Boolean

boolean: A data type containing two values: true or false.

When I had gone to see Margaret at the hospital, seen her lying there wrapped in bandages, one arm bent helplessly over the side of the hospital bed, the other clamped to the traction brace as though it were strangling her, I knew what I had to do.

Margie was my big sister, but her role in my life was vast. When our mother died, I was just a kid. Margie became my mother and raised me, and she is the reason I am on this earth.

She had wires in her jaw, but she could talk. “Marge,” I said, placing my hand over hers. “Tell me.”

The last time she had tripped in the middle of the night, cracked her cheek on a table. Before that, a softball caused the purple blossom over her eye. It happened during their weekly game, simple as that.

Her eyes flooded, and she tried to blink it away. “I’m a spaz. Would you believe I tripped on the litter box? I hate those stairs.” She winced in pain.

“Don’t talk,” I said, “And no, I don’t believe you.”

stack: linear data structures composed of a collection of items of the same type.

When I left my work cubical for the last time, I watered my plants and took the stairs to the garage.

In code, everything begins with numbers and characters to create complex things. Phone apps, websites, viruses that could wipe an entire city’s electrical grid. What it won’t do is uncreate your reality. In code, there are only two values. True and false.

It was the constants now, the things outside the stack, the wind blowing off the lake, whispering past my ears as my body moved toward my car, the soreness at my lower back from the blackjack club I had worn for days tucked up against my spine so that I knew it was there, the street ending somewhere I couldn’t see.

I know what I’m doing. I have a code. I’ve written a code for it in my head. Like any binary code, it will not work in reality unless all the data is correct. I made sure I always completed the entire stack in my head. That was important. I visualized the entire stack and saw it over and over.

I knew I had to control my anger and avoid carelessness. In the event things went sideways, I used the Dark Web to find tools so they couldn’t track me. I would go to Maldives, where they could not extradite me. Maybe they wouldn’t discover what was on my phone for days, but it didn’t matter. The phone would have the answers, a closure.

function: A routine with zero or more arguments that might return a valid outcome.

I wait. The act of waiting is a grievous thing. Stillness is an enemy to waiting. The body at rest holds its own melodies. Blood rushing through the body. A pulsing symphony in the ears, like a river. It can drive you insane, this reluctant hesitation.

I think of all the reasons I’m here, and it makes me burn, as though my skin were on fire, my very pores cauldrons of red coals. I go through the stack again in my mind, from the beginning.

Riley's car roars up and stops. He steps out, shuts the door, cocks his head left and right during his paranoid gait, and slowly climbs the steps to his apartment.

In my mind I hear his work boots climb the weathered stairs — I’ve been up them myself many times, measuring the distance to his door (thirty-two feet) — and as his boot touches the last step, I hear it moan under his weight, know the right beveled panel is missing a nail precisely twenty-six inches from where the door meets the wood.

Second floor, apartment 2B, rotted railings on the left side where the super hadn’t replaced them and never would, not in this neighborhood, a doormat that says Go Away frayed at the edges. He had rented the place when Margie insisted they separate, but still, he stalked her like an animal.

I see him reach for the corroded doorknob and push the fractured door open, split from the bottom where he had probably kicked it when he misplaced his keys.

He shuts the door. I wait two minutes, then reach for the blackjack —

exception: An interruption in normal processing, especially as caused by an error condition.

It didn’t happen like that. I snap forward in the front seat of my car. Someone is tapping on the roof. When I look to my left, his face fills my open window. He’s bent down to it, hands on his knees.

“What you doing out here, cowboy?” he says.

I’m stunned that he got by me. I didn’t see him arrive and it angers me, that it goes against the stack.

“Hey, how’s Margie doing? Meant to come see her today,” he says, pointing to his phone hooked on his belt. “So goddamn busy with these fucking storms blowin’ roofs up.”

I glare up at him. “I wanted to talk.”

“Yeah, goddamn shame, her falling and all.” He shifts his weight to the other hip as he leans into the window, invading my personal space, something he was good at. “Your sister can be such a dizzy bee.”

My temples pulse with acid blood. I study the tattoo on his forearm, two hissing snakes curled into a circle, then look at the back of his enormous hand. I imagine it crossing her face, snapping her head back. I hope she spat blood in his face.

He stares at me strangely.

“Talk, huh?” He holds his eyes on me, and grins. “Come up for a minute, have a beer.” He punches my shoulder like we’re two old friends. “Let’s talk.”

When he turns away from the window, I slip the slapjack into my belt and pat my phone tucked into my breast pocket.

decompose: condense an issue into minute pieces.

He closes the door to the apartment, opens the refrigerator, and hands me a beer. Then he walks back to the door and locks the deadbolt. This disturbs me. It was not part of the stack. I thought I had imagined every scenario.

He plops onto his peeling, fake leather couch and wipes his hand across his face. “Take a load off, man,” he says. He works in construction and wears a dirty T-shirt and cargo pants. He throws me a look and twitches his eyes at my button-down shirt that I’d purposely worn.

“Shit, cowboy. Kind of warm for that shirt, ain’t it? You cubical boys.”

He swigs his beer and gives me the twisted, smart-ass smile I’ve always despised. He’s watching me carefully. “Leo, you’re a funny little guy.”

I don’t sit because I want to look down at him. “I wanted to talk,” I say again.

He smiles at me. “You okay, Leo? Goddamn, you’re a funny little guy. Talk. Let’s talk. Sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down,” I say firmly. My pores swell. I push myself against the wall and force a swallow of air. He had appeared out of nowhere.

“She didn’t fall down the stairs,” I say. It’s like I didn’t say it, that another Leo said it, a Leo that has a method, that has visualized the stack carefully.

Then he stands up. He sucks his chin into his spine and widens his eyes in disbelief. He whistles and shakes his head. “This about her? She trying to blame me?” He steps toward me. “Little bro Leo’s gonna protect her? That it?”

“You broke her jaw.”

He tilts his head to one shoulder like a dog does when it hears its name and steps closer. I didn’t see him reach into his cargo pants for the knife, but he must have. I see the metal flash as he holds it at his side, the shaft of white whalebone handle nesting in his calm fingers.

As I stand there against the wall, watching him wave the blade around, I run through what I had omitted, trying to make it all work out.

The blackjack is in my hands, both hands gripping it, my elbows extended and locked in front of me. His face hovers at the end of it.

“Little Leo’s got him a club,” he says. “Ya know, you oughta relax your arms. Lockin’ 'em’ up like that makes you weak.” He grins. “Are you weak, Leo?”

Sweat pours from my face. I feel warm urine and squeeze to stop it.

He tosses the knife from hand to hand, singing my name each time. “Leo. Leo. Leo. You oughta put that bad club down. You’re scaring me,” he says.

“She didn’t fall down the stairs,” I say again. “She has wires in her jaw!”

This seems to stun him, like I’ve pumped shotgun pellets into his chest. He tilts his head again and fills his lungs with air, then exhales through puckered lips. His fingers are so relaxed the whalebone handle seems to melt from each hand.

“Okay,” he says calmly. “She didn’t fall down the stairs. I pushed her.”

A red flash behind my eyes. Fire as though my head were about to burst. Then I realized he said it. It’s all there. A bellow comes out of me, loud and penetrating, ferocious.

I’m surprised that I connect, and catch him at the side of the neck, lower than where I had aimed. I miss the skull, but the blow stuns him, and causes his torso to twist to the right.

The blade is in and out of my chest before I can take a breath, and when I do, I hear a hissing sound and feel my chest rattle.

It didn’t hurt, just a cold prick. I drop the club, his face suspended in the air. I study it, and it becomes a pale mask. The eyes on the mask don’t blink, the expression doesn’t change. The eyes lose all their color and fade to a vapid gaze. It’s a gaze of incredulity. Suddenly I feel like we’re even. It didn’t work out for him, either.

Then I don’t see it anymore. The mask has disappeared. I see the ceiling, study its pitted exterior and dust webs. I’m on my back but I’m not on my back. I’m floating, listening to my chest wheeze with my labored breath. I’m suffocating, but it doesn’t matter.

Then I feel his hand at the side of my rib cage, his palm over the hole he made. He holds it there. I can breathe and I fear he’ll take his hand away. I hear him at my side.

“I told you to put it down,” he says. “I told you.”

I smile. The constants again. My heart beating.