Graveyard Plots

Multiples (With Barry N. Malzberg)

Kenner murdered his wife for the tenth time on the evening of July 28, in the kitchen of their New York apartment. Or perhaps it was July 29. One day is much the same as another, and I cannot seem to keep dates clearly delineated in my head. He did it for the usual reasons: because she had dominated him for fourteen years of marriage (fifteen? sixteen?), and openly and regularly ridiculed him, and sapped all his energy and drive, and, oh I simply could not stand it any more.

He did not try to be elaborately clever as to method and execution. The simpler the better — that was the way he liked to do it. So he poisoned her with ten capsules of potassium, I mean nitrous oxide, disguised as saccharine tablets, which he neatly placed in her coffee with a twist of the wrist like a kiss. Nothing amiss.

She assumed almost at once the characteristic attitude of oxide poisoning, turning a faint green as she bent into the crockery on the table. A cigarette still smoldered unevenly beside her. She drank twenty cups of coffee every day and smoked approximately four packages of cigarettes, despite repeated warnings from her doctor. Kenner found it amusing to think that her last sensations were composed of acridity, need, and lung-filling inhalation. It was even possible that she believed, as death majestically overtook her, that the cigarette had done her in.

Kenner, a forty-five-year-old social worker of mundane background, few friends, and full civil service tenure (but nevertheless in grave trouble with his superiors, who had recently found him to be “insufficiently motivated”), then made all efforts to arrange the scene in what he thought to be a natural manner: adjusting the corpse in a comfortable position, cleaning the unused pellets of cyanide from the table, letting the damned cat out, and so forth. Immediately afterward, he went to a movie theater; that is, he went immediately after shutting off all the lights and locking all the doors. Windows were left open in the kitchen, however, to better disperse what he thought of as “the stench of death.”

What Kenner did at the movie theater was to sit through a double feature. The price he paid for admission and what films he saw or did not really see are not known at the time of this writing. Furthermore, what he hoped to gain by leaving the scene of the crime only to reenter at a “safer” time remains in doubt. I must have been crazy. Also, Kenner’s usual punctiliousness and sense of order did not control his actions during this tragic series of events. I was too excited.

After emerging from the theater, Kenner purchased an ice cream cone from a nearby stand and ate it slowly while walking back to his apartment. As he turned in a westerly direction, he was accosted by two co-workers at the Welfare Unit where he was employed. They greeted him and asked the whereabouts of his wife. Kenner responded that she had had a severe headache and, since she suffered from a mild heart condition complicated by diabetes, wanted to restrain her activities to the minimum. I suppose Kenner was attempting with this tactic to lay the groundwork for a “death by natural causes” verdict, but I’m not quite sure. I do know that one of the co-workers, commenting on Kenner’s appearance, said that he looked “ghastly.”

Once parted from his colleagues, Kenner continued west and eventually reentered his apartment at 10:51 P.M. It was frightening in the dark. Turning on the lights, he went into the living room and found his wife waiting there for him — sitting under a small lamp, reading and drinking coffee and smoking five cigarettes in various stages of completion. Much perturbed, he was unable to account for the fact that she was still alive. I felt as if I were dreaming.

There was a brief exchange of dialogue between Kenner and his wife, the substance of which I cannot recall, and then he proceeded to his own room. He wanted to lock the door behind him but could not, owing to the fact that his wife — saying that separate bedrooms or not, she wanted to know what the “little fool” was doing at all times — had forbidden him a bolt. On the way he noticed that the plates had been removed from the kitchen table and heaped as always to fester in the sink, and that there was no sign of the violence he was sure had taken place earlier.

Immediately after closing his door, Kenner seized his journal and began to record the evening’s curious events in his usual style. I could have been a published writer if only I had worked at it. He was hopeful that the documentation would help him to understand matters, but I was wrong, this was never the answer.

He was interrupted midway through his writing by his wife’s customarily unannounced entrance into his room. She told him that his strange state of excitation this evening had upset even her, and therefore agitated her mild heart condition (she had one, all right, although she did not have diabetes). She said she thought I was “breaking down,” and went on to say that she knew the “impulse to murder her” had long been uppermost in Kenner’s mind but he “didn’t have the guts to do it.” She further stated that Kenner was no doubt “dreaming all the time of ways and means and you probably fill that damned journal of yours with all your raving imaginations; I’ve never cared enough to bother reading it, but it’s sure to be full of lunatic fantasies.”

Kenner responded that he was a mature person and thus not prey to hostile thoughts. He begged her to leave the room so that he could continue his entries. I told her I was writing a novel, but she didn’t believe me. She knows everything.

She laughed at him and dared him to make her leave the room. Kenner stared at her mutely, whereupon she laughed again and said if looks could kill, she’d certainly be dead right now. Then she said, “But if I were dead, you’d be lost; you’d fall apart altogether. You need me and you don’t really want me dead, you know, even though as I’m talking to you you’re probably filling up pages with more vicious fantasies. I’ll bet I even know what you’re writing this very minute. You’re imagining me dead, aren’t you? You’re writing down right this minute that I’m dead.”

She’s dead.

She’s dead.

She — is — dead!

Kenner murdered his wife for the eleventh time on July 29 or July 30, in her bedroom in their New York apartment. He did it for the usual reasons, and he did not attempt to be elaborately clever as to method and execution. In fact, he chose to repeat the procedure of the previous evening. While she lounged in bed as was her custom on weekends (this was either Saturday or Sunday), I made her breakfast and poisoned her coffee with eleven capsules of nitrous oxide.

When Kenner took the tray into her bedroom, she was sitting up in bed and there were three cigarettes burning on the nightstand. She smiled at him maliciously as she lifted her cup, and asked if he had “put in a few drops of arsenic or something to sweeten the taste.” After which she laughed in her diabolical way and drank some of the coffee.

With clinical curiosity, Kenner watched the cup slip from her fingers and spill the rest of the liquid over the bedclothes; watched her expression alter and her face and body once more assume the characteristic attitude of oxide poisoning as she fell back against the headboard. The faint green color looked quite well on her, he concluded.

This time Kenner did not arrange the scene in what he thought to be a natural manner. He also did not open the windows. He simply left the apartment and took a subway to Times Square, where he consumed a breakfast of indeterminate nature in a restaurant or perhaps a cafeteria. Once finished he browsed through a bookstore, purchased a candy bar, and finally took the subway home again. Upon entering his apartment, I think the time was 10:51 A.M., he proceeded directly to his wife’s bedroom.

She was still lying in bed, and she was still quite surprisingly dead. The scene, however, had after all been changed in certain ways. The coffee that he was sure had been spilled across the bedclothes had not been spilled at all; the cup, in point of fact, rested empty on the breakfast tray. Her color was not greenish, but rather a violent purple. The three cigarettes had become four, and each had burned down to skeletal fingers of gray ash. Her hands were clutched somewhat pathetically at her breast.

Kenner stared at her for a long time, after which scrutiny he went to his room and attempted to write in his journal. I could not seem to think, I knew I would have to wait until later. Returning to his wife’s bedroom once more, he paused to study the empty coffee cup and the remains of the cigarettes. It was then that he understood the truth.

The cigarettes and the coffee, not Kenner, had done her in.

What he did next is not clear. Very little is clear even now, many hours later. He does seem to have telephoned his wife’s doctor, since the physician arrived eventually and pronounced her dead of a heart attack. Two or three interns also came with a stretcher and took her away. As I write this I can still smell the after-shave lotion one of them was wearing.

One thing, therefore, is quite clear: she’s dead.

Damn her, she really is dead and gone forever.

What am I going to do now?

Kenner murdered his dead wife for the first time on August 1, or possibly August 6, in the bathroom of their New York apartment...