(no subject)
There’s a lot of logistics involved in killing a man. The brainstorming goes long into the night. Twoie has figured out a lot about human culture. Seymour wonders where he got it from.
There’s only one Scrivello O. in the phone book. He lives in a house out in north Silver Lake. He doesn’t seem the type to move into his girlfriend’s apartment. His office is in the Oak Street shopping mall in the South Park district. Location.
Seymour has neither a credit card nor bank card with which to rent a car. They’ll have to use the Chevy despite the “Mushnik & Son’s” on the side. The keys are in the upper left hand drawer of the desk in the back. Transportation.
Behind the counter in the cashbox is a Glock. Weapon. Twoie nixes the idea.
“Can’t have him bleeding all over the place!”
“How do I-?”
“Knock him out or feed him drain cleaner or something.”
“Chloroform,” Seymour remembers, “That’s what they use in the movies.” In movies the bad guy always knocks the good guy out by sneaking up behind the good guy and shoving the rag over his nose and mouth. That will require getting close to the dentist. Seymour isn’t optimistic about his chances.
Twoie complicates things further. “And you’ll need to chop him up.”
“What? Why?”
“Can I fit an entire body in my mouth?”
Seymour spends half an hour figuring out how to chop someone up. In the end he decides to buy an axe, which Twoie suggested over a saw. Chloroform-soaked rag and axe with Glock as backup. Weapons.
Cleaning gloves to hide the fingerprints. Duct tape to bind the dentist’s hands and mouth. A pop bottle as a silencer. A tarp to spread under the body. A small vacuum to clean up clothing fibers from the trunk of the car. Lysol to clean the floor. Deodorizer to clean the smell. Disposal.
Plan 1: Seymour drives up to Orin’s house in the dead of night, sneaks in, hopes he doesn’t trip whatever security system he has, knocks him out, hopes none of the neighbours are up late.
Plan 2: Seymour drives up to Orin’s house during regular hours looking like he has a flower delivery, knocks him out, hopes none of the neighbours notice.
Plan 3: Seymour lies in wait at Audrey’s apartment, waits until Orin leaves, ambushes him outside.
Plan 4: Seymour waits for him outside his office, hopes he has no other employees, hopes the parking lot and the streets surrounding it are empty of witnesses, knocks him out.
All the plans revolve around Mushnik sleeping through the dentist’s death and dismemberment.
“Drug Mushnik,” the plant orders.
“I’m not drugging my dad,” Seymour says, horrified.
Seymour paces throughout the store, gulping orange juice and devouring cookies. “This is never going to work,” he moans. “On those true crime shows, those guys plan things for weeks.”
“We ain’t got weeks!” Twoie growls.
“Give me one more day, can ya do that, Twoie? I’ll buy a lot more meat but I can’t give you any more blood. I’ll need it. You don’t want me passing out, right?”
“‘Give me one more day,’” the plant mimics. “Like I can control when I starve to death!” it bellows.
“Shhhh!” Seymour hisses. His head and Twoie’s pod turn to the basement door.
“He’s awake,” the plant says quietly. Two of Twoie’s vines, the ones it uses to gesture with most, are pressed against the floor.
“The radio, stupid!” it hisses. Seymour darts over to it and turns it on. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” blares across his nerves (too late, my time has come/ sends shivers down my spine, body's aching all the time / goodbye, ev'rybody, I've got to go / gotta leave you all behind and face the truth). Twoie goes into his resting position - pod up, vines down. Seymour tunes every sense to the gradually approaching footsteps on the stairs.
Mushnik opens the door, rubbing crud from the corners of his eyes. “What goes on here?”
“I wanted a midnight,” Seymour glances at the clock, “A three o’clock in the morning snack. I wasn’t sleeping well.”
“Something woke me up,” Mushnik accuses.
“I…” was rearranging the inventory was working out was “…was fiddling with the volume on the radio a bit. Sorry, sir.”
Mushnik stares at him. Then he yawns. “Don’t think I’m letting you slack off at work tomorrow.”
“I won’t, sir.”
Mushnik turns to go downstairs. “And don’t let this Audrey thing eat at you so. Smarten up a little.” His voice recedes as he trudges downstairs. “She’s not the only pretty shiksa on the planet.”
Seymour only relaxes when Twoie whispers, “He’s in bed.”
By five o’clock in the morning, Seymour has the beginning of a plan and a thousand doubts.
*
The next day there’s no meeting with prospective clients or rush orders, which means there’s no opportunity to use the car. Seymour does manage to take his lunch break and buy some supplies he needs. Audrey doesn’t come to work. Seymour spends most of his time discreetly memorizing a map.
That night is, however, a night when Mushnik decides to have a drink with his pal Ed Bliq. He takes the car. Seymour has to take the bus to go location scouting.
The Oak Street shopping mall is both large and closed by the time Seymour gets there. He dismisses it immediately. It’s across from an apartment complex, next to an all-night gas station, and he wouldn’t want to trifle with any mall security. He has to take two transfers to get anywhere close to the dentist’s house. He scribbles down landmarks on the back of his bus schedule as the scenery passes by.
The dentist’s house has a lawn with two hedges on either side of it that go around to the back yard. It’s a bungalow, green with white trim. The car is in the garage. No lights are on. Some of the neighbours lights are, though. Seymour walks down the street, pretending to look for an address he can’t find. He walks back.
On the bus ride back, Seymour sees a liquor store and gets off. “I need something very alcoholic and very cheap,” he requests.
“Of course,” says the clerk, leading him to the back of the store. “Celebrating something big?”
The idea that he’s celebrating anything stops him in his tracks. “I-uh, ne-nevermind, I just forgot I left…my, uh, ID….” He hurries out of there, feeling chill sweat on his back. He trembles on the bus ride home and forgets to make note of the landscape.
By the time he returns to the store, Mushnik is entering the front door.
“What the hell are you doing out so late?” Mushnik demands, blinking owlishly at Seymour.
“Smartening up, sir.” Seymour had an entire walk from the bus stop to think of that. “Plenty of fish in the sea.”
Mushnik looks surprised, then gives him a hearty clap on the back. “Excellent, boychik, excellent! So, she was pretty?”
Seymour fights past the shock and grins. “Well, she was…” he decides not to press his luck, “She had a great sense of humour.”
“You crawl before you walk,” Mushnik says wisely, as he enters the store and heads to the basement. “Get her number?”
“No.”
Mushnik grunts in disappointment. “Why not? Boychik, you’ve got to be braver about these things. If she’s as funny as she must be to be interested in you, she probably would’ve been thrilled to be asked.”
“I know, sir. But I just- just didn’t want to get rejected.”
“Life is pain, boychik, life is pain. If that happens, you shrug it off, you have a drink, you move on. It’s how things are. You see her again, you ask for her number, all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And fix that damn plant. It looks sick again.”
“Yes, sir.”
This was a more than usual amount of attention. Seymour puzzles over the reasons for a while before remembering he has bigger things to think about.
He sneaks up to see the plant that night with a tray of meat. Its vines are browner and its pod is looking rather mottled.
“I can’t do this,” he tells Twoie after he feeds it. “This isn’t just me chickening out. I literally can’t do this. There is no possible way for me to pull this off.”
Except it is Seymour chickening out. It’s Seymour remembering what he’s doing, it’s Seymour shaking on the ride back from the liquor store, and it’s Seymour who had bought an axe….Dear God, of course he hadn’t meant to use it. That had been a different Seymour, a crazy person dead and gone.
“Kill a bum, then.” Its voice is weaker. “Plenty of them around.”
“No!” Seymour moans. “That’s worse. It just…it doesn’t work. It has to be the guy that-” He can’t say deserves it. It sticks in his throat.
A low, disgusted grunt is all the response the plant gives him.
“I just can’t do it, Twoie.” Seymour fills the watering can, though he’s sure the plant doesn’t need it. For some reason he needs the plant to understand why he’s letting it die. “There are so many details I know I’m not even thinking of. If I get arrested you don’t get fed.”
He kneels in front of the plant and waters it. “I can’t, I can’t- I mess everything up, Twoie, if anything can go wrong it will, it’s Murphy’s Law but it’s also mine too, Murphy and Seymour’s Law together-”
The vine wraps around his hand, gently pushes the watering can away.
“She’s gonna come in sometime, you and Mushnik are gonna get down on your knees, and maybe she’ll cry, but she’ll leave just the same. She’ll go back to him. And you’ll let her. He’s the alpha wolf, and if you think he’s gonna let you be friends, skulk around sniffing after his woman, you’re wrong.” He’d watched a documentary on wolves a week ago, Seymour remembered. Twoie must have heard. The TV was on a lot in the Mushnik household.
That giant mouth is so close to him. Seymour leans backward, but can’t go too far because the vine is still holding him.
“Those looks of hers are gonna be the first thing to go. Then her sweetness, her friendliness- or, shit, maybe it’s the other way around. I ain’t no expert. But I know what I seen, and that girl? Something will go and when it does she won’t do a damn thing about it. She won’t get help - hasn’t yet, right? She thinks he’s all she’s got.
“So she’ll keep with him no matter what. And one day he’ll smack her so hard she don’t come back. He’ll dump her body somewhere, maybe file a missing person’s report if he’s feeling generous.”
“No,” Seymour murmurs. “It won’t-I mean, it might not-”
“You don’t really think that.”
Does he? “I…do.”
But it’s not just punishment, the way Twoie tells it. It’s saving Audrey from the death of the soul and body. That’s practically heroic.
He sets the water can down. It was making his arm hurt - and his palms are sweating, he could barely hold on.
“Twoie…I can’t…. I want to but I can’t. I’m not….Christ, look at me. I’m a putz.”
“I-” the plant begins. Then it shuts it mouth. Seymour has never heard the plant interrupt itself before. It’s always been so forceful. Always known exactly what it wants.
Another vine - brown and wrinkled - slides over his shoulder. Seymour twitches.
“You’re stronger than you think, boy,” the plant says. It sounds calm. It isn’t yelling at him. “You’re smarter and braver, too.” It hesitates. The vine around his shoulder draws him closer and it leans forward to whisper in his ear, “Us orphans, we know life’s a bitch but we make it through.”
“I’m not an orphan,” Seymour protests softly, gaze dropping to the floor. “I have a father.”
“Mushnik? Some dad. He gave up on you being a man years ago. I haven’t. I got your blood in me, boy. I know you.”
Wanda and Horace told him there was more to him than he saw, didn’t they? He was kind--
“I know your fear that you could die tomorrow and no one’d be at your funeral….”
--considerate--
“I know your hatred and how you turn it on yourself ‘cuz everyone else is too big to hurt….”
--polite--
“I know you look out at those shining skyscrapers and feel sick, ‘cuz they’ve got all that and you’re stuck here…”
--sensitive--
“I know your anger that the asshole you call ‘sir’ don’t care that you’re s’poseda to call him dad….”
--caring--
“I know how much you hunger, boy. It’s strong. It’s gonna drive you. You been starvin’ yourself for too long. You can get money, respect, a place in the world, a name that means something. You can get Audrey calling you her boyfriend, her husband, or calling out your name as you fuck that sweet pussy - whatever you want.”
Don’t talk about her like that, Seymour wants to say, but he can’t. That vine is rubbing his shoulders and back, squeezing him gently in a hug. He can’t remember the last time Mushnik hugged him. Seymour has always wanted touch, always needed it, and he hadn’t realized how much until now.
“Now, you gonna tell me what some of these problems are. We’ll talk ‘em through. They ain't so big. People die in this city every day. And tomorrow night, you’re gonna bring me back what I need. You feed me, I feed you. Fill up those spaces inside you.”
The other vine guides Seymour’s chin upward, so he has to look at the plant. “Is it a deal?” Twoie asks.
Seymour is too choked up to speak. He nods once. The vine under his chin caresses his face. He closes his eyes, breathing coming harsher and deeper as he tries not to cry. He mourns for the Krelborns and how little they know him, he mourns for the (soon to be ex-) dentist, he mourns for Audrey who couldn’t even ask for help, he mourns for himself. He mourns for himself most of all.
“You take your time, boy,” the plant murmurs, and Seymour leans into its touch.
Boy, boychik, my baby….I’m always a child.
When you’ve eaten your fill, do you become a man?