I could have murdered all that lived in that second.
In that darkness, in that mass of pitch that boiled itself from spectra that had been so unbearably bright, I remembered my little surrogate, my little scapegoat. I reached into my mind and dug up the mind I’d had as a child. In there, cowering, I found Piggy.
Forcing my mind to be that of a child, I ripped away my blindness and found the little shit standing in front of me.
I bellowed and launched myself at it.
It was sweet—like when I knew the immortality of youth—to have it suffer and beg and plead and to hear with my mind’s ear the splintering of its bones and its screams and suddenly . . . bedded within the music of its screams I heard words, not the pleading excuses I’d been used to, but one syllable, uttered over and over beneath my imaginary blows like sobs.
“Why?”
I stopped and saw the bloody little face, so much like mine, the lips and cheeks hanging in shreds.
The little being faded from my mind’s eye, and I wondered, Why should I punish the thing that had helped me cope? The thing that helped me survive?
It was time to punish the ones who had hurt me, who had taken my life.
I crawled over the rubble of my apartment, trailing blood from my left ankle. I hobbled to bed and slept a death-like sleep for almost a full day.
When I awoke, with the sheet snaked around my feet clotted with dead brown blood, my mind felt wonderfully focused, clearer than I ever remembered. I planned the rest of my severed life with a new sense of purpose.
* * *
—Why did you give up Piggy at that age?
—Maybe I outgrew it. Maybe I refocused my anger into other channels, like all adolescents do. Not sure.
—Do you think at some point, you would have given up killing, if you hadn’t been caught?
—I think I would have finished my killings, or gotten tired of the planning and execution of them. Or died.
—Did you ever want to stop?
—I’d thought about it.
—Did you want to be caught?
—Oh please, stop me before I kill again? That’s so melodramatic. No. I expected to be caught, but I didn’t want to be.
—Whom would you have killed after Catherine?
—I thought about killing Sarah, another ex-girlfriend. But I thought about what she was like, and realized she must have been screwed up in the head, only I didn’t realize it when we were together. Too young. There was a lot bad in our relationship, but it was . . . human. Not cruel. Not malignant. I got in touch with her, just to see what she was like, now.
—And?
—We had a nice talk. She’s been in therapy. She had a pretty rough life I didn’t know about. I couldn’t hold her responsible for the crap she’d given me. The poor kid was scrambled. We had a quiet dinner date, for old times’ sake. It was all very nice.
—There was no way you could have reconciled with Catherine?
—No. We could only have peace after she was dead.
Catherine knew my voice when I called her. I could taste the Tom’s-of-Maine-scented huff she blew into the receiver, the same expulsion she made whenever I asked for a crumb of help, even when I asked for coins with which to make a phone call. Still, she asked (with the same high- pitched pain in her voice that I once heard in the yelp of a stray kitten I found as the vet drew its blood), “Who is this?”
“It’s Dean.”
“Dean?”
“Dean Garrison, Catherine.” Jesus Christ! You could pretend to remember the people you’ve pumped fluids with, you toxic, skeletal bitch.
“Oh . . . Dean.” She let out a different flustered sigh, like someone called about back taxes. She had a wide vocabulary of sighs, complex and subtle enough to compose Haiku with.
“I need to see you, Catherine.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She spoke as a teacher would to a bad third grader, voice thick with finality. Yet there was a reflexive quality to what she said, the same with which a shop-girl would mutter, “Have a nice day.”
I know her too well for her games to stab me now. I’ve read the fictions and the lies that are her life, to write myself into it as its coda. I know she’s had many lovers, a mass of half-remembered names and limbs and cocks she has puppeted not with strings, but words. I’ve choked on her gnawing hunger for control, and I know many of her lovers have come back to her, desperate for the opiate freedom of her manipulation, and for the woollen-soft comfort of her abuse. I’ve seen her pick up the phone when ex-lovers call and vivisect them with her scalpel-precise tongue, only to tell me afterward that she was meeting them for coffee.
But none of them have played the card I held, the totemic charm I’d now utter.
“I’m dying, Catherine.”
“What?!” She gasped, perhaps taken off guard while on the phone with a man for the first time.
“I’m dying.”
“How?!”
Through the phone lines, I felt the air around her tingle with her worry that her psychotic love life has risen, like a chain-draped ghost, to haunt her . . . that I gave her AIDS or she gave it to me. Since she was the greatest AIDS risk I’ve ever run, I let her sweat. I choked crocodile tears, took deep breaths.
“I have cancer.”
“Oh.” A new sigh, rich with poetry I’ve never heard before: a fucking sigh of relief.
“I want to talk. I want to make sure everything is squared away between us. It would mean a lot to me.”
At no point during our exchange did I tell a single lie.
The walk to Catherine’s apartment was pleasant. The wonderful smells of crisp October night thickened to a delicious liquor; the stars were bright as angels’ eyes, not faded by the glowing rot of the city. I hungered to drop my anger toward Catherine: a burden I’d carried too long. It was a near sexual need, a quasi-tantric state that trembled beneath my muscles deep near the bone. The desire, its silent, healing passion, told me along my very nerves that there had to be something decent at the core of my relationship with Catherine, otherwise we’d have never gotten together. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have stayed together as long as we did, and let our relationship twist into the knotted web that it became, something that grew like a cancer and sundered what was healthy between us. Tonight I’d cut that cancer away.
I stopped below Catherine’s building, palms damp, heart fluttering, as if I wore another body, like a coat, over the one full of tantric expectation: another body that I formed through the act of looking at and through her home. I leaned against a tree and unslung my book-bag, the final emblem of my youth, for I’d die at the age when I was expected to start carrying a briefcase. The bag clattered from the shiny metal instruments inside that I’d purloined from an undertakers’ supply house—the keen blades that would help Catherine and me fix our relationship better than any couples’ counsellor could.
I lit a cigarette to kill time as I watched her place and collected myself . . . as I collected more than myself into myself. The cigarette was an icon, potent as the caduceus of a healing god: a symbol of danger, the smoke of which I drank into my lungs to steady the nerves of the secondary body surrounding me, so that it could take the power I’d need to intrude on Catherine’s home with my presence before I intruded on her body with a blade of near-impossible fineness.
I don’t smoke, of course. But I had to try as many new things as possible in the weeks I had left. It made the ritual act of watching richer, gave the flavours of October air a new depth, like the essence of heat-aged cedar. The iconic danger of the cigarette rose up to dance with the breath of a time of reaping, when sheltering darkness gives its grace to those who are blessed to walk within it.
October has always been like a mistress to me. I love the new sublimity of the weather, the first frost, the painted sunsets, the decorations for Halloween. Everything becomes a mystery.
To stand and watch, during a season when
masks and all their terrible power are themselves masked as child’s play, made the deep-water shadows on the street seem like velvet, made the stone fences and oaks more solid. The neighbourhood was a tomb to the dead middle classes that had lived here. The disappearance of the people that had defined the place made it seem haunted, like land that had belonged to mound-building Native Americans. Absence made the reality here worn as the sole of a cracked boot. I could walk more easily through fiction and myth tonight than I could on any other night on which I’ve killed. The geometry of the street (with its once-sturdy single-family homes and duplexes cut into condos and high-end apartments with fire-code ugly stairways of steel) was made fragile as a light-sleeper’s dream by what October whispered upon it.
I was going to miss October.
I heard the shuffle of feet through leaves.
No one was there. October air changes sound. It was a kid on a side street, or a cat chasing mice through mist-damp piles of yard cuttings. Let it stalk. For that was what I now did, enrobing my form as the summoned demon of the vindictive ex-lover, the dangerous Phantom who possesses women, who is the monster lurking within facile love songs about “making you mine,” the stalker who terrifies through his harnessing the Deadly Sin of vanity. A different vanity than that which makes homes sanctuaries that Dark and Shadowy Men can violate. It is a deeper vanity than that, and much more potent.
As I finished the cigarette, ceremoniously throwing it in the gutter, I scanned Catherine’s five-unit building that had been a two-family duplex, making sure my escape routes were viable as I remembered them should Catherine have time to scream. It would be easy to swing from her balcony to the fire escape grafted to the side of the once house-like house. Depending on the situation, I could go down to the street or up to the slanting roof. From the roof, I could jump to the next building. If I missed the jump, what did I lose? Six months? A year of medical bills I couldn’t afford?
I went to the front door and rang her apartment. She buzzed me in.
Like old times. Only now, I didn’t enter with a bird’s-nest lump of dread in my craw.
She lived on the top floor. The foot of the stairwell touched a unit in which I heard people yelling and crying with the deep, rich pain of loss. Their pain hurt to hear. But in a way that shamed me, I knew their cries would create distraction, should I need it. On the second floor I went to the apartment just below Catherine’s and touched my ear to the door.
Absolute quiet. No newscasters. No laugh tracks to the misadventures of Chandler, Phoebe, Ross and Joey. No talk radio. Just the shade-still heartbeat of a vacant living space.
I’d cased Catherine’s building over these last few months of my existence, waiting for the people below her to go on vacation before calling her. It wouldn’t do for the thud of her body and what it would leak through floor and ceiling to alarm anybody. Evan’s death taught me how troublesome neighbours can be.
I took it as divine providence when the people below moved out, letting the turn of events melt on my tongue as a Catholic would a Communion wafer. I made an appointment with the building manager to view the apartment while Catherine was at work, and asked for an application to fill out in private. While he was gone, I unlocked the window closest to the drainpipe that ran down the southeast corner of the building. If Catherine made an aria of our reunion, I could shimmy down the pipe outside her window and hide in the vacant apartment, assuming I didn’t shatter my limbs on the alley below trying to get in, and so let floating bits of marrow join my tumours in their revolt against my body.
I climbed the stairs, drawn by Catherine’s siren-call she didn’t know was hers, because its notes were so deeply buried in the self-love at the core of her being—the self-love that punished her body for its disobedience in not bending to her focus-group-defined will. The tantric urgency in my flesh was changed by her song as I became the killer she sought: the stalking lover, the thing of myth that drew its strength from the voyeurism and narcissism of women such as Catherine, who make pretty and vicarious myths of empowerment and melodrama out of the plight of women who truly are stalked. Women such as Catherine . . . who longingly see victimhood as an opportunity for personal growth, to shine through adversity, and so perhaps meet a smoky-dark and handsome cop/protector. Victimhood wormed in their imagination as a chance, like multiple sclerosis or cancer or spinal injury or any other dramatically severe illness worthy of a made-for-TV movie, to will yourself to become better than you were, to not let adversity beat you, and so spit in the face of the truly stricken and afflicted.
I reached Catherine’s door. I knocked on the barrier that my passage through would finalize the bestowment of power, the vindictive actualization, I had begun by watching.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Dean.” Who else?
I heard the rattle, the clank, the rumble of locks being undone. Catherine’s protective barrier against all evil in the world. The throwing of locks was precise as the noh-play rigid dinners and conversations and lovemaking we’d shared, for the door was not the barrier that made her feel safe, but her control over it, her mastery of it through the manipulation of locks and bolts from one state to another.
She opened the door, relinquishing her control, admitting me to the imaginary safe space of her home as a mythic being that, like monsters out of folklore, can only harm upon being invited in.
When I saw her, my resolve to kill her faltered. She smiled the way people smile only for dear friends. She kissed my cheek, and it felt so very nice. I thought of Sarah, how we’d reconciled. Maybe Catherine and I could end on good terms. My mythic state, coursing within me, flowed into a warmth I could share with her, that could call from our hearts what had been good between us and save it, like a small thing pulled from a burning home. Maybe with understanding, not blood, we could quell my deep anger for her.
She blew her chance.
As she locked the door, controlling it and the entire world beyond by turning three throw-bolts and setting the New York T-bar that braced the door, she asked, “Are you okay?”
“For now.”
“You look okay.”
A long moment as I took off my jacket and dropped my bag carefully, so as to not make a clatter. The silence stood by intrusively, counting the seconds of its own duration.
She blurted, “Do you want coffee?” As soon as she asked, I saw the same flash of regret that darted behind her eyes when she asked me one night to light the red candle she liked lit when making love. As I struck the match, I saw that the candle had been melted down much farther than it had been two nights before, when I’d last been to her place. I felt her gaze on my back as I lit the candle, wondering whom she’d fucked the night before. I felt her hunger to start a fight or to slight me, so she could control the moment and deflect any chance of discussion. I heard the flap of her turning down the sheets. She said matter-of-factly, while I stared at the new flame cupped in the diminished candle: “Barbara thinks I should break up with you.”
Though how coffee could inspire the same flash of regret in her gaze, I couldn’t fathom.
“Tea’s fine.”
She spun and walked her nervous springing step through the realm of her possessions and the two-decades-old “elegance” she treasured to the kitchen, past the uncomfortable couch where she made me wait on so many occasions. She’d lost weight since I’d last seen her. She looked like a ghost, or a fault in the negative of the lifeless catalogue photo her home resembled. Her hatred of her body had grown more passionate.
I rested my book-bag by the fortified door, opened the top zipper a fraction of an inch, followed her to the kitchen as I heard the faucet shut off.
“I wanted to call you earlier,” she said as she set the kettle on the stove.
“Why?” I asked, when what I wanted to ask was, “Why didn’t you? And why bring it up, now?”
“I wanted to see if you wanted dinner tonight.”
“I have to watch what I
eat.”
“Oh.”
A pause of a second or two as I smelled fresh coffee, turned and saw the lone espresso she’d made for herself, the still-life with demitasse, book, and lemon rind she’d placed on her fine table to show me that I was not worthy of her making a second cup. I glanced to her espresso maker. It had been cleaned and wiped and shoved into the corner by the fridge where she stored it; the coffee grinder was not to be seen, and the counter was still damp and streaked from the sponge that had erased any trace of spilled grounds. Even the paring knife used to cut the lemon rind rested washed and shiny in the drainer by the sink. Her offer of coffee had been a mistake, a loss of her sacred control to fill the silence by the entryway, just as her asking me to light the candle had been a blurted loss of control. I stared at the espresso, at the demitasse that bore no mark of her lip on the rim, the perfect twist of rind that would be the envy of any barista, the book that had been so carefully placed. I felt Catherine’s eyes on me, touching my back as they had while I stared at the melted red candle.
I waited for her slight.
“I crossed out your number in my book. That’s why I couldn’t call.”
“I’m listed, Catherine.”
“Oh, yeah.”
I turned as she laughed a pretty little laugh, her almost translucent hand covering her mouth like a geisha’s. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Before, this coffee tableau and verbal exchange would have set my teeth grinding and flurried my guts into self-digestion. Her little attack, her reduction of me to nothing more than an inky smear in her address book . . . a new and living ink, changing color as the red cells within lost oxygen, would be a justified blot to give in return.
We spoke blithering small talk a few moments as the kettle heated, then, in mid-sentence, she walked toward me and took my hand . . . her fingers gently, sensually, caressing my palm. She kissed my lips. Her left hand touched my cheek as she said, “It’s really nice to see you again, Dean.”
“It’s nice to see you, too.”
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