Dying Is My Business

Three

I don’t sleep. I can’t, my body won’t let me. I learned pretty fast that it’s one of the side effects of not being able to die, like there’s some kind of battery inside me that won’t turn off. I feel tired sometimes, but never sleepy. That makes my downtime boring, frustrating, or both.

But that night I had a special ritual to perform. One I didn’t enjoy but felt compelled to do.

I lifted the mattress. On one side was a small tear in the fabric. I reached inside and pulled out the pen and sheet of paper hidden inside the stuffing. There was a list written on the paper, a list I’d been keeping—and adding to—for the past year. I kept it hidden in the mattress because I didn’t want anyone else seeing it. It felt sacred to me in ways I didn’t fully understand. No one else would understand it, either. I sat down on the bed and read over the list:

1. Ford

2. Wellington

3. Braum

4. Langan

5. Francisco

6. Perry

7. Petrucha

8. the boy

Then I took the pen and added another name to it.

9. Maddock

All the lives I’d stolen, reduced to the equivalent of a shopping list. Writing down their names was a compulsion. It helped me remember them, and that seemed like the right thing to do. I could recite the list forward and backward by now, knew their names by heart, all except one. Number eight, “the boy.” The only one who didn’t belong. The others were killers, racketeers, and thieves, but not him. He hadn’t done anything to anyone. He hadn’t tried to kill me first the way the others had. The boy had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I thought of the crack house on Fourth Avenue again, and had to forcefully push it from my mind. The memory of the boy had been lurking in the back of my head like a ghost ever since. I didn’t want to think about it. One night off, that was all I wanted. A way to forget, even if only for a few hours.

There was an old TV set in the corner of the room, rescued from the same garbage dump as my bed. It barely worked, and when it did its rabbit ears only picked up a single station, a local-access channel that showed old movies. I watched whenever I could. It was more than a pastime—it was my teacher. Everything I learned about the world that didn’t come from Underwood came from watching Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Lon Chaney Jr., and Boris Karloff.

I turned it on and watched for a couple of hours, taking in all of Werewolf of London and part of The Maltese Falcon before I realized I was too distracted to pay attention. I kept thinking about the boy, and God-knows-what happening to Bennett behind the black door. I needed something stronger than the TV. I turned it off and pulled out the other item I’d hidden inside the mattress. It was a paperback book I’d found one rainy day on the stoop of a brownstone in Park Slope after running a collection for Underwood. Something about the sight of the book lying there, discarded, unwanted, and alone, pelted mercilessly by the rain, had filled me with an unexpected sadness. I pitied it, felt almost a kinship with it, so I stuffed it inside my coat to keep it safe from the storm, and brought it back with me.

It seemed so small in my hands now, a fragile thing. Its rain-battered pages had dried, but they’d also become swollen and brittle from the moisture they’d absorbed. The cover art was a painting of a flat blue sea with a big white castle on the far shore. A ship with tall sails floated upon the waves. Standing on its deck was a woman in a white dress with long, flowing auburn hair. She held a sword in her hands. Above her, a winged horse and a flying lizard faced off. The title was printed along the top in a curled script: The Ragana’s Revenge by Elena De Voe. I opened the book carefully so the damaged pages wouldn’t tear.

At the front was a detailed map of a land called Kallamathus, charting regions with names like the Cliffs of Treachery, the Forest of Dark Secrets, and the Sea of Miseries. I thought it was ridiculous and chuckled at the idea of New York City’s geography named in a similar, absurdly specific manner. The Street of Forgotten Trash Bags. The Avenue of Impossibly Expensive Restaurants. I turned the page to a foreword by the author explaining how the magical kingdom of Kallamathus was based on an alternate version of Eastern Europe, and in fact the word ragana was Lithuanian for witch. Then, finally, the story began, describing the adventures of a dirt-poor peasant girl named Armelle who lived in a realm of magic and strange creatures, and discovered her world was far more dangerous, yet far more richly rewarding, than she ever knew. At the back of the book was a lengthy glossary of invented words that I found myself consulting regularly as I read, just to figure out what the hell the characters were talking about, and who was who. It didn’t help that most of the characters had unpronounceable names comprised of strings of consonants broken by random apostrophes—all except for the heroine, Armelle, and the villain, the Ragana. Armelle befriended a magical, telepathic horse (or rather, a Q’horse, only the Q and the apostrophe were silent), fell in love with the pointy-eared elf prince Ch’aqrath, and discovered she wasn’t a peasant at all but an orphaned princess who was prophesied to save the kingdom from the Ragana.

“There are worlds within worlds,” Ch’aqrath declared, petting the Q’horse’s soft, snowy mane. “The Ragana plans to tear this world asunder and reveal the true world that lies beneath its mask.”

“And what world would that be?” Armelle queried bravely, though her full, rosy lips quivered with the foreboding fear that overcame her.

Ch’aqrath set his handsome jaw, alerting her that what he was about to tell her was knowledge known only to Elfkind. “It is a world of wonders and terrors the likes of which you could never believe,” he replied. “Your kind is so fragile, my beautiful companion. Were they to behold the truth, they would surely fall into fits of madness.”

I grunted, annoyed. Elena De Voe had gotten it wrong. You didn’t need a secret, hidden world to scare people. The real world was awful enough. I continued reading, but by then the spell the story had cast over me was broken. As the Ragana unleashed an army of dragons upon the royal palace, I stopped, closed the book, and put it aside.

Dragons, magic, worlds within worlds—it was all preposterous. There was no magic to protect you from the rich and powerful; if you didn’t learn to lie, cheat, and steal, you were ground down. There were no ancient prophecies that guided people toward their destiny; everyone just muddled along as best they could. There were no poor peasants who were secretly wealthy royalty; the poor stayed poor under the heels of the rich, and they always would. It was the way of the world. In this world, the real world, there were only cold cement walls and dangerous men who patted you on the cheek and smiled as they called you a dog.

And there was death. Death was everywhere. It lurked in the barrels of the countless guns that had been pointed in my direction, and behind black doors in rooms with drains in their floors. Death was a constant, the only constant—and yet even death had rejected me. For reasons it refused to explain, death didn’t want me any more than the world of the living did.

It brought me back to the same question I asked myself every day: Who was I? Like Armelle, did I have a family somewhere I didn’t know about? Parents, siblings, a wife and kids? If I did, then why was no one looking for me? I’d walked every inch of this city on jobs for Underwood and hadn’t seen a single missing-person flyer with my picture. Why had no one ever recognized me on the street, stopped me, called me by my real name?

Maybe I was more like the Ragana, who rose fully formed from the Sea of Miseries, a self-contained force that existed only to bring evil and suffering. A freak, just like Bennett had called me.

Or maybe there were no answers.

No, I couldn’t accept that. There had to be answers. They were waiting for me in a past I couldn’t remember. But every time I tried, every time I forced my mind to reach back beyond the previous year, I came up empty.

I lay back on the bed, folding my arms under my head. I stared at the cracks in the ceiling and the cobwebs that gathered in the corners. I tried to put my thoughts in order so I could make sense out of them. So much was lost to me, but these, at least, were the things I knew to be true:

One. I was a man. Okay, that one wasn’t too hard to figure out, but it was as good a place to start as any. Judging by my reflection, I was in my mid to late thirties, with dark eyes and dark hair, though that wasn’t much to go on. I’d spent hours memorizing my features, studying my hairline, the cut of my jaw and shape of my nose, every crease around my eyes and fold in my ears, but the truth was there was nothing distinctive about my appearance. I’d scoured my body for scars, tattoos, anything that might help someone identify me, but there weren’t any. It was frustrating, but not entirely surprising. If my body could heal bullet wounds then surgery scars, tattoos, or marks from childhood accidents weren’t likely to stick around either.

Two. My amnesia was retrograde, a word I’d learned when I researched my condition on the free computers at the Brooklyn Public Library. It meant that I couldn’t remember who I was or where I lived, but I could still talk, tie my shoes, drive a car, feed myself. I also learned that the condition most likely stemmed from one of two possible causes, either brain damage or a mental defense mechanism against a traumatic event. So had I suffered a brain injury or seen something my mind couldn’t accept? There was no way to know. My memory, up until a year ago, was like a frustratingly blank piece of paper. Which brought me to the final item on the checklist of what I knew.

Three. The brick wall. My earliest memory, and only a vague one at that. I remembered regaining consciousness lying on my back in front of a brick wall. I wasn’t sure how much I could trust that memory, since my mind was constantly trying to fill in the blanks with fabricated stories, but this one at least felt true. The wall in question seemed average, but there was something about it I still wasn’t sure if I’d really seen or only imagined. One of the bricks had a symbol scratched into it. In the fuzziness of my memory I thought it looked like an eye inside a circle. I remembered sparkles of light dancing along the wall and fading away like dying embers as I opened my eyes. I remembered a small, swirling wisp of smoke, as if someone had just put out a cigarette.

I figured the brick wall probably belonged to an alley somewhere in the city, only I had no idea where. My next memory was of running down an empty street at night, lost and confused. I found a hospital, but without any ID and with no signs of physical trauma they turned me away. After that I camped on park benches and under bridges, rummaging through garbage cans for food and shooing away the rats that came too close at night. In the mornings I would move on, hoping to find someone or something that would remind me who I was. But all I found was Underwood.

He’d been in one of his stash houses, off of an alley in Harlem, a small, concrete hut with a counterfeit Con Edison sign on the door to keep people out. I was ravenously hungry, and the smell of food lured me down the alley. The lights coming out of the hut’s windows had looked so warm that I couldn’t help myself. When I saw the door was slightly ajar I didn’t bother knocking, my hunger was too great. I just walked right in. They were all there, Tomo, Big Joe, Ford, Underwood, and the dark-haired woman, standing around a table loaded with stacks of cash and empty fast-food wrappers. The woman saw me first, her dark eyes widening with alarm. She didn’t say a word, but the look on her face was enough to alert the others. Tomo, Big Joe, and Ford turned on me with their guns drawn. Then I felt something hit me in the chest. That was the first time I died. The next thing I knew I was waking up in a Dumpster, my shirt riddled with bullet holes. Only I didn’t have any bullet holes in me anymore. As I crawled out, I stepped on something that crunched underfoot. I looked down and saw a shriveled, desiccated corpse lying beside the Dumpster. Ford. He’d been unlucky enough to get the order to carry my body out to the Dumpster, and being the closest living person had paid the price for it. Ford’s was the first life I stole. The first name on my list, and the reason Tomo and Big Joe wanted me dead. The three of them had been like brothers.

After that, Underwood knew someone like me could be useful. He took me off the streets, put a roof over my head, and filled my pockets with enough money to clothe myself and keep my belly full. He promised to help me find the answers if I worked for him in the meantime. He gave me hope. He gave me a purpose.

The hope remained. But lately, ever since the crack house, I’d been wondering if the purpose was the right one.