Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  I’m seething with warmth. I push at it with my mind, trying to shove it away it’s so utterly inappropriate, utterly inconvenient. Almost predictably, I’m filled with affection and it’s shifted, it’s edged right over, it’s slipped out of me, these feelings, when I’m not looking. It’s the way it happens for me. I’ll take my mind away from my book to examine a thought for a moment, or glance up from my dinner, or from television, I’ll remember something, and it’s easing from me, wavering like a loose layer around me, like egg white. Alone, it can end with a hand down my pants, but anywhere else, it just never wells up when it’s appropriate. It just never seems to have to do with anything right now. In the car, in the glances I take of Alicia and keep as I return my eyes to the highway, I feel it, I’m squirming with it. I’m dizzy with it, frantic. The car is like a steel trap and I want to chew my fucking arm off. I can’t remember if I ever decided: am I driving home, or am I driving us, together, away?

  I think, Christ I don’t have time for this. I have to go to work on Monday. I think about how crappy motels are, how quickly I would run out of money, how it’s such a pain to travel with a dog. I mean how many abductions in history happened with poodles? How many rescues? Captivating captive. Adopted, abducted. Rescued, reduced. We’re past the actual town. We’re in that space between named places. She’s used to the bus, I think. She’s just zoning out there. She’s tired. Or she doesn’t care. Or she doesn’t want to go back to her uncle and Claire.

  In a bright spasm of a decision I jerk the car into the right lane and down the ramp off the highway. It’s pretty much in the country. There are farms. The road goes up and down some hills but is straight as far as I can see.

  Alicia looks up finally. “You miss the exit?” she says, but she’s so unruffled I wonder if I drugged her. She’s being what you call blasé. I can’t tell if she’s faking.

  I mean, I just don’t know her that well.

  “God, you drive fast,” she says.

  I don’t, but it’s true. I am.

  “Did someone die?” she says. She’s not afraid. She’s not scared, that I can tell. She’s not worried. “Where are we going? Come on, really,” she says. “Believe me, you can tell me. I’m not going to be shocked.” I believe her. If anything, I think she’s worried for me.

  I turn the car again. It’s like we’re driving on a grid. I jerk and turn, I jerk and turn. Each time I turn we’re on another straight road, and each turn the road’s more desolate, less kept. I turn onto dirt, finally. There are potholes. My dog is bouncing around in back, trying to stand and see out the window without falling down. I turn again. There’s no sign, and almost immediately I can see it’s a dead end. It’s a dead end into a cornfield. I stop the car. The cornstalks are taller than the car, and absolutely pale. It’s an abandoned field. The corn is dead, drained and colorless. No one bothered to harvest it.

  My dog really wants to get out of the car.

  “Are you going to tell me now?” says Alicia.

  I love it. She has no patience for drama.

  She’s stopped picking at her shoe but she’s still sitting with her one foot up on the seat, which makes it so she’s turned slightly toward me. She’s looking right at me. She’s waiting for me to say what I’m going to say, to do what I’m going to do.

  It’s one thing to let someone touch you. Being touched can almost be okay, because it’s merely a matter of bravado, of bearing it. You’ve made peace with anything that could happen. You’ve had to, in order to move through the world at all.

  But I can’t touch her, much as I scramble for a disclaimer about knocking a bug away or lifting a leaf from her hair. I shove at my mind but I can’t even imagine it, really. I can imagine my hand moving, and I can imagine it near her. I can imagine the particles that surround her humming with heat and I can imagine feeling the electricity of them, their hyper, microscopic orbits. I can imagine coming as close as imaginable to the rows and rows of practically transparent, practically invisible hairs on her body, and like a magnet turned backward, hovering there at their multitudinous uniform tips.

  I look at her and it’s as if I’m standing over her. I’m like that one girl who slammed that other girl into the iron beam in the basement locker room and stood over her as she disappeared into a coma.

  She’s a spinning top, her own little universe, all the particles in her body, these microscopic solar systems, molecules following one another in such close circles they’re bound, moving so fast they seem still. When I look at her I feel like I’m taking her into myself, like I’m wearing her, like she’s another layer of me. I feel as if I’m seeing her inside-out, but what I see is how mysterious she remains to me, as I remain mysterious to myself, and in this, how ultimately distant we are.

  The very gesture. My hand approaching. It could be a snake striking. It so easily could be one, despite any intentions at all. I can’t touch her. I can’t touch her because if I actually touched her, I’d have to know I could do it right.

  I mean, what if it hurt? What if it hurt her feelings, you know? I’d have to be certain. And there’s no way.

  Go ahead: think. Think about girls. Think about girls you know, and girls in history. Think about girls you knew in your childhood. Really. I was not surrounded by terrible things as a child, not particularly, and neither were any of them, any of the girls or any of the people. Where I lived was not a particularly bad place. It’s true, it’s gotten a lot of press about being a microcosm. The election, for instance, when the country was torn in half with apathy or antipathy and then again between two awful men who’d run and it came down to that place. It even came down to who’s the real kidnapper, us or them, of the six-year-old boy who was as dark and angelic as Adam was blond.

  Where I lived was just a suburb of a city that was the suburb of another less minor city. It wasn’t particularly bad, or particularly anything, comparatively. It’s as good as any place. It simply wasn’t a great place, and the lives that filled it simply weren’t safe lives. You have to remember, safe is not in fact the normal state of things. It is not what you are until one thing or another. It’s not the bottom line, and it is not what we are until we are something else. There might be a great place. I haven’t seen it.

  What makes it okay is that it turned out okay. Some memories you are so used to they are almost harmless. They’re separated, they float in front of your eyes, translucent, shrugging. I grew, I went, I did. I’m stunted, godless, practically impotent, often empty. Looking at me, most days, you’d never know I can speak, that I’m seeing anything at all, that I sense and feel. I’m only half around. I’m at twelve, thirteen.

  Just recently, a homeless planet was discovered floating in Orion’s belt, not orbiting any central star.

  The ones who are left lived through it. Be amazed, but remember it has nothing to do with anything. You just lived through. It doesn’t make you anything but here.

  We’re in my little car, which has rocked to a stop at the bottom of a dirt road, nose to the desiccated and looming cornstalks. My dog’s so exasperated she can hardly stand it. I’m so warped with desire I’m about to weep.

  I say, “I’m worried about you.”

  Alicia puts on a look that says she can’t imagine why. It’s an extremely kindhearted expression. I ask her about how she came to live here, how her aunt and uncle got her. How she feels about those quaking, howling children and their constant emergencies. She tells me about her father, how he’s in jail, how he’s a good guy but he can’t get it together and he keeps fucking up. Her mother, she tells me, was really depressed when she was born, and left them soon enough. I’m trying to figure out her tone. She’s frank about the whole thing. I figure she’s told it to numerous guidance counselors. She’s bored with it a little. Some stories of yourself you repeat and repeat for pleasure, and there’s a bit of that in the way she tells it, a bit of knowing it’s a pretty compelling story, that it’s worked before when she told it. She’s just told it on command a l
ittle too much lately, that I can see. It’s become kind of an annoying story. I can see she feels an exhaustion with the sound of her voice, a frustration with familiar syllables, when familiar syllables should feel comforting. But there’s another part of her tone that relieves me. It’s the part that matches the way she’s looking at my face, the way she’s studying me. It’s as if she knows, really, why I’m asking.

  Read it again, you say when you’re a little kid, to the people who are entirely their hands and voices. No, you say. Read it right. Read it exactly the way it says.

  Afterthought

  It’s winter. It’s night. I’m watching television with Alicia. She comes over a lot, whenever she can. I adore her. She likes me.

  We’re in my living room with a rosy fire. She’s begged off her duties next door. Said she had a cold and didn’t want the kids to get it. She is a little sniffly. I’ve made her insta-soup and she’s wrapped in an afghan, next to my curly dog, who’s asleep on the braided rag rug.

  Like magic, Florida’s all over the TV. On a news-magazine show, Asian sushi eels are infesting the Everglades. Pond lettuce is taking over like kudzu. A guy in a diving suit is standing there in the reeds, pointing. You know how that happens sometimes, how all of a sudden everything that comes out of the television seems directed at you. There’s a piece about how they’re making a database of manatee scars, the scars from where they’ve been run over by boats. They’re recording the scars because with manatees, it turns out, you can’t tell one from another. The only way to individuate them is by injury. Then there’s a promo for how Adam Walsh’s father wants to capture fifty fugitive killers in fifty states in one two-hour special. I’m suspicious, of course, and I tell Alicia so.

  “It’s like he’s already caught them,” I say, “Otherwise he couldn’t be so sure.” I can picture it. He’s got them bound and gagged in the basement. Even in the promo he’s lying, I can see it in his eyes. He’s going to bring them out one by one whether anyone calls in tips or not. Lucas and Toole might not have been able to keep count after a while; I mean even they started shrugging at some point after the bodies started piling up. But this guy sure does, he counts and counts.

  “I used to live there,” I say to Alicia.

  On another channel it’s a thing about a guy watching the silhouettes of ladies through a window. On another channel it’s a thing about how this one guy is dumpy and coarse but you gotta laugh at him because it’s so true. On another they’re reenacting the trial of a man who denies the Holocaust. Holocaust on Trial, it’s called.

  On PBS there’s a documentary showing. This guy is on a boat, easing along the Amazon. In the belly or whatever you call it are seven statues of seven indigenous individuals from seven tribes along the river. Some are standing facing each other. A couple lie carefully on their sides, balancing on their spears, rocking a bit when the boat’s motor stumbles.

  The film shows how, years ago, the guy pulled up and made friends with the tribes. He made an agreement. He said: Let me choose one from your people, for I am a great artist. I will make a cast of your most representative individual. I will carry that cast away to my studio in Paris or what have you. I’ll make your likeness in bronze. Life-size. I will. Do you see this photograph? he said, showing them a photograph, which is then shown on the film, up close. Here I am with a Pueblo in America. Do you see how they dress up, how they’re like you? And here they are dancing around their statue. And here I am eating their food. You with the sticks in your elegant noses. You with the leather, the clay beads, the hair. You will be united with representatives from tribes from all over the world, and in bronze you will travel together from exhibition to exhibition. Behind you will be placed a giant paragraph explaining everything in italicized letters.

  The guy’s French and you figure out what’s going on through hearing him talking in French but in the background while the narrator narrates, and then there’s another voice that does what the French guy is actually saying, in translation. Or sometimes what he wrote in his journal. When they do that, they show a clip of him writing by lantern in the belly of the boat, so you know when they’re translating from what.

  Then the French guy is talking to these indigenous people who all wear their hair in bobs with blunt-cut bangs. He speaks to them in a native language that he kind of knows, that is not exactly the indigenous people’s language, but it seems like there are enough cognates that they’re making some progress. Sometimes the French guy translates something he thinks an indigenous person said into French and tells it to his companion who drives the boat and helps him carry stuff around and sometimes works a camera. Then the translation-voice-over says, “He says it’s great news, the whole tribe will be there,” and then the narrator says, “Pierre (or whatever his name is) has been traveling for over a month. In some cases it’s been years since he made his promise. In this tribe, he chose a very old man to represent his people. Pierre had hoped the man would live to see his statue, but it was not to be. His is a labor-intensive craft, and after months of work on the statue it feels like the man is a dear friend, and Pierre feels the tribe’s loss.” He doesn’t say tribe, he says the tribe’s name, but it’s not the kind of thing you remember.

  The French guy and his navigator-type helper-fellow drag the statue of the old man off the boat. It’s a version made out of dense plastic, colored to look exactly like the carefully patina-ed bronze version that will make the rounds from city to city in America, with twenty-seven other statues, and more, as the project continues, and at some point the French man will have made so many statues that they can be split into groups and cover more territory at once. They drag the plastic Indian to the center of the group of shaggy huts where the indigenous people live. They set the statue upright. The indigenous people line up and file past it, touching the plastic folds in the man’s loincloth, or the plastic scales of the fish he is holding in his hand for them to see.

  “It is a great day for Pierre,” the narrator says. “He has kept his promise, and the many months of labor all seem worthwhile. But he has more promises to keep, so it’s back to the boat and the dark and treacherous Amazon, in search of the next tribe, to keep his promise to them before, like so much of the rainforest, they disappear.”

  There’s a pause so that PBS can thank its sponsors, and I go to the kitchen to fix cheese and crackers. When I come back in I practically drop the tray because Pierre is standing there, holding a spatula. There’s an eleven-year-old boy with straws up his nose, kneeling, holding a blow-up alligator, the kind you get for the pool. One knee on the animal’s back, one hand under its throat, pulling its bubble head back. They explain. The boy is Christopher Osceola. The straws are so he can breathe. He’s in the fifth grade. They’re covering him with plaster. They’ll put a realistic alligator in later; this one’s just so the boy can know where to keep his arms. There’s a shot of Chris’ mother, watching. She’s wearing a patchwork skirt. They’re going to do her, next. Her name is Jolin.

  “Holy shit,” I say. “I went to school with that girl. That’s Jolin Osceola.” I’m holding a piece of cheese like a dart and wondering if her son got her name because she’s single, or if she’s doing the matrilineal thing, or what. I think the Seminoles are pretty matriarchal, or were, but I’m having trouble remembering. I’m thinking of what Jolin looked like, walking along the cement breezeway with her friends and cousins and taking the whole width of it, how broad her stride was, how her hair rose and fell back into place, sleek and dark, so you could see the scissormarks. I say, “Jolin used to kick everyone’s ass. She looks great. Holy shit. He’s going to encase Jolin in plaster!” I can see Pierre in the breezeway, edging along the lockers and then darting from behind one I-beam to another. I see him sneaking up behind the girls with his spatula like a hatchet, and then I can see them, the plaster Osceolas, absolutely flat and white, hand in hand, a line of them, a chain of them, parading.

  “Wow, Alicia,” I say. “I wish you knew Jolin.” But Ali
cia’s not there anymore. The afghan is in a wad on the floor. The window’s open. The curtains are holding air, like sails. My big shaggy poodle lifts her floppy head from the braided rag rug and then trots to the window and looks out, into the vacant night. I think perhaps I’ve just zoned out, and there really aren’t plaster Osceolas, but I look again and they’re there, alive in video. I remember that I opened the window to get the fire going, and I sort of remember being in the kitchen and Alicia saying she was bored and she’d see me later, and I know I’ll see her later, 1 mean I love that girl and she really does like me, she likes to be around me, but with the curtains like that, like ghosts, it feels like she’s run away. Like she’s run away from my past.

  A psychokiller lives from one act of killing to the next. He produces himself. It’s only the depictions of him that have him carefully considering the scenes he leaves, how the scenes communicate what they communicate to those who witness and document the aftermath. People are so intent on making themselves, as the audience for these death acts, important. They cannot bear to be left out. I mean it has nothing to do with the psychokiller. He doesn’t produce meaning. He produces negative space. He’s a cutout. He’s a stuck record. He’s on a loop. Like cartoons where the running character is frozen in action and the scenery moves along behind. Every few moments the same cloud brushes his elbow. He keeps staring straight ahead. He refers only to himself, because he never takes another person to heart. He’s stuck staring at people as if he’s staring in a mirror, and even though there’s a mirror behind him and he’s everywhere, he doesn’t recognize himself.