Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

“You’re wrong. I think about what happened to your family all the time. I use it to make people better. Please-”

“Melanie, go and sit over there with your sisters,” Caleb says.

“No. I’m not leaving my dad.”

“It’s okay, Munchkin,” Stanton says, and his nickname for his daughter makes Caleb’s heart jump. On occasion he’d called his daughter the same thing. Munchkin. Pumpkin. Princess. Sometimes it’d be Princess Munchkin or Princess Pumpkin.

Melanie is starting to cry.

“Do what he says,” Stanton begs. “All three of you, go to the other side of the room.”

They do as he asks, Katy and Melanie carrying Octavia between them. Caleb moves in close, he crouches in front of the doctor. He lowers his voice. “It will be different for you, I promise,” he says.

“Please, please, don’t hurt my kids,” Stanton says, matching the volume of Caleb’s voice. “They haven’t done anything to you. I’ll do anything, anything, don’t hurt them.”

“What are their nicknames?” Caleb asks.

“What? Why?”

Why? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t need to know either, or at least he shouldn’t. But right now it’s important to him. “Tell me,” he says.

“Munchkin and Kitten,” he says. “Munchkin Mel and Katy Kitten.”

“And Octavia?”

“Huh?”

“Octavia.”

Stanton shakes his head. “She doesn’t have one.”

“Why?”

“Don’t hurt them,” Stanton says.

Caleb shakes his head. Fuck it. It’s time to move on. What does he care who is named what? “It’s too late for that.”

“No, no it’s not. There’s no reason why it’s too late. You haven’t hurt them yet, you don’t have to, you can do what you want with me, but you don’t have to hurt them. Please, I’m begging you.”

“Begging. My daughter begged for her life,” he says, knowing she would have. She would have begged and cried and called out for him and his wife. “We also used to call her Munchkin,” he says, and Stanton winces and Caleb knows why-suddenly it’s all become a lot more human to him. Suddenly Stanton’s imagining what it would be like to lose his own daughter. Well, he isn’t going to have to imagine for long. “I’m going to let you decide which one of your kids dies first,” Caleb says. “I never had that choice.” The sun is coming into the office, highlighting a beam of dust in the air. He knows the girls can’t hear him, because if they could they would be doing more than just crying, they’d be bawling their eyes out and screaming. “You’re going to be with them when they die,” Caleb says, carrying on. “My daughter was all alone out here with the man that killed her,” he says, and he’s seen it play out in his mind a thousand times a day since it happened. It’s always there on repeat, an image he can’t shake, an image that has defined him. “He stabbed her and raped her in the middle of winter. It was thirty fucking degrees out here and that didn’t slow him down. Stabbed her over and over in her chest and her stomach. Before that he stripped her naked and pressed her tiny body against concrete as cold as ice, and during that time you were sitting in your warm office drinking coffee and offering bullshit advice while having no fucking idea at all about how people tick.”

“I. .”

“You killed her, you fucker!” he yells, and now comes the sobbing from the children, and small brief screams too, and here comes his emotion, here it comes racing through him and if he doesn’t dial it back he’s going to ruin everything by gutting the doctor where he lies, and the doctor, well, he’s flinching at every word, as if they’re punches being thrown down on him. “You, you and your fucking skewed way of seeing the world, you and your arrogance, your vanity, you and all your importance because you just had to be the man, right? You had to be the fucking man who knew better! You only thought about your career, about making a name for yourself.”

Katy Kitten and Munchkin Mel are in full cry mode now as they clutch the teddy bear between them. They are low to the floor so they can clutch Octavia too. He looks at them, he sees the fear, but they don’t know what fear is-unless he undresses them and presses them into the floor they’ll never understand it.

He pulls himself back from losing control. He shakes his head and lowers his voice. “James Whitby, he couldn’t help himself. He was damaged goods, he was a bad guy, but it’s who he was. You say you were only doing your job, but that’s what the others were doing. You were doing more than that-it was your word that Whitby could be helped. Your word that his lawyer argued to the judge. You were the one in that stand seventeen years ago who convinced those twelve people that James Whitby was a stand-up guy, that he. .”

“I never said that!”

“No, and you never said we’d all be better off with him in jail. Instead you said he needed help, that medical help would help him. You said he could be cured and the jury and the judge, they believed that.”

“I. . I am, I’m truly sorry, I’m. . oh, Jesus, don’t hurt my kids.”

Caleb leans in and slaps him as hard as he can. The sound is louder than the crying from the girls. It echoes across the room and out the door and into the heart of the slaughterhouse, out past the can of tuna and the rats who are probably nibbling at it, outside past the plastic bag full of shit and the car with piss on the hood. For a moment it’s the only sound in the room, the girls stop crying, and then they start back up, the youngest slaps her palms against the floor.

“Think about what it is you want to say to them,” Caleb says, his voice still low but a lot more forceful now. “You’ve got the day to decide, because tonight I’m going to do to your family what was done to mine.”

“Please-”

“And I’m giving you the chance to comfort them, you son of a bitch. That’s a whole lot more than my daughter ever had. They don’t have to die out here alone.”

“Don’t do this.”

“Are you a religious man, Doctor?”

“What? No, no. . why?”

“Because now would be a good time to start praying. An eye for an eye, Doctor. It’s in the Bible. Symbolically, it sums up what we have here.”

“You don’t have to. .”

“Don’t waste your words on me,” Caleb tells him, getting out new plastic ties to bind the children. “They’re useless. Use them on your children. Talk to them, be with them, tell them goodbye, but make no mistake, tonight out here in this Godforsaken place I’m going to start killing your family and there isn’t a goddamn thing you can do about it.”

Ariel Chancellor’s house smells of wet cat and wet dog and I stay away from the walls to keep my clothes dry. I look down at my shoes to make sure they’re not squelching into the carpet and bringing up water. We walk through to the living room, where there are large stains in the ceiling with plaster and paint flaking away, the center of it bowing outward with the weight of rainwater trapped in the roof, a bucket on the floor collecting the drips. The light has no bulb in it and with all that moisture up there it must be a fire hazard. Ariel doesn’t offer me any tea or coffee or heroin. She sits down in a couch that tries to swallow her and works away at her drink, getting through half of it. I stay standing, wanting to get out of here quickly, hoping she can tell me something useful before I leave.

“How long’s it been since your last drink?” she asks me.

“I had coffee a few hours ago.”

“Huh, that’s good,” she says. “Really funny.”

“How long have you been doing this?” I ask, looking around the living room.