The Silk Noose

THE SILK NOOSE

by

Marcus McGee

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Pegasus Books/Marcus McGee on Smashwords

The Silk Noose

Copyright © 2010 by Marcus McGee

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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ISBN – 978-0-9826936-2-9

Comments about The Silk Noose and requests for additional copies, book club rates and author speaking appearances may be addressed to Marcus McGee or Pegasus Books c/o Ms. McGhee, P.O. Box 235, Neptune, New Jersey, 07754, or you can send your comments and requests via e-mail to [email protected] or to contact us at [email protected].

Dénouement

Dork

The Silk Noose (commence)

Bad Advice

The Silk Noose (continuer)

The Singing Poet

The Silk Noose (final)

The Essays

On Niggers and Squirrels

On Timothy McVeigh

On the Seven Year Itch

Hangin

Goddess

DÉNOUEMENT

I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts or Devil’s Triangles or luck or spells—basically anything supernatural. I’ve always been a practical guy, though most people (and notice I didn’t say friends; I have no friends and don’t need any), most people who know me would call me cynical. I guess that’s because I’ve never been able to temper my scathing commentaries and outbursts when I’ve heard morons talk about things like UFOs, alien abductions, out of body experiences and things like that.

Basically, stupid people offend me, though I’ve never understood why. And by stupid, I mean the idiot who’s sat near me for eight years in the next cubicle at work. This guy watched Sunday night paranormal crime shows and spent Monday and Tuesday describing, pouring over and analyzing the damn story to everyone in earshot. Unfortunately, I was always in earshot. And by stupid, I also mean my ex-sister-in-law, Odette, who consulted an astrology book before getting out of bed in the morning. If the book suggested anything negative, she stayed in bed all day. And my Bible-thumping grandmother—she spent her life preaching about everlasting life and promptly dropped dead on the day of my high school graduation. Yeah, you guessed it. I’m also agnostic.

I never believed any of it: God, the Devil, Heaven, Hell, sin, redemption, the afterlife, eternal damnation, miracles or curses. I long ago concluded that all this supernatural crap was a continual crock, cooked up and served by successive classes of social predators from the beginning of civilization until now. It’s predicated on humankind’s greatest flaw: the urge or need to believe.

For everything there is a rational, logical explanation; everything is the result of a causal relationship, implicit or explicit. But don’t get me confused with one of those philosophers. They’re quacks, all of them, scourges from society’s extremes. No, I simply live in a world of reality, a world where faith, spirit and symbolism have no meaning. But today, I’m forced to admit I’m a little confused. It’s nothing that happened today specifically; rather it’s happened over the last seven days.

One week ago as I sat at my breakfast table for morning tea, I happened to glance out the window. And just so you know, I’ve never given a damn about John Audubon, but as I looked out onto the balcony of my seventh floor apartment, I noticed a little bird out there. It was perched on the rail with its head cocked to one side, like it was peering through my window at me. I wasn’t being paranoid. I’d seen many birds perched on the rail in the course of morning tea, but this one was different. It unnerved me, and I couldn’t understand why.

I discovered later that it was a tit, which is short for titmouse. They’re supposed to be active, perky little birds, but this one just sat there, staring at me. I left the table to get dressed, forgetting about the tiny bird. So I was a little uneasy when I came back to find it still sitting in the same spot. Now that in itself didn’t alarm me, but when I got to work, which is exactly thirty-three miles from my apartment, and when I looked out my window, there was either that same tit or another tit that looked just like it, sitting on a branch outside my office window, staring in at me in that same peculiar way.

Naturally, I rationalized that they were different birds of the same species and they were probably common to the area. And the reason why I hadn’t noticed them before was because I’d never been one to fixate on stupid little birds. Why I had noticed the bird that particular morning—I had been scanning through the newspaper as I drank my tea. There was a small article on the second page about local birds. I hadn’t read it, but the title must have stuck in my mind and made me notice the bird.

I live alone, so I never have dinner at home. On Mondays after work, I always go to a restaurant called The Canard downtown on Seventh Street for the Roasted Pheasant under Glass special. I have a regular table there next to a window, and when I looked out, there was that same tit or another tit perched atop a hedge, staring in at me. The Canard was at least ten miles away from my job. That little bird couldn’t have flown that far! I hurried through dinner, sped home, rushed to my dining area and flung open the drapes to my great relief. The bird I saw that morning was still sitting there. There was no way the bird from outside the restaurant could have beat me home. The species was just very common in the area, I concluded.

I didn’t sleep well that first night. I felt disturbed, though I didn’t understand why. My life seemed to be going all right. I hated my job, but doesn’t everybody? I had no friends to bug me with the troubles and dilemmas of their pathetic lives. I lived far enough away from my family to avoid visits, invitations and all that other domestic crap. So I was okay, but I still couldn’t sleep.

Somewhere in the middle of the night my thoughts kept returning to a single incident from my youth. I was thirteen years old and in the eighth grade. I had a classmate named James Finch, who was a natural born troublemaker. He wasn’t a friend of mine—I had no friends. In fact, I had a couple of run-ins with James before he was banned from the school bus. He had to walk home every day. Anyway, one day I missed the bus, and having to walk from school, I found myself trailing James by about twenty feet as he made his way to our shared neighborhood. We lived on the other side of the highway, so we had to cross by means of a pedestrian overpass.

I was just starting up the incline when I saw James at the top, staring over the railing at the cars that were passing under. In his suspended hands he held a bread loaf-sized boulder. I stopped, watching him as he tried to gauge the timing of the release, and then I watched him let the rock fall. It crashed into the windshield of a station wagon, which screeched its tires, spun and careened into the highway’s retaining wall, exploding into flames. James fled to the other side of the overpass, and I retreated back toward the school, where I called my parents to pick me up.

I didn’t find out until the next day that the car James victimized contained one of our classmates, Amy Winger. Fortunately, no one in the car was killed, but Amy’s back and neck were broken. In fact, she spent the rest of eighth grade in the hospital and all of high school confined to a wheelchair as a paraplegic.

The school and the local district attorney launched an intensive investigation to find the person responsible, but nothing ever came of it. The school asked me directly if I had any information or idea about who may have dropped the boulder, but I said nothing. I didn’t want to get involved.

James Finch was stabbed to death during a knife fight when we were in the eleventh grade, so I was the only person who knew what really happened. Amy lived with her parents until they died, and she died a year after that, when she was twenty-three. I suppose it was a good thing. Who’d want to live to old age as a paraplegic?

When I finally fell asleep that first night, it must have been about three-thirty. So I tossed and turned for three hours before I rolled out of bed to begin the morning ritual: sit, shower and shave.

It was seven o’clock when I sat at the table with my Earl Grey tea. I was curious, so I paused a moment before I drew the drapes. The tit was still there, and next to it was a much larger bird, about eleven inches long. This new bird was brown with a white chin and breast; its beak was black and curved slightly downward. I found out later it was a black-billed cuckoo. It sat close to the tit, its head cocked in the same fashion, staring in at me.

When I got to work at eight, I checked the branch outside my office window and sighed to myself. The branch was empty. I ridiculed myself for even letting the presence or non-presence of a little bird outside my window bother me. And yet, I couldn’t stop my eyes from cutting toward the branch every few minutes. I was having a hard time concentrating on work. And then at nine when I glanced over, there they were: a tit and a cuckoo, on the branch, heads cocked, peering in.

Coincidence, I concluded. Somewhere in their evolutionary histories, the two species must have developed a sort of symbiotic relationship. It was nothing I hadn’t seen or come across before. In Africa, there’s a bird, a honeyguide, which is something of a cuckoo I think, that leads honey badgers to beehives to benefit from the plunder. And many other bird species benefit from a sort of cooperative predator lookout and warning system. I had read about such things. So there was a rational explanation for the birds sitting together outside my window, even if it remained unknown to me.

The birds stayed on the branch for the rest of the day while I did my best to ignore them. By lunch I had lowered and closed the blinds, though I still checked the scene outside at irregular intervals. At the end of the day I was angry with myself for letting something so stupid distract me for much of the day. They were just damn birds.

I had dinner at my regular Tuesday night spot, The Oyster Catcher, but I opted for a seat in the middle of the dining room rather than at my regular window table. As I ate, I resolved that I would not check the window when I got home. In my real world, what did it matter whether or not there were birds sitting on a rail outside? I figured I’d put an end to the disquiet about the birds by simply ignoring them.

I thought I would sleep better that second night, but I didn’t because I couldn’t. It wasn’t the birds. No, it was something I hadn’t thought about for years. When I was a much younger man, I had a girlfriend named Robyn. She was a pretty girl and she was a very sweet person, so sweet in fact that I never trusted her. She was nice to everyone—old geezers, bums, obnoxious friends of hers, family and stupid people. She seemed genuine, but that was the problem the cynic in me had with her. No one is nice for the sake of being nice.

I asked her to marry me only so she would sleep with me, and everything was working out fine until she and the rest of the world started pressing me for a wedding date. I put it off for three years, thinking we wouldn’t last that long, but we did. So when we got six months out, I began to worry.

Here I had this incredibly beautiful woman who was intelligent, witty, kind, optimistic and always happy. She told me every day she loved me and dreamed of the day when she would be my wife and the mother of my children. She brought handmade gifts, gave sentimental cards and wrote poetry for me. She clipped my toenails, pulled my nose hairs, cleaned my ears and refashioned my wardrobe. She was just too good to believe, and so I didn’t.

It took some doing, but I found the most eligible bachelor in town. His name was Stephen Crane, a rich, good-looking up-and-comer with an affable, infectious personality. Unfortunately, he also had scruples, so it took some doing and one thousand dollars to persuade him to put the moves on Robyn.

On a weekend I planned on going out of town, he was supposed to casually introduce himself to her at the senior center where she volunteered and accomplish a no-holds-barred seduction. Then I would come home, and she, riddled with guilt, would confess her transgression, giving me an excuse to call off the engagement.

It didn’t work. She turned him down cold. Ego bruised, this handsome guy said he never stood a chance with her. She told him she was totally in love with her fiancé. And while some men would have taken the result as an indication of Robyn’s veracity, I was all the more convinced it was only a matter of time before she would betray me. Women are false, all of them.

I couldn’t go through with it. As the day neared, I felt like the world was closing in on me. When I looked at Robyn I saw Guinevere, I saw Cressida, I saw Pandora. I should have come clean with her, but I didn’t. Instead, on the morning of the scheduled wedding, I packed my things and left town. Just like that. I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving; I didn’t leave any clues; I just disappeared.

I found out later Robyn never really got over the shock and disappointment of being jilted at the altar. People said she never found anyone else. She withdrew and just eked out a quiet life. They said her once shapely, supple body withered over time like a cut leaf. I felt bad about it, but if I hadn’t done it to her, she would have done it to me. I know it.

I think I drifted off to sleep for about fifteen minutes before the alarm went off. I guess I was so caught up reliving the relationship with Robyn that I completely forgot about the birds as I went about my morning routine. That is until I opened the drapes. A tit was there, and beside it was a cuckoo. But there was another bird on the rail, a large black bird, a corvid, clearly a crow or a young raven.

So by that morning I had three birds staring in at me, and for some odd reason just then, it struck me as funny. Not so much that I laughed, but those three birds sitting there looking in like that, they just looked funny to me. I even thought about getting out my camera and taking a picture. I laughed to myself as I sped to work—almost hoping three birds would coincidentally appear outside my window there.

A tit and a cuckoo showed up at nine and ten respectively, followed by a crow at eleven. It seemed the crow was just curious, as I understand crows are. I’ve read they’re the most intelligent of all birds. The crow probably flew by and noticed the tit and cuckoo staring in the window. So it landed on the branch because it wanted to explore what had the other birds so captivated. They were all looking at me, as if they were waiting for me to do something. I made a face at them once and rushed the window another time, but they did not react. They just sat there for the entire day.

That was Wednesday, and it was Greg Teal’s birthday. Greg is the idiot I mentioned earlier, the one who’s sat in the cubicle next to me for the last eight years. I call him Gullible Greg because he’s a guy who will believe just about anything: Area 51, X-Files, the World Wrestling Federation, the Bible and probably even the Easter Bunny. He’s a fat, annoying man who talks too much, a man with a constant need to be overheard. For example, when he’s on the phone, he intentionally talks loud enough for people twenty feet away to hear. And when he’s having a private meeting in the cubicle, it sounds like an office broadcast. He has no concept of intimacy. Sitting in the next space, I’ve heard disgusting chronicles from his dim-witted life in slow, agonizing and exaggeratedly loud detail over the years.

On his birthday the entire office sans me pitched in and bought him a cake. Right after lunch, they all converged on his desk and congratulated him for reaching his fiftieth birthday. The big boss compelled me to go over, though I didn’t sing when the rest of them were singing. After snatching plates of cake and cups of punch, all those phony, backstabbing idiots dispersed, leaving Gullible and me in the cubicle. On a whim, I asked him if he wanted to see something funny and took him over to the window next to my desk. The birds were gone.

Fifteen minutes later, after Gullible had left and he had settled his big butt in his seat, they were back. I thought to go over and get him, but it was way too much trouble. I had it all figured out anyway. As we walked over earlier, the birds saw this big, fat eating machine coming at them through the window and fluttered away in fright. Birds are smart in that way: they have an innate fear of fat people. It’s why they’ve been around for so long.

My sister had a planned rebuttal for every excuse I could make, so I was practically forced to go to her house for dinner that night. She lives in the suburbs, forty miles from me. Because I hate driving, I was irritated by the time I got there. She had invited my parents and all our siblings to celebrate the silver anniversary of her marriage to Bob White, the goofy husband she eloped with twenty-five years earlier.

The family was resistant to Bob early on, but most of them had warmed to him over the years. Not the case with me. I’ve always seen him for what he is. Bob’s an ass. I accept the fact that my sister apparently loves him, but he’s an ass, end of story. I figured I’d go to their house and make a brief appearance, though I wasn’t about to congratulate the couple. Their marriage, like every other marriage I had seen, was a big lie. I wasn’t going to perpetuate the lie by pretending they had done something wonderful by putting up with each other for twenty-five years.

My sister wouldn’t let me smoke in the house. I was forced out to the backyard where her smelly and mangy old mutt, starved for attention, tried to elope with my leg. I was sitting there, cigarette in my right hand and left hand fending off the dog’s amorous advances, when I saw a suspect crow tiptoeing along the fence top. When it stopped and sat, it was nestled next to a cuckoo. The cuckoo, in turn, was rubbing shoulders with a tit. I remember the moment. For a fleeting instant just then, I wondered if maybe the birds were following me.

I realized soon after that such a notion was impossible. Once again, it had to be a coincidence, just a routine coincidence. And then it still could have been the result of some sort of a symbiotic relationship of avian nature, one that logically could involve three active participants, and maybe even more in some cases. It wasn’t for me to figure out. Anyway, my thinking was interrupted when my sister stuck her head out the patio door to ask me if I wanted wine with dinner. When I turned again to the fence, the birds were gone.

When I got home that night, I still had three birds on my patio rail. I wasn’t surprised or bothered by it. It was just three birds on a rail, something that happens all the time. And still, I wondered what the odds were. A triplet of birds of three different species huddled together at my house, at my job and at my sister’s house, and all in the same day? Certainly it could all be reduced to some abstract statistical number with a decimal point and lots of zeros. If I wanted to do it, I’m sure I could have, but I had someone right under my nose who would probably get his jollies calculating the odds. Old Gullible over in the next cubicle loved challenges like that.

About six years ago, two years after I met and determined I didn’t like Gullible Greg, I played a prank on him that I regret until this day, though not from a sense of guilt or anything like that. I hated the guy from the start.

He put me on the spot at our initial introduction by asking if I was a Christian. Then he asked