Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  The bus stop itself was next to a parking lot that served a building with windows that had wire mesh between the panes. Maybe five or six cars were parked in it by the time I arrived in the mornings, and it got pretty full by the time we returned in the afternoon. I don’t know what they did in that building or what it was for. All kinds of extravagant plants grew from cracks in the cement and hung from the limbs of trees. I didn’t know the names of any of them. A lot of things no one bothers to know the name of unless they want to buy one. When you’re a kid, walking around in a world that’s nameless does not always seem like a problem. You’re used to things being mysterious. A lot of things just don’t matter. It’s sort of like being what they call carefree. But not really.

  So I stood outside that building every day for the whole time I went to that school. It was a building to stand in front of. It had a bit of an overhang at the front doors for when it rained. The boys hid broken-down cardboard boxes around the side and when I arrived in the mornings they were already taking turns spinning on their backs with their ankles crossed, showing each other what they could do. Break-dancing. Even when it rained and the boxes were ruined, we’d gather by the entrance to the building and they’d lay their raincoats down and try spinning on them.

  They looked like pill bugs. I imagined myself a giant over them, turning them on their backs and flicking their feet so they’d spin, sometimes trying to ease into more elaborate acrobatics. The boys had enormous respect for each other’s efforts. They all looked idiotic, but they marveled at one another. Even perpetually small and clumsy boys enjoyed a kind of hands-off policy, a respect in the face of what they all longed to do and none did well. They spat tobacco into triangular cups folded from notebook paper, and once you were on the bus you had nowhere to go if one of them wanted to throw his cup at you. No other girls used my bus stop.

  So it was a relief when, for a week, I didn’t have to ride the bus home, because for one week a year, the students who’d tested into special classes were invited to stay after school for a series of advanced lectures to be delivered by Mr. Freedman, our science teacher. His wife, Mrs. Freedman, our history teacher, ran the slide projector, and after the lecture each evening, she sat in the parking lot with the students until their parents arrived, while Mr. Freedman packed the slides into boxes and hid them in the lab somewhere.

  In the parking lot, Mrs. Freedman sat on the edge of a cement planter that held a palm tree, and the kids sat on the sidewalk in front of her. They talked about the lectures, which explained a lot of the mysteries about the Egyptians, proving how they must have had batteries and helicopters, and how there existed actual remains of such technologies, and photographs of those remains in gilded entombed boxes, slides of which Mr. Freedman presented to them. The kids felt what it must be like to be real scholars, discussing with Mrs. Freedman, whose great bubblelike eyeglasses seemed to float around her face, what it had been like to be listening to Mr. Freedman, whose gray beard brushed against his collar as he spoke, and whose kind eyes lit brightly as he lectured about the ancient people and their science and their culture—brighter even than they’d seemed earlier that day in fifth period when he taught them to produce brilliant colors by sprinkling chemicals over Bunsen burners. You could tell by the music in his voice through the shadows of the lab, and the shadow of his hand with its pointer that pointed like the pointer of an orchestral conductor at here and then here on each slide. They felt what it must feel like to be professionals, listening to and admiring another professional, thinking “That one knows something I’d like to know,” and “Now we are thinking about what we all know is important.”

  He said the batteries we saw there in their ancient gilded boxes, their own little tombs, were indeed containers themselves, that they contained the energy of history, as our bodies are containers for our minds. He talked about the regal nature and privilege of knowledge, how we were like electronic jewels. We imagined our brains in our skulls, vibrating with color.

  In the half-circle of kids that gathered around Mrs. Freedman in the parking lot under the palm in its planter with its trunk like a batik dress and the moon rising behind it, Julie and her best friend—I was her best friend, already not new anymore—sat next to each other with their legs stretched out in front of them and leaned on each other’s shoulders, still fuzzy and happy because they’d sneaked into the storage room and sniffed white-out among the white plastic jars of chemicals, microscopes, and beakers. They’d crouched between the metal shelving units in the fluorescent light, clapping their hands over their mouths, and then they’d sneaked back through the flap-doors into the dark classroom where the slides flashed blueprint-style drawings of a pyramid surrounded by biplanes. They’d looked at each other in the dark, in the deep blue and gold glow of Tutankhamun’s treasures, and then later, in the parking lot, leaning against each other’s shoulders and gazing up at Mrs. Freedman’s gigantic glasses, with the early evening stars spitting through her palm frond crown, the cement still warm from daylight and thousands of children’s feet, the girls clasped hands meaningfully when Mrs. Freedman told them that Mr. Freedman’s research was revolutionary and therefore unpopular, and that they should be gadflies like Galileo and Socrates, because that is where greatness comes from.

  It comes from the stars, from science and from history. Julie and her best friend could feel it, could feel the pull of greatness. They felt it like gravity, like the pull of the earth.

  Because of her leather skirts, Julie was on the edge of getting kicked out of special classes even though she’d tested in. She’d told the assistant principal, “If you don’t like it don’t look.” A bruise the shape of a peanut shell faded along her cheekbone, and Julie thought, fuzzily, about what it would be like to get on a motorcycle and ride to California. Mrs. Freedman’s words sounded like they were coming through water. The air itself felt tingly and particulate, and Mrs. Freedman’s words swam toward her, easing like a fleet of tiny spaceships through millions of tiny asteroids. She could feel how tiny her friend’s fingers were. Like a little bird, she thought. I could snap it like a bird, but I won’t, because I love her.

  That evening the girls spent the night at Julie’s house. Julie’s father dropped them off and then went somewhere else. They ate ham and cheese sandwiches at the kitchen table. Then they listened to music in Julie’s room, on Julie’s boom box, and then after a while they turned the patio lights on and sat in the lawn furniture between the house and the hedge, where they could still kind of hear the music as long as they kept the sliding doors open with only the screens shut for bugs. A shaft of air-conditioned air pushed through the screen, and occasionally they could feel it brush by on the edge of a breeze. A boy from next door came over, shaggy, aching, trying hard to seem mysterious, skinny and keeping his weight low in his hips when he walked. Everyone knew he had a thing for Julie but Julie wouldn’t have him even though he went to high school. He emptied a baggie of pot onto the glass table and the three of them poked around in it and separated the seeds.

  The boy rolled a joint and gave it to Julie. Julie said, “Thanks, you can go now,” and he did. The girls went back inside and Julie put the joint in her jewelry box and then they lay on their stomachs on Julie’s bed and watched TV with the sound off so they could keep listening to music. They worked on Julie’s lists of her favorite bands: an overall best list, a best song list and a most promising list. She wore a nightshirt that was basically two British flags sewn together.

  There’s a scene that comes up in a lot of movies where little girls play dress-up in their mothers’ closets and then later they give each other lessons with makeup and hair. I’d lie on my stomach on Julie’s bed and watch her at her dressing table. She’d show me how one kind of lipstick looked on her compared with another. She’d explain what each shade was good for, and in what ways it failed. She’d rank them. She’d mark her wrists with parallel lines of color. Her mouth would be smeary and she’d roll her eyes at herself and make sure I
knew that I wasn’t seeing the full effect because she wasn’t even using liner, and really she’d never put them on practically on top of each other.

  Maybe once or twice she said, “You want to try?” into the mirror, and in the mirror I shook my head, completely content. Despite the noise, and how we must have talked and talked, and how I can see the motion of our breathless chatter like a current in the remembered room, it’s a serene and quiet memory. For one thing, memory tends toward quiet. When you do it, remember, you feel quiet. You feel quiet now, and that seeps in. The history of the depiction of memory is of quiet depiction, which catches on. It seeps into the tone of your own memories and you have to work hard to hear in the face of it.

  When Julie slept, you could really see the bruise on her cheekbone, because a streetlight shining through the blind slats lit a strip on her face. You could also see another one on the side of her neck, although it could have been a hickey. Julie had pointed it out as a hickey. It was hard to sleep in such a pink room, but it was okay to be awake, or in a sleeplike state that felt continuous with waking. There was an unexpected reasonableness to it, a kind of logic, the way the lines and lines of little white sailboats that covered the walls in Julie’s yellow bathroom held a kind of logic. All night, I felt a kind of depth of sensibility with regard to the sheets and the rose-covered comforter, Julie’s breathing, and how she slept in one and then another contortion, each revealing a new angle to her face. In the morning, Julie’s dad drove us to school. On the way out to the car he dropped his keys. When he squatted to pick them up, and fumbled for them in the crabgrass, his cut-offs were so short one of his testicles slipped out and then slid back in as he stood up, none of which he appeared to notice.

  The morning after the last of the Egyptian lectures, I was the only one at the bus stop. I sat on my French horn on the sidewalk by the road and worried. I didn’t know if I should go home. I thought maybe school was cancelled. Maybe the teachers were back on strike. Then, as the bus appeared, the boys all came running from around the side of the building and through the parking lot, swinging their backpacks and spitting. They didn’t look at me as they pushed by and onto the bus.

  I sat with a boy I knew from a few of my classes. He got out of the seat and let me shove in toward the window with my French horn, and then he sat half into the aisle because I took so much room with it, but he didn’t say what they’d all been doing back there. He looked at my face for a long time and I wondered if he was going to tell me, or if he was thinking of asking me to go out with him, but he said, “You have tiny hairs growing on your nose,” and that was it.

  So I went to school, and I have no idea what kind of day it was, but at the end of the day the boys were really anxious to get by me on the way off the bus, when usually they were patient enough, amused even, when I had my horn. They pushed past me as soon as my feet hit the sidewalk, and as the bus pulled away, I set my horn down and watched them dash around the side of the building. I almost didn’t follow them. I didn’t want to drag the horn all the way across the parking lot, making sure I didn’t bump it into any cars, just so I could see them being idiots and then turn around and drag it back. I considered leaving it while I ran around the building to see, but that thought lasted only a moment given how easy it would be for anyone driving by to pull over, grab it, and pawn it for thirty bucks. So I dragged the thing with me, between cars and across the parking lot and around the corner of the building to a continuation of the parking lot, where I saw them gathered around a pickup truck parked not far from the dumpsters, its mirrors and chrome bumpers spastic with light.

  Alligators are ancient. That morning they’d found a small one, a baby with a green-gray back and a gray-pink belly. It wandered up the canal bank and started across the road toward the bus stop. The boys caught it, and they found some twine in the dumpster, and they bound it up and left it in the bed of the truck that was parked there. It lay lean and still, smaller than a bowling pin, between the ridges in the vast gleaming metal. I thought of the soft slats of streetlamp crossing Julie’s bed and body, and I thought of mummies, and that was as far as I got with that, because there is part of me, still, that is against even that much imposition of order in the face of boys like this standing in a circle around an animal that is too raw, too tired and blistered to squirm.

  They say, scientists even, that every thought makes a path through your brain, that your brain is a map of what’s happened to it. You think and think and patterns are worn like deer trails through the forest. The deepest marks are the thoughts you repeat. It’s that physical. Enough intersecting ideas can make a pit.

  A person who is psychotic cannot tell an idea from a memory, an image from an object. The world is both blurred and shattered, unboxed, unbound, and strewn. This terrifies the brain. A terrified brain can make sense of anything.

  Joan of Arc began hearing voices when she was thirteen. She named the voices angels. Rumor has it she was raped in prison, yet her virginity had made a pit, and so she named herself the Maid. I can see her, galloping at the head of the Dauphin’s army, her brain pitted with madness. It’s hard to do anything important without pits. It’s hard to move. It’s hard to believe you have a body at all. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m invisible.

  The Myth of Osiris, Civilizer of the Earth

  Mr. Freedman didn’t mention this part in his lectures—he was interested in science, not mythology—but when Osiris became king of Egypt he married his sister Isis, which made her queen. Then he decided to civilize Egypt. Osiris abolished cannibalism and he taught the art of agriculture, which meant planting along the Nile, along the river and its marshes of black soil, among crocodiles and snakes, and alongside swimming fishes and fishing birds. He erected temples and made laws. His name, in one or more of its incarnations, means Good One.

  After civilizing Egypt, he left Isis to rule while he went to civilize the earth. He combed it, raked it, drained it, stuffed it with corridors and pipes, shoved it into grids. Then, when he’d civilized the earth, Osiris returned.

  His brother Set arranged an extravagant banquet to celebrate the reunion of his siblings. The family and their fancy friends feasted in the highest room of the palace, at a great long gleaming table, and at the foot of the table, a window looked over the Nile, the stretching fields, the multitudes of slaves, and the abundant pastures of the new civilization. Dozens of scented dancing girls swooped and flitted around the table and as each passed the window, became silhouetted.

  When the royal family had filled themselves round with feasting, Set called for a final presentation, and six naked serving boys entered, and among the strewn, gleaming bones and the ornate dishes, they placed a magnificent coffin. The coffin was made of expensive woods, cedar from Lebanon and ebony from Punt. He’d imported the wood because Egypt had no wood of its own, only the useless and spongy palm. Standing there at the banquet table, presenting the coffin, Set’s square ears twitched and seemed to cause his snout to stretch and curve. The room grew silent and the dancing girls stopped dancing and clasped hands, oohing and aahing at the coffin and at how impressive Set had become in its presence.

  “Whoever fits this coffin gets this coffin,” Set said, much as, you remember, the Charming Prince later spoke of the glass slipper. If you think of that slipper as a kind of coffin. Ominous like that.

  So when Osiris climbed in, Set nailed the coffin shut, bang, bang, bang; he’d been ready with his hammer and nails, hidden them in his robes and under the napkin on his lap, for he’d had the coffin made precisely to fit Osiris’ dimensions and his taste.

  The family, lazy with food and woozy with wine, slumped, stunned, in their carved and gilded chairs, listening as the ringing of Set’s hammer ceased and gave way to the muted thumping of Osiris pounding from inside with the heels of his hands. They heard it like distant drumming, the way sometimes at night you can hear crickets humming, and they’ll sound like a field of celebrating people from all the way across town, buried as they are in the g
rass and brush in the dark. The family and the naked servers and the motionless girls in their translucent dresses gaped as Set gave the coffin a shove and the coffin slid with unexpected speed down the polished banquet table, knocking away ribcages from eaten animals and the cores and pits of fruit like marbles, then taking flight out the window like, if you can imagine, a skier off a cliff, and arcing out of the palace and into the river, entering like an arrow, and emerging like a long black crocodile a mile away in the slow current and reeds. One, two, three, as in tale after tale thereafter.

  I looked things up later, somewhere between then and now, around when I started worrying that something was missing and no one seemed to be noticing, at moments of quiet that appeared among accumulating doubts and disappointments. I looked into Isis, remembering a television cartoon of her, or perhaps it was one of those live action bionic-wonder-woman spin-offs. 3-d or 2d, I remember Isis spinning and spinning, and the jeweled neckline of her white desert dress. Turn, turn, and turn into a magical creature.

  I didn’t know about Osiris. I looked into it and it made me wonder about him, the great father, the good civilizer. How he and his people are drawn flat, in words and pictures, how he comes off like a paper cutout in these odd, handed-down and warmed-over translations. If you don’t pay attention, you might never think of how it must have been for him. You have to wonder about him, floating down the Nile in his exquisite coffin, custom-made. If you wonder, you can feel the way he’s trapped. He’s buried alive, but in water. He’s dead in the water, he’s sent down the river. It’s a form of death. But even if it’s the river that’s moving, if it’s the river carrying the coffin, there is no denying that the river means life, especially for Osiris, with all his agriculture. So even if it’s the river that’s running, there’s a way that it’s like Osiris is escaping, like he’s running away.