I
killed a man last night. I know that sounds evil and
macho and extraordinary, but it was really one of the
most mundane and embarrassing things I've ever done.
The more judgmental among you are formulating words
such as "murderer" in your heads now, and
recoiling a bit at the connotations. You're imagining
a handgun, a struggle before someone takes a bullet
in the heart perhaps, or five or six bullets pumped
into his back. "Murderer". It's a word
which for the narrow-minded has a lot of ready-made
images associated with it, just like
"virgin".
I'm
34 years old and I am about as ordinary, as dull,
a person as you could ever fear meeting. Well, I call
myself dull, and that might be the way you'd
characterize me if you met me and I told you about
myself, but the fact is I consider myself a valuable
person. I'm attentive. Probably the most significant
and most common detail I've noticed about most people
is that they are oblivious to the abundance of minute
facts and events that are bombarding us all every
second. Maybe that's a good thing, a necessary thing
for them. It makes life a little easier to deal with.
I'm
a bit of a nervous sort, and I think it has a lot to
do with the fact that I'm not able to screen out
sensations the way other people do. I walk down the
street, or I meet someone for the first time, and it
all feels like fireworks, things going off around me
everywhere. I've tried to calm myself, tried to lie
on my couch late at night in the dark, tried to
breathe slowly and feel comfortable, but I always end
up sensing the outside world seething and throbbing
around me.
The
first time I met Jeff I was bowled over. I wasn't
attracted to him but the strength of his character
was so intense that I could hardly speak. He said
hello and shook my hand and touched me casually on
the forearm. I stood there staring, blinked furiously
for a few seconds before I could utter a barely
audible grunt.
"I
don't think I've seen you in here before," Jeff
said.
I
regained some composure and eventually replied,
carefully, "No. I've been keeping to myself a
lot lately, not going out. I think the yuppies call
it 'cocooning'."
Jeff
laughed, touched me again on the arm. He looked
around the bar then, scouting a waitress or a friend,
and I took advantage of his inattention to watch him.
He wore a silk shirt, exquisite, which hung
naturally. His blond hair was impeccable, set in
place with gel but moving luxuriously as he turned
back to me and caught me staring. In the half-second
before he smiled and I looked away, I noticed that
his skin shone.
It
is not the absolute truth to say that I was not
attracted to him. A more accurate way of putting it
would be to say that I was determined not
to be attracted to him. I was here to escape the
rigors of my thesis research. The complications that
an alcohol-induced attraction could bring held no
appeal for me.
"What
are you drinking?" Jeff asked.
"Gin
and tonic," I said, and he held up two fingers
to the waitress as he told me that that was his drink
of choice, too.
"It's
the most beautiful of combinations," he said.
"The aroma is distinctive but subtle -- Jesus,
I'm starting to sound like one of those pompous
wine-tasters. I guess what I'm trying to say is that
it is simultaneously pure and luxurious. Transparent,
and complicated to just the right degree by the tonic
and the slice of lime and the squeeze of lime juice
which gives it just the right amount of texture.
Sorry, I'm babbling, and I'm not expressing myself
very well."
"No,
not at all, I think I understand what you mean,"
I said.
He
shook his head. Our drinks arrived and Jeff stirred
his and licked off the stick.
"Here's
to new faces and new adventures," he said,
clinking his glass against mine. We sipped.
"Ahhh,
delicious," he said. "So, why have you been
doing so much cocooning lately? Do you have a wife
and a dog and 2.37 kids at home, and do you all spend
your weekends in front of the tv?"
I
smiled.
"No,
no, not at all. I live alone and it's just that I've
been spending most of my time working on my thesis,
alternating between the library and my apartment. I'm
compiling a bibliography of Canadian mystery novels.
But I really don't want to talk about that. It's
pretty tedious work, really, and besides, the main
reason I came in here was to get away from all
that."
"Well,
that's a switch," Jeff said. "Most people
just come in here to get laid."
We
stood on opposite sides of the bed, pillows
symmetrically placed, bedspread as taut as a
trampoline, stood and watched each other undress. I
placed my clothing methodically on the chair but
Jeff's shirt and pants and underwear just disappeared
as he removed them and simply dropped them onto the
floor. I was surprised that someone who dressed so
carefully, undressed so carelessly. He put his watch
(a slender all-black Seiko) on the night-table, bent
over apparently to remove his socks, pulled the
covers down to reveal pristine sheets whose clinical
smell wafted to my nose, and then lay on his side
without covering up, facing me. I got into bed and
completed the symmetry.
I
remember a crazy kaleidoscope of details and images.
Tufts of hair of diminishing thickness on the inner
joints of toes from big to small ... Dry skin like
parchment on kneecaps ... His open palm cupping the
whole side of my bicep now ... The facts are really
quite simple and unalluring: we kissed, we fellated
each other, he held me for a while.
And
as he was turning to reach for something on his
night-table -- his watch? some matches? -- I turned
in the opposite direction, removed the handgun from
my inside jacket pocket, turned back exactly as he
did, and shot him in the nose.
If
you have gleaned from television and movies most of
what you know about what is vaguely referred to as
"violence", then you are really pretty
ignorant about the facts. I don't mean that the world
is not as violent a place as television might lead
you to believe, or that there is exaggerated
distortion, but rather that violence is more gruesome
for the victim and easier for the perpetrator than
the televised portrayal of the most blood-soaked
shooting by the coolest of killers could ever hope to
suggest.
For
example, I killed Jeff last night with one Winchester
115-grain jacketed hollowpoint bullet fired at
point-blank range from a SIG Sauer P226 9mm
semiautomatic handgun. The bullet left a hole about
the diameter of my index finger where his nose used
to be, expanded as it went through, and came out the
back of his head, leaving a hole about twice the size
of the one in his face. There was a lot of blood, and
some bone and brain exposed at the back. It was
nothing like those neat little pinpoints we are used
to seeing on tv. The sound, too, was closer to a pop
or a clack,
not that brash booming sound you hear when cops or
bad guys or innocent victims are gunned down on some
badly done show.
Jeff
probably died, as they say, instantly. His only
terror may have been the half-second when he turned
back to see that handgun barrel pointed directly at
him.
I
can state based on my own experience that there is no
great moral debate or hesitation when you kill
someone, and there is no incredulous shock, no
anguished panic afterwards. I had bought the gun six
weeks before with the express purpose of shooting
whoever my first lover would be. The decision to kill
had therefore been made in the most rational and
mundane of circumstances. I decided that I wanted to
have sex with a man. I decided that I also wanted to
kill that man. The anti-climactic events themselves
were just the sum on the other side of the equation.
As
Jeff lay there dead, I set the gun down on the bed
and got dressed. I put the gun back in my pocket, and
walked out of the room without looking back, closing
the door briskly behind me.
Some
of you will precipitously call me cold-blooded or
inhuman when I say that I then went to a nice Italian
café and had a delicious cappuccino. But please
remember: the decision had been made weeks before and
I felt no more agitated than I usually feel, say,
after watching a good movie.
Please
suppress your groans anticipating, apprehending,
tedium, as I prepare to tell you about my childhood.
There
are no cliché extreme facts to report, no accountant
father who routinely buggered me, no buxom mother who
pampered her pretty little boy, no younger brother
whose girlfriends giggled at the front door while I
puzzled over cosines in my bedroom upstairs.
I
don't remember much about my life before I started to
attend school. During an evening of shared gin and
tonics last month my mother told me that my father
had abandoned her and me when I was about 3 years
old, so that he could spend Christmas with his
girlfriend. My mother matter-of-factly got a job as a
waitress, and I started on my string of babysitters.
The
average of all my year-end averages through grade
school was 96 percent. I know that sounds high but I
was a fanatic for study, loved to memorize and absorb
facts. I remember studying for my physics final in
grade 10 by reading over and over again the passages
in the text about force and mass and power. I
eventually grew so familiar with chapters I had read
five or six times that I recognized turns of phrase
and anticipated formulae.
I
never had
any trouble with cosines.
I
had my first taste of alcohol during the first
weekend of my first term at university, some dreadful
whisky that everyone was downing straight to show
that they were hard drinkers. I never drank again for
six months when, on the first date I ever had, Sheila
introduced me to the concept of mix.
I
started university with the intention of majoring in
math, switched to philosophy and then English, and
eventually finished off with a degree in Canadian
studies. The average of my averages was 92 percent,
and I was conscious of my slippage.
And
now, of course, I am working on my master's thesis on
the much-neglected Canadian mystery novel. It's dull,
really, but it will be valuable to people who are
interested in such things. The idea of bibliography
is appealing, though: to produce a list of the titles
of all the mystery novels ever published in Canada. I
like the fact that the end result can be something
which is perfectly
comprehensive, a list in which absolutely nothing is
missed. That is a rare thing in life. For example,
there might have been a point, say, 30 years ago when
it would have been possible to summarize me,
to reduce me to a few choice sentences of
description. Since then, though, so much has
happened, so many small events, heartbreaks,
disappointments, brushes with people in everyday life
-- so much has happened that it would be impossible
to sum it all up now.
The
trick is to learn and to accept that everything is
arbitrary, that nothing is any more valuable or
desirable than anything else. Within that context you
make a few choices. I could have spent two years
searching out a passionate woman with integrity, got
married, found a job, and lived contentedly, even happily,
until I died: but I just could not be bothered. I
have been so busy scouring obscure periodicals and
formulating citations as precisely and consistently
as possible, that I only had time to buy the 9mm and
take one night off to get it all done. Later today I
will return to the library refreshed and dive back
into my research.
My
life has been an organized and uneventful one so far,
and I like it that way.