A look walked through Doctor Johansson’s eyes, like that of a watch-maker restoring an antique.
—Does it bother you that you can’t resolve things with your father? By killing him, or talking to him?
—I knew after I confronted my parents I’d never see or speak to them again. I’d get killed or caught. They’d never visit their son in a place like this.
—Can your resentment toward them ever be resolved?
A pressure on my shackled feet, a living weight. As if something heavy rested on them, with flesh like the brow of a feverish child. The thing squirmed as if to get comfortable. The hairs on my legs rose, and chills coursed under my skin like spilled mercury. My heart felt full of spun glass, and my genitals drew up inside me. The thing across my feet breathed with a shifting of its weight, as if its lungs didn’t draw air, but thick fluid.
—What’s wrong, Dean?
—Just a bad feeling, like someone walking over my grave.
A little laugh. Like a bark. (Can’t he hear it?) And the weight heaved itself off my feet. I can relax now. But it has never touched me before; it has never been real to me, save in the blood-lit world that had retreated from our stage.
Doctor Johansson frowned, sensing, because he’s no fool, I lied to him.
—How did you deal with your anger when you were young?
—Before I started killing people?
—Yes.
—I killed things.
In his furrowed brow, I read where his thoughts traveled. I was angry with myself for goading him by accident, for letting that which had dared to touch me fluster me so that I set his clinical alarms ringing.
—I killed insects, Doctor. Just bugs. I never hurt anything higher on the evolutionary scale than a spider.
The glassy-clear reality that had burned away the dusk-red shadows . . . I sensed now what it was: the hard light of my fellow actor’s clinical training imposing itself on the poetry that had given me strength, power, and the will to use them. I spoke, as if to crack that reality, to free myself from its oppression, lest it take all trace of that power from me.
—I never killed vertebrates. And I didn’t wet the bed or start fires, as the literature says all serial killers must. I could never enjoy killing animals.
Oh, but I did taste rapture killing insects. I enjoyed compensating for powerlessness. And hopelessness. I still savour the child’s thrill of hurling a black beetle atop a hill of red ants, watching them churn like angry breakers over the larger beast, rending past the thing’s armour. Its huge jaws clamped, unable to close on the small foes that so efficiently killed it. And there were the centipedes I poured hot candle wax over, entombing them, force-feeding them the paralysis and claustrophobia that had been life in my parents’ house.
But what I loved to kill most were the great, black carpenter ants. They were tough bastards, true warriors. It pleased me that despite their strength and fury, I could kill them without a thought.
Though I did think about killing them, always writing new scenarios, new premises, with which to punish them for being so insolently strong and pure. I thought of needles to drive through their heads (there was such pleasure when the point pressed against their chitinous shells, and the shells yielded with a faint pop as the metal shaft went through . . . they lived through that, for a while). I thought of matches, vivisections to be done with the scissors of my pocketknife, and drops of fine motor oil that suffocated them so very quickly.
What I especially loved were the Games, the gladiatorial contests I arranged that so beautifully expressed the feelings that defined my little life. The Games were fictions for which I was creator and audience, a semi-divine reaper of lives who found peace in witnessing death. I took up Godlike power, because God didn’t bother to do the job, having abandoned the world in which I’d been abandoned.
Behind my house near the rear porch, I’d draw a chalk circle on the summer-hot concrete. Two carpenter ants from different colonies would be thrown into this ring. If they did not notice each other, I grabbed one in each hand, their powerful jaws would snap in silent rage, dripping formic acid that smelled so slightly of maple. Then I’d bring them together in an awful embrace, their jaws clamping down on each other.
Then I’d set them in the chalk arena, with the Rule in mind that if either one disengaged and left the Circle, I would crush it with my thumb. If their struggle took them out of the Circle, I’d knock them back in. The battles could last hours. And it pleased me no end that they fought and were in pain for reasons they couldn’t understand, under laws they couldn’t understand. Sometimes, when the struggle went too long, I’d change the odds by ripping off a leg or snipping an antenna.
And if one ant proved itself worthy, if one ant followed my unknowable laws and killed the other, I crushed it anyway, happy to make another entity suffer as I’d known helplessness, following the oppressive rules of my parents, and receiving for it no love or acceptance or freedom or power.
It was good to kill the victor. I’d walk away from the chalk circle feeling wonderfully clean, and no longer angry.
Doctor Johansson packed his pipe with another bowlful of tobacco as fictional as the dreams I’d used as weapons.
—Would you describe yourself a serial killer if it would help your defense? To cop an insanity plea?
No, I am an avatar.
—I wouldn’t. Besides, I’m not going to see the inside of a courthouse. I’ll see the inside of a cheap coffin, first.
He began puffing, and my mind saw the bowl glow red. A blue-grey fog formed around him like a halo.
—There must have been times when killing insects wasn’t enough. What did you do then? Or when there were no bugs around, in the winter?
I was transfixed by the blue-orange will-o’-wisp glow of his pipe. I didn’t want to answer his question, even as my body answered it, with memories of blossoming pain echoing beneath my skin.
I’m seven years old. I’ve locked myself in a bathroom, and I’m punching myself. There’s joy to venting anger and frustration, joy in damaging myself, making real and feelable the rage that stabs me from within with ghost-blades too dishonest to draw blood, or to leave scars that offer the consolation of watching them heal. I can’t remember why I’m so enraged . . . some comment from my father has roiled me into this frenzy, or some accusation of my mother’s has bewitched me with a fury that must be released somehow, even against myself. All I can recall is the passionate need to hit and hurt and punish someone, anyone, anything. Saints have known this pain through hair-shirt self-martyrdoms that let them feel the love of the Divine Father and see the Light of Heaven, not through rage that stains shadows the color of dying scabs.
In my ecstasy of loathing, amid the blows I smashed against my brow and the back of my head, I looked up and saw my red, wrath-twisted face in the mirror . . . my little boy’s mouth fixed in a grimace, veins bulging at my temples, and bruises spreading like wine spilled on satin.
I stood there, my small fists stopped in mid-blow, panting like a wolf over a steaming kill, thinking perhaps I could reach through the mirror and kill the boy who inspired such pity and contempt in me, hoping to travel through the Looking Glass to the fantasy world where a weak little boy could die by my hand as he deserved to.
Instead of reaching through the unyielding and cruelly solid glass, I reached instead into my child’s mind and pulled forth a screaming, pleading surrogate: a thing to punish besides my own face, yet that still bore my face.
After several minutes of pantomimed blows against another, non-existent thing that cowered in the corner where two sheets of ugly vinyl wallpaper met, my rage subsided.
In the mirror, it seemed as if my bruises—for which I was often rewarded with extra food at dinner for sparing my parents the bother of inflicting them—faded. I washed my throbbing face with cold water and left the room with a soothing emptiness in my chest, knowing that what I had done was a ritual that offered
me salvation.
I decided to tell him.
—Most children have imaginary playmates. I had an imaginary victim.
—I . . . don’t understa . . .
—I didn’t play with my imaginary friend. I beat the shit out of it. It was smaller than me and weaker and I could pummel it and bully it. I made it pay for the unspoken crimes I committed. It was my little pal. My coping mechanism.
—It?
—Yes. It.
—It wasn’t a child, then? Another boy or girl?
I know where the little shit came from, now. I’ve witnessed his birth twice. When I was older, just going to college, I’d sprained my knee. For two weeks, I walked using an elastic brace. Late one night, while getting ice water, I was too tired to put on the brace. My knee buckled. My arms flailed as I grabbed hold of a chair.
And I saw myself ghosted in the night-black glass of the window over the sink, a mass of palsied movements, jerking limbs, reflected as on a pool of oil. A ridiculous caricature of who I am. The distorting glass made me look squat and twisted, like pictures I’d seen of the hunchback in Poe’s “Hop Frog.”
What happened next was more than memory. It was a snapping of my mind through time that drowned my senses. Years collapsed, cracking into the moment in which I now stood on a burst knee, my arms trembling to support my weight.
I’m five years old. My body remembers its weakness, its smallness. Even my mouth recalls the old set of my jaws before the loss of my milk teeth. I’m running through melting snow in my parents’ back yard. It’s warm for a winter’s day, spring-like. Despite this, my mother has packed me into a snowsuit too large for me, filling the space my body does not with layers of sweaters and pajama bottoms. Because it’s still winter out, no matter how warm and sunny and bright it is, no matter that the snow melts and drops from the branches . . . and to go to the yard in winter is how little shitty ungrateful boys catch cold and die, and that is how they show they don’t love their mothers, because their mothers have to worry all the time and if little boys really loved their mothers . . .
So I wear the snowsuit and the layers and I’m miserably hot, because I also wear a hat and scarf. The drawstring of the hood is knotted to press against the underside of my chin: punishment tied by my mother’s sharp-nailed and rose-scented fingers for my wanting to step out into the air. I feel stupid and silly and angry. My movements are weighted, as if the air were thick as stale honey. The outfit is a prison I’ve been forced to wear, a prison like the loveless home I live in. I’m enraged that my body is co-opted as part of my prison. That I’m forced to be as weak and useless as my parents wish me to be.
I try to run, as any child would, through the snow that glistens brilliantly, the only way I can: by holding my arms out almost to their sides and throwing my legs in front of me one at a time. I look up and see myself reflected against the windows of the house. They warp me like fun-house mirrors. I look like a twisted fat little goblin in a storybook, a troll creeping from under a bridge. Something rips inside me, tearing away like a strip of skin. The pain offers a kind of relief from the oppressive heat.
That had been the first moment of self-contempt I’d ever felt that I understood to be self-contempt. The first time I’d been consciously sickened by my own image, the first splitting of the first cancerous cell that would devour my psyche. I realized this as I leaned against the table, recalling how I’d leaned that day against the swing set from which my father had removed the swings, lest I fall. My knee ached as I tasted the gorge that the Truth had pushed into my throat, through its revelation that my little scapegoat who’d helped me cope with my childhood had been me at that specific moment. A visualization of everything I’d hated about myself before I’d shattered myself in front of the bathroom mirror and pulled forth my victim: weak, whining (oh, how it used to whine so for mercy while I imagined torturing it), and pathetic.
Thirst forgotten, I limped to bed.
But wondering if this small totem of self-hate had been with me since birth, I didn’t sleep that night.
Nor the next.
—No. It was an it. Not human. Like a gremlin.
—Did you imagine it to be not human so it would be easier to hurt? I watched the bank of phantom pipe smoke float between me and Doctor Johansson. The sun, creaking to the west, came from behind a cloud, and shadows from the thick window bars bled onto the smoke like slashes. I wondered if the yellowed air filter in the corner could draw the smoke that was not there.
—I don’t think I’d have been as fond of hurting it, if it had been easy to hurt.
—Did it have a name?
The shadow bars faded. I don’t know how long I must have been silent for the clouds to hide the sun again. How much of this day had I spent in fugue-like silence? I was afraid to answer, to speak the Name I had never spoken, and invoke whatever hidden power might be knotted within that Name.
—I gave it a stupid sort of kid’s name: Piggy.
Nothing changed with the invocation of the Name. I watched Doctor Johansson’s eyes, to make sure he didn’t think the name funny. Or trite. It would embarrass me if he did.
—Why did he have that name?
—I think I gave it to him because he was kind of baby-pink, like a pig, or a puppy’s belly. It seemed to fit. I’d never heard the name before I gave it to him. Maybe the name floated in the ether as the name of victim, and I picked it up. I’d never heard of any victim character named Piggy until high school.
The phantom smoke dulled the glass-hard reality before my eyes. The effect was soothing, yet I still felt a dread between my shoulder blades, that the Name so long unspoken might still reveal a potential that had been dormant.
—What did you do when you ah . . . punished Piggy?
—Most often, I’d shut myself away and throw punches at it. Before that there had to be the chase, where I’d look all over the room to see where it was hiding. Then I’d drag it from the hiding place by the roots of its hair. And then I’d start beating it.
—And this was like imaginary play?
— I’d swing and kick at where I imagined Piggy to be. I’d get something like a sugar high during the punishment. My vision would get grey and buzzing. I’d be spent afterward.
—Did you talk to it?
—Sometimes I’d speak to it, to re-enforce the punishment. Things I’d learned from my father. Things like, Come out and take your medicine, you little shit!
—Did Piggy say anything?
—Mostly it just begged not to be hit. Sometimes I’d imagine it screaming.
—You never had conversations with it? Like most kids do with imaginary friends?
—We weren’t on speaking terms.
—Sort of like you and your parents.
His insight struck me like a heavy boot. The tumours nestled in me felt as if they shifted, like waking things.
—Yes. Like me and my parents.
—In fact, you were its parent. At least as you understood parents to be.
Realization is the crash of a thing you didn’t know. What turned my guts to clay was not realization, but the stripping away of a refusal to know that the proportions of the creature, as I’d first imagined it, were the same as I had been proportioned to my father.
—I suppose I was.
—How old were you when you gave up Piggy?
—About eleven or twelve.
That wasn’t entirely true. The last time I’d used Piggy was about a year ago, the day I was diagnosed, the day all the nagging fears bloomed to awful fruition, when the worries about the bloody stools, cramps and fatigue boulder-crashed upon me and shattered whatever hope for a life I’d ever had.
The world had chewed me and spat me out. I drunk-stumbled home from the doctor’s, wanting to vomit, wanting to take a knife and cut out the cancer myself, to make bloody and visible the inner maulings I’d suffered. My jaw locked, my fists felt fused solid, immobile as blocks of wood. Blood tr
ickled from where I’d bitten through my lip, and I was afraid of my own blood, of the toxins it held that I could be ingesting back into me. Blind rage is a half-truth. Rage doesn’t blind. It inflicts more clarity than you can bear to see.
The pain of vision searing me, I upended the table, threw dishes against the walls, embedding fragments into cheap sheetrock. I pummelled a wooden door until it splintered. My gaze, vicious as desert sun, fell on a shelf of shiny new paperbacks. I was cheated of the time to read them, so I destroyed them, cracking their spines and ripping them as strong men rip phone books. I kicked apart the bookshelf; a jutting nail sank deep behind my Achilles’ tendon. My raging sight burned away the pain of it. I moved on my wounded foot like a wind, not walking to the things I destroyed, but surging, like a swarm of leaves.
I grabbed the phone from the wall. It was high-impact plastic, and would take a good long violent while to break. I hammered the receiver against the wall, watching lovely clouds of dust rise from the craters I punched into the plaster, watching each mote turn with the grace of malignantly indifferent planets.
I smashed my thumb against the wall, crushing it between receiver and plaster.
I howled as clarity burned itself to onyx. Evil thoughts packed themselves tight into my head, like a million blind maggots, a million demons all lusting for blood crammed inside my skull.
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