by Edward Lee
Then another climax tremored and burst.
And then…
“Oh, honey,” she murmured. Her hands ran up and down his sides, feeling flexing muscles through his shirt. The intent thrusts, however, began to slow, while the look on his face crumbled. What…happened? She knew he hadn’t climaxed yet—she would’ve felt it. Then that undeniable male fullness seemed to abate, shrinking right in the midst of her feminine flesh.
“Honey, what—”
“Aw, damn it,” he spat. He looked flustered, even pained. His penis seemed to retract like something being expeditiously reeled in. Don’t stop! she wanted to shriek. But next he was mumbling, getting off of her.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Tom, what’s wr—”
“It’s not you. Christ. I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. I’m sorry. I feel like an idiot.” Then he was getting up, shuffling to the bedroom.
Helen was waylaid. She lay there, like an astonished idiot herself, with her skirt jacked up and her panties still hanging off one foot. Her emotions clacked together like the steel balls on a desk curio. Confusion, embarrassment, then hostility. Just get up and leave me lying here on the floor, you asshole. She felt infuriated and used, until she counted to ten as Dr. Sallee had taught her, and thought about it. In actuality, how could she feel used? It was an illegitimate response. I came like a freight train, she reminded herself. Twice. Yet he hadn’t come at all. If anything, I used him… “You think too much of yourself,” Dr. Sallee had told her at a long-past session shortly after her divorce. “We all do. But keep in mind that a relationship involves a drastic set of human dynamics. It involves two people, not one. Anger, hostility, rage? These are useless emotions, and selfish ones when you let them come into you without sufficient reflection. Think about the other person too.”
The other person.
Tom.
She sat up, sluggishly pulled her panties back on. Christ, he lost his erection. Think how embarrassed he must feel.
Dr. Sallee was right. Consider other people’s feelings for a change. Tom had problems too, Tom was subject to the same kind of stress as Helen, yet how often did he go out of his way to coddle her own plethora of bad moods and bitchy outbursts? Too many times, she realized. And after what he’d had to do today? Autopsying Jeffrey Dahmer?
Who in their right mind wouldn’t be bent out of shape over something like that?
She buttoned herself back up, then went the bedroom. Tom was lying on top of the covers, eyes closed, a hand on his forehead. He sensed her entrance.
“Sorry,” he repeated. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she nonchalantly replied.
“I mean, that’s never happened to me before.”
Helen sat down next to him, stroked his chest. “Tom, it’s just something that happens sometimes. No big deal.” How else could she console him? “You don’t have to be a stud every night,” she joked.
“Some stud,” he sputtered. “Somebody get me some Geritol.”
“Stop it, will you?” She leaned over and gave him a peck. “You make me feel guilty.”
“Guilty?” One eye opened. “Why?”
“You made me come twice,” she said slyly.
“Oh, yeah?” That seemed to perk him up. “Well, at least I did something right tonight.”
She kissed him once more and left. It was easy to tell when men wanted to be left alone, and this was definitely one of those times. He’ll be back to his usual jokester self soon enough, she felt sure.
What to do now? She moped around the kitchen, then realized she wasn’t hungry. And it was too early to go to bed. In the den she contemplated turning on Tom’s computer and trying one of his CD-ROM games, but discarded the idea. At work, she putzed around with computers all day, and hated the blasted things. Why putz with them now? Instead, she idly picked up that day’s edition of the Madison daily, the Tribune, then groaned when she caught an article on the front page: DAHMER’S DEATH SAVES STATE TAXPAYERS $1,000,000.
Taxpayers may wish to thank Tredell W. Rosser, the alleged murderer of Jeffrey Dahmer, for reducing the fiscal corrections deficit by $1,000,000. “That’s how much money the state of Wisconsin would have to fork over to keep America’s most notorious mass murderer alive in order to reach the age of 74, the statistical average lifespan of state convicts sentenced to life imprisonment,” said Dr. William Beierschmitt, a University of Maryland sociology professor. “The ticket comes to about 26.5 grand per year—”
Then— Oh for crying out loud! Helen thought.
Yet another front pager read: PRISON OFFICIALS DESPERATE TO THWART DAHMER “CONSPIRACY” THEORY.
PORTAGE— Bizarre rumors leaking out of the Columbus County Detention Center continue to proliferate as prison director James Dipetro and his staff struggle to quell them. Multiple sources, who have asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, have told the Tribune that the November 28 bludgeoning murder of Jeffrey Dahmer may have been the work of more than one man, and not just other inmates. So far only a lone inmate, Tredell W. Rosser, convicted of murder in 1990, is being regarded as the assailant, but our sources claim that even detention officers may have taken part in deliberately arranging Dahmer’s janitorial detail in the prison’s gymnasium lavatory, and that they were paid to do so by Milwaukee drug lords who had put a “contract” out on Dahmer’s life. “Merely vicious rumors perpetuated by disgruntled employees,” stated Dipetro. “Rosser has already confessed.” Sheriff Tritt Tuckton of the Columbus County Sheriff’s Department, however, isn’t as convinced. “Sure, Rosser confessed to murdering Dahmer, but he also confessed to the Linberg Kidnapping and the assassination of Pope Felix VI. How much credibility are you going to give a man like that? He’s crazy.” “The only one crazy in this mess is Tuckton,” countered Dipetro. “He’s just a small-time county bumpkin who wants to be in the lime light, so that’s why he’s ordering this ridiculous investigation—”
Helen skipped the rest. Even the legitimate papers, these days, were sounding like the tabloids. Anonymous “sources.” Conspiracies. Contracts.
Ludicrous, she thought.
Out of desperation, then, she turned on Tom’s Trinitron with the remote, then went back to the kitchen. A drink would be nice now, but Tom rarely kept any liquor in the condo. She settled, instead, for a beer—IC Light, whatever that was—and then went back to the den. A dark, monotone shape warbled out of the color-tinged darkness, fluttering shadows on the wall. Helen turned, began to sit down on the couch, then winced when she saw what was on the screen. You gotta be kidding me! It was Dahmer.
One of those tabloid shows. A stiff-haired brunet announcer with too much lipstick tried to appear professional as she recited, “…during P.M. Edition’s landmark interview with this crazed, cannibalistic killer last July.” Dahmer hardly looked crazed or cannibalistic. His drab face—thinner than more recent photos—barely moved as he responded to an interview question.
“…which is why I asked the warden for general pop,” he said in slate-green correctional coveralls.
“General pop?”
“The general inmate population,” Dahmer defined. “It’s too lonely in the segregation wings.”
“But, Jeff,” the interviewess said with a phony concerned look, leaning over as though she really cared. All any of them really cared about were their paychecks and being seen on tv. “Aren’t you afraid that other inmates will try to do you harm?”
“I hope they will,” Dahmer said on the badly produced video. “I deserve to die for my sins. It’s a sin for someone like me to go on living.”
“You actually feel that way?”
“Thinking back on what I did,” Dahmer reflected, “is sometimes too much to bear. I feel strongly that I’d be better off dead.”
“You’re going to be here for the rest of your life, Jeff. Is there any comfort at all? Anything you can still enjoy or feel fulfilled by?”
“The Bible,
” replied the killer.
“I understand you were recently baptized.”
Dahmer nodded dully. “Yes, on May 10th, in the prison whirlpool by my friend Father Alexander.”
“I also understand you’re a lay reader now in the prison chapel.”
“Yes, I read the Word of God every morning. I consider it a privilege that God allows me to do this.”
“Do you have a favorite reading, Jeff?”
“Yes, I do. It’s from Revelations. ‘Then the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth. During that time, these men will seek death, but they will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.’“ Dahmer’s face remained chillingly expressionless. “‘Yes, I am coming soon, and bringing recompense with me, to requite everyone according to his deeds.’“
Dahmer’s deadpan voice flattened further, to an utterance barely human.
“And this one too, my favorite of all,” he said. “It’s from The Book of Isaiah. ‘Thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven… Yet thou shalt be brought down into hell, deep into the pit.’”
Helen took a sip of beer, shook her head, and switched channels.
— | — | —
CHAPTER FOUR
He steps out of the shower, pauses. He stands and listens. The silence seems loud as a cacophony. It reminds him of something—
The silence.
—that he hates.
The silence drips. He listens and thinks back—
««—»»
The boy from Bath, Ohio, is hiding. He hides a lot.
It’s a nice house, in a nice neighborhood. His mother is always nice but he doesn’t see her much since the divorce.
There are dead animals in the yard. Little pieces of them, all in the little places he has buried them.
For some reason, the little animals help him feel something he’s never felt before:
Power.
Stray kittens and small stray dogs mostly, and sometimes he’d read ads in the back of the paper. There’s a section for PETS, people who are moving so they have pets to give away. Gerbils, guinea pigs, hamsters. The boy picks them up, promises to take good care of the animals, and then he kills them. But he likes the dogs and cats the best, because he can see their eyes better.
It’s the look in their eyes just before they die, the tiniest glimmer: fear.
They fear him, and their fear gives him power.
But right now he is hiding because he knows his father has just gotten home.
And the boy from Bath, Ohio, knows that he will have the same look of fear in his eyes—just like the animals—when his father eventually comes into the room.
It is the boy’s fear that gives his father power.
So the boy remains, hiding behind his bed, and listening to the awful silence until he hears—
click
—the door click open.
“I’m back,” his father says.
««—»»
—and listens and thinks back and listens.
Enough, he thinks.
Weakling.
He fears the past, and he knows that his own fear makes him weak. Like—what was his name, back in eighth grade? Gil Valeda, the jock. “No way. You’re a weakling—”
And his father: “Don’t be such a weakling! Be a man!”
No, it can only be the fear of others.
The fear in their eyes.
The power it gives him.
Sometimes he even tells them what he’s going to do to them. It makes their eyes beautiful with fear…
He cranks off the shower’s annoying drip, dries off, then walks out into the quiet room. He dresses slowly, glancing around at the small room’s insignificance. A cheap lamp and a cheap dresser. A Magic Finger’s Massage box on the head board. But the word resurrection comes to mind when he spies the Gideon’s Bible on the writing table.
She took the fruit thereof and did eat it, he thinks.
He puts the hot plate in his leather bag, a few utensils, his Flair pen and one of his knives.
Thick, musty curtains part at the brush of his hand. Beyond the high window, the city teems in flecks of light and winter dark. Feel the fear, comes the plush, rich thought. It’s as though he is speaking to the world beyond the smudged window glass.
He pauses only for a moment to glance at the blood-sodden bed. Then he leaves the room and closes the door behind him.
“I’m back,” he says aloud.
— | — | —
CHAPTER FIVE
There was a roaring fire, and Helen struggled maniacally with the water hose. She had to put the fire out. But when she turned on the hose, nothing happened. No water issued forth. The fire raged. Next thing she knew, she was running.
Helen fled frantic down some nameless, stygian corridor. Someone—or some proverbial thing—was chasing her. Down one passage after another, she ran, breathless, steeped in terror. It’s the dream, she thought. It’s just the dream. But this knowledge did not allay her at all. Another, darker voice seemed to gutter: What if you’re wrong? What if this isn’t a dream? Pocked stone passed on either side; medieval torches sputtered oily yellow light.
What if this is real?
In another moment, she realized she was naked. A Freudian rape dream, perhaps. Symbolic birth-trauma or some such. Or perhaps the dream was a symbol of her impending menopause: the robust fruit of womanhood withering away to a grayed husk, her sexual self trapped in a labyrinth of cold stone walls and dead ends. There was no way out.
Laved in sweat, her bare breasts heaving, Helen turned at the final dead end. The shadow of her pursuer seemed to flow forward through the dungeon dark. A familiar figure indeed. Naked as she was but bereft of human feature.
The pallid face, eroded, bleached of any definition. The lidless, empty eyes and the soulless stare.
Its white-clay hands reached forward, to pluck at her raw breasts and pad stickily at her face. Eventually, a chalk-white finger poked into her mouth. She tried to scream, couldn’t, then bit down. The finger came off behind her teeth and began to wriggle on her tongue.
The dust-pale shadow chuckled…
It wasn’t the non-stop horror of the dream that woke her up. It was, of all things, a steady beeping sound. The dream-world and the real world merged then, like lovers hesitant to kiss until one tongue-tip touched the other. Helen’s eyes sprang open, and she jerked bolt upright like a b-movie cliche. A quick jostling to her left startled her nearly to the point of shrieking out loud. The beeping persisted as yet another shadow moved off. But, no, it wasn’t the putty-white specter of the dream. It was Tom.
The beeping pulsed on, then, in another instant, abated.
A beeper, Helen thought. Was it hers? She turned, winced in sweat damp sheets, then groggily checked her Motorola pager. No messages. Tom, she realized then. Of course. It was Tom’s hospital pager that went off.
Helen lay back, sighed. She tried to push the now actively recurrent nightmare from her head. At least, Tom’s pager had wakened her. If it hadn’t, she’d still be dreaming.
Her surroundings, at first, eluded her. Whaaaa… Most nights she slept at Tom’s; hence, she didn’t recognize her own bedroom now. Of course—he’d come to her apartment last night after work. She thought back, tried to remember more.
Tom hadn’t made love to her last night, had he? No, she felt certain. It had been the night before, at his place, when he’d made love to her on the floor and then faltered. Last night, he’d merely crawled into bed, kissed her, and rolled over. Even some rather forward—and uncharacteristic—inducements via her hands and mouth hadn’t roused his interest. “Aw, honey, I’m just not into it tonight, okay?” he said with his back to her. “Tough day, you know? Christ, I had to histologize three brains today, and ship a pineal gland to Berkeley.”
The latter comment had nipped her own interest. She’d shrugged and gone to sleep. So why, now, did she still feel this revenant of sex
ual arousal? Her fingers touched herself, for proof. They came away wet. Jeeze, she thought.
The dream?
But how could that be? There was certainly nothing erotic about her recurrent nightmare.
I’ll have to ask Dr. Sallee, she supposed, though she hated to think what his answer might be.
“Sure.” A muffled whisper. “Yeah.”
Tom’s voice. He’d gone to the kitchen to answer his page. But—
“Yeah? Maybe I ought to come over there right now and do the job right.”
Helen’s face turned rigid. The old demon returned—it never failed. The demon of jealousy and suspect. A mindless imp of caressing irrationality and jumping to conclusions. It was her “anomaly,” Dr. Sallee had told her. Acting before she would let herself think. Making judgments before surveying the facts. But in such times, her sense of reason stayed in bed.
“I’ll light you up real good,” she heard.
She pulled on her robe and walked very quietly into the front of the kitchen. Tom’s pager lay there, and she didn’t hesitate to pick it up. The message screen read 224-9855. Tom hung up and turned.
“Helen. You’re up,” he said.
Don’t let him lie to you, her not so better half ordered. He’ll probably say it was work calling. Don’t let him lie to you. Don’t let another man make a sucker out of you, goddamn it!
“Who was that?” she asked.
“It was work,” he said nonchalantly, and walked in his shorts to the Mr. Coffee.
“Bullshit.”
Tom turned, frowning. “What?”
“It wasn’t work calling, Tom. Who was it?”
Tom’s eyes rolled in their sockets. “Aw, come on, Helen. Give it a rest, huh? I just got up.”