I set the tube on the ground and fashioned the clothesline into a slipknot. I pulled the knot over his head and ran the other end of the line over the hanging dowel, close to the angle brace where it would be strongest. Then I used the rope to haul him up onto his knees. He listed forward a few degrees, but the rope restrained him. I tied off the end on the dowel, cut off all but about three feet of the excess, and stepped back.
Diminished oxygen supply to the brain, called cerebral anoxia, can intensify sensations, making it, for some people, a good accompaniment to masturbation. The practice is known as autoerotic asphyxiation and usually remains a secret until the enthusiast dies accidentally in the midst of the proceedings. The statistics make extreme sports look safe by comparison: somewhere from five hundred to a thousand fatalities every year in the United States alone.
I looked at Crawley for a moment. Make that a thousand and one.
I applied a measure of K-Y jelly to his right hand and his genitals, then stepped back and observed. Yeah, that looked about right. The private life of a “State Department” bureaucrat. The quintessence of buttoned-down Washington Beltway seriousness by day; periodic bouts of autoerotic asphyxiation games by night. Really, you just never know what goes on behind closed doors. Especially closed closet doors.
A sudden thought nagged me: Was he right-handed? Or left?
Hmm, should have thought to find a way to check on that earlier. Sloppy. But the hell with it, no harm done. Maybe he enjoyed himself in private ambidextrously. Who could say one way or the other? The main thing was, the CIA wouldn’t want this getting out. They’d want it dealt with quickly, quietly, and cleanly. They’d call it an embolism, a weak heart wall, something like that, and, wanting to believe this was the case, they’d repeat it until they did. Even if they had some suspicions, they would be reluctant to do anything that might cause this to leak. All of which would mean less pressure for me.
I pulled off the surgical gloves, dropped them inside out into the briefcase, and slipped once again into the deerskin pair. I eased into the overcoat. I rolled up the plastic, picked up the rest of the items, and put them in the briefcase, too, which I carried back into the living room. I looked around.
Take it backward, starting with the bathroom. I double-checked everything, then triple-checked. Nothing was out of place. No telltale signs. The washing machine was cycling through rinse. Crawley’s things would be clean soon.
One last check of the closet. Everything was in order, Crawley included. He was canted forward, the rope preventing him from tipping onto his face, his knuckles resting alongside him against the carpeting. Well, there are worse ways to go, I thought. And I’ve seen plenty of them.
Ordinarily, I work under substantial time constraints, and don’t have the opportunity for triple-checks, and certainly not for reflection, when the job is done. But this time, it seemed, I did.
I watched Crawley’s lifeless form, thinking of all the death I had seen, of the deaths I had caused, starting with that unlucky Viet Cong near the Xe Kong river so many years before. I wondered what that poor bastard would be doing today if our paths had never crossed.
Probably he’d be dead anyway, I thought. An accident or a disease or someone else would have killed him.
Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he would have lived, and today he would be married, to a pretty Vietnamese girl, a fighter, as he had been, and they would have three or four children, who would revere their parents for the sacrifices they had made during the war. Maybe his first grandchild would have been born recently. Maybe he would have wept with terrible joy as he hugged his child’s child to his own thin chest, thinking how strange life was, how precious.
Maybe.
I sighed, watching Crawley’s oddly canted form. He looked relaxed, somehow, untroubled, as cadavers often do.
In developed countries most people live their lives without ever even seeing a body, or, if they do, it’s an open-casket affair, where you have context and witness only the peaceful, ruddy-cheeked façade of the mortician’s artifice. When Mom and Dad die, they’re taken care of by strangers in a nursing home two towns over. The kids don’t have to see them go. They don’t even have to see them after. They just get a “we’re sorry to inform you” call late that night from the institution’s management, for whom such calls are as routine as putting out the weekly garbage is for a suburban homeowner. The funeral home picks up the body. The cemetery buries it. Unless you’re a professional, you might live your whole life without seeing someone in the moment of leaving his own.
People don’t know. They don’t know the way the jaw goes slack, how the skin turns instantly waxy and yellow, how readily the eyelids close when you ease them shut. They don’t know the awful smell of blood and entrails, or how, even if you can wash the stench from your skin, nothing can ever cleanse it from your memory. They don’t know a hundred other things. You might as well ask them about the mechanics of butchering the animals that become the meat on their supper tables. They don’t want to see any of that, either. And things are set up so they don’t have to.
Sometimes I can forget the divide this knowledge produces, the way it separates me from those unburdened by its weight. Mostly, though, I can’t. Midori sensed it even from the beginning, I think, although it wasn’t until later that she fully grasped its essence.
Yeah, sometimes I can forget, but never for very long. Mostly I look at the innocents around me with disdain. Or resentment. Or envy, when I’m being honest with myself. Always with alienation. Always from a distance that has nothing to do with geography.
I walked over to the door and looked through the peephole. There was nothing out there.
I let myself out, checking to ensure that the door had locked behind me. I left through the front entrance, just another resident, heading out for the evening. Someone new was at the front desk. Even if the college girl had still been there, she wouldn’t have recognized me. The light disguise I had been wearing earlier was gone, of course; but more than that, I was a different person now. Then, I had been a timid immigrant in a cheap, ill-fitting windbreaker, a visitor to the building. Now I walked as though I owned the place, a resident in a professional-looking overcoat, on his way out to a foreign car and thence to an important job at the office, a responsible position that no doubt occasionally required evening hours.
I left the building and crossed the street. I took off the galoshes, put them in the briefcase, and got in the car. I drove a few miles to another strip mall, where I changed into some of the clothes I was traveling with: gray worsted pants and an olive, lightweight merino wool crewneck sweater. I slipped the overcoat back on and was glad for its warmth.
For the next hour or so I drove around suburban Virginia, stopping at gas stations and convenience stores and fast food places, depositing a relic or two from the Crawley job at each of them until the briefcase was empty and it, too, had been discarded, in a Dumpster at a Roy Rogers. I pitched it in with the other refuse and watched a small avalanche of fast food wrappers cascade down and bury it.
I walked back to the car. The leafless trees along the road looked skeletal against the night sky beyond. I paused and stared for a long moment at that sky, at whatever might lie beyond it.
Oh, did I offend you? I thought. Go ahead, then. Take your best shot. I’m right here.