The Murder, Ethan Canter [debian ebook reader .txt] 📗

THE MURDER
by Ethan Canter

Everything is forever, and nothing, in its own way, is also forever. The one is the beginning point and the other the end point of eternity – only it’s unclear which is which – and even more unclear if it matters. It probably doesn’t matter, he thinks.

1
Looking down, he follows the drops of blood falling on the ground up to the soaked red stain on his shirt. He pulls his coat back. On his left side, just above his belt, his white shirt is a red mess. He touches the spot. A surge of pain rips through him. He muffles a scream against his shoulder and digs his head into the side of the building.

2
The fluorescent lights buzz and hiss. His shoes squeak against the shiny, white tiled floor as he drags himself up and down the aisles. Something for the pain. Something to stay awake. Something to stop the bleeding.
The man at the counter doesn’t look at him – there’s blood on his hands, on the boxes of pills and the packages of bandages. He motions at a bottle behind the counter.

3
He chews the pills as he walks. He slips into an alley. He opens his shirt. Black-red blood oozes slowly in pulses from the small hole in his side. His eyes water as he throws up the pills. He leans against the dirty wall, his breathing fast, shallow – each breath a stabbing pain. More pills, this time washed down with the alcohol. A sudden, though only momentary sense of clarity.
Another drink from the bottle for strength and to calm his hands. He opens his shirt. He grits his teeth. He holds back another retch. He sprays the antiseptic on the wound and it stings all the way inside him. He pulls his shirt up and grips it between his teeth. He reaches the spray around his side and douses the hole in his back where the bullet entered. He drops the can. It makes a dead clank and rolls away. He opens the bottle of blood coagulating gel, scoops it out and with his fingers putties it into the wound. The bottle cracks as it hits the ground. Another drink. The gauze pads stick to the gel and he wraps a long bandage around his abdomen.
He buttons his shirt. He closes his coat. He wipes his hands on the paper bag and lets it drop. Another drink.
He stumbles out of the alley. Headlights pass in the street. A light rain muffles and merges the sounds of the city into a flat din.
For a moment everything’s alright again. The pain’s numbed and turned into a hot ache. People pass in the street, but it’s evening, it’s dark, and it’s beginning to rain, and no one stops to notice him. But as the glare from a streetlight brings out a face, then another, and another, his mind collapses onto a single thought – I’ve been murdered.

4
Jerry had a face like a fist – meaty, dented, not made for the pleasure of eyes. “It’s what God gave me, so you can take your complaints up with Him,” he’d often say. He didn’t believe in God. Or rather, his ethics were Earth-born – he couldn’t concede to a higher set of rules any more than he could to another man’s. “It’s my life. I’m the one who lives it, and who dies it. So I’ll be deciding how,” he says. But for all his masculine and individualistic posturing he’s still just another weak and scared and defenceless soul – another bundle of flesh and blood and bone bound and tethered to a mind more ignorant of itself than the world around it.
“I don’t buy it,” he says.
“Buy what?” Jerry says, pinching grease out of a pockmark in his cheek.
“You didn’t come from nothing. Life’s inherited – you didn’t make it. And it’s been around a hell of a lot longer than you – and it’ll still be here long after you’re gone.”
“Your point?”
“My point...you can say anything you want, but so what. You can say red is blue, you can say the sun goes round the Earth, you can say God is dead – you can say whatever you want, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
“You want me to prove it?” Jerry says, reaching across the table.
“It’s not proof if you have to impose it. And either way, proof’s just dogma – dogma derived from the same course of explanations used to concrete the epiphany that bore it.”
“What?”
He stares at Jerry. His ugliness is inescapable, inexcusable – and all the more so when he displays his ignorance so sharply. And his ignorance, inevitably, is all the more unforgivable because he’s ugly.
“Speak English,” Jerry says, and lights a cigarette.
“Forget it,” he says, turning his head to the window and letting his eyes wander into the cold street.
“Hey!”
“Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter. Just forget it.”
“You think I’m so stupid I don’t know you’re calling me stupid?”
“I’m not calling you stupid, Jerry.”
“The hell you’re not.”
“Look,” he says, tearing his eyes from the street and meeting Jerry’s angry glare. “Look, I’m not saying you’re stupid. I’m not even saying you’re wrong – it’s your life, believe what you want.”
“Believe what I want?” Jerry says, exasperated. “Believe what I want?” he repeats, inflating himself. “Believe what I want while you sit there with the truth!”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.”
“Sure it is. And I oughta punch you in the mouth for it.”
“Look,” he says, putting his hands on the table. “I’m saying believe what you want – we all believe what we want. But your words are empty. I mean, everyone’s words are empty – words, just words themselves are empty. They’re just words. They don’t mean anything. They point to the things they mean. So sure, go ahead, tell me your life’s yours and you choose how to live it. But don’t expect me to believe it just because you can say it. And if you’re going to prove something to me,” he adds, “just remember that proof has to effect and alter my perception, not barbarously elicit agreement. So, yeah, I don’t believe what you’re saying. But believe what you want. And now I’m going to look out the window again.”
It’s a thin and cold light from the sun. The street looks like frozen rock. Dirty cars drive past dragging spewing whirlwinds of exhaust behind them. People rush everywhere – rush from the inside of vehicles to the inside of shops, from the inside of shops to the inside of other shops, to the inside of vehicles again, to offices, appointments, apartments.
“Well...what do you believe?” Jerry says slowly, offering the question in place of the apology he doesn’t know how to make.
He turns from the window and stares Jerry in the eyes again.
“I believe that I lack the insight to know what’s worth believing,” he says.
“Why don’t you just believe what you want to believe – what suits you, what makes you happy, I mean?”
“That’s reductive. It’s a coping method – half denial, half delusion.”
“What’s delusional about believing what’s good for you?” Jerry asks, his off-handed tone meaning to suggest that he understood, but the question itself once more exposing his ignorance.
“Nothing, if you know what’s good for you,” he says, raising his eyebrow, hoping his cryptic response will sway Jerry from venturing into yet another conversation destined to ignite his frustrations for disrupting the foundation of his ignorance.
“Exactly. But don’t try to tell me you don’t know what’s good for you.”
“I don’t.”
“Damn it! How can you say that? Who else is gonna know but you?”
“Exactly. But how can I trust what I know – or what I think I know?”
“Wait...I know what that is, I know what that one is.” Jerry searches the empty bottles and garage-girl calendars in his mind, unconsciously chewing at the inside of his lip. “Nihilism!” he says with a sudden burst of triumph, sitting up straight and tall and looking around the coffee shop. “That’s nihilism.”
“If you’re a sophist. But if you’re a nihilist it’s just the fact of the matter.”
“What?”
“Nevermind.”
“Look,” Jerry says, lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of the last, “I’ll give you that no one really, really knows – maybe there’s a God, maybe there’s not – maybe there’s ten. But we’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna find out someday. So you can’t just stop living. I mean, I don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow, but I’d be a fool to let that stop me from living today. You see what I mean?”
You’re an oaf, Jerry. Your head’s full of newspapers and radio talk. How am I supposed to listen to you when you don’t even listen to yourself? But don’t get me wrong, I do want to know what you think – sincerely, I do. But...but how are you ever going to tell me what you think when you don’t even know what you think? He laughs to himself – then stops, and curling his brow tries to figure out if he laughed out loud or just in his head. Jerry takes a slow drag on his cigarette and looks at him through slit eyes. He must have laughed out loud. But that only makes him laugh again.
“What are you laughing at?” Jerry says, trying to hide his insecurity.
“You, Jerry,” he says provokingly. But then immediately cuts in with, “You’re right. You’re totally right.”
Oblivious to his sarcasm, Jerry nods his head and says, with seriousness, “I know. You gotta live in the present. The present’s all we got. Tomorrow’s always a day away, and you can’t change the past. All we got is now. And it doesn’t matter if God, or the law of gravity, or whatever made it that way. The thing is, that’s the way it is.” Jerry rubs his cigarette out in the ashtray and leans across the table. “But when you figure that out then you got the advantage.” He ends in a whisper, and with a wink.
“Advantage?”
“Sure. You know what the game is. You know the score. Suddenly you see that ninety-eight percent of people don’t have a clue what’s going on. They live hand-to-mouth, day-to-day. They believe everything they’re told. They never question anything. But hey,” he adds, leaning back and shrugging his shoulders, “that’s how it goes – it’s their loss, not yours.”
“Jerry?”
“Yeah.”
“I need a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“I need a gun.”

5
Into her mouth. The wine – easy, promising so much. Her hair – I know that I used to love it, I know that I used to make it look like her, like my loved idea of her, like – not just like hair. I know that things used to be...different. He looks down. He looks at the table. Emptied plates, crumbs, a drop of orange sauce and a few red stains from the wine on the white tablecloth. She coughs, intentionally. The waiter clears their table. She coughs again. He stares at the tablecloth.
“What are you thinking about?” she says.
If only you wanted to know, he thinks – then quickly wipes his mouth in case his sneer wasn’t only in his mind.
She taps her glass with the flat side of her fingernails. He looks up. He stares at her face, but avoids her eyes.
“So,” she says, taking a dramatic sip of her wine, “what are you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“You mean