Every morning now when he woke up and before opening his eyes, Noah’s first thought was “I am a killer, I am an assassin. There is no turning back, no denying it.” His old life paled in the face of what he now was. His petty vanities, his useless competitiveness, his deluded ambition to make it in a world he held in contempt, his exaggerations about what he knew, his lies about what he had read, his failure to give attribution for ideas he had read but spouted as if they were his own, and for every one of these weaknesses, his guilt—that most corrupt and corrosive method of payment for our transgressions—all of it had been left so far behind it was hardly visible in the killer’s rearview mirror. All of it had withered away. The word wither reminded him of Marx and Engels and their idea that in the ideal communist world, the state would wither away. The people would see the light in the soul of pure communism, and the rules and laws that had established it would no longer be necessary. And Noah thought that everything false about him, everything that had defined him in the past would, through his act, wither away and he would become only who he was, the killer, the assassin. He opened his eyes and remembered a quote he had written down years ago and taped to his wall of ideas. Hoping he hadn’t destroyed it in one of his attacks to eliminate his past, he got out of bed and flipped through the papers still tacked up, some of which had, over time, been buried under others. He found it. There was no attribution and he couldn’t remember where it came from: “Although your life is made up of thousands of days and incidents, they can all be reduced to one moment, the moment when you know who you are, when you see yourself face to face. When Judas kissed Jesus he felt at that moment that he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny, and that he was being loyal to that evil destiny.”
Noah crawled back into bed and stared at the ceiling. He wondered whether these eloquent notions had any reality, or was he simply justifying a horrific crime with a semantic slight of hand. Was all of it just intellectual gamesmanship? He had read Camus’ The Stranger, and a significant amount of Crime and Punishment, and he wondered whether any criminal act could be justified with a talented play of words.
He wanted to stop thinking. He wanted to go back to sleep and wake up fucking Andrea Scott, “the no fuss, no muss woman.”
He gave her a call.
The sexual fantasy Noah associated with Andrea Scott never came close to his obsession with the fifteen-year-old’s orange-half breasts but had taken on a more adult character. Here was, by any upper-middle-class standard, a happily married woman with three healthy children and a successful and wealthy husband, a membership in a golf and tennis club, a two-and-a-half-million-dollar home and an island with a cottage on it in the Eastern Townships, and she would risk it all to satisfy her hunger for sex with Noah Douglas. All of this supported his belief in the vacuity of the American way of life while it confirmed his own masculinity. After stepping through his door, Andrea seemed to know the right time to slip out of her expensive clothes and crawl into his bed. The right amount of chatter, the right amount of nervousness, the right amount of indecision, all of which added up to an exquisite sexual tension. The sex was better than the last time. When they were finished, she asked if she could smoke a cigarette in his place and he said he didn’t mind. She dug a new pack out of her purse and asked if she could leave it behind because she never smoked at home. He said again that he didn’t mind. While they lay in bed and she smoked, he thought of the movie Belle de Jour and wondered if she knew he was a killer would she become more sexually aroused. Would she react to him like Catherine Deneuve reacted to the thug with the gold tooth, to his brute criminal-class behaviour? It was clear what Andrea wanted from him: she wanted something illicit, something that denied the life she had, and it was embodied in sex and cigarettes. Was she locked in a struggle with herself, perhaps not unlike his before the killing? She put out her cigarette and rolled over next to him. “I must smell of cigarette smoke.”
“I like that,” he said. What he didn’t say was that it reminded him of his mother, because that is the last thing a woman wants to hear after an orgasm. He considered, for one crazy moment, telling her that he had killed McEwen. That might make this the sexual relationship it was meant to be. His confession would put them smack-dab in the middle of a real-life Belle de Jour, and his killing would realize its essence as a work of art. But while he believed in a spiritual need to experience art, art is not life; it is something very different from life and if it weren’t different from life it wouldn’t be art. Belle de Jour belongs on the screen, not in my apartment, he told himself.
“What are you thinking?” Andrea asked him.
Christ, he hadn’t heard that question in bed after sex since university, and he realized that whatever Andrea’s struggle was, it certainly wasn’t a heavyweight fight like his. He remembered how his father often quoted Thor-eau’s line, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and how this was Andrea. This was what his father had feared most in his own life, and his only salvation was his unwavering devotion to Noah’s mother. When she died and he died of a heart attack just ten months later, his death was no surprise to Noah.
“I’m not thinking anything in particular,” Noah replied.
“I’m thinking about why I’m here,” she said in an unexpressive tone, as if she were laying the foundation for something bigger to come.
“Maybe this conversation shouldn’t go there,” he said. “What I mean is, this works because we don’t go there.”
She didn’t say anything more for two or three minutes. Then she said she’d better go.
Noah put on his only suit, which was now beginning to feel like his dedicated funeral attire, since funerals were, of late, the main occasion for it. He left his apartment to walk the forty minutes it would take to get to the McEwen funeral. He tried to enjoy the mild spring air and not think of the pure madness of his situation, attending the funeral of the man he had killed. This was another act he would have to perform as the “new Noah.” The role required an outward sincerity and an inward deceit. Or was it the other way around? He would treat it like the time he went to a cousin’s wedding on acid and all his relatives turned into people out of a Dickens novel, which included Mrs. Haversham and her cobweb-covered wedding cake. On the inside reality had completely collapsed, but on the outside, as he heard later, he was quite sociable and funny.
He passed a panhandler sitting cross-legged next to the curb with a dirty paper coffee cup held out. Noah gave him five dollars because he felt that any less from someone in a suit would look cheap.
“That’ll get you into heaven,” the panhandler yelled after him as he kept walking. But Noah didn’t give panhandlers money to get to heaven; he did it because of who they were. Not because they needed it but because they deserved it. For him the panhandler could only be who he or she was. Why be a panhandler when you’re really something else—when, for example, you’re secretly a person of means? It was the people who played their roles who he resented and hated. The hypocrites who cultivated professional lives and reputations, which they believed defined them, when, in fact, many of them were more than capable of deceit, theft and perhaps murder. Noah wasn’t a religious person, so heaven wasn’t on his agenda and neither was morality. His social concern was the face and the real person behind it, and almost everywhere he looked he saw fraudulence. The frauds he hated most were the successful frauds, because their success made him jealous and he hated most of all his own jealousy.
There was no morality, he thought; there was only the struggle to be truthful.
Noah arrived at the church and signed a guest book, which had a space beside each name for short comments about the deceased. No matter how macabre his situation, he couldn’t help but think how funny it would be to write, “He didn’t die easily. I virtually had to hack his head off.” He signed his name and next to it wrote, “A tragic loss, a remarkable man.”
Noah took a seat and nodded to a few people who he knew. The organ played, lulling everyone into that mourning rhythm that unifies all in common grief. He looked to the front where the coffin sat. During both his mother’s and his father’s funerals, no matter how hard he stared, he had not been able to imagine a body beyond the heavy wood of the coffin. Somehow the coffin did a miraculous job of isolating death from life, and the result was that funeral ceremonies were all done in the abstract. The actual body was never an issue. Whoever was inside the coffin had not only passed away but had passed from reality to hagiography. The ceremonies were all about selective memory or pure fiction, and Noah, on these terms, was able to join the chorus. None of the comments of love and admiration expressed by family and friends made Noah react any differently from anyone else. Some comments were touching; others were bullshit. This was like any other funeral, where everyone in the audience keeps his or her own secret scorecard.
Outside the church after the service, Noah expressed his shock to McEwen’s closer friends, chatted socially with others about crime rates and the “thin layer of civility” in our “supposedly civil society” and avoided a trip to the cemetery because of a doctor’s appointment which he characterized as “important,” but said he would be at the house in the evening.
At the house things were not what Noah expected. This was not just any funeral. This wasn’t an old person who had died, or a man who drank too much and smoked and went down with a massive heart attack, whose death was just another chapter in a high-risk life. This was the victim of a “bloody, sensational, inexplicable murder,” and no one had a clue why it had happened or who had done it; a tense pall hung over everyone because no one really knew why they were there. Not a soul could imagine where this death had come from, but there was still a quiet buzz of speculation, and every passing glance gave Noah a chill. He had a number of drinks, but the drinking only increased his paranoia. Were people watching him and whispering among themselves about him? He started to sweat under his suit, and even the most innocuous conversations became difficult for him to follow as he read insinuation into every comment and suspicion into every look and smile and pause in speech. He had to get out. He got the attention of McEwen’s ex-wife, Janice, so he could express his condolences and leave.
“This is like a bad dream. Inconceivable,” he said to her.
“You were supposed to play squash with him that night,” she said without finishing her thought. What she didn’t say was “Yes, it is like a bad dream.” She seemed to tilt back and look at him waiting for a response. Had she made a statement or asked a question? Did she expect him to flesh out his story about the squash game, perhaps add something new, something the police didn’t already know? She must have heard about the game from the police. But why would they raise it with her unless they considered it to be a piece of the crime’s overall picture?
“I was supposed to meet him at the gym, and when he didn’t show up I called him twice but got no answer. I didn’t think much of it other than he had forgotten, and when I heard the news in the morning, well … God … I mean …”
“I know,” she said, looking down at her feet, again without finishing her thought, or, for that matter, even expressing a thought. She didn’t say anything else, and Noah felt trapped by the silence like an insect stuck in tree sap. He knew he had an expression on his face but couldn’t tell what it was or what it said.
“I have to leave,” he said. And, without a handshake or a kiss or any response from her, he was gone and on the street walking as quickly as he could. He started to run. He was in a suit and heavy leather brogues but he pushed himself. He wanted to feel pain. But for what? He got to the point where his lungs were bursting and his feet were sore and his shirt was soaked with sweat. He was now on the main street that led to his apartment and he had to stop and get his breath. People passed him walking in both directions as he leaned over, his hands gripping his thighs. The odd one looked at him, but strange behaviour was not unusual on this strip and he must have looked like just another guy who had had one too many. He started to walk again. As he looked at people he passed, he no longer felt like the tragic Shakespearean hero amidst the crowd of minor players with insignificant roles. He was no longer the unique assassin, or the killer. He now felt that this wasn’t his nature but that he had invented it all to justify his crime. In fact, he had committed a monstrous and sickening crime. He felt a deep chill and his soaking shirt made it even worse in the cool night air. He found himself shivering. A terrifying loneliness seemed to throb through his veins with every pulse beat. He had never imagined that loneliness could be physical, and he felt like he was sinking into a place he didn’t recognize and couldn’t describe and he thought that this must be what it is to go mad. “This is where you go,” he said to himself with the morbid fascination of a crazed scientist from an old horror movie. As he walked, the new place started to come into a strange, vague focus that defied the senses. He couldn’t see it or hear or touch it but it was there, some deep crevasse between his old self and the killer he thought he could be. It was a place he couldn’t describe, with a language he couldn’t understand. And his alienation from this place was complete. He was a stranger in this place, a new arrival. This was the place of the truly insane, he thought. But he knew he wasn’t insane and he was there by some horrible mistake and he was alone and there was no help, there were no friends, no enemies either, and it was so dark and deep that he could barely see the light of the real world or hear its sounds. The conversations and screams and laughter of the real world had become a faint, muffled gibberish. As he walked, like the crazed scientist, he let himself go deeper and deeper into this place. Would he just keep going until he disappeared? How do you function from day to day in this place? What do you do for a living here? “Maybe politics,” he joked out of nowhere. And it was this joke that jolted him like an electric shock. It was the joke that reminded him he still had a mind. But what was the role of a mind in this place? He was now literally terrified.
“Noah!”
He heard his name and thought it was ringing in his head, some ephemeral self calling from his prior life.
He turned to his left and saw a man and a woman crossing the street through the night traffic. The man was smiling and they were coming toward him.
“Hey, this is crazy,” the man said. “I haven’t spoken to you in over a year and two hours ago I left a message on your machine and now I run into you on the street.”
It was Jeffrey Lawrence, a slightly slimy TV producer Noah had worked for in the past.
“Sarah Bemalman, Noah Douglas.”
The woman, who was at least twenty years younger than the producer, smiled and thrust out a hand. Noah shook it and thought how so many men of Lawrence’s age had to fuck younger women. It seemed epidemic. Was it another virus that had leapt from monkeys to man?
“That murder, that guy Patrick McEwen, you knew him, right?”
“Yeah”
“Fucking horrible. Scares the shit outta ya. Did you know him well?”
“Well enough.”
“I’m sorry. Horrible. Look, I called you because of Always Running.” He turned to the girl and explained that Always Running was a series idea he and Noah had developed and pitched but no network wanted a political show in “this climate.”
“It was a great fucking idea. A satire of the inner workings of government bureaucracy, Catch-22 in politics. They were insane to pass.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and turned back to Noah. “Now we have a buyer who’s very interested, and I called you because I know you got dropped by your show. I still smoke.” He offered one to Noah, who accepted. Lawrence lit both.
Noah had smoked from time to time in his life while drinking but stopped because of a high blood pressure scare. However, at this moment he wasn’t particularly concerned with his physical health.
“They want one scene that shows your kind of humour.” To the girl, “Politics scares everyone, that’s why I love this. Noah is fucking great at it.” To Noah, “Can you write out that scene you used to pitch where the incumbent is shot? If that scene works as well on paper as you pitched it, I think this is a slam dunk.”
Noah had taken a couple of drags and very suddenly became dizzy. He didn’t answer Lawrence and took a clumsy step backwards, then turned to walk away and weaved, then tripped and fell to the pavement. Everything went silent and into slow motion. He knew he was lying on his back and could see Lawrence over him saying something and the girl standing behind Lawrence looking down with a concerned expression, but he couldn’t hear a thing. He felt heavy and as if his body was sinking into the pavement. He thought he should say something like “I’m okay” but didn’t feel like it. For a moment he thought he could will himself to keep sinking until he completely disappeared, then everything would be over. He saw Lawrence dialling his cellphone and he closed his eyes. The next thing he knew he was on his knees and he could hear Lawrence repeating, “Are you okay?” as he helped Noah to his feet.
“I’m fine. It was the cigarette. I had a lot to drink. The two together …”
“Fuck, we thought you had a stroke or a heart attack. I called an ambulance. I think you should go to emergency.”
“No! Why did you do that?! It was the fucking cigarette! Call them back! Cancel it!”
“I think you should get checked out.”
“I’m okay, I swear! I’ll write the scene if you phone and cancel the fucking ambulance!”
Lawrence agreed. Noah knew that, like all producers, he could be negotiated with. Without another word, Noah turned and walked away.