Teachers at Shrinekill High School—any school anywhere for that matter—were typically not permitted to teach their own children. So when Nick entered high school they put him in Mr. Talib’s Biology class. It wasn’t until this happened that Benno realized he’d been harboring a fantasy in the background of his mind for many years: Nick as his student, sitting in the front row on his classroom, attentive, curious. A ridiculous fantasy, it turned out, especially since Benno was not even particularly interested in his own work or proud of his own career.
Benno would check in with Frank Talib when they crossed paths about how Nick was doing, and Frank always reported that he was doing fine, that his work was getting in on time and he was, more or less, engaged.
Benno was satisfied with fine. As a child, his own father—the revered semiotician Dr. Harold Haim—had stressed Benno to excel in school—to exceed merely fine and aspire for exceptional—with too much assiduity. Thus Benno had learned to resent school. And yet academics was, by all measures, the only field he was qualified to toil in. A shitty condition. At least science—unlike semiotics—was, more-or-less, definitive. Still he wanted none of this for Nick. Fine was fine. Fine was great.
Benno had Nick’s friends—Danny and Luca—in his Bio class. They were not great students. They were barely even fine students. They sat at the table all the way in the back and whispered to each other from bell to bell. They rarely turned in homework, and when they did it was either incomplete or incorrectly complete. And as the fall semester wound to a close, Benno increasingly suspected they were showing up stoned.
Nick was too old to get a lift home with Benno after school anymore. Instead, he would walk with Danny and Luca, either to Kay’s house on Monday’s and Tuesdays, or to Benno’s apartment in town on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Benno still had reason, however, to walk down the hill to the elementary school each afternoon. He’d get there around 3:15 and stand by the mural with the autumn forest and sunset-streaked sky and the looming school building across from the music room until Brooke Stern finished cleaning up. Then the two of them would walk to the faculty parking lot, get in Benno’s car, and, on most days, drive to the local tavern for drinks and a few games of pool.
On the second to last Tuesday in November—the last day of classes before Thanksgiving break—Benno and Brooke decided to skip the local tavern and drive into the Catskills. They explored desolate roads up and down the mountainsides, remarking on the beauty of the sparse, rusty trees and yawning gray sky spotted with tattered lines of migrating geese until Benno finally got sick of the folksy music Brooke insisted on playing, and he guided them into town and parked in a public lot. They found a bar off Main Street and set up shop at a booth in the back. The floor was sticky and it smelled like old beer, and the same Eagles song seemed to be stuck on repeat. It reminded Benno distinctly of a bar he’d gone to in college, just down the street from the apartment he lived in his senior year. He’d met Kay at that bar—or at least gotten to know her there. Sticky floors. The same Eagles song. Brooke looked like Kay used to.
“I asked for Jack but I think they gave us Jim.” Brooke set two shots down on the table and sat beside Benno. “Also, there’s a chick sitting at the bar who hasn’t stopped looking at you since we came in.”
Benno sniffed his shot—undoubtedly Jim Beam—and peered toward the bar. Sure enough, a pair of eyes looked back at him from behind the rim of a dark beer. A woman Benno had never seen, barely in her twenties, with unkempt bangs and numerous tattoos peeking out from the sleeves and collar of her coat. She blinked, averted her eyes, took a long gulp of her beer, and then got up and left through the bar’s front door.
“Someone you know?” Brooke sipped her shot of whiskey—a habit Benno was starting to loathe—and then lifted an eyebrow at Benno as if she’d caught him in some kind of act.
“No.” Benno threw back his shot. “Might just have a staring problem.”
“Hm.” Brooke sipped her shot again, leaned back in the booth and crossed her legs, and busied herself on her phone.
Benno had a strange thought—or maybe a feeling. A hallway. A series of hallways. With floral wallpaper and a salmon-colored carpet. Doors lined the walls. A motel, perhaps. Like any other motel. But there was something so nostalgic about it. Nostalgic and threatening. He nudged Brooke until she moved, and then went to the bar for another shot. Hallways. Doors. Just a feeling. Just a weird thought. Not significant or interesting in any way. Just one of those things that would pass, like everything else.
#
Brooke got handsy when she was drunk, which was a good indication it was time to leave. It had gotten late, and dark, and though Benno was fine to drive he figured he should take a second to center himself before getting in the car.
He bummed a cigarette from the bartender and stood outside in the cold while Brooke went to the bathroom. The streets were quiet, and dead leaves skated across the sidewalk in the low, gasping wind. It took Benno five matches before he managed to get the cigarette lit, and once he did he coughed on it for several minutes before finally catching his breath, and was left with a tight pain in his stomach that faded slowly like a dream.
As he smoked, he realized he had his phone out, his thumb tracing absentmindedly across the screen. He should call someone. Nick? Nick wouldn’t answer. Kay? They hadn’t spoken in weeks, and Benno had nothing to say to her. And she probably wouldn’t answer either.
He scrolled through his photos. He liked the picture of the three of them at home on Christmas seven years ago, all wearing matching pajamas, gathered in front of the tree. It was Kay’s holiday—one Benno was initially reluctant to adopt after being raised by an atheist father from a Reform Jewish family—but learned to enjoy. In the picture, Nick was clinging to Benno’s back, his face half-buried in Benno’s hair. They’d bought him a video game console that year. He was so happy he’d cried, and hugged his parents so deeply he’d hurt Benno’s shoulder. His strength surprised Benno. All the ways he grew surprised Benno. Those years sped by so blindingly fast. Everyone told him, but nothing prepared him. Kay struggled with it more than he did. She once said that from the moment Nick was born, some invisible monster had started dragging him irreversibly away from her. Benno hadn’t understood. He still wasn’t sure he understood. He wondered if Kay still struggled with this. Maybe he could call and ask her…
“Do you remember me?” A voice asked from the dark.
Benno startled, coughing anew on the nub of his cigarette.
The tattooed woman from the bar stood in the shadow of the doorway beside the bar’s entrance. She held her arms tucked against her, her bangs flittering in the wind, her long skirt whipping against the ankles of her hight boots. She couldn’t be older than twenty-one, but her eyes, out here in the dark, boring into Benno’s, appeared much, much older than the rest of her.
“Should I?” Benno asked, tossing the cigarette toward the curb.
The woman’s old eyes narrowed in her young face. “You’re Benno Haim,” she said.
Well shit, Benno thought. He looked hard at the woman. Her visible tattoos appeared all to be ancient Egyptian symbols: an Udjat eye on her throat, a scrawl of hieroglyphs along her jawline, an upside-down Ankh under her left eye. He certainly would have remembered her by her tattoos, but if he’d met her before she had them—as a student, he figured—he still couldn’t place her.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The woman looked back at Benno for a beat, inscrutable, then snorted loudly, hocked deeply, and spat a loogie onto the pavement. “Forget it,” she said, stepping out of the doorway and starting off down the street.
“Hey.” Benno hurried up next to her. “What’s your name?”
The woman ignored him.
“Were you a student of mine?” Benno had to walk fast to keep up, despite the woman’s short stature. “Just tell me your name, I’m sure I’ll remember.”
The woman’s eyes were hidden behind her bangs.
“Come on.” Benno touched her arm with the outside of his hand. “Obviously you want me to know who you are, otherwise you wouldn’t have waited out here in the cold for two hours. So just tell me. Or at least give me a hint.”
The woman sneered and walked faster.
“Okay so you weren’t a student.” Benno’s breath labored from the exertion of keeping pace and the recent cigarette. “Did we meet somewhere? A bar? I blacked out at some beer garden in Beacon last summer. Were you there?”
“Just go home,” the woman said.
“Enough.” Benno took hold of her arm, swinging her around to face him. “How do I know you? How do you know me?”
She looked up at him from her old eyes from beneath her jagged bangs, and a tight grin cut her face, exposing a gold tooth that glistened in the streetlamp overhead. And in that light, her tooth glinting, her eyes deeper and darker than the rest of her, Benno did remember her, somehow, from somewhere, maybe, though he couldn’t place it…
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“Hey!” Brooke’s voice rang out.
Benno startled, releasing the woman’s arm as he turned.
“What’s going on?” Brooke asked, swaying as she came up the sidewalk.
Benno looked back at the woman—but she was already gone, and when he looked up the street he saw a glimpse of her long skirt vanish around the corner.
“Hello?” Brooke swatted Benno’s shoulder. “Did you hear me?”
Benno nodded, still looking at the corner where the street turned away. An old student? Why wouldn’t she just say that? She was too young to be a past lover. Maybe someone’s daughter? He paged through his memories, but he was baffled, and a little drunk, and nothing was coming.
“So who is she?” Brooke crossed her arms, her eyebrows aloft.
“I don’t know.”
“Really? That’s the best you’ve got?”
“She knows me, but I don’t know her.”
Brooke scoffed and shook her head. “You’re a piece of shit.” She turned and huffed off in the direction of the car.
Benno looked at the corner. An old student. But he would’ve remembered her if she was one of his high schoolers. He’d taught in the elementary school for a few years before Nick was born. If the woman was in her early twenties, the numbers might add up. But why wouldn’t she just tell him? A dull pit tightened in Benno’s stomach. Why wouldn’t she just tell him? What was he not remembering?
“Are you serious?” Brooke called, halfway down the block.
Benno rubbed his face. It didn’t matter. Just an old student playing games with him. That was her problem, not his. Benno wouldn’t waste another second thinking about her. He started after Brooke, digging his hands deep into his pockets, satisfied that as he went, he was already starting to forget the encounter all together.
#
Brooke refused to speak to Benno for the entire drive until, as they took the exit into Shrinekill, he offered to drop her off at her place.
“I might as well just come over,” she said, her tongue sounding too big for her mouth. “Honestly I don’t even remember why I’m mad at you.”
Recipient had killed a mouse in the hallway. Its head was removed, and its organs spilled from the hole of its neck like an exclamation. Its little heart, nestled inside the beige coil of its entrails, continued—inexplicably—to twitch, despite the long hardened pool of blood in which it all lay. Muscle spasms, Benno reasoned. The tissue in the muscles contracting from the heat of the radiator, or the cold floors, or the moisture in the air…
“There’s something wrong with that fucking cat,” Brooke slurred on her way to the bedroom as Benno scooped the mouse carcass into a plastic bag.
They fell asleep watching TV, and Benno had a dream from which he awoke feeling damp and ferrous but about which he remembered nothing. It was still the middle of the night, but a vague nausea and the inklings of a ferocious headache prevented him falling back to sleep. His stomach ached. He tried to shit but couldn’t. He showered in the dark, then flicked on the light and wiped at the foggy mirror to get a look at himself. There was a swatch of gray hair behind his ears he’d never noticed before. His cheeks were sunken. The skin beneath his chin was starting to sag, and the lines around his eyes and mouth were deep enough that he could slide his fingernail through them. When he turned sideways he found his abdomen protruded rudely just below his ribcage. He was only thirty-eight. He didn’t look good for thirty-eight.
He fixed a whiskey and sat on the sofa in the small living room while Recipient prowled along the sofa’s seat back, his coarse hair grating occasionally along Benno’s neck. Benno took long swigs of whiskey until his hands settled. It was hours until sunrise. He was behind on grading tests. He had a lab to put together for his sophomores. He still needed to get online and sync up his credit cards to auto-pay on all the bills. There was a speeding ticket from August that was probably overdue. The sink in the kitchen could use a dose of Drain-o. Recipient stalked along the sofa. Benno’s stomach gurgled.
His phone buzzed. He squinted at the suddenly bright screen. Kay. Kay was calling him. Benno didn’t want to talk to Kay right now. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He set the phone down and looked off through the doorway into the kitchen, where the clock on the stove read 3:18 a.m. Kay was calling him. She was calling him at 3:18 a.m…
He dropped his whiskey on the table and answered. “Hello?”
The dull hum of many people speaking and moving about. The shout of a siren. A car door slamming.
“Benno?” Kay’s voice, distant at first, swam closer. “Benno?”
Benno’s feet were cold. He curled his bare toes against the floor. “What’s wrong?”
“Something happened.” Kay’s voice, laced with misery, was the most familiar sound in the world. “Benno something happened.”
#
A knot of emergency vehicles blocked the street. Benno left his car in front of a hydrant and hurried toward the house without shutting the door behind him. Blue and red lights convulsed against the low clouds. There was a smell like iron in the air.
Kay stood alone on the brittle grass of the front lawn, her jacket zipped up to her chin, her dark hair askew with interrupted sleep. When she saw Benno she took a slow breath, then met him as he panted up the sidewalk.
“Where is he?” Benno scanned the officers loitering by their cruisers and the sparse crowd of pajama-clad onlookers, purple in the wash of flashing lights.
“He’s okay,” Kay said, and then, because she couldn’t help herself: “You reek.”
“Where did it happen?”
“In the backyard. We got a fire pit.” She adjusted her jacket up higher around her chin. “Now there’s a bullet hole in the side of the shed.”
“Was he alone? What was he doing?”
Kay’s eyes swam over Benno’s face. “You’re gonna have to talk to the police.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“No. I mean they’re gonna want to talk to you.” She pointed over Benno’s shoulder.
Benno turned. An officer—easily ten years younger than Benno—stepped up to the curb, his gloved hands folded at his waist. “Are you the father?”
“I’m Nick’s father.”
“Can you step over here?”
Benno looked back at Kay. Her dark eyes swam with purple light. Benno felt, for just an instant, that something passed between them. Deep underground, choked and starved for sun. But she was already turning away.
The officer ushered Benno into the middle of the street.
“You own a firearm,” the officer said, his breath billowing in the red and blue light.
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“It’s a Smith & Wesson. Model 19. It was my dad’s.”
“And your son has access to it?”
“It’s been locked in a safe. In the closet in my apartment. I don’t know when the last time I took it out was. Years ago.”
“Does your son know the combination?”
Benno shook his head. The combination. Benno couldn’t even remember it. He squinted his eyes shut. Six digits. A date. A birthday. Nick’s birthday. The password to the safe was Nick’s birthday. Benno exhaled and wiped his lips. “He might’ve been able to guess it.”
The officer nodded.
“Is he in trouble?”
The officer looked up at the simmering sky. “He’s lucky. His friend was a few feet to the right. Could’ve been different… With negligent discharges like this, no injuries, in a private residence, it’s usually a misdemeanor. But because there were drugs—”
“Drugs?”
“And alcohol.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“Marijuana. It complicates things.”
“Is he going to jail?”
“He’ll spend the rest of the night at the station. You or your wife can come with him.”
“Should I call a lawyer?”
“That’s up to you. He’s a minor so it goes to family court. Usually there’s a fine. Community service. A judge might order you to take a safe ownership course.”
Benno wiped his lips again. They felt waxy and dry at the same time. He looked around at the purple street, trying to find Nick’s face among the heads and bodies, which all seemed to be facing away from him. When he couldn’t, he returned his focus to the officer. “Do you have kids?” he asked.
“A girl,” the officer said. “Almost two.”
Benno nodded slowly, as if thinking hard on this.
The officer cleared his throat. “You should start thinking about a new combination.”
#
By the time Benno got back to his apartment the sun had almost set.
Brooke had left a note on the coffee table in the living room: Called you a hundred times. I don’t think this is working anymore.
Benno looked at his phone. A hundred was an exaggeration, but not by much. He thumbed out a text—Family emergency call you tomorrow—and sent it off, then tossed his phone onto the sofa and trudged down the hall to the bedroom, the plastic bag with his father’s revolver and the loose bullets clinking off his thigh as he went.
He opened the safe and stared into the dark, empty compartment. Late light boiled into the space between the blinds and the windowsill, filling his periphery with fiery orange. For the first few years of Nick’s life, Benno had lived in a constant state of heightened vigilance. When he became a parent, the world’s hidden dangers bared themselves—dangers he had walked past, oblivious, his whole life. That quiet man with the acne scars loitering outside the supermarket day after day? A predator determined to rip his child to shreds. That Honda with the tinted windows that parks on the corner every weekend? A drug dealer with a target on his back and a hail of bullets in his future. The corner of that table in the den? A jagged knife. That heavy door to the garage? An amputator. The staircase? Gallows. That plastic bag, lozenge, Lego? Smotherers. Suffocators. Quiet little monsters.
But as Nick got older, the dangers had receded—or at least Benno’s awareness of them had receded. He’d sunken back into obliviousness, and then even further, losing sight not only of the quiet little monsters, but of the loud and hulking ones. Like a gun. A fucking gun. How could Benno have let this happen? How could he so completely have looked away?
He set the gun and the palmful of bullets in the safe. He should just get rid of the fucking thing. He would never use it. He didn’t ask for it. But the thought of selling it or leaving it at the police station filled him with a bewildering anxiety. There hadn’t been anything else from his father. No money, no letter, no keepsakes of any kind. Just an old revolver. Without it, there was nothing.
He closed the safe and dragged his fingernails through the deep lines around his eyes. Six digits. Kay’s birthday was out, as was Benno’s. Nick would try Brooke’s—and Benno didn’t even know it for that matter. No, birthdays were no good. Something random. Just a random six digit number. But he would have to memorize it, and his memory wasn’t great these days…
But there was a number. A six digit random number which, for some reason, was as clear and as permanent in Benno’s mind as his own name. He followed the reset instructions on the inside of the safe’s door, then tapped in the new combination on the keypad.
266362
A number. It meant nothing, and yet there it was. There was no reason to write it down anywhere and risk Nick finding it, because it was couched deep in the folds of Benno’s unreachable brain. Where had it come from? Benno shut the closet door and stood at the window. He considered raising the blinds and looking out at the setting sun, but some fear—some baffling fear of what might be out there, pulsing and bleeding over the horizon… What was that? What on earth was that thought? Benno was exhausted. His mind was goo. His stomach burned. He needed to sleep.
He went to the kitchen—a kitchen that felt like someone else’s in an apartment that would never be his home—and found he was out of whiskey. Recipient looked down at him from his perch atop the cabinets. The triangle on his collar reflected a sooty darkness, and the hot orange flicker of a flame. Not this room, Benno thought. Not this place. His hands shook insistently as he pulled on his coat to make the long walk to the liquor store.