The Last Man: A Novel

by D. W. Buffa

  Atkinson’s eyes flew open in dumb astonishment.

  “Because…?”

  “They hated you for what you did – what they thought you did. What do you think they would have felt if they had known – even suspected – what you had really done?”

  “What they…?”

  Bannister’s gaze seemed to go right through him, burn deep inside his brain. Atkinson felt trapped, riveted with nameless terror.

  “You did not go there to steal; no one told you that the house would be empty. You went there to kill. You went there to murder, to slaughter, everyone you could find: parents, children – you didn’t care! All you wanted was to murder, to feel what it was like, that moment when you took their lives.”

  “But I did go there to..; no one was supposed to be there. I….” He stopped, paralyzed by the scorn and disbelief written on Walter Bannister’s gray green eyes.

  “The 911 call - remember? A woman called reporting shots. Then you were seen running from the house. Shots were fired; you went running – just a few seconds later. There wouldn’t have been time to go down the hallway, to murder those two children – not the way they were butchered. You took your time with that, didn’t you? - First one, then the other. What did you do? Hold your hand over the mouth of one of them so he couldn’t scream, wake his parents, while you cut open the other one? And then, when you had finished the first – how many knife wounds did the coroner say: more than a dozen? – did the same brutal thing to the other one, cut him into pieces? You better hope there’s no heaven, Mr. Atkinson, because if there is you’re going straight to hell for what you did to that boy and girl.

  “But that was only the beginning, wasn’t it?” asked Bannister, his gaze so piercing that Atkinson drew back. “You murdered the children, and then with that blood covered knife still in your hand, you woke up their parents. What did you do? – Show them the knife and tell them what you had just done; tell them while you waved the gun around, so they knew they were next and that there was nothing they could do about it? Their children were dead and they were about to die! Is that what happened? Is that why you did it: to know what it was like to have that much power? This is your chance – the only chance you’re ever going to have – to tell the truth, to explain why you – why anyone – would do a thing like this!”

  “I didn’t…!” Atkinson started to protest, to deny once again that he was guilty of killing anyone. But then, suddenly, his expression changed. The tension left his body. He seemed surprised by how relaxed he felt. “I lied. It was the way you said it was. Almost. I didn’t go there to murder anyone, but, you’re right, I didn’t know if the place would be empty or not. I never thought about it. You want to know why I killed them. I didn’t like them.”

  He said this with such casual indifference, as if he were telling the reason he had turned in one direction and not another, that Bannister wondered if he had missed something.

  “You didn’t like them?”

  “Didn’t like what they had.”

  Now Bannister understood, or thought he did.

  “You murdered them, two small children and their parents, because they lived in a good neighborhood and had a nice house?”

  “Sure; why not? I didn’t really need a reason - did I? And that one is as good as any other.”

  Bannister wanted to be sure. “You killed them out of envy, because they had things you didn’t have?”

  Curiously, now that he had admitted his guilt, Atkinson seemed to go out of his way to deny contrition. He had murdered four people, but he did not feel sorry for it. More than that, he seemed to suggest by his attitude and demeanor that what he had done was perfectly understandable, if only you saw things through his eyes.

  “Things I didn’t have? You mean, because they had a house, a car, that kind of stuff? No, that wasn’t it.”

  “But you said you did it – that you didn’t like them – because of what they had.”

  “Yeah, what they had – a life! They did things, went places, had kids,” he said, speaking with a strange defiance that seemed to grow stronger and become more pronounced with every word. “But I had something they didn’t have, something they could never have – I had the way to end it, to take it all away; and that’s what I did – took it all away. So who is better off now – them or me?”

  “Them or you?” asked Bannister with the steady, clinical gaze he had used on him before, the look of a physician studying a patient with an incurable psychosis. “That is an interesting question, don’t you think? They’re dead, that’s true; but they – and especially the children – had lived blameless lives. They had friends, neighbors, who, if the trial testimony was any indication, thought the world of them. Hundreds of people came to their funeral; a whole city grieved. They’re dead and you’re alive, but do you really think anyone envies you for that, anyone who would like to take your place?”

  The answer, the only answer the prisoner could think of, was to repeat what he had just said. It was the ultimate standard by which he seemed to judge everything.

  “Wouldn’t you rather be alive?”

  “A life in prison; waiting on death row for my execution - convicted of four murders. No, I wouldn’t.” Pausing, Bannister twisted his head to the side and looked at Atkinson with sufficient skepticism to raise a doubt whether, despite what he had said, he believed it either. He pressed the point. “You ran away, exchanged gun fire with the police. Why did you do that - risk getting killed – if staying alive was the most important thing?”

  “But I didn’t get killed, did I? I’m still here.”

  “Yes, you’re still here; and you’re a fool if you think anyone things the better of you for that. The people you murdered – they’re the ones everyone respects, not you.”

  Saliva had begun to run down the corners of Atkinson’s rough, misshapen mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his arm and with cold contempt dismissed what Bannister had said.

  “What the fuck do I care what anyone thinks?”

  That thought, the obscenity of his defiance, filled him with a strange elation. He did nothing to hide his sense of triumph; that, far from remorse, the only feeling he had about what he had done was the merit of his own achievement: He had done what few others would have dared to do. His face wore the expression of a general who had won a battle, the difference of course that he had fought his against unarmed civilians and for no good cause at all.

  “You think I give a fuck what anyone thinks?” he demanded, amused that, as he imagined, Bannister had been reduced to silence by this show of indifference to what others thought or said.

  But Bannister had been thinking about something else.

  “Yes, I understand you don’t care what anyone thinks,” he said in a vague, distant voice. “But you cared about what they thought, didn’t you?” he asked. His gaze now became clear and penetrating. He moved his chair so he could look straight at him. “The man and woman you murdered, after you murdered their children – you cared about what they thought. You didn’t go there to rob them, and you didn’t just go there to kill them. You wanted more than that. They had to know: they had to hear you tell them what you had done; tell them what you were now going to do to them. That’s it, isn’t it?” he insisted, searching his eyes with such intensity that Atkinson, though he wanted to, could not turn away. He sat there, mesmerized by a manic power he could as little understand as resist. “You could have just killed them, shot them while they lay asleep; but that wouldn’t have given you what you wanted, what you needed: the acknowledgement, the recognition, of who you were; the realization that everything depended on you – their future, their lives - because during those few moments, while you had them in your power, you were like God. There was nothing, there was no one, more important. They had to look to you and no one else to take care of them, protect them – decide that instead of dying you would allow them to go on living!”

  Atkinson did not understand half of what Bannister was saying, b
ut what he did grasp was enough to trigger a response. His eyes grew wide with the pleasure of remembered cruelty, a look that Bannister had seen before: the eager satisfaction on the blood smeared face of a jackal. There was the same panting breath, the same rabid, deathlike eyes. Atkinson could hardly wait to tell what he had done.

  “They would have done anything – that guy and his wife! Anything at all! They would have killed each other if I had told them that it was the only way they could live.” A smile so corrosive you could smell the stink ran jagged around his thick wet lips. “You want to know what I made them do – what they were only too willing to do. I gave them the choice, said I was going to kill them both, but they could choose which one would get it first. You want to know -”

  “No, I don’t!” exclaimed Bannister. “I’ve heard all I need to hear.”

  “No, you haven’t,” said Atkinson with such strange assurance that Bannister was not sure he had heard him right. “You didn’t come here to give me a last chance to confess, to ‘cleanse my soul,’ to tell you how sorry I am, how bad I feel because those four people are dead, how I wish I could take it all back. You want to know what it feels like to kill.”

  It was a guess, a shrewd guess based on nothing but raw instinct and native cynicism; a guess, but surprising in how close it came to the truth. Bannister would not admit it, certainly not to Daniel Lee Atkinson, and perhaps not even to himself, but it was there, just below the surface of his mind, the question, the forbidden question that no one, especially someone with his intelligence and training, was supposed to ask: What was it like, what did it feel like, to murder.

  “I’m interested in the reason you did this terrible thing, whether you even had a reason; and I think now I know what it was. You explained it, better than perhaps you even know. What you haven’t explained, what you’re still lying about, is this belief you claim to have that you’re somehow better off than the people you murdered. No,” he said when Atkinson started to interrupt, “I’m not interested in hearing again that they’re dead and you’re alive.”

  Atkinson could only think one thought at a time. He paid no attention to what Bannister said because Bannister was lying.

  “Are you sure?” he asked with a knowing eye and a taunting voice. “Sure you don’t want to know what it was like, the moment I drove in the knife, cut open those two kids; what it was like when I blew that guy’s head off and then shoved the hot barrel of the gun down the throat of that bitch he was married to, made her suck on it, and then blew her brains away? Sure you don’t want me to tell you; sure you don’t want to know what it felt like – all that noise, all that blood? You sure you don’t -”

  “Jailer!” shouted Bannister as he jumped to his feet and banged on the door. “We’re through in here.”

  Though it was nearly one o’clock in the morning when he got home, Walter Bannister went for a long walk down the deserted palm lined streets of the neighborhood where he lived. The cool night air felt good against his face and the dark silence helped clear his mind, but when he returned to the house he was still too agitated to sleep. Careful not to wake his wife, he went into his book lined study and shut the door. In the middle drawer of his desk he found a leather-bound journal and opened it to the last written page, turned to the next one and began to write.

  Writing longhand with a fountain pen it was an indecipherable script. Even had it been possible to make out the words, he employed so many abbreviations of his own short hand invention that his meanings must always have been obscure. He could have left it out in the open, exposed to every wandering eye, and not felt the least alarm that anyone could actually read it. All the code breakers in the world could not have deciphered a single ink spattered line of what Walter Bannister put down on paper.

  Always meticulous, he wrote not just the date, but the time, at the right top corner of the blank unlined page.

  “It was a mistake to see Daniel Lee Atkinson tonight. He isn’t much more than an animal, a primitive creature, lacking in all intelligence. He chose his victims at random, and may not have chosen them at all. I don’t think he went there to kill anyone. He saw the house. He decided to try it: break in and decide what to do then. Even that isn’t right. I don’t think he decided anything. Everything was random: that house instead of another; that family instead of some other one. Then, he’s inside, looks around, and something about it – maybe just the comfortable affluence of the place – sets him off, makes him want to take revenge on a world that in his mind would not let him live like other people, like the people who lived in that house.

  “Perhaps it was not a mistake to see him. If nothing else, it confirmed once again my belief that there is in each of us an instinct for murder. With some of us, like Atkinson, it is right there on the surface, ready to react, to kill at any given moment; with the rest of us, however, it’s buried deeper; held in check, not so much by the fear of getting caught as by something more powerful: the belief, that is to say the delusion, that we’re not capable of killing, the belief that we’re too advanced, too ‘civilized’ to do anything so barbaric. What is the history of the 20th century, that century of self-proclaimed scientific progress, but a history of mass slaughter. The only difference between a political leader and a criminal is the number of their victims. One gets sent to the gas chamber while the other has a building named after him. Both murder and war take place outside the law; the murderer and the so-called statesman are both of them a law unto themselves. They both decide what they want. More than that, they decide what is ‘right.’ Am I the only one to notice this?

  “Killing isn’t always murder. The law allows me to kill someone if it is the only way to save my own life or to avoid ‘grievous bodily harm.’ Self-defense is always a defense to a charge of murder. Self-defense is always the most important part of the case for war. This is always seen from the perspective of the one who acted this way: forced to kill someone because that person was going to kill them. The need to survive, to continue to live, becomes the excuse, the lawful excuse, for causing the death of another. This is all black letter law. Everyone knows it. Does anyone understand what it means?

  “Suppose one of Atkinson’s victims, the husband, had survived. Suppose he had been there at the trial, a witness, and then, in front of everyone, had attacked Atkinson, tried to kill him, and that Atkinson had with those strong hands of his killed him in self-defense. It seems to me that it should not be self-defense, that it should be murder. Atkinson, not the husband, started the chain of events that led, inevitably, as it seems to me, to what the husband tried to do. If the husband had somehow managed to kill Atkinson, is there anyone who would not secretly approve of what he had done?

  “I am still trying to understand what others seem to find so simple. We insist murder is the exception, the inexplicable exception that we invariably explain by a motive that seems plain on the face of it or that we invent: the reason why. It may tell you why someone wanted to harm another; it does not tell you why they actually did it, why an emotion was translated into an action. The prosecution insisted that Atkinson killed because he did not want to get caught, that he had gone there to rob the place. Even if that had been true, even if he had gone there to rob and not to kill, the prosecution could never explain why he did not just leave, run away before anyone could get a good look at him. Atkinson murdered four people. That fact became, so to speak, a cause of itself. He is a brutal murderer, and that proves that he is different from you and me. That proves that he is – what? Someone who does things like this! And we think the murderer is insane!

  “Self-defense is rooted in the belief in equality. In Roman law, a slave who killed his master to stop his master from killing him was guilty of murder. We find that reprehensible, but only because we reject the idea of slavery. We have millions of slaves of our own, the inmates of prisons, men who have broken the law. If one of them, on the way to his own execution, tries to save his own life by killing one of the guards, we stop the execution and p
ut him on trial for – murder! Equality means that everyone has the right of self-defense, the right to do what is necessary to survive. This is the democratic instinct: the belief in the essential equality of everyone. But the murderer has another instinct: the drive to dominate, not to survive. The failure to understand this is the crucial mistake. It is not enough to live, to live just for the sake of living; the murderer lives to kill, to impose his will on others; to make them recognize him – to make them recognize us – for what we are: the ones whose only law is what we ourselves decide. The murderer needs his victim, depends on him, in the same way the master needs his slave. He does not want to survive; he wants to dominate. The politician needs the crowd to tell him he is important; the murderer needs a victim to tell him he has power.

  “But what kind of victim? A stranger, a face in the crowd, someone of no importance, someone whose death would be as anonymous as his life? There is no pleasure in the praise of fools, no triumph in the defeat of an adversary who cannot fight back. A man like Atkinson likes killing for the sake of killing. Though he won’t admit it, he believes that everyone – everyone with a normal life – is better than he is. It wouldn’t matter who he killed: the victim would always be someone superior. But me – who would I kill where murder would be an achievement?

  “There is no question now but that I am going to do it, murder someone. It isn’t just that this thing has been building up inside me to the point that I cannot control it; I don’t want to stop it. It has become plain to me, as I sit there in court, listing to all these stories, the sordid details of so many wretched, mindless lives, that the system is broken, that we do not know what we are doing, that everything is upside down. I sit there all day, wanting to scream, wishing half the time that instead of passing sentence I could be the one to carry it out. But who would I kill, and when?”