You Were Never Really Here

Joe put McCleary’s gun away and took out his new hammer. He sunk it deep into Votto’s forehead and left it there. He wanted them to know he was coming.

Then Paul was asleep, not dead, and Joe lowered him down gently across the backseat, checking his pulse and his breathing. He smoothed Paul’s hair, as Paul had in the vision, and, like a god, he looked at Paul with tenderness. He imagined Paul’s little apartment somewhere, his mean, unmade bed, his private place where he worried over himself, where he went to hide like an animal. Joe knew that all human beings are the star of their own very important film, a film in which they are both camera and actor; a film in which they are always playing the fearful and lonely hero who gets up each day hoping to finally strike upon the life they are meant to lead, though they never do.

So he had to be pure. He had to be holy. He had to be contained.

Everyone shared responsibility—on both sides of the moral axis—and he was of use. A hammer doesn’t ask why it strikes.

This was a face and posture that his mother made often. It occurred to him that he was increasingly borrowing the gestures of an old woman slipping into dementia, an old woman, nearly deaf, who communicated with him like they were both in a silent movie.

So his hands were weapons, his whole body was a weapon, cruel like a baseball bat. Six-two, one-ninety, no fat. He was forty-eight, but his olive-colored skin was still smooth, which made him appear younger than he was. His jet-black hair had receded at the temples, leaving a little wedge, like the point of a knife, at the front. He kept his hair at the length of a Marine on leave.

Back at the car, he put the gloves on, got inside, and held the hammer in his hand. It fit nicely. A hammer was Joe’s favorite weapon. He was his father’s son, after all.

Then one night in the motel, he had taken a lot of sleeping pills and wrapped his head in a few layers of black plastic bags, duct-taping them around his neck. He felt himself diminishing, a shadow around the edges of his mind, and he heard a voice say, It’s all right, you can go, you were never really here.

Joe felt something behind him. It was the presence of life and the coming of violence, and that anticipation, that sensitivity, enabled him to turn in time and catch the blackjack on his shoulder, which was better than taking it on the back of his head.

He thought about committing suicide. Such thinking was like a metronome for him. Always present, always ticking. All day long, every few minutes, he’d think, I have to kill myself.