I stood there, silent in the darkened bedroom. My target: a third-generation poet of the Fourth Reich, sleeping soundly in the king-sized bed, his face buried in the pillow. He was my first assignment since joining the Defenders of the Universal Alphabet (DUA).
The poet’s sentence was handed down and its execution entrusted to me, the newest killer in the employ of the DUA. I had killed countless times before, in every country and in every language, always without cruelty or judgment. I was good at my job. The group’s teachings simply enhanced my murderous nature with ascetic discipline and focus. I was death’s eager student, ready to put my education to use. The DUA was no cult; there were no fees, no tuition, no student turned away.
The sentence itself was beautiful. I was touched by its natural elegance, honored to make it real. No improvement could be made; the sentence was perfect like an emerald. It meant what it meant, miraculously erupting from the mouth of Nature, conveyed to my ears by a condor.
Our group had been watching the poet for a long time. There was plenty of evidence against him, all of it collated into a precise and damning assessment file. He wrote poems of flaccid protest, defanged refusal, poems that caught the scent yet ultimately allowed the world to continue its existence; he pulled punches, shaved points. He repeatedly balked at the last instant.
The world begins and ends with the Word. It’s simple. Everyone learns this lesson before they’re born, whether they remember it or not. God gave me my word and the poet his, the furious opposition of our respective words predestined long before the appearance of time.
My angelic nature could not change the fact that I was also an animal. But this animality, this creatureliness, did not prevent me from understanding with certainty that God was everywhere in everything. Quite the opposite, my savage nature only increased my sensitivity to the presence. The world is the lonely face of God, unseen and unknowable. I lived without the need for poetry. Its guesswork and hypotheses, its forms and its freedoms were incinerated by the terrifying beauty transmitted to me by the immutable expression of God.
I trained at the finest schools: Sinaloan, Neopolitan, Alamutan. I studied the methods of the CIA, the NKVD, the SS. An invisible child soldier, I arrived like a phantom in the rooms of my victims.
I was in the bedroom of a poet, a bedroom decorated in the D’Annunzian style, filled with artifacts of humanity’s achievements: limbless marble statuary, unexploded ordinance, amulets whose efficacies had lapsed. I was in this particular room because a poet, though cowardly, is actually quite powerful, a fact long forgotten. A poem can start wars, set civilizational decline in motion, bruise the face of the world. Or a poem can let the world remain untouched, in the same state one found it. Just like a human life, a poem begins and ends at the place of unknowing, a Calvary of language. I know how a poem works because I’m not only a killer. Every killer is a poet, naturally. We’re poets for whom poetry has always been unnecessary.
I loomed over the bed of a poet who was born and educated in the United States. He was fully aware of his abilities and limitations; he meditated twice a day, his soul shaped by years of psychotherapy. He ate organic foods. In theory, he was a leftist; in practice, a voluptuary.
He was talented, I couldn’t argue with that. His poems were fiery and emotional with a recognizable score to settle, and they touched the few poetry lovers left in the Western world. Praised by academics and critics, baristas and bartenders alike, he lived as comfortably as a poet could in this world. He was offered a room inside the mansion; he was domesticated and soft. His acolytes protected his reputation and gave it space to grow. His poems were sung in New York City and London; translations were sung in Tokyo and Paris.
The sentence was handed down to me by the DUA, a sentence I could never hope to understand fully, yet one I was obliged to carry out to the end.
I stood there, silent in the darkened bedroom. I cleared my throat and the poet stirred, his face illuminated by the slice of moonlight cutting through the small gap between the drawn curtains. His features were not dissimilar to my own, as if seen in a mirror, every feature flipped.
Mildly concerned by the visage we seemed to share, I cleared my throat again, this time with more insistence. I removed my mask so that when the poet awoke, he would see our strange and common likeness, a little jolt before he met his end. His eyes opened, closed momentarily, then opened again, adjusting to the dark room where he slept. When his gaze fell upon my face, his eyes betrayed no fear, no surprise. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, smoothed down his hair, and cleared his throat, a throat that sounded dry and scratchy, the remnants of an evening likely spent smoking and drinking. Poets love to smoke and drink.
—Before you begin, I know why you’re here, he said to me quietly, with a tremor of resignation in his voice.
I remained motionless, silent, halfway between the world and the dream. —Let him say what he has to say, I told myself. There will be no extreme unction, no last rites.
—You’re here because I prayed you’d come. I’ve been praying for your visit ever since the long night before I was born, and I’ve continued to pray nightly since… Honestly, I thought you’d never show up… So thank you for coming. I’m happy you did.
I was incredulous! He anticipated me. Who anticipates a ghost?! And more importantly, who welcomes their assassin’s sudden manifestation at their bedside?
—The prayerful can anticipate a ghost’s arrival.
I hadn’t said anything, yet he was responding.
I knew the poet’s life and work as if they were my own. In a different context, my knowledge of the poet would have made me his fan, his follower. But somehow I remained ignorant of his silent, secret prayer, the one he’d been reciting since eternity, apparently. How could the DUA’s analysts miss it? How was the prayer omitted from his file?
I still hadn’t said a single word aloud.
—Did you know that in addition to a face, we also share a desire? the poet asked.
—We don’t share a desire, I finally spoke, no thought given to my speech. Usually I’m deliberate.
—I want you to know that I write your name in every poem, sometimes in every line, and when I’m really on the trail, every letter contains your name.
—Tell me my name? I’ve read all your poems many times and never once came across it.
—Well, I’m honored to have a reader as illustrious as you. Your name is _______, the same as mine.
—You’re wrong. I don’t have a name. I sacrificed my name when I became a killer. I wrote it on a tiny slip of paper and burned it. I can’t even remember what it was.
—I burned my name too, when I chose a poet’s name. It’s all part of the same ritual.
He didn’t sit up to talk to me; his head remained on the pillow. A victim usually begs or bargains. The poet was fearless.
—What about this desire that we supposedly share? I asked. I was beginning to suspect the poet was trying to con me.
—That’s easy. I thought you would’ve figured it out by now. You’re the assassin assigned to take my life, am I correct?
—You are.
He paused, as if trying to remember an ancient incantation, hiding like a rodent in its hole.
—When we are at our best, on a sinking ship and grasping at straws, a poet and a killer are one in the same. We efface ourselves because of our common desire.
—Give it a name, I insisted.
—Annihil…
But before he could get the whole word out, my stiletto sank into his throat. His eyes bulged, his voice stilled, the final syllables of his final word suspended between the world and the dream.
I recalled the Quran: You did not kill them, but it was Allah who killed them. You did not throw, but it was Allah who threw.
There he was, flickering in and out like an analog television on the fritz, blood spurting from his wound, leaking from his mouth, no more words. I left the room. I left the same way I arrived. Outside the poet’s building, I sat down on the neighboring stoop. I pulled out my phone and texted my handler at the DUA.
—Done.
I fished a half-smoked joint from my jacket pocket and walked towards the subway.
— Mike Bones is the songwriter and guitarist for the band Weak Signal. He spent his whole life in and in the orbit of New York City. He recently moved to a rural village in East Anglia. He is adjusting to life in the countryside.