Ghosts always want more blood.
• • •
That night, I ran away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Don’t blame The Odyssey. I was probably most likely headed that way anyway.
I just couldn’t take it anymore. Any of it. All of it. Sitting in that house like some kind of caged lab rat. I might as well have been back at DSTI again in some tank. I was sick of the faces of “my” victims appearing. Sick of the black dress lady. Sick of worrying about what my dad was up to. Or IF the other guys would actually show up. Or IF Castillo was starting to maybe like me or not or was gonna dump me in some ditch. Or IF I was really just some horrible monster.
My whole life had become a huge pile of IFs, and I felt like I was gonna explode if I sat there thinking about it for one second longer. Ulysses had his path. A path home. He’d been warned by the ghosts that everyone he was with would die but him and that things would get worse before it was over. And he’d taken the challenge.
I had no such promises and warnings. I had no mission. There was no HOME for me to go to. And no one was telling me things would get worse before it was over. All I was getting was MAYBEs and I DON’T KNOWs and WE’LL SEEs.
OK, maybe you can blame the book a little.
Castillo’d given me some money when it got dark and told me how to get to a convenience store a mile or so down the street. This was not because he hoped I’d run away. Quite the opposite. It was something to help make me STAY. Something to do. A chance to get out of the house. I think he recognized I was getting a little nutty wandering around that house.
By the time I reached the store, I’d decided just to keep walking. I had the $40 Castillo’d given me. Figured that was enough to do something. Anything. Get on a bus or something. Or walk to the next town and figure out what to do then. To do something ACTIVE. Not just sit around waiting for something to happen to me.
So I just walked straight past that gas station for another few miles.
• • •
This was not anything like the first time I ran away. I mean it was, I guess, if you were a total bystander watching me from afar go buy food but really meaning to leave Castillo forever. But the first time, Castillo had given me $100 with the clear hint that I wasn’t supposed to come back. He’d wanted me to take off. And I’d come back to prove to him (and maybe myself too) that I wasn’t some piece of shit to be discarded like that. THIS time, however, I really think Castillo trusted me and totally expected to see me back again. And any delusions that I wasn’t some piece of shit were, at least by my personal estimation, long, long gone.
• • •
It had probably been an hour. I don’t know. Cars kept passing. Black things filled with black shapes I couldn’t see. A hundred people going God knows where. Just pairs of headlights racing past on their own life journeys. It was cold. I thought of getting back East somehow, to find my dad. Because he had more explaining to do. A hell of a lot more. A whole lot more about WHEN and WHO and WHERE. But mostly a whole lot more about WHY.
I didn’t need talking ghosts for that. I needed my goddamn dad.
HE held the answers to EVERYTHING. My past AND my future, too.
It was another mile before I figured out I hadn’t a single clue on how to find him.
The only thing I knew how to do was tune my bass, use the oven, and hook up the PlayStation. It was a pretty depressing realization. I think I cried a little.
I was a total loser. I couldn’t do it myself.
I only knew one way to find my dad. Only one person who could help.
As much as I hated to admit it, I needed Castillo.
So I turned back.
• • •
There was a phone outside the convenience store. My last chance. I got five dollars in quarters inside and tried the special number my dad had given me that first night.
He did not answer.
I stood there for twenty minutes. Kept dialing. Used all five dollars’ worth of quarters. The rest I just dropped to the ground.
My big real “run away” had been six miles and less than two hours.
When I came back to the house, Castillo was all Where-the-hell-were-you? about it.
I may have told him to F off.
• • •
Things kinda went back to normal. Our normal.
Castillo perched in his lawn chair like a hawk or a wolf or a lion or whatever the heck he was calling himself. Me in the hallway alone with the shadows. This time, however, I asked Castillo to lend me one of his phones to do research on. I told him I was trying to figure out more of my dad’s notes. Same lie I’d used before.
Strange hours passed then. Hours I will never, ever forget.
My first real hours with Jeffrey Dahmer.
• • •
I read everything I could about him.
The murders. Trials. His childhood. Interviews with doctors. Stupid jokes.
I learned the names of his victims. All seventeen of them.
I’ve already told you I’m not going into details here.
I will share only a couple of things I found specifically interesting. The discoveries that both answered questions and created whole new ones for me to wrestle with. The discoveries that gave me both hope and fear.
• • •
No one had ever called him “Jeffrey” until he was arrested.
Family, friends, coworkers, had known him only as “Jeff” for thirty years.
Jeff Dahmer was his real-person name.
Jeffrey Dahmer was his monster name.
• • •
I made a list of REASONS. Possible reasons.
Why had some middle-class kid raised in the suburban Midwest become such a monster? He hadn’t been molested or physically abused. A “normal” kid by all standards well into high school. So what the hell happened? Here’s what I got:
1. Jeff Dahmer’s mother got prescribed lots of medications during her pregnancy. Barbiturates and stuff to calm down her various anxiety issues. Sometimes she took a dozen pills a day. Had these changed Jeff’s chemical makeup while he was cooking in her womb?
2. He’d broken his foot during delivery and had a cast on his leg for the first few weeks of life. His first minutes of life on Earth were filled with PAIN.
3. His mother had violent seizures and mood swings throughout his childhood. He was too embarrassed to bring other kids around the house.
4. His parents fought all the time. Screamed at each other and finally got a messy divorce when Dahmer was in high school. What emotional trauma had that caused?
5. He was kinda bullied at school and had no real friends.
6. He started drinking at fifteen.
7. He recognized around this same time that he was probably gay and lived in a place and time that would condemn and likely attack this lifestyle.
All these possibilities on what had led to the killings.
Chemical. Physical. Social. Emotional.
None of which I’d had any relation to.
No broken leg. No drinking. Etc. Had I been picked on once or twice? Sure. Had it sucked growing up without a mom? Yes. Did I feel like a total goof being homeschooled? Some. But, come on. That wasn’t the same thing. Right?
Regardless, I couldn’t deny this simple fact: I’d been crafted from the genes of a thirty-three-year-old Dahmer. Had all that he’d gone through until that point been carried in his genetic makeup? Had it already modified his physical makeup? How many of those life hardships had transformed into real physiological changes in his brain development, chromosomal makeup, protein sequences?
How much of his life was still swirling around inside of me?
Was I really just the sum total of his thirty-three shitty years?
What had MY eight years on earth added? Hadn’t MY own experiences had some effect on my physiological and emotional development?
So maybe my Nature guaranteed I could never write music like Mozart. But did it also guaran
tee I would HAVE to kill like Dahmer?
Anymore, was I really still technically HIM?
• • •
In prison Dahmer got interested in Intelligent Design, a theory that God, whatever that means, was purposefully and personally still managing things like evolution and the universe. We weren’t just, to quote Dahmer, “things that’d crawled out of the slime.” There was a purpose and a Creator. And the Creator was still with us.
Dahmer, whose father was a chemist, had grown up with the modern scientific world view. Humanist. Atheist. The spiritual notions of God replaced by Darwin and Edison. (That’s how I’d grown up too. The only Faith I knew was that taught as mythology or history.) But Dahmer concluded in prison that without a God to answer to, people would do whatever they wanted. People would do BAD things like he had. So, later than he should have, he went searching for that God.
An anonymous donor had contributed some money to his prison account, and Dahmer used every penny of it to buy books on Intelligent Design and the ongoing fight between evolutionists and creationists. The same fight Scopes had fought in Tennessee forty years before Dahmer was born. Intelligent Design offered a sort of compromise. A chance for God to be found again IN the Science. The wonders of DNA and split atoms and carbon dating didn’t disprove the need or existence of God. Rather, it showed God’s guiding hand in a scientific way that we could measure and understand.
Dahmer claimed to have realized a new moral center.
He claimed to have finally realized God’s presence in our modern world.
• • •
God had a funny way of making himself known in Jeff Dahmer’s life.
• • •
When Jeff Dahmer’s parents first separated, he once got left alone in the family house for, like, three weeks. Now, for years he’d had a specific fantasy of picking up a hitchhiker. (He’d wanted control of something. Anything. Even if that meant a dead guy. Even if it meant MURDER. Damnation. He’d have control.) And during these precise three weeks, one appeared. A hitchhiker. A teen named Stephen Hicks on his way home from some local concert. As if placed down deus ex machina by some unseen author for The Story of Jeffrey Dahmer. His very first victim.
DAYS LATER Dahmer drove to the city dump at two in the morning with the teen’s body in three different trash bags. And got stopped by the police. They made Dahmer get out of the car and everything and asked why he was out so late. They even asked what the stinky bags in the back of his car were. Dahmer told them he’d simply forgotten to set the garbage out and was taking them to the dump because he couldn’t sleep. They said “be careful” and let him drive away.
MONTHS LATER his father found a locked box in Dahmer’s closet and demanded to be shown what was inside. Dahmer lied, claimed it was pornography, threw a fit about his privacy, and promised to get rid of the magazines first thing. It was not magazines. If his dad had only opened that box . . .
YEARS LATER one of Dahmer’s victims escaped. His name was Konerak Sinthasomphone. (Yes, him.) He’d been drugged, and Dahmer had already done “experiments” on him. Konerak was naked and bleeding in the street. When the cops showed up, Dahmer convinced them the boy was nineteen and drunk and that they were just two gay lovers having an argument. The cops led Konerak straight back to Dahmer’s apartment. They thought the place smelled funny but had seen enough and went back to command, making jokes about having to “delouse” after spending time with two gays. Witnesses of the event followed up with police but were told “everything was fine.” When the witnesses, who knew Konerak, explained that the boy was just fourteen and had looked to be in shock, the cops got mad and told the witnesses “enough.” (You can find these actual recordings online, and I’m sure the fact that these witnesses were poor blacks had nothing to do with the police blowing them off.) Dahmer killed Konerak that same night. And then he killed five more men in the next three months.
• • •
My point: How many different times and ways might he have been stopped but wasn’t?
It was almost as if he were destined to commit these crimes.
Protected by some higher power. By Fate or God or Chance.
Just like Cain.
Marked.
• • •
Once he was finally arrested for his crimes, Dahmer could have pled guilty and been sentenced to a psychiatric ward for life as opposed to the much harder prison. But he wanted the full trial. He wanted the months of exams and private interviews and experts from every side and discipline. At the end of the trial, he was sentenced to the thousand years in prison. He thanked the judge and then admitted he’d “only wanted to find out just what it was that caused me to be so bad and evil.”
• • •
“I don’t know why it started. I don’t have any definite answers on that myself. When I was a little kid I was just like anybody else. If I knew the true, real reasons why all this started, before it ever did, I wouldn’t probably have done any of it.”—Jeff Dahmer
• • •
So much for the trial.
Jeff Dahmer bled out on some prison floor still not knowing WHY.
He died not knowing how he’d become Jeffrey Dahmer.
I did not have this same problem.
I knew exactly how I’d come about.
How I’d become Dahmer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
You hear their blood. From a hundred miles away you hear it. Like . . . like the ocean. Wet. Rhythmic. Sloshing in a cavernous devouring sound. Swilling through veins breaking against their muscles. Skin. The lights are too bright. Too many people. You wait. In the dark, always in the dark. So many places to hide. There are three of them. Moving among the others on the boardwalk. Through them. Never part of them, though. Three who are different. Like you. Selecting following talking to the girls they might take. So many here to choose from. Their prey. One willingly follows the three into the darkness. You’re waiting there also. In the dark, unseen seagulls scream for fresh meat over the breaking surf. Your hand black fingers too long stretches wide over the door. Pushes. Their prey is stripped and bound. Ignore her. You’ve come for the three. It’s THEIR blood, their mark, that cries out to you. One face you know more than the others as the name forms on your lips. David. The sound jagged like wet sand and broken shells. The three boys move. You move faster. Blades shriek and whistle like hungry gulls, and the blood sprays in crimson mist as surf exploding against the shore, and—
• • •
Castillo shook me awake.
Jacobson! Jeff!
I fought to regain reality. To shake away/awake from the nightmare. The echo of shrieking gulls and surf still pounding in my ears as Castillo all but dragged me to the window. Guess he didn’t notice I was having a major seizure or something. Sleepwalking again. Forces unseen somehow pushing me this way and that.
I steadied myself with arms spread out against either side of the window. Focused on the view outside. Expected to see apartments, sand, boardwalks. Like before in the motel room, I couldn’t tell if I’d just seen repressed cosmic memories of some kind (more of Dahmer’s life somehow caught in my skin and bone and blood) OR something else. Something new happening right now that I’d somehow been given a real-time glimpse of.
My whole body was shaking, clammy, feverish.
I tried focusing on what was in front of me. The window. Backyard. Outside.
And outside a blue car was parked across the street. One I’d never seen before.
Castillo said something. Sounded muffled. I refocused on his voice, and he told me it (the car) had been there for five minutes. No one had gotten out yet.
And we waited another ten minutes.
The memories of the dream fading too slowly. My body still trembling inside in ways Castillo apparently couldn’t even see. Or just didn’t care about because he was so focused on the potential prize outside.
Eventually the car door opened. A man climbed out.
A teenager.
&
nbsp; Jacobson? Castillo murmured my name, calling me closer. Away from the darkness.
Below, I got a perfect look at the driver.
I recognized the kid completely. One of the original six from Massey.
It was Henry.
• • •
Castillo told me to get the car. I totally froze. The car, he said again.
He handed me the keys. His voice hadn’t changed at all. If anything, he sounded even calmer than usual. I would have preferred if he were cursing and yelling at me. THIS Castillo was somehow scarier. This was the same Castillo who’d calmly beaten the shit out of four guys. He told me where he’d last parked the car. I didn’t know if I could even make it out of the room, I was so far out of it. That memory, the screaming gulls, the blood, it all . . .
I blathered some kind of response, not sure if he really wanted me to—
Castillo stopped me.
He said: Albaum’s family was killed in minutes.
He said: I’m not letting that happen here.
He said: We’re not.
He said: Go!
We’re not.
I liked that. Needed, really. I needed that.
I’d never run so fast in my life.
• • •
I was gasping for air by the time I reached the car. Felt like acid was pumping through my whole body and I could hardly even get the key in the door. Took, like, a hundred times.
Finally I got inside. Sat down. Got my hands on the wheel. SHIT! Finally remembered I’d never driven before. My temps and lessons planned for the summer had been swept aside by a more “distracted” father. (By a man losing his mind . . . )
I tried to chill. Told myself driving wasn’t anything. Put the key in the ignition. Car started right up. So far, so good. Fumbled with the gear shift, found DRIVE. Foot on gas. The car pulled forward and everything. Coasted about two miles an hour down the street and eventually somehow made the necessary turn to the corner of Ashbridge and OldeGate. Totally ran onto someone’s lawn as I stomped on the brake and the car shuddered to a stop.
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