He came home from work and immediately poured a drink. Zorby thought of his old sponsor, William and his sage voice that often comes with the recognition – real or not – of hitting bottom. William's poison had been vodka sevens; Zorby preferred his liquor dark. He drained the first scotch he had poured himself in more than three years without even bothering with the ice. The minute it hit his throat, Zorby's body absorbed it almost instantly. He took more time with the second, putting ice in the glass and then topping it off. Then he drained the second and poured another on top of the melting ice. This one he sipped, as he turned and walked from the kitchen into the living room. He took the bottle with him.
“What a shitter of a day,” he said to the empty room. He sat down in his worn out orange rocker, took in the silence of his surroundings. He would be alone in the house for several more hours. Trina wouldn't be happy that he was drinking again. Depending on the kind of day she'd had, she may or may not say anything right away. But he supposed he have a few and put the bottle back under the kitchen sink before she came home. That was the original thought, anyway. That would require impulse control. And Zorby was pretty sure he'd used up what little impulse control he had.
The idea of moving to a small town had been that the quiet would be good for them. Well, mostly good for him. Quiet. Quietude. Peace and Quietude. It had seemed like a good idea. Phoenix had rubbed him the wrong way. Trina was tired of him being so angry all the time. But that wasn't all of it. She had pretty much hated Phoenix ever since they moved there. She didn't like the weather, especially the oven like quality of the summers. She didn't like the west coast lite cultural miasma. She didn't like shallow people. Zorby didn't like people anywhere, so Phoenix for him was no different than any other place in that respect.
As he drank and stared into the blankness of the television that he didn't want to turn on, he thought of the them. The people he'd seen that day. The ones he fantasized about doing horrible things to. Their gaping, yapping, toothless maws. Their limited vocabularies. Their weak chins and clearly inbred faces. The sounds of their voices set his teeth on edge, made his backbone tighten. Made his head begin to hurt. He had almost gotten to the point to where he could stand the sight of them; but then they had to talk.
He drained his drink and poured another. “They don't know,” he said. “They don't know how easy it would be.” One of the games he played to keep himself entertained was to imagine how he might kill them all. No one would die in quite the same way. That was one of the things he hated about how serial killers were depicted on television and in movies. Always doing the same thing over and over again. Recreating some moment in time. Zorby had no such moment. He liked the idea that each one of them – from the spiteful bitch at the drug store that eyed him like a thief to the Methodist minister who always tried to talk to him and convince him to attend church – would die in some unique way. It would be doing them a favor, actually. They could then achieve in dying what they had never achieved in life.
Not that he was a serial killer; not really. Zorby understood how people could BE like that. But there was something in him that prevented him. Not fear, necessarily. Not some high moral regard for human life. Something else. Something that held him back.
He drank this last drink slowly and checked the clock. Trina would come home and know he'd been drinking. She would say something. Why is there even a bottle in the house? she would ask. It had been a present from his brother. His brother still drank because he hadn't hit bottom. Zorby never felt like he hit bottom. But everyone else seemed to think he did.
The faces of his fantasy kills flashed through his mind. He saw each of them die. But it didn't make him feel any better. He turned on the television, hoping to drown them out.