Very Bad Deaths Read online

  “Your roommate and I were talking about the war. Zandor, is it? He mentioned your paper. I can’t believe nobody ever interpreted Red Badge as an antiwar novel before,” she said.

  “I can’t believe anybody ever read it any other way,” I admitted.

  “Me either. It’s so obvious. I mean, the only times the guy ever succeeds as a warrior—”

  “—are the times he goes nuts, loses his humanity—”

  “—loses or abandons it—”

  “—right! Exactly—”

  “—that scene right before the first battle, when he feels like he’s in a moving box—”

  “Would you like to walk with me?” I asked.

  And then I’m not sure about the choreography of what happened next—who did what, who went first—but when it was over her arm was in mine and we were walking out the west gate together.

  “So what was it you…I mean, why…”

  “I was hoping I could ask to borrow a copy. I’ve only heard about your paper, and I’d like to read it for myself.”

  “Are you a Crane freak?”

  She shook her head. “Peace freak.”

  “Ah. Were you there when they liberated the library?”

  We basically walked and talked all night—with intervals of doing neither, sharing silent companionship beside the reservoir, and again on a hill overlooking the state highway—and it wasn’t until after I’d dropped her off at her dorm and was halfway to my own, whistling, that I remembered the existence of the Bunny.

  When I did, I grinned wryly. It was like remembering my boyhood intention to be a cowboy when I grew up. As far as I was concerned, the Bunny was history.

  I didn’t know how right I was. Until I got back to my own dorm, and found the entire building in mourning.

  The Bunny had failed to show the night before. People had waited—a few were reportedly still waiting, down the hill—but there’d been no sign of her.

  Nor was there any that night.

  Or any subsequent night. As mysteriously as she had appeared in the first place, the Bunny had vanished for good.

  What did I care? I was in love. For the first time in my life. And, I could already sense, for the last as well.

  Flashforward:

  2003

  Trembling-on-the-Verge

  Heron Island, British Columbia

  Canada

  1.

  Yes, his words should have held my attention. But I was distracted. By the sudden realization that my first assessment had been completely mistaken. He did not smell as bad as ever.

  He did not smell bad at all.

  He smelled just like most people, which is to say he had no detectable aroma of any kind. That first blast of stench when I’d opened the door had been completely imaginary, a product of memory association.

  I realized I was openly sniffing the air, to confirm that—and was instantly mortified.

  “It finally didn’t help any more,” Zandor Zudenigo said, as if replying to some remark I’d made. “I got too sensitive.” His voice no longer sounded like that of Tweety Bird. It had deepened. It now sounded like the voice of Marvin the Martian, the little guy who wants to blow up Bugs Bunny and the earth with his Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator.

  I nodded as if I understood what the hell he was talking about. I couldn’t seem to get a handle on my thoughts; they careened around like a cloud of drunken gnats. “You want some coffee? Something to drink? Are you hungry? Do you still like Oreos? Come on in the house with me, and we’ll—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I can’t believe it’s really you,” I said. “I heard you were dead.”

  “I nearly was. They almost had me. Playing dead was the only way I could get clear.”

  “Clear of who?”

  He looked at me. Charlie Sanders had looked at me that way, thirty years and more ago. His expression had said, if you really need me to tell you, you won’t understand the answer.

  “You know who,” Zandor said.

  Instantly I was on the defensive. “No, I don’t.”

  “You know,” he insisted. “You knew when you heard I was dead.”

  My heart was hammering. “How would I know?”

  “You knew most of it thirty years ago. You put the rest together thinking about it, later. By the time my death was announced it didn’t surprise you much at all.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, Slim. You do.”

  Mouth dry, breathing fast and shallow, knees trembling. “God damn it, Zudie, you show up here without knocking after thirty fucking years, and the first thing you do, you—”

  He laid hands on me. Physically touched me. Grabbed me by the lapels of my shirt, hard enough to pop a button. He had never touched me before. Or anyone, to my knowledge. “Did you hear what I said when I came in the door?” he shouted. That cartoon voice, shouting, was ludicrous, but I didn’t laugh, because he had his hands on me, and because yes, I had heard what he’d said when he came in.

  He had asked me to help him prevent the rape, torture and murder of a whole family.

  “That was serious? For real?”

  “Serious enough that you don’t have the time to waste on denial, okay?” he said, and let go of my shirt. “I know you are a good man. Everybody knows you’re smart. But I know how smart you really are. I know how much you hate to admit the existence of anything you can’t explain. But I also know you’ve had it proven to you that such things exist. That there are things in this world, in this life, you’ll never be able to explain.”

  Reluctantly, I nodded.

  “So deal with it.”

  “You want to dump something spooky on my lap.”

  He nodded. “And if you can think of a better lap to move it to, great.”

  I closed my eyes for a second.

  The worst thing was, I did know what he was talking about, sort of. I didn’t want to, but I did. He was absolutely right: over the last thirty years I had been working it out in the back of my mind. I knew what he was. And I didn’t want any part of it.

  When I opened my eyes again, they met his. The years melted away and it was once again the afternoon we met, and those moist eyes were staring right into mine, just as they had back then.

  Forgiving me.

  Unconditionally. Blanket absolution, for anything I’d ever done or left undone and whatever I was about to do, for everything I’d said or left unsaid or might say in future, for who I was and who I could have been but wasn’t and whomever I might become.

  I was aware of my breath and pulse slowing. With each breath my shoulders settled a little lower. It was way too late to lock the barn door. And nothing was going to be stolen, anyway. There was nothing left to steal.

  With an effort, I broke eye contact. “Let’s go in the house.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  I was surprised. “There’s no good place for you to sit down in here. And nothing to eat or drink. We can—”

  “It would be too noisy in there for me,” he said.

  I understood what he meant at once. I didn’t want to admit that either.

  He was right, too. I sighed. “Well, I’ve got to have some coffee, if we’re going to be talking about this kind of shit. Take my desk chair, there. I’ll bring another out for me. Coffee for you?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You sure? If you like coffee, even a little…well, mine’s special.”

  “Another time,” he said, in a tone of voice that suggested the other time would postdate the glaciation of Hell.

  “Anything? Tea? Soda? Juice? Thirty-weight oil?” No hits, not even a smile on the last one. “At least take some water? It’s pure.”

  He nodded. “I’ll share water with you.”

  I shot him a quick look. Was he referencing Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land? Impossible to tell from his bland Baby Huey face.

  I left him there and went in the house and made coffe
e.

  It didn’t take much time, or require any of my attention. A German radio baron was once so pleased by something he read in a column of mine that he sent me, out of the blue, as a token of his appreciation, a Jura Espressa, the Scala Vario model. It is a Swiss machine the size of a portable TV, and requires a converter the size and weight of a truck battery to operate on Canadian wall current. It lists for US $2,000—very roughly CAN $2,700—and is worth every damn penny. It makes the best possible coffee, instantly.

  You keep it loaded up with a couple of liters of water, and half a pound of coffee beans. That’s it. Any time you push the Go button, it grinds some beans, makes coffee by the French press method, dumps the grounds into a hopper for disposal, and rinses itself. Once a week or so you empty the hopper—that and keeping it stocked with beans and water are the total work involved.

  So making superb coffee was a matter of pushing a button and waiting for the cup to finish dripping. The aroma of fresh-ground filled the room while I wrestled with myself, inside my head.

  I saw my cat Horsefeathers sprawled on the living room floor, staring at something invisible in midair, tracking it as it moved across the room. Could I say for sure there was nothing really there? Everywhere I looked, just out of my peripheral vision, were little ghostlets of Susan. Was I absolutely positive they were imaginary? Not five minutes ago I had been planning my suicide. Did it matter where this craziness might lead me?

  If you believe only in reason and empirical truth and the material world…no wonder Susan hasn’t contacted you from beyond, you dumb shit.

  The coffee finished dripping. I stirred in some sugar. I got cream and a half-liter bottle of filtered water from the fridge. I put some cream in my coffee and put the rest away again. I started to take my coffee and his water back out to the office, but before I was two steps out of the kitchen I stopped and backtracked. I tipped half an inch of coffee out into the sink, and replaced it with brandy. Before resealing the brandy, I took a big fiery gulp, and coughed. Then I put away the bottle, and brought my coffee and Zandor’s water and a folding chair out to the office.

  I set my coffee mug down on a bookshelf, and turned my back on him to set up the chair. As I was doing so, without warning I tossed the plastic bottle of water back over my left shoulder in his general direction. I finished arranging the chair to my satisfaction, retrieved my coffee, and when I turned around and sat, he was just as I had left him except that he was drinking water now. The sudden appearance of a flying bottle of water had startled him not at all.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I thought about it a long time. And you’re right. I did figure out a few things. I know the three most important things about you. I’m not so sure I didn’t know them back at St. Billy Joe.”

  He waited.

  “You read minds.”

  He nodded.

  “There’s no off switch.”

  He nodded again.

  “And it hurts.”

  He sighed and nodded a third time. “Christ, yes. More than I can tell you.”

  Holy shit.

  “Well,” I said, “I was going to ask how you managed to track me all the way across a continent, but I guess that wouldn’t be too much of a challenge for—”

  “I didn’t have to track you anywhere,” he interrupted. “I was here when you got here. For the last twenty years I’ve been living on Coveney Island.”

  Extremely holy shit.

  The coastal waters of southwestern British Columbia are over-generously supplied with islands, ranging from the leviathan Vancouver Island—nearly twice the size of Massachusetts—all the way down to Coveney, which is about twice the size of the average high school grounds. It made my little island of 3,000 souls seem like Metropolis. There was no ferry service to it at all, not even a foot-passenger-only water taxi as far as I knew, and until now I had believed it to be uninhabited. If Zandor lived there, he owned a boat. And must be uncommonly skilled in its use—even horny teenagers tended to avoid Coveney Island because there was no easy place to come ashore, and no beachfront. I only knew of its existence because the ferry between Horseshoe Bay and Heron Island passed near it, and I once idly asked a ferry crewman if it had a name. It was basically just a lumpy rock bristling with trees. From a certain angle, if the light was right, it looked like a sleeping green hedgehog. I could not recall ever seeing chimney smoke rising from it, or a boat moored there.

  “And basically what you’ve been doing there all this time,” I said, “is hiding out from the CIA. Right?”

  He didn’t flinch. “And the FBI, the NSA, Treasury, CSIS, the horsemen, Interpol—yes, they’re part of what I’ve been hiding from.”

  “Jesus, who else is there to hide from?”

  “Everybody.”

  “Oh.”

  “Back in college, I could stand having most people as close as ten or twenty meters away from me. Smelling terrible helped keep them outside that range—but it also made me noticeable and memorable.”

  I noted that he’d said “meters” instead of “yards.” He had been in Canada longer than I had. I also distinctly recalled that he had seemed comfortable having me within a meter or two of him for long periods, back then. I decided to be flattered.

  “You should be,” he said. “But now…” For the first time, I noticed lines on his face that hadn’t been there in college. A lot of them. “Ah Christ, being within a hundred meters of just about anybody is agony, now. My range and sensitivity have both increased to where there’s just no point in smelling bad anymore: it doesn’t keep people far enough away. And being that noticeable stopped being good strategy, anyway.” He had one of those thousand-yard stares. “It became time to bail out of the world. Or end up chained up somewhere in Langley or the Pentagon basement or RCMP headquarters. As I said, they very nearly got me.”

  “So you jungled up. On Coveney. Jesus. How did you know I was here on Heron?”

  “You mention it in your column sometimes. I tracked you from there.”

  “You can’t get The Globe and Mail on Coveney Island. Hell, I’m the only person on this island who gets it home delivered, and only because I’m on staff.”

  “I read it online.”

  Suddenly I felt myself blush.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “All those years ago, every time you called me Zandor, inside you were thinking Smelly—and every time I knew it. Big deal.”

  “I—” What was there to say? I was busted. “I’m sorry, man. Really.”

  He waved it away. “Don’t worry about it. Most people called me Smelly to my face. I appreciated you taking the trouble. Just like I appreciate the fact that you haven’t once thought of me as Smelly since you realized I’m not anymore.”

  I blushed again. “Look, I—”

  “Don’t worry about it, I said. Zudie is fine.”

  “Zandor just sounds like the name of the secret agent in an episode of General Hospital to me.”

  He nodded. “My uncle used to call me Zudie when I was a boy. I kind of like it.” Pause. “No, really, Russell.”

  I finished my coffee and set down the mug. “All right, Mr. Sensitive Mind Reader. You probably know my situation as well as I do, right?”

  “Better.”

  “You poor bastard. Okay, fine. So what’s wrong with me, that you need to fix? Grief? How the hell do you fix grief?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “You’re in deep clinical depression.”

  “Oh, horseshit. I don’t believe in depression. It’s the modern equivalent of witchcraft, complete with a magic potion.”

  He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “You’re about two days from suicide. Maybe less. I don’t need to be a mind reader to know that.”

  “Oh yeah? What was your first clue, Dr. Freud?”

  “You haven’t asked me a word about the family who are going to be butchered. You haven’t wondered about them. For all you know, they’re neighbors of yours. Your heart is switched off. Your soul has shut down
.”

  The strangest thing happened to me. Without warning I found myself crying, sobbing full out—except no water came out of my eyes. I cry dry, I thought. I cry dry.

  “What are you doing, counting in German?” he asked.

  I was startled enough to giggle, in the midst of my crying. In all the time I’d known him, I could not recall Zandor Zudenigo ever attempting a joke, let alone a pun, much less a multilingual pun.

  “Do you know why shrinks love to see a patient come in the door with clinical depression?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “Nonviolent?”

  He shook his head. “Nearly all their patients are nonviolent.”

  I shrugged again. “Why, then?”

  “It makes them feel effective. There are about a thousand things that can go wrong in the functioning of a human brain. Depression is the only one that can, to ninety-five percent certainty, be completely cured by prescribing a pill.”

  “Horseshit,” I said again.

  And again he ignored me. “The trouble is, you have to take them for at least a couple of weeks before they start to kick in. We don’t have that kind of time.”

  Oddly annoying dilemma: if you’re crying, but no water is flowing, what are you supposed to do? Pat your cheeks with an imaginary tissue? “That’s easy,” I said. “You’re a telepath. Just wander around until you find somebody who’s got a time machine, and that—”

  “Do you trust me, Slim?”

  “—way all we have to do…say what?”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you trust me?”

  I wasn’t crying any more. “That’s not a simple question, Zandor.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Well, in what sense? Are you asking, do I trust you not to boost anything while I’m in the house making coffee? Or, do I trust you’re not an al Qaeda mole? Or do you mean, do I trust you never to be mistaken about anything?”

  Those shiny eyes bored into mine. “You know that I walk around inside your head, privy to your innermost secrets. Yet you have made no attempt to kill me. So I know you trust me to that extent.”