by Shock Totem
The feeling bubbling up now in the mother’s chest and throat as she watches her son look away from this girl and all the girls like her, it will be for me, and it will truly be bottomless.
In her dreams and in the wishes this mother still insists upon, she’ll have raked me across whatever coals she can imagine, and then heaped them onto my stomach, watched them burn a pit into my very core. And she’ll have tried to make all the usual deals, of course. She’ll have promised a hundred times over to keep that wad of gum in her mouth an instant longer this day, if given the chance. To have not let her son’s hand slip her own—his complete hand, so small then. So delicate.
But she’s going to look up any moment, of course.
To me.
Am I not supposed to know better?
Is there not a contract among adults, to watch out for the young ones? And, if not a contract, then at least the common courtesy to do no harm?
I’m no doctor, though.
Not exactly.
• • •
On the fourth floor—always the fourth floor, as, without rules, the world collapses into chaos—is my, as the papers call it, ‘handiwork.’
Her name is unimportant.
Her height, though, that had to be exact.
I needed someone not more than five feet eight inches tall.
Once I found her, it was easy enough to acquire the adjoining room, and that deadbolt insuring our privacy...well. When she found the door ajar, I wasn’t behind the shower curtain or under the bed—hotel beds have no ‘under’—but crouched behind the only chair in the room. Wearing the complimentary white terrycloth robe provided by the hotel. It was scratchy on my naked skin, had probably been bleached to the point of surrender years ago.
When I stood in it, into the reflection behind her, I could tell she was battling with familiarity: she’d seen that robe earlier, hanging her pantsuit up, hadn’t she? Was this mirror affording some unlikely view into the closet? Was someone on her balcony? Did this room even have a balcony?
No, no, and no.
I lifted my left hand in an embarrassed half-wave. This is always the awkward part.
In my right there was no knife, no power cord from the lamp, no brush to batter a skull with.
To prove it to her, I spread my fingers wide.
It didn’t stop her from running.
The human female is more agile than you'd expect, in moments like this. Business attire or not, they can move like a shadow, they can flit like a bat.
Their own fears always defeat them, though.
Not the fear enabling their muscles and minds to work in this perfect, primal unison. No, what kills them, it’s the fear society’s conditioned into them, the fear that made her lever over the hotel swing lock, the fear that stops the door four inches into her desperate pull. The fear instilled in her by stories on the news about certain talented individuals, and their night-time proclivities.
But that’s an unfair generalization.
About me, I mean. About ‘night-time.’
It was just coming onto dusk in the city. And she wouldn’t be found for a day or two, at least, meaning time-of-actual-death was going to be a ballpark figure, probably encompassing both day and night, especially when it had to allow for the ice cubes I’d fingered down her throat post-mortem, so as to cool the liver through the wall of the stomach. How much ice, though? Exactly. Once melted, it seeps on into the gut proper.
So, no, I didn’t feel night falling like a curtain I could—or should—hide behind. If you’re that ashamed of your work, then it’s likely you should occupy yourself otherwise.
Still, I knew full-well that the police would collude with the media to case these events under cover of night, as if whispering around the side of the television set that daytime people, working people, honest people, this isn’t the kind of activity they would ever consider engaging in.
It doesn’t matter.
You don’t visit women alone in their hotel rooms hoping for accurate reporting.
You do it because you want a question answered.
The question this time, it was, if a woman with chemically-deadened legs is positioned under a doorknob, and if she’s short enough that the distance between the crown of her head and the axis of the doorknob, if that’s exactly the length of her longest finger, then, if an enterprising individual were to rig a noose or garrote around her neck and fasten it to said doorknob—her mouth is either gagged here or her tongue removed, or both, as the gag can act as pressure bandage (you don’t want her to choke)—then how many minutes or hours can she balance on her two middle fingers, before giving her neck the dying weight of her body?
And understand, I wasn’t attempting to measure or establish the limits of a muscle’s endurance when the life of that muscle is at stake. There’s too many variables to do that accurately, or, to do it accurately with as small a group as I was committed to. No, what I was interested in plumbing and capturing and experiencing, it was the look in this woman’s eyes when she fully realized the unavoidable outcome of this particular situation.
What I was interested in, it was human nature.
Would she, with me sitting in the doorway of the bathroom directly across from her, would she stare at me at any point in the first minute or two, then ball both hands into fists, in rebellion, or would she die in stages, her fingers extended until they cramped, then extending them again when her airflow was cut off? Perhaps she would even chance upon a cycle of alternating near-suffocations and finger-props, or maybe she would learn to point her chin in a way that neither cut off blood nor oxygen.
This businesswoman had taken two hours and fourteen minutes.
In the end, I was so proud of her.
Though her fingers and hands and muscles were trembling with fatigue and strain, she still managed to muster enough strength to lunge up an inch or two higher than I’d hanged her.
My immediate concern was that she was going to slip the loop, as it were. That we were going to have to start this laborious process all over, when I’d already administered my full dose of anesthetic into her lumbar area, to deny control of her legs.
That wasn’t the escape she was after, as it turned out.
That extra inch or two, it was so her subsequent fall into the noose, it would be that much harder, have that much more momentum behind it.
She didn’t try to catch herself, and she didn’t give me her eyes either.
Everyone has the impulse in them, I think. Not just to kill, but to dilate that moment, to savor it, to taste its every last drop. Recognizing that in me, she denied me the mental snapshot I’d been counting on.
I could have kissed her.
Her trachea caved in with what I can only accurately describe as a wet, white sound.
Instead of dying from blood deprivation, her brain shutting down lobe by lobe, she died of oxygen deprivation. I think.
I read somewhere once that a deer, caught in a fence, that when it sees the dogs coming for it, it looks away with its large green eyes, and it stops its own heart.
I hope that’s what it was like for her.
• • •
As for why I’d taken the stairs down from the fourth floor instead of the elevator I’d used to deliver me there, it’s that the swishing doors of an elevator, they never seal as tightly as you need, after an act like I’d committed in 414.
It’s about tendrils.
Every place you go, there’s a tendril trailing behind you, linking you to that place for some thirty-six hours, depending on season, and on time spent in that location, and on the intensity of your presence there.
If we had the eyes to see, the world is mossy with these tendrils. They’re the buttery but stubborn connective tissue between the sheath over a muscle and the backside of skin, which in turn suggests that that’s where we live, in the interstices, in the moist deadspace, not quite here, not quite there. Just blind fish, forcing our way through what we consider to be ‘life.’
Though I can’t follow those tendrils myself, I know that certain people, they have a sense for them. They clothe it as instinct and intuition, but watch those people’s hands as they move through a room; they don’t even know it, but they’re following a guide-line of sorts, so gossamer-soft they can only feel it with their mind.
People with this innate talent, as you would expect, they gravitate to professions that reward that talent.
‘Detective’ is one such profession.
Because one of them was going to be in 414 by the end of the week, I had to walk through doors that seal tightly enough to pinch off any tendrils leading eventually to me.
What most don’t know, it’s that a single door-closing, it’s hardly enough to sever a tendril as it needs to be severed.
When I walked out of 414, with the keycard from the purse on the bed—do this once or twice, you learn—I pulled the door tightly shut while facing it, so as to stretch tight any tendrils connecting me to the woman now hanging by the neck from the deadbolt of the locked adjoining door. Then I inserted the keycard, stepped back slightly, imagining tendrils still hanging on, and I shut the door again, and a third time, and a fourth, to match the floor we were on.
It’s all about proper observances. Pay the right kind of respect, and the god of serial killers will smile on you.
At the door to the stairs at the end of the hall, I repeated this, having to make a worried-confused expression to a couple passing hand-in-hand, eyes down as if not to pry into my complicated reasons for this seemingly harmless activity. Bar bet, mental condition, lost cufflink? They didn’t want to get involved. They didn’t have to.
Four flights later, just the lobby left to cross, I stepped through the last doorway, pulled it shut behind me, then I reached back, my body language suggesting I’d heard something, I’d forgot something, and I tugged the door open.
What I hadn’t anticipated, it was a child too young to walk on its own yet. A child following the wall, for balance.
A child that, had it been leaning instead against the doors of the elevator, could have met a much worse fate, its hands and arms small enough and sticky enough to even get dragged into the wall with the door.
It didn’t work out that way.
That second time I opened the door, the child’s hand settled on the temporary crack yawning open at the hinge-side, and its index finger, ever curious, plumbed the depths of that space.
A child’s bones at that age, they aren’t yet hardened, of course.
Especially when an adult is pressing a door firmly shut enough to sever any tendrils that would indict him, given the chance.
Human skin, however, it’s quite elastic.
When I realized what had just happened, that the tendril I’d just severed had a crunchy center, I jerked the door back open, and the child pulled this new point of pain away from the door.
As if mocking me, there was yet a tendril of that elastic skin yet connecting the burgeoning stump and the finger.
It pulled the mostly-severed finger from between the door and its metal jam. Just enough to, once that negligible flap of skin tore, deliver the now severed finger down to the gleaming tile floor of the lobby. Except of course for that point of pain causing the child to snap his hand back, as if from fire, or an insect’s sting; biology has programmed us even from this age to react without having to slow down, think things through.
The result was the finger not falling straight down from the now-opened door, but flinging back slightly past the child, completing the arc his tiny hand had reflexively started.
The mother didn’t see it moving through the air, I don’t think, but its impact on the floor, that left a crater in her heart. One that would begin filling immediately with regret, and then with the bile you would expect, as if that could cauterize her son’s wound.
My first thought, it was that the woman still in 414, her final act had bought her a moment of grace. That she was, literally, pointing a finger at me, telling all who could see that I was here, that I had done a certain thing upstairs, look, look.
You can find meaning everywhere if you insist on looking for it, though.
All the tendrils leading to her, they were black now, soon to be ash.
Mine, though severed between me and 414, they were still wet with life.
This day, it wasn’t yet over. Far from it.
• • •
Say you were in this particular hotel lobby for these eleven seconds. Even without the baby finger spasming on the floor, still, you would remember you’d been there.
According to the nightly news, I was there that day, right? I was moving among you, as one of you. You might have ridden the elevator with me. I might have handed you a napkin at the coffee bar. My suitcase might have been missing one of its four wheels, causing you to turn your head around to that very particular sound.
You would feel lucky, too. Not to have been the woman in 414, who, even if you actually don’t, you’ll still pretend to yourself that you remember from the hall, from the revolving door. It’s human impulse, some relic of our monkey past. For as long as you can hold her in your mind, you can preserve her. You can make her live forever, in that one day.
What you don’t know, it’s that one woman out of a thousand—out of sixteen, anyway—are made of what 414 was.
Her resolve, the strength it took for her to deny me my final pleasure—she must have been deadly in the board room.
I don’t say this to make her a grander trophy, either.
She was grand well before she caught my eye.
And maybe you did see her.
She was the one who walked into the elevator like she owned it. Like of course the doors waited a moment longer. The elevator sensed her approach. The world, it’s always been shaping itself around her.
Number seventeen wasn’t going to be half the person she was, nor were any of the rest.
What I never like, it’s the screamers, the beggars, the pleaders.
You’ve got to go into it with dignity. Otherwise, you’re compromising right at the end, when it matters most.
When some enterprising detective follows a faint tendril to my stoop one of these days, I only hope I can be so strong. I don’t want to get dragged out from the third cabinet in the kitchen, hiding like a child, my actions evincing guilt, or a forthcoming apology.
Rather, I’ll hold my head high, and maintain eye contact through all the days to come.
And I’ll never tell them what you know, if you were in the lobby with me that day. That night.
You've just seen a toddler’s index finger fall onto the ground like the smallest roll of fresh ham.
As is your natural reflex, you look first to the child, not yet screaming, and then you track back to the scene of the crime: the door that man is still holding.
And the air, it’s so full of screaming.
A mother’s lungs, for her child—there truly is nothing like it. And her body language only serves as amplification. It’s completely possible to stand in the form of a shriek.
And, she doesn’t know it yet, but her mind, it’s taking snapshots of each quarter-second, for later review. For later nightmares. To move through moment by moment, not for leisure, not for nostalgia, but as punishment that can never be enough.
My face, if I wasn’t careful, it was going to be in the blurry edge of some of those snapshots.
Cut all the tendrils you want, but, if you show up in a security feed or on a sketch artist’s pad, it’s all for naught.
The mother, sliding on her knees, reaches the child just as he starts the first of his weeks of screaming. More instinct: after your father spanked you, or after you pinched your fingers in the mousetrap—whatever you’ve done to hurt yourself, even down to simply failing football try-outs—the instant you catch your mother’s eye, the tears come, don’t they?
Perhaps it was like that for this child.
The mother’s response, it informed his.
But she was hardly done here.
I had disassembled her son, slightly.
She would now attempt to put him back together. She would put his finger on ice, have it sewn back on, lick those sutures daily.
She reached back with one hand for the wall, for purchase to pull herself up, but her eyes, they were scanning the tile floor, for the index finger now flattening out under the sole of my right shoe.
When she realized this, when she saw what I was doing, that it was no accident where I was now stepping, she backed her and her son away from me, closer to the wall, and planted her hind-hand deeper, to pull herself up.
Specifically, she planted that hind-hand at the crack between a certain metal jam and the guilty door I was still holding open.
Like mother like son, her index finger slipped into that dark space.
“Ma’am,” I said, for the benefit of all, and stepped forward, cleanly pushing the door shut.
I would have thought the volume of her screams couldn’t increase.
I would have been wrong.
It had the desired effect, though: her eyes, they never climbed all the way to the reproducible planes and contours of my face.
Because an adult’s bones are more stubborn, her index finger didn’t calve off, as her son’s had. But that was hardly my intention. A pair of related fingers from different hands, lost in a single event? I might as well call the news anchors myself.