Blood Music

by Jessie Prichard Hunter

  He drove and drove the dark streets. Sometimes he went to the meat-packing district up above the West Village, where the whores sucked him off. He didn’t hear the music when they took him in their mouths. He heard nothing; blessed blackness descended and he was lost to himself. His wife had tried to do it for him once. He had not let her—if she had not been his wife he might have killed her. The good women of his imagination did not do such things.

  He had never been able to control his fantasies. The bloody eye, the broken body, had been with him for as long as he could remember. Beauty was inextricably mixed up with blood. He fed his fantasies with girlie magazines, where all the women offered themselves to the men behind the camera’s eye. Unconsciously he thought all women were like this, that the women in the magazines got pleasure from their actions. That theirs was a chosen degradation, and that all women would choose it.

  His victims were everywhere. All women were a single Woman. He wanted a love as poignant as intense fear, as the moment before death. In destroying women he was penetrating the mystery of his life.

  Still he went around from job to job in the daylight hours; sometimes the client was a woman and while she was talking to him he thought about what he could do to her. He saw his female clients guillotined in front of him and he fixed their broken fuses and spliced their wires while he saw their faces contorted and covered with blood. And he said, oh, yes, that’s the trouble, you won’t have to worry anymore. And their bloody sightless eyes thanked him, and their cold fingers wrote the check, and he left them unaware of their own deaths. And he went home to a blond woman and when the pressure of the music grew too strong he escaped again into the chaos of the night in his van, along the dark empty streets inside his head.

  8

  The headlines were screaming. SLASHER VICTIM LIVES! It was May nineteenth, and John was drinking coffee in his office; he was the accountant for a medical publishing company in the Helmsley Building, across the street from Grand Central Terminal. The commute from Bayside took an hour and forty-five minutes, sometimes two hours. He took the express bus every morning, and every evening he waited on the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Third Avenue to catch the express bus home. He looked at the people in the crowd as he waited for the bus, he looked at them as he rode the bus home. The man could be any one of those people. That was the only way John ever thought of him: the man. He tried not to think about what the man had done.

  John had not known before that you can stop thought. That you can catch and freeze an image and back away from it before it moves—before it hurts you. Sometimes at night in the moments before sleep the image escaped and he saw Cheryl, her head thrown back; he saw the knife.

  SLASHER VICTIM LIVES! Could he really do what he had said he was going to do? The woman had been raped, but somehow she had gotten away before the knife. She knew, whoever she was, she knew some of the things that Cheryl had known. Not the last thing, not the blade. What was the last thing Cheryl saw? His face? And this woman had seen his face.

  At home in the morning John read the Times with his coffee, and every morning as he took the paper out of its blue plastic sheath he held his breath until he scanned the headlines for the Metropolitan section. The Times would never deign to put a Slasher murder on the front page. But it was there now, in the lower right-hand corner: WOMAN ESCAPES “SLASHER” ATTACK. And then the Post headlines over people’s shoulders on the bus. John hated the Post. The things it had said about Cheryl—“reported virgin,” as though that were shameful. He didn’t read the Post.

  The Times article didn’t mention the woman’s name. It was common practice now in the press not to print the names of sexual-abuse victims. To leave some clothing on the psyche, at least. John had a copy of the Daily News in his lap. He had finished reading the articles. He was still staring at the paper in front of him. The Daily News hadn’t printed her name either. But John had to know.

  She had been walking in the West Village at about eleven-thirty at night. She lived in the area. She was blond, “attractive.” Twenty-seven years old, a teacher. She’d been walking on Washington Street, one block in from the West Side Highway. Between Eleventh and Bank streets.

  John wished he could talk to that woman. The papers had been full for months of comparisons with other cases. They talked mostly about Ted Bundy. There had been one girl, Cheryl’s age, John thought her name was Georgiana. Georgiana was walking down an alley on a summer night, all the windows were open. This was in a college town, John couldn’t remember where. There were students leaning out all the windows, Georgiana knew them all. She called out hellos to them as she walked. At the end of the alley was a busy street. Right before the street there was a stretch of alley, about thirty feet long, where nobody could see Georgiana from the windows. She walked into the dark there and never came out the other side. Her body was never found.

  John didn’t know the West Village very well. He had been walking there several times, years ago. He remembered that there were steps leading down to used or unused basements in front of every row house along every street. There were courtyards in back of some of the houses, with narrow alleyways. They were kept locked—or most of them were usually kept locked. There were odd configurations of buildings butted up one against the other; some of the buildings were triangular. There were small, oddly shaped empty spaces between the buildings. There were empty buildings, for sale. Up near the meat-packing district above Jane Street there were parking lots, underneath the rusted columns that supported a stretch of old, abandoned railroad track that ran for several blocks over near the river. There were schoolyards, shadowy asphalt deserts at night, under surreal yellow lamplight. There was a playground that had been a cemetery in the nineteenth century. In that safe, well-to-do neighborhood there were a thousand places to commit a rape-murder.

  The woman, the woman who had seen the man’s face, had already been released from St. Vincent’s Hospital. The papers had published no description of her attacker. The woman was “cooperating with the police,” however, and they expected to circulate a description within twenty-four hours.

  When that woman was gang raped and beaten nearly to death in Central Park in 1989, none of New York City’s mainstream papers printed her name. The City Sun, one of the city’s two black newspapers, thought the arrest of five young black men had been a setup, and they did print her name. Protesters stood outside the courtroom every day while the trial was going on and chanted her name next to the television cameras. Cheryl had been very interested in that trial, she had said that if you read the City Sun and the Amsterdam News you understood why some people were saying it was a frame-up. So Cheryl knew that woman’s name but she said she would never have been able to say it out loud.

  All morning at work John thought about what to do. Call the hospital? They’d never tell him. At eleven o’clock he called anyway, Admissions, St. Vincent’s. “Excuse me, but could you tell me the name of the woman who was treated and released last night in the Slasher attack?”

  “Are you a member of the immediate family?”

  For one mad moment John thought of saying yes. “No,” he said. For the first time in a long time he almost laughed.

  “I’m sorry, but we are not at liberty to give out patient information.”

  “Is there anyone I could—”

  “I’m sorry, but we are not at liberty to give out patient information.”

  Numbers. Columns on a page. How much the new Mac computers were costing versus the figures on typesetting and page makeup for a year ago. What precinct would it be? Washington and Bank. He called information, where they eventually told him it was the Sixth Precinct. As he dialed the number he realized he was frightened. He had to tell himself there was no way the police were going to know who he was or why he was trying to find out the woman’s name. But when the phone rang in his ear he still wanted to hang up.

  “Sixth Precinct.” The voice, a woman’s, had no inflection at all.

  “Uh—I gue
ss I want the Slasher Task Force.”

  “Just a moment.” The voice was completely uninterested.

  “Slasher Task Force. How can I help you today?” This voice was big and hearty; it filled up John’s ear. A black voice, Southern.

  “Excuse me.” John hesitated. “I’m trying to find out the name of the woman who escaped from the Slasher,” he said finally; but he had given his hesitation to the policeman on the other end of the phone, like a piece of clothing that can later be used for tracking.

  There was a ruminative silence in John’s ear; when the voice spoke again it was easy.

  “My name is Sgt. Blackman,” the voice said, and it laughed. “And I am, too.” A truly rich voice, multilayered. Now it was friendly and watchful. “And what might your name be?” John said nothing, said, “Uh,” very softly. The voice filled the gap. “You know I can’t just hand out that information to whoever asks me for it. How about you tell me who you are and why you need to know?”

  “Is she all right?” John asked; quite suddenly it didn’t matter about finding the Slasher, just for a moment, it was more important that the woman be all right.

  “No, she’s not.” The voice had gone altogether cold. “She had the scare of a lifetime, and she doesn’t need any newspapermen knocking on her door this morning.”

  “Oh, no,” John burst out, “I’m not with the papers. My—” and he stopped in confusion; he had given something away.

  “Well, that’s good to hear,” Sgt. Blackman said, his voice smooth again. John got the impression of a big dog sitting up on a desk at the other end of the line, a big dog with its head cocked to one side and very intelligent eyes. “You know I can’t give out her name.” There was a pause so sudden and complete that John thought the phone had gone dead.

  “It’s just that—” he said, and then he stopped and heard nothing and went on, “—but I just wanted to talk to her. I need to talk to her.” The air was dead in his ear and then Sgt. Blackman said, very softly, “Why?”

  John moved the phone away from his ear because his eyes had filled with tears and he had to clear his throat. He didn’t want Sgt. Blackman to hear that but he probably had. John put his hand up to his face and rubbed, hard; he hated to cry. He put the receiver back up to his ear. “I’m sorry,” he said briskly, “I guess I’m wasting your time.” And he moved to hang up, ashamed of himself and angry, and Sgt. Blackman said, “Wait,” a command and a promise.

  “I want you to know I’m here, son,” Sgt. Blackman said. “You’re not trying to hurt the lady, I know that. I think you feel for her. But if you want to know something, why don’t you just ask me?”

  The voice was every male authority figure, loved and feared, that John had ever known, but he would not succumb. He said, “I’m sorry, Sergeant, but I can’t tell you. I have a good reason for wanting to talk to her, and you’re right, I’d never hurt her. She’s been hurt—” and his voice betrayed him, and he was crying, and he hung up the phone.

  He sat at his desk for fifteen minutes and then he went down the hall to Circulation to tell Mary Ellen that he was going home for the day. He’d say he didn’t feel well, and if anybody asked, would she tell them?

  Mary Ellen was bent over a copy of the Post. When she looked up and saw him her eyes were gleaming. “You hear about the latest—oh, I’m sorry.” In most people’s minds there was a tragic best-seller romance in being the relative of someone who had died so horribly, and John knew he was not tragically romantic. His pain was like Cheryl’s latent beauty: if you didn’t care you wouldn’t see it.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m going home. It made me sick. I wish I could find out her name. I want to talk to her. I think it would do me good to talk to her.” John didn’t know why he was telling this to Mary Ellen. It could be dangerous later, if he ever did what he had to do.

  Mary Ellen’s embarrassment was forgotten. “But the paper already printed her name,” she said eagerly. “In the Metro edition. Didn’t you hear? It was on the radio. They originally printed it but they got a lot of flack from the police and the girl’s family, so they printed a Metro Extra edition. They never did that before. So only about eighty thousand copies got out with the name in them.”

  Suddenly John’s heart was pounding. He didn’t think he could breathe.

  “No, I didn’t know,” he said. “Do you have that edition?”

  “No, I don’t get up that early. I think it’s terrible they printed her name at all, don’t you?” But John had gone.

  He went to the newsstand in the lobby of his office building but they only had the Metro Extra edition.

  “Excuse me, but do you have any copies left of this morning’s Metro edition?” he asked the Middle Eastern man behind the counter.

  “We have only what you see. All others are sold.”

  There was an Eastern Newsstand in Grand Central, where John used to buy the French and Italian editions of Vogue for Cheryl. (“I like to see how much too fat I am for Italy,” she’d say; Cheryl was very slim but like every woman she thought she was fat.) What if Mary Ellen were wrong and it wasn’t called the Metro edition? He knew about the Late City, that was the last one. There was a Sports edition maybe, or was that the Daily News? Did they have any more copies of the first edition? The Metro edition?

  “We sold out of that this morning.”

  There was another Eastern Newsstand at the other side of the building. “We don’t have any more of that edition. You like later edition maybe.”

  There were two newsstands on the first floor. “Only what you see there.” “We have no more of that.” They sold magazines and newspapers in the Barnes & Noble in the tunnel next to the subway. There was no Post at all. “I don’t know, if it’s not out we don’t have it.”

  “Are you sure?” Every place he went, “Are you sure?” Because maybe they weren’t sure, maybe they just didn’t want to bother and the name was there, behind the counter, carelessly folded, discarded in a corner, with a ring from a coffee cup obscuring the name of the only person who could help him.

  There was a newsstand at the corner of Forty-Second and Vanderbilt. A newsstand at the corner of Forty-Second and Madison. A newsstand next to the Forty-Second Street Library on Fifth Avenue. A newsstand down in the subway, or was there? John paid his fare but couldn’t find it. The city had taken out most of the subway newsstands because they were robbed so often. Cheryl had told him that the newsstands were good places to stand beside on the platform, because she felt safe there.

  There was a newsstand at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street. A newsstand at Sixth and Thirty-seventh. John walked in a daze. It was lunchtime. He didn’t quite bump into anybody because New Yorkers have a kind of inborn radar coupled with an extreme dislike of being touched. Nobody turned to look at John when he almost bumped into them; there was nothing special in the vacant face, the thoughtless step. There was a newsstand at Thirty-fourth Street, at Thirty-second. John began to think that maybe he would not be able to stop walking, to stop asking. “Do you have—do you have—” “No.” “No.” He stopped at a street corner, not because he saw the light but because everybody else stopped. A woman standing next to him was carrying a copy of the Post.

  “Excuse me, is that the Metro edition of the paper?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know.” The paper was folded to the gossip on Page Six.

  “May I look at it a moment?”

  “I guess so, sure.” The light changed but she did not move as the crowd flowed around them. Page three, John’s fingers fumbled and he stopped at the article. “—released last night from St. Vincent’s Hospital.” John looked at the woman waiting for him to give back her paper. About twenty-two. Pretty. Blond.

  “You shouldn’t be talking to me,” he said roughly, shoving the paper into her hand. His fingers were black with ink. “I could be a murderer.” He turned his back on her shocked and frightened face.

  There had been so little hope, just one woman who had seen
the man’s eyes, and now there was no hope at all.

  9

  The woman used to sing the boy songs from The Threepenny Opera. Her memory was prodigious, she sang from The Threepenny Opera and she sang “All the Pretty Little Horses” and Mother Goose rhymes and things he didn’t know what to call, la-la-ings from the music where they sang, there was one about a butterfly lady and one about a funny word that ended in “mouse.” And she read to him from all kinds of books; his favorites were stories from Finland about fat little animals called Moomintrolls. Sometimes in Finland it was night for months at a time.

  When he cut himself she would sing nonsense rhymes to him while she cleaned the wound and put a Band-Aid on. Seesaw, Margery Daw, which is the way to London Town? He couldn’t bear the sight of his own blood.

  The man hit the woman. He was afraid of the man. He knew he shouldn’t be: he should love him. But he didn’t.

  When it was just him and her alone together, she sang. “Und der Haifische, der hat Zahne, un die tragt er im Gesicht.” And they danced. (Her legs were covered with blue and yellow and purple bruises, and she danced so gracefully around the linoleum floor in her bare feet.) There was a piece of music she used to put on the record player when she didn’t feel like singing, he never could remember the name of it, it was harder than the Haifische even, but his mother told him it was the music the universe moved to.

  She taught him the names of the notes on the staff: Every Good Boy Does Fine. And, to make him laugh, how to tune a ukelele: My Dog Has Fleas. (Sometimes there was a blue or purple bruise around the delicate skin of her eye.) He could say the major scale by the time he was four years old: Whole step, whole step, half step, whole, whole, whole, half. He thought of the notes going up the steps, they were wide stone steps like the steps of a staircase in a castle, and when she played the music the universe moved to, he thought about all the beautiful frantic notes going up, up, tumbling up stone steps to the top of the universe.