Everyday Psychokillers (15 page)

“I don't want her to miss school,” said her mother.

“I don't think you understand,” said Marty.

“I don't want to argue about this,” said her mother.

“You're being ridiculous and I don't think you have your daughter's best interests in mind,” said Marty. “I mean I think you're really not realizing that this would be the right thing for her to do tomorrow. I'm going to show her all the rescued animals. You know we've talked about it, and she really wants me to bring her to see the rescued animals.”

“No,” said her mother.

“You are unreasonable,” said Marty, his voice rising.

The blond girl's mother watched her hand move quicker than she'd be able to move it if she was thinking, and she watched it come down on the plastic see-through buttons in the phone's cradle. She sat in bed with her other hand still resting on the telephone receiver, letting it hang on her shoulder. Her husband said, “Who the fuck was that?” but she couldn't think about it, and she couldn't think about it, and she couldn't think about it.

Here's something that always confused me about Pandora's box: Pandora can't help herself, curiosity overcomes her, she can't obey orders and so she lies or whatever and she opens the box. Out fly all the terrible things, like sorrow and war, anger and meanness, gangrene and deep unscratchable needs. She is stunned and shocked and can't get ahold of herself, watching these dark live ghosts scatter into the world, becoming particles within the air. When she snaps out of it, finally, and slams down the lid of the box, the only thing left is Hope. This is how the story was taught to me, during the Mythology Unit. My teacher said, So thank goodness she closed the lid, so that Hope is left and we still have Hope with all these evils in the world. Trouble is, my teacher was an idiot, because look, it's right there in
Pandora:
evil is loose in the world and hope is not, it's shut in a box. Precisely the moment Pandora thinks she might have come to her senses, she's created the most damage of all.

I thought of the snakes in the box and the snakes in the water where Scott was still swimming. It was so close to dark that I couldn't tell when he was underwater and when he was not. I could hear little splashes, but they could have been Scott or they could have been any number of animals. If I forgot I was looking into darkness over a pond, it could have been something splashing into water as easily as out. It could have been the sounds of twigs snapping. The way a hushing air sound could be wind or breath, any small disturbance can sound the same. It could be dark out or you could have your eyes closed, same difference.

At some point in my reading, I realized, with enormous reluctance, that Hiawatha was supposed to be a boy, and not a girl. With his name like Samantha, or Cynthia, names I liked to name my dolls. With long black hair, running through the woods. It took a long time, but I settled, finally, on imagining something half, both, or neither, something androgynous, hermaphroditic, or even sexless, but more likely I settled on trying not to worry about it. I let the book call him “him,” although I knew the truth.

I watched him run, caught up with how quickly he moved, how the forest was unchanged as he moved through it, how he could run through a field of purple flowers and none broke and none bent. Something felt odd, though, watching him, and then I knew: silence! Hiawatha ran silently, the way a barn owl with giant white wings has silent flight. It makes you dizzy to see a barn owl. It's flapping, but there's no sound. It feels like when you're in a car and the car next to you moves forward a little and it feels like you're going backward, even though you know you're not. That's what it feels like to watch a silent-flight bird flap. It's incongruous, but true. Hiawatha running: no snapping sticks and no whipping branches, no hot hard breath, no beating heart. He's not moving like the wind, because the wind howls. He's not moving like a fish because a fish will flop and gurgle. He's moving like a mere image, like a ghost, like animation.

I watched Scott that way, in the complete silence and the darkness that comes only in the imagination. I watched the darkness, and I knew that in the darkness was the enormous tree, and that the enormous tree was like a ship or like a brontosaurus by the shore of the pond, and that within the darkness, under the water, Scott swam in the dangerous water, silently, as if it was not dangerous. Somewhere in the pastures behind the pond my mother rode someone's horse. My father was somewhere in Miami. Marty was leading the blond girl among cages of exotic animals. Distance through darkness, through history, through the unintelligibility of multitudinous likenesses and insufficient sight. I watched Scott like he was my false Hiawatha, because someone gave me Hiawatha warped, and I had to make everything up from there.

Remember how Cassandra sat so still and quietly in the seething locker room filled with angry girls and their clothing. Remember how hard Mrs. Brodie had to shove through the masses of girls around that iron post, and how, once the girl was carried off in a coma, that was all we knew.

I don't remember why Hiawatha was running. He could be hunting. White men could be chasing him. And since I was sure he was a girl, white men could be chasing her. But Hiawatha wasn't panicked. She was running as if she was running for plain pleasure. She could be running into the woods toward something beautiful that might be there in the center of an uninhabited and unmapped place.

The real end of the story about Scott is that after a while my mother got a different job and the next year at school Scott wasn't there, and when I asked around no one knew where he was. Someone said his mother switched him to the next district over. I looked in the phone book, and I remember looking at the lists and lists of names, how everyone seemed equally invisible. I called some high schools, but no one had his name and after that there was nothing to do. He was gone and that was it.

 

 

I have this idea that for some forgotten period of time when I was a little, little kid, running around not knowing the name of anything, life was a mystery. Days felt like ages, and so much happened in each one that I couldn't possibly remember. And I didn't really know I was supposed to remember, that I was meant to organize my experiences, to keep track of them and add them up, that they were supposed to be meaningful at the end of the day. I have this idea that before I knew to differentiate one thing from the next I lived a kind of freedom. It's sort of ignorance-is-bliss, the state I'm describing, but only in retrospect, only with the kind of hindsight that creates foresight. If you know very much at all, everything gets really scary.

Let me make this plain, or as plain as it is to me: one thing about psychokillers is that they've always been around, and the way we know it is that they're so fastidiously depicted. The depictions feed off the people, and the people feed on the depictions. Every person is a depiction as soon as she imagines.

So, for instance, you've heard about how there's a kind of psychokiller who organizes and strategizes his destructions, the way an artist organizes and strategizes. Plots and plans and dry runs. Scripts and rehearsals for this guy. Then the psychokiller kills and makes a big old mess.

I mean it's really hard to kill someone. Look at that Hitchcock flick where they strangle that guy. It's exhausting.

How satisfying, after all that work, the awful mess.

This guy's like a kid with dominoes, who sets the whole thing up, domino after domino into a pleasing shape. If he's one kind of psychokiller, he'll tentatively touch the first piece and watch the journey unfold with distant glee. If he's another kind of psychokiller he sees the thing all laid out, how simultaneously silly and ambitious it is, and sweeps his arms across the whole map, sends the dotted blocks spinning.

But what I'm thinking of here is how there's another psychokiller, who doesn't bother setting any dominoes. He has no pretenses—it's obvious so much is built already and
not for him
. Sometimes, he comes across a coil of dominoes and thinks “Those fucking idiots, don't they know I could just knock that down?”

All I mean is, I emerged from that time when I lived without judgment, and then I witnessed an order that was not mine.

The True History of Black Caesar, the Runaway Slave Who Became a Pirate

They taught a lot of regional history in school, but I missed it all because I came late and left early. So I don't know how they taught the part about pirates, but sometime after I left the area I heard from somewhere about this Monsieur, a fancy French planter who lived in Haiti and owned a bunch of slaves who cleared the land and raked it into place and planted it with, primarily, crops useful for selling. From the highest window of his great house, and filled with the pride of a great conqueror, Monsieur liked to survey the growing civilization that billowed like an embroidered sheet below him: the efficient fields of sugar and occasional pineapples, plants as sweet as little ladies, some lithe and some plump, and wherever those fields petered into the jungle, his slaves were already working, two by two, with long two-handled saws, clearing the mahogany and stacking the logs in tidy pyramids. Monsieur did this daily, gazed from his high window, as a kind of observance of God, or of Nature, or perhaps even he knew it—an observance of self, and each day the sight filled him with such hope that his mind felt filled with ideas that bustled like bees in the hive of his head. He had to wait it out, let the bees jostle themselves into place, let some bees flit out his ears and away until one bee was left, and this was the bee that'd be his bee for the day. “Next we shall plant tobacco!” or “Next we'll import a service of china!” Those sorts of bees.

One day, his lofty gaze fell on a particular scampering African boy, and instantly he found himself taken. He shook his head and all the bees but that one fled.

“That boy has a cleverness of stride. An intellect shines in his form,” he thought, and ordered the boy brought from the fields to the great house for duties more dignified than hacking at this and that plant and this or that patch of earth.

The boy was called Henri. Little Henri, they called him at the house. They let his job be carrying bath water and working the punkah, which is the name for that wood and cloth stretcher thing on ropes that fans great halls. The house slaves petted his head and said, “I know you miss your Mama,” and sometimes a ruffled lady might look at him with kindness, or let him peek at a colorful piece of needlework, or tell him, “The Monsieur thinks you are special.” Henri paid close attention to the wealthy people and he thought he'd like wealth, too. He paid enough attention that he learned a lot about language and the manners of wealthy people. He noticed how they layered themselves in clothing, particularly the women, and how unnecessarily complicated they made the fastenings of their corsets and gowns.

Monsieur meanwhile flitted from one to another idea, and when he next laid eyes on Henri it was years later and I suspect he noticed the boy only because he wondered what one so ugly was doing in the house. This boy no longer even looked like a boy. He was more like a giant, barrel-chested and clumsy, with a long face and sagging eyes. This one had no depth perception to speak of and routinely walked too close to doorjambs while carrying trays of teacups. He was frightening the women. He filled hallways and knocked his head into candelabras.

One day Monsieur joined several ladies for tea and parlor games and Henri committed some breaking, spilling, knocking of something. Monsieur said, “Who let this monster in the house? Out with you and to the chopping of mahogany!”

“But Monsieur,” said a particular plump lady, who was brave enough not to fear Henri's garish face and bullish body, who, in fact, rather appreciated the humorous aspect of a big scary man entrusted with such dainty chores as delivering triangular pastries. In fact this lady felt a rounded affection for Henri, because she could see he was utterly innocent to the fear he invoked. He seemed to her as sweet as a bucket of new milk from a cow, maybe dopey, growing too fast as young men will do, struggling to find their minds within their bodies. “Monsieur,” said the lady, “this is the boy you once liked so particularly. He's grown.”

In that moment, time sprung for Monsieur. He remembered noticing the boy, those years ago, and it was a kind of folded feeling, because he knew he hadn't thought of the boy once between that first recognition from his high window and this current moment. He sat on the edge of his brocade parlor chair, with his hands on the arms, as if about to rise, and you could see him tilt his head with thoughtful intensity, like that dog with the Victrola who hears his master's voice. In Monsieur's mind, a line of soldiers that went over the hills and into the distance snapped into a new formation, into a line like a firing squad, right there in front of him. Time swung in one massive perspective shift, from z axis to y. Monsieur felt sad, and he wept quietly at the tragedy of a quick boy becoming so ugly. It made him sad to think how one could be born destined to be a brute, doomed to brutality, so to speak. It seems like only yesterday, he thought.

Then Monsieur sent Henri back outside, where he was given a two-handled saw and set to dismantling the jungle.

Imagine Henri, dismantling the jungle. Once there was an octopus, trained for a circus to do tricks for food. When the circus collapsed, the octopus was kept in a tank in a room stacked with other animals. Someone came to feed him, but no one paid attention to his tricks. The octopus grew pale, chromatophores blinking ever slower and expiring, swimming the patterns and turning his tentacles in the shapes that once earned him shrimp. Time moved, and one day the octopus performed his routine, waited, slumped, and then stabbed himself to death with his beak. Henri did not kill himself, but this is what time can do when it collapses, blink in the dusk and you're nothing you knew yourself to be before. Henri's eviction shocked him, stunted him, stopped his mind from moving because suddenly he was not who he'd been told he was, who he felt he'd known himself to be.