Total Victim Theory

by Ian Ballard

  I turn the flashlight off and slide it back into the backpack. It clanks against the bottle of chloroform.

  I do not cultivate fear in others for its own sake. I’m no sadist.

  I have no interest whatsoever in hurting Courtney. I like and admire Courtney. Fear is just the only way I have to reconnect myself to the truths without which my existence would have no meaning—

  Without which I’m but a swirl of thought in a backwater of the universe, as insignificant as the swish of a cow's tail—

  Without which I’m a pile of rationalizations, chirping away like a box of malicious crickets—

  Without which I’m nothing more than the motive searching of a motiveless malignancy.

  Courtney isn’t a suspicious person.

  She trusts me and it never crosses her mind that I will do anything to her. She fails to see anything sinister even in the scenario that’s unfolding now.

  She really has a good character, the more I come to understand it. She has a lot of integrity.

  Integrity has always been a fascinating concept to me. It has something to do with the internalization of values. Normal people apparently do this to varying degrees during the period of their social development. If this internalization process is extensive enough, you can say that an individual has integrity. In the same way that a building with a reinforced steel core will be resilient to both environmental hazards and the ravages of time, so too will a person of integrity resist evil and remain uncompromised by moral pressures.

  Some people, psychopaths less enlightened than myself and a few philosophers, would argue that this failure to internalize values is a positive thing. A kind of freedom, wherein a man becomes a moral universe unto himself. I suppose they are probably correct about the freedom thing. But they are dead wrong about the moral universe part, at least in their assessment that being a moral universe unto oneself is desirable.

  It is, emphatically, not. The unmoored life is utterly devoid of meaning, regardless of the fireworks it might produce.

  I’m reminded of a poem I once read which I think illustrates the point. “Freedom I’ve never known,” the poet wrote, “but the freedom of being enslaved to someone.”

  I assume the poet was talking about love rather than an actual state of physical servitude.

  When given the choice, I prefer to kill people of great integrity. Their inner lives have a vividness and beauty, a grandeur that’s hard to express. It is they who are the universes unto themselves. And it is my honor, in executing my terrible commission, to be briefly enslaved to them.

  The only freedom I have ever known.

  There, my cards are all on the table. Make what judgments you will.

  Courtney is reaching back for my hand. Her fingers brush my leg. “Take my hand,” she says, but I am still zipping up the backpack.

  “Hey, take my hand,” she repeats.

  “I was planning to,” I say, delivering my pun in a remote and icy voice.

  And then I reach out and I take her hand.

  18

  El Paso, 1989

  Rose took the flannel shirt she'd left on the windowsill and wrapped it tightly around Roscoe’s small corpse. She turned him over on his back and cradled him like a newborn infant. For a while, she held him, stroking his face and whispering to him. Finally, she placed his shrouded body back in the cardboard box, kissed his head, and refastened the lid. Her tears were already drying. The pain was gone. She just felt empty.

  As horrible as what had happened was, there was a sense in which it wasn't surprising. It was just the latest installment in Garrett's endless escalation of violence. On the other hand, this wasn’t another of his random acts of cruelty. This had been done especially to hurt her. And he'd succeeded.

  Roscoe had first arrived at the heels of one of the day laborers three or four years back. For whatever reason, the dog’s owner had moved on, leaving him behind. Rose established an instant rapport with the orphaned pup and happily took him in. He soon emerged as her favorite among the dozen members of the ranch’s canine tribe. She would often keep him with her throughout the day while she did housework, or bring him along when she ran errands. She would confide to him in meandering monologues as she ironed or did the dishes. He would patiently listen, looking up with shimmering black eyes, his attention focused on her every word as he played along like he understood. It was sad to say, but for her that dog had more warmth and empathy, more humanity than many—no most—of the people she knew. Somehow Roscoe was imbued with the kind of soul so conspicuously lacking in Garrett and suspect in several other members of her dubious clan.

  It was her attachment to Roscoe that led Garrett to target the animal. She guessed he’d even purposefully put the paw in with the wash, knowing she’d find it. Knowing that she couldn’t say for sure who did it. If accused, he'd deny it up and down, but there would be a tiny smirk on his face to let her know it was him.

  She felt the anger coming back again. Gradually, like a red mist thickening before her eyes.

  Rose knew that Garrett would commit murder one day. He would kill, and he would do it until someone made him stop. The venom was there. All that was lacking was the fangs. She remembered how he would bite at her fingers even before he had teeth and you could see it in his eyes that he was trying to hurt you. To hurt you even before he knew who you were, who he was.

  And it was all downhill from there.

  Once, when Garrett was four or five, Rose heard the cat screeching. Downstairs, she found Garrett sitting there crying, his face streaked with claw marks. The cat was mewing hysterically in the corner. When it finally submitted to an inspection, Rose found that the tail had been snapped in three places.

  How does a mother begin to deal with a son like that? What could you do other than beat the living daylights out of him in hopes that whatever demon had taken hold would release its teeth and flee? Or in hopes you could force his twisted mind to grasp what suffering was, what the suffering he had inflicted on that cat meant.

  Rose grasped early on that sometimes you had to be cruel to be kind, and that as painful as it was to discipline a child, the child depended on the parent to teach him right from wrong. And Rose had not been remiss in that duty. The rod had not been spared. Garrett’s broken arm the day he hurt the cat was a firm rejoinder to any who accused her of parental laxity. But as diligent as her efforts were, Rose eventually came to realize that there was nothing she could do to save Garrett, or even to help him. He simply was what he was from the beginning and would remain that way until the end. Without cause and without the possibility of a cure.

  Garrett had known too well that day what the cat’s suffering was. He did what he did not out of careless indifference, but just the opposite. He did it to make the cat suffer.

  This was what evil was. And there was no surgery that could remove it, and there was no demon to expel.

  The demon was him.

  Ultimately, she taught Garrett nothing about right and wrong, while Garrett taught her everything about depravity.

  Rose received her second lesson two years later when Garrett finished what he’d started in the living room that day. Late one night Rose heard noises. Footsteps. A door opening.

  She got up to investigate and eventually found Garrett in the basement, standing on a stool in front of their big, horizontal storage freezer. He was pulling out a blue Coleman cooler with all the strength his six-year-old body could muster. Inside Rose found the cat, frozen stiff. The underside of the lid grooved with scratch marks.

  She'd beaten Garrett almost senseless that time with a U-shaped bike lock lying nearby. When he looked up at her, blood was filling up the white part of his right eye. A red tear trickled down his cheek. The eye had always slightly wandered ever since, a bleak memento of that night.

  Admittedly, Rose did have, upon occasion, trouble controlling her anger. That was her one flaw in an otherwise disciplined and upstanding character. She'd lost control a few times—mostly when
provoked by Garrett’s outrages, but occasionally as a result of the other boys' misdeeds as well. Ever so often, there was a blow-up. When the steam built up, it had to be released.

  But in her defense, wasn’t anger sometimes justified? Wasn’t rage the proper response of a sane and healthy person when confronted with wickedness? Make what judgments you will, but that night in the basement was too much for her to stomach. She lost control. And though she never fully admitted it, she had, in fact, tried to end Garrett’s life that night.

  She forced him into the freezer with the dead cat and closed the lid. “Let's see how you like it, you monster!”

  Nothing was planned beyond that moment. There was nothing premeditated going on. He thrashed around screaming bloody murder—the coward. He sure had plenty of concern for himself, just not a drop for any other living creature.

  At some point the struggle awakened Gary, who rushed down and dumbfounded by the unfolding scene, pushed Rose aside and intervened on his son's behalf. Rose had insisted to Gary, swore up and down, that she wouldn't have let him suffocate. That she was just giving the kid a dose of his own medicine to teach him a lesson.

  Rose had occasionally felt remorse for what had happened that day. But the truth is that if he'd died in that freezer, the world would have owed her a debt of gratitude.

  In the end, the only thing the beatings taught Garrett was to conceal. To do in secret what he used to do in the light of day. And to lie. And all her efforts to fix him, to guide him toward the light, toward the good, had merely given him the tools to devise more elaborate cruelties. Undetected and on a larger scale.

  *

  Rose stayed over by the shed for a while, pacing, chain smoking cigarettes, thinking everything over. She'd bury Roscoe there by the shed. That was as good a place as any. Besides, she didn’t want to carry his body home in that box and potentially have to explain to any nosy someones she met along the way why her dog was cut into pieces.

  She set the box down and was forced to again venture into the shed's dread interior in search of a shovel. After looking around for a moment in the dim light, she found three of them stashed in the back near where she'd found Roscoe. One of the shovels was large and wooden, and alongside it were two smaller, metal ones. They all had dirt clumped on the ends. She grabbed the largest one.

  This was probably the very shovel Garrett would have used to bury Roscoe, if she hadn't beat him to it. Maybe he'd even been planning to do it that very evening. This thought further enraged her as she stormed out of the hideous enclosure.

  After looking around for a suitable patch of dirt, she selected a spot about twenty yards behind the shed where the reddish earth looked the flattest and most yielding. Then, with the tip of the shovel, she sketched out a rectangle slightly larger than the box containing Roscoe and prepared to dig.

  Just then, Rose caught sight of something odd out of the corner of her eye. She pulled the shovel out of the ground and turned. What she saw confused her. Several discolored patches of earth were scattered about in her vicinity. As with the hole she'd just started, the plots were all rectangular, though of varying sizes. She squinted at them. They were definitely manmade based on the right angles and straight lines. In fact, they looked about how she’d expect Roscoe’s grave to look once she’d filled it in.

  Goosebumps ran up her arms as Rose tried to count how many of the patches there were. At least fourteen or fifteen.

  She was standing in the midst of a small burial ground.

  Maybe Garrett had been doing this for years, but with less conspicuous victims than Roscoe. Slaughtering cats or coyotes or anything he could get his hands on.

  Her sense of dread only grew when she saw that two of the patches were quite large. Far longer and wider than would be needed to bury a dog, even a large one.

  What the hell had they buried there?

  Something as large as a sheep or a pig? Or could it be a mass grave with many small animals heaped one atop the other?

  She noticed the word they had crept into her thoughts. The scale of this operation had crossed a threshold where the assistance, or at least the awareness, of others seemed likely. There was no choice. She had to know what was buried there. Roscoe would have to wait.

  Rose gripped the shovel in her hands, as if intending to fend off some invisible attacker. She walked over to the nearest plot, one of medium size, her head filling up with terrible pictures. As bad as Garrett’s known transgressions were, the unknown ones could be still worse. She stuck the tip of the shovel in the dirt and drove it in as far as it would go. The ground gave way much easier than she’d expected, as if the dirt beneath was moist. The shovel's head disappeared into the earth.

  Putting her full weight into it, she pried the shovel up. A sizeable chunk of earth came with it. She cast the dirt aside and thrust the shovel in again. Again, she pried it back with all the strength she could muster. The wooden handle bent under the force, but this time the ground did not give. She pushed even harder, leveraging the weight of her body.

  A sharp crack rang out and the shovel snapped. A splintery maw opened up midway down the broken shaft.

  “Fuck,” she muttered.

  Her hands were shaking. Partly from fear, mostly from rage. A growing, blinding rage at what she knew had been done to Roscoe and at what must have been done all around her. She knew she was close to crossing a line. The line where she was no longer in control.

  She headed back to the shed for a second shovel, leaving the broken one standing at a slant. Stepping inside, she cringed. She was imagining all the vile acts the room had witnessed. It was almost like she could feel the suffering trapped around her, as if shrieks could be absorbed into the walls, the way blood could soak into the ground.

  She felt sick. Nauseous. She just wanted to erase this place. Erase it from the face of the fucking earth. She lunged at one of the small metal shovels and took it in her hands. Then she swung it at the structure’s aluminum walls. Trying to level it. Blows landed on the window, the desk, and on two plastic tool boxes sitting on a shelf.

  The swings landed wildly, hitting the ceiling on the upswing and the floor on the follow-through. She smashed a cardboard box, and two pairs of dusty cowboy boots tumbled out, along with a piece of pink satiny cloth—what might have been a shredded shirt or nightgown.

  Next, she hit the aquarium, crushing its glass sides. Water flowed out on the floor and the three small alligators wiggled desperately about, trying to escape through the resulting holes. She swung the shovel at one of the fleeing reptiles, hitting it on the back. The creature squirmed violently from side to side, pink entrails spilling from its burst midsection.

  The rampage continued. She took aim at the two tarantulas. They were in a glass vase on top of a shelf, curled in smug hairy balls. The vase shattered, and the spiders frantically eloped in a barrage of legs and glass and crawled across the adjacent walls, casting diabolical shadows across the dim interior.

  Rose cringed, then stomped her foot against the wall with savage gusto, annihilating the closer of the two fugitives and leaving a pulpy eight-pointed figure on the wall. She then turned and overtook its spindly fellow, who'd almost descended to the floor. She aimed the tread of her shoe and felt the smoosh. She liked how that felt.

  But then, to her surprise, as the spider’s crushed body dropped the last six inches from wall to floor, dozens—no hundreds—of tiny black spiders appeared in its wake, each scrambling about. They diffused outward in a disgusting arachnid wave. Rose gasped. The dead spider must have been a recent mother, toting a hoard of babies on her underside.

  Rose lowered the shovel and leaned on it, watching the spiders and listening to the sound of her labored breaths.

  The interior of the shed suddenly grew a shade darker. As if someone were blocking the light from the open doorway. She felt a palpable eeriness invade the air, a diabolical energy that wafted over her like a bad smell. She knew its source without having to look. You felt it anytime y
ou were in his presence.

  It was a feeling Rose had known too well and twelve years too long.

  19

  Austin

  Courtney’s looking up at me from the empty bathtub with wide attentive eyes. They really are quite striking. As green as a pair of lime Life Savers. And they couldn’t be more attentive. Like I’m the only person in the world.

  The eyes study me. They make tiny, staccato movements. Focusing on different points on my face. Collecting the slivers into a picture of me.

  I wish I could see myself the way she sees me. That bleak, primal face, hovering in her mind. Like the God of some rubbly, wound-down universe.

  Her lips are motionless beneath the tape. She’s stopped trying to chew through it or scream. A few minutes ago, she banged her head on the faucet. Six or seven smeared and cherry-red drops stain the bottom of the tub. There must be a wet, blackberry scab forming somewhere beneath her hair.

  I draw my rolly chair over a bit. Closer to the tub. The wheels squeak. I lean toward her.

  “Here’s the thing, Courtney,” I say. The sound of my voice seems to startle her. Bringing her back to “real time.”

  She struggles again. Flails like a caught fish in the bottom of a boat. Tugs at the ropes on her wrists. Her knees thump the tub. Red and green bottles topple over, some into the tub, some out. Matrix Essentials shampoo, Back to Basics colored conditioner, Mr. Bubble bubble bath. I gather them up and set them next to the toilet.

  “You had bad luck today,” I say, sitting back down on the rolly chair. “Epically bad luck.” I cross my legs. The bottom of my green Adidas shoe touches the side of the tub. “I’m the last guy you wanted to meet in a coffee shop.”

  Opening remarks are always awkward. Like the disclosures in Viagra ads, where an old man smiles vacantly on a beach, while a voiceover talks about heart attacks and erections lasting more than four hours.