The Octopus on My Head (16 page)

Two years before, the cops investigating Tweedy's disappearance had turned off the TV. They'd found the bed made up, as it still was, with an old crocheted coverlet folded over the footboard. The place had been neat and clean, then, but now it smelled very much of disuse, of abandon, of mice and mildew, of dust. A saucepan on the back of the stove contained what looked like a petrified chicken soup. It had been there for so long it had no odor at all.

Traces of fingerprint dust were still to be found here and there, on the mantel, on a corner of the kitchen table, on the casing of the front door, on the corner of a window that faced the street, on the toilet handle, on the handrail of the staircase. Torvald was very interested in these details, too, though he didn't say as much.

The deal closed without a hitch. The grandson and his wife took all the photos and Tweedy's fishing gear and the crocheted coverlet and returned to New Zealand forever.

After escrow closed and he took possession of the keys, Torvald hired a young and enthusiastic illegal immigrant to clean the place. He hired him off the corner of Cesar Chavez and Valencia and, fresh from Michoacán, the kid was proud to be seen by his street-corner acquaintances in the front seat of a well-kept Mercedes—from the rear-view mirror of which Torvald had taken the precaution of temporarily removing the blue handicap placard. Slim and handsome, soft-spoken and hard-working, quick to laugh, enthusiastic and gentle, the boy finished the job in one long day, right down to washing the windows.

As the sun set beyond the bank of fog which almost always lurks off the northern coast of California, Torvald invited the kid to stay for beer and quesadillas.

By sundown two days later, “Xavier” had became Volume V.

Chapter Sixteen

T
ORVALD TOOK HIS TIME IN RENTING HIS NEW UNIT.
I
T TOOK
him a while to figure out how to do it efficiently. Being a landlord wasn't really in his line. He'd noticed it seemed to be in many other people's lines, however. But, whereas most of these people did it so they wouldn't have to work, Torvald had a separate agenda.

And it wasn't that Torvald minded working. He just didn't want anybody to know he was working. Not until later. Not until it was time for them to know.

During the late nineties, the dotcom years—which turned San Francisco upside down as thoroughly as beatniks did merely to North Beach in the fifties, or as hippies did merely to the Haight Ashbury in the sixties, or as gay liberation did to merely the Castro, Polk Gulch and Folsom Street in the seventies, or as cocaine did to merely the entire city in the eighties—Torvald did as most other landlords did. He held a single open house for one hour at noon on a Saturday, then sifted through the resulting sixty-odd tenant applications for someone fitting his specifications. In the glory days of the landlord's market, it was that simple. The first specification? The prospective tenant's ability to pay two or three times what the apartment was worth. As for other specifications
….

Soon enough, Torvald had a comely twenty-something in the unit. Oddly, he thought at first, she was never home. Tranquility regined, albeit somewhat lonesomely on Torvald's part, but soon he figured it out. Since her rent was equivalent to two-thirds of her salary, his young tenant had to work all the time to come up with it. But that was only half the story. Unceasing work was in the nature of her ‘employment sector'—the dotcom world. Unstinting labor was part of its ‘culture.' That is to say, if working seventy hours a week for two years on the outside but not entirely remote chance that it could make you a millionaire can be called ‘culture,' then that's what it was.

This default privacy was such a gold mine for Torvald that he forestalled fishing off the company pier, as it were, and did his fishing elsewhere, steering his operation entirely into off-shore, as it were, opportunism.

Finally, however, he succumbed to the temptation. It began when Kerry gave him a month's notice, as specified in the lease. She had located another apartment for the same price in the Western Addition. The new apartment was smaller than Torvald's unit, but to Kerry it represented a quick bike ride to work. Parking near her job had become out of the question, and the ride from Anza and 36th to Folsom and Eighth, whether by bus or bike, was just too long. Another nice thing about it was that Kerry could continue to live alone while seeking her fortune. Privacy is worth a lot, as she remarked to Torvald. Torvald couldn't have agreed more.

The end of the month was a Wednesday, but Torvald cut her the requested slack and let her wait until the following Sunday to move out so she wouldn't have to interrupt her six-day work week. He smiled and told her not to worry, he would pro-rate the four days according to the thirty-one in that particular month and subtract the amount from her cleaning deposit. See, he said with a smile, how easy I am to get along with? She thanked him, her tone a touch sarcastic.

It takes years of experience and a focused mind to achieve control of one's tone, Torvald said to himself as he looked at Kerry thoughtfully; but youth has other advantages.

Kerry didn't own much. Torvald watched her move all her possessions with her brand-new Golf in five trips by herself.

When the car was loaded for the last time, she came to his door to return the keys. He suggested she give him her new address so he could mail her the cleaning deposit, less the prorated rent, as well as forward any first-class mail that slipped through the post office's notoriously porous forwarding mechanism.

She'd already had cards printed. She handed him one, said goodbye, and turned to walk away.

Before Torvald quite realized what he was saying, he verbalized an impulse. If she wanted to come in for a moment, he would write her a check. He remembered how it was, he added, to be young and moving house by yourself; it was expensive and it was hard work. Neither the computation of the simple interest—which by law he owed her on the deposit, which pleasantly surprised her—nor the subtraction of the four pro-rated days, was higher mathematics. He was sure the balance, almost a month's rent, would help.

She was sure it would help, too.

She stepped inside.

Thus initiated production on Volume IX.

“Kerry.”

When two police officers came by a week later to inquire after the missing girl, he showed them a check made out to her and a stamped envelope with her new address written on it. He'd been about to lick the envelope and walk it to the corner mailbox when the doorbell rang. When he first moved from Indiana to San Francisco to be a hippy in the sixties, as he told the two officers, you could leave mail at your door for the postman. No longer. You had to make sure it was in a mailbox. Sir, one of the officers told him, the bad guys got keys to all those drop boxes. Torvald begged the officer's pardon and asked for details. They open one up, the officer patiently explained; they grab a bunch of mail and go through it, looking for checks. Copy machines and scanners and software they got these days, bingo, they turn out stacks of your own personal checks. Exact duplicates. Signature and everything. They change the series numbers to avoid a conflict with the genuine article. They make them out like paychecks for day labor or house cleaning, stuff like that, and hand them off with a fake I.D. to professional accomplices who cash them all over town. Meanwhile the check they copied is carefully resealed in its envelope and sent on its way. Your bill or whatever gets paid so you're none the wiser until the bank starts bouncing your real checks because the fake ones have cleaned out your account. By that time—the officer snapped his fingers—the thieves and your money are long gone.

Well I'll be darned, Torvald said. He looked at Kerry's check, then back at the officer. That's awful.

The officer told Torvald that to be safe he should hand his mail over the counter to a live clerk at the post office. Then your checks have a chance to get where they're going without a nasty detour.

Torvald thanked the officer and said he certainly would do that. He hesitated. And what about this check?

The officer slowly shook his head. Mail it anyway, his partner suggested. It will be forwarded to the parents.

Her dotcom employer had called the police the morning of the second day she didn't show up for work or answer her cellphone. Her Golf was parked on Broderick around the corner from her new building, an eight-unit student affair in the flatlands between the panhandle and Lone Mountain College. The Golf was a convertible. Its top had been slit and some of Kerry's personal possessions—odd CDs, lingerie, sneakers, computer manuals and diskettes—were strewn up and down the block. Her previous address—Torvald's rental unit—had turned up when they ran a check of the car's license plate.

Her keys were found under the car; an oversight, no doubt, as anything else of value had presumably been stolen. A mountain bike and boxes containing the rest of her stuff were in her new apartment. But there was no stereo, for example. So the police were thinking along the lines of an opportunistic snatch. No body had been found, so her parents clung to the hope that the girl was still alive. Her dotcom had printed flyers and organized a search of the neighborhood and put up a website. On her chances for survival, the two officers offered no opinion. They had a look around the empty bungalow, thanked Torvald, and went away.

Should he mail the check?

Torvald realized that, if he continued to poach his own tenants—in fact, if he did it so much as one more time—the inevitable would happen sooner than later. This realization gave Torvald his first glimpse of the potential for control, even if it could only ever be partial control, over the inevitability factor.

Torvald mailed the check.

Sometimes, you have to invest in the future.

He came to think of his poaching a tenant and getting away with it as analogous to a man's managing to masturbate on a crowded subway car without being noticed. Everybody has masturbated on the subway—haven't they? No? People are so uptight! Plus they lie. The more Torvald elaborated this analogy, the more he liked it. One intriguing aspect was its built-in denial. You deny yourself the pleasure, and you deny yourself the pleasure, and you deny yourself the pleasure until, finally, you give in to it. Sensory fulfillment, spiced by sociopathy, trumps personal embarrassment and moral outrage. This denial and its prolongation can be many things but above all it's delicious. Inevitability figures into it, too. Sooner or later, if you masturbate in crowded subway cars, somebody's going to notice. If not, successful incidents accrue, and it's like hitting home runs. At a certain point you're batting for the record. But where baseball ends, the very personal nature of such crimes as interested Torvald begins. Right away, with such crimes, starting with the very first time, it's always a personal record. With each repetition, a new high is achieved. As the victories pile up
….
It's harder to top and it's harder to stop.

As these two factors crescendo, the inevitability of getting caught envelops the mindscape like a storm, like
….

It's like watching a mountain in your windshield. At first it's so distant, as you drive toward it, as to be practically an abstraction. As you approach, however, the mountain grows larger. Details resolve. At some point you arrive at the mountain. You drive on. You ascend its flank. Now the mountain is everywhere. You're intimate with the mountain, so intimate that you can't really see it any more. Now, as you drive on, you become part of the mountain
….

As the rate of commission increases, it traces an asymptote to oblivion. The sensation is nothing short of sublime.

There are dirty aspects, too, pollutions of the purity. An ember of guilt. The desire for punishment. The need to be caught. The satiation of psychopathology has its drawbacks, but only if you fall short of apotheosis.

That's the risk, and that's the reward.

Torvald woke up an iBook that waited on a rosewood secretary adjacent the front door. It was not very often of late that a fit of lucidity came over him so thoroughly. He opened a password protected file, to which he added his thoughts from time to time, and began to make a few notes. He helped himself to a mint. He collected his thoughts as he sucked. He made more notes.

The image of the mountain intrigued him. Other similes had struck him, the baseball one for example. But hitting home runs hardly encompassed the scope of his endeavor: not to mention, hitting home runs had never been considered sociopathic—had it? In any case, it was a limited analogy.

But a mountain gave the scope to match a man's ambition. He fiddled with the keys, wrote a few lines. After a minute or two his typing trickled to desultory pecking, then stopped. Not unlike a slashed body running out of blood, he thought, and glanced at the two bodies on the living room floor. Had he ever enjoyed such a surfeit of victims? When the profilers speak of crescendo, they aren't kidding! In his mind's eye he surveyed the shelves of media lining the back of the control room, directly beneath him, one story down. He took another mint. He turned to take a look at the big monitor.

Angelica seemed to be asleep. So nice for her, that she can sleep in that throne of rough timber, which he'd purchased mail order from a catalogue of S&M accessories, using his former tennant Kerry's name and the address of his rental unit. She looked peaceful. Just as well. He turned back to his computer screen. He hadn't used a methamphetamine injection, yet. One shot for her, one shot for him. Separate needles, of course. Fair's fair, but a man has to be careful. She was frail, that one. Though hardly more than a child, she had been debilitated by years of booze and drugs, so far as he could tell. A pretty thing nonetheless. It's just amazing how youth insulates a body against self-abuse—or any kind of abuse
….

Three of them. Torvald rubbed his eyes. He'd gone over the top and let himself in for a lot of work. He'd let himself in for a lot of risk, too. All these young people were connected, somehow. Although, he glanced toward the body lying closer to the front door, some of them weren't so young.

He looked at the computer screen. Something about mountains and sublimity and oblivion and driving
….

Abruptly he closed the file. He sat for a few minutes, perfectly still. The battery conservation utility blanked the computer screen. The house was silent but, outside, the fog wind buffeted it. The twin junipers brushed against the house, actively defining its front door. The western of the two, closer to the sea, had sanded a six-inch swath of paint off the door casing, a vertical redwood 1x6 directly behind it. Years of unceasing effort. The neighborhood association had circulated a flyer indicating without naming names certain properties deemed to be suffering from ‘substandard maintenance.' Torvald soundlessly chuffed the humorless laugh of the overtaxed homeowner, who knows in his heart who it was who, with his own hands, had wrested into reality a state-of-the-art secret beneath his house and beneath the very noses of his inquisitive neighbors
….

Substandard maintenance, indeed!

He could hear the labored breathing of the one closer to the doorway. Probably a crushed maxillary sinus. The other one, the girl, he'd stow below. Nice nautical sound to that. Stow her below, Bos'n. If only he had a Bos'n. Clap her in irons. Aye, Sir. Prepare the enema. Without delay, Skipper. Torvald giggled. Bread and water until I say gesundheit. Jolly good, Sir. And don't forget. Sir? The Bos'n pauses at the companionway, the girl dangling by her hair from his fist like a shotgunned duck. The annual novena for Malita. Not forgotten, Sir. Monsignor has been reminded? In writing, Sir, accompanied by a check. Away with you then. Very good, Sir.