by Eduard Duray

To the reader: 

Nearly a year has passed since the death of Nathanial Browning, an occasional freelance contributor to this magazine.  Within the last few weeks, the police have made the following manuscript available to me, since I was its intended recipient.  That this purported accounted of the events leading up to the tragedy was never introduced at his inquest is, I believe, the result of a bureaucratic error and not any sort of conspiracy.  Although it will not clear Nathan’s reputation, what follows at least provides a context for understanding the illness that gripped him in the last months of his life.  That he was guilty of the alleged crime has never been in doubt.  The manuscript, instead, attests to his diminished capacity during the commission of that act. 

Michael Ilk, Editor 

***** 

She was like a shivering limp rag when the neighbor kid held her out to me. 

“You knock too loud,” I told him.  “How many times do I have to tell you not to knock too loud?  It gives me headaches.  I don’t like headaches.” 

The kid held his ground, wincing as he pushed the white fur toward me just another inch. 

“My mom says living beings need companions,” he said. 

“I don’t like company,” I said. 

“She sneezes around cats or maybe she’d keep this one.” 

“Who’d keep a dead cat?”  I asked. 

“It ain’t dead yet.” 

“It will be if you don’t feed it,” I said, and closed the door. 

I turned away and was about two steps across the hardwood floor when I started talking to myself, telling myself I didn’t like kids and I didn’t like cats.  My back hurt from sitting in front of the computer all day and my eyes were fuzzy from staring at the screen. 

“I need some peace and quiet,” I said. 

The kid was still there when I re-opened the door.  His lips were pressed tight together and his eyes were squinted closed.  He looked like he was praying hard. 

“I don’t trust your mother,” I said, as I took the cat from him. 

I don’t like being jacked around by women and I hate living next door to Wiccans. 

***** 

“No,” I said. 

It was the twenty-eighth time that I had told her the same word. 

“This is my desk,” I told her.  “It is like sacred ground.  Only I use my desk.  This is where I do my writing.  This is where I create my articles.  Only I may touch my desk.” 

She meowed. 

Then, from the rolling file cabinet I had placed near the desk and topped with a green folded towel, she leaped onto my desk again and began rolling her back over my keyboard.  Long strands of white hair floated up and away as she shed more than her apparent body weight.  Gibberish appeared in the middle of my article tentatively titled “Black Witchcraft— Michigan’s Secret Religion.”  

“I don’t like cats on my keyboard,” I said. 

My new article was going to rip the drapes away from the dark rooms where they practiced their bizarre rights.  It would light shine in what they paraded as a natural religion.  Most of the women involved were dimwits like the slinky broad down the hall.  I knew when she moved in she was a witch from the hideous straw man she hung from her door.  In a woman’s religion, it’s always the man that ends up hanging. 

The cat rolled around some more. 

I picked her up and dumped her onto the floor. 

A female Turkish Angora, the vet had said.  She’d need a lot of shots and maybe it would be a good idea to get her fixed. 

“It’ll cost a bit,” he admitted.   

“Yeah,” I’d said. 

“Turkish Angoras have to be the center of attention,” he added,    “but they’re wonderfully sensitive, warm, and loving.” 

“Do those robot kitty litter things I saw on TV really work?”  I’d asked.  “I don’t want to be raking sand looking for shit all day.  I’ve got articles to write.” 

That’s pretty much how it had gone at the vet. 

She was pissed at being dumped on the floor and starting pawing and sniffing at a magazine I had left there. 

“Look,” I told her,  “here’s the deal.  You can run around the house as long as you use the litter box.  No more dumping on my magazines.  But you can’t get up here on my desk.  Have you got that, Kitty Sasquatch?” 

She launched straight up and was scratching her backside on my keyboard again in under three seconds flat.  She knocked over the only picture of my ex-wife that I still had.  I left it lay face down the way my ex had left me. 

“What is with you?”  I asked.  “Can’t you understand English?  Let me say it to you in cat- Meow, Meow, Meow, and Meow.  That means stay offa my desk.  That’s kitty Italian, okay?  Stay offa my desk.” 

I scooped her off the keyboard and dumped her back on the floor.  Her tail flipped back and forth like a hairy white metronome counting off the beats.   

“And another thing,” I said.  “I don’t like the smell of your litter box.  I keep a clean place.  I like the smell of Windex and furniture polish.” 

She was deaf in one ear- I couldn’t remember which, so I didn’t know if she was listening.  The vet had told me that a “statistically significant” number of Turkish Angoras had one green eye and one blue eye and that they were deaf in one ear that matched one of those colors.  I didn’t pay much attention to which one was which at the time.  I thought he was bullshitting me until the white fluff looked up and yowled a feline curse at me for bringing her to the clinic.  It was true.  One of her eyes was green and one was blue.  I didn’t know if she was deaf.  I thought all cats were deaf unless you were saying what they wanted to hear. 

It was the witch’s fault.  I hadn’t finished an article since the day her cat had arrived.  No articles meant no money. 

“You see,” I told her,  “if you can stay down on the floor, then maybe I can write, and then maybe I can print the article out, and mail it to a magazine, and then maybe— with a capital maybe— a desperate editor will buy the article and mail me a check before he or she actually reads it.  She’ll say, Wow, I didn’t know that Michigan was such a hotbed of occult activity.  I thought they just made cars that don’t sell there.  You get where I’m going with this?  There’s rent to pay and we’ll both be out digging for old tuna cans in the trash if I can’t sell another article.” 

She turned tail and strode imperiously from the room, her tail flicking attitude the way a live wire throws off sparks. 

I lifted the picture of my ex and took a long look at her before laying it back down.  She was a writer, too.  For years, she couldn’t sell anything.  I worked; I paid the bills, while she cranked out fantasies that no one wanted to buy.  Then, one day, she gets a sale.  Six months later, we’re divorced, and she marries her new publisher. 

I wiped another white hair from the keyboard.  I’d vacuumed the apartment twice already that day, sucking up enough fur to make an Angora sweater.  Scientifically speaking, the cat should be bald. 

After I had backspaced the feline gibberish out of existence, the monitor still showed the same half-finished sentence that it had an hour ago.  What had I been trying to say?  Something about how Black Mary had fled the Salem Witch trials and ended her long run in what became Wyandotte, Michigan.  Something about how Wyandotte, Michigan has more New Age shops and Occult Bookstores than they do variety stores.  Something about the peculiar association between salt and witchcraft, between the salt veins that ran beneath the Detroit suburbs and the geo-lines of psychic force.  Rumors of a new Black Mistress.  Whispers about mutilations and blood drinking.  That seemed right.   

For the Whacko channel. 

I got up and took grabbed the furniture polish spray and a rag and began wiping down my desk and chair to get rid of kitty footprints.  I stood back and turned my head sideways.  The kitty footprints disappeared into a liquid shine.  The air filled with lemon, and I breathed in the mist.  I put away the spray can and the rag and sat back down to write.  

She howled from the other room and my shoulders tensed.  Every time that I tried to think of something to type, she was either rubbing up against my leg, clawing my toes, meowing, jumping up in the sink, or dancing on the gas stove trying to catch herself on fire. 

Five minutes later, another cat howl came from somewhere at the other end of the apartment.  I blocked it out and rested my hands on the keyboard, ready to press down the first stroke, when I wondered if she was cleaning her claws. 

“Stay away from that couch,” I yelled.  “It’s not paid for yet.” 

Every living being needs a companion my ass. 

How was I supposed to think? 

To buy her off so that I could get back to the article, I drove to the store and picked up cat treats.  When I got back I shook three of them into my hand, saw that they were the size of peas and the color of acne and dropped them onto the floor in front of her.   

She looked down at them and up at me, then lay on the floor like she was dead. 

“Those cost me five dollars and sixty-nine cents,” I told her.  “Eat them.  They’ve got a picture of a happy cat on the front.  They taste good.  What’s wrong with them?” 

She began licking her paws. 

“Crap,” I said.  “Come on, give them a try, will you?” 

She looked up at me, and I knew that somehow she would eat them if I buttered them. 

“Butter’s bad for cats,” I said, even though I really didn’t know if it was or not. 

She went back to licking her paws. 

“All right, all right,” I said.  “I’ll butter them.” 

I didn’t need a companion.  I was in between girlfriends and I liked it that way.  It was bad enough that I had to squeeze my writing in between women who reminded me of my ex-wife— now I had to squeeze it in between non-stop cat maneuvers for attention.  Change the litter.  Fill her water bowl.  Feed her.  Pet her.  Pick her up when she wanted.  Put her down when she wanted.  Clean up hairball puke. 

When I didn’t do what she wanted, she meowed or howled or clawed my leg.   

I liked to write late at night, but late at night was when she freaked out and ripped around the apartment jumping on chairs and yanking at their threads with her claws.  Her eyes got big and round like she was on speed. 

I couldn’t concentrate when I was worrying about what she’s doing to my furniture. 

All sorts of people live in my building, from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Buddhists and the hypnotist one floor up and the witch two doors down with her creepy little kid.  When I first moved in it seemed like there were a lot of interesting people to write about.  But with the new feline addition to my life, I couldn’t concentrate enough to write about anything in or out of the building. 

“I’m never taking another cat from a witch,” I said. 

I put my fingers in the ready position again and prepared to type.  Something ceramic fell over in the living room and I heard it shatter. 

I wrapped my hands around the back of my head and pulled it down to the desk so that I could bang it against the wood. 

She started screeching about three feet behind me, and my body torqued up the way it does when I hear forks scraping against aluminum pans.   

“I hate you,” I said. 

Screech.  Yowl.  Screech.  Yowl. 

“What the hell do you want?”  I asked.  “What is it?” 

She scooted three feet, turned, looked at me and waited. 

“You’re like a dog, right?  I’m supposed to follow you?  You’re driving me nuts.” 

But I got up and went after her anyway.  She leaped up onto a kitchen chair and from there onto the table.  She looked at the window, meowed, and then stared back at me. 

The window.  She wanted the window opened so that she could listen for birds. 

“Do I look like your servant?”  I asked. 

I hooked my fingers under the window handle and pulled.  It stuck for a second, then jumped up and wide open.  She pressed her nose at the screen without saying thank you.  The room filled with the thick, wounded smell of the neighbor’s cut grass. 

“I can’t believe I’m a cat butler,” I said. 

While she hunted birds in her mind, I sat back down at my desk and prepared to write.  I tapped my fingers and rearranged my back end on the chair. 

Nothing.   

Absolutely nothing came to mind. 

I looked around the room, looking for someone to blame.  It wasn’t the bookshelf, I was pretty sure of that.  The pole lamp in the corner looked shifty, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t responsible either.  The pile of half-opened magazines stacked against the side of my desk was worth thinking about, but I suddenly had a better idea. 

It was the cat.  I knew it was the cat.   

She was always distracting me, always wanting something.  Maybe the witch would take her back. 

I picked up the phone and dialed her number so I wouldn’t have to go to see her in person.   Ever since that day in the bookstore I had tried to avoid her. 

Maybe she was trying to teach me a lesson. 

Why couldn’t she have kept the cat so it could sit on her shoulder the way witch’s familiars did in the movies?  What witches should have were black pointed caps, flying broomsticks, and long, hooked noses with hair- sprouting warts near the tip.   

The woman down the hall was nothing like that.  I wouldn’t have known what she was like except that I saw her one day in a bookstore, sorting through the various books on witchcraft, shaking her head over a spell-book or two, and tsk-tsking as she traced the artwork on a box of cards titled “The Tantric Tarot.”  Two young men with baggy black clothes adorned by silver zippers stood behind her like livery attendants and moved along side her when she stepped forward to run her delicate fingertips over the spine of a book the color of dried blood. 

“Lot of books on witchcraft and the occult in Michigan,” I had stepped forward and told her.  “I ought to know.  I’m writing an article concerning how witchcraft is making a serious comeback.” 

I’d seen her coming and going into her apartment from a distance and didn’t want to miss a chance to catch her attention now that I’d run into her outside of the complex.  She seemed to be single.  She had a son, but nowadays a lot of single women had kids. 

One of the boys- the one with a Mohawk- either blew his nose or hissed, but she held her hand up toward him like a crossing guard stopping traffic.  He stepped back and stared at his feet like he wasn’t sure they were really his. 

“Some things shouldn’t be written about” she said.  “We’re a quiet community.  We like our privacy.  Perhaps you should re-consider.” 

“But I’m working on a novel, too.  When it’s done, who knows?  Stephen King had to start somewhere.  Meantime, I’ve got to pay the bills so I’ll keep writing the article.  Besides, lot of people whispering a lot of bad things about witches.” 

“Do you know much about the Craft?” she asked.   

“What’s to know?”  I said.  “It’s a cheap fix for women who are tired of having men run religion.  I don’t believe in Witchcraft any more than I believe the Pope is always right.  But maybe people should know just how widespread it is in Michigan.  And how violent it’s getting.” 

“I see,” she said. 

“Don’t know who you’re talking to,” spat the other boy.  He was completely bald and his black leather clothes turned his skin the color of wet toilet paper. 

“She’s my neighbor Lily Treach from down the hall,” I said. 

The bald boy was about to say something else when she held up her hand again.  Her fan club had the look of angry Goths, but when she motioned them into silence, they kept quiet.  That should have told me something.  

She moved closer to me, a luminescence in her dark eyes, her lips parted, and they pulled back slightly when she stopped in front of me.  The room seemed to dim and the edges of my vision faded like I was at the beginning of a migraine.  She brushed away black hair streaked with white from her right ear and leaned closer as though listening to my thoughts.  Her soft musk smell surrounded me like the vapors of a hot spring. 

“You don’t believe?” she whispered. 

I didn’t know what to say.  I had walked over because she was good looking, but by then it was feeling like a bad idea.   

She repeated the question. 

“Believe what?”  I asked. 

“In what you write,” she said. 

“No,” I said. 

“But you should,” she said. 

“In Tarot cards, reading auras, and magic?”  I asked.  “That won’t fix the pot-holes on I-94.  Or maybe I should believe in Wicca and ancient religions and spells and hexes and drinking blood and boiling down little babies?” 

“At least,” she said. 

She wore tight black jeans with a wide belt covered with silver buckles.  Ornate silver rings circled each of her fingers and on her thumbs she had copper bands.  Underneath her black leather vest she wore a thin, tight sweater. 

“Real men don’t believe,” I said.   

Her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed and I took a half step backwards. 

“A shame,” she said, with a sudden flash of teeth white as a bright moon.  “I’m always interested in people who share my interests.” 

“So what about them?”  I said, nodding at the boys in black. 

“Companions,” she said.  “Every living being needs companions.  We, especially, need friends and helpers.  These are dangerous times for us.  People who believe the worst of us hunt us down.” 

“Like what people?” I asked. 

From behind her in the blurry mist of my fading vision, I heard one of the Goths snicker. 

I felt her palms press against my chest.  She looked right at me from just inches away, and I noticed that one of her eyes was light and the other was dark.  They grew larger and soon they were all that I could see. She whispered something to me in a voice as liquid as tears, and though I strained to catch what she was saying, her words were like music that I should have known but could not recognize. 

***** 

It was near midnight and I lay flat on my back in bed, the pillow double-rolled beneath my head and the blankets pulled up to my chin.  It was a warm night, but I kept the bedroom windows closed because lately I could hear the trees outside my room talking to each other in rustles and groans.  The apartment was still and the humid air clung to my face like moist clay.  Somewhere in another room, the cat was padding across the floor on its little fog feet, its eyes searching the dark for spirits. 

I could not sleep because I knew that eventually she would come into my room, hop silently up onto my bed, and then begin walking up my body, kneading her paws against the blanket as though trying to soften my skin.   

In the three weeks since the witch’s cursed child had brought me my new companion, I had written nothing except a paragraph here, a stray line there, and when I read them back later they made no sense.  I found that I had typed sentences without subjects, strings of verbs masquerading as quotes, and endless pages of periods and commas. 

Stay away from my room, I thought. 

I knew that I had to stay awake or she would sneak into my bedroom  and begin moving up my body, crawling toward my mouth so that she could steal the breath from my lungs while I slept. 

She yowled urgently and I knew that she wanted something, but I wasn’t sure what it was.  I called out for her to repeat it.   

Seconds flickered by on the digital clock. 

Moonlight the color of a werewolf’s eyes filtered through the blinds and I pulled the covers up higher and pressed them over my eyes.   

She wasn’t hungry.  No, it wasn’t that.  It wasn’t her litter box- I’d cleaned that before going to bed.  She didn’t like to be brushed at night, so it wasn’t that either.  Tension twisted my muscles.  I could have pretended that I was already asleep, but what if she didn’t believe me? 

I closed my eyes and the night moved on.  Sleep finally covered my mind and I dreamed something disturbing. 

***** 

The daylight hours seemed less and less like the time for me to be awake.  I began sleeping later and later. At first I would wake at ten in the morning, then two in the afternoon, then five, and soon I was eating breakfast after the sun went down.  I would dress quickly to make it to the corner store and buy treats and catnip, little bell toys, and things that dangled and shimmered because she liked to watch them dance and glitter. 

She liked the window facing the street open at night, and the apartment lights turned out.  I would pull up a metal chair and sit there with her, looking out into the night, not seeing everything that she saw.  When I stroked her, her fur felt like a woman’s hair.  She purred as my hand moved down her back the way that a lover sometimes growls with pleasure. 

Children were dark flashes down the sidewalk, the whir of their skateboards like electric knives cutting through meat. 

Winged things fluttered by; screeching shadows stuck in thin branches that caught them like garrotes.   

From the corner of my eye I saw something that looked like a gray dustball scurry across the room.  A streak of white blurred by me and I saw her land next to the intruder.  Her claw slapped it flat and I heard a quick squeal. 

The next morning, I found a bloody mouse head on my keyboard and tucked it into my right hip pocket.  As the hours passed, I tried to write but instead I kept taking out the tiny head and staring at its empty eye sockets. 

One night at three a.m., a car coughed and came to a stop in the street as we watched. When a thin man got out of the car carrying what looked to be a doctor’s bag, I saw her arch back and hiss.  He turned away from the car and looked directly up at us where we sat, as though it were possible to hear and see us through the dark window.  He cupped his mouth with his free hand and seemed to say something, but I heard nothing.   

Hunter, I thought. 

I felt motion behind me and turned to see the walls bend inward then straighten, then inward then straighten.  They bellowed inward and outward with the rhythm of my own lungs.  Papers that I had left lying on the floor began to scurry about as though looking for somewhere to hide.   

She hissed sharply, an expulsion of acid breath through bared teeth at the sound of knocking on the downstairs front entrance door. 

A cloud allowed moonlight to settle on her face as she turned, and her eyes seemed to suck in the rays.  Yet one eye still glowed a soft, haunted green, and the other shone like oil floating on water. 

***** 

She was still asleep when I woke the next afternoon.  My head was clouded and painful, and when I put my palm against my forehead it felt hot and sticky. 

The curtains were closed in the kitchen, but orange-yellow light pressed against them from the outside dusk.  The sink was filled with food-crusted dishes the color of dark mold.  The wastebasket lay on its side and a puddle of curdled milk wound toward me like an albino snake wriggling across the mottled yellow linoleum.  The smell of old bacon and buttermilk suffused the room and clung to my skin. 

 I opened the cabinet over the sink and felt around inside with stiff fingers.  I found the open bottle and pulled it out.  The label said that there were ninety ibuprofens inside, but that was a lie, since I had taken twelve every day for the last week. 

I leaned against the stove and threw back a handful of tablets into my mouth, and followed that by gulping warm water as I pushed aside food crusted dishes and held my head tilted back beneath the faucet.  I closed an eye as I twisted my neck to run water over one side of side of my face, and I saw that the only thing clean and shiny left in my dish drainer was the long butcher knife whose blade reflected back a distorted, dark, demonized caricature of my face. 

When I stood up, I felt a deep pressure hard against the inside of my head, like something was trying to escape by pushing through my skull.  I brought my hands up toward the pain but stopped when I saw how red and swollen they were.  My pulse throbbed beneath my fingernails.  I noticed dark scabs crusted over puncture wounds on my knuckles. 

“I should put something on that,” I said. 

The phone rang like a fire alarm in the other room, but I pretended I didn’t hear it and leaned forward to lick the back of my hands. 

***** 

An hour had passed and the apartment was dark.  I was sitting by the stove when she finally padded past me and hopped up onto my lap.  She purred and rubbed her head against my chest. 

“I’m tired,” I told her. 

She reverse arched and stretched her back. 

“It smells a little in here, don’t you think?”  I asked.  “Maybe the pilot light went out.  It’s like a gas smell.” 

I realized that it might have been my clothes mixed with the smell of the festering sink.  I felt down to my jeans pocket and took out the mouse head.  In the gauzy gray moonlight that filled the room, it seemed to have mummified.  I ran my left index fingertip over its withered ears, and then touched my own ears to feel the difference in texture.   

She pawed gently at my forearm and I said,  “Okay,” and returned it to my pocket. 

It had been a few days since I had changed clothes or bathed.  The only time that I left the apartment by then was the occasional walk to the corner store.  The owner didn’t look up at me any more when he cashed me out.  It seemed like a long time since I had talked to another person, but I was okay with that.  It was just the two of us now.  Lily Treach had been right- every living being needed a companion. 

The doorbell rang, sounding like a giant green and black beetle scurrying across an aluminum sheet. 

I leaned my head back and felt the enameled metal of the stove front. 

Again the doorbell. 

“Should I answer it?”  I asked. 

She hopped from my lap and padded toward the door. 

I followed, stopping twice to cover my ears to keep the cacophony  from liquefying my brain cells.  Someone was leaning against the doorbell.   

When I was directly in front of the door, the hideous noise stopped. 

I closed my eyes to a slit, afraid of the bright light that waited beyond.  I glanced down at her, to be certain that she wanted me to open it.  She inclined her head to one side, and I turned the knob. 

It was the witch’s child. 

“I got to talk to my mother,” he said.  

His eyes were wide and he brought his hand up to cover his nose and mouth. 

“She’s not here,” I said. 

“Okay,” he said from behind his hand. 

He kept his eyes on mine.  He didn’t look past me at the living room.  I could clean it later.  Maybe.  I had other things to do. 

He was still looking at me. 

I tucked part of my shirt in my jeans, wadding it up below the belt. 

She looked up at me, then padded into the hallway.  After a moment, the boy looked down at the carpet, then turned and began walking back toward his apartment with her.  My mind seemed to stretch the gray carpet and they took a very long time to get to the door at the end of the hall.   

“Hey,” I said,  “come back.” 

I took a step forward. 

The boy looked back and tripped, but caught his balance.  He ducked his head low and started walking faster. 

“Kitty, kitty,” I said.  “Here kitty, kitty.” 

She didn’t look back.  He started to run. 

At door to his apartment, he fumbled with the knob, pushed the door open and picked her up.  The door closed so fast that I knew he had put his whole body against it. 

I stood at the doorway to my apartment, realizing that I was alone. 

***** 

The night moved on. 

I went to my desk, shoved a crumpled bag from my chair and sat down.  It felt like I was sitting at someone else’s desk.  The clock in the system tray of my computer read two in the morning.  Outside, I heard the claws fingers of a tree scratching to get in.  The screen saver went round and round in an endless infinity of colors like a green and red poisonous snake devouring its tail. 

My mind tried to grasp why I was there.  I could not write. 

I pulled the mouse head from my pocket and placed it on my keyboard.   

Time slipped away as I sat there. The computer clock told me that it was two forty-five in the morning.  I looked at her gift.  The lips had peeled back and I could see its sharp little teeth.  If she had not killed it, it could have clawed its way up my blankets as I slept and bit me, maybe even given me rabies. 

The computer clock displayed two fifty in the morning.  I realized that the dark man with the doctor’s bag would be back to look for her.  He would be searching for a way in to use the gleaming stainless tools it contained to hurt her.  I knew then that she wouldn’t come back while he was alive. 

I didn’t like being alone.  It made my skin itch.  It made me very angry. 

I got up from the chair and went in the kitchen and retrieved the butcher’s knife.  Its wooden handle empowered my hand, and I ran its blade over my left palm to test its edge.  A thin line of pain seeped blood that began to pool and when I angled my hand sideways, the scarlet fluid began to drip.  I looked down at the floor, and watched it form a tiny pool of darkness.   

The hunter would pull up sooner or later in his car, turn off the lights, and step out into the street just like he did last time.  I wrapped a dirty dishrag around my wound and pulled it tight with my teeth.  I squeezed the knife handle in my other hand, and began walking toward the door. 

***** 

Editor’s note: 

Police arrived on the street shortly a neighbor who couldn’t sleep saw Nathan step out into the street waving a butcher knife, then attack and kill a stranger, now known to be William Kinzle, for no apparent reason.  Nathan escaped on foot, eluding capture for two days.  It is now known that he wrote the above manuscript while in hiding.  When it was finished, he found his way that night to the I-75 freeway, where he threw himself in front of an approaching tractor trailer.