Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

We’re bonding and we’re killing time as we eat our chocolate bars. We take ten minutes for ourselves and talk about families and the weather and nothing at all to do with the city or the crime rate. It’s the best ten minutes I’ve had in a long time.

Right on nine thirty, over an hour after Benson Barlow stepped into Schroder’s office, he steps back out of it and closes the door behind him. We rush over to him, hoping he’s going to give us something to bring us one step closer to finding Dr. Stanton and his family alive.

Six years ago he saw a man die in prison. Others died while he was in there, most from natural causes, many from drug overdoses, a few from beatings. People would smuggle contraband into the cells all the time. There was a big market for drugs and needles, cigarettes, food, or a hip flask of vodka or gin. They’d smuggle in cell phones, they’d bring in magazines full of pictures of naked women, and on one occasion that he remembers a magazine about landscaping. On this occasion somebody smuggled in a roofing nail.

The roofing nail got handed off to one inmate and jammed all the way into another. Nobody knows how it came from the outside world to the inside world of this man’s head, traveling through his ear canal on its way to a home run. The attack was quick and nobody saw it, but the dying lasted long enough for the guy to scream and to thrash his legs about on the floor as they all stood around watching. Nobody tried to help. Nobody showed much emotion. It was like watching a football match where you weren’t invested in the outcome. The guards came over. By then the guy had stopped moving. They picked him up and rushed him to the infirmary and Caleb never saw him again after that and nobody really much spoke about it. He was just a guy nobody really knew and death didn’t change that about him.

Looking at the blood on the floor, and the death jitters of a man fighting for life, that was the first time Caleb accepted he would feel nothing watching others die. When he killed James Whitby, he felt something. He felt anger and relief, he felt disgust and he felt euphoria, he felt pure hatred, he felt like he could murder the world.

Watching the man in jail, he felt nothing. It was a good thing. It was something he could use. He knew he would need it when he was released from jail, and it’s come in handy.

But right now what he is feeling is anger. He’s going to miss out on the judge and the bitch mother and the emotion is rushing back. He isn’t sure where to go. Since seeing the pizza boy jumped on, he has spent one hour driving aimlessly, then another hour parked out near the beach where he used to live when he first met his wife. Since then he’s been driving aimlessly again, listening to the news. The reporters have dropped the Gran Reaper handle and replaced it with his real name. They say to be on the lookout for Caleb Cole, that he’s considered armed and dangerous and if you see him to call the police.

Obsolete Octavia is asleep, a small snot bubble growing and shrinking from her left nostril as she breathes. Katy Kitten is asleep too.

The lights ahead are red and he sits at them with his foot on the brake, listening to Octavia breathing and waiting for the bubble under her nose to pop when a purple car with neon lights and a dent in the passenger door pulls up next to him. The music is nothing more than thumping bass, and the two boys in front can’t be much more than sixteen. They look over at him, the one closer raises his eyebrows and gives one sharp nod, his head going up first and then down, his eyes fixed on Caleb the entire time, then the driver guns the engine so loudly that Cole’s car shudders and Octavia wakes up and screams. Then the driver guns it four more times before the light turns green and they take off, the passenger leaning out the window and screaming “asshole!”

“It’s okay,” he tells Octavia, only it isn’t, because she’s crying hard now and her face is turning red and she seems to be running out of air just as quickly as the country is running out of hope for its future. Katy is murmuring from the backseat, the drugs wearing off.

He drives through the intersection and pulls over. He knows the one thing that may help the situation. He opens another jar of baby food and shovels a spoon toward Octavia, who manages to get it into her mouth and swallow it all while still carrying on. Soon he’s going to be dealing with a fat baby. At least it hasn’t crapped itself today. He finishes off the bottle, then realizes he’s left the plastic cup back at the slaughterhouse. He has nothing to give Octavia, and it takes her two seconds to realize the same thing and the crying gets louder. He looks in the backseat and sees nothing, then checks the glove compartment. There’s a small bottle of water in there that’s half empty. He unscrews the lid and takes a sniff-it smells okay, it could only be a few days old. Or it could be a year old. He tosses it back. Octavia is throwing her arms around, really starting to wind up.

He starts the car. Like with Jessica, the movement and engine noise calms her. He knows this area. There is a dairy a few blocks from here, he drives to it and pulls up outside. He locks the car and runs inside and buys a small box of orange juice and runs back out, telling the owner to keep the change. He punches the straw into it and hands it to Octavia who, in an instant, forgets all about crying as she stares at it, making a smacking noise with her lips before sucking on the straw.

“Good?” he asks.

She doesn’t answer, but stares at him while drinking. Her eyelashes are clumped together and look like starfish appendages.

He starts the car. Katy is moving around a little more. The doctor will be waking soon too. He can’t keep driving. He needs to make a decision and he has to find a location. Somewhere the police won’t think to look, which means a location that has no relevance to him. Somewhere abandoned. Somewhere he can get some sleep and refuel on energy and where he can think about Mrs. Whitby and the judge and how he can get them. There have to be plenty of abandoned places in Christchurch. There are industrial buildings shut down because people have gone bankrupt. Empty houses in every neighborhood where people have packed their stuff together and gotten the hell out. He can’t just pull over at a park somewhere and sleep in the car.

He passes a liquor store, one he used to come to on the way home from work sometimes when he’d pick up a bottle of wine to share with Lara over dinner. He slows down, trying to remember the last time he was here but he can’t, not specifically, all he can remember are images of the years of different visits. Why would he remember? It’s just a liquor store. He hasn’t even thought about this place in fifteen years. There are four cars parked out front. He drives past, slows down, does a U-turn, and parks on the street. All the cars are empty, all the people inside the store. He takes the knife and steps out of the car and runs to the closest one, a purple one with neon lights and a dent in the passenger door. He crouches down and slides the knife into the back tire, and then crawls along and slides it into the front one. He doesn’t move around to the other side, but he does start to carve the word asshole on the hood. It’s more difficult than he would have thought-he can’t form the curves in the s, not with his fucked-up hands, so it ends up looking like a backward z. He gives up halfway through the e when he sees people getting ready to exit the shop.

He carries on driving. It dawns on him that he isn’t driving as randomly as he first thought. That’s why he knew about the dairy. It’s why he recognized the liquor store. He’s been homing in on the house he lived in back when things were the way they were meant to be. The house was sold not long after he went into prison. None of the money went to him. The mortgage was big enough as it was, and what was left went into funeral costs and lawyers’ fees. He came out of it with nothing. All the furniture was sold. His clothes, his possessions, everything he owned was sold or dumped and back then he didn’t care. It was just stuff. His family was dead, and who really cared about your TV or favorite sofa finding a new home?