The Man Who Murdered Himself.
A Short Story.
Cable Nash paused outside the glass frontage of the Tyrell Building to finish his cigarette. He was old enough to remember when smoking was still allowed inside public buildings, although he had been too young to smoke. Whenever Wendy started nagging him to quit, what about the cancer, think about her and the kids if he didn’t care about himself, he’d remind her of all the movies he’d sat through with his dad, watching the film through a fog of cigarette smoke caught in the projector beam, wondering if the kids sat in the non-smoking section of the cinema could see any better, or had the smoking side’s pollution filled the whole auditorium, and their lungs, too?
After a while, Wendy quit asking Nash to give up on the cigarettes. She could see it was annoying him, and when Nash got annoyed, that’s when the other guy would show up. And that other guy was one nasty, fucked up son of a bitch.
Besides, Wendy never understood what he was talking about, never got the point. Nash’s mother and father had both been chain smokers, back in the days when a person had the right to light up anywhere they wanted. And young Cable Nash had been their constant companion, an only child, subject not only to their second hand cigarette smoke, but their incessant arguing, and violence too.
Good old Mom and Pop, they were the real problem, not the cigarettes. They’d both been dead many years, but the damage they had done in Cable Nash’s childhood lived on.
That was what Dr Egelman had told him, on his first visit to the clinic.
“They gave you cancer, son,” he had said, pointing a long finger at him from behind his desk, a shock of white hair falling over his forehead. “And I’m not talking about the kind of cancer that you’ll get from smoking all those cigarettes, either.”
Sure, he didn’t have any tumours, Egelman had continued, and a blood test wouldn’t show anything abnormal, but he had cancer all right. A cancer of the soul, of his psyche. As Egelman continued talking, Nash felt that he had finally found someone who understood him, realised the torment he had suffered all these years, even had empathy for him. Nash’s own doctor had diagnosed him as depressed. He’d prescribed anti-depressants, and Nash had seen countless psychiatrists. But no amount of psychobabble, or energy sapping drugs, did anything to release his head from the white static that filled it, or the lump of grey despair that sat in his chest.
“And this cancer,” Egelman had said, “has been allowed to grow and evolve over the years. It has become another side to your personality. The aggressive side, the bully, the abuser. That’s why you feel like you are two people, sometimes, why your own head can argue with itself, be bullied by itself.”
Oh yeah, Nash could identify with that, all right. All those nights he’d lain awake in bed, that voice in his head, telling him, You’re a fucking waste of space! Why don’t you do everybody a favour, and check out, buddy? Nobody’d miss you, in fact they’ll all be better off without you.
Nash would give anything to be free of that voice.
Nash flicked the cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and ground it out under his shoe. After a quick check to see if anyone had noticed, (the NYPD were like fucking Nazis these days, pick you up for anything) he checked his watch. He still had ten minutes before his appointment.
He lit up another cigarette.
It had taken years of failed relationships, and a continual build-up of anger, the kind he could only vent with his fists, before he had begun to think that something might be wrong. His second wife, that slut Janelle, (and what the fuck had he ever seen in her?) she had told him he was a psychopath. That was in the middle of a blazing row, while she was hurling kitchen knives at him.
You stupid bitch! He’d wanted to shout back. You’re the one throwing the knives at me!
But he had been too busy ducking and dodging, trying to stay alive, to say anything.
Nash had spent the next few years in and out of jail, on assault charges. No matter how hard he tried to hold onto it, to control the darkness within, he inevitably found himself in another bar, drunk and bitter, and ready to destroy something, or someone.
He got married again, had a kid, a sickly, skinny little thing, who didn’t survive its first winter. Cops had got involved on that one, seemed to think there might be a case against the parents for neglect, or something like that. But nothing came of it, and Nash got divorced again, and then he met Wendy.
Wendy was the first woman he met who wasn’t like him, or those skanks he’d been married to before. What she saw him in he didn’t know, and really, she should have stayed clear, she’d had her own bad relationships over the years, too many that wound up her being a punching bag. She told him, when they first started getting serious, she said, you lay a finger on me, and I’m gone, baby.
I’m gone.
Nash took one last drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt away. As soon as his treatment was complete, and he was better, Nash had promised himself, and Wendy, that he was going to give up the filthy habit.
The Tyrell building was one of those exclusive places, where you had to be buzzed in by a security guard, and then they looked you up on the monitor on the desk, and then made a phone call, until finally you got to ride in the elevator to your appointment. There were several businesses occupying the Tyrell building, none of which Nash had ever heard of. Just like Egelman’s clinic.
A friend of a cousin to a friend of Wendy’s sister, was how Nash got to hear about Egelman.
“You been tellin everyone about our private business?” Nash had yelled, the anger bubbling up with frightening ease.
“No, of course not,” Wendy had said. “But this woman, this friend, her partner was abusive, he was angry and depressed all the time. I think he was in Iraq, maybe suffering with, you know, post-traumatic stress.”
“And what, he went to see this quack, and he’s cured now?”
“Yeah, that’s what Sandrine says.”
“Probably gave him a fucking lobotomy. Betcha he sits around the house all day, watching reruns of Mork and Mindy, while his girlfriend feeds him baby food, and wipes his ass for him.”
After that, Wendy went into a sulk. Nash thought that was the end of it, but a couple of days later she started in on him again, and before he knew it, she’d worn him down, and Nash was looking this guy up, and making himself an appointment.
