For a time, I thought I was the monster, the thing held back and low within him. Conscious thought was wasted. Deeper things, deeper notions, concepts of our ancestors merged with what passed as my waking mind during that time. I know these were his thoughts. They were primal things full of passion I could never embrace. It was his love. It was his joy and his sadness as he knew them, murky as they were. They had no words or thoughts behind them. They were images, the swirling abstracts an animal might perceive as thought – or a man of far greater intelligence than I possess.
I felt his rage as well. His rage was not red as was my own. No. Its color was one unseen in our worlds but in his it might have been among the colors of a sunrise – his sunrise. His rage was not a simple thing. It was the rushing surge of a river gorge, the unfathomable power of the rise and fall of an ocean swell. It was also as delicate as a drop of dew quivering in the silk of a spider’s web. It was monstrous, horrid beyond imagining. But I saw that it was beautiful as well.
This was my life, my waking fugue that blended sleeping nightmares with the daily grind. But it came back to me only as a freeze-frame capture – chapter headings in a very long and very confusing DVD movie. There was me in a diner in the first hours after midnight. There was me standing under the steaming water in my crumbling shower, the tiles and fixtures thick and milky white with calcium. There was me lying with a young black prostitute whose name I may never have known. I had the taste of spearmint in my mouth once. I had the scent of a woman’s hair in my nose in one and the feel of it running through my fingers in another. The pain and flowing blood that has become a deep scar on my palm I still bear.
I might have been ill. I think I was but I don’t recall ever seeing a doctor in those four or so years. My body was strong and I don’t seem to recall much discomfort. At one point I quit smoking or rather as I returned to the world, I found I no longer cared for them. But even at a pack a day I could still jog five miles without spitting blood or collapsing.
Freddy stopped talking to me. I think that’s what it was – or part of it. I was left alone while the walls of my little world closed in around me. I atrophied. My trance-awake deepened. I knew I could reenter the world, the wider world. I was no longer chained within the cave. I was free to leave. But it was as sleep constrains. The limbs grow heavy. Conscious thought spirals away. The will to rise begins to fade. I could fight many things at many times but I could never fight myself in that state.
But that Tuesday morning came and suddenly I was awake again. I knew Freddy had killed. He finished his four-year plan and looked forward to the future. He found that future and it was dark – dark and beautiful. Freddy killed. He raged and he loved. He also threw himself into his school work.
He wrote his thesis in two semesters and finished his master’s degree early. The paper was published in a half-dozen journals throughout North America and he received high praise for it. He knew funding for his PhD would not be an issue. Not that he needed funding.
Freddy stunned the faculty with his easy grasp of even the most advanced concepts. His focus was in criminology and deviance and his methodology became almost legendary. Even before he finished his dissertation – nearly a year and a half early – the name Freddy Cartwright was becoming a household name within the circles that mattered.
We were both twenty-five, a quarter century old. I noticed my youth slipping away as only the not-as-young can. I sprained my ankle hauling an old water heater up the stairs and it was nearly two weeks before I could put my full weight on it. I cut myself on a loose strip of window flashing and it was still a scab ten days later. Little things like that, small things that escape your notice until they change. Twenty-five isn’t old but it is not eighteen. I’m sure those who reach forty look back and say forty isn’t twenty-five. The cycle just starts over again.
But twenty-five is special. Twenty-five is the last year of note in our lives that isn’t a decade. Sixty-five doesn’t count because no one retires at sixty-five anymore. Maybe seventy-five is a year. I don’t know. I won’t know. But maybe seventy-five is a year. Maybe every year after seventy-five is a year as well.
Freddy noticed his age less than I did. He was in better shape than me. He always was. He ate better than me as well. Freddy could still walk off a sprain and on him cuts would heal in days, leaving only a pale, white scar. In a month even that would fade. But he did notice.
It was his libido. At twenty he was always switched on, just as he had been at fifteen – hell, he had been like that all his life. He could go four or even five times in the space of an evening. His record was eight times in one day. He was proud of that. But at twenty-five he was finding four times was usually his upper threshold and that fourth was becoming a struggle.
The parties were still going on of course. Tina had moved on. She finished her master’s work in Toronto and she was working on her own doctorate there. She managed to get away from him alive. I’m glad for that much. Others weren’t as lucky. Tina wasn’t there but others stepped into her place. As another Freddy once said, ‘the show must go on.’
New faces replaced the old. Before she graduated and moved on, Freddy said he had Nairi O’Rourke, his Armenian fantasy and she was glorious. Most moved away but some remained. Freddy was twenty-five. Claire was twenty-six and working in town as an environmental engineer for an oil and gas firm. A couple of others from the earlier days were still around and they too were in their mid-twenties. They were the originals, the high council. But every semester a new batch of faces, a fresh batch of flesh would make the list.
By twenty-five Freddy’s body count was as high as twenty – or so he claimed. I think there were a few copy-cat killings but the police were loath to release any details. Jack Frost seemed to have moved on but another killer did come to town in the fall of 2002 and began to work from the shadows. He preyed on young women as well, but most were prostitutes or living on the streets – those that would not be missed. For a time, the police speculated there was only one killer out there. I don’t think the public bought it but we accepted it. One serial killer out there was horrible enough but it was far easier to stomach than two.
Dan Sobeleski’s death was ruled a suicide. Freddy kept his word and left the Inspector’s family alone. I don’t think he was ever actually considering hurting the girl but the threat did make for good leverage. Freddy killed him and moved on. He concluded his four-year plan with a succession of three horribly brutal deaths late that winter. He took a hiatus from his killings while his master’s thesis was in its final stages and then settled back to think about the future. He could change now. He should change. To be safe his m.o. needed to change.
I think I watched him for the next couple of years but in that time, I don’t recall seeing him so much as litter. His focus shifted to his doctorate. Freddy finished his classroom requirements in one year and set into his dissertation with all cylinders firing. He titled it: Death of the Ethical Soul – An Exploration of the Viral Nature of Deviance in Youth Culture Today. It was hardly a bedtime story.
Freddy interviewed criminals from every walk of life. He formulated a questionnaire to test them on their responses to a series of everyday occurrences. He asked the same questions to a group of junior high school kids and cross-referenced the results.
There was more to it than that. There would have had to be. It was for his PhD after all. He finished a year early and applied for his teaching fellowship while other students in his class were still seeking approval for their dissertation subjects.
Freddy was given a position in house shadowing one of the senior professors and marking his undergrad papers. He also made coffee, went on lunch runs and cleaned the faculty lounge. Freddy became the gopher and the bitch for the entire department. His job was made more arduous because he was alone in the fellowship program that year, but he slipped into it without complaint. He knew the next year there would be three people doing the job he was then doing on his own.
Freddy
didn’t mind the work. He had wanted to teach since some obscure point in our childhood neither of us can readily recall. He didn’t even mind not being paid to do the work of three people, the work that no one else wanted to do. He knew this was part of the program. Everyone went through it and he had to as well – even if he was years ahead of the curve.
-
Professor Ryan Childress became prominent in Freddy’s little world during those years. From their very first meeting Ryan knew Freddy was not like his other students. Most teachers wait a lifetime to find that one student who displays the aptitude, the skill and the brilliance Freddy demonstrated from the start. Freddy was brilliant – I grudgingly admit. He was brilliant in the way that made people murmur words like Protégé and Savant. Ryan Childress recognized that brilliance and he was not threatened by it. Instead he embraced it and nurtured it and made Freddy as close as his own child.
By the time Freddy began his teaching fellowship he was having dinner at the Childress house once or twice a month. He played catch with Ryan’s young daughter and taught her how to swing a bat to get her weight behind it. He swapped recipes and cleaning tips with Ryan’s wife. He was part of the family.
Ryan’s wife is named Elsie and they named their daughter Chelsea. Freddy grinned when he was introduced to them for the first time.
“I know,” Ryan started, “I can see the makings of a research project in there as well.”
“The Tendencies Toward Rhythmic Naming Patterns in the North American Family?” Freddy suggested.
Ryan nodded. “Something like that – Maude, Todd and Rod, right?”
“Don’t forget twins,” Elsie put in.
“Sherri and Terri,” Ryan shot back.
“He watches too much TV,” she explained to Freddy.
Freddy raised an eyebrow.
“They’re all characters on The Simpsons,” Ryan said. He frowned. “And here’s another one - the name Springfield. Every place is Springfield. It’s a name right out of American Mythology.”
“American Mythology?”
“I’m working on it,” Ryan replied. “It might either be a very long paper or a very short book.”
“No more work talk, gentlemen,” Elsie commanded. So it is written and all that.
-
It was under Ryan Childress that Freddy did his teaching fellowship. Professor Childress was on the panel for Freddy’s final oral presentation. There were six professors present. There should have been seven. Everyone was conscious of the empty seat.
The dean was absent. He was dead. Dean Taylor died just two nights before of a massive cardiac arrest. He was fifty-eight and fairly obese. He smoked despite his doctor’s orders and he rarely stuck to his two martinis per day limit. No one was really surprised that he died but it was still upsetting.
Ryan Childress would be stepping into the dean’s chair. Everyone knew it. Ezra Lewis would finally get the tenure she had long deserved and one of her assistants would step into her old place. That would leave an entry-level position in a faculty that had not hired in four years.
He could have done it for Ryan or he could have done it for Ezra. He was fond of both of them. I’m sure he only did it for himself. Freddy didn’t want to move anywhere else to teach. He liked Calgary and he did want to teach. I don’t know how or where he got the insulin or even where he learned how to put it to use. But he knew.
Alfred Taylor died in his sleep. He and his wife did not share a bedroom because he snored and he was often up half the night reading. She found him in the morning, stiff and cold, when he failed to come down for breakfast.
Even if he didn’t tell me he had done it I would have known. The timing was too perfect. Freddy received his PhD and he was offered an assistant professorship of the University of Calgary. This new job was not much different than his fellowship had been but at least he didn’t have to clean up or fetch meals anymore. He marked papers and exams and he was given a 100-level tutorial to teach. He was there. He was doing it and he loved it.
Freddy did have to keep up with his own writing. Tutorials were one thing but he wanted his own classes. To work his way up he needed to be published. He needed to demonstrate his ability to conduct original research. The university required it of him. They called it ‘contributing to his field of study’. Freddy was fine with that. He told me it was basically people watching – something he had done for most of his life.
-
But the Freddy I knew was not the same Freddy his colleagues had come to know. I knew he was brilliant, but the brilliance he showed me was something I could never appreciate. He had become a man of select tastes and well-defined appetites. Nothing should have changed that.
That Freddy, the learned Freddy, was gaining strength over the old and cold Freddy I knew and feared. I began to believe this newer version of him was one free of the darkness at last, dwelling in an annex to the outside. I have often thought this in the past but this time it was different. He was different. The words he used, the inflection in his voice as he described the fantasies and the realities of his little world to me were shifting. He was shifting, becoming something just a little more … human? I don’t know. I knew it was only my hopes blinding me to the truth but I wanted to believe.
Freddy had a reason to kill Alfred Taylor. The killing part is wrong. I know that. But having a reason beyond lust and passion is progress. Maybe I’m an idiot for even thinking such things but I truly thought the four-year plan was just a phase he needed to go through. By the end he was doing it out of necessity rather than desire. The last three women died because the four years weren’t quite up yet.
Often Freddy had waited. He waited in the shadows. He waited in the light. He waited for a date to finish getting ready or he waited, killing whole days just to catch a glimpse of someone where they should be at a set time. He was used to waiting. But so was I. I waited for him now. I waited for him to rise to the surface or sink back below.
-
Other people found out about the parties. They were almost always held at his house now. The guests were still mostly the university crowd. They were young, firm and ready to explore their limits. It was their youth that became the problem. The young just don’t understand. Generous, honest and open as they may be, the young are also selfish and naive and it is rare for them to see beyond the borders of their little worlds to see just how far the ripples go.
The assistants heard about the parties from one of the students. Freddy was approached in his little cubicle. It was late November of 2005. He was marking term papers. There were at least seven inches left in his stack and he promised Ezra they would be ready to hand out on the following Monday or Tuesday. Ezra trusted his grades. She rarely questioned his judgment and most often the papers he marked were passed back without her even looking at them.
Freddy enjoyed this part of his job. He could disappear into the minds of his students. He could feel their motivations and their dedication – or their lack thereof. Most students took sociology – or social science in the early years – as an elective. It was a class you could talk about at parties or at the bar and flex pseudo-intellectual muscle with like-minded wannabes or to impress the ladies. Few students took it seriously. Rarely did anyone take it as seriously as Freddy.
But those few who did drew his eye and he would walk in their skin while he read their words and he would know things about them when he was done that he had no right to know. Their words told him. Their punctuation and their style were their biography. Freddy began to discover the mind within and it was a place he enjoyed going. It was a place he realized had been neglected for too long.
One paper had caught his attention, the only paper so far worthy of an ‘A’. It was written by a first-year general studies freshman named Stacy Emerson. The name meant nothing to him and he could not put a face to it. No surprise – the class had nearly two-hundred students in it and his tutorial, one of four for the class, had about forty-five confused faces. The name was un
important. It was her mind. Her mind was exquisite. He knew he needed to meet her.
Freddy was rereading her paper for the third time. He was reading slowly. It had been marked but he was now seeing her through it. He imagined what she looked like even though he knew to do so was only to invite folly. He played the conversation they would have over in his mind. He did not hear footsteps or their whispered conversation and the fantasy broke when Jason Flynn and Samjeet Dalwal leaned into his six-by-six fabric-lined cell.
He sensed them behind him before either of them spoke. He knew something was different. Usually they were there to invite him out for a coffee or to watch them smoke on the third-floor balcony overlooking the broad walkway leading up to the library tower’s east entrance. Jason called it cleavage patrol and Sam called him an idiot. But they were quiet this time, subdued yet excited and nervous. Freddy could almost smell the tension wafting off them.
“Hey, Freddy,” Sam opened up.
“Hey,” he replied and set aside Stacy’s paper. He spun in his chair and did not like looking up at them but there was no room to stand.
“What’s up?” Jason asked. He glanced at Sam and licked his lips.
“I should ask you guys that.”
Sam looked up and down the hall outside Freddy’s cubicle. The room was long and narrow, two cells wide and five deep – should have been room for ten but the back two were given over to storage and one at the front of the room housed a coffee maker, a work table and the photocopier and printer. There was room for seven but the three of them had it to themselves at the moment.
“We’ve been hearing some shit, Freddy,” Sam told him.
“Wild shit!” Jason added. His eyes were wide enough to fall out.
“What have you been hearing?”
They looked at each other. “We hear you got a thing going,” Jason replied, “that’s what we hear.”
After The Flesh Page 40