Very Hard Choices Read online

  "Okay, but why? It has to be easier to kill him. Hell, you might even end up making friends. Wouldn't that be a nice change?"

  There was a lot of money in the pot, so I thought harder than usual about his question. "What's the hardest thing to do in a dormitory?"

  "Jerk off in privacy," Matt Mee said at once. He peered at his hand and called, and so did Jim Clooney.

  He had me there. "Okay, what's the second hardest?"

  "Getting any God damned studying done," Bill Doane said, raising a hundred bucks. "Noise, water fights, hall parties, room-jobbing, assholes knocking on the door with something more interesting to do. Card games in the end-hall lounge."

  "Exactly," I said. Bill seemed to have been using more words than he needed to, so I just called instead of raising back, to sucker him in further. "It's real peaceful in my room. Nobody comes near it. I was on academic pro last year . . . this semester, I've got a shot at Dean's List."

  "You've been on his shit list for a long time," Slinks said, raising fifty.

  "No, seriously. B's and up, man. If that stinks, so be it."

  Matt folded, got up and went down the hall to the can. "When Slim's right, he's right, Slinks," Bill said. "I myself derive a similar though lesser benefit from the healthy respect our own neighbors hold for your foul personality, psychotic instability, and known interest in explosives." He raised Slinks five hundred bucks.

  "Okay, but I don't stink."

  "At what?" I asked happily. Verbosity and confidence—just what I liked to see in Bill when I was planning to skin him first. I raised him a thousand dollars even.

  Silence. The kibitzers leaned closer, and one of the studiers opened an eye. Far away down the hall somewhere, someone cried out in disgust. Someone else joined him, and then a third voice imitated a girl screaming in a horror movie. Nobody around the table even glanced up.

  Slinky John stared at me intently. "You're full of shit," he decided, but he closed up his hand anyway and gestured with it to indicate he was folding, then reopened it and fanned himself with it.

  Bill regarded me balefully from under a forest canopy of red curls, and stroked his vast beard. He was smarter than I was, but he looked like a guy Conan the Barbarian would try to bribe before fighting. I dropped my head and swung it from side to side to crack my neck. "You always do that when you're bluffing," he said. "Raise you a grand right back."

  I grinned at my chest. That was indeed a pattern I'd been establishing for weeks against just such a moment. "And back at you," I said, putting a quaver in it.

  "And five thousand more," he boomed triumphantly.

  Oh God, if only we'd been playing for real money! "Ten thousand," I said, and looked up grinning.

  His face fell.

  Mike Linkman and Frank Vezina burst into the room. "Holy fucking Jesus Christ," they shouted in unison, as if it were an act they had rehearsed well. Then they said it again, sloppier this time. Then they turned to each other and nailed, "It can't be!" After that, they went into counterpoint, with one saying "Of course," while the other said "I don't believe it," and then "It explains everything," dueting with "How could he possibly not?" and like that.

  Bill rose from the table like a time-lapse movie of a redwood growing, grabbed their collars, and gently whacked their heads together. "Stop that," he suggested.

  They didn't, so he did it again, less gently. "Serious matters are at stake, here. I'm being screwed with my pants on."

  "Forget it," Frank said. "Listen to this."

  Bill regarded him thoughtfully, starting to become interested. In order to make Frank's and Mike's skulls meet, he'd had to lift Frank more than a foot off the floor, and was holding him at arm's length. "Okay," he said, set Frank down and released Matt too.

  Given the floor, they passed it silently back and forth like a hot potato for a few seconds.

  Frank started. "We see him plain as day, okay? You know how bright the light is down at that end?"

  "They're not gonna believe us," Matt told him.

  "Shit, I don't believe us," Frank said. "But I'm gonna tell it anyway. While I still don't believe it."

  Matt frowned. "Yeah. You are."

  "Everybody knows we got the can back today, right?"

  Slinky John had the grace to blush slightly, and fan himself a bit harder with his dead hand of cards. Nalligan Three's big common washroom had only just reopened, after an unreasonably lengthy closure necessitated by someone's scientific curiosity—admirable, really, considered objectively—as to whether or not it was really possible to lift a whole commode entirely off the floor using hypergolic chemicals alone. The answer is yes, but not just one. The long trudge down to Nalligan Two's washroom had become onerous for us, the territorial resentment and mockery there tiresome; we were all glad to finally have our own crapper back.

  "As it happens," Bill said, "we were discussing that very problem earlier."

  "Huh? How could you?" Frank asked, baffled.

  "What problem are you talking about?" Matt asked.

  "The difficulty of jerking off in privacy in a dorm. That is where you're going with this, right?"

  "I wish!" Frank said fervently.

  Something even more embarrassing! We all were starting to get interested now, even the studiers. "Just tell it," I suggested.

  Frank started to, then thought of one more thing we needed to know first. "We're in our socks, right?" He gestured to his and Matt's feet, and they were indeed wearing only double pairs of socks on their feet. So was I; it was a popular choice. The dorm floors were quite warm enough even in February— on the upper floors, at least—and so heavily overwaxed by generations of dirt-despising Marianite Brothers and their minions that a man in socks could learn to skate on them quite efficiently, if the alternative were studying.

  "But we're not zipping, just walking," he went on.

  "Not talking, because it's late, we don't want our asses kicked," Matt added.

  "And we just turn the corner, and there he is."

  "Right there," Matt agreed.

  Bill cleared his throat. "Where who is?"

  They looked at him, blinking.

  Bill closed his own eyes. "Whom did you see?" he inquired with massive patience. "And what was his location at the time?" His voice sounded like a locomotive idling a few floors below.

  "Him," Frank almost explained.

  "Right there," Matt unamplified.

  Bill's expression did not change, but his complexion began to approach the color of his shoulderblade-length hair and nipple-length beard.

  I jumped in to try and save their lives. "Say his name," I suggested, in the tone of voice one uses to say "Fetch the stick."

  "I can't," Frank said. Matty too shook his head.

  Which direction to take now? Ask why not? Say yes you can? Just let Bill crack their skulls, since there was nothing to leak out? Hadn't I been doing something important a minute ago? Oh, right—

  Frank picked then to qualify his statement, and intersected glancingly with coherence. "I can't pronounce it," he said, managing to actually explain, so effectively that his added, "Zibba Zabba-zooba," was redundant.

  Bill's eyes opened and we exchanged a glance. "Smelly," we said at the same time.

  "Yeah, but that's not his name," Frank said. "I can pronounce that."

  "Not without a tongue," Bill said dreamily.

  "What?"

  "A momentary pleasure you could regret for hours," I told him soothingly. "Allow me. Frank, Matt, you rounded the corner and saw Zan—" Lost cause. "—my roommate Smelly, coming out of the bog, is that right?"

  They both shook their heads and said "No no no," emphatically, "That's just what we didn't." (Frank.) "Didn't see him doing." (Matt.)

  "Going into it, then."

  Even louder no no no's. "That's exactly what he didn't do." (Matt.) "That's what he doesn't." (Frank.) "Exactly." (Both.)

  No civilians had hand guns in 1967 except lone-gunman assassins, if there actually were any. W
hen I had first come to St. Billy Joe I had thought it silly that they actually bothered to put a no-gun clause in the dormitory residence manual. But not for long. I wished I had one now. "Where was Smelly when you saw him?"

  Could I possibly have projected more menace with my voice than big Bill Doane had? I guess, because Frank just started spilling—at last. "He's coming toward us, halfway down the hall, but he isn't coming toward us. Frozen in his tracks, I'm saying. Deer in the headlights. One foot in the air, no shit."

  "Already," Matt added.

  "Right, that's what I'm saying: we come around the corner and he's already frozen, before he heard us or saw us. And he's standing directly under the good light, holding it right there by the top like a, like a, a—Jesus—you know: the thing with the fucking incense in it at fucking High Mass—"

  "Censer," Bill said.

  Frank blinked at him. "Sorry. Like the thing with the incense in it at High Mass, he's holding it like that. One of those Mason-Dixon jars, the biggest one they make, I guess. Big enough the first thing I'm thinking is, that's enough sausage there for all three of us."

  "Jesus, me too!" Matt agreed, shuddering.

  "Then I'm thinking, no, that's gotta be pickles: if it was sausage, there'd be something else solid in the soup with it, onions or something. Only by then I'm starting to notice his face, in spite of myself. I mean, you know, that's not a face you need to look at once it stops being funny."

  "Right on," Slinky John agreed, and others chimed in. If Sir Winston Churchill had been shaved bald, he and the cartoon character Baby Huey and Smelly could all have passed for brothers, and Smelly would have been considered the ugly one.

  "But he's got this expression like . . . I don't know what. I never saw anybody with that expression before. Matt?"

  "Maybe this kid in high school shop who cut a couple of his fingers off."

  "Okay. Anyway, I see this expression on his face, and right then, don't ask me how, I know what he's got in the jar. And I take a closer look, and it is."

  "I didn't get it until you yelled," Matt told him. "Well, I did, but I didn't want to believe I got it until somebody else did first."

  "Yeah." They nodded at each other in shared understanding.

  The sound of Bill inhaling was clearly audible, and went on for what seemed a long time.

  "It was a jar of shit," Frank and Matt said in slow unison.

  Bill stopped inhaling. Pretty much everyone else started.

  "A jar of shit and piss," Matt said.

  "His own shit and piss," Frank repeated.

  Everyone started talking at once, at the top of their lungs. Nice arrangement.

  Bill rode on top of the chorus by sheer lungpower. "Holy Christ on keyboards, it almost makes sense."

  His roommate stared at him. "Fuck you, it does."

  "Well, all right, no—but it almost makes sick sense, like deconstructionism."

  "Derrida versus da reader," Slinks couldn't help saying.

  "Exactly. Think about it—all of you, think hard. Did you ever see Smelly in the can? Going in the can? Going out of the can? Ever?"

  We combed our memories, with difficulty. It wasn't the kind of record one tends to store retrievably. I couldn't seem to bring a specific instance to mind myself, but surely someone would. It would only take one of us—

  Nobody. A lot of glances, shrugs, grimaces, not one retrieved memory of Smelly in the washroom.

  Bill turned to me. "He drinks coffee?"

  "Tea. A lot if he's pulling an all-nighter."

  "Ever see him get up and go piss?"

  I frowned. "No." This was silly . . .

  "I still don't get it," Frank said.

  "He's terrified that if anybody ever catches him in the john, that close to soap and water, a posse will spontaneously form, and toss him in the goddam shower and scrub him down with a toilet brush and a gallon of Mr. Clean."

  "At last, a plan," Slinky John growled.

  Bill spun on him. "Yeah? You go get him. Get close enough to put your hands on him—" Slinks was paling. "—and stay that close long enough to drag him down the hall and into the can."

  "I take your point."

  "Guys, guys," I said, "this is crazy. How would he make it through the weekend?"

  "Huh?"

  "A guy Smelly's size could fill the biggest Mason jar they make at least once a day. At least. I've seen him eat. So what about weekends?"

  "Huh."

  "On a school night, sure, you can be guaranteed at least a couple of hours of peace, to skulk down to the can. But Friday night? Saturday? Sunday, even? Forget it. No way."

  That won me a few supporter skeptics.

  Bill was frowning. "More than one j—"

  I shook my head. "In a room that size? I'd've noticed."

  "Out the—"

  "My bed's directly under the window, remember?"

  "The answer is right under your noses," Slinky John said.

  Bill glared at him. "Well? Out with it."

  "He holds on to it," Slinks said. "And it comes out his pores."

  There was a cry of general outrage, and pretty much everybody threw whatever was closest to hand at him. Unfortunately, I did too, and even more unfortunately, so did all the other card players, so the pot was void.

  Nobody ever came up with a better explanation than Slinky John's, though extravagant attempts were made. None of us—least of all I, his roommate—ever got up the nerve to raise with Smelly the question, why do you shit and piss in a jar, much less, how do you manage the logistics. The entire incident served mostly to solidify a long-standing tendency on the part of everyone to think about Smelly just as seldom as humanly possible.

  Maybe I'm editing memory, making myself smarter than I actually am. I do that sometimes. But I do think, I do, that it was a little later that night, sitting alone in the room I shared with Smelly at the end of the hall, that it consciously entered my head for the very first time—purely as a joke—that my roommate Zandor Zudenigo might be a telepath. If he were, went the thought, what spot on earth could possibly be more terrifying than the place where dozens of male college students went to masturbate?

  It was more than thirty-five years later that I learned I'd stumbled on the truth.

  4.

  Saturday, June 23, 2007

  West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

  He was given plenty of signage warning that the road was about to bifurcate, the right fork continuing to be the Sea to Sky Highway, and the left fork coming to a stop at a ferry terminal in a village called Horseshoe Bay. And his GPS snitch was more than good enough to tell him which fork he wanted: the left. So he continued to follow just out of sight, slowing from highway speed at the same rate as his target did.

  It was the size of the ferry terminal that took him by surprise: not as big as the monster he'd driven past at Tsawwassen, but not the one-boat commuter-pooter he'd expected either. By the time he grasped how many different options there were, he was very nearly too late to see which one his quarry had chosen. Irritatingly, it was the one he would have to cross the most lanes of traffic to reach; he barely managed it without causing horns to be honked. And at once he had to deal with an attendant who, by his standards, took forever to do a simple credit card swipe and issue him a ticket. To someplace with the uncouth name "Heron Island."

  Hell.

  He knew it would be the smallest destination served, because all the others had at least two booths. Therefore he was about to park just behind his quarry, and sit there motionless for an indeterminate time, and there would probably be hardly anyone else around for her to look at whom she didn't already know.

  "Lane One," the attendant said and gave him an unwanted receipt.

  "Can I get a newspaper somewhere nearby?"

  "As soon as you're underneath," the attendant agreed.

  Underneath? This kept getting better.

  All lanes of traffic past the ticket booths funneled leftward into a single lane—God knew
why—and again, the Canadians all queued up politely and waited their turn. After a bit of winding, it just as inexplicably opened out again into a dozen or so lanes, and Lane One was the one he was already in. Everybody else got out of his way and let him make a little speed. This cheered him until he hit the first speed bump. It was a serious speed bump, and turned out to be the least serious of the series.

  Lane One took him, very slowly, past long lines of stopped cars waiting for their ferry to arrive. His was empty. When he got to the front of it, there was a midget imitation of the ticket booth. He stopped by it. Without glancing up, a uniformed attendant inside pointed diagonally to the right. He followed the finger, and sure enough there was an unblocked entrance to a roofed-over area. He drove in cautiously, as slow as he dared.

  Four lanes were full of cars, two on either side of a concrete walkway lined with pillars that held the roof up. No, five lanes: a fifth had just started up to the left of the rest, with one or two cars in it. He saw his quarry at once, at the end of the lane furthest from him. It was nearly but not quite full.

  He thought fast. Take the lane farthest from her, and he was in front of her, in full view. Way in front, okay, but suppose they boarded the right lanes first, and she drove past him at three fucking kilometers per hour? Being what she was, how would she not notice him?

  He parked right behind her, in the last space in that row. To examine him she would have to either turn around, or use one of her three mirrors, and in all those cases he'd at least see it and know she was checking him out.