Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  And before that he sent them out after White Devils and Black Blasphemers, to stab people in their kidneys, to bring back the ears of his enemies. He sent Angels out when he thought someone was interfering with his Sales of Products or his Collection of Donations. He sent Angels out when he saw a white man wearing a Yahweh Star of David t-shirt. Sometimes, like when that boy Neville Snake Johnson or someone else was beaten or killed, Yahweh sent his Angels out to seek retribution, but really any day of the week everyone knows someone’s fucking with a black person somewhere, so it’s hard to see how it’d matter what instigated his orders. Randomness was part of it, and part of the point.

  One time he pitted a couple of the Angels against one another, because they both knew karate. He had the woman Gaines lock the door to the temple and everyone gathered in the great prayer hall and watched the men beat each other. Then Yahweh picked out who he thought should lose and had all the Angels jump on him and kill him, and then he had all the women and children jump on the guy and kick him after he was dead. I mean it got fucking ridiculous.

  Another follower was found decapitated in the Everglades. You can’t tell from the way people tell it if that means head, body, both, or what. You know, were found.

  There was a lot of other stuff, too. Like it’s hard to imagine that no one noticed what was going on when the whole neighborhood surrounding the Temple attacked some Yahweh members and Yahweh firebombed them. What people noticed more I guess was his Eight Million Dollar Empire of motels, stores, and warehouses. Black power, clean living, economic prosperity for the urban underclass, and unity with God. Shortly before his indictment the mayor declared a Yahweh Ben Yahweh Day.

  One time he ordered a sect member beheaded when she tried to leave, and her throat was slit but not all the way through and she lived, and testified. At the conclusion of the trial the Angels of Death kissed Yahweh on the hand or on the lips as they left the courtroom, on their way to jail or freedom, depending, and the papers carefully described how Yahweh embraced his attorney, a former federal judge who’d been impeached.

  But you know how people like to make things up, so I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s one thing, and then you look again and it’s exactly another. They say vagrants moved into the Temple of Love, but I can see who the vagrants were. They were the banished followers, and they were the not-yet recruited. They were the disenfranchised, the almost invisible, the ones on tiptoe at the edge of the throng, trying to get a peek at God. I can see them, like little white mice, skittering along the slippery white Temple halls. In the great circular meeting space there’s a vacant white throne with down-filled pillows, and the adorable animals with their wormy pink tails are burrowing and flinging the feathers with glee. In the back rooms, in the kitchens, they’re dancing in the pans and twirling spoons and whisks on their noses. In the bedrooms they’re bouncing on the mattresses, and in the parlors they’re tumbling from the drapery. They’re splashing in their bubblebaths in the bathroom sinks.

  Christine Falling with her snowflake name and witchy face is wafting away from a midnight Miami balcony, moving so slowly that she’s holding a little Yahweh mouse by its tail in front of her face and she can take her time looking at it. Someone told her to do something with the little mouse, but she can’t remember what it could be. Maybe she’s supposed to feed the mouse to her current cat. Maybe she’s supposed to drop the mouse in her own mouth, like candy. Then Oh! Look! She’s falling past a pulsing star. So she puts the mouse on the star, lets go of its tail and falls on by. The mouse is teetering there on the star. It’s like a white circus seal on a sparkling ball. Its body is tense and still, but its feet are moving like mad. The surface of the star is hot and pointed. The mouse can keep running like it’s running on a hot foil potato. Or it can leap away.

  The psychokiller is a historical fact and he’s a legend. Remember Jack the Ripper, tearing through the dark cobble corridors, invisible in the fog, like wind. Letters in brown ink arrived from him, updates for the men with canes and top hats who tracked and publicized him, warnings for their bustled wives, each published composition as earnestly scary as every depiction of him has been since.

  I mean the psychokiller is invisible, as gods are invisible. Letters arrive, documentation, signs of him, the way bodies appear in his wake, limp, flat, ravaged, deflated. Paper.

  The psychokiller is a member of a contemporary pantheon of villains. He’s embossed, for sale in grocery stores. He is, in fact, a deck of trading cards, each character depicted as a symbolic composite of his story, of his tidy psychology, like a Tarot figure, plus he gets stats like a baseball player: numbers attacked, numbers killed, numbers convicted, numbers confessed. There is always a movie playing about him. You can sit in front of the television and go channel to channel for twenty-four hours and watch nothing but psychokillers. I have.

  He is an enormous category with dozens of subcategories, and he drips constantly into additional categories all the time. Kung fu. Mobsters. War heroes. Bounty hunters. Suicide bombers. Vigilantes. Kings. Cops. Lovers. Gods.

  Sometimes when they capture him, when they capture one of him, and you can look at him through the newspaper pixels or the television pixels, his actual body, his lonesome form through all those lenses you can see, he’s suddenly so plain and humbly human that it’s as if it can’t actually be him, really. Because what he means is gone. I mean it’s as if the image of him replaces the image of all he’s done, which is the only reason anyone took his photo for you to see at all. Captured, you know. On film. Captive for all those captivated by him, for his captive audience.

  Stop him from striking again and he’s good as dead. He tries to be alive, captive as he is, stopped, boxed, caged. He writhes and opens and closes his mouth, he shoots little shoots from his stumplike self. Little efforts rumble from him like aftershocks, like huffs of smoke from a spent volcano: someone writes a book about him, or he writes a book about himself, or he sends letters to boys and desperate women and newspapers. He addresses the public at large, that invisible mass, that shimmering concept, that mirage, that mere idea. Last gasps from a life that’s been gasping all along.

  Flight

  My uncle Ted and I sat on the floor of his little balcony, crowded among the thin metal legs of two flimsy lawn chairs he’d bought at a going-out-of-business sidewalk sale at the drugstore next to the Price Chopper. He’d bought the two chairs, those low beachy kinds with plastic woven tubing for seats, to surprise CiCi, because Ted’s one chair had broken and she’d insisted that having no chairs was uncivilized. She was due back in minutes or in hours, sometime before dark, she’d said, laughing. Or later.

  We sat on the floor because Ted didn’t want stripes on his backside when she arrived and neither did I.

  CiCi was in Miami, meeting with a guy writing a book on Ted Bundy. On the floor there, I was thinking about innocence. I was trying to figure out whether CiCi was what you call innocent or not. Because by that point I’d been pretty convinced that everything innocent is in imminent danger. And innocent was meaning nothing more than beautiful. The chestnut horse, animals of all colors, the little alligator, pink and wriggling.

  In Miami the guy’d been studying court documents, going in-depth about the Chi Omega Sorority murders and the last desperate attempts of a killer to flee. He found CiCi’s name somewhere in the documents and looked up her parents in Tallahassee. CiCi’d had it with her parents and moved in with Ted by then. He got the number, and that’s how he found her.

  The guy wanted to buy her lunch in Miami. CiCi took a bus in because Ted, our Ted, didn’t want her to go and refused to drive her, and now she was taking the bus back and supposed to be here by dinner or by dark. On the balcony I was thinking about the two Teds. I was thinking about how, on cop shows, especially in the intros, like on Charlie’s Angels I remember particularly, they liked to make the image of the person freeze and then multiply, fan out like a hand of cards, these afterimages, these outlines. Or in James Bond, those int
ros, with his license to kill. Funny name for a guy who kills people, Bond, who kills and copulates with similar regularity. Charlie’s Angels had guns but I don’t think they were allowed to kill anyone.

  Ted had pounded a nail into the wall in the kitchen with the heel of a shoe. He’d hung the corkboard there with the collection of bugs. I said shouldn’t they be behind glass, like at the zoo? I said they were going to get covered in dust and impossible kitchen grime. He said if they got too gross he’d dump them and get more. So, thinking about that, the bugs and the two Teds, and then along with Unit IV: What Is Biology? from science class, all that together, it got me wondering along the lines of what was a characteristic of an individual and what was a characteristic of a species and how you could know the difference. Like if you’re a cute little animal are you automatically innocent, or are some little animals dumb enough to deserve it, whatever happens, whatever is done to them? I was wondering if I lived in a scary place, or a time in history that was scary, or if I was just one little weird kid, or if all kids worry all the time. Was I an individual, or was I indicative of my species, is what I wondered. A line of ants tromped silently around one of the rails in the balcony railing, sort of one long item, a line, sort of beads on a string, sort of uncapped bottles shoving along a conveyor belt.

  The chairs were a surprise, CiCi was coming, and I was painting my nails with a light pink kind of opalescent nail polish. In the bottle you could see multicolored swirls, marbleized like oil in a puddle, but on my nails it came out a cloudy pink. It wasn’t drying well in the wet heat. It was shifting and getting wrinkles. I touched it and it kept my fingerprint. At school they’d taken all our fingerprints for I.D. purposes. In case we got lost, they said. A program called I.M. Thumbuddy.

  Ted smoked a cigarette, ashing into an empty beer can and drinking from a fuller one. He’d crumpled the empty one a little to help tell the difference. He had to be careful to get the ashes in there without tipping it over, because squeezing the middle of the can had made it unstable, and if the end of his cigarette hit the can, the can rocked.

  Ted said, “You know, it’s weird about the Price Chopper sign, how the red ax cuts into that giant red coin. Right into the lady’s head. You think they’d notice it’s unpleasant.” He thought of something and leaned back against the glass door to the apartment and wiggled his free hand down into his pocket. His jeans were pretty tight and he was almost rolling on his back with his other hand in the air for balance, dainty and quivering with his cigarette. He finally got his hand back out and righted himself, and then he opened his fist and looked at the collection of pennies and nickels in his palm. He left his cigarette in his mouth for a bit and squinted through the smoke at his one hand, pushing the coins around in his other hand so that all the heads faced up. “Like Indian head coins, you know,” he said. “She’s scalped, like an Indian. I mean, look: heads and tails. We’re talking decapitation. We’re talking disembodied.” He went back to having one hand work his cigarette and he held the other one, with the coins, as if his palm was a little dish, like he had an assortment of heads on a platter. “Man, talk about exchange,” he said, feeling the weight of the coins.

  “Exchange?” I asked, exactly as he wanted me to.

  “Chop the head off a person, put it on a coin. Swap it for a package of meat. It’s uncivilized. That’s the whole reason I’m Marxist, if you want it in a nutshell. That’s the whole reason I left school, if you really want to know.” He balanced a penny on his thumbnail and then he flicked the penny past me and over the balcony railing.

  “I think I’d like school if I got to take classes I liked,” I said.

  “You’re missing my point,” said Ted, flicking a nickel. I listened for the coin to hit something, but of course I couldn’t hear it hit anything, especially behind my back where I couldn’t even see it. Little meteors zipping by me, one flashing mineral bit and then another.

  “When CiCi starts college, are you going to move up there with her?” I asked.

  “You kidding? CiCi’s not going to college.”

  Right then a bird flew, zooming into our little balcony area, smacked against the glass door and dropped next to Ted’s knee. We both watched, gaping, as the bird wobbled there, near the bent can of ashes.

  It was a weird moment, because I had double thoughts in my head. One was that CiCi was always telling me about how she was definitely starting college in January, definitely, and she could even move back in with her parents who were so old they might not even be a pain anymore. I’d never thought that she might not really be going to college, that it might be what you call a pipe dream.

  The other thought was how, because I was facing Ted and my back was to the balcony railing, the coins had been going by me in one direction, like slow traffic, as he flicked them, and then this bird seemed just flung by me, in the other direction. It was weird. Most likely the bird was just flying along and smacked into the door, not seeing it was glass, like birds do sometimes. But I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that some guy, from a balcony out across the parking lot in the complex, some mirror of Ted somewhere behind me, had flicked the bird with his thumb and it landed here.

  It was a little brown bird, a plain little thing. Little wobbling brown bird, the kind of bird you might find anywhere. Ted started to move his hand toward the bird and suddenly I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do for a moment, but then I leaned toward Ted, keeping my eyes on the little bird. I leaned on one hand and let the other one travel past Ted’s body and toward his hand as his hand moved toward the bird.

  I watched his hand move toward the bird and thought of a top spinning. I thought of how tempting it is when you see a top spinning to touch it and watch it fling itself on its side and bound crazily from its broken orbit. If you can only keep from touching it you can imagine it spinning on and on, as if friction and gravity might really step aside and let it go. I put my hand on Ted’s wrist and closed my fingers on it but not all the way around it, his wrist was so wide and flat. 1 could feel the knob of his ulna shift beneath his skin. The bird bounced in place once or twice, and then it sputtered into the air between our faces. It landed for a moment on the back of one of the new flimsy chairs and then used its legs to push off. The chair didn’t move, but I thought I heard it make a tiny metal sound against the bird’s feet. Ted shook my hand off his wrist like it was something dirty, and he scrambled to his feet and leaned over the balcony rail to see if he could see where the bird flew off to, but he couldn’t. He didn’t turn around or look at me to say it, but he said, “What the fuck’s your problem? I wasn’t going to hurt it.”

  If you read about Bundy it’ll say how good-looking he is. If you read another thing about him it’ll say how he looked like anybody, like your next door neighbor. At that time my next door neighbor was a squat blond woman who wore orange pancake makeup and her two little kids and one baby. They were crabby and noisy. The neighbor next to her was a hollow-faced, bent-over Seminole guy, an adult, but not old, maybe Ted’s age. He was sad and quiet. He liked to fish in the canal.

  So not my neighbors.

  Maybe rich people’s neighbors, I liked to think. Although that still didn’t make it seem likely he wasn’t around any corner I turned, or around any corner turned by anyone I knew.

  Sometimes people say you can look at ten different photos of Bundy and he’ll look different in each one. Sometimes people say they can see it in his eyes. I can look through any stack of photos, through any school yearbook or any issue of the paper. I can see it in the eyes of anyone I look at.

  CiCi arrived distant, grumpy, in a floaty sundress. It was close to seven and still light out and still hot. We went inside to greet her and she flung her bag onto the kitchen counter and said “Jesus, Ted, why don’t you get a damn air conditioner?” We followed her to the balcony and squeezed together on the threshold of the open sliding glass door, holding our grins, waiting to make her day.

  “Nice try,” she said when she s
aw the chairs, and tipped one over with, her foot. She was wearing her slim white tennis shoes and holding a pair of high-heeled sandals by their heels in one fist, the way you hold a bouquet of flowers, but in the way that holding a bouquet of flowers is like holding them by their necks. With her foot, she lifted the airy beach chair and kind of kicked it into the corner of the balcony where it clattered and then collapsed into a square heap. Then she sat on the other one with her knees together and her elbows on her knees and her fists to her temples. The strappy sandals seemed to come right out of her head like a trick dagger. Their straps flopped and dangled.

  “I want take-out, Ted,” she said. “I want greasy, ground-up chicken smushed into a patty and boiled in oil. No goddamn tomatoes. Extra mayo. Go. Fetch. And fries. And a shake.”

  Ted mussed the top of her head. I think it was one of his favorite things, when CiCi played baby. He said nothing and went off happily, jangling his keys.

  Now here’s one thing I knew about CiCi since I first met CiCi, which was right when she started going out with Ted, which was right around when I turned twelve, which was over a year before this time with this guy in Miami. Ted told me this thing, or CiCi told me, or they told me together, swapping off, my point being that it came up all the time, it was no secret and we all knew it had everything to do with whatever magical connection there was between those two. So what we all knew, the background information, if you want to call it that, was that a couple years before I met CiCi, before Ted met her even, back when she was living with her parents in Tallahassee and just starting high school, one day CiCi was finished taking a tennis lesson and sitting on the curb in the parking lot by the courts, zipping her racket back into its case, waiting for her mother to pick her up. The sun was pretty low, a really dense rosy sun coming at everything sideways, and CiCi sat there on one of the parking-spot dividers re-doing her ponytail. She pulled the rubber band out, shook her hair out over her head, and then, with the band clutched in her teeth, she closed her eyes for a second and flipped it back and ran her hands over it to put it back into its ponytail. She opened her eyes and in that moment a man appeared before her, a looming shadow in front of the sun, and she squinted up at him with her hands holding her hair and the rubber band still in her teeth.