Everyday Psychokillers Page 20

  It’s hard. I’m trying to decide what to mention, what to keep.

  At one point I lived in a city. Not Miami. This was on my own, with apartment buildings, public transportation, museums, a theater district. A northern city, with four distinct seasons marked by weather, year after year.

  I know there was more to it, but that’s what it was to me, as I see it now.

  Upstairs from me, in an apartment much nicer than mine, lived Ann. Plainest name I know. A dancer, gregarious, making up for her name, in a way. She had money from her parents whom I suspect named her as a kind of understatement, like they wanted to resist pretense. Ann carried a tourniquet in her bag so that almost anywhere we were she could tie her ankle or her wrist to a piece of furniture or a radiator and exercise.

  We met at the narrow brass mailboxes in our building’s foyer. I liked that place a lot. It was inside, but not heated or air-conditioned or anything. I liked the between-ness of the place. I liked the warping tile mosaic on the floor, the simple symmetrical design, worn by time. I tended to loiter there, after one door and before another, peeking through the slim glass peek-holes in the brass mailboxes to see how many slots held something. I liked to open my little box with its little key, to feel the low-slung motion of it, mail or no mail. The long and narrow, thick-walled and dark corridor. A coffin with a back door, a light at the end of the tunnel. A dark port for envelopes traveling in from anywhere. A miniature of the building itself, that little box that represented me, my apartment, in that row of boxes that represented all the other apartments in the building, the grid of boxes that represented the building itself. The grid of the city, my hole in the wall amid it. The rhythm of the door swinging open and the good thud it made when I swung it back shut. What a good solid object.

  I met Ann there, little energy pattern. We went through our mail. We went out. She let me in on being harrowed by her moneyed family, something I never imagined before.

  She could do all kinds of things with her body. She thought about her body all the time. Her body was her temple, she liked to say, the irony in her voice just for show because she really meant it. At one point I fell in love with a friend of hers, which made her feel uncomfortable, I think, so I didn’t see her much anymore. But before that, I remember she liked to say, Here’s what I discovered I can do today. See how my arm can do this? And that? I know it’s like what I showed you before, but see how it’s different? I could see. It was basically the same thing, but somehow entirely different. The feeling behind it, the way she felt this time versus last.

  Also Bertha. What a terrible name, tragic. It instructs. It says give her a wide girth and a wide berth from birth. Bertha kept six parrots in cages, two by two in her bay window. What else could she do? Her frazzled hair, her bated breath. She kept two of those white ones with headdress feathers that rose and flattened with their emotions—cockatoos. Also two little blue-and-green parakeets, and two hefty macaws, dense with color, with stubby black beaks and black rigid tongues.

  I got to know her before I saw her apartment, before I knew she had birds in there. We got to chatting at a bookstore, and when, a few weeks later, I went home with her, her birds surprised me, especially the way she talked to them, how she changed her voice, how she pushed her voice around. She talked higher to the parakeets, in falsetto, her version of twitter, and in a more growly kind of singsong voice for the macaws. It was creepy. I said, “Bertha, you’re parroting your parrots.” She said, “I only wish I could be so pure. But it’s not that simple. They’re all such individuals. I want more of them, more and more.”

  She wore layered gauzy dresses and long strings of beads. She wrote awful, heavily punctuated poetry. She flew out of town for conventions sometimes, to see birds, to talk birds with people.

  Bertha called herself a survivor. She was raped in high school. That’s about all she told me, which is fine. I mean I can imagine. But what she did say, and she’s not alone in this line of thinking, is that if she hadn’t gone through what she went through she wouldn’t be the strong woman she is today.

  When she mentioned this I remember I said something like, “Gosh Bertha, that’s awfully kind of you, don’t you think?”

  She said if she didn’t remain a kind person she’d be letting him win.

  “But don’t you think that’s very convenient for him?” To be providing that service, I thought. Because what good is surviving if there’s no real threat?

  She said she liked to imagine he’d justify it to himself, that part of him believed he was doing something good for her. “I know,” she said. “He’s probably just a monster. But I can’t let myself think that, you know? Even if he has his own scary logic. Don’t you have to justify things to yourself? Even if it’s lies, don’t you have to believe you’re doing the right thing when you do it?”

  Stop kidding yourself, I wanted to tell her. I mean you’re a strong woman or you’re not, whichever. He’s got nothing to do with it.

  “Bertha,” I said, “I don’t think you needed him to be strong. I think you’re probably strong anyway.” I said this lying. I was in a room filled with alternately frantic and sleeping multicolored birds. I do not think of Bertha as a strong woman. I actually loathe the term.

  I don’t remember if I’d thought this yet, but there are all these people who’d say he’s a monster, he’s just a monster and so long as you’re a right-thinking person there’s no understanding, and if you could understand, boy that’d make you creepy yourself. But then there’s all these other people who really want to know what’s going on when he does his things.

  Why do they want to know? Because anyway, the thing about a psychokiller is that he doesn’t care. If you think he’s justified it to himself, well, sure, he might have, but I mean he’s a fucking psychokiller. You don’t matter to him. And just because he’s a psychokiller it doesn’t mean he’s an interesting thinker, you know? It doesn’t matter what he thinks. It’s beside the point.

  One time, not long after that conversation, Bertha asked me to take care of her birds while she went out of town. They were so pretty and so messy. It was hard when she came back and I had to tell her I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t tell her why, and she was confused. She tilted her head and put that pained look on her face, making her eyes smaller, her brows rushing headlong toward one another like furry trains.

  Sometimes, from my bed, blocks and blocks away, I felt I could hear her through the walls making strangely robotic and endless imaginary conversation with those birds, courting them and waiting to be quoted. Imitation. Flattery. The parrots and the copycat. Who’s trapped. Who’s killing who.

  There were others, too.

  What I mean is that, between then and now, I did keep on living. I mean stuff kept accumulating. Energy patterns, cohesive waves. You lose something in the ocean and sometimes it resurfaces miles down the shore. In retrospect, though, it does seem mostly like more of the same.

  I left the city and some time later I moved here. I arrived in this town, this organization of houses, grass, and pavement, this place. I moved here after moving from other places, from the place I lived when I was born, in a wet basement where I slept in a drawer, to where I toddled through summer sprinklers in arid air, to where I learned to read in a place where outside I could tunnel through the snow when its top layer iced or walk on it balanced like magic, and then fucking Florida which I mentioned, with its man-made hills for rich people’s yards, its miniature mosques with their multicolored onion domes, its strip malls in Western-façade-motif, its candy-colored rows of houses on their slabs of cement, its whole desperately cultivated culture stretched like a plastic skin over the bubbling organic stew beneath. It seeps. It’s an incubator and a cesspool, it festers and blooms. You can rot where you stand, you can sink if you don’t move.

  Later I lived in a place with orange earth and brown rivers, and for a small time, for what seemed like an hour, a cliff with still clouds that seemed to spin like the exploding water that
spun below, and for another hour, I lived, tiny, halfway down an extravagant, deep, billowing green hill, lovely, lovely, and then here, my place, this place, for some time now, a much more vacant place.

  When you name something, you recognize its power. You name it to remember it, to contain it, so you can transfer it, via language, to someone else. You know how glad a sick person is to have a diagnosis. Even if it’s terminal, it’s termed. People are relieved to find their missing children even if they’re dead.

  Think of all the unnamed things, the things we believe are inconsequential, the space between objects, the harmless things, everything invisible. I don’t think of that city where I lived as having a name that applies to me. It could have been any of many cities and done its minor work in my mind. And all these other places, they are what they are, and for me, except in the ways I’ve mentioned, they’re simply overrun by Florida. Florida, in my mind, now, as I’m thinking of it, is place.

  Here is the way it worked with Isis: An entourage of scorpions escorted Isis around, for protection, through the sandy streets and along the marshes. Three to precede her and clear her path, one at each side, and two to follow. But you know how it goes, if you think of Altamont and the Hell’s Angels for example. Sometimes the scorpions would get edgy and start jostling each other around. They’d get bored, they’d get sick of each other, they’d get riled, and then one or another of them would just lose it, bust out of formation and jump some guy in the street, just anyone who happened by. No one could tell the scorpions apart from one another except Isis, and it was only she who could call them back into control.

  She’d say Petet! Or Tjetet! Or Matet! Or Mesetet, Mesetetef or Tefen or Befen, whichever it was. By naming him she could dominate him, bring him to terms. I was a warm bowl of oatmeal before Florida shaped me, and after, it was as if everything I carried with me from place to place, whatever exoskeleton of experience came to separate my body from the world was what I brought with me from that place. Florida’s big enough to try to name. I mean, these other places, what if they’re not comparatively benign? I can’t look too hard. I have plenty to contend with already.

  Florida surrounded me. I followed my father and his schooling, my mother and her jobs, then my schooling and my jobs, and I entered the places, loving them because I thought they might not be Florida, and then I found Florida in them and there they were, ruined versions of themselves, any identity fuzzed over with the repercussions of idiocy and meanness.

  I came here for a job. I mean it’s nonsense. I mean if I went ahead and named the thing, I can picture it wheeling around and naming me. I’d be done, I’d be boxing myself up, I’d be copping an identity that is not my own, that liars formed for me and that I crawled into. Set it aside. It’s not the point. You do what you have to do. You think about leaving, or you think about other things. I’m not a roast. You can’t poke me and say “Done.”

  The point is I moved to this place. Here. A house with a yard and neighbors. Everyone knows this place. For one thing, it’s all white people that you can see, driving around, shopping. And my house, for example, is taupe. Whatever it was in its past is covered with this slick siding. It was like this when I bought it.

  Here’s what I can mention about this place: There are mountains almost entirely covered with farms. In the mountains, smooth purple stones cover the beds of the streams. Lower down, chicken factories fill the air with chemicals and feathers. If you want to see black people or Mexican people you can go there and watch groups of them on break, smoking cigarettes in their powder-blue smocks and booties. Lower still, there’s a lot of Little League. Townhouses are popping from the earth of sold-off pastures, no town in sight, just these bare rows in pastel. One of the people Lucas hacked up is buried around here. Flotsam, jetsam, cultural driftwood. When there are so many symbols and symbolic languages everything feels incoherent again, a hum of crickets that could just as well be machinery or any number of noisemakers, frogs and telephone wires, jumbled together, bound. It gets uncivilized again with so many scrappy attempts at coherence, so many half-dead creatures, ideas, mangled, and mingled. Crumbling edges of pavement. Sometimes I think I can hear girls calling to one another over great distances, across dead air, separated by these barbed wire fences and the plastic walls of their parents’ homes. I see them clinging to the stray boards of a shipwreck, bobbing and gurgling in the dark waves.

  Now people want to farm the ocean. It’s old news already. It’s already begun.

  My little neighborhood has been around for decades, its houses renovated and re-renovated, in and out of fashions that only arrive here once they’re over. We’re half-circled with a smoking speedy highway and half-circled with a slow dim creek. We’re a few blocks square through the middle. My house is about smack in the center, no lie. It’s as close as I’ll get to living within a moat. Here, the animals are small brown birds, bunnies, mice, frogs, and toothless green snakes, each in its least obtrusive form, these little animals that live anywhere. They need water, but not pristine water, and they need plants, but none in particular. Some tall ones and some short ones should do. And also I mean this about the people.

  It’s extremely civilized here, placid almost, fertilized and humming with complacent activity. Picnics and barbecues and the burying of rosebush roots, pale time passing, household after household of families whose thoughts never leave their yards. Freshly paved or pebbled driveways alternating with ones gone gray and weedy. Women in headkerchiefs yanking hoses along behind them to the plastic wading pools that warp and fade all summer and by August have split from the slippery weight of dogs and children. Husbands drag them to the curb as they’ll drag the carcasses of Christmas trees come New Year’s.

  Here it feels both typical and composite, both generic and specifically Middle American. It’s as familiar as your empty hand. If you look at a map, at the space the black lines take up, separating one place from all the other places, that’s where I think I live now. The point is, here I feel I’m living in a perpetual present, history and memory indistinguishable, a mound of tentacles, of disassembled parts severed from any organizing mind, stable trunk or body. Lift the lines from the map and fling them into a pile. That’s where I am, how I live.

  One time, someone told me—Ted perhaps, but it’s hard to remember—that if you drop a penny from the Empire State Building it can kill someone. I thought about that a lot, I think I mentioned. It was so hard to believe that such a little thing could do so much with nothing but the natural pull of the earth to assist it, and I’ve heard, since, that indeed this does not and cannot happen. Still, I imagined the penny falling through a person and leaving a hole behind it. I imagined looking down on the person’s head where the penny had gone and being able to see right to the sidewalk. I remembered the stories in the news about someone at a county fair or a big parade who shoots a gun in the air and someone’s killed by the falling bullet. Death in the midst of mass celebration. These crowds gathered and something tiny falls from the sky and just drops you, drops down through your head and into your body from plain old gravity, drops from the sky, falls through you like you’re a cloud. Sometimes I imagine I am that penny, an inanimate and harmless object falling through time, falling through all the minds I can remember.

  I’m in my house, I’m in my yard. I’m no heir, but I’m no drifter. I’m separated, either way. I’m something of a stranger next door. It’s a good place to start thinking through. I’m here, but I’m all over the map.

  Nefertiti

  I’m thinking.

  I am in a white room with glass cases. Some of the glass cases are built into the walls, and some stand, staggered throughout the room.

  It’s a museum. It’s a real museum, one I went to recently, or it’s one farther back in my memory, a museum from childhood. Or I read about it in my giant hardcover book, Art and Civilization. In the paper, maybe. There’s an exhibit I meant to go to but missed. Or an old friend told me. She called me on the phone, an old frie
nd I haven’t seen in years and over the phone she tells me she’s been to this museum. Or the place is completely imaginary, as composite is imaginary, although nothing’s actually entirely imaginary.

  Someone dims the lights. Then lights come on in the glass cases. In the dark, I am surrounded by the illuminated heads of Nefertiti. Ancient, timeless, everyone’s beauty. She’s in stone. She’s in marble. She’s in yellow jasper and ebony. She’s over and over. She’s half done, or half ruined. She’s too beautiful to measure, too plentiful to count. Her eyes are epitomes of grace, and empty, bound and defined with charcoal lines. The subtlest, easing curves make her slender bones warm under stone skin. The blood in her lips blushes through.

  Some of her heads are parts of heads. Here is only her smooth jaw with the rough jagged density of torn stone behind it. I can see the pores in the stone. Here are whole and immaculate features, but her forehead is sliced and chiseled into a peg until somebody in history can finish her headdress. Her neck is endless and then ends.

  Outside the museum, where I arrive with the power of my mind, is amazing darkness in the depths of an amazing dense forest. It’s darkness in dark, but there are trees, trees, trees all through, like bars on cages, like taut vines, like stretched muscles, like cat gut in a half-strung racket, like piano strings, like light through blinds and blinds through light, and with the trees, with each tree, its shadow, because there’s always a source of light even when it can’t be seen through wet dense darkness. I can hear the wind, way off, way far away, approaching like a wave, and waves scare me with their aggressive breathing and the way they disappear in the ocean. On the bottom of the ocean there are countless treasure chests buried like coffins. Even if you find them, if you open them you might loose something on the world. You can imagine the jewels spilling like organs and intestines, like scarabs and snakes. Only you’ve forgotten, or nobody told you, there’s little or nothing left to be loosed on the world.