It’s 1999 in Long Island. I’m nine years old, and I’m about to kill the landlord.
There’s no preparation involved. I don’t know anything about him except for what I’ve overheard, and in fact he’s quite soft-spoken, it’s usually his wife that does the yelling.
On this particular day I’m on my way to school. Down our cement porch across our yellow lawn, past three blocks of row houses. Lined up for morning attendance fiddling the zipper of my Pokemon backpack. Today I’m going to kill the landlord.
He was fifty-something with a red face. His wife’s name was Karen. I put it together cause on the phone my Mom would say, “I swear I just gave it to Karen.” In a please don’t be too hard on me voice.
My Mom. Phone to her ear, smoking at the edge of her bed. Ceiling yellow, paint peeling. Rubbing her feet together in size four dollar-store slippers. My Mom.
It all made very little sense to me. I’m saying all as in everything.
Squatting outside Mom’s door, pulling at the frayed bits of our murky carpet, I’d listen to her squeak. I could faintly hear him down there. It made very little sense to me at all. Why was everyone so fucking upset all the time? It’s borderline, I get it, but it’s simple: on my morning cartoons everyone is smiling, I’m smiling too. So why is everyone so fucking upset all the time?
Her fear, my anxiety of that fear; they began to congeal into abstract terror.
At that age, life felt slow and foggy. Experiences were new, though, the edges of my perception were gilded, promising, despite this permissive sense of dread. I had few desires. Mostly just to laugh.
It didn’t take much. Say my brother and I got rough? The phone would ring and my chest would hurt, like when you’re about to fall out of a chair. Was I laughing too loud? Was the TV up? Did I have too many friends over? Me? Oh, I fell out of my bed, yeah, well — I was trying to make him laugh! Sorry… And it happens again and again and again until I’m outside playing with the neighbors and I’m thinking: Does he see me? Did I do something wrong? Am I standing on our part or his part of the lawn? Is there an our part of the lawn? Is Mom in trouble? Am I? Am I are they am I?
No, it didn’t take much. Thank God.
I think, typically, the impetus of action is the evasion of a certain feeling. What you won’t let yourself experience. What you refuse to feel. There are good and bad versions of this. It’s a skill or it’s a cope or it’s a crutch or a neurosis. The thing you do, the why, the where that thing comes from. It has a source, a pith. Strings and weights all webbed up in your brain.
I think what moved me was not fear but the possibility of fear. Not horror, but anticipation. It purveyed everything. This silent thing, this great dark maybe. Maybe sadness, maybe trouble, maybe guilty, maybe guilty guilty guilty.
What I’m saying is, there was a thing in me. In the gossamer in my brain. Innate. Obviously, there were better childhoods, but also obviously, there were worse ones, much worse ones. So whatever it was that made me do it — it was within me, was born there — will die there.
In retrospect, I was too young to understand but I was beginning to change. Whenever I was alone in a room, it felt as though a pale light was dimming in my chest.
Yes. I was nine years old but I was beginning to feel melancholy. Cheap food, cheap entertainment. I was growing to require their fresh air.
After school, I’m approaching my home. We live on the second floor of a two family building and our apartment is up these cement steps and through a side door. The door leads directly to a steep set of carpeted stairs and into our living room. When I reach the top of the first set of steps, I notice our door is already open.
Midway up I see the landlord and my Mom. They’re standing across from one another in the tight space of the staircase, feet on the same two steps. My mother is looking down at the floor, the landlord is looking down at her. When he notices me he looks up the stairs and makes himself flat, encouraging me to pass between them. I pass between them.
I walk to the kitchen and pull open a drawer. It’s full of stained cutlery and those little packets of salt/pepper that come in fast-food bags. There is exactly one flimsy steak knife, maybe it was technically a bread knife. The blade was three inches long a centimeter wide and paper thin. You could say it was serrated, I would use it to scratch my back sometimes.
I take it in my hand and walk back to the stairs and take a few steps down. When I’m just above them, I extend my left arm and I push the steak knife into my landlord’s neck, to the hilt.
The landlord’s left hand reaches out at my mother, his right hand twists against his pants, his eyes bulge. He looks above my head, makes a wet inhaling noise, then falls down the stairs.
It was like if you’ve ever stepped on a ketchup packet, the way thin lines of blood shot from his neck against the scuffed white framing of the front door. For like twenty seconds.
Apparently, my Mom was saying something, doing something. Trying for X looking for Y. She was quietly frantic, from what I understand. Like when you see a bird through a window, fluttering wildly around a branch.
I’m vague here because, sitting down on the steps, watching the blood squirting from his neck slowly wane — I was in the zone. I know that’s an absurd choice of words, but, look, I’m telling you I was in the zone.
For some reason the first group to come were firefighters, I’m not sure how it worked, but a few of my Mom’s cousins were volunteer firefighters and they showed up first and all they did was ask if I was okay.
My Mom was having trouble telling them what happened. She was totally flustered, she had too many rapid-fire decisions to make. Like, should she even say I did it? It’d be clear to, maybe, a detective, I suppose. But to her cousins, the firefighters, they’d probably help her lie about it. Besides, I’m nine years old. Doesn’t that factor in somehow? Should she tell them she did it? Jump on the sword? Or perhaps say the landlord attacked first?
I think his name was James, one of her cousins, and I remember the smell of his breath, he had been drinking. These guys spent the majority of their time barbecuing behind the firehouse, and he had his helmet on for God knows what reason, and he was trying to ask if I was alright, and they say I kept my eyes on the landlord, and just told him I was hungry.
I did end up in a police station and I spoke with a cop then a councilor then a cop, on a loop. The cop was kind, stern, kind stern, you know, alternating. And when the councilor walked in she got really low and she intoned, “You may be scaring him, we should go to a separate room.” Something about that, it was like a bug had bit me, I turned away from the zone and I stared into her bangs and I said, “No. I’m not scared at all.”
They asked me things like why and what happened and did he hurt me and we got nowhere. I didn’t explain because I couldn’t, He was mean! How do you unpack that?
So no cathartic reveal, no weepy story. My Mom told the truth. I told the truth.
I overheard one cop, “Well, he fucked with the kids mom, so.” The others didn’t like that. I felt nothing either way. Oh, and for some reason, the police station smelled like freshly cooked spaghetti. I’m not saying this is significant, I just remember it very well.
As for Karen, the wife, well she didn’t do her husband much justice. She was a flippant, cruel, shrew. She had quickly made herself a nuisance, and nobody likes a nuisance. Sympathy has uniquely shaped boundaries.
They’re often in my dreams, my memories of those rooms… those pale interiors and revolving doors of side-shuffling men with belts rattling. The look: lower lip pushing the upper lip into a face I can only describe as sympathetic disappointment.
And there I am; in a labyrinth of blue. Little legs dangling off my chair kicking the air. Cops and councilors and relatives and who-knows-whos stalking the halls like tired minotaurs, all trying to solve the puzzle. A little maze and at the center little nine year old me, indifferent as can be.
We can yada, yada, yada from here. I didn’t get in trouble. I had state therapists and councilors and in the infinite wisdom of the 1990’s I was made to participate in a D.A.R.E. program that I did not for a single moment comprehend.
I can tell you now that I am not a criminal. My life is maybe not ordinary but it’s certainly nothing gloomy. You’d never know I did this, I’m saying. From the outside.
I have no killer-urges. Which is something I have to say whenever this is brought up to a new person. No, John, I promise I am not a werewolf. No, Mary, I am hardly a tortured soul so button your shirt, there’ll be no saving here.
It’s just something I did.
Of course, at times rage has me. Like anyone. At times, I am inconsolable, just destitute. A shadow, a black blanket coil binds me, and I am darkness. But that’s a human thing.
I’ve learned to look just above the tree line or at the edge of a city building or somewhere amongst the clouds… and sometimes I see my child-self there. Smiling, watching to be rid of what may keep him from the grin. I love him. I love it. A soft golden egg of compassion born deep in the rage.
Yeah.
That’s all I’ve got to say about the time I killed the landlord.