Murderland

by Garrett Cook

  Whispers and Screams

  I rattle my cage, but I get no attention. Jeremy doesn’t even tell me to shut up now. Look at me, untouched housewife hungry for martini kisses from her neglectful husband. This is not the nature of our relationship. This is not what I am here for this is not why I am here Jeremy this is not where I am here you son of a bitch…

  If I could slide through these walls, breathe the stale air of this godforsaken moribund earth through lungs of my own it would be so much better, everything would be so much FUCKING better if I could walk out of here grab that pistol and fill everybody who deserves it with holes to match the ones inside them…it isn’t violence. Self expression. Revelation of soul states. Cadaver is cadaver. Cadaver is cadaverous. He is going to do it all wrong. He is going to fuck up. It would be so much FUCKING better if I could walk out of this FUCKING box and make everything right for myself I am a myself I am not just a system of bleeps I am not misfiring neurons JEREMY JENKINS I AM NOT A DISEASE JEREMY JENKINS I AM NOT A DISEASE I tell him his oatmeal is cum and maggots and he breathes deeply counts to 100 and eats it anyway. I am not in a position of weakness. I am not beaten. The mission will not be compromised. Son of a bitch the mission will not be compromised. He cannot stop history. He cannot fight off the dreams when they come. When battery acid falls from the sky and the rivers flow antifreeze, he will beg for me. I will tell him I told him so. I will tell him he has stepped out of line. I will be patient. Stop rattling the cage. Stop trying to bully my way out. All better now. He cannot fight history. History will happen and he will need me. Jeremy will beg.

  Cassandra Flynn’s Journal, September 18 th, 2006

  Dear diary,

  I bought you three years ago, and had yet to write a thing. I tried on many occasions to start writing, but every time something came up or I felt too timid or what I had to say didn’t feel important enough. I’ve always tried to be tough, but I found myself really intimidated by you, with your vast empty pages and your desire to hear special, juicy secrets. The gossip didn’t stack up, the life didn’t feel cool enough and the mood didn’t strike me, so I never got to say anything to you. It was Ian’s suggestion to get myself a journal, seconded by Jeremy, but both of them had exciting things to write about. Secretly, I had thought that wasn’t true of Jeremy.

  But, it turns out that Jeremy had a ton to tell his journal and that it wasn’t, as Ian put it, “therapeutic” at all. If the Jeremy that wrote in there was using that journal as a therapist, I think he’s got a damn good malpractice suit going. I still feel a little bitter that it was his journal and not him that told me everything. Maybe I was a little jealous of their relationship when you and I are so lukewarm. Maybe I wanted him to feel humble and simple and capable of making my life that way, and when I saw the journal, I saw that he wasn’t. My thoroughly sexy, thoroughly nice, thoroughly uncomplicated man disappeared and what walked out of that journal was completely different. All the time that he was silent, I thought he was some kind of emotional retard, but there was a rich, bizarre inner life there.

  For years I idolize serial killers and now I’m dating the best one in history. I have to resent his alien-hunting, waitress-butchering endeavors, but his numbers don’t lie. I resent him making me look like all those nice old Midwestern ladies next door. He was a nice boy, helped wash the car, bought groceries, cooked now and then, made love to me, and dated me for four years. To say that I am full of conflicting feelings is a massive understatement. My feelings are not just in conflict anymore, they are engaged in a full-on war. In spite of all of his deceit and all of his madness, he remains the man I love, and he is beyond the man I love, he is something completely incredible.

  As for my reservations, he has been doing something socially acceptable. Maybe it is wrong that it’s socially acceptable, but at least it is, in fact, socially acceptable. He could be the most famous killer in history. He could have a Bundy award and a book deal and all the things the big, important, deadly guys have, but he won’t compromise anything. In fact, he is starting a knockdown, drag out fight against everything that he thinks has gone wrong. Life is funny, life is sick, life is different.

  Maybe he’s a monster, but he’s my monster. I’m glad I made him, I’m glad I gave him back the will to fight against something that will ruin everything. Turning on the news and seeing someone killed who deserves it will be a boon, a hard earned reward if ever there was one. I should be frightened, because everybody who does the right thing starts out just plain terrified. After terrified, they become just hesitant and after hesitant, they become something else entirely; they become royally fucked. But with all the monsters out there, I’m glad to have the biggest, best one on my side. They’ve got Dracula and the Wolfman, but me, I’m the one with Godzilla on my side. Then again, nobody’s unstoppable. My feelings are too damn scattered to set them apart. I guess I’m writing not to express how I feel, but to figure it out. Jeremy does that a lot, too. It should be easier for me than it is for Jeremy, since there’s a ninety percent chance Jeremy’s a schizophrenic and a twenty percent chance that I am. Maybe fifteen.

  But how can I feel comfortable or sure about my feelings when I’m trying to decide whether or not rushing blindly into oblivion is doing the right thing? How can I feel comfortable when Jeremy seems just as unsure that this will work? The guy’s a born zealot and he’s in doubt. This should be a source of security, because I don’t like the thought of being that much weaker than somebody I love, but I equally dislike the thought that I’m following somebody who doesn’t know he’ll get out alive. I got into Reap because I wanted to be strong and to support the strongest. Or maybe I was just perverse. Maybe I was born perverse.

  Murder is the thing that turns people’s stomachs the most. Sure, they couldn’t show graphic sex on prime time TV, but teenagers were still doing it all the time, rolling around on their parent’s beds, at parties, camping out on the beach and making love in the moonlight. Not to mention the fact that all of us come from people having sex. But killing isn’t as universally accepted. Those same kids who had sex in their parents’ bed usually wouldn’t tie an old lady to it and crack her skull with a wrench until she bled to death. Even though everybody’s parents have fucked, not everybody’s parents have killed. If you do drugs, it only shows you’re tough enough to hurt yourself and get out alive. If you sell them, it only shows you’re tough enough to help people hurt themselves. So Reap glorifies the last real deviation. True defiance. Fuck Marilyn Manson. Who cares about a guy in makeup screaming when you’ve got Michael Collins to look up to?

  But Reap ignored the freedom fighters. Maybe Ian’s right that the Whitechapel whores oppressed the Ripper, took his freedom away by challenging his sanity, and maybe killing them did grant him freedom and express the freedom he was supposed to have. But what about everybody else’s freedom? I never thought about that. When the killers took to the streets to claim their freedom, what happens to everyone else’s freedoms? All I could think of was how things were getting fucked up beyond repair and I couldn’t bear to look weak. Fuck the innocent; it’s their fault for not being strong enough.

  Thank you Kevin, thank you Michael, thank you Neil. They started teaching me to stand up for myself when I was five. This is Southie, they always said, everybody’s gotta be tough here, because there’s no telling what could happen to a girl in a tough neighborhood in times like these. Mom agreed with them, said never to look like a sucker and never to look like easy prey. Try not to cry because nobody will respect you if you cry. Had to face facts, it was a jungle out there and perish the thought that I might be an antelope.

  She thought my father was a victim. He was always getting fucked over this way or that, a natural antelope with a bright red target on his chest. He could always wait to be paid for a gig or lend a little money to a friend or a friend of a friend. He could always let the other musicians he worked with have the spotlight, get famous, rise to the top while he played at little clubs and bars. I saw the
heat in my mother’s eyes when he came home with less money than he was promised, and I was embarrassed by him. Forget the fact that he was a great trumpet player; he was a source of shame and embarrassment. She thought that as a little girl, I might have inherited some of my father’s weakness and that would mean I would have no chance in life. All these things made me furious at him, because not only did they reveal that he was a target, but it cast the suspicion on me. If I acted like I was my father’s daughter I’d be just that pathetic. If you teach a kid with that many reasons to be furious to fight, than that means they’re gonna fight sooner or later.

  And did I ever. The first time I did was about the coat. There wasn’t much money in the house around Christmas time and my old coat was starting to get torn. My mother thought we weren’t going to be able to afford it, but my father, in spite of his spinelessness and charity was full of love. He went to all the people who owed him money and reminded them that it was Christmas and he’d done them plenty of favors. With all the money he collected, he managed to get my brothers plenty of baseball cards and comics and me a nice, comfy pink coat. Having been told that Santa wasn’t real a year back by Kevin, I knew that my father had managed to collect the money and I could see that my mother was happy with him. In that coat, I held all my pride in my father and all the joy that he’d brought the family. So I wore it proudly, and I wore it joyfully, and being proud and joyful are the things that set school bullies off. There’s quite likely something in the jealousy theory that parents so often use to explain to kids why they’re bullied.

  I don’t even remember the girl’s name anymore. She was a fifth grader from a broken, awful family. Though she was big, I still didn’t see her sneak up on me, nor did I hear anything until she said, “nice coat.” It’s always easy to tell what a school bully means when they say they like something. I started crying and begging, but I should have known that in some ways Neil and Kevin were right and crying would only encourage her. She started to pull it off, and I started to resist, but she was bigger than me, so she managed to pull it off. I could feel how cold Boston in February was. The wind was biting, and the bitch that took my coat was laughing. I couldn’t take the cold and I couldn’t take the laughing and I couldn’t take the thought that without that coat, I had no way of thinking of my father as a success. She stopped laughing when I kicked her in the shins. She went silent and a pale shocked look took over her face. I used that time to take a big, chunk of nice, brown, thick slush into my pink-gloved hands. I let it fly and gravel, snow and dirt hit her in the face. She stumbled back and that’s when I knew I had her in a position where I could do anything to her.

  This took me a second to think over. Neil said that if you have somebody stunned, you should run up and punch them in the stomach, then take out their legs. Michael said to go for the face and hit them in the nose or the eyes. But Kevin’s self-defense techniques looked best. Kevin said that if somebody’s stunned, you should rush forward and charge them, then bring them to the ground and make sure they stay down. As small as I was, I realized there was a good chance it wouldn’t work. A good chance, that is, if she hadn’t been so off balance, if the cold wasn’t filling me with adrenaline and the need to warm up, and if I wasn’t too young to realize that it would be wrong to kill for that coat and the pride that it represented for me. She fell like a ton of bricks and I kept coming. She raised her hands to try and protect her face, but wasn’t quick enough. My tiny fists drilled into her over and over again, until she couldn’t even bring herself to protect her face anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, “I’m sorry…” over and over again. I should have just taken my coat and gone at that point, but I was blinded. I can see what Jeremy means when he talks about not always being able to see things when you’re hurting someone. I could only see the rage at somebody who wanted to take everything they could from me and make me into something weak and small, like my father was most of the time. And now, there she was, on the ground, a victim. I’d been taught to have no mercy for victims, if they were stronger, they’d survive. If this girl were stronger and smarter, she’d survive.

  At a certain point, the injustice wasn’t even there anymore. Just the rush. The big rush. The one that everybody has to find some way to compensate for the loss of. I should have known that deep down I felt cheated by the Neanderthal men that had it eons ago and never shared it with the tribe’s women. It’s not the low wages or the fact that we’ve been chained to the kitchen that really upsets women, but the lack of the secret fraternal knowledge of what it felt like to conquer the mammoth. I hate to sound like Camille Paglia or something, but my theory seems right. It seems to me I felt it as that girl shook and cried and begged underneath me. It isn’t the cock we envy; it’s the spear they made to augment it.

  And that’s when Neil arrived to walk me home.

  “Cassandra Flynn, get off of her!”

  The red disappeared from in front of my eyes and dropped down to my face. I looked at the girl and almost wondered what I’d been doing to her and why I’d been doing it. I didn’t say a word to her, because she didn’t deserve an apology, I just put on my coat, dismounted and took my big brother’s hand.

  I tried to explain. “She pushed me,” I told him, “and she took my coat.”

  This didn’t make Neil look any less angry with me. But the confused little grin on his face showed me that he would have done the same thing. He tried to sound stern when he started lecturing, since each of my brothers decided to serve the function of father whenever they could.

  “What happens when she comes back with two friends her size?” he asked me to begin his lecture on playing it safe.

  My answer came quickly and naturally. It was the only logical thing to say. “I beat them too.”

  The lecture never occurred. The subject was dropped and he told me that mom was working late and had left him money to take me to Mc Donald’s. As mad as he still was trying to be, I don’t remember being closer to Neil than I was that night at Mc Donald’s. I got to be a little girl, since a little girl didn’t look to him like something weak and contemptible; it looked to him like something that might be stronger than it looked. This might have been because Neil himself had a girl he liked and she seemed positively formidable. He listened to every stupid little detail about my school day. I got a piggy back ride for about two blocks on the way home and he didn’t tell a soul in the house. Funny thing how you can be proud and ashamed of somebody’s courage at the same time. I thought a lot about Neil as I read Jeremy’s journal and a lot about Kevin who’d been killed in the Gulf. I really get my brothers now. I’d always thought that Kevin was the biggest asshole I’d ever met for dying, but I don’t think with the way he thought and the way he was raised, that he could have actually lived outside of the army.

  Sure enough, Neil was right about that girl. She came back with two other fifth graders. I got scraped up a bit, but those three girls went running. They didn’t stop coming for awhile, and as I grew older, their younger friends stepped up all through elementary school. I was seven when I learned to put on makeup to cover the bruises. I never got in trouble for my fights, because the losers were too ashamed to tell. I didn’t end up stopping until I started at the Windsor School. There were whole new kinds of abuse there. Nothing you can solve with your fists. From injury to insult. I learned after a two week suspension for nearly breaking some stupid preppy bitch’s nose that my rage was out of its element. But I did see places where it was welcome. Nick Cave and White Zombie blared into my earphones whenever I could get away with it.

  I would walk down the hallway and take some pleasure from watching them glare at the poor girl, at the weird girl at the violent and unstable girl. I felt that I wasn’t the unstable one, that it was everything else around me that was and that was why I was violent. My fists would be pale and white as I kept them clenched because I couldn’t strike anybody. That feeling gave me a clear message, that if you can’t shed blood, then you can
’t feel your own flow, that if you don’t use your hands they go numb and weak. The music began to feel impotent. Everything began to feel small and impotent to me. Nothing could be enough. I was in college when the trial happened, and it changed my life, because it finally looked like there was something that made sense.

  Godless Jack killed and ate to live. He reminded everybody that we all do the same thing, though not always to each other. He seemed like some kind of superior being at the time, and that people were to him what cows were to people. It felt sick and wrong to restrain that, and I think that resounded. They saw that he couldn’t live without killing and they couldn’t deprive him of the right to live they figured. They knew that it was wrong to contain urges that people have to survive. And this how Reap spread, not just to me, but to everyone. It could come to life because we’d gotten too liberal and could prosper because we’d gotten too conservative. We couldn’t starve the saber-tooth tigers in ourselves, because they too conquered the mammoth and as I said, people miss that feeling, not just women.

  This is what made me read Ian’s column and go to the clubs and dance. This is what made me find the thing that I’d been missing for several years, the knowledge that everybody was like me and I wasn’t weird. Everybody was violent and unstable in a violent and unstable world. I was raised to have no sympathy for the victims, which I guess makes it sort of strange that I chose Bundy girl and Whitechapel girl costumes instead of Ripchick or Manson girl costumes. My inner victim had been starved too, I guess.

  With all this on paper, the right thing feels much righter now. I had to write all this and think about violence to be truly secure. It validates all the time I’ve spent at the firing range, all the time working out with Jeremy and all the time studying my enemies like they were enemies and like I was a general. I am a general in a tragically small army. God, I hope we can fix that. We must be able too. Everybody who’s tired of being a victim can understand what we’ve got to say. Everybody’s tired of being a victim, anyway. We want to stop it and we want to indulge in it at the same time, we want to do everything Ian says when he says what Reap makes us into. He has a good mind, but it’s a warped one, a damaged one. Maybe in his own way, as damaged as Jeremy and as capable of excusing anything he does wrong.