The Many Deaths of Anthony Petrano - Part Three

The window is open and outside someone is raking leaves. The scritch of plastic tines on grass floats through the kitchen. Anne is at the table with chicken soup and the newspaper. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her husband Frank walk past in the hall. She hears the bathroom sink, hand washing. He's been in the garage all morning with the lawn mower, or the water heater, or whatever it is he's fixing now.

Anne's eyes meander through lines of text. She dips her spoon into the bowl of chicken and noodles, but it's some time before she picks it up again. “Frank,” she yells. “Frank, come here.”

He walks into the kitchen wearing a flannel shirt and a preoccupied expression; focused on his fingernails, he says, "What is it?"

"We know him, don't we?" Anne points at the newspaper on the table. "Don't we know him?" She looks up and sees Frank not paying attention. "Anthony Petrano," she says. "How do we know him?"

Frank picks under the nail of a pinky with his thumb and shrugs without looking up. “Doesn't ring a bell,” he says.

“Oh, come on,” says Anne. “Anthony Petrano. I know we know him. Does he go to St. Luke's?”

“Maybe,” says Frank. “Petrano. Sounds Italian – probably Catholic.” He moves to the refrigerator and opens it, leans into its cold glow and hum. The sound of Anne whispering the name to herself floats through the room. Her voice mingles with the sound of raking leaves and falls into a syncopated rhythm with the scrapes.

"Petrano...Petrano..." Anne says. "Do you think he's maybe in mom's tennis league?"

Hidden by the refrigerator door, Frank shrugs. He picks through some leftovers, but doesn't take anything out.

"Come look at this picture, and tell me if we know him. I swear we know him, Frank."

"Annie, I told you, I don't."

"Just come here for a second. Look at this."

Frank widens his eyes and flares his nostrils with an exasperated inhalation, but he closes the door and walks to the kitchen table. He stands behind her chair and looks over her shoulder as if he were proctoring a geometry test. His eyes scan the article from the bottom up: the blurred, gray text, a grainy photograph, the headline.

“His wife's name is Alice. Do you recognize that? Alice Petrano?”

“He's dead?”

Anne nods.

“He's dead?”

“Yeah,” Anne says. “Car accident, last night. Some kids. I wonder if...was he on the City Council?”

“Let me see that.” Frank leans over his wife – he doesn't touch her, doesn't brush her hair with his billowed shirt – and picks up the paper; the newsprint crackles in his hands. The article isn't long. He scans it, the picture, the article again.

Anthony Petrano was pronounced dead at the scene, killed by three Union College students in a Ford Escort. An accident. “A simple accident,” the paper says, but Anthony Petrano is dead. Frank can picture them, all of them – the three kids, and the wife who heard the crash and ran outside – all huddled around the body, all looking down with hands held over their mouths – it was dark enough that they couldn't really see, Frank pictures, so they couldn't just look, but had to peer at the body – everyone waiting for something, for recognition, for an arm to move or a voice to sound out in the still air, and nothing happening but people standing there, silent and held back by their own hands.

Or it wasn't like that. The wife was screaming, maybe. Slapping and hysterical, her arms swinging and chopping and smacking at the others. Belting those two teenage boys with words like, “Why,” and, “How,” and, “No,” and, “No.” The young men with arms held up and crossed for protection, shielding themselves with “Please,” and “Wait.” “You don't understand.”

And the girl – the girl who the woman had forgotten about – maybe, the girl, she stepped quietly, and maybe, the girl, she reached quietly, and maybe she touched quietly, touched, with just the tips of her fingers, maybe, she touched the back of the woman's shoulder, to calm her, the woman, she touched her, the girl. But the woman, in high dudgeon now, in full fury, she reacted in full fury and swung the back of her hand around the back of her body so that it landed with, not a smack, but with a thud on the girl's already reddened cheek. And although the diamond set in the woman's engagement ring was small and dulled like a milky eye from its years, it cut just the same, just as sharp, just as clean, just like the sharpest thing in the world. One long gash of blood opened on the girl's face, and the scar would someday become the kind of a scar that an artist would draw on a comic book anti-hero to show that, for all of the lives she'd saved, for all the good she'd done, there was a dark side lurking beneath her surface, the girl's, a dark side just itching and waiting to crawl out from that slashed up piece of skin.

“You don't think he was one of the old men who works at the Price Chopper, do you?”

“What?”

“What? Maybe he was. You don't know.”

“Anne, he's just a guy who got hit by a car.”

“Yeah, but I know him. I swear.” Anne grabs the paper back and flattens it on the table.

“Just give it a rest.”

She doesn't seem to hear him. Frank walks to the counter, takes a bagel from a plastic bag, slices it, and puts it in the toaster. He watches her read. The article ended with a quote from the wife, Alice. What happened when she heard the crash: “My heart just sank. It just sank right through the floor,” and Frank can picture that, too. He pictures it happening now, to his wife, at the table. A red, squishy plummet that tumbles from her chest, disappears down through formica, down through the floorboards and into the empty bedroom below. It falls like a ghost through the air and seeps into the carpet, into the damp basement cement, and deep deep into the center of the world where Frank can't see it any more. Where it is gone. The bagel pops up and Frank pulls it from the toaster slot. He eats it without condiment.

After a while Alice says, “Those poor kids.”

“What?”

“The kids in the car. It's sad. I mean, what if they go to jail? That one driving? That's vehicular manslaughter, isn't it?”

“Anne.”

“What? You watch the same episodes of Law & Order I do. That's a crime. And this kid is what, eighteen, nineteen years old? It says it was an accident, and poof, that's it. One accident and that's it for him.”

“What about the guy who died?”

“Well, sure, but he's dead. What does he care?”

“You just spent the last twenty minuted trying to figure out if you know this guy. Now you don't want anything to happen to the kid who killed him?”

“That's not what I said. I just said it was an an accident.”

“Well, sure,” Frank says. “But he's dead.” Frank bites into the dry second half of his bagel and looks at his wife until she curls her lips to one side and turns back to the paper again.

“What if it was me,” Anne says, eyes down, half quiet.

“Oh, come on. Don't do this.”

“What? What if it was me? What if I was driving along one day, and I...I don't know, I look down at the radio to change the station. And when I look down, someone starts to cross the street in front of me. Only I don't look up again until it's too late. So even though I slam on the brakes, it's too late, or I hit a patch of wet leaves, or something – black ice – and I crash into him and he's dead. It's an accident but...but there. He's dead. Would I deserve to go to jail?”

“Anne.”

“What? Would I?”

“Anne, come on. That's not even what I was talking about.”

“Well what were you talking about, then?”

A beat, and then Frank flutters his lashes and rolls his eyes; he shakes his head and mutters. “Jesus, I don't know,” he says, just loud enough so Anne can hear. “Just wanted a bagel.”

“What?”

“I said, I don't know, Anne! I don't know! Christ – your questions, this guy. I don't know, okay? I don't know who he is, I don't know how you know him, I don't know what'll happen to this idiot kid or his friends. I don't – just–” His speech runs out of steam, stalls. He looks at his wife and her face is contorted with shock; her eyes wide and framed by her glasses, she looks like a child. She looks like an eleven year-old kid. “You know what – forget it. I'm in the garage. If you want me, I'm in the garage.”

*

The Many Deaths of Anthony Petrano - Part Two

"It was okay," Jenny said from the back seat.

“Only okay? Are you crazy?” Mark turned around in shotgun so he could argue more effectively. “You dumb bitch: it was amazing!”

Jenny punched Mark's seatback. “I told you not to call me that.”

“Well what am I supposed to do?” Mark said. “We go see what's probably going to be the movie of the year, if not the decade, and you give me that review? 'It was okay,' Jenny Zambrowski, Dumb Bitch Quarterly. I mean, come on – were you even in the same theater?” He turned to the boy driving next to him who was grinning, but trying not to laugh. “Doug, you sat next to her. Was she there? Did she leave after the trailers or something?”

“Dude, calm down,” Doug said. “Not everybody wants to suck Christian Bale's dick the way you do.”

“Thank you,” Jenny said. “I just didn't buy the British accent.”

“Listen,” Mark said, calmer, more composed. “First of all, you two seriously need to have your libidos checked if you don't want to play a couple rounds of SexMatch 2000 with Christian Bale. And second,” Mark's voice rose to a yell again, “the man is British, you stupid, stupid bitch! Christ!”

Jenny whacked Mark's seat again, harder this time, and Doug's laughter finally broke.

“I mean, how can you not buy the British accent? It's his normal, fucking voice.”

“It did sound a little weird,” Doug said. “Just because he's usually doing an American accent, I mean. And besides, the whole thing with the baby at the end? Really? Don't tell me you bought into that shit.”

The car's interior went silent momentarily while Mark held his fist to his mouth. Outside, the world was dark. A car with one headlight passed going the opposite direction. “Okay,” Mark said. “I'll give you the thing with the baby.”

“Ha!” Jenny punched the seat again.

“But I will fight anyone who criticizes Christian Bale's acting ability. To the death. The man is a giant among Vern Troyers.”

Silence again, save the sound of thick rubber on wet asphalt.

“Really?” Jenny said. “Mini Me?”

“To the death,” said Mark. There was a pause, and another, and then, without warning, he unhooked his seatbelt and launched himself headfirst into the back seat. Doug watched his own eyes roll in the rearview mirror as a mix of muffled shrieks and growls emerged from the scrambled pair behind him. The sounds of combat changed to giggles first, belly-laughs next, and Doug felt his heart sink a little deeper into his chest. He could feel it happening; again, it was happening. The same thing that had happened with Laura. The same thing that had happened with Katie. The same thing that always happened. They always found their way to Mark; he always managed to pull them away.

“Hey,” Doug yelled, straining to get a better view in the mirror of where Mark's hands were, what expression was on Jenny's face. “Come on, guys. Knock it off.”

He thought he'd been doing alright. He'd gotten the seat next to her in the theater. He'd gotten the handbrush on three separate occasions while grabbing for popcorn. And she'd smiled. All the time, she'd smiled. At him – Doug – and once she'd smiled while doing a category five hair-behind-the-ear-tuck at the same time. But give Mark two minutes on the soapbox and it's over. He'd lost another one.

"Ow, hey!" Doug said as Mark's foot clipped his ear. "Seriously, I'm gonna get pulled over. Quit it." In the mirror, their movements were a blur.

“To the death!” Mark yelled, and Jenny accompanied him with an exuberant squeal.

“I said quit it,” Doug said, but quietly this time, so no one else would hear. He batted Mark's foot with his right hand. He turned around for a second and saw Mark's teeth flash in the light of a streetlamp; he saw the glint in Jenny's eye. Doug reached behind him and slapped his hand on Mark's back, grabbed a handful of sweatshirt, and tried to heave him back up to the front seat.

He only took his eyes off the road for a second.

Just one second.

There was a terrible noise – a thump, but the kind of a thump like dynamite thumps; the kind of a thump that thumps you from skull to coccyx and back again – and the car lurched sideways and up. Mark flew in the air and crushed Doug's hand between his back and the ceiling. He landed on Jenny and they all heard the breath go out of her in one, amazed expulsion of air. And they all heard the tires squeal along the blacktop, and they heard the leaves crackle under the tires. But most of all they heard the thump. It echoed in every one of their heartbeats and made sure they knew what they had done. It made sure they knew that whatever they had hit – whatever it had been before – it was dead now. It made sure of that.

*

The Many Deaths of Anthony Petrano - Part One

The beginning of the beginning of another story. Here you go.

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The Many Deaths of Anthony Petrano

A chill tickled the air to attention. It was a good chill – the first autumn chill – and it brought with it the smell of dying leaves and snow that was yet to fall. The glow of the living room light bled onto the lawn from the open front door. Anthony Petrano stood under the transom taking the chill into his nostrils, into his lungs, into the blood of his muscles and veins. He appreciated autumn. He loved and respected it in a way that he knew few others did. His wife, for one, and his grandchildren. So resentful of the end of summer, the inevitable return to raking and math tests. They didn't understand autumn the way he did. They didn't understand the life that burned at the edge of the chill. Anthony took another deep breath and hefted the black garbage bag in his hand, walked out of the warmth of the living room light.

It was dark outside, but light enough to see that he would have to rake the leaves soon. Next week, probably. The Monday after at the latest. The grass between the leaves bristled against his bare feet. The ground was cold and a little wet from a late afternoon shower. The feeling reminded him of when he was younger – when he used to wear a beard – and what the frost felt like when he rubbed it off his face after coming in from the winter.

The streetlight on the other side of the road ticced on and off. Alice called it, “The neurotic lamp.” She'd written letters and spoken in town meetings about it. It wasn't that people ignored her, it was just that you can only fix the same streetlight so many times before you give up and go deaf to any more complaints about it. Anthony told her that when her latest letter to the editor of the Schenectady Gazette was returned with the words “Cease and Desist” stamped in red ink across the body.

Anthony dropped the trash bag on the corner of asphalt that wedded driveway and roadway, and he watched to light wink on and off in rapid succession. He tried to find a pattern in it. As a child, he'd learned Morse code with his neighbor, Louie Carvallo. They could each see into the other's window across the street, and they used to send each other messages at night by switching their own lamps on and off. D-A-N-N-Y-I-S-A-B-O-O-B when Danny, Anthony's older brother, had gotten him grounded for breaking the vase that Danny had been tossing around like a football with his friend. And M-O-N-A-I-S-A-M-O-A-N-E-R when Louie had finally lost his virginity. And B-A-C-K-B-Y-X-M-A-S when Louie left with the rest of the 1-A boys. The streetlight flickered dot-dash, dash-dash, and then fizzled and went black entirely. It would turn on again, Anthony knew, in an hour or two at the outside. From around the bend that led to Route 7 he heard the engine of an approaching car. He turned toward the sound instinctively. As it came into view around the curve of the night, Anthony noticed it only had one headlight.

“Padiddle,” he said, as his daughter had done when she saw such things back before she knew how to drive. He laughed at the word, and at the thought of his daughter, still just barely post-pubescent, scowling at the music on the radio, touching her finger to the roof at the sight of a one-lamped car. She did it to, “Ward off evil spirits,” she said. And he would do it too, if he knew what was good for him. Anthony watched as the headlight swung around to point at him. He waited for the breeze the car would bring with it.

*

First Draft - The End

So this is the last section of this particular story. I don't have a title yet, so any suggestions would be much appreciated. And no, Jordan, I'm not calling it "The Suckiest Suck That Ever Sucked." That can't be the title of every story I write.

Anyway, without further ado...
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"Timmy, are you ok?" she says. She only ever calls him Timmy if she thinks something's wrong.

She knows something's wrong, he thinks, before he realizes it's even her. Before he realizes that the voice is more than just his imagination.

“Why are you standing like that?” Kara says. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing. No,” he says. “It's nothing. I'm fine.” He realizes he should look at her so he straightens up and turns. To prove that he's alright; to prove that nothing's wrong. He sees her, and she's colored with concern. Her fingers are folded at her chest, and her elbows are pressed tight to her sides. Tim smiles to reassure her, “Fine,” but he feels the smile go wrong. He can feel that it's one of those sickly smiles that looks like it's being pulled down at the corners by some unseen weight. He can feel that it looks almost sarcastic, that it looks almost mocking. Kara's eyes and expression go flat, and he sees that he's done nothing to reassure her, that he must only look worse. So Tim lets the smile fall, lets his eyes droop, lets his face pull his head down a little. His breath escapes him in one, thick rush. He looks up at her again. He says, “Kara. I think you're great.”

Nothing about her face changes, and This, he thinks, is unexpected.

“I, I think you're great. And I just wanted you to know that. And, but, well...”

“You're breaking up with me,” she says. Her voice is vacant of emotion.

“What? No, I'm...well, um...”

Her voice the same, her face the same – flat – she says, “You're breaking up with me.”

“Kara, I,” Tim starts. “I just, well...” His gaze leans out the window again. Earlier he'd thought that the rain's intensity was growing, but now he sees that it's slowed to a patient drizzle. “Yes,” he says. “I am.”

“Fine.”

She doesn't leave. She stays. Tim can see the haze of her in his periphery. This is something that she does, he knows, so she can win. She waits so she can have the last word. She waits until she has you by the eyes. Tim focuses on the Draper building, on the tan-brown of the bricks. He doesn't want her to win. He doesn't know why, but there is that feeling, strong and at the base of him – that feeling of, No.

“Fine,” Kara says again.

Tim feels his neck twitch toward her. A gust of wind throws some rain against the window. It obscures the view, and as the water sheets downward, it makes the Draper building look as if it's dancing, as if it's wriggling back and forth like a charmed snake. Tim knows that Kara is waiting, and that she can wait for a long, long time, but I won't look, he thinks. Not until she's gone. I won't look. I won't look till it's over. But it doesn't end. She waits. And she waits. And she waits. Tim's neck twitches, and then it twitches more and more, and although he doesn't want to see, he wants desperately to look. He wants desperately for the twitching to stop, and the moment to stop, and for all of it to stop and be over with: gone.

“Fine,” Kara says with flat, affectless fury.

I'm going to look, Tim thinks. I can't help it, I'm just...I'm going to look. I know it.

“You want to break up with me, that's fine, Timothy.”

And, She never calls me 'Timothy.'

Outside, a shadow appears to fall over the Draper building, darker than the rest of the day's shadow.

Just go away, Tim thinks. Please, just something happen, and make her go away.

“But look at me when I say this.”

And like that – like she had snapped, or yanked a leash around, or like she had smacked him hard in the face – he turns to her. Christ, he thinks. And as he turns: the sound.

The crack, the breach. The thunder that is not thunder, but worse. So loud that inches-thick, body-proof windows can't hold it back. So loud, it shakes the earth. So loud, the ground itself is afraid.

And because he can't see it, the sound – the explosion and crush of fifty stories-worth of concrete, metal, glass, of flesh – of one whole building as it topples in on itself and crashes down outside, because it is sound without source, for Tim, at first, because it is only sound, the sound has no meaning. It is only sound: awful, terrible, horrible sound. But then he sees Kara look outside, and he sees all of the heads around the office look outside. And so he looks outside, out the window, through the rain, and he sees what the sound was, and he sees what has happened.

Someone, speaking for everyone, says, “Oh. Oh my God.”

And still the sound is there.

He felt horrible about it later. He never told anyone about it later. But the first thing that Tim thought when he looked out the window and saw the shattered remains of the Draper building – a cloud of dust and terror swirling up and consuming one black, bony spike of tortured architecture – the first thing he thought was, Thank God. Thank God that building just blew up. And before the first siren-wail could be heard on the street below, he was gone: alone and atremble on the shiny men's room floor.

First Draft, Part Six

The water cooler is in the corner by the windows - grand, wall-wide stretches of glass that look out onto the expanse of skyscrapers and pollution that fill the city and give it life and give it death. Tim pulls a paper cone down from its holster, fills it with water, gulps it down, still hunched halfway over. He re-fills and re-gulps, then re-fills again. On his third cup he stands up straight. He takes his time; he takes a sip. He looks at the world outside, at the gray sky, at the gray streets far below, at the gray rain that he thinks has only just begun to fall.

The buildings in the city all used to have different names than the names they have now. Tim used to know them, most of them. His father taught them to him years and years ago. He was a businessman, Tim's father, with an office in the old Draper building. He used to take Tim to work with him some summer days, and he'd rattle off the names of the buildings as they walked past. Warren Brothers, Viceroy, Hart & Landers and more. And now the Hart&Landers building is the SunCola building. And the Warren Brothers building is the First Bank Center. And the Draper building that once was the tallest building in the state...Well, that's still the Draper building. But not for much longer. It can't be much longer, I'm sure.

Tim stares at the Draper building, just a few blocks away from the Sanseko Industries building where he is now. He remembers wearing a tiny suit and tie as a child, and the way he followed his father through the office and pretended his lunchbox was a briefcase full of important files. He kept out of the way well enough as a boy, and none of the other men minded having him around. Most of their square jaws cracked into grins when they saw him approach; some of them ruffled his hair and called him, “Buster Brown.” But sometimes a meeting was too important for him. Sometimes a client would come, and Tim would have to hide under his father's desk, silent and secret, until whatever business that needed to be done was done. Those were Tim's favorite times. He would wedge himself in between his father's socks and the thick, oak paneling of the desk, and suddenly the whole world would change. He would be a hero cornered in a cave, waiting for the right moment to steal some treasure, or save some damsel, from under the monocled eye of a mustachioed villain. Or he would be a spy in a deadly foreign land, collecting secret information about “unit cost” and “shipping expenditures” to bring back home to Uncle Sam. Or he would be, or he would be, or he would be...Something. Back when I could be anything, he thinks. Back when I wasn't what I became. This...

Tim finishes his cup of water and drops it in the trash bin next to the cooler. He leans closer to the window. He stares out through the curtains of rain. Little gargoyles run up and down the corners of the Draper building, but Tim can't make them out. He leans closer to the window, until his forehead bumps against the glass. It's bulletproof up here, he was told – up on the 39th floor. You could run and hurl yourself at it, full speed, and the worst that would happen to you would be a cheap bruise. Tim tilts his head downward, hears a small squeak: skin sliding on a smooth surface. Below, apart from the indistinct gray of sidewalk and weather, he sees a yellow line of cabs, all stuck, all waiting for the light to change.

First Draft: Part Five

And then it starts. It starts when he returns from the break room. Tim runs back through his speech, from the top, from “Kara, I think you're great,” and, as he does, his words begin to betray him. They disappear, the words. They vanish. At first they only do so in drips: one or two at a time. At first he thinks nothing of it. They're drips. It's nothing. Tim opens his notebook and scoops the the words back up, plugs up the holes. And he moves on.

And then he goes through the speech again. And then it's a phrase that goes missing. And then an entire sentence. And panic trembles through the voice in Tim's head as he comes to “The Reasons.” And then, when he comes to “The Reasons,” they're gone. All of them. The whole section, a paragraphs-long piece of script, vanished and blank.

Gone.

Tim tries to backtrack. He goes back to the sentence before.

Gone.

All gone. So Tim reads his notes. He re-reads, his words, his sentences, his phrases. He says them out loud; he hammers them into his mind with his voice. But it only feeds the flood. As soon as they flow in, the words, the phrases, they cascade out of him again. Tim closes his eyes tight and tries to pull them back, but they're all gone. Simply gone. All of them. Gone. And the only thing they've left behind is static.

Tim starts over. He reboots. “Kara, I think you're great,” he says. His voice is soft and measured. “And–”

Kssssssssssssssss.

“And–”

Kssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

“Shit.”

The clock on his computer screen clicks over to 1:42 in silence, but Tim feels it like someone behind him taking another step closer. Like someone behind him adjusting her grip on a knife. He's managed to recall a few snippets of the speech. The first line, which never left, and a few shopworn pearls of wisdom about friendship, about why they'll both be better off apart. Nothing more.

1:43. Another step. Tim thinks that Kara will be back soon. He thinks that, Kara will stop by. Because Kara always stops by. She always has to stop by, she can't just leave me alone for one damn day. And then I'll have to do it. I'll just have to do it.

The thought that hasn't entered his mind, now that the speech is gone, is that he won't do it: that he won't break up with Kara, that he won't have to. As each minute ticks down, he knows that he's only getting closer and closer to the inevitable. And his terror deepens like a river-split canyon.

Tim thinks about the first line, and that makes him feel worse. He imagines Kara's reaction to it. She smiles at the end of the sentence. Her lips turn up, like the wings of a heart, at his words. Because he thinks she's great. Because he's going to say something nice, something sweet, something lovely. Because, maybe, he's going to say, “I love you,” and maybe they'll be together forever. Or so she thinks. Or so he thinks she thinks.

And he thinks, What if I can't go on? What if I see her smile and I can't do it? He sees himself in his mind, staring at the smiling woman across the way, helpless in the face of her happiness. He's stuck. He opens his eyes to get away from the look on Kara's face. He looks at the computer screen. 1:46. Tim's mouth is dry. Water, he thinks, and he stands up and walks away.