The Suicide Man

Tom Mizell

Michael didn’t trust the mid-day rain. It was good cover, sure. Folks kept their heads down, tried to keep the water off their faces, never stopped to take long looks at the other passerby. But he thought the sun was always preferable. Customers were like to sympathize with the rain, let themselves get washed in the gloom of it. If a feeling was real, it was at its realest in the sunshine.

All the same, he liked to keep a schedule. He popped the hood of his jacket over his head, weaved through the foot traffic, and tried to keep his feet dry. It was his third job on the West side in as many weeks. All men, not that he minded.

It was a gray part of town. Folks shuffled between half-empty shops and half-empty food joints, catching up with each other in convenience store parking lots. It was a dying place, like so many places were now. It was the like the bomb had already dropped, but no one had bothered to notice.

Numbers clung to doors with duct tape. Michael scanned for 1324 but the rain made it difficult to tell between the buildings. They’d been cookie-cutter houses once, back before anyone living could remember. Now each had been carved into at least three or four dwellings that could only be distinguished by how many bicycles with missing wheels were chained to the front steps.

It took three rings before a scratchy voice answered Michael on the intercom.

“Hello?”

“Courier,” Michael answered, the agreed upon lie.

“Come on up,” said the voice, followed by the mechanical buzz of the door.

Carpet had turned yellow from years of stains on the creaking staircase. Michael did carry a courier bag, one of those insulated totes for food delivery. He often thought that this was being a bit too cautious, no one had ever really noticed him on the job. All the same, he took some comfort playing the role. Sometimes he would fancy himself a real courier, fantasize about scraping tips together from pizza deliveries.

Michael’s customer was waiting in the doorway on the second floor. He looked maybe fifty, with thinning hair and smoker’s teeth.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, “it felt silly to make you knock. Uh. Come in, I guess.”

They made their way to a cluttered seating area. Discarded take-out containers littered the floor space, so the host sat cross-legged on the couch. Michael found himself in a metal folding chair that had taken the place of a traditional recliner.

“So. Um. Do I just- Uh.” The customer reached for a thick, brown wallet. A few loose business cards spilled onto the couch as he pulled out a stack of hundreds. Michael counted the bills. A thousand, even. Flat rate. He tucked the cash in his back pocket.

Michael’s customer wouldn’t meet his eyes. He was looking off to the middle distance, locked on something no one else could see. The man’s hand trembled as he absently scratched his scalp. Michael wasn’t surprised. Most folks were shells by the time they called him.

“You’re sure about this?” Michael asked, though he already knew the answer.

The man nodded slowly. “Please. I can’t do this anymore, I can’t- I don’t have the strength. Please. Help me.”

Michael opened his bag and removed the pistol, silencer already attached. He pressed it to the man’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

It only took a few minutes to clean up, do a little staging. After all, he was a professional.

It was lonely to be the Suicide Man, but it paid rent. A real hit could cost upward of twenty grand, but Michael was just a trigger man so he kept it at a flat thousand. There wasn’t much difficulty to it, no prowling, no ambush. All he did was help people.

Michael offered his services to anyone desperate enough to find his unassuming little webpage. He was often surprised by the steady flow of jobs. Word of mouth wasn’t exactly an option so any boom in business just meant individual cases of desperation. Sign of the times, he figured.

The first hit had been free. Michael didn’t remember why he’d been out, but he’d come home late. When he struggled with the door a bit, he had chalked it up to the alcohol, but a few heavy pushes revealed the chair that had been half-heartedly hooked under the doorknob.

Inside, his roommate, Daniel, was huddled on the floor, breathing in shudders. Michael met Daniel’s

red, red eyes before noticing the gun that lay next to him on the floor.

“Please,” Daniel had rasped. “Please, I can’t.”

Michael went to the floor, sat with his shaking friend. When Michael went to put his arm around him, Daniel had shaken him off. It was as if Daniel was somewhere else, somewhere terrifying, and he could only reach back to Michael’s world long enough to repeat, “I can’t. Please.”

Over and over, he had repeated his plea. Eventually, Michael understood. He took the pistol in his left hand. It was light, small. The kind of gun usually found in handbags and pawn shops.

Daniel’s breathing steadied when he saw his friend take up the gun. His eyes closed as Michael held it to his forehead.

“Please. Please, I can’t.”

Harsh sunlight reflected off of white walls and French doors. Michael rarely visited the burbs, and never for a job before.

The doorbell lasted an uncomfortably long time, bellowing out a full recorded tune like it was signaling Sunday mass. The PA crackled to life, but no one spoke.

“Courier,” Michael finally offered.

For a while, there was no response. Only the static from the little speaker let him know he was not alone.

A pair of ceramic gnomes held reclined positions on the white wooden porch. Michael offered them a shrug, as if to say “What can you do?”

At last a voice, higher than Michael had expected, came over the PA. “It’s unlocked. I’m upstairs.”

The massive white door was real wood, heavy to open. Inside, the house was like a sitcom set. An open floor plan revealed carefully matched, pristinely clean furniture decorated with fake flowers in a cheery pastel color scheme. One wall was dotted with picture frames. Michael thought it was curious. There were no people in the pictures, only sunsets. Each had been taken from a different exotic beach or mountaintop.

The stairs were covered in white carpet, bordered by a dark stained wood. They formed a crisp spiral in the dead center of the home. Michael ascended with his hands at his sides, not trusting the ornate railing to hold his weight.

The stairs ended in a spacious landing that peeled off into different doorways. Noise spilled out from one, voices on a television. Michael went to turn the doorknob to that room, but thought better and knocked gently with the back of his hand.

He recognized the blank expression that haunted all of his employers, but he hadn’t expected her to be so young. She held the door with fingers that barely poked out from the long sleeves of her pink sweater. It took some time for her to work up enough breath to speak, and even then it was only an “Okay,” as she led him into the room.

The girl’s bedroom was pristine as the rest of the house. Intricately painted figurines stood watch on real wooden bookshelves. A set of colored pens was laid out ruler straight, parallel with a yellow legal pad on a glass-top desk. The notable exception to the catalog-like order of the place was the bed, or rather the bedding. Sheets were tangled up with the comforter, a fitted corner had sprung loose, and a little pillow stain had formed from a pool of spittle.

“How old are you?” Michael asked.

She didn’t answer him. Rather she slid an envelope out from under her pillow and held it out to him. The wad of bills inside was thicker than Michael was accustomed to receiving. Instead of the usual fresh-from-the-bank hundreds, his fee had been offered in a mix of crumpled tens and twenties. He pushed the pile of sheets aside so he could sit on the bed and count. The girl looked nervously, not quite at Michael, but at the spot on the floor nearest his feet.

The money was all there. One thousand. Michael pocketed the envelope. He reached for his bag, but stopped short.

“How old are you?” he repeated.

The girl’s eyes snapped into focus and she met his gaze first with confusion, and then despair.

“No no no, please. Please. I gave you the money. It’s all there.”

Michael didn’t know what to say. The girl sat at the other end of the bed and started to cry. Michael could see that her legs were shaking. They sat like that for what felt like hours, her sobbing and him staring the bag he held in his lap.

Finally he turned to her. “What’s your name?”

She laughed through her tears, and it seemed to calm her a bit. “Does it matter?”

Michael shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Rachel.”

“How old are you, Rachel?”

“Sixteen,” she answered with defeat.

Michael stood, shouldering his bag. He took a look back at Rachel.

“You’ll get over it,” he said. “Whatever it is.”

“There is no it!” she snapped. Michael stopped in the doorway. He retreated a step into the room. Rachel was hesitant, she hadn’t hoped he would actually listen. Michael gave her a nod to make her case.

“There’s nothing to get over. Nothing happened, I-” she stopped herself short. “I”m just like this. It just hurts. I just… want it to stop.”

She matched his gaze for a minute, her brown eyes pleading with his blue. Michael paced the room, his hand mindlessly wandering over the zipper of his gun bag.

“I don’t,” he said finally, “kill kids.”

“I’m not a kid.”

“Close enough.”

Rachel slumped back on the bed.

“Is it not real,” she asked,”because I’m young?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you won’t help?”

Michael ran a frustrated hand through his hair. He couldn’t remember what he was like at sixteen. Or eighteen, for that matter. He figured he was probably like he was now, but thinner. Did he have someone then who cared about him, who would’ve been hurt? Maybe, he thought, but didn’t everyone?

Michael ran a finger lightly along a wooden shelf. His hand hovered briefly over a trophy from a grade school spelling bee. The wobbly reflection of the room glittered in the fake bronze.

He took a look back at his waiting customer. She had the hollow look, the far-away eyes, all the tell-tale signs. Her pain was the same as all the other’s had been. But, for whatever reason, he just couldn’t help her.

Michael looked her up and down. He slowly shook his head.

“Fine,” she sighed. “I’ll just… do it myself.”

Michael wasn’t sure why, but he exclaimed, “You can’t!”

“I can’t?”

“I- I won’t let you,” he stammered. Then he added, “I’ll call the police.”

Rachel looked at him incredulously. She almost laughed.

“You’re not going to call the police. You’re the Suicide Man.”

At that, Michael could almost hear the little shattering in his brain. He was the Suicide Man. A killer. He was no help to anybody. Just a murderer like any other. Halfway down the stairs, he remembered the crumpled payment in his pocket and returned to the room. Michael thrust the envelope toward her.

“Take it,” he said. “Take the money back.”

“I don’t need it,” she protested.

“Just take it.”

It took quite some effort for Rachel to stand, more to walk to him. She couldn’t meet his eyes, but he couldn’t meet hers so neither of them noticed the other’s shame.

“Okay,” she muttered, and took the envelope back.

The Suicide Man made a dash for the stairs, never looking back.

Michael was used to the neighborhood. Kids on bikes criss-crossed through Summer streets, until the inevitable Midwestern rain sent them scurrying back inside on a Summer day. He clutched his courier bag anxiously.

The white wooden door swung open with a long creak.

“Rachel?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry for the wait,” he said.

“It’s no problem,” she replied.

Neither met the other’s eye, as Michael handed her the take out order from the insulated bag.

Without words, they agreed to pretend they were not the people who had met before. She went back inside, and hoped, as she ate her lunch, that she would never be that person again.

Michael closed his zippered bag, and disappeared into the mid-day rain.