The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

‘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.