Under the Knife(2)

A man, bald and short and thick, inched forward from a gleaming black Town Car parked on a nearby road. He cleared his throat.

“Mr. Finney?” His voice was reedy yet carried clearly. He and the tall man were the only living souls now remaining in this section of the cemetery.

The tall man lifted his chin and inclined his head to one side.

The thick man coughed. “Mr. Finney. You have that, ah, meeting. In forty-five minutes. At the Salk.” He tapped his wristwatch. “Just wanted to, uh, remind you.”

Finney did not turn around, or speak. He kept his head tilted toward the horizontal, as if he were in the aisle of a supermarket, casually holding up a cereal box to inspect its list of ingredients.

The man reeks of cigarettes, Finney thought. He was specifically instructed that I hate cigarettes.

Finney watched him out of the corner of his eye. The seconds ticked by. Perspiration gathered across the thick man’s bare skull and glinted in the sun. The man cleared his throat, as if to speak again, then seemed to think the better of it. He retreated to the car, wheezing.

Finney straightened his head back to the vertical, so that his chin was once again aligned with his neck. Although he’d never been predisposed to quick anger, or rash thoughts, Jenny’s death had kindled in him an emotional brittleness, worsened by his hopeless incapacity to process the cauldron of feelings that had simmered deep in his psyche since she’d been taken from him. Rage, raw as an open wound, bubbled over from inside him and threatened to consume him.

He drew a deep breath and held it.

Finney was not given to cliché. He, in fact, hated cliché. So he was surprised when the first coherent thought to pop into his mind as the thick man waddled away was I’m going to kill him: a sentiment that was, of course, a cliché.

He forced the air out of his lungs and seized that thought. Flipped it around in his mind. Mentally hefted it, turned it this way and that, considered its substance.

I’m going to kill him.

In an instant, his anger over the thick man’s stupendous idiocy had turned to curiosity.

I’m going to kill him?

People casually uttered that phrase all the time, without thought or conviction. As in, if he shows up late again for work, I’m going to kill him. It was a sitcom catchphrase or a throwaway line for cheap villains in summer movies. It meant nothing. No substance. All cliché.

But was it really, at this moment? For him?

Because Finney knew, with the absolute certainty of a man who had grown rich from being absolutely certain about things, that at this moment he really did want to kill the thick man.

This insight fascinated him. He was a law-abiding citizen, after all. Well, mostly law-abiding. Certainly not given to thoughts of premeditated homicide. From what dark corner of his mind had this urge sprung?

The immediacy of his conviction, its vividness and power, intrigued him. Finney didn’t believe in the existence of God. But if he did, he would at this moment invoke God to witness the fact that he wanted nothing more than to wrap his fingers around the man’s fat throat and squeeze, really squeeze, until his fingers disappeared into the folds of skin, as if they’d slipped beneath fleshy quicksand; and he felt the man’s windpipe crack, and heard the gratifying, high-pitched gasp of his final, foul breath.

It was an odd sensation. Not simply rage, anymore, or indignation over the man’s appalling disrespect, even as Jenny was about to disappear into the ground forever.

No.

It seemed to him something greater, far more consequential: as if the mere existence of this squat, nicotine-addled creature had somehow tipped the universe out of balance, and it was Finney’s mission—no, his burden—to right the order of things.

Finney’s emotions were something that he’d always experienced from a distance, from the outside in, like they were fish in an aquarium, and he was viewing them from the other side of thick-paned glass; so it was rather like he watched, instead of felt, the murderous urge slip away, disappearing beneath the murky surface of his subconscious. It did so slowly, as if reluctant to give up its grasp on him.

He sighed.

Order.

Or a lack thereof.

Maybe that’s what it was that was bothering him so much, that had been eating away at him, chewing on his insides, at all times of day and night over the last week. He hadn’t slept in days, and he was exhausted. Jenny’s death had set askew the natural order of things, and he sensed the unbalance in the universe around him. Newton’s Third Law at work: Her death was the action, and cosmic disequilibrium the reaction.

He would have to settle for firing the thick man, who had only recently started working for him, and ensuring he never again achieved any professional rank above that of graveyard-shift janitor. The man otherwise wasn’t worth the mental effort: not a single additional electrical impulse fired in a single neuron of Finney’s brain.

Besides, as much as he repulsed Finney, the thick man was not responsible for Jenny’s death.

That distinction belonged to another.

Because, really, what else mattered now?

The grief crashed over him without warning. It was as if his grief were a dense, poisonous liquid, and he was drowning in it, tumbling and spinning, helpless and sick. The familiar feeling, the hated feeling, rose in his throat.

He was going to cry.

He closed his eyes and balled his hands into fists, fighting the tears, as he had done repeatedly since her death. Even so, he felt them pooling in the corners of his eyes. Soon, here in the bright sunlight, in front of the thick man and the world, he would be sobbing like some pathetic child.