Indeed, following my execution of Perry it appeared to be far darker than it ought to have been, even considering that hour which was annually excised for several months from the time zone I inhabited. It looked to me, as I stood in the moonlight of the empty field beside the warehouse, that there was a blackness behind the blackness of the black sky, some constellation of ‘black spots’, like stars in negative photographic exposure, which collected above me and which I felt only I could see. But although this blackness, in my perception, did seem to describe a kind of constellation far off in the galaxy overhead, I also sensed in the most intimate way that it was connected to that fearsome presence I had encountered so recently.
On the way back to my apartment this formation of dark stars, along with the fear that accompanied them, faded away to a large extent. Yet even as morning broke there still remained some residue, in my peculiar vision, of those dark spots . . . leaving a kind of stain upon the sky, a dirty smear that never entirely dissipated. No mention was made of this phenomenon by the local weather reports, which I was able to check and recheck quite thoroughly using my newly gained powers of surveillance. Somehow I knew that these dark spots of the night, these stains upon the daytime sky, were not visible to any living persons.
Yet I still did not believe myself to be dead. This conviction didn’t merely derive from the fact that I had been a lifelong non-believer in an afterlife – I was always willing to concede my errors of opinion when sufficient evidence arose to the contrary. But no evidence of the kind presented itself, no matter how hard I searched for it. No newspaper obituary – those little boxes with tiny letters inside – had reported the death of Francis Vincent Dominio. My name appeared nowhere in any of the official records that I scanned in my own fashion. Thus, I had to conclude that I was not dead, even if I was obviously no longer among the living.
This situation might have been a great problem for me if I had not been so preoccupied with other business. I still had some special plans to make. And I also knew that it wouldn’t be long before Detectives White and Black followed up on their information concerning a bad apple who had ‘hereby resign[ed] effective immediately’ from the company where Mr Stokowski had until recently been employed and who, now that the homicide detectives finally noticed it, had worked closely with the deceased for a number of years.
White and Black would soon be asking Lillian about the tenant in the apartment above the Metro Diner. Before that happened, I needed to get some of my affairs in order.
4
HELLO, IDIOT.’
The voice was Richard’s and the person addressed was Supervisor Chipman.
‘What did you say to them?’ Richard asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Chipman like a child who was trying to cover up some misdeed.
‘You called him Domino.’
‘So what?’ said Chipman.
An expression of sly calm suddenly appeared on Richard’s face. ‘So what, indeed,’ Richard seemed to be thinking as he eased his weight against Chipman’s cubicle counter and complacently crossed his arms, cheerfully chastising himself for having overreacted. Some people are obsessive-compulsives. Richard merely had an instinct for devious caution, for hyper-vigilance in the cause of self-interested wile.
‘Hey, I didn’t show this to anybody, if that’s what’s worrying you.’
As Chipman spoke these words he simultaneously slid open the bottom drawer of his desk. Inside was a stack of papers on top of which was a page from a yellow legal pad that, in my handwriting, read: WORK NOT DONE.
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Richard, kicking the drawer closed with his huge wing-tipped foot. Then he gingerly pulled out the desk drawer just enough to slide in his fingers and remove the piece of paper with the handwriting on it, crumpling it into a little paper ball that disappeared inside his right hand just before his hand disappeared within the pin-striped pocket of his trousers. ‘Now get rid of the rest of it, pinhead.’
‘I didn’t know I was supposed to,’ said Chipman the Clueless.
‘What you don’t know is going to seriously affect your advancement around here. Understood?’
‘Yeah,’ said Chipman.
‘Yeah?’ mocked Richard.
‘Yes, I understand.’
‘Good. And no more talk about anybody called Domino.’
‘Yes, I understand,’ Chipman mocked back. This was somewhat unwise because now he was on Richard’s list as well as on mine. I wondered who would get to him first.
5
THAT SAME AFTERNOON, Richard called an emergency ‘lunch meeting’ of The Seven – excuse me, Six. I didn’t exactly need this distraction at the moment, since I was scrambling against the clock (darn that lost hour!) and was forced to divide my attention between the work at hand in my apartment and the lunchtime scene at the company.
Sidebar: Anthropologists who once held that all human activity could be reduced to the three F’s – Feeding, Fighting, and, in the present instance, a little Fondling – would have been pleased to see how closely their hypothesis was enacted at the banquet table in that Gothic Gallery where I used to assemble with this contemptibly familiar cast of characters and where their lunch-meeting was now in progress.
Sherry popped the lid on a plastic bowl filled with vegetables sliced up into spears. But she suddenly stopped short. ‘I forgot to bring anything to drink,’ whined the Sherry-thing, who was sitting close to the head of the table, immediately to Richard’s left. The meal that Richard had brought along consisted only of an extra thermos of coffee. He took a swig directly from the mouth of the thermos he had already opened – a shining metal silo – and then slid it over to Sherry, who just gawked at it for a moment, as if she were looking at some exotic artifact she had never seen before.
‘Here,’ said Richard, slapping the plastic cap of the thermos before Sherry’s eyes, which no more recognized this ‘particular object than they had the other. ‘You can use it as a cup,’ Richard explained.
‘But –’ Sherry started to say.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Richard with fatherly wisdom and understanding. Then he reached down into Sherry’s purse on the floor between them, rummaged around inside it, and came up with a miniature bottle of vodka. He casually ran his hand along Sherry’s leg before bringing the dwarf-sized bottle up to her. ‘Go ahead,’ he said to her. ‘Everybody knows.’ Sherry went ahead and daintily dumped the spirits into the plastic container, then quickly dropped the evidence of her alcoholism back in her purse before pouring in the coffee, awkwardly maneuvering Richard’s shining metal thermos.
Barry the Great-Bodied One removed the first of several hamburgers from a sack that sagged heavily upon that banquet table. But his eyes were fixed across the table at what Kerrie was shoveling into her mouth from a field-style plate with attached covering.
‘What are you looking at, Mr America?’ said Kerrie.
‘I’m just trying to identify that stuff you’re eating.’
‘It’s leftovers.’
‘Right,’ said Barry with a world of doubt in his voice.
Further down the table Mary sat before the cardboard dish – square and shallow – of a microwaved meal. (Swedish Meatballs and Noodles in Gravy – her favorite, although she sometimes broke up the monotony with Salisbury Steak, topped with Mushroom Sauce, and Macaroni and Cheese.)
Harry wasn’t eating, waving off Barry’s offer of a hamburger. ‘I’ve got plenty,’ said Barry.
‘I’m sure you do, thanks,’ said the inscrutable Harry.
It was also lunchtime at the Metro Diner, and the place was packed. I didn’t see the homicide detectives anywhere around. However, I knew they had run a check on my credit card activity: the gun shop, the clothes store, the . . . the . . . paper? (Did I buy a newspaper that night? If so, I wouldn’t have used my credit card.) But even though I couldn’t bring into my brain any other spending I had done, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something else, something far more significant than paper, th
at was also being masked by those dark spots. In any case, I knew that soon the cops would be beating on my door, and it was imperative that Lillian made it up to my apartment before they did. My tactic for doing this involved a baseball bat that once served as my only means of ‘personal protection’. Gripping this shapely piece of wood, I stood before my computer monitor as if I were facing a hated pitcher on a rival team. I wound up my swing and –
‘All right, then,’ said Richard. ‘As we all know by now we have a problem.’
‘No kidding,’ said Sherry. ‘What happened? You said that Frank was finished. Instead we’ve got one dead Polack.’
‘These things don’t always go according to plan,’ said Richard.
‘Yeah, like that girl, Andrea What’s-Her-Name, ending up dead on your desk,’ said Kerrie, who continued sporking a mysterious mash into her mouth. ‘You said Frank would go quietly. Now it’s a mess.’
‘Before you leave the room to go vomit up your lunch, Kerrie, I’d like to point out that the problem wasn’t with Domino – it was with Perry Stokowski. He was the mess.’
‘How so?’ asked Mary.
‘To put it simply, Perry wasn’t quite a full member of our family.’
‘Please, Richard, I’ve got enough with my real family at home. I don’t need to think in terms of a second family.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong, Mary,’ said Richard. ‘Let me ask you something. Who do you prefer spending your time with, not to mention most of your extra time – those people at home . . . or us?’
Mary looked thoughtfully down at the empty microwave-proof container on the table before her.
‘You can’t lie to me, Mary. Or to the rest of us. We are your family. We are the only family that any of us have. Oh, some of you may have spouses or someone you live with, even children. But they aren’t your family. Why do you think you’re sitting at this table with us? It wasn’t by chance, I can tell you. It’s because I chose you.’
I had to call time-out back at my apartment because I had forgotten to unplug my computer. My purpose wasn’t to start a fire in that old building but to get Lillian’s attention. (And no, Kerrie, I would not be going quietly – I would go with quite a bit of noise and mayhem.) After I had dealt with the potential threat of an electrical fire, I finally swung my bat. Disappointingly, it made only a spider-web pattern of cracks in the computer screen. (Downstairs in the diner, amidst all the lunch-hour chewing and chattering, my first hit went unnoticed. Strike one.) My next swing was dedicated to Andrea and the others who had been done in by Richard. I connected well with the monitor and sent it into the farthest bleachers, where Richard sat sipping coffee from a thermos on a sunny afternoon. In short order the monitor was just a pile of glass and plastic lying on the floor. Beside it was the keyboard whose teeth I then smashed with a lusty surge of madness. A momentary hiatus of conversation ensued in the diner below, as well as a suspension of service on the part of Rudy and the waitresses. And Lillian at last glanced upward toward my apartment.
‘You may have hired all of us, Richard. But that includes Perry,’ argued Mary. ‘You said yourself that he wasn’t a member of this family of yours.’
‘I said he wasn’t a full member. I thought he would have become so in time. But I didn’t think it would take so long to wean him off that music nonsense on which he wasted so much of himself. He wasn’t fully focused on the one important thing in all our lives – The Job. That caused him to let his guard down. Now he’s gone, rest in peace.’
‘Excuse me, Richard, but none of what you’re saying accounts for Frank Dominio. If there was ever someone who wasn’t one of us, it was Frank. Why in the world did you “choose” him?’
‘Frank?’ said Richard. ‘He was one of the family too . . . in a red-headed stepchild capacity. The truth is we really needed Frank. Please don’t take this personally, any of you. That is, each of you has your uses. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. But Frank had something the rest of you don’t, including myself. It was just a matter of time before he brought it to us. None of us could have come up with that.’
‘You mean that idea of his?’ said Sherry.
‘That’s right.’
‘What was so great about that?’ Sherry continued to badger. ‘You told us to give it the cold shoulder. It seemed to me that was exactly what it deserved.’
‘Barry,’ said Richard, turning to his right. ‘Would you enlighten her?’
Barry swallowed a cheek-stretching mouthful of macerated bread and meat, with extra-extra ketchup. Then he held up the remains of the object in his hand.
‘Do you know what this is, Sherry?’
‘Yeah – it’s a hamburger, or what’s left of one.’
‘It’s also Frank’s idea. But even he didn’t realize that. Here’s the analogy. It wasn’t so long ago that some stroke of genius caused the creation of these ground slabs of beef and fat inserted between two pillowy pieces of bread. Of course it was only some time later that the full lucrative potential of this edible invention was realized. Could any of us have invented the hamburger? Not likely.’
Sherry suddenly smiled, a mouthful of coffee and vodka almost spilling forth. ‘But we would sure know how to market the things,’ she practically cried out.
‘Billions and billions of them,’ added Kerrie.
Swine, swine, swine, etc. Each utterance of this word was accompanied by a smashing blow upon the metal box of my modem. Then I dropped my bat, abandoning this primitive means of destruction, and went to work on the beast’s entrails in the fashion of my new-born self – tying the transistors into the tiniest knots with only a twitch of my mind, melting wiring boards and decimating the soul of that thing – those diabolical chips – on an atomic level. Nobody was going to get into my mind through that infernal machine. And you, Richard – you knew, you knew my idea was brilliant, that I was worth more than all the rest of you. But you let me contort myself into a mass of obsessive doubt and self-loathing. Laugh while you can, you swine.
Mary was in fact tittering at her end of the table, while Richard was outright guffawing in a deep dark tone. Even Harry cracked a crooked grin. It was so nice to see such a happy family. But the magic moment died when Kerrie spoke up, hesitantly asking, ‘But wasn’t there a lot more documentation to Frank’s idea? Don’t we need that?’
‘We’ll see. Maybe we do and maybe we don’t. We do want to cover all the bases, don’t we, Harry?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Harry replied. Everyone else grew quiet.
‘Do you think you can work as well without Perry’s assistance?’
‘It’ll be better without him,’ said Harry. ‘It was because of him that the Andrea What’s-Her-Name thing went badly. I never said anything.’
‘I know,’ said Richard. ‘I didn’t blame you.’
‘He was a worthless drug addict,’ said Harry. (As an addendum to Harry’s remark, I should mention that it was Perry’s syringe in his glove compartment that gave me the idea for the intravenous mode of his murder.) After Harry had finally gotten that bit of bile out of himself about Perry’s dope fiendery, he looked over at Sherry and said, ‘No offense.’
The eyes of the Sherry-thing glared at Harry. ‘It’s not the same thing,’ she hissed. ‘My name is Sherry. And I am an alcoholic! Got it?’
‘Uh, yeah,’ said Harry, who obviously couldn’t have cared less one way or the other.
Lillian was finally knocking on my door and calling out my name. I had left the door slightly ajar, causing it to push open easily and allowing Lillian to exercise her landlord’s privilege to investigate what all the noise was about in her tenant’s apartment. Cautiously she entered the kitchen through the backstairs door. By the time Lillian was inside I had absented myself from visibility. The last thing I wanted was to put a scare into the only person who came close to being family to me. (You were right to a certain extent, Richard – I was as alienated as the rest of you from my own blood relations.)
Lillian did draw a st
artled breath when she first spied the mutilated machine lying about my apartment floor. I had pushed most of the pieces aside, creating a path to lead her straight to my desk and the shoe box that was waiting there for her. She picked up the box and mouthed the words written on its lid that addressed the package to her. She then reached under the apron she was wearing and from within her waitress’s uniform produced a pocketknife. It was no Buck Skinner Hunting Knife but a business-like instrument nonetheless. Good for you, Lil, I thought. After pulling the blade from its slot, she cut the packing tape wrapped around the shoe box, lifted off the top, and gazed upon the stack of packets which constituted the whole of my worldly worth. ‘My god,’ she gasped. Quickly putting two and two together, she said aloud, ‘I guess this means I won’tbe seeing you any more, Frank. Good luck to you.’ Lillian looked so sad as she replaced the lid back on the box and cradled the package under her arm.
Before leaving my apartment, locking the door behind her with her landlord’s key (‘Thank you, Lillian Hayes’), she turned for a moment to look around the place. She could not possibly have seen me as I watched her from my niche of the non-living. But somehow she fixed her eyes, if briefly, on the exact spot where I was looking back at her. Then she was gone, and I shifted my visual and auditory attention back to the gathering in the Great Hall.
‘One more thing,’ said Mary. ‘I assume we’re not doing this just so the company can make a pile out of it and leave us with, at most, some miserable little “bonus”?’