Published: May 1, 2008

“Take off your shoes and put out that cigarette.” I’m motioning towards the floor, which I have Saran-wrapped wall-to-wall.

“Why?”

“Listen, Chief, you want to do this or—you want to do this or what?” I can’t have you smoking.” So I plucked his lit cigarette right from his lips, squeezing it between my fingertips, and shot it back down the stairwell. He watched it spiral out of control, then crash and burn six flights down.

“What the—?”

“Alright,” I say, rotating my key clockwise, counter-clockwise, and clockwise; diligently entering and exiting four different tumblers. “Are your socks clean? Come on in.”

I can usually split my customers into two distinct character types. First, you’ve got the pseudo-Goth thrill seekers, looking for a memento or two, something to hang above their mantle or use as cover art for the shitty nu-metal band they play bass in. Smeared in black make-up, clad in black clothing, slack-jawed and using an overabundance of adjectives that don’t suit them.

Cool. Gnarly. Sick.

‘Cool man,’ they’d say, ‘that’s some sick gnarly shit right there.’

This guy I have with me now fits into the second category. Wrinkled turtleneck shirts: maroon colored or hunter green. Tight, straight-legged jeans, cuffed over hiking shoes that he’s never hiked in. His hair parted on one side and swept over, dangling gently on the boxy glasses he’s been wearing since he was eight. His face was wan, emotionless, overtly thin but not angular. These are the men you have to worry about.

“It’s clean in here,” he says, as he presses his hand against the sliding glass door that leads to my outdoor patio, ironically contributing dirt as he comments on the cleanliness. I finish washing my hands abruptly to rush in and say,

“Don’t! Don’t, touch anything, please.” I take his hands away from the window, rubbing away the fingerprints he left on the glass. “Just take a seat, Chief, please.”

“Are you going to call me Chief all day? You know my real name is—”

“Let,” I pause and say, “let me stop you right there. I don’t care what your real name is, okay? Yes, I am going to call you Chief all day because it’s monosyllabic and sonically appealing to me. If I went around calling you by your real name, I’d end up confusing you with people I already know.”

I pour out two identical glasses of water, set them on my living room table, thinking: is it wrong to whet the appetites of the criminally depraved?

I slide a leather-bound album into place, in front of us; ‘J.M. Cartwright’ embroidered in gold foil on the top right hand corner.

The first photograph is a picture of a motorcycle helmet, a road flare casting a shadow over the brim, darkening a landscape of scalp and brains, straddling a highway line. The caption says, “Life in the Fast Lane!”

The second photograph is a picture of a hotel maid, sitting on a hotel toilet, hands clasped sweet and somber, all dressed in black and white, her mop and bucket at her side, thoroughly disemboweled. I mean, completely eviscerated.

“I feel her pain,” I mention, “I once scrubbed the grout in my bathroom for over eight hours.” The caption reads, “What a mess!”

I get up suddenly, protractor in hand, and start measuring the angles of various things in my apartment, biting my fingernails. I switch to a rule, measure: four inches, eight inches, one foot.

“Increments of four,” I say, winking, twice, involuntarily.

The third photograph is a close-up of a man’s hands, ravaged by shark bite, two thumbs and one pinky suture-salvaged, skin: blue and pruned, a tattoo half-eaten and a caption that says, “Hang Ten!” The man stares at it, unfazed.

“Too obvious?” I ask.

My boss calls, so I excuse myself from the table. On the other end of the line was Graham Slattery, his voice was an effeminate rasp that defied his muscular, bulldog build. He was the Head Chief of the Greater California Crime Scene Investigations Unit. He used to say, “the C.I.U. is the only place in the world where you hope the I.C.U. is your next stop.”

“Yes, sir,” I snap my fingers twice.

“Understood, sir.”

Snap.

Snap.

I shut the blinds in the kitchen, stretching the phone cord, smiting two diagonal shadows, and then I sharpen up the perpendicularities of my refrigerator magnets, saying, “first thing in the morning, sir.”

When I sit back down, the man says, “I’ll take this one,” pointing at a picture of a man with a pear and a bird in the park.

“Alright,” I said, “good choice.” I slide a form towards him that says things like, ‘address,’ and ‘no. of copies:’ and ‘size, choose one.’

My blood itches.

I watch his cracked, yellowing fingernails snake around my pen, scrawling in the finer details.

“You have to go now,” I said, and stood at the window watching him as he drove as fast as he could up California 1. The sun, golden and grape-ripening, thick and amber, glittering the salt-spray of the ocean crashing over the rocky coastline. I watched as long as I could, then I threw away the pen, bleach-cleaned my telephone, and re-organized my photographic collection of grotesqueries.

Next I walked around my apartment, enjoying all of the ritualistic whirr and clicking noises of snaps and locks, the audio affirmation of sealing every compartmental gateway to the outside. Square things, full sounds. I thought about, [frowning while doing so,] the sepia-tone photograph of a young boy, cradled in sagebrush, eyes only half-closed in death, clutching at a half-eaten pear.

I thought about the crow, oblivious to his own mortality, tracking little crowfeet stamps of blood on a boy’s neck, staring into my camera, bewildered, a mouth full of pear.