Everyday Psychokillers

by Lucy Corin

  The next stretch of time was what they wanted it to be, really. They held up little grocery stores here and there as they moved along as a sort of shifting family unit, where sometimes it was Lucas feeling like a dad with two kids, and sometimes Lucas feeling like a husband with a dumb brother, and sometimes Lucas feeling like a man with two lovers. It was good, though, and for some time nights were peaceful, and he didn’t even feel bored, and the water in the bottom of his brain was more like a bath than a sloshing puddle. They were fugitives, but it didn’t feel like you’d think being fugitives would feel. It felt more like going where you please.

  Toward summer, though, Ottis was wandering off more and Lucas really started feeling like Becky might be an actual human woman next to him. When the weather was clear they’d take a blanket into a field and make a little fire, cut up some food and cook it out there, eat it, sleep out there, and one of those nights Lucas found himself one time pointing at the stars and making shit up about them for her, pretending he knew constellations, pretending he was telling her a bedtime story. “That one’s the one that’s shaped like a wild pig,” he said. “And you can see there how it’s after that snake. It’ll grab that snake up and whip it around till the teeth fly out of it. And that’s all those stars around it is, teeth.” Becky’s eyes shone, and he felt like he’d made her eyes with his own hands.

  Then she said, “I want to see my mom.”

  “You know you can’t,” Lucas said. “You know she’s dead.”

  “I want the house then.”

  “That ain’t a house. It’s nothing. It’s shit.”

  “I bet it’s mine,” she said, beginning to look ugly. “Let’s go,” she said. Then she stood up, holding a corner of the blanket. “Let’s go. Let’s go,” she said and made a move to start walking. Lucas put a hand on her elbow and she turned around and hit him. Years later, when he was telling this part to his jailer he said he grabbed the cooking knife and struck her like a snake, and in his mind that’s how he saw it, was the snake striking back at this wild pig. When he left, her limbs were strewn in the field, her trunk there like a lump, like a stump.

  After this he and Ottis went off variously and their various endeavors became confused. It was during this time that, among other people, Lucas might have killed a runaway girl who was found naked except for orange socks, but he might have been killing someone else at that time. Sometimes he felt like he killed a girl with orange socks, and sometimes he felt like he might not have. By the end of his trial the girl’s name was Orange Socks. He might have had her mixed up with a suitcase.

  Around sometime after that it got confused with Ottis, too. They were around each other sometimes, and sometimes not, it was hard to remember, but it was also sort of fun for Lucas to act like he remembered and then like he lied and so on. Alone in his dark cell, Lucas felt sure he saw one bald lightbulb in the ceiling, and as he looked at it with his one good eye, sometimes the bulb seemed to tell him to speak, and so he’d speak.

  Around sometime after Becky was when Ottis was probably swiping Adam Walsh from the mall and traveling with his head along the Indian River, nibbling on the edge of the wound he’d made.

  Once, in the good days, the train carrying Ottis and Lucas passed an orange Volkswagen Bug going way too slow along a country road that ran along the tracks. They laughed at the driver as they rattled by. That slow guy in the dumb bubble car. They scooped dirt and straw from the traincar and threw handfuls at him, and shining intellectual Ted Bundy looked up from his dreaming for long enough to roll his eyes at the two grizzled old giggling men dangling their legs from the open door of the traincar. All over the continent, psychokillers are zigzagging, criss-crossing one another’s paths, lugging bodies, heads, or limbs from place to place, or zooming gleefully from wherever they’ve last left some.

  Composite Psychokiller

  The rest of the part about CiCi and Ted, which you know, you know what had to happen, is that it went like this: I’m sitting in Ted’s basically vacant living room with its idiot brown shag carpet crushed and left from two presidents ago, and there’s one crummy outlet in the room, with the little TV plugged into it and its bent antennae with its wads of foil, that’s in the room with me, the cord sneaking out its ass and into the wall. I’m part way across the room in one of the lawnchairs I pulled in from the balcony to sit in and watch the stupid TV. My butt is an inch from the floor. My neck hurts from looking down at the TV. Ted’s not home. CiCi’s not home.

  I’ve parked my horn at school and run from the bus stop. I’ve run past the triplex, past the Catholic church, which looks like a miniature abstraction of a Spanish castle, and past the sprawling Methodist church, which looks like it’s made from the sprung innards of seven pirate ships, and through the parking lot that the Methodist church shares with the little park. I’ve run past a kid throwing sand on the sparkling chrome slide and then there’s the merry-go-round, the minimal playground version that has no animals whatsoever, just a piece of warped plywood painted red that’s balanced on a rusting axis. I don’t stop but I remember: there’s a little kid, pretty much a baby, with pants pooched out so you can tell they’re covering diapers. It’s young enough that it’s still androgynous. It can be anything. The baby’s sitting on the merry-go-round, wearing crochet booties with white pompoms. It’s sitting next to a pair of red sneakers, these two little vessels. Another kid, a girl, she’s maybe five or six, is pushing at the dumpy merry-go-round with all her might. She’s barefoot. They’re her empty sneakers. She’s holding the edge of the merry-go-round and shoving at it. It creaks a little, moves with a jolt and the baby teeters, but doesn’t quite tip over, and then it sticks again, so the girl leans back and tries pulling to unstick it. Then she turns around and tries shoving it the other way. She’s shifting around, trying hard, but nothing will move. I run past them. I run through the gathering of eucalyptus trees that bust through the earth like the half-skinned hands of zombie giants, the texture of gore without blood. Then I slip through a flapping corner of the chain-link fence that separates the park from Ted’s apartment complex.

  I forgot not to lose my breath so I stop and pant. I wonder about my hair. It feels bunchy. I’m sweating. I should not have run. I’m a mess.

  But when I knock at Ted’s door there’s no answer. It’s not locked, so I go in. I figure they’re at the store, they’re picking up dinner. CiCi is so constantly hungry. I’m worried, but only in a distant way.

  I bring a lawn chair in. I stick it in the living room and watch the TV. I don’t remember what was on the TV. Something. Something that’s probably still on.

  CiCi comes in, and I leap up from the chair like I was doing something wrong. She’s storming. She’s furious.

  “Hey, sweetie,” she says to me, and storms on into the kitchen, where, as I mentioned, Ted’s amateur bug collection is nailed to the wall, slowly accumulating layers of dust and grease. The butterfly’s wings are ragged. The grasshopper has no wings. No single beetle has retained all its limbs. Any time you look, there’s part of a bug, some unidentifiable fragment of a desiccated bug on the linoleum in there. Sometimes a whole pin falls out and the entire bug is there on the vast floor, a lost little planet impaled on its useless axis.

  I stay standing on the carpet. I can hear her messing with the refrigerator. I turn off the TV but immediately go back to my position. I am afraid, somehow, that if I move, something will go terribly wrong.

  CiCi comes to the threshold and leans there in the doorway with her canvas bag. She’s eating a sandwich made of two flopping slices of bread and four slices of bologna, still stuck together and looking like a stiff tongue.

  “Sweetie,” she says to me. “Angel. Honey.” She’s shaking her head. “Baby, I’m gonna go. I fucking hate that guy.”

  She puts the sandwich down on the counter on the other side of the wall. I can tell because her hand comes back empty. She finishes chewing. She walks over to me. There’s no way I’m moving. I am certain I will d
ie before she reaches me.

  “It’s not about you,” she says. “I mean, I love you.”

  She hugs me. I can smell her. She kisses my head. I’m gasping.

  She backs up and doesn’t look at me, slings her canvas bag over her shoulder, and takes off, out the door.

  Later, Ted comes home. He’s really sad. For the next couple months I go by to see him after school, still, sometimes, when I don’t go with my mother to where she works. He’s always sad.

  One time I go by and he’s not home and the door to his apartment is locked. I go back to the triplex. My father is in Miami. My mother’s asleep in the living room.

  I think about waking her up to ask her, Do you know where Ted is? But I figure I basically know. He’s walking along the beach. It’s sunset, you know, the way it always is if you believe the postcards. There are rows and rows of cardboard boxes. People are living there, a whole community of people on up into the dunes, crouched in their boxes, pulling sandspurs from their feet. Ted’s walking by, in silhouette, in a line with the bikini girls like bucket-headed flamingoes, in a line like a chain of daisies, like elephants trunk to tail but spindly like dolls, like animated mannequins, and he’s this one odd link. Sometimes a bent lump of a figure emerges from a box and scurries up to him, and he sells it Quaaludes.

  A psychokiller, I should make clear, is not a regular murderer. A murderer has a vendetta, a nice specific personal thing against his victim. You can think, oh, if this or that hadn’t happened, if there wasn’t that last straw or whatever. As a potential victim you can imagine that if you just hang out with decent people…

  Also, he’s not a mass murderer, because a mass murderer wants to go out with a bang. The psychokiller wants to survive. He wants to live through it again and again. Serial is a big part of it, the single that splits, that doubles and keeps doubling. He lives through again and again, wrecking and wreaking havoc. It feels cellular, biological, and only in addition to that is it diseased.

  Also, he’s a psychokiller because of psychology. Because people say, “It’s his psychology,” which makes it sound scientific and therefore comprehensible, but also makes it entirely his, his personal little psychology, not mine. His abnormal psychology keeps him from being human. He’s inhuman, is what people like to say. He wants to kill your psyche.

  Of course, he is extremely human. He has a personal thing against a lot of people, against exactly what so many of them represent.

  I think Ted was not a psychokiller because he was too aware of his own melancholy. I’m not sure how he felt about living through, how much he cared about that part. I don’t think he saw himself enough as a victim to actually play out the perpetrator part. He was half-there, though. He was always almost a psychokiller.

  There are a lot of them, a barrage of psychokillers. There are series of them, uncountable multitudes, masses, each with his own pristine and identified psychological structure. Herman Mudgett, for example, who changed his name to Holmes and built a one hundred room castle in Chicago. Holmes, king of his castle, of his home. Each room contained a mechanical torture device of his own invention. How could it not be a map of his mind? How tidy, how utterly conceivable. The pale bones of a psychology.

  When you look into it, it’s so playful, so easy. Dean Corll, the paint-sniffing Candy Man. George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer. Edward Gein, the taxidermist, the guy who puts on skin like a costume, like an identity. His dining bowls made of skulls. His retarded assistant, Gus, the graverobber. How simplistic, how contained. Gacy the Clown, the Good Neighborly Democrat who performed at birthdays and stuffed dead boys under the floorboards at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. A ranch house, I think it was. Terrifically American.

  Dahmer, who loved stomach sounds, gastric noises, imagine his ear to your body, imagine the unconscious biological mechanics of being alive. The guy who consumes what he views as both the opposite of himself and the epitome of desirable, valuable. The guy who consumes reflections of himself.

  The one from that movie with the seven deadly sins. Or all those guys who only like blonds, or whores, or girls who remind them of Vietnam.

  Nilson, the articulate loner, the kind who killed for company.

  Lake’s partner, Ng, the snuff filmmaker, who recorded and catalogued everything.

  Lawrence “Pliers” Bittaker with the fingernails.

  Hannibal the Cannibal with the gourmet’s tagline and his crossdressing sidekick, Buffalo Bill. Their masks of sanity. Their secret identities. Their riddles and codes. This and that roman á clef.

  The Ax Man of New Orleans. The Mad Biter. The Measuring Man. The Green Man. The Son of Sam and Zodiac. The Monster of the Belfry, the Monster Butler, the Monster of the Wedge or of this or that city. Smelly Bob. Metal Fang. Two-Face and Prune-Face. Monk. Freight Train. Minus Man and Leatherman. The Texas Chainsaw what’s-his-name.

  Black Widows and Bluebeards and Baby Farmers. Mad Bombers, mad scientists, mad this or that. This or that monster. Freeway Murderers and Highway Killers. Nightstalkers. Voyeurs. Slayers. Devils and Demons. Jason, Chucky, Freddy, the supernatural ones without the superhero names. This odd form of understatement.

  The guy who fed waitresses to alligators.

  Remote killers, the poisoners and tamperers, the mailbombers and snipers. Intimate killers, who want to get as close as possible, who want to look up close, as close as any close-up photograph. They want to open her like the case of a machine, to pull her tendons and watch her legs work. They want to climb inside and inhabit her. These two forms of creating anonymity, of typifying the person you’re faced with, far away and up close exactly equal, because either way she’s an abstract concept, it’s a matter of looking at her organs as shapes, as colors.

  Cutting her. I think of a great blade slicing asphalt, and swamp water, thick with silt, rising through. Dissecting her, arranging her, preparing her. Codifying her. They’re civilizing her.

  I can remember Ted looming over his grid of bugs, and I can remember him on his balcony, like a bug on his back, one hand wriggling into his pocket and the other elevated, angular, pinching his cigarette which looked like an eye on a stem. I could think of him as Bugman Ted. I can remember him like that, but I know it’s not right. I know, for one thing, how much thoughtfulness I felt from him. I’m pretty sure he loved me a lot.

  When you look into it you’ll find the names of their victims, their wives, their mothers, daughters, girlfriends, buddies, lovers, although the categories don’t work well because so many belong in more than one. Julie Dart, Rhonda Knuckles, Angel Lenair, Novella Toole. Names out of a comic book. Somewhere there are humans behind them, but there’s no way you could know. Exxie Wilson, Betty Goodyear, Veronica Compton, Florine Braggs, Ida Irga, Stephanie Vikko, Hectorina McLennan. They’re like the strewn parts of one enormous wrecked body. They’re their names alone.

  Each belongs to a psychokiller or two, and the names are earnestly included in the various accounts, so that they will not be forgotten—as if reading a name alone conjures an actual person…but if a pen just slipped, imagine, a pen slips on the big white dry erase board in the police station, or downstairs in the station’s fileroom some senile clerk, or recovering junkie, or sleepy bombshell, or dyslexic intern slips you into one file over from the one you’re meant for and suddenly you’re a whole other person’s victim, you’re the lovesick prison correspondent and not the girl he bleached. At some point someone decides whether or not the case of you and your killer is solved. Brings the mess back down to two lists. Solved, unsolved, saved, not saved, dead, not dead yet. Lubie Geter. Elton Crude. They’re killers or they’re victims. It depends on when you look, at what point you check in on the story, at what point in the history of how it’s been told and recorded. It depends which version you read, who you hear about him from, which cop, which chronicler, which book, which flick, which sad high school kid who wrote to him and got some letters back.

  Lubie Crude, Elton Geter. They’ve killed or been murdered. Elto
n Lubie, Geter Crude. They’re ideas of people. All of them.

  As you read the book, see the film, watch for updates in the news, you’ll notice how each depiction of unfolding events makes you feel, for the moments you’re watching, like there’s only this one bad guy in the whole world. In each depiction that one guy strikes and strikes again, and then in the sequel, where the last girl left alive grows up, he strikes again. It’s still as if there’s this one single evil guy, and if we’d only get it together and get him, that poor girl could jog in the dark again.

  But there are many, many killers, and many multiple killers.

  In each depiction, victim after victim, there is that one special victim, the one they go all out for. There’s a whole swat team, there’s helicopters, there’s armies of men with guns out to save her. This one we’ll save. This little innocent, whoever she is, sweetheart or asshole, it doesn’t matter, if you’re captured you’re innocent. You could be anybody.

  There she is, alone in her cage, her cave, her dungeon, her rack, her white room, her glass cell, her steel drawer, her pit, and so much of her agony, at least half of what’s tearing her up is that she could be one of many, or she could be the one, but there’s no way she can have anything to do with the decision. If she’s the lucky, special one, then the whole world, it seems, is out to save her. They’re sparing no resources. They’re out to save her as they’ve never been out to save her before.

  There is nothing strange about wanting to be rescued.

  Of course what matters really is the psychokiller, what he’s done, what he threatens to do. Of course to be the lucky one you have to be abducted in the first place. Without him, you wouldn’t exist.