Section 51
SECTION 51
by Kevin Varghese
i.
I first saw Mott at the botanical gardens.
A strange scent floated on the breeze. Burnt plastic. And the cherry blossoms, at the end of their season, left behind a sea of pink petals.
When I stepped onto the main grove, adrift waves of drunk dandelions wisping their seeds into the wind, a young man burst through the crowd and shoved past me. He was there and gone in a second. Two officers pursued, but they were outmatched. A few minutes later, he brushed against me again, nearly lapping his would-be captors.
I had just passed my service exam for the State Department. When I told my mother, she laughed and said Sam, you hate taking orders. She was right. But, I'd reached an understanding with myself – that if I didn’t change now, if I continued my rituals of self-loathing, I would leave behind a life of little meaning. I didn't develop my hobbies. I ignored my friends. And my total job experience amounted to a single, feeble line at the top of an otherwise blank resume. The State was looking for nothing more than a pulse and that’s all I was.
Over the next few years, I cut my teeth on patrol.
Mott was a known quantity. He was in and out of the station on petty crimes – traffic violations, defacement of property – misdemeanors that were expunged with community service. The State had slanted towards leniency to unclog the precincts. It didn't hurt that he always had fantastic public defenders, bleeding hearts that wanted more for a child failed by the foster system. Mott was elusive and he knew it. We were fine with it, because he wasn't the kind of person that needed to be locked behind rolled steel. He was reckless, but harmless. And, he was oddly charming. Whenever I saw him, it felt like I was meeting him for the first time.
Once, when he got booked for vandalism, he flashed a genuine smile and said, "I'm not all bad, you know."
"None of us are,” I replied.
“Well, what’s the secret? How do you change?”
“No secret. You just do better. Start small.”
“But, how?
“Get out of your own way.”
ii.
Over time, I'd built myself a half-decent life with a series of undue successes. None of it felt like my doing. Promotions landed on my lap, cases closed with relative ease, and a truly wonderful woman fell in love with me. Cindy. She knew me well. Sam, you can take a break now, she'd mumble at night, playing with my ear as we fell asleep. Sam, you should be proud of yourself. And hearing it from her was the closest it ever felt to the truth.
By then, Mott had become a very different criminal. His offenses grew worse and his misdeeds festered into felonies. Armed robbery. Fraud. Drug trafficking. He was prolific, wanted in several districts, and his local lore blossomed into myth.
One Winter, I waited for him by the Southern boardwalk, an oddly empty esplanade overlooking the river. Snow coated the sidewalks, leaving little mounds on streetlights and shielding cars in white armor. For nine hours, I camped in a van, crushed against surveillance equipment. Eventually, two masked men met in the distance and mouthed plans at each other. The conversation grew more aggressive until one grabbed the other by the nape of his neck, scolding him like a child. Fueled by sleep deprivation and a newfound urge to test my mettle, I crept out of the van and approached the men with a loaded pistol. They bolted.
I hesitated, then ran after the meeker one. I was nearly upon him. My knees burned. Each breath stung my chest. I screamed for him to stop, but no sound came out. My words turned to frost. We carved our path in the snow all the way to the boardwalk’s edge. And before I could reach him, he leapt over the railing, fifty feet into icy waters.
Splash.
Backup arrived later with space blankets and hot coffee. We pulled a body from the river, thinking myth had met its end. No match. This man was not Mott. His face was horribly disfigured, so burnt that it was no longer recognizable as human. Blurred. It smelled awful. His fingerprints were torched, his head was shaven, and his teeth were missing. What had Mott done to this man?
There was nothing to identify him except for a small scar on his left wrist that read “51”.
iii.
A season passed before we got a new lead.
A bevy of informants gave us enough to trace a shoddy map. It led to a warehouse near the harbor. A little past midnight, a dozen officers and I had the place surrounded. But, we stormed in and stumbled upon little fuss. There were only five masked men inside, already kneeling, awaiting execution with their hands interlocked behind their heads. We demanded they peel their masks off. Five more melted faces.
A light flicked on upstairs. The corner office.
I walked up, drew my weapon, and paced my breathing. When my hand gripped the cold metal of the doorknob, I braced for a shootout, for something bloody and final. But, I pushed the door open to see that Mott was there, calm and leaning back in a chair.
“Hands up,” I said.
He obliged, and I saw a detonator neatly tucked in his right palm. His thumb slid along the button.
“Don’t.”
He smiled, “It takes a little sacrifice.”
“Put it down,” I said, inching closer to him.
“All I had to do was ask myself…”
“Put it down!”
“Do I contradict myself?”
I had no idea what he meant. “It’s over. Whatever you do now will decide how bad it is for you.”
“You know, I’m worried.”
“About what?” A bead of sweat raced down my temple.
He paused and glanced out the window, where a dozen police cars waited, painting flashes of red and blue against the glass.
“I’m worried I’m all bad now.”
He gestured for me to put the gun down. He hardened his gaze and raised the detonator.
I holstered.
“Mott, let’s talk about-”
Before I could finish my sentence, a plume of fire ripped through the first floor of the building, killing every officer and the five accomplices instantly. I was flung through the window, and I landed hard on the fire escape stairs, sliding downward. All the glass in the building shattered at once. The pop of confetti. Flames curled out the windows towards the roof and thick clouds of black smoke flooded the sky.
By the next morning, thirteen charred bodies were zipped up and sent to the morgue. Six of them had a rough 51 carved into their wrists.
Mott was one of them. He was flung out of the window as well but wasn’t as lucky as me. He was abstract art on the sidewalk. In the morning, sanitation hosed his legacy off the asphalt.
iv.
I was beset with a new sense of rest. I had finally earned my tenure on the force. The feeling was often reciprocated by my colleagues, sometimes in thoughtful gestures, but mainly in thoughtless jest. I enjoyed and appreciated all of it. It was mostly boredom, I think. But, Cindy would say it was good for me. We welcomed our first child to the world – a beautiful baby boy named Thomas. He was a sweet kid, who on his first birthday made up his mind to follow in my footsteps. And though he spent most of his time chewing on a toy badge, I knew that kid would do great things.
I loved making him laugh.
And I started to recognize that boredom was a sign of a good life, a signal that you had time to slow down and savor things.
But, this era was short-lived.
I was called back to the station, surely to writhe once again under the thumb of the State. A new and especially violent criminal was active in over twenty cities. Extortion, large-scale robberies, assassination plots. It was someone with a vast and loyal network, a cultish following that took great care to keep their boss hidden. When they handed me his picture, I laughed.
It was Mott.
I handed it back and smirked, said there was no way. I looked around the room and repeated it. There was no way. I watched him die.
They had me undergo psychological evaluations and lie detector tests. No one doubted me, but they wanted to see if I would doubt myself. Maybe it wasn’t him. It was. Maybe you were seeing things. I wasn’t. Will you help us find him?
I often flashed back to the night at the warehouse. Not the explosion, not to Mott, but to the moment with my hand on the doorknob. A small infinity before me. An ode to Schrödinger, where my death sat uncertainly in the next room, only made real if I was foolish enough to peek. I had too much to lose, and I’d never had that before. But, I couldn’t leave this unfinished, incomplete, the way my life was before. Until now, I had traded my obsession for a few years of peace. It was time to hold up my end of the bargain.
It hurt to spend so many sleepless nights without Tom and Cindy. Mott was alive and had been expanding both his grasp and reach. While I grew fat and tired, he had carved his name into the city’s heart as a kingpin.
A month passed and there was no news. No faceless henchmen. All leads were frayed wires, all wells were dry. But, I never let up. I found a sense of balance, but balance is exhausting. I was split, burdened by my two faces of doting father and public servant.
I reminded myself that I was lucky. I watched Tommy grow into a precocious child. Cindy and I took him to the aquarium, to the zoo, to the park. And life was never boring, it was stable. I often got them confused, but stability is a rare joy, and I spent too many years running away from it.
v.
On a breezy evening at the onset of Fall, we returned from a little vacation. The house was quiet. My little family was fast asleep. I stepped out to grab a couple bottles of wine and clear my mind. I found myself strolling past the Southern River and leaning over the railing. Even though the boardwalk was peppered with passersby, I drank half the bottle and thought of myths and martyrs. I cleared and tossed the bottle into the water.
Splash. The second untouched bottle stayed safely tucked under my arm.
I walked back home warm and found the door slightly cracked.
“Come on in.”
The living room was filled with masked men. The one in the center, seated on the coffee table, had his mask off, revealing a melted face. He pointed a gun at me through the leather of his jacket pocket.
“Come, come, sit,” he said with a hearty smile. Like it was his house.
I stepped in slowly while another man shut the door behind me. “Where are they?” I snarled through gritted teeth.
“Sit,” the ringleader said brusquely, as two others shoved me down into a chair.
“Are you going to hurt them?
“Not sure yet.” The melted man raised up a blowtorch and pulled the trigger a few times. It hissed and spat out a pointed flame. “I have no interest in killing a kid. But, you know me, I’m okay with sacrifices.”
“I know you?”
The man chuckled, “we’re old friends at this point.”
“I knew your boss. It’s not my fault he’s dead.”
He pointed to a masked man in a corner. This one pulled off his mask.
My heart sank and anchored me to the chair. I was dizzy. “Mott?”
The one beside me tapped my shoulder and took off his mask. I looked at his face and back to the other.
Both were Mott. Exactly. Perfectly. The same glimmer of charm, the same smile. The smile I finally realized had no authenticity, but instead a dark sense of knowing – knowing something that no one else could ever know.
The melted man in the center spun his finger in the air. All the men started to pull of their masks. The one by the fireplace. Mott. The one sitting on the stairs. Mott again. A cascade of faces. Mott, every single one. They all had the exact same face, except for the melted man before me.
“You died. You died.”
“Many times,” the melted man agreed.
"How?" I choked out.
“I can do things you can’t, that’s all.”
It took me some time to sort it out. The liquor, the fear, the shock – they paralyzed me. The melted man leaned in, “I owe you. You gave me the answer. Or really, you gave me the right question.”
The blowtorch flickered and warmed my face. “Mott.” I felt the crawl of countless eyes on me, all impossibly identical. I replayed every interaction we had, stretching all the way back to the first scene at the gardens. “How many of you are there?”
“Enough,” he said, “multitudes.”
The melted man stood and gripped the blowtorch tightly. I could see his wrists. There was no 51 etched into it like the others.
“Show him,” he said.
The man by the corner walked up and kneeled before me. Mott took the blowtorch to his face. The man gurgled and groaned, stifling it the best he could. His flesh bubbled, blistered, and blended, before he collapsed to the floor.
The scent of burnt plastic filled my lungs. I vomited on my shirt.
“What do you want?”
“I want to tell you the answer!”
“The answer to what?!”
The melted man’s smile, Mott’s true smile, was massive now, gleaming white under a hideous topography of flayed skin. The two men beside me held me down.
“Mott, please! Stop!”
“How do you get out of your own way?”
“I don’t know. Please, think this through. If you kill me, they’ll track you down.”
“I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to free you.
“What?”
“How do you get out of your own way?”
As the flame corroded my skin, my vision dimmed. Pain gave way to numbness and soon cut off all sensation. Tears poured down my cheeks, quickly evaporating, until my ducts were fused shut. A whisper bled into my ear, before my nerves sizzled, before my heart stopped.
“You put someone else there.”
Kevin Varghese is a Malayali writer and poet fascinated by the blurred line between horror and absurdity. His work explores the human condition through themes like addiction, mental illness, and morbid curiosity. He enjoys crafting small worlds, and he hopes his work can offer others a healthy escape from reality.
