WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IS OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE

by Anonymous

Charlotte Green's total comes to $12.78. The cashier helps her load the cinder blocks into her cart, but she does not need the help. She puts them into her passenger seat and covers them with a shirt two sizes too big for her and with the buttons on the incorrect side. For a moment, there is a person there with her in the car: the mixed smell of processed earth and familiar body. She feels warm if in a distant soured way. Like falling asleep by a fire and waking in the night to warm coals.

The rope is coiled in the backseat like a snake.

*

He was once Officer August Bridges and now he's just Gus. His cellmate had told him early in the going that he was no longer an Officer and he was certainly no longer august. "Just Gus. Just some asshole named Gus." The cellmate was reading Finnegans Wake. "Someday duly, oneday truly, twosday newly, till whensday," he read aloud.

As he now steps out into chill November air, Gus feels no different than on the day he'd gone in. Mountain air spills down through evergreens. He feels the valley fill up with air as new as it is old—take it in and spill it on down to lower ground. He scratches at an ingrown hair on his cheek. His whole life is slung over his shoulder in a duffel bag, including a copy of the deed to an old house he hasn't been in since he was a boy. Though he'll never again have a badge, it occurs to him that it would not take much for him to get a gun. He thinks he ought to get up early tomorrow and get a gun.

Gus does not think about why this occurs to him. He steps off toward the bus station, rolling his ankle on his second step.

He grunts without words. The grunt is a glottal roll of g's and r's which brings a flash of hazel and aftershave across the range of his bottommost mind. Clear green. A hot sizzle up his back. Up over his neck and face. He keeps it pushing, the pain in his ankle ebbing quickly.

It's early in the day. Most stores are closed and the streets are wet with mist and dew. Gus passes a homeless woman half-asleep on a bus bench and she tries to trip him with a crutch. "Christ. Bitch," he mutters. She laughs in a gurgly gargling way; lets the crutch clack-clack to the concrete; seems to fall back into sleep.

He remembers her gargling laugh, but the memory is old and tilted. He'd evicted this woman—long enough ago to warrant the counting of years on fingers.

As with most eviction orders, it was the early evening—the unfortunate fact of the matter is that most people who get evicted work full-time jobs, and thus must come home from their 9-to-5's to find movers hefting and shifting and throwing boxes with police flanking the doorway like well-trained dogs. Officer August Bridges stood at the bottom of the front steps, Lieutenant Grier to his right. Deathly still. The Lieutenant's head was tall and rectangular like a mo'ai, his big green eyes seeming, at a glance, as wide as his forehead.

When the woman arrived home from work (Gus, now, could not remember her name—did he even know it then?) she fell to the lawn. Her groceries fell in their big fat sacks and soaked up the lawn's water. A can of ringed pineapple rolled out into the street and was run over by a passing car, splattering sick yellow on the blacktop.

Gus's breath catches for a moment—just one breath.

The woman on the lawn let her head fall forward, her forehead finding the grass in prayer position. Her sobs fell through her throat and gargled—wet and bubbling. Officer August Bridges watched as Lieutenant Grier—tall and lean with thinning hair—went and sat down next to her on the lawn. He didn't arrest her. But he also did not help her. He just sat. He just watched.

Later, he asked Lieutenant Grier why he hadn't said anything. And if he wasn't going to say anything, why did he go over to her? Grier lifted a green can to his chin and spat.

"Can't let 'em know you're human. They know you're human, then they start asking for things you can't give."

"But why go over to her?"

Grier throws the can out the squad car window.

"Why not just stay where you were?"

"Would you shut the fuck up?"

Officer August Bridges looked down at his boots. Mud from their soles had rubbed off on the car's floor mat in Hebrew curls.

"How else was she gonna know I was there? How else was she gonna know that I was watching?"

Lieutenant Grier throws the green can, rich inside with tobacco and saliva, out into the street where it rolls into a gutter.

"Touchdown."

And that was all there was ever going to be.

Officer August Bridges stood and watched and sat and listened and now Gus is forgetting. Gus has forgotten.

*

Midnight gloom; light pollution sickly yellow-gray; the sound of cars on a highway too near.

The basement window is properly hidden behind overgrown shrubbery and shatters easily from a thrown rock. Charlotte waits across the yard from which the rock was thrown to ensure the shattering went unheard. She waits there for a long time. In her head, she runs an entire episode of Seinfeld—she felt, in planning, that one episode would be enough time to warrant a response if it were to come. She watches it in the space behind her eyes.

No one comes. Synth-bass fades into production logos fades back into midnight gloom.

She shuffles across the yard and makes herself small to get into the shrubbery. She wraps her jacket around her fist and clears what glass is left in the window frame. She slides in easily and rolls onto a washing machine.

The basement reeks in an intriguing way: black mold doesn't smell all that different from mushrooms or oysters. Charlotte removes a flashlight from her jacket pocket and lights up the basement like a refrigerator. No movement but the slow snow-dance of dust across her flashlight's beam.

The wooden stairs are missing two steps, luckily not in direct sequence. Charlotte's legs are not long, but her knees are exceptionally healthy and cartilage-rich for her age (her doctor's red-framed glasses and scent of Burberry rise within then disappear), so she clears the gap.

Inside, on the house's main floor, all the furniture is covered in sheets gone pale yellow with the unseen movement of time. The dust is like a nuclear winter: caked in even layers and piles and floating everywhere where there would otherwise be air to breathe. She holds her covered hand up to her nose and mouth. She fears a cough, its spittle, will leave a trace of her that she'd otherwise prefer to remain inside her. After all that she has already given, she will not leave evidence of her own being.

All over the walls there are frames covered in sheets. As Charlotte passes the den, its open entry on her right, she's seized by the presence of eyes in her periphery: there, in the den, over the fireplace. She stops, not turning her shoulders, craning only her head to peer into the den. From an uncovered frame, three sets of eyes look out at her; another set, the smallest, an infant's, looks up toward the ceiling as they once looked up at the face of the Sears photographer. An older boy looks dead center, his smile showing an adult front tooth only half-emerged from its gumline. His sweater has multi-colored androids with "POWER RANGERS" carved out in lightning-bolt letters. The father and mother too look dead center, at the camera, at Charlotte. The father has the sweet round face of a toddler. The mother's costume necklace has a big fake emerald the same color as her eyes.

Charlotte pauses there, meeting the gaze of this family. Something sick and warm, like a fevered sleep, rises up like bile or a late sunrise. But to feel it, to think it, would mean waiting—would mean stopping: she knows this. So she casts her gaze up like the infant's and moves on.

It's worth noting here, as Charlotte creeps down the hallway toward the front door, that she appears to be experiencing no thought at all. If one could look within, they'd know better: interior movements rich and hot and bright in the manner of young stars. She's drawn everything inside her arrow-like to the forward movement of knowledge itself. Here is all Charlotte knows—jacket in-hand to keep her skin from the door’s knob. This is all she knows: her son is dead and the cop will be here in the morning.

The cinder blocks and rope and stakes and school-boy backpack are waiting on the front porch and Robert is dead and the cop will be here in the morning.

*

Gus stops at a corner store and buys a pack of cigarettes with two handfuls of quarters. The woman behind the counter, sleepy and sipping from a bright tie-dye can, decides that it's too early in her shift to get upset about it.

Outside, on the corner, Gus smokes and watches a man down the street unload bags of flour from a delivery truck. As he moves each bag up to his shoulder, little plumes of white dust escape from the bag's corner and disappear into the wet air. It looks like breath—the air takes it. Gus wonders whether the flour would do more damage to his lungs than the cigarettes. He'd always heard that airborne flour is dangerous: it can ignite. A hundred years ago, a local bakery, Hart's, exploded when an eight-fingered baker, the child of sharecroppers, struck a match against a flour-laden countertop. Locals thought it was an attack by the Ku Klux Klan. They were happy to take credit.

Gus thinks that the term "powder keg" isn't quite right. Potential energy isn't stored anywhere. You can't locate it—can't point to it—can't contain it. At any given moment, the very air we breathe can ignite, turning us inside-out.

"Power," Gus thinks. He whispers it in a circle: "powerpowerpowerpower." It loops and loses voice until it's just the sound of breath. He pulls at his cigarette and it disappears.

He thinks again that he ought to get a gun. Just a pistol. Something that can be held near to him. He recalls the weight of his service weapon against his hip; the gentle sway that matched his own movement. It took years for the moments of quiet panic at its absence to cease. He'd wake in his cell as if at the bottom of a pool. Breathless, and in the breathlessness a stillness: the silent ceasing of great underground machines.

A familiar feeling sets in. He can't stop it. Gus is remembering the day he killed Robert Green.

*

Given a properly constructed system, one person can lift just about anything. The history of civilization is the history of pulley systems: the redirection of strength to make rock float.

Charlotte thinks of Roman water and loin-clothed Egyptian laborers as she throws one end of the rope up and over a beam beneath the porch's canopy. She walks over and grabs the flung end, pulling it down toward the ground. The canopy is made of good wood and the sound of the rope being pulled down the other end, down toward the cinder blocks, is a solid burning hiss. To Charlotte, the sound is black and gold.

The sky is beginning to take on color from its own low rim. The houses across the street are backlit by the low growing black-and-blue light of a still awaited sunrise. They're Caravaggio black; the black of paintings and old films. Looking out at it, as she ties the rope through and around the two cinder blocks, pairing them like hands at a wedding, Charlotte thinks of Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes. Judith knew fear but did not bear it—she saw it in the eyes of her countrymen. And when the opportunity came for that knowledge to turn into action, her steady beauty permitted her into the heart-tent of her people's conqueror. As he slept, dread and drunken Holofernes peacefully grasping the bayonet atop which the Israelites sat, she took the head of heads. She took it back to her people to show them what her knowledge made her do: how her knowledge of fear had freed them. The eyes of Caravaggio's Judith are that of a surgeon: quiet repulsion mewling through a deep distant visage.

Judith never married. She passed into the next thing with her love reaching up and out to that spirit in the dark.

The blocks are raised and tenuously held to the canopy with garden stakes, a proper portion of slack rope bunched up atop them. Charlotte moves quietly down the porch steps and into the yard to ensure they can't be seen as one approaches. She's done well and they are hidden. She comes back to the porch and begins the important work. A good craftsman, Charlotte reminds herself of this thing's function before getting to the really important steps:

When the front door is opened, swinging inward, it will take the far end of the rope, run taut along the ceiling of the canopy, inward with it. It will be enough of a pull for the garden stakes to come loose and the cinder blocks to fall. The rope having been run over the canopy's lowered x-axial beam, their fall will turn into a swing, launching the blocks through the entryway.

There's a bit of hope involved, Charlotte knows. Hope is that spirit toward which Judith reached: that spirit held, as if between cupped palms, at the center of all makers.

"Come home," she thinks. "Just come home and meet yours."

With the rope and blocks in place, she slings the backpack over her shoulder and heads around toward the backyard: toward the broken window that will bring her back into the house.

*

On the morning of the evening on which Officer August Bridges killed Robert Green, a great howling emerged from the police station locker room—a sound more ape than man. Gus recalls sipping instant coffee from a wax-paper cup when the sound emerged and quickly finishing it, lukewarm liquid dripping to his chin, before following the other officers to the howling's source.

A Private, nude to the waist, was running up and down the length of the lockers yanking on their locked latches with enough force to send entire rows into a slight nodding rock. The sound of his bare feet against the concrete floor was like a poolside toddler. His yells were not words—just consonants—but when three officers tackled the Private and the crown of his head met the concrete with an empty thump, they resolved into a high clear protestation: "My gun! Gone! Can't find my gun!" The Private tried to rock himself loose, his neck beneath his bleeding head craning painfully up and away from the floor, his knees trying to bend inward against the pull of an officer's grip around his ankles. His words again disintegrated into meaningless howls now wet with tears and boggy with phlegm.

The officer atop the Private's chest removed his taser from his belt and attempted to show it to the Private, pinching it between his index finger and thumb and moving it with the sway of the captive's head. "I don't want to use this," the officer said. "Don't make me put you out, son. You just calm down."

Beneath the weight of the speaking officer's heft, breath began to leave the Private—his sobs grew emptier. There was a moment of near-silence in the locker room: just the sound of the Private's waning plaintive breaths. Then the Private stiffened, craned his head upward and opened his mouth in a silent scream.

The officer brought the taser down in the center of his captive's chest. A yelp, then the sound of a throat writhing against a seized nervous system, then silence and the small manic movements in the Private's abdomen and fingers and toes as the officers climbed back to their feet.

"He's just a kid," Officer August Bridges said aloud, though he did not intend to. An officer beside him (Gus can't recall his name or face) stuck his fingers into his pockets and leaned back against the wall. "Yeah, well," the officer said, "he will be as long as he keeps acting like that."

"Like what?"

"Losing shit. Crying. Making messes for everyone else to clean up. He ought to be fucking ashamed. A man loses his gun, he swallows his spit and walks right into his CO's office and fesses up and takes his raps. A man don't make messes he won't clean up on his own. Who's gonna clean his blood off this floor? You best believe that I'll have him in here bright and early on his hands and knees."

"And how are you going to do that?"

The nameless officer looked August up and down. He clicked his tongue then turned and walked toward the exit.

"Is there a problem? Tell me—how are you going to make him do it?"

The officer paused and turned. "You know, you're not grown yet yourself. Figure it out on your own." Then he left.

The Private continued to bleed as officers picked him up and laid him atop a table and called the paramedics. He was completely still now; in a dreamless sleep: he could not then know that the gun sat on his kitchen table—safety on but very much loaded—next to the packed lunch he had also forgotten in his rush out the door. Outside his front window, across the street, as the paramedics arrived and swept the Private away, two little girls took turns sliding down their driveway on a skateboard. But no one was there to see it.

Later, beneath an evening sun losing more and more of its light beyond the horizon, Officer August Bridges was on patrol. The morning's cacophony still weighed on him like an iron ball around an ankle and no amount of rote driving or traffic stops could pull him free from it. Why did the Private panic? he wondered. What was with that response? No answers came. The radio clicked on and the dispatcher's voice felt like fingernails drumming on felt: robbery at a convenience store, suspect a Black male, six feet, likely still armed. Officer August Bridges did not hear the whole call—his thoughts were low and furtive—but he switched on his siren and made the u-turn toward the convenience store.

The whole street was cast in dusk-blue when he arrived. He parked across the street from the site and, through its open door, he could see the owner: long gray beard hanging down over a red apron, sweeping the floors. Something in the sway of the man's beard, or perhaps it was his downcast eyes or the way he had not heard the squad car pull up on the curb, kept August in his seat with the motor running. He sat and watched the man for a few moments. He could've wept just then, had he known himself better. Instead, he put the car in gear and set off around the block.

It never occurred to him that this may have been a mistake. Amid an ocean of high-bile doubt, he had caught an unexpected current and resolved to ride it back to shore. He could not be responsible for where it took him or what he'd have to do to keep moving forward. If it was not yet possible for him to possess knowledge, he would at least act. He circled the block at a slow seeking crawl—his headlights were off and he watched for bodies in the dark or shadows fleeing out from the stages of streetlights. The moon had not yet risen and the whole world seemed beneath a rich velvet blanket.

August spotted movement: a figure trudging slowly down the sidewalk, the rivets on their blue jeans glinting little stars as they occasionally caught oblique beams of street light. He watched the figure, now a few hundred feet from the corner that would take him out toward Main Street, and August straightened himself and pulled his gun from its holster and held it in his lap.

Robert Green heard the squad car slowing to a crawl across the street. He heard the window come down and saw the sallow face of the policeman looking out at him. He knew better than to run, so he stopped and, in one motion, raised his hands above his head and turned to face the officer. The two men sat there in silence, Robert watching August and August looking through Robert at something without name.

"Can I help you, Officer?" August did not hear the question, only its sound—it startled him.

"Get on the ground."

"I'm sorry?"

"Get on the ground." August brought the pistol up to the window and aimed it at Robert.

Knowing then that this was different—that this was not routine—pale fear climbed arachnid-like up Robert's spine. He looked to the corner, out toward Main Street, and made a dash for its warm yellow lights.

In an apartment above, a young woman heard a bang that could've been a firecracker or an old backfiring motor. She did not think twice about it. But the yells for help brought her up and out from her chair and, as she approached the window, the cry suddenly fell silent, giving way only to a series of dull thumps.

From the window, she saw it—that which August did not see: Robert Green's life rising up like the voice of violins amid the slow steady beat of a concrete drum.

*

Gus is standing across the street from his childhood home. The front door's red has now faded into a sickly marshmallow pink. Inside, he used to sit under the kitchen table and wait for his father to come home from work. Inside, he used to press the pads of his fingers into the soft soles of his infant brother's feet, feeling his own already-hardening flesh against that newness. Inside, he used to lay his head in his mother's lap as she read the paper, hoping that the ash from her cigarette would not fall into his ear. Inside, he used to leap down the stairway without touching a single step.

Inside, Charlotte Green sits in a wooden chair facing the front door's interior. Her left hand rests gently on her left knee. Her right hand holds a framed photo in front of her face. She took the photo when Robert was seven years old: she had stepped on one of his toys as she came in from the garden, breaking it. The boy heard her sigh and entered the kitchen where she stood. He did not cry: he crossed his arms and leaned against the door-jamb and lightly scolded his mother: "You really ought to be more careful, " he said, his breath lispy through his missing front tooth. It was so beautifully adult, Charlotte thought. This little boy, my child, telling me what-for. From her pocket, she drew her disposable camera, its roll filled with roses and marigolds and squash blossoms, and took his picture. She kissed him on the head and promised to replace the toy, then paused and let their foreheads touch.

"Stay just like this. My beautiful boy. Just like this."

She hears footsteps on the porch.