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**If you like this story, stop bymindofbryan.comfor morefiction and other projects. You might also go toauthonomy.com, a site HarperCollins uses to find new talentand give it a good ranking. It is in a collection called“Strangely Familiar”.**TevBy Bryan Lee Petersonwith apologies to BorgesThe guard approached my cell like it was the last thing hewanted to do. I had gained a Hannibal Lecter kind of rep,and while my past might have earned it, I wasn't about tomake a daring escape set to classical music, killingeverybody on the way. I wasn't going to ever leave thisprison. I knew that much for a fact. I looked up at him tosee what he wanted."Lawyer's here," he said.He tossed in shackles, and I put them on before heopened the cell door. I don't mind talking to lawyers. Theyprovided company. We walked out of the death row block,and eventually made it to a private room that could belocked. I sat in a metal chair, across from a lawyer and apile of papers. Two guards stayed in the room with us. Itwas procedure."Hello, my name is Tom Meyers. I've been appointed todirect the appeals process of your case," he said. He wasyoung."No appeals," I said."I've noticed a few technicalities of your case thatwe might be able to use to commute your execution.""It won't stand up. I know.""But..." He was confused."I did it all. Not entirely like they said in thecase, but it was close enough. I wouldn't sweat thedetails.""You don't want appeals?""Won't change nothing. You're the third one they sent.I'll tell you the same story as the others, and then you'llgo back to your office, have a shot of that 20 year scotchyou like so much, then probably another, and then you'll
 
try to forget me, but you won't be able to."He looked at me funny, wondering how I knew. I smiledback at him to set him more at ease."I can't drop it. The Office of the DA will need afull report," he said. "Start at the beginning.""You'll see," I told him."There are neighborhoods that are dead ends. You knowthem. You probably lock the doors when you drive through,if you ever found a reason why you'd have to drive throughthem. You don't want to break down there. You don't want toget off at the Dunton exit on the freeway, that's why thefreeway goes clear past. If you saw my neighborhood in yourwindshield, you'd turn back. I don't know what businessoutsiders have there anyway. And if you were born in aneighborhood like mine, you were dead before you even gotstarted. It's just a matter of time. You can talk about thecrime, the poverty, the drugs, the pollution, they're allparts of the same beast. The neighborhood is a predator,it's always stalking you. All around you are its claws andfangs, its hot breath seeping into your lungs, and thesound of its heartbeat that lingers in the back of yourmind. It gives you fear. We all live scared there, nomatter how much we deny it."If you grow up there, you feel powerless. There's nochance of getting out safe and respectable. It stripsrespectable right from your ribs. Everybody I ever known,none of them never made it out, except into the ground, orin prison like me. Never anything to strive for, never ashining example, you learn who you are from yourenvironment."Me, I grew up in Dunton. And I always wanted to getout. I wanted to be better than the rest of the shitbagsthat lived there. You do what you can, you do what youlearn in the streets, 'cause the schools don't teachnothing. First way I ever got a leg up was picking pockets,petty burglary. Fuck, I did what I had to and I never gotcaught. Cops didn't care to investigate things like that.They don't even come through at night. Isn't safe for them.Maybe it was luck I didn't get caught. Maybe even then Tevwas protecting me, grooming me, maybe it knew I would findit. Predestination and crap like that. Fuck, think of that.It was controlling me from way back then. Fuck."Am I in this cell because of the neighborhood?Neighborhood didn't send me to death row. It's just my end.Cause is a funny thing. You'd think cause starts from anevent, and plays out until its momentum is gone, a chancehappening that sets you into motion until your whole life
 
is a series of dismal fucking events. And then each ofthose sets off another series of dismal events for anybodyyou touch, an avalanche of fucking up."Or does cause work backwards, from effect? The end isset, and the causes play out backwards, to a logicalbeginning. You don't think that it could work that way, butI know better, I think I do. I think about it a lot. Fuck.If only it were that clear. I can tell you how it ends, Ican tell you how anything ends. I can tell you, because Tevtold me. Beginnings are a little less clear for me."I know you want to know about Tev. I'll get to it. Nouse in hurrying me. I know when my time's up, you can'thurry me."The neighborhood was old. Old buildings, clangingsteam heat, peeling paint, you could pull bricks out of thewalls of the buildings, some of them. Pull the bricks rightout. You'd hear about porches collapsing all the time. Thewood had rotted out from them. Everybody was poor, and Idon't mean cutting it somehow. I mean broke like cut you upfor a dollar. When nobody's got nothing, anybody will doanything. That's a lesson from the street. Some peoplefound themselves there. and when they did, they never left.Like the air. I never seen air so still as there. Never acool breeze. Hot and humid and stagnant and stinking likeshit. Even the air couldn't get out."I worked my way through the neighborhood, drugs,gangs, odd jobs. Had a good deal once that gave me a lot ofmoney. The guy I was supposed to pay it to got killed in ashooting, so I figured, what the fuck? I bought a suit,went to the bank looking respectable, put the rest of itdown on a building. Twelve flats. You know, retirement. Icould live off the income after I paid the mortgage. It wasenough. Got me off the streets, which suited me. My kneeswere hurting, you know? That was ten years ago or so. Itwas run down when I bought it, and I didn't really care. Iworked as the super, as well. I wasn't going to paysomebody to do that shit. I didn't lift a goddamned fingerto do anything, though. Trash that lived there hardly paidrent, what did they expect? I fixed up my apartment, sure,had it pretty nice.""You still lived there?""Of course I lived there, you can't escape, remember?"It was the goddamned hot water that led me to it.Came home after a long day out, no hot water. Now if it wasanybody else's place but mine, I'd have told them to fuckoff, but it was mine and I'm not the kind for cold showers."I went down into the basement. The light was out, I
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