the sink, razor in hand, he felt his penis erecting itself and he looked down at his shorts. She would spread herself on the green, green ground. Corridors of green.
He usually ate breakfast in the kitchen, but today Emil went outside with his coffee and newspaper, as he and Elena had done on summer weekends. Sometimes they fucked after a breakfast of crêpes Suzettes, their fingers sticky with apricot jam.
The morning that greeted him was dull; the afternoon promised to be brutal. The late-night news had warned of a heat wave. A hazy bowl of foul air was already coagulating over the city, a thick, gauzy film. Rain would be a godsend, heavy clouds to feed a thirsty earth, but no rain would fall this day. The past few summers had been dry; by August nearly all the Eastern seaboard was toughing out some degree of drought. This year looked to be more of the same.
Emil sat down at the round marble table and took a bite of toast. The New York Times lay in front of him. He opened the Metro section first; the dummy blotter he called it, filled with snapshots of local foul play. He’d read the section regularly when he’d been with the force. “A cop could learn a lot from what goes on in here,” he’d told Elena on so many mornings, though it was Elena who’d gotten him hooked on reading the papers in the first place. His toast sat hardening on the plate as he read about a man who walked into his father’s hospital room, slashed the old man’s throat, then whacked the eighty-year-old in the next bed with a hammer and, while he was at it, sliced his sister’s throat. And why did he do that? This is what the police would want to know; what sort of motive lay behind such savage behavior? There was always a reason. Knock, knock: Emil, why did you fire your revolver?
“We do this,” he once told Elena. “We take this wonder of tissue and bone and blood and brain, this fragile body, and we beat and violate and torture and destroy it in our unending hatreds; we find ways to justify murder. …”
She stared at him. “Of course we do.”
“Why do you look at me that way?”
She lowered her eyes. “It’s as you say; we find a way so we can go on.”
“I didn’t mean us—you and I.”
“No … but something …”
“What?”
“No, it isn’t important right now.”
That was all she would say, nothing else. Her private mysteries were like restless phantoms.
His father had cancer, the son told the cops, and he took it upon himself to end the misery. It was obvious. The roommate had been abusive, he added. Oh, an eighty-year-old? They can be cranky, but to end up in some deranged man’s idea of justice, snuffed because he maybe said something disagreeable about the hospital food?
Looking up through breaks in the grapevine growing along the pergola, Emil glimpsed an unnatural greenish-white sky. He was already warm in his shirt. And the murderer’s sister? The brother disapproved of her lifestyle; unmarried and living at home with her kid while he was out driving a cab. Cabby, tough job, thought Emil, underappreciated. He disliked taking cabs himself. And the sister’s child, now orphaned; had the killer—the child’s uncle—thought of that?
The guy snapping wasn’t much of a surprise, but it bewildered Emil even though to a lawman those sorts of goings-on were as common as skin. What about all the other frayed citizens who didn’t snap? The parents, say, of a four-year-old with leukemia whose health insurance had dried up. You couldn’t tell them the insurance guys were anything other than legitimized crooks. Or the woman hurrying home from work to fix her kids’ supper when a guy slips out of the stairwell, forcing her to her knees at knifepoint for a quick sodomy before taking her cash. Why didn’t they snap? Why only pockets of snappers and not the other way round? For all the years Emil had been a criminal investigator the question never left him: why the citizenry was mostly docile.
His shirt, which was loose, felt close. The heat nagged, forced its way up to his verbal brain so he had to fight from stating the obvious, from declaring out loud, “Jesus, it’s hot!” He’d have to get the sprinkler going. He preferred to hand-water; it took forever but what kind of hurry was he in? Besides, hand-watering showed up problems: eaters, wilts, a million fungi looking to have their way. A heat wave, like a plague, requires vigilance. Emil was calm as he thought of watering and droughts, heat and smog.
For now his thoughts steered nicely clear of the day before, of having fired the two rounds into the pepper patch. He’d thought in the night that the shots could have attracted attention—locking the stable door after the horse is out—but nothing had come of it so far, and twenty-four hours had now gone by. His cleaning the revolver was good training; a cop’s automatic response to having fired his weapon. That he had no business discharging the weapon in the first place was not yet a sore he was ready to rub. Worse, he did not know why he fired. Had he intended, for even a flicker of a second, to shoot his neighbor?
Emil sometimes imagined what his former partner, Detective John Michael Dunn, might have to say. They’d spent enough time sharing crime scenes and car-seat lunches, had talked over plenty. Mike might say Emil was shooting at God.
God was in the dirt, was he, Mike?
Not precisely. But the God who made your wife sick deserved a bullet, right?
So I was mad at God, shot the dirt instead? That’s the idea?
Grief’s not a tidy package, Milosec, much as you might like it to be.
“Neither is your God,” Emil said aloud to the empty garden.
But a temporary calm disallowed any real analysis. Instead, Emil behaved like a dazed man who has just walked away from a car crash, ignorant for the time being and numb as to what has befallen him, of his reasons for having fired two bullets into his garden on a Brooklyn morning in June 1995—two years after the death of his lovely wife.
He crossed his legs, picked up what was left of the now rock-hard toast, smeared jam on it, and moved on to the Science pages. The impossible certainty of the scientists amused him. Let them explain the criminal mind. What, genetics, upbringing? Given time, would science get to the bottom of the whole loving show? Birth to death, and all the issues in between?
Lately he’d been wading into articles on the universe. There was the idea of nothingness and possibility: the cosmological constant energy and its opposite twin, dark matter, in an expanding universe—if that made any sense. Some of it knotted his brain. Like the theory of the shrinking universe. But where did that leave the expanding one? He figured it couldn’t do both. He didn’t mind the idea of nothingness as much as he minded searching for false comfort. Nothingness, according to Emil, was preferable to a fabricated faith filling in the void, a distraction papered with promises of heaven and hell. Chaos made more sense; laws of physics and this and that randomly coming to be. When he read about things like string theory, he pictured the cat’s cradle game his sister used to play on his outstretched fingers.
The headline of today’s Science section read, “Beginning a Bargain Basement Invasion of Mars.” Emil raised his head, looked out onto his glorious garden, and smiled
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