The Serialist

by David Gordon

  I’m glad we’re both from Queens. Did you know Queens is really an island? Part of Long Island. I like that idea, like a kingdom unto itself. But less showy about it than Manhattan. Even though I traveled all over the country, I knew I wanted to end up back there. It’s home. Home to the world. I miss the food. Amazing isn’t it? Argentinean, Colombian, Chinese, Korean, Malaysian, Indian, Greek, Italian, all shoulder to shoulder. Compared to the city it feels slower, warmer, like a small town, and yet now I feel like it is the real New York, all that is left of that city we both knew growing up. Real estate developers, yuppies, Eurotrash millionaires, and trust fund snotnoses: if I had to do it all again, that’s who I’d kill. You know, as a one-man crime wave, I might have single-handedly kept rents low, scared the rich off, and thereby saved Western culture. There’d be a statue of me in Astor Place. Oh well. Anyway, I don’t have to tell you about Queens. You still live there, in your dead mother’s apartment. Yes, I know all about you. I read your vampire literature and the crime novels. The one where the black fellow, your hero, Jeremiah Johnson, is it? Mordechai Jones, yes, the one where he tracks a serial killer who’s harvesting all of the top pimp’s women. Quite amusing. Though I prefer the sci-fi ones, that other planet with the sex slaves and fuckbots and such. Those are fun. I even had my mother follow you for a while, before you met officially of course, before I wrote you my fan letter. She told me you have quite the eye for the ladies yourself: that little one who follows you around, Claire is it? I hope Mom didn’t hurt her too badly. She has a problem with women, like I said, especially young attractive ones. And then you also bagged our mutual friend Dani. I must say I am jealous of you there. She and I corresponded for a while and I was quite impressed. That girl has potential.

  Where was I? Oh yes, the photos. The endgame. My downfall and my final, fatal girlfriends. The Queens princesses. Though I suppose in a way it was art that doomed me, not women. I never got over that itch, and it crept into my work. I’m sure you’ve considered how individual development is like a metonym of the history of art itself: from the infant messing about with feces, to savages finger painting with berry juice and charcoal on a cave wall, to Michelangelo floating on his back coloring the roof of heaven. Well, on a far humbler level of course, that was I. All that fooling with blood and guts, at first just butchery, I admit, it was the killing that thrilled me. Then I started wanting to create instead of just destroy, I guess, or to create through destroying. I wanted to make beauty too, you see. I worked with eyes, hair, hands, fingers and feet. I came to understand skin and what it can do. The largest and strangest of our organs. To appreciate and love the stomach, the lungs, the intestines. To know them, if you’ll pardon the pun, inside out, like any craftsman understands stone or wood or clay.

  Back home in Queens I decided to make some more permanent work, on film. I didn’t plan to kill these models at all. I was going to simply shoot a portfolio, make normal pictures. Well, relatively. So I posted ads for models in the schools, at work, in the local papers, even shot a few. Basic stuff. Then that one girl answered. Nancy something, yes. That sounds right. I remember in the papers she was described as the quiet type, a good girl who lived at home. Well, sorry, folks, not quite. Remember I was still young and pretty then and I’d sharpened my charm, like all of us vampires must. At first she was nervous and we shot some fairly bland stuff. But a bottle of wine later, we did some nudes. Two bottles, and I was going down on her till she moaned and shook. After that she’d do anything I asked, stand on her head with flowers in her ass. Then Mom came home. Well, like I said, she doesn’t trust women. And you know how it is when they get going. My God. I bet your mother was like that. Relentless with the nagging. How could I bring a stranger in our home? And a stupid slutty bitch as well. She was a danger, a liability, blah, blah. Finally I slit her throat just to shut her up. The girl’s throat I mean, not Mom’s. Though who knows, maybe I made the wrong choice. Know what I mean? Anyway, the rest is art history. I’d found my project. My work. I had to keep going till they caught me, like all artists. And I had to make sure that somehow my work lived on, even if only in a file in a police station basement. It will find its way, like all art does, like undiscovered paintings, unpublished novels, unsold poems. As long as it gets made, then it will live. Don’t you agree?

  Have I ever known love? Why not? Who says I didn’t love that jade-eyed tattoo girl in Ohio? Or one of those Mexican whores? The one on the left. Maybe I loved them all in my way. After all, who else thinks of them now but me? Or perhaps in the end I love only my work. But that’s the choice we make, right? The artist’s choice. What are other people to us? Material. The stuff of our work. Whom do we love more, the girl or the portrait, the thing we’ve made of her? We artists, we’re not quite human, are we? We love no one. Nor do we hate. Does the hurricane hate the tree it snaps? Do tigers love or hate the creatures they rip to pieces? And when the tiger slows, and his teeth dull and he dies, who weeps? We artists live and die alone.

  What gives me the right to do as I do? Nature itself, who creates and destroys, who creates by destroying, and who endows me with these desires. I am nature, that is all. Nature values the maggots that eat the flesh as much as the rotting saint. The only limits are those we humans impose, and why? If they are demanded by the majority, that is to say the weak, it is to protect themselves from the strong, a herd of sheep banded together against the wolf. The only law that a free, intelligent and reasonable person obeys is his own desire, and the only limit he accepts is that of his power to live that desire out. Do I regret my crimes now? Of course not. I am completely content. To be tried and punished, these are no hardships for me. In the old days criminals dressed for the gallows as though they were going to their own weddings, and the crowd threw flowers and cheered. To be publicly executed for our crimes is the highest honor that our society can bestow. Aren’t we humans killers first of all? Each day we are wiping out whole species, destroying the very planet, using up our own sources of life, until through our own deeds, we erase ourselves from the world. And so what? Life will go on. The planet will not miss us.

  And now we come to our little partnership, for there is one regret that I must admit: I wish I had done even more. This is the only boundary that nature herself imposes on us, the limitations on what we can accomplish, in space and time, with one body and one life. Perhaps even you know this feeling. You are with your girlfriend, your lover, that Jane perhaps or our mutual friend Dani, and you have fucked her once or twice, and you are lying there, exhausted, spent, musing like Socrates after he’s buggered a few boys, and you see her bend over perhaps to get a cigarette from her purse or else go to sit sweetly on the toilet in the moonlight, and when she returns your desire for her returns too, and you want to possess her again, but you cannot. You are empty, finished, done. This is the only frustration, the only torment, that a man like me can know, for my imagination drives my desire beyond the capacities of my body, while the pleasure of my senses inflames my imagination in turn, so that from one to the next, desire to thought, philosophy to pornography, there is an endless cycle. But luckily, even here, there is a way out. If the Lover becomes an Artist, then there is no limit to how far his desire can range and whom he can reach. He can inflame the minds of others to enact the deeds he could never in a dozen lives accomplish, and by infecting generations he can multiply his desires forever through time. Think of all the words you wrote. Think of all the minds you touched, the dreams you implanted, the desires you lit. Who knows what loves and what crimes you inspired? What else is writing for? Literature is nothing more or less than an attempt to fuck the whole world up the ass. Here’s a poem: I wish this page were a razor and you all had one throat.

  75

  After the interview, I hurried back to my hotel and, without benefit of a tape recorder, wrote down, as close as I could, a verbatim record of what he had said. I filled page after page of a yellow legal pad with my scrawl until my hand ached, and by the time I finished, it was
dark. Then I checked out, paid for my room, and took the last train back to the city.

  As for the veracity of what he told me, who knows? Is it possible that he really killed so many more people than anyone even accused him of, dozens at least, on a cross-country death trip that went on for over a decade? I suppose it is. After all, when someone is convicted of, say, stealing a car, we assume it is only one of many the person stole, and if his record shows five, we guess it was really fifty or a hundred. It is an unspoken element in our morality of punishment, this idea that the career criminal, by the time he gets caught, has already done more damage than we can know. This might be even more true of a serial killer. After all, a professional car thief, a bank robber, a drug addict, a man who beats his wife: all these have clear patterns, motives and methods that make it almost certain they will eventually be caught. But a psychopath who kills for no reason, or no reason we can fathom, who chooses his victims randomly, or lets fate decide, and wanders the country aimlessly, burying and sinking bodies wherever he goes—the hard truth is that it is only by luck that such a person is ever caught, and unless he confesses, it is hard to be sure which crimes to even hang from his name.

  It’s chilling, in this light, to consider all the people who go missing, thousands each year in this county alone. The husbands and wives who can’t stand any more and take off, storming away after a fight or just popping out for a pack of smokes and never coming back. The parents who abandon their families, delinquent dads, moms who dump their babies at a hospital or on the steps of a church. The choked workers who commute back and forth to their jobs for years and then one day just skip the exit and drive until they run out of gas. The debtors escaping their bad names. The heartbroken lovers hoping to forget and be forgotten, to float off and drown in the crowd. The addicts, the drunks, the gamblers and the perverts, hiding out from themselves. All those runaway kids, armies of them, heading like pilgrims from whatever toward whatever, vanishing into our cities, our nights. We assume that they all chose to disappear, driven on by their own demons. But what if it was another kind of demon who disappeared them? What if they were not lost but found?

  On the other hand, maybe he was full of shit. I have tried, where I could, to check the particulars of his statements where he mentions a place or event, and in some cases they do match up with accounts I found in newspapers or other public records: A couple found dead after a home invasion in Memphis. A missing girl, never found, who had freckles and green eyes. Then again, Clay could have checked these same sources as easily as I did and simply woven them into his story. He had plenty of free time. Perhaps he was taking credit for other people’s crimes, to boost his own profile, to assure his place in history, to have a last joke on us and leave a confession that was really only another cryptic false lead, a red herring. Or maybe just to fuck with me.

  The same goes for his philosophizing, if that’s what you want to call it, his theorizing and self-analysis. His grand views of Art and Life and Death. Again, he had all the time in the world to construct his arguments and work out those suspiciously solipsistic and self-serving ideas. Who knows if that is really what he thought and felt while killing, or if it was all an attempt, undertaken long after the fact, to add a veneer, a coat of intellectual and aesthetic polish, to the senseless rampage of a madman? Remember, despite his claims to deep learning and artsy sensibilities, it was only in prison that he read, thought, studied. At the time he began his crime spree, he was a semiliterate ward of the state who had barely completed high school. With the education in brutality he received, he was well prepared, even groomed, for sex crime and murder and not much else. He was like a rare species bred in a hothouse: the American maniac.

  And it is from this angle that I want to consider his other assertion, his supposed commonality with other writers and artists, and with art and literature, including my own minor efforts. Despite everything he said, one small but essential difference remains: he is a total nut job. And that is his blind spot.