Jeff Lepper has left his house!

Jeff Lepper has left his house!

Jeff Lepper has walked to the corner!

Jeff Lepper has returned to his apartment, his face covered in sweat and tears. 

Jeff Lepper sits on his couch and, when his breathing returns to a somewhat normal pace, he renews his vow to leave the house the following day, mentally marking his twenty-seventh attempt. After some time passes, he does what he does after every failed attempt, he stands and he moves to the window in the TV room. The window is large and faces west over Long Beach, California, and the venetian blinds that keep the world outside with its pale, loud slats are always angled so that anyone walking by could, at most, see the ceiling and nothing, or rather nobody, inside. And every night Jeff Lepper stands with his eyes in the narrow space between two slats and watches the night fall, purple and orange and black, occasionally scanning neighboring windows to confirm his isolation. He’ll typically stand there in front of the glowing window until the room goes dark around him. His shadow will climb across the floor, stretching back and back further before it slowly raises from the floor to stand behind Jeff Lepper and watch his every move. Jeff Lepper knows without knowing that something is waiting behind him, forever waiting behind him, something looking to see him hung, displayed for all the neighbors to see, no, all the world to see the truth about Jeff Lepper. And after a while, his shadow, typically, melts into the darkness of the room, finding its way into every crack in the wall, every fiber of furniture, everything and everywhere in Jeff Lepper’s sad little apartment. 

Tonight, however, something unusual is happening within Jeff Lepper. Tonight, Jeff Lepper stands as the sun falls, and thinks, with a strength that concerns me some, that tomorrow could be different, better. He smiles at the colors hanging over the city and at the bridge in the distance, the bridge to San Pedro, and imagines future day trips for Italian sandwiches and walks through Sunken City. And for a moment, he touches an abnormally focused sense of gratitude within himself, gratitude for what he has and acceptance of what he no longer does, but it doesn’t matter. Soon I will get my rope around Jeff Lepper’s neck, the headlines will sing, and the public will forever remember him and what he did, and my job will be comple-

Wait! 

Wait! 

He’s going into the bathroom! Cue the sun! Raise it back up just a touch! Angle it at the mirror! A little further. Perfect!

Jeff Lepper washes his hands and looks into the bathroom mirror, watching the gray hairs at his temples twinkle in the evening sun, and he remembers his age. Thirty years old and all he’s done with his life is make one big, strange, terrible mess. He sees the years behind him, the easy coos and fixed bruises of young love doomed from the start and forever in the past, the belly laughs from movies that don’t hold up anymore, the cigarettes and skateboards and kisses. Then, he sees the years ahead of him, the indifferent doctors and greedy dentists, the emptied-out houses of his buried parents, the hairline that won’t stop crawling away from his sunken eyes, the canes, the fiber, and the dentures.

Sad little Jeff Lepper. Recently fired Jeff Lepper. Recently de-pluralized Jeff Lepper. Lost his job. Lost his wife. One bedroom apartment. One foot in the grave. Never made time for kids and never will. 

It’s dinner time now, but when he sees a sink full of dishes, he understands just what it would take to cook a meal. He considers ordering out, but the numbers in his bank account flash in his mind. Tomorrow, he reminds himself, he has to find a job. You see, Jeff Lepper had a good job and he’s lived off what he had left for two years now, but it’s drying up. Jeff Lepper was the regional manager of a major automobile manufacturing plant based out of Sacramento. In a community that size, ensuring a very public “leave of absence” was a relatively simple task. It wasn’t hard for me to get his story spinning. After nearly a year of hiding and watching his life fall apart around him, powerless to stop it, and then moving south some, he landed a job selling BMWs in Costa Mesa. He was there for around six months. I wanted to let him get comfortable, to start to believe that things could change, before I sent the anonymous email to his boss containing links to the news article in the Sacramento Sun. 

Patience is an important ingredient of success, but shame is what lingers and leads to repeated feedings. If done correctly, his failures will explode into a magnificent mess and then fade away quickly. They will follow him around forever, but it’s essential that he watches how easily the world moves on to the next scandal and leaves him behind, broken and motionless. And it must always be googleable. Because when people see that top result, they won’t ever think about the details. It’ll just register as dangerous, and they will leave him, and he will die alone in his kitchen with the noose I tied for him around his neck. 

Really, what happened to him could’ve happened to anyone, but in the world we live in, you just can’t know for sure that your microphone and camera are off during a Zoom call. You can assume they are, but I’d recommend against masturbating to a twenty-two-year-old camgirl and roleplaying as her professor, because I can tell you, with a mountain of experiential data to back me up, that if you tell her to say, “You like how young I am, Daddy? You like fucking your eighteen-year-old student?” and your colleagues hear it, you’re going to get fired, and everyone will see the monster you’ve hidden from them. Everyone including your wife, who will most certainly leave you when she finds out that the reason you haven’t had sex with her in months is because of your carefully hidden desires, the desires you crave and risk everything for, the fantasies you realize only to be rewarded with hot shame immediately upon release because you hate yourself for wanting and for hiding these simple, little things. 

And when the news picks it up, you’ll lose all your friends, too, even though if they were asked, and were being honest, they would admit to similar desires. But it’s too hot. They’ll get burned if they stand too close. You’ll excuse some of them for keeping their distance, but some, like the friends you thought were closer than brothers, closer than sisters, they will haunt you forever. And when it becomes the first thing anyone sees when they google your name, you’ll be truly alone. Sure, it’ll fall out of fashion. People will forget. But, from me, everyone is no more than one email away. One little email, like the one I sent to everybody in Jeff Lepper’s life three years ago, shortly after being assigned to him, and like the one I sent to Costa Mesa BMW one month ago, the one that’s kept him hiding in his house on the edge of my success. 

Anyway, as far as I can tell, he didn’t even know he was on the Zoom call, but even with my access, I can’t be sure. People lie to themselves in ways you wouldn’t believe.

Truthfully, I’m not particularly proud of my work with Jeff Lepper. Ruining his marriage was a simple task. They were terrible for each other. It was security they married for. There was passion at times and often there were laughs, but there was no trust. Bonds based on unflinching honesty and audacious communication are nearly impenetrable. Fortunately, in my line of work, you don’t see that much. Furthermore, nearly every board member and administrator on that Zoom call was on my docket. I’ve hung a few of them since. Those animals are, or were, so full of secrets that I hardly have to try. I prefer a challenge. I remember when we used to have to actually write the news reports, jumping from city to city to make sure they were printed. Now, it’s just a tweet or two in the right place and it’s on the local news by morning. Some of these new guys just keep up on whatever buzz words are in the zeitgeist, whisper them to some network interns, and take the rest of the week off. I heard one of the rookies got a dock worker to walk into a subway train for calling his tank top a wife beater. 

Anyway, where’s Jeff Lepper now?

Ah, I see. It seems he’s paced the kitchen a while and found the courage to clean up and get dinner started. I need to pay more attention. No matter. I’ve got an idea.

Jeff Lepper sets an iPad up next to the sink, resolving to watch the news while he does the dishes and cooks himself a nice meal. He turns the knob for hot water and with his eyes fixed on the screen and his soapy hands in the sink he washes each plate and bowl and mug and watches the world burn around him. There’s a well-dressed woman behind a desk holding some papers and she tells him—hm. Oh, I know. She tells him about the recent trial of his favorite comedy actor who is under fire for sexual misconduct on a recent movie set. Yes, that’ll start his mind. 

Perhaps, for a while, we’ll switch to the ordinary gut-turning disasters. In the business, this is known as edging. We’ll show him earthquakes, babies pulled out of crumbled buildings, war. Oh, war. What a gift. We’ll go back to the comedy actor in a while, but these images are working better than I expected. I make a note of his growing compassion, something to keep an eye on. 

He’s washing the bowls, now, and the glassware is next. Perfect. The images of bombs and politicians bite from the screen and he’s taken by them completely. “Today, the Doomsday Clock has moved forward, now resting at ninety seconds to midnight.” He swirls a sponge along the outer rim of a ceramic bowl and then circles around the inside, then the outside, rinses it, and sets it on the drying rack. “These images may be disturbing.” He adjusts the water temperature and clicks the volume up some. “Negotiations have halted, leaving many to wonder how long this war will last.” He pumps blue soap onto a yellow sponge and another bowl done and another bomb lands in a city street while old ladies run and fall and another bowl done and it’s glasses now and thunder strikes as another bomb lands and he picks up a glass from the sink and—Cue the sirens! 

Someone runs the red light on Declan and McManus and a cop stopped at the intersection just outside Jeff Lepper’s kitchen window hits his sirens and they scream so loud that Jeff Lepper drops a glass in the soapstone basin. He reaches for it, trying to catch it before it drops but he fails and it shatters, and just after it does, his hand lands in the mess of broken glass and slices his finger wide open. He wraps a towel around his hand, and he screams to no one as blood runs to his elbow, pools on the countertop and drips into the drain. After bravely peaking behind the blood-soaked towel, he sees what I’ve done to him and that’s a trip to the emergency room for Jeff Lepper. Perfect. In a room that miserable, it won’t take much more to get him to kill himself. I should have this one wrapped up by tomorrow afternoon. That’ll give me a few days off before I’ll have to move on to the next one.

It is now the following morning and a woman wearing a white mask and pale green scrubs just told Jeff Lepper, “The hospital’s computer system has gone offline and there are two fires currently being fought nearby.” She says, “Damn near every ambulance we got is headed here right now. I know you’ve been here a long time—”

“Eight hours,” Jeff Lepper says.

“I know you’ve been here a long time,” the woman repeats with an open palm now pressing forward at the air between her and bloody Jeff Lepper, “but we’ll sew your finger up when we can.”

The woman walks away and so Jeff Lepper returns to his seat to find it occupied. He searches through the waiting room and finds nothing. He stands by the desk until the automatic doors open and a team of EMTs rush past him and tell him he can’t stand there. 

Eventually, he finds a seat in the back between a woman with a sheet over her entire body and a man with his toenail hanging off. The man’s bare foot is resting in a puddle of blood, and he is having a very polite conversation with some mucus that has dried on the wall. The woman is not dead, Jeff, decides. He cannot see any movement or hear any sound, but he believes he can sense her under there. He believes there is something people have that can be known without knowing, without naming. He believes people see each other, that they often do not look, but when they have the necessary strength or perhaps foolishness or courage or arrogance, Jeff Lepper doesn’t know, but he knows that when they can find whatever it takes to look real close, they can see that they are all the same and that a worm is just a gastrointestinal tract without earth-specific appendages to protect it from fish hooks. 

Jeff Lepper believes, for only as long as it takes for me to regain control, that he will someday be seen for who he truly is. That he will outlive this. That, someday, he will cease to be defined by bitter hearsay, by a narrow glimpse into what was just a moment in his past. That the name they gave him will fall away and time will see him reborn. Reborn with a fresh start so fresh that he will be allowed the simple pleasures of watching his children play in a warm house with a full fridge and a loving father, a childhood nothing like his own. Jeff Lepper will break the cycle of violence and flush out the hate in his blood, he will never lay a hand on their funny, smart, happy mother, with whom Jeff Lepper will smile and watch as their children grow to become something stupid like artists or pharmacists, wasting their youth on cigarettes and stolen liquor, pining for the freedom of their own car and their own house only to get there to find that freedom was youth and that youth, once used, can never be had back because we are young once and old forever.

There we go. I’ve got him back. Using his father is typically very effective.

Jeff Lepper looks straight ahead and thinks about life without a finger or hand. He imagines opening doors, shaking hands. Who knows, he thinks, who knows what infection becomes, what a little microscopic problem like bacteria can take away from you, his whole arm probably, his whole life even. He takes out his phone because the cries of children who know nothing and the whimpers of adults who know too much are all that he can hear, apart from, of course, the sickness and misery inside and outside of every poisoned heart in this room, city, county, state, country, continent, and world. 

His phone screen glows open with nothing but a single little notification from a lovely woman on a dating app. I love these dating apps. I’d like to shake the hand of whichever one of us created them. There is just so much opportunity for torture. Social media almost makes my job too easy. 

You see, I found a woman, she is perfect. Her name is Elaine. She looks a little bit like Jeff’s mother, a little like his first girlfriend, and a little like a prostitute he still hates himself for seeing. Her eyes are just the right shade of green, they are a little paler than he would ask for if he were deciding but that shade of difference registers as exotic, something he never knew he needed and now needs more than whatever ordinary beauty a normal woman might have. Her hair is this and her ass is that and her smile betrays “a real sense of humor.” Oh! And she’s a therapist. So, she may be compassionate enough, he hopes, understanding enough, he prays, decent enough, he tells himself, to see him for who he is and not the mistakes he’s made, to see him for what he has become and not for who he was when he was the man he most certainly no longer is. 

And she will.

Yes, of course she will, Jeff. 

So, they talk and they laugh and every message he sends lands like an uppercut on the chin of every man that stands in line behind him to meet this beautiful, smart, funny, loving woman. There is energy. There is chemistry. They spend Jeff Lepper’s eighth, ninth and tenth hour sitting in this terrible room trading memes and messaging about their childhoods, hometowns, hobbies and more! Jeff Lepper is as good as at the altar in his mind and she’s not far from it in hers. 

It’s almost too easy. 

And when the info-screens around the waiting room flicker on and the people behind the desk start to stir in excited hushed tones and clack on keyboards with relief in every fingertip, he finally types, “Here’s my number,” and “It looks like the computer system is back up. I’m sure I’m not anywhere near the front of the line, but I’m going to go check,” and he nearly floats up and into the drop ceiling when she texts him and says, “I don’t have any patients today, why don’t I come there with a couple tumblers full of wine and ride out the storm with you?” And when she tells him she’ll get ready and be there in a half-hour, he leans back, and, between a living woman and a friendly man, he imagines happiness.

A half-hour passes.

An hour passes.

Two hours pass.

The woman under the sheet groans in a persistent rhythm not much unlike a fire siren and Jeff Lepper shrinks with each one wishing it would end until they do and become deep-bellied screams for help instead. The man with the bloody toe is now very much upset with the mucus on the wall and their conversation has turned dreadfully, and inexplicably racist in nature. 

Jeff Lepper sits there and imagines his would-be dear as she types his phone number into google, for safe measure, because you never can be too safe these days, and sees his full name. After that, she types the name into google and she sees everything. The news let up on Jeff Lepper years ago but I keep it right up top in the search. He, nor any other man named Jeff Lepper in his lifetime, will achieve anything more googleable than the failure of my Jeff Lepper. 

But Jeff Lepper doesn’t know if she actually googled him. So, Jeff Lepper repeats his psychologist’s words: “You’ve got to be stronger than the stories.” 

He then, as I hurry to finish up with Elaine, speaks to himself as his psychologist would: You don’t know that she googled you, Jeff. She just as likely could have had an emergency with one of her patients. You can’t just believe these terrible things about yourself, Jeff. You’re not a monster. You deserve to be loved. And don’t be so narcissistic! She could just be busy. Or something horrible could have happened to her and here you are acting like everything is about you. Typical. Focus on what you can control, Jeff. Focus on yourself. Be kind to yourself. Even if you feel the whole world is against you, you just don’t know what other people are really thinking.

But Jeff knows. 

He’s fighting back, and he’s getting stronger, but he knows.

It’s time I do something about that psychologist, though. I couldn’t get more than a few sentences in there. Perhaps I’ll take a look at his Twitter. He’s got to have said something we can use.

—————-

I must admit, this one is proving to be more difficult than I had expected. It’s already been one year since the Emergency Room, and that was fine work by any standards. So, that makes nearly three years total and I’m still no closer to closing this case. It’s rare that it takes more than five years, but it does happen. Still, if I do this, it will make me look bad around the office and I’ll certainly hear from the brass about it. But I’ve tried everything I could think of: his psychologist walked off a building directly after a session with him, his father called him after fifteen years of silence and told him he was never any good and deserved everything that happened to him, his mother ate a bottle of pills and died alone in her apartment, his brother blamed him for it and hasn’t spoken to him since, and still, Jeff Lepper hangs on. Jeff Lepper finds some spark of hope, some sunset or smiling dog or comedy podcast, and he finds a way through the misery of his solitude. Some nights he spends HOURS laughing at old clips of Late Night with Conan O’Brien on YouTube. He hasn’t even been drinking lately! 

I’ve decided that the only way to make sure any future attempts are successful is to play a long game. I’m going quiet for a while. I’ll turn up just often enough to stop him from growing too strong for me to control, but I won’t be around much. It’s risky. He has surprised me with his strength before. But I see no other way forward. I must let Jeff Lepper believe that I am gone and then, when he lets his guard down, I will kill him. 

—————-

Five years. Five years. It took this sad bastard five years to find a girlfriend. And then, three more to marry her. Now he’s got a son. His son is starting to talk. Do the math. I’ve been on this case for ten years. Ten. Years. Luckily, I’ve filled my down time with other cases and have had enough success with them to be permitted to remain on this one, but Jeff Lepper is nearly forty, and, statistically speaking, if I can’t get him before then, I never will. After that, he is likely to accept his life and see it through. Or at least that’s department policy. Anyway, the brass is breathing down my neck and now I’ve got two weeks to get my rope around Jeff Lepper’s. Two weeks and he walks free. Two weeks. Two weeks.

—————-

I’ve spent the past thirteen days studying the Leppers and planning my attack, and I must say, this is a tricky situation. You see, Jeff Lepper met his wife, Peg Penents, on Fetlife and, at first, I’d hoped that her desires would contribute to his self-destruction, but in my absence, I failed to properly vet her. It appears she’s helped him. She is, by leaps and bounds, the purest soul I have ever encountered. She’s taught Jeff Lepper that it wasn’t what he wanted that was wrong, it was the self-deception, the hiding it from his wife, the lying. Living two lives split him in half. The shame brought him into himself, to sit with every lie he’d ever told, all for just another cheap fuck. It was the people he used that he had to pay for. He knew this, but she’s convinced him that he’s paid enough, that he need not pay with his life. She has convinced him that there is a good man buried under all of that deceit. She’s taught him honesty and she’s taught him communication. 

Together, they host and attend many kink parties, safely celebrating their bizarre desires. They even run an organization committed to destigmatizing fetishes and teaching others to engage with their desires with mutual respect and consent. Their classes include: BDSM, Cuckolding, Electrostimulation, Asphyxiation, Foot Play, Food Play, Gerontophilia, Impact Play, Katoptronophilia, Balloons, and even Spectrophilia! It’s outrageous! All profits from the organization are donated to different charities involved in supporting sexual abuse survivors. Together Jeff Lepper and Peg Penents are strong.

And so, I have no choice. I must break them both. And to do this, I must take their son. And so today, I have set in motion a series of events that will result in their son’s death. Today is the first day of Jeff Lepper’s class on Age Play. In its conception, it was meant to be Peg’s class, but thirteen days ago, she decided that Jeff should teach it. Jeff expressed some concern given his past, but she assured him, with love and trust shining in her eyes, that he was ready. 

And so this is his final test. 

Jeff Lepper enters the Zoom meeting and waits as the squares populate with faces, some smiling, some twisted up with timidity. He even sees a few that remind him of himself when he was a lesser man, and he feels pride in spite of knowing without knowing that their intentions, and their pasts, could be quiet ugly. He is grateful that he has the chance to help them shed their programming and become better, kinder, perverts. And then, she enters. I must say it is a delicious moment. Seeing her face appear in place of the black square, seeing Jeff’s posture flicker and sink as he notices those pale green eyes and that sardonic smile, it was almost worth ten years of work. 

As Jeff goes through his syllabus and sings his first-day-standards like “When I call your name say a little about yourself,” and “What brought you here?”, he prays that his memory is somehow wrong, that this is some other Elaine. But when he ends the class and thanks everyone for their vulnerability and commitment, watching as each square disappears, he prays that hers will too. And when it doesn’t, and when, just before he nods to her and ends the call, she says, “It’s good to see you, Jeff,” he feigns, “I’m sorry, have we met?”

“Well, no,” she giggles, “but we should have.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“Bullshit, Jeff.”

“I really have to go.”

“Look. I’m sorry. I liked you. I should’ve told you why I didn’t show up at the ER. I just, I saw the article and I was afraid. Truthfully, I was never like that. I’d never googled someone before a date before or since, and I don’t even care about what you did. I mean, it was gross, but I’ve done worse. Really, I don’t know what came over me. I was on my way there with two tumblers full of wine, and then I just sudden-”

“It’s fine.”
“It’s not. I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t done that. I’ve thought you often.”

“Really, it’s-”

“No. I felt something. Something real. Something I’d wanted so badly and still haven’t found, something I believed I’d never find. And when I came here today and saw you-,” she looks into his eyes, smiles and says, “I want you, Jeff Lepper.”

“I’m logging off now,” he says, steeling himself hopelessly against her green eyes that all but beg for him. “You can expect a full refund on your deposit. Thank you-”

“Jeff,” she says again, dropping her dress off her left shoulder, then her right, “I want you bad.” Elaine steps back from the camera as Jeff Lepper’s cursor hovers over the big red button that could end it all. She drops her dress past her firm, perfect breasts and it lands in a cotton puddle around her bare feet, her toes painted red against her brown skin. She lowers herself onto her knees. Staring into the camera lens she says, “Please, daddy. Don’t you like how young I am? Please. I’ve been a bad girl and I need you to teach me a lesson.”

And Jeff Lepper replies, “How young are you?”

And she says, well you know what she says. And relax, you lecher. Even I can see you’re enjoying this a little too much, you think the barista can’t? I’d recommend being a little more careful. I’ve only got a few days until I choose my next case. Go home and take a shower. The girl at the other end of the coffee shop isn’t going to fuck you anyway. Go home and masturbate and pray we never meet.

Jeff Lepper slams his laptop shut and slowly begins to weep. The sun sets around him and he remains in the darkness, in silence, for several hours. Sometime later, his phone rings. It’s his wife. She is screaming. She is crying. She is able to release a single word between each sob that erupts from her chest and seems to shake him, too. “He,” she whispers, “is,” she cries, “dead!” she screams. He hears the clatter as her phone drops from her hand, and then he hears another scream, a different scream.

“Where are you?” he pleads. “Who is dead?” he begs. “Answer me,” he demands. And there are other questions, but it doesn’t matter, not to me, or you, or even to Jeff Lepper, because he, me, and you all know the answers. And in time, Jeff learns more than you need to, and, frankly, more than I wish to know, but the boy is dead. I killed him. Well, Jeff killed him. Jeff was supposed to pick him up from school. He was supposed to be there. He was supposed to be home. He was supposed to protect them. But he did not. Instead, a man, a student of Peg’s, strangely and quite suddenly turned from a perfectly respectful student to a babbling maniac obsessed with his Looners 101 professor. Thirteen days ago, this man began coincidentally running into Peg at the supermarket, their son’s daycare, and then, nine days ago, around their home. Six days ago, he was asked to leave the program. And today he has responded to his removal with a desperate act. He took the boy from school, drove to Jeff and Peg’s home in Signal Hill, and, well, you don’t need the details, do you? 

Anyway, then Jeff Lepper drives his car through every red light between his office and home and, upon arriving on his block, now painted entirely by the red and blue lights spinning around on top of the various emergency response vehicles parked in his driveway, he steps out of his car and watches as a stretcher rolls out of his front doorway draped in a sheet. After that, another passes, and though he cannot see any movement or hear any sound, he can sense them under there. He knows without knowing, that he has once again, destroyed everything. Jeff Lepper drops to his knees on his lawn and sinks into the grass. He stays there, seemingly unaware of each neighbor or police officer’s attempt to help him up, until around an hour after the rain begins to pour on him. At which point he walks into the house, takes the telephone cord from the wall, wraps it around his neck, and, well, you know.

*The title for this story is borrowed from the lyrics from “You” by the band X.

About the Author:

For most of his adult life, Tony Godino was a roadie, touring the world. In 2019, he left this career to pursue fiction and poetry writing full-time. Starting over in his thirties probably should be terrifying, but it was a lot scarier to live his life ignoring his dream. He can be found on Instagram @TonyGodinoDied and Twitter/X @TonyGodinoDied

*Feature image by Angelegea from Pixabay