The worst day of my life started with work, as these things do. It started after rising at noon and doing things tantamount to nothing for three hours--curling up with Twitter in the warm spot of my bed for twenty minutes, brushing my teeth in the on-suite kitchen, smoking four cigarettes out the window, face aglow and exhausted for the world to see. I had the second story studio, you know. I could see the pores on the foreheads of the people walking by, hear their music if their headphones were shitty. I mean. I was honestly right on the street, all my windows flung open with bug zappers in the windowsill, my whole world outstretched and naked. I can’t imagine everything Charley must have seen. He’d been following me for about three months, then.

I think I watched the latter quarter of DS9 season 4. That was a good season. I remembered watching Body Parts over a bowl of Krave--it’s the one where Kira got knocked up in the name of the universal goodness of humanity. All the while, Charley Rose was starting what would no doubt be the worst day of his life, doing what the following investigation surmised as followed:

Charley Rose rose (ha-ha) sometime prior to 10:31 AM on the morning of Sunday, August 26th, 2018. It was his day off. He made breakfast, an omelette he let partially eaten on his kitchen table, then called his supervisor at Alliance Data to alert him to a cold--sneezing, coughing, a knee-buckling ringing in his ears--that would require him taking a sick day the following Monday. It’s possible that this moment of premeditation may have lost him an insanity plea, if this had come to trial, but I do remember him popping an Aleve that he rescued from his cupholder while I was facedown on the back carpet of his Toyota Corrolla. 

Then he jerked off in his basement--some poor forensic anaylsis sampled some spunk, and I suppose could assertain it’s freshness. At some point he watched an episode of Bojack Horseman on his ex’s Netflix, which she swore up and down to press that she did not know he had. 

And at some point he must have left, because security footage from the Shell around the corner from where I live placed his Corolla on my block at about 2:23 PM, where he stopped for gas and a Coke and some shittalk with the girl behind the counter. He must have parked near my house just at the end of “Broken Link”-- “Gowron, head of the Klingon Empire, is a changeling!”. Groundbreaking. I ran out of the house ten minutes late with my least-corroded work shirt half-flung over my head, my keys in my teeth, my TV still connected to Netflix and loading season five.

My aunt called me when I hit the street--he must have heard me answer it.

“Habiba,” I said, “I’m walking to work.”

“You don’t have a night shift tonight, do you?”

I did. But it had become less of a chore and more of a game to get through as few truths as possible 

“Whatever, dude,” she said, “Stan LOONA.”

“Stan LOONA?” I repeated, incredelous. “Stan LOONA?! I’ll FUCKING kill you!”

mariam aym, charley rose, charlie knight, faye poullain, kamar scott, ethel rose

mariam aym was a 22-year-old waitress at the time. cynical, lackadaisical, and a good bit self-loathing, mariam was going nowhere quick with a half-felt ambition to sound tech for radio. she busies herself with reading about philiosphy of the self (which the narrator--her five years later--regards with bemused contempt), revisiting past media obsessions (old horror movies, Star Trek, magical-realist indie comics), and her then-current--and soon-to-be-ironic--obsession with true crime. she gets the occasional tech gig from friends from her old radio department, but isn’t very good, and is pretty certain she should give up entirely at everything.

mariam was born to algerian expats in cincinatti, ohio, though she spent much of her early childhood in a cincinatti hospital with a rare heart defect. her mother and primary caretaker died when she was six--struck by a drunk driver--and she was sent to a therapist for three years after this, a process that gave her a general distaste towards psychology. her father, a generally morose man before her mother’s death, fell into a deep depression after, and became obsessed with therapy as if it was his only lifeline. despite frequent sessions, his depression worsened, and he eventually sent mariam to live with her maternal aunts in wyoming, ohio. she had not spoken to him in nearly three years at the time of the novel.

mariam quickly established herself as a loner. she dripped through all the teenage angst phases one could go through--all-black clothes, cutting, cigarette burns, fucking the worst people imaginable, the occasional eating disorder. her aunts, loving but not particuarly good at raising a teen, attempted structure by forcing her into after-school activities. one such activity was teching for the school’s plays, where she found herself horrible at stage crew and a disaster at lighting, but pretty good at sound teching. 

it was not radio but philosophy that initially found mariam going to school in chicago, at a little art’s college which she’s pretty certain is actually an elaborate pyramid scheme. she spent a semester skipping her philosophy classes and got a modest job sound teching for a college radio show, which she liked enough to switch her major to audio. it didn’t stick, though; she dropped out her sophomore year, ceased contact with her aunts around the same time, got a job at a late-night diner called Mr. Syrup’s, and stayed firmly planted there for the better part of three years.

charley rose and his accomplice started following mariam after ethel rose complained about how shit her service was at mariam’s hand. he went to Mr. Syrup’s twice, but both times he got another server--at one point, though, they did make eye contact and exchane a smile.

on the night of charley’s death, he followed her from work to her friend Kamar’s house, to a bar, until she finally was taking her should-have-been final drunk walk home, despondant and self-pitying after a disasterous attempt to sound tech Kamar’s podcast. charley rolled up and plainly told her to not make a sound or he would shoot her dead--Mariam, almost immediately, requests it. they back-and-forth until charley finally threatens her into silence. he binds her hands with a zip tie and tells her to lay face-down in the back seat. it’s only halfway through the drive that drunken mariam really comprehends what’s happening. 

she begins to struggle almost immediately upon leaving the car, insulting rose and daring him to just kill her now. he slams her head into a concrete wall in his basement, breaking her nose, and implies that she’s the best he’s ever gonna have. it’s only when he’s turned from her for a moment that she remembers a video she saw a video of someone breaking through zip-ties on facebook. she does it quickly and knocks out the lightbulb. in the ensuing chaos of charley both trying to find her and find another light, mariam happens upon one of his guns; the moment he finds and flicks on a desk lamp, mariam shoots him in the head. he dies almost instantly.

a ringing in her ears begins, and does not end, for the rest of her life.

Our catclysmic falling into bed with one another was amplified by one ugly trait, one that I didn’t see plainly until a too-late span of time: Charlie was, in a distinctive way, a sadboy. He’d danced around the label quite cleverly, forgoing flippy depression hair and ahegao shirts for a boring quiff and a plain T-shirt diet. But it was still there, brooding underneath. I’d always roll over in the mid-morning to hear some bassy beat pumping from his office, Tyler the Creator or XXXTENATION or some abomindable Soundcloud act. As September got chillier, the windbreakers he donned were pastel and multicolored, Windows ‘95 computers in some strange, fashionable meltdown. 

And the sighing. And the cigarettes. And oh, God, the little breakdowns of his psyche when he was doing work. We’d often have shitty little breakfasts while he was researching in the mornings--instant oatmeal, bowls of Chex, the occasional almost-cooked overeasy egg--and he’d sometimes break from the book in a calculated wince, closing it on his Star Wars bookmark.

“Too gross?” I’d say, mouthful of oatmeal. 

"Too awful,” he’d say, rubbing whatever Schechter book was about the murderer this week. “Sometimes, you know--sometimes--it gets draining, you know, reading about tragedy after tragedy...”

And he’d look at me with the sadboy eyes, the kind that sit above bags that suggest he hadn’t slept for the better part of a month (though I know, for a fact, that he could sleep for twelve hours without an alarm). And he’d be searching me. Looking for a therapist, or a mother’s knowing coo, or at the very least a shocked girlfriend seeing her strong, strong, strong man invent emotions before her very eyes.

I didn’t care, of course. If I was in my right mind I might have been insulted, said “Oh, I’m sorry, is murder traumatic? I had no idea!” But I’d rub his arm and tell him I’m sorry, it must be hard, reading about all that blood and guts and oh, the humanity of it all, et cetera et cetera to infinity. He’d be dissapointed, and I’d be dissapointed, and he’d usually reopen the book not too long after.