The Fires of Orc

The urge for destruction is,

at the same time, a creative urge.

Mikhail Bakunin

Iwas on my way to Tequis in 2032, a few weeks before the fires, when I last saw The Soldier. I stopped in San Diego, spent a night, and flew out of Tijuana the next morning. It was at that last meeting in that soul-crushing dive bar that he said, “We should have gotten rid of the girl sooner.” It was a curious thing for him to say. I know he and Markus discussed the need to “deal” with Lydia, but they had nothing to do with her death. I alone am responsible for the death of Lydia Black and therefore the death of Tom Markus and thus, I’m convinced, for the death of the old world. Did The Soldier know all along that it was me? I remember him telling the detectives the morning after she died that he could place me in my apartment the prior night, all night. That wasn’t true. I don’t know if he knew it at the time but why else would he say it? The Soldier wasn’t the type of man to lie on the spot. Everything he said was the result of careful planning.

I did go out that night. As everyone knew, I received a text from Lydia asking me to come over. It was after eleven p.m. Veronica was asleep in my bed and so I went to Lydia’s, not knowing what to expect. Veronica swore I was in all night and The Soldier confirmed it and that was enough for a police department that didn’t want to investigate something so close to San Diego’s favorite son. No one looked past the obvious, which was that she overdosed on a combination of alcohol and Alexigin. The authorities were almost right, which means they were completely wrong.

I arrived at Lydia’s door around eleven thirty that night. I knocked and heard her voice from inside.

“Come on in,” she said.

She was in her kitchen pouring wine. I declined a glass for myself. Lydia’s apartment was an oversized studio with a room divider to create a semi-separate bedroom area. With the exception of a small bathroom the whole space was open, bounded only by four walls. I could see at a glance that she had been home for days. Papers spilled over in leaning piles, several empty wine bottles lined a coffee table and unwashed laundry lay in heaps around the floor.

I pushed aside a clutter of magazines on one end of the couch and sat down. She joined me with her glass of merlot in hand. On a small table at her end of the couch her tablet sat glowing, open to her email reader on the campaign server. A light blinked, indicating an unsent message awaiting her instruction.

“Do you need to finish that?” I asked, gesturing at the blinking tablet.

“Not right now,” she answered. “That’s actually what I wanted to see you about.”

Her eyes were half-glazed. She had been crying recently. I asked when she had last slept. She shrugged off the question and others about her well-being. I didn’t really need to ask. I had seen depression and despair enough to recognize the signs. Lydia was a wily, experienced, extraordinary young woman but young nonetheless and still capable of disillusionment. Recent events had left her empty, searching for reassurance and if possible an explanation. Her world was supposed to line up neatly along ethical lines, with principles and values constraining events. Good people were supposed to win in Lydia’s world and good people certainly weren’t supposed to do bad things. To have her belief so callously pulled out from under her shattered something inside her.

“So how’s it going?” I asked stupidly.

“You can see how it’s going,” she said.

I apologized for my awkwardness. “So, what about your email? What do you need to talk about?”

“You sound like you’re in a hurry,” she said.

“No, not really,” I assured her. “It’s just that it’s getting late and I don’t know how long I’m going to be good for.”

“Whatever,” she muttered.

“So anyway,” I pressed, “tell me what’s going on.”

She swallowed half a glass of merlot and announced, “I’m officially quitting. That’s one thing.”

“Well that’s not really news now, is it?” I asked.

“There’s no reason to get surly,” she answered, “and that’s just part of it. I have decided that the only right thing to do is to officially resign and to share with key media contacts my knowledge of the Dunlap affair. I still hope Markus wins, I admit it. But I wouldn’t feel right if he won without the voters having a chance to decide how they feel about his involvement in slimy political tactics.”

“Oh come on, Lydia,” I snapped. “Seriously? You’re a former mid-level bureaucrat with an ax to grind. Don’t presume to act as if you have some lofty moral duty here. You want to smear the candidate because you’re disappointed that the world isn’t all sweet and immaculate.”

A tear ran from her eye. She might have cried outright but even blind-drunk and angry she wouldn’t let an adversary see that.

“I can’t believe I was so wrong about you,” she said.

“You weren’t wrong about me,” I insisted, “you just wanted to be. From the very beginning you knew what I was about. You knew I would win at any price and something about that was enticing to you. You can be disappointed in your own susceptibility to the influence of power or your attraction to a dastardly man like me or whatever it is you need to console yourself about. But I haven’t been dishonest with you. You’re a grown woman, a smart woman. You’re responsible for your own choices.”

Her jaw stiffened. “Very well. You’re right. I am responsible for my choices and this is my choice. I won’t blame it on you or Markus or my own gullibility. I have just decided that I want the truth to come out and that is my right.”

“I suppose it is,” I shrugged.

She drained the last of her merlot.

“I think I changed my mind. May I have a glass of wine?” I asked.

“You’ll have to open another bottle,” she said. “Pour me a glass too.”

In the kitchen I saw a bottle of Alexigin sitting beside the spice rack next to an unopened bottle of red table wine.

“All you’ve got here are a couple of bottles of cheap table red. Is that good?”

She answered with a slight but perceptible slur. “I just finished a whole bottle. I don’t think it matters.”

Alexigin was produced as a small, round tablet, smaller than the average aspirin. It was a potent drug, a synergistic blend of anti-depressant and synthetic morphine. A single tablet, even two or three, wasn’t enough to harm a healthy adult. It was just enough to knock the edge off a powerful bout of depression or self-doubt or general anxiety or just the post-modern blues. But more than a few tablets washed down with a few liters of red wine, that was something altogether different.

“Do you mind if I have some of this?” I asked, referring to the block of cheese on the counter?

“Help yourself,” she replied.

I quietly emptied the pill bottle in my hand. Under the guise of cheese slicing and struggling with a cork I crushed two-dozen tablets with the back of a spoon. I swept the powdered pills into Lydia’s oversized goblet and poured wine nearly to the top. I swirled the concoction waiting for the fine powdery film on top to settle.

People who don’t habitually kill other people can’t know what it’s like in the moments before ending a life. There was panic, a complete, unnerving panic. Would she notice the suspended bits of pill? Would the taste of the wine give me away? Was she drunk enough not to notice anything out of line? Was it enough to do the job? What if she just went to sleep? Would she wake in the morning and know what happened? Should I have a back-up plan to make sure she didn’t wake up?

I gathered myself and proceeded to the couch and proffered the glass. She took it and drank deeply, a third of a glass gone in one swallow. I was then sure she was drunk enough that the plan would work but I had to make sure she finished the glass.

“I can’t say I don’t wish you would reconsider,” I said.

“Well I’m not going to,” she mumbled, her eyes wild, the pupils wide, as if some part of her sensed on some level what was happening within – the slow, warm death creeping outward from her center, slowing the tongue, blurring the vision, thickening the fog in the mind.

“I respect that,” I said. “Cheers!”

We clinked glasses and she took another red-brown mouthful, again not noticing the gritty poison suspended in her glass goblet.

I sat with her a few minutes until I could see her eyes beginning to close. I woke her with conversation.

“So what does your email say? You still haven’t sent it.”

She shook herself. Her words came torpidly, her jaw slackening under sedation.

“It just says ‘I’m sorry,’” she replied. “I wanted to say I’m sorry that I have to make this choice, etc., but I couldn’t get any further. I typed two words hours and hours ago and since then I’ve just been drinking wine, wondering if I had the strength to hit send.”

“You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known,” I told her. “Cheers to that.”

She drank again. No more than an ounce of wine still covered the bottom of her glass. I let her lay back, her head on the couch cushion, her chin thrust delicately upward showing her bare throat.

“You should go to sleep,” I said.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Here,” I said. “Finish this. I’ll straighten up on my way out.”

Without speaking she sat forward and parted her beautiful lips, already turning a faint blue. I kissed her open mouth and she moaned unintelligibly. Then I held her chin and helped her to gulp down the remaining concoction.

Tears ran freely down my cheeks. I held myself together but barely. I sat with her for perhaps fifteen minutes, holding her hand, stroking her hair out of her face. Her chest did not move. Her mouth hung open, her head cocked back against the couch. She was completely limp.

The second phase of real panic set in. I had to leave the scene as if there was no foul play. I washed the spoon with the Alexigin residue. I wiped counters. I washed and put away my glass and I wiped bottles and countertops to remove any obviously recent fingerprints. I knew there was no way I could eradicate all evidence of my presence in Lydia’s home, but as long as it wasn’t evidence that pointed to that particular night, I was in the clear. Everyone knew the relationship between us outside of work. I could afford to let some evidence remain. In fact, doing too much to clean the scene would be a bigger risk than doing too little. The less I did to stage things the safer I would be.

I was home before one that morning and climbed into bed with Veronica. She rolled over without waking and laid her arm across my chest. I tried to slow my breathing. I did not sleep and was awake when Veronica rose and pattered off to the shower. She hummed and sang lowly so as not to wake me up. It was evident I had gotten past her detection.

I went to work as usual. I pretended to attend to normal daily affairs until I received The Soldier’s text message telling me to stay put. Thereafter I was at home. The police arrived, informed me of their preliminary conclusion and so it was. All that anyone had from Lydia to testify to the facts of that fatal night was a two-word email: “I’m sorry.”

Now you might ask how a man can kill a woman, especially a woman with whom he had shared all that passed between Lydia and me. You’ll wonder if I’m a monster. You’ll ask yourself what kind of fiend could decide in the moment to poison an innocent young woman, practically still a girl, and then stick around to make sure the job was done.

I concede there is something truly monstrous about that night and about me. But be assured, monsters live among us. They were more plentiful in my day but there are now and have always been monsters. A monster is not born; he is made. A monster begins as a person with a hurt in the heart and a pang in the belly. A monster loses his way by following the hurt and hunger that drive a desperate man. And at first a monster might restrain himself and might not devour his victim. He might toy with her, placate her, indulge her and assuage his guilt for dabbling with his victim in the first place thinking, “I did not eat her.”

But the appetizer can never be so toothsome that the monster will forego the meal. And thus he will take each opportunity to nibble at the innocence and in time he will wound her with a bite. By then maybe she is broken, wearing her heart on the outside and he may tell himself, “I will not take all of her,” but he will in time. And in the end a monster will be nothing but a destroyed heart and unending hunger that ate a person from the inside out.

Thus we must watch that monsters do not come to rule the earth.

I was not born a monster. I was not born with an ugly, wounded heart. Like all children I was born with a heart as beautiful as the world around me. But hurt grew in my heart and the monster came to cover over the hurt. For most of my life I have known the monster’s impulse and I have crushed it down inside me, hiding the hurt and the monster in my heart wrapped tightly in a scoundrel’s indifference. But on that night the monster won and Lydia was his victim.

I recall an afternoon when I was a boy. My father had given me a twenty-two rifle and instructed me to be conscious of what a gun can do.

“This can kill,” he told me. “And if you shoot at a thing, you must mean to kill it. Never take the responsibility lightly. To shoot is to kill.”

That afternoon I shot at a rabbit, a small grey-brown rabbit eating peacefully in the countryside around my boyhood home. I pulled the trigger and I saw the rabbit leap frantically. He came to the ground and tossed and writhed and lurched in the dirt.

I ran to the rabbit and found it twisted and contorted, unable to pull its feet beneath itself, blood coating its hind legs, its back gruesomely torqued. It looked up at me with one wide eye, its ears back, its mouth agape. The eye was the worst part – the pupil dilated turning it to a pit of black in a wet, white orb. Death approached and the terrified rabbit heart knew it but in that moment, with its eye turned toward me the desperate rabbit searched for any hope. I placed the barrel of my gun against his grey-brown head and pulled the trigger, ending his desperation and following my father’s counsel. To shoot is to kill and not just because it’s a deadly thing to fire a gun, but also because it’s unkind to leave a wounded thing to suffer.

Ugliness was not born in my heart that day. It was just another day for a kid in Southern California. But I learned that day that I could look a desperate, innocent rabbit in the eye and blow its head off. I had the makings of a monster already. Killing Lydia was not killing a rabbit but I had wounded her as surely as if I shot her and I knew that I had to kill what I shot.

That could be the case, but it could also be the case that I wanted to win a contest I started even at the price of an innocent young woman who trusted me. That’s a monstrous possibility indeed! No matter what the actual case may be, I believe the fate of the world was determined for certain when I handed Lydia that glass.

What now is left of the world bears little resemblance to the folly of those times. There are, as always, ambitious men with delusions of grandeur. But gone are the ogres and the warlords that dominated the earth. There are still clashes and conflicts and tribal wars and great violence among men. But gone are the armies that enslaved nations. Women still toil and men still squabble and children still grow up in a sometimes frightening world. But our problems now are human-sized. Gone are the systems and power structures that dwarfed real people, reducing us all to insignificance.

This burned out world, the only world we have, still lives and where there is life monsters might still be defeated.

And now I sit past midnight, the end of a day among all others, having read nothing and told a story to carry on when I am gone. The Landlord blows out a candle on the kitchen counter.

“I’m going to bed, Old Timer. You’ve outlasted me.”

“I wasn’t aware it was a contest,” I say.

“You’re an ornery old man, aren’t you?”

“It keeps me alive,” I tell him.

“I want you to think about what I shared with you,” he says. “New Pacifica’s not bad but I really think there might be a better life out there. You should think about coming with us.”

I watch him make his way to the stairs. “I will definitely think about it – and thank you.”

He looks my way. “You’re very welcome, Old Timer.”

I rise to follow him upstairs, my day done, my story told.

I ask, “Why do you never call me by name?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Why do you never call me by mine?”

He has a point.

“Fair enough,” I tell him, making my way up the first steps of the crooked staircase. I pause. The night is heavy around me. I look up at him, my heart full, my throat tight.

“Good night, my friend.”

He pauses on the landing and smiles.

“Good night,” he says, “and Happy birthday, Andrew.”