Disintegration Read Free Page A

left calf. Bar codes on my wrists and I turn my hands over. I bend back and let the water baptize my head,
for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory
. Opening my eyes, I grab the bar of soap, and lather up my hands. Another leftover, Oil of Olay. The shea butter. It’s a small thing, but it gives me great pleasure. The black letters on my knuckles. The gossamer wings across my shoulder blades. The spinal column tattooed over my own spinal column, the fifth vertebra fractured. Celtic crosses on my forearms, ancient Hebrew script, Japanese letters, cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and fire-breathing dragons covered in scales. This is my new language.
    To record each incident, to mark the moment, I get a tattoo. Every time I bury another body, every time I burn down a house, inject an air bubble into a shaky vein, every time I corner a man in an alley, his head shaking back and forth, blubbering like an idiot, filling his pants with piss.
    “No, no man, you’ve got the wrong guy. No, please, wait, it was an accident, I have money. I mean it, I thought she was eighteen.”
    Every time I kill I get a new tattoo. I have a lot of tattoos.

Chapter 10
    “Hey, baby, I guess you’re working late again. Taylor wants Daddy’s Special Chicken, and Robbie…”

Chapter 11
    I’m off the grid now. I have been for a while. There are no mirrors in my apartment. I have forgotten my own face. My wife is a distant memory, and I can’t remember what she smells like, the melody of my son’s laugh, the gentle kisses of my daughter’s soft lips on my cheek. They are shadows that haunt my every movement, and I drown them out, blur them every chance I get.
    I lurk in the blind spots and only come out at night. I wait for the rain, the clouds to pass over, the wind to rush in off the lake. I don’t make eye contact, but when I do, you’ll know it’s your time. I can’t stop. And I don’t want to.
    The envelopes are all the same: a name, an address someplace in Chicago, and a picture. That’s the only variation. It can be a professional portrait. It can be a sketch. I’ve seen Polaroids and hasty 5x7s on Kodak film that’s printed at the grocery store, the drugstore, down at Walgreens—unaware of the death sentence they were issuing.
    I stand by the edge of the bed, and pick up the lipstick. Rolling it around in my hands, I pull open the drawer and toss it in with the rest of Holly’s stuff—a nail file, an amulet, a hairbrush, a thin tube of fragrance, a pair of leather gloves, and her thick pink vibrator. I stick my head in the drawer and inhale. For a moment she is here with me, her hands resting lightly on my back, leaning over, pressing her head against my back, wrapping her arms around me. I straighten up and she is gone.
    Sitting on the edge of the king-sized bed, the blinds down, I pick up the envelope and turn it over in my hands. Red currant drifts to me from the candle on the dresser. It’s sickly sweet, and I can taste Holly in my mouth. Sliding my finger under the lip of the paper, I run it down the length of the envelope, tearing it open, a hot flash of moonlight and the curved blade of my knife running up and into a rib cage, a gush of air, foul as a mausoleum, wet on my hands, up and in. So many nights standing naked in a strange backyard, a desolate cornfield, an alley, a bottle of lighter fluid in one hand, a lit match in the other, hovering over a hole in the ground, a steel barrel, a pile of black cloth and denim, white tube socks, all spattered with blood. Whether I’m invisible or not doesn’t matter. I believe I am. And it may be my downfall. But I have work to do. And the justice I sought when my own world toppled down around me, it never came. There are the laws of man, and then there are the laws of mankind.
    When I meet my maker I will look him square in the eye and ask him for nothing.
    The slip of white paper has only the two lines, in blocky letters:
Peter Masterson
    2139 East Fulton Market
    His