The Joy of Killing
Page 10
THE RESTROOM SCENE in the train is fading. Losing its color, its vitality. The boy seems to be barely there. He watches the girl rearrange her sweater. He wants to want her, but he feels no force in his body. Her glance in the mirror catches him, and he looks away. Now you see what you have, he thinks. You’ve wasted your night. He looks over at the door.
The scene is stuck there. With him in collapse. Her looking at him in the mirror, with eyes now soft and concerned. I squeeze my eyes shut, let them drift open. I tap on the space bar several times. Listen intently for sounds. The scene is now like an ink etching, bereft of color and texture. It can’t end like this, I think. It will leave us all nowhere. It’s not too much to ask, I insist. A little peace at the end. I know better than to force it, but Jesus, the boy came so far. I look away from the scene, into the blackness beyond the moon and stars. What difference does it make? You owe him clarity, I answer. He doesn’t understand. It all swirls in his soul. The wallett. The life jacket. Even what is yet to come. You mustn’t feel sorry for him. The girl understands. I would shake him if I could. I try to imagine another scene, to distract my mind. I see the cold light of a winter morning as we pull into the Chicago train yards. Everything is bright but unmoving, frozen in black and white, like a scene on an old postcard. “Chicago,” the rough voice calls out. “End of the line.”
The concern in the girl’s eyes lingers, but she sees the boy’s features have come back to life. She sees a tenderness she had missed before.
MY FINGERS RISE from the keys and brush my neck, nick a rough edge I hadn’t noticed before. The tear in my thigh pulses. I’d forgotten about it. I grab hold of the edge of the torn jean and rip it back to reveal a three-inch-long gash. I pull the lamp over to the edge of the desk, bend it low over my wound. The edges of the gash are crusted, but a bright red is seeping out the center. I rip the jean back until my thigh is exposed to the knee, and there I spot it: the old scar a few inches below the new one. I hadn’t gone to the doctor for several days after ripping it on the fence in Judy Pauling’s backyard. I told my mother I had fallen off my bike. The doctor, who worked out of a house at the end of our street, said it was almost too late to close, but threaded a few stitches in anyway. I had bragged about it afterward, my battle scar, a wound suffered in the unsuccessful pursuit of pussy. Over the years the scar had shrunk some, but now it seemed to glisten fiercely in the light. The new one was ragged, and deeper, cut voraciously. I pressed in on it; pinkish blood spurted from the crust. I felt the pulse again, but this time there was no pain.
I recall that the main character in my novel The Professor went about his murderous deed without concern or care. Some said he must have had a cold heart. I agree: Cold enough that he knew neither remorse nor guilt would follow in the path of his deeds. He was a free actor, in other words. He could move through the world without fear of consequences, because in his makeup there was no place for them to land. I think we secretly envy him his ability to live his life in neutral, our natural state of being.
I’M OFF THE track. Night will soon fail. I read through some early pages of the train ride to move back into the story. The boy’s reaction to the girl and his first true sexual experience of any note seem strangely muted, as if he’s watching it all from a distance, and he can’t quite decide how far in he wants to go; or better, how much of it, of her, he can handle. He’s in, he’s out, he wants more, he wants less, he wants to hold her forever, he wants to be alone in his seat. Maybe it’s simply the matter-of-fact way I’m writing the scene. Maybe something is lost in the translation into words. The girl is trying to free him, you can tell. She sees his incompleteness and wants to bring him more alive, and she believes in this one lonely night on the rails she can do something for him. The boy didn’t see it that way. He felt the distance, but it seemed natural to him, and he satisfied himself with the physical sensations of sex. He memorized the experience as it was happening, perhaps in fear that it will be lost to him if he doesn’t burn it into his brain. Wake up! I want to shout at him. But of course it’s me writing it, so I would be screaming at myself. It’s my version of how that night went that is the account of it; the boy, were he available, might tell it much differently. The years since have colored it. Truth is nowhere to be found, but that’s nothing new. Glimpses here and there, through thin clouds of dust. He was happy that night. And not just because the girl fucked him. The flat tone is in my writing, and there’s little to be done about it, and now that I understand it, I don’t care. In fact, I’m pulling for the girl, because I don’t quite remember how the rest of the story goes. She is determined, along with everything else, for reasons beyond me, then or now, to lead the boy out of the haze.
What if I had told her about Willie? About Joseph? David? Perhaps she would have loved me for my courage. Maybe we would have stayed together. Maybe I wouldn’t be here now. A love that never faded. But what would I have told her? The boy’s memories, at least the way I recall, were very vague and not subject to a linear recitation. Not unlike now, really. The past lay like a terrible storm beyond the horizon: something in you is always waiting for it to blow in, but it never hits. There was a moment in the restroom on the train when it seemed like it might. The girl’s face in the mirror was gentle and receptive. The relentless click-clacking of the wheels had faded into silence. But I could not find a word to begin with. I looked away, and then back. She was a stranger.
I see now that my fear had transformed her. But in the moment all I could feel was loneliness turning into a raging lust. I didn’t want to just fuck her, I wanted to punish her. I placed one hand on her neck to hold her in place, and with the other I pulled my dick from my pants. I lifted up her skirt, and ran my cock down the crack until I felt wetness. I sought resistance on her face, maybe even a little fear, but her eyes were closed.
“OK,” I said.
I lurched forward and jammed into her. I grabbed both shoulders, pulled back and pushed in deeper, hearing a guttural sound from my throat. Her head dropped. I grabbed a handful of hair and jerked her head back. She cried out, and I jerked it back further, until her white throat was arched and her mouth was forced open. I heard the slapping of flesh on flesh.
The girl was waiting.
“Fuck you,” she said.
I grasped her hips with both hands and bucked into her hard. Her head banged into the mirror.
The lights dimmed. Flickered, went off. The room was dark, except for lights flashing by in the window.
“See what you did?” she said.
I laughed, she laughed, and then we both were laughing, exhausted. The lights came back on, flickered, then stayed. I glanced at her in the mirror. Her eyes held mine. On her forehead was a red streak. And a crimson smear on the mirror. I started to back away. “No!” she cried and pushed back into me. Her hands reached back around and grabbed my hips.
BLOOD EVERYWHERE. ON her forehead, my nose, beading around Shelley’s neck, on the very page, my first wife’s wedding dress, my thigh, the cat’s whiskers, the white face of the moon, and the pavement where Willie had lain. My hand, the palm. Was that Willie’s blood I had tasted? I glance at the briefcase a few feet away: The blotch on the handle his as well? Here, in my lost city of refuge? What had I done? I needed the truth of this day, as well as what had come before, I was coming to see, and I knew that if you sought the truth you couldn’t open the door a few inches, let a crack of light in, and then shut it.
The Professor grasped that. If you want to be free you can’t draw a circle around yourself and declare all else out of bounds. He understood that if he didn’t take care of his wife the feeling of impotence would effectively neuter him for the rest of his days. Certainly the feeling of killing her caused him some discomfort—he still loved her—but it would leave him in a place where he could live in peace whatever the circumstances. He could have been wrong; the crime could have left him wracked with guilt and remorse, even self-loathing; in which case, his choice would have been a mistake. But
he wasn’t wrong. The rest of his life was a circus, and he was a spectator as well as the ringmaster, and he loved it. Of course his happiness earned him the sobriquet of sociopath, even psychopath, but he believed, and I agree with him, he had made the right choice, being who he was. The cut he made on her nerve through which electricity flowed to her heart was not made in anger, or a desire for revenge, or punishment, or to cause her pain. It was made out of an obligation to his own peace of mind, his own happiness. His lack of remorse stirred up hate in others, to be sure, but that was to be expected.
If Willie is not to be blamed, neither is the person who took his life. Willie had lived his life the way he was meant to live it, and the person who ended it for him was acting in his own interest, according to his own immutable design. I doubt the harmless old man seriously objected, other than perhaps about the manner of his dying. He bled to the last drop, you could see that from the size of the stain.
The window cracks open, and a breeze slips in. I walk over and let the night air caress my face. The last traces of the squall have fled. The moon has gone white as chalk. Even the leaves are quiet. No fluttering of bat wings or shaking of baby rattles. The solitude is creased by the lonely wail of a loon at the far end of the lake.
I close the window. Clarity will bring peace, you think. You hope. But what if it doesn’t? There is no going back now. Even to the small town down the road. The world will be catching up to me soon. But the night is still mine, and I will make of it what I will.
The briefcase now sitting alone on the chair by the window was my identity in my teaching days; the more battered it got, the more wisdom it carried within it. In my little plays in the classroom, it had sometimes served as the child on the floor. Never repaired once, I think, over all the years. The splotch on the handle, however, was disconcerting. I reach for the case and lift it by the edge. It’s heavier than I thought, and I have to grasp it firmly. I set it on my lap. I rub a finger on the handle, hold it under the lamp, and it comes up dark crimson. I turn my palm over; the streak on it matches the handle. I unsnap the brass clasp. My hand is a little shaky. A book sits in the front slot. In the next slot is a sheaf of papers. In the last one, a small calendar and a newspaper article. The book, I see, is the Professor’s memoir, The Joy of Killing. I can’t help but smile.
After the success of my novel, the Professor undertook to write the story of the killing and the consequences from inside his head. The very personal memoir takes the reader right up to the moment of his execution. It did quite well posthumously and still has quite a following. People respect honesty in others, even if they don’t live it themselves.
Since the Professor was dead, I was frequently asked to read from and talk about the book. One campus presentation had drawn over one hundred students. When I was finished reading, there was utter silence, then muted but sustained applause.
I slipped the book from the briefcase. On the back cover is a split screen of the elegant, educated face of the author and a wooden electric chair with straps and a metal cap. That some people took the book literally was not the author’s fault. Even the title was criticized for being too provocative. The book was banned from the campus bookstore, suffered a feminist boycott, which only helped its sales.
The Professor understood that he had a choice in killing his wife, and he insisted that he had made the right choice. He was willing to accept the consequences of his action. He had gone happily to his death. He wrote that he looked forward to the experience, and you believed it. But still he wanted to stay conscious as long as possible, to live fully every last second of his dying. I wrote the afterward to the memoir, since I was one of the witnesses to the execution. His eyes slid open after the first jolt. He was saying something; I took it to be “Nothing really matters,” although no one else heard this. I wanted that to be the title of the book, but the publisher insisted on The Joy of Killing, since the Professor described in such compelling detail the deep satisfaction the severing of his wife’s spinal cord brought him. Page after page, and it was this that brought the most objections. You needn’t read it, I said. But they had to. I’d heard that people got sick before they could put it down.
THE BELL ON the Underwood bings loudly. It’s the first time I’ve heard the sound all night. I push the lever on the carriage and slide it back along the track, until it catches. I push a key that releases it, and it tears back along the track and bangs to a stop; the bell rings, more loudly this time it seems, as if objecting to the foolishness. I see that I’ve been writing about the girl on the train. I’m pleased, because I believe even more than before that the story of that night is my road to salvation. I’ve come some distance as it is. And I believe that the boy need not suffer from it. He can stay as he is, which right now is pretty happy with the way things are going. Whatever shadow hangs over him is unseen and unfelt, which is the way it should be.
I’VE LOCKED EYES with the girl in the mirror. Her head rocks with each push into her, but her eyes don’t leave me. Her hands are grasping the sink. My hands hold her hips, my thumbs imprinting brightly, and I want to look down at the sight, but I’m scared to leave her eyes, fearful that I might lose her if I do.
FOR ALL OF his physical dominance—he’s a good three inches taller than the girl—the boy understands he’s not in control, but it doesn’t bother him. In fact, I suspect he’s rather grateful. He’s beginning to trust the girl. As for her, she’s a mystery, isn’t she? She’s kind to the boy, as if she sees something to love in him, even knowing this night is the end of it. There is a slight air of urgency about her. She needs something from him. For a moment I’m distracted by the sounds of our coupling. It’s a powerful rhythm, and it seems disconnected from me. My thighs are shaking.
“Slowly,” she says.
In the midst of all the sensations, I feel a faint ache. I look away from the mirror. Lights are flashing by outside. We are next to a highway. People in cars going the same way could see us. She rocks her hips gently, and I hold perfectly still. It feels like she’s pulling me inside her, all of me. My hands float off her hips and lift her skirt up. I tilt my head back. Burning the image for all time in my brain. Even the red marks from my hands, which now fold the edge of her skirt up over her waist. I lower my head to see what I can see, but sweat creeps into my eyes and stings and blurs. I’m more outside than in, and I freeze on the edge of laughter.
The girl stops moving. “I can’t feel you,” she says.
I slip almost out, hesitate; I can barely make out the conjunction of our flesh. I hold for a long second, and bang in, thinking let’s see if you feel this. She lets out a sharp cry of pleasure and pushes back into me hard, and I get it then—who can take the most, inflict the most, hurt the most. I’m slicked all over and breathing hard. And so it goes. I slam into her, she cries out, then pushes hard back into me, at which point I must hold straight and solid as a post. And back and forth we go, until the rhythm is consuming, and the train rocks and click-clacks in time with us, and it seems like we could roll on like this through the night.
I wonder if in that moment some healing began. There was no thinking, or observing, no separation. The energy flowed back and forth between them, like a powerful, releasing balm. Finally, he lets go. Tears slide down his cheeks, land on her bottom.
BING! THE BELL goes. A half page has gone by. I nod my head. The kid was doing all right, for a beginner. He’s a natural. At least this night. I push the carriage to the right. I close my eyes, to play out the rest of the scene, my fingers skipping over the keys.
MY EYES SWING over to The Joy of Killing. Bright red letters on white. The Professor’s memoir was quite remarkably stitched together, a compellingly told story from inside the mind of a remorseless killer. Hard to believe he was an academic. In my novel, he had earned a second PhD in anthropology, and his study in this area greatly affected his philosophy. His initial area of focus had been the early crop civilizations in the Fertile Crescent, when man had learned to plant whea
t and rye, which meant that he could store them and take the winter off. It allowed him to settle down and not spend all of his time hunting for his next meal. He had time for art and music and community. He began painting and writing stories and composing music, which gave him memory and hope and capacities beyond simple survival. It also gave him time to develop a broader range of emotional strategies beyond reduction of fear and procreation. He began to possess a woman, rather than just breed her out of instinct. He had his own home, his own plot of land, and now he had the time and energy to fight to protect them. The freedom to act from pure instinct had been lost by this shift. Emotional strategies were woven into all behavior now; anger became the critical feeling, for it drove the various forms of violence, retaliation, and retribution. Theft. Assault. Murder. Rape. The primitive mind began evolving into a process of weaving instincts into emotional landscapes. It had to. If a neighbor began sleeping with your wife, you were more effective if you responded with anger; you would do a better job of making him pay in a way that would discourage him or anyone else from doing it again. Even better if you could make him feel guilty over what he did. If his wife and children shamed him for it. If he felt remorse over it. Instinct, while critical, was no longer the linchpin. And if you slept with his wife, you predicted—and here was the key element of the Professor’s doctoral thesis and subsequent scholarly efforts—you predicted that you would not feel bad for having done it; or rather, that the joy you felt while and after screwing her would far outweigh any negative feelings, such as guilt at having used the woman to get even with the man. Predicting correctly is the definition of wisdom.