Free The Joy of Killing by Harry MacLean Page A

I shake my head. My moment of stillness and silence is over. I see that the story needs to be finished before anyone, even the girl on the train, finds peace. As I am closing the window, I hear a loud tap, the sound of a key on paper. I say the girl’s name aloud. I’ve known it all these years. It’s lain like a crumpled flower somewhere in the fecund subconscious.

THE PROFESSOR

    I T ’ S TIME TO venture forth from my little warren. I need descend only one flight of stairs, to the bathroom in the middle of the hall. I think of the kitchen, but I’m neither hungry nor thirsty, and I’m not sure how many lights work. The rattling sound most certainly came from the kitchen, although the last time it seemed a little louder, a little closer, perhaps at the bottom of the stairs. I spot a broken stave leaning in a far corner. I walk over and pick it up. I swing at an imaginary animal scurrying across the floor, squeaking and belching, and catch it in the head as it leaps. It drops in a broken heap. I see I’ve caught a splinter in the web between my first two fingers, and blood has oozed onto my palm. Not good, if the thing is a blood seeker. I whack it in the head a couple more times, let the stave fall to the floor.
    Leaving the room might bring me around a little, but I dare not lose that elusive linear sense necessary to tell the story. Why peace can only come with understanding I don’t know. Perhaps in the end I’ll get that as well. I kick the chair with my foot. The girl on the train—so beautiful, so desperate, now floats free in my head, not in reproach but in yearning. What I wouldn’t give to change that story, to hold her hand and turn to her rather than away, into the night. You couldn’t handle it, I think. The point above all is to stay put together, isn’t it? What good can come if you end up scattered in pieces on the floor, a puppet whose strings have been cut? So you fuck up, so you’re on the run, so that’s life for most people. A little wisdom, late to come in life, brought you here, at last, and for that you should feel a little gratitude. Awaiting you now is the rest of the night on the train with the girl.
    When I sit down to resume typing I notice a bloody smear on the stack of fresh paper. I insert the sheet into the machine and spin the roller, until the top of the smear is right where the key hits. I tap out letters to see the effect: My second wife. Sally. Joseph. Blood tells the story, doesn’t it? I lick my palm. The images roil in my head, stimulated and freed up by the taste. I type the girl’s name into the red. It’s a stunning sight: Her name in blood. Next to Joseph, like they belonged together. What had become of them? Joseph had screeched to a breathless halt, while the two of us, the girl and I, sailed on. She struggled and fought and loved and lost and had grown so disconsolate by middle age that she let herself go so no man would want her. To no avail, though. Every fucked-up male was drawn to her. The need to take a life, to see someone’s blood flow from their corpus, to know the person’s very cessation of being resulted from a decision occurring in my brain, flowing out through my hands, abated somewhat as I grew older, but never completely. I type Willie’s name into the blood next to the girl’s. It’s obscene in a lovely way. I strike him through, and then type him in again, not so close this time. David arranged another meeting with Willie, again on the assurance that this time he would get us a girl. I remember the wet July heat boiling up from the summer sidewalk as we walked the few blocks to the edge of downtown where he lived in a rundown two-story yellow brick apartment building, the type found in every town over a few thousand, for drifters, ex-cons, any sort of misfit. Although I wondered how this guy could manage a girl for us, the idea of walking away never really materialized.