Like bullets on tin, the rain, like a constant drone, like drowning in salad forks, endless waves, not to hide in, not to ride on, not to break against the coast, endless waves of water, drifting in from the ocean, the ocean not too far away. Daniel and Peter had had their silences, their moments where it might as well have been a one-man operation. Or so it had seemed. Peter had felt it the moment the red lamp turned on, felt it even before Daniel had left, felt that void, that extra silence. It was extra silent. Except for the rain, endless, unrelenting, Peter let time take care of itself and got the best out of the solitude, the thoughts streaming more freely, more chaotically, less worried about legibility, there was no audience but the mind, and the mind was the performer and the audience in one and Peter saw that this was good. Peter made sure to be on the sidelines, ready to untangle, to untie, to cut through, let there be free debate between mind and mind but let it not go unsupervised lest things emerged that were counterproductive to the main goal at large. Whatever it may be.
Tonight the main goal was carved in stone and cardboard, carved in press releases and year-end budget reports. They would catch this person. This killer. Peter felt an unwavering certainty about it, felt years of experience and years of learning how to analyze situations to fit said experience tell him that after tonight there would be no more problems with this killer. Which left only some six billion potential killers to worry about, several millions of these under Peters jurisdiction.
Of course there were patterns, there were statistics, if you lived in a certain place, had a certain age, a certain income and an uncertain upbringing you were, statistically, more prone to end life than someone living just a few hundred yards away. But that was the thing with statistics; at the end of the day everything was fifty/fifty. It either happened or it didn’t. That revelation had come to Peter at an early age. Something he could thank the Children for. And he did. Their encouragement of abstract thought right from the introduction into grade school had served Peter no end throughout the years. He could still recall, however, that some of the thoughts that had come to him as a pre-teen and earlier had been so abstract that he had had no place to put them in his conscious mind and so they had been placed away from everything else, where they eventually probably caused more harm than if they had been more thoroughly examined. The whole concept of time as a manmade framework to avoid our little heads exploding had been of no good use to him at the age of seven. Yet here he was, flipping through his youth at the speed of the mind, reaping the harvest of a youth doused in theory and an adult life surrounded by the really real world.
Moments ticked by.
Seconds, minutes, it seemed to Peter that one moved as fast as the other. This was the closest to meditation he ever came, this degradation of the time units, the removal of importance, the lack of clear-cut distinction between one of one and one of another. The Children had an extensive portion of their recruiting material deal with meditation. Just like every other new religion, like every other movement. He had been a while finding the obvious parts out, it had taken him more time than could have been expected to see that the Children were just another on a long list of faiths that promised answers to every question at the slight cost of everything. Give up your worldly possessions, the end is not only neigh, it’s actually here, right now, inside each and every one of us. What you had doesn’t matter, there will be no escape, there was no escape, everything ended and you just didn’t notice. That was a prime philosophy. It was a fun brainteaser. What if the world had actually ended, Ragnarok, all the gods dead, the Earth the last unended piece of Creation?
The answer had finally come to Peter one day during scripture studies. It was really quite simple.
So what? If the gods were dead then why even worry? If the end had already been, shouldn’t one try to live life to the fullest, happier with what one had now that it was gone, so close to everything lost, never having to lose it again? All the ritual trappings of the Children had paled that day, instead of going deeper into the ‘mystery’ Peter had slowly pulled himself away, tactfully, quietly, but away. He had left as soon as he could, gone away to find deeper mysteries or just people who could live without them. There were no deeper mysteries to find than those in crime and the fighting of it. Peter had thrown himself at training as he was throwing himself at the past now, rather than to ponder the present. The past was over, ended, right now there was a colleague out there on his own, walking up and down in the rain, checking cars for parking violations, keeping his eyes secretly out for a face that they were uncertain how looked. They had put up posters in several post-offices, not too many, they didn’t want the killer to know he was wanted or to know that his foes knew his face. Peter knew that face, had memorized it, and so did Daniel. Out there in his sunglasses playing a role, out there one on one with a multiple murderer. Damn! What was taking so long? Waiting, waiting. Was that it? Was that the signal. Tap tap, yeah, that was it. Into the rain. Towards the end.
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I leave him alone with his dragons, a few cents poorer. He screams something that sounds vaguely like god-is-the-fire-that-blesses-you-but-where-does-that-fire-come-from? Where indeed. One-track mind like his would tell me that the ‘blessed fire’ was a sulfur reeking by-product of some large, winged beast covered in silver and gold scales. So I don’t ask. He shouldn’t be out on a night like this, no one should, there must be a shelter or a church, somewhere warm, where does my tax money go? To what? Wet roads that stretch for an eternity only to double back on themselves. Rain like this, there’ll be no one to drop a pittance in his cup, no one to help him build a fortune. Every fortune starts small, starts with nothing at all. I’ve got to keep him out of my mind, can’t get caught up in every tragedy I meet, every mishap, every downfall. It sucks to be me too, I want some pity, me, me. Sure I have a roof over my head, but that makes being outside in the world that much worse. Makes the rain that much colder, bone chill.
Sure I have throngs of people who love me, I mean, on a scale of one to ten I think I’ve got pretty much every sub-category covered. Fraternal, paternal, maternal, passing, glancing, everlasting. And now I’m away from them all, away from everything, they’re all separated from just one person, but me, I’m separated from an ocean of faces, a forest of arms and what have you. Alone in the rain, why, why. Oh. Oh yeah. Booze. But then, what am I doing by the Park? Nearest one from here is inwards toward the theater district. I must really have let my attention slip. A good party will do that, well, it’s not really a party, a gathering of old friends.
Boy the Park is anonymous at night, a wall of branches and leaves. Hotels and branches and old metal fences and the city is hiding, the city is in the lights and far off – can’t be too far off, the Manhattan got to me, haven’t had lunch – traffic sounds. Time to turn inwards, pedestrian traffic is picking up. A bunch of Japanese businessmen. Another panhandler. Some guy on a cell phone.
Red vermouth, need that, maybe some vodka, a port? Perhaps. Maraschino cherries, that’s for sure. Car drives off from the hotel in kind of a hurry.
Oh fuck, I’ve forgotten my wallet!
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If I come with you, what then?
Changes. Cataclysmic changes.
That’s what I was afraid of. Let me go. Alone.
Can’t do it. Won’t.
Then we have a problem.
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