I Am Unravelling

There’s urgency and chatter in town about Lee and how he’s going to arrive on Saturday bringing a ton of shit with him from down south. He is one evil son of a bitch, getting stronger by the hour. He killed on the islands, and now he’s headed to Truro, where they’re probably scared witless. When he gets here on Saturday, he’ll still be in a fighting mood, knives out, ready to rumble, like when Bob came through here years ago, ripping stuff up and spreading terror. More than a few kids in town were named after that evil mother, though they’re not kids anymore. 

So, it’s busy down at the waterfront. Sally, the harbormaster – harbor mistress – she’s pulled the town dock. The schooners have left the marina and are moored out in the harbor, near the breakwater. Old geezers, silver beards each, are scooting across the ocean surface in their skiffs and dinghies, checking on moorings, doubling up on pennants, battening down hatches. “Don’t forget to check your insurance”, says one old timer to another, and they laugh. They won’t be laughing on Saturday, for two reasons that I can think of. I’m not keen on boat people and their haughty indifference to things terrestrial.

It’s too busy for a random act of violence; for throwing a punch at an unsuspecting sidewalk civilian or jumping the bird-lady. The able-bodied abound, including the sinewy silver beards, or those fatties over there in the Buick, chowing on lobster rolls.  Ginny, my next-door neighbor, is smiling as I approach her on the harbor trail, which makes me nervous. She really must be the nicest person in town, like my wife used to say. Ex-wife, as in no longer living. I should have killed Ginny yesterday, but here she is standing on the trail, like I’m her long-lost friend, like I’m someone decent and good. 

“Good morning, Chip”, she says. We’re fairytale characters meeting on the way to market. “How are you today?”, she sing-songs and she seems to mean it, but I know she knows. She saw me, out there, last night, doing bad things.

“Good morning, Ginny”, I try to look busy, preoccupied, like I’m working on something big and important, which I am. I’m hoping she’ll just let it all go, pretend like nothing happened, otherwise I will have to kill her, and that would be a shame because she’s got two kids, one of them is still in middle school. I don’t slow down, I’m gonna walk straight by.

“I am sorry about last night”, she says.

Damn, that does it. She’s spoken of things best left unsaid. Am I supposed to stop, turnaround, or just keep going? Which is weirder? I stop and face her, but I don’t look at her, instead I stare at her shoes, running shoes. She’s got nice legs; they show off nicely in black running tights. I feel like I could wrap one hand all the way around her waist, and squeeze the life out of her, like toothpaste out of a tube. She is so lovely, but she’s on the list. 

“Oh, that’s fine. Don’t trouble yourself”. I wave things away, “It won’t happen again”. I can’t help it, I must look in her eyes, but when I do, I regret it because I think I see sympathy and understanding, not fear and disgust. That’s heavy baggage for me, like she’s poking at my conscience. I hate her face. It tells me how far I have fallen from grace.

“Yeah, I’m so sorry Chip. It’s just that I heard sounds, thought it might be a lost pet, or maybe a coyote, or a deer”, she just won’t stop, “I didn’t see anything really, so please don’t worry”.

This doesn’t make sense. If she didn’t see anything, why the sorry, why the worry? And what does she mean by really? Did she almost see real things, or totally see unreal things? She saw me, she knows. She knows I’m a freak, but there’s that sympathy thing again, in those big brown liquidy eyes.

“Looks like the storm’s gonna be a doozy”, I say, “spaghetti models have us dead to rights”. I’m bumbling around with untested idioms that don’t quite work, which happens when I’m nervous. I should stop, but I’m gushing, hoping that a fog of words will obscure things. I’m the local savant now, the expert on storm systems. “Difficult to imagine”, I gesture at the glass-like ocean, the low clouds that hang low over Bucks Head peninsula, obscuring the ridge of pines, “but when it blows it can snap the Douglas Firs like they’re matchsticks. I bet we go dark”. 

I want to ask her why she didn’t call the police, but it’s best to let the sleeping dog lie.

“Stay safe, Ginny”, I say, but she is on the list, so her future is bleak. Force majeure, it is predetermined.

“You too Chip”, she smiles at me, then waves as I leave; a little hand-flutter. There’s a bluebird on her shoulder.  She thinks I’m a pitiful fool.

I walk to the supermarket, it’s not far. The strip lighting helps me see people clearly and to assess my prey at the demographic level, not by name, though that is how I execute the strategy, of course. People are so stupid, stocking up on stuff like it’s the apocalypse, toilet paper, diapers, and bottled water, all gone. Mike and Nelly Sorenson are tut-tutting in the produce section, shaking their heads at common man. “So stupid, all this panic-buying”, says Nelly, shaking her head. Mike agrees, utters some fin-de-cycle stuff, and we laugh knowingly. They’re not pushing a cart, Mike’s hauling a basket, the flesh around the knuckles of his hand is turning white.  They are good neo-liberal targets. They drive a Tesla. I hate their earnest and well-informed concern, their technocratic understanding, like that makes any kind of difference!  I should revisit my list. 

Disasters are good opportunities for generalized mayhem. Individual acts of violence and plunder blur into the melee. I liked the pandemic a lot, reveling in misinformation and fud.  My pandemic crimes were victimless and took place in front of a computer screen, though one day a friendly yellow lab wandered all jolly-jolly into my back yard, and I fired an arrow from my porch into its hind leg. Poor thing looked confused, like it blamed itself, limped away, whelping. Not much of a pandemic highlight, in retrospect, but my point is that the incident went by unnoticed. 

Friday, first thing, I checked in on Lee. I bought a two-gallon can of gas at the garage. Spent much of the day planning and reading. Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy speaks to me. The irony is not lost on me, trust me.

Late afternoon, and Lee is still category two, landfall forecast for 2.00am tomorrow morning. It’s a robin’s egg blue sky for now, the calm before the storm, but fate hangs heavy in the air; mother nature already knows her victims, so precaution is pointless. There’s nothing to be done, except for the doing of things already inevitable, so I run my finger across the names on my list, rearrange the sequence.

I do my best work with hand tools. The bow and arrow, a knife, the hatchet, and the flail. There is intimacy, the blood on your hands, the final aspiration, and the witness to phase-change. I’m definitely old school in this regard, of the Jack-the-Ripper era, though much less discriminating against women, more progressive I like to think. 

I’ve seen the soul leave the body, the phase-change. A flickering light that ascends to the sky, a cold vapor in the air, a notable tear in the energy-lattice, a wispy phantasma or an ectoplasmic balloon.  The Enigma variations is how I refer to them. So, I am sure that there is a soul and an afterlife, but I’ve never seen a ghost. I think my victims aren’t interested in hanging around or looking back on things. 

I’m watching cable news. From space Lee is a gigantic Catherine wheel, swirling anti-clockwise, a sightless eye at his center, he is blindly lurching to the north, towards our small stretch of coastline. He is a geostrophic soul burst forth from the Atlantic abyss, purposeful and angry, vengeful for eons of imprisonment at the bottom of the ocean. 

Ginny saw me on Thursday night, that’s for certain. I know this because I heard her pushing through the laurel bushes, I saw her lovely face in the moonlight, I observed her shocked expression, and the mouthed “sorry”, the hasty retreat. It all happened so fast. She obviously saw me, registered my strangeness, my self-harmed body, but maybe that is all she saw? Perhaps, the strangeness distracted her, and she didn’t see what I was doing? She didn’t see the fresh-dug grave down by the hemlock bushes, the small pile of black plastic trash bags on the lawn. All she saw was a mutilated old man.   

I’ve noticed that people on this street, only a block from the ocean, are busy. They’re storing away yard furniture, packing stuff into their cars. The young couple over the road, I think he’s a website designer, pick up their yellow lab and put it on the back seat, next to a pile of clothing and two stacked brown cardboard filing boxes. He’s carrying a computer; she’s struggling with a sleeping bag. They lock and leave. 

My wife died in mysterious circumstances, losing her balance atop Sandegan Cliff, and falling to her death on the rocks below. Unsurprisingly I was a prime suspect, especially given the insurance policies out in her name, but when the examined her cellphone, the last photo captured an image of me, blurry and two-dimensional, but forensically me, fishing from a canoe on Icehouse Pond, five hundred feet below the cliff top. The lead detective was persistent, started poking around, trying to understand why I was on the lake, that day, at that time, but he was reassigned and eventually got priced out of the region by the real estate boom and when he moved to Portland the case went cold. It wasn’t me in that canoe. In fact, it wasn’t anybody.

The weather warnings are popping up on my phone, hourly updates, and the forecast is narrowing down to specific details. The eye could hit Granite Port head-on, Bob redux. Winds of 74 to 110 MPH, hazardous surge, heavy rainfall, and there’s a threat of tornadoes. This is most inconvenient. It’s gonna cramp my style tonight. Also, I’m fretting over my list. I need a contingency; in case the targets have fled town.

Absent from the seven cardinal sins are: dissociation, ennui, hate and nihilism. Pope Gregory didn’t show much foresight in my opinion. This sets me thinking about the sacraments of penance. There’s a website, I can book a thirty-minute confessional with the priest at St Bernadette, but I don’t think that’s enough time. Also, I’m not a Catholic and I’m not sure of the protocols involved; I might embarrass myself.

It’s night, the rain has started. It’s thrashing against the windows on the north side of the house. The maples at the bottom of the property are whipping around in the gusts and rainwater is accumulating on the lawn, pooling down by the hemlock. Katrina flooded the graveyards in New Orleans and corpses were observed in the floodwater, carried out to sea by the retreating tide. I imagine the confusion if trash bags of body parts are discovered floating around our zip code. Ginny’s car is gone. I scratch her from the list.

I’m ready but I’m unravelling. I’ve got my bow, my arrows, the hunting knife and my last resort, the spiked flail. I’m having problems with the flail though, it’s an awkward accessory. I have the list in my pockets, names, and addresses, but the deserted street tells me it might be useless a fool’s errand. I many need to go straight to self-immolation, the denouement.

There’s a roaring sound, like a runaway freight train. The wind just tore something from the roof and tossed it into the street. When I look out the front window, I can see a sheet of roof tiles spinning down the street. Whoosh, a trash container flies by and crashes into a curbside poplar tree, its contents explode in the wind and are sucked into darkness. The streetlights are flickering, my lights are flickering. My neighborhood is going dark. Cars are gone.

There’s a knock on the door. I freeze. There’s another knock, heavy, insistent. “Police. Granite Police! Answer the door, please”.

Please? I’m not going peacefully. 

“Mandatory evacuation. We’re evacuating the neighborhood. You’ve gotta leave. Everyone’s gotta leave”. The police officer is shouting, he sounds scared. I shout back that I’m OK, not leaving, but he can’t hear me, or he doesn’t care, “Gotta go, buddy. Governor’s orders”. He’s banging harder, sounds like he’s using a baton or a flashlight. “Hurry up! This thing’s bigger than us!”

The being exists as a presence for itself; I know what I was doing, but I don’t remember why I was doing it. All I can think of is the now-ness of the tempest that is roaring outside. I ditch the weaponry in a pile next to the gas cannister and the sparkwheel lighter on the orange carpet, very domestic, sophomoric. The kill-kit looks pathetic; the banality of evil, I suppose.

The cop is in a hurry, he’s a continuum of force. He rushes me out of the house, bundles me into the back of the police cruiser, arresting, but with beneficent intent. We race into town, heading to the High School gymnasium, but there’s a fallen tree, and flooding. It’s dark and disorienting, there’s the sounds of breaking glass, cracking trees, crashing metal, but it’s very dark. We flee the vehicle, into knee-deep salt water. It’s every man for himself. A downed electric cable is spitting yellow sparks, and I can see the ocean surging up a side street, carrying with it small boats which jam into a parked white car, push it sidelong towards us. There’s a flash of lightning, brilliant is the chaos. I can see the underside of Lee, a crushing, churning, writhing, death-dealing gray-black monster that is clawing things from buildings, raking the land, and dragging the ocean. There’s another flash of lightning, another roar of tornadic magnitude. A boat slams into the plate glass window of the museum, and the gyrating white car crashes into me, sends me headlong into the water, toward the now-dead police officer floating like discarded doll, he is slapping against brick wall of the bank building.   

I am ready to die, to disgorge my soul into the eye of the hurricane.