Everyday Psychokillers (19 page)

I said, “Where are you now, Carlotta? I mean where in your house?”

“My room,” she said. “Sitting on the floor. Leaning on the wall.”

I'd been standing in my towel, with my elbows on my dresser where the body of the phone stayed. I brought the phone with me as I sat on the floor next to my dresser and leaned against the wall. “Me, too,” I said. The towel was damp all through and I felt cold. I'd missed a patch of hair near my ankle and I touched where my skin was bare right above it. “You can't kill yourself, Carlotta,” I said. She was crying.

“My mother's like a zombie,” she said. “I feel like it's either me next or it's my sister. I can't be alone with her,” she said. “I can't be the last one left.”

Carlotta didn't kill herself that I know of, at least not then. Maybe later, maybe in high school she did, I don't know. And after that, around school, it's not like we had a special understanding. I mean she didn't look at me knowingly from across the room, but she didn't shut me out either, the way she might have. It was basically as it had been before. She spent more and more time with Julie, but I felt like I understood why they were becoming best friends and my job was more to look at them from a distance and think about how fucked up and lovely they were. At one point during that late night conversation with Carlotta I got up from the phone and it had such a long cord I could walk all the way to the bathroom. I hung up my damp towel and put my robe on. I let the water from my bath out of the tub and watched the gross little hairs swim down the drain or get left clinging to the plastic walls. I felt afraid. I saw Carlotta lined up with her dead and missing sisters, but I loved hearing her tell it. I felt afraid that I was mean. I looked at myself in the mirror for a while, and watched myself listening to her.

Around that same time, although I didn't know it until years and years later, although when I learned about it, it seemed like I must have felt it, seeping out of Miami and dribbling along the highways, picked up by fleeing birds and fluttering down like airborne seeds, Yahweh Ben Yahweh, a great, black, bearded man in a white turban and robes was moving through the entrepreneurial world in Ft. Lauderdale and Miami, revitalizing the economic opportunities for African Americans with one great arm and beheading errant followers and other enemies with the other. No lie: he called himself God, Son of God, and led the Nation of Yahweh for the Only True Jews at the Temple of Love, which housed his people who left their birth families, their enslaved families, to join their True Family, and which also housed a printery, a grocery, and a beauty salon. A great, white, winged building, guarded by Yahweh's Circle of Ten, men who body-searched anyone entering the temple and stood at its gates with wooden staffs the size of men, and machetes, and swords. Followers who spoke against him were ridiculed and beaten at Temple Meetings. I will die for God Yahweh, I will kill for God Yahweh. That's what the followers shouted in unison, in throngs in the great white circular hall in the Temple of Love. And he ordered the members of the Brotherhood, the extra-super secret central circle within the sect, the men he called his Angels of Death (Leon Grant, known as Abiri Israel; James Louis Mack, known as Jesse Obed Israel; Ernest Lee James, known as Ahinadad Israel, and others, too, like Rozier, Pace, Beasley, Maurice, Ingraham, and also Gaines, who stood out because she's a woman, but I don't remember their special cult names) to kill, among others, a man named Branch who'd had what they call a scuffle with a member of the Yahweh religious sect.

And before that he sent them out after White Devils and Black Blasphemers, to stab people in their kidneys, to bring back the ears of his enemies. He sent Angels out when he thought someone was interfering with his Sales of Products or his Collection of Donations. He sent Angels out when he saw a white man wearing a Yahweh Star of David t-shirt. Sometimes, like when that boy Neville Snake Johnson or someone else was beaten or killed, Yahweh sent his Angels out to seek retribution, but really any day of the week everyone knows someone's fucking with a black person somewhere, so it's hard to see how it'd matter what instigated his orders. Randomness was part of it, and part of the point.

One time he pitted a couple of the Angels against one another, because they both knew karate. He had the woman Gaines lock the door to the temple and everyone gathered in the great prayer hall and watched the men beat each other. Then Yahweh picked out who he thought should lose and had all the Angels jump on him and kill him, and then he had all the women and children jump on the guy and kick him after he was dead. I mean it got fucking ridiculous.

Another follower was found decapitated in the Everglades. You can't tell from the way people tell it if that means head, body, both, or what. You know, were found.

There was a lot of other stuff, too. Like it's hard to imagine that no one noticed what was going on when the whole neighborhood surrounding the Temple attacked some Yahweh members and Yahweh firebombed them. What people noticed more I guess was his Eight Million Dollar Empire of motels, stores, and warehouses. Black power, clean living, economic prosperity for the urban underclass, and unity with God. Shortly before his indictment the mayor declared a Yahweh Ben Yahweh Day.

One time he ordered a sect member beheaded when she tried to leave, and her throat was slit but not all the way through and she lived, and testified. At the conclusion of the trial the Angels of Death kissed Yahweh on the hand or on the lips as they left the courtroom, on their way to jail or freedom, depending, and the papers carefully described how Yahweh embraced his attorney, a former federal judge who'd been impeached.

But you know how people like to make things up, so I don't know, I don't know. It's one thing, and then you look again and it's exactly another. They say vagrants moved into the Temple of Love, but I can see who the vagrants were. They were the banished followers, and they were the not-yet recruited. They were the disenfranchised, the almost invisible, the ones on tiptoe at the edge of the throng, trying to get a peek at God. I can see them, like little white mice, skittering along the slippery white Temple halls. In the great circular meeting space there's a vacant white throne with down-filled pillows, and the adorable animals with their wormy pink tails are burrowing and flinging the feathers with glee. In the back rooms, in the kitchens, they're dancing in the pans and twirling spoons and whisks on their noses. In the bedrooms they're bouncing on the mattresses, and in the parlors they're tumbling from the drapery. They're splashing in their bubblebaths in the bathroom sinks.

Christine Falling with her snowflake name and witchy face is wafting away from a midnight Miami balcony, moving so slowly that she's holding a little Yahweh mouse by its tail in front of her face and she can take her time looking at it. Someone told her to do something with the little mouse, but she can't remember what it could be. Maybe she's supposed to feed the mouse to her current cat. Maybe she's supposed to drop the mouse in her own mouth, like candy. Then Oh! Look! She's falling past a pulsing star. So she puts the mouse on the star, lets go of its tail and falls on by. The mouse is teetering there on the star. It's like a white circus seal on a sparkling ball. Its body is tense and still, but its feet are moving like mad. The surface of the star is hot and pointed. The mouse can keep running like it's running on a hot foil potato. Or it can leap away.

 

 

The psychokiller is a historical fact and he's a legend. Remember Jack the Ripper, tearing through the dark cobble corridors, invisible in the fog, like wind. Letters in brown ink arrived from him, updates for the men with canes and top hats who tracked and publicized him, warnings for their bustled wives, each published composition as earnestly scary as every depiction of him has been since.

I mean the psychokiller is invisible, as gods are invisible. Letters arrive, documentation, signs of him, the way bodies appear in his wake, limp, flat, ravaged, deflated. Paper.

The psychokiller is a member of a contemporary pantheon of villains. He's embossed, for sale in grocery stores. He is, in fact, a deck of trading cards, each character depicted as a symbolic composite of his story, of his tidy psychology, like a Tarot figure, plus he gets stats like a baseball player: numbers attacked, numbers killed, numbers convicted, numbers confessed. There is always a movie playing about him. You can sit in front of the television and go channel to channel for twenty-four hours and watch nothing but psychokillers. I have.

He is an enormous category with dozens of subcategories, and he drips constantly into additional categories all the time. Kung fu. Mobsters. War heroes. Bounty hunters. Suicide bombers. Vigilantes. Kings. Cops. Lovers. Gods.

Sometimes when they capture him, when they capture one of him, and you can look at him through the newspaper pixels or the television pixels, his actual body, his lonesome form through all those lenses you can see, he's suddenly so plain and humbly human that it's as if it can't actually be him, really. Because what he
means
is gone. I mean it's as if the image of him replaces the image of all he's done, which is the only reason anyone took his photo for you to see at all. Captured, you know. On film. Captive for all those captivated by him, for his captive audience.

Stop him from striking again and he's good as dead. He tries to be alive, captive as he is, stopped, boxed, caged. He writhes and opens and closes his mouth, he shoots little shoots from his stumplike self. Little efforts rumble from him like aftershocks, like huffs of smoke from a spent volcano: someone writes a book about him, or he writes a book about himself, or he sends letters to boys and desperate women and newspapers. He addresses the public at large, that invisible mass, that shimmering concept, that mirage, that mere idea. Last gasps from a life that's been gasping all along.

Flight

My uncle Ted and I sat on the floor of his little balcony, crowded among the thin metal legs of two flimsy lawn chairs he'd bought at a going-out-of-business sidewalk sale at the drugstore next to the Price Chopper. He'd bought the two chairs, those low beachy kinds with plastic woven tubing for seats, to surprise CiCi, because Ted's one chair had broken and she'd insisted that having no chairs was uncivilized. She was due back in minutes or in hours, sometime before dark, she'd said, laughing. Or later.

We sat on the floor because Ted didn't want stripes on his backside when she arrived and neither did I.

CiCi was in Miami, meeting with a guy writing a book on Ted Bundy. On the floor there, I was thinking about innocence. I was trying to figure out whether CiCi was what you call innocent or not. Because by that point I'd been pretty convinced that everything innocent is in imminent danger. And innocent was meaning nothing more than beautiful. The chestnut horse, animals of all colors, the little alligator, pink and wriggling.

In Miami the guy'd been studying court documents, going in-depth about the Chi Omega Sorority murders and the last desperate attempts of a killer to flee. He found CiCi's name somewhere in the documents and looked up her parents in Tallahassee. CiCi'd had it with her parents and moved in with Ted by then. He got the number, and that's how he found her.

The guy wanted to buy her lunch in Miami. CiCi took a bus in because Ted, our Ted, didn't want her to go and refused to drive her, and now she was taking the bus back and supposed to be here by dinner or by dark. On the balcony I was thinking about the two Teds. I was thinking about how, on cop shows, especially in the intros, like on
Charlie's Angels
I remember particularly, they liked to make the image of the person freeze and then multiply, fan out like a hand of cards, these after-images, these outlines. Or in James Bond, those intros, with his license to kill. Funny name for a guy who kills people, Bond, who kills and copulates with similar regularity. Charlie's Angels had guns but I don't think they were allowed to kill anyone.

Ted had pounded a nail into the wall in the kitchen with the heel of a shoe. He'd hung the corkboard there with the collection of bugs. I said shouldn't they be behind glass, like at the zoo? I said they were going to get covered in dust and impossible kitchen grime. He said if they got too gross he'd dump them and get more. So, thinking about that, the bugs and the two Teds, and then along with Unit IV: What Is Biology? from science class, all that together, it got me wondering along the lines of what was a characteristic of an individual and what was a characteristic of a species and how you could know the difference. Like if you're a cute little animal are you automatically innocent, or are some little animals dumb enough to deserve it, whatever happens, whatever is done to them? I was wondering if I lived in a scary place, or a time in history that was scary, or if I was just one little weird kid, or if all kids worry all the time. Was I an individual, or was I indicative of my species, is what I wondered. A line of ants tromped silently around one of the rails in the balcony railing, sort of one long item, a line, sort of beads on a string, sort of uncapped bottles shoving along a conveyor belt.

The chairs were a surprise, CiCi was coming, and I was painting my nails with a light pink kind of opalescent nail polish. In the bottle you could see multi-colored swirls, marbleized like oil in a puddle, but on my nails it came out a cloudy pink. It wasn't drying well in the wet heat. It was shifting and getting wrinkles. I touched it and it kept my fingerprint. At school they'd taken all our fingerprints for I.D. purposes. In case we got lost, they said. A program called I.M. Thumbuddy.

Ted smoked a cigarette, ashing into an empty beer can and drinking from a fuller one. He'd crumpled the empty one a little to help tell the difference. He had to be careful to get the ashes in there without tipping it over, because squeezing the middle of the can had made it unstable, and if the end of his cigarette hit the can, the can rocked.