by Christian, M
The worst of it was that I wasn't even afraid. I felt a stark, quiet inevitability. I told myself: this is the sort of thing that happens to young women who go out alone at night. – And so it's happening to me.
I fell to the pavement. He landed on top of me. The last thing I heard was my neck snapping.
A twisting shock coursed through me and I found myself gazing down at my corpse. Hairy knuckles released my throat. Four parallel bruises ribbed either side of my neck, framing two fat thumbprints. My tongue stuck out.
* * * *
"You'll goddamn well go without me!" My sister slammed her palms on the heavy oak table and half stood up. She sat down again. "Be quiet, you'll wake the kids."
"I wasn't yelling," I said. I stood with the table between us. "I just think you should visit your father. He's dying."
"Fuck him. I'll be glad when he dies."
"For God's sake, Anna, listen to yourself." Our voices were muffled in the large dining room, caught and silenced by the floor-length curtains, the thick paneling and carpeting.
I pulled out a chair and sat across from her. "The past is dead, Anna. What good does it do, keeping all this hate inside? You're just hurting yourself." I covered her hands with mine.
She jerked her hands away. "Bullshit! I hate the old bastard's guts for what he did to us and I always will. And he did you worse than me, daddy's little favorite, but you keep telling me to forgive and forget, he can't help what he is. Well I think that's sick, you know? Sometimes I wonder about you, I really fucking wonder."
* * * *
My killer had a fourth-floor walkup on East Tenth. It was a nice apartment but he'd let it go to hell.
He went directly there after killing me. He stripped and showered. My marriage had lasted five years and I'd never showered with my husband. Now I couldn't get away from this guy.
His penis was veiny and had a scar running almost the length of it. The whole time he showered he was erect. I thought he would masturbate, but he didn't.
He toweled himself dry and went to bed. He lay there naked. My husband had always worn pajamas to bed.
After a while, he closed his eyes.
* * * *
Afternoon sunlight filtered through the window; rusted bars broke the light into rectangular columns angling across the room. My killer got up, went to the bathroom. He brushed his teeth and combed his hair. He dressed: shorts, T-shirt, sneakers.
I had never been religious. I might have missed something. I was not prepared for an afterlife in which the souls of murder victims entered their killers.
He walked downstairs and outside. It was Saturday afternoon, the first day of my death.
There was a newsstand on the corner. My host said something to the proprietor, who was blind; the man's pupil-less brown irises stared at nothing. The newsdealer reached under the counter, pulled out a copy of the Times and a copy of the Post. My killer handed him a few coins. He counted them with his fingertips.
His eyes seemed to be fixed on a point just above my killer's head – which was exactly where I was, or at least thought I was, near as I could tell.
As my killer walked away I looked back – or did whatever I did to shift my viewpoint – and that nonexistent gaze was still on me. Well, why not, I thought. I, too, am nonexistent.
Then he winked, and smiled.
* * * *
My killer scanned every page of the newspapers. He ran his index finger down the columns and then turned the page. He went through each paper twice.
There was no story of my death. It must have happened too late to make the morning papers.
He threw the newspapers away. He didn't even read the funnies or the sports. My husband had never read anything but the funnies and the sports.
* * * *
The son of a bitch had a girlfriend. He took her to a restaurant on Mulberry Street. They ate shrimp parmigiana and spaghetti and drank two bottles of wine. Then they went to her apartment and made love.
I thought: You bastard! Last night you were killing me and tonight you're making love to this woman.
Sometimes he got rough with her, but she seemed to like it. And he put his head between her legs and put his tongue on her. My husband had never done that to me, though he'd always wanted me to put my mouth on him.
* * * *
He went home the next morning. He stopped at the newsstand and bought the Sunday papers. The blind newsdealer wouldn't look at me.
We had made the papers. My killer seemed happy: he cut out the articles and taped them in a notebook. The Times headline read:
WOMAN, 29, FOUND SLAIN
The Post had a bit more life:
DIVORCEE STRANGLED IN SOHO DOORWAY
Fragments of the stories floated through my cold detached self. The fully clothed body of a woman. Mary Dorane, a 29-year-old high school English teacher. Bruises indicating. Police have no. Her ex-husband, reached for comment at. No evidence of sexual assault.
No evidence of sexual assault. Thank God. My ex would have been very upset.
* * * *
"What the hell is wrong with you?"
I backed away from him. "Please. I don't–"
"You don't what!" He flung his arms in the air. "You don't nothing. You don't talk, you don't get mad, you don't get happy, you don't have friends, you don't open up."
"Stop yelling at me. I've tried–"
"You've tried nothing. You're dead inside. You won't even make love to me. You just don't – oh, shit. I can't take this anymore."
He grabbed his jacket. I wanted to tell him. I wanted to open up, make him understand.
I stood silently, tears streaming down my face, my head pounding.
He slammed the door.
* * * *
My killer was a postal clerk (surprise!). Ten hours a day he sorted mail. He had to pull each letter out of a sack full of mail and put it in a box, according to its zip code. I don't know how he could stand it, I was dying of boredom.
Every morning he stopped at the newsstand and bought a paper. The blind man became my reference point for reality. Each morning I tried to make contact, get him to acknowledge my existence as he had before. He ignored me.
* * * *
Friday night my killer went out. He followed women. He was patient. He trailed them until they went home, or to a bar, or met up with someone.
He followed a woman who came out of a trendy bar for twenty-somethings. She was drunk and didn't seem sure of where she was going. He followed her for ten blocks. He followed her into an alleyway between two apartment buildings.
The woman crouched behind some garbage cans. She hiked her dress up, pulled her panties down and urinated. I had never seen a woman urinate in public. My ex-husband did it all the time.
My killer put his hands on her neck.
The night's darkness faded to black, flat and absolute. Dizziness rocked me. A physical sensation; how could it affect my naked soul?
A flicker, peripherally. I searched for it. There – a blue glow, suddenly brilliant, a complex maze of burning lines twisting and tearing and folding back on themselves. It was beautiful. I grabbed it; it was the only thing keeping me from total sensory deprivation.
It grabbed me, blasted me, a splash of liquid hydrogen on warm flesh. Power, raw cold life force, washed over me, burning. Something alive clutched at me and shrieked. It grabbed and tried to hold on, smothering me, a storm pounding me from all sides. I hung on blindly. Rode the storm until it finally dissipated and faded to nothing.
The woman was gone, but the raw energy of her life force coursed through me.
I gasped. I saw him. He knelt over the victim, lowered the woman to the ground; her face looked swollen and mottled and overripe.
I felt thick – dense.
For a second I had been complete. My gasp was real, lungs expanding to suck in air. Heavy thighs sunk into the concrete of the city. I felt rooted and massive. Yet no flesh surrounded me; the sensations of a body, of mass, were f
leeting and ghostlike.
I wanted my legs back. I wanted to feel the air on my skin. I wanted eyes so I could turn them away from this dead woman's face, and cry.
He let go of the corpse, lurched to his feet. Moved unsteadily from the alley. His back was bent, his knees shook; he kept looking behind him. Sweat dripped from him.
He staggered all the way back to his apartment, stumbling, taking wrong turns. Inside, with the door locked behind him, he began drinking heavily. He drank until his shaking stopped. It started again; he drank until he passed out.
On the trip back to the apartment it had almost seemed, at times, as if my killer were dragging me.
I could see the ceiling. Dim pastel neon flickers pushed sluggishly through the window, around the bars, throwing the ceiling into soft relief. Far off, I thought I heard my killer breathing hoarsely through his mouth.
The cracks in the ceiling lurched into a viscous swirling spiral. They converged in the center, a gray mass of tangled lines that gradually coalesced into an almost human form. Lumpy, shadowed, indistinct.
It whispered, "You like it. You need it."
My sister's words, my father's voice.
"You love being helpless. Can I borrow five thousand bucks?"
I reached out to the swirling vortex. Sure, Anna, I tried to say, you know I'll always help you; and it was funny to look at my outstretched hands, because they were tiny, and holding Monopoly money –
"Thank you," my father said gently, as he took my offering. "Your mother's gone for the afternoon. You know you're very special, don't you?"
I told myself to run away, but I was only ten. When you're ten, you think your parents love you, know what's right; you don't question them.
"You know I love you," he said. "It's a grownup thing. It means you're growing up, becoming a woman, that I let you do this."
So he started doing things and I went away like I always did, divorced myself from my body. Detached.
* * * *
My killer was awake.
He got up. He looked exhausted, burned out. He moved slowly and cautiously. He threw up; he took some pills; he drank coffee.
He went down to get the paper. Eyes straight ahead, tunnel vision; grabbed the paper and turned and hurried back toward his apartment. I trailed after him. Comforting blind eyes followed me; I wanted to stay, to be with someone who recognized my existence, even if he kept ignoring me.
As my host entered his apartment building I bumped into the door jamb.
I looked down. There was nothing there. But I'd felt it; there was a sore sensation somewhere around where my hip might have been.
* * * *
My killer made an unusual personal entry in his notebook. He wrote, in a spastic scrawl that I could barely read, of being overwhelmed by anxiety and fatigue after his second murder. It "sapped and drained" him.
He titled the entry "Notes on the Second Expiration."
An irresistible urge to do something, an alien urge toward action, came over me. Do something to this bastard. He'd murdered me, but I'd been given one more chance: fight back.
I experimented. I pushed him – concentrated on making him do what I wanted him to do, did my best to make him uncomfortable; I made it a habit to try to go in a direction other than the one he was going in. He showed signs of fatigue; became jittery, edgy; constantly looked over his shoulder, shied away from crowds.
His girlfriend came over. He was rude to her and they had an argument. She left.
We were walking along Hudson Street three nights after the second murder when a man tumbled out of a fourth-floor window and pinwheeled down to the sidewalk, half a block away from us. He cried out as he fell, a sort of surprised yelp punctuated by a wet thud.
My killer edged away as a crowd formed. He couldn't resist a glance back, though, so I looked with him.
Several people were leaning over the body. A few more stood some distance away, watching.
I saw the body, ugly and dead on the concrete. A forest of legs obscured my view. Between the legs something blue flickered, tangling –
My killer turned and walked away.
I slammed into him with everything I had, commanding him to turn around, go back. I leaned on him – hard.
He paused, shifted back and forth. He stood for a few seconds like a confused dog. He turned and walked to the edge of the crowd.
A tangle of blue phosphorescence lifted from the corpse, swayed above it, pushed by invisible currents; it settled slowly over the concerned old man who was feeling the corpse's neck. The old man looked around at the crowd, shook his head.
I let my murderer go. I was intensely aware of my flickering senses, a slow, steadily growing life. I grew acres of soft skin on some immaterial plane of existence. A plain of flesh.
My killer walked the streets for hours like a wounded bear, semiconscious, dangerous. He was going to do it tonight.
I didn't try to stop him.
He found her and he followed her and he had her. He was brutal and uncontrolled, slamming her head into the pavement as he lay on her, throttling her. Blackness enveloped me, a tangled skein of burning blue invaded me. I fought off the consciousness within it while I engulfed its life force, swallowed it greedily.
I heard things: the woman's choking, the man's hoarse gasps, as if he too couldn't breathe. Shoes scraping pavement, distant late-night traffic.
And I felt again that cold shock ripping through me. It bloated me, brought on spurts of sensation: concrete scraping skin, the smell of urine, the taste of bloody bile; jumbling over each other, viewpoints all mixed up.
I absorbed the dead woman's life energy, swelled almost to bursting.
He released his victim and staggered away. He ran, stumbling, all the way back to his apartment. I was sure then of what was happening to him, and felt that somehow he knew too. I lived and fed off him, drew energy and life force from him: sapped him. He probably didn't understand in any logical way; it was a gut feeling. He was trying to get away from me.
There was nowhere to go. I was within and throughout him; he was my foundation.
He was near hysteria when he finally reached his apartment. He slumped to the floor, shaking.
He drank himself to sleep. Pulling on a bottle of vodka, pulling off his clothes, he fell into bed. He slept with the empty bottle next to him like a teddy bear.
I burned. My skin was too tight, but I had no skin. Memories, desires, emotions coursed through me. I rubbed my hands over sticky wet slippery flesh. It went away, came back again. I walked through the wall.
I saw him lying there naked on the bed. I hated him. He was my murderer, but also, in a way, my liberator; he had freed me from my boring life. My new life gave me sensations and experiences I had never known before and I loved him for that.
I crawled to the bed. My body flickered into and out of existence, caught in a bad connection between dreaming and reality, with not enough life yet to break into the world. I hungered for more. I had never wanted anything so much. Even though I was horrified at what I was about to do, I couldn't stop myself.
His body was a hot shock that solidified me. I sank into his flesh, washed through his tormented sleeping mind, stroked his skin with hands existing in two worlds. He thrashed about but didn't wake up. I was sliding into the world; I felt his hips underneath me, squeezed by my thighs. I felt his sleeping body respond. He cried out, thrust his hips up at me as I slowly impaled myself on his penis. It was like being stabbed by a dull and rusted knife. I came, shuddering, pushing and gasping as I reentered the world, and I couldn't help thinking of all those nights with my husband: he had never made me come.
Time went away for a while. When it came back, things were fading, I was fading. It wasn't enough.
I grabbed the empty bottle and shattered it on the bars of the window next to us. He woke then, as glass rained down on him. His eyes widened in shock. He tried to get up, but I was still straddling him and I was much stronger than I had ever been
before. I shoved his face back down into the mattress. My hands were sweaty. He struggled, but I managed to get the broken bottle against his throat. I ground it into the tough cords of his neck. It wasn't easy.
I cut the carotid artery. Blood spurted out in rhythmic pulses with a force that startled me, drenched me. I cut more. Blood soaked me, the smell of it filled my nostrils, I tasted it on my tongue. I heard blood splashing against the walls, against me. The bed creaked to the rhythm of his death spasms.
I concentrated then. I felt the life force flowing out of him as he died, saw blue lightning dissipating, energy cascading to chaos. I was strong enough now to channel all of it into myself.
I rolled off him and fell out of the bed. I made a resounding thud as I hit the floor. I slapped the dirty linoleum a couple of times, felt the stinging contact on my palm. City sounds filtered up from the street. The room was warm, but my skin was cooled by the blood drying on it. The blood smelled worse than shit.
* * * *
I stood under a hot shower, washing my new flesh. Cleansed, I wiped the mirror dry and looked at myself.
Mix and match... I sort of looked like a bigger and stronger version of my old self, but there was a strong contribution from my two dead friends. My fellow victims.
I pushed those thoughts away. I'd taken their life force because I needed it; but their consciousness, their selves – what had happened to them?
I thought of the man who fell from the window, who had died and entered the nearest bystander. All those dead people, trapped in the cages of the living, weighing them down. I had found a way out of my cage and back into the world.
I turned away from the mirror, forcing my thoughts to more practical matters.
I found some clothes in his closet, not much. A baggy red flannel shirt fit me well enough; I tucked it into bluejeans that were too tight around the hips. His sneakers, a size or so too big for me, would have to do. I couldn't find any clean socks.
I stood indecisively by the door. The stench was getting to me. I had to leave.
Where the hell would I go? I was dead. Cold in the ground, buried. No one from my past life would recognize me. I didn't have a driver's license or Social Security card. I stared at the tips of my fingers: had my fingerprints changed? I had no idea.