Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  Looking at her torn heads is a kind of reverence until it’s violation, and you feel it, how we are still only ancient.

  I can hear the wind like a wave, shoving through millions and millions of leaves. It sounds like one thing: the wind. But it exists because of what it touches, what it knocks out of its way, multiple, multiple leaves. A wave is made of drops, wind of particles of air and the dust it carries. A tree of leaves. A flock of birds. A gathering of cells. A psychokiller does not exist except in what he’s left behind, the havoc he wreaks, blow by blow, the ripples of each event, the climate you hear about. You know, of fear. What’s in his wake is him entirely. The rest is entirely imagined, really as imaginary as it gets.

  Even in real life, Nefertiti’s body is missing.

  Confession

  Next door to my taupe house. The serious Christians. Their golden retriever lies very still on the porch. They have a garden shed, a compost heap, a sandbox. They’re building a tree house, and ropes dangle from it. That’s how good they’re sure they are, and they’re proving it to God. They’re proving themselves with children variously sprung from their loins and adopted, and either way, each child looks exactly as the next will look in no time. The Christians direct and teach and cuddle, mother motherly, father fatherly, but although I look and look I’ve never seen either overcome with amusement, or in any way aghast at the simple beauty of the existence of one of those girls or boys.

  The mother is Claire. She has the round, nervous eyes of a rabbit. Sometimes she makes these funny orgasmic noises when she lifts a kid and puts him here or there. Despite all their efforts, she never seems quite convinced that she knows what she is doing. Except when she prays, and sometimes she’ll just drop, in her yard, and pray, and when she does, her entire mind backs away from her face. She’s vacant. Her voice deepens into something lovely, rich, and mellow.

  Her husband works for the city, so off he goes. When I see him that’s mostly what he’s doing, is going. He has the blue outfit, the tag on his left breast that I’ve never been close enough to see. It could be the logo for his department. It could say his name. I don’t want to see it. He’s skinny. He’s balding. His glasses are too big for his face. His mouth is smaller in width than his nose. He’s as tall as Claire but only just, and only when he stops crouching. He’s got a high, dim voice, and every evening he stands on their porch with a tin can, ding-ding-dinging it with a fork until the cat comes. His teeth are goofy, he’s officially harmless, and Claire is frightened of him. I can see. They’re fenced off, but if I stand at the fence surrounded by trees they’re only a few feet away, and I’m as good as invisible. Sometimes I prune the trees or pull weeds from the ground at their roots. I’m ready with my excuse (“Hello there, it’s such a nice day for weeding…”), but part of me doesn’t believe that if they look they will actually bother to see me.

  One time, it was about two weeks after they adopted two additional little kids. Making several, all told. Over at Claire’s house a bunch of wet kids were yapping and babbling, rolling around on the back porch in day-glo beach towels. She stood in the center of the circle of them holding a comb. She stood, tall but sinking, and from where I stood the comb in her hand looked like an Indian’s hand, saying “How,” the way she held it, at a loss. Her face was rosy and drawn, her eyebrows up, her chin about pulled into her neck, awfully like a dopey turtle for a woman so tall and basically so tough looking. Really, without the mask of anguish she’d be beautiful.

  Their pick-up truck, filled with firewood, pulled into the driveway and the husband hopped out. He swung himself over the rail onto the porch the way super-cops on TV hop into their zoomy convertibles. “Chop, chop,” he said, clapping his hands. “Hop to it, kids. Let’s get crackin’.” His big round eyeglasses caught the sun.

  “They came with lice,” Claire said, wilting, bewildered. “I can’t help it,” she whispered, and quivered in his presence. The kids became still, on their knees in the circle. On their garish towels, cartoon robots and cartoon animals fired bright lines of red and green at one another and froze, exploding. The kids held the towels around their shoulders like capes. They gazed at her, and she gazed at him. He stood outside the circle, and I saw the little scene in dices through the chain-link, and his lower half sliced, through the porch rail.

  “Everyone,” he said. “Get back inside.” They did, and here and there I saw little faces appear and then disappear from the windows.

  I’d been watching for so long my dog came over and sat next to me. She’s lanky, black and longhaired, a shaggy poodle who looks like a sheepdog. Her coat reminds me a little of Ted, his loopy curls. I kneeled and put my arm around her shoulder and we watched together, like it was a show. Spectating, as if everything I saw was already history.

  Sometimes I do, I stay watching, not just the neighbors, anything, the street out my window, my television, my washing machine, a wall, anything. I can stay like that for spans of time, it’s impossible to tell how long. I can do that, pretty much space out, while appearing, I’m sure, alert enough. Like I’m watching a pretty good movie, silently relating it to something more important than the movie itself intended. No sense of time, so that when I get up and start moving around again, triggered by a sound, or my dog’s bored sigh, or the conclusion of whatever was going on in my mind, I often don’t remember what I was doing. It could be clean like meditation or dense with image and narrative like a dream. I couldn’t say. I could be taking in the immense actual complexity of the texture of the air that surrounds me. Sometimes, washing dishes, walking around, going to work, doing my job, I have a thought, one I know isn’t a new one, but I don’t know if it’s one I dreamed or one I worked with while sitting like that. It comes from spending so much time alone, and it keeps me feeling I’m living in a kind of perpetual present.

  It does, it pains me. I can watch in myself a caricature of myself, a kind of active depiction. I can watch myself performing what’s become of me. I’ve been made small and static, a bit what you might call stunted, a bit cut off at the knees. It comes from the magic of being able to be many places at once, the mindtricks that make memory sort of keep you back and sort of move you forward, on that edge between here and there that means both places at once, past and present, how I’m both coming to terms and stuck in the past, struggling with a primitive vocabulary. I’m on the cusp. I feel like I’ve been bonked on the head by what I’ve witnessed, struck by my whole culture. I feel I’m up in the air, I’m riding the edge of a tossed coin.

  One thing I remember, watching the kids on the porch next door: I was thinking of when the extras in a play are whispering in the background. Once I loved a girl who was an actress, that friend of the dancer I mentioned, and one time after I saw her in a play we were walking home and she told me what they really say, those extras on stage, to make it sound like they’re having a conversation but so there’s no chance of distracting from the action with real sentences. What they say is, “Watermelon, watermelon.” They say that, or they say, “Rutabaga, rutabaga.” Arm around my dog, eyes on my neighbors, I thought about my parents’ voices through walls, how I took the sounds for comforting, those distant certain voices, the humming noise of them. Later, for a period of time, I’d lie there in my bed, below my window, wanting to know what they were saying. I wanted to know what they talked about without me, the exact content of their secrets, what they must have known that I did not. But some particular moment after that, a moment I know occurred but cannot place, I figured it out: what they’re saying, really, is watermelon, watermelon. That’s all they have to say.

  Next door the father emptied the taick of its cord of wood. He drove off, I suppose, to drag home more, bits of bark bouncing off the flopping tailgate. I went inside. Time passed. I came back out.

  People had put covered dishes of food on the stoop. Church people. Pies and foil-covered casseroles. Someone had brought a potted plant. I should get lice, I thought, from behind the fence, watching the dishes steam. Her
angled arms reached from behind the creaking screen door and pulled the goodies in. For a minute I imagined the little wet kids in domed birdcages dangling in the kitchen, five of them, or twenty, Claire poking them with chicken bones.

  Soon after, or right before, around the same time, I’m digging in the garden in the backyard of my castle, my hovel. I’ve got a little bucket and a trowel I’m using to turn the earth. Gardening. I’m planting vines. Claire’s husband has already warned me that the vines could crawl under the fence into their yard, and I certainly don’t want that, I don’t want the vines taking over, he says. Of course, I do. The inside of my house has braided rugs and wooden floors. Iron pans and copper-bottom pots hang in the kitchen, although I cannot bear to cook. I do, I want the vines to cover the house, to make it match its inside somehow, to bind the windows, too, if I can make them cling to plastic siding. I want my cottage in the goddamned woods.

  We shall see, I think, swinging my bucket of vines on the crook of my elbow, rubbing my imaginary hands with glee. My dog has loosened the soil under a tree and is lying there with her belly on the cool ground. I have my bucket filled with sprigs and sprouts and tiny heart-shaped leaves.

  Next door, four boys are like pegs in their sandbox. They’re watching through the chain-link fence. They’re standing with toy buckets for playing at the beach. They’re holding their buckets without seeming to know they’re holding anything. They stand, amazed, watching me.

  It’s the same when they watch me play with my dog: I can see them thinking it looks like fun, what I’m doing, throwing the ball, watching it come back, praising the dog who runs away from me and then back, making me her source of gravity. The boys watch with seeping jealousy. They want a dog. They want fun. I can see how the boys are each standing there, wishing for a dog. It never occurs to them that they have a dog, who sits in a stupor under the porch.

  They hold their buckets. I comb the earth with my cultivator.

  “Whatcha doin?” they say, but they don’t wait for a response. One says it, then repeats it, or else it’s one and then another, and I can’t bring myself to look, to see whose mouth it comes from. Because it doesn’t matter.

  “Whatcha doin? Whatcha doin? Whatcha doin? Whatcha doin?”

  They’re in training. I can tell they’re in training for long idiotic lives.

  I cut the earth with my hand. I make a little gully and line the sprouts along it. I think about Adam Walsh, how he too was in training when he was swiped from the mall, and I think about how ours was one of the very first malls in the country, and how the mall here is the same. It’s one of countless monstrous, paste-yellow, truncated buildings. Identical skin, identical guts, these things scattered around the country could be mere slices of one gargantuan building.

  I think about Adam, how you can tell he was in training by the way they talked about him and the way they wrote about him. Adam, they say, who was the only child of a charismatic marketing executive, was beheaded, is how they put it. The head, which was severed from his body, was identified as that of Adam. The severed head of whom was found in a murky canal. They say murky, and they say of whom. The head of Adam, the discovery of the Walsh head by two fishermen in a canal in Indian River County, near Vero Beach. The only child whose head was found.

  You can tell he was in training, you can tell by his mother, on Good Morning America. “Adam was evidently too good for this world,” she says. “You know,” she says, “Only the good die young.” The arrogance of such a statement. You can tell, because when there was no ransom demand it puzzled them immensely that a child could be missing and yet not for sale, or not for sale for them. You can tell because of how John and Reve were, as they say, touching hearts across the nation. Touching hearts.

  You know he was in training. How they put it in a sentence all alone in its own paragraph:

  Adam was their only child.

  So that, at this point, in kitchens all over the country, people with a bunch of children think something I can only imagine, about whether more is more, or less. People think about how awful it would be to have a child with a severed head. Some people who have a child momentarily forget they have a child, they’re so caught up with wondering what it would be like. The children are pounding the handles of their spoons on the table. The rhythm is so foreign it takes a while for it to seep past the translucent newspaper or television voices and actually register, in their minds, as real noise. The people snap the papers closed or flip the TV dial so it fades and for a moment all they can see are their children’s heads bobbing over breakfast plates.

  You can tell that Adam was in training. They say they know what the instrument was, that they’re keeping it a secret. Their inclination, they say, is to believe he was decapitated by the hand of a human. Although some marks on the skin, suggested, they say, by the wound edges, could be interpreted as animal activity.

  It takes a moment, but then it’s clear. When they say wound they mean neck. They mean the last noticeable sign of his entire body.

  They announce: they are looking for a psychopath. Who could strike again. The blue van. A mustachioed driver. The animal that did this. They are weeding out the whackos who want to claim responsibility. He was such a cute little boy, they say, and we need to get this psycho off the streets.

  You can tell that Adam was in training because of what they’ve been feeding him, bit by bit, stuffing him his whole life, unit by unit, lesson by lesson learned.

  You can tell by the photo, the one of Adam in his baseball uniform with his red baseball cap, the photo that is, for public consumption, the only fact of him outside his head. He has no body outside the photo, so it’s just his head and that photo with him in his baseball outfit, holding, innovative child that he was, that his parents trained him to be, a baseball bat! Good fucking morning. Give him ten years he’ll be fucking a twelve-year-old in the back seat of his dad’s Camaro.

  Not long after the finding of the head of the body of the son of the charismatic Walsh there’s the TV movie made of it, and soon enough John Walsh has his own show, called America‘s Most Wanted, and you can help catch criminals and save a child. It’s all about tips. How to phone them in. Not long after, there are all kinds of puns in the paper about how it’s America’s most wanted show.

  They can’t resist allusions to Adam and Eve. How he’s God’s child. America’s child. How something corrupted him. Got him kicked out of the garden so to speak, but this time off the earth and into heaven. They mix a lot of metaphors. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

  I cover the roots of the vine sprouts with dirt and primp them, so they stand tidily in their starting line. The four boys face me through the chain-link, ankles buried in the sand so it’s as if they have no feet, which they do not seem to mind at all. If they noticed that I have feet they’d surely think Wow! Feet! I wish I had some. If they thought anything at all. They’re pegs in their sandbox, bowling pins, watching me, dumbstruck, because I play with a dog, I have feet, I’m digging in my garden and they are amazed. It is as if they are not standing in a sandbox, as if sand is not something one can dig. I dig in the garden with my trowel and take a sprouted root from my bucket of vinelets and they can’t believe it. They stand with their buckets, three of them, three buckets, the kind that nest: a big red one, a medium yellow one, a small blue one, each with a white faux-rope plastic handle. One boy doesn’t have a bucket, but he has the little shovel. It’s as if what they hold in their paws are not little plastic buckets and a little plastic shovel. They are so separate from one another. They’re like the four limbs of a person who’s been dismembered and all that is left on the scene are the limbs, the members, if you will. If the boy notices he has a shovel he might think there is nothing to do because there is not a bucket there in his hand with it. And what are the three boys to do without shovels? And what would go there in the shovel or in the bucket except perhaps that dark wet earth in that lady’s yard? “Whatcha doin?” says one.

  �
�Planting,” I say, angry.

  “Whatcha doin?” says one, or perhaps it is another.

  “Digging.”

  “Whatcha doin?” one says.

  “Gardening.”

  “Whatcha doin?”

  “What do you think?”

  I say that one more angrily than I believe I am capable of saying anything to a little kid. They’re a bit struck. They are waiting for something. They know something is different, but they do not know that this latest response, this noise sausaging through the chain-link is a question rather than a statement, and they don’t know what to do.

  Then they remain silent. They don’t speak and they don’t move and they don’t look to one another for any ideas.

  Then one says, “Whatcha doin?”

  “Guess,” I say, this time kindly. “What do you think?” I say.

  But they can’t do it. They cannot make the connection. The fence has cut them off, and they can’t get past it, not even in their minds.

  I’m watching them, and I can’t help it. I think of the collection of bugs, those boys pinned there in their box. I watch them through the fence and sometimes I watch them from my house, through my window. I’m watching them, willing them to make the connection, and I’m thinking things through. They’re the bugs and they’re Ted. They’re both. It’s awful. But watching them is helping me with whatever I’m doing in my mind.

  Their small sister—you can tell because she wears a bow—is sitting in the grass outside the box, stabbing the ground with a stick.