Butterfly Skin (21 page)

After throwing the papers in the basket and rearranging the folders, Ksenia sits down on her chair again. In the bottom corner of the monitor the ICQ icon is blinking – someone once wittily dubbed it “a flower on the grave of the working day.” Ksenia clicks on the yellow rectangle and a message appears: “Hi!”

“Hi,” Ksenia answers and dives into the user’s details.

No first name or surname, just the nick “alien,” written in English – highly original – and the only information given is the sex – male. In the “About” section there’s a flashy text in English that looks like the introduction for some character in a computer game: “I’m a monster in your chest. I’m a really nasty one. And in a few hours, I’m gonna burst my way through your ribcage and you’re gonna die. Any questions?”

“Do we know each other?” asks Ksenia.

“No,” the other person replies, “but that can be fixed, can’t it?”

Ksenia sighs. From time to time bored men come knocking at her ICQ door, wanting either to flirt or just chat. As a rule it only takes a few lines of conversation before she consigns them to the eternal oblivion of “ignore.”

“I’m not sure I want to fix it,” she replies hostilely.

Ksenia wonders if this one will start writing flirtatious nonsense like: “Ah, why are you so grumpy, darling?”

“All right,” says the man, “let’s not introduce ourselves. Let’s just talk.”

“What about?”

“What should people who don’t know each other and are never going to see each other talk about? Their most intimate secrets, of course. So tell me, Ksenia, what is your most cherished secret desire?”

Ksenia looks at the Samsung liquid crystal display monitor, at the tube of metal mesh with two pens and three pencils standing in it, at the neat piles of folders and papers. Career, money, success? You could hardly call those desires secret, and in any case, they’re not even desires – they’re the inevitable future or, rather, a premonition of the future. For a second Ksenia’s thin hands hover motionless above the ergonomic keyboard.

“I’m an ordinary girl,” she types. “I want to find a man who will understand me and make me happy.”

I OFTEN THINK ABOUT WHY THIS HAPPENED TO ME
. There are many theories explaining why people lure solitary girls into their basements, torture them for days and then kill them.

Of course, there are simply the creeps who the girls won’t put out for, or who are afraid they won’t put out, vicious little boys ready to break a beautiful toy just because it doesn’t belong to them. I don’t think that’s really my case.

And they like to talk about homosexuals, victims of repressed sexuality who hate women or are afraid of them. These men obviously had problems with their mother and father, as well as with society in general, Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal Code, jokes about fags, a spacious closet with a tenth of the male population inside it. I don’t think that’s me either.

I would actually like to be gay, for some reason they find it easier to talk about pain and love in the same sentence. I once read a story in which two boys in love are standing with their eyes closed on the shore of the ocean and they suddenly hear the screams of a dolphin that has been cast up on the shore, and the local lads are amusing themselves by jabbing it with pitchforks. And it is clear to the reader that those screams have an absolutely direct connection to their love. If I could write a story like that, I wouldn’t need to kill.

And then there are the schizophrenics, God’s own fools, to whom He speaks, or the Devil does – some Sam, Beelzebub or Belial. In Russia I guess they could hear the voices of Stalin or Hitler. After all, even Chikatilo wrote that he felt he was a partisan. Anyway, they hear voices that order them to kill – and that’s definitely not about me.

I haven’t heard any voice, neither God nor the Devil have spoken to me, nobody has given me any messages. I am here completely alone. I think that if someone did speak, God or the Devil, no matter who, I wouldn’t feel so lonely and I wouldn’t need to kill.

I’ve read Stanislav Grof, the Czech psychologist, who cleared off to California at the right time and experimented with LSD and special breathing techniques. He believes there are four perinatal matrices that determine a person’s life via the process of birth. And the third matrix, the journey through the birth canal, is what engenders serial killers and sadists. I was so intrigued that I even asked my mother how it all happened, and whether that stage was the most difficult for me. I can’t be sure that she really does remember but, as far as she can recall, it was just an ordinary birth, nothing that surprised the doctors. So this isn’t my story either.

I have conscientiously read the American books, taking great care to buy them abroad and not attract the attention of the postal service or some department at
Amazon.com
that analyzes orders. They all say the same thing: repressed sexuality, child abuse, parental cruelty. To be quite honest, I’d only be happy if I knew my father raped me at the age of five in a drunken fit or my mother used to make me watch as she was screwed by the clients from whom she earned the money for a bottle of vodka or a shot of heroin. It would be a real stroke of luck if my brother had been eaten during the famine years, as Chikatilo’s brother was.

I even invented a past like this for myself, false memories masking goodness only knows what. Yes, as a boy I certainly had a rich imagination. I had many fantasies – but in reality I had a happy childhood. I would prefer it to be the other way round – that would mean I’ve simply been unlucky. Shit happens, as the Americans say. I’ve been unlucky, but the world’s just fine, I can leave the damned newspapers and their readers in peace, let them live as they like.

If I knew this was just my problem, I’d go to an analyst and I wouldn’t need to kill.

If I went to an analyst, I would ask him just one question: why do I always kill girls? Why no men or boys? If I killed boys I could say, like John Wayne Gacy, that they are all me. I would quote Denis Nilsen, who said: “I always killed myself, but it was always someone else that died.”

But I don’t kill men, I don’t touch people who are like me. I kill women and girls who are still very young. Why them? Yes, of course, I sleep with them, they arouse me. But what I want to receive – understanding, sympathy and forgiveness – I would receive from men too.

I don’t think my sexuality is all that seriously repressed. And in general, it seemed to me that sex really had nothing to do with the whole business. So one day I decided to hold an experiment.

I thought: I wonder, can I kill a woman

But feel no arousal as I do it

Not masturbate beside her body

Not make her take me in her mouth

Or give herself to me in various positions

Mostly uncomfortable and humiliating?

I thought I would choose a woman at random

One for whom I feel nothing

Kill her quickly and walk away from the scene

Of course then, when they find the body

It will not be as impressive as the installations

That I set up in the forests outside Moscow

To please the mushroom pickers and young mothers with their buggies

And couples seeking solitude

This killing won’t make people think about the cruelty of life

But maybe they will understand something about the suddenness of death

And that’s a pretty good result as well

I chose the office building where I used to work

I knew the side entrance, no ID needed there

And no security cameras inside, that was important

I walked up to the third floor, called the elevator

Not sure what I was counting on, but I was lucky

I’ve read that serial killers often are

Even Chikatilo was arrested twice and then released

But right now that is not the point.

The doors opened. There was a woman in the elevator

Aged about forty-five, not very beautiful

And wearing a cheap trouser suit

I guess she thought was business style

A bookkeeper or something of the kind

Her hair cut in a fussy style

And light in color, almost red.

Obviously dyed, with natural red hair the skin

Is never like her skin

Believe me. I should know

She aroused no feelings in me

Believe me, there were no vibrations

My penis lay curled up and sleeping soundly

The doors closed and I stepped behind her

And put one hand in my pocket,

To take the knife and cut her throat

It would only take two seconds

And I would get out on the next floor

Send the elevator with the body on up to the top

And then walk down the stairs to the side door

But as I took a tight grip on the handle

My penis suddenly turned hard inside my jeans

Hard as the Vendôme column or the Alexandria pillar

As if all the blood in the world had flowed into it at that moment

I let go of the knife. The experiment was over

And as she stepped out of the elevator

I saw a gray strand running through her hair

I guess they missed it at the hair salon

Or left it gray on purpose, I don’t know

But when I saw that scattering of ash

In that fussy light-red hairstyle

Suddenly I felt a great tenderness

And I thought that this woman

Had lived more than forty years, loved and been loved

Buried her loved ones and perhaps had children

Had wept and laughed – and now the ash was settling on her head

And in forty more years would overwhelm it

Like Pompeii or Herculaneum

When I thought about that I wanted to run after her

Beg her forgiveness for my worthless life

Hug her and press my lips against that strand of ash.

My penis was still standing hard

In my tight jeans, causing me pain

Distracting me from the tears pouring down my cheeks

For the first time my arousal had saved someone’s life

ON THE WAY FROM THE CLEAR PONDS SUBWAY TO THE
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie restaurant Ksenia notices a gap between the buildings, as if a tooth has been pulled out. There had been a restaurant in the basement there, she came here with her parents to celebrate Lyova’s wedding. Ksenia was fifteen and Lyova, correspondingly, twenty-one. Ksenia already knew the bride well by then: a tall girl with brown hair and a tendency to put on weight, and a large nose that stood out on her face like a foreign growth. She smoked Marlboro cigarettes, and wore baggy sweaters and tight jeans that looked absurd on her already voluminous backside. It was a mystery what Lyova saw in her, but one Sunday morning as she came into the kitchen, Ksenia saw Mom standing there stroking Lyova’s hair and repeating: “What else can you do?” Ksenia only got her hair stroked when something happened: when she cut her hand, sprained something or simply fell ill. In fact, when she fell ill, her forehead was touched rather than stroked – to see if she had a temperature. So Ksenia thought that Lyova had been expelled from college and she asked spitefully: “Thrown you out, have they?” She was fifteen, and the times when Lyova used to chase her all round the apartment, making her pretend she was Sarah Connor, were long past. “I’m getting married,” Lyova replied. “To Lyusya.” “Well, congratulations,” said Ksenia and turned round and ran to her room. For some reason she wanted to cry, but Ksenia never cried.

Later, when Lyova went to propose formally, Ksenia asked Mom: “Is she knocked up, then?” Mom nodded and Ksenia said “I see,” and went to phone Marina. She herself was so afraid of getting pregnant that she carried condoms around with her even then. You could never tell, maybe some rapist would suddenly attack her on the way home – she imagined herself running away from him across a dark courtyard, down some steps with used syringes crunching under her feet, through basements full of slapping water, gasping for breath like Sarah Connor and then, when there’s nowhere left to run, she stops, trying to calm her pounding heart, and says calmly: “Put this on.” Of course, Lyusya had got pregnant on purpose, Ksenia didn’t doubt that for a moment, but even so, as she lay there at night in the room that was empty without Lyova, she imagined the cells dividing inside Lyusya’s ungainly body, swelling up in the impenetrable darkness and turning into a baby. As Ksenia fell asleep, she felt as if the blanket pulled right up over her head was that womb, the womb in which there was a basement restaurant where they had celebrated Lyova’s wedding in a modest gathering of fifteen people.

That summer, while Ksenia was defending Marina’s honor and meeting Nikita, the newlyweds dragged out their honeymoon in the Crimea to a full three months, and when they came back the child that Lyusya was supposedly expecting had disappeared without trace. Ksenia never did ask Lyova straight out what had happened: was it a miscarriage, an abortion, or had there never been any child at all and Lyusya had simply lied? The child disappeared, then Lyusya disappeared, moving out of the apartment that the young couple rented without any great fuss and going back to her mother. Lyova said he would stay in the apartment for the two months that had already been paid for, but four months went by and Ksenia realized he was never going to come back home. A year later he went away to the States and when they parted he said “I’ll be back,” and winked at Ksenia as if to say: don’t be sad. But she had already worked through all her sadness two years earlier, when Lyova got married and Lyusya was pregnant with a child that later disappeared without trace, as if it had never existed – the same way the restaurant where they celebrated the wedding had disappeared now.

Olya loved The Discreet Charm… maybe because it was close to the salon where her hair was styled and she had her hands manicured twice a week. Two pairs of hands on one table: Olya’s soft, well-groomed hands, freshly anointed with creams and fragrant oils, and Ksenia’s little hands with bitten nails and one little silver ring. A small figurine stands between them, a ceramic or stone idol with square eyes and teeth that take up half its face.