From: Nathan Alderman Date: Sat, 25 Apr 1998 01:05:58 -0500 (CDT) Subject: New story: Guardian Author: "Raoul Bloodworth" (xfnight@nwu.edu) Title: Guardian Classification: Story Rating: PG-13 Keywords: Cigarette-Smoking Man, Cancerman Summary: A guardian angel, wreathed in clouds of smoke. Guardian By Raoul Bloodworth What is the point of ruling the world if you can't change it every now and then? I ask myself that often. I am left to fix the big things, the sweeping things, the ones that draw the attention of the nation like a magician's cunning left hand. But occasionally I dip my fingers into the world of small things, ordinary personal things. I consider it an indulgence. Case in point: the matter of the Wayland boy. You see where I live, where I choose to live. It's rather modest, isn't it? Nothing befitting a man of my influence. I should be living in the Playboy mansion, shouldn't I? But such is the fate of men like me: to toil in obscurity for the benefit of the unknowing masses. My apartment, succinctly, is nothing. I sleep, when I sleep, when I can sleep, on a foldaway bed with cheap broken springs. The plaster on my ceiling peels. My television flickers epileptically. There are roaches in the cabinet under my sink, the mocking little bastards. I use an IBM Selectric. To look at it, you'd never know I was me, which is of course the exact purpose. I have neighbors. I suppose I could have spoken a few words in someone's ear and emptied out the apartments all around me. But I find it quaint, somehow. I come home at night after picking the Best Supporting Actress Winner (wondering about Marisa Tomei? Wonder no more. I thought she was fabulous) and ordering a bullet between the eyes of a foreign minister and I am reminded that though I hold the magnifying glass over the hill, technically I'm still one of the ants. Couple months ago I was up late typing. I have this wonderful idea for a novel-- a pair of FBI agents trying to uncover a government conspiracy. It ends tragically, they both wind up dead, quite a tearjerker. I have a feeling it won't sell, but I enjoy writing it. Ah. I'm getting away from myself, aren't I? So I'm up late, typing away, and I hear something on the other side of the wall. Screaming, shrieking. Things thumping around. Ugly sounds, the kind I'm quite used to. It's an annoyance, it makes me lose my train of thought. I stop to think about who lives, there, consider maybe banging on the wall with one of my shoes. Who lives there? Yes, that's right, the woman and her little boy. She's quite a pretty young thing, stretched out and darkened from trying to make ends meet. I see her on the stairs, the boy trailing along behind her. Sometimes she reminds me of my daughter. She has a husband; from my window I can see him stumble in late most nights, shouting at nothing in particular. When I listen closely I can recognize his voice loud and angry, her voice quiet and sobbing. At one point the child's voice slides through the wall high and upset, followed by the father's growl, a particularly loud thump, and the mother's shriek. It goes on all the time. I can't afford to get involved with it, with any of it. That's what I say to myself. Sometime during the night an ambulance comes. The next morning on my way to work I see the woman through the window of the laundromat across the street. The day is overcast and humid and she is wearing sunglasses indoors and a long-sleeved sweater, and that is how I know she has been beaten. It doesn't move me too terribly much-- I've done worse to others, and taken pride in it. It's the boy that pushes me to action. The next time I see him he is sitting on an empty concrete marker in the parking lot next to the building. He is tossing stones against the pavement. He has a cast on one arm. I stop, look, get my binoculars, look closer. The father has broken his son's arm. In my work I draw a fine distincion between the helpless and the ignorant. The ignorant deserve what they get; their unpreparedness is a matter of choice, whether they know it or not. When I blew off the back of Kennedy's head in '63, the first thing I thought was: should've gone with the bulletproof bubble. But this, this is different. This is helpless. And--don't presume to lecture me on the pot and the kettle-- this is wrong. With a parabolic microphone I can hear what the boy is saying. He is angry. He wishes his mother and he could go off somewhere. He wishes his father were dead. Little boy, I think to myself, don't you know I grant wishes? I make calls. The "phone company" shows up the next day while the apartment is empty, sweeps the place, plants little eyes and ears in out-of-the-way places. That is how I learn the boy is Jared, Jared Wayland, and the mother is Sharon and the drunken father is Earl. When I play back the tapes after work I learn that when Sharon is home she spends much of the day crying quietly to herself. She sings her child to sleep, even though he inisists-- not too fervently-- that he is too big for that. Her husband likes to call her a worthless slut-- his favorite insult. I count 47 uses over a three-day period. The videos tell me that she wants to get away. She rushes to the television to watch whenever a vacation commercial comes on. She buys lottery tickets and hides them behind her dresser so her husband doesn't accuser her of wasting valuable beer money. She fills out and sends in those magazine sweepstakes forms that breed virulently in unwatched piles of junk mail. Too bad we've already chosen the winners for the next five years. Earl Wayland seems to spend all his time at least partially drunk. He averages a beer every ten minutes from his arrival at five-thirty p.m. to six-thirty, with the intervals stretching to thirty minutes until eight, when he usually leaves for a bar eight blocks west. My sources say he usually orders shots of expensive scotch until he is just this side of ambulatory, and drives home. He owns a 1976 Camaro with low pressure in the right rear tire and bad shocks, and he seems to love it more than his wife or son. I watch the Waylands for a week, deciding exactly what I should do with them. They are my pet project, sort of like an aquarium. I make my decision the night that Earl finds Sharon's lottery tickets. He smashes her face against the wall. When his son calls him dirty word Earl goes after him with a thick leather belt. I would turn off the cameras, to see it, but somehow I feel that would be dereliction of duty. For about five minutes I am too sick to want another cigarette, which on my scale is two ticks shy of eternity. Oh, I could pick from any number of people to do the job. But this once, I want to be personally involved. The next night I meet him coming out of the back door of his favorite bar, just after closing time. The parking lot is empty and dark, and I am standing next to his Camaro. He asks me who the hell I am. I ask him if he would like to make his son very happy. He laughs slowly and tells me to get away from his car. I draw my silenced pistol and sink three shots into his bulging stomach. When he falls I put my foot on his chest and fire again, into his heart. He lies still and bleeding. I kneel down and stub out my cigarette in one of his eyes. Then I see to it that neither he nor his car are ever seen again, unless at some point thousands of years from now the dried-up riverbed of the Potomac is excavated. I give him a tidy alibi. I put him in his car and I have him drive away from the bar after closing time, headed for the highway. Seven different people will swear to it as if they saw it with their own eyes. Sharon thinks he has driven far away and will never come back again. Jared seems happier. He misses his Dad a little-- I can see him stare at the family picture he keeps on the table by his bed-- but this is only to be expected. Sharon is better too. She no longer jumps on shadows. She is safe. And I make a few, final calls, change a few long-term plans. Unfortunately I am called away on business the night that the camera crew's van pulls up in front of my building and brings an oversized check to Sharon's door. By the time I return she has moved out, and there is nothing to do but have the bugs removed and get back to my novel. I'm sure I could find out what happened to them if I wanted to. It is certainly tempting; I've grown rather fond of them, in a way. But connections are distractions, and distractions can be somewhat bad for your health in my line of work. So I let them go and turn my attention to the Guatemalan presidential primaries. I spend my life embroiled in grand, far-reaching plans, matters of vast importance. So I suppose you could call it nice, once in a while, when I take time to attend to the small details. In a few years none of it will matter anyway. In a few years they will all be dead. I am entitlted to enjoy it while I can. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Nathan Alderman ("Son of Guido") "They say every atom in our Northwestern University bodies was once part of a n-alderman@nwu.edu ICQ: 8457866 star..." http://charlotte.at.nwu.edu/nma912 -- Andrew Niccol, "Gattaca" According to the "Guinness Book of Records" the cast and crew of "The Blues Brothers" movie set a new world record for per-capita consumption of controlled substances during the filming of a major motion picture. Only laboratory animals used in scientific experiments are known to have exceeded this.-- from the Internet