Chapter 1
Mr. Harkwell, 8 A.M.
Today’s appointment is an 8 A.M. with a “Mr. Harkwell”. No surprise at that. The brain of an early-riser is inherently wired differently. It is the accumulation of esoteric experiences that Florence fears: knowing the pinkness of the clouds at dawn, the creeping elongation of shadows behind the early sunlight, the exact minute the birds sing their awakening, the jarring cry of un-snoozed alarms, the taste of coffee on a sleep-deprived tongue, and perhaps, just perhaps, the sight of his sleeping face. He thinks of those experiences as traumas, which corrupt the early-riser and predispose the early-riser to… bad thoughts.
(Anomalous fixations. Deviant preoccupations. Homicidal elations.)
Though, Florence is biased. He already knows Mr. Harkwell is a murderer. All of his clients are—that’s what his business runs on. Florence only attributes the idiosyncrasies of his clients as being indicative of their true nature as murderers because he thrives on pattern-finding. It makes him feel human, but at the same time, makes him feel higher than human. He thinks he feels both at the same time, despite the paradox.
The knocking at the door tells Florence that he’s already late for the appointment. That’s supposed to be impossible. His clients come to him. To be on time, all he has to do is let them in. But that comes with the assumption that he cares about his business enough to be timely, and he doesn’t. He would love it if his services were never needed, if his clients simply walked away instead of going through the turmoil of such bad customer service, if his attitude was so sour that it crashed the demand for his business.
Florence decides that he must criticize Mr. Harkwell’s decision to reveal his real name instead of answering the door. The knocking is an ugly sound, an incessant pounding on hollow wood that crescendos with every new burst of energy from Mr. Harkwell. He can feel the chalky layer of dust rubbing off on Mr. Harkwell’s knuckles as if it’s on his own knuckles, imagines that the relieving breaks between knockings is when Mr. Harkwell is trying to peek through the front window, anticipates the tongue-lashing he’ll get from Mr. Harkwell when he finally does answer the door—all the more reason to delay the appointment.
It’s a high priority to insult clients, higher than actually attending to those clients. Mr. Harkwell should’ve known better than to use his real name during the transaction. Florence did his best to discourage it. He specifically asks his clients for their preferred moniker and not their real name. Florence didn’t ask Mr. Harkwell to tell him that his real name was John Harkwell. He asked, “Is that your real name?”, to which Mr. Harkwell stupidly said yes, and then he asked, “Are you sure?”, because Mr. Harkwell should’ve thought twice about being honest about his identity.
The knocking becomes flat-palmed and accompanied by desperate yelling for attention, but Florence feels obligated to continue his thought process before ceasing the noise. The fact is, Mr. Harkwell had every reason not to give his real name. The service Florence provides is not one that should see the light of day. It’s a cash-only transaction that will ruin Mr. Harkwell’s life if anyone ever found out about it. Florence has every right to trace Mr. Harkwell to his employers and loved ones, tell them exactly what Mr. Harkwell intentions were with him, and reap the benefits off of Mr. Harkwell’s blunder. Mr. Harkwell’s decision was one of self-declared immunity, and Florence is no stranger to temptation. He succumbs to all temptations, like he’s human. Like he’s higher than human.
Florence finally entertains the idea of answering the door, now that he’s done with that train of thought, which gives him just enough motivation to check his phone—his personal phone, not his work phone. His business, unfortunately, is fruitful enough to allow him to afford separate phones for leisure and business, of the highest models available. He already knows that his work phone is blowing up with annoyed calls and texts from Mr. Harkwell.
Checking his personal phone is the first part of the ritual that starts his day, a ritual that usually occurs no earlier than noon. Florence is endlessly grateful that technology has progressed in such a way that he can spend hours on social media without being social whatsoever. He hasn’t made a single friend in centuries, yet somehow, he’s able to derive so much entertainment under the guise of seeking human connection. He has no false pretenses about why his thumb endlessly scrolls through miles of vapid content. Wasting time is ecstatic. That’s what being alive means, at the end of the day.
Florence can only scroll through six feet’s equivalent of content, taller than his height, before he can’t endure the noise any longer. It’s been too long. Mr. Harkwell would’ve left already, if he had any doubts about this appointment. Florence thought allowing Mr. Harkwell to schedule an 8 A.M. appointment and then also being late to that 8 A.M. appointment would deter Mr. Harkwell from the appointment enough, but apparently not. Early-risers are obviously too crazy to discourage.
He leaves the comfort of his queen-sized bed, exits his bedroom, goes back into his bedroom for a jacket once he realizes how cold the morning air is in just a nightgown, exits his bedroom again, trudges down the stairs, and finally answers Mr. Harkwell’s pleas.
“Johnny-boy!” Florence greets. The rush of cold air from the outside is more uncomfortable to him than the glare he’s met with from Mr. Harkwell. “Shut the fuck up and come in.”
Despite his red-faced, teeth-gritting, fist-flenching anger, Mr. Harkwell does come inside. “You’re late to our appointment, you’re addressing me too casually, and just look at what you’re wearing! You are unprofessional on every level!” He admires Florence’s taste in decor with the same indignant passion he put into insulting Florence’s business practices.
“And that’s exactly what you’re paying for,” Florence says. “Unless you think you can find someone else to fulfill your needs. No, ‘needs’ isn’t quite right. What I mean is, your filthy fucking desires. Your weird fetish, or something. It’s a fetish, right? It has to be.”
“You think you can insult me because you have the moral high ground here. But you’re the one who asked for this. Your business specifically seeks out people like me. Insult me all you want, but you chose this.”
Florence loves hearing the strain in Mr. Harkwell’s voice, hoarse from over thirty minutes of yelling at the door. Mr. Harkwell towers over him by a good half-foot, with glowering eyes and flared nostrils and bulging veins that seem ready to burst any second. “I know, already. That’s why I *will* insult you all I want. You stupid pig. You fucking moron. You disgusting, awful, miserable piece of shit.”
All at once, Mr. Harkwell’s anger is released. Wrinkles smooth out. Crescent indentations from fingernails digging into his palms sting no longer. Blood pressure drops. “Is that it?”
Florence loves that part, too: the sudden bout of apathy. He knows that Mr. Harkwell hasn’t learned emotional restraint. Quite the opposite. Mr. Harkwell has only regained his composure because he realizes that the only resolution to his frustrations is in the appointment. Mr. Harkwell will get the last word in, at the end of the day, because that is what he’s paying for.
“Not yet,” Florence says. “Be useful and make me some breakfast.”
He leads Mr. Harkwell from the foyer to the hallway of mirrors that leads to the kitchen. A single line of wall mirrors, of various elaborate frames and shapes and sizes, stretches all the way down the hallway. It is clear that the mirrors are meant only for Florence’s use, rather than a psychological tactic to instill shame into his clients, given by the height at which they’re hung. Mr. Harkwell’s passing reflections cut off the top of his head, emphasizing his neck and upper chest where Florence’s eye-level would be.
“You don’t think you’ll end up throwing it up during the appointment?” Mr. Harkwell asks.
“Do you want me to?” Florence asks in response.
“I suppose not. I also suppose I wouldn’t be able to stop you if you did.”
“Sounds like you’re finally picking things up, John-o-tron.”
Mr. Harkwell is surprised by how long the walk down the hallway is. Florence’s house appears to be the same size as his own from the outside, but now he sees that Florence’s house might be twice as large, stretching far out behind like it’s trying to delay something. The hallway isn’t so long where he can’t see the end of it, but the end he can see is a door. In his entire life, Mr. Harkwell has never yet seen a kitchen closed off by a door. It fills him with dread to think of what’s behind the door, even though he knows that, logically, it must only be a kitchen as well-decorated as the foyer.
At the end of the hallway, Florence lets them both into the kitchen. He’s immediately drawn towards the rotting vines of devil’s ivy spilling off over the wine glass cabinet. Similarly, dead heart-shaped leaves droop off another house plant at the window sill in front of the kitchen sink. Next to the heart leaf plant lays the browned and shrunk remains of an aloe vera, and beside that, a dried-up moon cactus with a sun-bleached ruby cap.
“Oh no,” Florence softly laments.
He gently lifts the devil’s ivy vine like it’s the delicate hand of someone on their deathbed. He tries to feel for any remaining moisture in the vascular tissue, some deceiving hope that he may still be able to resurrect the plant with some water and a newfound resolve to care more, but it’s completely dry. The dead leaves snap off the vine like they’ve been aching to be crunched and reduced to dust. He picks up the pot of aloe, light as a feather. Also completely dry. All of his kitchen plants are dead and probably have been dead for weeks.
It’s supposed to be easy to take care of kitchen plants. All he had to do was water his plants every time he came downstairs for a meal, but he couldn’t even do that. He thinks the last time he visited his kitchen must’ve been the day he bought all the plants.
“Isn’t it sad, John? How desensitized to love we can be, given enough time?”
Mr. Harkwell doesn’t appreciate Florence’s new meek demeanor. A few dead leaves, and now Florence is soft and sympathetic and respectful, as if that were his true nature all along. As if. Mr. Harkwell calls it yet another bullying tactic designed to cast himself in the worst light possible. There’s no right answer to Florence’s question: agreeing makes the moment too intimate, which juxtaposes awfully against the nature of their appointment, but accusing Florence of never having loved his plants is too outright insensitive. He’s forced to change the subject, a choice that still proves his callousness.
“What breakfast am I supposed to make for you?” Mr. Harkwell asks.
Florence starts tossing the plastic pots of dead plants into the trash can. “A toasted bagel. With cream cheese. And coffee, too.”
“Where’s the bagels?”
“In the place where bagels go.”
Mr. Harkwell checks the pantry. It’s full of brands that have been discontinued longer than he’s been alive, cobwebs as thick as cotton candy, and dust. Everything in Florence’s house seems to be preserved under a thin layer of gray dust.
“You’re stupid,” Florence says. “Bagels go in the fridge.”
Mr. Harkwell opens the stainless steel fridge. The smell emanating from its contents registers in his mind before the sight of all the decaying food does. Florence might have a green thumb, after all—there were probably thousands of bacteria colonies in his fridge, generations of microscopic fungi thriving off of Florence’s neglect. Mr. Harkwell finds a more modern brand of bagels sitting on the middle shelf, but it’s encased in bunny-white fuzziness. Florence’s fridge belongs in a microbiology lab.
“Buy some new bagels,” Mr. Harkwell says. “And a new fridge, while you’re at it.”
“No coffee, either?”
“Your coffee is from the 1900’s.”
“And isn’t it sad?”
“You let this happen.”
***
The business takes place in the basement, down a poorly lit, unnecessarily long staircase that would surely tempt Orpheus into glancing behind to make sure Eurydice was still behind him. Florence has no such urges. He can feel the impact of Mr. Harkwell’s heavy footsteps behind him just fine, not to mention the labored breathing and the gripping of Mr. Harkwell’s sweaty hands against the metal railings, which hitch every few steps, like he’s trying to pull himself along down the stairs.
By now, Mr. Harkwell is familiar with Florence’s architecture. He’s not surprised that an even more arduous hallway awaits them after the stairs. He can’t see the end of the hallway, this time. The hallway vanishes to a single point of darkness a mere hundred feet away from where he stands.
“Aren’t the stairs nice? I just had them installed,” Florence boasts. He flips on the right light switch at the bottom of the staircase, which illuminates the elevator door behind the staircase. “I thought it’d be better if my business was as accommodating as possible, so for the longest time, I’ve only had the elevator. But then somebody told me it was a fire hazard, so I had the stairs installed. Now that I think about it, there’s still the problem about how inaccessible stairs are during a fire. Maybe the stairs are a waste. Are there fire-proof elevators yet?”
“Your business is infuriatingly lucrative. The more I hate you, the more I’ll come back.”
“All I did was make you take the stairs, you know. Oh, whatever. I don’t understand why I’m expecting rationality from a homicidal maniac.”
They disappear down the inky black hallway, darker than blindness. Florence doesn’t mention that the left light switch could have lit their path.
***
It’s time to stop stalling.
The money goes into the built-in wall vault, to lay dormant until it is retrieved the next day.
Florence goes silent as soon as the money is deposited, as previously agreed upon. His heart pounds, even after millions of repetitions of the same ordeal. He hates this part too much. It takes all of his strength to let it happen to him.
Struggling is the easy way out. Behind his eyelids, he sees everyone who has ever stalked towards him with killing intent. Their facial features blur together, except for that look in their eyes. That cold hatred remains the same, seems to be the one dominant trait their common ancestor has never failed to pass down. Florence watches the tension in Mr. Harkwell’s face relax away, energy wasted away as heat that dissipates back into the entropic universe.
He wants to see Mr. Harkwell the way he’s presented in reality, but his memories keeps glitching. His eyes keep deceiving him with familiar sights, of all the people who had hurt him before.
The knitted eyebrows of a mailman.
The coarse mustache hair of a politician.
The nose of a teacher.
The face shape of an old friend.
The disappointment of a father.
Mr. Harkwell, like most uncreative cretins, starts with a knife. He doesn’t even have a proper grip. It makes no sense to steady the blade with your fingers; that’s how you end up losing one. A fond smile aches at the corners of Florence’s lips. He sees Mr. Harkwell the most clearly when he focuses on the blunders.
Instead of shrinking away, Florence approaches Mr. Harkwell, meets him halfway, and adjusts Mr. Harkwell’s hand into a more sensible reverse grip. “You really do have shit for brains. You’ll hurt yourself if you hold the knife like that.” That’s Florence’s first time using that insult out loud. He saw it in a comment thread under a video game walkthrough, once. He had to Google example sentences to make sure he understood it properly. Learning the new slang helps hide his age better.
“Shut up,” Mr. Harkwell grumbles. “Didn’t I pay you to shut up?”
Florence doesn’t hate Mr. Harkwell. He wants to, but that would be like projecting his anxieties about the world onto a blind kitten, still wet from the water of its mother’s womb and unintroduced to its developing retinas. He doesn’t fear the promise shining in the blade of Mr. Harkwell’s knife; he fears that he’ll wake up the next morning in his own congealed blood and still be laughing at Mr. Harkwell’s incompetence. He has a bad habit of missing his clients too much once they’re gone.
But he’s just stalling again. The next part is what everyone is after, so Florence finally goes ahead and lets it happen:
Mr. Harkwell goes straight for the throat. Being stabbed by a knife isn’t quite the same as being punctured by a needle at the doctor’s office. The pain is perhaps so great that it transcends the threshold that nociceptors can properly decipher. Florence can’t register every millimeter of the blade that sinks into him, not even the breaking of skin, not even how sharp the knife is. He’s starving for oxygen immediately, yet physically, he wouldn’t be able to recognize the blockage in his throat if it weren’t for his own blurry vision directed steeply downwards.
With what little air he could summon from his lungs, he sputters. This part, he’s actually faking: the naive gasps attempting to cry out betrayal, lips moving but unsynchronized to the syllables the air escaping past his lips is trying to imitate. He could very well just shut up and take it like how Mr. Harkwell wants him to—how Mr. Harkwell thinks he wants him to—but that wouldn’t haunt either of them into another appointment. Florence profits the most from repeat customers, who convince themselves that the appointments were only the best substitute for what they actually craved, until the appointments actually became the craving. Actually, he loves this part. It takes the rest of his strength to not overact.
Florence staggers backwards, his back conveniently collapsing against the wall in a way that flips a lightswitch which floods the black-bricked room in red light. The blood looks black, like that. He rips the knife out of him, clatters it to the concrete floor, coughs out inky darkness and has it dribble down his lips. Dilated pupils, indistinguishable from his surrounding dark irises, spectate the horror of Mr. Harkwell reaching for the knife again. Now that Harkwell has gotten his hands a little wet, he’s more comfortable with wading further into darkness.
No. Who’s he kidding? Florence hates this. Mr. Harkwell is making swiss cheese out of his almost-corpse, but not the kind whose holes get patched by fuzzy mold after a few days left on the kitchen counter. The knife is playing peek-a-boo with Florence’s internal organs and his guts’ only cover is the gushing obsidian murk tempting anemia out of him. Every impalement permeates more wetness out of him. Besides the burning of his wounds, the bleeding is the main sensation Florence’s mind is capable of comprehending. Like pissing out of his diaphragm.
Florence does kind of like this part, though. Blood has a specific type of viscosity that red food dye and corn syrup can’t capture. It slips, yet it catches. There’s friction in the lubrication as the platelets work on coagulating at a wound they’ve already escaped from. The sickly sweet aroma of hemoglobin reminds Florence of the molecules evaporating up around them.
He gargles out incoherence. “The dehumidifier,” is what he’s trying to say. He tries snapping his fingers to catch his client’s attention and luckily the blood on his fingers is dried enough for him to get out a sliver of a sound. His other hand trembles into a finger pointing behind Mr. Harkwell, at the magic block of white plastic and metal that’s supposed to help prevent mildew. He bought it just the other day. It was criminal not to put it to good use. “I forgot to turn on the dehumidifier, John Quincy Adams. Get that for me?” is what he’s trying to say.
“You’re killing the mood.”
“At least one of us is killing,” is supposed to be Florence’s retort. “I haven’t even passed out from blood loss yet, you wannabe Jack The Ripper.”
Somehow, the same guy who lashes back with a stab to the heart is the same guy who’s polite enough to actually bother his cracking joints into getting up for the dehumidifier. Florence reaches his arm just far enough up for his fingertip to jostle the lightswitch he collapsed against before. The red light returns to regular white light. Florence watches his client struggle with finding the power button on the dehumidifier.
“Agrwagurgalagloov,” is what Florence is actually saying, but he actually means that the power button is just on the left and can’t possibly be missed.
Mr. Harkwell is an expert in the impossible, though. “I don’t even know what you’re saying!”
Mr. Harkwell struggles for a fat ten minutes before he’s distracted by the repetitive clicking behind him. He whips around.
“You’re kidding me! You are fucking kidding me. Where the hell did you even get a lighter and cigarette from?”
As Florence takes a long drag from his cigarette, smoke leaks out from the gaping hole in his throat. He spews out more gargling incoherence, which is supposed to give away the magic trick. It doesn’t actually.
Mr. Harkwell finally finds the stupid button. “Oh. Here we go.”
Once the dehumidifier kicks in, Mr. Harkwell is finally free to resume the appointment. Florence sizzles out the cigarette in his own pool of blood, which is flaking and crusting at the edges. He turns the red light back on and lays back down.
Florence hates this part as much as he loves it as much as he hates it. It’s Ouroboros being the predator and prey, an antidote being the same poison it cures itself for, the rhythmic dripping against a skull being the horrendous noise and the music it’s trying to cover up with. In reality, it’s only more stabbings. He doesn’t quite live in reality, though. Florence lives in flashes of passion from the past, hallucinogenic time leaps, corner-of-the-eye resemblances—a deal from the past as Faustian as it was Freudian as it was Friedrich Nietzschean.
Almost, just almost, he can reconstruct a forgotten truth. With every meeting of stainless steel to stainful flesh, Florence can almost-almost-almost remember what he promised to an entity long ago.
But then again, it’s too goddamn early in the fucking morning for any clear thoughts.
(TO BE CONTINUED)