The Ethical Assassin

The assassin looked at me, cocked his head like a deer in a petting zoo. “You’re not afraid of me, are you, Lemuel?”

It might have sounded odd or creepy, but in fact there was something kind of touching about it. The killer didn’t want me to be afraid.

“You know…,” I began. I didn’t know where to take it.

“I told you. I’m not going to hurt you. You’re going to have to trust me, now, because we’re in this together.”

“Fuck this,” I a

“That’s a great idea,” the assassin said. “Ru

I didn’t want to accept it, but I knew it was true. “I can’t believe this.”

“I don’t blame you,” the assassin said, “but denial is not going to get you through this. Lemuel, I’m going to get you through this.”

He gazed at me, a beatific smile on his pale skin, and I believed it. Inexplicable as it was, I believed it. The rational thing would have been to run screaming, to barricade myself in the room and call the cops. That was the only way I might get out of it, but the assassin was so smooth, so crafty, I couldn’t quite believe that I would get the better of him. If I called the cops, I’d end up in jail, and if I rebuffed the assassin, I’d end up in jail. I didn’t want to go anywhere with him. He was a killer, and I didn’t want to be alone with a killer.

“Okay,” I breathed.

“Now, we have to go get that checkbook. The two of us, okay? You can do this.”

I nodded, unable to summon any words.

The assassin drove a slightly beat-up Datsun hatchback, charcoal or gray or something. It was hard to tell in the dark. I had vaguely imagined he would drive an Aston Martin or a Jaguar or something James Bond-ish, with ejector seats, retractable machine-gun turrets, a button that would instantly turn it into a speedboat. Mainly it had old magazines and empty orange juice cartons cramping the floor on the passenger side. There was a pile of paperback books on the backseat- books with odd titles like Animal Liberation and The History of Sexuality, Volume One. How many volumes did a history of sexuality require?

I’d been nervous getting in. We weren’t allowed to leave the motel, and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere with friends who might live in town. If I had reported Ro

The assassin kept his eyes straight ahead of him, hands at two and ten o’clock on the wheel. He looked calm and comfortable, just an ordinary evening of an ordinary life. I felt neither calm nor comfortable. My heart pounded, my stomach churned and the nausea returned, this time interlaced with glutinous chunks of fear. Leaving in pursuit of the checkbook had seemed like my only move, but now I had to wonder if I had just signed on to my own death.

“Why are you going to such trouble to help me?” I asked, mostly just to break the horrific silence. The assassin had some kind of strange, hollow, thudding music playing softly from his tape deck. The singer groaned that love would tear him apart again. “You could just fuck me over if you wanted to.”

“I could. You’re right. But I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“To begin with, if the cops get you, there’s always a chance that you’ll lead them to me. It’s unlikely, but it could happen. Better they should get no one than get you. Besides, it would be wrong for you to go to jail for this. Even if you were arrested and acquitted, that would be monumentally unfair if I could prevent it. I did what I did to those people because it was the ethical thing to do. It hardly makes sense to let someone else suffer for my convenience. What’s the point of behaving ethically if it’s going to have unethical consequences?”

“You want to tell me why it was ethical to kill them?”

“Melford.”

“What?”

“Melford Kean. That’s my name. I figured, you know, now that we’re working together, you ought to know my name. So maybe you’ll trust me. And now you don’t have to think of me as ‘the killer’ or something.” He thrust out his right hand.

Feeling fully the absurdity of it, I shook. He had a firm shake, but Melford Kean’s hand felt thin and precise, like a musical instrument. It wasn’t the hand of a killer- more like that of a surgeon or an artist. And the calm confidence of his shake helped to distract me from the notion that his giving me his name didn’t make me feel safer, it made me feel less safe. I knew his name. Didn’t that make me a danger to him? I didn’t point that out, however. Rather, I said, “I’ve been thinking of you as ‘the assassin.’ ”

“That’s sort of cool. The assassin. Mysterious agent of unknown forces.” He laughed.

I didn’t get why it was fu

“Since we’re friends and all,” I proposed, “maybe you can tell me why you killed them.”

“I can’t, Lemuel. I’d like to, but I can’t because you’re not ready to hear it yet. If I tell you, you’ll say, ‘He’s crazy,’ and your opinion of me and what I do will be set in stone. But I’m not crazy. I just see things more clearly than most people.”

“Isn’t that what crazy people say?”

“Point taken. But it’s also what people who see more clearly say. The question is when to believe those who say it. You know about ideology?”

“You mean like politics?”

“I mean ideology in the Marxist sense. The way in which culture produces the illusion of normative reality. Social discourse tells us what’s real, and our perception of reality depends as much on that discourse as it does on our senses. Sometimes even more. You have to understand that we’re all peering at the world through a gauze, a haze, a filter- and that filter is ideology. We see not what’s there, but what we’re supposed to believe is there. Ideology makes some things invisible and makes some things that aren’t there seem like they’re visible. It’s true not just of political discourse, but of everything. Like stories. Why do stories always have to have a love component? It seems natural, right? But it’s only natural because we think it is. Or fashion. Ideology is why people in one era might think their clothes look normal and neutral, but twenty years later they’re absurd. One minute striped jeans are cool, the next they’re a joke.”

“So, you’re above all that?” I asked.

“The striped jeans? Yes. But for the most part, I’m bound up in ideology the same as everyone else. Yet knowing that it’s there grants us some small power over ideology, and if you squint, you can see a little more clearly than most. That’s really the best you can hope for. Because we’re all the products of ideology, none of us, even the smartest and the most aware, most revolutionary, can escape it- but we can try. We have to always try. And maybe you can try, too, so when I see you squinting, I’ll tell you.”

“That sounds like an awful lot of crap to me.” I wished I could take it back the minute I said it.