Here it is, guys and gals. The whole thing.
I’m an Artist
I trembled. Every single time I would see him, I trembled. I thought that maybe I would get used to it and the nerves would go away. I was wrong. Oh, God was I wrong. It seemed as though when I would get closer to my masterpiece, I would get tenser. Scared, even.
I may have learned everything about him. His alarm was set for 7:30 every morning and he would snooze on average of twenty minutes. He was lazy. Fuck, he was lazy. He lived a life of unoriginality. I couldn’t stand that. I didn’t want to let him do that. What kind of person would I be if I just sat back and watched someone live that kind of life? A life of regularity and prediction. Everything he did was calculated before-hand, but the calculations were memorized because of constant repetition. His life was the same over and over again.
He had a family. It was like watching the Cleavers. June and Ward living their perfect lives with their perfect children, Theodore and Wally. Disgusting.
He worked a sales job. That is one of the things I never got the specifics on. I didn’t want to know. I thought that if I learned about his work, I would jump the gun, get angry, and try to finish my work before I had everything figured out. I couldn’t do that.
He never saw me. At least, he never saw me when I was working. He and I had met. Multiple times even. We met at company functions and would talk briefly while either of us would spoon another cup of punch. The thing is he never remembered my name. Not once did he ever remember me. We talked about baseball and cars. The usual, I hated that.
He did work hard, though. I have to give him that. He was an honest man. Although, he was boring and insignificant in the grand scheme of the world, he worked hard. Ward was the bread winner in the family.
There were times when I would ask myself, “Why do I let it get to me so bad?” I could never find an answer. I despise mediocrity, but the thing is, I myself am mediocre. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to let someone else, someone I knew, stoop down to the level I had fallen. Wow, that makes me sound kind of caring and loving. Don’t think too hard; I hated him.
I started watching him about a year ago. Close to a year, not quite an entire one. I still can’t believe he never saw me.
I would watch in the morning from when he got up to when he would get in the car and head over to work. The beautiful part about that is that I work at the same place. I wasn’t “following” him to work. I was simply going there.
At work, things were a little tougher. He had work to do; I had work to do. There were times when I thought about just stopping my work and just watching, but I’m smarter than that. If I didn’t do my work, I would have gotten fired. If I got fired, what the hell was I supposed to do then? Right?
I remember once, I saw him the restroom. I had to go because I drink an excess of coffee that no one should drink. I walked into the restroom and up to a urinal to do my business. And who would walk in but Ward himself. I ran the scenario in my head over and over. I wanted to just finish, zip up my pants and fix my belt, grab him by the head and smash his face into the urinal piping until he couldn’t stand anymore. I imagine the sound of him crashing against the chrome. The breaks in his nose and cheekbones, his eye sockets collapsing, all making this admirable and almost comical crunch. He would just lie there, bleeding profusely from his mangled nose and jaw, choking, gasping for air.
I went to wash my hands and I started to chuckle a bit. It wasn’t a full laugh, just a snigger and a crooked smile I was trying to hide. He asked me why I was laughing and I told him that I wasn’t with a perfectly serious face. We made eye contact briefly and I left the room to go back to my desk.
Was that wrong of me? Have you ever had a thought like that? Like, maybe, you wanted to see a person die in a grisly, brutal way by your hands? Am I the only one? Is it wrong? Or is it just human? I think we all have that primal, brute instinct in us. It seemed normal to me.
Listen to me, rambling about my subject and here you don’t know anything about me. How rude. Just call me Eddie. That’s fine. Just Eddie. I work as an analyst for the same company that Ward does. I run numbers and make sure that the books match up. I hate my job.
I’m an artist. Painting is my forte, but lately, I’ve been getting into sculpture. I don’t want to tell you much more than that, though, at least about my art, because I may give something away. And I want it to be a surprise.
When I’m not working, either on my art or company business, I read. I read a lot or at least, as much as I can. My activities listed above take a significant amount of my time. To be honest, I read romance novels. Is that weird? I really get into them. The characters are so squishy and molded. They are like shells of people that you can insert yourself into and be completely immersed in the story. The passion and love, betrayal and drama, I just really get into it. I think I would have to say that my favorite so far is Chasing Horses by Christy Tiller French. It’s funny and light. It deals with past relationships that surface constantly and new ones that emerge. Plus, I’ve always been a sucker for activist crap.
He reads the newspaper.
I had this plan. God, it was perfect. First I had to buy some chloroform. You know, that stuff isn’t cheap. It was, like, fifty bucks for a hundred milliliters. That was the smallest amount I could find on the web. I searched for all of twenty minutes and finally just gave into what I found. “Fuck it,” I thought. I'll just shell out the fifty dollars plus whatever the shipping came out to be. It took, I don’t know, six weeks for that to arrive which was alright. I needed more time anyway. He was my subject and I needed to fully understand him before I would do anything.
There were times when I thought that it was odd that I chose Ward. I thought about it time and time again, but really, I couldn’t think of a specific reason. Maybe it was accessibility? He was there. I don’t meet a lot of people; as you can imagine, and he is one of the few, honored people that grace me with their presence. Note the sarcasm.
He started working for the company about four months after I started. That was eight years ago. Eight whole years I sat there and just stewed in what I thought was just an annoyance, but it was more than that. It is more than that. It’s pure hatred.
Where did the hate come from?
When I was younger, I had two older brothers. I guess our relationship was nothing out of the ordinary. We played rough and teased each other, just like good siblings would. It seemed, though, like they were perfect. They got good grades and were active in only God knows what they did. Sports, extracurricular crap, whatever. I, however, was not like them. I focused most of my time on drawing. Then, I loved to draw. I would sit in my room all of the time and draw, draw, draw.
I threw away most of it, though. I hated the things I made. Not too different from now, I suppose. I still hate the things I make, but now I don’t get rid of them; I learn from them. But I digress.
I made poor grades in high school. I never got involved with anything and I didn’t have any friends. It sounds so horrible when I talk about it, but really, it wasn’t. I had my art, and that’s all I needed. My parents, they were divorced, would yell at me and scream at me for not “applying myself.” Bullshit. I just didn’t do the things I didn’t want to do. I didn’t do the things they wanted me to do.
Anyway, I finished high school and then went to a community college with no aspirations other than I wanted to be an artist. I may work a dead-end job with people, one person in particular, that I hate, but I am an artist. I’m going to make an impact. On Ward’s life and on my life. On everyone’s life. No one can take that away from me and that’s the beauty of it.
Ward couldn’t be an artist.
He was too busy with his pathetic life. He was too busy with his boring family. He was too busy with his everyday existence.
So, watching Ward become somewhat of a second job. After we would get to work, I would do my best to budget my time so that I could go to lunch at the same time that he did. Genius, right? I know, I know.
He always did the same thing for lunch. June packed him a brown sack lunch and he took it to the break room where he bought a diet Coke and sat for half an hour while he consumed whatever sandwich it was and a small bag of chips.
I didn’t eat in the same room, though. I ate in my car. I didn’t want him making conversation with me or getting to know me. If he got to know me and started to like me, then it would all be betrayal and I can’t have that on my conscience.
I remember once seeing him at lunch. In the break room, there are some pipes that run along the ceiling, painted to blend in. Whoever did that didn’t know a thing about painting, trust me. There were three round tables and four chairs around each of them. I thought about hitting him with one of the chairs and grabbing him by his necktie and tying it to one of the pipes. He would awaken shortly after being tied to find himself fastened to the pipe, standing on a chair. Just as he would start to say something, questioning his position, I would kick the chair from underneath of him and watch him flail like a fish caught on a line. The tightening of the tie would force him to make insane and fantastic gurgling sounds. He may even kick over a couple more of the chairs. The blood vessels in his eyes would break and he would be staring through crimson marbles. That would be great.
So, back to my plan. You have to stop letting me go off topic, here. I think you get the picture. I watched him. I learned about him. I knew just about every goddamn thing about him.
Every Saturday he would go for a run at the junior high school track. It was open to the public and he would go really early in the morning. To be honest, it was kind of a pain in the ass for me. He started his run and I let him finish most of it before I approached him. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and tennis shoes. He didn’t think that was odd and that was the idea. I had a towel in my right hand that I had doused in the chloroform and I started running my first lap. I got to two laps and started running beside him. He looked over and I nodded in acknowledgment. Slowly, I dipped behind him and made my move.
I jumped on his back and threw the towel over his face. He went down damn near immediately. No one saw me do it. No one. I dragged him to my car and lifted him into the trunk where I had some rope waiting. I bound him unnecessarily tight and closed the top.
Step one was complete. Can I take a minute and tell you how happy I was about that?
I drove to my house and pulled him out of the trunk after I parked the car in the garage and closed it. He was a bit heavier than I thought he would be. And to my basement we went.
The night before, I prepped everything I would need: all of the boards, the nails, my hammer, and a letter to the police. It was perfect. I dropped the letter off the next day.
I got him to the basement and laid him down on the boards. I used clear pine because it’s a pretty wood, really pale.
I had the wood laid out in the formation of a cross, but please, don’t get the idea that I crucified this man. This shape was simply the easiest to deal with.
I put the first nail in his left forearm followed by his right. He bled a bit and pools started to form immediately under the wood. I then put two nails in each leg. I could hear the tearing of his muscles as the nail wedged itself through the meat and into the wood. It was then I noticed that he started to open his eyes.
Quickly, I put a long nail through his gut. He screamed and began to writhe in pain. I took a step back and watched as he moved and the nail tore through his skin and I could see bits and pieces of his entrails. I put a hand over my mouth gently to cover my smile. Everything was perfect.
I knelt down and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of my hand and shushed him. His eyes wandered frantically and his breathing steadily sped up.
I drove nails in all over his body. Actually, It’s kind of hard to remember how many I used. Thirty? It’s kind of a blur now.
Anyway, I drove a few more into his belly to get him to stop moving around. Each nail completely pierced his body and fixed him to the clear pine. The blood started to soak into the wood, acting as some kind of natural stain
One nail went through his throat and that’s where it got really messy. A good spurt of gore came from the hole and got me in the face. Although I’m proud of what I was making, I didn’t want to wear it.
After a while, he stopped screaming and moving and being ordinary. He was drenched in his own cherry juice and completely nailed down to the beautiful clear pine. I took a step back to look and I couldn’t have been happier. Some of his insides became outsides and they kind of made a mess, but that wasn’t the point.
He was no longer normal. He was art. The police showed up an hour or so later. I was still sitting, gazing at what I made. I wondered how many nails Ward felt before he died.
And then they committed me here and I’m stuck talking to you. Are you even listening? I just see you drawing in your little notebook. Doc! Do you want me to tell the story again?
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Tue Feb 23, 2010 3:44 pm
