The Murder of Smith Corsden, by Antony Coleoptera

I
am embarrassed by my name, I will not use it. The “by” underneath the title is a true word, but the other two words are false. But “by” is unimportant, like I am, so I haven’t told you anything and I want to keep it that way. Except I want to tell you who killed Smitty, who is Smith Corsden. No need for suspense, I know who it was—Jeremy Corsden, his brother. You’re lucky I can still write. If catatonia could be deliberately induced I’d have the glass eyes by now. That’s what it means to know something.

I am a chess piece watching, staring down again at the alley that I call my boulevard, staring from my square window, which in spare winter is boarded to blackness; in lush summer, as now, it is open to knowledge. It is a risk but sometimes I move to the next open window. It is also square, 64 altogether, square upon square. There is no reason to move me anywhere else, where fear dices even the strong stomach. But I lost my mind’s windshield, wrinkle-cracked and sharded. The blood that the mortician sucked out of me was spread shining, rainbows over the boulevard like gasoline on flatwater. How many suicides can dance together on the tip of a needle? You’ll find out.

Over my boulevard, as in Italian cities, sheets hang strung on ropes with the wind beating white clean repentance into them. They hid me, so nothing for Jeremy to worry about; I’m the only one who knows.

Smitty was getting off rehearsal again—stupid play, based on Moby-Dick, which Jeremy called a venereal disease but Smitty liked. Standing in the shadows, Jeremy had a plan. He lounged heatedly with a wrench he lifted from the repair shop, about two and a half feet long and heavy, his face like a tick engorged with his own blood, the wrench like an arm, part of his body. The arm/wrench barely started to touch Smitty’s skull when his face seemed to die, instantly, even before the skull cracked, like he’d been porcelainized by first contact, his head being construed as a Victorian bisque doll in lacy gingham with rotating eyes and cheeks airbrushed pink. He didn’t know it was his own brother had done it.

I knew the both of them. If a chessboard had been stuck to the side of the building, then I was watching from the dark open window called white king four. Not too high not to see. I was wearing black, smoking. He might have seen the tip of the cigarette, and I had no reason to hide it, but that’s the one thing he missed. And I missed it too since I didn’t know anything would be important until after it happened. Mostly I was looking into the sky and trying not to focus on it. In my syncope of dirty collar and baseball uniform (another story) I was aware that other people lived in the other squares but nobody was there in the blacks or the whites that night but me. In the next window I would have been on white, and Smith Corsden, poor guy, I might have saved him.

I leaned back deeper into the continuous dark when it started. Jeremy was waiting. It was so obvious. I clarified the compositeness and randomness of his identity as soon as he’d waited in the dark for more than ten minutes. Nothing else but intended murder could be the reason. Smitty was already doomed, a mosquito in the belly of the fish. Jeremy’s black jacket was painted with a face and lightning. That helped him do it. The floor of my room had its swarming waves of papers, its surfable wheeling of pages, but they didn’t help me.

Jeremy porcelainized Smitty’s head with the first tap of the wrench. From then on it was just the breakage, the shatter. Mechanism defunct. Elegant aloneness. Phantom softly from somewhere in one of the other building squares. Music of the night. Smitty in bluejeans. Jeremy’s move already just a flicker in my eyes between the time he raised the wrench and the time Smitty grunted, almost silently falling back against the brick alley wall and there was nothing to see anymore. No life except the murderer’s. I fell back into the spidery shadows, smoking, waiting for the police to knock on the door asking for witnesses. I would be a good witness. I saw everything. But they didn’t come. I was harnessing myself but no one came to drive the team. Despite the inefficacy of words and their subsidiary emotions, I knew I could speak about it. Jeremy started off in some wired and frenetic orbit down the boulevard, perhaps reliving it, the porcelainization of his brother. I leaned forward after a few minutes when the police didn’t come and looked down to see the odd angle of Smitty’s mouth set like a slash. I was hunching myself into myself, his head like a darkening of some wet droplet on cloth. I felt like I was going into paralysis and coming out of it. Smitty was handsomely adroitly sensually curved in his heap. Stage presence, I think they call it. Gelatinous muscles were oozing into subsidence almost before my eyes. His spinal column even then weighing less, wrenched like a piston in its change of direction. I actually saw his brother do it and I couldn’t conceive of lying. Maybe Hamlet felt guilty the way I did, watching the rotten ruin of the state even as he killed it.

I’d been with Jeremy that day at Lightning Ridge Facility. I relived his restlessness. Magazines like playing cards across the blonde wood table. Nothing could accelerate or decelerate what was going to happen, I know that. Nothing could either prevent him from doing it or make him not do it. Or do it, I mean. I could have been the words on the wall, the “mene mene” submitting him to a Nebuchadnezzarian plight of drugged behemoth-brained spaghettiness, a neuron miscellany without fences like he deserved, the punk.

The reason I think I knew—it was not the woman but the womanliness of the woman. Jeremy had waited for Smitty to get the girl; they both liked her but Jeremy more. Except he gave up on her, slew it all for love of his brother so there would be happiness. Jeremy didn’t think happiness had been dealt him. So he sacrificed. Hated himself, really. Ingested himself like a lonely cannibal. But Smitty didn’t take the bait his brother dropped in the pond. He lounged and sputtered. He ate birthday cake with her at Jeremy’s party and flirted just enough to make Jeremy know that it wouldn’t be enough. She wanted somebody who wanted her the way Jeremy did and that wasn’t Smitty. Jeremy really didn’t want her bad enough or he would have had her. He proved that. He killed his own love so he wouldn’t have to have her. You realize that by now. Smitty was just the excuse to kill love. Smitty alive was the proof to Jeremy that he hated himself. This is all babbler-driven drivel from an upright man in a square in the board on the wall. But it’s true.

I should have been a novel, titled The Book of Hamlet. I have been too much like an insect in a web, kicking too many legs like metronomes. I am always three-in-the-morning nightmares being run down by cobalt-blue hoodlums who can walk vertical walls. She was completely unimportant to the crime.

A clock was just visible through a pause in the building frenzy and the numbers were 3, colon, 1 and 5. With me as the only ineradicable witness Jeremy doesn’t have a thing to worry about. Who believes anymore? And really there wasn’t any woman after all. It’s just that Jeremy is a shit and I hate him and if he ever did actually kill his brother it would be just like what I’ve imagined, and it would be just like him to do it with me standing here. Just like him.