Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  Remember how Cassandra sat so still and quietly in the seething locker room filled with angry girls and their clothing. Remember how hard Mrs. Brodie had to shove through the masses of girls around that iron post, and how, once the girl was carried off in a coma, that was all we knew.

  I don’t remember why Hiawatha was running. He could be hunting. White men could be chasing him. And since I was sure he was a girl, white men could be chasing her. But Hiawatha wasn’t panicked. She was running as if she was running for plain pleasure. She could be running into the woods toward something beautiful that might be there in the center of an uninhabited and unmapped place.

  The real end of the story about Scott is that after a while my mother got a different job and the next year at school Scott wasn’t there, and when I asked around no one knew where he was. Someone said his mother switched him to the next district over. I looked in the phone book, and I remember looking at the lists and lists of names, how everyone seemed equally invisible. I called some high schools, but no one had his name and after that there was nothing to do. He was gone and that was it.

  I have this idea that for some forgotten period of time when I was a little, little kid, running around not knowing the name of anything, life was a mystery. Days felt like ages, and so much happened in each one that I couldn’t possibly remember. And I didn’t really know I was supposed to remember, that I was meant to organize my experiences, to keep track of them and add them up, that they were supposed to be meaningful at the end of the day. I have this idea that before I knew to differentiate one thing from the next I lived a kind of freedom. It’s sort of ignorance-is-bliss, the state I’m describing, but only in retrospect, only with the kind of hindsight that creates foresight. If you know very much at all, everything gets really scary.

  Let me make this plain, or as plain as it is to me: one thing about psychokillers is that they’ve always been around, and the way we know it is that they’re so fastidiously depicted. The depictions feed off the people, and the people feed on the depictions. Every person is a depiction as soon as she imagines.

  So, for instance, you’ve heard about how there’s a kind of psychokiller who organizes and strategizes his destructions, the way an artist organizes and strategizes. Plots and plans and dry runs. Scripts and rehearsals for this guy. Then the psychokiller kills and makes a big old mess.

  I mean it’s really hard to kill someone. Look at that Hitchcock flick where they strangle that guy. It’s exhausting.

  How satisfying, after all that work, the awful mess.

  This guy’s like a kid with dominoes, who sets the whole thing up, domino after domino into a pleasing shape. If he’s one kind of psychokiller, he’ll tentatively touch the first piece and watch the journey unfold with distant glee. If he’s another kind of psychokiller he sees the thing all laid out, how simultaneously silly and ambitious it is, and sweeps his arms across the whole map, sends the dotted blocks spinning.

  But what I’m thinking of here is how there’s another psychokiller, who doesn’t bother setting any dominoes. He has no pretenses—it’s obvious so much is built already and not for him. Sometimes, he comes across a coil of dominoes and thinks “Those fucking idiots, don’t they know I could just knock that down?”

  All I mean is, I emerged from that time when I lived without judgment, and then I witnessed an order that was not mine.

  The True History of Black Caesar, the Runaway Slave Who Became a Pirate

  They taught a lot of regional history in school, but I missed it all because I came late and left early. So I don’t know how they taught the part about pirates, but sometime after I left the area I heard from somewhere about this Monsieur, a fancy French planter who lived in Haiti and owned a bunch of slaves who cleared the land and raked it into place and planted it with, primarily, crops useful for selling. From the highest window of his great house, and filled with the pride of a great conqueror, Monsieur liked to survey the growing civilization that billowed like an embroidered sheet below him: the efficient fields of sugar and occasional pineapples, plants as sweet as little ladies, some lithe and some plump, and wherever those fields petered into the jungle, his slaves were already working, two by two, with long two-handled saws, clearing the mahogany and stacking the logs in tidy pyramids. Monsieur did this daily, gazed from his high window, as a kind of observance of God, or of Nature, or perhaps even he knew it—an observance of self, and each day the sight filled him with such hope that his mind felt filled with ideas that bustled like bees in the hive of his head. He had to wait it out, let the bees jostle themselves into place, let some bees flit out his ears and away until one bee was left, and this was the bee that’d be his bee for the day. “Next we shall plant tobacco!” or “Next we’ll import a service of china!” Those sorts of bees.

  One day, his lofty gaze fell on a particular scampering African boy, and instantly he found himself taken. He shook his head and all the bees but that one fled.

  “That boy has a cleverness of stride. An intellect shines in his form,” he thought, and ordered the boy brought from the fields to the great house for duties more dignified than hacking at this and that plant and this or that patch of earth.

  The boy was called Henri. Little Henri, they called him at the house. They let his job be carrying bath water and working the punkah, which is the name for that wood and cloth stretcher thing on ropes that fans great halls. The house slaves petted his head and said, “I know you miss your Mama,” and sometimes a ruffled lady might look at him with kindness, or let him peek at a colorful piece of needlework, or tell him, “The Monsieur thinks you are special.” Henri paid close attention to the wealthy people and he thought he’d like wealth, too. He paid enough attention that he learned a lot about language and the manners of wealthy people. He noticed how they layered themselves in clothing, particularly the women, and how unnecessarily complicated they made the fastenings of their corsets and gowns.

  Monsieur meanwhile flitted from one to another idea, and when he next laid eyes on Henri it was years later and I suspect he noticed the boy only because he wondered what one so ugly was doing in the house. This boy no longer even looked like a boy. He was more like a giant, barrel-chested and clumsy, with a long face and sagging eyes. This one had no depth perception to speak of and routinely walked too close to doorjambs while carrying trays of teacups. He was frightening the women. He filled hallways and knocked his head into candelabras.

  One day Monsieur joined several ladies for tea and parlor games and Henri committed some breaking, spilling, knocking of something. Monsieur said, “Who let this monster in the house? Out with you and to the chopping of mahogany!”

  “But Monsieur,” said a particular plump lady, who was brave enough not to fear Henri’s garish face and bullish body, who, in fact, rather appreciated the humorous aspect of a big scary man entrusted with such dainty chores as delivering triangular pastries. In fact this lady felt a rounded affection for Henri, because she could see he was utterly innocent to the fear he invoked. He seemed to her as sweet as a bucket of new milk from a cow, maybe dopey, growing too fast as young men will do, struggling to find their minds within their bodies. “Monsieur,” said the lady, “this is the boy you once liked so particularly. He’s grown.”

  In that moment, time sprung for Monsieur. He remembered noticing the boy, those years ago, and it was a kind of folded feeling, because he knew he hadn’t thought of the boy once between that first recognition from his high window and this current moment. He sat on the edge of his brocade parlor chair, with his hands on the arms, as if about to rise, and you could see him tilt his head with thoughtful intensity, like that dog with the Victrola who hears his master’s voice. In Monsieur’s mind, a line of soldiers that went over the hills and into the distance snapped into a new formation, into a line like a firing squad, right there in front of him. Time swung in one massive perspective shift, from z axis to y. Monsieur felt sad, and he wept quietly at the tragedy of a quick boy becoming so ugly.
It made him sad to think how one could be born destined to be a brute, doomed to brutality, so to speak. It seems like only yesterday, he thought.

  Then Monsieur sent Henri back outside, where he was given a two-handled saw and set to dismantling the jungle.

  Imagine Henri, dismantling the jungle. Once there was an octopus, trained for a circus to do tricks for food. When the circus collapsed, the octopus was kept in a tank in a room stacked with other animals. Someone came to feed him, but no one paid attention to his tricks. The octopus grew pale, chromatophores blinking ever slower and expiring, swimming the patterns and turning his tentacles in the shapes that once earned him shrimp. Time moved, and one day the octopus performed his routine, waited, slumped, and then stabbed himself to death with his beak. Henri did not kill himself, but this is what time can do when it collapses, blink in the dusk and you’re nothing you knew yourself to be before. Henri’s eviction shocked him, stunted him, stopped his mind from moving because suddenly he was not who he’d been told he was, who he felt he’d known himself to be.

  Next, twelve years passed as Henri pulled and shoved on the two-handled saw, one or another brute version of himself attached to the other end, on the other side of one and then another tree. Although he knew there was always a man on the other end of the saw, he caught only glimpses, and he could see only one part of the man’s body, or another part. With so much time passing, Henri didn’t know if he’d worked the saw with one other man, with many men, with many parts of men, or with shadows of himself. At first he clung to memories of blue-and-white china on silver trays surrounded by tiny, immaculate cakes. He sucked particles of the goodies from the air and through time, as when he was a boy he’d sucked crumbs with his lips from the emptied plates. He pictured himself tugging the punkah cords instead of the two-man-saw, standing behind the reclining bodies of two lithe ladies and a plump one instead of two spindly trees and a shrub. He pictured the ladies fanning the pages of the books they carried, little paper books with strips of velvet to mark their places, and he pictured the lines of print lifting from the fluttering pages and making one zigzagging string of linked letters that, if stretched out, could bind the entire plantation and leave it gagging in the sand. Sometimes he pushed and shoved so hard and with such relentless rhythm that the man on the other side of the tree, at the other end of the saw, would howl at him to slow down. “You’re gonna kill me,” the other man said, or “Why you wanna kill this tree so bad?”

  Henri worked with such intensity that he blocked out all sounds but the sounds of his mind. His eyes were like the eyes of a person talking on the telephone, eyes that sometimes shift, but are usually vacant, as if focused on a cottonball floating a foot away. Henri worked so hard that by the time his mind shifted into the present, it was twelve years gone by and the fields were burning, the slaves’ tiki huts were burning, the jungle was wet and smoky and burning too, around him. He’d missed the years of brewing plans and whispers, and suddenly the place was in revolt. Henri looked at the other end of his saw, but no one was there. He shook the saw in the air and it made a thundering sound. He took the sound into his body. His mind cleared and his eyes narrowed with a sudden blank wisdom. He could feel his brain thump in its shell. The last of his boyhood seemed to fall to his feet in a heap like heat at the end of a long day, to slough itself like a snakeskin. All around him rioting raged. He began to move through the bodies, the snakeskin caught around an ankle, clinging but weightless. Slaves strung Frenchmen from trees by their garterbelts and torched them as they dangled. They knocked Frenchmen from their horses, looped their feet into their stirrups and set the horses dragging them, panicked, through the burning fields. Others they herded with sticks, past the flames and into the ocean where they splashed, spasmed, and sunk like wilted leaves.

  Slaves in Revolt! Runaway Slaves!

  Henri trudged through the rioting like he was bushwhacking dense jungle brush and soon he reached the great house. Coifed heads of ladies and their sappy children bounced down staircases and wobbled on the verandah.

  “I want Monsieur!” Henri hollered, his saw flashing and flinging sparkles in the flaming air. And although he’d kept to himself, seething all those years with all that was left of his memory, and although not one of his fellow slaves could claim to have known him before that moment, every man who heard him holler for Monsieur saw him and shook with fear at the sight of him. Henri Caesar was enraged to a higher and fuller pitch than anything around him. It was his great black beard that seemed to produce all the smoke, and it was his mirroring two-man saw that seemed to produce all the flames. All the men around recognized him instantly as the most brutal of them all.

  Of course, these were primarily field men, who’d never set foot in the big house before, so when Henri called for Monsieur, they produced for him the evil overseer they’d captured and bound in his own whip. And by this time it was indeed the same difference to Henri: the evil leader of the outdoors rather than the evil leader of the indoors. The men propped the overseer against a pillar in the palatial front foyer of the house. Henri offered the other end of his two-man saw, and a good dozen men took it, hands over hands in a massive clump; they needed that many men, the story goes, to balance the determined rage that Black Caesar emanated as they sawed the overseer into pieces.

  For a while, several years in fact, Caesar and his gang tracked and ambushed French patrols along the jungle roads while the war raged around them. It was a busy time. Caesar led his gang and his gang admired his anger. Caesar liked the way the men talked about the way he looked, how he looked like a part of the jungle, and the way his voice carried, how it carried like a disturbance in the weather, and the way he smelled, how he smelled like a deep fire, like he’d risen from underground. He liked to watch the men josh with one another and then fall silent when he approached, waiting for his nod before they continued. After a while Haiti was little more than a smoldering, heaving, barren mound, so the French soldiers went home. With the land spent and the French gone with their lovely imports, Caesar found himself one evening wandering the beach with his followers, kicking at the sand, and hungry, and bored to boot. Several leagues offshore, a Spanish ship was anchored, and when Caesar glanced up from the sand and saw it, he felt something rise in his memory. The ship looked so delicate and frilly from that distance that Caesar set his sights on it, as a child might set his sights on the moon when it glows in the night like a sugar cookie. His men saw the stillness that overtook his bulk as he gazed at the ship, but they couldn’t see the sweetness that tickled the back of his tongue. This is when Caesar conceived himself a pirate.

  “Come,’’ he said to the men. They stole a fishing boat and paddled out there in the quaking night. They slit the throats of the sleeping sailors, all except the captain and two seamen, because while Black Caesar was fevered and reckless with years of battle and pillaging, he still carried the history of being shown in so many ways that he was merely brutal, that any notice of any other aspect of him had been mistaken. In other words, he was not stupid enough to ignore having been taught that he was stupid, and so he cleverly abducted these men whose skills he needed. He forced the Spaniards to teach him their seafaring ways (brutally, but perhaps not merely brutal), and much to his own surprise he learned so handily that after a few weeks he lined them up on the bow and one, two, three, stabbed each once in the back and tipped him into the ocean.

  With a sort of scavenging decorum, Black Caesar embarked on his pirating career. He knew better than to attack well-armed merchant ships and instead raided smaller vessels and coastal villages in Cuba and the Bahamas, and then, when his trail got hot, in the Gulf of Mexico. He and the pirate José Gaspar worked roughly the same territory and had a kind of professional ethics going on for a while, kind of stayed out of each other’s way and sort of cornered different markets you might say, working with such differing aesthetics that they had only being pirates in common.

  There was a lot of pirating going on, swords, limbs, and tr
easures flying, and soon it started to get just plain silly.

  Black Caesar saw Gasparilla (which was what José called himself) as something of a dandy, because he kept headquarters at a rococo Boca Grande mansion, guarded by men with cannons. Behind the mansion, in dingy shacks (because while he might have enjoyed dungeons, it’s enough to ask swampland to hold up a mansion, you don’t then also try digging basements), Gasparilla chained the ladies he captured in his attacks on Spanish ships, the wealthiest ladies, the ones whose bodies, he imagined, flowed with royal blood. He staffed his mansion with many servants who, of course, scampered around cleaning everything and were charged, also, with running out back to wash, primp, and deliver ladies for rapes. “It’s lady time!” Gasparilla proclaimed, on the edge of his chair, pattering his feet on the parquet floor in his shiny shoes. He pinched his cheeks and fluffed his pillows when he sent servants out to fetch some, as at other times of day they might fetch wine or cured ham from the smokehouse. The mansion brimmed with servants and the shacks brimmed with ladies, the whole shebang surrounded with enormous guns and men to fire them. Imagine it! He called the place, no lie, Captiva.

  And Gasparilla liked people knowing Captiva was there, so they’d get the idea they could attack it and take it, so they’d be approaching with a gang of buddies and all their hopes for stealing booty, and then: Crap! they’d see the fancy house and the cannons, feel dumb and go home. No Captiva for you, if you know what I mean.