The Joy of Killing (16 page)

“In a small town in Iowa. You?”

“Chicago, North Shore.”

Her eyes were misty. “What was it like growing up in your house?”

I had to think for a second. “Not much fun.”

“Why?”

“Everyone's waiting for the next explosion, from my mother.”

“Your father, too?”

“He went along with the show. The path of least resistance.”

Like me, I should have added. I went along with things, too. For all the trouble I've been in, it was never my idea.

I didn't tell her this. I don't think I even knew it myself back then. Christmas, my childhood, wasn't that bad. I don't want to overplay it, suggest by sleight of hand that that's why I've lead such a disjointed life and ended up here, alone, in my little refuge. I did what I wanted, and didn't do what I didn't want. In the face of my mother's tirades, I went numb. I never took anything as absolutely what it seemed. In the train car that evening, having just had my first sexual experience, with a girl way out of my league, even then I wasn't that sure of the reality of it all; even then it felt like I was beginning to make parts of it up, fill in the space and glaze over the dull parts. I looked at the girl's forehead and realized that it wasn't
blood on the skin, but lipstick from the mirror. She had run into her own word. What else had I painted into the scene over the years?

“It doesn't matter?” I said.

“What doesn't?” she asked.

“Your forehead,” I said. “The red lipstick.”

She sat up and glanced in the mirror. She laughed.

“It was my first time,” I said before I could stop myself. I looked at her. “First time all the way.”

She leaned in, kissed me lightly on the lips. She lay her head on my shoulder, touched my neck. “I like you,” she said.

I
CLOSE MY
eyes to recreate the scene. It was almost as exciting as the sex. She loved what she saw, and she saw more than either of us admitted. Somehow she understood, I could feel it, and the sensation was so strong it scared me.

I
TURN THE
light off and stand slowly. When my eyes adjust to the dark, I step to the window. I see that the moon has floated just beyond the center of the night sky and is now so dominant it eclipses the stars and planets. The limbs and leaves of the great oaks have fallen invisible. The lake beneath the moon reflects the light back into the sky, accentuating its power. I can feel the pull of the orb in my blood. I am strong. My sight is extremely sharp; I can make out the ripples in the middle of the lake. I can hear the waves wash over the rocks below. The night is now half over, and it's mine, I see that now. It belongs to me. Everything lay before me like a kingdom before a king. In this light there are no shadows,
no place to hide. Everything will be revealed. I will fly into the night free and feel nothing more than the cool air on my brow. This feeling of freedom is the one I believed would befall me when I approached understanding of the lines of my life. The clouds are clearing, the water is calming, the blood is flowing smoothly and cleanly through my veins, enlivening my organs, for the final vision. How it turned out, I no longer cared. The girl, I thought, her true beauty lay in her understanding, in her sight. Feeling that now, at this moment, in the power of the moon, has brought me here, as I predicted, without knowing quite how.

An image of the knife slips unbidden from the shadow of the moon. The absolute glory of the moment is gone, and I am slightly pissed over it, but wisely I let the feeling go, and a gradual sensation of calm falls over me as I let the moonlight wrap me in its silvery embrace. I breathe even more deeply until I can feel the squeeze of the heart pulse the blood through my groin. With a finger I wipe the lipstick from the girl's forehead and make a cross with it on mine. She laughs and touches my cheek, and the last of my resistance gives way.

Thunk! I jump back, startled. Something smashed into the window. Dropped to the windowsill. There is a faint stain on the glass. I lift the latch and push open the window. The night air is sharp and powerful. My hands and arms are so white in the moonlight I can see the blue veins, the magic disc so bright I can barely look into it. A dark form lays crumpled on the ledge below the window. Little black eyes stare blindly at the moon. A wing flutters in despair. I remember that bats flew in packs of thousands; this one must
have lost his way, confused by the brightness of the light. I poke its wing gently. Its tiny furry body heaves jerkily. Still alive, I think. Just stunned. I lean over and lift the wing and stretch it out to full span. The tiny black struts arch in response. The skin is translucent; through it I can see blurry moonlight. The wing, half a foot at least, twitches from my finger and folds back in. The mouth pops open to reveal two fangs. Beyond myth, I know, there is such a thing as bloodsucking bats that feed on people and animals. I look closer: two smaller teeth arc up from the bottom to intersect nicely with the top ones. The glassy eyes don't blink, but I swear they move slightly in my direction. I pull my hand back, and the tiny mouth clenches. I am tempted to brush him from the ledge, to see if it would bring him around and he could gain flight. I want to see him fly off and sweep across the face of the moon with his cohorts, taking with him my touch on his wings. The thought makes me shiver. I close the window quietly and turn away.

WILLIE OR THE UNDERWOOD

F
OR A MOMENT
I'm caught in the irony: all the blood in this story—on my hand, jeans, the paper, the cat whiskers, not to mention Shelley Duvall—and I spotted not a drop on the fangs of the bat. I need to calm down and get back to work, back to the girl on the train. Always the girl on the train. I settle into the chair. The metal space bar on the Underwood, I notice for the first time, is severely worn in the middle. Various thumbs must have tapped it millions of times to cause the crease. I tap it with my left thumb, then my right. I accept the Professor's principle of human motivation: your choice always anticipates an emotional payoff. In small things—you pour your vodka over ice because you believe that chilled vodka will be more pleasing than straight vodka; and big things—you choose to marry a particular woman not because you love her but because the feeling of someone else having her is intolerable. A man debates whether to go to a funeral of a brother he didn't care for, and he asks: How bad will I feel if I don't go? I would estimate—and this is the subject of my never-to-be-finished paper, the one scattered about on my living room floor, that at least 80 percent of all human behavior is aimed at
avoiding
feelings; the main ones being guilt, shame, or regret. No one wants to feel bad about what they did with their life, so they do what they think they need to do to avoid that feeling at the end. Almost always unsuccessfully, I might add. Very few people feel good about their lives at the end, if they feel anything at all. The Professor was one of them. I will be one, once I come through the fog of this story. And that's all I want: a decent feeling at the end. Over the years I've thought about the girl and that night on the train because it brings
me pleasure, more pleasure than most of my relationships, in fact. There was no dishonesty, and she saw the truth, whether she could articulate it or not, and it's that truth I would have her share with me. There is no other source of it; Joseph is dead; Willie is dead; my first wife is dead. The Professor is dead. I hear a flutter of wings. I step to the window, just in time to see the bat arch his wings and swoop down from the ledge. He rises above the treetops, into the sky, the white light of the moon. He streaks across the face of it.

The stars have receded into tiny specks. This means that time is growing short; in not too long, the fading of the black around the edges will toll the hour. I dare not rush the story, but I must focus on moving through the thin shrouds of memory or else the opportunity will be lost. I relax and take a deep breath.

I remember bumping my shoulder on the corner of Willie's dresser as I left the room. I glanced back a final time as I closed the door, and I saw the sight that is so clear in my mind now. Willie's glasses have fallen off and lay on the floor next to his shoes. His thin hair, slicked back, is curled on his collar. David's hand is resting easily on his shoulder. I pulled the door shut behind me. Outside the window at the end of the hall, I can see children playing in the yard. The walls in the hallway are greasy, the carpet thin and torn. I jammed my hands in my pocket and bolted for the stairways. As I turned on the step, the door to the first apartment opened open a crack, and I saw the face of the old lady who had been watching us from the window earlier. Her door closed soundlessly. I was dizzy when I finally hit the front door. I leaned into the fresh air. The children were screaming now.

As the boy steps onto the sidewalk, I notice a look of confusion on his face. The scene must still be in his head, like a painting on a rock wall. Yet I've never seen it before. Only vague recollections of the apartment building, the playground, even the hallway. The image must have disintegrated slowly, into bits and pieces, slivers. I could see how it would fuck him up some, being made a fool of like that. He hadn't done anything except watch, and leave, and yet I can see that he feels dirty himself. Is this where it started, I think? The learning of the ability to disintegrate stories into images and images into bits and pieces, molecules, even, protons, which barely recognize each other, and which float unmolested and free form in the subcutaneous consciousness. Some forever unseen; others to collide in new and vibrant images, which may or may not have the slightest to do with the original event. It's a way of being, and one of which I think the Professor would approve, for it is essentially honest. There is nothing to measure your self against, because your self doesn't really exist as a thing. You can't argue the truth of anything to anybody; you can't in good conscience pass judgment on anyone, even yourself. If you live it through and through, if you don't strive for some objective picture of life, you will accept the existence of all things as emanations of nature.
You won't struggle
. Obviously I never got there, or I wouldn't be here, at my desk, knocking out letters on the keys of an ancient Underwood and thinking of the night I spent with the girl on the train. And yet I don't think of my childhood as particularly disjointed. Alone, yes, but not miserable. The observer, the thinker, the describer—who even then understood as some sort of cognitive birthright that
nothing really mattered, not in the slightest, and could sense the freedom such an understanding could bring if he could accept it with every breath. He got into trouble, yes, as I've mentioned, but not because he was angry or rebellious, but mainly because down deep he didn't care. He went along with the others and shoplifted and broke school windows and skipped class and swiped his grandmother's car. Because it was something to do and all the same to him. The meetings in the principal's office, the sessions down at the Booneville Police Department, the threats from juvenile probation officers registered, but didn't hold his mind in place. He was unto himself, it seems. So, the way I see it now, he had barely retrieved his bike from behind the drugstore and swung over the bar for the ride home when the disintegration of the scene in Willie's room began.

Somewhere growing up the boy came to understand the void you would be left in if you truly lived according to this principle. You would, for all intents and purposes, be alone. Which really shouldn't matter, but the truth was he didn't like the feeling of being all alone. So, in accordance with the Professor's theory of motivation (he didn't see it this way at the time, of course) he learned to behave in a way that would alleviate, if not avoid, this feeling of aloneness. It worked, to some extent. He kept his views to himself. He became deft at acting as if one thing or another mattered, whether some new film was a director's greatest yet, what grade he got in geology class, if Rocky Marciano was going to retain the World Heavyweight title. That was his state when he met the girl on the train; she was beautiful and sexy and on the face of it
unlikely to want to have much to do with him, but he went along with her because he knew it would feel good if he did, and it did feel good; she felt good. As you can tell, he was worried and anxious, but he felt the joy of the pleasures of her body and the power of her needing him, and he altered his behavior in order to obtain more of it, and he avoided behaving in ways that he thought might end up depriving him of it, and in the course of the night he even experienced feelings of deep affection for her, of love, you might say. He was greatly pleased with the discovery of this capacity within himself. But did he ever believe that it really mattered? That the experience meant something? He might have, at the time, I'll cede that. And even now I see it as probably the emotional highlight of his life. If I could have seen ways through my life to replicate the feelings of that night, I would have. But even then I would not have believed that it mattered, not in any substantive way. The desire to seek emotional depth was based on the simple belief that it would be more satisfying than the absence of it, of emotional shallowness. Nothing more. The true value of the night on the train, as I've said before, lies in my belief that within it exists the portal to some sort of linear understanding of a few key events in my life. I guess it does matter, but only in the sense that being allowed to die in some sort of peace matters. Could I swear that I had always seen life this way, even before the morning at Willie's apartment building? No, of course not. Who could know anything about their childhood for sure? But I see the boy now, on his much beloved green-and-white Schwinn, pedaling off to the municipal swimming pool, seemingly neutral toward the day and all things.