We killed him
Mark you fucking killed him
Instantly the current that had brought him here seemed to desert him, to drain away in a final roar and expose an underlying quiet that he had not known he had not been hearing, the ever-present quiet of the dirt and the stars and their bodies quietly alive. A barge lowed somewhere on the water. They swung the body blindly into the river and left, scared as hell, and no one saw them. Afterward no one suspected them. It was only later that Mark began to gain a crude understanding that the current had not left him at all; it had only merged into a larger course, one in which he was no longer an active mechanism but a thing powerlessly adrift, too small and too integrated to perceive what engulfed him as anything separate from the carriage of existence itself.
He was driving the company truck toward the South Side after work, last week’s snow still shrinking on the edges of the road. The heater was rasping. It was an old pickup of an indeterminate grade of black, a rattling, smoking steel thing with a busted radio and cracked vinyl seats and faded lettering on the sides. The windshield was cold and sunbrushed with the last of the slanting daylight. Normally he took the bus home, but today he had volunteered to close the shop, then taken the truck out when the others had gone, with hardly a thought given to consequence or purpose.
He drove now with the half-formed notion of going to a bar, but was thinking of Levi’s murder and seeing everything around him, the entire world as he knew it, as what the murder had left behind in its wake. One of his science teachers, who had liked to tell Mark that he could go far in life if he only applied himself, had once said that the course of the universe was like a cosmic game of billiards. And Mark was thinking of this now, of pool balls ricocheting again and again in endlessly multiplying accident. Thinking, He’s dead Mark you killed him. Thinking of Abigail, how they had broken up soon after, how she had then ricocheted until she had become engaged to Zacharias, how Mark had thought her ricocheting had stopped then. Thinking how the ricocheting had now killed Zacharias too, and knowing now that its reverberation would never cease — that it would one day become unattributable to the murder, but only because it would exceed the limits of human calculation and memory.
As he neared the East Carson bars, he found himself turning onto the narrow street on which stood UPMC South Side, where Zacharias was lying somewhere, brain-dead. He found a vacant spot by the curb and, from the idling truck, gazed up at the building’s turreted façade without intention, only thinking in a mild stupor that this was where the Gorski family would finally be blotted out. He was recalling the classic illustration of human evolution, the monkey uncrouching by increments toward the apotheosis that was man, and in his mind he pictured the Gorskis’ ancestral line in the same way: the descendents springing up one after another through dark millennia in an unbroken and resolute linear procession, only to be suddenly extinguished by the repercussive force of his own trivial and incredulous hand. Permanently annihilated. There would be whole branches of people who would now never come into being, whom the world would never even know to miss. The idea was almost unfathomable to him in its simple desolation.
When a few minutes had passed, he twisted off the engine and sat in the violently ensuing silence, sensing the tiny clustering of the oncoming dusk, the near-imperceptible way it began its purple bloodying of the air. He continued to stare up at the hospital, as if by staring enough he might see Zacharias. At any moment he expected to restart the engine and drive to the bar, but his expectation was devoid of will, as though the decision to leave would be made by someone other than himself.
When she came out, he did not immediately recognize her. She was just another figure emerging from the building, small in her puff of a white jacket, like something blown out onto the sidewalk. There was an air of relief about her, something he had noticed in others who had exited, some registering of freedom, but in her it somehow seemed intentioned, the exhalation exaggerated for her own witnessing, as if by feigning it, the actual relief, and then the actual freedom, would follow. He tracked her absently as she walked in his direction, but it was only when she stepped in front of the truck to cross the street that he recognized her as Abigail. He watched a few moments longer, unmoving and unthinking, before abruptly quitting the truck and walking after her.
She was proceeding hurriedly, cutting toward the next block through the small sitting area opposite the hospital, and he followed as if pulled by the slipstream, not calling out, not knowing what he would say when he caught up to her. They had not remained close after they broke up those years ago. Their affair, which had lasted maybe seven months, had seemed a thing of real substance by high school standards, the first convincing romance for both, and perhaps would have continued had it not been for the murder. He remembered it as a sustained flash of heat against the cold, beginning in the waning warmth of late late summer and fizzling in the spring, in full bloom only in fall and winter. It had seemed to have its own unspoken logic, by which their fierce rifts were graced with the same intimacy as their tenderest moments. Their arguments in the halls had reached levels of violence that bordered on parody, taking on the air of staged teen dramas in which they were secretly witting actors; on campus they became as famous for their public fights as for their public affection. Their theatricality — the cheek both burning from a slap and imprinted with lipstick — had made itself the trademark of their relationship, seemed crucial to its continuing survival, and this may have set the precedent for Mark’s brutal response to Levi’s offense, because between them there had never been any room for the middle ground.
They had broken up soon after. As he followed her now he was thinking of how they had never spoken over the years, seeming almost to realize it for the first time. She had become a neighborhood fixture to him, someone he saw with inevitable regularity around Carrick and East Carson, and in the process she had entered that strange realm of once-familiar things that have fallen into conspicuous obscurity. He had heard through friends about her father’s brain cancer — a bad headache one morning, buried five months later — and her engagement to Zacharias, but had otherwise rarely thought about her directly, instead remembering Abigail and that segment of his past as a single crude impression of vivid color and heat. He followed her for another short block, muted by the years. There were stretches of the sidewalk still crusted over with ice, but she moved quickly, incautiously. At the corner she crossed the street to the first available bar, a dingy corner dive with a white shingled overhang, and pushed through its palm-smudged door.
He stopped, lingering on the opposite side, but in a minute Abigail reappeared, clutching a weighted paper bag with both hands. She saw him standing across the street then and quickly looked away as if she hadn’t, as had been their custom. But now he held his gaze, unmoving as she crossed back to his side, the beer bottles clinking in her bag, and finally she looked back at him when it could no longer be avoided, her expression hard but unable to fully conceal her incredulousness. “Mark,” she said ironically. He had not looked at her this closely in eight years, but he felt no tug of old emotion, only a defamiliarized recollection of intimacy. While most people he knew, including himself, had gained some heft around the jaw since high school, Abigail had grown bonier, shedding the shapeless skinniness of her youth for a thinness that seemed lighter and frailer and more severe, giving an impression of bones growing hollow. She was not wearing makeup today, and her face had that raw scrubbed appearance of women who are rarely seen without it.