Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

SUNDAY MORNING

Well, live and learn.

I suck in a deep breath, close my eyes, and squeeze all the way on the trigger.

The world explodes.

It explodes with light and sound and pain, and it’s not right, because it should be exploding with darkness. There should be a shroud of black enveloping me, taking me away from all of this. I’m in control-Slow Joe is a winner-and proof of this comes when my life starts flashing in front of me. The darkness is mere moments away, but first I must go through images of my mother, my father, my childhood, time spent with my auntie. Hours and hours of footage from my life is broken up into snapshots then condensed into a two-second movie, one scene flicking into the next like watching an old film projector. The images speed up. They flash through my mind.

But that is not all.

Sally is flashing across my mind. No, not my mind, but my field of vision. She is right in front of me, against me, her clumpy body pressing me all over in the way she has always wanted to. There are a dozen voices.

I hit the pavement and my arm flies out to the side. Sally’s flesh is pushed aside by my body. It rolls over my limbs, trying to swallow me like a soft couch. I’m not dying yet, but I’m already in Hell. I pull the trigger without any target, and it turns out without any success because the gun is no longer in my hand. Sally is crushing the air out of me and I’m still not real sure what’s going on. The world is topsy-turvy and there is a packet of cat food pressed up against my shoulder. My face is burning and is wet with blood. There is high-pitched screaming in my ear, a monotonous tone that won’t end. Sally is pulled off me, she disappears only to be replaced by Detective Schroder, and I have never been so relieved in my life. Schroder will save me, Schroder will take Sally and hopefully lock her away in the kind of place fat girls like Sally ought to be locked away.

“I’m. .” I say, but I can’t even hear my voice over my ringing ears. I can’t figure out what’s going on. I’m so confused. The world is shifting off its axis.

“Shut up,” Schroder yells, but I can hardly hear him. “You hear me? Shut up before I put a Goddamn bullet in your head!”

I have never heard Schroder talk that way, and I guess for him to talk that way to Sally means he’s really, really pissed off at her for jumping on me. I suddenly feel closer to him than I ever have. But the pain I’m in, the fact that Fat Sally just folded her flesh around me, now I’m thinking I want the bullet he’s offering her. I want that sweet, sweet darkness and the silence that will come along with it. But I stay quiet. Mostly.

“I’m Joe,” I shout, in case they can all hear the ringing tone too. “Slow Joe.”

Somebody hits me. I don’t know who, and I don’t know if it’s a punch or a kick, but it comes out of nowhere and my head snaps to the side and Schroder disappears for a moment and the side of my apartment building appears. I can see the top floor and the guttering, I can see dirty windows and cracked windows and somewhere up there is my apartment, and all I want to do is make my way inside and lie down and try to figure out what’s going on. It all goes blurry and seems to run into the ground, like the colors of a watercolor painting all leaking away, leaving only reds, and it stays that way as I’m dragged up onto my feet. My clothes are wet because the sidewalk is wet because it rained all night.

“I forgot my briefcase,” I say, and it’s true. In fact I have no idea where it is.

“Shut. The fuck. Up, Joe,” somebody says.

Joe? I don’t understand-is it me these people are being mean to, and not Sally?

I can’t feel my hands. My arms are behind me and they’re locked so tight they won’t move. My wrists hurt. I’m pulled along, my feet stumbling, and I try to focus on the ground and I try to focus on what is happening and can do neither, not until I look over at Sally and the men restraining her, Sally with tears on her face and suddenly the last sixty seconds all come flooding back to me. I was walking home. I was happy. I had spent the weekend with Melissa. Then Sally had pulled onto my street and accused me of lying to her, accused me of being the Christchurch Carver, then the police had shown up, then I’d. . I’d tried to shoot myself.

And failed, because Sally had jumped on me.

The ringing in my ears fades a little, but everything stays red. There’s a police car ahead of me that wasn’t there a few minutes ago when Sally pulled onto the street. One of the men dressed in black opens the rear door. There are lots of men in black, all of them with guns. Somebody mentions an ambulance and somebody says “No way” and somebody else says “Just bloody shoot him.”

“Jesus, he’s getting blood all over the seat,” somebody says.

I look down, and sure enough, there’s enough of my blood all over the seat and floor to keep some cleaner just like me disgruntled for a few hours. There’s a trail of it leading back to my gun. Sally is standing over there no longer being restrained. Her face and clothes splattered with blood. My blood. She has this wet look on her face that makes me feel sick in ways I can’t identify. She’s staring at me, probably trying to figure a way to climb into the backseat of the car and crush herself all over me again. Her blond hair that was in a ponytail a few minutes ago is now hanging loosely, and she takes a few strands of it and starts chewing on the ends-a nervous tic, I guess, or a seductive gesture for the two police officers standing next to her who, if they see her doing it, might just try to blow their own brains out like I did.

I blink the redness away and a few seconds later it starts flowing back into my field of vision.

Two guys enter the car up front. One of them is Schroder. He gets behind the wheel. He doesn’t even look around at me. The second guy is dressed in black. Like Death. Like the rest of them. He’s carrying a gun that looks like it could do a lot of damage, and the guy gives me the kind of look that suggests he wants to see just how much damage it can do. Schroder starts the car and turns the siren on. It seems louder than any other siren I’ve heard before, as if it has more of a point to make. I don’t get to put on a seat belt. Schroder pulls away from the side of the road, jumping forward so fast I nearly fly out of the seat. I twist around to see another car pulling in behind us, and behind that is a dark van. I watch my apartment building get smaller and I wonder what kind of mess it’s going to be in when I get home tonight.

“I’m innocent,” I say, but it’s like I’m talking to myself. Blood enters my mouth when I speak and I like the taste of it, and I know that if we were to drive back home we’d see Sally licking her fingers, liking the taste of it too. Poor Sally. She has brought these men to me in a storm of confusion, and what was becoming the best weekend of my life seems to be heading down a path of the worst. How long will it take me to explain my actions, to convince them of my innocence? How long until I can get back to Melissa?

I spit the blood out.

“Jesus, don’t fucking do that,” the man in the front seat says.

I close my eyes, but my left one doesn’t close properly. It’s hot, but not painful. Not yet anyway. I straighten up and get a look at myself in the rearview mirror. My face and neck are covered in blood. My eyelid is flopping about. I shake my head and it slips over my eye like a leaf. It’s not hanging on by much. I try to blink the eyelid back into place, but it doesn’t work. Hell, I’ve had worse. A lot worse. And again I think of Melissa.