A Mercy Killing

The Blacksmith smiled as he finished the final link.  "Done," he rasped, his decaying, humorless, rictus of a grin like an acid bath.  A man considers the shackle on his leg, the chain that was solidly attached to it, and the way the thick chain led to a weighty ball of fool’s gold.

She was hired a few months after me.  I didn’t think much of it, at the time, but I did notice that she held up well against the constant commentary of a workforce, besides her, consisting entirely of men.  I was jealous that she could fluently speak French.  I made the observations that men are biologically required to make; large breasts, usually shown off, and work pants that consistently lacked back pockets.  Other than that, though, she was a coworker–friendly, smart, funny, and to be seen once or twice a week.  This status quo eventually disappeared: everything changed.

Slowly–or suddenly, I can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter–I wanted to work with her.  I wanted to see her at the bar after work, and we’d take shots.  Our legs would touch and our eyes would smile and we’d talk with our mouths just a few short oh so unnecessary inches apart.  It’d be alright, though, because the music would be loud and our lips wouldn’t touch.  Not too often, anyways, and never mutually: not in such a way that her conscience couldn’t remain intact.  Some might argue that sexual attraction, when born of nothing but increasing knowledge of one another, deserves attention.  The fact became unavoidable; while I can’t write for her, I can say that I was sexually attracted to her mind just as much as her body, and that’s an important, remarkable thing.

These things have an unfortunate tendency of sneaking up on you.  I don’t want to hear my text ringtone and hope it’s her.  I don’t want to check her work schedule against mine anymore.  This is the man, barely breathing and eyesight fading, watching a plug in an ICU.  This is the man, trapped in a white lab coat, face ashen with gentle remorse, his hand on a plug in an ICU.  This is a mercy killing.  This is the killer and the killed.

When I woke up next to her, I nearly exploded in a combination of remorse, confusion, and contentment.  I didn’t mind her being there, of course.  I just figured she might, and that her boyfriend of six years almost certainly would.  Her breasts were pliable against my hand as I shifted against her; her hair glittered like refulgent rose quartz.  Her perfume was warm, flowery.  And I wondered, however fantastically, if time might stop.  If she might remain asleep, and I might drift off next to her, and we might slumber on, and on, and on, contentedly sighing through dreams of a bon hiver.  If the consequences of tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after, might stay safely off in the unknowable.  I tried my hardest to pretend like this was good and right.

A songbird contemplated me through the window, over the tumbled, tangled mass of her red hair.  It berated me, disdainful, before taking to wing.  I remembered my dad, face tear-streaked, soul gin-soaked, crying on my shoulder–his wife, my mother, had cheated on him.  My skin crawled and my fingers went numb and I hated myself, then, lying there, for not hating myself more.  For not jumping up and getting dressed and running out of my own bedroom.  I hated myself for being so happy.

Dear Fifteen Year-Old Mitch:

Things are rarely, ever so simple.  Know this, though–I’m sorry.  I betrayed you.

Sincerely,

Twenty-Four Year-Old Mitch

PS–I’m trying my hardest to regret it.

The halls of the Center for the Arts shivered in the silence.  As I walked through them, I dragged an index finger aimlessly along them, feeling all of the grooves and seams.  What was I going to say?  I’d known, as she left the few days prior, that her conscience was already taking soul-sized chunks out of her.  She’d been downcast, confused, upset.  What was I supposed to say?  I’d driven her home, making a comment: "Alcohol is a mischief potion.  A potion of mischief."  And she’d nodded and agreed, but she couldn’t argue with the way her arm had twisted behind her head and grasped mine; she couldn’t pretend like she hadn’t ground her hips back against me; she couldn’t deny to herself that she’d responded, biologically, in all the ways a woman who wants to have sex would respond.

So when I received the text–My conscience is shot–I knew it was going to be an unfortunate and unpleasant conversation.  Necessary, of course, but necessity is usually unfortunate and unpleasant.  How could I explain, really, how awful it is to have to give advice to a girl, a woman you desperately want to be with, on how to preserve her present relationship?  I shudder to remember the conversation.  The pained look on her face, the thin layer of understanding and patience that wrapped my ambivalence, the memory of her and I…ugh.  It might have sounded patently absurd when I told her not to tell her boyfriend, although the reasoning behind it was fairly tight.  "What purpose would it serve?" I asked her.  "It would alleviate your aching conscience and make him miserable.  That hardly seems fair."  She nodded, agreeing, but I think she might have agreed with anything I said.  She had no idea.  "So, let it bother you.  What we did was wrong, certainly, and we both deserve to feel bad.  Learn, laugh, repeat."  She nodded and graced me with a slight smile.  She liked that–learn, laugh, repeat–despite its corniness.  We parted ways that night, resolving to never let it happen again.

The second time it happened, I was still drunk when I woke up.  As I lay there, I suddenly realized, I drink too much.  She was already awake, staring at the chaos of empty bottles and cans around my room.  How do I explain to her, then, that by keeping my room disgustingly messy, I’m discouraging myself from bringing random girls home?  Would she believe it?  All things considering, and although she wasn’t "random," probably not.  She was naked and I wasn’t, which was both confusing and reassuring.

Superego: You heartless asshole.  What are you doing?  What are you thinking?

Id:  I’m doing what other men have done since time immemorial.

Superego:  They have been dating for six years.  A marriage in everything but name.  You’re a homewrecker.

Id:  Hold it.  I’m not dating anyone.  I’m not betraying anyone.

Superego:  Besides me, of course.

Id:  Listen, they’ve been dating since she was seventeen.  What if it’s a relationship based on fear of the unknown?  Wouldn’t I be doing her a favor, then?

Superego:  Not the right way.  Not the way you should.  Yes, they have been dating since shewas seventeen: do you realize how big of a part that makes him in her life?  No.  You’re just going in, arms flailing, insisting, like a child, that you be given what you want.  There are consequences fracturing and growing into more and more consequences.  In the end, both you and I are of very little consequence.

Id:  Shut up.  Go away.

She lay there, wrapped tightly in a plaid flannel blanket, discovering sobriety and contrition in equal measure.  She began to talk.  "’Who do you always text,’ he asks, ‘wearing that secretive little smile?  You are going to the bars alone?  Who are you going to meet,’ he asks, ‘who so obviously deserves your time more than me?’"  She was silent, then, and took a few shallow, halting breaths.  A tear, stained black by conscience and mascara, began to paint a trail from the corner of her eye to bassinet of my bed.  Because, in this, I have been an infant.  One with a troublesome penchant for alcohol and an immutable need for instant gratification.

Her phone buzzed, and it was a text message from her boyfriend.  Yikes.  "Your bar days are over."  Obviously upset that his girlfriend had failed to come home the night before.  I imagined that waking up alone, for him, had been profoundly strange and worrisome.  Even more oddly, he didn’t want to know.  I drove her home, and she smiled sadly as she waved goodbye to me through the windshield.  She went up the stairs, smoked weed with him, and he didn’t want to know.

I went home and wrote in my diary:

Cynicism is, in and of itself, a rigid, tensile carapace protecting the soft underside, the vitals, the viscera.  We are dually blessed and cursed, I think, with the shrill objections of our conscience, prodding us, mapping our courses and forcing our hands.  We are stalked by our misdeeds in the spare moments of the day, foiled by an inability to wrap ourselves in the comfort of constant action, plagued by the inner-demons waiting in the vacancy of idleness, deserted by economy of emotion.  The heavy mantle of leaden confusion smashing down and smothering a flowerbed; the wide-eyed and dreamy, starry wonder in the world unraveled and poisoned by an inability to divorce thought from action.

To not want to know is the height of fear; to embrace ignorance is to cravenly embrace its comfort and protection.  Choices are made in anguish, uncertainly; even when offered cake or ice cream, might I not wonder how good the cake might have been, even as I eat the ice cream?  Might I not question the wisdom of my decision?  You cannot hide from the stern admonishments of retrospective fate; you cannot run from the broken, disproven notions you once held about yourself.  It is a true crisis of conscience when you marry enjoyment to remorse, and it is doubly bad when you kind of, sort of want it to repeat itself.  It is a tragedy when you can’t savor that enjoyment, and it is doubly bad to think of a wonderful night as anything but wonderful.  It is all so selfishly human.  The overripe, citrus orange of life is, upon closer inspection, actually a sprig of winter bittersweet.  Is there no penitence lest it be public?  I don’t know, John, but I do know that we all hang for silence.  You can see a long way from that gallows, all the way back through human history.

We’ve no right to think that we know anything, and to invoke an old existentialist, we are left alone, without excuse.  Perhaps, unencumbered and unprotected by a carapace, my skin will thicken, harden, and I will wear my underside like a gleaming suit of armor.  Perhaps I will evolve into something chameleon-like, and safely hide in my surroundings, kept safe in the towering cowardice of anonymity.   Forward, forward, always forward; Up, Guards, and at ’em.  Opportunities foregone always portentously promise of either self-recrimination or of the smug self-congratulatory; opportunities pursued usually promise the same, if only accompanied by knowledge and the confusion that it inevitably spawns.  I regret nothing except that I cannot live in the few kept memories, them that flashbulb in the black, wherein consequences and consciences and the unblinking devils of thinking were a world of bottles away.  That wine and that night held enough truth to kill a philosopher-king; hips may confound, but they never lie.

The situation deteriorated.  Every shared day at work, it became more and more obvious.  Snarky comments from the boss: "Hey, why are you always in a better mood when Mitch is working?"  So on and so forth.  And, despite my better self, I grew to want her more and more.  I cringed and ran, tail between my legs, whenever I saw them out together.  Lying awake, alone in bed, I pictured them, curled up naked in theirs.  What is she thinking?  Does she miss me?  The immovable, fool’s gold weight in my chest began to smother out my lungs.  Breathing became a challenge and a chore. 

My brother came for the holidays.  As we drove toward an uncle’s, just him and I, I told all.

He shut his eyes and sighed.  "You need to throw the whole situation away, Mitch," he told me, fraternal concern endeavoring to sway and support me, all at once.  "Throw it away.  Crumple it up, first, tear it to shreds, so you can’t ever read what it once read."  The car reared forward as he shifted to overdrive.  "You’re not geared towards such situations.  You’re not."  There’s something oddly reassuring and subtly offensive about being told about yourself.  I remembered Shakespeare, then: Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.  "You’re a good man, Mitch.  You are.  People like you more than they have ever liked me.  I get shit done, but, dammit, people love you.  You’ll be no good for anyone if you let this eat at you."  He laughed sympathetically, knowingly.  "I know it.  When you’re sad, even if no one else does.  You’re quiet, listening to yourself, mediating between despair and hope, and the vehemence of the debate makes you depressed.  That debate even has its own special smile."  He snuck a glance at me.  "There it is," he told me, nodding towards the empty smile dissembling to my face.

I nodded, wearing my silence like a foot of snow.  The window’s frost crept up my nose.  Emotions played kettle drums in the auditoriums in my ribcage, recalcitrant and unwilling to be ignored.  They were painfully beautiful.  The air was bright and the sky was clear, but the snow kept piling up, looming over me, ever-higher, ever-colder.

"You’re not an epiphany, Mitch.  Maybe you learned something.  I hope you did."  His voice hung heavy with shared sorrow.  "Fate, circumstance, karma taught her.  You’re a learning experience."  He looked away, out his window, and neither one of us watched the road.  I thought I might cry.  "You’re a barely recollected and constantly regretted memory–a wraith of conscience haunting a couple nights of heavy drinking."  His voice softened into something gentler, something remorseful, and I knew he was sorry to say it–a mercy killing.  "You’re her great mistake."

A man tugs a ball behind him, both hands on the chain.  Livestock have sheared the grass into a thin layer of soft stubble, and the weighty sphere furrows the earth.  I don’t know how long the man pulled the chain, but I do know the way the tendons popped out of his muscles as he groaned, straining, nearly sobbing in his arduous frustration.  Finally, he happened upon an isolated pond, someplace deep in the verdant sheepfolds.  A strange woman sat, cross-legged with face serene, atop a monstrous boulder by an endless pier.  "When you tear up what grew, something else will grow," she implacably informed him, her face boring like an auger into his.  "Turn around."

The furrow stretched off into the unremembered distance.  For its entire length, wildflowers smiled blindly into the beaming sun.