AS A CHILD, I was fascinated by decapitation. Not what we think of now: grainy terrorist videos, or Hong Kong sword-fight films, or serial killers with trophies grinning in the freezer. And not by every beheading, but only certain ones. The virgin martyrs left me cold, as did John the Baptist, though the volume of The Lives of the Saints on our otherwise sparse suburban bookshelf featured an illustration of a luscious Salome with the Baptist’s head on a platter. Marie Antoinette held me for a while, but finally what drew me were the legal executions with which kings got rid of their wives.
I was obsessed with the history of the court of King Henry VIII. I read through the school and library books and asked my parents for more. It was how I learned about sex—that is, something beyond the basics. What other reason could there have been for a man to tire of one woman and divorce her if he could, kill her if he couldn’t or when the divorces got to be too much trouble? Why else would he keep marrying his dead wife’s ladies-in-waiting, and what charges convinced a judge to execute them so cruelly? Had the women really fallen in love with those handsome young nobles? This was nothing I could have learned at home, where my religious parents stayed lukewarmly married until they died, months apart. Like only children everywhere, I got a partial education: isolated, by turns removed, and unhealthily attentive.
I used to imagine the moment when the head is severed from the body. What were head and body, one without the other? Where did the person go? Was there such a thing as a soul, and where did it reside? I became a child expert on the mind-body problem. I used to imagine what it was like to order your wife’s head chopped off, or to be married to a man who had done that to his wife. I imagined being the executioner’s child, and the odd mood in the house at night when Dad came home from his job. I imagined being a courtier, being formally presented to the new queen and everyone trying their hardest to ignore what had happened to the last one.
I should say that I was good in school, I had friends, I played sports. Beheading was only part of what I thought about in my spare time.
I was eleven or maybe twelve when I began to have a recurring dream. It began with me knocking on a door, always the same door, which was opened by a man, always the same kind, friendly, handsome man, who led me to the same room in which there was a chopping block, an ax, and a pyramid made from the heads of children. And I always understood that I was about to join them.
The dream returned fairly often. Each time I woke up screaming. Worried, my parents took me to the family doctor. He said, Sure, I’d been an easy kid, but—winking at my parents—the next few years might be bumpy. He advised us to fasten our seat belts.
Around this time a new couple moved onto our block. The wife was having a baby. I learned this from my parents, who met them before I did. I also learned, without anyone saying so, that this young couple was thrilling; everyone wanted to be their friends. There had been competition about who would invite them for dinner first, and, lucky for once, my parents won.
My mother cooked for days, tested family favorites, green beans with fried onion rings, along with elegant experiments, beets halved and stuffed with dollops of lightly bleeding egg salad. Multicolored liquor bottles lined up on the sideboard, though my father never drank more than a few beers on weekends.
Two by two, the guests arrived, filling the house with the exotic aromas of gardenia and tobacco. My mother had begged me to dress up and help, and it was easier to agree. I was bringing out a bucket of ice when the new couple arrived.
The wife was tall and graceful, with a column of smoky blonde hair twisting up the back of her proud head. Probably it was the first time that anyone in that crowd had seen a pregnant woman in black. This alone sent a tremor through the already charged, bright room.
Her husband followed, guiding her elbow. He smiled at everyone at once and somehow made everyone think that his smile was intended for each of them, alone. I recognized him from my dreams. I watched him from the kitchen.
How hard it is to remember a dream, even the morning after—and how exponentially trickier when decades have elapsed. I have said he was the man in my dream, but the truth is I can’t exactly remember the man who opened the door in my nightmares, nor can I precisely recall the man who walked into my parents’ house. Did he really look like the man, or did he just give me a similar feeling?
Fortunately, I was a sensible kid. I knew such things didn’t happen. You didn’t dream about people, then meet them. I watched as coats were shed, introductions made, hands shaken, kisses exchanged. The strangers kissed our neighbors, they kissed my mom and dad.
Finally my parents brought the new couple into the kitchen. The pretty wife shook my hand. Then her husband turned my way and shone his blinding light on me. Never had a grown person smiled at me like that—a movie-star smile, friendly enough, but intimate and suggestive. A smile like the rosy heat lamps that kept food warm at our neighborhood diner.
Who knew what his smile conveyed? I was sure that I did. Did it mean he was glad to meet me? It meant that he knew me and knew that I knew. He knew that I had seen the ax, the chopping block, the heads.
I screamed, the scream I’d practiced to wake myself from the dream. I dropped the ice bucket and the cubes crashed and skittered across the floor so violently that everyone scrambled as if I’d broken a glass.
Perhaps my mother recognized the scream. Without a word she scooped me up and led me off to my room. She felt my head and a few minutes later returned with an ice pack, made from the ice I had dropped, which she pressed to my forehead until I fell asleep.
By morning, I had recovered. At breakfast my parents seemed to feel that their party had been a success. Apparently their new friend had been gracious about my behavior. He said he’d never gotten that reaction from a kid before, maybe he’d better work on it, now that he was about to have one.
As it happened, their new friends did not become their new friends. Maybe because their child was born, impeding their social life, but the heartfelt promises of returned invitations were never kept. Maybe it was my fault. My parents didn’t blame me, they never asked what happened. They seemed fractionally more disappointed, though by such a small fraction, how could it have been measured?
Not long afterward, my father was transferred to a distant office. Our home dissolved and recrystallized in another house, another suburb. The bad dreams stopped, as did my fascination with beheading and with the wives of King Henry VIII.
Since then, whenever I read or heard a story about a killer of children, I found myself searching for evidence accusing my parents’ former neighbor. But of course there was none. Where did my suspicion come from? What evidence did I have? A child had had a bad dream. A man had done nothing wrong. But whenever I think back on that time, I reach a different conclusion.
I think, He got away with it. I think, They never caught him.
Celebration
ABRAHAM RODRIGUEZ JR.
Celebrate good times
Come on
—Kool and the Gang
AN OFfiCE CROWD, partying it up somewhere near the West End. Bodies packed on the dance floor, bopping up and down. Drinks spilling, bottles clinking. Loosened ties and rolled-up sleeves on saggy white shirts. The office girls were whoop-whooping themselves beyond silliness. The mindless giggle attack when Benny from accounting started doing the robot, and Jenny countered with a frantic funky chicken. It was a small, garish hall, mirrored walls, gold columns that ringed a glimmery scuffed dance floor.
The DJ was in a booth opposite the dance floor, bopping to his rig. He played the usual assortment of disco hits, eighties synth pop, and some hip-hop of dubious quality, stuff one could find on any office party CD, the kind that includes such anthems to office bonding as Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family.” After that came the inevitable Kool & the Gang song, “Celebration.” Loud and pounding, whoops and screams, it flowed out along that sullen, marble hallway outside the hall. It hit M in the face like a sharp uppercut to the jaw. (He was c
alling himself M now, because of what Myron said.) It half blinded him, made his stomach burn. It set off the colors, strange flashes of red, of yellow, of black. The red especially—he headed back toward the bank of elevators frantic fast, pulling the hood over his head. The pounding, the sick feel, was it the music, pounding a burning hole through his brain? Was it his fists punching at the elevator buttons senselessly, flashing red, blink blink, no elevator in sight, the song would not stop. He turned swift. Stairs!? There must be stairs, some way off this ride, fast.
He hurried down the marble hall, which looked like a relic from some fifties movie. The elevator bank led nowhere, there was a barred window, there was a locked door. He went back the only way he could, and that meant going past the racket, the madhouse, the pulsating sick sound. There was a cluster of people over by the entrance to that man-made hell, that inferno of bodies and spandex skin, but he was sure no one had looked at him, and why would they? They weren’t even turned toward him, in their glittery dresses and pressed pants and shiny shoes. Someone was smoking a cigarette, a cigarette, he would just KILL for a cigarette, the red flash, the yellow, the black, he pressed his temples, he went straight right past, and people like that, dressed like that, in the throes of double martinis, would not waste a glance at some sneakered low-class going by in his hoodie. Maybe he had a delivery! Maybe someone ordered a pizza. Candygram? M rounded the corner. A dead end, another barred window, and a door, a door, there was a fucking door and it had to be the stairs because it was getting very hard to see
and he went through the door fast and it wasn’t the stairs, no stairs, it was a fucking men’s room and he slammed the door hard and hard again, it killed the music when he slammed it felt good to slam it slam it again just some sound beating in his head FLASH the bright fluorescents FLASH the mirrors over the pair of basins FLASH the tiled wall, all of it blasting brightness at him. The door, the door, he slam slam SLAMMED it again and again and it was almost blotting out the noise and maybe if he could keep that up he could beat the noise because Myron said the best way to blot out the noise is with another noise, adding cryptically that this was the solution and paradoxically (he used that word), also sometimes the problem
and that made M laugh in midslam, it was possible he was doing it he was going to beat this because they weren’t going to get him. And that’s when the guy came out of one of the stalls, looking mad as hell and somehow puffed up with all the authority his three-piece suits gave him.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing?”
It was a color thing, and a sound thing. Both at once: Now it was two marbles clacking together, clacking together hard, over and over again. It was wood breaking all sharp and crack, it was chicken bones splitting. It was the guy’s skull splitting, cracking against the wall over and over. Whimpering cries. Mad bursts of air, gurgled gasps. A body crumples down crash against the toilet and sets it off to flush. Fresh water bursting spin with that muffled, crash thump.
At the last breath … the song changed.
He was not calling himself M anymore. He was O now. Myron said it was good to use letters, just letters. It throws the waves off. Counts to change what you call yourself, even while just telling a story on the inside, because these people, they have machines. They’re inside your brain and every time you talk to yourself in there, they pick up on it. They zero in and send you things. That’s why calling yourself something different in your head throws them off. The machine, it can’t find you so fast. Of course, O hadn’t asked Myron why he was always a Myron, or what he called himself inside his head. It didn’t occur to him to ask ball-breaking questions like that, because Myron had all the answers. O liked that, he needed that. Myron came along at the perfect moment, seemed to lift the gray fog with just a few words. Everything he said had double meanings spinning on a wild axis, and though O hadn’t told him about the red yellow black attack, or about the things Joanna was doing to him, Myron said a few words and right from the beginning started to connect all the dots.
It started and ended with Joanna, his white-girl dream. Myron made him realize. You come across people in life and you interact with them and all of a sudden it feels like they were planted there on purpose, a setup to put you on a certain path. He had that feeling those first moments with Joanna, feeling himself slowly falling, morphing into someone else. He was a stranger obeying commands, another person growing inside him doing things and he didn’t know why, these voices … they all belonged to Joanna, coaxing, teasing, laughing with pleasure when he gurgled in pain. It wasn’t until Myron that he started to really think about what she was doing to him. Myron, another “chance” meeting, or was that all on purpose, again a setup?
Joanna was a nice white girl from a small town in Texas. She moved to New York, studied marketing at NYU. She had blonde-reddish hair and green eyes. O met her at a tiki bar on the West Side the night he was supposed to meet his friend Nero there, who never actually showed up. He met Joanna there while he stood at the bar, having a red cocktail. She was magically drawn to his cocktail and almost swiped it and he told her the bargirl had made it especially for him and there was only one per night and she picked the people especially and Joanna didn’t believe him and so he called the bargirl over and tried to get a red cocktail for her but the bargirl said no dice, only one per night, so he got her a mojito instead and the mojito made her talk about how much she loves Mexico and how she had been there and how she loves the music and he said he’s not Mexican he’s Puerto Rican and she freaked out and said she LOVES Puerto Rico and how she was in San Juan last summer and how much she loves the music and the people and he admitted that she had probably been to the island more times than he ever had, and she said ohhhh that doesn’t matter because Puerto Ricans from New York are sexier which created a fast, warm pulse between them. And her eyes stared at his lips as if she would touch them.
“I’m Joanna,” she said, pronouncing it Jo-awna. They spent hours snuggled in the small lounge by the dance floor. The smell of her wrapped itself around him like a drug, the closer together they came on those pink cushions. Those first kisses. How she bit on his lips, teasingly, at first—then, the sudden, sharp sting of her teeth.
“Yah,” he said, involuntarily.
“I have to warn you,” she said. “I’m a nymphomaniac.”
He laughed, but she was looking him seriously in the eyes.
“I don’t know a single guy that doesn’t dream of hearing that,” he said.
“But it’s true. I send men running into the night, screaming. They never come back.” She gave him another biting kiss.
“Uhhhhhhhh,” he said, involuntarily. Vaguely tasting blood.
“I can be very demanding,” she said.
She drove a black Ford Escort that slinked along streets like a shiny cockroach. Her apartment was a modest three-room on Ninety-second Street. (He only ever really saw the bedroom.) The going there was a red blur through yellow flashes of passing street lamps, the black-hole night that turned into morning as first light blued the windows.
He was naked. She was wearing black stockings. It started with kisses and snuggle words. Then she began biting him. These weren’t tickly nibbles but deep bites that set off manic tremors of pain. She would suck on his neck and dig her teeth in and grind them. She sucked his cock with such a voracious desperation that he was soon swirling in mad delirium, up, down, all direction lost. She sat on his face and smothered him with her pussy until he was faded to black, the lingering yellow-red when he came to and realized he was alone on the bed. That his hands were spread out and tied to the bedposts. And then it was
that song. The one she started it all with, the one she started
blaring from the living room, getting louder, boomier still. She came back, sliding her body over him. And his cock is a stiff stick and moves as if no longer under his control. Her pussy is a sudden, flaming breath. He was sinking, twitching his way back to the surface, just that song, just that song,
and then she started scratching him. Not just soft strokes with the tips of her nails, but grinding in her fingers deep into his sides, his chest, his ass. The tendrils of pain burned all through him. Her deep laugh shook her body and resonated in his cock. She paused for a moment, there on top of him, just looking down on him and the crisscross designs of the fresh scratches she had made on his chest and stomach. She leaned a little to the side and picked up the thin, green knitting needle. Her eyes were different, a different face from any he had seen before. Some feeling like that. He strained against the bonds.
“Joanna,” he said.
“Are you going to beg? I would like you to beg.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Joanna, what’s the knitting needle for?”
She smiled, but her eyes looked different. (Again that feeling.) Oh shit.
He strained.
“I already told you,” she said, picking up a small remote. “I like to scratch.” She pressed a button on the remote vigorously. The music got louder and louder. That same song, that same fucking song.
“Sorry about the music,” she said. “It’s just the walls are pretty thin here. I don’t want the neighbors to hear the screaming.”
“Joanna, Joanna, please … ”
A slow smile. It pleased her to hear him say her name.
“I would like you to beg,” she said. “Are you going to beg for me?” And she teased the tip of the knitting needle with her finger.
The first time (deep breath). He didn’t mean to, he didn’t mean to. Be taken so far. The woman scared him, she was possessed with some mad, demon spirit. She could see things in him. She had a certain smile for when it hurt the most and he cringed he squirmed he twitched—he had to keep the slamming sound going, see? He had to drown out that other sound, nothing would stop it until that slow, last breath, clean water cascading down rocks in a Japanese garden, the nagging question why, why, and that was like asking why does she hurt you? and why does she like to see blood? The two flowed together, it was all one sea. He shouldn’t see her, he should stop. He said that after the first time, he said it again and again for three months of fuck dates that came and went in her bedroom and that one time in the hotel on Fifty-seventh Street because “if I’m going to kill you, I’m not going to do it at home,” and she even wore a wig and joked about how the guy in reception won’t recognize her when she leaves as a brunette. (She didn’t get to kill him that time.) Or that Friday night, and how she kept him there until Sunday, a nonstop fuck attack that left him paralyzed and senseless, tied to the bed for a large part of the day while she went shopping with friends. When she came back, that song came on, that fucking song … felt drugged and falling and he hadn’t eaten and his chest was sticky with blood from where she was carving her name. Appeared at the door in nothing but her black shiny tights, just leaning against the jamb, looking at him, looking at him lying there … no more, no more please, no more weekends ever again …
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