1 YEAR AND 23 DAYS AFTER
THE DAY, FRIDAY, JUNE 4
Sohlberg reaches into the shelf and takes out Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — the doomed lovers.
“Huh!”
He’s amazed that his parents still have all of the compact discs that he bought them over the decades for their birthdays and for Christmas and for Mother’s Day and for Father’s Day. He opens the case and studies the libretto for the divine and unsurpassed 1953 classic EMI recording with Kirsten Flagstad (Soprano) and Blanche Thebom (Mezzo Soprano) and Ludwig Suthaus (Tenor) and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Baritone) and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Orchestra directed by Wilhelm Furtwangler.
The prelude overwhelms Sohlberg with its intensity.
He takes Wagner’s masterpiece off the CD player and decides to hear the opera at another time. Wagner’s music hits too close to home. The music literally brings to his heart and mind and soul the overpowering nature of love and death and how those two mixed together can easily lead to insanity itself.
The sickening shisssh of the rope going through the carabiner on Karoline’s harness. Her eyes wide and filled with love and acceptance of her fate.
The last soft breath of Harald Junior before the leukemia killed him. His dreamy eyes slowly dimming away until the light is extinguished and gone.
The grief. The insanity.
A month after Karoline’s death Sohlberg takes a trip to a country house at Asgardstrand. A partner at Sohlberg’s law firm offers him indefinite use of the house for Sohlberg to have all the time and space to decompress. Sohlberg has always wanted to visit the popular summer vacation spot and pretty fishing village in Vestfold County about 65 miles south of Oslo. He spends days just watching the sailboats and the fishing boats from the lovely southwest side of the mouth of the Oslofjord. At night he watches panoramic lightning from immense thunderstorms that roll in from the North Sea over the Strait of Skagerrak.
His grief worsens. A guilty conscience consumes him for not having asked Karoline to check her ropes and knots. On the third night he takes his uncle’s double-barrel shotgun out of the car and loads the shells. His plan: walk down to the dock with the loaded shotgun when no one is around and end his pain and reunite with Karoline.
Unfortunately a knock on the door at midnight. Then more loud pounding.
“Hello,” yells Matthias Otterstad. “Wake up Sohlberg. . I know you’re in there. I’m here to keep you company. Open up will you! I brought a ton of food with me.”
Sohlberg’s plans remain inactive until his son dies. A guilty conscience again. This time for not having spent enough time with his son or for that matter with his wife. Again a loaded gun and plans interrupted by an unexpected visitor — Chief Homicide Detective Alec Mikesell of the combined Salt Lake City Police and Salt Lake County Sheriff Task Force in Utah.
Fru Sohlberg calls her husband out of his painful reverie: “Sohlberg where are you?”
Sohlberg takes the stairs up to his wife and says, “Just checking out stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Oh. . just looking at some of the operas that I bought my parents many years ago.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Actually yes. Wagner. Tristan and Isolde.”
“Why that one?”
“I don’t know. . I picked it at random but it seems appropriate.”
“How so?”
“How love sometimes leads to insanity.”
“Are you thinking of the missing boy. . Karl Haugen?”
“Ja. Of course. . what else?”
“You need to rest for this investigation. Please come to sleep.”
“I can’t with this midnight sun. I have a lot to think about.”
Nothing. Absolutely nothing surprises him any more. After eight years she has exhausted any surprise left in him. He certainly won’t be surprised if she doesn’t break down in a torture session and tell him what he wants and needs to hear. The only surprise will be how she reacts to the torture and how she reacts when she realizes that he will exterminate her.
Will she scream?
Will she cry?
Will she beg for mercy?
If she begs for mercy he will remind her that she gave him none. Therefore all that she can expect is justice. Ja that’s all she can expect. And that’s all she deserves.
“What a waste,” he says softly to himself as he mows the lawn with a manual or push reel mower which she forced him to use because she’s very worried about climate change and carbon emissions.
The grass clippings fly off the sharp blades just like the many illusions that he had about her and their love and their marriage. Together eight years and married half that time. And the mystery of her true nature only keeps getting stronger. She is unfathomable. She is unknowable.
He almost laughs when he thinks of how much he will enjoy shoving her lifeless body into a special barrel that he brought from his workplace a few months ago. The barrel is specially designed to hold acids and it is marked ‘CORROSIVE” and he shivers with ecstasy at the thought of how greatly he will enjoy pouring acid on her lifeless body and how after 6 hours in an acid bath she will become nothing but a pink fluid to be taken to a chemical recycling plant. He giggles when he thinks of her tombstone — a barrel marked CORROSIVE.
He starts laughing and laughing when he realizes that finally something in her miserable and toxic life of lies is true: CORROSIVE.
Ja that’s her!
His shoulders shake as he laughs and laughs and thinks of her winding up as a acidic gob of pink nothingness. Ja. She will be truly unfathomable and unknowable at the chemical waste management plant that will receive the barrel with her remains.
The barrel. He’s glad to have snuck one out of his employer’s factory during a long holiday weekend when no one was looking or paying close attention. He’s already begun stealing two bottles of acid at the time from the factory’s nearby warehouse. No one notices since they literally use thousands of gallons of acid every week. When a man plans the end and when a man works on the end phase of a project then everything else falls into place all the way back to the beginning of the project.
Is her acid grave a case of the end justifying the means?
He laughs at his hilarious observation.
An hour later he is raking the dead grass clippings off the lawn and she is watching him from their deck in the backyard. She is tanning topless. He waves at her and blows her a kiss. She barely smiles as if she’s a stunning celebrity bored by her beauty and the fawning idiots who worship her.
How did she first trick me?
What was her hook and bait?
What lies did she use to catch me?
His mind searches the earliest memories that he has of her. He goes over these memories and he’s sickened by the realization that he’s been played like a violin by a virtuoso.
He decides that when he tortures her he will cut off one of her fingers for every big lie she ever told him. That means he’ll have to start lopping off her toes soon after finishing the ten amputations on her hands.
He realizes that with all of her many many lies he’ll quickly run out of fingers and toes to chop and slice off.
Should I instead cut each finger and toe one little piece at a time at the different joints?
That would certainly increase his quality time with her.
The first big lie. For that whopper he has to cut off her right thumb.
“You’re adopted? So am I.”
Was that also her first hook into him?
“I was born in the Ostlandet the East Country. My mother came from a wealthy family. She was forced by her family to give me up for adoption.”
Her coming from a wealthy family background lowered his natural resistance to sleeping with someone who was vulgar and tacky and worked as an assistant manager at the McDonald’s where he went once a week for a milkshake. Everyone at his company especially the senior managers and their wives would have been embarrassed to see him with a woman who wore garish makeup that startled and gaudy-colored polyester clothes that revealed too much. She chewed bubble gum loudly and all day long even while eating a meal or making love or sitting on the toilet.
Her mother later corrected her daughter’s misinformation:
“Born to a wealthy family? No. The social worker told us her mother turned tricks just to get a bottle of vodka. Sometimes just for a smoke and a beer. Wealthy family? Nonsense. She’s making things up. . as always. Oh well. I should’ve put a stop to that when I caught her telling her teachers and friends that she was one of the King’s illegitimate children.”
“Why didn’t you stop her from lying?”
“I just didn’t want to affect her self-esteem. You know what psychologists say about parents ruining a child’s self-esteem. . ”
He said nothing although he wanted to say, “What do these dumb psychologists say about you pathologically spoiling a child and letting them get away with bald-faced lies?”
The two university professors had gone overboard in spoiling her as their only child. She always got whatever she wanted from them as a child and it was just as bad after she turned 20.
There was one thing that she had not lied to him about and that was when she told him:
“My parents are idiots. They’ll do anything and everything for me. I snap my fingers and they ask me how high they need to jump.”
Her parents always believed whatever she told them at face value even when they should have suspected some of her behavior as an adult. For example: after she got a drunk driving conviction they believed her lie that she had not been drunk but rather driving impaired because she was sleepy and exhausted from taking care of him and his and her children at home.
“Our poor daughter. She works so hard. That judge was so mean. He simply wouldn’t listen!”
Of course she never told her parents that she had also received a suspended conviction for child endangerment because her son had been in the car with her when she drove plastered with double the legal blood alcohol limit. But to her credit she did milk the drunk driving crash for all it was worth. She stopped doing chores at home and never cared for her son because she had “migraines” and “back pain” from the “accident.”
The second big lie. For that lie her right index finger comes flying off the chopping block.
“Did you know I came from old money on my mother’s side?”
“No,” he said without realizing that she used this lie to make her vulgarity and failed career as a teacher more palatable. He would never have brought a McDonald’s worker into his home as a sex partner let alone a live-in companion. The lie about old money tricked him.
“My poor mother. . she was forced to give me up because her family and my father’s family opposed their union. His family is blue blood if you know what I mean and they couldn’t tolerate her being a commoner even if her family had money.”
He wondered if her endless lying perhaps came from an adopted child never getting over feelings of abandonment. He never had. Nor his brother. Sure they were grateful for the love and care of their adoptive parents. But deep down he always wondered why his mother had tossed him and his brother aside to another set of parents.
Constant feelings of abandonment always left him torn between having to commit to a permanent relationship with a woman versus the convenience of a temporary disposable relationship. Somehow he always wound up with the convenient and disposable relationships because that was after all the relationship that his precious birth mother had inflicted on him and his brother. He also noticed that he always became enraged whenever he thought about his birth mother and her decision which had enormous consequences including the molestation.
Do unto others as you have had done unto you the abandoned.
Does she think the same thoughts I have?
In hindsight he realized that she did indeed feel abandoned. She later admitted that much one day when a few drinks loosened her tongue. And yet she would never admit that she had an unsatiable need to be accepted by someone who would love her and want her and only her. Nor would she admit that she was angry or bitter over the abandonment. Unlike him she never said anything about her anger and bitterness over being abandoned. Not even when he plied her with alcohol to get her talking. She always fell into a silent dark brooding that at first charmed him and later scared him.
When he tortured her would she feel abandoned?
When he snuffed the life out of her would she feel abandoned?
He couldn’t wait to see her reaction to her torture and her own death. Finally she’d get a taste of her own medicine.
The third big lie. For that lie he slowly saws off her middle finger.
“I love teaching elementary school. I’ve always wanted to be an elementary school teacher since I was nine years old.”
Was that her third hook into him?
Did she know that this statement would win him over as a single father?
Of course she did. An elementary school teacher is the ultimate example of a kind and nurturing role model who exercises a positive influence over children especially those living in a single parent household. He’s angry and disgusted by how easily he fell for that lie.
After they got married her mother dropped another bombshell on him when she said:
“Did my daughter really tell you that she wanted to be an elementary school teacher since she was nine years old? Oh no. Absolutely not. She always wanted to be a beauty queen. . and an actress when she got older. . oh yes she definitely wanted to be a movie star when she got older. But she really didn’t have the looks did she?”
He almost told the mother: “But she does have a talent for acting!”
Her talent for acting never failed to impress him. The problem was that almost no one ever saw it was acting until long after the performance was delivered and the desired outcome was accomplished and her gullible audience left ready for more after having swallowed her lies hook line and sinker.
He once met her former mother-in-law (per husband Number Two) who said:
“She always put on a big production. Everything she did was only to impress people. I mean. . goodness me. . well her productions were extravagant. She was after my son and trying to get him to marry her and so she used to bring me and my husband all these flowers and candy and gifts and poems and cards and that all stopped after she got married to my son. She had what she wanted and didn’t need us no more.
“Then she started again with the gifts and cards and phony friendship when she tried to get us to loan her money. She used to make these pretty cards with top ten lists of why we were good parents or friends or whatever and it was incredible how totally accurate she was about us. That was surprising. She knew us very well. . a lot more than we ever knew her."
“Did she get the loan from you?”
“No and you can imagine what happened when she did not get the loan. . no more gifts or telephone calls or cards or visits for us.”
The fourth big lie. Her finger comes off after he beats it to a pulp with a hammer.
“I was good at swimming. My parents were swimming champions in high school and the university. I even got to national finals in my senior year of high school. I love swimming and competing in sports.”
She told him the lie about her loving swimming after he made the mistake of showing her his high school swimming trophies and medals. That’s when she instantly became little Miss Froken Swimming Champion who loved swimming and competing.
At a high school reunion the swim coach quickly corrected the false information:
“Loved swimming? No. She hated swimming. Her father forced her to do it. She lost her first competition on purpose. She never made it to national finals. That’s a big fat lie! She wouldn’t even jump into the water at the starting line of her first competition. After that she dropped out of the team and never swam or competed again. I never understood how even after she did that her parents kept showering her with money and clothes. They even bought her a brand new Volvo while she was in high school. Can you believe that?”
The fifth big lie. For that he makes her eat her own right pinkie finger which he severs with a cleaver.
“I’m kind of a shy bookworm. . a homebody really.”
Was that another hook into him the introvert who preferred reading for hours in silence at home?
He was soon dissuaded of this wrong impression at a booze-fueled party by one of her friends who was a teacher at the school where the monster briefly taught part-time:
“Book worm? Other than being forced to read books at school for homework I don’t think she’s even read one comic book or magazine in her life. No books. Just partying and spending money. She’s a party girl alright. Did you know that she always dated two or more boys at the same time in high school and college?”
“No.”
“Oh yeah. Done the same thing when she was married those three times. I guess I’ve told you too much. But you guys ain’t married. . are you?”
“No. But we’ve talked about it.”
“Keep it at the talk level honey.”
“Why?”
“She once told me she couldn’t wait to get married so she could start dating again.”
“That’s funny.”
“It sure wasn’t funny for her first or second or third husband. See. . she married Husband Number One because he was a rich Daddy’s Boy who partied hard and could get her away from her parent’s control without her having to leave home and get a job. The problem was that his parents absolutely hated her. They had to pay her off when her husband decided to get a divorce after his parents showed him that she had lied about having to get married to him because she was pregnant when it of course turned out that she wasn’t knocked up.
“Then before she’s divorced from Husband Number One she jumps into bed with future Husband Number Two who’s as smart as a drunk donkey. She gets him started in business with her parents’ money in a business that eventually failed. She soon gets pregnant and after she has their baby Thor she goes nuts and starts dating other high school flames and generally sleeping with anything in pants. I remember one week when she bragged about sleeping with nine men during a long weekend in addition to her future Husband Number Two.”
“She told me she was divorced when she met her second husband.”
“No. No. She was still married to the Rich Daddy’s Boy. Later on she was dating several men while that dumb donkey of Husband Number Two was out busy busting his tail trying to make her parents’ business work.”
“And the baby?”
“She couldn’t stand the baby after a couple of weeks. Couldn’t stand being tied down to a kid. The Mommy thing got boring for her real fast. She dumped the baby with her parents since she wasn’t working. When they got tired she dumped the kid on her husband’s parents.”
He now realizes he was blind blind blind to her pattern of getting bored and frustrated with a child. He’s angry and disgusted at how he never caught on to how she always abandoned anything and anyone after she got bored and frustrated with anything or anyone she could not perfectly control. Like her first swimming competition. Like her teaching career. Like her bodybuilding. Like her husbands. Like her son.
The sixth big lie. That means he burns off her left thumb with a blowtorch.
“I’ve always worked. No welfare for me. I always worked to put food on the table for me and my son. When I couldn’t get permanent full-time employment at any of the schools I swallowed my pride and went to work in restaurants.”
Was that another hook into him who always feared getting stuck with a parasitic woman who’d latch unto him just for his incredible income?
Of course it was. One summer she had a bad cold and asked him to take her son Thor to spend the weekend visiting Husband Number Three the boy’s adoptive father. By that time he was wising up to her. He decided to have a talk with the boy’s father because one of his friends a manager at Genentech gave him what turned out to be priceless advice:
“The best way to get a handle on your wife is to talk to and be friendly with your wife’s ex-husband or ex-husbands.”
At the drop-off point he invited the boy’s father for lunch while the boy played at a park next to the restaurant. It didn’t take long for the truth to come out even before the waitress served them the traditional open-faced sandwiches.
Thor’s father looked straight at him as if reading his mind and said, “Ah. The joys of fatherhood.”
“Ja. That is true.”
“Problem is that sometimes the joy gets forced on you.”
“That’s true too.”
“Look at me. Three years after we got married I finally fell for the daddy trap that she had carefully prepared and laid out for me months if not years before. I should’ve seen it coming from the first year of our marriage when she released her second husband from financial maintenance for their son.
“My mother warned me over and over to be careful. She told me over and over that it was a trap. . a set-up.
“I stupidly thought she had released her second husband from his financial obligations because the man was a deadbeat who spent most of his time unemployed and drinking after she left him. I should have seen it coming when she got the ex-husband to release all of his parental rights to the boy in exchange for being released from the child support.”
“What could you do?”
“Leave her. Kick her lazy lying cheating butt out of the house. Instead I stayed and she worked up a big production for me every day about the boy growing up all alone in the world without a father. Then at night she would love my brains out. She knows how to work a man. I stupidly caved in and adopted the boy. The loving stopped of course.
“I adopted the boy despite the fact that my parents warned me a million times not to do it. They begged me. They showed me how much of my income would disappear into child support if she was to ever divorce me down the road.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That she’d never divorce me. Ja. . I knew that she loved me working and bringing her money while she did nothing at home other than sleeping with other men and partying with her girlfriends. Two months after I adopt the boy she divorces me and tells the court that I’m ‘controlling and abusive’. Ain’t that something?”
“The pot calling the kettle black.”
“Ja. Ain’t that something? She dumps the kid on me during the divorce. . I think that’s when she started dating you. Then after she moves in with you she takes the kid back. . which means that I had to start paying her child support again.”
“I’m sorry. This is all so much to think about. I didn’t know about this situation with her. We should talk more from now on.”
“Ja ja. By the way. . it kills me that she always brings him back here to me with no change of clothes. I now have to buy him clothes for the weekend. Just what the heck do you guys do with all the money that I have to pay every month now that she has custody and I only have visitation.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the big fat check I send your wife every month for my son’s support!”
“That’s her department. I don’t see any of it,” he said. “How much do you pay her?”
When he heard the enormous sum his rage almost exploded that day at the restaurant and the drive back home. But to his credit he did not say anything at all to her about how he had discovered that she was hiding and secretly pocketing all that child support money while she made him buy all of the boy’s clothes and toys and food and you name it.
“So,” said the ex-husband, “do you see why I’m angry that she sent the boy here today with no extra clothes for the weekend? Not even pyjamas. . now I have to buy him more clothes.”
“Ja. I see your point.”
“Do you? You know. . I once went to see her. . and begged her to please lower the child support payments because I had to help my widowed sister in New York City who had cancer. My sick sister had five children to care for. . and I desperately needed to send her and the five children money.
“What does your wife do?
“She smiles and says yes. .that she’ll gladly go to her lawyer and ask him to lower the monthly payment. . then. . an hour later the police are at my office asking about me ‘harassing and threatening’ her.”
“Not good.”
“There’s more. Much more. A year after we got married she went back to school to get her undergraduate degree. She had me pay her tuition. I never got to go to the university and get my degree because I paid for her schooling. She always told me she’d pay me back once she got to teach but the crazy broad could never get full-time work at teaching because all of the teachers and principals and staff soon got to hate the Bossy Queen Bee.”
“She told me that getting a full-time teaching job at an elementary school is not easy. . but rather difficult.”
“Oh really? I don’t think it’s that difficult since I later found out that she finally got a full-time job offer to teach.”
“She never told me.”
“Why should she? That’s when you proposed to her. She turned down the job offer as soon as you slipped that big fat engagement ring on her finger. The meal-ticket of her newest Prince Charming had arrived to rescue her from working at McDonald’s and at a school. . and so. . she traded me the old beat-up model for the higher income model you offered and now provide her.”
The seventh big lie. For that he slowly electrocutes and burns off her left thumb with a live electric wire wrapped like a ring around the base of her thumb.
“I’m not big into material things. I don’t like showing-off. Hate it. My family is my life. That’s all I care about.”
Was that another well-placed hook into him who was so careful with his hard-earned money?
She said she wasn’t big into material things and yet she made it abundantly clear that she wanted a big fat diamond from him for the engagement ring and the wedding ring. He remembers how she spent a small fortune on clothes at H amp; M shortly after claiming that she had ‘lost’ the engagement ring.
She doesn’t like showing-off but she forced him into an expensive wedding on a private island in Greece. She then pushed him into buying her the red Audi TT sports car as a wedding gift with the car title in her name only.
She says she hates showing off and loves family above everything else and yet she abandoned him and everyone else so she could spend 8 to 10 hours a day every day of the week at the gym training for bodybuilding championships. During that time he had to cook and care for her son from another marriage and for his son from a previous marriage because she simply refused to do any other work other than working on the sculpting of her body.
Is that when her anger started getting out of control?
Did she take steroids? After all they are well-known for causing uncontrollable rage as a side-effect.
Probably. For sure she took those fat-burning pills that acted like amphetamines and left her paranoid and wide awake night after night. That’s also when she started hanging around all these female muscle-building freaks at the gym. They were such disgusting repulsive freaks. The sight of women ogling each other was sickening to him especially when the women lathered themselves in oil and then slowly flexed different muscles groups such as their stomach muscles or butts. Their rippling muscles looked like oiled snakes moving under their skin.
She hates showing off but she made him pay for her giant breast implants after she quit bodybuilding.
Her family is her life but she dumped their children at the gym’s daycare so she could spend most of the day doing whatever she wanted with whomever she wanted.
The eighth big lie. For that he chews off her left index finger.
Or should he buy a pet rat to chew her finger off by putting the rat into a tube and then lighting a blowtorch behind the rat and letting the rat chew through her bone and flesh?
Or should he use the rat to chew through her nose and cheeks or through her ribs or stomach?
The eighth lie was one of her worst and most damaging lies. She trapped him forever with that lie. She would have her hand inside his pockets for the next twenty years paying child support if they divorced.
The eighth lie had been so so clever.
“I can’t have more children. The doctor said my tubes and uterus are scarred beyond repair from a bad infection I got from my IUD. . my intrauterine device almost killed me. Anyway I take the pill just to make sure.”
Her pregnancy almost two years ago left him stunned and in a daze for weeks. He was beyond surprised because she made him think that there was absolutely no way that they were going to have children. She often left the circular birth control pill dispenser on the bathroom counter so that he was sure to see it.
When he no longer saw the pill dispenser on the bathroom she told him:
“Oh honey. . I forgot to tell you. . I switched to Implanon. . it’s even more effective than the pill. . the nurse put the little plastic rod in my arm a week ago. . just under my skin. . kind of hurt a little. . the slow and steady drug release lasts three years. We won’t have to worry anymore about my forgetting to take the pill. Now you take your clothes off and come into bed right now so we can celebrate my little rod with your big rod!”
The baby.
She changed even more after the baby than she did with the bodybuilding. After the baby she had no patience and lots of explosive temper with my son and her son. The baby turned her world upside down. She was no longer in control. The baby controlled her and everyone else.
Why was she so angry about the baby?
Aren’t babies supposed to change you from selfish to altruistic?
Aren’t babies supposed to make you grow into a better adult?
No. Not with her. Her moods only got worse and worse.
Was it postpartum depression as she claimed or was that just another lie to avoid responsibility?
Right after having the baby is when she started getting on the Internet for hours and hooking up with all of her old boyfriends. The worst was finding out with his key logging software that she put herself out on many websites for singles and for people looking for relationships. Trolling for men hour after hour. Sending them lewd disgusting messages and nude pictures.
Why have a baby if you start acting like you hate the baby?
Her moods. They left no room for error. She got nasty even with her son and of course with my son.
Should I have let her be so strict with the two boys especially with my son?
Who wouldn’t have let her have her way if they had heard her arguing all the time about disciplining the boys especially my son?
He decides then and there that the torture sessions will include him forcing caustic lye down her throat to let her feel what it was like hearing her rant on and on every day about how she was an educator a trained professional who knew how to handle children.
He finishes mowing the yard and planning her torture and he walks into the kitchen exhausted and dripping in sweat.
“Are you going to feed the baby?” she says in her surly bad-mood voice.
“Sure. . but I was going to clean the deck and then prune the driveway bushes. Why can’t you-”
She walks out of the room. “I’m going to the gym. I need a break!”
She’s too far away to hear him say:
“Yeah bitch. . I’ll give you a break. . break your neck!”
He realizes that there’s no way he’s going to wait a full year before exterminating her. He’s got to do it sooner. If not he’ll go absolutely stark raving mad. He calls his parents.
“Hiya. . good. . I wanted to see if I can use Grandpa’s old barn for a painting project. Ja. . I’ve got several things I need to spray-paint.”
He hangs up and closes his eyes. The old barn. The pervert. The molestations. The violations. Bad bad memories.
Can a building attract bad people doing bad things?
He’s gonna do bad bad things. Just like in the old days.