On The Outside Looking In

I don’t complain, I don’t ask, I just do.

I was in front of Perkins as he led me from behind, and the first thing I noticed was someone asleep in a bed. It was a another woman, this time with long black hair and smooth skin, barely visible from the slight moonlight. A soft resonant whisper of breath poured from her parted lips as she slept. I was that close to her mouth. Perkins turned me to face him, but did not look at me, only fixating his wide-eyed open stares at this woman. He began to tremble slightly and I felt that. His breathing became faster, again licking his lips and swallowing.

We did what we came to do while she slept. In the end, it was just another wrapped body that he laid in the trunk of the long car. I heard him mumbling to himself. " . . . regrets, " he said. Over and over, variations of his word, " . . . regrets . . . very regrettable, Jill . . . what would I regret? Ha!" I suppose he was talking to the woman. I can tell when he’s speaking to me.

One evening we were both sitting on his bed, and the television was on, apparently some news network. The voice from the television was some man talking about . . . the scourge of the city. Fear has "enveloped" this community, and people need to be cautious of their surroundings, following all curfew hours mandated by local authorities.

To Perkins, this seemed amusing. Mostly he chuckled and smirked while he watched. Sometimes he made noises by sucking his teeth, or yelled out some profanity. When he spoke to me, it was about what everything meant to him. He told me how this was a cleansing of some kind. That he was responsible for cleaning those who were impure and soiled. That this was a mission of mercy and he had been chosen to carry out these tasks and duties. That this was truly an honor for him, and how dare the people, along with this "television man" who represented the voice of the people, portray his work, his calling, as something that perverts the city that he loves so dearly, the same city that he grew up in and ran through the streets in as a young child.

I just listened.

We continued the work for a long time. Many nights we would sit and listen to the words from the television, highlighting the details of our work. Would it ever stop, or, police have no leads, or, loved ones mourn tonight. I noticed this pattern over time, and since Perkins never gave me a reason to believe that what we were doing was wrong, I knew that everything must be going according to the divine plan.

Yet . . . I still see the hurt on his face. He doesn’t hide it well. I stood by him one time as we looked in a mirror. It was the kind that folds out into three separate sections. We stood close to it as he opened the doors on both ends. Inside, from our point of view, was an almost eternity of faces, splitting each other in halves, in quarters, slicing and overlapping, and growing smaller and smaller as the doors closed in. And every face, every sliver of Perkins profile that I saw, still had that same despondent expression from when we first met.

I don’t deny anything that I’ve admitted. As I said earlier, you might as well label me an accomplice. I was there, I knew, I saw, I performed, and I have no guilt about.