The Joy of Killing (15 page)

It seldom helped to explain our theory of human motivation to critics: that people acted solely on their prediction of the emotional outcomes of their behavior. I would pick a simple, innocuous example. You're out for a walk on a hot summer day and you come to an ice cream stand with an inviting presentation of flavors. You appear to decide not to have a cone because of your diet. But the process is likely more complex and subtle than that as you
balance out the emotional consequences. If I eat an ice cream cone, I will have a good feeling at the time. However, in not too long I will crash from the sugar, and I will feel bad from having eaten an unhealthy thing, from having wasted the money, from consuming the calories. You weigh in your mind whether the enjoyment from eating the ice cream cone will in the end outweigh the crash and the guilt. Which isn't to say that you might not end up making an emotionally stupid decision; that while you know that the negative consequences will far outweigh the rush, you go for the short term and eat the ice cream anyway. Another factor in the equation: you learn from experience that if you don't buy the ice cream cone you will be entitled to the good feelings of self-control and self-righteousness. The key, of course, is learning to accurately predict the emotional consequences, and to act according to the prediction. The Professor believed, as did I, that this process, to whatever extent conscious or unconscious, was behind every decision human beings made. In his case, as I said, he correctly predicted that the joy he felt from murdering his wife would far outweigh the consequences he would suffer from the act. Conversely, he understood the terrible feelings that would afflict him if he did not take care of her. So, he ended up in balance. Call it what else you will. The students continued to insist, however, that their decisions were made strictly on a rational, conscious consideration of all the facts.

I push the book aside and think back to the boy and the girl in the vestibule on the train. He is still in a state of rigidity from the orgasm—except that his legs are weakening.

T
HE LAST OF
me has drained inside the girl. Her head is low and I can't see her eyes, but she seems to be shaking, too. I pull halfway out and plunge back in. She looks up at me, an almost desperate longing on her face. She reaches back and grabs my hand from her hip and places a finger between the lips of her pussy, moves it back and forth, and then drops her hand. I feel a little embarrassed, but the feel of the nub under my finger shoots juice into my brain and steadies me. I am the male, again. Her fate lay with me, the skill of my finger. I catch the reflection in the mirror. The scar on my thigh glistens. I rub the nub back and forth, slowly and lightly, until I feel her impatience, and then I bear down until it slips away. Then as fast and hard as I can, pausing every few seconds, until I can begin to feel a sound rising in her throat. I pinch the nub between my fingers.

S
EE HOW EASILY
I get lost in the narrative? The power of the scene overwhelms me so if I'm not careful I might stay in it and perhaps never resurface. The image of the last few moments, when I could see from her eyes that she was finally done, could keep me in thrall for a long time. I'm tempted to give in and let it be the final scene in my head—no one would ever know the difference—but then my life would have ended perhaps in a confabulation, certainly in confusion, and the feeling that accompanies clarity—at least the one I
predict
will accompany clarity—will have been forever lost to me. The feeling of not clinging to life is one of great freedom, beyond what I could ever have imagined, but it comes only with the understanding that your entire psyche is fair game. Reluctantly, I let the
girl's face in the mirror fade from my vision, knowing the next time I see her the explosion will have evaporated and the hard aftermath will be facing us; which, right now, I barely remember.

In the darkness, I wait. It seems there's a shadow in my mind. The projector has broken. Or the reel is empty. Ironic: how I longed for this during the course of my life, simple moments of darkness, where the present was unimpeded by images real or unreal of the past, and I could simply
be
. Not to say that it never happened, but other than times when I was on something or other it was pretty rare. Even in my sleep I seldom found peace. Seconds slip by. I think of times and places to generate a flash. I turn once again to the girl on the train, I try to taste her, smell her, touch her, but now she is dim at best, a faint hologram of an image. The detectives. My mother. David. Even the wretch Willie. Thoughts of them pass through my mind, unaccompanied by the images that will make me feel something and kick the narrative into flow. I haven't time for the numbness to wear off, have I? If I had a match, I would light it and hold it under a finger. If I had a knife, I would slice open a knuckle. My hand suddenly reaches for the briefcase; in the bottom is a zipper leading to a hidden compartment in which I sometimes kept pills and other times photographs, or recently, after the publication of
The Professor
and
The Joy of Killing
, a knife. A knife with a long thin blade meant to slice not cut, the very one I had seen in the drying rack on the kitchen counter this morning. Which means it's probably not in the briefcase. I jerk the briefcase up to my lap, open it, and tap along the bottom, where the zipper is hidden under a thin fold of leather. Something is in there. I open the fold with
one hand and pull the zipper down with the other. There is the black riveted handle. I touch it lightly, as if it is a sacred object. I pry open the leather flap further, to see the blade. What a beauty. I used it as a prop when describing the Professor's crime of murder. In front of the class I would hold the knife lightly, where it seemed no more than a feather, and balance it on one finger. It was sharp enough to shred paper.

The Professor confessed at the trial that the instance in the hammock wasn't the first time he had caught his wife and his neighbor cheating; about a week earlier, through a window in the next-door garage, he had seen his wife spread out like a doll on the workbench, her hands and ankles cleated to the wood, while the neighbor crouched on elbows and knees and hammered into her. At the trial, he introduced a video of them screwing on the dock of the pavilion on City Lake, under the moonlight, with a radio playing next to a half-empty bottle of wine. In between incidents, the Professor sharpened the knife and waited for what he felt would be the propitious moment, when all would have tilted in the direction of the end he predicted. Thus, he admitted he had planned it. There was no irresistible impulse. No heat of passion. He begged for nothing from the jury. He just wanted them to feel everything he had felt, leading up to, during, and after the murder, so they would understand the common sense nature of the act.

The Professor, with a shock of black hair graying at the temples, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, stood at the bar in a tweed jacket and slacks and spoke to the members of the jury in his genteel
manner, as if they were a class of his brightest students. You could see them gradually get it, and several of them, women, surprisingly, began nodding along, particularly when he got to the point in the theory about the ability of people to accurately predict which line of behavior would lead to which emotional consequences. For men, he explained, image is critical to how they feel about themselves; not image in so much as looks, but as in masculinity, meaning competitiveness. To be outwitted by a man in a business deal, or to lose his wife to the neighbor down the block, will leave him feeling like a loser in the eyes of the world, and in his own eyes, certainly a feeling to be avoided if at all possible.

Women, on the other hand, care little about winning or losing or how they appear in the eyes of the world; what matters to them is their internal feelings about themselves. Am I a decent human being? Am I a kind and caring person, sensitive to the needs of others? She will not confront the person who cuts in the movie line because she doesn't want to feel like a bully. Both men and women modify their behavior in ways to maximize the good feelings and minimize the bad ones.

It might be hard to accept, the Professor told the jurors, but there is no such thing as a truly unselfish act. The woman who volunteers ten hours a week at the Animal Rescue Foundation does so for the simple reason that it makes her feel like a good person. The man who coaches the boys' soccer team does so because it provides him the opportunity to obtain the feeling of winning. The philanthropist who donates millions of dollars a year to girls' education in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa does so because the magnitude
of the gift will demonstrate to one and all that he is indeed a male at the top of the heap, and that will provide the feeling he has sought for as long as he can remember.

So, you see me here before you today, the Professor told the jury, a man who acted according to his true nature. I do not ask for your forgiveness, nor do I ask for you leniency. I ask only for your understanding. I loved my wife. I miss her to this day. But had I allowed her to live I would have become a fraudulent human being, an unbearable fate to which no one should knowingly consign himself. The choice I made was the choice I had to make. I know you will make yours with the same integrity.

To everyone's surprise, the jury was out for two days before bringing in a guilty verdict.

I notice the typewriter has long since fallen silent. This meandering of the mind is wasteful, and this path was particularly non-productive. It's been five years since I quit the college, and I thought I had left most of this behind. I haven't spoken or written about
The Joy of Killing
or the Professor himself for several years. I don't disavow him, but I am not him. It was an exercise in philosophical and mental expansion, meant to test the limits of people's tolerance. That there might be some truth to it is really no longer the point. I've never lived according to the principles, and I don't regret it. The point now is to finish the night's work.

I
PICK UP
the knife, determined to put it away and get on with the story of the girl on the train. Along the top edge I notice a faint smear of what appears to be blood. I am startled. I don't remember
putting the knife in the case, yet I was sure I saw it in the dish holder this morning. It was clean then.

Could I have killed Willie? Absolutely not. Such an act would have stayed with me in vivid detail. I hadn't thought about the man for years until I read the article in the paper this morning.

I can smell the aftershave now as if I was in his room. He is sitting on the bed, with David next to him. Willie was trying to put on a pleasant face, but lust had contorted it.

I am still as stone in front of the table, fighting the realization that I had always been aware that this was what it was all about. How could you look at Willie and not know what he was up to? David glanced at me—and I see this for the first time now—smiled a small guilty smile. An admission of deceit, complicity. Willie's grubby little hand moved from David's thigh to his groin, dug in, tugged the zipper down, and disappeared. Willie's face clenched in pleasure as he grasped the prize, and his thin lips worked and moistened. I could not get up and leave. I had to watch. David's eyes were closed, whether in pleasure or disgust, I didn't know, but suddenly I wondered if David was the way Willie was and all this talk of girls was bullshit. Willie's mouth descended on David. An ugly sound emanated from the man. His head moved slowly up and down. I couldn't watch the rest of it. I stood and moved toward the door. I turned the lock and pulled it open. David glanced over at me.

A
CAR HORN
sounded from below. I jumped. The knife clattered to the floor. It sounded again. I rose and walked to the window at the back of the room, facing out over the drive and porch. It was
the caretaker's dark blue Dodge van. Had he come to confront me? Joseph was his only son. Sally, I gathered, had never married; he was an old man with no grandchildren. The look in his eyes earlier was speckled with pain, an old man's pain, perhaps, but still capable of fueling violence.

The driver's door on the van opened. Two feet swung out, hit the ground, and a figure straightened. It was not the caretaker. A woman. Tall and with coal black hair. After all this time, I recognized her. The confidence of her posture. The tilt of her head. Sally glanced up at the window. Her beauty was effervescent in the moonlight. She walked to the back of the van, opened the door, leaned in, and straightened up with a cardboard box in her arms. Without looking up again, she walked to the porch and set it down. She moved back to the car. I grabbed the handles on the window and pulled up. Jammed tight. I undid the lock on the top of the bottom window and jerked again, without success. I raised my hands to rap on the window, but she was getting in the car, and it was too late, and it shouldn't happen anyway. The world inside this room at the top of the house overlooking the lake contained my fate. I was sure the box sitting on the porch was meant for me. I watched the van pull out of the drive, under the clean light of the white moon, and disappear into the trees at the turn of the road. Sally had never left this town, or her brother, behind. She never would.

T
HE GIRL AND
I sat in the vestibule in the train car and stared out the window at the lights and passing towns. She was loosely in my arms. I breathed in her scent. I wasn't sure what to do or
say now. There seemed a kind of sadness about her. About us. As if the rough passion had sucked the spirit out of us, and now that the night was over we would drift slowly apart, like two canoes on a placid lake.

She turned to me. “Where did you grow up?”