Seamus grumbled something about voting early. For the rest of Seamus’s life, a diminishing proposition, indignation would race cholesterol. He would make a colorful choking victim, but the clown had promised himself patience, intentionality. Cruelty and pain were easy quantities, but murder used to express something in him. Take the kings of Greece and Persia who entertained guests with hollow bronze bulls that seemed to bay when wheeled over a fire, when in fact it was condemned queens screaming from inside. It was cruel, it was painful — but it was so kingly too. The court clapping and marveling, pretending they didn’t know, while the king spat seeds from his grapes. The Aztecs murdered like Aztecs, the Nazis murdered like Nazis. The clown, meanwhile, had groomed himself to match the Lexus that was supposed to give him credibility regarding other people’s homes.
“Been saving this place for a special family,” he said, pulling into the driveway. It was true.
During the walk-through, Seamus stuck close by, explaining everything to the clown: “I never liked these kind of light switches... Chessboard, huh? I want to learn some chess strategy, some real chess systems... No disrespect to your grill here, but it’s all about the smoker.”
Noted. The clown had to remind himself it wasn’t about killing Seamus, no matter how urgently he deserved to be murdered. Murder had to come from the inside. The urgency must be in him.
“We’re only two crosswalks to Langston Elementary, where Mark Zuckerberg’s nephew went to school,” he said. “Langston’s a recipient of a 2016 tech-arts grant from the George Lucas Foundation, the one on NPR.” That was enough to provoke several more minutes of opinionation from Seamus. It was an old trick: the more a client heard his own voice in a house, the more he felt the house was his. Eliza, meanwhile, was going around seeing how the toilets flushed.
The clown liked knives, big knives, little knives — but what even was a knife? Something very narrow but no less hard. The set stashed in the crawl space of 404 Rocking Horse had chef’s knives, cleavers, a straightedge razor, a few more theatrical things, toothy, curving. Almost every night since the house had been vacant, he’d let himself in, retrieved his things from the crawl space, and, fully kitted out, sharpened his knives, grind by meditative grind. Just last night, he’d sat thickly painted under this floor. Breathe. Intuit the killer already implied by the house. On the iPhone on his knee, his Facebook feed worked the cud of another late-breaking candidate scandal.
Touring the basement (“Here’s your water heater... These guys here are for bolting a safe...”), he found one of his fingernails. “Huh? What do you think this is?” He showed the man, but the shrug was a shrug, not a shiver.
Whatever. He’d imagined stashing acids and paralyzing agents down there too — imagined how shocked and impressed Eliza and Seamus would be if they woke to find themselves prepped for a chemical flaying or immobilized beneath a swinging blade. He wished he could do something like that, but it was too much contraption. The engineering and constructing, the procurement of regulated chemicals — it was beyond him. He was a knife clown. He could never pretend to be what he was not.
Eliza said the house was perfect. Seamus, saving face, said they’d “have to do a little thinking through.” The deciders, the clown imagined, were Eliza and her billboard dad. “Well, I think you’re perfect for it,” the clown said. They were. Their smug veneer would rip right through. The clown expected to hear from them Monday or Tuesday at the worst. He would throw in a moving service if the sale called for it, and they’d be dead before Thanksgiving. He promised it to himself the way he’d promised Owen ski camp, which now he would actually be able to pay for. A thing to look forward to, as the boy’s therapist had suggested. Something the best version of you, if not you yourself, would want to do.
After he returned Seamus and Eliza to the RE/MAX lot, the clown accepted a Friday nachos invitation. Usually, a birthday or two had accumulated during the week. This time Lauren had made her first sale since licensure. “I’m going to buy you a drink,” she said to the clown, poking and sweeping a fingertip accidentally enough across his nipple. She leaned in and whispered behind her nails, “It’s a lie... you’re going to buy me a drink.” He doubted she actually wanted to fuck him, but he was pretty sure she wanted him imagining it, so he did imagine it, let it imbue his smile, and told her he’d be there.
He pulled over on his way to Baja’s and made notes on the couple in his phone. Arrogance, wealth, an anxious hatefulness, the unconscious rivalry between them. There was some authentic American fearfulness in them perfectly suited to the Rocking Horse property, away in its little suburban circlet of fast-growth trees and prize schools and four-cheese macaroni chains. He worried for a second that someone else might murder them first.
At Baja’s, Haru and Leroy hailed him from the corner booth. Lauren didn’t even look up from her eye tunnel with Monique, who was telling the story of the movie she’d watched last night. Haru and Leroy were comparing notes on the BioShock installment they both were playing. Haru liked spicy food, shoes, and video games. Leroy liked Bernie Sanders, video games, and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Monique liked movies, her husband, and coconut oil. Everybody was a person. And the clown? For his birthday, the office had given him a Starbucks card.
After ten minutes, he proposed a toast: “To virtue!” he said and sat quickly down. Lauren made a wounded scoffing sound, and everyone laughed, and the clown stood up quickly and amended: “To the conquests of Lauren — may they be many.”
They shared a smile then, escaping for some seconds the commotion of the nachos. He hadn’t been fair. These were real people, not portfolios of interest. He searched her. Lauren had bobbed black hair, wore silver; the purple in her veins made her neck seem almost tattooed. She did have at least one tattoo, some text on her side you could see through the white of her work shirts. She liked Heart, she hated baby carrots... He searched harder. Maybe his own self had become small through a habitual disregard for the uniquenesses of other selves. So he studied her for particularities. At RE/MAX Reservoir Day, Lauren had spat arcs of water through her teeth. She called her car Thumper. She could do fingertip push-ups. For Halloween she was going to be the Terminator mom. He waited for a reciprocal sense of selfhood to reveal itself in him, but all he saw was Seamus trailing entrails through his perfect home.
“I don’t think I should drive,” she said. It was the third or fourth time she had said it, but they’d stayed there drinking beers. The others — Monique with her eyebrows — had long ago waved bye.
“How bad is the Uber from here?” He waved for the bill.
“I don’t trust Ubers. Could be anyone,” she said. “Could be—”
He waited. “Could be who?”
“A serial fucker.” She was drunk. She laughed.
“Really. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Are you kidding?” She chipped off a dot of toasted cheese.
She was right. He apologized. He was just fishing for ideas. He said, “You never told me though. What’d you sell?”