Charlie's Weight

I have a nosebleed when the plane lands. That sense of lift you have when your balls try to run back into your pelvis, your heart skips in your chest, and your brain plays the rerun of Airplane Destination Death doesn't leave me even after the plane parks and the hostess tells everyone to unbuckle their seatbelts. I chalk it up to nerves. Right about now, my would-be father-in-law should be going up in a glorious blaze of purifying flames erasing his taint from the Earth.

He’s a murderer and now I am too.

But that’s not why I’m back here in Manhattan; angels would take him into Heaven and never know the blood that’d soaked so deeply into his hands the skin looked clean. The bone was filthy. Peel away the skin to see the devilry. I recorded all of it. It’s all in my write-up—my benched investigation—the tally of all his sins. This is the record I will present to Heaven. There is no salvation for those seeking retribution, but there is no salvation where the demonic find blessedness. Heaven and Earth will know what he did.

I can see it now as if I were there… family portraits: Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson, and Franklin—everywhere I look, I see them in picture frames staring at me—mocking me. I scatter them all to the floor, breaking the glass of the frames as they hit red wood. All these things, these designer chairs and ottomans, the little endtables featured on magazine spreads like pinups only big enough to hold your cheese and crackers, the framed banknotes adorning the self-indulgent walls… it’s maddening.

The radio screams as I set fire to it all, “Oh She dIeD? thAt’s unFORtunAtE. WE DiDn’t kIll YOur wife to bE, pEopLe Don’t diE from lack of MONEY. hAve FAIth in mE!”

The radio continues shouting as I close the door.

“I am G---N and mY wORd is lAW. There ARe No nOn-beLIEverS. HahAhaHAhaAhaHAhaaHAAhaHaaAAA!”

Let it all burn. That’s what happens when what you own owns you. But I’m not really here anyway. I’m in a plane in JFK.

Thinking ahead, I could be in two places at once. Work was complicit in this crime, keeping me away while the murderer did his work. Without constraint, I need only recover my neutered blackmail… a black book supposed to stand as a deterrent… and yet… how was it worth it? I don’t understand it. wHy!?

I’m surrounded by marionettes tangled in gilded strings. Their operating crosses hover behind their heads like halos and reek of the smell of freshly printed money. As soon as I step off the ramp I’m greeted with talking heads and a sea of faceless puppets.

“thERE was a fIRe tHat BRokE OuT oN the THIRTEENTH floOR of the SHeRRy-nETHerLAND buiLdng juSt HOURs agO. ReSIdeNTs weRE SAfeLY EVACuatED. We HaVen’T yet reCIeveD rePoRTs oF FaTaLiTieS.”

I swim in limbo. My puppet drives me to the Hyatt and I feel like the water’s murky. It’s somewhat of a wonder the taxi’s still moving. Fish swim by me.

I check in with the marionettes at the desk. Their hair runs red like mahogany and drips over their eyes, uncomfortably I imagine. I’ve paid in advance. The one who hands me my key offers to show me to my room. She’s new. I’m not. The familiar one shifts her strings a little. He speaks to me.

“I wIsh the miSSuS a spEEdY reCOVeRerY.”

They leave me alone and I walk out the back door to call for a new submarine.

Over the shoreline are trashy boxes housing broken-down marionettes no one likes using. The commute is three hours outside his route, but I have holy currency. He will take me as far as I need him to.

And then we’re here. Our trashy box on the hillside. I pay the chauffer and my strings on him snap as he returns to the limbic sea.

“Eliza, I’m home.”

She can’t reply. The vestibule platform is the highest point of the house. Walking down, the water level reaches my knees, my neck, then my hair. I’ve walked down these stairs so much I don’t even notice it anymore.

I walk over to her bed. She’s looking at me, but saying nothing. Nothing in her shines anymore: not her eyes, vacant and listless; not her smile, which I never see; and not even the diamond ring. The outside light is tinted green like a swamp. The stagnant water is only clear enough to see where you focus. It’s been awhile since we’ve had visitors.

She just looks at me. I instinctively reach to push the hair out of her face; the water undoes the gesture. My hand highlights the red thread connecting us by needles to the chest. Our hearts are pincushions. We gifted them to each other.

She holds out her hand and as I reach for it, blood needles her skin, forming veins, crawling out of the cavity where her pincushion should be. As the threads spill out faster and faster in this horrific and transfixing manner she looks at me still, skin dyed red—eyes unchanged and arm outstretched. The severed thread that connected us floats across my field of vision and I fixate on it.

When I look back at her I catch something in my periphery and realize the notebook is in her outstretched hand. Glass floats past me—tempered glass shards that reflect the window light like glitter. I feel them prick my skin as they slowly move by like a school of dead fish. My stomach rises into my chest and my body drags against the gravity of the Earth pulling me down. It feels difficult to reach for the notebook, but I exert myself to do so. It’s not simply justice; it’s precious: a gift before the accident.

Once I feel its leather bound texture on my skin, I find myself in need of air. I make it halfway up the stairs in the vestibule before I forget breathing. I open the book. The black cover folds a perfect curve around my fingers as I bend it back and the pages float in the current as I look down. The streetlight coming in from the front door illuminates the print.

With more than a dime, but not worth one, he watches his daughter dying.

With patience is sleep slain, but the gods of the father tell him her fate is foregone. They speak in chorus, drowning out the sound of reason; for however many he spends, he still has more and can scarce remember which of them have gone.

So it is written.

I must see her one last time. I must speak with her. I must make my peace with her. Carrying retribution doesn’t secure absolution.

The car groans to pitiful life and takes me back into the city. I pull up to the hospital and make the trip to the whining elevator. They still haven’t fixed the lean. It makes the pass by other shaft lifts sound like an oncoming 18-wheeler on the freeway. I step out onto the floor with seats always half-full and the nurses always carrying three breathing masks as if they have three sets of feet to give them all out at once. The dysfunctional light flickers incessantly—the third one from the left down her hallway. The attendant monitor knows me by appearance and says nothing as I pass. Everywhere, I hear static on the TV’s.

And here is her room; the bed is being cleared and a breeze blasts through as if a fan had been there. Papers scatter and the TV’s these poor marionettes watch, hell-tangled in golden knots and strings, begin to get louder and louder until I feel the static in my head and can’t think.

YoUr wIfe to Be wAS a mEAt PuPPet wiTh GolDEn stRiNGs. bUY A nEw One and We’Ll thRow iN frEE aiRbaGS. We oFFer PaID oPpoRtUnIty-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-yaAAAHhahAHahahahhAHahAhHAhahaAhahaHAHAAaaAAaahaHaHahaHaAahAaAhAHahaAaAahAaAAhAAAHAAA—.

“Charlie.” The voices fade. Eliza watches me from the bed, sitting upright after the nurses clear out. I drop to my knees.

“Your father killed you.”

She shakes her head at me. “Don’t let it get to you.”

“I came here to tell you I avenged you.”

The talking heads, always on cue, “OnE faTaLitY hAs bEen rePoRTed as A reSuLT of tHe FiRe ThaT broKe OuT earlier tOdAy.”

“So that was you. I thought you were at the hotel to be closer to me.” Eliza, close enough to the window, leans back and looks out. She swings her feet back and forth rhythmically.

“I was. But when I heard what your father did, I had to come back. Everyone will know what kind of man he was… then connecting him to your murder will only be a matter of time.”

“Reporter’s nature…” she shakes her head. “A waste of time. You were supposed to be working.”

“I was. That job was the only thing keeping me afloat.”

She doesn’t meet my gaze. “So you were looking out for yourself…”

“That’s not what I—”

“Good. I worried you might have let the crash kill you too.”

“What…” I don’t know how to respond to that.

“Why are you here?”

“To tell you the deed is done! I just… needed you to know. I won’t be able to see you anymore.”

She tips her head back and gazes at me with relaxed and crippling judgement. “You investigated my father, figured out where his money came from, and recorded it all before the accident?”

“It’s all right here!” I show her. The notebook folds back with my fingers.

She looks at the content and closes her eyes slowly with a pain that makes my heart race. “Charlie…” she remains quiet and my soul lifts partly out of my body as time slows down. “Read what you wrote.”

I know what I wrote so I get it over with.

LIFE INSURANCE IS BLOOD MONEY WALTER IS GUILTY

So iT Is WriTTeN….

Life insurance? Life insurance… life insurance… lIfE iNSuranCe… of course. Of course… Of CouRSe…. It was the impetus—imPEtUS—for one crime and the facilitatOR of another—his and mine.

“You can’t be in two places at once Charlie.”

Of course not. I bought a killer. “With that money, I could’ve paid your hospital bill for the next year….”

“That’s the joke.”

“No. The joke is that I spent nineteen of it paying for that.” I point to the smoking television airing static.

“What was the last grand for?”

Grand… wait. How would you know that? I look up at her and an ambulance is heard below. The soundwave hits the window glass and it implodes, the shards embedding in our skin like rhinestone inlays.

The siren keeps laughing, HaahaaaHAhaaHAAAAaAaAaAaHAaAaAaAaHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

I remember where I am.

There’s blood gushing out of my side like a leaky faucet where the bullet wound burns. I only see red, but I can barely keep my eyes open. I’m falling into the Harlem River down above me. My legs are lifting toward my face as the ambulance I launched tumbles in airborne ballet.

My final investment was the gun I used to shoot myself as I walked out of my moving car near Washington Bridge. It paid dividends when I used it to commandeer the ambulance that came for me.

I called that ambulance to hear the laughing siren one more time. No oNe Who hEArS iT cAn afford iT. IsN’t tHAt the JokE?

I think, let’s see it laugh now, but I don’t. The crash almost knocks me out. I’m barely conscious. The inside of the ambulance is a swampy shade of green and Eliza, in the passenger seat, takes my hand and smiles at me.

But of course I don’t see it.

I’m dead now.