The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel (3 page)

“So, tell me about yourself,” he said.

This was an unqualified catastrophe. The man drawled out the word
So
as if he didn’t even want to start the conversation, as though he was thinking inane thoughts about breakfast and bacon and pancakes. The way he enunciated the word
me
was even worse. He broke sharp at the
M
and spent very little time on the
E
— the hallmark indication of apathy toward a self-referencing pronoun. This was bad. Very bad. The interview was barely eight seconds old and already it was an out-of-control locomotive steaming off the tracks. Roland had to do something to right its course.

The thought popped into his head: What would Regis do?

He placed his elbow firmly on the table and lifted his hand up in a
45
-degree angle. “Let’s arm wrestle,” Roland said. “You and me. We’ll see which one of us is the real man here.”

Silence.

The interviewer’s eyes grew wide. His expression morphed from ambivalence to confusion and then outrage, all in the course of a few seconds. Meanwhile, Roland’s arm hovered precariously in the air. The interviewer took off his glasses and locked eyes with Roland.

“Boy — what in hell do you think you’re doing?”

Roland’s arm deflated to the table.

“But . . . but I saw you flexing your bicep. Mason reached out and touched it.”

The interviewer leaned forward. He seemed to be growing angrier with each passing second. “That young man and I work out at the same gym,” he said.

Despite pleading with the man and practically begging for a second chance, Roland was ushered out the door and into the street. He mumbled to himself and replayed the embarrassing incident in his head. Could anything have been more humiliating? More demoralizing? Mason was going to get the big promotion and travel around the world while Roland was destined to live out his days in his dreary gray cubicle. And he wouldn’t just have to share it with Mason, who for all his ill wit and bad haircut was a diabolical trickster, but most likely with someone even more crafty and cunning. Roland groaned out loud and headed back to the office.

At the time, he could have never known that the very next day, his fortunes would change.

four

Bonnie, the woman Henrik bumped into at the lottery booth, left the marketplace and entered the apartment building three doors down from the market: a home she shared with her husband Clyde. Ten years ago when they met, Bonnie and Clyde were immediately taken with one another when they realized their names matched those of the famous movie couple. They based their entire relationship on this interesting, if somewhat irrelevant, coincidence. To Bonnie, it wasn’t just coincidence but rather a twist of fate. She fell in love with Clyde because the moon and the stars above told her to fall in love with him. Over the past decade, she’d gradually become disillusioned with Clyde’s rampant gambling and his womanizing ways. Moreover, he had an outright disrespect for her job. Bonnie’s job was of the utmost importance to her. Her parents and friends supported her. She couldn’t understand why her husband didn’t support her.

From their wedding day, Bonnie’s love for Clyde deteriorated. Very quickly, she started to dislike him. This dislike developed rapidly into severe loathing. Twelve months ago, Bonnie phoned her parents up in tears. She wanted a divorce and she wanted them to pay for it. She couldn’t live with this man anymore. Not for another day. Bonnie was shocked when her father not only refused to pony up the cash, he insisted no daughter of his would be getting a divorce. “Not within my lifetime,” her father said. “We might forgive your lifestyle and accept some of the choices you’ve made, but you made a commitment to that young man and we expect you to live up to your obligations.” Bonnie pleaded with him, cried for hours, and when that didn’t work she appealed to his logical nature. Bonnie’s father wouldn’t budge. The right and left sides of his brain were in equal parts resolved. Bonnie couldn’t litigate her way out of this in a courtroom filled with attorneys and statutes and men in suits.

So, for close to a year, Bonnie had been trying to kill her husband. She would place arsenic in his soup and even left a tuberculosis-infected needle she snagged from the hospital under his pillow. Despite her best efforts, Bonnie’s attempts always fell short of their mark. True, Clyde had gotten sick a few times. And there was a promising three-week stay in the hospital a few months ago. That showed some real potential. But as time went by, she started to believe that Clyde was entirely indestructible. She couldn’t kill him no matter how hard she tried and his resilience brought her to a state of misery and despair. Lately, she’d suspected Clyde knew she was attempting to kill him and had been using his wiles to avoid being murdered.

Clyde, for his part, was completely oblivious to the fact that Bonnie was trying to kill him. He’d been far too busy trying to kill her to notice. Clyde wanted his wife dead for an entirely different set of reasons. Over time, the years had faded on Bonnie. Her beauty, incalculable in her youth, had curdled like warm milk left in the afternoon sun. Though she had once been glamorous and alluring, her constant cigarette smoking ravaged her body, left her with a persistent incurable cough and cast a lifeless sheen over her now leathery skin. Bonnie had changed in spirit as well. Clyde would think back to when he met her; the words he used to describe her on their wedding day were beautiful, sweet and joyful. With each passing year, Clyde replaced each of those with a new adjective — unpleasant, callous and mean. Whereas once she smelled like cotton candy outside on a spring day, her liver had started to turn and the harsh, yellow-scented perfume she used to cover up the overpowering aroma of old smoke forced a gagging sensation to swell up to the base of his throat every time Clyde sat next to her.

For a brief while, Clyde had also thought about dissolving the marriage. He even approached a few attorneys last year to discuss fees. But the cost of a long, drawn-out divorce would be catastrophic, considering his low salary, and in the end he could never let it happen. No matter what she’d become, Bonnie was his wife and no one else’s. Clyde could never let another man have her fully and completely. But he couldn’t live with her either. Late at night after his wife had erupted into a vodka-induced snore, Clyde would roll off the bed and sit on the floor, crying and wishing for a peaceful end. He had to kill her. If he didn’t, he would kill himself.

So far Clyde had made three unsuccessful attempts at ending Bonnie’s life.

Attempt One:
At her cousin’s bungalow, Clyde dropped a heavy cinderblock on Bonnie’s head from the rooftop fifteen feet above. He’d spent weeks planning the specifics of the attack. Nothing was left to chance. The width and length of the block, the distance to the ground, the relative trajectory of the object. Wind resistance. Clyde had thought of it all. The attack would be as systematic as he was methodical in planning it. The only problem was that Clyde never expected the block to be so damn hard to move. It must have weighed
130
pounds and for the life of him Clyde couldn’t imagine how Bonnie’s cousin got it up on the roof in the first place. As Bonnie approached, he tested the wind with his finger and then tried to push the block off with his boot. It wouldn’t budge. He started kicking it now. Bits of cinder dust scattered in the wind. Finally he knelt down on one knee just as he’d done for his bride years before and shoved the stone slab over the edge. Alas, the cinder block barely grazed her temple and Bonnie spent only three days in the hospital and required no more than a dozen trips to rehab.

Attempt Two:
Following a rehab session, as Clyde assisted Bonnie in through the back door of their building, he pointed out a large ceramic unicorn sitting in the far corner of an open garbage Dumpster. Bonnie, who had an infatuation with tawdry velvet murals and ornate keepsakes, immediately got excited and vowed to return later that evening to fish it out of the debris. When she came back a few hours later, Bonnie climbed into the garbage bin only to discover someone had rigged a string around the unicorn’s leg. The moment she pulled on the unicorn, the garbage bin lid slammed shut and trapped poor Bonnie inside. Clyde, the mastermind who planted the mythical creature in the bin, had intended to starve or suffocate Bonnie to death. Only his plan proved ill-conceived — there was not only a wide crack in which his wife could suck in air, but the Dumpster was used by a local restaurant, giving Bonnie piles of edible garbage on which she could feast for weeks on end. Much to Clyde’s chagrin, less than an hour elapsed before a maintenance worker heard her screams and released her. The ceramic unicorn now stood as an umbrella holder in their front hall.

Attempt Three:
Bonnie was severely allergic to peanuts. At dinner with Bonnie’s parents one night, under the pretense of being silly, Clyde tossed a peanut into Bonnie’s open mouth. His aim was true and good fortune was on his side as the felonious nut ricocheted off her tongue and bounced straight to the back of her throat, where it lodged squarely in her esophagus. She gasped and gagged as Clyde pretended to try to save her. It was all going incredibly well until an insolent young man ran out from the kitchen and pulled the peanut from Bonnie’s throat using a pair of salad tongs.

Bonnie, for her part, had yet to notice Clyde was trying to murder her; she’d been too busy trying to kill him to notice. And this is how the two of them had lived for several months, with homicidal intent in their souls but without the cleverness or proficiency to pull off their respective crimes. During this time, neither of them gave any indication that something was wrong. They still kissed one another in the morning and chatted about their days when they returned home from work.

Twenty-four hours after the incident in the marketplace, Bonnie sat down to read her morning newspaper. She checked the lottery numbers and sighed a little when she saw that hers hadn’t been picked. Bonnie’s numbers were
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
and
6
. She chose them based on the assumption that since six numbers are picked randomly, the sequence of
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
was equally as possible as the numbers that won this time —
4, 15, 22, 33, 35, 48
. Bonnie never realized that there were at least a thousand other jackasses across the country who routinely picked
1
,
2, 3, 4, 5, 6
and made the same silly assertion. Were she ever to win, the four million dollar jackpot would be split a thousand ways, still winning her a sizable sum of money, but a patently demoralizing amount once she came down from the euphoria of thinking she’d hit the true jackpot.

Bonnie reached inside her purse and pulled out the lottery ticket she’d bought at the market to check it just in case. To her surprise, the numbers on her ticket weren’t in sequence. The cashier had handed her the young man’s ticket by mistake. A smile spread over Bonnie’s face when the first number matched. Then the second number matched as well. Bonnie stared at the ticket in staggering astonishment. Her eyes shuffled back to the newspaper and then the ticket again. All six numbers were the same. This ticket — the one with the numbers the young man had picked — was the winner. Bonnie had just won four million dollars!

From the next room, a set of footsteps sounded. Quickly, Bonnie hid the ticket back in her purse. Her husband Clyde wandered into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Good morning,” she said.

Clyde looked at her out of the corner of his eye but didn’t respond.

“Big day planned?” she said.

Clyde gave her that same look. “I told you the other day, I think I’m giving up caffeine,” he said and poured his coffee into the sink without even taking a sip. It was a good thing. The cup was laced with arsenic.

Clyde noticed the expression on his wife’s face.

“What’s up?”

Bonnie could barely contain her excitement.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

Clyde threw his jacket over his shoulder and kissed his wife goodbye. Bonnie kissed him back. She even opened her mouth a little more than usual.

“I’ll see you tonight.”

“I’ll miss you,” she said.

Clyde left the apartment and Bonnie pulled out the ticket again. She checked the numbers one more time. The euphoria burned in her chest. With one final glance, she tucked the ticket back in her purse and thought about Clyde. There was no way she was going to share the money with him. Maybe if he respected her job a little more, if he’d shown the occasional burst of encouragement or congratulated her on her promotion, she might be inclined to give him half. But no. He was an irrefutable fiend and he had to die.

Bonnie would have to double her efforts.

five

Henrik Nordmark had spent the past twenty-four hours experiencing a rollercoaster ride of emotions. He set out to redefine himself — or rather to define himself in the first place. For hours on end, he tried everything he could think of and when he felt himself about to give up, he remembered Ronnie James Dio’s prophetic words at a
1981
Black Sabbath concert (which Henrik had accidentally stumbled upon while in search of a flea market) — “If you want to be successful, you have to be unique.” If Ronnie James Dio said it, it had to be true.

Henrik started by stripping off all his clothes and standing in front of a full-length mirror. He held his gratuitous pot belly in his hands and gave it a good shake. Perhaps, he decided, physical fitness could be his unique characteristic. Henrik had once seen a bodybuilding competition at a local fairground in which the gargantuan men on stage all had rippling, pulsating muscles. The men would flex their giant biceps and the crowd erupted in applause. They squeezed their
toight
buttocks and heard a chorus of lamentations from the women. Some of their muscles, like those triangle-shaped ones on their backs, Henrik wasn’t even sure he had. Nevertheless, he was undaunted. The regular man could become physically fit. And it didn’t even have to take that long. The Jamaican woman who worked the security night shift had recently lost thirty pounds on a program called Body For Life, which promised to give you the body you’ve always dreamed of in three months or less. Henrik even overheard her telling one of her friends how great she felt. He decided that he would feel great as well. Henrik fell to the floor, stark naked, and set about doing sit-ups. He accomplished three partial crunches before his back began to ache and he felt a dull pain in his abdomen. Henrik didn’t understand. He was supposed to feel great. He most certainly did not.

After a strenuous attempt at a fourth sit-up, Henrik gave up on exercise. He decided there must be other ways to manipulate his appearance and make himself more noticeable. Henrik hastily put on his clothes and headed over to a nearby secondhand clothing store, where he purchased the most garish items he could find on the rack. Back home, he pulled on a pair of super-tight velvet bellbottom pants. Henrik laced them up underneath his belly and then wrapped a skull-printed headband around his forehead and pulled a fluorescent yellow, half cropped Menudo-era T-shirt over his chest. Henrik stood in front of the mirror. He looked like an insane person.

Perhaps some music will help, Henrik thought. He walked over to his cassette deck and pressed play. The only cassette he owned was the
Flashdance
soundtrack. A woman at a yard sale had thrown in the cassette as a sympathetic bonus when Henrik purchased her old, non-functioning Ikea lamp. Henrik pressed play and the first few synthesizer sounds of “What a Feeling” emitted from the stereo’s fuzzy speakers. Henrik did interpretive dance moves to the slow portion before shaking his arms wildly and breaking out into full maniacal movement.

Henrik stopped himself before the song finished. He looked like an idiot. The point was to be unique and distinct, not downright ridiculous. He stripped off his clothes and tossed them in the trash and then flopped in front of the television.

His old black and white television received only three channels: the weather network, a religious station and
NBC
. On
NBC
tonight there was a
Dateline
special —
To Catch a Predator
. For an hour, Henrik watched as countless men were busted for soliciting sex from minors over the internet. He found this show to be infinitely fascinating. Each felon followed the same script. They would spend days, sometimes weeks, flirting with a teenage girl in an internet chat room before finally arranging a live, in-person meeting in which they were supposed to have sex. Only what they didn’t know was that the teenage girl they were flirting with was actually a middle-aged police officer named Frank who had a moustache, a gut three times the size of Henrik’s and, from the look of him, most likely some sort of foul stench emanating from his armpits. The predators would show up at a designated house expecting underage sex but instead they were accosted by Chris Hansen, a courageous reporter with a full head of excellent hair and rampant moral superiority. For some strange reason, when confronted by the handsome Chris Hansen, each and every one of the predators admitted exactly why they had come to the house, then once they found out they were going to be on national television, they cried, begged for forgiveness and left the house, appearing somewhat surprised when there were police officers standing outside to arrest them. To be fair, some of the predators didn’t cry. But they all looked like they were about to cry and in Henrik’s mind, that was as good as crying.

Henrik thought the idea of sex with a minor was completely repugnant. But he considered this all to be a matter of age and attraction, and wasn’t quite sure what role moral accountability played in all of this. While he found sex with a minor to be an abominable act, he found sex with a senior citizen to be equally as abhorrent. However, if he were to be pressed into a decision — if, for example, some evil supervillain was holding the world hostage and valorous Henrik, as the last remaining member of a dying breed of superheroes, was forced to fornicate in order to save the planet from certain destruction with the one catch being that he had to choose either a minor or a senior to fornicate with, Henrik knew that deep in his heart of hearts, he would never —
never
— choose the senior. That Henrik could find such monstrosity within himself to be a child molester, albeit only in the due course of courageous service to mankind and only as a very last resort . . . the thought of it sent a flush of endorphins rushing to his brain where the opiate receptors responded in a pang of delight. He — Henrik Nordmark — might actually be depraved! Depravity had to be better than dullness. It just had to be.

Henrik clapped his hands in victory and suddenly fell sullen again. The clapping sound reminded him of a
1978
episode of
Super Friends
in which the Wonder Twins’ sidekick Gleek was put in a trance and forced to commit all sorts of outrageous atrocities until he heard Robin the Boy Wonder clapping his hands and came to his senses, establishing that anyone can perform abominable acts under the right circumstances, given duress and good intentions in his heart. Henrik realized he wasn’t super at all. He wasn’t extraordinary. He would never be a superhero, or even a supervillain for that matter. At best he could aspire to the heights of comedic relief sidekick, and not even that — comedic relief monkey sidekick with limited speech capabilities.

Henrik turned off the television. He left his home and wandered the streets as the hour approached midnight. Two women passed him on their way to a local dance club, one of whom bore a striking resemblance to a young lady Henrik had stood beside in a grocery store lineup last week. Pink sunglasses, flowing blond hair, diamonds beaming from her fingers, neck and navel — that other woman had been holding a basket filled with cosmetic supplies and a four-pack of single-roll toilet paper. Henrik had waddled up next to her carrying a Costco-sized pack of forty-eight industrial-strength double-ply extra-fortified toilet rolls. The pretty young girl in line glanced at Henrik out of the corner of her eye. The glance lasted for the briefest of moments, a miniscule blip on the timeline of human history, but long enough to convey to Henrik the omnipresent, relentless truth — that this woman thought he was a monster who does nothing but sit on a porcelain bowl, magazine in hand, and poop all day and night long.

This woman and her friend were dressed to the nines with wild hair, sultry makeup and plentiful exposed cleavage. Henrik imagined what it would be like to kiss one or maybe even both of these women — how their wet tongues would taste like cherries and pink marshmallows. He leered brazenly at their breasts and felt himself ridiculous for doing so. Henrik pictured a painful, demoralizing scene in a discotheque in which he would approach these fine young women and ask them to dance . . . only to be ridiculed, or worse — ignored.
Yes
, Henrik decided,
that is exactly what these women would do. They would ignore me. So I will ignore them.
Henrik turned his eyes away from their supple bosoms. For a second or two as they passed, Henrik felt morally superior. Their exposed cleavage would not control him. He was no Pavlovian dog.

In the end, Henrik’s moral outrage was all for naught. The women didn’t even notice him staring the other way. They were too busy texting on their cell phones to even look up.

He passed an all-night internet café when suddenly inspiration struck. Henrik was only boring to the rest of the world because they could see him. They could sense from his outward physical appearance, from the way he carried himself and from the smell of discount laundry detergent in his clothes that he wasn’t worthy of their interest. But in the virtual world there were no such concerns. Virtual communication was purely intellectual. Perhaps in this abstract realm, Henrik could shine in the way he’d always dreamt of shining. Henrik entered the café, paid for an hour’s worth of internet time and then sat down at the nearest computer. He stared at the open Internet Explorer window in front of him. The default Google page had a text box with a slow, repetitively flashing cursor. At first, Henrik didn’t know what to type. So he entered the words “chat room” and
54,900,000
sites returned. Undaunted, Henrik began scrolling through them. After nearly entering a chat room dedicated to the drastic alterations North Korea had made to Anne Frank’s diary, he stumbled across a room where people met online to discuss the singer and poet Jewel. Henrik had actually heard one of her songs on the radio. It was pretty good. She wasn’t quite the wordsmith Ronnie James Dio had been in his prime — but then again, who was?

Henrik entered the chat room, signed in with his real name and typed the words “I am obsessed with Jewel.” There were only two other members currently chatting. Neither of them acknowledged Henrik. He tried again.

Henrik Nordmark — I am obsessed with Jewel

Sassycat8 — Did you see her on David Letterman last week?

Atc_Xtreme — yes, I did. She looked beautiful, snaggle tooth and all

Sassycat8 — have you ever seen her live in concert?

Henrik Nordmark — I saw Black Sabbath play a concert in 1981

Atc_Xtreme — really? Ozzy Osbourne rocks !!!!!

Henrik Nordmark — who’s Ozzy Osbourne?

Atc_Xtreme — he’s the singer for Black Sabbath

Henrik Nordmark — No, Ronnie James Dio is the singer for Black Sabbath

Atc_Xtreme — no, he’s not

Henrik Nordmark — yes, he is

Sassycat8 — doesn’t anyone want to talk about Jewel?

[Saintdameon has entered the room]

Saintdameon — my balls really itch when I fuck fat chicks

Atc_Xtreme — that’s just gross

[Atc_Xtreme has left the room]

Sassycat8 — I’m leaving. This chat room sucks . . .

[Sassycat8 has left the room]

Henrik Nordmark —

Henrik Nordmark —

Saintdameon — so Henrik, what do you have to say for yourself?

Henrik Nordmark —

Henrik Nordmark —

Henrik Nordmark —

Saintdameon — nothing?

Henrik Nordmark — I am obsessed with Jewel