Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  How nuclear they felt, Ted and CiCi, what a wanting, warped family we played out. Family enough, in any case, that I know I inherit from them. Sometimes she felt like a happy mother, sometimes a first love, sometimes a torn sister, sometimes a live paper doll, an icon of doomed foolish girlness. When she left, I figure she left both Teds, she left all of them, I like to think, all the little Teds and forms of Ted who’d gathered in her life and in her mind.

  You know I see her like a horse, running. How extremely liberating it must have felt. A horse is beautiful when it runs, there is no denying it. All those images you’ve seen of that beauty, the glossy power, the primitive grace of it, I know that, I know it as fully as I know anything. But horses run out of fear. Fight or flight, you know. It’s easy to forget, when you see them playing at it in a field, like kids at hide and seek, hearts thumping, giddy, bubbling, gleeful with the raw truth of their imaginings, the powerful feeling of teasing your own emotions, playing it all out in your muscles, in the containment of a paddock, of a yard, of a place that feels safe, like home.

  How is it possible to look at a creature and know it’s acting out of fear, even if it’s only mimicking fear, in preparation for real fear that is sure to come, beating it to the punch so to speak—how is it possible to see that and find that beautiful? Because I can, and I know I do.

  After she said I love you, which broke my heart, the air shivered in her wake, and I looked around the damp apartment with its few strewn articles, the weak paint, the dense rank smell of wet ash and old water. She’s exactly who I never want to be, and because of that she feels as bound to me as the air that surrounds my shape. One of us is a looming shadow, and one the frantic sparkling space around it.

  How visible she was to me. How visible she was, half-submerged. How was she to know? How Bundy liked his girls with dark limp hair, parted cleanly in the center, a white road bisecting the head. And after she knew it was college girls he liked, girls with social promise—how could she have mistaken herself for one of those? Lousy tennis player. Great blowing chestnut-headed runaway, hitchhiker. She had it all wrong. She was some other psychokiller’s chick. I think of CiCi and that guy, how when you are recorded, when you go down in history, it’s just another kind of disappearing.

  I can hear them asking her: His name was Mark, you say? Mark is what he said his name was? As in Mark my words? As in on your Mark get set?

  Let me try again. Let me try again to explain this psychokiller. This time I think of the busy psychokiller doing his thing. I picture a composite of him, a composite psychokiller.

  I picture him in his apartment, which looks a lot like Ted’s apartment, that same sad carpet. He’s got everything in there—one of each malady, each psychology you’ve heard these psychos have. He’s got the collage of cut-up photographs of his victims on the wall surrounding his bare mattress, one wall for those he’s stalking, one wall to commemorate dismemberment. A little physical space, nicely delineated, for each atrocious habit. He has his room of complicated torture machines. Under the rug by the sofa there’s a trapdoor in his floor. He keeps a bone or two in his closet with his shoes, only half getting his own joke. He hangs his collection of garrotes among his ties. He owns an assortment of woodworking tools, a chemistry set, and shiny medical instruments, and keeps them sparkling with disinfectant. He’s got the vat of acid, and the hooks to hold up chains in the dining room. He’s got his own darkroom setup in the bathroom, and a stash of special lightbulbs to set the mood. In his refrigerator leftover body parts pose frostily in ziplock bags. Fifteen deflated breasts like pancakes are stacked in a plastic tub that used to store whipped margarine.

  He collects stuff: archeological finds, or religious images and icons. He keeps fastidious records. In his chosen form, he encodes everything he does. Sometimes he encodes where he left the body, but sometimes he encodes how many eggs he ate that week, how many people entered the coffeeshop across the street. He likes countdowns: his twenty favorite movies, his fifty favorite songs. He organizes and categorizes and counts. He’s a failed scientist or historian, anthropologist or artist, or he’s weak and dumb, unloved, ugly, poor. He’s been abused, bonked on the head when he was young, really bonked or just felt like it, you know, emotionally bonked, or bonked by the world, plus he might be a bad seed, with that extra Y chromosome. He has a variety of warning signs, bulbous fingertips, frizzy hair, potentially wacky thyroids, and now he does it all. He pisses in bed and eats shit, but he’s also a neat freak. He’s a dissector and a cooker, driven to civilize what’s raw as he simultaneously destroys it.

  But for me, picturing him, watching him press a shape onto my life, he’s a decapitator most of all, because the towhead Adam was the one that started me thinking about what people might do, the one who spawned. It could have been anyone, Elton Crude or Lubie Geter, Delton Creder or Gubie Lude. For me it was Adam. My first. The first one I saw when I glanced up from whatever I was doing before. What Adam’s psychokiller did was decapitate him. Parted the head from the body. I imagine a composite psychokiller, a collage of one, one I can picture, that I can wrap my head around, so to speak, and that’s what he does, too.

  A long time ago, back when the composite psychokiller was a little kid, when he was merely pulling the legs from spiders and setting tiny measured piles of them on fire, watching them smolder and fume like hair, back when the welts on his head still felt new and unwarranted, when his humiliation was fresh and his mind clear, and clearly in pain, clearly confused, he went to school one clay and the teacher stood at the far end of one row after another and counted out, licking her finger, six times six sheets of plain white eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper and sent them down the row, minus four for the kids who were out, two in one row, one more in two other rows. The psychokiller sat in his desk near the back but not quite in the back, surreptitiously sucking on a lifesaver, because he was in the midst of a phase where he worried his breath smelled and maybe that was why kids didn’t like him as much as he wanted them to.

  Even though plenty of kids liked him fine. They even liked John and Mary Crumb, the retards, who were obviously annoying. I mean, who wasn’t annoying? They were all annoying, all those kids, like for instance the very smart but annoying girl with long red hair and freckles and the temper she’d always been told goes with it. Bossy girl. I mean the psychokiller had as many friends as she did, probably, and she was home in the evening staring at the black ceiling, mentally dividing her toys into groups based on who should get them when she died.

  The psychokiller sat in his particleboard desk with its blond plastic veneer and shallow pencil groove, and thought maybe if he fixed his breath, you know, he wouldn’t feel like such a loser. Each morning he swiped coins from the top of his father’s dresser and bought a roll of bright translucent candy from a vending machine at a gas station on the way to school, even though it meant riding his bike a longer route.

  You might remember that right around that time when I went to that school in the suburb of a suburb, a lot of magazines and newspapers were writing about how serial killers were what they called a new breed of killer. Which I believed, but is ridiculous because, I mean, as long as there’ve been records of history there’ve been records of a lot of killing. So I suspect what was new, really, was the idea of a breed of killer, that there was some force at work, some seeming consciousness replicating some type of person. People in the field (you see how after a while everything sounds like a euphemism: this field of studying, how pacific, how pastoral. A new breed, etcetera…the way the word type suddenly feels evil, when the notion of a machine that replicates symbols is re-connected to the notion of erasing a human person’s three-dimensionality…) people were in any case becoming really interested in dividing murder into increasingly specific categories. They argued over the connotations of the possible terms, and in fact they’re up to it still: how many do you have to kill to make it mass; does mass mean all at once or within one day; what if partway through the day he takes a n
ap; is rampage a technical or descriptive term; how many do you have to kill before it’s serial; how similar do the killings have to be for an MO and then what’s part of and what’s a deviation from an MO once one’s established; what’s a sociopath and what’s a psychopath; can you be both methodical and insane; can you be organized sometimes and disorganized sometimes or does sometimes disorganized make the moments of organization not count because you just go back and mess up your good work, like clean everything up and then drive away and then freak out that maybe you forgot something and go back and let a receipt fly from your pocket while you’re checking your work? So is that “organized” or “disorganized,” I ask you. What kind of killer are you? What kind of psycho?

  All of this in an effort, of course, to understand him, so he can be identified, captured, and put away forever, or electrocuted or what have you, or shot by a mob that swarms, like zombies, with pitchforks and wagging fingers as he’s being led from the courthouse in shackles, or strapped to a table and linked by plastic tubes to a machine and then pumped with no less than three deadly substances while staring at his own face in the one-way mirror that separates him from his anonymous executioner—

  It’s something about the act of description, about coming to terms that makes it so when I describe a psychokiller I feel I could be describing anyone. Choose your weapon, choose your terms. Termination, you know. I mean, I do, too. I want to live through atrocity. A psychokiller wants to be the one left to tell the tale, the witness who knows what really happened, who knows the truth. This is a disconcertingly not-quite-incomprehensible stance in a world where the other choice seems to be invisibility, to be dead to the world, so to speak.

  The psychokiller sucks on his lifesaver and listens to his stomach gurgle as the children in his row each take a piece of white paper and pass the rest along. On the bulletin boards that surround him, enormous cutout letters float along in wobbly lines, spelling things in color. A blue O from one word is over a yellow N and a yellow E from another. He separates his piece of paper from the one it came with, like he’s pulling a sticker from its backing, and he hands the bottom piece to Jessica, the red-haired girl who sits next to him. Jessica examines the sheet on her desk and brushes it off, as if it’s accumulated dust in its few moments wafting away from its stack. There’s a fingerprint on her blank piece of paper that she can see if she looks very closely. It’s made out of faint cherry candy. “You messed up my paper,” she says.

  The teacher gets two volunteers and hands each a cracker-tin filled with crayons. The two volunteers hand out crayons, three for each kid. “Only three,” she says. “No more, no less,” and she begins writing on the board.

  “What if it’s broken,” says one of the volunteers.

  “Three pieces, then,” says the teacher. The sleeve of her blouse is powdered with a smear of chalk. “Three colors. Everyone gets three colors.”

  The children begin requesting colors. They all know exactly which colors they want, but then they change their minds. The volunteers are frustrated, but the teacher decides to let it get noisy for a bit so she can write on the board. The psychokiller decides he won’t be picky, he’ll be mature and just take what he gets. He does, he takes what he gets, but not even the volunteer seems to notice, much less be impressed. All three of his colors are broken. And two of his colors are green, which doesn’t seem fair.

  The assignment is as follows: Choose a sentence from the board, and draw a picture of it.

  There are ten sentences. One of the sentences is “He’s walking on eggs.” Another sentence is “She’s running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

  It’s a lesson about figurative and literal, although the teacher doesn’t use those terms.

  As soon as the children resign themselves to their crayons, it becomes clear that some of the kids have never heard “He’s walking on eggs.” The teacher has to explain. It means he’s nervous. A lot of kids think that’s really funny, so they pick that sentence. They draw piled-up circles along the bottom of the page, which look like a stone wall. They draw a guy on top. They try to make his face look nervous, but they mess up. Jessica, the red-haired girl, messes up the expression on her guy’s face, trying to make him look nervous, and in frustration she fills the face in with black crayon, which she’d been using for outlines.

  “I need a new piece of paper,” she says, with her hand up. “I really really need a new piece of paper.” The teacher will not give her a new piece of paper. She comes over and says the drawing is beautiful. She says, “Maybe the man is walking away.”

  The girl hates, hates, hates that idea. The guy’s wearing a tie, for one thing, and she thinks the tie came out best. She is not going to cover up the tie. She looks at the picture for a long time, and draws some cracks in the eggs. Then she decides it’s a black guy, and that’s why his face is black. A black guy, walking on eggs.

  Most of the kids really like the assignment. They’re laughing and laughing.

  You are my sunshine looks like a person piercing a yellow ball.

  You blow my mind was really hard, and two kids next to each other both picked it. One kid shows a cloud with a face, blowing on a person’s head, which sits by itself on a row of grass. The other kid actually draws a mound of mazelike coils, which are meant to look like a brain. He floats the brain over a bundle of red dynamite, with sparkling fuses.

  You’re getting under my skin is a very lumpy person. You turkey is just a picture of a turkey, made from the tracing of a hand. You animal turns out to be a kitten, made by starting with an upside-down heart for the nose.

  The psychokiller is both the best and worst at this assignment. The thing is, he’s a literalist. Most people hear “I want to fuck your brains out” and hear only the metaphor, with its dangerous tone. The imaginative stretch is from figurative toward literal, and not confusing the two relies on the desire of one person to know what the other one means. You could never tell by looking at him, and at this age at least the psychokiller has little or no idea himself, but the truth is he’s cut off. He can’t imagine what you want, what you mean. It never occurs to him. Literal is all that’s left.

  When the psychokiller is sitting in school, sticky with red candy, trying to get his pencil to quit rolling down the desk, he’s surrounded. You’re stuck with me. I get a kick out of you. The air buzzes with these notions, these ideas, these instructions. The more he lives with the ideas, the more it feels like psychokilling is merely a matter of following directions.

  As a toddler, his favorite toy was the horse with its head on a stick. As he gets older, as puberty starts knocking around and he starts dreaming of cars, it must feel like language gives him permission. He would never put it that way, he would never say, “The language made me do it.” He’d say porn did, or his mother, or the devil. His ideas are the simplest most normal ideas there could be. I want to fuck your brains out. He simply has no imagination.

  When another human is orifice only, when she’s this thing you can enter, a vessel, a thing you get inside so you can travel around, so you can move through the world, hacking through her as you’d have to bushwhack through a jungle, natural as she is—

  When he actually fucks the girl’s brains out, when he separates her head from her body, her body from her intelligence, from her imagination, when he makes this new orifice, two new holes in fact with one fell swoop, these new dartboards with their infinite bullseyes eye to eye, when he fucks her mind behind her back, and then rearranges the pieces so she has to watch.him fuck her body and then fuck the absence of her face—

  It seems very imaginative. Creative, you know. Original. I mean, who’d think of that?

  In fact it’s so original it’s as old as time, as old as recorded history, as recordmaking, as language, as communicable ideas.

  Between Then and Now

  Time, as they say, went by. Let me try to give a sense of how it passed, across the map, this scraggly hand-drawn version of so much life lived,
so much out of the frame of hindsight, contained as hindsight is by the shape I’m in.

  I’m seeing it laid out on a floating plain, a floating square in space, as on a computer screen, lifted between then and now. I could fold it up and slip it in my flat back pocket. I could pass it like a note. I could tear it into pea-sized pieces and eat it like a secret code, a mission impossible. If you open an old book and find flowers pressed there, the map is like that, because once the flowers were round and ripe, and now they’re like slices of themselves, translucent and seeping into the lines of print. The map is like sheet music, making the invisible a kind of visible. You know how in cartoons singing animals spit out actual notes.

  The map is like wallpaper, It could go on and on, but at some point it stops, just because, and after a while you get the idea. In physics they say a person is actually an energy pattern, a cohesive wave. There are patterns in time, especially in time remembered, time mapped.

  For one thing, we moved. There’s this series of contained times when we sorted all our stuff, sold a lot, gave a lot away, and packed some of it into boxes, and packed those boxes into the pick-up truck we bought after the Rabbit’s engine block cracked. Someone gets another job or needs one, so you move. The times are very intense while they’re happening, these moves. They’re transitions. You think very hard about what’s important, what to keep and what to leave. You work very hard, sweating and pulling muscles. You get in arguments with yourself and your landlord and your boss and your family. It’s between time, like time spent in airports. It’s dense time, but once it’s done you basically forget it until you’re moving again and then you remember all those other moves, as if they’ve come running in from the fields and lined up for a head count. You stand in your empty apartment with your key, getting ready to lock yourself out.

  Every couple years we moved. Me and my mother and my father, and then me and my mother, and then me, I moved. My parents each went ahead and fully disappeared along the way. Accidents took them, and other loves, natural causes, and other interests. They’re out of the picture, so to speak, they’re good as dead. They lied, they were misinformed, confused, overworked and underpaid, or underworked and undernourished. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They didn’t mean it. They couldn’t help themselves. It was too much. Someone said they could provide safety, and they believed it, but they were wrong. It’s okay. I talk to them sometimes.