The Convulsion Factory

by Brian Hodge

  The interview was conducted in a sterile room in the county jail, unfurnished except for a scarred table. Kevin set up two cameras and lights; sound levels were monitored. Darryl Hiller was the last to arrive, manacles on his wrists and ankles, with a pair of Rushmore-faced deputies standing guard a few feet away in case he got frisky.

  roll tape. three, two, one

  “I forgive you,” was the first thing he said to her. “I don’t hold it against you that you turned me in. I was disappointed at first, sure. But you played it well. Now I understand it had to be this way.”

  “Did you want to get caught six months ago?” she asked.

  He shook his head, eyes full of visions no one else in the room could perceive. “No.” A smile. “But it had to be that way. I’d gone as far as I could staying anonymous. I had to go to the next level. Beyond. And now?” He beamed. “Everybody knows Darryl Hiller.”

  Sandra thought he still looked so unremarkable in that chair, across that table. Still pale. His hair was trimmed shorter and he looked boyish, his face still plain. Only a small scar marked his forehead to commemorate contact with her camcorder. His hands fidgeted on the table, more out of idleness, she thought, than nerves. She decided it was better to let him ramble and free-associate rather than try to direct him in an orderly flow of Q&A. They had plenty of tape to roll.

  He told stories of childhood. What went wrong? Everything. Nothing. He said he’d been a sometimes bedwetter in gradeschool and that his mother used to tape his prepubescent penis to his lower belly every night as punishment, and whip him in the morning if he had freed it. Then he laughed and said he’d made it all up. The truth could’ve been anything.

  “Sixteen women raped and suffocated,” Sandra cut in at one point. Properly outraged, under control. Professional. “Why did you do it? Your core reason.”

  He tilted his head back, let his gaze rove over the ceiling. He had a habit of avoiding eye contact when answering.

  “The worst crime a man can inflict on himself is anonymity. It eats people alive inside if they go too long with their grubby little lives, not counting for anything, good or bad. They just exist. No one should have to live an anonymous life. Me? I had the courage to become known. That’s all. How else could I do it? I don’t have a cure for cancer or zits. I can’t balance the federal budget. I’m not Tom Cruise in some new movie. So I had to use my imagination. And the tools at my disposal.” Now, finally, eye contact. “And you. You inspired me. Because you’ve got it down to an art. You know what it’s like to be public property.”

  “Did you believe you had some sort of moral superiority?”

  He looked irritated, as if she’d missed the point entirely. “It doesn’t have anything to do with morality. Or superiority. It’s a question of economics. Supply and demand.”

  “Economics,” she repeated.

  “Right,” he said. Most natural thing in the world. “When does newspaper circulation rise? When does everyone tune in TV news? Not when the doctor with the cure is on. Not when a budget analyst is on. Not when Tom Cruise is on. No. It’s when there’s a killer on the loose. You know … we’re not so different, you and me. There’s a symbiosis. You need me as much as I need you.”

  She was about to formulate a rebuttal, but he broke in: “Do you believe in cancer?”

  She flubbed her first try, flustered. Have to edit that out later. “Of course. Everyone knows someone affected in some way by cancer.”

  He nodded. “And do you believe in rats?”

  She didn’t like this track of inquiry. “Of course I do.”

  “So you’ll acknowledge the cause-and-effect relationship between them.”

  “Rats cause cancer?” Her voice was incredulous.

  “No, that’s backwards. Cancer causes rats.”

  “You’ve lost me with this, Darryl.”

  He hunched forward, toward Sandra and camera one. “Cancer’s out there. It’s out there. Feeding on people. All these food additives and chemicals and crap in the environment? Cancer has a field day with that stuff. For cancer, it’s like rocket fuel. Now. You got all these labs everywhere, right, scientists looking for new drugs to fight cancer? Places breed all these lab rats just for experiments. That’s all the rats are good for. They wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for cancer.” A deep breath, reloading. “That’s the way it is between you and me. All this crap wrong with cities today, and small towns, the world at large? You people are like cancer, feeding on it with your cameras, poking your mikes into it, stirring it. Pretty soon, you just have to expect rats like me popping up to give you more to work with.”

  “There’s nothing cancerous about meeting the public’s right to know. You’re making a perversity out of something inherently noble.”

  “Keep thinking that, if it helps.” He chuckled. “Do you think pharmaceutical companies want to cure cancer? Not in a million years. They won’t wipe it out because of economics. Get rid of a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry? All they want is to cure some individual patients … and keep the hope alive in everyone else.” He settled back in his chair with a grin. “So save the self-righteousness. I may disgust you, and you may hate me. But your job would never be the same without me.”

  “And how do you feel about the continuing cycle of murder? By now you must know about the copycat killer who started imitating you last month.”

  Darryl’s forehead creased. “I feel honored,” he said slowly. “I influenced a stranger’s destiny.” A broad, dawning grin. “For once, I was the inspiration. The growth cycle continues.”

  Fifty minutes later, once the interview was concluded, Sandra hurried to the nearest bathroom and hung over the toilet with dry heaves. She’d eaten nothing all day, but the rejection reaction was the same.

  The following week — after editing, rearranging, splicing, and redubbing — the five-part series on Darryl Hiller was shown on the eleven o’clock news.

  And drew the largest audience in ActioNews 8’s history.

  *

  November is the cruelest month, but ActioNews 8 weathers it well. They’re top of the heap in a nine-station market, no small thanks due to Sandra Riley and her considerable drawing power. She’s now a weeknight anchor with a hefty salary kicked up into six figures, and management’s only cause for fretting is that her agent would contract her new position for no more than a year. She has to be free to jump when those inevitable network offers start to materialize.

  The copycat Tapeworm gives them a body every few weeks. It’s not the original rapist-murderer; the DNA evidence he leaves behind proves that. Of the original, no one knows. But Tapeworm is as Tapeworm does, and the public tunes fearfully in, dreading another dose of reality, enthralled when they get it. Sandra anchors the footage shot in the field by a younger protégée who idolizes her, and every time, Sandra dies a little more inside. Remembering her role. But her makeup never runs.

  The package arrives via courier one afternoon, brown paper wrapper, neatly handlettered and marked to her attention at ActioNews 8 studios. No return address, but the paperwork was done across the country on the west coast.

  She pops it into the VCR in her office — a larger one now, with windows — when she gets a free moment on this blustery November afternoon. She presses PLAY and sits.

  The amateur filmmaker has rigged up a cheerful title card, reading Sex, Death, and Videotape 2. Sandra sits straighter and bites down on a knuckle as her eyes widen

  and there he is, Darryl Hiller seated on a stool with nothing in the background but stark white. Medium close-up, chest and head and shoulders. The camera doesn’t move, as if tripod-mounted.

  “There was so much I wanted to tell you before I left last June.” He gazes directly at her without blinking. “But you understand the situation. I know you do. You always do.

  “There was a lot I didn’t understand when we did our interview. Not that I was wrong, I haven’t been wrong in years, I was just … incomplete. When I told you I had to go beyo
nd to the next level, I had no idea. No idea. Remember how you asked me how I felt about inspiring someone to follow in my footsteps and I said it felt good? I found out it meant more than that. It meant there’d been a change in me. I wasn’t just a rat anymore, because I’d created something in my own image. He wouldn’t have existed without me. And that meant I’d just been upgraded to cancer.” He starts to grin, the only one who gets the joke. “That’s how I got away at the sentencing. They escorted me right out of that bathroom and took the cuffs off me themselves. Poor, poor Reggie Blaine. Innocent bystander. All I had to do was break one guy’s face and tell one lie.”

  Sandra forgets to breathe, begins to comprehend. Recalling the footage of Reggie Blaine, Victim, forced to wear jailhouse orange. Except there was only one set of clothes all along, she knows this now. Knows it as surely as she knows she was a midwife for an entirely new aberration. She dies inside all the more for it. But her blank-faced shell sits, watching

  as Darryl Hiller’s face contorts ripples rearranges. Pudgy cheeks, red hair, she has seen it before, weeping for the cameras along marble corridors. And then it’s gone, replaced by a new face that could easily belong to the boy next door. But the voice continues:

  “You see, I became the cancer —”

  new faces, leering at the lens

  “— and I’ll be back to see you very very soon —”

  a rogue’s gallery of anonymity

  “— but you won’t see me —”

  lifting a roll of vinyl tape to the camera eye and peeling a strip free to lick its sticky underside

  “— because I’ve learned the one fundamental trick of cancer:”

  his last word on flashcut repeat, a different face speaking with every flick of the editing console

  “Mutation/Mutation/Mutation/Mutation/Mutation.”

  Fade to black.

  Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt

  I was a couple years adrift out of school, thinking yes, today is probably the day I’ll kill myself, when the weatherman went and upstaged anything I could’ve done.

  They say he was distraught over a woman, a restraining order, negative publicity. Family problems too, you have to figure. I hadn’t heard a word of any of it. He had a pilot’s license and his own plane, and what he did was, he aired one final weather report on the early evening news, smiled at the city one last time, then drove out to his plane, got cleared for takeoff, climbed 500 feet into the blue summer sky, then turned flaps down and did a full-throttle nosedive straight into the runway. This while rush-hour traffic was still clogging Chicago’s paved arteries. They say the fireball was a thing of beauty, although not so for the pieces they finally pulled from the wreckage.

  And I ask you: Now how can you follow something like that?

  Megan, one of my housemates, taped the later re-broadcast of his final weather report, and we’d watch it over and over, running it back and back again. We were looking for clues. Anything. But the weatherman gave up nothing. Not one thing.

  “I just realized something,” she finally said, days after the burial. “He didn’t even fly around for one last look. Just got the plane up and did it.” Then she grew very reflective. “I couldn’t have done it that way. I’d have to fly around, make some goodbyes, see everything from above. Make one final bid for a little genuine pathos. The way he did it … that’s so cold.”

  Megan was right. It had been a very singular-minded devotion to purpose. No wonder he’d been a success in his career.

  *

  The summer I was ten I played Little League baseball with a number of other boys who were either too lanky or too pudgy, and who spent every spare moment of every game with one fearful eye turned to the stands, where our fathers sat, expectant and often quite rabid. I was not a star player.

  I can’t remember if it was my idea, or the coach’s, but every time we took the field, I dangled my glove from a loose arm and went trudging out into right field, as if it were my own personal Siberia. Whether my own altruism, or the coach’s doing, it seemed the best way I could serve the team. Nothing much ever happened in right field. The kids at bat generally pulled to the left. So I’d stand out there and gaze across into left field, watching Dennis Freemont as he heroically went loping after each fly ball that came his way, effortlessly plucking them from the air like some budding young god of the harvest. I alternately felt sickened by him and wanted to be his best friend, imagining what it must feel like being in control of his precociously developed musculature instead of the puny sticks that were my arms and legs. Imagining what his glowing father must’ve said to him after every game. I’d never hear words like that.

  I remember the fly ball that came directly to me as clearly as if it’d been a comet bearing down on me, or a small plane. The world fell into a silent hush as I braced myself beneath the ball and wondered if my father would notice my glove trembling.

  I reached forward from my crouch as the ball plopped straight into my glove as I caught it underhanded, the way the coach always said not to. It fell into the laced pocket, then wormed its way back and went dribbling out the other end of the glove…

  And somehow ended up wedged between my knees. I stood knock-kneed, the ball caught there and pivoting as if it were the socket of a new joint that had fused my legs together. All the sounds of the world came rushing back again, most of all the cries of my teammates, and then I toppled over backward, the ball dropped, my miracle play hopelessly blown.

  My father had little to say in the car later, quietly smoking and blowing his gray clouds out the window as he sought to merge with the road, lose himself and his disappointment in the traffic. Finally he turned to me and his eyes weren’t too accusing, and I realized that he was, in his way, trying to understand.

  “Maybe baseball’s not the thing for you,” he said. “But the one thing I don’t ever want you to forget is, with hard work and effort you can be anything you want to be. I know you can do it. You can be whatever you want.”

  I nodded. This was a great relief to me.

  “I want to be a girl,” I told him.

  It seemed easier then, to my ten-year-old outlook. All the expectations just weren’t as brutal. Nobody forced girls into the fields like untrained gladiators. But at the time I didn’t realize that there were mothers who made up their daughters, as young as five and six, into seductive miniature adults, entered them in contests, got their pictures in the papers where they could be ogled by sick men who didn’t understand — or maybe didn’t want to admit — that that knowing look in their eyes was just Maybelline. I didn’t know any of that then.

  I only wanted to be a girl because I thought fathers left you alone then.

  And mine looked at me, everything new again between us, new and awful. He looked at me as if for the first time realizing that I wasn’t something from his loins after all, rather something he’d excreted in a moment of illness.

  My father turned back to the road then, started smoking with renewed need. He no longer bothered blowing it out the window, and I rode the rest of the way home in the choking clouds.

  *

  Even before the weatherman snuffed his life out on the tarmac and made me realize how uncreative I was, I didn’t really consider myself suicidal. It’s just that I’d been weighing options lately, and there was something about turning out all the lights that I’d begun to find very sensible.

  A few days before, one weekend morning, all six of us in the house had managed to straggle awake at the same time, and we sat around the breakfast table talking about all the things we didn’t want to be, and all the things we’d love to do but that would’ve still left us penniless urchins, old enough to know better, that the world wasn’t that accommodating. Most of us had earned our college degrees in the past year or two, but by choice or by dire curricular miscalculation were still marking time before doing anything real.

  There was a lot of bitter laughter in the kitchen that morning. I happened to remark that, as career options
went, medical school cadaver was looking better and better.

  Later, Megan came up to me where I sat in the back, looking over a lawn that had earned us the enmity of our neighbors. She sat down and drank most of a Tab in silence before looking at me, quizzical and maybe worried, and saying, “You were kind of serious this morning, weren’t you?”

  To me, the creepy thing was, I immediately knew what she was talking about. I told her I was, come to think of it.

  “Nobody else around here catches shit like that. Sometimes I really hate being the sensitive one.” Then her worried look gave way to one of nervousness. “You’re not going to … act on it, are you?”

  “Wrong time of year,” I said, and she didn’t understand that at all, so I had to explain. “If it was winter, I might have to go over to Lake Michigan. Find an ice floe and chip away at it, until I could float off into the haze, like a toothless old Eskimo. I heard they do that when they realize their lives are useless.”

  “You are not useless,” then Megan started laughing. “You pay one-sixth of the rent and utilities.”

  “Anybody who answers an ad can do that.”

  “That’s true. But you do it on time.”

  Of those under our roof I liked Megan best, with a rare and true affection that left me terrified at the notion of sleeping with her, because of what it probably would’ve destroyed. Among the little archipelagos that were all our lives, I think Megan and I sat closest together.

  There were Syd and Brendan, grad students and hypochondriacs who worked themselves into weekly frenzies over what they might’ve contracted. I was convinced they remained in school mainly for the health benefits. They went to Student Health Services so much that the rest of us had taken to calling them the Socialist Patients Kollective — unwieldy, but it gave us a great sense of personal vindictiveness.

  Then there were Pam and Camilla, who were trying very hard to be lesbians because it was the correct thing to do, but they just didn’t seem very good at it, and the time Pam slipped up and slept with a guy at a party, it triggered a screaming match that lasted a week. When I came to Pam’s defense, it seemed to mend the rift because finally they had a new target, womyn together, and they spent the next week deciding to hate me for being patronizing. I then understood why so many police officers are attacked at domestic disputes.