Portrait of the Psychopath as a Young Woman - Edward Lee.wps

by phuc

  "They never told him where the meetings were held," Simmons said. "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?"

  "How many?"

  "One, but only if the lightbulb wants to change."

  Spence shook his head. "One question before I go. Not only did she cut off her pimp's genitals, she cut off his right hand. Any idea why?"

  "Her totem, after all, is more than likely religious. Perhaps it's biblical."

  "Biblical?"

  "If thine right hand offends thee," Simmons theorized, "cut if off."

  Spence contemplated this when he left the office. Objects of abuse serve as objects of power to be envied hence the missing penises, he recalled Simmons telling him a few days ago. In a monstrous way, it made sense. But...the hand? he wondered now. What purpose did she have in cutting off Tyrone Chaplin's hand?

  (III)

  Earlier she finished typing "The Mummy."

  Then she Express Mailed it to Kathleen Shade in the special Express Mail box so she wouldn't have to go into the post office.

  She drove past The Cross on the way home.

  It reminds her of something but she never knows what.

  In the basement she feeds the prostitute.

  She's getting so skinny, her mother says.

  "I know."

  You forgot to feed her yesterday.

  She blinks. "I forgot?"

  Yes, honey.

  Suddenly she wants to scream.

  How could she forget...

  You also forgot to go to work last night.

  Her teeth clacked shut.

  She goes to the shelves, to the toolbox.

  She takes the scratch awl.

  She lays her hand on the bench, palm up.

  "I will not forget," she says and sticks the awl into the center of her palm.

  "I will not forget."

  "I will not forget."

  "I will not forget."

  "I will not forget."

  When she's done there's a cross in her hand formed of punctures.

  «« »»

  "I'm sorry I forgot to feed you," she says to the prostitute.

  Sego Strawberry today.

  The prostitute's ribs show like crevices along her side, or like gills.

  She's dirty and pale bound to the bench.

  Lacerations crust her wrists and ankles.

  She inserts the plastic tube between the stitches in the prostitute's lips.

  The lean throat wobbles as the liquid meal is quickly gulped down through the tube.

  "Isn't that good?" she says to the prostitute. "For dinner we'll have Dutch Chocolate."

  Then she goes upstairs to masturbate in Daddy's Room.

  The feelings build.

  Beautiful, hot flashes of feelings.

  She thinks of blood pouring out of incisions.

  Men's blood.

  As the feelings build she thinks of little birds crowded in a cage, their wings flapping in chaos to get out.

  She always waits weeks and weeks to masturbate.

  She likes the way the feelings build up.

  She likes to masturbate in Daddy's Room because she can see the fiery white light of The Cross in The Window.

  Her mother is standing by The Window now, looking out as her beautiful daughter's sleek, strong body writhes in pleasure on the bed, the perfect legs spread, the perfect stitches bared, the clitoris radiating at the intent manipulation, and the intricate, maladapted brain dreaming of all the men she will kill.

  The stitches hum.

  Her orgasm bursts...

  Like the little birds released from the crowded cage all at once.

  She's been masturbating not with her own hand but with the hand of Tyrone Chaplin.

  | |

  Chapter 19

  (I)

  Maxwell worked on the new poem all day. Often times arose for artists when the creative élan tapped itself out. Maxwell followed William Faulkner's advice: he quit writing in the middle of his peak rather than drain himself dry. There was nothing worse for a poet than an aesthetic hangover due to overwork. Maxwell kept a reserve for the next day at all costs or the next day proved useless.

  I know you're home, he thought, his ear to the phone. He called Kathleen repeatedly, but she wasn't answering. This did not surprise him. It was a woman's way of articulating the need for distance. Distance, hogwash, he thought. He would just go to her apartment, uninvited. You did things like that when you were in love. Love had its privileges.

  She loves me, came the thought with a shining certainty. She just doesn't realize it yet.

  In faded jeans, then, and a powder orange T-shirt that read Hanson's Magazine of Literary and Social Interest, Maxwell locked up, went out onto P Street, and hailed a cab. Twenty five minutes later he was striding up Kathleen's echoic apartment steps. A white plastic Blockbuster Video bag dangled from one hand.

  The bag contained a loaded .38 Colt revolver.

  Maxwell's gape lengthened as he glimpsed her through the opened door. Dark smudges underscored bloodshot eyes like soot. She'd been crying. Her hair reminded him of a clump of tentacles.

  "I must look like shit," she said and let him in.

  "Well..."

  Inside was hotter even than outside; it was like stepping into clay oven. "Kathleen," he tried not to complain too pointedly. He turned on the air conditioning and began closing the windows.

  "You're going to cook in this heat."

  "I like it when it's hot," she said, meandering to the couch. "Heat absolves me."

  Maxwell made a frown like sucking lemons. "Absolves you of what?"

  "Lots of things," Kathleen muttered.

  Maxwell refrained from further comment. It saddened him and made him mad to see her like this: doleful, saturnine. What the hell is wrong now? he wondered. He left her to close the bedroom window, and found the radio on. Some talk show psychiatrist was counseling a caller in a voice like an alien radio transmission: " history of mankind is more proof than we'll ever need.

  Sexual harassment is culturally and historically all inclusive. We as women must never forget that it is not a privilege but a basic human right to live free of all manner of sexual harassment.

  And I don't just mean in the workplace I mean at home, on the street, in the bedroom. When we watch television, when we read, when we go to the movie theater or listen to music. Through centuries of subjugation, the male sexual hierarchy has evolved into a monster of diabolical proportions." The counselor lapsed into a heated pause. "When we succumb to the monster, we fail in all that we are. We must never succumb to the monster of male exploitation."

  "What good is that?" a caller retorted. Her voice, as distant as the psychiatrist's, mixed rage with sobs. "I have two kids and a dead husband. I gotta car that breaks down every week and I can barely even afford the lot rental for my trailer. I have to feed my children tuna fish and crackers every night for God's sake. If I don't have sex with my boss, he'll give that raise to someone else."

  "Don't succumb," the counselor insisted. "Report the bastard."

  "Oh, come on! I'm so sick of hearing that. I can't prove it; it's my word against his. Who are they going to believe?"

  The counselor had no answer.

  "God." The caller broke into quiet sobs. "It isn't fair."

  "No, no it's not."

  Maxwell silenced the radio. No answers for anything, he mused. He was tired of hearing sad things, of people taken advantage of, of souls in turmoil. Despair, it seemed, flourished without surcease, even in the airwaves, and in the dead space of the ether.

  He slammed closed the window, sealing out the heat. It would take all night for the apartment to get cool, hot as it was. Unnamed distresses plucked at his nerves like pizzicato. When he went back out to the living room, and asked Kathleen what was wrong, she told him that her uncle was out of prison.

  He sat with her on the couch, all the lights off but one. He held her hand as he listened. Her hand felt dry, cool. "
At first I thought Spence might be lying," she said. "It's almost like I'm his enemy; for some reason he goes out of his way to keep me on edge, to keep me in pieces."

  "The asshole," Maxwell articulated. "But maybe he is lying. Isn't that possible?"

  "No." She craned her head back on the couch, looking up at the ceiling. "I called the prison.

  There's some new early release program they're doing, to save money. They're cycling people in and out of there like it's a goddamn voting booth. Uncle Sammy was paroled yesterday afternoon.

  They said he was a model prisoner." She gave a faint, dark chuckle. "Good behavior, they said."

  Maxwell cringed for something to say to console her. But nothing came nothing, at least, that wasn't a lie. What could he say? Don't worry, Kathleen, it's all right? It wasn't all right. You'll forget all about him? She'd never forget, never. How could she?

  He wondered what he'd done to her some obsidian inquisitor in him, with no heart. She'd only implied thus far, never exacting upon details. He thought of dredgers. He thought of rocks turned over to reveal slug slime and nests of worms. No, he realized. I don't want to know. I never want to know.

  But then she told him anyway, as though fate or premonition had posted challenge to his negation. It all poured out of her the blackest ichor tapped through the wounds her uncle had lain into her spirit.

  "He'd always call it Sleepytime that was his cue. He always spoke very quietly and repetitively.

  He said that there were special secret things that uncles and little girls were supposed to do together. That's why God made uncles, he said. To show little girls the special Secret Things. It was a special secret from God and if I ever told anyone, bad things would happen to me, but little girls who kept the secret would always be happy, and good things would always happen to them and their loved ones." Kathleen's eyes remained riveted upward, to the ceiling. She seemed to never blink at all. "He'd always be talking to me while he was doing it, it was always the same quiet voice. He'd be asking me about school, and about my friends. He'd always repeat key words at particular times. He bought me one of those cat clocks, where the tail and the eyes move back and forth, and he'd always position me so that I'd be looking at the clock while he was doing it. It was always from behind, and he'd always move with the rhythm of the clock. The therapist told me years later that he was actually using some fairly advanced hypnotic techniques, an integral system of vocal and kinesthetic reinforcements combined with subliminal persuasion methods."

  Monster, Maxwell thought. Pure, unadulterated evil. He was going to tell her not to say anymore, that she didn't have to, but then he quickly realized how essential it was for her to go on. If she didn't get these things out of her, they'd turn to rot in her soul. She'd been left to sit alone with her past now. The savior therapists were long gone there was only Maxwell, who sat immobile as she continued in a voice like crust, like gravel.

  "Sammy never had a fixed place of residence. Evidently he was always going back and forth to New Jersey. He told my father he was involved in some commercial real estate investments; what he was really doing was running kiddie porn masters from Jersey to some duplication facility here. But whenever my father was away on business at least a half dozen times a year, sometimes for weeks at a time Sammy would live at the house, take me to and from school, take care of the bills, etc. He was always very gentle, he was always very careful with my body. He used contraceptive jelly and a variety of lubricants. He'd always rub up against me at first he never let me see him. That's another thing the therapists said was typical among expert pedophiles. He'd always insert himself in me from behind. He didn't begin to sodomize me 'til I was older, like 13, 14, but it was always from behind so I'd have to see the clock, the eyes and the tail ticking back and forth. He never came in me I think he was really afraid that I might get pregnant, especially when I got older."

  Maxwell morosely remembered what she'd told him a few nights ago: that though her uncle's abuse of her had started when she was nine, it had continued into her late teens. How many times? the morbid inquiry occurred to him. How many times had her uncle raped her? Hundreds, probably, he realized. Over all those years? Yes, it had to be. Hundreds of times.

  "He never came in me," Kathleen repeated. Either tears or perspiration sparkled on her cheek.

  Her hand tightened in Maxwell's; her gaze remained upward. "It was always the same, the clock eyes switching back and forth with the thrusts, the soft ticking sound and his soft voice behind me in the dark." Now she closed her eyes, squeezing something back. "His voice was so light, so gentle. He'd always say the same thing. ‘Almost, almost Here,' he'd say and then he'd pull out of me and he'd grab my hand and gently guide it behind me and he'd wrap my hand around his penis, he'd jerk himself off with my hand."

  Maxwell exerted himself to try and decipher how she felt and what she was thinking whenever her uncle did this to her, but a void swelled in his mind, a wasteland.

  "‘Almost, almost Here,'" she whispered. Then she leaned against him, her head on his shoulder, and she fell silent.

  Whatever a spirit really was Maxwell's plummeted, a stone dropped into a bottomless fissure.

  Was it the world that had created her uncle? Was it sociology, environment, and chemical brain defects? Or was it simply evil? If the latter, then what had created Maxwell, and the thoughts that now surged in him? In a fantasy, or a vision, he could easily picture himself killing Uncle Sammy, sticking his .38 right into the guy's ear and dropping the hammer. It would be easy.

  You're a poet, not a hitman, he reminded himself when the image faded. But how was he supposed to feel, after hearing this? Was it evil to want to exterminate someone like Kathleen's uncle?

  He waited a long time before he spoke. He sat with his arm around her, thinking and giving her time to calm down. She may even have dozed off for a few minutes.

  When she stirred, he reached for the Blockbuster bag.

  "What did you bring?" she said. "Videos?"

  "Not quite." The bag sat in his lap like something stillborn. "I don't know how you feel about this, but this killer thing has me really worried the fact that she's writing to you, that she knows your address. And now, with your uncle out of prison, I guess that's one more thing to worry about. That's why I brought this."

  "What is it?"

  "A gun," Maxwell said. "I mean, you need some kind of protection, don't you? More than some cop in the parking lot who's probably asleep if he's there at all."

  "I don't know anything about guns," Kathleen replied, leaning up to look at the bag. "And the killer will never come here. She's deliberately leaving the bodies where the police can find them.

  She knows the police are well aware of her, and she's smart enough to suspect that they're staking out my apartment. She'll never come here, Maxwell."

  "Okay, maybe she won't. But what if your Uncle Sammy does?"

  Her refusal to answer was answer enough. She was looking at the bag, at the strange edges formed by its contents.

  "I don't think it's a good idea," she eventually said.

  "I want you to have it," he persisted. "Just to be safe."

  "It's not a good idea. I " Her voice wandered. "Because if my uncle actually did come here, I'd probably kill him."

  So would I, Maxwell thought. I'd fucking kill him.

  | |

  Chapter 20

  (I)

  She wonders what it would be like to pull out his eyes with Duplay 3 prong cervical forceps.

  Or exsanguinate him with an arterial catheter.

  Or do a torso job on him.

  These are good ideas.

  You'll have to remember them, she thinks.

  "So why'd you miss your shift last night?"

  The night physical plant manager is fat and bald.

  He's scribbling on papers at his desk.

  "I forgot I was on the schedule," she says.

  "Forgot?"

  He has a dark mustache like a caterpillar
.

  His nose is full of tiny broken veins.

  She could cut his nose off with the Stille Liston bone cutters.

  Are you going to fire me? she wonders. Suspend me?

  "Don't worry about it," he huffs, never looking up. "Just don't let it happen again."

  "I won't."

  "I'll mark it off as a vacation day."