Solution

What can I say now that I’m here?

I can feel an ache in my spine. A tensing of every muscle along my back. My arms are trembling. Tears fall from my shuddering eyes. The pain that’s long lived in and around every fiber of my being for years seems to subside for a moment. I imagine it’s as close as I can come to having lost a limb and being able to – if only briefly – feel it there again. A sort of phantom pain. A pain that hurts in a way that I miss.

For all the composure I kept in the hours before, I have naught but fright and fragility now. My hands trace the silver edges of the flat, rectangular box before me.

–

As far as I’m aware, there is no pain that exists which overshadows the loss of one who should not have been lost or, at the very least, not been lost so soon. The world, of course, is littered with the remains of those who stand a generation or three in excess of those whom they are forced to mourn.

That such a world could be allowed to exist feels like the greatest question of hope that one could ask. I find myself more and more lacking an answer. I find myself losing myself more and more. I find a lack of solutions in solutions that offer me dissolution. My mind in a perpetual haze. The allotted time off from work spiraling around a drain. My thinning sanity exists at the same volume as the hair that I was already beginning to lose twenty years ago.

I think about the movie Interview With A Vampire sometimes. How Louis was looking for death and something other than death found him. I think I’m holding on to that illusion like a dying candle so that I don’t have to worry about the many ways in which I’m killing myself.

This morning, the calendar told me that I have to go back to work next week.

My home looks like I’m an invader. A squatter. A man who’s broken in and found refuge until Johnny Law comes in with a bright badge and guns blazing. Protecting the status quo from the evils of me eating soup in my underwear in a box of painted drywall where no one can see me.

The directions to the cemetery are still stuck to the refrigerator.

I don’t cry as much when I see it today.

–

“Life’s a lightning storm, isn’t it?” a voice says – overly boisterous.

The reason why clubs are great to drink at is because of the noise. No one tries to talk to the weird lonely guy at a normal bar. They do so even less in a world of spinning lights and music so loud that it makes your pores hurt.

And then this asshole shows up.

Something about him makes me think of a pilot. Not a real one, but the ones you see in movies. The overly cocky, smooth but in a weird way, skin like a man who drinks scotch with his cereal, Don Draper 1950’s style hair that somehow works but makes you feel like you’re talking to a clothing store mannequin kind of pilot.

I don’t answer because I’m not a lunatic and few things push strangers away faster than not replying. Unless the speaker is an officer of the law. Then it’s just a good way to get tased or shot or both. If I knew it would always be the second, I would have instigated that end a long time ago. Something about that makes me chuckle.

When he speaks again, I can hear him as though he’s the only sound in the room. It’s like he’s talking in the most casual of tones and I can hear him like we exist within a small room with soundproofing foam on every wall.

“What if there were a way,” he says. “A way to resolve that which haunts you. An actual solution.”

I pause for a moment, mostly because I can’t tell if the words are real or imaginary. I’ve been having a hard time determining the difference lately. It’s probably the drugs. And the alcohol. And the insomnia. And the cocaine. And the pills. And the caffeine. And the opiates. And the grief. And the depression. And the anxiety. And the medication. And the medication for the medication.

By the time I try to reply, he’s not looking at me at all. He’s facing away now.

Under my drink is a business card.

It says:
Nicholas Ian Luther
(009) 009-0090

Written in pen upon the back it says: 11:40 AM

–

With Monday looming, I sit with my phone in sweaty palms. I type in the number that feels like a fake number and I stare at the clock across from me and then at the time on my phone and then at the time on my computer.

When I click the symbol to call, I want more than anything for no one to pick up.

I think of Louis again. How he didn’t want what he ultimately got. How he found what he wasn’t looking for.

“1072 Bridge Street. Tomorrow. 8:17 PM.”

–

I tell myself that the devastation is collateral. I tell myself a lot of things these days.

I tell myself what I need to, I suppose.

When they gave me a gun and a name all those weeks and all those months ago, I’d taken it without hesitation. When they told me that every entry is suicide because that’s how you exit the network, I was nearly giddy. There’s something in me that wants to die and I feel like it needs to be more than once. If ever there was a feeling that the universe was listening to my heart and answering in kind, it was that moment.

As I stand here now, I’m having doubts.

Still, the book in my glove compartment says that my bill is nearly paid. My reward is near. They promised me a solution. They promised me a way to a world where things are better. Considering what they’re capable of, if ever there were a way back to a world before, they would have it.

Tonight (in as much as time is meaningful in this line of work), the target is one Elizabeth Robin Rutherford. I don’t know much about her. It’s easier for me this way. The display on my wrist says the year is 1997. The weather tells me it might be autumn.

I think about what I might say if she asks me how I fixed things. How I brought her back. I wonder if she’ll even know or if she’ll simply open her eyes and think that all the years of her loss were just a momentary lapse of consciousness. I want to believe that when things are over she’ll know nothing of how they ended before. I wonder if they’ll send me back to her or send her up to me. I don’t really understand the constraints of time as they do. All things being equal, I don’t suppose I need to.

When the car pulls into the driveway, it’s time to focus.

I wait until the life within dies out. The lights go out or dim until just before.

I don’t cry like I did on the first night. I don’t shake anymore. I don’t hesitate. The days of panic and peril are like a distant dream. It feels almost mechanical now. Something about that is as comforting as it is discomforting.

Her eyes are full of fear and all I can see is a progress bar like I’m downloading a remedy via torrent. She’s trying to say words but the barrel makes everything a string of rolling vowels without purpose.

Silencers are poorly named and nothing like the movies. I gave up on the concern surrounding sound so many deaths ago that I can’t even remember what a silencer sounds like. The gun sounds like a semicolon in a sentence that I’m tired of reading. Always the same sentence. Different words all saying the same thing. Different screams at different volumes terminating with a metallic clap of thunder that would make Thor wince.

I place the barrel in my mouth for the four hundred and eleventh time and pull the trigger. The equivalent of pulling the ripcord on a parachute. It hurts the same as always but the repetition makes the sensation feel old and stale. Like a jump scare that I’ve encountered too many times to be startled by. Somehow the taste of revelation that it once was has become the equivalent of taking an overly large and bitter pill with not enough water.

–

In the main chamber, the room is silent. Lined on all sides by people in thick layers of dark red. They stand like a wall of dense crimson wool and striking eyes.

At the center before me is a pedestal with a slim black box. Beyond that is a figure in a garb of dense black. Eyes of mottled white and soft yellow. His voice is low and clipped. He does little more than recount the agreement. The debt. The reward.

My composure is shifting as the time unfolds. I want nothing more than to take the case and flee. To open it and find my way to where life was better than it is now. Than it’s been for so long. I know, of course, that I can’t. I mustn’t.

Even the walk home is tense. I want nothing more than to run. Somehow I fear that even in this, my resolution will be upended and so I move as though I were a man carrying nothing more than a letter from the post.

–

I hold my breath as my fingers trace the silver edges of the box. All that hesitation and all that anxiety and yet I stand here now nearly fearful to see the essence of a promise fulfilled. I remember all those months ago when I was sitting in my living room, mind in a blur of scotch and cocaine with a razor in my hand and a wrist that looked ripe for reddening. I think about Interview With A Vampire.

I think about what I’ll say first. How I’ll say it. How she’ll smile and she’ll never know that she wasn’t here for so very long. I can feel my wrist itching for the device within. The passage to then or the passage from then to now. I can feel myself thinking about how I’m not breathing right as the anxiety builds.

When I open the box, I see before me an ornate design imprinted upon very elegant metal. Pulled from within, I press the base where a depression lives and see a blade slip from within. With a small bit of movement from my thumb, the blade extends in its entirety.

Beneath it is a small note on very fine, very thin paper. It says: Thank you. Goodbye.

I lack the words to express the depth of my lament.