Kiernan was saying something, now, about how his victims’ families were dividing among themselves—some feeling vindicated, some feeling as though they’d been cheated of justice.
Justice. Ha!
What did they know about justice, anyway, he wanted to know as he pushed himself off the couch. Ryan was dead. Sure, so were their children, but what the hell was a child? A child didn’t fucking hold you at night when the winds and the rats were whistling through the fire-damaged walls around you. A child didn’t do anything that Ryan could do. He staggered toward the kitchen, and fell against the full-length mirror that was mounted to the closet door, still sobbing.
“Fuck!” he cried, slamming the side of his fist into the glass, and he repeated himself mindlessly, knowing no other way to express himself anymore. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Ryan, fuck!” Stupid, mindless cursing, because he was trash and Ryan had never been. Ryan had been smart, Ryan had been worth something and society had just happened to root out the worst in him.
He staggered again, finally arriving in the kitchen where he yanked open the cabinets, and the very sight of Horace’s French drinking glasses suddenly filled him with rage. What right did stupid fucking trivial French drinking glasses have to exist, if Ryan couldn’t? His hands swept along the bottom of the cabinet, hurling the glasses to the floor, where he didn’t care if the shattered glass cut into his feet. He fell again, the sobs stealing control of his legs, and he cracked his chin on the edge of the sink, his fingers scrabbling in vain for purchase as he went.
He pulled himself up again, knees full of glass, and he was suddenly determined to find the medicine cabinet. The liquor cabinet. The cleaning cabinet, even. Any cabinet with dangerous substances stored in it, and he knew they were all in the kitchen.
He found the medicine cabinet first, with obnoxious, giant brown jars of vitamins and supplements, but behind those were the Tylenol PM, the extra-strength generic aspirin, the leftovers of a prescription of hydrocodone that Shaun had left behind from some long-ago injury. For a moment he couldn’t handle the child-proof caps, and he felt all the stupider as his shaking hands failed again and again, but he was fucking determined to die now. Had to.
The orange bottle opened with a pop and a rattle, the white pills scattering across the counter, but he grabbed at them with open palms, scooping them up and into his mouth, which he found too dry to swallow anything. He threw himself against the fridge, hurled open the door to pull out a bottle of wine. Wine. He didn’t even know the differences in wines past red and white. He was so fucking uneducated, so amazingly ignorant.
The differences didn’t matter now, though, as he pulled the cork from the bottle in one forceful motion and put it to his lips. He opened up his throat; he scorned himself for using deep-throating techniques to kill himself. What a dumb whore. He was nothing like Ryan, poor Ryan who would never debase himself like this and kill himself, poor Ryan who had been murdered by the system.
He choked on the wine and started coughing, bracing himself on the counter as he hacked. He’d swallowed the hydrocodone, at least. The alcohol was bitter, and briefly he wondered what Horace saw in this shit. He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm, feeling a little woozy already, and crawled to the cabinet beneath the sink. The hinges groaned when he pulled them open, leaning his weight onto the tops of the doors to get a better look inside.
The bleach. The bleach would do it where the wine and the few pills had so far failed. He pulled the bleach out and onto the glass-littered linoleum, and again he struggled with the cap. “You’re such a dumb motherfucker, Thomas,” he told himself as he pushed down and around on the cap again and again. He was ready to try another cleaning liquid when the cap finally surrendered, and the smell of the bleach hit his nostrils with an acidic little kick.
The bleach had sort of a blue tint to it, and the side of the big white jug was plastered with warnings not to swallow it or let it get in one’s eyes. He sat with his back against another cabinet, legs straightened to either side of the bleach, staring into the little mouth of it. Horace would be so disappointed, but Horace, too, was ten thousand times smarter than he was. Respa was a burden on Horace’s income, on his space and time. Horace has a college degree, had a nice job, had had a nice relationship before Respa had rolled back into his life. He lifted the jug to his lips, and tipped it back.
The bleach burned, more than any liquid should have a right to, and everything in him screamed to spit it out, but he pushed past it and swallowed, a hard, determined swallow. It was like drinking acid; he could feel the corrosion inside his body. He tried for a second swallow, but his body revolted against the poison, and the bottle of bleach clattered and spun on the floor as he vomited. Each retch threw him forward, rocking on bare knees on the glass-strewn floor. Things looked at once too bright and too dark.
He reached for the wine bottle he knew was nearby—anything to wash this taste out, even in his presumed final moments. But in his woozy state, he leaned most of his weight on the bottle, and it shattered beneath his hand, driving glass shards into his palm.
And finally, he crashed face forward into the whole mess, unconscious.
“I feel like you’re going to cut off my ear,” Horace said with a laugh as Respa sauntered out of the dressing room, taking poses in front of the triad of mirror.
“Your ear—what?” The reference sailed over his head.
“Nothing,” Horace said, laughing again. He came up to him and straightened his lapels, looking proud. “You look good.”
“I think this is too nice for my boots, though,” Respa commented as he admired the outfit in the mirror. For a moment he thought that maybe he could take a job modeling, before his eyes flicked up to his face and he was reminded of the crooked nose, which in turn reminded him of his myriad of scars, and the dead fingers on his hand. He put it out of his mind.
“Your boots?” Horace said, with a look of both horror and disgust. “Rez, I threw those out.”
“You did what?”
“Well, you were wearing your Chucks because it’s summer! So I threw them out. Come on, they were gross. They were barely staying together and they were covered in old dirty glue.”
“Then I’ll wear my Chucks with this, I guess,” Respa said, looking himself in the eye resolutely.
“No, I’m going to get you new shoes.” Horace looked just as resolved, crossing his arms.
“What am I, your project? It’s a good look anyway, right? Sneakers with a suit?”
“Not for an interview, it isn’t! Do you want this job or not?!” Horace shouted, taking a heavy step forward as his arms came up.
“Of course I do!” Respa retorted. “Of course I want to…join society. All that.” A deep breath. “Of course I do. I want to be normal, Horace.” He glanced at the shorter man. “Like you.”
Horace sighed. “You’re not a charity case, okay? Consider this my way of getting you back on your feet. Or on your feet at all, since I’m not sure you were ever on your feet,” he said with a little chuckle, although Respa recognized he wasn’t being made fun of. Somehow.
“Alright.” He turned back to the mirror, tugged pointlessly at the lapels as he thought again what a sharp figure he cut. “Alright.”
The suit rang up somewhere in the triple digits, not counting the change, and the shoes (leather, black, an almost-appalling size 12) were well over a hundred dollars, which was more or less where Respa’s brain stopped counting money off the clock.
The next day, Horace steered him by the shoulders to his computer, a cheerful-looking apparatus encased in white plastic. A bitten apple that meant nothing to him decorated the front of it.
“You need a resumé,” Horace stated as he pulled up an extra chair to the computer.
“Is this a joke?” Respa asked, staring at the white keyboard blankly. His very few forays into typing had been slow and frustrating. Like trying to talk while drowning in honey. “A resuwhat?”
“A resumé. You know, a list of jobs you’ve held in the past.”
Respa stared for a moment, wondering if Horace had given up and decided to just mock him all day. “…Jobs.”
“Yeah, um, you know, like even if you just worked at McDonald’s when you were in high school.” He stared back. “Have you never had a job, Respa?”
Respa shrugged. “If the one I had when I met you counts.”
“Oh.”
“So, what, if I don’t have a resuma—“
“Resumé.”
“—Whatever—then I don’t get the job? I don’t get any job?” Rocking idly in the computer chair.
Horace sighed, pulling his short fingers through his hair and rolling his neck. “It’s not that you don’t get a job, Respa, it just makes it hard. I can recommend you, but…” He looked at Respa. “How much are you willing to reveal?”
“Rev—I have to tell my life story?” He scowled. “To get a job as a paper pusher?”
“No! I just—“ The fingers flew faster now, and short blond hairs floated to the floor, one landing on Respa’s bare toes. He bit his lip, and stood to take hold of Horace’s wrists. Horace looked up at him, an almost bewildered look on his face.
“Look, you just tell them whatever you think they need to know,” Respa said, his best attempt yet at maturity. “Don’t they have some kind of form thing to fill out, so they know I’m not a robot?” He let go of Horace’s arms. “Now stop pulling out your hair.”
And so the next day Horace brought him a job application, two double-sided sheets of paper with boxes waiting to be filled. Glancing over the information the boxes asked of him, he despaired; where was he supposed to find “three business references” and “three personal references?” He couldn’t even bring himself to think about the section asking his highest education.
So he filled in his name.
“Thomas?” Horace asked with a note of surprise, reading over Respa’s shoulder. “Your name is Thomas Wilkins?”
“Yes,” he muttered, filling in his birthday next. Oh-four for April, 12 for the day, and then a double loop-de-loop of 88 for the year.
“I just…Wilkins?” Looking perplexed, Horace leaned on the back of the chair, his other hand coming to rest on his hip.
“My dad was white,” Respa said distractedly, tapping the paper with the end of the pen. “I don’t know what kind of white, just white.”
“So where did you pick up a name like Respa?” Horace asked, moving again to stand behind him. The tips of his fingers brushed behind Respa’s ears, and then along the nape of his neck, drawing his hair back into a ponytail that only lasted a few seconds. Respa shivered and waved his hands away, though it was pointless by then. “We should get you a haircut again,” Horace murmured.
“I picked it in Juvie,” Respa said, tapping ever faster. “What’s my social security number, how the hell am I supposed to figure that out? Is it some invisible number tattoo they put on babies’ asses?” he asked, cranky.
“Your parents would have your social security card, I guess,” Horace said, crossing his arms and leaning them on the top of the chair, so his chin hovered above the crown of Respa’s head.
“Well that’s helpful,” he snapped. “Can I just not have one?”
“We’ll figure it out later,” Horace said, reaching out to still the tapping pen. “How’d you pick your name?”
“I just wanted something Egyptian-sounding, I guess. My mom’s Egyptian, I think first-generation American. I know like, nothing about her side of the family.” He put the pen down. “It’s not like I had the resources to look up a real Egyptian name. I was just tired of every stupid kid calling me random Arab names.” He glanced again at the application, irritated. “I don’t know most of this information, Horace. This is pointless, I can’t even apply for this job.”
“Just don’t worry about what you can’t fill in right now, Rez,” Horace said, his hands moving to Respa’s shoulders. “I’ll deal with that, okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” he muttered, pushing the application away.
“Do you ever think,” Horace sighed, “that maybe you’re just afraid? That maybe that’s why you keep rejecting things like a place to sleep, a job?”
“The fuck are you talking about, afraid?” Respa snapped, shrugging Horace’s hands off as he looked up at him. “Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of domestication. Of being tamed.” Horace didn’t replace his hands, though his fingers twitched like he wanted to. “The gilded cage, so to speak.”
“Don’t be stupid.” He leaned forward on his elbows, staring sullenly at the wall. “Who’d be afraid of a better life?”
Despite Horace’s reassurances that he’d take care of it, though, the job application didn’t work out. He had no social security number, no references, and moreover no experience. He was outside the system, so the system didn’t want him. Respa tried not to be surprised.
Back to square one—jobless with no chance of employment—Respa took to watching the news while Horace was out at work. He watched New York One the most, since it ran all day. CNN ran all day, too, but CNN seemed specifically aimed at old men who cared about little else but money. World affairs meant nothing to him. When Horace came home, Respa would parrot back news items that had caught his interest, in an effort to not be totally useless. Horace would smile, half-listening, say things like “Uh-huh” and “Oh really?” Respa sensed he was being patronized, but it was still a better feeling than being a lump on Horace’s couch.
At night, Respa started thinking a lot about what Horace had said about a fear of domestication. He would look over at Horace, asleep on the other side of the mattress—no funny business, just as promised, though there were nights when he had to peel Horace off his back—and envy him his straightforward life. He had no issues being comfortable with being comfortable, because comfort had (seemingly) been his to have since day one. He slept spread-eagled, wearing the poodle-printed pajama bottoms that he’d probably picked up for himself at Target while shopping for the blue damask sheets currently fitted to the bed. Respa’s life was as foreign to him as his was to Respa’s.
He dreamed, ever since it had happened, of Tanya’s death often. Some nights, she stayed dead, but others she pulled her zombie corpse up and onto his body, her arms encircling him like an anaconda. These also tended to be the nights Horace spooned him in his sleep, but only once had Respa’s shouting woken him; Horace was a deep sleeper. Horace had been panicky upon waking, asking what was wrong, and Respa had explained it away as a falling dream. Unfortunately, Horace believed in the meaning of dreams, and he’d pulled out a decrepit dream encyclopedia while looking at Respa with a measure of concern. Respa remembered groaning and going back to sleep.
“Oh, Pat Kiernan,” Respa sighed, finding himself once more stationed in front of the TV. “You’re too funny for me.” He sometimes wondered if they meant for Pat Kiernan to look more like a Ken doll than any other male news anchor, and then wondered exactly how much product was smeared into Pat Kiernan’s hair. Kiernan’s eyes flicked down and then up again as he launched into the Weather on the Ones, and Respa settled deeper into the cotton-covered couch. He was feeling downright comfortable, listening to the rain pattering on the window and the squeak of the overhead fan.
Pat Kiernan’s lilt was suddenly cut off, and Respa sat up attentively. A disembodied hand pushed something toward him on his desk, and they murmured something to each other. Kiernan glanced down at the paper, and his brow knit only briefly before he cleared his throat and turned back to the camera.
“Ahh, I’m receiving word right now that Ryan Kamizaki,” he said, and Respa’s heart stilled, “is dead.”
If his heart had stilled before, then it dropped to the pit of his stomach, now. It twisted, it writhed, it dissolved within him.
Someone was screaming. Screaming loud and almost shrill, though the voice was clearly a man’s, and he wanted to reach out and twist shut the throat producing it. This was no time to be screaming.
Ryan Kamizaki is dead.
He realized, finally, that he was the one screaming, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. He pressed his hands against his own neck, and the scream devolved into horrible, throat-rending sobs that robbed him of his strength.
Ryan Kamizaki is dead.
“Kamizaki had apparently been abstaining from his medication, and stockpiling them in his room,” Kiernan continued, looking shocked himself, “and then used them in his suicide.”
Suicide? Ryan Kamizaki wouldn’t commit suicide. Suicide was so beneath him, something so emotional and human. If there was anything Ryan would never have admitted to being, it was human. No, someone had killed Ryan. Some nurse with an agenda, some doctor with a relation on Ryan’s kill list, someone had poisoned him. Tipped arsenic into his water, salted his steak tips Portobello with cyanide. Somehow. Or even less obvious—given him the wrong medication. Something powerful meant for patients on the brink of death, something to make his heart explode quietly in his chest.
Ryan Kamizaki wouldn’t kill himself.
Ryan Kamizaki is dead.
Pat Kiernan was saying something, now, about how his victims’ families were dividing among themselves—some feeling vindicated, some feeling as though they’d been cheated of justice.
Justice. Ha!
What did they know about justice, anyway, he wanted to know as he pushed himself off the couch. Ryan was dead. Sure, so were their children, but what the hell was a child? A child didn’t fucking hold you at night when the winds and the rats were whistling through the fire-damaged walls around you. A child didn’t do anything that Ryan could do. He staggered toward the kitchen, and fell against the full-length mirror that was mounted to the closet door, still sobbing.
“Fuck!” he cried, slamming the side of his fist into the glass, and he repeated himself mindlessly, knowing no other way to express himself anymore. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Ryan, fuck!” Stupid, mindless cursing, because he was trash and Ryan had never been. Ryan had been smart, Ryan had been worth something and society had just happened to root out the worst in him.
He staggered again, finally arriving in the kitchen where he yanked open the cabinets, and the very sight of Horace’s French drinking glasses suddenly filled him with rage. What right did stupid fucking trivial French drinking glasses have to exist, if Ryan couldn’t? His hands swept along the bottom of the cabinet, hurling the glasses to the floor, where he didn’t care if the shattered glass cut into his feet. He fell again, the sobs stealing control of his legs, and he cracked his chin on the edge of the sink, his fingers scrabbling in vain for purchase as he went.
He pulled himself up again, knees full of glass, and he was suddenly determined to find the medicine cabinet. The liquor cabinet. The cleaning cabinet, even. Any cabinet with dangerous substances stored in it, and he knew they were all in the kitchen.
He found the medicine cabinet first, with obnoxious, giant brown jars of vitamins and supplements, but behind those were the Tylenol PM, the extra-strength generic aspirin, the leftovers of a prescription of hydrocodone that Shaun had left behind from some long-ago injury. For a moment he couldn’t handle the child-proof caps, and he felt all the stupider as his shaking hands failed again and again, but he was fucking determined to die now. Had to.
The orange bottle opened with a pop and a rattle, the white pills scattering across the counter, but he grabbed at them with open palms, scooping them up and into his mouth, which he found too dry to swallow anything. He threw himself against the fridge, hurled open the door to pull out a bottle of wine. Wine. He didn’t even know the differences in wines past red and white. He was so fucking uneducated, so amazingly ignorant.
The differences didn’t matter now, though, as he pulled the cork from the bottle in one forceful motion and put it to his lips. He opened up his throat; he scorned himself for using deep-throating techniques to kill himself. What a dumb whore. He was nothing like Ryan, poor Ryan who would never debase himself like this and kill himself, poor Ryan who had been murdered by the system.
He choked on the wine and started coughing, bracing himself on the counter as he hacked. He’d swallowed the hydrocodone, at least. The alcohol was bitter, and briefly he wondered what Horace saw in this shit. He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm, feeling a little woozy already, and crawled to the cabinet beneath the sink. The hinges groaned when he pulled them open, leaning his weight onto the tops of the doors to get a better look inside.
The bleach. The bleach would do it where the wine and the few pills had so far failed. He pulled the bleach out and onto the glass-littered linoleum, and again he struggled with the cap. “You’re such a dumb motherfucker, Thomas,” he told himself as he pushed down and around on the cap again and again. He was ready to try another cleaning liquid when the cap finally surrendered, and the smell of the bleach hit his nostrils with an acidic little kick.
The bleach had sort of a blue tint to it, and the side of the big white jug was plastered with warnings not to swallow it or let it get in one’s eyes. He sat with his back against another cabinet, legs straightened to either side of the bleach, staring into the little mouth of it. Horace would be so disappointed, but Horace, too, was ten thousand times smarter than he was. Respa was a burden on Horace’s income, on his space and time. Horace has a college degree, had a nice job, had had a nice relationship before Respa had rolled back into his life. He lifted the jug to his lips, and tipped it back.
The bleach burned, more than any liquid should have a right to, and everything in him screamed to spit it out, but he pushed past it and swallowed, a hard, determined swallow. It was like drinking acid; he could feel the corrosion inside his body. He tried for a second swallow, but his body revolted against the poison, and the bottle of bleach clattered and spun on the floor as he vomited. Each retch threw him forward, rocking on bare knees on the glass-strewn floor. Things looked at once too bright and too dark.
He reached for the wine bottle he knew was nearby—anything to wash this taste out, even in his presumed final moments. But in his woozy state, he leaned most of his weight on the bottle, and it shattered beneath his hand, driving glass shards into his palm.
And finally, he crashed face forward into the whole mess, unconscious.