Gun Church

Thirty-Six

One morning I woke up and Stan Petrovic wasn’t the first thing on my mind. The man I thought of as McGuinn had written about it in the notebook: the process of forgetting the worst of things. He’d written that it got easier and easier each time he killed. I had no desire to find out if that was so. I was sure I’d done all the killing I was ever going to do. What did I know?

The month that passed since I’d arrived in Brooklyn had been the weirdest month of my life and, given my life, that was saying something. From one moment to the next, my guts churned with terror and relief, paranoia and calm, rage and regret. I couldn’t see an NYPD cruiser on the street without sweating through my shirt. Each time the phone rang or my landlord knocked at my door, I jumped back down the rabbit hole. I relived my last night in Brixton over and over and over again, killing Stan Petrovic a hundred times, a thousand times. I’d second-guessed myself at every turn and there were days my complete inner monologue consisted of two words: What if. About the only emotion I hadn’t suffered was guilt.

Harder to get out of my head than the image of Stan’s bullet-fucked body was the image of Renee. I still seethed, recollecting the terror in her eyes, her helplessness, and the dark humiliation of her urine-soaked jeans. No, I was without guilt over killing Stan. If ever a man was born deserving of a violent death, it was him. It was kind of hard to argue that the universe wasn’t a better place without the belligerent prick. His death fueled my work. Whenever I found myself panicking, I would go back to reread or tweak some of Gun Church. Whenever I found myself missing Renee, there was one scene I would reread over and over again:

Everything was different tonight. Not because the world had changed, but because it hadn’t. She had. Tonight would mark the sixth time she would lure someone to their death.

Cosmo’s was different in name only from the other two bars in which Zoe had trolled for her prey: dark, smoke-filled, and crowded, with plank flooring rank with spilled beer, and the stink of toilet backwash. Good, she thought. Her aim was to attract attention without being at its center. She could not afford the spotlight and had so far been able to avoid it. The descriptions in the papers were always pretty vague. It was amazing what different color wigs and makeup could do.

Someone once wrote that God was his most cruel in his use of imperfection, in that he used it to such varied ends. So it was for Zoe-a dollar-store demigoddess with electric blue eyes, but unruly blond hair; pleasing curves, but a slightly thick waist; long legs, but one just slightly longer than the other. Yet her imperfections made her alluring in a way that unadorned beauty could not match. Unwanted attention and unwanted touches had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember. She didn’t like thinking about that, about her father putting himself inside her before she’d even gotten to middle school. Now the touching, all the touching, was on her terms.

The deafening music in Cosmo’s that night was a bizarre intergenerational mishmash that blended into an emulsified roar. For Zoe, the louder, the better. Her prey would have to get in close to talk to her, and when the preliminary chitchat was over they would have to move on to conduct business elsewhere. She would press her way through the crowd, taking notice of who noticed her. Then she would work her way to the bar and order a drink. The first time, that was all it took. She was so nervous that she picked up the first man-a college kid, really-who approached her. He proved to be too easy a target. He came almost before she had him fully inside her, and then it took barely fifteen minutes for him to run himself straight into a killing zone. That’s why she had chosen more wisely the next time. He proved to be a real challenge. Took him a long time to come and nearly two hours to kill.

Zoe dreamed of the victim’s kiss. It had been different this week because she knew they were thinking of executing McGuinn tonight as well, that the prey was only meant as a distraction. She wasn’t going to let anything happen to McGuinn. She didn’t love him. She didn’t have love in her. Her father had seen to that, but McGuinn was the only man whose touch didn’t make her retreat into that dark place. So she moved through the bar, her face neutral as a spider’s. Circling back through the crowd, she found her prey. They wanted a distraction and she meant to give it to them, only not the distraction they’d had in mind.

“Hi,” Zoe said, moving in close to a petite brunette seated near the beer pulls. “I don’t even know why I bothered coming here.”

When the brunette looked up and took a close look, Zoe knew she was already entwined in her web.

The pages of Gun Church seemed to be my only retreat for those first few weeks and, like everything else in the surreal world I’d inhabited since September, Stan’s death helped push me to take risks with my work, to edge the plot further out on the limb. That fusion of me and McGuinn that began in the berry patch was nearly complete. The lines between my life and my work were getting awfully blurry. What had started out as a vehicle to tell McGuinn’s story was veering perilously close to autobiography and myth-making, to auto-mythology.

For the first week, I shut myself in my new apartment, unpacking only my laptop and toiletries. I even slept on the floor. Meg tried to get me to come into Manhattan for dinner, but I begged off, explaining to her that I needed time to adjust. Eventually, she stopped asking. I called both Renee and Jim so many times I lost count. I wanted reassurance that everything was all right, that Stan was buried and forgotten, that there was nothing that could lead from him to me. They never answered. They never called back. I found a kind of reassurance in their silence. Whether or not I wanted to put Brixton behind me was beside the point. It seemed Jim and Renee were determined to do it for me, and I stopped calling altogether.

Mid-February in Brooklyn isn’t exactly Paris in the springtime, but that first morning I woke up without Stan Petrovic’s corpse on my back felt like the best spring day ever, in spite of the snow. That was the morning I returned Meg’s calls.

“So, you are alive, Weiler? I was beginning to get concerned.”

“Concerned? No need to speak in code to me anymore, Donovan. I’m not using. The only thing I’ve put in my nose in seven years was a Kleenex and I haven’t had a drink in a month. I’ve just shut myself in to do my work. You’ve gotten the pages I sent you, right?”

“I guess that’s what alarms me,” she said. “Very scary stuff.”

“You have no idea, Meg. No idea.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No, and don’t ever bring it up!” I snapped.

“No need to bite my head off.”

“Sorry. It’s just safer if you think of it as purely fictional, Meg.”

“Safer? Safer for whom?”

“Just safer. Leave it alone,” I said more to myself than to her.

“So I see the book is moving along.”

“It’s getting there.”

“But where is ‘there’ exactly? You were pretty vague about the ending in your plot synopsis and I’m not sure where you’re taking it.”

“You’re worried?”

“It’s my job to worry.”

“Well, stop it. You’re my agent, not my editor.”

“I’m your friend.”

“The ending will be as good as the rest of the book,” I said.

“I think that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“I didn’t call to talk about the book.”

“What then?”

“What’s Amy’s cell number?”

The question has been raised a thousand times: Would Romeo and Juliet’s love have endured had they survived? In Kip Weiler’s uproariously profane and deliciously cruel second novel, Romeo vs. Juliet, he not only restates the question, but uses the answer to absolutely flay the American body politic. Weiler takes to task all the parties insinuating themselves in the divorce proceedings. No group or individual is immune from his scathing wit. With demonic delight, he skewers the Knights of Columbus, ACT UP, Sinatra, Streisand, Jerry Falwell, and even poor Larry King.

— JACKSON DRUM, THE MERTON REVIEW