The Serialist

by David Gordon

  “Eyes?” He peered at the sheet.

  “Every girl. The eyes are the same in every shot. No movement. The camera’s fast but not that fast. You always get a shot with the eyes shut or droopy. Not here. Not a blink, not a squint. Not a glance to the side. The same fixed stare, always. Plus these are studio shots, brightly lit with big, strong lights. None of their pupils are contracted. Have your guys blow these up and measure or check however they can, but I’m telling you. The girls in those pictures look dead. And that means they were murdered before he photographed them, not after, like Flosky says. Clay is guilty as hell.”

  In silence, Townes pushed the loupe to his face and hunched over the photos. He stared for a long time, moving from image to image, sheet to sheet, while I waited. Then he looked up, and for the first time since I’d met him, he smiled, revealing a discolored front bottom tooth. It didn’t last long. As soon as I smiled back, he frowned, hit the intercom, and started yelling.

  72

  Townes insisted on taking me and Terence out to celebrate, but the place they took me to, a randomly selected Hooters-type gentlemen’s club, reminded me of that other night at the bar where Dani danced, and I got depressed thinking of her. After one drink I begged off, complaining about my arm. Outside, I called Morris and went over to his place, where his boyfriend Gary cooked me an excellent Vietnamese dinner of pho: kind of like my mother’s brisket, but with glass noodles, basil, and chili. Then I went home and lay awake on my couch, staring at the TV.

  But I couldn’t sleep. After cycling through every channel twice, I got up and went to my office. I checked my email for news from Claire. There was nothing but a couple of vampire-related items forwarded from the publisher’s site that I had been too busy to read. One, a fan letter from a Dallas teen, got a standard cut-and-paste, thanks-for-writing response. The other was local, an invitation to a vampire-themed night at a Brooklyn goth club held every Monday. This was Monday, or just had been; it was a little after twelve.

  Of course the invitation was to Sibylline, not me, and of course they wanted her to read or answer questions or who knows what, arrive on bat wings and bite someone, but I was restless and, I admit, scared to lie there alone. Also, I further confess, I had the dim thought Theresa might show. So I got dressed and pulled on what I thought was an acceptably nefarious black overcoat. I turned the collar up.

  I found the club without much trouble, at the end of a street near the river in Dumbo. The sky was purple, the water was black, the bridges and buildings were blinking white and yellow. The building looked like some kind of old factory, shut tight and dark, with only one bulb burning over a small sign that read TO CRYPT. An arrow pointed toward a sloping ramp that led into the mouth of the basement, where another faint light glowed, behind shadows and garbage, as if in the back of a throat. I started down, leaning back against the slope, and once the street sounds faded, I heard nothing but my own heels clicking on the concrete. The ramp curved, and as I approached the blind turn, a little fist of panic squeezed my chest. I almost turned and ran. I put my hand out to steady myself, but flinched when my fingers touched the cold, clammy wall. I breathed deeply, trying to ward off what felt like an anxiety attack and remembering, ludicrously, that I was supposed to put my head between my legs. Hardly the way I wanted my dead body to be found. Bullshit Writer Discovered with Head Up Own Ass. I forced myself forward and peeked around the bend.

  I saw an empty parking garage, with spaces marked in white paint and, at the far end, a metal door where a big black bouncer sat on a stool. He waved a flashlight at me and flicked it off. Adopting a jaunty air, I walked over, while he stared unmoving from behind mirrored shades. He checked my license, handed me a flyer and pulled open the heavy steel door.

  I entered a long, low-ceilinged room, with a bar along one wall, tables in the middle and a dance floor in the back, all lit dimly in reds and blues. Some kind of heavy dance music was beeping and booming. The acoustics were lousy and I could hear the bass buzzing in the ceiling and feel it beneath me in the floor. The place was about half full, with the whole crowd pushed into the back. Of course, as soon as I was inside, my eyes began hunting for Theresa, but it was hard at first to distinguish people in the dark. Not to mention that they were all wearing black, with the occasional splash of red, and here and there a girl in a long white dress, fluttering among the dark bodies, the cotton lace dyed pink in the lights. I thought of Marie Fontaine’s house, the white siding and dirty snow stained pink from spinning sirens, while upstairs her room was red.

  Shaking the image off, I snaked a path through the crowd, hands in my pockets, scanning the faces, until I reached the back wall. Theresa wasn’t there. It was just as well, and I was starting to wonder why I’d even come, when I realized that there was something odd about two women dancing near me. They were dressed the same, for one thing, in black dresses with high lace collars close around their throats, one in gloves and the other with a hat and veil. Both were brunettes, heavily made up, one pale with powdered skin and bright red lips, the other dark with dark brows and a mouth that looked purple in this light. The pale girl was shockingly thin and taller than me. Her knees poked sharply through her fishnets. Her companion was heavy, with thick fleshy arms emerging from her sleeveless dress and a wide bottom half. But there was something else about them, something that held me. Then another woman wandered by, older and blond, and she too was wearing a high-necked black lace dress, a wide hat and a veil. They were dressed like Sibylline. Like my mother. Like me.

  Wearing clothes similar to the clothes I’d lifted from my mother’s closet, and with made-up faces reminiscent of Claire’s attempts to hide my stubble, these women were bizarre caricatures of my own imposture of my mom. It gave me the creeps, frankly, and I turned quickly away, feeling paradoxically exposed, as if afraid they would somehow recognize me. As I tried to make my way across the dance floor, the whole room snapped into focus and I saw: The girls in the white dresses were Sasha, my half-vampire heroine. The men in the black suits carrying canes were impersonating Aram, the master vampire, while those in white wigs were acting as his rival, Faubourg St. Germaine. The sultry-looking women clad in tattered black were Ivy, high queen of the vampire world. And of course, the men in the black overcoats, with the collars turned up (like me!) were playing Jack Silver, the vampire hunter, who couldn’t help giving his heart to young Sasha. I squinted at the card the security guy had handed me when I came in: “Vampyre Monday,” it declared. “This week a salute to Sibylline Lorindo-Gold.”

  Now the panic attack came back for real, and while I tried to breathe deeply, inhaling perfume, sweat, and beer, I found myself fixated on their passing faces. Sheened in sweat from the lights, yelling over the noise, these girls and boys—with streaks and smears in their makeup, with ill-fitting suits and thrift store costumes, with pimples and bad haircuts, with stained armpits in their ball gowns and dandruff sparkling in the blue light—they all gathered here, a dark coven, drawn together by their shared regard for a badly selling trash horror series, and met, in a nondescript, boring bar on a dismal night, seeking not blood, or eternal unlife, or an evil Sabbath, but that most mysteriously mortal of our dark desires: simple connection with another human being.

  When I got home that night I checked my email, nothing, then opened my buddy box. VampT3, the only buddy I had, was AWAY. On her vampire blog it said she was going out of town to visit friends for a while and would be off-line.

  73

  Townes called early the next morning. The results had finally come back: inconclusive. The lab guys all agreed with me, but there was no way to prove with certainty that a person in a still photo like this was dead. Fortunately, certain proof wasn’t what we needed. It was Clay who was trying to use his mother’s confession to reopen his own case. The expert testimony of the FBI photo lab was enough to tip the scales and convince the judge that Clay’s new evidence wasn’t sufficiently compelling. That evening we learned that his request had been denied and
that the stay on his execution had been lifted. He would die after all.

  It was a victory, but somehow the call just left me empty, and even Townes, who’d been laughing and toasting the night before, was subdued. I left Dani a message with the news. I checked the mail, puttered around, showered and shaved. Then in a sudden rush, as if answering an urgent request, I packed an overnight bag and hurried out to catch the subway into Penn Station, and then the train upstate.

  I wasn’t really sure why I was going to visit Clay again. He had never intended to write any book, and he had no reason to see me, now that his use for me was over and I had actually helped ensure his end. Nevertheless, I had a hunch he would talk to me, and I was right. His ego, his sense of himself as both the subject and the ultimate author of his own adventure demanded it. If no longer his writer, I was still his ghost, and now his only reader. But the story was incomplete and I wanted to know the end, even if it would remain unwritten.

  So once again, I spent the night in a crappy hotel I could hardly afford, ate a damp club sandwich, slept badly with the sound of trucks rumbling outside. I loitered in the visitors’ lounge, where I’d seen Flosky and where, who knows, her own lawyer might soon be visiting while she sat on death row. I bought a stale Snickers from the machine. And then they brought me in.

  Clay looked older, thinner, grayer, but he didn’t look scared or even unhappy.

  “Hey!” he called out when he saw me, smiling broadly and raising his cuffed hands in greeting. Then he lounged back in his chair with his legs crossed, as if he were waiting for his after-dinner coffee, or perhaps chatting with Jay Leno, and it was only by whimsical choice that he had donned an orange jumpsuit for the occasion. He didn’t seem particularly worried about dying, despite his decadelong struggle to live and the lengths he and his mother had gone to, nor did he seem upset that she was now quite possibly headed for death herself because of him. He didn’t even seem upset with me. He seemed eager to chat.

  He did make it clear: whatever he said would be of no use to me whatsoever. The contract was null and void, if it was ever really legal in the first place. He still denied everything publicly and had specifically announced, through his new public defender, that he was innocent and all stories to the contrary were lies. I had no tape recorder, no notes. Anything I wrote might as well be considered fiction.

  I told him that I understood. So he talked and I listened. He talked until the guard came and said I had to leave.

  74

  The first thing I ever killed was a gerbil. Or a guinea pig. I forget the difference. One of the other foster kids had it. This girl Betsy. Mrs. Gretchen favored her. She preferred the girls in general because she said they were neater. Anyway Betsy got to have this gerbil or whatever. Hamster? That’s it, this hamster in a glass tank with a wheel and cedar chips, with his little turds mixed in and one of those water bottles that it drank from with the little metal drip spout. Betsy was a brat. A bit older. I was seven or eight maybe. I’d been in foster care a couple of years. They all had their favorites. But it was never me. Well, some of the men liked me well enough. Still, Betsy could have let me play with it, let me pet it, but she never did.

  Then one day she stayed after school, for a play rehearsal. They were doing Annie, I think. Mrs. Gretchen was drinking in the yard. Her boyfriend was at work. I snuck in and got the gerbil and started petting it, holding it in my lap. I still remember how soft it was, like putting your hand in a mink-lined glove and those black eyes like buttons. It’s amazing to think they’re seeing, isn’t it? That a little mind of some sort, a little consciousness, is watching through those pinheads, thinking its little hamster thoughts? A little life, the same as yours, as everyone and everything. Isn’t it difficult to conceive, really? I’ll tell you how I picture it. Like a beach after the wave crashes and recedes back out. Whether it’s the ocean itself, or a wave in the ocean, or a pool left behind in the sand, or just the drop inside a tiny shell, it’s all the same thing, the same water. And I remember petting the hamster, Donny, I think she called it, and feeling that little heart beating so fast, and just squeezing tighter, and thinking about how much I hated Betsy, and then feeling those little bones crunch under my fingers, and then just squeezing till it stopped. Then I put it back in the cage, in its wheel. Then I went out and played. When she found it, everyone thought it’d had a heart attack running on its wheel. We buried it in the woods behind the house.

  As you may know, or guess, by now, my mother and I never lost touch, at least not for long. She tracked me down and we began meeting in secret. An illicit romance. She’d take me for ice cream after school or I’d say I was seeing a movie with a friend and go with her. She even gave me the money for that first camera I bought. Of course she was still hustling, picking up men, taking them back to her room. Sometimes I’d wait outside, or once she got a small apartment and I’d wait in the kitchen. Sometimes I watched through a crack in the door. Things went on like that for a while until I was sixteen, I think. Or seventeen maybe, a senior in high school. My mother had this trick over and he was smacking her around. There was nothing new in that, frankly. She was very casual about nudity, needless to say, and she often had bruises that I noticed when she was dressing or getting out of the shower. I think she liked it. I’d seen her getting hit by men, and how it turned her on. But this time it got out of hand. I heard her screaming and cursing and fighting back and something crashed. I opened the door and her nose was bleeding. This guy, a big guy, at least six feet and a couple hundred pounds, was punching her in the face, full strength. She flew across the room. She spit out blood. At first I was stunned. I didn’t know what to do. I was still just a kid. Then he got his hands around her throat and started choking her, hard, shaking her like a doll, and I knew he would kill her. I saw her eyes and she looked at me and just gurgled. So I ran into the kitchen and got a knife, the big serrated bread knife, and without stopping to think, there was no time to think, I ran over and jumped on his back. It was like mounting a horse, and he reached behind to swat me, he must have been surprised that anyone was even there, but I just grabbed his hair and pulled his head back and ran the blade over his throat. He bled out like an ox. Flopping and shivering while I rode his back and my mother struggling under him. That was it. It was easy. The hard part was rolling that big moose off of her and then getting rid of the corpse. She had to shower his blood off while I mopped the floor. Then we chopped him up in the bathtub and took him out in bags. We put cinder blocks and bricks in the bags and sunk him in the river. We sold his watch and rings and credit cards.

  After that it just grew. I spent more time with her and went to stay for good after I finished high school and got sprung from foster care. We were traveling around by then. All over. We’d both go out and pick people up—a bar, a park, a men’s room—like two fishermen, whoever bagged one first, the other would trail along. Most times that was all that happened. She’d blow the guy or let him fuck her. Or I’d let some old fruit suck me off. Get paid and call it a night. Other times I just beat him up and took his cash, his jewelry, his cards. Or I’d sneak in and knock her trick over the head. They never called the cops. How could they? Then sometimes it went further. I got good at it too. I remember cutting my first heart out and feeling it beat in my hand. I pulled a man’s intestines out while he watched. He didn’t look pained. He looked, well, kind of fascinated. Why, you want to know. Why one and not the other? That’s what you want to ask me, I know, but all I can say is, wrong question. They were all the same to me. Just bodies. Bodies with eyes moving in them, and a beating heart, and a little brain teeming with thoughts. A few drops of blood, floating in an ocean of gore, an ocean of blood that has been coming and going in waves for an eternity. So what if I spill it back in or I don’t and that body keeps moving for another few years? Just another drop, like rain over the ocean. Like the gerbil. Like me or you.

  I lost my virginity when I was twenty. Late bloomer, I know. I was handsome but I was very shy and afra
id to smile around girls because of my teeth. I stuttered a little and I’d always been awkward and poor. But then one night I was in a bar and this woman picked me up, she got me drunk, and we went to her place. She was older, like thirty-five or forty maybe, and she showed me what to do. She put it in for me. Told me to go faster, slower, harder. Told me it was OK to squeeze her breasts, squeeze them hard, to pull her hair, to smack her ass like the men did to my mother. She screamed like my mom screamed and I came. I told my mother and she said, Well you better go back and take care of her. She said maybe she’d get pregnant or track me down. She said bitches were even worse than men. She said never trust a woman. Aside from her. So I went back the next night and I knocked on her door and she smiled and let me in and we did it again, but this time when I put my hands around her neck I kept squeezing. I strangled her. I choked the life out of her while I was fucking her and I could feel it, I could feel her pussy contracting as she struggled and I banged her head against the wall and then she died. My mother was waiting in the car, or so I thought. But afterward I looked up and saw she was watching. She’d snuck in to make sure I didn’t need help going through with it. We wrapped her in a blanket and she helped me get her into the car and we drove out to the country and buried her in the woods with lye, so that no one could find my DNA inside her.

  I’ve fucked a lot of girls since then. Hundreds. I don’t know how many. I got good at it. After that first time I wasn’t shy anymore. I knew I could have them, so I just went right up and talked to them. Hookers a lot of times, sure, I didn’t care. I’m the son of a whore. They got to eat too. But also college girls, married women, waitresses, girls in shops, moms watching their kids play in the park. Some turned me down, of course, but a lot say yes, believe me. They need it and they know I can give it to them. Most I didn’t hurt. I left them happy. Every so often when one would rebuff me harshly or get on her high horse, I’d laugh and think, You don’t know how close you just came. I’d laugh and walk away. I’d let her go. Or not. Who cares? I wasn’t angry. That’s not what this is about. I don’t hate women. Why should I? Because of my mother? Nigger, please! That’s what the black guys say in here to each other. I think it’s from some show. Anyway, I’ve heard enough from shrinks about my mother. Yeah, she was fucked up. So what? The only thing I ever owned is my life, and she gave me that. I’ve never struck a person in anger except maybe that first guy, with the bread knife, but really even then I don’t recall feeling angry, just numb, like I was in shock, which most likely means I was terrified. But after that, I didn’t feel fear or anger. I simply felt alive. The way an artist feels when he’s working. Perhaps the way you feel writing about your goblins. I became fascinated with the endless variety of nature, the infinite beauty and complexity of bodies. Often, I’ve lingered over a perfect asshole, that hidden cleft tucked within the crease of the round ass, sometimes a pale pink, sometimes a deep rose, like a tight bud ready to open, sometimes almost purple, like a plum tucked inside a peach. So delicate, so carefully brushed on, like blush. I’ve heard all the sounds bodies make, in pleasure, in pain. Sometimes you can’t tell one from the other. I’ve seen their eyes roll up into their heads. I’ve smelled their perfume and their hair. Other times though, I would be equally amazed carving up some fat man, spilling his guts like a sack of offal, wading into him almost, with my tools, unloading his organs like a battered old pig-hide suitcase. I saw what he had for dinner, peas and carrots. Then in the cold, my breath fogging under a three-quarters moon, I went and dug a hole until the back of my neck ran with sweat. I buried his mess and by dawn was eating breakfast in a truck stop. Steak and eggs. That was West Virginia, I think. The Smokies at dawn with the mist burning off the mountaintops and then creeping away down the valleys like those invasive Japanese vines. That day I drove to Kentucky. Very pretty. Very green. A really deep shade we don’t get here. Ohio to me was brick houses, old trees and the river. I worked for a bit in a convenience store, the night shift. I didn’t care and that’s a job you can always get. My mother picked up men in the bar, fucked them in hotels while I worked. One night I met a girl with eyes like jade, really, that milky green. At least it looked that way to me when she came in for a pack of Newports and some kind of chips. Doritos, maybe. Or Cheeze Doodles. I remember that orange dust on her fingers and her lips. Funyuns. Her hair was copper blond. She sucked an iced cherry slush through a straw. She had a smattering of freckles across a button nose and a tattoo of a chain around her ankle that she showed me by, with admirable flexibility, thumping her sneakered foot atop my counter. She had great cheekbones and a fetching gap between her teeth that embarrassed her; she laughed at my witticisms behind her hand. After my shift I went to her trailer. Fucked her mouth and cunt willingly, her ass against her will, and against her wall as well, with my hands around her throat. I hung her from the shower and cut those pretty eyes out. Then I went home and found my mother under some grunting lug in tube socks, her nails dug knuckle-deep into that white flab. I slipped in quietly and checked his wallet. He was loaded. A truck driver who’d just delivered and been paid. So I sunk the claw end of a hammer into his skull. It was, as they say, quite a night. In Mexico I sliced up two hookers that I picked up in a bar outside of Tijuana. Both had high round asses and low round breasts. Indian faces, like a Mayan stone. One had green eyes though, darker and brighter than the white Ohio girl’s. The other had gold front teeth. I tied one up and made her watch while I used the other, cut her eyelids off so that she couldn’t look away. It was hot, and by the time I was done I’d stripped down, naked and covered in blood. Drinking tequila while flies licked my back. I waded out in the ocean with their dismembered corpses in some bags, let them go with the tide, and then splashed around in the surf under the moon. I felt great and I recall that next morning, the butterflies, the monarchs arrived. Have you ever seen that? A vast nation of moving orange flowers, flying down from northern California to die on their ancient land. Creatures too small to have brains, too short-lived to have memories, and yet they remember this, a homecoming to a place they’ve never been. They’d cover a whole tree, fluttering like leaves, like a bush of blinking eyes. Extraordinary. The coast of Michoacan in fall. In Los Angeles that year, I met a pregnant woman with a belly like a melon in her skirt. Can you believe she wanted me still? A rich man’s wife. I let her live. Why not? I sent her home to hubby. She climbed into her Mercedes and drove off, blowing me a kiss. She left me laughing. In Albuquerque they overcooked my steak. I followed the waiter home and knocked him unconscious. He woke up as I was nailing him to the floor. I can’t abide an overcooked piece of meat. I killed an old man in Denver. He was a bum, sleeping, drunk on the side of a road, under an overpass, stinking of wine and piss. I stopped and I cut his throat and I went. In Minneapolis a hooker named Cookie, with a C-section scar across her gut. In Memphis a couple of married swingers, tanned and waxed and buff. People are much too uptight about the human body, don’t you think? Whatever their age, race, or size, I wish they could learn to appreciate the beauty of their bodies, like I do. And the inner beauty too. Have you ever seen a liver? That purplish brown, the sheen. A spray of fresh blood. The pink organs nestled in their warmth. People are horrified, nauseated by entrails, and I admit the aroma is a bit rich and takes some getting used to, but if you can set aside your preconceived notions, really the inside of a human being is quite pretty.