He stepped away from the wall and turned, positioning himself directly in front of the door. Then he kicked it, heel-first. It opened at once.
He entered shooting. He did not aim and fire. He just fired. Let it express itself.
The walls were down. This was the first thing he saw in the wobbly light. He was looking into a sizable space with wall rubble everywhere. He tried to spot the subject. There was a shredded sofa, unoccupied, with a stationary bike nearby. He saw a heavy metal desk, battleship vintage, covered with papers. He saw the remains of a kitchen and bathroom, with brutally empty spaces where major appliances had stood. There was a portable orange toilet from a construction site, seven feet tall, mud-smoked and dented. He saw a coffee table with an unlit candle in a saucer and a dozen coins scattered around an Mk.23 military pistol with a matte black finish and an overall length of nine and a half inches, equipped with a laser-aiming module.
The toilet door opened and a man came out. Eric fired again, indifferently, distracted by the man's appearance.
He was barefoot in jeans and T-shirt, with a bath towel over his head and shoulders, draped in the manner of a prayer shawl.
"What are you doing here?"
"That's not the question. The question," Eric said, "is yours to answer. Why do you want to kill me?"
"No, that's not the question. That's too easy to be the question. I want to kill you in order to count for something in my own life. See how easy?"
He walked over to the table and picked up the weapon. Then he sat on the sofa, hunched forward, half lost in the towel shroud.
"You're not a reflective man. I live consciously in my head," he said. "Give me a cigarette."
"Give me a drink."
"Do you recognize me?"
He was slight and unshaven and looked absurd trying to manage such a formidable weapon. The gun dominated him, even in the drama of the towel on his head.
"I can't see you clearly."
"Sit. We'll talk."
Eric didn't want to sit on the exercise bike. The confrontation would crumble into farce. He saw a molded plastic chair, the desk chair, and took it to the coffee table.
"Yes, I'd like that. Sit and talk," he said. "I've had a long day. Things and people. Time for a philosophical pause. Some reflection, yes."
The man fired a shot into the ceiling. It startled him. Not Eric; the other, the subject.
"You're not familiar with that weapon. I've fired that weapon. It's a serious weapon. Whereas this," he said, wagging the revolver in his hand. "I'm thinking of installing a shooting range in my apartment."
"Why not your office? Line them up and shoot them."
"You know the office. Is that right? You've been in the office."
"Tell me who you think I am."
The awfulness of his need, the half-pandering expectancy made it clear that Eric's next word, or the one after, could be his last. They faced each other across the table. It almost didn't occur to him that he could shoot first. Not that he knew whether there was a bullet left in the chamber.
He said, "I don't know. Who are you?"
The man took the towel off his head. This meant nothing to Eric. There was the high forehead. He saw the scarified hair, hanging in unwashed strips, thin and limp. "Maybe if you told me your name."
"You wouldn't know my name."
"I know names more than faces. Tell me your name."
"Benno Levin."
"That's a phony name."
The man was a little stunned to hear this. "It's phony. It's fake."
He was rattled and embarrassed.
"It's fake. It isn't real. But I think I recognize you now. You were at the cash machine outside a bank sometime after noon."
"You saw me."
"You looked familiar. I didn't know why. Maybe you used to work for me. Hate me. Want to kill me. Fine."
"Everything in our lives, yours and mine, has brought us to this moment."
"Fine. I could use a tall cold beer about now."
For all his haggardness, his stringiness, the ash of despair, there was a light in the subject's eye. He found encouragement in the thought that Eric had recognized him. Not recognized so much as simply seen. Seen and found linkage, faintly, on a crowded street. It was nearly lost inside the desperate bearing of the man, an attentiveness that wasn't feral or deadly.
"How old are you? I'm interested."
"Do you think people like me can't happen?"
"How old?"
"We happen. Forty-one."
"A prime number."
"But not an interesting one. Or did I turn forty-two, which is possible, because I don't keep track, because why should I?"
The wind was blowing through the halls. He looked chilled and put the towel back on his head, the ends falling over his shoulders.
"I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint
Augustine. And herein lies my sickness."
"That's a start. That's a crucial self-realization," Eric said.
"I'm not talking about myself. I'm talking about you. Your whole waking life is a self-contradiction. That's why you're engineering your own downfall. Why are you here? That's the first thing I said to you when I came out of the toilet."
"I noticed the toilet. It's one of the first things I noticed. What happens to your waste?"
"There's a hole below the fixture. I knocked a hole in the floor. Then I positioned the toilet so that one hole fits over the other."
"Holes are interesting. There are books about holes."
"There are books about shit. But we want to know why you'd willingly enter a house where there's someone inside who's prepared to kill you."
"All right. Tell me. Why am I here?"
"You have to tell me. Some kind of unexpected failure. A shock to your self-esteem."
Eric thought about this. Across the table the man's head was lowered and he held the weapon between his knees, using both hands to grip it. The stance was patient and thoughtful.
"The yen. I couldn't figure out the yen."
"The yen."
"I couldn't chart the yen."
"So you brought everything down."
"The yen eluded me. This had never happened. I became halfhearted."
"This is because you have half a heart. Give me a cigarette."
"I don't smoke cigarettes."
"The huge ambition. The contempt. I can list the things. I can name the appetites, the people. Mistreat some, ignore some, persecute others. The self-totality. The lack of remorse. These are your gifts," he said sadly, without irony.
"What else?"
"Funny feeling in your bones."
"What?"
"Tell me if I'm wrong."
"What?"
"Intuition of early death."
"What else?"
"What else. Secret doubts. Doubts you could never acknowledge."
"You know some things."
"I know you smoke cigars. I know everything that's ever been said or written about you. I know what I see in your face, after years of study."
"You worked for me. Doing what?"
"Currency analysis. I worked on the baht."
"The baht is interesting."
"I loved the baht. But your system is so microtimed that I couldn't keep up with it. I couldn't find it. It's so infinitesimal. I began to hate my work, and you, and all the numbers on my screen, and every minute of my life."
"One hundred satang to the baht. What's your real name?"
"You wouldn't know it."
"Tell me your name."
He sat back and looked away. Telling his name seemed to strike him as an essential defeat, the most intimate failure of character and will, but also so inevitable there was no point resisting.
"Sheets. Richard Sheets."
"Means nothing to me."
He said these words into the face of Richard Sheets. Means nothing to me. He felt a trace of the old stale pleasure, dropping an offhand remark that makes a person feel worthless.
So small and forgettable a thing that spins such disturbance.
"Tell me. Do you imagine that I stole ideas from you? Intellectual property"
"What does anyone imagine? A hundred things a minute. Whether I imagine a thing or not, it's real to me. I have syndromes where they're real, from Malaysia for example. The things I imagine become facts. They have the time and space of facts."
"You're forcing me to be reasonable. I don't like that."
"I have severe anxieties that my sex organ is receding into my body."
"But it's not."
"Shrinking into my abdomen."
"But it's not."
"Whether it is or not, I know it is."
"Show me."
"I don't have to look. There are folk beliefs. There are epidemics that happen. Men in the thousands, in real fear and pain."
He closed his eyes and fired a shot into the floorboards between his feet. He didn't open his eyes until the report stopped vibrating through the room.
"All right. People like you can happen. I understand this. I believe it. But not the violence. Not the gun. The gun is all wrong. You're not a violent man. Violence is meant to be real, based on real motives, on forces in the world that what. That make us want to defend ourselves or take aggressive action. The crime you want to commit is cheap imitation. It's a stale fantasy. People do it because other people do it. It's another syndrome, a thing you caught from others. It has no history."
"It's all history." He said, "The whole thing is history. You are foully and berserkly rich. Don't tell me about your charities."
"I have no charities."
"I know this."
"You don't resent the rich. That's not your sensibility"
"What's my sensibility?"
"Confusion. This is why you're unemployable."
"Y?
"Because you want to kill people."
"That's not why I'm unemployable."
"Then why?"
"Because I stink. Smell me."
"Smell me," Eric said.
The subject thought about this.
"Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others. In the old tribes the chief who destroyed more of his property than the other chiefs was the most powerful."
"What else?"
"You have everything to live and die for. I have nothing and neither. That's another reason to kill you."
"Richard. Listen."
"I want to be known as Benno."
"You're unsettled because you feel you have no role, you have no place. But you have to ask yourself whose fault this is. Because in fact there's very little for you to hate in this society."
This made Benno laugh. His eyes went slightly wild and he looked around him, shaking and laughing. The laughter was mirthless and disturbing and the shaking increased. He had to put the weapon on the table so he could laugh and shake freely.
Eric said, "Think."
"Think."
"Violence needs a cause, a truth."
He was thinking of the bodyguard with the scarred face and air of close combat and the hard squat Slavic name, Danko, who'd fought in wars of ancestral blood. He was thinking of the Sikh with the missing finger, the driver he'd glimpsed when he shared a taxi with Elise, briefly, much earlier in the day, in the life, a time beyond memory nearly. He was thinking of Ibrahim Hamadou, his own driver, tortured for politics or religion or clan hatreds, a victim of rooted violence driven by the spirits of his enemies' forebears. He was even thinking of Andre Petrescu, the pastry assassin, all those pies in the face and the blows he took in return.
Finally he thought of the burning man and imagined himself back at the scene, in Times Square, watching the body on fire, or in the body, was the body, looking out through gas and flame.
"There's nothing in the world but other people," Benno said.
He was having trouble speaking. The words exploded from his face, not loud so much as impulsive, blurted under stress.
"I had this thought one day. It was the thought of my life. I'm surrounded by other people. It's buy and sell. It's let's have lunch. I thought look at them and look at me. Light shines through me on the stre I'm what's the word, pervious to visible light."
He spread his arms wide.
"I thought all these other people. I thought how did they get to be who they are. It's banks and car parks. It's airline tickets in their computers. It's restaurants filled with people talking. It's people signing the merchant copy. It's people taking the merchant copy out of the leather folder and then signing it and separating the merchant copy from the customer copy and putting their credit card in their wallet. This alone could do it. It's people who have doctors who order tests for them. This alone," he said. "I'm helpless in their system that makes no sense to me. You wanted me to be a helpless robot soldier but all I could be was helpless."
Eric said, "No."'
"It's women's shoes. It's all the names they have for shoes. It's all those people in the park behind the library, talking in the sun."
"No. Your crime has no conscience. You haven't been driven to do it by some oppressive social force. How I hate to be reasonable. You're not against the rich. Nobody's against the rich. Everybody's ten seconds from being rich. Or so everybody thought. No. Your crime is in your head. Another fool shooting up a diner because because."
He looked at the Mk.23 lying on the table.
"Bullets flying through the walls and floor. So useless and stupid," he said. "Even your weapon is a fantasy. What is it called?"
The subject looked hurt and betrayed.
"What's the attachment that abuts the trigger guard? What is it called? What does it do?"
"All right. I don't have the manhood to know these names. Men know these names. You have the experience of manhood. I can't think that far ahead. It's all I can do to be a person."
"Violence needs a burden, a purpose."
He pressed the muzzle of his gun, Eric did, against the palm of his left hand. He tried to think clearly. He thought of his chief of security flat on the asphalt, a second yet left in his life. He thought of others down the years, hazy and nameless. He felt an enormous remorseful awareness. It moved through him, called guilt, and strange how soft the trigger felt against his finger.
"What are you doing?"
"I don't know. Maybe nothing," he said.
He looked at Benno and squeezed the trigger. He realized the gun had one round left just about the time it fired, the briefest instant before, way too late to matter. The shot blew a hole in the middle of his hand.
He sat head down, out of ideas, and felt the pain. The hand went hot. It was all scald and flash. It seemed separate from the rest of him, pervertedly alive in its own little subplot. The fingers curled, middle finger twitching. He thought he could feel his pressure drop to shock level. Blood ran down both sides of the hand and a dark discoloration, a scorch mark, began to spread across the palm.
He shut his eyes against the pain. This made no sense but then it did in a way, intuitively, as a gesture of concentration, his direct involvement in the action of painreducing hormones.
The man across the table was folded over in his shroud. There seemed nothing left for him, anywhere, that might be worth doing or thinking about. Words fell out of the towel, or sounds, and he held one hand over the other, the bent hand pressing the still, the flat, the other hand, in identification and pity.
There was pain and there was suffering. He wasn't sure if he was suffering. He was sure Benno was suffering. Eric watched him apply a cold compress to the ravaged hand. It wasn't a compress and it wasn't cold but they agreed unspokenly to use this term for whatever palliative effect it might have.
The echo of the shot rang electrically through his forearm and wrist.
Benno knotted the compress caringly under the thumb, two handkerchiefs he'd spent some time spiraling together. At the lower forearm was a tourniquet he'd employed, a rag and pencil arrangement.
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