Vincent Calhoun woke up every morning at five forty-five, put on his Charvet tie, earned good money by key presses and routine words, and then returned home with the dusk in his beard. He did this for twenty-five years up until the day he almost became a man. You wouldn’t notice him on a train, or, if you did notice him, you would feel oddly calm and then forget about him altogether because he was far too ordinary to be worth remembering. He lived on Milford Avenue two streets down from Wallgrove Street.

The far end of Wallgrove Street died into bush. The unsold blocks of land here were covered with coarse grass and weeds, and the eucalyptus ran ragged and slouched over the road. Here, the cicadas were louder, the wind danced with greater madness, and once the road ended in mud and clay there was no telling what wild things frolicked and bred there. They were no doubt unaware that one day fresh urban sprawl would drown their chatter-tree whispers in safe neon silence under asphalt grids of mortgaged paradise.

It was here that Vincent Calhoun’s daughter was stabbed and violated fifty-four and a half times to death. She was wearing her school uniform and it happened at roughly ten o’clock in the evening on a cool summer Tuesday. She had been eating ice cream. The cicadas played and the street lights glowed on the Monday night, and did exactly the same on the Tuesday night while her attacker tied her up against a tree, while she begged, while she screamed, while she bled, while a pen was employed, of all things, and the cicadas and street lights did exactly the same again on the Wednesday night once the police had cleared away her corpse and once the small circles of blood had begun to fade against the sap on the gum trees.

It was here that my daughter would go with Alethea Momos and her boyfriend and his friends. The Momos lived opposite the tangled bush at the end of Wallgrove Street, in a new house that had been built a mere couple of months before Vincent Calhoun’s daughter was attacked. My daughter would wait at home, twirling her black hair and talking on her phone, until Alethea arrived in her car. Alethea’s boyfriend would hunch in the driver’s seat in his dark red hoodie while Alethea trotted up to the door. Her red hair would flick up and swing about her lithe neck but she never made eye contact with me or my wife. Then Alethea and my daughter would disappear to spend time with their friends and their cars at the end of Wallgrove Street, with the cool breezes and dark night and long swathes of trees.

We told our daughter to stop going there, and she promised us that she would listen, but we knew that she still went.

Twenty-one and a half days after his daughter was murdered, Vincent Calhoun woke up at five-forty-five, put on his Charvet tie, read a little Hesiod, hunted down her murderer, put a carefully sharpened fragment of a keyboard into this man’s skull, and returned home with blood in his beard, almost a man. The family moved out of Milford Avenue once he was sentenced to fifty-four and a half years in an asylum.

The story of Vincent Calhoun taught me this simple lesson: every man, to be a man, needs to know how to kill another man. And know how to get away with it.

What is a real man? It kept me up at night. The cold breeze echoed through the twigs and rustling nothingness between the dry bush at the end of Wallgrove street, and in my broken sleep I imagined I could hear its uncaring melody. The bush told me, in my half-sleep and sweating dreams, that sometimes there was nothing I could do to protect my family. But no, not true, not true. No matter my loyalty; no matter how close I kept them by my side? The dark corners of Wallgrove street told me, with their eucalyptus breath and ancient, haughty, black-pupiled glares, that the prism of alarm clocks and crisp bills and tooting kettles and tiled pagodas and private schools and upper-middle-class elegance was no wall against anarchic intrusions. Despite their doom being spelled out by ever-encroaching suburbia, the wild things of the dark knew that their unforeseeable viral mania could slip through the cracks and rend my precious things apart at any given moment.

Vincent Calhoun could not contain the infection of this ancient, haughty, black-pupiled fury within him as he pictured the ruin of his one and only daughter. A man must not. So, how would I get away with it, come home to my wife, mourn and care for my remaining family, and be more than almost a man?

When I finally found the answer, it brought me to a surprisingly clean room.

Mr Nyx had a gaunt face that made his opaque blue eyes glow like orbs. The billows of smoke from his cigar wrapped around the grey stubble on his leathery cheeks. We were the only people in the room, and it was night.

Show me the photo of your daughter.

My daughter said goodbye one evening and rushed out the door. On the porch, under the hazy lamplight, her boyfriend grinned at me and promised he would drive her back home by ten o’clock. Alethea’s boyfriend simply hunched in his hoodie, reeking of cigarettes and shuffling on his too-big feet. Alethea, as usual, refused to look me in the eye, and, as she threw a faint curl of lip my way and turned around to walk quickly to her car, arm in arm with my daughter, I thought I saw a bruise under the red hair falling around her lithe neck. That night, my daughter left her phone at home.

Mr Nyx sighed and handed the photo back to me.

I had a daughter with green eyes also.

I put the photo away, pushed my glasses up on my nose, thought of my daughter, now at home, or perhaps not, and said nothing. He leaned forward and handed me a bright orange card. On one side was a number. On the other, the words How to Be a Man.

This is what we do. It is all we do. It is my profession, and I have no competition. On this little orange card is a phone number. No one can tap it, no one can trace it. If the worst should happen to your daughter, and only the worst, you need only call this number and say the time, location, and date of the incident. No more. Yes? But remember, you must only call if the incident is the worst, an end that is satisfied by only the most brutal justice. Most brutal indeed.

I want to do it myself. God forbid… but I want to do it.

Of course. There is no substitution for this propitiation. I know.

But I cannot be caught. I must not. I have a family to take care of. Can you guarantee this?

Mr Nyx no doubt heard the tremor in my voice. He leaned forward, his face emerging from a Stygian fog, his eyes flashing, and he did not smile.

My friend, why are we here? You know our reputation. That is exactly what we promise. We will create a scenario. A place. A time. A somewhere. A some-time. You will be alone with the perpetrator. After it is done, there will be a self-defence, an alibi, a loophole, a way out—a resurrection of sorts. The law, the police, the gods themselves will be on your side, so nothing will touch you, Pandora’s box shall ne’er be opened. This is what you pay for, yes. Every man, to be a man, needs to know how to kill another man and—the hard part—to get away with it.

I held the card tight in my hand. The exchange was made. Consumption promising impossible justice; fear impregnated with wrath. Mr Nyx’s gaunt faced turned very miserable, very old, turned suddenly ancient and propitious as he turned away from me and spoke into the shadows.

My friend, how can we tell, we who buy and sell, to solve, to solve the very riddles of life? Perhaps this is no longer the time for us, perhaps it is the time for the great wind, the great ancient, insectile, black-pupiled eucalyptus wave. It is sweeping us aside, no? No matter how much we cling, buy, sell, yearn, demand, or pray, or how much we chant or change, the great wild virulent tawny dark comes with a great untamed limb to sweep us all aside, and along with us our ways, our ideals, our very memory of what we are owed and what is right, until there is no trace left of us and the green things hold sway as if we have never been. And there is no return. No matter how violent our desire to go on. A great breath of release is coming, and perhaps hope for all that is Gaian stands in there being no hope for us.

Or, he did not say these things. But they blew a fluted note in me, a tremble, a whisper, as I left him in a state of muted consciousness. Beneath it, denial, resistance, a kernel of desperate promise. The very vengeance of God wrought by his most ferocious image, designed to make men into real men, most savage and pure, for we are nothing if we cannot both care for and avenge our families. Because sometimes we cannot protect them from the serpentine wild, so we must become one with it, and it was right, we must be right, and go on. I became assured.

I left Mr Nyx satisfied and full of trust, but Vincent Calhoun followed me out of that room. He was in the orange card. Months went by, and my worry changed to fear. And the trees, far-away on the corner of Wallgrove street, hidden under sooty skies, always whispering, infectious, started to influence me somehow, and I wondered, only once, a brief thought, if this path would make me a man or a monster, and if there was a difference.

The orange card. At first I was too scared to hold it. But then I began to toy with it, twisting it between my fingers. How to Be a Man. Over and over again, I toyed with it…

I toyed with the card and my thoughts wandered. I began to think more and more about Vincent Calhoun, and about the unnamed murderer, and about how it felt for him to stab that girl over and over again more than fifty times and how he buried a keyboard in the murderer’s head and why (why that?) and how he violated the girl and how both men shared an insectile bond in their acts of violence…

I toyed with it as I dreamt half-awake of the lightless void between the scratchy arms of the trees…

I toyed with it as I contemplated my daughter, living carefree amidst all I had fought for just to give her a safe home, which was now no more than an illusion, a bubble with an Achilles heel around every unseen turn…

I toyed with it as I considered Alethea and her brooding boyfriend and her downcast eyes and her occasional bruises and her lithe neck and her burnished red hair and her light but troubled step…

I toyed with it as I dreamt half-asleep of Vincent Calhoun and his rising tide, his heart’s ashen waves, a hungry man-god anamnesis, stirred unknowingly in him by the mysterious wooden spires which had one day invaded his mind with their murmurs of the brutal robbery of his daughter’s life that they had blithely witnessed under their leaves. The tree-claws had planted in him an inky river of anguish, boiling, rolling, coiling and boiling as he dreamed of his daughter’s last moments, which eventually spilled over and foamed into a mighty black ocean, a black storm, a blind tsunami of untameable rage that flooded from his hands to his eyes to a keyboard to a skull. I imagined him, half-awake and bleary as I now always was, lost and confused in prison, that holy almost-man brute…

I toyed with it as I imagined the day I might have to face a crack in the protection I had forged so neatly around my beloved family, face the sheer ignominy and awfulness of my daughter’s mutilated misery, and watch my hands, so hungry for revenge, dialling the number on the card and speaking such horrifically-apt grief-stricken words of disgusting satisfaction… was it inevitable? It seemed inevitable to me, this lucid obsession…

I toyed with it as I looked for my daughter at the end of Wallgrove street after she did not come home one night and left her mobile phone behind in her room…

I toyed with it as I envisioned finding Alethea fighting with her boyfriend amid the itchy grass and pools of lonely streetlight at the end of Wallgrove street where the creeping watcher-places nibbled at the quiet…

I toyed with it, blinking, as one night I looked down with dizzy surprise at Alethea Momos’ limp form in front of me. She seemed misshapen, a crumpled grasshopper, all red twists and awkward limbs where the trees began their untamed domain and the night things laid claim to the magnetic air…

I toyed with it as I envisioned hitting Alethea with my car while trying to drive after her fleeing boyfriend…

I toyed with it as I envisioned bringing her into her house through a battered door. When she saw me, through purple cheeks and weak eyes, she was surprised at first, and then a curious, hard look of resentment shut down her gaze…

I toyed with it as I began shaking her consoling her demanding of her telling her soothing her watching her asking her where is my daughter where is my daughter. I saw that the front of her dress was saturated with blood. Alethea Momos smiled, a taut flex of her lips, and then shut her eyes. Her lithe neck was impossibly twisted and the tips of her bloody hair touched the floor…

I toy with it as Mr Momos arrives—what did you do what did you do Phillip Laseter what have you done to my daughter—and I envision that he too has an orange card in hand… We look at each other’s cards and even as I make confused excuses about looking for my daughter and Alethea’s boyfriend and the car and no sleep and not remembering and Vincent Calhoun, we both realise with horror that we are caught in the same web of deceit, a mirage about our fortress lawn-and-brick life and a lie about the manly satisfaction of revenge… And we both shed strange tears, tears of little boys… And I don’t care if he calls the number on his card against me because I can only think of my daughter my daughter my darling daughter oh my darling daughter my little girl what a world I brought you into and where are you now and what is a man…

And so, magnificent, here it comes. Here comes into my aching mind a vision to finish it all. Here comes Vincent Calhoun, finally proving a man, bursting out of prison with asphalt grids and bright street lamps to mow down the wild cicada riots and cleanse the world of all the threats from the dark Pandoran chaos that lurks behind our suburban nests, but inevitably failing, falling, retreating back to our mutual mind-prison, a mere false idol to the success of brick-tile dominion, all in vain, his bloodstained and hand-cuffed hands puppets to the laughing bark-scented nights and their fickle contortions of our destiny. And instead, growing from the mushrooms ripening over the suddenly decayed corpses of all our daughters, growing and seeding and solemnly sure, here comes the wild corner rising, triumphant in the spaces of air without and the spaces of civilised hearts within, triumphant over all, a vast eternal tree-madness with roots deep in our shadowy natures and with gargantuan hideous branches blotting out the entire metropolitan universe with a mirror to the vengeance hidden in all men’s souls, until we slink and shuffle about in our daily monkey-keyboard routines with our well-suited pretence of command, our lie of security, each one of us crushed by the grudging, secret knowledge that we are at the mercy of an ancient whim, an infecting weakness, each of one us fated to have our security turned into insanity should the wild bend its black-pupiled eucalyptus eye upon us, each one of us almost a man…

Maheesha often still clings to a ubiquitous faith in tomorrow, despite himself. Please comment below, message him here, or throw him a few bucks for this effort.

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