"Absolutely." Although I wasn't as excited by the prospect as you might think. With the little head not in charge, doubts about Katie's motivations had continued to solidify. And, I have to admit, I found it a little upsetting that she was so eager to get Jeroma's chair back into the office.
Lowering her voice, even though we were alone, she said, "I don't suppose you've written any more . . ." Her glistening lips formed the word obits.
"I haven't even thought of it."
This was an extremely bodacious lie. Writing obits was the first thing I thought about in the morning, and the last thing I thought about at night. The way the words just flowed out. And the feeling that went with it: a bowling ball rolling over the right diamond, a twenty-foot putt heading straight for the hole, a spear thunking home in exactly the place you aimed at. Bullseye, dead center.
"What else have you been writing? Any reviews yet? I understand Paramount's releasing Jack Briggs's last movie, and I'm hearing it's even worse than Holy Rollers. That's got to be tempting."
"I haven't exactly been writing," I said. "I've been ghostwriting. As in everyone else's work. But I was never cut out to be an editor. That's your job, Katie."
This time she didn't protest.
Later that day, I looked up from the back row, where I was trying (and failing) to write a CD review, and saw her in the office, bent over her laptop. Her mouth was moving, and at first I thought she must also be on her phone, but no phone was in evidence. I had an idea--almost certainly ridiculous, but weirdly hard to shake--that she had found a leftover stash of eucalyptus drops in the top drawer, and was sucking on one.
*
I arrived at her apartment shortly before seven, bearing bags of Chinese from Fun Joy. No shorts and filmy top that night; she was dressed in a pullover and baggy khakis. Also, she wasn't alone. Penny Langston was sitting on one end of the sofa (crouching there, actually). She wasn't wearing her baseball cap, but that strange smile, the one that said touch me and I'll kill you, was all present and accounted for.
Katie kissed my cheek. "I invited Penny to join us."
That was patently obvious, but I said, "Hi, Pens."
"Hi, Mike." Tiny mouse-voice and no eye contact, but she made a valiant effort to turn the smile into something a tad less creepy.
I looked back to Katie. I raised my eyebrows.
"I said I didn't tell anyone about what you can do," Katie said. "That . . . sort of wasn't the truth."
"And I sort of knew that." I put the grease-spotted white bags down on the coffee table. I didn't feel hungry anymore, and I didn't expect a whole lot of Fun Joy in the next few minutes. "Do you want to tell me what this is about before I accuse you of breaking your solemn promise and stalk out?"
"Don't do that. Please. Just listen. Penny works at Neon Circus because I talked Jeroma into hiring her. I met her when she still lived here in the city. We were in a group together, weren't we, Pens?"
"Yes," Penny said in her tiny mouse-voice. She was looking at her hands, clasped so tightly in her lap that the knuckles were white. "The Holy Name of Mary Group."
"Which is what, exactly, when it's home with its hat off?" As if I had to ask. Sometimes when the pieces come together, you can actually hear the click.
"Rape support," Katie said. "I never saw my rapist, but Penny saw hers. Didn't you, Pens?"
"Yes. Lots of times." Now Penny was looking at me, and her voice grew stronger with each word. By the end, she was nearly shouting, and tears were rolling down her cheeks. "It was my uncle. I was nine years old. My sister was eleven. He raped her too. Katie says you can kill people with obituaries. I want you to write his."
*
I'm not going to tell the story she told me, sitting there on the couch with Katie next to her, holding one of her hands and putting Kleenex after Kleenex in the other. Unless you've lived in one of the seven places in this country not yet equipped for multimedia, you've heard it before. All you need to know is that Penny's parents died in a car accident, and she and her sister were shipped off to Uncle Amos and Aunt Claudia. Aunt Claudia refused to hear anything said against her husband. Figure the rest out for yourself.
I wanted to do it. Because the story was horrible, yes. Because guys like Uncle Amos need to take it in the head for preying on the weakest and most vulnerable, check. Because Katie wanted me to do it, absolutely. But in the end, it all came down to the sadly pretty dress Penny was wearing. And the shoes. And the bit of inexpertly applied makeup. For the first time in years, perhaps for the first time since Uncle Amos had begun making his nighttime visits to her bedroom, always telling her it was "our little secret," she had tried to make herself presentable for a male human being. It sort of broke my heart. Katie had been scarred by her rape, but had risen above it. Some girls and women can do that. Many can't.
When she finished, I asked, "Do you swear to God that your uncle really did this?"
"Yes. Again and again and again. When we got old enough to have babies, he made us turn over and used our . . ." She didn't finish this. "I bet it didn't stop with Jessie and me, either."
"And he's never been caught."
She shook her head vehemently, dank ringlets flying.
"Okay." I took my iPad out of my briefcase. "But you'll have to tell me about him."
"I can do better." She disengaged her hand from Katie's and grabbed the ugliest purse I've ever seen outside of a thrift-shop window. From it she took a crumpled sheet of paper, so sweat-stained it was limp and semitransparent. She had written in pencil. The looping scrawl looked like something a child might have done. It was headed AMOS CULLEN LANGFORD: HIS OBITUARY.
This miserable excuse for a man who raped little girls every chance he could get died slowly and painfully of many cancers in the soft parts of his body. During the last week, pus came pouring out of his eyes. He was 63 years old and in his last extremity, his screams filled the house as he begged for extra morphine . . .
There was more. Much. Her handwriting was that of a child, but her vocabulary was terrific, and she had done a far better job on this piece than anything she'd ever written for Neon Circus.
"I don't know if this will work," I said, trying to hand it back. "I think I have to write it myself."
Katie said, "It won't hurt to try, will it?"
I supposed it wouldn't. Looking directly at Penny, I said, "I've never even seen this guy, and you want me to kill him."
"Yes," she said, and now she was meeting my eyes fair and square. "That's what I want."
"You're positive."
She nodded.
I sat down at Katie's little home desk, laid out Penny's handwritten death-diatribe beside my iPad, opened a blank document, and began transcribing. I knew immediately that it was going to work. The sense of power was stronger than ever. The sense of aiming. I quit looking at the sheet after the second sentence and just hammered the keyboard screen, hitting the main points and ended with this abjuration: Funeral attendees--no one could call them mourners, given Mr. Langston's unspeakable predilections--are warned not to send flowers, but spitting on the coffin is encouraged.
The two women were staring at me, big-eyed.
"Will it work?" Penny asked, then answered herself. "It will. I felt it."
"I think maybe it already has." I turned my attention to Katie. "Ask me to do this again, Kates, and I'll be tempted to write your obituary."
She tried to smile, but I could see she was scared. I hadn't meant to do that (at least I don't think I had), so I took her hand. She jumped, started to pull away, then let me hold it. The skin was cold and clammy.
"I'm joking. Bad joke, but I mean what I say. This needs to end."
"Yes," she said, and swallowed loudly, a cartoon gulp sound. "Absolutely."
"And no talking. Not to anybody. Ever."
Once again they agreed. I started to get up and Penny leaped at me, knocking me back into the chair and almost spilling us both to the floor. The hug wasn't affectionate; it was more like the
grip of a drowning woman muckling onto her would-be rescuer. She was greasy with sweat.
"Thank you," she whispered harshly. "Thank you, Mike."
I left without telling her she was welcome. I couldn't wait to get out of there. I don't know if they ate the food I brought, but I rather doubt it. Fun Joy, my rosy red ass.
*
I didn't sleep that night, and it wasn't thinking of Amos Langford that kept me awake. I had other things to worry about.
One was the eternal problem of addiction. I had left Katie's apartment determined that I would never wield that terrible power again, but it was a promise I'd made to myself before, and it wasn't one I was sure I could keep, because each time I wrote a "live obit," the urge to do it again grew stronger. It was like heroin. Use it once or twice, maybe you can stop. After awhile, though, you have to have it. I might not have reached that point yet, but I was on the edge of the pit and knew it. What I'd said to Katie was the absolute rock-bottom truth--this needed to end while I could still end it. Assuming it wasn't too late already.
The second thing wasn't quite as grim, but it was bad enough. On the subway back to Brooklyn, a particularly apropos Ben Franklin adage had come to mind: Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead. There were already three people keeping this one, and since I had no intention of murdering Katie and Penny via obituary, that meant a really nasty secret was in their hands.
They'd keep it for awhile, I was sure. Penny would be especially keen to do so if she got a call in the morning informing her that dear old Uncle Amos had bitten the big one. But time would weaken the taboo. There was another factor, as well. Both of them were not just writers but Neon Circus writers, which meant spilling the beans was their business. Bean-spilling might not be as addictive as killing people with obits, but it had its own strong pull, as I well knew. Sooner or later there would be a bar, and too many drinks, and then . . .
Do you want to hear something really crazy? You have to promise not to tell anybody, though.
I pictured myself sitting in the newsroom by the Thanksgiving poster, occupied with my latest snarky review. Frank Jessup slides up, sits down, and asks if I've ever considered writing an obit for Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator with the little tiny head, or--hey, even better!--that Korean butterball, Kim Jong-un. For all I knew, Jessup might want me to off the new head coach of the Knicks.
I tried to tell myself that one was ridiculous, and couldn't manage it. Mohawk Sports Boy was a crazed Knicks fan.
There was an even more horrific possibility (this I got to around three in the morning). Suppose word of my talent found its way to the wrong governmental ear? It seemed unlikely, but hadn't I read somewhere that the government had experimented with LSD and mind control on unsuspecting subjects back in the fifties? People capable of that might be capable of anything. What if some fellows from NSA appeared either at Circus or here at my folks' house in Brooklyn, and I wound up taking a one-way trip in a private jet to some government base where I would be installed in a private apartment (luxurious, but with guards on the door) and given a list of Al Qaeda and Isis militant leaders, complete with files that would allow me to write extremely detailed obituaries? I could make rocket-equipped drones obsolete.
Loony? Yuh. But at four in the morning, anything can seem possible.
Around five, just as the day's first light was creeping into my room, I found myself wondering yet again how I had come by this unwelcome talent in the first place. Not to mention how long I'd had it. There was no way of telling, because as a rule, folks do not write obituaries of live people. They don't even do that at The New York Times, they just stockpile the necessary info so it's at hand when a famous person dies. I could have had the ability all my life, and if I hadn't written that crappy bad joke about Jeroma, I never would have known. I thought of how I'd ended up writing for Neon Circus in the first place: by way of an unsolicited obituary. Of a person already dead, true, but an obit is an obit. And talent only wants one thing, don't you see? It wants to come out. It wants to put on a tuxedo and tap-dance all across the stage.
On that thought, I fell asleep.
*
My phone woke me at quarter to noon. It was Katie, and she was upset. "You need to come to the office," she said. "Right now."
I sat up in bed. "What's wrong?"
"I'll tell you when you get here, but I'll tell you one thing right now. You can't do it again."
"Duh," I said. "I think I told you that. And on more than one occasion."
If she heard me, she paid no attention, just steamed ahead. "Not ever in your life. If it was Hitler you couldn't do it. If your father had a knife to your mother's throat you couldn't do it."
She broke the connection before I could ask questions. I wondered why we weren't having this Code Red meeting in her apartment, which offered a lot more privacy than Neon Circus's cramped digs, and only one answer came to mind: Katie didn't want to be alone with me. I was a dangerous dude. I had only done what she and her fellow rape survivor wanted me to do, but that didn't change the fact.
Now I was a dangerous dude.
*
She greeted me with a smile and a hug for the benefit of the few staffers on hand, quaffing their postlunch Red Bulls and plugging lackadaisically away at their laptops, but today the blinds in the office were down, and the smile disappeared as soon as we were behind them.
"I'm scared to death," she said. "I mean, I was last night, but when you're actually doing it--"
"It feels sort of good. Yeah, I know."
"But I'm a lot more scared now. I keep thinking of those spring-loaded gadgets you squeeze to make your hands and forearms stronger."
"What are you talking about?"
She didn't tell me. Not then. "I had to start in the middle, with Ken Wanderly's kid, and work both ways--"
"Wicked Ken had a kid?"
"A son, yes. Stop interrupting. I had to start in the middle because the item about the son was the first one I came across. There was a 'death reported' item in the Times this morning. For once they scooped the webs. Somebody at Huffpo or Daily Beast is apt to get taken to the woodshed for that, because it happened awhile ago. My guess is the family decided to wait until after the burial to release the news."
"Katie--"
"Shut up and listen." She leaned forward. "There's collateral damage. And it's getting worse."
"I don't--"
She put a palm over my mouth. "Shut. The fuck. Up."
I shut. She took her hand away.
"Jeroma Whitfield was where this started. So far as I can tell using Google, she's the only one in the world. Was, I mean. There are tons of Jerome Whitfields, though, so thank God she was your first, or it might have been attracted to other Jeromas. Some of them, anyway. The closest ones."
"It?"
She looked at me as if I were an idiot. "The power. Your second . . ." She paused, I think because the word that came immediately to mind was victim. "Your second subject was Peter Stefano. Also not the world's most common name, but not completely weird, either. Now look at this."
From her desk she took a few sheets of paper. She eased the first from the paper clip holding them together and passed it to me. On it were three obituaries, all from small newspapers--one in Pennsylvania, one in Ohio, and one in upstate New York. The Pennsylvania Peter Stefano had died of a heart attack. The one in Ohio had fallen from a ladder. The one from New York--Woodstock--had suffered a stroke. All had died on the same day as the crazed record producer whose name they shared.
I sat down hard. "This can't be."
"It is. The good news is that I found two dozen other Peter Stefanos across the USA, and they're fine. I think because they all live farther away from Gowanda Correctional. That was ground zero. The shrapnel spread out from there."
I looked at her, dumbfounded.
"Wicked Ken came next. Another unusual name, thank God. There's a whole nest of Wanderlys in Wisconsin and Minnesota, but I guess that was too far. O
nly . . ."
She handed me the second sheet. First up was the news item from the Times: SERIAL KILLER'S SON DIES. His wife claimed Ken Wanderly Jr. had shot himself by accident while cleaning a pistol, but the item pointed out that the "accident" had happened less than twelve hours after his father's death. That it might actually have been suicide was left for the reader to imply.
"I don't think it was suicide," Katie said. Beneath her makeup, she looked very pale. "I don't think it was exactly an accident, either. It homes in on the names, Mike. You see that, right? And it can't spell, which makes it even worse."
The obit (I was coming to loathe that word) below the piece about Wicked Ken's son concerned one Kenneth Wanderlee, of Paramus, New Jersey. Like Peter Stefano of Pennsylvania (an innocent who had probably never killed anything but time), Wanderlee of Paramus had died of a heart attack.
Just like Jeroma.
I was breathing fast, and sweating all over. My balls had drawn up until they felt roughly the size of peach pits. I felt like fainting, also like vomiting, and managed to do neither. Although I did plenty of vomiting later. That went on for a week or more, and I lost ten pounds. (I told my worried mother it was the flu.)
"Here's the capper," she said, and handed me the last page. There were seventeen Amos Langfords on it. The biggest cluster was in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area, but one had died in Baltimore, one in Virginia, and two had kicked off in West Virginia. In Florida there were three.
"No," I whispered.
"Yes," she said. "This second one, in Amityville, is Penny's bad uncle. Just be grateful that Amos is also a fairly unusual name in this day and age. If it had been James or William, there could have been hundreds of dead Langfords. Probably not thousands, because it's still not reaching farther than the Midwest, but Florida's nine hundred miles away. Farther than any AM radio signal can reach, at least in the daytime."
The sheets of paper slipped from my hand and seesawed to the floor.
"Now do you see what I meant about those squeezie things people use to make their hands and arms stronger? At first maybe you can only squeeze the handles together once or twice. But if you keep doing it, the muscles get stronger. That's what's happening to you, Mike. I'm sure of it. Every time you write an obit for a living person, the power gets stronger and reaches farther."