Switchblade Knife

Murder is easy. It's for the birds, really. It's boring after a while unless you really conceptualize it. Unless you truly embrace it as an art or hobby. There are so many people who deserve it. They got it coming, as they say. They float around and do nothing but cause trouble for other people who are just trying to live their life in peace, or to do their job unfettered. I am the protector of quiet enjoyment. 

If you ask me, murder is like trash collecting. Where they go when they are dead, who knows. Heaven or Hell is just a distant garbage dump that no one really knows exists. We just assume that it does because that is what we've been told. We don't know where they are, only that they are not here anymore. They are gone. In our mind, we imagine them with angel wings playing harps or farting bubbles. 

Someone might come along and murder me, I don't know. It's only fair. Perhaps, they will incorrectly identify me as being a floater. Nothing personal, or anything. They'll just figure I caused enough problems and they'll flush me into oblivion like I flush random people here and there—as they appear on my beeper which is the black box I carry on my hip that flashes names, periodically. I look them up on my computer and track them down and dispose of them as quickly as I can. My record is 3 minutes and 17 seconds. 

They call people like me flushers or plungers, depending upon who you talk to. It's like soda or pop. Those that I flush are called floaters. And what I do, instead of murder, is usually called plunging. There is no animosity to it. No hatred or personal disdain. It is not about settling some vendetta. It's just a business. A low-key private sort of business that pays my bills and affords me this beautiful house in suburbia and the car that I drive, which I love more than anything else in the world other than my dear cat, Elsa. I don't know what I would do without Elsa. I might murder myself. 

I am an employee of the Department of Homeland Security and I have about five years until I retire at which time, per my contract, I will be given 100 acres of land in Michigan and will start my own animal sanctuary at the age of 55 or 56. Everyday I see animals and can picture it all in my head as vividly as though it was painted on my eyelids. Cows, pigs, chickens, you name it. Cats galore. Dogs, rabbits. The whole nine yards. 

I have loved animals ever since I can remember. Since I was a little boy and had that old See N Say toy that you pulled the lever and the dial spun until it landed on an animal who made its particular sound after a brief introduction. 

When I was young, I didn't expect I'd grow up to be a murderer. It wasn't an occupation back then, really. It was more of a dangerous hobby for angry degenerates, I guess you can say. You could go to prison for life or get the electric chair, or gas chamber, or lethal injection, or firing squad. Murdered for murder, basically. You could get all that by a jury of your peers and a judge who would wag his finger and lecture you and say that he finds what you did to be most heinous, morally repugnant, that old bit. 

This is a duck. The ducks says, "Quack, quack, quack."

I pick my nose pretty regularly. I don't understand why it is so taboo. I don't hide the fact that I pick my nose. I don't eat it, or anything. I just pick it and then I wipe it on a tissue or napkin and properly dispose of it. I also am not ashamed to fart and do so regularly with unabashed pleasure. It is a satisfying feeling, if you ask me. 

I read an article that said a recent study of mice out of some university in Australia found that nose picking can usher chlamydia pneumoniae, a bacteria that can cause respiratory tract infections, into the olfactory nerve, at least in the noses of the mice that were used in the study. The bacteria can then travel to the brain.

The real question is how did they get the mice to pick their noses?

Those that I originally murdered weren't real people, per say. They thought they were real, but they were not. They were AI robots. They were created by various companies and sold for any number of reasons. Some for servitude, others for companionship. Some for military or security purposes. They've been retired, let go, or kicked out, and here I am, Andrew Jackson Sandman, to come along and end their existence—what they knew of life, anyway. They were duped into believing that they were real, but they were no more real than a vacuum cleaner. They were obsolete, wayward, useless robots who kind of just meandered around and got into all sorts of mischief. 

Once we eliminated all of the outmoded robots, the mission became to eliminate those who served no purpose—people called floaters. Some call them loafers, others still, porch monkeys, drips, or geeks. The drug addicted, the homeless, serious criminals, the constantly unemployed, wife beaters, cheaters, those who frequent gay bars, the androgynous, glory holers, holy rollers, the gender-confused, furries. In general, those guilty of acts of moral turpitude. 

We also eliminated those who created the robots so that they didn't do it again. They were the most difficult targets due to their money and security teams that got paid very well to keep them alive. For them, the job usually required distant assassination. Maybe a shot from 200 yards, or so. Maybe a well-placed bomb. But I wasn't a very good bombmaker.

This was not specifically demanded, required, or even asked for. There was no directive. No clear order. But it was a reasonable assertion. It was our mandate now that most of the robots had been flushed and those in service lasted longer due to drastic improvements in battery longevity. We continued our duty to maintain a safe and more judicious world—to protect quiet enjoyment. What else were we to do?

I flushed 6 of the 9 creators myself. I don't know how many aimless people. How many vagabonds. How many criminals and no accounts. The number was in the tens of thousands, surely, but I am no bean counter. I haven't killed anyone with the Glock I was issued in over a year. Rather, I used a switchblade knife for the past 500, or so, bar the six creators who required the use of a sniper rifle. A knife is much more personal, if you ask me. Intimate. Respectful. There is nothing quite as disrespectful as shooting someone. They have no opportunity to confess their sins. They are dead before they hit the floor. I don't even get to say hello or goodbye, much less, introduce myself. 

They gave me the nickname "The Priest" because, somehow, they got video footage or had an eyewitness saying that I administered last rites to those that I killed, and that I took confession. That I swiped my hand over their face in a spiritual way and closed their eyelids. That I did the sign of the trinity and all that—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

That is not true. I was picking my nose, and I simply had no other recourse but to listen to whatever those floaters were saying as I plunged them. I felt that it would have been disrespectful to leave as they lay there dying. 

I don't understand why anyone makes a big deal of death. I was simply hastening their eternal reward. If you are a Christian and truly believe in God and Heaven, why not be happy someone punched your ticket for you. Why would you want to mope around on Earth?

I stopped in the Old Pussy Eater Club—OPEC for short. It was the only place I could relax because it was the only place where I was guaranteed not to find anyone to flush. You had to be a member to get in, and the doorman, who looked remarkably like one of those heads on Easter Island, would not let anyone in that shouldn't be in. It was a plunger hangout. Cops of all sorts, and plungers alike, living in harmony, eating pussy.

I sat at my usual table and had my usual drink. I didn't order an appetizer. I hadn't the desire for midget pussy today. I was disappointed from the last time I ordered it because it was too salty and pungent and tasted a little like bad guacamole. But my usual girl wasn't there so I had to pick a different girl, so I carefully perused the menu which provided pictures and a brief description of her taste—a refreshing flavor of lilac, lemon zest, with earthy undertones, and the hint of a perfectly ripe peach. 

When she came over, she said her name was Annabelle, and that she was from Wisconsin. She sat on the table in front of me and lifted up her plaid skirt and smiled skittishly, parting her legs. The girls were required to smile so to make the guest feel welcomed. It was an illusion they were to create, even if they were not enjoying themselves or happy at all.  

She was young and cute and couldn't have been more than 110 pounds. Brown hair and brown eyes. She wore black knee-high stockings that were tight around her thighs and left elastic imprints exposed from where they had slid down her legs a little. She asked me how was my day, and I said it was fine. And I asked her how was her day, and she said it was fine, too. 

"I can tell you're lying," I said. 

"How can you tell?" she asked as she waited for me to indulge in her buffet. I was so close I could smell those earthy undertones and that lemon zest that lingered in the air.

"I can tell," I assured her.

She remained in the position—sitting on the table in front of me with her knees bent and her legs hiked up, keeping her balance with her thin arms which were like kickstands behind her. She looked like the letter M. Her pussy was perfect. Pink in color, but not that too ripe of pink that makes it look inflamed, or a sketch shrimp cocktail pink. Not a baboon ass pink, either. Hers was the pale pink of good health and youth. She was new here and hadn't been eaten that much, if at all. I would have seen her by now as I come here every other day, at least. She had the body of a switchblade knife. 

The name of the place can confuse the average joe. It isn't about eating old pussy, though it's called the Old Pussy Eating Club. It just means that the practice of pussy eating is old as time, or the place is old, though it wasn't old at all. But one can eat actual old pussy if he wants—if that's his thing. They usually keep one or two grannies on shift for those with more sophisticated taste, as they say, desiring that piquant flavor of the aged. Pussy is like cheese in that way. 

I salivated looking down at her perfect platter, but it would have been rude to have indulged without at least asking what was the matter in that I had opened the can of worms to begin with. If I was anything at all, I was sincere. I don't ever ask how someone's day was, or how are you, without being genuinely interested in the response. I was empathetic and kind. I wasn't like most of the other flushers who were impersonal and mean. I wasn't an animal, after all. I wasn't a cretin. I was a human‐being.  

Anyway, while I tried to figure out what was the matter, I fingered her a little to get the juices flowing. She was tight and slightly winced as I inserted my pointer to the first knuckle. 

"Are you going to tell me?" I prodded her.

"I don't know how," she gasped, looking around the club. 

Observations intervene. 

It really wasn't much of a club at all. It used to be a Pizza Hut. There were various girls on other tables where pizzas used to be plopped down for consumption. The tables were black mahogany with a thick clear-coat that was shined to a high-polish. 

The men in the room were devouring their girls, and here I was, talking to mine, getting to know her, only fingering her in secret hopes that she would squirt like my last girl did—Eva. Like a water fountain. I don't know what happened to Eva. Maybe she just had the day off, or she had the flu. Maybe she was on vacation or she quit without giving her two weeks. 

But I didn't have any interest in Eva beyond her edible pussy—which tasted like cucumber and watermelon with a hint of whiskey when she came. I don't know that I could even remember a single conversation we ever had that was not sexual or flippant in nature. Sometimes words don't mean anything. 

Having a conversation with your girl at OPEC was as ridiculous as it would have been to have a conversation with a deep-dish pizza at Pizza Hut. Annabelle smiled at me, and my finger was sopping wet. She bit her bottom lip. In OPEC, you could finger a girl all you want, but there was no fucking. It was a fingery and eatery—nothing more. The tables were in a perfect line and it was all business. They still used the lamps from Pizza Hut, which hung over each table, and they served food, just not pizza. They missed a real opportunity not naming it Pussy Hut, if you ask me. 

"I want to die," she muttered. "I don't want to live anymore."

"You've barely lived," I said withdrawing my finger which was like a melted popsicle. I licked my finger then asked, "What are you? Twenty?"

"Twenty-one. And I know. I got my whole life ahead of me."  

"I wasn't going to say that. You could have some disease. Or you might die in some tragic way, by fate. I've seen it happen. You might die far before you reach your average life expectancy. You never know." 

"Gee, thanks. Or I might be flushed by a flusher. Plunged by a plunger. Murdered by a murderer."

I was confused. She was still sitting there in the shape of an M, obediently. I was salivating. I had a raging erection that was angry like Dick Nixon. Her pussy was my Watergate. It was okay to beat off while you ate. You could hear other guys grunt and groan as they did. You could hear them slap their meat. There were plastic mats beneath the tables, and they steamed the floors regularly, we were assured. But I never did. I saved it for when I got home. I let it build up for one grand finale.

"But you serve a purpose," I argued. "You have a good job, and you are able to procreate, or, at least, I'd assume. Not to mention you're beautiful, and smart."

"But I don't want this job. Or to procreate. I want to die. You could kill me. Eat me and then kill me, please. You won't even have to pay your tab if you do."

"What's so good about death, anyway?"

"What's not good about it?" she challenged. "It's a permanent reprieve from life. Besides, you kill people for a living. What's one more?"

There was a jukebox in OPEC, a holdover from a wholesome time when they served pizza and not pussy. When teenage kids came here on dates and parents brought their kids in for a meal so they didn't have to cook. Someone dropped some quarters into the machine and played a song. 

Mr. Sandman. Bring me a dream...

My last name, by coincidence, is Sandman. Of course, Annabelle did not know that. No one in the club knew that. She didn't even know my first name was Andrew, or my middle name was Jackson, or that I went by Jack. I wondered if she knew who Andrew Jackson was. I had no faith in the younger generation to know anything of historical value. She didn't know anything at all about me, other than the obvious. 

"Well, I can't do it here," I resolved.

"Then eat me and meet me after work." 

I nodded and then indulged. For the next thirty minutes I devoured her, greedily, I devoured her. Like I was a starving Ethiopian. Like a rabid feasting dog. Like a retard on bath salts. Or a ferocious werewolf under the spell of a full moon. She came fourteen times or so, but who was counting. Foolishly, I thought maybe her will to live would be revived by a good enough orgasm. At the time, I thought I was correct in the way she arched her back and cooed. The way she lifted her ass up off the table as though to pour her orgasm into my mouth. 

But when it was all said and done and she got up and I paid the bill, she whispered to me to meet her at 10 out front by the Dairy Queen, which was still a Dairy Queen. Someday I wondered if it would be converted to a place where you go to give or get blow jobs. I nodded and smiled in reluctant agreement. It was as though I made a deal with the devil. 

I was there at 9:49 in case she got off early. I didn't jerk off when I got back to my apartment as I had planned, so I was amped up and full of cum and high hopes that I could convince her to live. Why, though, I wondered as I waited for her, had she not committed suicide. It seemed like a simple way out. I suppose like many she just didn't have the stomach for it. Or maybe she was Catholic. The Catholics believe they can fool God. Some live utterly terrible lives and do dumb shit all the time and then ask for forgiveness from a priest and get some Hail Mary's. They ask someone to murder them so they don't have to commit suicide. They must think God is a real dumb asshole. 

She came out in her regular clothes, and she was even more gorgeous than before. Torn blue jeans and a baggy sweater. Her dark eyes twinkled in the parking lot lights. Her hair had a natural curl to it and looked darker and curlier than before. She got in the car and asked me my name and I told her. She said her real name was Annabelle—Annabelle Swan. She asked if I went by Andy and I said no, I go by Jack. She said we sounded like a cartoon strip—Annabelle and Jack. Or Jack and Annabelle. 

I smiled and started the car. Then there was a pop and the sound of cracking glass. It sounded like a .38 revolver. It shattered the driver-side window and although I couldn't feel anything, the glass rained all over my head and shoulders and scattered over the console. It lied there like a spilled box of popcorn and my left ear rang.  

I couldn't think. I slumped over onto the steering wheel, and everything glitched. I felt sparks sizzle, and my head was burning. I had been shot, I knew, and I was dying. It was apparent to me that I had been put on the list—deemed expendable and a hit was put out on me as I had carried out on so many others. No longer the giver of death, now the receiver. I was careless because I felt something for someone that I had never felt before. I wasn't checking my mirrors or my surroundings because I was staring at Annabelle. Preoccupied by her beauty. I was lost in her. There was no way I could not look at her. And I looked at her now with my head shot open, resting on the steering wheel. One last lasting look.

She screamed in panic, but I reached over and grabbed her hand and she calmed down. Then it all went dark, like a TV that had been shut off in a dark room. She was the last thing I saw. 

This is a chicken. The chicken says, "Cluck. Cluck. Cluck."

The robots I flushed were collected and gathered by someone other than me. I sent coordinates to my company and they sent a cleaner to clean up the mess and to collect the body. I don't know what they did with the bodies. When they stopped sending me the names of people to flush, and I started to flush those who I researched and found randomly, I didn't send coordinates to anyone. The police would have been called, an investigation would take place, so on and so forth. I didn't even know if I was still employed, truthfully. Though I was still getting paid, I hadn't had a sanctioned job in well over a month. It would seem that going rogue might have cost me my life. This was it for me. No hard feelings. Goodbye, cruel world. 

I opened my eyes and I was in a colorful sunlit room with a television and a framed painting of a peacock staring at me. It appeared to be a motel room of some sort as I caught the glimpse of a neon sign out the window through the tell-tale drapes that hung like lead aprons which you see nowhere other than in a motel. I didn't know what happened, or where I was, but Annabelle was lying beside of me, rubbing my head. Her nose was burrowed in my neck. 

The TV was on some old movie and the black-and-white from the screen sprawled over the room casting beautiful warm blankets of shadows. She woke up as I did and kissed my cheek, her arm draped over my bare chest. I was naked, my lower half under a blanket. 

"Where are we?" I asked. My voice was raspy. 

"Don't worry. I got your cat—Elsa. Those were your dying words. To get your cat. There she is."

Annabelle lifted Elsa up on the bed and she purred and settled under my armpit—her favorite place to sleep. 

"Where are we?"

"Palm Beach, Florida. We got a room with a view. My dad lives down here. He'll be back in a few hours. When you were shot, I panicked. I didn't know what to do. So, well, I called him and drove you down here. My dad has a master's in robotics and works for Dow-Emery. He knows what to do."

"Dow-Emery? What does that have to do with me?"

"You don't know," she remarked. 

"Know what?"

"I don't want to say," she murmured getting up off the bed and sitting in a chair nearby. She lit a cigarette. Blew halos of smoke. "I know. It's a terribly nasty habit. Can you smell the smoke?"

"Yes."

"And taste?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Where were you going to take me?" she asked. "I know you weren't going to kill me."

"To a cabin in the woods. I have a secret place," I said. "Where I go to read or to get away. I was going to—well, I hoped to—um—convince you to live. I guess I had—romantic intentions, you might say. I thought maybe—I don't know—maybe."

"Maybe," she smiled. 

"Am I dead?" 

She gave me that look that I didn't want to get. The look the doctor gives you before breaking the bad news. The look your girlfriend gives you before saying it's all over. That painful and pitiful sort of look. That of dread and the promise of ensuing pain.  

"Well, no. You're not—dead."

"Then what?"

"What is that cabin like?" she asked, changing the subject. "Tell me. Please."

"It's small, but beautiful. Very beautiful. Wonderful woods. Scenic. I decorated it with mostly antiques. Old things, really. Odd eclectic things. Strange art. I have an affinity for old and strange things. Things that other people have touched and collected. Things that no one else would want. I have been only one thing my whole life—a weirdo."

"You don't think much of death, do you?"

"No. I think it is a part of life. I don't believe that it ends anything, other than your life as you now know it. Your life here. I believe we go on and on and on. Maybe we start over. Maybe the next life will be better, or it will be worse. Maybe it is Heaven or Hell, or some garbage dump. I don't know."

I sat up and twirled my switchblade knife. I pressed the release on the handle. The comforting sound of the flick of the blade soothed me as did the click of folding it back into the pearl-plated handle. How much time I had spent playing with that knife. Cleaning it. Sharpening and polishing it. It was as much part of me as my arm. I was really nothing without it. Nothing at all.

Annabelle's father came to look at my head some time later. I stared at Annabelle who sat across the motel room as he unwrapped the bandage. Know thyself is an ancient Greek Socratic maxim, urging one to develop a deep sense of self-understanding. To know one's own true nature, his ignorance, his place in the world, his limits and abilities in the pursuit of truth and virtue. Socrates believed that a life without serious introspection and self-examination wasn't worth living. I was starting to realize that I never knew myself, but suddenly, I did. I knew who I was.

I knew Annabelle's father, whose name was Steve Swan, was not a brain surgeon or any sort of human doctor. He was a robotic engineer who worked at a manufacturing plant in Florida that produced two-thirds of the robots I had flushed over the past twenty years—those defunct, obsolete wanderers who didn't know what to do with themselves after they were no longer wanted. He was soldering wires and circuits in my brain so that I could properly function as I was intended to function by my creator—a rich man of flesh and bone. 

I wasn't like them. I wasn't human. I wasn't organic at all. I was fabricated. I was not haplessly thrown together by two people who were horny one night. Or, in the perspective of the religious, that intelligent design business none of us can really comprehend. I was not planted sacredly like a seed in a womb that gestated into a beautiful baby boy whose birth was celebrated. No. I was designed and built in a sterile factory and programmed to be a killer, which I had done. I fulfilled my usefulness and I was obsolete and someone had come to flush me. I suppose I should have known in that I hadn't aged. I had been 35 my whole life with planted artificial memories of a childhood that never occurred. 

This is a pig. The pig goes, "Oink. Oink. Oink." 

Steve was a good man. He drank a beer while he worked on me and his beard was a wiry sort of bush, but well-trimmed. He wore a Hawaiian shirt buttoned by one button and sandals and had a pair of cheaters on that slid to the bottom of his bumpy nose causing him to arch his head back so to realize their usefulness and peer through them. His face was sunburned and care-worn, and his eyes were brown and sharp. He must have had trust in his work because he didn't ask me to turn over the switchblade, which I twirled in my hand while he tinkered with my artificial brain. I was suddenly Annabelle. I didn't want to live anymore—not with the realization that I was a robot. I wanted to stab myself in the throat and die. 

But Annabelle smiled at me. The ocean out the window behind her broke, tired but never relenting. White-foam caps crashing gently ashore as they have for a million years. Tourists strolling in their bare feet in awe of its vastness. The evening painting the sky a brilliant, melted orange with strands of cotton candy blue and white, wispy, nearly non-existent clouds. 

The look she gave me only moments earlier—that despairing sort of look tainted by regret—was gone, and what replaced it was something beautiful. Something hopeful. There was life in her eyes and purpose in her voice when she spoke. She had been reluctant to reach out to her dad, she said, but here she was. And there they were, bonding over me as though I were a 68 Camaro. In that, I found life and a desire to live as Annabelle found life in me. We both had something we hadn't before—purpose in an otherwise purposeless world. We found life in each other. 

As Steve finished, he said that they couldn't track me anymore. The gunshot disabled their ability to do so and he removed the hardware entirely. He asked me if I would like to have my memory wiped. I looked at Annabelle and said no. I didn't want to forget anything.

I reached over and handed Annabelle my switchblade knife. She smiled, I suppose, understanding the significance of the gesture. That part of me, whether it was a program, or a learned behavior, was dead. It died so that a new me could be born. Hopefully, I could do good. I could save people from fires or from threats of harm. Maybe I could be a First Aid/CPR trainer. Or at least, repurposed as the mannequin. 

I smiled back at Annabelle. I don't know that I truly understand love as I understand desire. Or that the spark of electricity that pervades my body is like that of a soul. But I feel that I live because I feel pleasure and pain. I have desires and needs. I feel that I have a conscience that is further developed by reading and thinking. By countless hours of self-examination. 

I don't know if I will be burdened through my laborious introspection by all those I have wrongly murdered—though not callously—murdered, nonetheless. I will have to find a way to live with myself. To forgive myself. I hope that Annabelle always see me as more than a machine and never doubts my sincerity. I watch over her as she sleeps. I make love to her when she desires love. I have been repurposed to love in the way a person has been reborn and saved in Jesus Christ. And the only thing I will ever murder is her pussy—with love and tender affection.