by Jim Nisbet
Her keys were found under the car; an oversight, no doubt, as anything else of value had presumably been stolen. A mountain bike and boxes containing the rest of her stuff were in her new apartment. But there was no stereo, for example. So the police were thinking along the lines of an opportunistic snatch. No body had been found, so her parents clung to the hope that the girl was still alive. Her dotcom had printed flyers and organized a search of the neighborhood and put up a website. On her chances for survival, the two officers offered no opinion. They had a look around the empty bungalow, thanked Torvald, and went away.
Should he mail the check?
Torvald realized that, if he continued to poach his own tenants—in fact, if he did it so much as one more time—the inevitable would happen sooner than later. This realization gave Torvald his first glimpse of the potential for control, even if it could only ever be partial control, over the inevitability factor.
Torvald mailed the check.
Sometimes, you have to invest in the future.
He came to think of his poaching a tenant and getting away with it as analogous to a man’s managing to masturbate on a crowded subway car without being noticed. Everybody has masturbated on the subway—haven’t they? No? People are so uptight! Plus they lie. The more Torvald elaborated this analogy, the more he liked it. One intriguing aspect was its built-in denial. You deny yourself the pleasure, and you deny yourself the pleasure, and you deny yourself the pleasure until, finally, you give in to it. Sensory fulfillment, spiced by sociopathy, trumps personal embarrassment and moral outrage. This denial and its prolongation can be many things but above all it’s delicious. Inevitability figures into it, too. Sooner or later, if you masturbate in crowded subway cars, somebody’s going to notice. If not, successful incidents accrue, and it’s like hitting home runs. At a certain point you’re batting for the record. But where baseball ends, the very personal nature of such crimes as interested Torvald begins. Right away, with such crimes, starting with the very first time, it’s always a personal record. With each repetition, a new high is achieved. As the victories pile up….It’s harder to top and it’s harder to stop.
As these two factors crescendo, the inevitability of getting caught envelops the mindscape like a storm, like….
It’s like watching a mountain in your windshield. At first it’s so distant, as you drive toward it, as to be practically an abstraction. As you approach, however, the mountain grows larger. Details resolve. At some point you arrive at the mountain. You drive on. You ascend its flank. Now the mountain is everywhere. You’re intimate with the mountain, so intimate that you can’t really see it any more. Now, as you drive on, you become part of the mountain….
As the rate of commission increases, it traces an asymptote to oblivion. The sensation is nothing short of sublime.
There are dirty aspects, too, pollutions of the purity. An ember of guilt. The desire for punishment. The need to be caught. The satiation of psychopathology has its drawbacks, but only if you fall short of apotheosis.
That’s the risk, and that’s the reward.
Torvald woke up an iBook that waited on a rosewood secretary adjacent the front door. It was not very often of late that a fit of lucidity came over him so thoroughly. He opened a password protected file, to which he added his thoughts from time to time, and began to make a few notes. He helped himself to a mint. He collected his thoughts as he sucked. He made more notes.
The image of the mountain intrigued him. Other similes had struck him, the baseball one for example. But hitting home runs hardly encompassed the scope of his endeavor: not to mention, hitting home runs had never been considered sociopathic—had it? In any case, it was a limited analogy.
But a mountain gave the scope to match a man’s ambition. He fiddled with the keys, wrote a few lines. After a minute or two his typing trickled to desultory pecking, then stopped. Not unlike a slashed body running out of blood, he thought, and glanced at the two bodies on the living room floor. Had he ever enjoyed such a surfeit of victims? When the profilers speak of crescendo, they aren’t kidding! In his mind’s eye he surveyed the shelves of media lining the back of the control room, directly beneath him, one story down. He took another mint. He turned to take a look at the big monitor.
Angelica seemed to be asleep. So nice for her, that she can sleep in that throne of rough timber, which he’d purchased mail order from a catalogue of S&M accessories, using his former tennant Kerry’s name and the address of his rental unit. She looked peaceful. Just as well. He turned back to his computer screen. He hadn’t used a methamphetamine injection, yet. One shot for her, one shot for him. Separate needles, of course. Fair’s fair, but a man has to be careful. She was frail, that one. Though hardly more than a child, she had been debilitated by years of booze and drugs, so far as he could tell. A pretty thing nonetheless. It’s just amazing how youth insulates a body against self-abuse—or any kind of abuse….
Three of them. Torvald rubbed his eyes. He’d gone over the top and let himself in for a lot of work. He’d let himself in for a lot of risk, too. All these young people were connected, somehow. Although, he glanced toward the body lying closer to the front door, some of them weren’t so young.
He looked at the computer screen. Something about mountains and sublimity and oblivion and driving….
Abruptly he closed the file. He sat for a few minutes, perfectly still. The battery conservation utility blanked the computer screen. The house was silent but, outside, the fog wind buffeted it. The twin junipers brushed against the house, actively defining its front door. The western of the two, closer to the sea, had sanded a six-inch swath of paint off the door casing, a vertical redwood 1x6 directly behind it. Years of unceasing effort. The neighborhood association had circulated a flyer indicating without naming names certain properties deemed to be suffering from ‘substandard maintenance.’ Torvald soundlessly chuffed the humorless laugh of the overtaxed homeowner, who knows in his heart who it was who, with his own hands, had wrested into reality a state-of-the-art secret beneath his house and beneath the very noses of his inquisitive neighbors….
Substandard maintenance, indeed!
He could hear the labored breathing of the one closer to the doorway. Probably a crushed maxillary sinus. The other one, the girl, he’d stow below. Nice nautical sound to that. Stow her below, Bos’n. If only he had a Bos’n. Clap her in irons. Aye, Sir. Prepare the enema. Without delay, Skipper. Torvald giggled. Bread and water until I say gesundheit. Jolly good, Sir. And don’t forget. Sir? The Bos’n pauses at the companionway, the girl dangling by her hair from his fist like a shotgunned duck. The annual novena for Malita. Not forgotten, Sir. Monsignor has been reminded? In writing, Sir, accompanied by a check. Away with you then. Very good, Sir.
One of the curious aspects of Torvald’s madness was its hermeticism. Reality seeped in once in a while, like a shaft of late afternoon sunlight over the valence of a curtain. Take the two cops who had visited to inquire after Kerry, for example, three years before. Torvald’s imaginative world had graciously accommodated them, yielding to their foray like a body of water yields to the bow of a ship, permitting, even abetting the ship’s passage, marking it with a pretty wake, and, sooner than later, smoothing until not a trace of the incursion remains. Not a mark of the trowel, as it were. If flights of fancy occurred once in a while, well, perhaps they were … inevitable. His current fascination with metaphor, for example. For a long time his lucidity had given him to think that a craving for power was at the root of his dominance over his victims. Their loudest scream and feeblest whimper nurtured this belief, both reflected and reinforced it. Certainly power, and gratification, and dominance, and sadism, not to mention blood lust, and, yes, the puerile craving to be the center of attention, all of these figured into the construction of the railroad that had conveyed Torvald from a quiet middle-class homeowner, mandatorily retired after seventeen years of supervising the flatness of floppy disks manufactured by a small plant in South
San Francisco, all the way to what he had become today, which was … what? A purveyor of metaphor, who carried a certain meaning in his blood, much as others carry a virus? A connoisseur of simile, much like others cultivate the taste of Cuban cigars? An eminence of psycho-historic proportions? It all seemed too obvious, in retrospect. So … inevitable. Much as, a mere eighteen months after his retirement, Malita just had to go.
A killer with sand, as in mettle. His mind lingered over the volumes of cassettes, CDs, CD-ROMs and DVDs aligned along the walls of the subterranean control room. The net result would serve individual psyches in the way that war serves nations: it would make one or two and break the rest.
Not a killer, but one of the killers. Not an indefinite article, but the genuine article.
Torvald sighed. Given the times, seventeen people didn’t seem like so many. The ways in which they expired, however, were systematic yet multifarious. These distinctions aggregated to his credit. And to his record of them.
The iBook had fallen asleep. Torvald frowned and keyed it awake. Bored, bitch? Typing key combinations as automatically as a doting mother dialing her son’s telephone number, he started a slide show program which enabled him to select and organize, size and crop and rotate and view any number of images he wanted. He could control gray scales, he could control gamma saturation, but most facilely he could manage the rate of presentation with a preset toggle or merely by touching the space bar, to pause or unpause an image or clip, to page or dawdle through the sequence of scenes, as he liked. Torvald had worked a long time at this particular edit. At fifteen seconds per exposure there were nearly two hours of viewing comprised of some four hundred and eighty images. As far as Torvald was concerned, this slide show documented the reinvention of his life. At first, when the number of images was limited, he’d intercut them with highlights from the first and only movie he’d shot on film, the black and white 16 millimeter documentary Zero Tolerance: On Ensuring the Planar Regularity of Digital Storage Media. But the result had proved too … successful. It was too affecting. Its platinum banality detracted from Torvald’s real accomplishment. It was pornography with a plot, and its failure was precisely that.
He had cut the final product drastically. Every scene involving floppy disks was excised. A lot of work to undo. But now, after man-years of work, he was proud of the result. His achievement would stand for a long time, perhaps forever, as an aesthetically meticulous archive of his endowment to mankind, which, as he earnestly hoped, might stand as a clairvoyant metaphor for mankind’s endowment to itself.
Many are the monsters of history. Torvald had made a study of them. He’d turned three walls of his basement control room into a floor-to-ceiling library, and the subjects of this library were the monsters and the monstrous acts of history, including himself and his own.
Among his favorites Torvald numbered Gilles de Rais. Gilles de Rais started out in history, and remains there, as one of Saint Jean d’Arc’s staunchest supporters. But at some point he quit the young visionary and retired to his castle. There, over the next several years, he conducted human sacrifices, practiced cannibalism, and perpetrated heinous outrages upon his victims, torturing them to unconsciousness and reviving them only to torture them to death. Almost all of Gilles’ victims were children. By the time a cardinal showed up at the head of an army to arrest him, it was said that the countryside surrounding Gilles de Rais’ castle was bereft of children for fifty miles in any direction.
A full confession was tortured out of Gilles de Rais, and it makes for interesting reading. Torvald possessed a facsimile of the original as well as all translations into English he’d been able to find. He’d even commissioned his own translation. He had not permitted this particular interaction with a scholar of medieval French to become a reckless exposure, however; rather, that personage, long since terrorized by the horrors of the Confessions, had every potential to evolve into one of Torvald’s most eccentric productions: Volume XII, “Freddy.”
But the translation was so good, Torvald let Freddy live.
In the end, however, no matter what Gilles de Rais had achieved, it wasn’t on video. There were words but there was no footage. Words have their place, but this is the twenty-first century. The word is kaput. Frames per second reign.
The reflected images cascaded over the features of Torvald’s face. Occasionally he resisted the impulse to delete one. The edit had been locked and compressed. He had learned from experience that if he wanted to meddle with this carousel of images, he needed to save it under another name, leave the original intact, and tweak the copy. So meticulously had his work built up over the years that a whimsical cut or spontaneous rearrangement of its chronology would subsequently seem awkward. The concentration necessary to perform an edit at this advanced stage was enormous; at times he thought it might now be beyond his capacity to improve the current version. His energy was waning. He knew it. His bloodlust, while not sated, was losing its focus. This, too, he sensed as symptomatic of the yin and yang of inevitability.
Torvald keyed the space bar to accelerate the progression of images. When Kerry appeared he slowed the procession. What a beauty…. How she squealed and squirmed and wept…. So full of life…. So much energy…. She almost took his eye out with that kick…. And paid for it here. Click. Here. Click. And here. Click, click, click….
Even so, Torvald’s mind wandered. It was almost as if energy had its own life, as if its human form were merely borrowed. That Stepnowski, for example. Short work. A mere pistol—his own pistol. Yet the man shirked off his mortal coil—or vice versa—as if sick of it and good riddance, as if Torvald had shorn him, as it were, of his suffering rather than the gift of life. There’d been no time to convince him otherwise. In fact, there had been no time for the loppers. Then the truth would out. He’d found garden tools as effective as they are innocuous. The loppers, the hedge shears, the limb saw. Get it? Physically as well as psychologically, garden tools are so…hyperbolic. Grossly banal. But he’d had no time for the heinous hirsute beer belly on such a little man. Grotesque. What had his pulchritudinous wife seen in that swine of a husband? Torvald glanced over his shoulder. Still passed out. Boy, could he wake her up. Volume XIX, on the floor behind him, would watch Volume XVIII in production. There is no garden tool so tortuous as the imagination; of that, he had made a certainty. But even that, he’d been through. Been even there, done even that. Torvald suppressed the intimation of panic brought on by any hint of inadequacy. He glanced toward the body near the door. There had been a time, not so distant, when Torvald might have gotten aroused for a guy like that. Put him through his paces just to keep in shape. But six foot and two or three inches? With a shaved head? And the octopus?
Later.
Way later.
Torvald turned back to the computer screen. Idly, he took a mint. He looked at the slides without really seeing them. He turned around again.
It might make a good picture, he thought, as the blade goes in.
He tapped a thoughtful fingernail on the lid of his mint tin.
Multi-camera coverage, slow motion, sound of course.
He adjusted the crotch of his trousers.
Cameras on the floor, on the windowsill, on top of the TV. Every angle. Close. Zoom. Long.
He sucked on the mint. He repositioned his bridge with the tip of his tongue.
One foot on the head. The axe comes in … axially. Ha! Actually…. Axial Actualization: get it? This ennui comes in waves. Forgot the guy’s name. Detail. The brother from Philadelphia. What did he take me for? I might have known he’d come back with her. Delicious, though. Worth the trouble. Let him remain anonymous. He’ll be the interlude, an interregnum, between XVIII and XIX, the exception that proves the rule, with a music box playing Brahms’ Lullaby. That’s the stuff. Wait: Cranial Croquet. That waxes it; I’m a genius. Not losing the old touch. Not yet anyway. Not just yet. Far from it, one might say. My god, what a relief.
His spirit renewed, slaked at th
e well of creativity, he turned to watch the computer screen. Colors washed over his face. His jaw trembled. The images meant nothing and everything to him. His lower lip quivered. A tear coursed over his cheek.
Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn, Torvald thought, I might get it up after all….
Chapter Seventeen
A FEW HOURS BEFORE DAYLIGHT, ALMOST ANY NIGHT, THE Avenues of San Francisco are quiet. Sound is discrete. But fog manipulates sound deceptively.
That scratching is the junipers, flanking the front door.
That tapping is a computer keyboard. Unmistakable. In another part of the world, however, it might pass for the sound of quail pecking at seeds on the roof.
A steady sibilance, barely perceptible over the sound of the junipers abrading the facade of the house, might well have been a dry-cleaning plant, far down the block. But no; rather, it was the hiss of a forced-air respirator, breathing for someone who couldn’t breathe on his own.
The bass moan would be the “moaner,” a loud basso profundo foghorn, on the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The drool on the rug below a lower corner of the respirator’s mask accrues in silence, tinged with blood.
Stuffed birds flew along the wall to the right of the front door, above the stationary heads of several cats and one dog.
A robin. A mockingbird. A pair of house finches, the male more rubicund than the female. Five pigeons. A golden crown sparrow. A vireo. One raven. Two crows.
There’s something these birds are trying to tell me. What could it be? He adjusted the strap on the respirator mask and touched the tip of the needle to a vein in the top of the hand. Answer, as the needle sank, They’re all endemic to Golden Gate Park. A red contrail bloomed in the plastic barrel. Does that include the tomcat? He depressed the plunger. Yes, but that’s no tomcat, son. That’s calico. Only the female occurs as calico.