Raised in Captivity Read online

  I explained that this is not how the law operates.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you own the rights to your life?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You do not,” said Trog. “That’s something you must learn.”

  He stepped off my porch, slid into his silver Pagani Zonda, and sped away. I explained the conversation to Sarah, and we both spent the night drinking ouzo and chuckling over Trog’s petulance and absurdity. We laughed less when we showed up for work on Monday and realized that my parking space had been reassigned and our keys no longer opened the door.

  Not That Kind of Person

  Sheila knew she wanted to murder her husband. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that she had no idea how to make that happen. She knew she wasn’t a killer. She didn’t even use glue traps. She purchased an old trade paperback online, an anthology titled The Mammoth Book of Killer Women, hoping it might point her in the right direction. But all it did was remind her that most female murderers kill their victims with poison, and there was no way she was doing that. She would never kill someone with food. That would be an ideological affront to her career. Seeing no better option, she decided to hire a hit man, which was much harder than finding a used book on Amazon. She had to download Tor software. But nevertheless, she persisted, and it wasn’t long before she was communicating with a wide variety of regional murderers-for-hire. Each potential killer made a viable pitch. A few employed emojis, most notably the emoji for “bullet.” However, one candidate offered more than meat-and-potatoes murder. The man billed himself as the Ultimate Assassin, which Sheila initially found arrogant and a little on-the-nose. But the man insisted he could prove this moniker was no exaggeration. He offered to meet Sheila at her bakery to explain his methodology. He was persuasive, and his emails were grammatically correct. That was huge. There was no way Sheila would let someone execute her husband if the executioner didn’t understand the difference between your and you’re.

  The meeting was set for ten in the morning. As a safety precaution, Sheila wanted to make sure they met when the bakery was crowded. But the moment the assassin stepped through the door, she realized there was no need for worry. He was congenial, well dressed, and passive. Tall, but never looming. Expensive haircut, fashion-forward eyeglasses, grown-up leather shoes. They shook hands and sat by a window. He asked several questions about the bakery and made a few insightful comments about the functional difference between a cake and a pie. He asked if she wanted to talk about money at the beginning of the conversation or at the end. Sheila said the end.

  “How did you get into this line of work?” she asked. The assassin noted this was a common question.

  Like most professional killers, he’d started in the military before entering the private sector. He’d been part of a death squad that usually worked in Central America and Eastern Europe, the kind of assignment members of the media always classified as black ops (though he chuckled at the reference and said no member of a real death squad would ever use a term so melodramatic). He didn’t want to explain how he’d been recruited for this vocation, beyond saying he’d “received high scores” on tests that “reward pragmatism and violence.” He said he’d only had direct involvement with three military assassinations in a span of eight years, but that the training exercises were challenging and informative and the ideal preparation for a life in private practice. He nonchalantly outlined the various ways to murder people and the pros and cons of each prospect. A “rando” was a one-man job committed in public, with the downside being a high possibility of failure. A “crash and bash” was a two-man job where a residence was forcibly entered and the scene was fixed to resemble a drug deal gone awry. A “fiver” required five attackers, with the goal of making the victim disappear without a trace. There were ways to make a homicide seem like an accident. There were ways to make it seem like the victim was actually the aggressor. There were ways to frame other people for the crime, but he said he didn’t like to do that if it wasn’t necessary (and if she did intend to frame someone for the murder, the price would be double). “There are obviously many ways to kill a husband,” he said, “although I’ve developed my own style, which is the style I prefer.”

  Sheila listened to these details, enthralled and delighted. She was immediately convinced she’d selected the right applicant. She loved his approach to storytelling. “Do you want to know why I want to kill my husband?” she asked, assuming he’d say something cool and detached like, “That’s never my concern.” But his reaction was the opposite of her expectation. “Yes. Tell me everything,” he said. “Is it okay if I take notes?”

  Though she’d thought about this decision for months, Sheila had never spoken of it aloud and relished the opportunity to finally do so. Her husband was lazy, she said, and he was a liar. What’s worse than a lazy liar? Nothing. He would say he was working late, but then he’d go to the bar, and when she caught him at the bar he’d try to claim he was actually there for work, but when she asked why he was working at the bar he would pretend like he was hurt that she didn’t trust him, even though he was never genuinely hurt by anything. He would say they didn’t have enough money to take a vacation, but then he’d buy a massive TV and claim he got it on sale, but then she’d call the store and it wasn’t on sale at all. One summer, she thought he was having an affair, which she accused him of constantly. He said, “You know, if you keep accusing me of having an affair, I probably will have an affair, since that’s what you seem to believe, anyway.” That was two years ago. And since she’d never stopped making the accusation, the affair must have happened by now, unless he was lying about his intentions or his willingness to try, in which case he was still (at best) a lazy liar. Also, she did not love him and he did not love her, but he wouldn’t get a divorce because he was Catholic and believed the virtuous move was to just spend the rest of their lives in misery.

  “I see,” said the assassin. “Your case is classic. Almost generic. I can absolutely work with this data. Now, before we go any further, we need to talk about the time frame. When do you want this to happen?”

  “Soon,” said Sheila. “Now. Today. Yesterday, if that were possible.”

  The man whistled. “I was afraid you might say that. That’s a problem. That would require a more brutal approach, which is not my preference. To do it my way, I will need more time.”

  “How much more?”

  “I’d estimate four years.”

  “Four years? I don’t want to wait four years,” said Sheila. “What kind of assassin takes four years to assassinate someone?”

  “The ultimate assassin,” said the Ultimate Assassin. “There’s a reason I’m the best at this. I’m not like the other goons. Could I just walk up and blast your husband in the skull with a three-fifty-seven Magnum? Sure. That’s one way to kill someone. But it’s a stupid way to kill someone. That generates more problems than it solves. My preferred style is considerably more sophisticated. My style is the ultimate style.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It means I will convince your husband to murder himself.”

  For the first time in her life, Sheila understood the sensation of buyer’s remorse. She’d always known what that term meant, but she’d never felt it. It hit her in the face like a frying pan, even though she still hadn’t paid this man a nickel.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Sheila. “I don’t even know what that means or how it would work.”

  “I think you know exactly what it means, and how it works is my concern. This isn’t like hiring a plumber. Every murder has problems. No murder is unsolvable. In the fifties, the CIA used to throw guys out of windows and blame it on LSD. That barely worked then and would never work now. There are always questions. There’s always residue. If you kill this man, if I kill this man, if anyone kills this man—it won’t be clean. Mistakes will be made, always. There will alwa
ys be a few details that can’t be explained, and people can end up in jail, and one of those people might be you. But not if this man kills himself. If he kills himself voluntarily, there is no killer to indict. The only perfect homicide is a legitimate suicide.”

  Sheila explained that her husband was the kind of guy who watched It’s a Wonderful Life every December and cried during the closing credits. He was the kind of guy who ordered seafood in Omaha and rooted for the Cleveland Browns. He would never commit suicide.

  “Of course he wouldn’t. Not today,” said the assassin. “That’s why I need four years. I first need to manufacture a scenario where I meet your husband by chance and convince him to become my friend. That’s the easy part. I slowly gain his trust. That’s the hard part. I become his best friend, or at least his closest day-to-day confidant. That takes at least a year, maybe two. From there, I convince him that his life is terrible, which shouldn’t be too difficult, if what you’ve told me is true. His marriage is bad, he’s oppressed by religious ideology, he cares too much about TV. Who knows? He might be miserable already. And that’s when we make our move. We pivot away from the limited view that his life is bad and toward the wider view that life itself is bad. That there is no hope for improvement, and that it wouldn’t matter if there were. I leave a few books around his house—a little Plath, a little Camus. He won’t even need to read them. He just needs to Google the authors’ names out of curiosity. The net impact is identical. Maybe I invite him to my summer house on a rainy weekend and maybe we listen to Morrissey for two days. Maybe we have deep conversations about the hopelessness of existence. I ask rhetorical questions. I express admiration for authenticity and grit, and for men who follow through on difficult commitments. We drink red wine and stare at birds. And then, one day, it just happens. You come home, and there he will be, in the garage. The problem has solved itself.”

  The assassin leaned back in his chair and asked if he could sample a glazed doughnut.

  “That’s sick,” said Sheila. “That’s diabolical, not to mention implausible. There is no way I’m doing this. Get out of my bakery. Please. Get out of my bakery.”

  The assassin leaned forward.

  “I apologize,” he said. “I misread the seriousness of your request. If you want me to leave, I will leave. The customer is always right. But remember why I came here. You wanted me to kill your husband. Judging from what you said earlier, you wanted me to walk into your home and put a bullet in his brain. I’m offering a better solution. I’m offering the same service, but conducted humanely. The victim will have control over his final act. You will get what you want, and—in a way—so will he. In the end, he will welcome his own murder.”

  “You don’t understand what I want,” said Sheila. Did she want her husband dead? Of course she did. But she didn’t want to make him depressed. She was not that kind of person.

  Rhinoceros

  Let me preface all this by pointing out something that isn’t important to anyone except me: I wasn’t even reading the magazine. I don’t read local magazines, particularly not local magazines that present themselves as national publications. It was a woman sitting next to me in the waiting room, waiting for her husband. She was the one who was reading the magazine. I was pretending not to look at her when I pretended not to see the photo on the opposite side of the page she was perusing. It was a photograph of Marvin, a familiar face I hadn’t seen in years. He was not smiling. He had his arm wrapped around the waist of a cherry-haired woman who was also not smiling and who was also not his wife. I wouldn’t describe my reaction as shock, but I was shook, which is only one letter away. I could immediately think of at least five reasons why this photo should not have existed. But then the receptionist called my name, and I had to walk away from a photo that shouldn’t have existed in order to spend two hours lying on my stomach with a camera up my ass. When the procedure was over, I dragged myself back into the waiting area and found the discarded magazine on the floor. I decided to roll it up and take it with me. The upside to this decision was that I would not have to waste $5.99 on a local magazine. The downside was that I was now a thief who had to act casual as I limped out of the doctor’s office. It also meant I couldn’t open the magazine until I reached street level, so I had ninety additional seconds to consider why this photo was so disturbing.

  Marvin was my closest friend among the many friends I no longer had any relationship with. He was widely considered the finest nonfamous jazz writer in America, although I don’t think he’d written about jazz in almost ten years, although I wasn’t totally sure about that, since I’d never read an article about jazz in my entire life. He lived across the country with his wife and their two twin sons, both of whom were allegedly math prodigies. I assumed the marriage was solid. He’d once sent me a digital Christmas card where the entire family was laughing and eating saltine crackers, a concept that felt too weird to be staged. He was notoriously private, having refused to grant even one interview for the release of his critically lauded, commercially unsuccessful book How Not to Care About Things That Aren’t Jazz. Why would a local magazine in New York publish a story about an introverted jazz critic living in Seattle? Who was this provocative redhead I’d never seen before, and why was he touching her in such an intimate way? Why wasn’t she smiling? Why wasn’t he smiling? How did I not know what was going on with a person who would have likely been the best man in my wedding, had my fiancée not committed suicide days before the ceremony? It would have been a lot to process even if my rectum felt terrific.

  I finally read the article on the K train, sitting on a pillow. It was like reading about someone I’d never met. There was only one dismissive sentence about Marvin’s career as a jazz writer, halfway implying he now hated the entire genre. Marvin’s wife, Donna, was never mentioned. Most of the story’s quotes were attributed to the red-haired woman from the photo, a self-described leftist propagandist who called herself Reckless Opportunist. Marvin still referred to himself as Marvin, although he lied about his age and made an awkward joke about how he would murder the president if he knew who the president was. The article didn’t directly state that the pair was romantically conjoined, but the writer suggested as much in three separate paragraphs. The crux of the story was that Marvin and his female friend had figured out a way to delete Wikipedia entries with an embedded code that made it technologically impossible to replace the content that had been removed (it had something to do with an algorithm that operated as a retrovirus, but all the technical details were summarized in a sidebar I only skimmed). This, as it turns out, was a marginally illegal act. I wasn’t aware it was illegal until I read the article, but I suppose the law makes sense: The legislation had been drafted around the same time Wikipedia merged with the public school system, back when there was justifiable fear over the notion of tampering with the official social record. The story in the magazine portrayed Marvin and his companion as counterculture heroes, encamped in a clandestine downtown apartment above an unnamed secret bar, intrepidly eliminating entries that deserved to be eliminated. Both Marvin and his accomplice were reticent to specify which subjects had already been purged, as doing so would contradict their larger intention. But they admitted the overall number of deletions was approaching two thousand, and Reckless was willing to confirm at least three—the entry for Robert E. Lee, the entry for Margaret Sanger, and the entry for Smashing Pumpkins.

  To say this confused me would be akin to saying I enjoy mashed potatoes. I knew Marvin had become politicized after the 2004 election and I’d heard (through Facebook) that he’d been further radicalized by the Mossad assassination of Justin Trudeau. But this Wikipedia news was virgin chernozem. This was a complete reinvention, punctuated by an uncharacteristic embrace of insouciant cybercrime. Did something tragic happen to Donna? Social media indicated she was still in Seattle with the two boys, though her selected relationship status now read “nontraditional.” I considered texting her, but we’
d never texted previously. There was no thread to restart. We’d never had a sincere conversation since the weekend of the wedding and I didn’t feel like pretending to care about how she was doing. I only wanted data. The lone mutual friend I could imagine being remotely helpful was my old racquetball partner Jacoby Foxcat, whom Marvin had lived with in the late nineties. I called him that night and asked if he knew what was going on with Marvin. Foxcat said, “Of course.” But as we spoke, I realized he was just regurgitating the same information he’d gleaned from the same magazine I’d stolen from the ass doctor. He had no firsthand knowledge of anything. Foxcat hadn’t interacted with Marvin since the finale of Lost. He was as confounded as I was, though much less interested in how or why this evolution had occurred. Jacoby assumed Marvin was just trying to make it seem like his midlife crisis wasn’t cliché. He told me to relax and mind my own business. In the end, I regretted calling him at all.

  A month passed. I had to go back uptown to the ass doctor for a follow-up visit. They always make you do that. I walk into the waiting room and almost soil myself: There sits Marvin, alone in the corner, reading an issue of Grit. He recognizes me instantly and seems happy, although not quite as happy as you’re supposed to act when you unexpectedly encounter a long-lost friend. I ask him what he’s doing in the office of my physician, and he says there’s only one reason men our age see this kind of doctor. We both laugh. It’s less uncomfortable than I would have guessed. I mention how I recently spoke to Jacoby Foxcat, and we spend a few minutes mocking his ineptitude as a racquetball player. I mention the magazine article, and Marvin acts slightly embarrassed and slightly proud. I sympathetically inquire about what went down with Donna, insinuating that I will take his side regardless of the answer. He tells me he met someone new who made him realize that he and Donna had never been in love. The bluntness of his description reminds me that Marvin is the kind of person who doesn’t require niceties, so I directly ask him why he’s illegally deleting Wikipedia entries. He says it’s a hard thing to explain in public and that I should instead meet him and his new “lover” (his word) at their apartment tomorrow evening.