Everyday Psychokillers Read online

  Picture the moment in families through history. You come home from school. Daddy is there with Mom at the kitchen table. You’re given the news: the job is lost, the money is gone, the marriage is over, your dog is dead, the jig is up. The world doesn’t love you and you thought it did. You fool. You run. In a more minor moment you might run to your room and slam the door, but this one is big, and you know that even your bed will turn against you, because you suddenly know that the house is a cage. You thought it was keeping you safe, but it’s faking it. A frightening world is not locked out, it’s locked in. You feel this and you’re out the nearest window, running in any direction down any road, and wide and dead as the pavement may be, it feels close as any enchanted wood.

  I mean Osiris just found out, really, that his brother is Evil. So it’s a death, but it’s a liberating death. The kind of death that has an afterlife. You might disappear from all who knew you, you might want to become dead to them, at least for a while, at least until you figure things out, if you ever can, if you ever do.

  In the aftermath of the feast, Set took his place on Osiris’ throne, and the moment he did, silhouetted in the window where she’d rushed as if to catch the coffin when it flew, Isis began to spin. She twirled and spun until she’d spun herself into flight, and in the shape of a vulture, Isis winged her way out the window and away.

  Years, years. She flew. She searched. Found his body far away. Pried open the coffin with a crowbar of some sort. Brought him back in a boat made of papyrus. Hid him in the marsh, beyond the palace gate, docking him there in the reeds. Went off with her sister, errands to run, canopic jars to buy.

  But Set, some days, liked to crawl into the body of a dead crocodile and swim around, looking through its eyes, swimming with its limbs, disguised. He’d been doing just that and he’d spied her there with their half-dead, all-dead, good-as-dead brother, knee-deep in the Nile. When Isis kissed her fingertips and pressed them to her brother’s head, and waded out of the river and out of sight, Set emerged, flung the crocodile carcass off like a cape, and tore the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces with his savage wild-pig teeth, scattering them throughout the marsh.

  When Isis returned, she wept in her paper boat, and then she gathered herself together, and searched the Nile a second time. She collected thirteen pieces, found all but one, and she bandaged them together.

  When you’re a child on a tour in your local museum, sitting on the linoleum floor, in a semicircle with your group from school, on your knees in front of the glass case with reproductions of thirteen action-figure-sized Egyptian gods, they don’t tell the part of the story about how the fourteenth piece was his genitals, and that the reason Isis couldn’t find them is they were eaten in the reeds by impious fishes. Isis the wife, the sister, the mother, the scavenging vulture. Isis the magician, the physician, the disemboweler, and embalmer. And the thing about Osiris is that while he’s all about death and constantly dying he’s never completely dead and gone. Which is how, when Isis bound his parts together, she beat her wings and fanned breath into him, and he breathed just enough to be breathing as she conjured his genitals, and as the last wisp of breath from her wings cruised through his body, Isis impregnated herself with his likeness. Osiris, great fragmented father of civilization. Horus was born bent on vengeance, and history went on from there.

  Life passes through air, through bodies that are somehow incidental and sacred at once. If you took the museum at its word, you’d never know.

  In the museum, one wall away from the Egyptian gods, in a glass case where they don’t stop on tours with schoolchildren, there are ancient Greek urns, and on them men are running after women with their enormous cocks before them like swords, just as Aubrey Beardsley drew them so much later. The women run from them around the urns with their arms outstretched, wearing gowns of fish scales, in order, I suppose, to expose their femininity. Of course crocks are round, so who’s chasing who is part of it. Fishes gobbling gonads, men grabbing at girls dressed as fish.

  Now, I wasn’t in that school system the year they did local history, but along the way, years later, I got curious and looked it up, wondering what I was missing. Some car-racing guy from Indianapolis came and civilized the Everglades, draining it so he could build Miami Beach, all very much as Osiris civilized Egypt so long ago. In fact, the car-racing man was the first to apply circus promotion tactics to the sale of real estate. Elephants and hot-air balloons. And even before that, the Calusa People from the Ten Thousand Islands steered the water in the marshes, engineering slow flows in certain directions so that fish would pile up in predictable places. They’d mapped in their memories the way rivers moved through the massive, reedy, puddlelike land, which you can’t call an ocean, because for acres and miles it’ll be only inches deep, and you can’t call land, because if you stand still for too long you’ll sink. For a thousand or thousands of years the Calusas steered their canoes along, shifted the flow of things, kind of wore it away, the way, as I mentioned, repeated ideas mark the map of your mind.

  Of course, the car-racing guy had no way to see the rivers within the river. He brought in workers and dredgers, scooter boats and steamboats, dragline rigs, roads, and then came cattle and the first golf courses. He made land.

  In the dark classroom, the slide projector hummed. A circle of square lights issued from its carousel and cast shadows like warped teeth on the ceiling and part of a wall. It had to be helicopters, Mr. Freedman explained. There’s simply no other way they could do it.

  When he said Ancient Egypt, how flat and distant it sounded. I remember how that felt, how he was speaking as if the Egyptians were dinosaurs, as if they died out. Because everyone knows people don’t do that stuff anymore. They don’t cannibalize. They don’t fuck their sisters and brothers. They don’t cut each other up, they don’t hack one another to pieces. Not in real life. Not anymore. It just isn’t done.

  In fact, he was saying, basically, that there aren’t Egyptians anymore, really. There’s only their buried treasure.

  Some of Mr. Freedman’s slides came from snapshots he took through the glass of the displays of reproduced artifacts at the local museum. Which is why some of the slides had shiny washed-out spots, from his flashcube, which he said was the reflection of the great Egyptian sun.

  I remember, from here, as grown as I think I’ll get, how Osiris, the great Civilizer, took the landscape and shaped it, licked his fingers after dinner and then lickety split found himself locked in a box, tricked by his family into thinking he did it of his own accord. I think my school tricked me. I think the museums tricked me. They tricked me into believing I was not in a box. I think of the worked-over land along the river, how from the high window it must have looked like a tattooed grid, each block filled with its particular pattern. New animals dotted it like buttons. You know what agriculture looks like. You know what it looks like when they add a neighborhood and a mall.

  I think of Osiris in the box that is one size bigger than his skin, how death for Egyptians is a kind of travel. I think of a runaway, a girl in her toughest-looking jacket slipping away in the night, away from her stepfather and into the city’s underworld, or I think of the young hero from fairy tales, Jack, right? off to seek his fortune with the last lunch from home wrapped in a cloth in his pocket. Your coffin’s a boat, and it’s a boat of papyrus, and you’re on a journey, and you feel perhaps for the first time that of all lives, maybe it’s your life being written. This is unless you’re doomed. Then it’s merely memory that’s being written as you move.

  I think of Osiris’ final death. How Set cut him up, and Isis gathered him back together and bound him. How a mummy is hollow as a doll, how the wrapped shell of the body lies among its separated and contained organs. The skin is an organ, they like to tell you in biology. There it is. Inside-out, re-contained, and organized into labeled vessels. I think of how disassembling bodies is civilization.

  Following Rhonda

  My uncle Ted and I sat on his littl
e cement balcony, on the floor, because he had only one chair and didn’t want to tower over me. He’d recently collected a giant rhinoceros bug, and now he took it from the cardboard box where he’d been keeping it for observation. With its legs waving, he chose a spot for it on the corkboard where a dozen other large bugs were pinned, colorful and still. He lay the corkboard on the floor between us, placed the rhinoceros bug on its spot, and pushed its pin through. The bug waved and waved.

  I was trying to figure out why people kill things—how they are able, when it is okay and when it is not okay. You might remember, at this point in history, people were starting to fight about terms like mass murderer, serial killer, and sociopath.

  I appreciated the monstrosity of the rhinoceros bug, which reminded me of the Egyptians and their sacred scarabs, the symbols for renewed life, which were placed in the mummy, over the heart, which is what they called the Seat of Intelligence, which was the only organ left in an entombed body.

  Once, my mother used a spade to chop the head off a water moccasin that came in too close from the pond near the horse barn where she worked, and the snake’s head chomped on the air, in the dust, while she lifted its body away. She used the handle of the spade to lift it, turning away from the snake’s head. She lifted it and turned away from the snake and away from me where I stood watching, and the body hung in the shape of an omega until she flung it.

  None of which the snake could see, I thought, watching. It didn’t see the spade, because the spade came from behind, and it couldn’t see its body as it moved through the air, twisting, because it was facing the wrong way. Its head faced me, and not its body. It might have seen my mother’s shadow, or felt it, if that’s what snakes do. I could see its giant teeth. Retractable fangs is the term. I thought I could see them squirting venom, and I thought I saw its eyes wild with rage at having its body taken and thrown away behind its back.

  So the bug, I thought, was the same, waving. It seemed impossible that a thing could be moving, and yet unable to take in information.

  Unlike my mother, though, Ted must have known what he was doing to me. My mother was intent on killing the snake to save me from it, essentially, to protect the horses, because its nest was near the barn. She watched the snake when she went at it with the shovel, and then she watched its body as she threw it away into the brush. Then she looked over at me with a that’s-that nod, scooped up the head and flung it too, in one swift motion. Ted kept his eyes on the bug as he placed and pinned it, but he talked to me the whole time he was doing it, as if he knew exactly what my face looked like each moment, and knew what each look meant I must be feeling. Ted said the giant rhinoceros bug didn’t have pain, that it wasn’t even frustrated at being unable to move. He said it was like a remote control car up against a wall, but without the remote. Don’t worry, he said, the bug has no pain.

  The bug has no pain, I thought, word by word. I sat on the balcony, hung over a parking lot and across from the rows of balconies of the apartments next door, trying to think about it, trying to imagine it, and finding it unimaginable. Because as I looked at the bug, I wondered about the bug, which meant, for me, that I imagined a pin through my back. There I was on the corkboard, and I was only trying to walk but my legs were as if treading water. It must have shown on my face.

  Ted said, “You see, we know the bug feels no pain, because we did studies on its brain and it can’t have pain. It doesn’t have nerves and such.” He touched the bug on the side of its shell, and then stopped touching it and moved his hand toward me.

  “Who is we?” I asked, looking harder and harder at the bug to avoid looking at him. His hand hovered over my knee for a moment. One of the things that makes bugs creepy is they have exoskeletons. They’re inside-out. They’re flesh in bones. One thing that makes hands creepy is they’re like wingless butterflies, they’re like spiders with missing limbs. I watched the bug and I watched Ted’s hand move from it toward my knee and I didn’t look at his face. I had no idea what the hand was thinking, why it moved near me, if it was a threat or a shy effort to comfort.

  “We people,” Ted said. “That’s who.” Then he laughed at himself and said, “We the people, you know.” He was very dramatic about it. He adjusted the angle of the bug’s pin. “It doesn’t have the nerve, get it?”

  But this was unimaginable for me, this whole notion of being alive, of having motion but no feeling. All of which, particularly the part about imagination, is connected to psychokillers, and I knew it from that instant.

  I spent a lot of time looking at Ted. He was my mother’s younger brother, her half-brother. He had black, looping hair and quite a white face. Although the skin on it was a bit abused, it must have been striking when he was younger, although he wasn’t old. Stuff had happened to him, stuff I think he assumed I knew, but I didn’t know. His hands were large, flat, and square and his fingers were square like sausages pressed together, and whether it was to enhance the squareness or because he didn’t care, he cut his nails flat off, leaving the corners pointy. I spent a lot of afternoons at his apartment after school because my mother was sleeping. I looked at him a lot because that’s what I do when something makes me worry: look at it. Ted lived in a nine-unit, six-building complex a few blocks from our triplex, across the park. He’d gone to college until he ran out of money. My mother seemed to think that if he’d stayed in college it could have saved him from his obvious melancholy, from his limp apartment, the way my father’s schooling was meant to save us. Watching Ted, I learned how to look at people antiseptically, how to play up my distance, how to shape the tone of my voice so that anything I said, whether I meant it or not, could be taken as funny.

  Another time, this time on the carpet in the living room of his apartment, Ted and I sat knee to knee in what was called Indian style, and perhaps still is, I’d have to look it up. We decided it needed a new name, not because the term Native American hadn’t trickled down yet—it hadn’t and trickled down hadn’t either—but because even then you had to say “India Indian? Or Indian Indian?” Ted suggested “knees akimbo,” but I said people would think “eskimo,” and then there’d be the whole nose-kissing thing. I said, “pretzel position?” which he liked but I decided embarrassed me. So we sat namelessly, our legs knotted, and he was clipping his nails and then we were going to clip mine. The last time I’d stayed the weekend with him, my mother complained that he’d returned me with messy hair. This time, he said, I would arrive immaculate. We devoted all Sunday afternoon to the project. We’d ironed my pants so they had creases—jeans with creases—like when he was in high school, Ted told me. I’d never have agreed to it except we were going straight home, and then the jeans were going straight back in the laundry, inside-out, to keep their fresh indigo color.

  Then he said, “You know, they say some Indians would will themselves to death when captured.”

  “Kill themselves to death. That’s funny,” I said.

  “Will,” he said.

  “I know. I heard you,” I said.

  He worked at his toes with the clippers, digging at the springy stuff from the edge of the nail’s underside. I watched a curl boing on his forehead. Then he set the clippers down and pulled at a loose a tab of skin by the nail so that the crease where it met his flesh filled with blood. When he tapped the side of his toe, the blood formed a bead. “I like to make sure one tiny bit of me is in a speck of pain at all times. It keeps things in perspective.” Then he said, “And take this from the Indians: never be without the means to kill yourself, just in case. That’s what I say,” he said.

  So, yes, he was dramatic, but that kind of thing can work when you’re young. It can get you thinking.

  What else: quite deeply set gray eyes that sometimes looked a little greenish. A five o’clock shadow almost every time of the day.

  I mean, say I was a boy, and Ted took me camping and we sat at the edge of our fire in its little rock circle instead of on the floor of his living room or his balcony, and he took ou
t a flashlight and shone it up his face and told ghost stories—Anne Boleyn with her head chop-chopped, or the golden arm, or tromp-tromping up the stairs, whatever they’re telling these days. There is an obvious tradition of scaring children—Grimm’s tales and all those “Daddy’s going to get you” games. Is the point, I wonder, to keep children home, where they believe they are safe? Although they are not safe. Or the game could be for parents who want to believe they can control their children’s fate, to frighten or protect them at will—shifting their vocal tones, or shifting the angles of their outstretched arms so that what once would strangle becomes a comfort to crawl into. Either way it works either way, because everyone wants to believe. The children want to believe, and the parents want to believe. It’s a good little outfit.

  For Ted with his toenails it was absolutely about control, the way you hear about girls cutting their arms and legs with razors, the way, in fact, girls I knew were probably cutting themselves at that moment, right as I watched the edge of Ted’s toenail fill with blood, only I didn’t see it that way, with the girls I knew. I thought of it later: how this is the age when you start noticing that you are a series of orifices. People are looking at your mouth. They’re looking at your ass. There’s a way that cutting yourself is a matter of beating them to the punch, of breaking your skin before it’s broken for you, so you can feel what it feels like, so you can watch it try to heal, so you can watch yourself live through. Your body seals itself up and the marks leave a record, writing on a wall, a kind of hieroglyph, your skin like paper.

  Ted’s version was he had this secret little secret of this bit of pain, which he let me in on, and that made me sure he was hiding more. The point of telling a secret at all, I suppose, is to point out how much else must be hidden.

  Weeks later, I was still thinking about the Indians, and I took to quizzing him. In the grocery, I zoomed up behind him, riding the cart like a scooter, and dragged to a stop where he knelt, picking a soup. “Ted, how about now?” and he said, “Knives at the deli. Or see, I pull the shelf this way, I’m crushed, thousands of falling cans. And I’m carrying a pen,” he said, put his hand in a fist, and tap-tapped on his chest over his heart to show me where he’d stab. Once, in the waiting room at the dentist, I said, “How now?” and he was fed up, and bored, so he said, “Look, brown cow, it comes down to teeth,” and made a gnawing gesture at his arm. Food. Teeth. I pictured a pyramid of soup cans with their labels torn off, these silver bundles of energy, like batteries, like giant bullets. I pictured a tumbling pyramid of cans, filled with energy, organic electricity. Falling cans, falling bullets. Every so often, there’s a report on the radio about crowds at New Year’s, or Mardi Gras, or the Fourth of July, and someone shoots a gun in the air and people die from falling bullets. Every so often, someone drops a coin from the Empire State Building and the coin, by the force of the earth itself, is a weapon. Story goes it could fall right through your skull. Food. Teeth. Ted, a kind of cannibal, eating himself. Wolves chewing their arms off in iron traps in the snowy woods.