Raised in Captivity Page 13

  “Hey, bae,” said the woman. She didn’t look up from the suds.

  “Hi,” said Cope. “Hello.”

  “What happened to the garbage disposal? Did you break it again?”

  “I have no idea,” said Cope. “Probably. Yes.”

  Trial and Error

  She believed she could solve her problems by killing a wolf. That’s how it was in those days. It was something that was questioned and debated, but generally internalized and accepted. Not everyone believed killing a wolf was a viable solution to any problem that had no answer, but enough people did to make it reasonable. You would never be viewed as eccentric for killing a wolf. In fact, some might make the accusation if you didn’t at least consider the possibility.

  She used to believe she could solve her problems on her own, back when she was younger and less terrified of her limitations. Her friends insisted this was all within her control—isolate each issue, drill down to the core, fix what is fixable, endure what is not. But her problems were not like that. She was lonely. She longed to be in a relationship, specifically with the one person who appeared to understand the dark feelings she never dared to express. This person, however, was already married and used his understanding to manipulate her. Her best qualities made her vulnerable. She was able to make a little money doing what she enjoyed, but it wasn’t enough money. She needed to make a lot more money in order to pay for the things she’d purchased when she was broke, so she took a job that was boring and sometimes humiliating. There was no way around this. There was no other job to take. She constantly felt ill, but doctors were mystified as to why (and sometimes seemed to accuse her of lying, although never directly). Her parents longed to help but only made things worse, suffocating her with unwanted attention that sowed envy and resentment among her siblings. There was simply no escape from the life she had assembled by accident. There were no analytical conversations or tiers of self-reflection that would resolve her dilemmas. It was time to try something radical. It was time to kill the wolf.

  She knew of several people who had killed wolves in order to improve their lives, but only one of these people was a close enough friend to ask for advice. They met in a tavern. He explained how his business had failed and how his wife had deserted him, so he killed a wolf. Now he had a new job and a new wife. His new wife had also killed a wolf, just before they began dating.

  She asked how the wolf had been killed. He said he had used the traditional method: He covered a sharpened knife in pig’s blood, placed the knife in his freezer, and allowed the blood to freeze into ice. The frozen blade was then doused with another coating of pig’s blood and frozen again. He repeated this process forty times, until the knife had become a crimson pork popsicle. A final coat of fresh blood was applied to the surface of the ice, just before he positioned the blade upright on the forest floor. A wolf, smelling the fresh blood, discovered the camouflaged knife and commenced licking its savory frozen coating. Over time, the wolf stripped away the ice and exposed the blade, but the ice had numbed the animal’s tongue. The wolf did not realize the knife was now slicing into his anesthetized mouth; instead, the wolf tasted his own warm blood and licked even harder. This continued until the wolf, weakened by his actions and conditioned by his desire, slowly bled out.

  She found this description disturbing. She also found it preposterous. It did not seem like a practical way to kill anything, unless wolves were far dumber than she’d always believed. She was embarrassed by the depth of her desperation. How could a dead wolf solve any problem that wasn’t wolf-related? If it worked, it worked. She’d do it if it worked, no matter how brutal or implausible. But how would it work? Why would it work? “I don’t know if it necessarily does,” her friend said, immune to the consequence of his confession. “I can’t prove any undeniable relationship between what I did and what happened in my life. It’s possible I murdered a wolf for no reason. But I’d do it again, and so would my wife. If we end up having kids and my kids have problems, I will absolutely advise them to kill a wolf. I will give them my knife and pay for the pig blood.”

  She did not find his reasoning persuasive. She would not kill a wolf. She was not going to pretend to believe something insane, based on the minuscule possibility that accepting such insanity might work to her advantage.

  She told him she had changed her mind. “That’s fine,” he replied. “But you’re looking at this with the wrong kind of certitude. I don’t know if I believe that killing a wolf does anything, or that whatever it supposedly achieves is somehow related to making life better than it already is. It probably makes some lives worse. Maybe it made my life worse. Maybe I shouldn’t have a job at all. Maybe I’m not that good at the thing I think I’m good at. Maybe I shouldn’t be married to anyone. Maybe my first wife left me because I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t need a valid reason to kill a wolf. But I need to do something, and I have to live somewhere, and I don’t want to live by myself, and I don’t want to die alone. I want a certain type of life, and it seems like the wolf killers get that life. So I killed the wolf. I froze the blood and planted the knife. I did the weird thing that was required. I don’t know how much it matters if I don’t believe in the weird thing. It’s something that people do, and I’m a person, and I prefer to be with the other people.”

  She listened to his story and nodded politely. She thanked him for his time and walked home. She returned to her apartment and went to bed, fantasizing about the married man she hated to love and dreading the mind-numbing work that would await her tomorrow morning. Her creditors would be in contact. Her parents would want to know how she was feeling and why she wasn’t getting better. Tomorrow would be another horrible day, as would the day after that and the day after that.

  She would kill a wolf, someday. She’d already mentally selected the knife she’d freeze. She understood who she was, below the surface. But she wouldn’t kill the wolf tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that. It would take a long time, and it would take even longer before she’d quit wondering why she was no longer miserable.

  Tricks Aren’t Illusions

  It was snowing when he awoke and it was still snowing now. It was snowing so hard that every window became more interesting than the television. Like every other nonessential employee, he had been warned to stay away from the office. They told him to work from home, so he checked Slack on his phone while flipping through a coffee table book about prehistoric mammals. It was a long eight hours, but not long enough. Now he was boiling tricolor rotini and warming a jar of organic pomodoro sauce on the stove, staring down at the empty white streets from his kitchen window and fantasizing about staying home again tomorrow, or at least staying home until noon. The fantasy was interrupted by three knocks at the door, fast and loud. He assumed it was his elderly neighbor from down the hall, because no one had buzzed the downstairs buzzer. But when he opened the door, it was Keith, looking like a man who’d died descending Everest.

  “How did you get in?”

  “The downstairs door is ajar,” said Keith. “There’s a snowdrift in your lobby.”

  “How’d you get here? Are the subways running?”

  “I drove,” said Keith.

  “Why the fuck did you drive?”

  “I have a problem,” said Keith.

  Keith removed his black peacoat and shook off the snow in the hallway. He took off his black seventy-five-cent thrift-store stocking cap and his black cowhide work gloves and his black Rag & Bone boots and his red cashmere scarf. There was a duffel bag at his side, which he tossed onto a chair as he stepped through the doorway. He used the bathroom without closing the door and asked over his shoulder if there was anything to eat. They sat in the living room with matching bowls of pasta. Keith shoveled forkfuls into his mouth with the shameless focus of a teenager. He declined a beer. He declined an offer to get high. He said he didn’t want to play Xbox or listen to the Doors or watch the Weather Cha
nnel. These were troubling signs.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Why am I here?”

  “Yeah. What’s happening?”

  “I need your help,” said Keith. “The BQE is closed. The West Side Highway is closed above Fourteenth and the tunnel is closed completely. I need to stay here tonight. I’ll leave as soon as anything opens.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Before I explain,” said Keith, “I need you to think about everything you know about me.”

  “I need to do what?”

  “Just think about everything you know about me,” said Keith. “Who am I? What am I like?”

  “You’re the kind of person who shows up unannounced during a snowstorm and won’t explain why.”

  “Indulge me,” said Keith.

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “No, you’re not. Not really,” said Keith. “I need you to think about who I am. You know me. Think about the person you know.”

  He did know Keith. That was undeniable. He’d known him for fourteen years, after college but before either had moved to the city, back when they were both trying to become professional magicians. It seemed so ridiculous, in retrospect, that this had been their shared aspiration. But that was who they used to be. They would constantly run into each other at clubs on the outskirts of Las Vegas, almost always working for free, almost always finishing their sets around the time it made sense to drink coffee and eat pancakes. They were terrible magicians. They didn’t realize how terrible until they became roommates and had to reconcile the fact that working the same places at the same times meant they were the same level of dismal. They lived together for eighteen months before Keith decided failing in California was better than failing in Nevada. He moved to L.A. in the middle of the night on Halloween. They spoke on the phone the following week, then again the following month, and then lost contact for the next three years. There was no dispute. There were no hard feelings. It was pure male laziness. He did not expect to see Keith again, which bothered him (although not enough to stop it from happening). He gave up on magic when his parents died in a fire. He took the insurance money and moved to Manhattan, a move intended to eliminate the possibility of running into anyone he knew. He didn’t want to explain who he was or what had happened. But Keith was already there, somehow, managing a used book store in the same gentrified neighborhood as his sublet. They’d both become different people, and a different kind of friendship instantly resumed. It wasn’t like Vegas at all. They were no longer irresponsible or ambitious, they never complained about the price of doves or rabbits, and there were no drunken arguments about the ethics of Val Valentino. Magic was never referenced, even in jest. It was like that part of their lives had never happened, despite being the genesis for everything between them.

  They did New Yorkish things together, particularly things that were social and sedentary and vaguely cosmopolitan. It was a high-volume, low-impact relationship. Keith was an easy person to know, mostly because Keith was unusually willing to discuss all the contradictory qualities he believed made him unknowable. He always gave spare change to the homeless while habitually classifying those who contributed to institutional charities as misguided sheeple. He believed the clearest gauge of any musical group’s significance was the moral clarity of its fan base, so he forced himself to love the Mekons and Pussy Riot. He was against abortion, the death penalty, and the space program. Virtually all of his short-lived girlfriends were black, but he didn’t have a single black male friend. He was a hospice volunteer. He hated dogs. He was obsessed with politics but never voted. He didn’t care about money, but he also didn’t make much money, so it was difficult to understand how he always had plenty of money on the rare occasions he wanted to spend a lot of it. Once, seated at a restaurant with five other people, he declared that he would happily donate a kidney to anyone he knew, with no qualms and no questions asked. But his expressed motive for doing so was problematic, in that this pledge hinged on the condition that everyone he knew would be obligated to remember he had done this and thereby view the rest of his personality through the prism of this one specific generosity. He was a glutton, but the kind of glutton who offered to wash the dishes.

  “Okay. I’m doing it. I’m thinking about who you are.”

  “Good,” said Keith. “Now tell me this: Do you consider me to be a reasonable person?”

  “Not especially.”

  “But do I at least employ reason when I make decisions? Even if you disagree with my reasoning, do you concede that some level of reasoning was involved?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And would you concede,” Keith continued, “that I’m a good person? Do you consider me a moral person?”

  “Well, you’re technically my best friend, so . . .”

  “So?”

  “So I wouldn’t classify my best friend as a bad person. I wouldn’t have a best friend who was a bad person. That would be hard to justify.”

  Keith stood up and padded into the kitchen. It felt like he was in there for a long time, in light of the circumstances and the imprecise gravity of the conversation. When he returned to the living room, he had another bowl of pasta, along with an unwrapped piece of coffee cake.

  “Here’s the two-pronged situation,” said Keith. “I can’t tell you what my problem is, and I’m going to eat this coffee cake, if that’s cool with you. It’s from Starbucks, right?”

  “It is. But you have to tell me what the problem is. Otherwise you can’t have the cake.”

  “I can’t tell you my problem,” said Keith. “For your own protection. It’s better if you don’t know. I don’t want to implicate you, and I don’t want to put you in a position where you need to lie to someone else.”

  “Did you kill somebody?”

  “Let’s say that I did,” said Keith. “Would you want to know that?”

  “You killed someone.”

  “I didn’t say I killed someone,” said Keith. “I said let’s say I killed someone. Let’s just pretend that I did. If that happened, if I killed someone, why would you assume I did that? What would be my motive?”

  “I have no idea. But I also can’t tell what we’re actually talking about, so . . .”

  “You’ve known me a long time,” said Keith. “We’re friends. Best friends, as you yourself have specified. And as you noted, you wouldn’t have a best friend who was a bad person. So let me ask you this: In all the years we’ve known each other, have I done anything that would lead you to believe that I would kill another person?”

  “On purpose? Not on purpose.”

  “But I’m a reasonable man,” said Keith. “That’s been established. You said so yourself. If a reasonable man killed someone accidentally, he would not flee the city in the dead of night. T or F? A reasonable man would call the police and explain what happened.”

  “What I actually said was that you were not especially reasonable.”

  “But you were joking, because you didn’t really know what we were talking about,” said Keith. “And you did grant that I employ reason. You believe I’m a good person who employs reason, the kind of person who has never exhibited any desire or aptitude to kill. So if that did happen—if I did kill someone—it would have to be a reasonable, justifiable act. Any other scenario would contradict every other thing you know about me. You said so yourself. You openly said you would not be best friends with an unreasonable murderer.”

  “Unless I didn’t know that the friend in question was both unreasonable and murderous.”

  “But how could that be?” asked Keith. “How could you not recognize something that profound? What is more likely: that the past fourteen years have been false, or that this current moment—though atypical—still jibes with your lived experience?”

  “The answer to that question is irrelevant. I’m not going to sit here an
d conclude that it’s okay if you hypothetically killed someone, simply because we’ve been friends for fourteen years and you haven’t killed anyone before.”

  “Here again, I did not say I killed someone,” said Keith. “But that’s a rough equivalency.”

  “Did you rape someone?”

  “Jesus, of course not. I can’t believe you’d even say that.”

  “Well, I don’t know of a lot of other crimes that are roughly equivalent to murder. If you won’t tell me what happened, what am I supposed to think? You still work in a fucking bookstore. You’re not exactly well positioned to commit treason.”

  “This is precisely why I can’t tell you my problem,” said Keith. “If you have no idea what happened, if you can’t even guess—that’s to your advantage. You have plausible deniability, in the truest sense of the definition: A reasonable, moral friend barged into your home during a nor’easter. You offered him pasta. He ate a piece of store-purchased coffee cake. He slept on your couch. You thought it was strange. His behavior annoyed you, because you were saving the coffee cake for tomorrow. But that’s all you know, and you can express that lack of knowledge with honesty. From your perspective, there’s nothing else to the story. It’s not airtight logic, but it’s a form of logic. Agree or disagree? T or F?”

  It was almost nine o’clock. He could not kick Keith out into the weather, nor could he prove that Keith had done anything warranting expulsion. He would never call the police, he wouldn’t have anything to tell them if he did, and they wouldn’t show up during a blizzard, anyway. Moreover, bad-faith reasoning appealed to his sympathies. He saw himself as the kind of guy who would always help a friend who needed help, even if that friend didn’t necessarily deserve it. In fact, especially if that friend didn’t deserve it. A friend who didn’t deserve help was indeed a friend in need. It’s easy to do the right thing when you believe what you are doing is right. It’s harder when you have no idea. They were still arguing, but it wasn’t a real argument. Keith was staying. There had never been any doubt in either of their minds.