“The same thing you told me.”
“She insulted me, she threatened to lawyer-up, to sue me. I told her I would pay whatever I had to pay, that wasn’t the issue. I tried so hard to convince her to stop, but I couldn’t. And I hated her for that, for being so dead set on bringing a child into this fucking world. So his ashes could end up scattered all over the place, just like all the rest of us! And one day, when she had already started to show, she disappeared, just up and took off for Santo Domingo without saying a word. And I haven’t seen her since.”
So she had done what I never had the strength of will to do myself. She stood up to Fabián without letting him twist her arm, without giving in.
“The separation documents arrived three months before my daughter was born. So now I was free, I could return to my life. The irony is that I couldn’t. I kept thinking about my daughter, about what I had done. If I was blocked before, now it was even worse. Someone who was exactly like me, someone who was me, came to visit one day and just stayed put. He sat down next to me on the couch with his long gravedigger’s face, and scared the wits out of me.”
“You could have tried to work things out with her.”
“Things with Mayra are broken beyond repair. The problem is the baby girl. I’ll never forgive Mayra for having had her without my consent, but it’s not my daughter’s fault. I’m no family man, but I admit to feeling curious about her, to know what she’s like.”
“I don’t get it. Honestly, I don’t. With everything you went through with Mayra, why did you allow the same thing to happen with me?”
“The paradox is that what happened with you was what made me finally hit rock bottom and decide it was time to climb out of the well.”
I felt like punching him, spitting on him.
“If it’s any comfort, I’m not proud of my behavior.”
“Oh, so easy for you to say that, isn’t it? You have your daughter. What about me?”
I had no stomach for self-pity anymore, but I was struggling to maintain my self-control, my sense of dignity.
“You have your writing,” he said. “Your drawings. You’ll go far, accomplish much, I’m sure of it.”
“Yeah, you make it all sound so easy. You’re such a cynic.”
I turned around; I wanted to wish him the worst in life. This little road to redemption, this eagerness to meet his daughter, it wasn’t going to last very long. Just another one of his pipe dreams; he’d needed rehab a long time ago, somebody should have told him that. All I’d done was enable his vices instead of helping him.
I stopped. I looked up and pictured myself arguing with him on the balcony. I looked around at the yard and expanse of property and imagined it during spring or summer, when the vegetation was lush and impossible to walk through: what a perfect place it would be to hide a body. He didn’t really have a daughter. Mayra hadn’t really left Landslide; in fact, her bones were rotting six feet under. Why should I believe Fabián’s story? There was no evidence to prove what he was saying. And just as he’d lied about his book for such a long time, he obviously had no qualms about keeping a con going with people for years and years.
An anonymous phone call to the police was all it would take. Report that I’d seen some strange man digging in the yard at night, burying something there. Fabían traveled light, like his friend from San Antonio. He dropped weight when he had to and kept moving on.
“Something wrong, Michelle?”
“No, nothing.”
The vision of myself on the balcony evaporated. There was nothing to gain by imposing my imagination on reality.
I couldn’t help asking him what he planned on doing when he got there.
“I don’t know. Look for work that will allow me to continue writing.”
There was nothing more to say. When he tried to hug me, I turned away.
Sam came around to the studio. He knew Fabián had taken off, and he complained that now he would be forced to restructure his committee, but then he said maybe it was for the better. I let him go on for a while and then told him to change the subject please, I don’t want to talk about him anymore. He told me he’d been exchanging letters with a serial killer, and I was stunned.
“Yeah. They call him the Railroad Killer. Remember I was telling you his story?”
“Yeah, of course I do. The dude who killed the Swedish girl.”
“He’s being executed next week. He wants me to be there, in Huntsville. I don’t want to go by myself. Wanna come with?”
“Are you out of your mind? What would I do in a place like that?”
“He wrote me a twelve-page letter because he listened to the special I did on him. He said that he listened to a voice inside that sent him to people where evil was nesting. All he did was what ‘the Unnamed’ told him to do. Then he went off on a tangent about the abuses of government, Waco, and how they murdered David Koresh, a whole bunch of stuff. I answered his letter, and then he wrote again. And again.”
I didn’t say anything.
He went on: “I read something once by an FBI profiler who said that serial killers are from the moon. What he meant was that their minds work like beings from another planet; it’s impossible to understand all of what’s inside of them. How they breathe, what they think, what brings them to kill this one or to pardon that one. What do they smell, hear, what do they see that excites them enough to actually commit a crime? Reading Jesús’s letters made me think about that. His name is Jesús María José.”
“Well, executing him is a very precise way of sending him back to the moon.”
“So will you come with me?”
“Let me think about it.”
His interest was so contagious I ended up completely gripped by the story of the Railroad Killer. A Latino serial killer like the Night Stalker, a Mexican. There’s something there. A vast country where Latinos lose themselves and are found. It made me think about extreme forms of madness. I thought about Fabián. Though there was no madness there, more like a surfeit of lucidity, of rationale, so much so that he did one idiotic thing after another. Unless, of course, we’re really the stupid ones. Maybe we should be as paranoid as him, and suspicious of his paranoia. He took off and left the house as empty as his friend’s house in San Antonio. Now he’ll set up shop in Santo Domingo and open the doors wide for people to come in, when in fact the entrance is barred, he always lives shut away in an ivory tower.
Right after Sam left, I surfed around the Internet for the Railroad Killer. Something was stirring inside of me.
My idea for this graphic novel falls within the genre of fantastic literature, with elements of horror and superheroes. Like The Sandman, its success will rest on a combination of genres including fantasy/horror/superheroes. It will lean more heavily toward fantasy than horror. It is set in the present with apocalyptic undertones.
It tells the story of a scientist who is married to a painter; they have a four-year-old daughter. They live in La Línea, a border city that belongs to the North by day and the South by night. One night when the scientist is away at a weekend conference, a serial killer enters their home. The killer slashes his daughter to pieces, then rapes his wife and leaves her for dead.
The scientist’s name is Federico. The painter’s is Samantha. The daughter is Aida.
Still in shock, the scientist buries his daughter. His wife is still in a deep coma and must remain in the hospital for a few more weeks. She comes out of the coma and ends up at home under the care of a full-time nurse; she is unable to speak and her stare is vacant. In an attempt to bring her back from this living death, the scientist hangs a few of her paintings around the house, filling her room with brushes, oil paints, watercolors, and easels. Maybe if she remembers that she had once been an artist, she’ll return to the way she was.
Flashback to the woman’s childhood and adolescence in the South, her trip by freight train to the North, the years during which she lived in a camp full of illegal aliens and discovered her talent f
or painting. Her obsessions: bridges, trains, and tunnels. The scientist visits the camp to run a few experiments there; they meet and fall in love. He helps get a special permit so they can marry and settle together in La Línea.
A second flashback tells the scientist’s story. He was successful very early in his career, but for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, he fell into a deep depression. He gets blocked; he loses his creative impulse. He starts experimenting with drugs that give him unusual strength. He fashions a black mask with silver lining around the eyes and begins living a double life. He prowls the city streets at night wearing his disguise. He says he’s fighting crime in cities near La Línea, but the truth is more ambiguous. The scientist isn’t able to distinguish between good and bad, and it isn’t clear whether this is a result of the drugs or of some secret in his past. The only thing he really wants now is to find his daughter’s killer and avenge her death.
I stopped writing at midnight. I finally had the groundwork for my story.
But now what? What was going to happen? Should I develop it using the kinds of plot twists that are so typical of B-movies: the woman discovers, clue by clue, that her daughter’s killer was her husband? That the scientist is in fact a serial killer?
I called Sam to let him know the good news—that after struggling for such a long time, I had finally figured out how to articulate the story my own way; it was convincing and I could see my future in it. He’d see too. After ages of poking fun at my taste for zombie and vampire stories, for serial killers and superheroes, insisting on the idea that popular stuff can’t have artistic merit, he’ll now be forced to see how powerful the material is, that it can be touching and deeply moving.
He wasn’t paying too much attention to what I was saying. He was using his self-righteous tone of voice, that hint of arrogant moral superiority. He was probably just feeling hurt.
“So nothing has changed. Instead of devoting time to things that matter, you’re still drawing your little cartoons.”
I took a deep breath, and for the first time in several weeks, I felt happy. No, I hadn’t changed, and thank goodness for that. I had to keep doing my own thing.
I hung up without saying goodbye and went back to my drawings.
7
Landslide, 1999
Sergeant Fernandez waited in the Landslide train station next to María Luisa. They stood beside a bench in the vestibule per Jesús’s instructions. The station was closed; undercover officers were on the lookout, and snipers were positioned in the rooms on the second floor with bird’s-eye views of the entire hall.
María Luisa was wearing a black skirt and white ruffled blouse. She had high heels on, and makeup concealing the blotches on her cheeks. He’d been surprised to see her so done up for the occasion; her brother was a serial criminal, but she still wanted to look pretty.
Fernandez was having a hard time controlling his anxiety and kept looking at the huge clock between an Amtrak sign and a Citibank advertisement. It was eleven-thirty in the morning, and Jesús had said he’d show up at twelve o’clock sharp.
“What if he doesn’t show?”
“He will.”
“How are you so sure?”
“Because he promised me he would.”
“Strange that he decided to surrender.”
“Stranger that he killed so many people.”
True. Who was he to fathom what drove a man to kill?
Fernandez allowed himself a moment’s optimism. One should show compassion to all creatures scrabbling along their path in life, should be willing to throw a cloak of pity over the shoulders of even a man like Jesús.
But then he recalled some of the sentences and illustrations he’d read in the killer’s notebooks—“my knife will soke the corupt in blood, that is everybody”—and he remembered vivid scenes of the crimes: the elderly woman stabbed to death in her bed, raped postmortem, the illustrator who had been hideously maimed in her home. And he thought, not this time. He just couldn’t. This was a limit: there was no forgiveness for Jesús.
Still, he was happy to be an instrument of grace. Human grace, imperfect: the only kind they deserved.
María Luisa asked if she could smoke. He said yes, even though there was a sign in front of them proclaiming that it was prohibited in the station.
It was now twelve o’clock.
At five minutes past, the sergeant said, that’s it: Jesús wasn’t going to show up. It had all been a big bluff.
That’s when he saw María Luisa stiffen and he followed her gaze.
There was a man walking toward them. He wore a dirty T-shirt and was carrying a blue Adidas bag. He was short, slight-framed, and wearing glasses. His hair was tousled.
It was him.
Fernandez palmed the pistol that was hidden in his shoulder holster and raised the thumb of his right hand just slightly, to gesture to the agents and snipers that the man had arrived.
Jesús stopped a few feet away from María Luisa and Fernandez.
“Hermanita,” he said, his eyes wide open and afraid.
“Jesús.”
“It’s so nice to see you, qué padre,” he spoke without looking at Fernandez, as if he hadn’t even noticed his presence there. “I missed you. Mucho.”
“I missed you too.”
Jesús made a gesture as if to move in closer and embrace his sister. Without taking his eyes off him, Fernandez pulled out handcuffs. Jesús threw his bag down and lunged at María Luisa; Fernandez caught the glint of a blade in Jesús’s right hand. He was drawing his pistol when he heard the shot. Jesús screamed and collapsed onto his sister; both of them fell to the ground. Fernandez grabbed Jesús and turned him over, pointing his gun at him, and shouted, “Don’t move, don’t you dare move.” Jesús looked up at him with an expression of disbelief, as if the words being shouted weren’t meant for him. Blood gushed from his right forearm.
Fernandez took a step backwards. María Luisa was sobbing. There wasn’t time for anything else. The FBI had them surrounded.
EPILOGUE
Huntsville, Texas, 1999–2009
During the first few months, he counted every single hour of every single day obsessively, as if being imprisoned in Houston were just that, a matter of counting the days and hours. He checked the calendars during his frequent doctor’s appointments for the pain in his knee, or for heart palpitations, migraines, insomnia, panic attacks. But eventually, he wasn’t sure exactly when, he stopped noticing the slow passage of time.
He stared at the ceiling and walls, sprawled on a cot that hurt his back if he lay there too long, and scolded himself for having accepted his sister’s arrangement. María Luisa came to visit regularly and told him that she forgave him, that he had done the right thing by turning himself in; he had prevented any further senseless deaths, above all his own. But obviously he didn’t see it that way. He was convinced that his pact with the Unnamed meant that he would never die. They sure as hell hadn’t been able to apprehend him. It would have been sweet and easy to continue outwitting the police. He’d still be out there running free if only he hadn’t freaked out when he saw his face in the newspapers and on television, if he had exercised a little patience and waited for things to calm down.
When María Luisa convinced him to turn himself in peacefully, it had occurred to him that this would be the perfect way to finally get at her. He was tired of being hunted, and now he could kill two birds with one stone. Hand himself in and make her see that she was high up on his list of undesirables. He had grappled with confused feelings for such a long time, and now he still struggled every day in his cell between the desire to see her and be happy by her side and the desire to hurt her, let her know how much she made him suffer. It had been the kind of plan the brainless morons he knew in Starke might have concocted.
María Luisa had reassured him that in return for turning himself in, they had promised there would be no death sentence. But his lawyer explained in their first meeting that it wasn’t a bin
ding promise. Some Ranger had made it without consulting with the FBI or the state prosecutor.
“I don’t get it,” the public defender said. “You could have turned yourself in anywhere in the whole country. Why would you choose to do it in the state with the highest number of executions in the nation?”
“Would you please calm down,” María Luisa begged through the Plexiglas when he told her what the lawyer said on her next visit. He couldn’t; he insulted her, told her he’d never forgive her, he never wanted to see her again, she was a traitor, she was on their side, she had betrayed her own blood. It upset her so much that she let a few months pass by before returning. It was better that way. How long had he been dreaming of her, only to discover that she was another fake. She wasn’t the same person he had lived with in Villa Ahumada. She wasn’t even pretty. What were all those marks on her cheeks?
His lawyer, Brad Johnson, was the only person on his side. But how far could he trust him? He was young; he dressed in a suit and tie and used some sweet-smelling cologne that always made Jesús a little queasy. He could speak Spanish, but Jesús preferred to answer in English. Brad’s mother was Guatemalan, and she told him it was his duty to support the Latino community. He accepted the case for humanitarian reasons, not because he believed he could achieve a not-guilty verdict.
“I don’t believe in capital punishment, Jesús. It’s contrary to what the good Lord wants for us. The old idea of eye for an eye, it’s useless. We’re supposed to turn the other cheek. That doesn’t mean we’re going to let you continue to do what you were doing. Absolutely not. Sooner or later you’ll have to face the Lord yourself, whether you live out the rest of your life here or not.”
“I hate this place, Mr. J. My problem ain’t the Lord. I have his agent living right here in my heart. He always been there, you gotta believe me.”
“It’s not my place to argue about that, but maybe there’s a, let’s say, a cognitive dissonance between your faith and your actions.”
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