He Gave Me All He Had

Money was not the usual cost of my services.

I've never had much use for money, so I rarely take on jobs where the only reward is pigeon feed. I'm far more interested in bigger prizes, more fascinating things. Things that make your heart pump harder and your skin break out in a cool sweat of anticipation and fear.

So my sudden ownership of twenty thousand dollars was unexpected, even to me. I could wax lyrical and say that it was by kindness that I accepted the offer, or perhaps that I did it because I was intrigued.

But that would be a lie. And I do not lie.

I was suddenly twenty thousand dollars richer because when he came to me, it was clear that it was all he had to give me. Looking at his face, seeing the emptiness behind his eyes, it was clear there was nothing else I could ask of him. Nothing else he could offer to me.

Someone had already taken it all.

He was a child. Perhaps nineteen. The age when things were meant to be the freshest. When the greed for life had not yet been made frantic by the realisation of mortality. The possibilities for his future should have been endless.

Those were the things I wanted, those endless possibilities. Those were the things I wanted to take from him. I wanted his greed, his determination. I should have been able to ask for his very future when he came to me.

But it was already gone. Forcibly stripped with bruises and words meant to carve him away.

I didn't ask where he'd got the money, and he didn't offer the story. A lottery win, perhaps, or a kidney sold on the black market.

I didn't care.

He just wanted me to solve a problem.

I could do that. I could solve his problem. So I took his money, and I took the name of his problem, and I had him write it all down in my little black book.

He didn't flinch when he took my pen. Pressing his fingers willingly to the thorns that pierced his skin as he wrote the sticky red letters. His writing was wobbly and child-like, matching him in his hunched shoulders and too-big clothes. He didn't tremble or cheer or ache or laugh like most did when they realised what they had just done.

He dropped his bloody hand to his side, blinked his empty eyes and left me at my crossroads.

I enjoyed his twenty thousand dollars, though I can't remember how I spent it all.

I've always marvelled at how any amount of money could seem both life changing and inconsequential depending on who was holding it. In my hands it was a fun plaything, something I didn't need, nor want, yet was in sudden and surprising possession of.

But to the woman leaving the corner store, juggling her baby and an armful of groceries she couldn't afford, the thousand dollars I dropped between the formula and cinnamon crunch would be quite a big deal.

I took pleasure in imagining her shock and panic upon discovering it. Her worry and contemplation on if she should hand it to police or keep it. Her guilt when she eventually and inevitably used it despite her concerns.

It made me giddy knowing that anything she purchased with that money would slowly rot in her conscience.

I left five thousand dollars in a bus station locker, alongside a list of names and places and a suspicious box of powder. I soaked in the joy as the police arrived, confused yet determined, and picked apart the darkest foundations of the city with my silly little list. I watched lives crumble as they tore their own departments apart. I simpered as the corrupt and broken among their elite were thrown from their pedestals.

Such a small amount of money to some, but oh what damage it could do.

I revelled in the chaos of my spending.

But I did not forget the child. The one who had given me the only thing he had left.

In the steaming heat of the midday sun, I sought out the woman attached to the name in my little black book. She was all smiles and fury and disgust. Built of hatred and vile opinions masquerading as facts. She wielded her words as weapons and slaughtered everyone who did not bow.

I didn't usually take the time to know the problems that I solved, but when I at last had her alone I felt a long dormant curiosity swell within me. It was as she was clutching her chest, hands pawing the skin above her heart, that I took the time to peer into her tearful and unfocused eyes.

Looming through the panic, through the terror and the pain of my making, I saw everything.

I saw his everything. I stared hard at it, saw the potential, the wonder, the very soul that she had stripped from him.

I wondered why a woman would bear a child, only to take all that made him real. Why anyone would steal the potential from a creature they have birthed.

She did not answer my wondering. She looked through me as she slumped against her kitchen counter, glassy eyed and gasping.

Really, even if she had seen me, had heard my wonderings, I doubted she would have know herself well enough to answer.

Nevertheless, I bent and murmured in her ear.

“Why?” I asked her. “Why are you like this?”

I did not ask this question of her alone. I posed it to the world. I asked it to the centuries worth of people I had observed through the rise and fall of empires, and to the centuries of people yet to disturb and amuse me.

I asked it of the political climbers, the foolish dictators, those in pain for their lack of money and those who hurt for more of it.

I asked it of the people whose kindness had been crushed, yet continued being kind. Of those who were no longer kind and felt justified in their cruelty to others who had not been hurt as they had.

I asked it of those who hated because of appearance and fought because of thrones and invisible borders.

Sometimes, in these moments, when my curiosity truly crested the wave within me, I asked the same question skyward. To something larger than myself.

To the clouds and stars and wide blue expanse I asked: why?

But that question, like the one I posed the woman and the world, went unanswered.

So I stood, surrounded by the pieces of a woman's life. The framed photos of false joy and perfection, the books that were just for show, the walls that had soaked up the boys pain like unwilling sponges.

As her malice faded, I sliced a line through her name in my little black book.

Her memory, her crimes, lost in my little book of eons.