Years ago, I broke a bunch of roses from the top of his wall. A thorn from that is still in my palm, working deeper.

From Hallaj, I learned to hunt lions, But I became something hungrier than a lion.

Rumi, c. 1250

It is not easy to take a life. The emotions involved, the magnitude of the act can set your ears afire with all the heat, the blood rushing to your head. True, there are those who can kill for sport and feel nothing, the sociopaths and assorted monsters who roam our world. The snatchers of children and the slaughterers of the weak. It seems to surround us every day.

I am educated and grew up in a typical middle class Catholic family. My life had been the picture of normal with church every Sunday, family vacations, birthday parties. See, it is the normalcy he stole from us, a remarkable and beautiful watercolor portrait of the mind until three years ago when everything changed forever.

I would be lying if I did not admit that the hunt contained a flavor of excitement but its matrix did not lay in the act of murder itself. To some revenge may seem a cheap motivator but it is also a powerful one that should never be underestimated. Sometimes the innocent suffer and in revenge we may try to suffocate a portion of our own grief. Someone once pondered that perhaps grief is nothing more than the tiniest drop of acid in the brain, so perhaps revenge is simply the brain's way of trying to reinstate its own equilibrium. In any case, sometimes the law fails us and a primal instinct takes over, sprouts wings, and lifts us soaring through the air. It is only after we have been dropped that we realize how far away we have been taken. Many do not find their way back again. I know I did not.

People thought the name Justice was an odd choice but it seemed to make our parents happy. Being Catholic, they were a little superstitious and thought the name might instill a certain kind of power, perhaps protection, in my baby brother. It did not. Sometimes God does not protect the innocent and He fails us miserably, leaving us to wallow in the aftermath of a killer storm.

The particular storm of which I speak is called--wait, was called--Brandon. A young man with a bright future ahead of him, he was intelligent and handsome. However, his psyche contained a narcissism that would be his undoing, a path to his own annihilation, at my hands. Do I believe that he was evil? Or can ordinary people commit evil acts without realizing the extent of the destruction they have caused? Perhaps. Some would call what I did evil. It is funny to realize now that the question itself no longer holds value. I do not pretend to know anymore of Brandon.

It took time to find him, and much patience. Oh, how dangerous patience can be to your prey! After two years in prison it took time for him to reestablish a routine but I knew what made his clock tick. The liquor and drugs would call to him once again, even in his sleep. You do not need a degree in psychology to figure out that if a guy takes an apartment around the corner from a grossly popular dance club you will simply and most likely find him there, eventually. If you wait long enough.

The waiting was okay. The alcohol soothed the burning in my head, the dancing being the ultimate stress reducer. All those pumping hormones. It is no wonder so many people hook up at these places and go home to fuck. I moved to a swirling rhythm that seemed to live outside of myself and yet swam through me. I frequently fell into a hypnotic spinning and, strangely, never lost my balance and never bumped into the other sweating, gyrating men. Maybe I did but do not recall it now.

He danced well and I found myself appreciating the way his body moved, the rivet of hair at the collar of his expensive silk shirt, the way his button fly jeans accentuated the curves of his groin. The black steel-toed boots were not a good match for the rest of him. Alas, his judgment failed but that should not have been a surprise to me at the time.

Later, as I watched him smiling and flirting with the men at the bar, a bitter taste blossomed in my mouth. My beer could not erase it. It tasted like metal. Like rust.

Now I know how the cat feels when she is frozen solid, nonexistent, watching the bird. It is pure focus and nothing more. She does not mourn the damage and pain she will inflict, does not wade in a sea of neuroses wondering about right and wrong. She can only taste the feathers, the meat, in her mind while she waits for the exact second to strike.

Getting him to take me back to his apartment was not difficult. I am a fairly good looking man in my early 30s and word had it that Brandon liked his men a little older, with facial hair and my beard took only several weeks to grow. By the time I approached him he was coked to the gills and swilling shots. It might make it easier for him later, a Chivas Regal Novocain.

I had not expected the beauty of his face, the long eyelashes, the pert lips that were dark red with dancing and spirits and cocaine. He looked at me like he was hungry. How ironic.

I kissed his neck at the jugular before sliding my tongue over his chest, biting his left nipple too hard. Brandon cried out his protest but I held him down. He was drunk and high so his nerve endings were not quite up to par in their communications with his brain.

He seemed excited that I so easily pinned him to the bed so I ripped off his belt and tried to secure his hands over his head. Wait, he said, I have handcuffs. Perfect.

The jury bought it hook, line, and sinker. The poor young law student had made a terrible mistake, a lapse in judgment that would haunt him for the rest of his days. His attorney told the jury that his client had suffered enough already. The cast over the broken arm he sustained in the collision was a symbol of his pain as he shook and cried on the stand, his lawyer gently prodding him to continue his testimony. Crocodile tears. In the middle of his histrionics I looked at my mother's face and when she glanced back at me her face was a mask of anger and pain. We were both thinking the same thing.

There is nothing harder than seeing your mother cry.

I will not bore you with the details of the trial because in the end none of that really matters. The jury convicted him of manslaughter while driving under the influence of alcohol and cocaine. His blood alcohol level was two and one-half the legal limit to safely operate a car. It was his third DUI charge in 18 months.

Brandon's mother was seated in the front of the courthouse, a pale grinning spectator offering emotional support to her son in his dreadful hour of need. It struck me how much they looked alike, the killer and his mother.

My brother, Justice, was almost unrecognizable when mom and dad tried to identify the body at the hospital morgue.

I never planned on actually fucking him. I am still not sure why I did it. As I entered him with a stab he cried out for me to go easy on him. I slowed down until he began to move to my rhythm, bucking his hips to meet my thrusts. The cocaine must have made him particularly responsive. His eyes closed and he moaned almost as if in pain, the sound of sexual overload, mixed with the scratching of handcuffs against a metal bedpost. The tight wet ring of his asshole clenched as if trying to protect itself from my wrath, my poison. I did not bother to put on the condom he handed me from the bedside bureau. Nothing could protect him now.

He had the best attorneys money could buy, his rich daddy a prominent lawyer himself. The father paid handsomely for Brandon's legal team to use every loophole available to save him from a long prison term. He could have been given up to 15 years.

The lawyers posed their questions but they were more like accusations. Why was this young man driving around that late at night in that part of town? Funny, you could get lost in their words and forget which young man to whom they were referring, Justice or Brandon. Now I only vaguely recall hearing the words no malicious intent to harm. Guilty. Two years.

It was the smirk that doomed him. As Brandon was taken away he glanced over at us, what was left of my devastated family, my parents who now only had one son left, and he smiled at us. Like a child sticking out his tongue to one parent after the other caves in, he was letting us know how indestructible he was.

My beard was excellent camouflage because he never would have taken me home if he knew who I really was. After three years enough time had passed for him to forget.

With my hands around his neck his complexion at first went pale, then dark. Soon the blue veins on the backs of my clutching hands matched the color of his face. I spoke only two words to him before he lost consciousness for the final time.

Remember Justice?

 

©2002 Alexander Renault - Contributor's Bio