Warning Sign

I was seated comfortably in a bright room, surrounded by cameras and microphones and the people who pointed them. On a table before me, just as I had requested, they had placed a glass of spring water and a plate of decadent cheeses. I had contacted every major news outlet I could find the day before, telling them—should they offer enough money—that I would consent to a taped interview on the subject of the perpetrator. Normally I would have tried to abstain from capitalizing on an atrocity, but I was unemployed at the time, and a bit frustrated with the direction my life had recently taken, and so, after considering the exorbitant sums that they offered, and imagining all the ways in which the money would help me get back on track, I decided that it would be an act of incredible pride to turn them down, and so complied.

“It’s hard to believe that only twenty-four hours have passed since the incident,” they said.

“Yes,” I said, “when I close my eyes, all I see are the faces of the dead and missing.” This was true. I had found it difficult to sleep the night before.

“It will haunt us all for many years to come,” they offered.

“It?” I said.

“The event yesterday,” they said.

“Something new will replace it,” I said. I ate a piece of cheese.

“Tell us how you knew Buddy.”

“Buddy was my roommate.”

“We understand that you and Buddy had other roommates. . . .”

“Oh yes,” I said. “But they lived in different parts of the house. Have you spoken to them?”

“They’ve agreed to talk,” they said, “but you’re our first, among those who knew him. We were told you knew him best.”

“I knew him fairly well,” I said. “We had different schedules.”

“So you shared a room with Buddy?”

“Yes,” I said. “Our beds were on opposite sides of the room, next to our desks.”

“Was it your decision to arrange the room this way?”

“I suppose. I guess that it was.”

“Did you see Buddy yesterday morning?”

“Do you mean the morning of the atrocity?” I asked.

“It will be difficult for us to continue this interview if the word ‘atrocity’ is repeatedly used. Many of us have friends who have friends who have friends who perished in the . . . yesterday.”

“I’ll try to work around it,” I said.

“You seem a bit detached, given the trauma of the last twenty-four hours.”

“My grief and anger are packed so tightly inside me,” I said, “they might take a few minutes to loosen themselves.”

“Take us through yesterday morning.”

“Well,” I said, “when I opened my eyes from sleep, Buddy was performing jumping jacks in the middle of the room. He liked to do them very slowly. He would raise his pale arms and clap them together. He was very steady. Are you familiar with the paleness of his skin?”

“It is very pale,” they said. “What else did you perceive?”

“Sometimes, during his jumping jacks, his hands wouldn’t meet each other and his wrists would slap together.”

“There seems something symbolic in that action,” they said. “A circle closing, then reopening. The hands slapping against each other, eager for something to do. The very hands that would later that day. . . . How did you fail to pick up on it?”

“I suppose you have a point,” I said, “but I focused on the beauty of his movements, nothing more. Is that acceptable? I feel as if I’m on the witness stand.” I was trying to stretch the interview as long as possible, because several of them had offered to pay me by the minute instead of a single lump sum. At this point in our conversation, beneath the table on which my water and cheese lay, I had uncapped my pen and begun scribbling on the palm of my hand.

“Please don’t get upset,” they said. “If we sometimes sound harsh and insensitive, it’s only because we aim to find out the truth of yesterday morning.”

“I’m doing fine,” I said.

“And besides, appreciation of beauty doesn’t really pertain much to Buddy’s story,” they said. “There was, in fact, nothing beautiful about his actions yesterday.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Are you also aware that at the jailhouse where they are holding him, he routinely asks—on the hour—to be executed?”

“Such a strange man,” I said. “Out of curiosity, what manner of execution is he requesting?”

“A hanging. He has stressed several times that it must be public.”

“It’s not so good to hang a man,” I said, feeling a little bold. “The rope leaves a hideous bruise. And the soiled trousers. . . .”

“So you are intimately familiar with the hanged?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “My brother went the way of the rope a long time ago.” Again I was not lying.

“That’s very sad. Very interesting and sad.” I saw several of them dab handkerchiefs at their eyes. “Does suicide run in your family?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “My brother committed an atrocity and was justly punished for it.”

“How is it,” they said, “that you have managed to avoid this kind of fate yourself? You carry your parents’ genes, after all.”

“I was adopted,” I said. Also true. “I did not meet the people who made me.”

“Here it seems appropriate,” they said, “to ask how you came to know Buddy?”

“I answered his want ad for a roommate.”

“Do you remember what the ad said?”

“Oh, yes. ‘Happy man needs like creature to sleep on other side of bedroom and pay half the rent, until the day when roommate is no longer present among the willing, at which point remaining roommate will pay rent in totality or find other roommate.’ ”

“So you might admit that right away, the warning signs were there?”

“I find people very difficult to read,” I said. “And I admired his honesty in saying that there would come a day when he’d be gone. I can’t tell you how many roommates of mine have skipped out without any notice.”

“Do you plan to search for a replacement, now that Buddy is gone?”

“No,” I admitted. “I think a part of me still believes he will come back. I plan to leave his bed the way he left it.”

“And what way was that?”

“Messy,” I said, which had everyone, including myself, laughing for a moment.

Then a door on the side of the room opened, and several more of them walked in, carrying cameras and microphones. Some very good-looking ones approached me, and—whispering in my ear—offered outrageous sums for the chance to record the remainder of my interview. Obviously I agreed. I even signed the contracts with my own pen.

“Now,” they said, “Did you two have a conversation while he performed his jumping jacks?”

“No,” I said. “I knew enough not to disturb him when he exercised. However, when he was finished, he came and sat at the edge of my bed and leaned over me.”

“The memory must be chilling now, considering what he was doing only hours later.”

“I thought it was nice of him to devote time out of his busy day to me. While I pretended to sleep, he whispered a song in my ear. To interrupt him would have been a sin, his voice was so gorgeous.”

“Tell us the nature of the song,” they said.

“Well,” I said, “the melody was rather rudimentary, almost folksy. Were it not for the lyrics, it could have been a children’s song. He sang, ‘Farewell endless toiling, farewell old shambling frame. I’m attending to my second self, reacquiring my good name. Please regard me joyfully, as you listen to me sing. I have an appointment in America, for to kiss the king’s fat ring.’ Then he went on to rhyme ‘atrocity’ with ‘paucity,’ which I thought especially clever.”

“And how did you interpret those lines?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I thought it was a spiritual.”

“Do you realize,” they said, “that he was spelling out exactly what he was going to do later that day? The fatalism in those farewells? The second self? The fat ring of the king? It couldn’t be more obvious.”

“Well, now that you mention it, his words do seem a bit prophetic. Maybe Buddy was trying to warm me, in his own way. He was quite a man.” My heart ached a little for him just then.

“Did you say warn, or warm?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“In what way was he quite a man?”

“Well,” I said, “yesterday morning, after his jumping jacks and that apparently clue-ridden song, I opened my eyes just as he began disrobing. He stood there, in his glory, for several minutes, until I told him to get in the shower or risk getting me a little hot under the comforter. I’m sure you know how well-proportioned Buddy is—you have access to medical records, correct?”

“Yes, but this is news to us that the two of you had a relationship.”

“Oh, not at all,” I said. “We were perfect platonic roommates. Only it had been a good number of months since I’d had a chance to ravish someone, so I was definitely ready to go. I’m sure everyone here can relate.”

The room went silent. I looked down to see what I had written on my palm, but discovered that my pen had exploded—my hands were smeared all over with ink and nothing legible remained.

“We are,” they said, “so deeply saddened by the . . . events yesterday, that it seems impossible, at this moment, to either empathize or fail to be offended by your sentiment.”

“May I ask a favor?”

“You may.”

“I’m feeling a little tickle in my lungs as I talk, and if it isn’t too much to ask, I’d like a towel to expel the culprit into.”

Then the door opened and one of them left. We all sat in silence. Some cried silently, shifting the cameras away from me and onto themselves, while into the cameras they mouthed the word “why?” over and over. Then the door opened again, and someone in white entered, making his way down the aisle. He placed the towel on the table. With a clean finger I drew it to the table’s edge, picked it up, coughed several times into it, and then, when it was safely in my lap, used it to clean the ink.

“Better?” they said.

“I think so,” I said.

“Though it pains us to ask this,” they said, “you became aroused by Buddy’s display?”

“That would be putting it lightly.”

“And though it perhaps breaches matters of good taste,” they said, “did you act on these feelings of arousal?”

“I touched myself beneath the covers after he entered the shower,” I said, which was a lie. In truth, I had taken him in the shower, and he had cleaned every area unreachable to me. It was not the first time; we were practically strangers. It was just something we did once in a while.

“Do you value your life?” they asked.

“Certainly,” I said. “I’d like to accomplish many things before I die. I’d like to see a solar eclipse or perhaps the northern lights, and/or hunt a grizzly. There are others, but I don’t imagine you’re interested in them.”

“Does it worry you that, in light of these new revelations, you might be charged with aiding and abetting the perpetrator of this . . . ?”

“Those who charge me would be mistaken,” I said, and I was being truthful again. “He clearly led a double life. It’s not so rare. But let me just say this, atrocity aside: the Buddy I knew was smart, intelligent, playful, funny, mischievous, playful, easy-going, sensitive, playful, and considerate.”

“What time did he exit the shower?”

“Nine-fifteen.”

“What time did he leave the apartment?”

“Around ten-thirty.”

“And the . . . , excuse us, was committed at eleven o’ clock. Did you have any more interactions with him in the forty-five minutes after he left the shower and before he left the apartment?”

“Yes,” I said. “He dressed, put on his backpack, and stood beside the breakfast table where I sat watching television.”

“Do you remember what program you were watching?”

“It was the news.”

“And what was being reported?”

“Something certainly paling in comparison to the atrocity,” I said. Seeing that my use of the word really was affecting them, I just couldn’t help myself anymore. “I apologize for using the word ‘atrocity,’” I said.

“Try to remember. Maybe something he was watching set him off.”

“They were reporting a story about a cat stuck in a tree. This happened in the ghetto, I think, and no fireman would try and save it because they feared the people who inhabited the ghetto. So for several days, and without the fire department’s help, the ghetto-dwellers fed the cat by means of a long pole. ‘And for the time being,’ the reporter concluded, ‘the cat is fat and happy on its perch.’ The story was going to be continued the following day.” This was a complete lie. I could not remember what I was actually watching.

“Did he say anything to you while you sat at the table?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, right before he left, he stood over me and put his hand on my shoulder and said—”

But before I could begin, the door opened once again, and another one of them came in. He was dressed like the others—nicely, in a crisp suit—and he whispered in the ear of the person nearest to him. Then the person who received the initial message whispered in the ear of the one closest to him, and so on and so on until the entire room sat up very straight and began to fidget.

“We apologize for interrupting,” they said, “but we have just received word that a lynch mob has broken into the jail and done unto Buddy what he has been clamoring for all day. Please continue, but do make it brief. We’ve lined up interviews with several mob members.”

I was not ready, at that moment, to begin considering what all of it meant. Buddy was a fine acquaintance, but was he something more? It was difficult to know. We were roommates, and then we were not. I ate several pieces of cheese. I took a long swallow of water. I looked down at my lap, where my inky fingers clutched the inky towel. I looked out over the restless crowd. They seemed to require something more. So I took a deep breath and said, “He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Goodbye, dear roommate, I’m leaving this place, striking out for new country, settling the outer banks. Goodbye good roommate, I’ll remember the long lost ribbon in your hair, playing gourd and hatchet in the gazebo long ago, oh roommate of mine. Though we didn’t even know each other, didn’t know each other’s minds. It’s such a shame, that we might have lived for so long together and been ignorant of each other. I am feeling so mournful, so solemn, sweet roommate. I want to believe in the future, but I can’t see beyond my watch. I want to bite from the essence, the true root. I want to ride through the city in a caravan at dawn. I want the drums to encircle me, the vultures to wheel over me. I want the bitter bile of betrayal to flee from me. I want the warm expansive language of joy to radiate around me. Recall, oh roommate, that fine fellow down the hall who used to show his skin to anyone who’d cross their eyes. Recall that evening sun that set golden, golden, golden, then red in the west. Recall how we once shared this dim corporeal property together. Goodbye my sweet devil with flies in your eyes, you who saw everything as it should be instead of as it was. May there be some noble path shining somewhere for you; may the Lord keep a nice nasty watch over you. And to all my sweet darlings plunging from rooftops, to all my good ghosts forever ascending fearless: goodbye.’ Then Buddy left for the atrocity.” This was a bald lie, but it felt right somehow. As right as anything could, anyway, given the circumstances. Buddy had actually said nothing that morning, had really just abandoned me there at the table.