This kids, is my first attempt to write something out of genre for me. I hope you like it.
What You Don’t Know
1
At first, I thought it was about the normal stuff. You know, like.. I wasn’t really sure why he started it and I wasn’t too positive how he did it. I didn’t think that the cops had a name, or could guess his age, skin color, height, or weight. As far as I could tell, they sure as hell didn’t know where he came from or where he went. Even worse, I wasn’t too convinced that he stopped. The only thing that I thought I knew, the single thing I could have told my boy, the only bit of information I could have calmed my wife with, is that I just knew his mother had very large hands. And I only knew this—or thought I knew it—quite frankly, because I thought it was only about the normal stuff.
See, about a week ago, I got a call from Sherrif Aymore around 8 AM while I was eating breakfast.
The first thing he said: “We’re gonna to need you on Redwood. There’s been an incident.”
“Sure,” I said. Then I hung up the phone and got out the butter. The State always paid well and he seemed unusually upset, so I went to the scene after I showered, had another piece of toast and made myself a cup of coffee for the road. Basically, within the hour.
The house was your standard upper-income deal: Brick. Black shingles. White shutters. Two-car garage with two silver Elu Flip-tops charging inside. Snarky, little lawn pixie. Angular sidewalk that lead up to a humble porch with a small, white plastic swing. Beige carpet. An oak dining set. A few televisions. A large, painted sign that said, “Welcome to the Bakers” above a kerosene fireplace. A Robodog. An STP Home Security System and just about every kitchen appliance made after 2015.
There was, of course, blood. The usual spatter on the walls, the usual pools of it on the nice, low carpet, and the usual large piece of skin taped to the handles of the family’s two, white, French doors. The only thing that looked out of the ordinary was still pretty ordinary: the master bedroom’s bathroom had been in the process of being refurbished. A few pieces of PVC piping, a can of orange spray-paint and a bucket of grouting material were carefully set on the large, beige, dual sink. The toilet was sideways and the mirror looked like a bit of spackle had found its way to the corners. Not exactly a sloppy job though. There was a few lines of spray-paint on the tub, but I couldn’t make it out. Seemed pretty usual at the time, like how my father used to use it to measure out boards when he built decks or pools, so all I could tell was that I had to do what I usually had to do: the good old standard cleaning job. It had the standard gore. The standard, carefully planned murder. The standard everything.
After I had my look around the other rooms—which were untouched—I left the house. Four cruisers were still parked in the yard with their lights off. The foremost cruiser was Sheriff Aymore’s. He stuck his hand out of the passenger window to get my attention and I went over to him.
“The standard deal, Sheriff,” I told him.
“Do what you do,” he said, and I drove home to get my van.
2
When I came back, the few neighbors that had been gawking like schoolgirls from the sidewalk were roped and escorted to the Mindwipe by Aymore’s guys. For some company, I decided to pull the van up the driveway and park beside a cruiser. It whirred a few feet and then the breaks finally caught. The marvels of technology, I thought.
Somehow, I ended up spending most of the time with Russell, a new guy from Accident. We talked about hockey for about half an hour; but, eventually, I couldn’t help myself.
“You ever see stuff like this in Maryland?” I asked.
“I can’t talk about it, Powers.”
“I know, but really…I mean, this is pretty usual stuff…just wondering.”
“You keep this up and I’ll be forced to take you in, you know that.” He lit a cigarette.
“Alright,” I said, “but you do realize that if a non-Party sees you smoking like that, you’ll have to take them in, and wiping isn’t exactly free to the State.”
Ashing the cigarette, “You just worry about you.”
I asked him how long it was going to take; he said another two hours before all of the officers would leave me to my work. We didn’t speak again, and after he finished his cigarette, Russell changed and left to look for witnesses in civilian clothes. In khakis and a golf shirt, I noticed that he was a quite the brawny guy; like Aymore probably was back in his day. They both had closely-cropped, blonde hair and blue eyes and pronounced their names with an authoritative clarity. There were differences, though; you could tell who had been serving longer. Russell had a cleft chin and Aymore a double-chin. Russell had longer, more muscular arms and Aymore was getting sluggish in the gut. Russell even wore his hat loftily on the back of his head: like a rookie cop.
All this thinking about the cops and the job ahead made me hungry, so I walked down a few blocks to Ashley’s. They had the best toast and coffee for at least three blocks. Though, nothing else was too special about the place.
I ate slowly and enjoyed my meal. But, just as I tipped the waitress, the sheriff called. “We’ve got something else,” he said.
“Of course,” I said and walked back to the house.
Inside, a large government man with a black light and sleek, silver-framed,orange sunglasses escorted me to the master bedroom’s bathroom. On the walls, “My mother has large hands,” was sprayed with almost stencil accuracy.
Aymore stepped in front of me, “You think you can get this off of here? Vice wants it cleaned and ready to sell tomorrow. The crazy bastard must have just left his mark and got out of here.”
“I don’t see why not,” I said.
The large government man removed his sunglasses and looked over at Aymore, “You sure about him?”
“As sure as I am about myself.”
3
Much earlier than expected, the officers left me to my business. A few dabs of oxygenated cleaning dust got the blood out of the carpet and off the walls in a few minutes. I used liquid nitrogen on the skin and broke it into pieces for the lab. I vacuumed the carpet and lit a sugar cookie candle. People, I realized at an earlier job, could smell blood just as well as they could pick a spot of it out from a t-shirt three miles away.
When I took a break at noon, I finally got to thinking about the whole mother thing. I remembered my own mother’s hands and finally came to the conclusion that there are certain, irrefutable facts about mothers and sons. Of course, not all mothers are baking pies, sipping lemonade on the park bench as their sons play baseball with their friends. Some are chopping wood. Some are teaching their sons how to slit throats. My mother wasn’t like that, of course, because I turned out pretty normal, but still not everybody had the same benefit as I did.
You know, come to think of it, ever since The Party took control of things, not many people have had the same benefits as I did. When Tyler was born, for instance, Silvia and I were instructed to play DVDs of elementary math equations on the prompter above his bed. Two apples would appear and the prompter would say “Two.” Then, one apple would be added and it would say “Three.” Sure, he was probably too young to absorb anything, but I’ll be damned if my grandmother didn’t do the same thing when I was a boy. Real apples though. But you know, some things never change.
Though, the thing is, some things do change because those some things don’t. The world gets in a panic and starts grabbing things; that’s normal. But when we start changing everything out of fear and thinking that there is innate evil in everybody, well, every goddamned person starts acting like a drone following the mighty Overlord. Like when the poor boy turned ten—the minimum age of playing sports—it wasn’t but three weeks when The Party decided that it would be best for all if sports were completely eliminated. For fear of excommunication, nobody said a word. Fun as I knew it was single-handedly wiped off the map.
This is crazy, I thought. If Aymore or any of the other policemen knew that I had been thinking like this, I’d be done and they’d prop up some low level government kid to take over the clean-up jobs in Keyser. Who knows what they’d do to Silvia and Tyler. The main thing I should be wondering now, I thought, is how to get that damned spraypaint off that tile. Can’t have murderers leaving their mark in Eutopia, you know.
After my break, I phoned CCP, the construction arm of The Party. I knew it’d be at least another two or three hours before I could get the whole house in perfect shape: the bedrooms were messy and loaded with various toys, the kitchen still had food in it, and that bathroom was still unfinished. I figured that if they wanted to sell this house, it’d be much easier to get that bathroom finished with CCP help and then clear out the rest of the stuff with the incinerator.
Though, there was a problem. No answer at CCP. I tried again. No answer.
I thought and then came to the conclusion that I’d have to take it upon myself to do the whole thing. If it wasn’t done, it’d be my ass, nobody else’s.
After an hour of removing toys and beds and mirrors, I retracted my statement. I realized it was going to take all day and all night to have the place ready and 9 AM was an outrageous deadline to set; The Party’s realtors apparently needed to make a helluva quick sell. So, I called Aymore and asked for an extension.
“No,” He said.
“Listen, I got a whole house here, no help and CCP isn’t picking up.”
“CCP won’t be picking up. Don’t bother with them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“That’s none of your concern.”
“You’ve never been this—“
“You’ll do it, or you’re out of a job.”
And out of a cerebral cortex, I thought.
“Powers. You’ve got until tomorrow at nine. No clean house. No pay. No job. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There will be an incinerator sent immediately. I suggest you get to work.”
The phone clicked and I hung up. Looking back to the house, I noticed that something was off. There’s never been a need to sell a house so quickly, and Vice has never been in on a cleaning job. Hell, even the Mindwipe had moved in pretty goddamned fast, considering this was Keyser and not Baltimore or D.C.
Regardless, I had a job to do.
4
I shuffled through the van’s console and found my last cassette tape: George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone. I had snuck it, along with a small, cheap cassette player, past security once Keyser was labeled “Party friendly,” a few years back. I kept the volume down, and not even Silvia knew I had it.
I clicked play. The music started and I went back to work in the kitchen. I started by emptying out cabinets and drawers. Nothing too peculiar stood out. A few bills, a few Post-its, a shopping list. I kept dumping and dumping until, finally, I reached the freezer. It took me only a few seconds to see it: inside the ice bin, an airtight, plastic container hid beneath at least two thin layers of ice. There was something inside. Though I hadn’t seen one in ages, I could tell by the thin, rectangular shape that it was a photograph.
The fact that this could have slipped by not only Aymore’s guys, but also the Mindwipe, Vice and that burly government fellow surprised me. Photography, cameras, camcorders and the like were all trashed when the city was turned over to The Party.
Nevertheless, I still had a job to do. I grabbed the container and began to leave the house for the incinerator.
This is too strange, I said and decided it best to look inside. Just as the frost began to thaw, I saw a picture of a man of about forty holding onto what looked like a small, gray, trollish woman. They were both smiling and the woman had a titled party hat resting on her head. On the back: “9/17/39: Mom’s 70th.”
It was recent and the woman had massive hands.
5
I grabbed the black light that the Government man had left and found out my theory quickly. They matched: “My mother has large hands” and “Mom’s 70th.” The M’s were identical in angle and curve. The S’s were close, but apparently the man, Baker, had been in a bit of a rush to draw this version on the wall. On the picture, his handwriting was immaculate: comparable to the flowing script you’d see on shops like “Ye Olde Shoppe.” While I had thought the letters on the wall were beautifully done, there was really no comparison. The man knew how to write.
This got me thinking. A man with such eloquent handwriting had to have some familiarity with writing itself. But, the whole “My mother has large hands” didn’t seem to match up. The phrase was coarse, at the very least. I mean, not to brag, but I’ve read some eloquent prose, like Keats and whatnot—writers that The Party actually adopted in schools, ironically enough—and I knew what was good and what wasn’t. “My mother has large hands,” was so bad it had to be something else. An omen, a clue. It was something intentional, at the very least.
As I studied the picture, my cell vibrated. It was CCP.
6
“Mr. Powers, we’ve shown that you’ve dialed our number twice from the same location, are you in need of our services?”
“No thank you. I thought I wouldn’t have things done on a site and turns out, everything is going smoothly.”
“Thank you,” the woman said, and the phone clicked off.
After dark, I had gotten back to work. Figuring out this mystery would have my knee caps broken either way. The kitchen was clean, the bedrooms were empty, but I had still had a lot to do. The CCP call had given me motivation to get the house spotless before nine.
The photograph was still in my back pocket, and I had been thinking about it since the batteries to my cassette player died. Turns out, getting AA batteries in post-Party Keyser was damned near impossible. But so was getting out alive if you were considered non-Party.
Then it hit me. Didn’t Aymore say something about the CCP not answering?
7
I finally decided to stop thinking about it around 3 AM. The whole house had been cleared and the bathroom was the last thing I had to clean. I decided that a little plaster and some good spin-selling could market this place as a fixer-upper. Maybe they can knock off a few thousand bucks and skip on the Mindwipe serum for me, I thought.
I began by clearing out the small things. I took the soap and shampoo from the tub, tossed the loose PVC piping out and cleared all of the toiletries from under the sink. Then, the big things. I grabbed chunks of plaster, the toilet bowl plunger and the automatic tools and stuffed them in a large, black garbage bag. With everything finally cleared, I headed downstairs for the incinerator.
8
Outside, the early morning air was uncomfortably cold, so I decided it best to put on a jacket and catch a breath. But first, I followed protocol. I was only allowed to start the incinerator once, as the noise and gas that expelled from it generally brought attention to the job. So, before I took my final break and called Aymore to tell him the good news—that all I had left was a short plaster job and a few minutes scrubbing on the bathroom wall—I walked the trash to the incinerator, pressed “Start,” and then got my keys out to open the van.
I put the key in the lock, turned it right and came to find that I had already left it unlocked. The door slid open.
Inside, Aymore and three of his men were waiting.
“I’m glad to see you’ve finished,” he said.
9
Within seconds I was bound. Another officer had pulled my arms back and said, “Powers, Christian. I hearby charge you with High Treason.”
“High treason?!” I asked.
It was worthless. Before I got anything out, Russell had jammed a hard, yellow gag in my mouth.
“For your crimes against The Party, you are punishable without fair trial. Up to, and including, death.”
I was then handcuffed and forced into the back of Russell’s cruiser within seconds. They let me sit and my mind began to comb over the possibilities. What could have brought this about? I screamed through the gag. I kicked the leather seat in front of me. Nothing. I could think of nothing.
As I rolled around the cruiser, the photograph crumpled in my back pocket and then I remembered: Vice never left a stone unturned.
Defeated, I pressed my head against the window and heard Aymore dictating to Russell the last line of a final report: “Powers, Christian: Operation Hands Complete.” Russell got in the cruiser and threw his clipboard on the seat. He smiled and asked, “Bad the Bone, eh?”
That’s it? I wondered. This is what they’re using to charge me? No. I needed something else. I needed to know why I was charged. Things like a cassette didn’t warrant this sort of response, ever.
I then realized that I had one chance: the report. If I was going to die, I had to know why.
I leaned forward as the cruiser began to move and with the light from the passing streetlights, I finally saw it: “High Treason via Sting.” They had set me up. Goddamnit. They had set me up! I took one more look to confirm my suspicions. That Arian bastard, had beautiful handwriting.
I kicked the seat and began hitting the metal grate with my shoulders. Russell turned around. “George Thorogood?” he said, “There’s nothing special about him at all. Nothing out of the ordinary.”