That was why it was scary having everyone so close together. Even when his father had killed in the same state, he’d done it in different cities, different regions. The old man hadn’t had this geographical proximity to deal with.
Which was why he would probably think Steve was a jack-off and a fuckup once again.
When he got home, he realized that he didn’t want to be there. It was a Saturday, and he’d told Sherry he’d be at his mother’s until late, so she’d signed up to work at the library in order to build up some comp time. He went over to the library to see her, but she was busy and couldn’t talk, so he grabbed a couple of CDs, took them into one of the listening cubicles and sat there with the headphones on until she came and told him the library was closing.
He waited for her outside. They drove both cars back to her place, took a shower together, made love, then took his car to Fashion Island, where they people-watched and window-shopped until the stores were closed. Afterward, in her apartment, Sherry wanted sex again, but he couldn’t get hard, and they got in an argument and they both went to sleep angry.
He dreamed about his parents, and they were young and he was a child and it was an entirely different world.
When he awoke, he was crying, and Sherry was holding his head in her lap, wiping the tears from his face. “Shhh,” she murmured. “Shhh.”
He was embarrassed, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. She seemed to enjoy comforting him, and he lay there submitting to it gratefully.
She was a good woman.
Whatever happened in the future, he thought, he could never hurt her.
Never.
Never.
Twenty-seven
Writing Habits
He was what was commonly referred to as a “cult writer,” though it was not something to which he had aspired. He wrote of the subjects that concerned him, in the manner in which he felt most comfortable, and unfortunately this appealed not to the general population or to those individuals whose opinions he respected, but to that segment of the reading public that remained perpetually in a state of arrested adolescence. The pseudointellectuals. The phonies. Thin girls who wore white makeup and dressed in black. Boys too cool to comb their hair who bought books not to read but to display in conspicuous locations on their bookshelves. Readers of Kerouac and Ginsberg and Genet, people who continued to think the beats were profound and whose musical taste was always alternative.
It was a depressing situation, but there was little he could do about it. He would be Philip Roth if he could. Hell, he’d be Tom Clancy if he could. But he was who he was, he wrote what he wrote, and he made the rounds of colleges and universities, answering questions on existentialism and decon struction from intense young men carrying philosophy books under their arms, signing the obligatory copies of his novels with a chic, indecipherable signature.
It would be one thing if he could enjoy his cult status or, better still, use it as a stepping-stone to legitimacy, as so many others had done before him. But he resented his position, and he knew with fatalistic certainty that he was destined to remain forever in this literary ghetto.
Which might have been one reason why the first murder felt so good.
He’d been speaking at UCLA before a fairly large group in a small, crowded theater, and she had come up to him after the lecture, waiting until all of the others had asked their questions and had their books signed before saying what she had come here to say.
“Kill me.”
He stared at her. He’d been expecting her to ask about the feminist perspective of his latest work or to inquire about his current reading preferences to see if his tastes were obscure enough to qualify as hip, and this bizarre statement threw him. He didn’t know what to say. He clicked his briefcase shut. “Excuse me?”
“Kill me. Take my life.”
She was not joking, or, if she was, she was doing an excellent job of hiding it. Both her speech and manner were utterly devoid of levity. He took a closer look at her. She was so completely typical that she was almost stereotypical: black pants, black T-shirt, black plastic-framed glasses, silver ear-ring, short hair. His new book was clutched under her arm. He still was not sure how to respond, so he laughed. “I have to get going,” he said. “It’s late.”
“Kill me,” she repeated.
He looked around for help, and one of the professors who had sponsored the lecture walked over. He smiled when he saw the young woman. “Deidre,” the man said, nodding to her.
“I was just telling Mr. Childes how much I enjoyed his work,” the young woman lied.
“Deidre is one of our brightest students,” the professor said.
The young woman beamed.
The professor invited him to the on-campus pub for a drink, and he accepted, grateful that Deidre did not come with them. But she was waiting by his car an hour later, when he returned, slightly drunk, to the visitors’ lot in which he had parked.
“Kill me,” she said again.
He shook his head and tried to push her aside so he could open his car door.
“Kill me. Take my life.”
And he killed her. It required no more provocation than that. It was as if all of the rage that had been building within him for years came rushing through his hands in a surge of power as he grabbed her willing neck and squeezed. His fingers sank deeply into her soft, warm flesh, and beneath the skin he felt tubes and veins, ridges of cartilage. He could not explain why, but at that moment he felt exhilarated, as though he were striking back against fate itself, against all of those intransigent forces and immovable barriers that had been impeding his progress for so long.
The life ebbed and died within her, and Deidre’s body suddenly became much heavier. He let it fall to the ground and heard a thump as her head hit the asphalt. There was a smile frozen on her lips.
He left her body there, in the parking lot. There was no worry that he would get caught, and indeed he received no calls from the police or anyone else the next day. Or the day after. Or the day after that. A profound lethargy seemed to have settled over him after the cathartic release of the murder, and he found himself staying inside the house for the rest of the week, wandering listlessly from room to room.
It was after a signing in Brentwood the next Monday that a trendily androgynous young man, carrying a copy of his new book, accosted him on his way to the car. “Kill me,” the young man said.
He looked at the youth’s carefully plucked eyebrows, at his stylishly cut hair, at the hip clothes hanging from his almost anorexic frame. “You want me to kill you?”
“Yes. Please. Take my life.”
He thought for a moment. “Get in the car,” he said.
They drove to the mountains, to a deserted area not frequented by either campers or picnickers. Neither of them spoke on the drive up, but when he glanced at the young man out of the corner of his eye, he saw no fear there, no doubt, only an expression of cultivated cool on the feminine face, as though the youth were playing to a nonexistent audience, posing for an unseen camera.
He killed him with a tire iron.
The young man stood on the flat rock, unmoving, as he swung the metal tool like a baseball bat and smashed his head. The impact felt good, and once more he felt a rush of exhilaration as metal crunched against bone, as blood and brains went flying. He could have stopped there—the youth was dead after the first swing—but he continued to beat the body as it lay on the ground, not letting up until what had once been the head was nothing more than a bloody red pulp.
The lethargy that hit him afterward lasted only until a signing at a literary bookstore the next day. This time, he invited the young woman home before killing her with a knife in the kitchen.
She had been holding a copy of his new book.
He made himself a drink and stood there, sipping it. His new book. It was obvious that all of this was connected somehow to his latest work. His other novels had also produced a variety of strange responses in his readers, but he�
�d always ascribed them to the personalities of those people attracted to his work and not to something within the writing itself. Now, however, he thought back and tried to recall whether there were any patterns to the peculiar requests he’d received, any similarities in the reactions of his readers. Try as he might, though, he could find no common threads in the responses to his previous work.
What was different about this one? Was it possible that his writing had somehow tapped into the collective unconscious of these readers, that the particular sequence of words he had chosen to use in the novel pushed some button within them and caused this reaction?
It sounded like the plot of one of his books.
He stared at the body of the young woman. Even more disturbing was why he went along with their requests, why he felt this compulsion to kill his readers. And why he felt no remorse about it afterward. He had committed murder three times now. But the memory of all three events felt flat, false, like something he had written about rather than done. Even now, looking at the coagulating blood on the body in front of him, he felt no grief, no sadness, no anger, no remorse, no disgust, nothing but a dispassionate intellectual curiosity. Perhaps, he thought, having written words that compelled readers to offer themselves as sacrifices, he had instilled within himself a complementary need to take life.
He finished the drink. Who the hell knew?
Loading the body into the car, he cleaned up the kitchen and drove to a park, burying the dead woman under a pile of leaves and branches before returning home to bed.
He awoke feeling refreshed, and for the first time in over a year, for the first time since he had completed the novel that had just been published, he sat down to write. It was eight o’clock in the morning when he plopped himself down in front of the PC, and it was nine o’clock at night when he finally stood up, his back sore, his eyes tired, his leg muscles cramped. In the output tray of the printer were thirty double-spaced pages. And they were good. He would not cringe in embarrassment tomorrow when he read what he had written. He would not tear up the pages and consign them to the trash, as he so often did. He had written the beginning of what he knew was going to be a great mainstream novel. His familiar themes and writing style were intact, but something had jelled, and he had found a way to express himself in a more universal way.
He hoped.
No. He knew.
He was writing a crossover book.
He felt like celebrating, and he placed the pages in a manila envelope, slipping the envelope in a desk drawer before walking outside. The night was warm. The sky, encased in smog and cloud cover, was an orangish purple, illuminated from underneath by the lights of Los Angeles. He didn’t want to get drunk, but he wanted to celebrate somehow, to let off steam and have some fun.
An idea came to him, and he got into his car and drove down the freeway to Westwood, where he walked into the trendiest bookstore he could find. The woman behind the counter was older and fairly average-looking—normal—but there was a young man in a black T-shirt and tight intentionally faded jeans perusing the classics section at the rear of the store. He had a shiny shaved head and was wearing small wire-framed Lennon glasses. Childes smiled to himself as he walked down the narrow aisle and approached the young man. “Excuse me,” he said. “My name is Harold Childes, and I’m doing research for a book I’m writing. I wonder if you could help me.”
“The Harold Childes?”
He smiled. “You’ve heard of me?”
“I just finished your new book. It was great.”
“Thank you.”
“Kill me,” the young man said.
“Are you sure?”
“Kill me. Take my life.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” He smiled. “Let’s go out to my car.”
* * *
He continued killing throughout the year, and the writing went well. Several of his murders made the papers, but none of them were ever linked together, and none of them were ever traced to him. That was odd, given the similarity of the victims’ backgrounds and lifestyles, but he supposed part of the cops’ confusion had to do with the fact that he never killed the same way twice. He had always been inept at household chores, a failure at cooking, at gardening, at handicrafts, at sports, but in murder he’d finally found a way to express himself with his hands, a relaxing counterpart to the purely mental exercise of writing. In killing he found freedom, and he let his instincts run wild, finding myriad new ways to extinguish human life.
The new book, when it was published, became both a critical and a popular success.
In the months between acceptance and publication, he wrote nothing and killed not at all. In fact, he did not venture outside of the house except to buy groceries and other necessities. His conscience, which had been dormant throughout the past year, suddenly kicked into overdrive, and it was as though all of the guilt, all of the remorse over the murders he had committed descended upon him like a flood. There were days when he did not get out of bed, weeks where he existed only in a drunkenly numbed netherworld. The pain was almost unbearable. At least once a day he started to dial the police and turn himself in, but some kernel of self-preservation always kept him from completing the call. It was as if on some deep, subconscious level, he understood that this torment he was going through, this conscience-inflicted hell, was merely a transitional phase, and that when it finally ended, all of it would remain behind. Emotionally, he did not feel as though he would ever get over the guilt, and intellectually he did not think he should, but some rational writer’s core of his being told him that it would be so.
And the guilt did go away, the memory of what he had done fading into flatness, receding in his mind like the plot of a not-very-well-loved novel. And after his book hit number five on the New York Times bestseller list, he finally agreed to do some signings.
He let his publisher work out the arrangements.
The signing this time was at neither a college nor a small esoteric bookstore. It was at a Borders in a large shopping center in Orange County. Seated at a table next to a display of his books, he saw a few young hipsters waiting in the long line that wound through the store’s aisles—vampiric girls and poseur boys—but for the most part the crowd seemed mainstream and surprisingly, gratifyingly heterogeneous.
The first person in line was a middle-aged man of his own generation, a bearded, bespectacled gentleman wearing a tweed jacket. “I’ve always been an admirer of yours, Mr. Childes,” he said. “But I must tell you, this novel took me completely by surprise. It’s absolutely brilliant.”
Childes smiled as he signed the copy of the book placed before him. “And what do you do?”
“I teach English at UC Irvine. In fact, I’m thinking of adding your novel to the reading list of my Contemporary Literature course this semester. I was wondering if you would be willing to speak to my class.”
He nodded, feeling a familiar rush of exhilaration. “I’d love to,” he admitted. He took out a piece of scratch paper and wrote down his cell phone number. “Give me a call.”
“I’ll do that,” the professor said.
He spent the rest of the afternoon autographing books and talking with his fans. His new readers, overall, seemed remarkably intelligent and well-balanced, nowhere near as tunnel-visioned as his cult audience.
After the signing, he wandered through the open-air mall, looking into the small shops between the big anchor stores, before finally heading out to his car.
The young woman stopped him when he was halfway across the parking lot.
“Mr. Childes!” she called. “Mr. Childes!”
He waited as she ran up to him. She was Asian, with long black hair and finely sculpted cheeks, and was wearing a conservative yet classy skirt and blouse. She smiled when she reached him, holding a hand to her chest as she caught her breath. She handed him a copy of the new book, lowering her eyes shyly. “Would you sign this for me?” she asked.
He had a momentary flash of déjà vu, remembranc
e of another parking lot, nagging persistence and sacrificial blood, but he found himself nodding. “Sure.” He took out his pen and opened the book.
Between the cover and the flyleaf were a pair of white silk panties.
“I took them off in the bathroom,” the young woman said, looking up at him demurely.
He stared at her, not saying anything.
“Rape me,” she said.
“What?”
“Rape me. Use my body.”
He thought for a moment.
Then smiled.
“Get in the car,” he said.
Twenty-eight
Steve and Sherry both went with his mother to look for a new place to live, spending a Saturday touring senior communities throughout suburban Orange County. The surprising thing was that it had actually been his mother’s idea. She had invited them along, and the three of them submitted to well-rehearsed presentations, took golf-cart rides through quiet, kidless streets and asked questions of the low-pressure sales reps. They even had an enjoyable lunch at a Souplan tation in Brea, where his mother was uncharacteris tically pleasant and actually offered to pay for the meal.
The gated developments they visited were all nice and, despite wide fluctuations in price, appeared to be fairly uniform. Steve honestly couldn’t see much difference among them. But his mother seemed to have her heart set on Leisure World, and while she was always polite to the agents, she would get into the car after each visit and declare, “That’s not for me.”
He’d been right. The Leisure World in south Orange County had incorporated and become a differently named city, but there was still a Leisure World in Seal Beach, and that was their last destination of the day. They encountered no traffic and the trip was quick, but Steve didn’t like the drive. It followed the same series of freeways they had used to get to the VA hospital, and all he could think about as they headed west were the many times he had driven this route to see his father. In his mind, he saw his dad doped up and restrained in that psych-ward room. It had been a horrible way to go out, and it made him wonder how he would die. He hoped it would be fast, in his sleep.
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