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By all accounts, David Kentley was a fine young man. David Kentley was an upstanding citizen, a graduate of a respectable college, a young man of great means and charm. David Kentley was the pinnacle of American bourgeois, polite and mild, carved from the finest stock of high society. David Kentley was a punctual sort, diligent but not nervous about the fact. He was the kind of man who would say ‘thank you’ when his hat and overcoat were taken as he stepped in the door. He would smile bright and handsome when offered a drink – whiskey, he'd say, the drink of choice for any young man playing at the notion of refined adulthood. He would have the courtesy to stifle his discomfort at the alcohol burning his throat. He was with friends, after all.
David Kentley was the sort of man who trusted his friends.
It was this thought, perhaps, that had caused Phillip’s hands to falter as this fine young man stood writhing against the rope around his neck. A moment of weakness was all that their victim needed to break free. David pushed against Brandon with all his weight, stumbling back and sending them both crashing to the floor. David dragged himself along his stomach, drawing in a long, jagged breath of air that rattled and whined as it went to his lungs. His mouth opened, strained and gaping, every vein and tendon protruding under flushed, sweating skin. It was possible he was trying to scream, but the sound wheezed out of him high, hushed and broken. Phillip found himself quite unable to move.
Brandon shouted something at him as he leapt to his feet. David tried and failed desperately to stand, still shambling down on his hands and knees and feeling at the rope still loose around his neck with wordless horror.
David would run out into the street, Phillip thought. David would run to the police. To anyone who would listen. Images of monochrome jumpsuits and steel handcuffs flooded his mind. Iron bars. Last meals. Last rites. The chair.
He was trembling badly now.
Far away the commotion rang out, fists flung with frightened yelps and bodies crashed against each other in the abstract image of his peripheral. A blur of Brandon's blue suit flickered across his vision. A wayward strand of light flashed on something metallic in his right hand.
Phillip turned away from the scene, absurdly self conscious at the act even though the tumult. He moved dumbly, like a frightened child, hoping it would all just go away if he didn't look. Phillip’s right shoulder collided with the wall.
Someone screamed, a primal yell of confusion and blind panic. It could have come from any of them.
David's body hit the ground with a wet thud, sending a single tremor through the floor. Phillip didn't dare turn to see, the closed curtains transfixed him. He ran his fingers through his gelled hair. He didn't dare look. He couldn't look. Nothing could make him.
“He's dead.” Brandon's voice was soft, matter-of-fact, faltering slightly with exhaustion. Phillip shuttered. He gasped and cupped a hand to his mouth, slouching impossibly further into himself.
“He's dead!” Brandon yelled from deep in his chest, all viscera and rage. Phillip could barely react before he was being wrenched from his feeble hiding place and shoved full force with his back to the wall. Still, his eyes remained stubbornly jammed shut.
Brandon grabbed Phillip’s shoulders and bashed the back of his head against the drywall. Phillip groaned with a sob, not entirely from the pain. Brandon grabbed wildly for the lapels of Phillip's ill fitting suit jacket and clumps of his shirt. “You want to get us killed!? Huh!? You want to be a fucking headline, Phillip!?” Another slam against the wall.The hot tears streamed from his eyes. He tried to breathe only to find he had forgotten the basics altogether.
Brandon's nails dug into the sides of his arms, Phillip's jaw tightened, fighting back the urge to cry in earnest. He feared he would never stop if he got started.
Brandon tossed him to the floor. Phillip fell gracelessly, all bent, shaking limbs. “Answer me! Pull yourself together, God damn it, do you hear me!? Stop sniveling like a dog and think!”“He's dead.” Phillip murmured without conviction. David was dead.
“And no thanks to you. What happened to our plan?” Phillip could hear the sounds of fabric rustling, Brandon hurriedly taking off his jacket, the silky lining shifting against his dress shirt. He sighed mournfully. “It would have been so clean. So easy. Two, three more seconds and he would have been-”
“Please, Brandon I can't-”
“Shut up.” Brandon dropped down to kneel beside him. Phillip hadn't bothered to draw himself up. He lay limp as a corpse. The fight-or-flight instinct had passed him over entirely.
“It's over now.” He snarled. “All over. He'll be sleeping at the bottom of the river tonight. Look.”
Phillip mustered the gall to shake his head.“Look.”
Brandon knotted a hand in his hair and yanked, wrenching his head up above his body. Phillip’s eyes fell open, held in place and forced to view the aftermath of the violent scene.
David was laying on his belly, arms and legs sprawled with a penknife stuck in his back. Brandon's face, shirt, and hands were drenched with blood. He had tracked blood on the carpet. He had smeared blood on Phillip's clothes.“Not so bad, is it?”
Phillip almost laughed.
A man was lying dead in their living room.“Hardly an immaculate murder,” Brandon sighed. “But a murder nonetheless.”
Phillip drank deep in the sight, knowing he would see it behind his eyes for the rest of his life no matter what he did. It burned caverns into the soft brain matter behind his skull. David Kentley. The man he killed. The name emblazoned in Helvetica and Hellfire for all time.
Brandon let go of his hair. Phillip felt his cheek scratch against the carpet.
“Damn you, we'll have to call off the dinner party. Suppose I'll have to inform our guests that they ought to not come tonight.” Brandon's voice dripped with contempt. Phillip finally wiped the tears from his eyes. “I didn't mean to, it was an accident. The angle, I couldn't hold him.”
Brandon turned for a moment before deciding what to say, a phenomenon which usually precluded some kind of harsh insinuation. This time was no exception.
“That was one hell of a time to grow a conscience, Phillip.”
Indignation sparked in him like a faulty wire. Phillip glared up at him, eyes red and bleary. He tried to sound as collected as he could. “You honestly think I would throw our lives away like that? Your life?”Brandon gave him an odd glare. Phillip willed himself to sit up. “It was an accident.” He insisted.
Brandon seemed unmoved.“Well it's all over now.” He repeated flatly. Phillip knew better than to take that to mean I forgive you. Without another word or look, Brandon hurried to the telephone.
Phillip sat alone on the floor, too proud to give in to the impulse to wrap his arms around his knees and rock gently. He remained silent and still, glaring a hole into an empty spot on the carpet. There was a coldness in his nerves, aimless jitters taking him like an excess of coffee on an empty stomach. Like the gnawing anxiety that pried at his chest before playing for a crowd.
David Kentley was dead.
Brandon returned a few minutes later after having made a series of calls. He paused in the doorway, arms braced against the frame. He tilted his chin up, taking a long, composed breath. He inhaled the moment, the subsiding adrenaline, the blood and sweat in the air. Exhaling, he had the makings of a smile on his face. He looked around the room and was strangely satisfied. “You should have seen him.” He said, wistful. He sauntered closer. Phillip steeled himself. “You should have felt it when he died. The life just slipped out of him second by second.” Brandon looked down at him, absentmindedly reaching down to smooth over Phillip's dark curls with his bloodied fingers. It was a comfort, a practiced move that could placate him like an opioid. He shuttered and melted at the touch, slightly desperate for it now. “You must have begun to feel it yourself, strangling him.” He ran his hand down the back of his scalp to the soft nape of his neck. “Complete dominion. Alight with the struggle.” He traced his finger across the sharp line of Phillip's jaw. A shiver ran through him.
“We killed him.” Phillip whispered. Even now, it didn't seem real. For all their talk of Nietzsche, fervent academic defenses and waxing philosophical together atop sex stained sheets in the small hours of the morning, the deed itself had remained safely tucked away behind a shield of intellectual detachment. Everything was possible in theory, easy, even. One could imagine the act of killing with complete calm while perched comfortably in his armchair, pipe in hand. One could twist the idea of killing into a plethora of shapes, each examining and embellishing the nature of it for unsold books of essays with big words and small print.Theories upon theories of clauses and exceptions and justifications of murder all seemed like child's play now. All the flowery language died on the vine. In all its antiseptic plainness, the truth lay in front of him. They had killed a man. It was a cold, sterile, indifferent fact, devoid of all romance.“Killed? Why, Phillip Morgan, I'm surprised at you.” Brandon had a cruel lilt to his voice, shadowed behind the characteristic levity that had suddenly returned to him. “Men have killed each other brawling, sure, and in wars, too, all for pitiful reasons. To kill is a meager thing. An impulse. But murder. Murder is the refined extract of killing. Murder is a privilege exclusive to creatures of sound mind. Murder demands discipline and artistry.” It wasn't a new song. Phillip had heard the same argument from him for months now. He recited it verbatim, ardent as a preacher to his captive pulpit. “To plan, to orchestrate and execute, that's the beauty of it. No one forced our hand, David posed no mortal threat to us, nor to anyone, really. Yet there he lies. We didn't kill him as animals, Phillip, we murdered him as men. Intelligent men.” The words had indeed enticed him once, whispered in clandestine study sessions, the shining thesis of many a debate incited by Mr. Cadell.
Brandon took Philip’s chin firmly, tilting his head up to meet his gaze. “Why did we murder him, Phillip?” He asked, speaking slowly.
If his father hadn't urged him so strongly to go in for business, Brandon would have settled in nicely with the more sadistic among their college professors. He loved to educate, more than that, he loved to patronize. The ignorance of others was his drug, a selfish taste that he and Phillip alone had shared during the dullest of seminars. That jaded smile and didactic tone could level mediocrities. A mere change of expression could make young men shrivel in their chairs. Their mutual distaste for unexceptional people had drawn them to each other, to leer above the rest as sovereign kings of all independent thought. It was an awful thing to be the recipient of the same wrath, but so, so glorious to stand behind it. Phillip wanted very much to stand behind it once more. “We murdered him because we wanted to. Because we could.” Phillip swallowed. It was that very conclusion that had set their plan in motion. Phillip put all he had into sounding convincing. “I wanted to.”
Brandon smiled, a proud teacher to his pupil. “Good.” His cadence matched Mr. Cadell’s impeccably. “Very good.”
Brandon pulled him close by his tie, wrapping the fabric over his hand and slowly reining him in. He kissed Phillip gently, grinning and prodding at his bottom lip with his thumb. “Now, see for yourself.”
Phillip nodded obediently and suffered the turn of his stomach in silence.
They rose and treaded lightly on their way to the body. Phillip took stock of the state of the carpet, a red streak on the wall, the body itself. Would the chest leak? He wondered. Maybe they could cut out squares of the tainted carpet, come up with a clever excuse and lose their security deposit on the apartment. Would that seem out of place? Phillip recalled the dime detective novels he once read. Was it peroxide one was supposed to use for blood? How long would it take to come out?All the while, Brandon looked as if he were admiring the greatest work of art on Earth.
“We'll have to send away Ms. Wilson. A holiday maybe. We'll be away, that'd be innocent enough.”Brandon nodded absentmindedly, hardly hearing him. “Soon.” Phillip stressed. Brandon nodded again. “Quiet, would you?” He raised a playful finger to his lips. Brandon knelt down beside David's lifeless body, and Phillip followed suit. There was a trembling silence.
Brandon removed the knife from David's back and held it out to Phillip. “Rather fortunate you forgot to put this away.”
The paperknife was Phillip's, a handsome letter opener his mother had gifted him for his last birthday. There was a fine spiraling detail on the handle, engraved in gold calligraphy was an ornate initial “M.”
Brandon caught his hand as he tried to turn away. “Phillip.”
“I-”
“He's not going to hurt you, Phillip. Look here.” He pried two of Phillips fingers from a clenched fist and shoved them under David's chin. Warm and slick. Brandon must have cut his throat.
“Feel a pulse?”
Phillip shook his head. “Then there's nothing to fear.” Brandon rolled the corpse on its back, the arms flopping boneless as though they'd never known the notion of life. Brandon demonstrated the state of his handiwork, shaking David's limp hand by the wrist in a macabre display that even Phillip thought distasteful. “Fascinating, isn't it? Reach out. Touch him. Shake his hand if you want to. He doesn't mind.”
Phillip examined coppery red drying on his own fingertips. “Brandon, what are we going to do?”“About what?”“You butchered him.” Phillip gestured to the room and its mess, angrier than he had any real right to be. Petulant. That's how Brandon liked to describe him. “You couldn't have been more careful?”
Brandon's eye twitched. “For such a gifted musician, you have an alarmingly underdeveloped appreciation for improvisation.”
“It's not that I'm not grateful, I am, but-”“I don't want your gratitude, Phillip, I want you to stop looking away. Here, take the knife.”“I don't want the knife.”
“Take it, damn it! We were supposed to do this together.”
Amidst his frustration, there was a rare undercurrent of real disappointment, like he'd been scorned. Refused. Ordinarily, Phillip found it incredibly difficult to refuse him anything. “Take it.” He repeated. Phillip got the impression that he wouldn't ask him again.
The metal was warm from Brandon's palm as he forced it into Phillip's hands, clamping his own around them. He gripped tight, trying to keep Phillip from shaking. Phillip buried a stillborn yelp in the bottom of his throat. Brandon's eyes bored into his with absolute concentration. There was a quality of mania to him still. What was it in the look that disturbed him? Fear? Triumph? He searched Phillip desperately, as if he were speaking a forgotten language and wanting him to share in his understanding.
Arte et marte.
Suddenly they were in prep school again, passing vague jokes in Latin as the only truly dedicated acolytes of a dead tongue. The rest only learned out of obligation. Brandon would learn and do nothing if not to its fullest extent.
“I can't do it without you, you know. We have to finish it. It's our design. Our right.” He squeezed his arm sympathetically, never breaking his intense gaze. Phillip blinked and shuttered.
“I'm sorry Brandon, I am.” Brandon nodded, casting away his apology and returning to his point. “Right. You're curious, though, aren't you? Don't you want to know how it feels?”
Morbidly, disgustingly, in the most depraved and vile sense, he did. “Yes.” He mumbled. And it sickened him utterly.
Brandon couldn't keep himself from grinning. “Go ahead… Take a stab at it, then.”
He nudged his fingers against Phillip’s wrist, edging it closer to David's chest. The blade hovered over their friend cautiously, just barely scraping the soiled fabric of his shirt, catching, for a jarring moment, as it glided across a neat white button. Phillip drew in a breath, heart beating in his throat and in his skull and thrumming rhythmically in the tension of his clenched hand. He drew the knife up, poised and waiting like the single shining tooth of a hideous animal. David's bloody face lay peacefully on its side, his lifeless eyes hooded and turned down like a church fresco of a gentle martyr. The point of the letter opener paused cowardly at the first feel of flesh beneath it.With a strangled cry, Phillip plunged it down deep.
After some contemplation, Brandon had had the idea to swaddle the body in old bedsheets. David's blood had still stained through, but it was better than nothing. They sat next to each other on the couch after hauling the mess into their venetian chest, Brandon looking around the room as he pondered the most effective method of decontamination, Phillip making a valiant effort to steady his nerves. Brandon had refused him a drink, but allowed him his box of cigarettes, which Phillip went on to chain-smoke like his life depended on it. He had burned his way through half the package in silence before Brandon thought to break the uneasy silence. He stole a drag from the smoldering butt that dangled dangerously from Phillip's fingers and breathed it in.
“Was it as good for you as it was for me?” He smiled, all white teeth. He sounded tired, not quite as blithe as the joke suggested, but he scoffed a laugh anyway. Phillip couldn't find it within himself to chuckle along with him. Brandon softened slightly after a few moments. He extended a hesitant arm across his shoulder. “How do you feel?”
“I wish we could open the curtains.” Said Phillip half madly. The frame of light from the window was golden, dusk was fast approaching and with it, their allotted time to vacate to Connecticut waned. “I wish it had gone to our plan. I wish David wasn't splattered halfway across the living room. I wish-” his voice caught. His wide eyes looked cautiously to Brandon, who was taking another drag off his cigarette. “I wish you weren't cross with me.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
Phillip slouched, looking up at him like a kicked hound. “You hurt me.” Even he couldn't stand how pathetic it sounded. He wanted to bite his tongue until it stopped working.
Brandon shrugged half regretfully. “I was angry.”
“You're still mad at me. You think it was my fault.”
Brandon angled his body towards him. There was a curious lightness about him still. “Damn what I think, how do you feel about it all?”“What?”“David.” He took Phillips hands, tracing the lines of his knuckles and joints with reverence. “We've done it together, with our own hands. Our experiment worked. Doesn't it excite you?”
Phillip could remember the feeling of the knife piercing the flesh. The resistance of the muscle. The scraping of the rib. All while David lay motionless and numb. They shared the sensation now, the cutting and slicing and the feel of warm blood against their own live skin.
My hands are of your color. Phillip thought, an echo of his English studies from years past. He wore his own ivory heart with lilly white shame.
“Terribly so.” He breathed shakily, looking up at Brandon intently. “I'm frightened. I'm awake and alive. Oh, I feel so horribly and wonderfully alive.”
Brandon's hand rested itself upon his knee. Phillip felt a subtle thrill go through him. “And what else?”
“Heavy.” He observed strangely, trying to articulate. “Burdened, like I'm staring down the barrel of something. We can't go back from this.”
The ancient Greeks believed in a special place in hell for the murderers of houseguests, he remembered. Camus envisioned the condemned king Sisyphus happy, Phillip hoped he was right.
Brandon grinned devilishly, sliding his hand up the length of Phillip’s thigh. “No, we can't.”
“I'm afraid, Brandon.”
“Of me?”
Of everything. He thought desperately. Of the world. Of being caught. The fear was not new, it had been with him as long as he could remember. The suspicious eyes of strangers had always pried for hints and loose threads to pull. The lingering glances and brushes of bold hands were just as damning as blood caked under one's fingernails. They had always been bound by their degeneracy, it was the nature of the crime that had changed. Both their hands were rusted with the browning tint of a man's blood. It created a pact between them. Simply walking away after the fact became an impossibility. This wasn't an alleyway tryst or secret affair, together they had taken a man's life. On top of each other's reputation and livelihoods, they held the other's death warrant between their teeth and would carry it for the rest of their lives. Naturally, neither would let the other wander far again. Together. Always together. Two sides of the same murder, inextricable in the blind eyes of the effigy of justice. Together, they had laughed in the face of God and together they would be punished for it, if at all.
‘If.'That was the key. ‘If’ was the terrible amorphous thing that occupied him, cluttering up his smoke-filled head with all the potentials and hypotheticals. ‘If’ was what kept his mind racing. ‘If’ could mean so many things. ‘If’ could leave him dead or jailed or running for the rest of his life. If someone had heard them… if they had overlooked some minute detail… if they were discovered… they had come dangerously close to failure already.
Trust was all they had, that spider’s thread of security that was often invisible to his naked eye. They'd cast their lot in on blind faith and tenuous devotion. Loyalty to one another would be their only hope in the days and weeks to come. Phillip supposed he knew better than to ask for more. Security had taken its hat on the way out the door the day that Brandon had entered his life. Now the boy who'd compared his notes and left annotations in his textbooks had done and sacrificed more for him than any husband seemed inclined to do for his wife.
Phillip couldn't turn his back on him now. Phillip couldn't disagree. Phillip couldn't call him mad or sick or say he frankly seemed unnervingly blissful about the whole ordeal. He had to turn his face to the fire and follow him into Hell if he led him. And he very well might.
Phillip looked at him, the man he'd chained himself to, his cold, impenetrable eyes and rakish smile.
He decided he loved him. He decided he had to love him. It would only make matters difficult if he didn't.
“No Brandon.” He said, drawing himself up to straddle his hips. “Never of you.”