"How's the new roommate?"
"Fantastic," I said, twirling a fat accretion of ramen onto my fork. "I hide from him, and we rarely talk."
Adam had moved in with me. Ruth was asking about him.
"And...how's your new girlfriend?"
"Would it be wrong to say 'better than my old one?' Assuming that were true?"
That hair, the exploded landmine of copper springs, shifted during a pensive head-tilt. "Well, everything you say is wrong."
After turning a six-year-old boy into a man so I could punch him to death, and this after killing his family, I had nightmares. Rather, the same nightmare.
"Jeremy?"
The first one, at the top of the wish, the kid calling out for his older brother. His last moment as a child. His second-to-last moment alive.
A wish. And that's how I used it.
A couple more cranks on the fork handle dislodged the ramen pile's nucleus, ripped out the squiggly noodle-brain (which I ate in a single, jammed-in bite). "He had to die," I explained, bringing my bowl to my lips, tipping broth and bloated stragglers into my mouth. "What parents could safely adopt him? Plus, he would always be trying to kill me, I imagine. So I. Well, you know."
After lunch, I rested my head on Ruth's lap, fully extending my legs as I occupied her couch like a luxuriating prince of old. Kyle haunted my sleep. Remained a boy there.
"This is really affecting you," Ruth observed. "I always knew. Or suspected. That there was more to you than just...the Greg on display."
"What?"
"I can rephrase that. I think you might really have a soul. Or at least enough compunction to evade sociopathy."
"Much improved, thank you."
She placed her hand flat on my chest. Her other hand, a turtle sampling different sections of grass, slow-motion tousled my hair.
"You beat up that Cody guy?"
"Yes."
"Good. I hated how that transpired with him in your room. I'm so happy for you."
Happy times came at a price. Mainly for the jewelry store that was missing an earring and necklace set. A week of nightmares featuring Kyle's plea for Jeremy summoned a machete-swinging desperation--my shame had been hacked apart. I was ready for human interaction to distract me, perhaps comfort me, but introducing more than perfunctory conversation into the ecosystem that was Greg and Adam would have--in nutria-like fashion--destroyed the levees keeping out disdain, so I went to secure my Plan "B," my backup, first.
"Hey Prophet."
"Hey Lucy."
We stood on her front porch.
"I heard you fought Mike the night he got killed."
"Correct," I said, steeling my tone and expression against the startle of Lucy being brave enough to raise that topic. "I was angry because of what he had said about me and you."
"Um, okay," she said, her eyes avoiding mine. "I will pretend that was somehow relevant before telling you...that you shouldn't come here anymore. We can't talk anymore."
I puzzled over this prohibition. "Because, in your culture, you continue honoring the brother's wishes?"
Confusion grappled with insult for control of Lucy's face. "My culture?"
"Um...Egypt...culture."
"My parents are Dutch and Irish, you moronic piece of crap," Lucy explained, then explained further, "you're the only one who called Mike 'Egyptian.' Did you know that? How he was patient with you because ‘not everyone gets to be smart?’ And did you know? That the bullets meant for you--"
I put my hands up to block her self-indulgence. "Geez, you said we can't talk," I reminded, turning to walk off the porch, to flee the eyebrow filler of judgment.
"Loser," she said.
I'll try that again later, I told myself, checking the bag on my front passenger seat. Because it was time for Plan "A."
I knocked. I still loved her. I held her gift with the reverence and trembling of a man who has been chosen, in the third act, to safeguard the antidote for a worldwide plague.
Ruth opened the door. I held up the fancy-looking box.
"You can't buy my forgiveness. You can't bribe me into liking you again. This 'breaking up a hundred times' bullshit waveform of stress and more stress--"
Her t-shirt went to her mid-thigh. All I saw were bare legs and my future.
"It's...expediting," I told her, perhaps interrupting. "Filling the cracks and gaps that my words can't reach."
She grabbed the box, opened it. Saw jewelry priced beyond any car I could ever finance. Her eyes farther opened. Her lips wrestled with a smile.
"You can touch them and wear them and use them on multiple occasions. Other people can compliment them. You can leave them as a bequest. A speech from me? Middling in the moment, ineffectual in memory. And dwarfed by whatever subsequent crap I will definitely do. So. Ruth. You are holding my apology. A necklace...and earrings."
Diamond facets splintered Ruth's attention. She took a few seconds to respond.
"I can't accept this. I can't accept you--"
I floated. First up and away, then down and toward her. Awe stapled her gaze to me as she allowed me to drift past her, into her living room.
"Greg--"
I set my feet on the floor then hugged her, suffocating any protest, any terms and conditions. Ruth squeezed back, using all her tiny strength as if every second we'd been apart could be wrung from my middle then used again.
We went back to our old routine. Back to movies in place of sleep. Back to full-contact raillery and mocking the world. Back to the couch with my head on her lap. The weeks had been glorious.
"What if other people from that basement church come after you?"
My ramen-belly gurgled. "I’ll hit them until they die."
"Don’t they have a spellbook? What if they manage to enslave their own Byron?"
I sat up then moved over, adding a seat cushion’s width between us.
"Why don’t you believe in me?"
"I do. I do. I’m only...anticipating scenarios. For example, what if Bjorn Prime is real, and he wants revenge?"
"He was asleep during all the stuff I did."
"Greg--"
"I’ll fuck him up, too. Listen. This mumbo-jumbo had zero purchase on my imagination before, and I will not force myself to think about it now, okay?"
"Okay, Greg."
"If my head survived your grandma's rolling pin, and my neck survived that big German knife your mom bought--"
"Yeah, but I wasn't vigorously trying to kill you. We were...demonstrating your super toughness."
Ruth on her stomach, sobbing and sweat-drenched, exhausted from bashing my face with an eight-pound thunder egg. I talked around it.
"Yes. And absolutely no resentment for my past wrongdoing got snuck in for any of that."
Ruth pondered my sarcasm. Then she laughed. "True."
I got up off the couch, held out my hand.
"We should nap together."
We went to her bed, the all-forgiving den of warmth. Our nap cradled me in its arms then sprinted across fifteen hours, dropping me in a field of wailing robot babies. I turned off the alarm.
"You should quit today," Ruth said, her hair a tangle of red lightning and dreams.
"Might happen," I said, lying. Because I really needed the pension.
Tammy talked on a cell phone, crying in front of other people in the break room. During this unadulterated display, I built no facade of civil inattention. Instead, my focus became a razor, a tunnel, as I fought to eavesdrop through the din of TV and competing conversations. As I chopped and snorted her public pain.
"It's that Amber woman. She's so mean. I know she thinks I'm a joke."
Tammy paused her whimpering to shove a spoonful--a bestial glob--of rice pudding into her mouth. Tears and snot undoubtedly seasoned that bite. And the next.
"She talks to me like I'm less than human, and it's allowed, but if I treated her the same, I'd be terminated."
Tammy's shirt was pink, pink and the size of a titan's bubble gum. I studied her with the intensity one might expect from a first encounter, my stare just melting any consideration for what she (or others observing me) might prefer I do with my eyes or neck position. I battled through my own unease, rarely blinked.
A noise, a cleaver smacking a butcher's block, cut through the ambient clutter, shattering my concentration. I swiveled my vision around the room to find a source but failed to confirm anything. When the noise repeated, I was looking at the big-faced girl...whose bulging eye burst, leaked blood.
That almost figures, I thought.
Tammy's shirt was pink and red. While she looked down at the mysterious color change, pudding escaped her mouth in a dribble. Wordlessly, she set her phone on the table then dropped her spoon on the floor.
A ninja. Rather, a man wearing a black ninja costume and ballistic goggles aimed a suppressed pistol at the break room ladies. Before anyone could scream, before anyone knew it was a situation that warranted screaming, the shooter stepped closer to the table, firing at the human backstops who were too unathletic for a miracle to happen. When the bullets hit, when the victims did begin to groan and shriek with pain, fear, and surprise, each instance was beaten back to silence by a further clapping of gunfire.
"Owee," one lady said.
The bodies randomly posed for death; one fell backward, head and shoulder blades on the floor, legs up on the bench. Another died slumped over while sitting at the table, forehead resting on cross-armed support like when students nap at a desk.
The Shooter, no yoke of hesitation, walked the room to give everybody an extra bullet through the skull. I wasn't sure, but thought maybe in doing so, he had solved the Salesman's Problem. Eyeing his follow-through on each individual life, I contemplated his courtesy, how he let me watch the culling of background people without forcing my involvement, without his bullets marking me as Break Room Lady Adjacent. I pictured the Soup Man, absent that day, stepping back from the eyepiece of the same telescope that normally observes him eating. He and his goblin overseer look at each other, converge their nods in unison. That really could have been him, and I partook in their relief.
An obviously fake voice addressed me. "You can go."
Who would spare me? I wondered. The Shooter had turned away, heading for the offices. "I need to get as many as I can before the cops get here," he said. Then, pausing, he grunted in a very conspicuous manner. A tightly-strained, rising-pitch vocalization that ended on a sharp blast of nasal air. Which meant.
Adam had just farted.
Which meant.
Adam had just killed eight people.
"Wait. I know that it's you," I told him. "So take me with, as a hostage. I can help."
In his head, Adam bargained with the pros and cons for a few seconds. "Alright. Come on," he said. He grabbed me by the arm then led me down the hallway.
"Go to Amber's," I whispered.
The sane, sensible coworker. The invisible roommate. The handsome workplace gunman. I couldn't pick a favorite. Each persona impressed me.
On our way to Amber's office, serendipity crossed our path.
"Ooh. Get her, please," I urged.
"You," Adam said, pointing the gun at Phyllis, "are coming with us. Or you will die right now, a bullet through your fuckin' heart."
Phyllis began to shake. Hysterical sobbing erupted from her entire body, many decibels above good taste. She dared to believe that her life--her life--among the thousands per day reaped by the blind swing of a scythe merited tears.
"And you other two?"
Adam acknowledged the men who had been walking on either side of Phyllis. The men who should have done more than just raise their hands in a palms-out, unbidden surrender.
Bang, bang. Two headshots, two dead mail room automatons. Two dead fantasies involving never-practiced heroism, like tackling the guy with the gun. The next anniversary, the next grandchild, the next holiday get-together with family, all taken away as a result of walking with Phyllis (an arguably deserved outcome, therefore). At least one of the guys’ "in memoriam" pictures tacked to a bulletin board at work would feature him holding up a fish he’d caught, I predicted.
Phyllis completed our trio as we arrived at Amber's door. Adam turned the knob without knocking.
Amber's wrinkle-free everything, her primly composed lines and edges, remained unmussed when confronted by two hostages and a gun. She closed a filing cabinet drawer.
"We can't give raises until next year," she said. "And I will have to call the police."
Not a smidgen of doubt corrupted her belief that the gun-holding peon would stop his little plan. The expectancy offended even me.
"Shut the blind," Adam said.
"Are you going to kill me if I don't?"
"I'm going to kill Greg if he doesn't."
I pulled on the cord to lower the window blind, but the contraption refused any outside influence, and different angles and levels of torque failed to improve the situation. The amount of time everyone allowed for me to bungle this activity was confounding.
"Typical," Phyllis said, through the muzzle of a quiet sob.
So I grazed her jaw with a wrist-powered slap. The back of her head slammed against the wooden office door, and she collapsed like when a dress on a hanger misses the valet rod.
"Fuck you," I said, stomping on her mouth. No more captious diarrhea came out.
With that necessary step completed, I lowered the blinds. Adam and Amber both stared at me.
"You murdered ten people in, like, two minutes. Are you judging me? Adam?"
Amber looked at him. A mob of cries and thudding feet ebbed and flowed outside the office. Adam's handiwork had been discovered. He held a pistol an inch from my face.
"Funny guy. Whose brain will become a fine mist if he doesn't start violating the boss on her desk."
That's twice now, seeing me but not me. I thought about Devin tugging on his own limp wang in that failed assault on Mick's anus. I thought about myself trying to jerk off to Amber once upon a time. Because of my bulletproofness, there wasn’t a real threat, but excluding that, in a timeline without Byron-power, would I have allowed someone to murder me for the sake of protecting Amber’s vagina from a round peg/round hole situation? It's not like she had mercy for me, stupid fucking--
"No!" Amber screeched, lunging for the door.
Adam swatted her across the cheek. He mashed her face with his open hand, pushing her toward me.
I grabbed her by the nape. Her legs buckled as I forced her to kneel.
"So this is you, dropped in the dirt," I taunted.
I plucked the pins out of her hair then swirled my hand on her scalp to conjure a mess. Tears, mucus, and a bit of manhandling had scuffed away the indestructible veneer--the doll was no longer mint condition. The rage in her eyes beamed a phony, unenforceable threat, accentuating just how helpless she was.
"He wants me to pick between raping you and dying. So you can't say 'yes' to me."
I lifted her by the suit jacket then slammed her onto the desk. I stood between her legs, yanking them toward me to slide her butt against my crotch. Adam laughed. Amber screamed, so I muzzled her with a cupped hand. A hammerfist "bop" on each thigh calmed her thrashing.
"Hey. Both of you. Are you ready?"
The shriek inside Amber's throat would have turned the city into a blast shadow diorama if not trapped behind my hand.
"Quiet. Because this can happen with or without your teeth," I said.
She resigned. A whisper of pneuma, defiance's aeriform corpse, had been eeked from her nostrils. I swatted her on the hip, tossing her into Adam, which knocked him down. My restraint actively contributes to the number of good moments experienced by humanity. They grunted from their two-person jumble in the corner, their weakness to blame for anything that happened.
I pulled off Adam's right-hand glove to wear for myself (frowning at, but choosing to persevere against, the warm, moist interior). With my borrowed cover, I grabbed the pistol off the carpet, put the suppressor against my roommate's temple, then pulled the trigger.
I shot Phyllis's forehead, dissuaded myself from pulping her face in my fingers.
Amber--deposed, a thing I had thrown on the floor--glared, locking two death rays on me as I stood over her. She breathed with an increasing forcefulness, as though building to a moment.
Five bullets in the chest. And that was the end of her. I dropped the gun onto Adam's leg then re-gloved his hand. For destroying the office villain and improving dozens of lives by extension, I would receive no credit. For increasing the world's beauty by sending Phyllis to a mortuary makeup artist, then to a grave, I would also be unheralded. When the next pack of escapees ran past the door, I followed them outside. Door shut, please, on your way out. Chapter Seventeen