The Joy of Killing (18 page)

In front of my father I could only say, “Yeah,” although he had never pressed me on it.

“You won't make it if we put down here that you lied to police officers.”

I waited for my father, who had earned a Silver Star, two Bronze stars, and two Purple Hearts in the Pacific, to say something. I put the unlit cigarette in the ashtray, slipped the Zippo back in my front pocket, and looked out the window.

L
OOKING BACK ON
that boy, I don't think I could have told them what happened, even if I wanted to. Even if my mother wasn't there, there was no way I could describe the scene. Once on my bike, I pedaled as fast as I could, leaning down over the handlebars
to cut the wind, whipping down the street, around corners. Now, looking out the window, with the detectives breathing down my neck, the images had already grown faint, the edges blurry. Which was another reason, if I needed one, to keep my mouth shut. The second cop, with the still eyes and small ears, leaned forward.

“I don't want to be a Marine,” I finally said, still looking out the window.

I'd never heard myself say that before. Which really is the whole thing, my coming out here, spending the night with the girl on the train: Who knows what else exists beyond the common mind? Things you've done or said, or have been done or said to you. You can be scared of them most of your life, but if you really want peace of mind you have to allow them to coagulate and simply hope you can handle what comes up. If you understand the nature of the human being, like I do—although I would never take it as far as the Professor—you accept that there is no self that exists independent of the forces that created it, and thus you cannot be held personally, or perhaps I should say morally, accountable for what you did or didn't do. I shouldn't have gone into the apartment building with David and Willie. Perhaps I should have left the minute I saw the leer on Willie's face. Or the moment he unzipped David's pants. Was Willie evil? You tell me. Did he deserve to die the way he did? Probably. Perhaps much earlier, even, and in every bit as bad a way. If he's not evil, then you can't say the person who gutted him was evil. You can't even say he was wrong. Perhaps you would say that Willie had a choice. Bullshit. He had no more choice than the chimp who reached through the bars of his cage and peeled the women's
face off. I am always greatly amused by the shows in which the narrator intones profoundly about the great struggle between “man and nature.” As if man weren't nature himself, didn't evolve from the same source as the turtle and the typhoon.
I understand
we have to judge and incarcerate and separate in order to have a chance at a civilized society. It's the moral labels we place on the Specks and Pol Pots of the world, as if the fact that we're better than they are is a result of our own doing, that are illegitimate. Pure chance, a simple role of the genetic dice. You deserve no credit or blame for what you do or don't do in your life. If you can breathe this into your soul once and for all, you will experience the freedom of the eagle soaring high over the water. I saw the look of it on the Professor's face as the straps were pulled tight on his chest and legs. He was fully awake to every dimension of the experience; he was hungry for it. When the cap was finally secured to his head, he smiled.

Would I have felt better if I had told the detectives to get fucked right then and there? Perhaps. The good feeling would have lasted until the detectives drove off in their cars and my parents left for a cocktail party at the country club and I was left alone in the house as night fell, and then worse ones would have come over me. Even then, unknowing, I was smart enough to get that. (Not that I give myself credit for it.) Which is where most people fuck up: they mispredict the emotional consequences of what they undertake. Or, more often, more profound, and more sad, they get the feeling they're seeking but it doesn't last. It's faded before a fortnight, and they're right back where they were, or perhaps, as is often the case, worse off. It's as simple as the man who steals money from his
kid's college account to buy a BMW with the belief that the car will make him happy. It does, for a while. Then, in a matter of weeks, it's just another car, and he's got a residue of guilt to live with. It's as complicated as the woman who avoids all involvement with men because she thinks she can't handle the feeling of being demolished when it's over. The truth is, she could handle it. The anxiety over the possibility rules her; to avoid the anxiety, she avoids any intimacy (which of course leaves her with another feeling, isolation, but one which she judges to be less intolerable than demolishment).

The Professor was in good shape, you see? I would guess that at the time of his expiration he was reliving the act of killing his wife, letting the motion of the knife zipping across her spinal cord flow into his final breath. What else could account for the look on his face?

T
HE LAST FEW
words are blank on the page. You can see a faint imprint of the letter, but not the inked letter itself. I punch “O” several times; it strikes and falls back, fainter each time. The ribbon is twitching, but not moving. It's wound down. As I recall, the ribbon is supposed to reverse itself when this happens, so it starts winding in the other direction, and this keeps on until the ribbon is worn out. This ribbon looks fairly shot. I find a little switch close to the spool, and throw it, and type a few letters, and they are imprinting, but now in red, almost scarlet, bright and sharp. Fitting, I think, and leave the switch where it is.

I think back to when the girl and I walked down the aisle in the car to our seat, after the scene in the vestibule. The air was heavy,
unmoving, glowing slightly. I watched her fingers brush the tops of the seats as she passed by and realized I couldn't remember touching them, in spite of all the other places I had touched. I imagined the signals transmitting from her brain down through her arms and wrists to her hands, telling them when to touch, when to untouch. Her slender, unpainted fingers had touched my face, my dick, herself, and now they floated onto seat tops only inches from unseeing, unknowing heads. I wondered if the perfume of them would seep into the dreams of the poor devils, light in their projectors strange and erotic, even scary images. I followed her carefully down the aisle, placing my hands just where hers had been. Perhaps now that sex was over we would separate and return to our seats and sleep alone the rest of the night through. Two or three in the morning, I thought. A long way yet to go, with her and the other lost souls on this night rocket. I watched her hips sway, but with a faint sadness at the loss of the intense desire I had for them moments ago. I placed a hand on her right hip and felt the movement of the bones as she shifted weight. She turned her head slightly in my direction, with a slight smile, as if in reassurance: I might not need you anymore, but I still like you.

T
HE SWING FROM
power to weakness is immense, I think. From the primitive to the finished. We develop ways of dealing with la petite mort. The old cliché of having a cigarette. Talking your way through it. Telling the other person you love them. Leaving. The boy knew nothing of this; he was captivated by the feeling of loss and aloneness after such passion, and of course he thought it was
peculiar to him, to them. He let his hand fall away and dropped back a step, then two, until he could see her complete form. She seemed more untouchable, more alien than when he had first laid eyes on her so long ago.

I
WAS HIT
by an intense wave of tiredness. Wobbling between the seats. Water, I thought. A paper cup of water, from the dispenser at the front of the car. I turned back. The conductor was standing at the door, arms folded, staring at me, at us. I lurched back into the darkness. She'll want to sleep, I thought. Spread out on the seat, with her coat as a pillow. That's that, I thought, with relief. You've got the story, she's got the story.

Then I saw her, sitting in my seat. With that mysterious half smile, eyes knowing something beyond what they're seeing. “I put your jacket up top,” she said. She scooted over to the window seat, left her hand on the empty one.

T
HE BOY SEEMS
so hapless, always thinking he knows what's coming next, always wrong, but hanging in there. A likeable kid, occasionally turning his head to see the shadow, but never quite fast enough. Thank God for the girl. That she happened to be there and she was who she was. It's this next part that is a little sketchy, what happens after I sit down. I know we stayed together, because I can see the faintest light of dawn pass over her face. Images have flitted in and out over the years, but never in a way I could hold onto, from one time to the next. Her hands clenched on her lap, a soft fluttery voice, caught in muted pain. Her lips parted for breath, eyes awash.

Between there and here is an emptiness and I can't move into it, not now. I hit the carriage bar and swing it back, and hit it a couple more times to move a few lines down the page. The red ink is startling. I read in the paper not long ago that my first wife had died. We hadn't seen much of each other since the wedding in Jamaica. Still, it was a shock—to see her name in black letters under a picture taken of her in her thirties, about the time of our split. “After a long illness,” it said, which almost always meant cancer. She hadn't called to say good-bye, I remember thinking. We had some good years. Perhaps a note, or a word through a friend. I never blamed her for the divorce, or even for fucking David. The night I walked in on them I stood there and watched in silence, absorbing their heat. They didn't lose their rhythm until finally he moved around from behind her and spread her legs and buried his face in her. She raked her nails up his back as she came. I could have been angry, the double betrayal. But I wasn't. Not at either of them. What was I, then? Captivated by the images. Impressed at the audacity of it, their mutual skills and enthusiasm. Even when it was obvious it wasn't their first time I didn't get pissed. Beyond that, I don't recall feeling much of anything. A little sorry for her because David was a prick. She used to say to me, when we were married, that I was a black hole into which she could lose herself if she wasn't careful. “You're not there,” she would say in frustration. “You seem like you are, but you're not.” I argued, of course, told her that I cared for her, but without much conviction. How do you tell the person who has attached herself to you in the belief that you love her that you're with her because the idea of being truly alone is too scary?
That you're playing life in a way to avoid that feeling, and you try to do your best at pulling it off, even to the point of thinking the right thoughts you hope might get you there?

“What really pisses you off?” she would demand. “What really gets you? Makes you want to scream or hit somebody?”

“Nothing I can think of right now,” I would say, if I said anything at all, and she would shake her head and mutter, “That's the fucking problem.”

So, I would get pissed when she got home late from shopping and we missed our dinner reservations. She would look at me, trying to divine the sincerity of my anger, the dimensions of it, and I would do whatever I could to convince her, including calling her selfish and insensitive and not caring about me. I think now, looking back, that my pauses gave me away. They were in the wrong place. That pissed her off even more. At which point I could only shrug; what do you want? “You,” she would say, “but there's no one there.” It usually ended in tears, and I would try to comfort her, but that only seemed to make it worse. Which I think I understood at the time was probably the reason she put on the show with David in my bedroom. To see if she could get me to crack. It didn't work, of course. Like I said, I found myself captivated by the imagery, the smells and the sounds, the crashing of a lamp on the floor. I wasn't eroticized, as I know some men are by the thought, much less the sight, of other men fucking their wives. True, I felt the absence of feelings—you should be pissed—but even that seemed to bother me little. As for David? The one who had lured me into Willie's den? That's a little trickier. He was smiling at me as he
pounded into my wife; he even gestured that I could take a turn if I wanted to. He was doing me a favor, his smirk said. I should be grateful to him, just as I should be thankful that he had led me into other adventures in life. He was taking care of things, as usual, getting me out of a marriage I really wasn't suited for. I did feel some sense of invasion, but it was nothing I could act on, and whatever it was it quickly evaporated.

The feeling-nothing syndrome, which I was so often invited to feel badly about by my first wife and others, I would now view through the lens of the Professor's theory on moral neutrality. Anger comes from the need to condemn one for violating yourself; love comes from the need to have someone make you feel not lonely. If you are nothing that you created, if you exist simply as one of the swaths of goldenrods along the edge of the country road, the sparrow singing in the tall sycamore outside the cottage window, you are always like the newborn who takes no responsibility for who he is or what he's to become. You judge no one. You experience every moment as equal to the other, for the pure joy of it, like drinking a good wine or, as in the case of the Professor taking a good life. You treasure it the way the tree treasures Buddha, the way a cat prizes the mouse, the rose the sun. You perceive it and let it go, to be what it will.

It occurs to me that if I were a little more like the Professor, I could, theoretically at least, embrace confusion as much as clarity, which would undermine the very thrust of this entire effort.