Today should have felt like something, but it didn’t. It was a spectacularly ordinary evening. At some point the sleek dark buildings in the center of the city gave way to homogenous brownstones and I lost the urge to watch anymore.

There was a flash of motion and for one insane second, I didn’t recognize myself in the cabbie’s rearview mirror. I had gotten thick-black rimmed sunglasses from a drug store some time ago, and I had grown a small patchy beard. It was the last part of my transformation and the easiest, and if any cameras happened to catch me it would make facial identification quite difficult.

It was convenient to believe that I’d thought of everything. There certainly had been enough time. By now, it had to be twelve years, twelve long years, years that I hadn’t thought about but that came rushing in now, in the back of a humid taxi cub.

Stores were closing now, and streetlights coming on. The city’s pulse was dying down to a trickle now. I entered the womb of the city, beneath the skeleton of shoddy underpasses and spindly road signs. I tried to slow down my breathing like I had been taught, and inexplicably fixated on the pale spot on my wrist where I usually wore a watch. Over the years, weightlifting had made my bones denser and thicker and I had had to expand the band as time went on.

When my uncle first tried to speak to me, I was like every other college student, skin and bones, and he had looked at my frame and clucked disapprovingly which he tended to do a lot when he looked at me.

I went over everything again, where the knives were on my body and the guns, although using guns at this point would certainly be a failure of some kind. I felt very strongly that way, but I didn’t know why. Maybe it’s the investment of time, pain and money it had taken to make my whole body a weapon, to learn to kill, with my hands, elbows, feet and even my teeth. Anything that can move can be used as a weapon. It had been a slow, laborious process, but its better than what she went through. I know better than anyone.

I found her first.

I was on winter break from school, sneaking back to her house to ravage her cabinets for precious food, when I thought she wouldn’t be home. I knew something was wrong when the door stood open. It was nothing I could see, but everything sounded differently. The hinges were loose on the front door, they popped like tendons when I opened it.

I went to bedroom instinctively and one glance was quite enough. I hadn’t seen her naked since we were children, but there she was, face purple, hanging from her own bed with a belt around her neck. The smell hit me a second later, like a wave. For some reason, that was worse, there was something final about it.

Life is a funny thing. You can’t explain what animates someone, what that spark is in their eyes. But when its gone, you know it.

After that, it was a blur of activity. I remember bits and pieces. I was sitting with my brother-in-law when the police said they found semen in two locations on her body, and when toxicology reports found cocaine and alcohol in her system. We didn’t tell the family about that.

It was no time until we found the man, David “Booby” Harris, a three time drug felon with a handful of other charges on his rap sheet. There was a trial, or something that was supposed to be trial, where they spent weeks detailing what happened to my sister, only to have Harris walk, because they really didn’t have much of a case. And to beat it all, he got arrested six weeks later on Federal gun charges and went to prison anyway. In the end, he did four and half years. It seemed like a life should be worth more than that.

I remember my uncle calling me into his study. He was the de facto patriarch of the family, ever since my dad got his divorce and fled town, and no one else seemed to want the job. He always had this way of looking at me like I was something physically repellant. I suppose I was, with my skinny jeans and pasty skin, and my college back pack.

The study was foul smelling, cheap cigars, musty books. There was less light, stale air, it was like another dimension from the rest of the house. It was dedicated to a time period in history that had never existed. There were scores of drab books dedicated to military history and tactics, and badly maintained weapons from yesteryear. My uncle was a Korean war veteran, but the truth is, he was honorably discharged after three months due to an injury he sustained from his backpack.

“Terrible thing that happened to your sister,” he said. It was the obvious thing to say, but he didn’t know how to transition the conversation to the topic he wanted to talk about. I nodded and tried to find books on the shelf that were sort of interesting or were valuable first editions. I’d played this game for years, and in my mind there was always a Guttenberg Bible lurking behind the innumerable copies of Leathernecks.

“And they let that man get away so easily, “ he continued. “There’s no value to life anymore. None at all. Not like that in the old days-“

“I don’t think there’s ever been any value to human life,” I replied. It sounded more glib that I meant it too.

“That’s a horrible thing to say,” he snapped. “Your generation doesn’t appreciate the effort it takes to purchase freedom. The sacrifice. Nothing done was ever accomplished without it.”

“I understand effort, uncle. I just believe that violence, conflict, war, they’re all the most debasing things that we could possibly think about. They lower us. I don’t know what we could have accomplished as a race, if we hadn’t spent most of the time fighting about race and possessions and land. I wish I could change it, but I can’t. The best I can do, is not be part of it.”

He paused, and absent-mindedly played with a knob on a leprous writing desk. The only movement for a while was a languid ceiling fan.

“You never know what tomorrow will bring,” he said thoughtfully. “What you have to do to defend your family. What you have to do that you might think barbaric.”

“I can’t see it,” I replied. “There’s always another way. Another way out. If we could separate ego from the process of resolving conflicts we’d see there was never any reason to fight.
“I remember the rabbi telling about the scapegoat, that the nation would get together and declare their sins and then pass them onto a goat, and then they would send him into the desert to die eventually. And everyone would feel better about themselves. And that’s what it all is.”

“I suppose it is a relief to know that you retained something from the synagogue,” he said dryly. “Nevermind. I’ll do the damned thing myself.”
“What thing,” I said, suddenly attentive. But it was too late, and there was no more conversation to be had.

I heard about it later. How he found a dress uniform and the remains of an M1 Carbine and headed to one of the most blighted spots in the whole city. And I knew he was looking for Booby Harris. It didn’t end well. The police spotted him with a loaded weapon and brought him down before he even got close, but in the scuffle he broke his cheekbone and his hip.

When I came to visit him in the hospital I thought he didn’t have the will to keep fighting. Rehab is hard and long and humiliating and for him it was one indignity too many. His skin was dry and waxy and his breathing sounded like papers rustling. In the end, he had become one of his books.

I didn’t know what to say. I don’t like hospitals, but the inference there is that someone does like hospitals, and I find that hard to believe.
“In the old days,” he said distantly. “When someone died and justice could not be done, the burden of the deed went to the family. Among the males one had to be chosen. He was the Avenger of blood, and he was to hunt down the killer unless the murderer fled to one of the seven cities of refuge. One who did not comply was cursed forever.”
“Is that what you thought you were doing,” I asked, irritated by his nonsense. “Getting street justice? You almost killed half this family, you know everyone is grieving my sister!”
He shook his head gently.

“Not justice,” he said as firmly as he could. “Vengeance. Justice comes from Yahweh.”
I put my face in my hands, ran them through hair that was quite long and obstinately curly.

“You’ve always been a leech,” he said hatefully. “Draining from this family, contributing nothing, like most of your wretched generation. Mocking us, like we didn’t know what you were doing. You think me quite mad, but I am sane enough for one last thing.

“You will not get a penny from this family until you do your duty. I’ve spoken to your mother, she’s not happy, but she is obedient. I’ve spoken to all of them. I’ve created a trust for your college funds. They’ll be put in an account handled by a guardian in the family, and that person’s identity will not be told to you. If you want to finish school, it will be on your own dime, but I know you haven’t got the sand for it. You’ll come back to the teat eventually. But it will be on my terms.”

He leaned back, completely satisfied. I just shook my head. The man was delirious. Something that monstrous would never happen. The idea of me killing a man for my college money – I’d be a hitman basically. And the idea of my family going along with it-
I didn’t believe it until my mother looked down away from me.
“You can’t be serious,” I started.

“You were there,” she said firmly. “You saw her. You saw what happened to her. That lunatic drugged her, he raped her-“
I stepped back. I’m not a big fan of denial. I never thought she was drugged. Back in college, she liked to party. Hard. I thought she grew out of it, but I knew she was married and bored. For that matter, I wasn’t completely sold on her being raped either. I remember reading about a shark that had to swim all the time or else it drowned. She was like that never still, never predictable. She got into a lot of things that way.

But they saw wanted they wanted to see. They were willing me to do what they could not, what they would not. All our life, we were passed along, from daycares and camps, to private schools and sports teams. We were babysat by a television, and fed premade meals by people so busy living their own lives that they couldn’t be bothered with ours. At every gathering it was clear our presence was an intrusion and we were shepherded into a corner and abandoned. And now posthumously, everyone wanted to be grief stricken about someone they never had time to know. And someone – someone had to bear the weight of their sins.

The freefall took a while, but it was inevitable. The old man was right about one thing, I had been terribly sheltered and all at once, I was in a single room apartment, over a bodega, working as a waiter and unable to pay for school.

In one sweep he had stripped me of my identity. I couldn’t get the vintage ironic clothes. Being a vegan was no longer cost effective, I ate the same cheaply made, genetically altered, trans fat swill everyone else ate. My books, my music, my art supplies, everything costs money, and when you’re down to your last dollar, everything that you have breaks at the same time. When the trappings of your life leave, the ‘friends’ leave to. There’s always another couch to sleep on.

At night, the streets were tempestuous as ocean waves. Animals rooted through trash, car alarms rang incessantly, arguments started and ended abruptly, and police sirens streamed sound in ley lines. I couldn’t sleep. It didn’t bother me before, but I started seeing visions of my sister in the bed, her eyes like eye whites, her skin like clay hanging limply from an unmade bed.

I met Melissa mostly because she looked as desperate as I did. I can’t say we loved each other, but our imperfections lined up nicely and we didn’t fight too much. Society had separated the wheat from the chaff, and we weren’t the wheat.

I wasn’t crazy about her habit, but my life felt further and further out of my control and it seemed like there were bigger fish to fry. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? That a girl with a needle in her arm didn’t even bother me anymore, but everybody does something to escape this world.

The first time I did cocaine was the best day of my life. It was like being surrounded by friends at the best party you’ve ever been too. It was like Mardi Gras, Carnivale and Spring Break all rolled into one feeling and the moment it was over I knew I was utterly fucked. Drugs were color and life was getting very black and white. Soon my little room became a chemistry set of sorts and Melissa spent all of our time and money we didn’t have making ourselves as happy as possible.

It’s a progression that isn’t original in the least. You start out and you have discipline, weed to relax, coke to stay alert, maybe some ecstasy at a club. But sometimes your pockets are kinda low, and you can’t afford the good stuff. You can make meth yourself, and you can get it cheap, heroin isn’t too bad either and diabetic supplies are everywhere so needles are easy to get, and crack is the most convenient of all them. When you’re down to your last ten bucks, you can either get a bag of crack or you can go home and read a book to relax.

I don’t have a lot of books at my place anymore, and I don’t feel like reading them.

Across the town, the old man sat patiently in a bed in a nursing home. Hate kept him alive. He was waiting for me to crack. Its not like he had anything else to do.

When you sleep during the day and you slink around at night, time becomes strange. One day ran seamlessly into the next, and weekdays were no different than weekends. Either we were high or we were trying to get high. That was the only distinction. Every now and then, I would see myself in a mirror, but my image had no significance.

It ended as all things have to.

One day I shot her up and she smiled at me gently as she started to wink out.

And she never woke up.

I sat there, not moving. Not grieved, not shocked just blank. When the cops got there, they just took me gently. For all my good intentions, I was now a killer, at least in the eyes of the law. I was told that my uncle died shortly after he heard of my arrest. He died at peace. He knew his job was done.

I did three and a half years total. That doesn’t sound like much for a human life because it isn’t. If you’ve never done any time, it doesn’t sound bad at all. It sounds like a slap in the wrist. Three and a half years is both long and short.

When you first see a Federal prison on the bus, it gets real. County isn’t so bad. There’s drunk drivers and Mexicans and if you keep to yourself, and you don’t mind bad food, its okay, but when you get sent upstate it’s a whole other thing. We passed uneven field and choppy grass. It’s the only green I saw for the next three years.

The prison itself was an utterly utilitarian structure, it was made to punish and nothing else. It was a combination of long stretches of mottled concrete, rusty barbed wire and cinderblock. The only colors that exist are brown, the orange of the uniform, and about a thousand different kinds of grey. Its little things you miss. Certain sounds. Seeing grass and birds. The lack of color hit me harder than I thought.

They process you pretty much like they process animals in the slaughterhouse. They strip you naked and see if you’re hiding contraband in your asshole. Until then, I was too numb to feel anything, but the indignity of it hit me, and I started to cry. And honestly, once you’re in prison, tears are the weakest currency of all.

Let’s get this straight, because there’s a lot of bullshit about this. If you’re getting sent down for any chunk of time, you’re going to fuck another man in the ass, and you’re probably going to get fucked in the ass, and anyone who tells you any different is lying. When you’re outside on the street, you feel like a predator, but when they release you into general population, you become keenly aware that you’re prey. There were a hundred lazy looks, the way a resting lion looks at wildebeest in the distance and marks his kill. You’re an animal. You’re treated like an animal and you become an animal.

The key thing about getting locked up is the first six weeks. If you’re going to crack its starts then. At first, the routine is new and you’re learning what to do. But around the second week, you start getting antsy. You wouldn’t mind going anywhere, seeing anything different, anything but those fucking walls, and that wire. Then the cellblock gets a little smaller everyday. The air is heavy, but the light is thin. The noise is oppressive, and you’re never alone, not when you take a shit, not when you want to jerk off, not ever. There’s no way to vent the pressure. And you start to feel this funny sort of tickling inside your head, and you realize that’s what insanity feels like.

And maybe that’s the way it would have ended except for one small thing. The guards and the prisoners both liked to bet. Its funny, they stick prisons out in the middle of nowhere as much as they can, which means the guards are usually locals. Hicks. Low-level military types. Bullies and Sadists. And in this prison, like a few others I heard about, they had a fight club.

Down in the belly of the building, beneath the cafeteria, a couple times a month matches were held. The guards were trained with diluted Krav Maga and some jiu-jitsu. The prisoners had the Jailhouse Rock. And everyone liked to play cops and robbers. And maybe I was the best longshot of all, a pampered, undersized Jewish kid, in over his head with a manslaughter charge.

The first step was getting me in shape. After the first eight months, the state came in and took out all the free weights. They claimed the prisoners were getting too big, like there was something else for us to, so my routine changed. I did down-ups, pushups on my knuckles, pull-ups that kind of shit. The rest of the time was spent learning to fight, to be of no mind, to maim, hurt and kill without thinking.

I’m not going to tell you that I became a total badass. I can’t tell you that when I got paroled that I was feared. But I won more scraps than I lost, and that in itself was a miracle.

More importantly, my heart was dead. I was ready to kill Booby Harris. The money would be nice, and there was quite a bit stored up now, collecting interest, but college wasn’t an option for me anymore. My major had been music, and now my hands had perpetually suffered broken knuckles and fingers. The dream was over. Its just that now there was nothing else I could do.

The first problem was finding him. He was an ex-con like me, and he was likely working under the table somewhere. I asked around in the usual places, but it sounded like he had gone straight and that took him off the radar. I paid my bills working for a bookie. My mom had bought a nice house out of town, so I didn’t see her anymore, not like anyone wanted to talk to me anyway. If they were scarce before, they were nonexistent now.

Again, the days dragged on. And then one day, I found Booby Harris downtown, buying cigarettes. I followed him to nice project on Jonathan Street and then went home to wait for nightfall. Finally it would be over. I got a call to do an errand in the afternoon, but it wasn’t a schedule conflict so I said yes. Wasn’t really thinking.

I went to the bookie’s place to pick up some numbers and maybe eat some oysters and I got greeted by a submachine gun. The night I was supposed to kill Booby Harris, I spent in Central Booking, because the Feds had gotten word of our numbers game and we all got ratted out.

I ended up serving damn near six years on that one. That’s how America works. If you kill somebody that society doesn’t think much of, you aren’t going to get any time. But don’t fuck with anybody’s money.

The older you get, the more pointless prison is. It gets a little harder to get up in the morning. The conversations get less interesting. You spend less time lifting or playing ball and more time in the library. Guy start finding religion, or trying to get certificates and degrees for jobs that will never touch them. You start thinking about your life and what you could be doing right now, instead of dying slowly, like an animal in a zoo.

I wanted to be a high school music teacher, maybe have a band on the side. By now, I would have had a steady job for a while, maybe in charge of the chorus or the band. I definitely would have been married by now. I would have been slightly plump, and I would have had a house. But for now, I was nothing. And I had always been nothing. And it’s a streak that didn’t seem like it was going to break.

There was one last thing I had to do. By now, I was hard as a coffin nail, there was no doubt about that. But I wasn’t a killer. And I still didn’t know if that time came if I could do it. There was only one way to know.

One day, when it’s busy on the street, I want you to stand there and look at everybody. And I want you to imagine that one of them has to die. And I want you to pick one. Cause that’s suddenly what I had to do. Its not a decision a man should make, to look at the totality of a man’s plusses and minuses and then decide whether he lives or dies. It was agony. But I had one last barrier to break. I couldn’t pause with Booby Harris, he was a dangerous man and I had one hell of a scrap ahead of me when I came for him.

In the end, I found a pitiful sex offender in another cellblock. Its funny, we’re all scum, but we get high and mighty like what we didn’t isn’t as bad as someone one else. I guess everyone is like that. But I felt okay with him dying, at least as okay as I was going to feel.

Going from one cellblock to another is not too bad most of the time. I went over on a card game and when the guards got talking I slipped up the stairs. He was staying in his cell, trying to stay away from population. They would find a way to get to him, but at least he was buying time.

“Can I help you,” he said, exposing a crooked, rotting tooth. He was trying to puff up his body to look intimidating. He looked arthritic.

“You gotta watch your back, man,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “Word is, somebody is coming for you.”

He followed my eyes downstairs and at that second, I struck a pressure point in his neck and dragged him to his cot, unconscious. Without wasting a second, I put his pillow over his face and used my bodyweight to push it down. He never woke up or moved. I waited and got out of his cell when started ushering us out for dinnertime.

There was a lot of chatter about him dying, but no one looked too hard. They buried him in the prison cemetery, and for three years I couldn’t help but glance at that spot every time I had chores near there. But now I knew I could kill.

When I got released this time they let me out in the rain, and there was no one to pick me up, but I hadn’t expected anyone. I hadn’t gotten any letters from my mother in a couple years. I heard through the grapevine that she had remarried, some guy that owned a couple of gas stations in town and was a good fifteen years older than her. I didn’t really care.

My life had a purpose again.
I found Booby Harris because I knew where to look, but he had gotten out of the projects by keeping a job delivering bread. He was in a crumbling rowhome on the East side of town. There was no time to waste.

“Wait for me,” I told the cabbie. He nodded in agreement.
I got out the corner and walked two blocks to Harris’ home. The lights were on in the kitchen towards the back, and then upstairs, but I didn’t hear any noise. He lived alone, I knew that, and it didn’t look like he had any guests.

I moved to the back of the house like a cat, and pulled out my 45 and held it down by my coat. The gun was the last resort. In my other pocket was a bottle of arsenic, tightly sealed in a bottle with a small brush on the lid. No point shooting him, if painting the stuff on the lid of his toilet would kill him quietly, that was fine with me.

His door was cheap, flimsy. Easy to get opened. I went in cautiously. Harris was an old-school dealer and they knew how to protect their stash. They could have dogs, snakes, anything.

But it wasn’t like that at all. Harris was sitting at his table, with a bowl of cereal dead as a dog. I didn’t move as a cockroach ran across the table up his bare chest and along his forehead. A lifetime of drug abuse had stopped his clock before I could. I was a tool specifically made for a machine that didn’t exist.

I didn’t stop to think. I pulled out my cellphone and called my mother as I leaned against a wall for support.

“It’s done,” I said hoarsely.
“What’s done,” she said lightly, and I didn’t speak again until she figured it out.
“Talk to the family,” I said. “I want my money.”
“Oh God, Eli,” she said. “After all this time-“
“I want my money,” I said firmly. It was time to get out of town, start a new life. All of this shit was old. I just felt old.
“There is no money,” she said finally.
“He lied,” I asked incredulous. The old man was a bastard, but he was as good as his word. Not like him to string me along.

“No, there was money. Quite a bit actually,” she continued. “But its been twelve years, son. No one thought you’d actually do it! It was like it was wasting there in the account. I needed to get out of town, so I took the money and bought the house and there was still a lot left, but then Scott and I went through a very tough time with his business right after we got married, and I just didn’t think you would do it and we needed it so badly, so they gave the rest of the money to us and we spent it.

“Maybe Scott could give you a job with a salary or something. We could start to give some of it back, not now but when things are better. I know it was a terrible thing to do Eli, but I was going to lose my house-“

I ended the call. Needed to think about what to do. I had that tickling feeling again.

My life was in this house. I started to walk through it silently. There were prescription pills all along the kitchen counter, pills for diabetes, blood pressure, heart problems, mood stabilizers, a cornucopia of drugs, legal ones. There was a stack of credit card offers on the table, that he’d never opened, obviously he’d rebuilt his finances. There was the jacket of his uniform draped over a spindly chair, with several years worth of perfect attendance medals.

In the living room was an assortment of children’s cartoons, and above the television I could see him with what must be his grandchildren. By the entertainment stand was a custom bowling ball in a bag, and there were several trophies spaced along the room. I looked back in the kitchen to see roaches crawling into his open mouth.

Upstairs was nondescript. He had a small study with an oversized open Bible on his desk and a bookmark to help with his daily reading. There was another larger television with a mini-cooler and Kansas City Chiefs foam finger on the wall. In the top drawer of his desk was a toppled stack of photographs.

For some reason I flipped through them, aware that my plastic gloves were still on. I got halfway through the stack, and I saw my sister.

She was smiling in every picture and in one picture she was clinging onto to him for dear life. His face was sullen, but he had a thick arm draped protectively along her shoulder. She wasn’t wearing her wedding ring and there was no tan line where it should have been.

I smiled slightly, but it had nothing to do with amusement. Outside it began to gently rain and a breeze stirred the upstairs curtains. I moved soundlessly through the house like a specter and left through the back door.

The cabbie hadn’t waited for me, but I did not have the slightest hint of irritation. I made my way towards the heart of the city, pulling my collar close to me, as the rain collected around my face like a cloud of gnats. I didn’t feel them.

My family had screwed me over, but they weren’t really thinking about it when they did it. Over the years, I’m what my uncle wanted me to be. An Avenger. Someone who responds to a wrong by killing and maiming everyone who had anything to do with it. And its not something you can just turn off.

I can’t do anything else. I’ll never have a good job, or a nice wife. God knows the state of my body right now, what disease I have, what damage I’ve done. I’ll never have a good night’s sleep or a clean conscience. Hell, I’ll never have a close family again. All I have is a burning desire to hunt them and get my money’s worth of pain out of them.

And I got to tell you, its pretty fucking tempting.