Know My Name

PART I

He had stopped growing but he still looked like a child, and in his suffering, he felt hungry.

He wore a full black jumpsuit with a gold zipper and a large gold necklace. His face was a shadow next to his slick, deep, black greasy hair. He walked stiffly as if injured from behind. He made his way slowly to the mall Country Buffet.

This is what he looked like after a bad week.

On the weekdays, however, he was slightly relaxed, wholesome, social, magazine-good looks, and affable. He was the local who lived in his mother’s house while she wintered in Florida. Every 90 days or so he would leave town on a road trip aimed as business - staged just so that folks could never entirely pin him for living with his mother at the age of 48. He needed to keep up the appearance that he was viable. That he could be caught and married and would make a good mate. He was ready.

With the people in town he socialized with, he knew exactly when to move forward on a provocation or pull back in retreat. His dance was so smooth that if it ever looked jagged for a moment you might shake your head and say, “No, he’s simply too nice to be a bad guy,” Whatever his misstep he would always to be forgiven. He was good looking. That's how that goes for guys like him.

The town he lived in was beautiful, affluent, and safe. To succeed as someone in the town there was a certain way to settle into your relationships, create trust, and meander slowly, letting your crime out carefully like a small dog on a leash in a winter storm. He understood this better than most.

No one ever questioned his activities. Everything seemed viable. He seemed like an independent man who just liked to travel. At times he got caught up in his own game and believed every bit at what he played at.

His was a solid white block of a house; a block of stacked masonry flanked by four tall, narrow blacked-out windows that striped the house from the base of the bushes to the top edge of the flat roof. It was a cold modern sculpture. An edifice of nothing. There was a single black BMW in the driveway that never moved and there was one single feminine looking plant at the front entrance.

It was a house that you might pass and not really notice. Or if you did see it out of the corner of your eye, you wouldn’t quite know why it bothered you. The discarded bones in the basement wouldn’t give away anything as they no longer emitted any odor. The countless men who had walked in and never walked out were never missed.

Country Kitchen Buffet was a wonderful corral of anonymous herding. He loved the “road trips.” 90 days of unknowable travel. As far as anyone was concerned he was gone. Out of town. When he went away the women looked a little more drained than they did before. The thinner girls got fat. The fat girls got thinner.

Nothing shifted much for him. His women friends texted him in “his faraway lands,” while in fact he sat not half a mile from the clatter of the coffee house and the chirping of the gossip, filled up in his lovely, opulent escape hatch of a home. In his home with all the fish, he’d caught.

His was a long-term goal.

In the between moments when he would become someone else and leave his game, it was a circular maze. When he did return from his travels he couldn’t figure out why all the women looked so drained?

Sometimes, while sitting at the local coffee house, chit-chatting each morning with a group of locals, something in the back of his head would tingle like a memory or an important thought. But it would vanish and he would look again at a girl at his table and not be able to figure out why she looked different to him since the last time he’d seen her.

“Her eyes look so small. Like she is backing into herself,” he would think. He even voiced his concern to a friend next to him. “What has gone wrong with Stella? She doesn’t look well.”

His friend stared blankly at him then answered. “Well, I can’t say. Didn’t something go awry between you two a few months back? You know...when you left town?”

He would shake his head, pursing his lips, and nod sideways like he couldn’t place the wrongdoing, and like, all of a sudden, maybe he didn’t care. The friend would turn away into another conversation and he would sit and pretend to read the newspaper on his lap, all the while thinking of other things. This is how it went. He'd charm and seduce the women just to the point of action. He would play them slowly and become friends with them. He would lead them so slowly that they didn't realize they were being quietly consumed. Like those fish who are digested in the belly of another fish that's see through. They didn't actually know they were inside something, actively and slowly being eaten.

The town he lived in was beautiful and sometimes he had a hard time pulling himself away from its direct shine. But the town seemed to be caving in on itself, he thought, that the cracks were starting to show. The cracks were things you couldn't quite put your finger on. Like how the local monthly society magazine, now well into March, was highlighting society events that took place in December. Three teenagers threw themselves in front of trains. Perhaps this wasn’t the best place for him anymore.

Everyone in that town were disintigrating in the clutches of their own distortions. The women he knew, the ones that kept retreating, were the local single and divorced middle-aged women who had absolutely no other options for love within a 30-mile radius.

It was the baiting with the hope that made his meal of the insecure women all but left for dead by their ex-husbands and children, still pretty and fit but losing their edge. It was a breed near extinction. It was in these times, seeing the slow decline of the women around him that he felt alive. The more he gave them hope with no real outcome, the more they questioned themselves. And while he never once took any of them to some deep dark basement of a lair to properly hack them up, he did accomplish killing them slowly and precisely and with much more cunning torture than anyone could really imagine.

But now things seemed to be shifting. The town was wrinkling and stretching behind its own plastic surgery. He’d have to leave soon. Soon, the real world would sink in, the money would fade, the women would become more self-confident and the grass wouldn’t sparkle anymore.

Perhaps he could step aside from his own human habits. The women, his drying them of their emotions hadn’t quite left the salt bath of his cells. His confidence in it all was coming into question. The women were slowly dying in their own paradigm. He could no longer affect that downward trend. It was happening all on its own. The town didn’t need him anymore.

He must give it all up. Reform. Try to put right what countless authority figures had tried to stamp into him for so many years. Put it right.

Find just the right girl for his last effort. Leave town for good.

PART II

“By the End of the Night, You Will Know My Name.”

It was on the billboard as she drove on the freeway. She never paid much attention to billboards, advertising didn’t work on her, she liked to say. But this billboard was different. It only had the text, black on white. And it didn’t look very professional. There was no image to entice. Just the words. The white background was bumpy and rippled. The text looked like it was peeling off in the middle. Each word wasn’t capitalized as it should be. It was more of a sentence, a proclamation, than an ad. Was that intentional? Advertising was so sophisticated now.

It made her feel uneasy.

The sun was just setting and the freeway should have been congested but was oddly flowing.

Another billboard. Have you seen me? My name is _____. Please call _____ if you have. Somehow she thought of cancer and prom queens and couldn’t figure out why this particular billboard didn’t make sense to her. Why? she thought, do police work and advertising and driving have to co-mingle like this? Can’t I just drive home in peace? Do I really need to be looking out for everyone, she thought.

The turn-off for her small, affluent town came sooner than she expected. Perhaps she didn’t want to get home as much as she thought. The empty apartment of her own waiting for her. The empty apartment above her waiting for no one. The whole two-flat situation was a loneliness that she didn’t look forward to. Perhaps there’d be a good drama on Masterpiece Theatre to make her feel comfortable, regal, and at home.

The alleyway leading to her garage wasn’t very long but it was an alleyway nonetheless. The alleyway didn’t speak to lower-income or urban living, it spoke mainly of hidden entrances. In a town of such affluence, it was odd how many non-attached garages filled the backyards of all the homes on the square. Hers was a rental and though it was handsome on its own, it was clearly not backed by money or monied people.

Coming out of her garage without thought, she went to get the garbage can left that morning for collection. When she looked up there were three large-chested men walking in formation toward her. Each had deep black bullet-proof vests on and large waist belts carrying any number of items and the man was marked with a name to describe them, like an item on a grocery store shelf, POLICE.

It was nice to have such strong, good-looking men looking at her. It had been so long since she felt attractive. It was startling the effect it had on her looking at these men. Her face flushed a bit. Her eyes glazed over. Sure there were lots of good-looking men in town but they were all married. It was a town made especially for married people. Singles like her were flotsam in the otherwise sparkling blue ocean of Lake Fortmore. She couldn’t hope to meet a man in town. That never happened they never married within the community. They went out and got the best stock, blond, strong, young, and thin, from northern Europe and with good breeding. Then they came back and settled, putting out a few blond kids and a lot of swagger. The only way to ever meet men was to leave town or have an unsuspecting outsider come in and wisk her away. Oh, how she hoped.

“Have you seen a man here? Does a man live upstairs? We are looking for a man”, they said.

“No. The lady from the top flat just moved out. Hers is empty. No man in mine.”

“We're looking for a man.”

So am I, she thought. So am I.

“Well, the upstairs is empty. Have a look if you want. The door’s open. I’m sure I haven’t heard anyone up there in a week but for the cleaning lady.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Anything very troubling?” she asked.

“No ma’am. Nothing really.”

The three good-looking men walked away. She suddenly felt sad and alone. She wished she could have helped them. She wishes she could have made them stay longer with some clever bit of information that might have helped. Maybe she should have said more.

Her therapist had told her that just because she was once beautiful, middle age was a hard landscape to walk. And that she shouldn’t expect too much while dating online. Someone else had told her to try a special interest group.

The fact of it; she didn’t need anyone to tell her what was going on. She had a knockout body. Unusually so for someone her age. Genetics or just enough nervous energy? She was thin and tight. A butt you could bounce a quarter off of and abdominals like a six-pack. No one would have guessed. And so if they couldn’t guess at how amazing she was, she would just have to advertise it a bit. Fuck these men, she thought. What they need is a good, strong dose. And so she did.

It wasn’t difficult to find the right clothes. She skipped work the next day, put on lots of good loud rock music, and drank straight from a chilled bottle of Absolute that she’d had in her freezer for years, never opened. It was her holiday. She was having fun. If I can’t justify this, she thought, then I’ll just pretend it's Halloween, one day just for me and if I can’t land at least one man in town then I will leave.

She strolled casually down the sidewalk of Main Street. Very few people looked in her direction immediately. There was hardly anyone out. But if they did look they did a double-take in their minds, not certain exactly what it was that made her unique. A man sitting in a beach chair outside a novelty store smoking a cigarette couldn’t have been more disinterested when she turned the corner into the threshold of the store and then snaked back out onto the sidewalk again like she was sleepwalking. She had on a black bikini and a mesh something around her hips, the man in the lounge chair thought. No, it wasn’t a bikini. There was something not right. The cut? The lack of material?

A car passing by quickly saw her too just as she entered the store and while there was something mesh around her hips, thought the driver, it looked almost like a western outfit. Some kind of holster? The lingering thought to each of the passers-by was that she was in the sex industry. Really? No, they thought. That couldn’t possibly be. Sex industry types don’t walk around in the town like this. Impossible.

But then two cop cars pull up and the men walk into the store. 10 minutes later the fire trucks show up, sirens and all.

He was in the back of the store looking for rope. He’d used up all the good stuff he’d gotten from Home Depot.

She sauntered in looking all drunk and used up. She wasn’t hopeful or looking for life and love. She had already deteriorated. She was at the height of her own extinction. She was a walking picture he’d always wanted to see, putting perfectly into place his own need for hyperbolic pornography. Public pornography. It was brilliant. So many women in town had done nothing for him with their subtle efforts and their high-style holdbacks. This woman was entirely different. She was off the rails. A drippy sexy mess in heels.

It was his crowning moment. This was it. This was the end.

In the haze of her own agenda for destruction, she moved towards him. He was a greasy speck in the back of the aisle. He was both fuzzy and glittering, mouth agape, standing silently staring at her. Expecting her. Then he looked past her as the firetrucks that had just pulled up outside the store and then gently took her elbow. “Come this way,” he directed and he led her out the back of the store and quickly into his small black car. It was only because the firemen and police were taking so long talking to the shop owner that they missed the opportunity to arrest her. She, him, and the black car slipped through the streets quietly and made their way out of town.

She fell asleep in the front seat and if she’d been awake to hear him say, “We're not going back to your apartment.” She wouldn’t have cared anyway. He had no interest in returning to his home either. The town no longer needed either one of them. The glow of highway lights peeking into a dilapidated hotel window awoke her at 3 am. He held her strong like she was his childhood blanket. She didn’t recognize him and she didn’t care. She was safe. She was saved. Gone from that town. She looked at the name tag on the lapel of his black canvas jumpsuit. “My Name Here,” it said.