Write to Kill

By Sandra Ruttan

Coaxing his stubby legs to move faster, he squinted slightly as he looked through the dark rims of his glasses, darting to and fro to avert the rush hour crowd. The sweat was starting to pool on his fingers under the handle of his briefcase.

He darted left, left, left, stopping short as someone walked into his path carelessly and they almost bumped. The towering man glared down at him. Adrian pushed his glasses back up on his nose and kept moving, shifting the briefcase to his other hand.

Just as his fingers made contact with the handle another man, who looked like he should be a stand-in for Tony Soprano, sidestepped a puddle and knocked the suitcase from Adrian's fingers, sending it tumbling down the sidewalk.

"Oh, uh…" Adrian stammered. 'Not the briefcase. Not today. Oh no, no, no.' He made the mistake of glancing at his watch again, his heart accelerating. The man hadn't even muttered an apology.

As Adrian turned, the background noise of two teens arguing came to the fore as one pushed the other right into him. Adrian felt the shoulder blade of the youth intersect with his nose and he stepped back automatically, feeling his torso brush against a polished woman trotting by in a sleek, black suit. She glared at him, too preoccupied with the conversation on her cell phone to comment.

He turned again, this time managing to stay clear of the crowd. 'Faster, faster, faster. Don't be late, don't be late.' He kept the mantra going until he reached the building, turning to walk up the stairs.

"Good morning Adrian," Paula said automatically as he shuffled into the staffroom.

"Good morning," he mumbled back. But it wasn't. Why did he have to lie? Oh, to see the looks on their faces if he just blurted out, "No, it isn't Paula. It's a terrible, rotten, lousy, stinking morning, like every other morning this week. And I'm late."

Late. Not to her, he wasn't. But two minutes of deep breathing and scanning the stock market reports was gone from his day. He needed those two minutes. He had a routine and it was important. He'd proven that. When he followed his routine the day was as smooth as a professional skating rink.

'Skating. Oh damn.' He'd forgotten to buy a new tape. Stars on Ice would be on tonight, but it conflicted with his schedule. He wanted to watch it on the weekend. Now he would have to try to get a tape in the afternoon shuffle.

He pushed the glasses back up on his nose and opened the newspaper, feeling the deep breaths filter into his chest as he lost himself in the numbers.

*****

The day went by, as all days did. Sort and file, sort and file, just like a thousand days before as he filtered office mail into the appointed slots, circulating memos and briefs as they were dispatched. His position offered a certain orderliness that soothed his nerves. He never liked his workstation to be in disarray and he didn't like surprises.

He also didn't like interruptions. When Mr. Brenner held the door open for a wide-eyed blonde who looked like she should be in a cheerleading outfit, Adrian felt his lips curling down with displeasure.

"Morris," Brenner's voice boomed, his eyes monitoring his fingers as they straightened his Italian silk shirt. "Can I see you for a moment?"

"I…uh… I'm just…" Adrian stammered, trying to think of what to say. He could never get the words out when he was nervous or distracted. He was in the middle of a stack. Brenner's presence was affecting his rhythm. He straightened the pile, set it down on the table and shuffled after Brenner, his finger instinctively reaching up for the routine nudge of the bridge of his glasses.

"You've been doing a fine job down here Morris," Brenner's voice boomed. Full of volume but nothing more than hollow, predictable words that echoed off the concrete walls of the stairwell Brenner had led him into.

"Th-thank you," Morris muttered.

"It's just that we have to do some streamlining. Be more economical. More savvy with the cash flow and all that, you know?"

Adrian didn't know. Why was Brenner talking about business to him? He squinted up at the suave figure looming over him.

"If, uh, you need me to do… some, er, extra, I can…"

"No, no, Morris," Brenner interrupted him. "I'm saying we have to let you go. You'll get a good referral and a nice severance. Paula has all the details. You just need to swing by her desk." Brenner looked at his Rolex. "You can go home early, with pay."

Brenner turned on his heel, opening the door and letting it fall shut behind him as Adrian compiled Brenner's words, struggling to process their meaning.

He tugged the door open and scurried after Brenner, who was more than halfway across the room. "But I'm not finished," he squeaked.

"That's alright. Chrissy will finish up for you. Go see Paula." The edge of his tone left no invitation of debate.

Adrian Morris turned and shuffled meekly towards the stairwell. He could hear Chrissy's fluffy giggles mocking him as he trudged up the staircase, the quiver in his knees increasing with each step he took.

*****

Adrian found it disconcerting to be able to choose from the empty seats on the bus. He was accustomed to the throng of people he had to navigate morning and night. The relative solitude added to his uneasiness. He took deep breaths, concentrating on his nerves and nothing more, feeling his heart palpitating as he tried to push his stringy, sweaty hair off his brow.

The bus slowed and a woman stood, her two children in tow. Adrian felt his shoulders loosen at the prospect of respite from the noisy kids who'd been begging for a treat and protesting over the news that they were spending the night at Grandma's. He'd tried to block it out, but the hum in his ears intensified painfully and he'd given up trying to filter the noise.

The door opened and a new sound thudded into his sensitive orifices. The boom of the bass seemed to shake the windows as the youths strutted into the bus, oversized ghetto blaster draped over the shoulder of the first one. Adrian glanced up nervously at the wrong time. The teen glared down at him.

"Yo, what you lookin' at?"

Adrian's eyes widened and his lips trembled. Before he could muster a word of response the young man laughed cruelly and continued his trek to the back of the bus.

Now the whine of children had been replaced with the thud of the boom box. The so-called music was so loud that it pushed any possibility of thought beyond grasp.

Adrian could feel the sweat pooling on his fingers, trickling from his neck down his back, his heart outpacing the techno punk blaring in his head. He wanted to reach up and cover his ears, scream until the music stopped, but then he was there. His stop. The place he could exit to and return to processing his day, sorting and filing it and trying to make sense of where his life was going now.

'Order. I need to find order,' he told himself as he walked down the sidewalk. The cherry blossoms were blooming. With the spring rain came a number of things and his furtive glances at the manicured lawns he passed showed tulips emerging from the flowerbeds. Soon the dismal grey would give way to colour.

He'd forgotten he wasn't in a hurry anymore until he saw Claire. Her silky brown hair hung over her shoulders, her long legs augmented by the pleated skirt she was wearing as she walked towards him, a dark terrier in tow.

Claire's blue eyes sparkled as her whole face resonated with her smile. "Hi Adrian. How are you?"

"Oh, um. I'm alright." He managed to get the words out without much of a stammer, pushing his glasses back up on his nose instinctively as he looked down at the dog. "Is he, uh, your dog?"

He looked up at her in time to see her nod. He felt his neck kink slightly, but ignored it. Somehow, talking to Claire always overrode all the markers he relied on for comfort.

"I just got him. Isn't he adorable?"

"Oh, uh, yes Claire. Wha-what's his name?"

"Leigh."

"Really? Tha… that… That's m-my… middle name," he said, barely managing to get the words out coherently as she smiled and nodded, waiting for him to finish. Claire wasn't like other people, who took the gaps as a chance to cut in.

Once, when he'd been upset, he'd muttered that he wished he could just get the words out without tripping over them. He'd always known it was just nerves, but he couldn't stop himself.

She told him she thought that everyone deserved to have at least one wish come true. He'd smiled and stuttered that he thought that was a nice idea, and she'd taken the time to talk to him when she saw him ever since.

She even lent him tapes of music she said she liked. Music he wasn't sure he liked, but he was trying hard to like it.

Her smile widened now. "I didn't even know that! Isn't that funny? You've been renting our suite for years and I never knew that. You're home early."

"Yes, well, I, uh… do you think you…" he started, only to be interrupted from a voice across the street.

"Claire! I managed to get us tickets for the theatre," the approaching figure declared as he jaunted across the road without so much as a hint of a sweat or a hair out of place. He glanced at Adrian, giving him a toothy smile. "Hi."

"Oh, hi. I'll, uh… Nice to meet your Leigh," Adrian said lamely, unnerved by the site of Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome, the man who was the embodiment of all the things he knew appealed to women, all the things he knew he wasn't. He trudged off to his basement suite, descending the steps and wishing he could really sink into the earth and have it swallow him up. Wasn't that what everyone wanted to see happen to him anyway? He was insignificant, a 'nobody'. Nobody anybody wanted to know.

*****

Claire watched him go, her eyes shadowed.

"You're so soft. You worry about everyone," Mark said to her with a shake of his head.

"Didn't you see what was in his hand? That's a severance package. He must have lost his job."

"It happens," Mark said, shrugging unsympathetically.

She turned to him with a slight twist of her mouth, thrusting the dog leash into his hands. "I'm going to check on him."

"Claire…"

"He'll be on my mind all night if I don't make sure he's okay." She could never explain to Mark that she sensed in Adrian a sensitive spirit, a kindness that so many people lacked. She never had to try to live up to an expectation with Adrian. Although they had really only begun to talk in the past few months, he heard every word she said, cared about what she thought. He tried hard too, she knew, to find nice things to say about her taste in music and books. 'I'll just make sure he's okay.'

*****

'Now, where to put this,' Adrian thought, wearing a trench into the linoleum as he covered the narrow space over and over again. Everything had its place, its allotted spaced within his small suite. But this, this letter from work, was throwing off the balance. He held his head in his hands in an effort to keep his thoughts from spinning out of control, relying as always on the external to govern the internal, to help him sort the whirling voices into order.

He stopped swirling around, vaguely surprised that he wasn't dizzy. Dropping the letter onto the table he trotted into the bedroom, carefully pulling the tin box from under his bed. He pulled it out and sat down, setting the box on his knees.

Lifting the lid cautiously, he set it on the bed alongside his body. Adrian reached into the box, stroking the cold metal barrel of the gun. He felt the pinch in his neck unwind and he lifted the gun into his hand.

He smiled. He knew what to do. He would show them, show them all he wasn't insignificant. He wasn't a 'nobody'. He was the 'somebody' that everybody had overlooked.

Crossing the room, Adrian pulled the squeaky chair back from the desk, letting it absorb his girth as he squeezed between the arms. He leaned forward, feeding a sheet of paper into the old Olympic he'd stubbornly clung to.

The first two words were easy. He was going to tell them all, leaving no room for doubt. He didn't want someone else to take his credit and he didn't want some headshrinker propagating the wrong conclusion. He wanted them to know. He wanted to be known.

And this was the way.

He slid his fingers back over the gun slowly, the conviction solidifying. He reached for his tape deck, pressing play.

His music usually soothed his mind too, but he'd forgotten one of Claire's mixes was in the tape deck. The band The Box offered its mantra, "Walking, walking, on the tightrope of insanity… Walking, walking, on the verge of losing mind. Walking, walking, on the tightrope of insanity… Walking, walking on the verge of losing mind."

He turned the tape off, feeling his heart trot with the insinuation. He wasn't crazy. He wasn't losing his mind. He'd show them all.

Adrian lost himself in the soothing rhythms of a 70 word per minute keystroke echoing like machinegun fire in an alley as the words flowed from his mind through his willing fingers…

Claire walked around the side of the old house, intending to knock at his door around back, but as she passed the bedroom her attention was drawn by a movement from the other side of the window that she saw from the corner of her eye.

When she didn't return, Mark reluctantly walked around the house, glancing at his watch. He had plans for the evening, and they didn't include holding the hand of a dreary little man his fiancé felt sorry for.

"What…" he started to ask. Claire stepped back from the window and shook her head.

His brows merged to form a solid line and he choked back a sigh as he approached the window, seeing the satisfied smile as Adrian Morris stroked the gun.

"I swear! I was only writing a story," Adrian protested as the officers sought to restrain him. He was contorting his body, pulling back against their grasp, turning his head from side to side and trying to twist his head to see what the stream of uniformed people were doing inside his home…

He froze as his eyes focused in on Claire, the officers seizing the chance to tighten their grip as they forced him along the sidewalk to the waiting cruiser.

"I was writing a book! It was just a list of names for a book," he squealed pleadingly as they pushed his hands together and cuffed him, needing only to nudge his head down slightly to get him inside the open back door.

"Come on, Claire. They can handle things now."

"But they want to take him away."

Mark shook his head. "I heard them say he has a history, he's been committed before."

Claire swallowed. "That doesn't mean he's lying. What if he was only…?"

Mark summoned a soothing tone. "Then they'll let him go. But we did the right thing."

*****

"Now, this is the gun, isn't it? What can you tell us about it, Mr. Morris?"

An enigmatic smile filled his face, the hush of the crowd of fans straining to hear him speak lingering in the air invitingly. They were holding their breath for him, waiting to hear what he would say. He glanced over the crowd, and then nodded.

"Yes, it is."

"So this is your weapon of choice?"

"No, no. My weapon is the words. The gun is just another tool, no different than the characters in the story."

"Your book, Compelled to Kill, is an international best-seller. Can you tell us about what inspired you to write this story?"

"I was out of work, so I finally had time to write. The idea had been shaping for some time. It was just a matter of sitting down at the typewriter and putting my thoughts down on paper."

"You make it sound so simple. Why did you choose a typewriter instead of a computer?"

Adrian Morris smiled again, nodding his approval of the question. He carried on, indulging in the rapt attention of the audience…

*****

"Is there any progress?" Claire asked.

The doctor shrugged slightly. "When he first came he insisted he was just writing a book. He insisted it was just a list of character names."

"He wrote that in a letter to me," Claire said. "He said that if he stayed here he would lose his mind."

"We aren't here to make people crazy."

"What is he doing?" Claire asked.

The corners of the doctor's mouth twisted down. "This is his alternate reality. He believes he's written a best-selling book and that he's being interviewed in front of hundreds of adoring fans."

She shook her head, watching Adrian talk to the empty chair, all the inhibitions that had governed him outside these walls suppressed by the dominance of the delusion.

Claire turned to walk away, pausing to hear Adrian Morris continue his monologue, his voice smooth and crisp as the words came effortlessly, without hesitation.

'He isn't stuttering. I guess he got one wish after all.'

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra Ruttan has studied journalism, communication theory and special education. After several years of early intervention work with children with speech and motor delays she is concentrating on her writing. She has written a police procedural that made the shortlist in an international unpublished novel competition, and another mystery she's been working on recently made the long list in a different competition. Sandra is now focusing on finding an agent or publisher for her work. Write to Kill was
written to play with the mind. Was Adrian Morris crazy or was he really just an aspiring writer? You decide.

Sandra is a regular contributor to SPINETINGLER Magazine and can be reached at sandra.ruttan@spinetinglermag.com