Getting Off

“Me?”

“Change your mind?”

“No. I’ll do it.”

“Yeah, what I realized about you. Last night, thinking. You’re steel inside.”

She let that go.

“Tried to spare you. Last night. Tried to swallow my tongue. Supposed to be a way to kill yourself, shuts off the air flow. Heard of it somewhere. Don’t know if it’s even possible, but I couldn’t do it.”

“I said I’d do it.”

“I know. There’s a pillow on the sofa. No? What’s wrong with that?”

“Pinpoint hemorrhages on the eyeballs. First thing anybody’d look for, and then they’d look at Joanne.”

“Sis? Anybody who knows her’d know she wouldn’t do it in a million years.”

“So then they’d come looking for me. They wouldn’t find me, but they’d come looking, and who needs it? I’m not gonna hold a pillow over your face, okay? It’s not that easy if the person’s conscious, anyway.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve done this before, okay? And not as a fucking act of mercy, either. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? Like a roadside bomb, comes from out of nowhere and takes you by surprise.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I put a pillow over a guy’s face once,” she said, “and then I sat on it, and I have to say it was H-O-T. But I don’t think he liked it much, and it took him a while to die. Which was fine with me, but I like you, and I want this to be easy, so why don’t you just let me do it my way?”

God, the look in his eye.

“I have some drugs with me. Should be quick and easy, and if you feel anything you won’t feel it for very long.”

“I can’t swallow pills.”

“This would be an injection. There’ll be a pinprick, but you won’t feel that, will you?”

“No.”

She’d prepared the syringe before she left the motel, filled it from one of the vials from the drugstore in Glens Falls. Now she retrieved it from her suitcase and showed it to him.

“All set,” she said. “Anything you’d like to do first?”

“Like what? Eat a sandwich? Take a quick jog around the block?”

“I thought you might want to have sex again.”

“No.”

“Or, I don’t know. Say a prayer?”

“Not much for praying.”

“Me neither. You figure there’s anything afterward?”

“After you die, you mean?”

“Maybe you’ll have your body back again. You know, in another dimension. Your arms and legs, and everything healthy.”

“Not counting on it.”

“Or maybe it’s a kind of existence where there aren’t bodies.”

“Just souls floating around?”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe it’s nothing,” he said. “Maybe it just, you know, stops.”

“Maybe. This vein looks good. Are you ready?”

“More than ready.”

“I don’t suppose I need an alcohol swab. I guess infection’s not a consideration. Sorry, I’m all thumbs all of a sudden. Just as well you can’t feel anything. Okay, I think I’ve got it in the vein. Alvin?”

“What?”

“Look, if there is something afterward, and somebody up there wants a report, would you tell them I wasn’t bad all the time? That there was one time I did something good?”

Jesus, was that a tear in the corner of his eye?

She pressed the plunger, kept looking at his eye, watched the light fade from it.

One.

TWENTY-ONE

One.

A bus, a plane, another bus. A Rust Belt city in east-central Ohio, immune to economic cycles because it had been in its own permanent recession ever since the end of the Second World War. A dingy SRO hotel, her drab room so small that the initials might as easily have stood for Standing Room Only as Single Room Occupancy.

And a minimum-wage job two blocks away, in a shop that sold rolling papers and recycled jeans. She wore the same basic outfit every day, loose jeans and a bulky sweater, and she didn’t put on makeup or lipstick, or do anything with her hair. She kept herself as unattractive as possible short of putting on weight or breaking out in pimples, but a certain number of guys hit on her anyway. Some guys were like that; the mere possibility that you might be the possessor of a vagina was all it took to arouse their interest.

She deflected any attention that came her way, meeting their gaze with a slack-jawed, bovine stare, missing the point of their innuendo. Some of them probably thought she was retarded. One way or the other, they all lost what minimal interest she’d inspired.

After work she’d pick up half a barbecued chicken or some Chinese take-out and eat in her room; when that got old she’d stop at a diner and sit in a rear booth reading the paper while she ate. Back in her room she read library books until it was bedtime. She went to bed early and didn’t get up until she had to. If this city was a place to hide, well, so was sleep.

It was strange. She’d felt uplifted after she left Hedgemont, felt she’d done something good, something transcendent. She’d given Alvin Kirkaby something he longed for, and something no one else could or would have given him — the liberation of a peaceful death.

And that made her feel good, in an unfamiliar way, and she enjoyed the feeling while it lasted.

But it didn’t last very long, and when it passed it gave way to a feeling of emptiness. Her life stretched out in front of her, and she saw herself going on like this forever, hooking up with men, sleeping with them, killing them, and moving on. What she had always enjoyed, what had indeed never failed to thrill her, all at once seemed unendurable.

So she worked in the daytime and read in the evenings and slept at night. And put everything on hold, waiting.

One afternoon she bought a phone. Prepaid, good for a couple of hours of calls. You could trace it back to the store where she bought it, but no further than that. They didn’t make her give a name, let alone show ID.

She took it back to her room, put it in a drawer. Three nights later she picked it up and made a call.

“Kimmie!”

“Hi, Rita.”

“I was wondering if I’d ever hear from you again.”

“Oh, I’m harder to shake than a summer cold.”

“It’s so good to hear your voice. Only the thing is—”

“You’ve got company.”

“How’d you know?”

“Is he cute? Has he got a nice cock?”

“Kimmie…”