Death by Cursor

The gold numbers 416 hung on a modest wooden door with a single lock. It was swung half-open, the entrance secured only by a strip of yellow police tape. Despite what my parents and high school friends had told me, you actually didn’t need more than a solitary lock in Lowell on most nights. It wasn’t the cesspool us snotty Chelmsford residents had always imagined. Naysayers might simply reply, “It’s just that part of Lowell that’s nice, and it’s because it’s the part on the Chelmsford border that it’s actually livable.” And they might be right, but I have never been a big believer in ‘the wrong side of the tracks,’ or any other cliché for that matter.

And that’s strange, I guess, I thought to myself as Randall and I ducked under the tape that roped off the doorway, as Randall groaned about his bad knees and his bad back, when really it was the size of his Budweiser belly that was to blame for his pain. That was a cliché, wasn’t it? Good cop, fat cop, y’know?

That is what it must seem like from the outside, the surface. Probably why most guys head to the academy. It’s all so simple: You’re the good guy and the other guy, the one with the gun, or the car doing 80 in a 55, he’s the bad guy. But most police work is a bit more complex than the crap they air on Fox. COPS and World’s Greatest Police Chases IV—that shit pisses me off.

This particular situation was different, this particular studio apartment with its minimalist furnishings: a flimsy Wal-Mart bookcase and dining set; a hand-me-down cobalt blue pullout couch; and a grungy fish tank with yellow-green water and no fish. There were only two things anywhere near valuable here: a five-year-old Hewlett Packard PC, and what two years ago might have been considered a top of the line entertainment center. This apartment was different. Complicated.

It had been a year since I’d set foot in Apartment 416, and as bad as I’d left things, I’d never expected to return like this.

Randall was huffing and puffing his way through a routine check of the kitchenette area. The four flights of stairs had had their way with my rotund friend. As he did his thing, dusting for prints and such, I made my way to the computer.

I stared at the monitor, at the tedious flashing of the blinking cursor. That’s death. I thought to myself. To guys like Marcus Gold, the tenant of Apartment 416, a blinking cursor on a blank page might as well be a bullet in the head.

This little corner of the apartment was where he wrote. His computer was heaped onto a tiny desk: CPU, monitor, printer, and all the cables that held them together. A computer was so easy to repair. If only human beings were that simple. If only you could go out and replace the defective chip for a couple hundred bucks, or buy a new cable at Circuit City for nineteen ninety-five. Then maybe... Who the hell knows?

The walls that adjoined to form Mark’s writing corner were plastered with minuscule letters. They couldn’t even dignify him with a full page. Carefully typed, with crisp photocopied signatures, they were no bigger than an index card. It was hard to tell what this was all about without getting in closer. When you got closer, it became the most depressing thing you’d ever seen. They were rejection letters, hundreds of them, plastered to the wall so thick there might not have been any wallpaper underneath. There were thousands of harsh ‘no thank yous,’ and cold ‘not quite it, better luck next times,’ and of course there were plenty of the old standby, “Not suitable for our publication. Please try again.” This was the backdrop against which Marcus Gold worked each and every day.