The Joy of Killing (21 page)

I
SHAKE OUT
my hands, drop them to my side. Physically, I was in excellent health. Lean as a lodgepole pine from forty years of almost daily swimming. A full head of graying hair. A sound heart and lungs. My interest in sex had faded some in the past several years, which makes me highly suspicious that there was in fact a woman in my bed this morning. A dream must have lingered a little longer than usual; splinters and flecks of past times formed something slightly new and different, which led me to believe it was real. There had been the wine glass, though, with what looked at one
moment to have been a coral lip print on it, and there had been the newspaper with the story of Willie's murder. I had thought of calling the police department for information, or even the newspaper, but decided it was foolish to draw attention to myself. Who knows what the detectives had left in their files? My name. My juvenile mug shot, from my arrest for shoplifting. The detectives, my detectives, were far too old now to be working this case. I suspect they were behind Willie's conviction and imprisonment that I read about several years later. It mentioned a felony in the article, which I had slipped into my briefcase before leaving my apartment. Five to ten years, probably out in two or less. I did see one of the detectives again. I was giving a reading from
The Professor
at a bookstore downtown—the owner was a former student of mine—when I looked up from one of my favorite passages—the Professor addressing the jury after it imposed the death sentence on him and inviting the members to attend his execution—and was startled by a face in the second row. The scar had faded as the skin had crumpled over time, but you could still see it, the way he was holding his head. And the look in his eyes: time hadn't softened the intimation that he knew more about you than you did. He was wearing a replica of the cheap coat and tie, although now there was a little more bulk to him. He was almost bald. He caught me looking at him, and the barest of smiles crossed his face. It was a smile of encouragement, I wanted to believe, of admiration for having pulled it off, after all. I was rattled during the rest of the reading, and during the questions I could feel his eyes on me, watching my every gesture as if it might confirm what he knew, or perhaps discern any hint of guilt or shame
over what had happened thirty or so years earlier. I worried that he was going to come up to me afterward and say something, or buy a book and stand in line. “To my favorite detective,” I would write. But by the time I made it to the signing table, he was gone.

I
REACH FOR
the sky and feel the tightness in my shoulders. I bend over and touch my toes, the white tips of my Keds, and feel the rush to my head. I straighten up. The blood draining from my head leaves a red halo around the moon. The red against the white is startlingly beautiful, a fitting image of the night as it has gone and is yet to go. I unlatch the window again and push it open, first a few inches and then all the way. The night chill on the late September air has sharpened. I take a deep breath and feel the cold spread through my lungs and into my bloodstream and through my heart to my limbs. If I had walked through life like this, I think, I would have awakened to the missed dimensions. Your mind as clear as the night sky, with a point of light banishing concerns and fears and allowing an unblemished clarity of sight and feeling. Let the fangs of night's creatures pierce your flesh, let assaults and insults and murders and attempts pile up on you, let failures seek to define you; your vision would be microscopically clear through the depths of your soul and out through the farthest reaches of the universe. By accepting all emotions, you would be the captive of none. As sadness wraps its cloak around you, you pull it tighter, seeking the full warmth of its embrace. Love you cherish the way you might an ancient brandy, knowing that when it's finished the sense of loss will bring you some comfort. You fear nothing, because you
see everything. You're one of those glass globes that spins in the sunlight—and reflects the light back into the universe, untouched and unaffected.

A shadow in the corner of my eye, a ruffling of a wing over my hair. My visitor is excited by the blood moon, I see. I lean out for a glimpse and spot a speck in the round light encircled in crimson. I slowly pull the window shut and turn back to the illuminated darkness.

I feel good, neither hunger nor thirst nor fatigue. But I know, from the rhythm of the night so far, if nothing else, that this epiphany, this feeling of acceptance and understanding, will not last. The euphoria is momentary; it will succumb readily to the next image that burbles its way into the clearing. Something from somewhere for some reason of its own will intrude and unsettle the peace. It always comes back to the story of the girl on the train, as it must.

I
SLIPPED THE
Zippo in my pants pocket. The weed was oddly unsatisfying. Stale, like cardboard. I blew the smoke against the window; it bounced off the glass and dissipated in the darkness. The girl watched me quietly. She extricated the pack from my shirt pocket and knocked a weed out. She thwacked it against the face of her watch several times. She put the weed between her lips and reached for my hand, which she held lightly by the wrist. She leaned forward until the burning end was a millimeter from hers. She brought the red glow closer, glancing at me through the smoke, and the two ends touched. She puffed once, twice, then the end of her weed flamed brightly. She leaned back. Then started coughing.

I laughed. “Amateur.” Pulled deep into my lungs, and blew one then two then three perfect rings, which floated slowly, delicately past her face. She poked her finger through them, one by one. Smiling, she brought her cigarette up to her mouth.

“It's harder than it looks,” I said.

“Show me.”

“You make your mouth into an O, then push the smoke out with your tongue. Like this.” I blew several rings; one encircled her right breast; the other veered away and bounced off her elbow.

The light seemed to shade a little from her face, her eyes faded. Like somebody had switched channels. She was there with me, but somewhere else, too.

The door hissed and snapped open. The conductor made his way down the aisle toward us. He stopped a few rows ahead, picked the ticket from the slot overhead, read it. “Toledo,” he said. “Five minutes.” No response. “Toledo,” he repeated a little louder. Finally, he reached down and ruffled a shoulder. “Toledo,” he said again. “Five minutes.” A body stirred, sat up. “OK,” a male voice blurted. Two arms shot up in the air, followed by a loud grunt. The conductor continued, stopping here and there to check tickets, found another Toledo passenger, across from us, a woman, who thanked him and clicked on her reading light. She glanced over at us. Old as my mother, with glasses hanging on a string around her neck, brownish hair loosely curled.

I can see her now. Narrow eyes a mixture of curiosity and concern. She could have made herself known to us and put a stop to it.

She scooched to the aisle seat. “Where are you kids going?” she asked pleasantly.

Neither of us responded. “Chicago?” she asked. She slipped her glasses up on her nose and glanced at her watch.

The girl leaned forward a little. “Yes,” she said. “You?'

“Here, Toledo. Lived my whole life here. Raised a family. My husband died five years ago, and I live alone now. All of my kids moved on, to the West. Montana, California.”

“That's too bad,” the girl said.

“I see them once a year. I have one daughter who calls every Sunday. They didn't like their father very much. I taught second grade for thirty-five years.”

The girl glanced at me. Raised her eyebrows. The woman flicked on the light over the aisle seat. It was like an operating room.

“My students were my real kids,” the woman continued. “Didn't really need any of my own. Life would have been a lot simpler.”

The woman sat back. I glanced down at the girl's breasts, to see if they changed shape when she leaned forward. I cupped one, felt the soft weight as it molded into my hand.

A true moment of random harmony for the boy, I think to myself.

W
HEN
I
WROTE
the essays on the philosophy of violence, I included a final piece on the notion of peak experiences, which I called the theory of random harmony. The theory is based on the
statistical concept of chance. The underpinning is that there is no underlying scheme or order to the universe. We construct moral order, but there is really nothing there except randomly spinning molecules, bouncing aimlessly around, that will—and here is the key—on occasion line up purely by chance to construct or create a moment of pure harmony or beauty. It happens as a matter of statistics; you can't seek it out, you can't make it happen. Thus, Chopin and Gaudi are statistical emanations. They are bound to show up sooner or later. Psychologist Maslow allowed that each individual had two or three such experiences in a lifetime; where everything worked the way you always wanted it to; every piece slipped into place, and for an incredible moment, the sense of being fully awake cleared out every other feeling.

The theory is somewhat nihilistic in the sense that it denies the possibility of achieving a higher order; it denies good and evil, every theory of morality, things like karma and transcendence, peace through proximity to God. What an individual
can
do, however, is create an atmosphere that will lay the ground work for the moment of harmony, that will allow it to flower, to flow, to be realized to the fullest, when it does appear. Heads full of fear and anger and selfish desire and ego and regret or guilt are not good bedding grounds for the realization of a moment of random harmony. It could pass unnoticed, and probably does for most people, or be barely felt, and you will be the less for it, will miss one of life's rare genuine pleasures.

Now I believe that the entire night on the train with the girl was itself a great extended moment of harmony, and there has been
nothing like it before or since, and it was nothing I had deserved or earned. If I had gotten on the train two cars from the end, rather than the very last car, nothing. One of the risks, of course, and I wrote little about this, is that you would want to stay in that moment, and when you realized you couldn't, you would descend into a well of despair.

The early lectures on the philosophy of violence were well received. The college appreciated the wide attention they brought. As they proceeded to man and nature, man as nature, essentially denying moral responsibility, the reactions grew quieter. Still, I received an offer from a prestigious university press to publish the talks in a book (which I declined). The theory of human motivation was presented as an invitation to people to try to understand why they did what they did, and as such stimulated much discussion and debate. That people acted in their own perceived self-interest was an established Darwinian fact.

There were quarrels with academics and religious leaders, of course, but they were well within bounds of reasonable discourse. The real trouble began later when I wrote
The Professor
, demonstrating the principles in actual form, albeit in the guise of a novel. Moments of random harmony, it seemed, were supposed to be ones of great insight and beauty, where you intuitively grasped the theory of relativity or dashed out
The Stranger
. That an experience of pure harmony could come from the taking of a life, from murder, was inconceivable. As crazy as the idea that Hitler could have been in a state of genuine rhapsody when he conceived of the Final Solution. That the Professor never renounced the pleasure
that the deed brought him, that he seemed happy—more than happy, fulfilled—at the end of his life, as he wrote about so vividly in his memoir, was the problem; that he accepted the ultimate punishment as simply the last act in the play of his life, that he didn't experience pain or remorse, or fear, all the things that go with moral judgment, was the problem. He behaved true to his nature; his moment of harmony left him in peace, which was to others simply intolerable. Peace comes from noble acts, to kind and caring souls, one woman argued at a forum. To suggest that a man could justifiably feel good after killing his wife was heresy. She had, of course, missed the point. As calmly as possible, I plucked the word “justifiably” from her sentence. I laid it on the podium. “There is your problem,” I said. The Professor didn't feel he was justified or not justified. You are making that judgment. He simply acted in harmony with the deepest source of his being. And thus, I would go on, while such a moment of harmony is effervescent and unmaintainable, it will, if fully experienced, leave lasting and beneficial effects on the individual. And so the Professor died a happy man. Why does this anger us so? Why cannot we accept it? I would ask the audience. That was when the accusations started, the requests by some faculty members to the dean that I undergo a mental health evaluation. I could have easily passed with flying colors, but I refused, because I didn't want some label like “mentally sound” placed on me.

I didn't leave the campus out of fear or weakness; I could have fought and probably stayed on, and if my nature were different I would have. But when I thought of the feelings I would be entitled
to in victory—triumph, vindication, superiority—I felt sure they would not bring any true or lasting sense of satisfaction or pleasure. I would necessarily in the heat of battle have been drawn into characterizing others and their statements. You're wrong. I'm right. It would have been a step backward for me, and that feeling definitely would have been an unpleasant one. So I left on my own terms, in my own way, with full retirement and my integrity intact.