Happy Endings

It’s in the quiet moments—the stagnant silence after the children are tucked in bed and the only sounds hanging in the air are an electrical hum and rhythmic breaths—that I think of the murder of Henry Horowitz. The years are no consolation to the maggots of memory, the parasite that perennially awakens and reminds me of the truth. My wife stirs in her sleep by my side, and I wonder what it must be to be pure of guilt, what it must be to feel like death will grant you upward ascension. Not that I believe in God. If He were real, I would’ve expired years ago, and yet, day after day, good people die, and I remain. The neighbor who adopted an orphan and runs a nonprofit died of cancer last month, and yet I am still here. No, He isn’t real. Murderers wouldn’t get happy endings in a divine world. I turn my head to rest my cheek upon the pillow, focusing on the docile feminine face before me, but even she cannot console my mind. A steady thump murmurs in my ear, as the blood crawls from my chest and into my limbs, but even so, the heartbeat I hear is not my own—it is the heart of Henry Horowitz. It all started as a dare. As a way for three young men with nothing but fresh rage and time to deflate a classmate’s ego, to put him in his place for making them suffer. That was all it was supposed to be, a taste of his own medicine—medicine we were supposed to drip. Medicine we poured. In the darkness of my bedroom, I am transported to that night.

           The three of us sat in a dimly lit back room of the university library. I stared down at the pages of a case file, my eyes skimming the words a hundred times before absorbing their meaning. Another man my age was seducing some undergraduate behind the Fiction section, but with no luck, as it ended in how nearly all interactions with the young man ended: in an eye roll and a murmured pejorative. That was our Luca Castelli. His parents immigrated from Italy before he was born, but if you crossed him, he wouldn’t hesitate to reveal his supposed connection with the Mafia. Sometimes that hackneyed narrative of how he grew up on the wrong side of the tracks worked—but we knew he was a middle-class sleaze full of shit, and that’s why we loved him. Luca strutted back to the table and spun a story of his conquest, one so farfetched even Charlie snorted. Luca gave him a smack on the back of the head, “We all don’t got a girl as nice as yours, Charles.”

Charlie Tucker was one of those people that was both unforgettable and so mundane at the same time, he had developed the need to introduce himself every time he talked. He was a Missouri native, nearly seven feet tall, built like a tank yet wouldn’t lay a finger on a fly, and talked with a slow southern drawl that made people think he had some sort of cognitive hindrance, when in reality, he was the smartest of us all. I had never seen him study in my life, he spent most of his time at his job at the steel mill or at his second job at the butcher’s, and yet he still managed to know the answer to every question and the result of every verdict in the courtroom. That was us: three penniless student burnouts, coasting on the collective dream that we’d be big shot lawyers one day. It would’ve been fine like that, we whined about the government and women who didn’t love us back, we were nonexistent, but we didn’t seem to mind. That was, until Henry Horowitz took notice. The Horowitz name loomed in the subconscious of every person on campus, it was plastered in golden letters above dozens of hotels across the city. Henry came from family money, the kind you’re born into so you never learn to appreciate, the kind you think you deserve because God deemed you worthy. The little jabs didn’t bother us, the quips of the patches on our jackets, the rumors spread between every sound and syllable of our names, it fueled our rage and even drove us to work harder. I think it was for this reason we wanted to be lawyers: it was a chance to reclaim power in a world that had for so long, held our face just below the waterline. For so long we were drowning in the pool of insignificance, water clear enough to see others succeed, trapped far enough to never break the surface. It was the good kind of rage until Horowitz decided to bed Charlie’s girl. That was the day the docile friend I once knew to never lay a hand on a living creature, became a fire of violent hate. Perhaps things could have been different… if Luca hadn’t found him first. I came upon the two in our library back room, but I knew something was wrong by their hushed voices, their boozy labored breaths. Here they explained their plan: Lock Horowitz up on the top of his daddy’s hotel rooftop and have him spend a night freezing off his ass in the New York winter cold. I dared to ask how they planned to get him up there. That’s when Luca, the man who was all mouth and no action, proved me wrong. His eyes darted around us, then he pulled a silver pistol from his jacket pocket. Without thinking, I backed up, knocking down a chair or two in my descent. “Calm down, it’s just to scare him a bit.” Luca ineffectively reassured me. They stared at me with eyes of intent, asking me the question they already knew the answer to. We were brothers. I nodded my head.

           We waited outside the pub he frequented, collars turned up, eyes at our shoes. There wasn’t much of a struggle, Horowitz was already liquored up, but when Luca pressed the cold barrel to his ribs, the man was sobered in seconds. As we walked a block over and rode the elevator up to the roof, our classmate pleaded, promised she came onto him. Assured us that he was an innocent man. I would imagine he was trying to conjure up some sympathy in us, but instead it made us rougher, more crude, as we realized we had control of the man with the name of the very building we ascended. On the rooftop we were the kings of the city, stripping Horowitz of his coat, his scarf, his dignity. We were addicts to the power, hypnotized by the sight of our greatest antagonist dethroned with his hands to the sky in surrender. The wind was unforgiving as it turned our lips blue, but an intoxicating flame danced along our skin and seared through our veins. We stepped closer, basking in his trepidation. The gun in Luca’s hand seemed like a limb he had always had, steady, sure. Charlie took another step closer and Horowitz shuddered, facing us while backing away, pleading something unintelligible. I turned to Luca and Charlie, waiting for them to return to the door to lock the pathetic looking man out in the cold, but my gaze did nothing to obstruct their path. A step closer. The wind now sent a chill down my spine, the erect hairs on my neck pricked my collar. A step closer. I was now behind them, frozen in place, Charlie’s figure blocking my view of our hostage. Then came the scream. It wasn’t one of fear, but shock. Short, breathy, a gasping realization. We all ran to the edge of the roof.

I’d like to believe he tripped that night. I tell myself he lost his footing and fell to an avoidable and tragic demise, but Charlie and Luca never told me what had actually happened. In fact, after the few seconds we stared at the body of Henry Horowitz, mangled like a bug on a windshield, unmoving upon the concrete below, we took the stairs down to the lobby, each took separate cabs, and went back to the dorms as if nothing happened. As if we had not just killed a man. From that night we never spoke to one another beyond that of a nod or a wave. The police visited our campus but we were never questioned. We were insignificant once again. It was deemed a suicide.

The room was now a bedroom again, the darkness no longer a canvas of the past, the darkness was simply a lack of light. My wife stirred next to me, her delicate features now furled in a grimace. My pulse sputtered for a moment as I feared she saw the images I had relived, but soon her face softened as she let out a peaceful sigh. In later years I heard from classmates that Charlie got into an accident with a tractor and didn’t make it out alive. Luca and I did graduate law school, but after showing up to a deposition plastered more than a few times, he lost his license, and became an angry drunk like his father, and just like his father, drank himself into the grave. It wasn’t grief that I was succumbed to when I heard of their deaths, but instead anxiety ridden fear. I played the part as I was supposed to. I kept my mouth shut. On paper I should have been happy. On paper I had the perfect life. But paper only knows what is written down, what is seen, what is spoken. The deaths of my classmates, my accomplices, my brothers, they reaffirmed the truth I had been denying for years.

What does it mean when all your brothers have died and you are left? That you are lucky? That you survived? No. It means you're next.