Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

Subject: re: Broomeville

What do you mean, “encounter”? What do you mean, “visit”? What do you mean, “next stage of our plan”? There’s only one stage. That one stage is the whole plan. If I were to write out the entire plan, it would read, “Kill him.”

And then he went g a borg ga borg ga borg gya, ” Jenny was saying. “And when Mr. L. didn’t say anything back, the guy said in English, ‘Larsen: that’s a Danish name.’ ”

“And then you walked in and the guy took off,” Kevin said. This was the fourth time Jenny had told the story. She’d had to tell it a second time because no one listened to her the first time, because no one ever listened to her the first time. She’d had to tell it a third time because too many people had mistaken the moral of the story to be that Jenny was so unbelievably gross that her mere entrance into a room would cause anyone else in that room to flee, even a mysterious stranger. She’d had to tell it a fourth time because after the third telling, everyone realized that something truly strange was happening and that it’d be useful to hear the facts from Jenny one more time. Now, after the fourth telling, everyone seemed to understand the facts of the story, and they were ready to reach a conclusion.

“He’s a gay,” Tyler said.

“Wait, who is?”

“Well, they both are, obviously. Both Mr. L. and this guy. His lover.”

“His lover ? Did you just use the word lover ?”

“What? It’s a word. Lover . Someone who loves .”

“What makes you think Mr. L. is gay?” Jenny said.

“There’s lots of reasons,” Tyler said, and he proceeded to list them: that Mr. L. had always acted in a secretive, gay-like manner; that this man, whom no one had ever seen before, was therefore logically part of this secret; that when you catch two men alone in a room and one of them then flees, that is more or less definitive proof of their homosexuality; that the stranger had spoken to Mr. L. in gay code.

“It wasn’t code,” Jenny said. “It was a language.”

“What language, since you know so much?”

“Danish?” Jenny guessed. “Isn’t Mr. L. from Denmark?”

“He’s from Sweden,” Kurt said.

“Aw,” Tyler said, waving his hand dismissively. “Norland.”

“He’s from Sweden,” Kurt said again, but he wasn’t really talking to them. He was simply going through the facts, going through them in his head but also out loud, as though he were studying for a test. “But according to this stranger, he has a Danish name.”

“ And he’s gay,” Tyler said.

“He’s not gay,” Kurt said.

“How do you know?”

“How do I know ?” Kurt said. “Because he’s getting married to my mother on Saturday. That’s how I know.”

No one responded to that information immediately, though Kurt could sense how much everyone resented him for using this basic point of fact to destroy their fantastic hypothesis.

“Well, what is he, then?” Tyler finally said.

“I don’t know what he is,” Kurt admitted. He looked up at the stands. A moment earlier Mr. L. had been sitting with Dr. Vernon. But now Dr. Vernon was sitting by himself. No wonder, since he was wearing that ridiculous shirt and yelling those ridiculous things at Kurt’s father and supposedly having the ridiculous degree of doctor of philosophy and the ridiculous title of permanent substitute teacher. He was pretty close to unbearable. The only thing that prevented him from being totally unbearable was that he sold pot to Kurt and his cronies whenever they needed it. Before Jenny had walked over, in fact, Kurt and his cronies had been talking about how much they needed it. Kurt waved hello at Dr. Vernon as a way of saying not hello but, We need to buy some pot from you later on, and Dr. Vernon waved back as a way of saying, Yeah, you do. Sometimes that’s all Kurt could think about: how much he needed to smoke some pot. Although now he was also thinking about something else. You can trust me, Kurt, Mr. L. had said. That had been only an hour ago. He’d believed him then. Now he didn’t know what to believe. “I don’t know what he is,” Kurt said about Mr. L. “Maybe he’s a spy or something.” Kurt had intended that as a joke, but the moment he said it, he felt he’d hit on something close to the truth and didn’t want to talk to them about it anymore.

Larsen, that’s a Danish name,” he’d said, first in Danish, and then in English. Although that was not part of the plan that Søren had made with the American secret agent. That plan was simple: Søren would find the cartoonist, and he would kill him. The American agent had wanted Søren to kill the cartoonist with a gun, but Danes, even murderous Danes, are famously opposed to guns, and Søren said that he’d rather use something else. A knife, for instance.

“A knife ?” the American agent had said. Her face was pinched, as though she found the idea of using a knife to kill someone particularly distasteful.

“I don’t know how to use a gun,” Søren had explained.

“Jesus, a knife ?” the American agent had said. “Why don’t you just hit him with a rock or something?”

“But where would I get a gun?”

“Oh, I could tell you where to get a gun,” the American agent had said.

“But could you tell me where to get a knife?” Søren had said, and the American agent had had to think about it for a long time before saying, “You know, I’m not even sure. I guess at the knife store?”

In the end, Søren had purchased the knife at something called a superstore, which the bus had passed on its way into Broomeville. In the superstore you could buy enormous tubs of mayonnaise and blinking shoes for your children and lawn mowers and boxes of cereal and prescription drugs and also, in a section right next to the other store sections, lethal weapons, including guns and also knives. The knife Søren had bought was a big-bladed thing with smooth edges and a deep, deep groove. The man who sold Søren the knife seemed to think that Søren was missing an excellent opportunity. He cocked his head in the direction of the wall lined with mounted pistols, rifles, shotguns, and semiautomatic weapons of all kinds, and asked, “You sure you don’t want something else? It doesn’t have to be a knife.”

Anyway, Søren had bought the knife, placed it in its protective sleeve and attached the sleeve to his belt, made sure it was obscured by his jacket, and then walked to the high school. The American agent had told him where to go. “Just walk in the front door, like you’ve done it every day of your life. No one will stop you if you do that. Find the stairs that lead to the basement. They always put the guidance counselor in the basement.”

“What’s a guidance counselor?” Søren had wanted to know.

“He’s the jerk you’re going to kill,” the American agent had said.

Søren had found the cartoonist in the basement. But then he immediately began to have doubts about his mission. For instance, this guidance counselor was a white man and the cartoonist was a white man, but other than that, they did not strongly resemble each other. Was this man the same man? Was this man even Danish? He did have a Danish name. Which lead Søren to make his statement, first in Danish and then in English. But this Larsen didn’t respond to either language: he just sat there, arms crossed, frowning, as though asking Søren, Are you really going to do this?

And then the girl with the disturbing neck had walked into the room and Søren realized that he was not really going to do this. So he’d fled, out of the room, past a janitor mopping the hall floor, up the stairs, glancing nervously from side to side as he ran, looking very much like he was someone who had not entered and exited the Broomeville Junior-Senior High School every day of his life. He opened the school’s front door and thought the same thing so many other people exiting that building had thought before him — Freedom! — and then someone pulled Søren’s arms behind his back and quickly bound them with something and then a black four-door sedan pulled up in the circular drive outside the school and the person behind Søren reached around him and opened the back door and pushed Søren in so that Søren fell facedown on the seat. “Scoot over,” the man said. Søren did that. The man climbed in next to him, slammed the door shut. Then the car, which smelled strongly of kitchen grease and potatoes, drove off. There were two people in the front seat. Søren could see only the back of their heads but could tell nonetheless that the driver was a man and the passenger a woman. He turned and looked at the man sitting next to him. He was approximately Søren’s age and was holding what looked to Søren like a black bag or sack.