Everyday Psychokillers (25 page)

All of this in an effort, of course, to understand him, so he can be identified, captured, and put away forever, or electrocuted or what have you, or shot by a mob that swarms, like zombies, with pitchforks and wagging fingers as he's being led from the courthouse in shackles, or strapped to a table and linked by plastic tubes to a machine and then pumped with no less than three deadly substances while staring at his own face in the one-way mirror that separates him from his anonymous executioner—

It's something about the act of description, about coming to
terms
that makes it so when I describe a psychokiller I feel I could be describing anyone. Choose your weapon, choose your terms. Termination, you know. I mean, I do, too. I want to live through atrocity. A psychokiller wants to be the one left to tell the tale, the witness who knows what really happened, who knows the truth. This is a disconcertingly not-quite-incomprehensible stance in a world where the other choice seems to be invisibility, to be dead to the world, so to speak.

The psychokiller sucks on his lifesaver and listens to his stomach gurgle as the children in his row each take a piece of white paper and pass the rest along. On the bulletin boards that surround him, enormous cutout letters float along in wobbly lines, spelling things in color. A blue O from one word is over a yellow N and a yellow E from another. He separates his piece of paper from the one it came with, like he's pulling a sticker from its backing, and he hands the bottom piece to Jessica, the red-haired girl who sits next to him. Jessica examines the sheet on her desk and brushes it off, as if it's accumulated dust in its few moments wafting away from its stack. There's a fingerprint on her blank piece of paper that she can see if she looks very closely. It's made out of faint cherry candy. “You messed up my paper,” she says.

The teacher gets two volunteers and hands each a cracker-tin filled with crayons. The two volunteers hand out crayons, three for each kid. “Only three,” she says. “No more, no less,” and she begins writing on the board.

“What if it's broken,” says one of the volunteers.

“Three pieces, then,” says the teacher. The sleeve of her blouse is powdered with a smear of chalk. “Three colors. Everyone gets three colors.”

The children begin requesting colors. They all know exactly which colors they want, but then they change their minds. The volunteers are frustrated, but the teacher decides to let it get noisy for a bit so she can write on the board. The psychokiller decides he won't be picky, he'll be mature and just take what he gets. He does, he takes what he gets, but not even the volunteer seems to notice, much less be impressed. All three of his colors are broken. And two of his colors are green, which doesn't seem fair.

The assignment is as follows: Choose a sentence from the board, and draw a picture of it.

There are ten sentences. One of the sentences is “He's walking on eggs.” Another sentence is “She's running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

It's a lesson about figurative and literal, although the teacher doesn't use those terms.

As soon as the children resign themselves to their crayons, it becomes clear that some of the kids have never heard “He's walking on eggs.” The teacher has to explain. It means he's nervous. A lot of kids think that's really funny, so they pick that sentence. They draw piled-up circles along the bottom of the page, which look like a stone wall. They draw a guy on top. They try to make his face look nervous, but they mess up. Jessica, the red-haired girl, messes up the expression on her guy's face, trying to make him look nervous, and in frustration she fills the face in with black crayon, which she'd been using for outlines.

“I need a new piece of paper,” she says, with her hand up. “I really really need a new piece of paper.” The teacher will not give her a new piece of paper. She comes over and says the drawing is beautiful. She says, “Maybe the man is walking away.”

The girl hates, hates, hates that idea. The guy's wearing a tie, for one thing, and she thinks the tie came out best. She is not going to cover up the tie. She looks at the picture for a long time, and draws some cracks in the eggs. Then she decides it's a black guy, and that's why his face is black. A black guy, walking on eggs.

Most of the kids really like the assignment. They're laughing and laughing.

You are my sunshine looks like a person piercing a yellow ball.

You blow my mind was really hard, and two kids next to each other both picked it. One kid shows a cloud with a face, blowing on a person's head, which sits by itself on a row of grass. The other kid actually draws a mound of mazelike coils, which are meant to look like a brain. He floats the brain over a bundle of red dynamite, with sparkling fuses.

You're getting under my skin is a very lumpy person. You turkey is just a picture of a turkey, made from the tracing of a hand. You animal turns out to be a kitten, made by starting with an upside-down heart for the nose.

The psychokiller is both the best and worst at this assignment. The thing is, he's a literalist. Most people hear “I want to fuck your brains out” and hear only the metaphor, with its dangerous tone. The imaginative stretch is from figurative
toward
literal, and not confusing the two relies on the desire of one person to know what the other one
means
. You could never tell by looking at him, and at this age at least the psychokiller has little or no idea himself, but the truth is he's
cut off
. He can't imagine what you want, what you mean. It never occurs to him. Literal is all that's left.

When the psychokiller is sitting in school, sticky with red candy, trying to get his pencil to quit rolling down the desk, he's surrounded. You're stuck with me. I get a kick out of you. The air buzzes with these notions, these ideas, these instructions. The more he lives with the ideas, the more it feels like psychokilling is merely a matter of following directions.

As a toddler, his favorite toy was the horse with its head on a stick. As he gets older, as puberty starts knocking around and he starts dreaming of cars, it must feel like language gives him permission. He would never put it that way, he would never say, “The language made me do it.” He'd say porn did, or his mother, or the devil. His ideas are the simplest most normal ideas there could be. I want to fuck your brains out. He simply has no imagination.

When another human is orifice only, when she's this thing you can enter, a vessel, a thing you get inside so you can travel around, so you can move through the world, hacking through her as you'd have to bushwhack through a jungle, natural as she is—

When he actually fucks the girl's brains out, when he separates her head from her body, her body from her intelligence, from her imagination, when he makes this new orifice,
two
new holes in fact with one fell swoop, these new dartboards with their infinite bullseyes eye to eye, when he fucks her mind behind her back, and then rearranges the pieces so she has to watch.him fuck her body and then fuck the absence of her face—

It seems very imaginative. Creative, you know. Original. I mean, who'd think of that?

In fact it's so original it's as old as time, as old as recorded history, as recordmaking, as language, as communicable ideas.

Between Then and Now

Time, as they say, went by. Let me try to give a sense of how it passed, across the map, this scraggly hand-drawn version of so much life lived, so much out of the frame of hindsight, contained as hindsight is by the shape I'm in.

I'm seeing it laid out on a floating plain, a floating square in space, as on a computer screen, lifted between then and now. I could fold it up and slip it in my flat back pocket. I could pass it like a note. I could tear it into pea-sized pieces and eat it like a secret code, a mission impossible. If you open an old book and find flowers pressed there, the map is like that, because once the flowers were round and ripe, and now they're like slices of themselves, translucent and seeping into the lines of print. The map is like sheet music, making the invisible a kind of visible. You know how in cartoons singing animals spit out actual notes.

The map is like wallpaper, It could go on and on, but at some point it stops, just because, and after a while you get the idea. In physics they say a person is actually an energy pattern, a cohesive wave. There are patterns in time, especially in time remembered, time mapped.

For one thing, we moved. There's this series of contained times when we sorted all our stuff, sold a lot, gave a lot away, and packed some of it into boxes, and packed those boxes into the pick-up truck we bought after the Rabbit's engine block cracked. Someone gets another job or needs one, so you move. The times are very intense while they're happening, these moves. They're transitions. You think very hard about what's important, what to keep and what to leave. You work very hard, sweating and pulling muscles. You get in arguments with yourself and your landlord and your boss and your family. It's between time, like time spent in airports. It's dense time, but once it's done you basically forget it until you're moving again and then you remember all those other moves, as if they've come running in from the fields and lined up for a head count. You stand in your empty apartment with your key, getting ready to lock yourself out.

Every couple years we moved. Me and my mother and my father, and then me and my mother, and then me, I moved. My parents each went ahead and fully disappeared along the way. Accidents took them, and other loves, natural causes, and other interests. They're out of the picture, so to speak, they're good as dead. They lied, they were misinformed, confused, overworked and underpaid, or underworked and undernourished. They don't know what they're talking about. They didn't mean it. They couldn't help themselves. It was too much. Someone said they could provide safety, and they believed it, but they were wrong. It's okay. I talk to them sometimes.

It's hard. I'm trying to decide what to mention, what to keep.

At one point I lived in a city. Not Miami. This was on my own, with apartment buildings, public transportation, museums, a theater district. A northern city, with four distinct seasons marked by weather, year after year.

I know there was more to it, but that's what it was to me, as I see it now.

Upstairs from me, in an apartment much nicer than mine, lived Ann. Plainest name I know. A dancer, gregarious, making up for her name, in a way. She had money from her parents whom I suspect named her as a kind of understatement, like they wanted to resist pretense. Ann carried a tourniquet in her bag so that almost anywhere we were she could tie her ankle or her wrist to a piece of furniture or a radiator and exercise.

We met at the narrow brass mailboxes in our building's foyer. I liked that place a lot. It was inside, but not heated or air-conditioned or anything. I liked the between-ness of the place. I liked the warping tile mosaic on the floor, the simple symmetrical design, worn by time. I tended to loiter there, after one door and before another, peeking through the slim glass peek-holes in the brass mailboxes to see how many slots held something. I liked to open my little box with its little key, to feel the low-slung motion of it, mail or no mail. The long and narrow, thick-walled and dark corridor. A coffin with a back door, a light at the end of the tunnel. A dark port for envelopes traveling in from anywhere. A miniature of the building itself, that little box that represented me, my apartment, in that row of boxes that represented all the other apartments in the building, the grid of boxes that represented the building itself. The grid of the city, my hole in the wall amid it. The rhythm of the door swinging open and the good thud it made when I swung it back shut. What a good solid object.

I met Ann there, little energy pattern. We went through our mail. We went out. She let me in on being harrowed by her moneyed family, something I never imagined before.

She could do all kinds of things with her body. She thought about her body all the time. Her body was her temple, she liked to say, the irony in her voice just for show because she really meant it. At one point I fell in love with a friend of hers, which made her feel uncomfortable, I think, so I didn't see her much anymore. But before that, I remember she liked to say, Here's what I discovered I can do today. See how my arm can do this? And that? I know it's like what I showed you before, but see how it's different? I could see. It was basically the same thing, but somehow entirely different. The feeling behind it, the way she felt this time versus last.

Also Bertha. What a terrible name, tragic. It instructs. It says give her a wide girth and a wide berth from birth. Bertha kept six parrots in cages, two by two in her bay window. What else could she do? Her frazzled hair, her bated breath. She kept two of those white ones with headdress feathers that rose and flattened with their emotions—cockatoos. Also two little blue-and-green parakeets, and two hefty macaws, dense with color, with stubby black beaks and black rigid tongues.

I got to know her before I saw her apartment, before I knew she had birds in there. We got to chatting at a bookstore, and when, a few weeks later, I went home with her, her birds surprised me, especially the way she talked to them, how she changed her voice, how she pushed her voice around. She talked higher to the parakeets, in falsetto, her version of twitter, and in a more growly kind of singsong voice for the macaws. It was creepy. I said, “Bertha, you're parroting your parrots.” She said, “I only wish I could be so pure. But it's not that simple. They're all such individuals. I want more of them, more and more.”

She wore layered gauzy dresses and long strings of beads. She wrote awful, heavily punctuated poetry. She flew out of town for conventions sometimes, to see birds, to talk birds with people.

Bertha called herself a survivor. She was raped in high school. That's about all she told me, which is fine. I mean I can imagine. But what she did say, and she's not alone in this line of thinking, is that if she hadn't gone through what she went through she wouldn't be the strong woman she is today.