Текст книги "Forgive me, Leonard Peacock"

Автор книги: Matthew Quick

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

TWENTY-THREE

Just like I’d hoped, after school today, when I arrive at our town’s subway station, I find Lauren handing out tracts, or rather holding the tracts out to everyone who passes by and doesn’t say a word to her or even give her a glance.

I wonder what crazy bit of propaganda she’s peddling today and what scary pictures are inside—hell flames and bloody saviors and all sorts of Christian gore.

I didn’t come here to mess with Lauren’s head or argue with her about religion or logic or ask for favors or anything else.

I just came to say good-bye.

Lauren’s cut her hair into bangs that hang out under the home-knit beret-type hat she’s got on. A little curtain of blond shields her forehead. The hat’s so homely and old-ladyish that it makes me crush on[51]51
  I know it’s weird to crush on homely and old-ladyish, but mostly I just like the fact that Lauren looks nothing like the girls in my school. She looks one-of-a-kind pretty. She also looks like she needs to be rescued. Like she’s helpless on her own. So pathetic. Maybe the only person more pathetic than me.


[Закрыть] Lauren again so much—even if she did stop praying for me.

It’s like she’s not even aware that she’s so horribly out of fashion. She’s not wearing the hat in any ironic way, like some of the black-nail-polish girls in my high school would. And Lauren’s also got on this off-white jacket that goes down to her knees and from far away makes her look like she’s wearing a robe—like the stereotypical angel a child would draw.

God, she looks perfect.

And no one is paying her any attention but me.

Since I’ve been watching her, I’d say at least thirty people have passed and she’s extended her mitten-clutched pamphlet to every single one and yet no one has even glanced at her.

I still think the idea of god is bullshit, obviously, but I have to tell you, the one thing I admire about Lauren is that she’s not out here because she wants to be right or righteous or make people feel bad about what they already believe; she’s not really interested in arguing with anyone or anything like that—and I’ll admit that maybe subconsciously she needs to prove that her ideas are more important than the ideas of others, but she also really worries that everyone is literally going to burn in hell forever and ever and she doesn’t want that to happen to anyone at all. It’s like she’s living in a fairy tale and she’s desperately trying to keep the big bad wolf from devouring us or blowing down our houses. I love her for at least caring about strangers—for at least trying to save people, even if the threat she perceives isn’t real.

When I approach her, she doesn’t see me at first.

“Excuse me, miss,” I say, trying to do Bogart again. “You wouldn’t be able to tell me how to make Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior, would you? Because I’ve been—”

“Stop making fun of me, please, Leonard,” she says as five suits pass by her outstretched hand without taking a tract.

“How many people have you saved today?” I ask just to make conversation.

“Why is there no hair hanging down from inside that hat?” she says, which makes me smile, because she noticed I cut it off.

“Got in a fight with some scissors. Have you been praying for me like you said you would?”

“Every day,” she says in a way that makes me believe her.

It’s depressing, because if she is telling the truth—considering what I’m about to do—it means prayer doesn’t work after all.

“You know, I saw this show on TV and it was all about how maybe aliens came to Earth thousands of years ago and gave humans information that we weren’t yet ready to fathom—like space travel—and so we maybe made religion out of those ideas, like metaphors to explain what the aliens had told us. Jesus ascending into the heavens. Promising to return again. That sounds like space travel, right?”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Well, they suggested that prayer was a form of trying to communicate with these aliens. And they said that Indians wore feathers and kings wore crowns as antennas, sort of.”

“What are you talking about?”

Just because I want to do something nice before I kill Asher Beal and off myself, I say, “Well, the important thing is that they kept discussing the universality of prayer all over the world and even used scientific instruments to measure the energy that many people praying together creates, suggesting that prayer can be scientifically detected, that it actually changes our surroundings by manipulating electrons or something, and maybe it even helps—regardless of whether we’re really communicating with someone, be it a god or aliens or even if we are just meditating. Praying helps, or at least that’s what the show suggested. The power of prayer may be real.”

“It IS real,” she says, and starts to turn red. She really looks pissed off. “God hears all of our prayers. Prayer is very powerful.”

“I know. I know,” I say, realizing that she has no idea what I’m talking about and, worse yet, she won’t allow herself to even consider what I’m saying, because it would ruin the illusions she has to cling to if she is to get through her six mandatory weekly unsuccessful hours of trying to convert subway riders to Christianity.

“Can I ask you a question, Lauren?”

She doesn’t answer, but manages to get this mom-looking woman to take a tract. Lauren says “Jesus loves you” to the woman.

“Forget about all the aliens stuff, okay? What I really want to know before I go and never see you again is this—”

“Where are you going?”

I don’t want to tell her that I’m going to kill Asher Beal and myself because it will make her worry about me ending up in hell—which is a real place to her—so I say, “I don’t know why I said that. I’m just being stupid, but I wanted to ask you—”

She says “Jesus loves you” to another stranger.

“Do you think that maybe if I were a Christian—like maybe if I were born into a family like yours and was homeschooled and forced to believe that—”

“I’m not forced to believe anything. I believe of my own free will.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But the point I’m trying to make is that if I were more like you, if I believed in god like you do, do you think that maybe you and I could have dated and maybe gotten married and had babies and lived a happily-ever-after sort of life?”

She looks at me like she’s trying to make a decision, and then she says, “You could have that sort of life if you ask God for it. If you give your life to God, He will provide for you in marvelous ways. He promises us that. If He takes care of the sparrows, how much more will He take care of us?”

There are a million arguments I could use against her right now, because not everyone who believes in god gets to live in suburbia and have first-world problems like Baback says, and if believing in god could really solve all of my problems and make me feel better, I would definitely do that pronto—everyone would, right?

But I’m not really interested in debunking her theology right now. I’m much more interested in the fact that Lauren’s never been kissed and that I might die without kissing her.

“Just pretend I’m a Christian like you. For argument’s sake. Theoretically. Could we have ended up married and living a regular life? Like maybe in an alternate universe?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

She looks really confused and like she might actually run away from me, so I drop it and say, “I bought you a present,” and start to open my backpack.

“Why did you buy me a present?”

“This may seem weird, but I feel like god told me to buy you this present.” I’m completely lying, but I manage to say it with a serious old-school Hollywood face and I can tell she buys it, mostly because she wants to buy it. “He spoke to me. Told me you had been praying hard. And so he wanted me to give you a sign today.”

Her lips are parted just a little. She doesn’t wear any makeup ever, so she looks natural right now, which I love.

Her breath is slipping in and out of her like a soul yo-yo.

I hand her the little pink box.

“I don’t know that I can accept a present from you, Leonard,” she says, but she’s also staring at the box like she really wants to know what’s inside.

“It’s from god,” I say. “So it’s okay.”

She sucks her lips in between her teeth and then her mittens come off and she’s unwrapping the paper, which makes me so so so happy.

Lauren lifts off the lid and pulls out the silver cross on the silver chain.

“I know how much you love Christianity, so I found this on the Internet. It’s simple enough to go with your style, but—”

She clamps it on around her neck, holds the cross in front of her nose, and gives it a good stare before tucking it into her shirt. Then she smiles beautifully.

“Did God really tell you to buy this for me?”

“He sure did,” I lie. “I’m really thinking about turning around my life and avoiding hell. Giving my life to Jesus and all the rest. I just have to sort through some issues first, but your dedication, the fact that you stand out here three times a week, the strength of your faith is amazing and really won me over.”

Her eyes open wide and I can tell I’m totally making her day, like she was waiting for some sort of signal from god, some sort of affirmation, and I’m her miracle, so I just keep piling it on, talking about being a changed man, and wanting to live a good life, and spending eternity with her in heaven.

Inside I start to feel terrible, thinking about how disappointed she’ll be when she sees the news tonight—how crushing that will be for her—and I wonder if her faith will be able to withstand it.

I think god is just a fairy tale, but I’m really starting to like the fact that Lauren has faith.

Don’t know why.

It’s weird.

A contradiction, maybe.

Or maybe it’s like wanting little kids to believe in Santa after someone else already ruined it for you, or you just figured out that your parents were Santa after all and the magic of Christmas instantly evaporated. But thinking about my destroying her faith by tricking her and then killing myself really starts to bring me down, until I just can’t lie to her anymore.

“Life can be really hard, you know. It makes it difficult to believe in god sometimes, but I’m trying—for you, and maybe for me too,” I say, and then I just start to fucking cry. I’m not sure why. Man, I bawl and bawl.

She hugs me and I clutch her, sob into her neck that smells like vanilla extract baking inside cookies—so fucking wonderful!

The sad suits and briefcases pass us in droves, but no one even seems to notice us as I drink her up.

“God works in mysterious ways,” she says, and rubs my back all motherly. “This world is a test. It’s hard. But I will continue to pray for you. We could pray together. You could come to church with me. It would help you. My father will help you too.”

She’s saying all of these really nice things, trying to comfort me the only way she knows how, and I love just being on someone’s radar so much that I start kissing her neck and then her mouth. Our tongues touch, and she kisses me back for a fraction of a second– Her mouth is so warm and wet and mint-y from the gum she’s chewing and my heart’s pulsing spikes of adrenaline through my veins, which is exciting and animalistic and primal, but maybe not quite what I was expecting, because I thought kissing Lauren would be like the epic kisses in Bogie films, like the string section would kick in and I’d get that swirling feeling Baback’s playing produces, and Lauren would pause to gaze at me and say, “I like that. I’d like more,” just like Bacall says– in that infamous husky voice—to Bogie in The Big Sleep, and when I kissed her glossy battleship-gray lips again, she’d say, “That’s even better,” but instead it’s just the hot sweaty rush of bodies mangling when they maybe shouldn’t even be mingling—and she tries to push me away, but the rush forces me to hold on to her tight, even though I want to let go, even though I should really LET GO!, so she turns her face from my mouth and yells “Stop” in this high-pitched squeal that is the complete antithesis of Bacall’s warm sexy brassy voice and when I keep kissing her cheek and ear, she smashes my chin with the heel of her hand, jolting my brain back to reality and knocking off my Bogart hat in the process.

I stagger backward and then pick up my fedora.

The warm rush freezes into a heavy lump in my chest and suddenly I feel so so shitty—like I need to vomit.

“Is there a problem here?” says this subway rent-a-cop who has magically appeared. He has this dirt moustache that makes him seem about twelve years old. He’s hilarious-looking in his official uniform with the little silver badge. Almost cute. Like a kid wearing a Halloween costume.

“I’m just delivering a message from god,” I say, and pop my hat back onto my head. I’m acting again, keeping my true feelings repressed—I’m aware of that, but I can’t help it.

Lauren looks at me like maybe I’m a demon from hell or the Antichrist, and says, “Why did you do that?”

“What did you do to her?” the rent-a-cop asks, trying to look official and tough.

“I gave her a cross on a silver chain and tried to tell her I love her—I do love you, Lauren; I really do—then I kissed her passionately.”

She looks at me with her head all cockeyed and her wet lips parted.

She’s so confused.

I’m kind of confused too, because I’m not attracted to Lauren at all anymore and the kiss was a spectacular failure.

I can tell that some part of her deep inside liked the kissing, because it’s natural for teenage girls to like kissing, but she feels conflicted, like she’s not supposed to like it, that she’s supposed to deny her instincts here, like her religious training bids her, and that’s what’s really eating her up inside.

Maybe that’s how rapists justify their actions.

Maybe I’m a monster now.

Because I can see the thought process happening—it’s written all over her face.

Yes.

No.

Yes.

No.

Yes.

No.

No.

No.

No.

I can’t.

I really can’t.

I really truly absolutely can’t.

Why did you do this to me?

Why did you make me feel this way?

Why?!?

Lauren says, “I have to go,” just before she drops her stack of religious pamphlets and runs away.

I hate myself.

She literally runs.

I really fucking hate myself.

And I don’t have the heart to chase, mostly because I used up whatever courage and strength I had just to kiss her.

There’s a part of me that still wants to believe the kissing was wonderful.

Black-and-white Bogie-Bacall perfect.

Even though it wasn’t.

My dad used to say that the last drink of the day, when the work and thinking are over and you’re just about to surrender to unconsciousness, that’s always the best drink regardless of how it tastes.

Maybe Lauren was my last drink of the day.

The tracts blow all over the concrete sidewalk like dead leaves in the breeze.

“You better work on your delivery, Romeo,” the rent-a-cop says. “Now keep moving.”

“Aye, aye,” I say, and give the kid a military salute, making my body rigid and stiff, karate-chopping my eyebrows. “Good job keeping people with guns away from the subway. You really are a fantastic rent-a-cop.”

He looks at me and puts a hand on this two-foot club strapped to his belt, probably because they won’t let the kid carry a gun. He makes this evil twisted face, like beating me to death would really make his day. The rent-a-cop actually intimidates me a little, which is ironic, since I’m going to kill myself. But I haven’t shot Asher Beal yet, and death by rent-a-cop is probably even worse than death by übermorons.

“Here’s me moving on,” I say, and he lets me, because it’s the easiest thing for him to do.

He probably makes what—eleven-fifty an hour?

A rent-a-cop’s not exactly going to take a bullet in the line of duty for that type of wage, and who would?

As I walk away, my backpack feels lighter.

I’ve delivered all of my presents, so now it’s finally time to kill Asher Beal.

Let’s get this birthday party started!

I’m so ready to be done with this life.

It will be so so beautiful to finally be end-of-the-road done.

This will be the best birthday present ever; I’m pretty sure of that.

TWENTY-FOUR

I open my birthday present in the woods behind Asher Beal’s house—feel the familiar cold heaviness of the P-38 in my hand—and then wait for my target[52]52
  I read on the Internet that the US military employs euphemism to make it easier to kill people. Military men and women shoot “targets,” not people, and blow up “targets,” not buildings full of women and children. So I employ that little bit of wisdom here. I will shoot a “target” and not a former friend/current classmate. You might think using euphemism is dumb, but you’d be surprised how much it helps to calm the nerves and ease the conscience. It really works.


[Закрыть] to come home.

I’ve been doing reconnaissance for a few weeks now, so I know that on Thursdays my target arrives home around 5:43 from wrestling practice, and then usually goes into his first-floor bedroom for an hour before dinner.

The target usually surfs the Internet while waiting for feeding time, at which point the target will relocate to the kitchen.

The glow of the laptop screen lights up the target’s face and makes him look like an alien or a demon or a fish in a lit tank, and watching the target’s dead expression illuminated by the screen has also made it easier to visualize killing him—the weird lighting really dehumanizes the target.

I’ve practiced shooting my target from the tree line, using my hand as a gun.

But today I’m going to creep up to the window, shoot the target through the pane at point-blank range, stick my arm through the jagged glass teeth and pop the target six more times—mixing head shots with chest shots—to ensure the target has been eliminated, and then I’ll escape into the woods, where I will off my second target with the last bullet in the magazine before the local cops and maybe even the FBI arrive.

That’s my plan.

All I have to do is wait for my target to flick on his bedroom light, which will be the first falling domino to set the chain of events in motion.

TWENTY-FIVE

It’s cold and dark in the woods and I wonder if this is what it’s going to feel like when I’m finally dead– like a stupid unfeeling unthinking unnoticed tree. I’m hoping to feel nothing. Übernothing. I’m hoping that I merely cease to exist. What dreams may come? Hamlet and Lauren would ask.[53]53
  For completely different reasons.


[Закрыть] None, I’m betting. None. Hellfire is not in the plans. Heaven is not in the plans. Cold and dark are not in the plans. Übernothing. That’s what I want. Nothing.[54]54
  “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot—full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That’s William Shakespeare on the type of nothing I DON’T want. I gleaned that little nugget of anti-life-affirming wisdom from last year’s English class, when I had to memorize Macbeth’s soliloquy. Public school can be a real shot of lithium, let me tell you. It’s crazy the pessimistic shit we’re made to memorize in school and then carry around in our skulls for the rest of our lives.


[Закрыть]

TWENTY-SIX

I’ve been watching the target’s mom framed in the kitchen’s bay window, the soft overhead light making it look like she’s in a film and the bay window is like a drive-in movie screen.

I decide to call the movie Mrs. Beal Makes Her Perverted Son His Last Meal.

It’s a boring picture in the literal sense, but it conjures up a lot of emotions inside me for personal reasons.

I remember Mrs. Beal being really stupid[55]55
  Maybe a better word is oblivious. She was mentally absent in a way that might be perceived as enlightened or transcendent maybe to the untrained eye, but really she had this disguised sham blind-eye head-in-the-clouds type of defense mechanism at work, which maybe fostered Asher’s sense of entitlement and general disregard for the emotional well-being of others—even his best friend at the time. Like one time we were in a T.G.I. Fridays–type restaurant and Asher kept pouring his soda into the huge clay pot of a palm tree close to our table and then raising his glass in the air and demanding endless refills from the waitress, yelling, “More soda!” across the joint. And even though Mrs. Beal must have seen him pouring the soda into the palm tree pot—everyone in the restaurant did, I know because people were shaking their heads by the end of our meal—Asher’s mom didn’t tell him to knock it off or even acknowledge what he was doing in any way at all. She just let him abuse the waitress, who was young and too busy (and maybe too dumb) to argue or do anything but bring Asher endless Cokes. He seemed to delight in abusing the waitress. He smiled and smiled like a boy king, and I hated him on that day even more than I usually hated him back then in junior high. When he turned evil, he really turned evil. It was like something inside him broke and could never be repaired again. He never used to be like that when we were in elementary school, before what happened began and changed everything.


[Закрыть] but sweet on the surface when we were kids.

She would always order us a pizza whenever I was over at their house, regardless of whether we were hungry or not. There was always pizza. Pizza was ubiquitous. It’s like that was an official rule in their house—when guests under fourteen visit, there shall be pizza, pronto.

She was also always singing songs from the musical Cats. So much that I can quote the lyrics of many of the songs, even though I have never seen the show, nor have I ever listened to a recording of the musical.[56]56
  Other than what I’ve heard on elevators.


[Закрыть]

“Memory” was her favorite.

Although she also liked “Mr. Mistoffelees,” who was apparently clever.

It’s funny how I’m remembering all of this right now when I’m trying to use military euphemisms, and it makes me sad, because Mrs. Beal has no idea what a Charles Darwin-type favor I’ll be doing by killing her son, mostly because she has no idea who her son is—what he has done and of what he’s capable.

Not in a million years would she believe what her son made me endure.

She wouldn’t believe it because if she did, I don’t think she’d be able to sing songs from silly musicals while doing housework, and that’s her favorite thing to do in the world, or at least it was when I used to hang out with Asher back in middle school.[57]57
  It’s funny how much I simultaneously like and hate the fact that Mrs. Beal sings, seemingly oblivious to the rest of the world.


[Закрыть]

I try not to think about her hearing the gunshots, her running into Asher’s room, her screaming, her maybe even cradling Asher’s blood-soaked head in her arms, trying to put his brains back into his skull,[58]58
  Which just may mute her singing forever.


[Закрыть] and her endless weeping for a fictional boy who didn’t ever exist—the son she never had—because she believes her Asher is an absolute angel.

She never saw him change, or if she did, she chose not to believe it, which makes her just as guilty, just as culpable.

I mean, don’t get me wrong; I could never shoot Mrs. Beal in the face, because she’s always singing songs from Cats and never wronged me personally.

But when you really think about it, she’s to blame just as much as Linda is—and my dad too, regardless of whether or not he’s still alive in Venezuela.

These people we call Mom and Dad, they bring us into the world and then they don’t follow through with what we need, or provide any answers at all really—it’s a fend-for-yourself free-for-all in the end, and I’m just not cut out for that sort of living.

Thinking about all of this gets me feeling so low, and I’m shivering now.

“Come on, Target Asher. Ollie Ollie in come free. Come home so I can finish this once and for all,” I whisper as I watch gray-haired Mrs. Beal pull a small chicken from the oven.

The huge window frames her perfectly as she slices the meat and moves her mouth.

She’s singing again.[59]59
  This might sound weird, but watching Mrs. Beal sing reminds me of the Dickens Christmas Carol display they put up in the city every December. You walk through Victorian England peeping through the windows of miniature houses on fake cobblestone streets lit with gas lamps—and I’m pretty sure the little wooden people sing at some point—as you follow around the three ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future through the life of the miserly miserable Scrooge until he has his change of heart and it’s all Merry Christmas and huge-ass turkeys and God bless us every one. My dad took me to Dickens Village once when I was in junior high and therefore too old for such a kid-ish father-son event. He was too high to notice that all the other sons and daughters there were less than four feet tall. He was also too high to notice that he was kind of staggering bleary-eyed and everyone was staring at him. Ironically, my dad was a big fan of Christmas. It always got the bastard feeling sentimental, which forced him to do even more drugs and drink—two of his favorite activities.


[Закрыть]