III

HIS HOUSE

I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge.
— Mary Shelly, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

LINDA RONSTADT IS SINGING Blue Bayou as Alex stumbles back into the bookcase filled with row after row of my father’s firmly packed notebooks before her body slides down to the floor. Blood spills from a wound above her left ear, running like a thick river down her neck, then forking over the fabric of her clothes and curves of her body, until eventually the tributaries gather into a puddle spreading over the cold, metal floor. While her right foot twitches from misfiring nerve signals and urine darkens the front of her jeans she stretches her left hand out toward her purse, it having landed no more than a foot away.

I deliberately place my foot in front of her hand and, with a cruel shove, move the back beyond reach. Her eyes try to find me as the expected why comes spilling out of her mouth. The wood-carved snake head drops from my hand, hitting the floor with a dense thud as I bend down to her face level.

“Why,” she says again with more air than sound. I reach forward to touch the side of her cheek. She tries to recoil but there’s not enough strength left to pull completely away. “Why,” I say, repeating her with a sneer, then answer without that stupid Russian accent, “Because my name is Yelena Gorgo and my father was Spiral.”

Half an hour earlier I’m standing in the dark smoking a cigarette. I can’t help but think of my father. 2211 Prytania Street was his house. He lived here primarily for several years, especially after his release from the mental hospital in which he was illegally imprisoned, if only by staying here to rub their noses in their failure to keep him locked away. I imagine it was beautiful once, prior to him being forced to flee this country to avoid further harassment from the authorities, when a full staff was employed to oversee its upkeep and manage the degradations one would expect from a house built in 1843, but many years have passed and the neglect has taken its toll.

Overgrown grass and weeds. Sagging trumpet vines decaying around the exterior. Corroded wrought iron fence and accents. All the windows are boarded up and someone has spray painted SPIRAL LIVES across the first floor facade. If only.

The interior is a dark and sullen tribute to my father’s abasement and mortification. The peeling paint flakes away like necrotic skin from bone. The floorboards creak over termite-infested joists. The lights flicker and buzz as the wiring can’t deliver a steady flow of electricity. Then there’s the air. It’s laced with a bitter fetor and smells old, like rust and smoke mixed with mildew.

It’s hot and viscid and obscene. Everything is moribound, worn down and covered in sorrow. In every room countless strips of sticky paper dangle like vines and sway in procession for the millions of dead flies that coat them. I have no idea who hung them, but likely it was the junkies who, until recently, were squatting the property. There are old, ratty mattresses upstairs, and I saw a few used needles on my initial walkthrough. Someone died in the garage of an overdose a month ago, likely leading to the city chasing off the rest, which explains why the boards on all the windows have been recently replaced. The door was barred, too, until I pried off the plywood earlier tonight.

A small space between two planks nailed across what would’ve been the living room window gives me a view of the street. I drop a spent cigarette to the floor and crush it under my shoe next to a dozen others that have accumulated while waiting for Alex to arrive. I light another then check the time on my watch through the strands of willowy smoke. It’s just after midnight. Her book signing ended at eleven. She would have tried to leave in a hurry, but good luck fending off the jackals.

The bookstore is only a ten minute walk away but first she would have to fetch the two thousand dollars promised to me. She was very confident in that number. Either the money was at home in a safe or she knew where she could get it in a pinch.

I’ve seen her house. It’s a three story villa at Fourth and Coliseum, close enough she would likely forgo a car ride. According to public records she purchased it for $1.3 million not long after the housing rates plummeted due to the pandemic. All this time she’s lived so close but she hasn’t stepped foot in this house since my father died. I know this because she didn’t question me when I said my father’s notebooks were here. Had she been here before, she would have never seen a single shelf, let alone a library of handwritten journals. This place, to any prying eyes, is an empty grave of lost memories.

A groan of rusted metal catches my attention and my eyes laser focus through the crack in the window. There she is, practically bouncing as she closes the wrought iron gate behind her and starts up the long line of pavers leading to the porch. I take another drag from the cigarette then dispose of it with its siblings.

“Oh,” she says surprisingly when the door opens before she can knock. I smile at her, not like me but a fake-fake smile people like her flash like second nature out of terror of appearing anything other than polite.

“Hello,” I say, still with the Russian accent. “I was getting worried you changed your mind.

“No, no,” she says nervously while pushing a lock of hair behind her ear. A large black purse hangs from her right shoulder. “I had to get the money and freshen up a bit. May I come in?”

I move aside and hold out my arm. She enters quickly, as if worried about being noticed by passersby but from the street it’s quite difficult to see past the gate and trees. After closing the door behind her, I hold my hand out. She wanders a little around the foyer, taking in the grime and grit and the wonderful smells, until she notices me waiting.

“I’m sorry,” she says while reaching into the bag. When her hand reappears it’s holding a bundle of $20’s wrapped in a rubber band. They look fresh—straight out of the ATM, I assume, given the hour. Or maybe she went to one of those overnight cash checking places drug addicts frequent. Wouldn’t that have been a sight. Decorated former officer-of-the-law standing in line with meth heads and crack fiends.

I don’t care about the money but she needs to think I do, so I thumb through the bills, ensuring that there are no blank pieces or dumby dollars to pad the count.

She rocks impatiently on her feet. “It’s all there. Promise.”

My eyes lift to study her nervous face. After a long beat I flash a smile. “Where are my manners? Welcome. I trust you had no problem finding the place. After all, you’ve been here before.”

“I have, but it’s been some time.”

“This is where you saved Spiral’s life, yes?”

The question causes her to flinch. She must not have expected me to know that little detail. “It was exactly nine years ago. You were still a homicide detective. You received a call from a hysterical woman claiming her husband, a man named Hugo Smith, was planning to kill Spiral. Despite the fact that you believed Spiral was a murderer himself, you rushed here to stop Hugo.”

“Yes,” she says with a restrained annoyance, clearly uncomfortable talking about this.

“And when you came in through this door, you looked over there—” I motion past her, toward the dark living room. “—and saw Hugo pointing a gun at Spiral, who had already been shot in the shoulder. You ordered Hugo to drop his weapon. He refused and you shot him. He died on scene.”

Her eyes fill with suspicion and the feeling drives her back, just outside of arm’s reach. “How do you know all that?”

The way she clutches her purse betrays the gun hidden inside, as the fabric is pulled tight, the bulge of a revolver becomes undeniably apparent. “It is my job to know these things,” I say matter-of-factly and then spin the tale. “Most of that was reported online. Of course, Maxim has sources in law enforcement. Your statement, along with the forensics and detective notes were easily acquired. You would be amazed at how cheap it is to buy the loyalty of New Orleans’ finest. They say there are only a few bad apples but I find that most officers are hard pressed to turn away cold hard cash.”

I’m lying, of course. My father told me all of this. He spared no detail of when Hugo Smith, half blind and long toothed, put a bullet in his shoulder with a .38 special. As Spiral sat there, bleeding all over the floor, he accepted his death, but Hugo was easily distracted, like so many are, when their rage skews their senses. If the old man simply wanted justice, he would have shot my father in the face and been done with it. Instead he wanted revenge for his niece, Jackie Moreau.

Alex gives an anxious little smirk, like she’s trying to hide her discomfort for this particular subject. “That was a long time ago.” Her hand reaches out as she moves toward me and touches my forearm. “How about we leave my skeletons in the closet where they belong, and you show me what I came here for?”

Her eyes are filled with fire.

I pull her body close to mine and bend my neck forward until my lips dance across her cheek on their way to her ear. I whisper, “The notebooks? Or me?”

She hesitates to pull away, to ignore that burning heat inside of her, the desire that’s scratching at the walls to be let out, but her professional ambition wins out. While moving away from me, she gives me a cute little look and says, “Spiral’s journals first. After that, we’ll see.”

“Very well,” I say with a click of my teeth before turning to walk past her. “This way, little darling.” She follows me from the foyer and past the stairs, then right down a double-wide hallway. We pass several rooms, dimly-lit and empty, whose purposes have long been forgotten. At the end is a solid wood door secured by two deadbolts.

“This is the garage,” I say. “I must warn you of the smell.”

She looks at me, perplexed. “The smell?”

After releasing the locks the door pulls open. Immediately a waft of a horrible odor rushes into the house. It’s a rancid smell, like rotten meat mixed with fermented fruit. My hand moves inside to the wall where it finds the switch. The fluorescent tube lights flicker on, revealing a barren slab floor and, in the center, a dark stain that has completely soaked into the porous cement.

I walk in first, but she’s not far behind. She says, “Someone died there,” after clearing her throat, as if the stench had gotten stuck trying to worm its way down into her lungs. “It was in the paper, maybe a month or two ago. The body was here for three weeks before someone walking by called the police to report the odor. The body was probably mostly jelly by that point. There’s no cleaning it up. That entire floor will have to be demolished and have new concrete poured.

“You’d know,” I say, turning the conversation to her previous life as a homicide detective as we continue walking, careful not to step on the stain. “I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of dead bodies.”

“Unfortunately,” she says a little quieter.

“I imagine it gets easier.”

She moves in front of me and says sternly, “No, it never gets easier…unless you’re a psychopath like the man who lived here. He did horrible things.”

“He did. And if he hadn’t, what would you be? Still a police detective? You have made a lot of money based on what Spiral may or may not have done.”

She’s getting angry. There’s a little twitch just under her left eye, as if every bit of rage at my accusation has concentrated in that one spot. “The world deserves to know what he did. There are still people who worship him, and based on what, wrestling? Fighting? Fuck that. I wrote a book to tell the world exactly what kind of monster he was and it hasn’t stopped people buying t-shirts with his face on it or spraying graffiti in his honor. I told them and they still don’t believe me but now? With his journals? When I get done, no one ever again will mention his name with anything but utter contempt and disgust. Now, show me what I came here for or I’m leaving, and my next move will be to call the FBI and tell them all about Nadezhda Alyokhina and her connection to Maxim Gorodetsky.”

There is no reaction to her futile attempt to threaten me. I simply motion toward the back of the garage where a series of empty storage shelves stretch from wall to wall. “No need for all that. We are here already.”

“What do you mean? I don’t see anything. This room is fucking empty and smells like death. You said there were hundreds of Spiral’s journals here, somehow having not been discovered by the drug addicts and homeless who have been in and out of this house ever since the asshole died. Now you’re just walking away from me.”

I place the bundle of money on one of the shelves and then grab the frame. With a little effort, it rolls outward from the concrete wall where the breaker box is mounted. “I’m told that when Hurricane Katrina nearly wiped this city out, this particular block was significantly flooded. Some of the houses were so severely damaged the insurance adjusters wanted to write them off rather than pay for the necessary repairs. Spiral made a cash offer to every one of his neighbors for their lots. Not himself, of course. No, he did this through a shell company.”

With the shelf moved aside, I open the metal cover on the electric panel. Inside everything looks normal. Two columns of breakers run down vertically with little labels taped next to each switch. I, of course, see the slight outline of a smaller panel at the bottom.

“Then, once all the prying eyes were gone, he brought in a contractor from Denmark, a man he trusted, along with a crew. They had a rather impossible job, when you consider the geological makeup of this area.” I switch four breaks that I know are not connected to any circuits. I do this in a specific order, after which a hinge springs forward and a keypad is revealed.

I ask without looking back at her, “New Orleans houses do not have basements because of the water table, correct? Dig more than a few feet down and immediately the hole will fill up. And yet this was their task, to build something underground, something that could be hidden in plain sight. To that end, I’m sure you will soon agree, they surpassed all expectations.” I enter the correct code. 041199. My birthday. Next to me a hidden door releases from its seal and gently swings outward.

“No fucking way,” she says from behind me.

“According to my source, between fabrication and installation it took about three months of work.” I close the keypad and replace the panel on the electrical box before turning to face her. “Then, once everything was buried and hidden, he repaired the surrounding properties, and eventually sold them off for a tidy sum.”

She perks up. “And who is your source?” The thought mulls around for a moment before she offers a guess. “The Danish contractor?” Her skepticism is amusing to me. If she wasn’t so blinded by her self-imposed mission to destroy my father’s reputation, she would be running for the hills—or pulling that gun on me and demanding the truth—but with the answer to all her woes dangling in front of her, she cannot walk away now.

“Oh, perhaps it was the contractor,” I muse as the door smoothly opens with little additional effort on my behalf to reveal a sealed, galvanized steel hatch about one meter off the floor with a small set of stairs leading up to it, likely to allow entry in case of a flood. “Or perhaps not. I wouldn’t want to betray their confidence at this late hour, but nevertheless, they thankfully included a key.”

The hockey-puck-shaped lock is protected under a welded box near the front lip of the hatch. From my satchel I pull out a ring with a handful of keys of various sizes, all of which are paired with locks to different properties or storage facilities entrusted to me by my father in his final days. With the correct key insert, a quick turn releases the shackle and the hatch slowly tilts upward on its own. Light bulbs flicker on automatically, revealing twenty steps descending down a round metal shaft.

“If you want answers,” I say with amusement while looking back, “down there you shall find them.”

She’s reticent, lost in thought, pondering the wisdom of following me down those stairs and seeing what awaits her. Surely by now there’s a voice screaming warnings at her. How loud it must be, and yet still she stands there, not running away, not calling for help, not pulling that gun. Her sin is greed and it has made her blind to all the red flags waving in front of her face. She will risk everything to read what’s in those notebooks and pay whatever price the knowledge demands.

I will give her exactly what she desires.

The conversation in her head must have ended skeptical of any danger, because she is already climbing to the opening. “Careful,” I say sincerely, not wanting to see her go tumbling down, ending our fun prematurely. “There’s a rail to your right.”

With no more than her head still peeking out of the hatch, she looks back up at me in the cold, sickly light and asks with a half-smirk, “You coming?”

I answer, “Absolutely.”

Every one of her steps clang on the aluminum grated metal. Before climbing down myself, I hit a switch on the wall near the frame. The door automatically is pulled shut by magnetic hinges, firmly enclosing by the time I disappear into the shaft behind her. It’s an awkward climb down, but eventually we both reach the bottom, which turns left into a mudroom and ends at a gas-sealed blast door, like you might expect to see in a military installation. Dead center is a five-spoke handle which requires effort to initially turn before it spins freely. Once the five locking bolts retract I grab the handles and pull.

Beyond is a large, low-ceiling chamber crafted from steel plating that has been welded together to ensure a water-tight fit to protect from any ground water seeping in through the seams. The interior is roughly square, nine meters to a side, with a sealed, concrete floor. Above, the ceiling is segmented into blocks of LEDs which pour cold, white light onto every surface, leaving no shadow a place to hide. Dead center is a large concrete slab, polished and sitting atop two steel posts—my father’s personal desk, and behind it a high-back, brown leather chair. It’s a bare surface, having been cleared before he returned to Denmark. Behind it is a rectangular block of tinted glass, nearly as wide as the bunker, with steel supports at the corners and between each pane. Vaguely discernible through the glass is a long bookcase stretching from one end to the other, with seven tall rows filled with a collection of old books and manuscripts, along with what she came to see: hundreds of his private journals.

She rushes past me like a giddy school girl, not even acknowledging the thousands of dollars in art arranged on the walls or the long table to the left displaying several antiquities from the Viking Age.

“I can’t say for certain,” I wonder aloud as we both find ourselves staring at our faint reflections in the thick ballistic glass, “but a considerable sum of money sits within this vault. I have personally noted several first editions, including Milton’s Paradise Lost and—”

“I don’t care,” she interrupts, then looks at me with hunger in her eyes. “Whatever weird little collection of literary fuckwads he collected doesn’t matter to me. I’m here to read his writings, not expound upon whatever philosophical or literary sources fueled his twisted goddamn mind. Open it.”

My physical reaction is subservient. I dip my head and apologize, never betraying the leviathan within, the beast that I have called friend for as long as I can remember. It grows tired of hiding beneath my perfectly-constructed human suit of flesh and wishes to break out and ravage this woman who betrayed my father’s legacy.

After entering the same code into the keypad on the pedestal next to the vault, two glass doors retract with a hiss. The scent of old paper and leather is immediately noticeable. “As you can see, all of Spiral’s journals are arranged dead center on the fourth shelf. They are in chronological order.”

She enters the vault and starts looking at the bendings, all of which have dates scribbled for quick reference. Not long passes before she pulls one of the notebooks out and begins flipping through it. I ask if she needs anything but she quickly waves me off without ever looking back. I can’t help but to smile a very Gorgo-like smile as I walk away.

I walk over to the left half of the room, where the table of artifacts sits beneath an abstract painting. Next to it is a small stand with a decanter half-filled with what looks like whisky, a handful of glasses and an empty ice box. Further over is a cabinet filled with albums and on top a turntable, receiver and a set of speakers. Kneeling down, I look through his collection. Most of the records are classical, as he didn’t care much for popular music, but there was one he liked—ah, there it is. Linda Ronstadt. Simple Dreams. Asylum Records. Some who knew my father might think it a little odd, but he told me his mother used to play it when he was a child. He never struck me as a sentimental man but this was the one thing he held onto. The one human quality he couldn’t shake.

I put the record on, side two, and flip the switch. The turntable begins to spin smoothly while I manually move the arm until the needle is positioned over the first track’s groove. From there the machine takes over, gracefully lowering it into position until the needle meets vinyl.

After a few seconds of warm crackles, the first few bars of Blue Bayou resonate around the room while my attention moves down to the table of Viking Age relics. It’s a collection of antiquities that would be welcomed by any museum in the world and surely cost a small fortune to acquire. There’s a nearly complete bronze helm on a black mannequin head, as well as two swords and an ax head, but the metal is so corroded and brittle that even holding them might cause them to disintegrate. Figurines, jewelry and even a toy boat also grace the exhibit, each of them tagged with a description and date, but the most interesting pieces are on a small riser in the back.  Exquisite animal heads, expertly carved, at the heads of five hardwood posts, roughly fifty centimeters tall. The details in the chiseled creatures are immaculate and certainly the work of a master woodworker. There is a wolf, a bear and some species of bird of prey, as well as a boar, but the one that calls to me is a serpent-like creature which reminds me of the stories he told me when I was a little girl. It’s the Níðhöggr, a dragon from Norse mythology who was imprisoned in the roots of Yggdrasil but prophesied to escape, heralding the beginning of Ragnarök. I reach out and take it.

Alex is flipping through one of the notebooks when I enter the vault behind her. Words are mumbling quietly under her breath as her eyes scan whatever horrible little tale is recounted in my father’s messy handwriting.

I ask if she’s found anything interesting. Her attention is so focused on the pages she doesn’t even realize I’ve abandoned the fake Russian accent for my natural Moldovan elocution of the English language.

“That is a gross understatement,” she answers, obviously annoyed at the interruption. My hand tightens around the serpent-carved pole as I stand no more than two steps behind her. I say, “I hate to intrude but there’s something I wanted to ask you.” She sighs, then asks, “And what is that,” without looking at me.

“When we met earlier in the bookshop, you called Spiral’s son a psychopath.”

“I did,” she says, “because he is.”

“Have you met him?”

She laughs, finally shutting the notebook before turning around to look up at me, not noticing what’s in my hand. “That’s an understatement. March, last year, I came home to find him standing in my living room. Naked. Crying. Rambling about some nonsense involving a box and a smoke monster. I was frightened initially, assuming he came there to kill me, but quickly I realized how truly pathetic he was. He was talking to himself, like he was having some sort of conversation in his head and I think he was hallucinating because he kept referring to someone being tied to the empty chair beside him. I went into the other room and called the police. They came and hauled him to the hospital. I got a restraining order. His lawyers claimed at the hearing he ran out of his medication. Bullshit, ya know? But I guess if you have enough money to hire the right attorney you can get court records sealed and force me to sign an NDA. But fuck em, right? From what I saw, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

“You’re right about that,” I say coldly, right before swinging the wooden pole into the side of her head. The crack it makes would turn a weaker stomach, as would the blood that immediately spews out of a finger-length gash above her right ear. Her purse slips off her shoulder and hits with a dead thud from the weight of the concealed revolver when her legs buckle and collapse, no longer able to support her weight, sending her backward into the bookcase before she slides down into a seated position on the floor. The notebook lands in her lap and is immediately covered in blood.

I kick her purse away from her reaching hand before tossing aside the pole and kneeling down in front of her. She’s asking me why. Why would I do this? They always want to know, as if it matters in the end, when the darkness swallows them and they’re returned to the nothingness from which we all originate. “Because my name is Yelena Gorgo and my father was Spiral.”

“Oh god,” she says, louder than before, the adrenaline momentarily overpowering the pain and blood loss. “Please, please don’t kill me. I have a son. His name is Sean and he’s five years old.” She keeps saying the boy’s name, over and over, until I crack the back of my hand across her face. She starts screaming now, as if anyone could possibly hear her.

I lean over her and shout directly into her face, “Yes, scream all you want, screaming until your throat feels like razor blades.” I grab a handful of her hair and yank backward, forcing her to look directly at me and shout over her, “Keep going, you fucking ticălos.” Then I spit in her face before shoving her back against the books. Those guttural cries turn to mournful wails and then finally pathetic little moans. She’s growing weaker and I fear she might pass out, so I grind my knuckles into her sternum. Her eyes widen and she lifts her head.

“Please,” she starts again. “Let me go. I won’t tell anyone.”

I sit back, incredulous. “Why would you want to leave? This is what you wanted, isn’t it? To read my father’s journals? To confirm that he’s the monster you’ve been telling everyone he is all these years? Do you not see that I have given you exactly what you wanted? That head wound won’t kill you, at least not for a while. I’m going to allow you to stay down here and read as many of his accounts as you like.”

She’s begging me now for her life while her hands reach out for me, perhaps trying to force some human connection, so I stand and tower over her. “You don’t get it, do you? This is it. There is nothing you can say to change this outcome. Even if I were capable of feeling sympathy you would be the last person deserving of it. You took my father away from me for years by throwing him in that hospital where he was kept in a near constant drug-induced stupor, except of course when they were torturing him with electric shock therapy. Not once, but twice you did this with your crusade against him. And why? Because you think he killed that fucking bitch Jacqueline Moreau? The mother of my bastard half brother? You fucking idiot. You stupid little girl. She shot herself, exactly like he told the police. He didn’t have to kill her because he drove that woman so fucking insane she put a bullet through her own head just to get away from him. Can you believe it? How pathetic is that?”

Blood gushes out of the wound. Is that skull I see?

“Look at what I’ve done to you now,” I say. “If I gave you that gun from your purse with one bullet and left you alone in this vault, would you kill yourself? No, I didn’t think so. You still think there is a way out of this, that there’s something you can say to me to make me forget what you did to him or that horrible book of lies you published after his death. Or maybe you think after I leave you’ll have a signal on your cell phone and you can call for help. I’ll save you the trouble, your phone will not work, nor is there an emergency escape hatch or any other way to signal someone above ground come morning when the gardeners are tending the lawns above you. One way in and one way out. This is it. Right here. You are going to die in this room. Maybe hours from now, maybe days. Maybe you use the gun to get it over with, maybe it’s the shock from the blood loss, or finally dehydration that takes you. It doesn’t matter to me how or when. The only thing I care about is knowing that your bones will be another addition to his little collection over there. Given the temperature and humidity control in this room and the lack of insects, I believe it will take quite a while, but don’t worry, I’ll come check on you in a month to see your progress. Until then.”

“They’ll look for me,” she says, stopping me.

“They will eventually. Maybe you told someone you were coming here. Maybe the phone carrier will note your last reported position being within this house, but they will never find you down here. Your son will never know what happened to you. There will be no body to entomb. Eventually you will be forgotten altogether but my father? His legacy will live through me.”

I leave her there, crying a throaty howl as Linda belts out the final chorus of the song. Their two dissonant voices follow after me, echoing off the steel and concrete, all the way through the bulkhead door. I take one last look at her, to see her on her side trying to dig the gun out of her purse. The revolver appears in her shaking hands and swings to aim at me, but not before the blast door is shut, cutting off her ululations and the music like a silencing guillotine. Not even the blast of gunfire booms on this side. There are only six little taps, like a finger rapping on a muted gong. She used all the bullets. Poor decision.

Once I’m up the stairs and the hatch is closed and locked, the hidden door is moved back into position to conceal the bunker’s entrance. It’s imperceptible to anyone not knowing what to look for. Once the shelving is pushed back in place I take the two grand she gave me and stick it in my satchel before leaving the foul-smelling garage and returning back into the house. Near the front door, I bend down to dig through the duffel bag I left sitting there. I quickly change out of the dress and put on baggy jeans, a hoodie and boots. My hair gets quickly tied into a bun and hidden under a Saints cap. When I leave, I carry myself like a man with my head tilted down, letting the bill to block the headlights of passing cars from revealing my face.

I walk north to the corner and then turn to wait for the pedestrian light to turn green so I can continue down Jackson Avenue. A homeless man with a bad limp pushes a garbage-filled shopping cart in front of me, aiming to go straight and continue on Prytania. He looks at me from under a crooked hood and asks for change. I could give him Alex’s money. Wouldn’t that be a kind thing to do? His face is disfigured, with one eye drooping downward and a cleft lip that has never fully healed. When I don’t answer he curses me before pushing his cart off the sidewalk. Unfortunately he waited too long and the lights have changed. A city bus comes rushing down Jackson and smashes into him. The cart flips away into the opposite lane of traffic, crashing into the windshield of an SUV which spins out into the line of parked cars on the side of the road. The homeless man is splattered across the front of the bus before his remains get sucked underneath. He’s dragged for ten meters before the squealing hydraulic brakes finally grind the bus to a stop. Only a trail of blood and body parts is what’s left of the man.

My light flashes walk so I casually cross, paying little attention to the gory scene as people come rushing out of the nearby houses and a bar that’s right next to the horrible scene. One woman is retching as I pass her. A moment later I hear vomit splattering the pavement. I could have saved that man if I had only given him a moment of time. He might have realized the traffic lights had changed and it wasn’t safe to cross. Then the world would have had the delightful privilege of seeing his disgusting face and smelling his horrible body odor.

I could tell the people mourning his loss not to worry. There are many more like him out here to take his place. Humans have been giving birth to monsters from the beginning. Most, like that man, you can see. Misshapen, lame or disfigured. Grotesquely large or pathetically small and brittle. Missing or extra limbs. Tails. Blind. Deaf. Mouths full of overgrown, misaligned incisors and gnashers. They were punishments from the gods, our ancestors believed. The horrible little creatures were tossed off cliffs or fed to the sea, rarely ever allowed to live to adulthood out of fear of what they might become and the terror their curses could spread.

Monsters, however, are not limited to only physical deformities. A face and body may be beautiful, but a twisted gene can just as easily rot a mind as it can flesh. Is that what I am? Is that what he made me when he impregnated my mother? No, I am no monster, though in the end many may call me one. To be born without a conscience is not what a soul-stricken man would consider human but what people will never understand is that morality is a prison while I am free. They are billions of faceless nonentities while I am unique. They revel in the ugliness of their mind and bodies while I am perfect.