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Maybe you'd like to know how this little story came about. I got the idea to make a negated "Seven" and planned some basic plot - mostly decided on which virtues would negate the sins of "Seven". And then I started writing and it just became automatic writing. I've never tried, or even thought about doing that, but this one story flowed out of me like I was just channeling it from some higher plane. I only stopped once, to sleep. On the surface it reads like a hollywood movie, but I'm still discovering layers of symbolism and metaphor in it. And I suck at making and interpreting metaphors.
Of course I've polished it a bit, and if I say so myself it's pretty darn stylish. If you please, tell me what you think.
So here goes:
MINUS SEVEN
--1
'Do you believe in God?' The question is echoing in the man's head, just like everything seems to echo today. The one asking him is a young woman with steel in her voice and fire in her eyes. She is standing at his side and talking - preaching - constantly, loudly to be heard over the howling wind. He is barely listening to her, but he already understands the message. She makes sense of everything. The whole world is clear as glass and full of purpose. She is his best friend since three days and it breaks his heart to see her tense, serious face and her long, bright hair wavering insanely in the wind.
'As Jesus said', he says, 'I do not want to challenge my God.' He is out of breath and feels hot tears filling up his eyes. He staggers in a particularly strong gust of air.
'The question isn't whether you want to challenge Him, it's if you believe in Him.' Her voice is very strict. She puts a hand on his shoulder and shovels a bunch of hair out of her face to see him eye to eye. 'If you believe in God it doesn't matter if you live or die, you don't want him to prove anything, you want to prove your faith.'
'I love you', he shouts and throws himself over the ledge. 'I love You, Lord', and he screams all the way down and splashes over the street, the two bottom stories and fifteen by-passers who're all confused over his last words. His head is pushed up into his stomach and little meat pieces that don't resemble a human are flying in all directions. He dies a happy man.
Still on the roof, Katharina Kurtz stands and looks down on the mess. 'Your faith is strong', she says, bowing. She wants to follow him down, not to prove anything but to die, but the wind pushes her back and she changes her mind when she sees the vomit mix with the blood on the ground. For clarity she scratches the word "Faith" into the stone where the man was standing, and walks home.
She doesn't live in a dull or unpleasant apartment, she thinks. It's full of light and happiness. That's her opinion anyway and nobody comes here to think different. It's also full of dust and empty fast food packages, which she unconsciously wades through to get to her desk. She unpacks her food - hamburger, orange, energy drink - and writes down the events of this momentous day in a brand new journal with an empty white cover. Kat likes white.
After careful consideration she writes "VIR7UES" in big letters on the first page, and laughs a little at her ingenuity, before writing without pause until the sun goes down, a river of ink. She writes about her adventure, the mission she just began that will change the world, although she doesn't know exactly how, yet. But she has seen the face of the truth and she cannot look away, she writes about God, how she feels both his presence and absence, and she is both scared and brave, and how confusing it is that He is both; both sides of the coin, both night and day, both strong and weak, it makes sense she believes since he is both Alpha and Omega. She writes also about her newfound friend, whom she misses although she never knew his name, and how terrible and wonderful it is to be chosen, yet the choice was always her own, there is the confusing twosomeness again.
When the light grows too weak to go on she stops and walks, on stiff legs, to her tiny balcony and stands leaning on the iron bar ledge, to enjoy the night sky. Here, in the big city, a lot of corny colors show up when the sun is gone, the composition of the air she is breathing is safest not to think too much about, but it's still a pleasurable experience. She stands unmoving for a few hours and then goes out there again. In the stillness of midnight she runs as fast as she can just to tire herself. It takes too long and she loses interest some ways outside of the city. There is a small lake on the side of the road, so she soaks herself. It's too cold but she's not worried about getting ill. The water numbs her and that's exactly what she wants. When the cold embraces her and penetrates her skin and she is running out of air it is everything she can think of.
Afterwards she is lying on her back in the grass, shaking rhythmically, but relaxed for a moment. After one last quiver of pleasure she is still. 'Am I sleeping', she says to herself. 'Have I slept?'
When the sun rises again she puts her clothes on and goes back. She gets her breakfast in a health food store and eats it while writing a little more and watching telly.
At work Kat is a cleaner in a large hospital and there is a doctor named Peter who takes great pride in caring for her. He tells her she looks unusually well today. She hadn't noticed, but she says it must be because she slept. She flashes her most fake smile and hurries away to clean an operating room. She soaks everything in it with a ninety-six percent alcohol solution and the fumes make her dizzy but she still manages to make it look clean. That is what counts.
She has stashed away enough to get by until the plan is completed so she does not really have to go to work, but one part of her - the most masochistic, she supposes - enjoys the endless, joyless, soul-killing job. The job and maybe Doctor Peter's clumsy, narcissistic care. She cleans his rest room today and chuckles quietly every now and then when she notices their efforts: Five or so doctors eating cookies and drinking coffee and making ten times more money than she does jumping through hoops to make her feel like an equal while she vacuums the carpet around their feet. Peter is the funniest of them all, he wants to massage her shoulders when she, upon their insisting, sits down at their table.
She lets him close, it feels good after all and she never gets massaged otherwise, and close he comes, close enough to feel the scent of her hair, and he draws a breath to whisper something appreciative when she bends her neck to the left so it makes a squishy crunching sound. He jumps like a chased killer hit in the face by searchlights and she laughs out loud.
--2
A couple of weeks pass until the weather turns the way Kat wants it, a night as cold as it gets with pouring rain. She goes to the oldest part of the city, where the skyscrapers barely let any sunlight down even in the middle of the day to the rotting stone and wood foundations on which the city was built, where the streetlights execrates a dirty yellow light that smears over the wet pavement on the few places where it is lit, where the shells of shops and factories stare at each other through window holes, where the homeless lay down to sleep in peace. She walks quietly and quickly and nobody notices her although she walks in the middle of the street, searching. A poor lonesome hobo is lying in a street corner with a whole block to himself; she sneaks past him and into a narrow side street where the houses seem to lean against each other over her and stretch infinitely upwards.
Parallel lines meet in the horizon, she recalls, and takes her clothes off and hides them under some sort of pile of sand, clothing fabrics, newspapers, leaves and slippery plastic garbage bags with something melting inside them; same kind of trash that covers most of the street. Then she waits five or ten minutes and lets the rain pummel her head, shoulders and back. She messes up her hair and holds her wrists hard to make red marks on them and crawls on her bare knees to the sleeping man. She weeps and cries and makes him give her his clothes; she has been assaulted and it hurts so much and she is such a long way from home. She lies down to rest and trusts him to help her, he seems to be a man of honor et cetera and he willingly holds her and guards her until he freezes to death. It takes long, the sun would be shining if it weren't raining still when his heart finally stops.
Kat gives his clothes back and takes on her own, kisses his cold forehead and scratches the word "Compassion" into the brick wall over his head with her trusty old Swiss army knife. She had hopes her DNA on the scene would tell the story but realizes it is not enough. It is important that the whole picture is visible, it would be hard enough for anyone to see the pattern, she thinks. Halfway home she also realizes it can take days for anyone to find him and calls the police from a phone booth.
'He was so terribly good', she sobs into the anonymous receiver. 'He died of compassion. By the way, there will be five more.' She accidentally laughs and quickly tells the address and hangs up, before they get any ideas about her sanity.
She is trembling with cold again when she gets home, empties a paper cup of tea, falls in her bed and blacks out before she knows what is happening. When she wakes up she is on the telly, although of course nobody knows it is her. They assume the killer is a man. They assume he has watched a movie one time too many and can no longer tell the difference between reality and fiction. She laughs sporadically and eats tiny pies with sweet berry filling and washes them down with vitamin-enhanced fruit juice and let her words wash over the paper, page after page.
--3
Already before lunch the next day she finds the next victim, a bookwormish university student with a nervous twitch and no friends nearby. She talks to him about the imperatives of knowledge until he, surprised of his own courage, follows her to one of the city's larger libraries that same night. Kat does not know where she got the keys from, but they work and the two of them get inside without any problems.
By candlelight he reads book after book. She doesn't let him sleep or eat; and thanks to the holidays the library is closed for four consecutive days. His thirst for knowledge is great, unquenchable, and she hardly needs to encourage him to make him forget everything else. She strolls around, drinking and eating in even intervals and greatest secrecy, but spends most of the time in the company of the devoted student. His name is Hans, she learns, but she suspects she'll forget it soon.
She spurs him on with considered, valid questions about whatever he's reading, massages his temples when she notices his tension, and sometimes slumbers right on the big oak table, between staples of books.
'Got any soft literature there', she asks laughingly, 'I need something comfortable to sit on.'
He raises his head and draws a rattling breath, adjusts his glasses and looks at her. 'No time for that', he says, and she wonders if he actually heard a word. 'Maybe later. This stuff about electromagnetism is really fascinating.' He swallows with an effort, throat as dry as sand, and absently notices how thirsty he is. Before he fully formulates the thought of a glass of water the woman clings on him, radiating heat, tearing aimlessly at his clothes and asks so innocently, so sensually, if he has studied anatomy, if he has any knowledge of love, and if it is not foolish to gather wisdom in one's head without any real experience, if not theoretic skills with no practical contact with the outside world is useless. In his exhausted state he has no real idea what is happening until he is taking her on the table and her naked, wiry body twitches and flails and pushes towards him in complete, uncontrolled ecstasy and he is helplessly swept away.
He falls asleep, or maybe in coma, she has no idea. But he doesn't wake up when she dresses him, nor a day later when a last breath escapes him like a soft breeze in a papyrus bush.
Kat takes a bible and carefully rips out the word "wisdom" in one of its many instances and puts it next to Hans, very visibly. She also puts the keys there, because she doesn't need them to get out and Kat is no thief.
--4
When she wakes in her bed, she feels clean and rested. Sleeping could become a habit, she thinks, content. The weather is great too, crystal clear and tolerably cold. Unable to think of a plan for the next step, she feels her mood sink as the day passes. No matter how hard she tries, she can only see a mess of faces and places and things happening in the future, as opposed to what she has been used to. She can do nothing about it, she thinks, and goes out to let the future overlap the present and events fall as they please. Her journal during this time becomes equally confused.
There is a gang war with heavy losses on all sides. Somehow she finds a mob boss and talks him into giving everything he has to gain control over large parts of the city. Kat walks from one well-dressed young man to another and makes them kill and be killed for the sake of their families' influence.
Suddenly she is the only one standing up in a restaurant torn apart by gunfire. Corpses are lying in heaps everywhere and there is blood up to her ankles. A bald, old man with a skin problem and bullets in his knees waves a gun in her direction, leaning on a wall. He whispers something about everything is over, something grand about he regrets nothing, and without getting overly pretentious he shoots himself.
Everything is quiet, apart from the whining of a few henchmen. Her beautiful white dress is soiled with blood, it'll never be clean she thinks. Her hair clings to her skin as she shoves it out of her eyes and dips her hand in blood. She writes "Justice" with big letters on a wall and walks to the door.
'Justice is such a vague concept', she thinks as she opens the door and faces rows and rows of policemen. One of them has a loudspeaker and tells her name and what to do but she cannot do it. She looks him in the eye and he seems to understand her over a distance of thirty feet; he wets his lips and looks away nervously. She goes calmly to the right, with controlled steps. At least twenty guns follow her walk to the corner of the building. They are not completely petrified but enough to not open fire right away.
Fifteen feet from the haven of the alleyway she starts running, but the bullets hit the bricks only when she has rounded the corner. The cops follow her, naturally, and she zigzags a bit before taking a left around the next corner. Here an open sewer awaits her that wasn't open earlier, and she dives in without a second thought. The stinking water reaches to her hips and she runs slowly, as in a nightmare, for a long time until she realizes nobody has followed her.
Kat is hoping to find some clothes to change to down here - preferably clean and dry - but she gives up hope on further miracles and sneaks up onto the streets and into a cosy little clothing store. The bills in her shoe are soaked, but plenty enough to make the clerk forgive her soiled appearance and give her access to the inner chambers, where she can clean up, and still some money left over.
With a hooded coat, to hide her face, she manages to get a seat on a cross-country bus without any divine interventions, and so Kat disappears without a trace to a completely different part of the land. It is not easy to give up her home, friends and everything, the city itself that pleased her in many ways, but she never expected for this to work without any sacrifices. On the bright side a change is always nice, she thinks to console herself. And it's not like she will be completely alone over there, Kat is not one to pick a goal completely at random for a one-way trip.
Sun Tzu tells us: "Never be without a plan and never rely on it".
Enclosed in the metal shell of the bus, she dreams of a field of grass stretching from one horizon to the other. She is lying on her back and looks at the sky and doesn't have a single worry in the world. Tranquillity fills her heart. If only I wasn't alone, she thinks, at one with the longing blue sky. Because this is a dream someone now lies beside her and strokes her cheek with a hand. She wakes when she sees his face, wakes with a blush and a pounding heart.
--5
When the bus stops she waits for a while before getting off. She walks around this new city, so much like the old one on the surface and so very different. She walks in circles to postpone her next meeting. He will be angry. He will not sell her out. He will ask why she is doing what she does. He will ask her to stop. He will take her in even though she will not do what he asks. He will say he has no choice and Kat loves when he does all that and she hates it. No, she does not know what it is she feels about it but it's a lot of emotion. So she waits. In the middle of the night alone in a foreign city, Kat is afraid of nothing other than going home.
She eats in a 24-7 restaurant and forces herself to eat as much as she needs though her belly feels tense and full. She gets sick, but not enough to throw up. She realizes, briefly, the stupidity of delaying and walks to the little house on the field outside the city.
Nobody answers the doorbell so she rings it in a random pattern. Five seconds delay, seven, two, five, eight, three, two, three, three, six, two, fifteen, four, three and then he opens the door.
'How do you do that', he asks angrily, with eyes firmly shut, still half asleep in a pair of washed-out boxers.
'Hi, big brother', says Kat with an involuntary little girl's voice and an anxious smile.
'Little sister', he says, waking up. 'What have you done now?' His voice is sad, desolate. He steps forward and embraces her tightly. 'What have you done?' She sobs and presses her face against his chest and closes her eyes and pretends he is everything in the world. All strength seems to leave him and he is filled with soft, sticky emotion, like syrup, that weighs down his ribcage and makes his voice thick but that's okay because Kat feels the same way and they support each other as they go inside and lock the door.
On the telly they talk about she is armed and dangerous and if you see her do not approach her, for the love of God, just alert the authorities, while the siblings sit deep down in an old brown couch in front of it and Kat tries to explain why she cannot explain why.
'It's partly about the kick', she says. 'Yeah, I guess I'm a psychopath, I enjoy killing people. But that's not all. I wouldn't have to do it if it was just to make me feel better. I'm trying to show something. Something big and beautiful which I believe everyone wants - no, needs to see. There are no words for it, that's why I have to show it.'
'You sound a bit like mom when she'd seen God', Christian says, probing.
'Yeah, I guess I have. Me too. I wrote it all down, it made sense though it was contradictory, the twosomeness, the paradox, it's a big part of it. . . but the cops got my journal now. I don't remember. But I did see God, that I'm sure of.'
'And God told you to kill seven righteous men?' Mrs. Kurtz is locked up in a room with soft walls, in a secret place, but nobody is saying that she sees things that aren't there. In the family they rather say she sees things that nobody else does.
'Nah, not exactly. It's mostly my idea.' She blushes modestly and smiles for the first time this day.
'What is going to happen', he asks after a moment's silence, in which he realizes Kat will not say any more about her reasons.
She takes the question seriously, but it confuses her. 'What's going to happen to what?'
'To you, to your plan, to the world, I don't know.'
'Well. . .' She falls silent after opening her mouth, trying to think of a better way to say it. he deserves to know, of course, more than that, he deserves to know in a nice way. But she is unable to think of anything and tells it like a weather forecast: 'I'm going to die, the plan will be completed and the world will never be the same again.'
'You. . .'
'I may end up in jail, I guess. Keep mom company, haha.'
'But. . .'
'But if the plan works perfectly I will die. Oh, I got to find a victim for the next step. Do you know anyone patient?' She slips away while talking, her voice grows thin and distant while she drops slowly to the side, almost asleep when she comes to rest leaning on her brother.
'I've never felt this good, she mumbles. 'Not in my entire life. Don't take that away from me. Please,'
Chris sits there all day, cradling his sister and sometimes shuddering, overcome with grief and despair.
By twilight Kat wakes, hungry. While she takes care of her bodily needs Chris comes to think of something, or someone. 'There's a guy at work. He's snobbish and boring and hates himself. He has no friends, no woman, no kids, his own family doesn't like him. If you have to kill somebody I can't think of anyone better.
'You're a fascist in an angel's guise', Kat says. She giggles and kisses his cheek.
'How are you going to do it, anyway?' The morbid curiosity gets the better of him.
'I don't know exactly. She returns to her fried eggs and sausages. 'Maybe put him on a rack, and the more he screams the slower I'll turn it, so if he's patient he'll die fast.'
'Where the heck are you gonna find a rack?'
'Those mundane problems always work out. Don't they have one on the museum? Pass the ketchup please.'
--6
Eventually she ends up in the lonely guy's apartment, without a rack. She talks about the virtues of temperance well enough and long enough that he asks her himself to test him. She gets a big sharp butcher knife from his kitchen and takes her clothes off - just in case so she won't get any blood on them, she assures - and starts carving.
'Just tell me when to stop', she says and he says nothing, just grits his teeth and holds on to a bar in a doorway that is probably intended to hang a curtain in. When he loses consciousness and collapses in a heap on the floor he makes a relieved noise. Kat carves the word "Temperance" in the wall above him, dutifully, and washes off the blood, takes on her clothes and goes out into the night, leaving his door open so somebody will find him before he stinks up the whole building and falls apart when they touch him.
She only moves outside at night now, and she gets sad at the thought of never having the sun in her face again. But the night has its own kind of magic.
At home she finds Chris drinking vodka straight out of a bottle and grows worried.
'I know you don't approve of drinking', he says, surprisingly steady. 'I don't either, really. But I have to, you're not the only one who has to do unpleasant things.'
'You want to forget for a while, run away a bit, I understand', she says nicely and sits down next to him. 'It's okay.'
'The intoxication springs from an elemental urge to thread outside of time, they say.' Chris almost passes out form the effort of delivering this wisdom.
'Is it really that bad here? In this time?' She searches deep in his wavering eyes and absently strokes his chin.
'You oughtta know, you're the one wants to change everything.'
'Oh, it's not me you want to forget?'
'No, just the world in general.' He catches her hand and squeezes it. 'I don't want to forget you. Not before you're dead. Not after, either.'
'Remember when we were kids?'
They were always closer to each other than the other kids, closer perhaps than siblings ought to be. Kat remembers the closeness, the heat, the merciless lust, in insane excitement, the most forbidden thing; the volatile sense of intimacy, of belonging. The memories blend into the present, but near the end it changes when she prepares to break his neck. It is what she has to do, he is the one who will die of love, but when she pictures it she begins to cry silently. She cannot do it, but she does not know if it is because the whole point is lost if she kills someone drunk or because he is her brother.
Then it is over and they are children again and holding each other so tightly, unable to move, drowning in fear of the unknown. What if someone caught them, what if she became pregnant.
--7
The next night they pretend nothing happened and Kat explains the next, crucial step of her plan involves the police and she knows no better way to involve them than simply going to the station and give herself up. She asks Chris to stay, to not get himself involved, knowing that he will, hating herself for using him so.
'Just don't try to get killed, I beg ya', he says. She hugs him and leaves without saying anything. She feels pretty in his white jeans and armless shirt. The sun is shining and the sky is clear and blue and a warm wind blows in her hair. It is a beautiful day to die and Kat has never felt more alive.
At the police station, the man behind the desk does not recognize her and dismisses her with her lack of identification, until an officer passing through throws himself at her, nails her to the floor and chains her hands behind her back before she even sees him. She is taken to a little room in a distant part of the building for preliminary questioning and talks a lot more than anyone is prepared for, mesmerizing the three policemen in the room for hours. The spell is broken by a series of explosions downstairs, followed by a choir of gunshots. The sounds of large-calibre automatic fire slowly comes closer and two of the cops leave, neglecting to close the door behind them. Kat can hear the screams now.
Chris is playing the hero, just as she expected. Like a Terminator he goes through the station - and its inhabitants - systematically until he finds Kat. She moves to kick her guardian upside the head when the gun barrel shows up outside the door, but he is prepared and knocks her to the floor and shoots Chris four times high in his chest. He falls with guns clattering and Kat gets there so quickly she hardly believes it and tries to hold him without her hands. She brushes her face against his and ask painfully for his forgiveness and dips her tongue in his blood and writes "Love" on his forehead and closes his eyes by kissing them.
The policeman, who has never shot anyone before, stands frozen with the gun between his feet while Kat rises and turns to face him. She doesn't have a drop of blood on her, he thinks, it's a miracle. She stands very close to the petrified man, invading his personal space and looking at him with wild, wounded, tear-filled eyes.
'He was my brother', she says with her proudest, clearest voice. The tape recorder is still humming, recording her words and she knows this is her last, greatest moment and she trembles just a little. The cop is staring back at her, he dares not look away, dares not blink. he knows he is already dead. He is wrong.
'He died because he loved me', she says. 'You have already done much that you don't like, but now you will kill me too.' She picks up the gun and gives it back to him, holding the barrel, and drops to her knees. 'My life is in your hands', she says and raises her arms, slowly. They feel like wings. She closes her eyes and sees only light and turns her face up. The bullet enters through her forehead and tears apart more than half her brain. The death is instantaneous.
In her pocket is a paper note with the word "Mercy". |
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