Somebody please help me. Mother, please help me.
“Were you thinking of me when you butt-raped your Anabel?”
Tom grabbed him by the collar. He seemed very close to striking a blow.
“I thought Pip might enjoy that little scene. That’s why I sent her your document. Just now, while you were taking your nap. I included the password.”
Tom tightened his grip on the collar. Someone took hold of his wrists.
“Don’t strangle me. There are better ways to do this. Ways you can get away with.”
Tom let go of the collar. “What are you doing?”
Someone went closer to the edge of the pinnacle. “I’m saying you can push me.”
Tom stared at him.
I’m unbearably sad about this.
“I polluted your daughter. Just because she was your daughter, just for the fun of it. She said it was the best ever. I’m not making this up. It’s all factual truth — she’ll admit it if you ask her. And then I sent her your document, to make sure she knows how filthy she is. Didn’t you promise to destroy me if I did that? If I were you, I’d kill me.”
Tom looked afraid now, not angry.
Please help me. Not that anyone ever did.
“Sit down on the ground, so you don’t fall. And then give me a hard push with your feet. Doesn’t that sound good to you? Especially if I — here.” Someone took a pen out of his pocket. “I’ll write a note absolving you of responsibility. I’ll write it on my arm. Here, see, I’m writing it on my arm.”
The writing, on sweat-dampened skin, and with hairs interfering, went slowly, but his hand was firm. The text was complete in his head without his having thought of it.
YOU KNOW ME TO BE HONEST. NO THREAT COULD COMPEL ME TO WRITE UNTRUTH. I CONFESS TO THE MURDER OF HORST WERNER KLEINHOLZ IN NOVEMBER 1987. I AM SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACT I COMMITTED TODAY. ANDREAS WOLF
Someone showed the words to Tom, who was sitting on the bench now, his head in his hands.
“This should suffice, don’t you think? The confession itself provides the motive. If need be, you can corroborate the confession. But I don’t think anyone will question it.” Someone extended a hand to Tom. “Will you do it?”
“No.”
“I’m asking you as a friend. Do I have to beg?”
Tom shook his head.
“Do I have to drag you along with me?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me, Tom. You know what it’s like to want to kill someone.”
“The difference is I didn’t do it.”
“But now you can. You want to. At least admit you want to.”
“No. You’re psychotic, and you can’t see it because you’re psychotic. You need to—”
The sound of Tom’s voice stopped. It was curious and abrupt. Tom’s mouth was still moving, and there was still the distant rush of water, the screeching of parakeets. Only human speech had ceased to be audible. It was very disorienting and had to be the Killer’s work somehow. But someone was the Killer. Had the Killer always been deaf to speech?
In the mysterious selective silence, he wandered away from Tom, out to the edge of the cliff. He heard a scrabble of feet on gravel and looked back to see Tom standing up, gesturing to him, apparently shouting. He turned back to the precipice and looked down at the tropical treetops, the large shards of fallen rock, the green surf of undergrowth crashing against them. When they began to drift slowly closer, and then moved rapidly closer, and more rapidly yet, he kept his eyes open wide, because he was honest with himself. In the instant before it was over and pure nothing, he heard all the human voices in the world.
The Rain Comes
Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was. On better days it spread across the bay and took over Oakland street by street, a thing you saw coming, a change you watched happening to you, a season on the move. Where it encountered redwoods, the most local of rains fell. Where it found open space, its weightless pale passage seemed both endless and like the end of all things. It was a temporary sadness, the more beautiful for being sad, the more precious for being temporary. It was the slow song in minor that the rock-and-roll sun then chased away.
Pip was feeling not so temporarily sad as she walked up the hill to work. Sunday morning, early, the streets were empty. Cars that in sunshine might have looked merely parked looked abandoned in the fog. From some direction and some distance, a raven was croaking. Fog subdued the other birds but made the ravens talkative.
At Peet’s, she found the assistant manager, Navi, loading pastries into the display case. Navi had wooden disks the size of poker chips in his earlobes and was scarcely older than Pip, but he seemed completely at peace with corporations and retail. It was her first day of work post-training, and the way he oversaw her, as she booted up the register and filled receptacles with liquids, was all business and no indulgence. She felt almost weepingly grateful to have a boss who was nothing but a boss; who let her be.
Three customers were waiting in the fog when she unlocked the front door. After she’d served them, a lull came, and into this lull walked a person she recognized. It was Jason, the boy she’d tried and failed to sleep with a year and a half ago, the boy whose texts she’d read. Jason Whitaker with his Sunday Times. She’d thought of him, their Sunday mornings, when she’d applied for the Peet’s job. But she’d figured that by now he’d found some other coffee place to be enthusiastic about.
She waited, with the particular exposure of a barista, while he claimed his preferred table with his paper and came over to the pastry case. To herself, she was no longer the person who’d left him waiting forever in her bedroom and then rained abuse on him, but he had no way of knowing this, because, of course, she was also still that person. When he stepped up to the cash register, he saw this person and blushed.
She gave him an ironic little wave. “Hello.”
“Wow. You work here.”
“It’s my first real day.”
“It took me a second to recognize you. Your hair is short.”
“Yes.”
“It looks nice. You look great.”
“Thank you.”
“Wow, so.” He looked over his shoulder. No one was behind him. His own hair was shorter, his body still skinny but less skinny than before. She remembered why she’d wanted him.
“What can I get you?” she said.
“You probably remember. Bear claw and a three-shot cappuccino, tall.”
She was relieved to turn away from him and work on his drink. Navi was occupied at the back with a large plastic drum.
“So are you part-time here?” Jason said. “Do you still work for the alt-energy place?”
“No.” She tonged a bear claw from the case. “I’ve been away. I just came back.”
“Where were you?”
“Bolivia and then Denver.”
“Bolivia? For real? What were you doing down there?”
She got the milk steamer squealing so she didn’t have to answer.
“This is on me,” she said when she was finished. “You don’t have to pay.”
“No, come on.”
He pushed a ten-dollar bill at her. She pushed it back. It lay there on the counter. Keeping her eyes on it, she said, “I never apologized to you. I should have apologized.”
“God, no, it’s OK. I’m the one who should have apologized.”
“You did. I got your texts. I was so ashamed of myself I couldn’t write back to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am, I suspect.”
“It was like a perfect storm of wrongness, that night.”
“Yah.”
“That guy I was texting? I’m not even friends with him anymore.”