How It Ends

I sat down on the couch next to her lifeless body. I watched the blood flow from her naked breast, carving around the curve as though it were a rock in a stream, dripping down to the couch and the floor. I held the warm pistol in my hand, imagining a snakelike smoke stream up from the spout just like in the movies. Everything here was from the movies, a film noir, black and white and still and silent. All I needed was a coffee cup and a cigarette. Even my disturbing calmness, which I maintained throughout the entire ordeal, was something surreal. I had raised my voice, I had had corrupt and rotten thoughts stroll through my head at having her under my control, a running demonic dialogue that tried its hardest to make me be worse than what I actually was. But it was all an act, the emotion and zeal I had forced out like a meat grinder pumping out pink slime. What I had done was not proof of my having emotion though, it was proof that now, finally, I had superseded the fragile lacework of the intricately woven veils of humanity, superseded it and had become a god.

I really needed something to distract me, if not a coffee, a beer. I looked at the girl next to me. I call her a girl, but she was really a grandmother. So old at her young age of 38 and yet, her mind never grew, never matured. I saw more peace on her face now than I had ever seen on it before. Perhaps I had done her a favor.

I rotated the gun in my hand, observed the stitched pattern across the handle, the smooth contours, the carved word: BERETTA. I bounced it around in my hand, thinking, What to do, what to do? Do I leave the bodies here or do I do something with them? Dump them somewhere? Now that was something from the movies. No, I would just leave them there. Practically, if I didn’t hear the cops now, they wouldn’t be here for some time. Days even. Not until someone started asking questions at Siva’s work. I put the gun down on the table.

Siva was the guy in the kitchen, hands spread outward and upward. The eyes of Siva were in permanent fixture at his plasmatic display, held still in awe or reverence. Such holiness we find in death that it becomes an imitation. A profanity. Here in that moment was the highest profanity. The smell of shit soaked with blood rising through the room which I imagined in days would decay and maggot lifecycles would begin. The growing stench was already stronger than the curry that had once filled the room. Maybe they’d discover the bodies because a complaint from someone about the smell. What if I complained about the smell? Would that make me less suspect? Would I even be a suspect if I ignored the whole thing? I hear gunshots at night on a weekly basis around here. It’s nothing too strange, nothing too out of the ordinary. It’s entirely possible for a neighbor to have been at home, listening to music, not noticing anything. None of the neighbors now were prying in. None of them have turned off their radios, stopped sipping their beers, stopped cooking their stews with cigarettes hanging from their mouths. Life goes on for each of them. A neighbor gone, dead on the floor, is no different to them than a neighbor gone off to Stanford College. It’s simply a neighbor gone.

I stepped between bloodstreams, which had now begun to dry, creating some sort of impressionistic piece that might be at the beginning of the next James Bond movie. I opened the fridge. Stella Artois. I could trust the Indian in his taste for beer. I was also glad he had no real national pride for his heritage and didn’t have Kingfisher. I reached to the counter, again careful not to touch any blood, retrieved the bottle opener and popped open the tab on the Stella. The tab fell from my hand and straight into the blood. I cursed. I walked back over to the living room table, set down the bottle opener and turned back to the body. Should I get the Stella tab? No, just take the Stella with me. I took a sip, bit back the bitterness.

On the floor between the couch and the kitchen, there was an I Ching arrangement. Earlier, a short, Chinese guy named Wen was here, before I had left to go and retrieve my gun. He was reading their fortune. I couldn’t find him anywhere in the apartment. Apparently, he didn’t bother sharing what he saw. I looked down at the I Ching sticks. I wondered what they meant. I looked over at Siva’s desk, picked up a pad and a pencil and copied the arrangement down. Where was the Asian who had done this? Where was Wen? Wen was the final connection. He was the missing piece. If I found him, I could find that thief of a writer and solve all of my problems.

I looked again through the entire apartment while nursing my beer. There was no sign of him anywhere. Not in the bedroom, not in any closet, not in the restroom. Siva had been telling the truth when he told me that Wen had left. Now what to do about the bodies? Should I just leave them? I wondered how long it would take for anyone to discover them. Maybe I should arrange them, make some sort of artwork out of them.

It occurred to me what I had done. It’s like I was climbing a staircase. I realized by such small increments. I looked back at the shirtless and bloody Virginia. I looked into her lifeless eyes that stared through me. I stood over her. I fought the temptation to mutilate her body, to grab her breasts, to rape her as she had begged me so many times to do before. I felt myself mastering my anger, my grief. I felt myself dying. I saw a tear drop fall onto her chest. It trailed down, getting caught in her scar from a Caesarian section, before finally making its way down the rest of her smooth skin to the floor; like an insatiable vampire, gravity always fights for the flow of blood and tears. I stepped back and tripped over the table. I landed on my back and stared up at the ceiling. The ceiling was spinning. I closed my eyes, reopened them. My head was wet with beer, spilled from the bottle. I forced myself to my feet.

I looked back at the girl. I could feel the salty dryness around my eyes, of the past tears I had shed before I fell. New ones were forming. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. I remembered the last time we were together, in my bed. How she had left in such anger and drunkenness. That I wouldn’t screw her. My morals and my fear had gotten in the way. I wanted to be a good person. I didn’t want to use her and treat her like an animal. I didn’t want to be an animal. I was so afraid that what I liked I would not be able to stop. I laughed at the moment of clarity. My morals had gotten in the way of screwing her. Imagine, if we had made love, if we had fucked, if I had simply inserted knob A into slot B, she would be alive today. I wouldn’t have murdered her or Siva. I looked at her shirt on the floor, the shirt I had told her to remove. A tight black tube top, crumpled up, her blood had dripped down onto it. I took it. Holding the inkpad, the shirt and the gun, I left. So much for fucking morals.