See Karl sitting cross-legged in the snow.
See Karl in the snow for almost long enough to numb the feeling.
* * *
Karl?
* * *
Shhh! Karl whispered and watched the vapor from his breath curl around his raised finger. See Karl’s eyes bulging and bloodshot. Shhh! Karl put his finger to his lips and reclined his thumb, made a pistol with his hand, leveled his arm, and aimed at the oak tree across the street. He sighted it up and down, shifted his weight, and scanned the length of the street staring down the barrel of his index finger.
* * *
This happened to be a pleasant neighborhood, tinseled and bright for the holidays. Fathers shoveled the walks with a proud sense of purpose. Children used snow as instruments of war. Holly wreaths hung to welcome lovers, family, and friends. Across the street, a reindeer composed of rope light raised and lowered its head, as if in silent agreement with the directives of the pagan God of Christmas. Karl aimed for its head, paused. He felt serenity. He felt peace. Then the voices returned. They said, Karl, come on.
You are not the devil, but you have let the devil in. You have known the spice used in hell’s evening meal. You’ve felt the boiling polyp of wind from the basement. Karl, you are not the devil, but you have seen the outline of the devil’s penis, Karl — shhhhhhhh!
* * *
This was a pleasant neighborhood. Families, Volvos, young creatives, tall oak trees. It was a quiet night. Across the street, Namath was making a snow angel. The neighbor’s son on his back, extending his limbs, in a blue snowsuit and mittens staring up at the tree.
Sometimes it’s all Karl could do to sit by his window recall his own youth and watch Namath chase squirrels up a tree with a green plastic shovel.
* * *
He shook his hair of the snow and stood up. Three pink notices taped to his door and warped by the snow warned his landlord to pave the sidewalk.
Four flights of stairs, turn the knob, find the switch. Karl blew into his palms and rubbed them together. He surveyed his apartment.
* * *
His apartment was a cobbled monument to the discarded brassiere. White, lace, frill, plain, plum with pink lace, pumice with contour cups, bright with little ribbons, red with a front clasp, a leopard colored number common to anniversaries, or dates with oysters. They were strewn across the nightstand, stepped over across the floor, clumped behind the bed, slumped over the dresser, or hanging off a chair in two different sizes — before and after and they’d decided no more birth control.
It hurt to remember Anna, her large eyes. Sometimes green. Sometimes gray, like the granite exterior of a federal building after it rains. It hurt to remember how they’d picked the names, bought a book on Feng Shui to arrange the furniture or how she lit sage on her mornings after a bad shift. Most of all, when he recalled what made him ache, he thought of the morning he’d brought home coffees and she purred, “Good morning, love,” and raised her foot from the bed and curled it down like a child’s fingers and waved hello to him with her toes.
Why leave the memory? Why leave the apartment? Why go outside if it meant telling a stranger with a clipboard that, no, you do not have time to save the children? Karl didn’t leave his apartment if he could help it. He heard a cold breeze through the window blow across the high ceiling and exposed rafters — this was a living room with loft-like sensibilities.
* * *
He left a litter box next to the toilet, raked like a Japanese rock garden. Cats out the ears in those days. She couldn’t resist. It helped for a while. Anna would bring them home from the Humane Society. Where Anna walked high-stepping tomcats followed behind in parade. In cherry red heels, hers was a feline strut. She grew up on an army base, and house cats made her feel at home. On his dime, all day, cats would yawn and lounge. Karl and Anna would watch them and laugh. For a while, it was ok. All in all, they weren’t bad. Except for Jaspers — mangy, opinionated, blind in one eye. Jaspers was a bellicose blonde tabby who snapped at Karl’s heels when he walked to the bathroom; who pissed on the insulation and vomited gray-yellow chunks of anything that wasn’t, specifically, Whisker Lickems.
If Karl looked up…Karl, look up. Either the ceiling fan ricketing, or the metal rafters waiting. What’s it matter? No more surveying.
Okay, said Karl as he stepped over a broken mirror and the overturned chair. Sideways on the edge of the chair lay the hammer his dad had given him after he graduated high school. It was the last time they spoke. His dad was a fanatically Christian three-hundred-pounder who could seize celebration like a ball from the air.
Karl walked to the nightstand in a fit of blinks and twitches, picked up a bra with both hands, palms up like an offering, and set it gently on the bed. Sweat, clams, he had clams, clammy, shaking, sweating hands whose palm lines indicate a man perspired to the point of saturation. He put his pants on backwards, and he took them off. He threw a scarf around the collar of his chambray shirt and put the pants on backwards again.
* * *
Why is Karl so nervous? Tonight’s the big night, and Karl can’t keep his legs from shaking. He stumbled to the kitchen and poured a glass from the bottle of Reyka. He held the bottle to his eye like a frozen steak to quell the swelling.
But Karl learned early that vodka doesn’t freeze. He and his brother, Dennis, used to stay up in the dining room pretending to play Skip-Bo until that glorious ‘click’ of their parent’s bedroom door. Shhh. Dennis would hold his finger to his lips. Karl would move the dining room chair in tiny triumphant increments, silent mini-inch by silent mini-inch, toward the freezer. A brave campaign to the heart of darkness. Dennis in his ninja footies would stand in a daze smiling at the freezer. So Karl leans forward, eleven-year-old elbows extended, legs bent, steady forward march, pushing ahead the convoy as the cold white expanse grows larger and hums louder with every charging step forward. A tiny recreational activity, a small-scale reproduction of Russian occupation. They took tiny gulps and coughed into each other’s shoulders. They laughed their heads off and punched each other. Then they tiptoed from the basement back to the kitchen sink, replaced the missing with water, and later in their bunk beds congratulate each other as extraordinary cat burglars.
Then their Dad found a quarter frozen pint of vodka. There was a belt or some blunt object. If you ask Karl about his three guns, A black .22 Magnum Derringer standard, a swift Colt .25 automatic, and a copper-tipped 12-gauge nicknamed Cronkite McDaniels, Salami Diaspora, and Jennifer Connelly, respectively — he won’t tell you where they’re hidden in two kitchen cupboards and under the sink. Or that he owns three guns but never bought a bullet.
And something else is hidden.
A diamond ring in a black velvet box. Karl winced. He shut the drawer slowly and, picking a bra from the bed, he tried to set it as naturally as he could where it was before, hanging off the nightstand.
He walked crunch by crunch over bits of broken mirror to his shoes and kneeled down. How was it that you tied shoes again, ah, yes — two separate strands, looped, and laid on top of each other. Then one gets pulled around, strung out, and put inside the other one.
* * *
It was getting dark. The reindeer kept nodding, but Namath’s angel was buried in snow. His truck stalled. How do you start a car again? You stick in the jagged object, Karl, then you twist.
As Karl changed lines erratically driving north on 21, he passed the Lowell exit. A small mill town where he and Denis passed their late adolescence throwing rocks at the abandoned chemical plant. They threw rocks in the pond in the afternoon and gave each other Indian rope burns to prove who would be warrior chief. The true test of a man, the Indian rope burn. Being pulled in two directions simultaneously and at a vicious speed. Even though he was two years younger, Denis would grip his hands around Karl’s arm and set it on fire.
They could have burns on their arms for a week.
