Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  Thinking about the boys, one thing I think is about a film I saw, a contemporary film with a contemporary setting. It starred and co-starred a young man and a young woman. The young man was a writer and the young woman was his girlfriend. Of course whenever there’s a writer in a movie there has to be a scene that lets you know he’s writing this one special thing, and that there’s only one copy of it, although that doesn’t seem to concern anyone. I mean no one in the movie ever says, “Hey, why don’t you make a copy of that?” So once you know there’s just one copy you know something has to happen to it, and in this version, what happens to the manuscript is the girlfriend’s on the bow of a ferryboat, flinging pages into the water as the young man cries helplessly from the dock, watching the pages flap, scatter, and sink. It’s torture for him, he’s in agony. Can’t she see what she’s doing? That she’s flinging bits of his soul into the wind, into the water? How she’s killing him, how the pages are like bit after bit of his body? How he might as well throw himself into the ocean as well?

  People love that story. They love to watch it. Even now, when there’s never only one copy of anything, the scenario persists. It’s not like the guy lives in war-torn Nicaragua and can’t get to a xerox machine. He lives in Seattle, or New York. People don’t care if it makes sense. They really want to believe there’s that one copy, this representation of a man’s mind, this symbol made of symbols. But just one, so that something can seem to be at stake. So there could never be another.

  Are you one-in-a-million or just one in a million? Are you like everyone or are you some exceptional individual?

  In fact, some time before I saw that movie, back in the city, I went to see a play, because that actress I mentioned was in it. It had one of those manuscript scenes, too. In the play I think she was the evil young wife of the young writer-man instead of the evil girlfriend. Sometimes it’s simply evil fire, some personified phenomenon that’s destroying his only copy, but this time it was the young wife. Feeling neglected. In the play, my actress was high on a ladder, behind the representation of a window, flinging the pages of the manuscript into the audience. They had a fan blowing, secretly, to help the leaves waft and spin. Some nights, she explained to me, as the director had explained to her, the pages she threw were blank, and other nights the pages were actually copies of the play itself. Because of alternate interpretations, she explained. You can come to see the show both ways. Because each way there’s a meaning, but different. On good nights, people in the audience scrambled to collect the pages.

  I remember watching the play, thinking of psychokillers. Afterwards we went to dinner. She hummed while she read the menu. She was feeling warm and affectionate, happy about herself in the cozy red light of the restaurant. I realized she was humming that Broadway song “My One and Only.” I looked at her, thinking of her history. I thought of how she’d been fucked, all the ways I knew she’d been fucked. I saw her eyes all tired and dried-out, jellyballs in her head, plugs to keep her from spilling her guts. I saw her as a piece of biology.

  Another thing. About the boys. Before or after that last thing about the boys in the sandbox. One more thing. Still summer, though, flies still flying madly around the house, spazzing against the glass or ecstatic between panes. Possibly, although who can tell, they’re the very same flies that, in mere months, will be walking, trudging across the carpet, still hoping they’ll find the way out. So one more thing about the boys.

  Grandparents have come to visit. I hear the long car pull into the driveway, and from my window I watch them stumble out. It’s the father’s parents. I can tell by the gestures, all around, who shakes which hand and claps which shoulder. The way Claire hangs back with the golden retriever, how they both kind of hover, trying to decide what’s best to do, doing little half-bows. They guide each other inside and I can almost hear the dishes through all our walls, clanking through theirs, then across both driveways, and then through mine.

  In the late afternoon I go outside for some reason, I don’t remember. Mail, garbage, primp the plants, I don’t know. I’m curious. All day their grandfather was rocking in a chair on the porch, the dog sleeping with his tail agonizingly close to getting clipped. Then the boys came out. Four or five of tfiem, maybe more. The girls were inside somewhere. Baking cookies, I’m sure. The retriever scuttled away and the boys surrounded him for a bit. At one point the old man used his cane and stood up and moved around there in front of his chair with the boys around him and then sat back down. A couple of the boys went inside. The rest sat on the porch steps, looking into the palms of their hands.

  The boys see me in the yard and rush up to the fence and push their faces on it. “Look! Look!” say the boys. One, two, three, four, they each hold up what they have, and what they each have is an Indian head coin. Each boy holds each coin in the frame made by a fence link. Grandfather has dispersed his collection. Now I know. I realize that somewhere in his history, something just like this must have happened to Ted.

  Now I can see how the old man stooped in the center of the hopping boys, and how the boys look and look at the heads he holds for them. They don’t know if they’re allowed to touch, though. The grandfather feels a surge of youth for a moment, he is so pleased with his grandfatherliness and he hobbles in a circle around his cane. He raises his free fist in a feeble gesture of power. I finally get it. He’s showing the boys how the Indian danced around with a tomahawk and how he’ll chop-chop you. Then he gives them the coins.

  I’m thinking about what we inherit. I’m thinking of Adam’s body capped off with an Indian head, this double anonymity. It’s all so horrible I want to die.

  On the side of the Christians’ house that faces mine there’s a small window in the nutcracker of the roofline. Sometimes kids peek from it. I can see it from my living room. They hop and I see them, blurry in a fragment of time, as they see the world.

  One afternoon, it’s deep autumn. Outside, dusk’s revving up for a good glowing show. The sandbox is covered with a blue tarp. The flies are walking across the wood floor and my shaggy poodle is walking behind one. Next door in the window in the peak there’s a face, and it’s a girl. Twelve, thirteen.

  I can see her behind layers of smudgy fingerprints and I know what happened. I can tell from her face exactly what happened, and later, when I meet her, it turns out it’s basically true.

  Her folks split, died, what have you, and Claire’s her aunt, her father’s sister. And it turns out Aunt Claire was actually not always religious, particularly. She ran away from home at, indeed, thirteen, and found sanctuary with acquaintances of acquaintances and was converted and married off fairly immediately. Claire’s brother stayed where they beat him and beat him and he grew, warped and dented, and then there was this girl he met, and then this baby they had, and then these mishaps, these accidents, these ways he always meant to be wise and was not. Next thing, smoke is huff-puffing from the chimney next door and inside Claire’s whispering to her husband by the flashing fire in the wooden living room, “My brother will never shape up, he’s not fit, he’s not fit,” and she stutters and paces. She’s wringing her hands and yanking her hair. She’s a bit broken. She’s practically ruined.

  So one day I’m in the yard with my dog and the husband steps up to the fence like he’s about to lean an elbow on it, but it’s not that kind of fence. He puts both hands on it, on the metal pole that goes across the top. His nose is just above the pole and his hands are one at each ear, like a puppy, but pockmarked. Then he has the conversation with me that makes no sense until I see the girl’s face in the window.

  “Well there,” he says grinning, pulling his features broad across his narrow face. “Well there, it looks like if all goes well we’ll have some help around here with the kids,” he says. It’s like he wants a cigar. “Turns out the father’s in jail and we can get her out of that terrible home,” he says, or something just like it. I don’t know what he said. I can’t do his voice. He’s so awful I can’t listen. I can’
t even look at him when he talks. I can’t do any of those encouraging motions with my eyes or my hands that you do to show someone you care that they’re talking. But he doesn’t believe he’s not good, you know. He can’t picture it. So that’s what he says, basically, and soon thereafter, there she was. In the window. At the peak. A wide smudge behind the frosty panes, luminous. Alicia, like Alice, but lighter, and not down a rabbit-hole and underground, here on earth. A dreamgirl. Not her dream, though. Mine.

  For one thing, she pet the retriever, and the stiff old thing hobbled after her in awe as she shuttled the kids in and out of the house for play in the yard, or packed them into the van for church. He sat at attention at her heel when she stood on the porch at the door, lined the children up and, one by one, pulled their sweaters over their heads and their boots from their feet until the last one toddled or tumbled over the threshold and into the house, sockfooted, and Alicia lifted the monstrous mound of candy-colored clothing and disappeared after them. Stiff and wasted as he was, the dog followed her for weeks until he felt absolutely sure, or as sure as a dog can be, that she wouldn’t just leave for good at any moment, after which he posted himself where he could be sure he could see her, and lay there with an ease I believe was as new and inevitable to him as loving this girl felt to me.

  Believe me, I knew how she was an accumulation. I know it’s her, repeated through my past. It’s what makes her make sense, though. It’s what makes her right. I can see them receding, the girls, one behind the other, the way a row of girls might look in an ancient Egyptian painting, and I’ve seen paintings like that with a carriage pulled by a row of four horses: they draw the carriage and a horse in profile, then they draw the horse behind the horse, and you can see it in outline behind, just the tracing, this bare rendition of perspective, and then they draw an outline and another outline behind that. It’s like looking in a mirror facing a mirror, those drawings. It looks like a vibration.

  Okay, so I think of Alicia in one of those paintings and she’s the girl in front right now, she’s the girl, now, and behind her are all those girls through history, through mine, my history, all lined behind her. They’re bound. A string is strung through them. They’re beads on a string. I pull the string. They’re not beads, they’re shadows, they’re paper, I pull the string and they all slide forward until they hit Alicia’s back and smack, pop, pow, they’re one girl, they’re a whole girl, they’re animated, multi-dimensional, they’re more than composite, they’re her, she’s alive, she’s here.

  I watch her. I imagine her. For weeks, for months maybe. All those things you do when you’re a psychokiller. No lie.

  It is very difficult to remember what I was thinking.

  Then one day I follow her to school. I do. I decide that what I have to do is I have to follow the bus, because I don’t really know where the school is, which one she goes to.

  I take off work on a Friday and I put my poodle in my hatchback, and my poodle promptly hops up front and sits next to me like she’s a person, like a person’s crawled inside her and she’s a disguise. It’s such a decent town that each morning the bus pulls right up in front of the house, first the bus that takes some of the little kids to their school, and then the bus that takes Alicia. I’ve become used to being a few minutes late for work so that I can wait with her, and watch her get on it. The first bus grumbles and squeaks to a stop at their walkway. The kids totter through the yard and Alicia shuttles them along and then runs back into the house to collect her own stuff. If it’s nice weather she sits outside and waits. Sometimes she reads. All dressed and ready to go, I watch out my window with the last of my coffee.

  So the morning I follow the bus it’s a little tough to change my routine that I like so much. I wait in the car in my driveway with its nose facing out, huffing and puffing from its stubby exhaust pipe, pretending I’m letting it warm up, practicing so that if someone walks over for some reason and asks about my dog I’ll be able to say it’s take-your-dog-to-work day.

  For a second, I ask myself why I am bringing my dog. And then I realize: I’m not sure when I’m coming back.

  The first bus leaves and then the second bus arrives. Alicia’s running late and she springs from the front door holding her backpack by its loop handle because she doesn’t have time to sling it over her shoulder. She’s wearing a goofy crochet hat with a pompom on top. The back seats of the bus are already full, so I know immediately there’s no chance of her sitting where I can see her. I follow the bus up and down two more blocks. Within those blocks we make three more stops. Then I follow the bus out of the neighborhood. We cross the creek and swing onto the highway and go one exit away. We pass a shabby golf course and a public park and then we arrive at a tidy brick building with white columns rising from wide front steps. No surprise, on the sign with the name of the school, which I read and promptly forget, there’s a cross. I pull over. The bus pulls in behind two other busses.

  Alicia exits the bus. She’s not wearing her hat anymore. Her hair is newly cropped in chunks. It’s both ridiculous and adorable. The sole of one of her completely beaten sneakers is flopping and I can see her little smirk at the sound on the sidewalk. I’m struck, knowing we are thinking of the same thing.

  She’s surrounded. She’s one bright, fallen leaf in a stream with thousands. The great double doors to the boxy brick school suck them up, a breath, the half of a breath that goes backwards.

  There’s no fence around this school and I have a clear view. I spend the day in the car, parked across the street, with a sandwich and the newspaper. My dog fusses for a while. She can see the soccer fields and she’s convinced I meant to take her out to run and have lost my mind. She’s sure I’ve simply forgotten. She pokes her nose at my paper. She’s briefly interested in my sandwich. She gives up, I’m being ridiculous, and she curls up in the bucket seat and sleeps.

  At lunchtime, the kids come out of the school again. It’s pretty big for a private school, but apparently there’s no hot lunch and they gather in groups outside along the brick retaining wall or spread their sweaters like picnic blankets, eating their lunches from paper bags and lunchpails the shape of mailboxes. They’re in groups according to the clothes they wear and how big they are.

  Alicia’s there. She’s eating lunch with three girls. Apparently each girl has done something funny to her hair: one has dyed hers black, one has dyed hers blue, one has braided hers in dozens of sloppy braids. Alicia’s the only one who’s chopped hers off, though, and I imagine they’re impressed. All day, at intervals, they’ve been saying, “God, Alicia, I can’t believe you did that,” or “God, Alicia, you’re crazy. I totally didn’t think you would.” In math, in algebra I bet, the one with the braids, the timid one, passes a note to Alicia. It’s intricately folded into a square with a diamond in the center. “Don’t worry,” it says in smudgy pencil. “Your hair looks pretty cool. Plus it will grow back.”

  Mostly, though, watching them, I wish I’d saved my sandwich so I could unwrap mine as she unwraps hers, so I could open it up and adjust the placement of the tomatoes, so I could see how it feels to eat the whole thing before taking even a sip of soda, the way, it turns out, she does.

  All day the sun comes through the windshield, one angle at a time. At some moments colors sparkle from my dog’s black curls like momentary rainbows in oil. In the schoolyard lost bits of plastic wrap float over the grass like baby ghosts.

  The bell rings. It’s mechanical, broadcast. My dog sits up, and I sit up. The kids fill the yard, moving at such varieties of speeds it’s impossible to focus really. Some are flat out running, shoving through the crowd, and some are slouched and shuffling and some are standing in clumps with their hips cocked, holding their books to their chests and snapping gum, planning their weekends, cramming in social information while they can. I can see how noisy it is. Alicia’s solitary, striding toward the line of busses. She’s already done thinking about school. She’s thinking about something else, and I can see it’s some
thing that somewhere pains her. She only half-knows she’s in public. I think she’s already home, sweeping the leaves from the porch, seven squat kids screaming Emergency! Emergency! because suddenly their toys have become entirely unappealing, and I leap from my car. I feel it finally, how desperately I must save her.

  “Alicia!” I holler. I’m waving madly. I’ve got both hands in the air. Like I’m at a rock show. Like someone in the sky’s got my fingers caught in strings, deus ex machina, shaking them from above. “Alicia! It’s me!” I call. “From next door!”

  I’m driving. I’m amazed. She’s next to me.

  I waved like that and she did, she came over. She stood with me by the hood of my car. I said, “I’m here to give you a ride home.”

  She said, “Why?” Her eyelashes went right around her eyes, precisely as you’d expect. One eyelash had escaped, and balanced on her cheekbone near her nose, undecided.

  I said, “Don’t you hate the bus?” and she said, “No, I don’t mind the bus. It’s kind of meditative.”

  I said, “Well, your aunt asked me. To pick you up.”

  A couple girls approached, but she waved them away. “See you later,” she said. Then she said, “Shit. What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You know her.”

  Alicia said, “I thought she was over the hair.”

  I opened the door to her side of the car and my poodle stood there, wiggling at her. I shooed her into the backseat and Alicia got in. My dog licked the side of her face from behind. Alicia smiled like mad. She shoved her backpack back there and it settled nicely into the depression in the backseat, right where if I was another abductor I might have tossed her once I clunked her on the head with my golfclub.

  Instead, I’m driving and she’s next to me, leaning her head against the window, letting it vibrate there. When I glance over I can almost mistake her for being asleep, as if she’s fainted and slid sideways down a wall. Her scrappy hair is the color of a faun. She’s remarkable. She pulls her knee up so her foot’s on the seat with her, and picks at the rubber that’s still holding the flapping sole to her shoe. Her little toes peek out of their container. Her white sock is black with filth. She’s immaculate. My face, I make sure, is as blank as possible, but I’m clinging to the steering wheel much harder than I mean. I pass our exit. It’s gone as if it never came up.