by Tom Perrotta
Later, when she didn’t die, she was embarrassed that she’d told me. She laughed that raucous laugh of hers and said, “Way to go, Marcy! On your deathbed tell your son you’re a whore and then don’t die!”
“It’s okay,” I said.
And it was. It frankly was not really even much of a surprise. It was her vanity that disgusted me, the way she undercut the confession with a preening, maudlin joke. I could not respect that even then.
I don’t think that my mom’s confession, or whatever it may have implied, had anything to do with what I think of as “it.” When I was growing up, there was, after all, no evidence of her past, nothing that could have affected me. But suddenly, just as I was about fourteen, I started getting excited about the thought of girls being hurt. Or killed. A horror movie would be on TV, a girl in shorts would be running and screaming with some guy chasing her, and to me it was like porn. Even a scene where a sexy girl was getting her legs torn off by a shark—bingo. It was like pushing a button. My mom would be in the kitchen making dinner and talking on the phone, stirring and striding around with the phone tucked between her shoulder and chin. Outside, cars would go by, a dog might run across the lawn. My homework would be slowly getting done in my lap and this sexy girl was screaming “God help me!” and having her legs torn off. And I would go invisibly into an invisible world that I called “the other place.” Where I sometimes passively watched a killer and other times became one.
It’s true that I started drinking and drugging right about then. All my friends did. My mom tried to lay down the law, but I found ways around her. We would go into the woods, me and usually Chet Wotazak and Jim Bonham, and we’d smoke weed we’d got from Chet’s brother, a local dealer named Dan, and drink cheap wine. We could sometimes get Chet’s dad to give us a gun—in my memory he had an AK-47, though I don’t know how that’s possible—and we’d go out to a local junkyard and take turns shooting up toilets, long tubes of fluorescent lights, whatever was there. And then we’d go to Chet’s house, up to his room, where we’d play loud music and tell dumb jokes and watch music videos in which disgusting things happened: snakes crawled over a little boy’s sleeping face and he woke up being chased by a huge truck; a girl was turned into a pig and then a cake and then the lead singer bit off her head.
You might think the videos and the guns were part of it, that they encouraged my violent thoughts. But Chet and Jim were watching and doing the same things and they were not like me. They said mean things about girls, and they were disrespectful sometimes, but they didn’t want to hurt them, not really. They wanted to touch them and be touched by them; they wanted that more than anything. You could hear it in their voices and see it in their eyes, no matter what they said.
So I would sit with them and yet be completely apart from them, talking and laughing about normal things in a dark mash of music and snakes and children running from psychos and girls being eaten—and be someplace my friends couldn’t see, although it was right there in the room with us.
It was the same at home. My mother made dinner, talked on the phone, fought with my dad, had guys over. Our cat licked itself and ate from its dish. Around us, people cared about one another. Jenna Legge slept peacefully. But in the other place, sexy girls—and sometimes ugly girls or older women—ran and screamed for help as an unstoppable, all-powerful killer came closer and closer. There was no school or sports or mom or dad or caring, and it was great.
I’ve told my wife about most of this, the drinking, the drugs, the murder fantasies. She understands because she has her past too: extreme sex, vandalizing cars, talking vulnerable girls into getting more drunk than they should on behalf of some guy. There’s a picture of her and this other girl wearing bathing suits, the other girl chugging a beer being held by a guy so it goes straight down her throat as her head is tipped way back. Another guy is watching, and my smiling wife is holding the girl’s hand. It’s a picture that foreshadows cruelty or misery, or maybe just a funny story to tell about throwing up in the bathroom later. Privately, I see no similarity between it and my death fantasies. For my wife, the connection is drugs and alcohol; she believes that we were that way because we were both addicts expressing our pain and anger in violent fantasies and blind actions.
The first time I took Doug out to fish, it was me on the hot golf course all over again. As we walked to the lake in our heavy boots and clothes, I could feel his irritation at the bugs and the brightness, the squalor of nature in his fastidious eyes. I told him that fly-fishing was like driving a sports car as opposed to the Subaru of rod and reel. I went on about how anything beautiful had to be conquered. He just pulled down his mouth.
He got interested, though, in tying on the fly; the simple elegance of the knot (the “fish-killer”) arrested him. He laid it down the first time too, placing the backcast perfectly in a space between trees. He gazed at the brown, light-wrinkled water with satisfaction. But when I put my hand on his shoulder, I could feel him inwardly pull away.
As I got older, my night walks became rarer, with a different, sadder feeling to them. I would go out when I was not drunk or high but in a quiet mood, wanting to be somewhere that was neither the normal social world nor the other place. A world where I could still sit and feel the power of nature come up through my feet, and be near other people without them being near me. Where I could believe in and for a moment possess the goodness of their lives. Jenna Legge still slept on the ground floor and sometimes I would look in and watch her breathe, and, if I was lucky, see one of her developing breasts swell out of her nightgown.
I never thought of killing Jenna. I didn’t think about killing anyone I actually knew—not girls I didn’t like at school, not the few I had sex with. The first times I had sex, I was so caught up in the feeling of it that I didn’t even think about killing—I didn’t think about anything at all. But I didn’t have sex much. I was small, awkward, too quiet; I had that tremor. My expression must’ve been strange as I sat in class, feeling hidden in my other place, but outwardly visible to whoever looked—not that many did.
Then one day I was with Chet’s brother, Dan, on a drug drop; he happened to be giving me a ride because the drop, at the local college, was on the way to wherever I was going. It was a guy buying, but when we arrived, a girl opened the door. She was pretty and she knew it, but whatever confidence that knowledge gave her was superficial. We stayed for a while and smoked the product with her and her boyfriend. The girl sat very erect and talked too much, as if she was smart, but there was a question at the end of everything she said. When we left, Dan said, “That’s the kind of lady I’d like to slap in the face.” I said, “Why?” But I knew. I don’t remember what he said, because it didn’t matter. I already knew. And later, instead of making up a girl, I thought of that one.
I forgot to mention: one night, when I was outside Jenna’s window, she opened her eyes and looked right at me. I was stunned, so stunned that I couldn’t move. There was nothing between us but a screen with a hole in it. She looked at me and blinked. I said, “Hi.” I held my breath; I had not spoken to her since third grade. But she just sighed, rolled over, and lay still. I stood there trembling for a long moment. And then, slowly and carefully, I walked through the yard and onto the sidewalk, back to my house.
I cut school the next day and the next because I was scared that Jenna would’ve told everybody and that I would be mocked. But eventually it became clear that nobody was saying anything, so I went back. I looked at Jenna cautiously, then gratefully. But she did not return my look. At first this moved me, made me consider her powerful. I tried insistently to catch her eye, to let her know what I felt. Finally our eyes met, and I realized she didn’t understand why I was looking at her. I realized that although her eyes had been open that night, she had been asleep. She had looked right at me, but she had not seen me at all.
And so one night, or early morning, I got out of bed, into my mother’s car, and drove to the campus to look for her—the college girl.
The campus was in a heavily wooded area bordering a nature preserve. The dorms were widely scattered, though some, resembling midsized family homes, were clustered together. The girl lived in one of those, but though I remembered the general location, I couldn’t be sure which one it was. I couldn’t see into any of the windows because even the open ones had blinds pulled down. While I was standing indecisively on a paved path between dorms, I saw two guys coming toward me. Quickly, I walked off into a section of trees and underbrush. I moved carefully through the thicket, coming to a wide field that led toward the nature preserve. The darkness deepened as I got farther from the dorms. As I walked, I could feel things coming up from the ground—teeth and claws, eyes, crawling legs, and brainless eating mouths. A song played in my head, an enormously popular romantic song about love and death that had supposedly made a bunch of teenagers kill themselves.
Kids still listen to this same song—I once heard it coming from the computer in the family room. When I came in and looked over Doug’s hunched shoulder, I realized the song was being used as the soundtrack for a graphic video about a little boy in a mask murdering people. It was spellbinding, the yearning, eerie harmony of the song juxtaposed with terrified screaming. I told Doug to turn it off. He looked pissed, but he did it and went slumping out the door. I found it and watched it by myself later.
I went back to the campus many times. I went to avoid my mother as much as anything. Her new boyfriend was an asshole, and she whined when he was around. When he wasn’t around, she whined about him on the phone. Sometimes she called two people in a row to whine about exactly the same things he’d said or done. Even when I played loud music so I couldn’t hear her, I could feel her. When that happened, I’d leave my music on so she’d think I was in my room and I’d go to the campus. I’d follow female students as closely as I could, and I’d feel the other place running against the membrane of the world, almost touching it.
Why does it make sense to put romantic music together with a little boy murdering people? Because it did make sense—only I don’t know how. It seems dimly to have to do with justice, with some wrong being avenged, but what? The hurts of childhood? The stupidity of life? The kid doesn’t seem to be having fun. Random murder just seems like a job he has to do. But why?
Soon enough I realized that the college campus was the wrong place to think about making it real. It wasn’t an environment I could control; there were too many variables. I needed to get the girl someplace private. I needed to have certain things there. I needed to have a gun. I could find a place; there were deserted places. I could get a gun from Chet’s house; I knew where his father kept his. But the girl?
Then, while I was in the car with my mom, we saw a guy hitchhiking. He was middle-aged and fucked-up-looking and my mom—we were stopped at a light—remarked that nobody in their right mind would pick him up. Two seconds later, somebody pulled over for him. My mom laughed.
I started hitchhiking. Most of the people who picked me up were men, but there were women too. No one was scared of me. I was almost eighteen by then, but I was still small and quiet-looking. Women picked me up because they were concerned about me.
I didn’t really plan to do it. Mostly I just wanted to feel the gun in my pocket and look at the woman and know I could do it. There was this one; a thirtyish blond with breasts I could see through her open coat. But then she said she was pregnant and I started thinking, What if I was killing the baby?
Doug had a lot of nightmares when he was a baby, by which I mean between the ages of two and four. When he cried out in his sleep it was usually Marla who went to him. But one night she was sick and I told her to stay in bed while I went to comfort the boy. He was still crying “Mommy!” when I sat on the bed, and I felt his anxiety at seeing me instead of his mother, felt the moment of hesitation in his body before he came into my arms, vibrating rather than trembling, sweating and fragrant with emotion. He had dreamed that he was home alone and it was dark, and he was calling for his mother, but she wasn’t there. “Daddy, Daddy,” he wept, “there was a sick lady with red eyes and Mommy wouldn’t come. Where is Mommy?”
That may’ve been the first time I truly remembered her, the woman in the car. It was so intense a moment that in a bizarre intersection of impossible feelings, I got an erection with my crying child in my arms. But it lasted only a moment. I picked Doug up and carried him into our bedroom so that he could see his mother and nestle against her. I stayed awake nearly all night watching them.
The day it happened was a bright day, but windy and cold, and my mom would not shut up. I just wanted to watch a movie, but even with the TV turned up loud—I guess that’s why she kept talking; she didn’t think I could hear—I couldn’t blot out the sound of her yakking about how ashamed this asshole made her feel. I whispered, “If you’re so ashamed, why do you talk about it?” She said, “It all goes back to being fucking molested.” She lowered her voice; the only words I caught were “fucking corny.” I went out into the hall to hear. “The worst of it was that he wouldn’t look at me,” she said. I could almost hear her pacing around, the phone tucked between shoulder and chin. “That’s why I fall for these passive-aggressive types who turn me on and then make me feel ashamed.” Whoever she was talking to must’ve said something funny then, because she laughed. I left the TV on and walked out. I took the gun, but more for protection against perverts than the other thing.
I gave my boy that dream as surely as if I’d handed it to him. But I’ve given him a lot of other things too. The first time he caught a fish, he responded to my encouraging words with a bright glance I will never forget. We let that one go, but only after he held it in his hands: cold and quick, muscle with eyes and a heart, scales specked with yellow and red, and one tiny orange fin. Then the next one, bigger, leaping to break the rippling murk—I said, “Don’t point the rod at the fish. Keep the tip up, keep it up”—and he listened to me and he brought it in. There is a picture of it on the corkboard in his room, the fish in the net, the lure bristling in its crude mouth. And I have another picture too of him holding it in his hands, smiling triumphantly, its shining, still-living body fully extended.
She was older than I’d wanted, forty or even forty-five, but still good-looking. She had a voice that was strong and lifeless at the same time. She had black hair and she wore tight black pants. She did not have a wedding ring, which meant that maybe nobody would miss her. She picked me up on a lightly traveled forty-five-miles-an-hour road. She was listening to a talk show on the radio and she asked if I wanted to hear music instead. I said no, I liked talk shows.
“Yeah?” she asked. “Why?”
“Because I’m interested in current events.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I just listen to this shit because the voices relax me. I don’t really care what they’re talking about.”
They were talking about a war somewhere. Bombs were going off in markets where people bought vegetables; somebody’s legs had been blown off. We turned onto a road with a few cars, but none close to us.
“You don’t care?”
“No, why should I? Oh, about this?” She paused. There was something about a little boy being rushed to an overcrowded hospital. “Yeah, that’s bad. But it’s not like we can do anything about it.” On the radio, foreign people cried.
I took the gun out of my pocket.
I said, “Do you have kids?”
“No,” she said. “Why?”
“Take me to Old Post Road. I’m going to the abandoned house there.”
“I’m not going by there, but I can get you pretty close. So why do you care about current events? I didn’t give a shit at your age.”
“Take me there or I’ll kill you.”
She cocked her head and wrinkled her brow, as if she was trying to be sure she heard right. Then she looked down at the gun, and cut her eyes up at me; quickly, she looked back at the road. The car picked up speed.
“Take the next right or you’
ll die.” My voice at that moment did not come from me but from the other place. My whole body felt like an erection. She hit the right-turn signal. There was a long moment as we approached the crucial road. The voices on the radio roared ecstatically.
She pulled over to the shoulder.
“What are you doing?”
She put the car in park.
“Turn right or you die!”
She unbuckled her seat belt and turned to face me. “I’m ready,” she said. She leaned back and gripped the steering wheel with one hand, as if to steady herself. With her free hand she tapped herself between the eyes—bright blue, hot, rimmed with red. “Put it here,” she said. “Go for it.”
A car went by. Someone in the passenger seat looked at us blankly. “I don’t want to do it here. There’s witnesses. You need to take me to the place.”
“What witnesses? That car’s not stopping, nobody’s going to stop unless the emergency lights are on and they’re not, look.”
“But if I shoot you in the head, the blood will spray on the window and somebody could see.” It was my own voice again: the power was gone. The people on the radio kept talking. Suddenly I felt my heart beating.
“Okay, then do it here.” She opened her jacket to show me her chest. “Nobody’ll hear. When you’re done, you can move me to the passenger seat and drive the car wherever.”
“Get in the passenger seat now and I’ll do it.”
She laughed, hard. Her eyes were crazy. They were crazy the way an animal can be crazy in a tiny cage. “Hell, no. I’m not going to your place with you. You do it here, motherfucker.”
