And that place which gave you your bearings will always reside within you complete. And of those places and circumstances, only those that offered resistance to one’s being will ever produce individuals worth their words. —Harper Grey

Step One: Life is like bread. It’s great at first, but as time passes it gets harder.

Eli was very quiet. And by quiet I’m saying that he never spoke, not that he was soft spoken. In fact Eli didn’t utter a word to another living thing until he was almost seven years old. And he did so only to get the attention of a dog so that it did not get hit by an oncoming car. There are events in every life that shape individuality. If that dog had heard Eli in time, it probably would have moved out of the road. But as it happened, the dog did not hear him. And Eli would not speak again until he was seventeen. What was the point?

Eli Lemski was the sort who went undetected by social radar. Raised by his father, an obsessive-compulsive aeronautical engineer, Eli spent most of his childhood sitting in various rooms starring at them. By the time he was twenty-one there wasn’t one millimetre of those rooms that he hadn’t spent fourteen hours looking at without moving. This, of course, made him one of the most observant people of all time. And though Eli would spend most of his life searching for his one true worldly gift, it always escaped him that his power of observation was it. The downside, of course, is that amazing powers of observation only pay if you decide to count cards at Blackjack tables. Eli’s alternative, as it turned out, was much worse.

Due to the fact that Mr. Lemski worked primarily on military contracts, Eli and his father spent a great deal of time moving from one place to another. And as Eli’s speech problem worsened it didn’t make sense to Mr. Lemski that Eli should attend regular schools. Being the egoist that he was, he assumed that his son had inherited his intellect and wouldn’t need to waste his time in the company of troglodytes. So Eli took to getting an education through the mail. It was soon apparent that Eli was not the prodigy his father thought him to be. Eli squeaked through his scholastic career and received his high school diploma in a large manila envelope. And although the water damage to that envelope had turned most of the diploma into an incoherent mess, Eli was still able to make out the two most important words on it. And those were Eli Lemski.

As this story’s narrator (and participant), I always find it strange that a man like Leo Lemski (PhD), would have the gall to think his son as brilliant as himself and yet allow him to get an education by correspondence. When I first met Mr. Lemski I realized immediately that this was the kind of man who couldn’t care less whether or not Eli did anything at all with his life. He was so entirely self-absorbed that he rarely spoke to his son, let alone give a damn whether or not he excelled at anything. But he used to love using Eli’s mediocrity as an excuse to blow off steam. And due to the fact that Eli never raised his voice in his own defense, it just made it all the easier. Neither Leo or Eli were big men. They were slight, gangly creatures with sunken eyes and hands that seemed too large for their arms. But unlike his father, Eli was not an awkward person. He was graceful and moved as though he was trying to elude some unseen force that constantly stalked him. That was the thing I noticed about him when we first met. That and the fact that he could shoot a pistol like no one I had ever seen. And that’s where I come into it. I was the one who took Eli to the shooting range that afternoon when we were both twenty-one. My father, unlike Leo Lemski, was not an engineering genius. My father was a test pilot and then later an air force liaison. Before he died he worked with Leo on a couple of projects. That’s how I came to meet Eli. One morning my father asked me if I would take Eli with me to the shooting range as a favour to Leo. I was staying with him during spring break and was due back at college a couple of days later. So, since the base was just as boring as every other airbase in the world, I figured it couldn’t hurt. My dad warned me that Eli didn’t talk much but I wasn’t prepared for what I found when I met him. Of all the people in this world and out of it, Eli Lemski only chose to talk to two of them: myself and his mother, Irene. The difference was that I was alive at the time whereas Irene hadn’t been for almost nineteen years. Beats me why.

I should clear something up before you start to get the wrong impression. Even though I was taking Eli to a shooting range it does not mean that I am, or was, a proponent of firearms. Truth be told I’d have them all melted down and turned into candleholders given the chance. During my four years at Stanford an ex-girlfriend of mine was killed by a guy at a house party. He thought the handgun that he found in a dresser drawer wasn’t loaded. In a haze of cocaine and tequila he squeezed the trigger and sent two bullets through the bedroom wall and into the living room, killing my friend and injuring another. He would serve nine months of an involuntary manslaughter plea. Sometimes having influential parents and lawyers can get you out of most anything. The dead are rarely afforded the luxury of afterthought in such circumstances. The court saw no reason to ruin the boy’s life over what they deemed an accident. Had it been their daughter, I’m sure they would have felt different. So let’s just say that I’m not fond of guns. Even before that I could never stand them. But growing up in a military family you have little choice as a boy. If your father wants you to learn to shoot, then you shut the hell up and you do it. Because sometimes the fear you have of disappointing your father is stronger than your convictions. So I did what I always did. I went and shot off some rounds at the range so the good o’ boys down there could tell my dad that they’d seen me. And on that particular occasion I just so happened to bring along a treat for them. Eli Lemski.

There are certain things in this world that when the right people do them they just seem natural, like driving or cooking or sex. Eli Lemski was a natural marksman. He could hit anything at any range as long as the weapon could perform the task. The day that I picked him up I was initially a little peeved at my father for making me take him. Of course I pictured him as being just another air force brat. But I would understand what my father was talking about the moment that he came out of his front door. He was dressed in a white button-down short-sleeve shirt, dark brown pants, and brown leather shoes. His hair was parted on the side, pasted to his head with pomade, and he wore large-rimmed glasses that were far too big for his face. In all the years I knew him, Eli always wore exactly the same thing, which he owned in triplicate (or at least I hoped he did). But put a gun in that boy’s hands and it was like watching God creating and recreating the world. When we got to the range he stood with his hands pressed over his ears as I shot my father’s .45. The noise bothered him so much that he went and stood in the parking lot and still would not take his hands away from his ears. But after a while he inched his way back inside and got close enough that I eventually offered him the gun. He meagerly pointed it at the target and looked as if the weight of it would topple him. And then he shot off five rounds right on top of each other without so much as blinking. His body didn’t even seem to move. The flurry of reports brought over some of the regulars and we just stood there and watched him fire clip after clip. All afternoon he hit nothing but chests and heads. It was one of the most bizarre things that I have ever witnessed.

That was my first encounter with Eli Lemski. After I finished the semester at Stanford I returned to Texas in the summer of 1982 and spent a great deal of time with Eli. I even got him to talk to me a little. But that summer was the last time that I would see him for almost five years. The next time we’d run into each other would be in a Manhattan alleyway. I was puking and Eli, well, Eli was working.

Step Two: Cancelling yourself because you’ve been stolen.

After I graduated from Stanford I spent some time working in the Bay area before I realized that I was getting nowhere and didn’t like myself much. So I did what every good American kid does. I fucked off. I travelled the country in search of that thing that America is supposed to be. You never find it of course, but at least it made me realize that the “thing� everyone’s always talking about never really existed. It’s just Saturday Evening Post memorabilia bullshit. How in the hell do we have a country where the cradle of our government and historical fortitude exists in a vacuum with the highest crime rate in the union? Figure me that one. The First World is a farce. It’s a comedy about a comedy where perfection re-enacts day-to-day life and then feeds itself to the populace and convinces it that it’s a reflection of continental reality. Everything’s okay. Everything is always okay. I’m sure there will come a time when our greatness resembles that great snake which feasts upon its own tail because there is nothing left for it to eat. We will consume ourselves through consumption. That’s what I learned in the two years that I travelled America. That it’s kidding itself. That and the fact that I should have just stayed in San Francisco and stopped complaining.

But that’s how I ended up in New York. A friend of mine from college was in advertising out there and I looked him up. At the time I was a broke, backpacking, hippie. I explained to him what I’d been up to and it didn’t seem to bother him much. You can never tell how people from your past are going to react when you show up penniless on their doorstep and they’re well off. He was one of the many who fell victim to the success equals happiness equation. He and his wife had matching Mercedes with signature plates. One was “Jack B� and the other was “Tara B�. And despite my disdain at the time for such nonsense I wasn’t about to mention it. His sofa was the most comfortable thing I’d slept on in months. Of course he’d changed since school, as most people tend to. There was no point telling them that at the time, mind you, but it’s the truth of things. So enjoy your youth while you have it. Because despite your unwavering opinions and views you will change into something later in life that will not understand why music has to be so damn loud.

So there I was. Showered, shaved and ready to hit the town. Jack had made reservations at an upscale place near the park and it conveniently worked out to be Tara’s bridge night so it was just he and I. We had dinner and then got drunk at a nearby bar. That’s when I began to realize that everything in Jack’s life wasn’t as perfect as he would have liked it to seem. There were affairs with younger women, borderline alcoholism, flirtations with financial disaster. Tara knew nothing about any of it of course. Wives in situations like that rarely do. They just keep doing whatever it is that they do and don’t stop to consider much. Because there’s always another Jack out there. And like most, Jack was good for ten years of ignorant bliss. But that’s how I ran into Eli again. Puking my guts out in the alley next to the bar.

It’s to be expected that people you knew in your youth will become something in their later life that will change your opinion of them. Take Jack. I would have never thought that he’d move to New York and spend his days driving between Manhattan and Jersey, hopelessly grasping for the illusory gold ring. In school he was the sort that spent the majority of his time drinking beer and sleeping. Most things are rarely what they seem. And as for the future, well, it never is. So there I was, puking my guts out in an alley when I caught a glimpse of someone clambering down a fire escape. Now the fact that I was in New York sobered me somewhat. When figures jump from fire escapes in alleyways you tend to get a little wary. It wasn’t until I heard my name that I calmed down enough to turn around and see who it was. And of course, it was Eli. He was standing there with a strange grin on his face, and I say strange only because I had never seen him smile or make any other facial gestures of any kind. He was wearing what he usually wore accompanied by a beige trench coat, tied tightly at the waist. At first I thought there was a design on the coat. And then I realized that it was blood. A great deal of blood. So I did what anyone in my position would have done. I puked some more.

Unfortunately Eli wasn’t in the mood to stand around while I did. By the time I realized what was happening I was being shoved into the back seat of a car half a block away. Jack was nowhere to be seen; though I would later learn that he had met a young accounting intern and had spent the night wallowing in her arms. Coincidentally, Tara had been doing the same thing back in Jersey. Turns out that she had been sleeping with some famous attorney from Philadelphia for years. But that comes later. At the time I was concerned that Jack wouldn’t let me stay with him if I was rude enough to skip out on him. I was lying in the back seat of what I thought was Eli’s car when we came to a stop and Eli motioned for me to stay put. Chancing a quick peek out the front windshield, I realized that we were somewhere near the water, but where I couldn’t be sure. Some time passed before Eli returned and pulled me from the backseat only to shove me into another car. He then proceeded to pour gasoline in his car and set fire to it. And that’s all I remember about that night. When I woke up the next morning I was lying on a sofa in a small apartment somewhere in the Bronx. Eli was sitting at a small table drinking a cup of what I guessed to be coffee and cleaning a variety of handguns.

Oh God. What had I done.

Step Three: Strange things happen to ordinary people and vice versa.

If he had become a cop or a soldier I could have stomached it a little easier. But there was no way that I could ever come to terms with the fact that he actually killed people for money. This was the same guy who hadn’t uttered a word in decade in succession. But that’s exactly what he did. He killed people for money. He had convinced himself that he’d found his one true worldly gift. And to Eli that was all that mattered. The ridiculous thing about it was that he didn’t much like what he did. He didn’t enjoy his work and didn’t really have the mentality required to forgo the anxieties that came with it. But he had convinced himself that there was nothing else in the world that he could do as well. And, like so many others, he just accepted it. It might sound strange to you but it really isn’t all that abnormal. People spend decades doing the nine-to-five thing and hate every second of it. But they never do anything about it because they convince themselves that there isn’t anything better within their reach. So they’re comfortable with the fact that they know their job and can do it well enough to remain somewhat unconscious day in and day out. The problem with that kind of thinking is that it always ends up creeping into every other aspect of your life. Now I’m not saying that there aren’t exceptions. In lower class situations you do what you have to do. Most of the time you just don’t have any choice in the matter. That may be difficult for some of you to swallow but it’s the truth. Industrialists, social leftists, whomever, can go on about this and that but it matters little. Anyone who can afford the luxury of waxing intellectual on the subject simply isn’t in that position. There is no dishonor in spending a life providing for your family. There is no dishonour in doing work that others might consider beneath them or trivial. There are hundreds of millions that do those jobs and are happy that they have them. That’s the stoic simplicity of the blue-collar existence. Making the world go round was never that easy. But someone’s got to do it.

Everyone gets a turn at bat. Hit anything.

So that’s how I found Eli. Trapped in a line of work that he didn’t particularly like but was good at. Beside that he hadn’t changed much. When work came in someone would give him a call. Sometimes, if he was lucky, there was a reason. But Eli didn’t much care about reasons. As far as he was concerned he had found his one true gift and that was good enough for him. But as I sat there I couldn’t quite put all the pieces together. How does the introverted son of an egomaniacal engineer go from a life of quite redundancy to one of a hit man? For the life of me I couldn’t figure it. So I decided to be blunt and just asked Eli to tell me. Which he did.

It all started the year my father died. Eli was still living with his dad and was working part time at the shooting range. From what I could gather he took the job so that he could shoot after work for free. Later that year Leo Lemski suffered a stroke and Eli was forced to put him in a home. It never ceases to amaze me how things always come around. I’m sure that if Leo had given a damn about his son, then maybe Eli would have taken care of him. But Eli had no reservations about dumping his dad off in some home. As far as he was concerned he was just some stranger that yelled at him. Eli ended up getting a job stocking shelves at a supermarket in Houston and got a small place of his own. At the end of that year he had saved up enough money to buy a used car and decided to give up his apartment in favour of living in the car. He said he did it primarily to save money but I would venture to guess that it was either the apartment or the car. So Eli was working at the supermarket and living in his car. Ain’t it just like fate to make that decision seem poignant when it was nothing more than a fluke. One night Eli left work late and was searching for a place to pull over for the night and sleep. He was driving around at about 2 am when he came to a hard stop at a red light. This caused a great deal of crap to come flying up from the backseat and fill the passenger side of the car. So Eli started to throw stuff into the backseat. And that’s when it happened. Parked on the other side of the street there was a van. And in the van there was a big guy sitting in the driver’s seat. The rear doors of the van were open and just as Eli’s eyes came upon them he saw another man hit a woman and then throw her into the back of the van.

Eli’s first reaction was to say something. But remembering the whole dog incident from his youth he decided not to bother. Maybe the girl would be alright if he kept his mouth shut. He was good at keeping his mouth shut. Unfortunately, the large guy sitting in the driver’s seat of the van noticed that Eli had seen what was going on. So he decided to get out of the van and walk over to the passenger side window of Eli’s car. Now, any normal person would have hit the gas and gotten out of there. But Eli just froze. The guy started banging on the window and kept yelling “you didn’t see nothin’ you little shit!� Now if Eli had simply nodded, his head it might have ended there. But Eli didn’t. He just sat there looking from the guy pounding on the window to the other guy standing at the back of the van. And that’s when the big guy decided to smash Eli’s window. The rest happened so fast that Eli couldn’t really go into much detail. All that he could recall was that he went for his gun in the glove box, chambered a round and fired through the broken window. The big guy fell to the ground and the guy behind the van went for something. What that turned out to be was a semi-automatic riffle.

Eli didn’t know that of course. He was lost in some strange mental time warp that had taken control of his body, superseding the authority of his rationale. His primary reaction to the man’s movement was to get out of the driver’s side door and stay crouched behind his car. Luckily it was the right decision. After producing the rifle, the guy emptied and entire clip into Eli’s car. But seeing as the guy couldn’t shoot for shit, he didn’t hit the gas tank. He just took out all the windows and put some holes in the quarter panels. Eli was hit in the leg by a bullet that ricocheted off the pavement under the car and caught him in the thigh. Eli’s reaction was to come straight up and return fire through the blown out backseat windows. And like I’ve said throughout this story, Eli was the best shot that I have ever seen. He took him with two shots to the side of the head and that was that. The light turned green, sirens popped up in the distance and Eli realized that there was a hole in his leg, prompting him to do the decent thing. Pass out.

It doesn’t end there, mind you. As it turned out, the girl that had been thrown into the back of the van was the runaway daughter of a New Orleans gangster. It seems that daughter and father had had an argument several months earlier and she had left New Orleans for Houston with some biker. Broke, and accustomed to feeding a hefty drug habit, she soon turned to prostitution and wound up working for the two guys that Eli had shot dead. When the police showed up they questioned the girl, who went to great lengths to make Eli appear her savior. The whole thing was chalked up to self-defense since the cops were familiar with the two dead pimps and didn’t really give a damn either way. Eli’s gun was conveniently misplaced by an officer and the girl, after being identified, was sent back to New Orleans. So now you’ve got this gangster who’s been reunited with his only child after several months of worrying and wondering where she was, and on top of it all, he learns that some complete stranger saved her life. The fact that she left out the part about being a prostitute had little to do with the fact that the man felt indebted to Eli. So he decided to do something about it. And you know gangsters. When they set their minds to something, well…

The world of crime works in a very specific way. If you’ve got enough pull you can find out just about anything you need to. A phone call is made from New Orleans to Dallas, from Dallas to an individual on the Houston PD, the chain is then reversed. And, after the delivery of a sound beating to a daughter, a member of the New Orleans mob sends a couple of guys to Houston to pay Eli a visit. It’s as simple as that. When Eli was released from the hospital a week later he was met by two men who ushered him into the back of a car. At first Eli was a little concerned that the men were affiliated with the two guys that he had shot and it was curtains. But after one of the men explained the whole thing to him he found it considerably easier to relax. Eli had no thoughts either way about organized crime. During the time that I spent with him it seemed to me that he always gave people the benefit of the doubt, no matter their position in life. So he wasn’t all that against the fact that he was being flown to New Orleans mere hours after being wheeled out of a hospital door. After all, we’re talking about a guy who stocked shelves at a supermarket and lived in his car. So Eli got on the plane, flew to Louisiana and met the gangster. And that’s where his life took a turn for the worse as the gangster’s idea of repaying Eli was to give him a job. And because it paid better than stocking shelves, Eli wasted no time in accepting it.

At first Eli did menial things like the opening of car doors, transporting goods, what have you. It wasn’t until the summer of the next year that he was invited along to “go see about a guy�. It was in Baton Rouge on a rainy night that Eli Lemski took part in his first professional killing. He was only the driver but that’s all it would take to get him started. Once his knowledge of guns became apparent to his co-workers he started seeing about more guys. By the winter of that same year Eli was seeing about a lot of people.

As mentioned earlier, the world of crime has specific ways of doing things. There were those in New Orleans that didn’t like the fact that an outsider had moved from errand-boy to the guy who saw about people in a little over a year. They were concerned that their superior had become too attached to a kid who, it has to be said, was an outsider. So after the boss was tipped off that someone was going to try and get rid of Eli, he decided to do the decent thing. After all, Eli had saved his daughter’s life and that meant more to him than it did to those around him. So he sent Eli to Chicago and set him free.

It was in the Windy City that Eli became an independent, or contract-killer. Because of his affiliation with the mob in New Orleans he got enough work to build up a decent sized clientele. And like any business, that’s how the cream rises to the top. Eli was efficient and extremely thorough. And because he tended to keep his mouth shut most of the time those who employed him got the impression that he had been doing this sort of thing for much longer than he had been. Eli’s lack of verbalization gave him that whole no-nonsense hit man kind of quality. It made him seem dangerous and unpredictable. Not that anyone in their right mind would ever consider Eli dangerous if they saw a picture of him. But if you knew what he did for a living and met him, you’d understand. His business flourished as word spread, and like some hip new bistro, Eli became the go-to-guy for all the jobs that no one else would touch. And he pulled them off, as if born to it.

So that’s how he ended up in New York. After he got too large for Chicago, so much so that the police were watching his apartment, he decided to pack it in and move to New York. And that’s where he was when I met up with him. Standing quietly in the middle of a shit storm.

Step Four: There’s always something better out there. It’s in here that’s the problem.

I spent the better part of two weeks with Eli after heading back to Jack’s to get my things. He really didn’t notice that I was leaving since he and Tara had both decided to simultaneously confess to their affairs. Jack’s life went into the shitter and I took a cab to the Bronx to stay with Eli. And it was during those weeks that I found myself for the first time. In a small, lonely apartment in the middle of a mass of humanity. It was there I realized that I, myself, would be the only one accountable for my own happiness. Everything and everyone else just didn’t matter somehow. And through that I discovered that eventually I would have to make sure that they did.

Eli spent most of his time just sitting in the kitchen looking out the window. I found it sad that he had lived a life inside himself and surfaced only to find a hideous reality in which he found little comfort. Of all the people I’ve known in my life Eli deserved the greatest amount of happiness. Simply because he never asked for anything. Simply because nothing was ever asked. There was a time when I used to dream that Eli had settled down and got married. He’d bring his kids over to my place and we’d sit around and talk about sports and politics and life. But I always awoke to the realization that Eli killed people for a living and would never know the simple pleasures of such activities. And you know, somewhere in there I realized that there isn’t anything premeditated about us, even though we do our best to convince ourselves otherwise. There’s just a long fly ball to center field and the sun’s in your eyes. So maybe you come up with the ball, maybe you don’t. The only thing that separates us as human beings is the specifics of the play. Everyone’s got their concerns. Maybe you’re going back for that ball and there are runners in scoring position and your team’s down a run. Maybe the bases are empty and it’s only the second. It doesn’t really matter in the end. It’s whether you catch the ball or not that matters. Because that’s just you, singularly, tested by both the ball and yourself. The sun’s just in your head. So let it go.

For those two weeks I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what to do next. Eli’s situation, though giving me ample excuses to wax poetic on life and its mysteries, was nonetheless making me uncomfortable. So at the end of those two weeks I decided that my great American adventure had come to an end. I rationalized this by telling myself I had uncovered everything that I had set out to find. It was a lie of course, but then again what isn’t these days. I came to the conclusion that I’d head back to San Francisco and give writing a serious go, even though I had a degree in biology and didn’t know the first thing about publishing and the rest of it. So I left Eli standing at the door to his apartment block and got in a cab. He waved a slight wave and quickly walked back inside. I continued on to Newark and then home to Austin for a while before returning to the coast. My mother had been kind enough to spring for my flights, so I couldn’t refuse a quick stopover at home to appease her never-ending complaints that I rarely endeavour, to visit or call. And that was the last I saw of Eli Lemski. We never crossed paths again.

Step Five: Guts enough to swallow hard and just do what you have to.

As I sit here years later I am comforted by the fact that I took the time to explain myself. My wife often asks me whether or not I’m contented with the fact that I write children’s books for a living and I always reply, “it’s better than stocking shelves in a Houston supermarket�. Of course, she has no idea what I mean when I say that, and I’ve never told her the whole truth about Eli and what he did. A few years ago I published my first work of adult fiction entitled Street Oracle. During my research for that book I decided to look up Eli, as one of the characters was loosely based on him. To my dismay I came across his name in the archives of a New Jersey newspaper. His body had been discovered in a dumpster next to a high school. He had been shot in the head. It’s something I try not to visualize but often do. I wonder whether his eyes were open or closed. Because it makes me depressed to think that, even in death, he was robbed of his one true worldly gift. The power of observation. And it seems strange to me that for someone who was so observant he could never see that it was always right in front of him the whole time. Maybe if I hadn’t taken him to the shooting range that day he’d still be alive. Blaming myself always seems easier than looking for another reason, even if it’s just a blind alley. That way a part of him remains in me and I remember everything. Because remembering is important. Maybe of the utmost importance. The thing that burns me the most is that for someone like Eli there are never any easy roads or happy endings. Life just happens like it’s paint by numbers and you only have one colour. So now I write books for kids and my biggest critics are my two daughters. And you know, that ain’t so bad. So this one’s for Eli Lemski. And maybe a little for me as well.

Once there lived a boy who loved to look outside of his window. And on the other side of that window was a world filled with secrets that only he knew of. He stayed inside his house so that he could watch all the other people stumble over and around all of his secrets. And it made him smile because only he could see them.

Rest easy people.

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