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Display a printable version Ledger Entries
I blinked. Another car popped into sight. It raced the yellow light. I stepped back. Racer struck Left-turner from behind, there, not more than twenty feet away, a sickening thunk, tinkling explosions of glass. Then a spasm of silence, like inertia had to catch up. I heard fluttering, but spotted no birds. Instead, I watched Left-turner spinning one way, Racer another. And in the air, a flat, thin book tumbled toward me, its whitish pages bucking the breeze caused by their own passing. Sound resumed at full volume, tires screeching, victims screaming. The book hit the asphalt, flipped twice, and slid toward me: black cover, red spine, gold-leaf letters on its front, probably "LEDGER." It bumped hard against the curb, fell open. Its twin pages, shining white, showed me short sets of sentences, hand-written. I stooped and read: "July 21, 1993, 6:21 p.m. Randy Zemelka of 862 Brainerd Court, Apartment I-202, will kill Bridget Humerickhouse of same address by strangling her with his hands." I squatted over the spread and exposed ledger, fingered several pages, turned them all at once, and fixed my gaze to the top of the right-hand page. Same handwriting, different pen, this entry said: "May 16, 1995, 2:43 a.m. Billy Hardy, Roberto Guiterriz, and Jerrod Castle, all of E. Madison Street, numbers 10102, 10104, and 10109, respectively, will kill William A. Gersten of no particular address by beating him with baseball bats and kicking him." I scooped up the ledger, swung around, smacked into one hustling gawker, jostled another, elbowed a third, and broke free of the crowd. The sidewalk lay straight and empty ahead of me, so I could walk and look at the ledger, again and again, jumping randomly through the pages of writing in its front half, fixing my gaze on a different part of each refreshed pair, reading a new set of fine, even words, and finding the same thing every time: date, time, name and address, "will kill", name and address, followed by method. I thumbed forward from the back, searching for the last entry. It was dated three days in the future. There were sirens now, had been for several minutes, I realized. I glanced back. I couldn't see the accident -- too many people in the way, motionless people, their faces locked on the gore and agony. Ghouls, feasting on other people's suffering from their curbside safety. Voyeurs, peering unashamedly across an asphalt moat, relishing the distant blood and misery, content to linger untouched, connected only by their limited sense of sight. What if one of them had found the ledger? I shuddered, clutched it to my chest, and kept walking away. *** The library beckoned from a few blocks away. I walked there because I don't keep more than a week of papers at home, now that my trash company recycles at the curb. Inside, I descended immediately to the Research Department and strode through its towering stacks, snug carrels, and implacable computer stations. People hunched there, foolishly intent on their pursuit of Truth. Truth does not exist, only facts and extrapolations from facts. As usual, the librarian guided me quickly to the proper sources, and I settled into microfiche renditions of my favorite of the local papers. I started at the beginning of the ledger, over four years before, then lost myself in the search for dates, victim names, and then, as coverage of trials overlapped crimes, keeping track of justice. I'm rational to an extreme, I admit it. And in reason's service, thoroughness often pays dividends. After five hours, I moved to actual newspapers for the ledger's last month. I chose two entries dated yesterday. One hadn't made the paper, but I'd seen that before. Some bodies have to wait more than a week. I made final notations, sat back, and let go of my concentration. A slurry of sounds rushed in, grunts of futile effort, sighs of disappointment, thuds from abused books dropped in frustration, whirs from printers spouting useless tracts, all produced by people who wouldn't accept that while many facts can be known, others are denied to us -- and none of them truly explain Life and our role within it. Suddenly shaky, I also realized that hunger had given up on my stomach and throbbed its message in my head. I yielded to the espresso bar in the lobby that I normally wouldn't consider. Then, I carried a bran muffin and a very hot cup of latte outside to a bench. When I got around to adding up the numbers in the back of my Day-Timer Junior Edition binder, there in the long shadows of the mountains, the sweltering edge of the afternoon blunted by the onset of twilight, I found that my sampling of the ledger yielded 50 (to make statistics easier) allegedly predicted murders. Of those, 49 made the papers, 92% the next day, another 5% within a week, and the rest stretched out over four to six weeks. Every crime matched up, and there had been no unforeseen victims. Date and time always fell very close to prediction, as far as I could tell inasmuch as some reporters didn't divulge that data. Method predictions never failed, after I'd adjusted for forensic semantics and journalistic sleight of word. Justice, however, didn't fare as well as my unknown clairvoyant. The police made arrests in 82% of the cases. The prosecutor convicted the suspect in 78% of the indictments, if I counted plea bargains. Of course, only 94% of those sentenced were actually guilty, according to the ledger. I found that level of deficiency in the justice system appalling, even in this day and age. The Rocky Mountains finally blocked all of the dazzling orb of the sun as they hastened sunset on one more day. The light was seriously failing in the courtyard of the library. I felt at peace with my work, satisfied with its thoroughness, assured that I could now proceed to my true interest in the situation. I opened the ledger one more time and worked my familiar way through its pages, searching for a specific date 38 days before. It was a busy day for the seer whose hand I read, as it had been a busy day for the police, at least in my memory. I looked for a specific time. The seer made it 4:53 p.m. The police hadn't been that precise, bracketing the time between 4:30 and 5. The ledger entry said, "Peter Olson of 6983E Arlington Court will kill Michelle Brademas of 6983B of same by striking her repeatedly on the head with a tire iron." Okay, my compulsions help me escape life. At least they're not criminal and/or destructive, like drugs or gambling or Fortune-500 executive jobs. I sat there, I confess, as the sun continued to fall in its daily sacrifice, as the library emptied and closed, as twilight lost its grip on the sky. My mind churned with thoughts ... about the police and their lack of progress ... about Peter, our neighbor, a casual acquaintance -- or so I had assumed ... about the rest of my life, a life that had stalled out after Michelle's death, a life that suddenly had purpose again ... about civilization and its demands on each of us. At its barest, civilization deals with the facts of human life. People can be cruel and violent. People cannot know everything. People are limited vessels of reason while frothing with emotions. Therefore, civilization limits our courses of action. In the face of the unknown, it asks us to be calm, collected, and lawful. In the face of grisly, horrifying facts, it demands that we trust in its system. Without this control, civilization collapses and humankind loses its niche at the peak of evolution. Civilization stands as our bulwark against the fires of chaos. A chill swept over me. I glanced around in the dark, at this building dedicated to reason and the shadows that draped over it now. I lifted my eyes to the mountains beyond, their purple bulwark holding back the sun's unwatchable blaze. And I noticed flames licking past their craggy edges, flames from a warm, comforting fire that could settle my mind and satisfy my soul. All I had to do was cross that societal boundary, step into the light, and see ... Life from a whole new vantage. My cassock of conscience ruffled. "No!" I cried and reached out to clutch at the cassock's deep hood and bring it back low over my eyes. I hunkered deep within the garment's metaphorical drape, heavy and reassuring about me. I couldn't just go ... balance the books, so to speak ... could I? I hunched forward to calm my body and mind, and when that didn't work, I rose to my feet and walked through the dusk toward home. What did I have to go on, after all? Surely not enough to abandon a lifetime of reason, of devotion to civilization. These hours of dry research -- nothing more than paperwork, really -- had produced statistics ... and we all know how close statistics correlate to reality. Well, actually, no one knows that, and never will. I feared the direction where these statistics led me, toward a light too brilliant for me to withstand. Yet, I could deny no facts. The 50 entries in my notebook existed, pristine, blatant, demanding. If they weren't enough to provide an end to my suffering, then I must find companions for them. I remembered the seer's unfulfilled prophesies, three days' worth, six entries I couldn't verify in the library because their times lay in the future. That hurt because reason now compelled me to follow up library research with fieldwork. Now I had to go out into the world and see whether this ledger prophet truly saw the future or in his delusion, merely rewrote the past. *** In the morning, while I drove toward the site of the next murder, I forced myself into adamant rationality, recognizing that I couldn't account for the extant structure and content of the ledger in any way ... outside two hypotheses: it was written by a clairvoyant or by a real wacko who spent most of his life pretending to be clairvoyant and risking writer's cramp. After all, the writer of the ledger entries could be simply demented. Perhaps, some strange obsession forced him (for the right-handed writing was definitely masculine) to pretend powers by copying down newspaper accounts of murders in the future tense. On the other hand, I couldn't account for how he kept them in chronological order when the paper didn't ... unless he recopied the whole ledger each time journalism tripped him up -- and wouldn't it all be in one pen then? And, I couldn't account for how he knew addresses of victim and attacker at the time of the entry ... unless he personally visited each site after the papers were done with their reporting ... and re-wrote the whole ledger each time. Then, why did he sometimes ... 39.878% of the time ... choose the wrong person to be the culprit? With personal observation of a prediction coming true, I could upgrade one of these hypotheses to theory. The morning paper had confirmed three of the six prophesies, wrapped neatly into one page of "Crimebeat" articles. I had read over the next ledger entry: "Kwao Grosscup of 708 Xenia Way will kill Henry Grosscup of same by splitting open his neck with a cleaver." So, I had called in sick at the clinic, climbed reluctantly into my car, and driven to Xenia Way. The 700 block contained a meandering set of buildings, connected to each other through garage walls and petite swatches of lawn with no privacy fences between, cluster homes, they're called around here. I parked at the far end, walked to the next street, then cut back to 708. As I figured, nearly everyone had gone, off to warrens to do Corporate America's bidding, a fate Michelle and I had avoided, to a large degree. So I could cross that yard unnoticed and approach the specified house just short of the specified time. I heard voices before I could see anything. The shrill sounds of domestic discord beat their way out into the neighborhood. I favored the kitchen window as I crept up to the house. When I got there, I discovered that my stealth had been wasted because the couple inside had no mind for anything or anybody else. These Grosscups, they fought dirty and they fought mean. Henry was a potbellied, short, white guy with thick glasses. Kwao was a wiry Asian woman. When he hit her, she hit back. They battled for a few minutes while I watched and gave points. I was rating them about even when he got in a lucky backhand that split open her left cheek. Bleeding, she withdrew up the longish room, pale hand smearing crimson across her face. He, meanwhile, turned with a self-satisfied smirk back to his eggs in the breakfast nook, where wispy curtains played in the breeze from the open window through which I watched. I heard a drawer being opened. He didn't. I saw Kwao charge down the kitchen's tile floor. He didn't ... until she was upon him. Then he jerked his head up to see and thus stretched his neck just right as a target. Her right-handed roundhouse blow splattered blood across two walls and the fine-mesh screen between me and them. I still remember the streak of bright arterial red as it spread inches from my eyes, the morning sun glinting off the tiny squares, with drops bulging along its bottom, trembling with the urge to fall, while Henry flopped out his life beneath the tabletop and Kwao wailed her remorse. I carried that scarlet motif away as an after-image. Partway out of their yard, I licked my lips and tasted blood, brilliant, almost metallic, with a trace of salt. I touched it: sticky, clinging between lip and fingertip, as though tugging me back to the scene, like I had missed something. Yea, I missed le frisson du voyeur. I failed to take joy in vicarious misery, in blood shed before my eyes. My guts, my gonads, my mind shunned that sick pleasure. Just in case, I turned my head to look back. A muted box stood there, more coffin than dwelling, its face unchanged by the recent past, other than one window streaked with a trace of color. This facade of time and place hid the destruction of two lives. No twinge of sadistic delight arose in me. No glee in my safety while others suffered. No joy that the jungle of Life had defeated my competitors, leaving more for me. Instead, I grieved for the Grosscups, for Kwao's regret, for Henry's callous disregard, for the possibilities of their union that Chance and their own personalities had aborted. And I recognized the results of this tiny morality play: the ledger writer was a true seer; he was also a voyeur. He watched a deadly future arise, take form in the present, then slip into immutable past -- and took no action to rescue the innocent or forestall the guilty. I condemned him -- and longed to punish him for his affront to civilization. What right had he to keep his predictions a secret? What right had he to live secure in his second-sight when the rest of us have to work blind? I shifted my feet then, aligning my body with my head, confronting both the scene and its implications. I drew myself up with a breath and cast fresh attentions on my surroundings. A swath of bluegrass, long-leaved and bright green, smelling of simple life, connecting me to the death-punctuated house. The house, beige siding, saffron trim, all in crisp, hard rectangles, quiet with contrition, amidst so many others. The neighborhood, a cascade of slightly different, pleasant replicas, sharing an air of aloofness. The breeze stroking my bare arms and face, delivering pastel scents and wicking off the sweat that prickled my forehead. The limpid azure sky framing the scene. All so vivid, stark, symbolic. Overhead, the sun blared at me, filling my every cell with light. No mountain bastion, symbolic of civilization's cowl, protected me now. I ventured beyond the pale. I faced a set of facts so extravagant as to form Truth, a Truth denied by a society unable to manage its implications. I stood as avatar, civilization's representative, elected by circumstance, deemed worthy in mind and spirit by this test of blood. I stood freed of civilization's restraints so I could defend it. I would punish this seer -- who secretly recorded his visions in a humble accounting ledger -- to dissuade his foresight, perhaps even destroy his talent, but I wouldn't kill him. After all, I owed him for the name of Michelle's murderer. And Peter? Did my dispensation extend to righting that wrong? I could defend civilization, but could I avenge myself? A cloud passed before the sun, took away my insight, and chilled me. I retreated then, full of doubt. *** That evening, I waited on our porch, standing vigil with the ledger closed and heavy in my hands. The building stretched along in front of me, like a Monopoly hotel, one among many, each one containing six townhouses, lettered from A to F. We lived in B. I could easily see Peter's front door at E. Michelle's entry in the ledger stood vividly in my mind. I saw its letters, marching compulsively across two pale-blue lines. I read its words, laid out neatly in black ink, ignoring the page's vertical divisions. I felt its impact on my life, as though daring me to -- finally -- be real, be passionate, be human. Or was it Michelle's diary that was daring me? Another book -- how ironic that dry, safe words, which had sustained me all of my life, were now twisting it ... right out of my hands! I hadn't known about the diary while she lived, while we lived, together, in a happy existence where we shared a veterinary practice and a quiet home life. Only as I packed her things for collection by a local charity did I find the key -- a pair actually, one for a padlock, another for the diary itself. I searched for three days, exploring every nook and cranny in our townhouse, invading chambers that I never knew existed, tapping every wall and panel. I found it, finally, locked inside a fireproof box, behind the burners of our furnace, which was crammed into the dirt-floored crawlspace. The diary told me about Michelle's affair, a tempestuous thing that had raged for weeks completely without my knowledge. It told me about her birth as a sensuous being, with an intensity of feeling she'd never suspected before (I, in the meantime, thought our sex was great). It told me about her desire for children (I, in the meantime, declined to bring one into this irrational world) and her decision to leave me and take up life with this new man, giving herself completely to him and bearing his progeny. It did not tell me, however, who this man was. She called him only "Rock." For thirty days, I had attacked the puzzle of "Rock." We had known no one with such a name. I had combed our list of customers. I had covered the neighborhood. I had even looked for an actual rock that might be a trysting spot and found nothing like that in a five-mile radius. But now I knew that "Rock" was not a real name or a description. It was a code. "Peter" in Greek meant "Rock," or close enough. I knew now what she meant. That sired by a toad-shaped demon, birthed by a dead and rotting she-hound, damned-to-eternal-torture son of a ... bitch, by which I meant Peter. Which brought me back to the ledger, solid, loud, in my mind and my hands. Which brought me back to the diary, surreal, unrelenting, shattering. Which ... While I was lost somewhere in those cycles, headlights swept our building. I lifted my tear-blurred gaze to watch the car pass -- it was Peter's BMW. I waited until the man had climbed out and slammed his car door shut, managing to evoke a harsh metallic clunk out of the fine German craftsmanship. "Hey, Peter!" I called out. "Hey, Michel!" he called back without turning his head. He stepped onto his porch, right hand sorting through an enormous keychain, other hand grappling with a suitcoat, briefcase, and newspapers. When he had the door open, he looked over at me and waved. "How's it going?" I stared across the two house fronts that separated me from him. I stared at that hand, the one he waved, the one he favored, the one he'd used to hammer my Michelle into oblivion. I hated every atom in it. "Doing ... better now, I think." "Good, good." Peter fluttered that hand again, pushed his way into his townhouse, and slammed the door after him. The sound reverberated in the quiet night, bouncing between our building and the one facing it. As avatar, I would punish the seer to protect my society. As human, I would kill Peter to avenge Michelle. The duality made sense, felt good, settled the past, and rectified my future. I opened the ledger then, braced it in my right hand, and wrote in it, wrote two entries of my own, wrote with red ink to balance the black, wrote, not to predict but to plan two events, wrote to plan as well an end to this crazy thing and a new beginning for my rational life. *** After the best night's sleep in weeks, I sought out my stash of newspapers. People died in that traffic accident, so it was covered well. The article was very helpful; the reporter included the name of Left-turner -- his car smacked hard from behind, his ledger flung through his open window and into my life -- and which hospital he was staying in. The hospital, too, was quite helpful, with visiting hours, room numbers, and such. So, after I tended to Peter, I went over there, with a bouquet as cover and the ledger in a bookbag. I found the seer in a private room. I guess I expected him to be jammed into a ward. I guess I imagined him to be a huddled and haunted man, unsuccessful, pinned into a desperate and poor life by his paranormal abilities. I guess I expected to have to overcome pity for him. I bustled into a cozy room, decorated with subtle touches of tweed and amber, with posters of soothing graphics hanging off every wall, and startled the man lying in the single bed. I flopped the flowers onto his belly, ignored his leg in traction, his heavily bandaged left arm, his bruised and exhausted face. Just as I had ignored Peter's pleas as I tied him down in his own living room. But the seer's gauze-swaddled throat with a clear tube looping out of it slowed me down. "Can you talk?" I asked bluntly. He opened his mouth to reply, winced instead, then gave his head a slight, painful shake. His eyes brimmed over with tears. "Is it permanent?" His nod was short, to the point, confined by his bandages. Sometimes, even compulsives get a break. Fate had done my hardest work for me. Buoyed by this touch of luck, I gripped his undamaged right hand with mine and watched his face. "Michel Brademas," I announced. His drooping lids drew back from bloodshot eyeballs, converting them from bedraggled, hidden things. Even as they bulged, they flickered away from my face, to his bedside table, then to the door opening onto the hallway, then to the nurse's call button lying by his head. I had his hand. He was trapped. He flung his gaze back at me. I tossed away the call button and delved into the table's single drawer. I found several sheets of hospital stationery there, folded over and paper-clipped together. On them, I found the familiar handwriting gathered into familiar little paragraphs. One of them read, "Michel Brademas of 6983E Arlington Court will kill Peter Olson of 6983B of same by mutilation and blood loss." It was time-stamped earlier that morning. "Do you remember the details of all these?" I asked as I dumped the prophesies on the bed between us. He wanted to raise his uninjured arm, but I held that still. He flattened his fruitless lips and shook his head instead. "Why did you recognize my name?" I asked him. He sagged as a haunted expression spread from his eyes across his sunken cheeks and drained color from his clenched jaws. I finally stirred with pity, but easily pushed that away. Funny, though, I had experienced no such feeling for Peter even though he had thrashed about so pitifully. "Vivid? Very emotional?" I guessed. He nodded. "Yes." Overcome with pride, I bowed my head. "I can understand that." The experience blazed in my memory. "It was a very emotional scene." A solitary outburst, never to be repeated. "How much of the rest of it do you remember?" He shook his head. I showed him the ledger. "Recognize this?" His eyes filled with relief as he mouthed "Yes." "Remember this?" I read about Peter killing Michelle. He shook his head, but his face seemed calmer, his aversion to me less. I closed the ledger. "I already did something about that." He nodded, a placating, exaggerated movement. "And I have to do something about you." He stared. Desperation must have flared again in his mind, for it suddenly showed itself in his color, his expression, his frantic gestures. Just like Peter, though Peter had been naked, there on the carpet, his limbs drawn in each direction -- except for his right arm, which I had tied down at the elbow. "What do you think I should do?" I asked him gently. He knotted his brow, as though puzzled. I set down the ledger and shuffled quickly through his papers. I found no other prediction with my name as murderer. "You didn't see me killing you, did you?" His lips formed "No," and I grinned. Already I liked this guy. We seemed to be simpatico, in tune with each other. Perhaps I, too, am a little bit psychic. "So I can't do that." That was sort of a question, sort of a statement. He shrugged. Sweat rolled off his forehead. His internal struggle to handle his fear was obviously hard work. Peter had not struggled so quietly, so bravely. "You're right-handed?" With my right hand, I stretched his arm out along the bedside. With my left, I reached into the bookbag and lifted a hypodermic from its box. He nodded raggedly. "Would you like the ledger back?" I indicated the book. His eyes opened in surprise. His face let down around them, as though hope had started up its deceptive hymn in his mind. Had I played with Peter such? No, I don't think so. I shook my head and laughed even as I plugged his shoulder with four CCs of horse anesthetic and held him until the drug took over. Then I walked calmly back to the door and closed it quietly. I was very careful with my seer. I made sure I had tourniquets as well as scalpels and stitches. I made sure that I set off his call button just before I escaped. I made sure he didn't suffer anymore than he needed to ... when I tied down his right arm and amputated his writing hand. I took it with me, just to be sure it stayed off. I didn't take such precautions with Peter, of course. After all, what right had the seer to protect Michelle's killer, especially when the police had no clue? And, what right had he to threaten the rest of my life? I did make sure the seer would live, minus a hand to write with, minus a voice to accuse me, minus the ledger and the scraps with his latest -- his last? -- prophesies. By the time his left hand heals enough, I'll be long gone. On the other hand, I left Peter alive so he could feel himself die, like I had done. I cut off his right hand so he could curse it, like I had done. I fed it to him, one knuckle at a time, for the hell of it. Then I walked out so he could die alone, his mouth full of himself and taped closed. Now I can remove the avatar's gleaming helm. Now I can throw down the avenger's crusted blade. Now I can go back to being reasonable. END
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| Last updated on 1/10/2010 2:34:25 PM by Jennifer Brozek |
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| Other documents at this level: 34 - The Mask of Deslow Mansion 35 - Ducks 36 - The Sound of Gears 37 - Choking on Red Flowers 38 - Choice 39 - All the Little Secrets 40 - Carrying the Torch 41 - My Rough Cut 42 - Inspirations 43 - The House of Bad Blood 44 - The Letter |
The traffic light changed to yellow. I anticipated the final step in its procedure by setting one foot down off the curb. One car waiting in the intersection opposed me; it stood part-way through its left turn, windows open to the summer afternoon, turn signal passing time patiently. 
Glenn Lewis Gillette - In the early '70s, Analog published two of my stories; another appeared in "Lone Star Universe"; this last story is now available on the fictionwise web-site (