Self-Defense

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “At Sanctum,” he said, “my goal is to be true to the essential consciousness of the locus, selecting materials that provide a synthesis with the prevailing mental and physical geometry. There are several log structures already on the property, and I want the new buildings to be indistinguishable from them.”

  Log structures.

  Either Lucy had read about the retreat or her brother had told her about it.

  December, another Publishers Journal squib: Paperback publication of Command: Shed the Light was canceled and sales of Lowell’s backlist—his previously published books—had bottomed, as had prices for his canvases.

  March: The Village Voice ran a highly unfavorable retrospective of Lowell’s body of work, suggesting that his place in history be reassessed. Three weeks later, a letter from someone named Terrence Trafficant of Rahway, New Jersey, attacked the article, labeling the author a “bloodsucking, motherfucking nematode” and hailing M. Bayard Lowell as “the dark Jesus of twentieth-century American thought—all of you are just too fucking blocked and preternaturally dense to realize it, you asshole-fucking New York Jew revisionist Pharisees.”

  July: Completion of construction at Sanctum was announced by Lowell in the L.A. Times Book Review. The first crop of Sanctum fellows was introduced:

  Christopher Graydon-Jones, 27, sculptor in iron and “found objects,” Newcastle, England.

  Denton Mellors, 28, former doctoral candidate in American Literature at Columbia University and critic for the Manhattan Book Review; “Mr. Mellors will complete work on his first novel, The Bride.”

  Joachim Sprentzel, 25, electronic music composer from Munich.

  Terrence Gary Trafficant, 41, essayist and former inmate at the New Jersey State Prison at Rahway, where he had been serving a thirteen-year sentence for manslaughter.

  Next day’s paper cared only about Trafficant, describing how acceptance as a Sanctum Fellow had hastened the ex-con’s parole and detailing Trafficant’s criminal history: robbery, assault, narcotics use, attempted rape.

  Jailed almost continuously since the age of seventeen, Lowell’s protÉgÉ had earned a reputation as a combative prisoner. With the exception of a prison diary, he’d never produced anything remotely artistic. A photo showed him in his cell, tattooed hands gripping the bars: skinny and fair, with long, limp hair, bad teeth, sunken cheeks, a devilish goatee.

  Questioned about the appropriateness of Trafficant’s selection, Lowell said, “Terry is excruciatingly authentic on smooth-muscle issues of freedom and will. He’s also an anarchist, and that will be an exhilarating influence.”

  Mid-August: Sanctum’s opening was celebrated by an all-night party at the former nudist colony. Catering by Chef Sandor Nunez of Scones Restaurant, music by four rock bands and a contingent from the L.A. Philharmonic, ambience by M. Bayard Lowell “in a long white caftan, drinking and delivering monologues, surrounded by admirers.”

  Among the sighted guests: a psychology professor turned LSD high priest, an Arab arms dealer, a cosmetics tycoon, actors, directors, agents, producers, and a buzzing swarm of journalists.

  Terry Trafficant was spotted holding forth to his own group of fans. His prison diary, From Hunger to Rage, had just been bought by Lowell’s publisher. His editor called it “an intravenous shot of poison and beauty. One of the most important books to emerge this century.”

  The New York police lieutenant who’d arrested Trafficant on the manslaughter charge was quoted, too: “This guy is serious bad news. They might as well light a stick of dynamite and wait for it to blow.”

  The next few citations on Lowell turned out to be cross-referenced interviews with Trafficant. Describing himself as “Scum made good, an urban aborigine exploring a new world,” the ex-con quoted from the classics, Marxist theory, and postwar avant-garde literature. When asked about his crimes, he said, “That’s all dead and I’m not an undertaker.” Crediting Buck Lowell for his freedom, he called his mentor “one of the four greatest men who ever lived, the other three being Jesus Christ, Krishnamurti, and Peter Kurten.” When asked who Peter Kurten was, he said, “Look it up, Jack,” and ended the interview.

  The article went on to identify Kurten as a German mass murderer, nicknamed the Däusseldorf Monster, who’d sadistically raped and butchered dozens of men, women, and children between 1915 and 1930. Kurten had other quirks, too, enjoying coitus with a variety of farm animals and going to his execution hoping he could hear his own blood bubble at the precise moment of death.

  When recontacted and asked how he could term that kind of thing “greatness,” Trafficant replied, “It’s all a matter of context, friend,” and hung up.

  A storm of outraged letters ensued. Several religious leaders condemned Lowell in their Sunday sermons. Lowell and Trafficant refused further interviews, and after a week or so the fuss died down. In May, From Hunger to Rage was published to uniformly strong reviews, went into a second printing, and made it to Number 10 on The New York Times best-seller list. A scheduled book tour for Trafficant was canceled, however, when the author didn’t show up for an interview on a national morning talk show.

  When questioned about Trafficant’s whereabouts, Buck Lowell said, “Terry walked out on us a couple of weeks ago. Right after all the sturmdrang idiocy about Kurten. Words mean different things to a man like that. He was wounded deeply.”

  A sensitive soul? asked the reporter.

  “It’s all a matter of context,” said Lowell.

  Over the next two decades, coverage of Lowell diminished steadily, and by the end of the period nothing was left but a few doctoral theses, inflicting upon him that peculiar gleeful viciousness that passes for wit in the academic world. Command: Shed the Light went out of print, and no further books or paintings materialized. No mention at all of Terry Trafficant, though his book did go into paperback.

  Checking out the gray volume, I drove home. When I passed Topanga Canyon, I wondered if the great man was still living there.

  CHAPTER

  6

  At Las Flores Canyon, static wiped out the music on my radio. I fooled with the tuner and caught the word Shwandt at the tail end of a news broadcast. Then the disk jockey said, “And now back to more music.”

  I couldn’t find a newscast and switched to AM. Both all-news stations were doing the sports scores, and everything else was chatter and music and people trying to sell things.

  I gave up and concentrated on the beauty of the highway, open and clean as it ribboned past true-blue water. Even the commercial strip near the Malibu pier didn’t look half bad in the afternoon sun. Bikini shops, diving schools, clam stands, real estate companies pretending they still had something to do during the slump.

  Once home, I took a beer and Lowell’s poetry onto the deck. It soon became clear this wouldn’t be reading for fun.

  Nasty stuff. Nothing like the luxuriant verse and lust-for-life stories Lowell had put out during the forties and fifties. Nearly all the poems dealt explicitly with violence, and many seemed to glorify it.

  The first, entitled “Home-icide,” was almost a haiku:

  He walks in the door

  briefcase-appendaged. And

  Finds

  She’s shot the kids.

  But the dog’s still alive.

  Time to feed it.

  Another proclaimed:

  Over the meadows and through the woods to:

  Clarity

  Chastity

  Priapisty

  Buggery

  Butchery

  Prepared perfectly for truncation:

  Hone the bone. Toss the I Ching,

  then toss the rules out the window.

  The title poem was an empty black page. Several other pieces seemed no more than random collections of words, and a six-page poem entitled Shaht-up consisted of four four-line verses in a language that a footnote explained was “Finnish, stupid.”

  The final piece was printed in letters so tiny I had to strain to read them:

>   Slung and arrowed, she begs for it.

  Shitsmear idiocy—who does she think she is?

  Snap.

  To give up!

  Snap.

  Just like that—

  LIKE THAT

  Easy to see why the book hadn’t worked—and why it had enchanted Trafficant.

  I pictured him poring over it in his cell, then rushing to Lowell’s defense.

  His motive would have been more than shared literary taste. With a few supportive words, he’d bought himself early parole.

  I reread the final poem.

  A woman begging for it, then scorned for giving up.

  Classic male rape fantasy?

  Lucy’s incubus . . .

  The abduction imagery in the dream.

  Had she come across this dreadful little book, perhaps as part of her brother’s “roots” research?

  Reading it and identifying with the victim?

  Or what if the dream represented something more personal—being molested herself?

  At the voir dire, she’d denied ever having been a crime victim. But if it had happened long ago and she’d repressed it, she wouldn’t have remembered.

  The dream had started right after she’d listened to Milo testify about Carrie.

  Identifying with a child victim.

  Abused in childhood, not by her father—he hadn’t been around to do it—but by a father surrogate? A teacher or some other trusted adult?

  Other men in the dream—melding with her father because he had hurt her in another way?

  I thought of her waking up on the kitchen floor.

  The helplessness of the position.

  Victimization.

  Or maybe none of the above.

  I wrestled with it a while longer, got no further, and went back inside. Remembering the radio broadcast I’d heard in the car, I flipped TV channels till I found a news show. Something about Eastern Europe; then Shwandt’s face appeared, leering, over the anchor’s left shoulder.

  “Police in Santa Ana are investigating the mutilation slaying of a young woman, still unidentified, whose body was found, stuffed in a trash bag, by the side of the Santa Ana Freeway early this morning near the Main Street exit. Sources close to the investigation say the slaying bears striking similarities to the serial murders for which the Bogeyman, Jobe Shwandt, was recently sentenced to death, and the possibility of a copycat killer operating out of Orange County is being considered. More on this breaking story as details emerge.”

  Too much bad stuff, time to sweat it out of my system. Pretending my knees were eighteen years old, I took a hard jog on the beach. When I got back, the phone was ringing. My service with Lucy, again.

  “Dr. Delaware? I’m . . . calling from work. I had a . . . bit of a problem.” Her voice dropped so low I could barely hear it. Noise in the background didn’t help.

  “What happened, Lucy?”

  “The dream. I . . . had it again.”

  “Since this morning’s session?”

  “Yes.” Her voice shook. “Here. At work, at my desk. . . . God, this is so—I have to talk softly; I’m at a pay phone in the lobby and people are staring. Can you hear me?”

  “I hear you fine.”

  She caught her breath. “I feel so stupid! Falling asleep at my desk!”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Lunch hour. I was brown-bagging, trying to catch up. I guess I nodded off, I don’t know, I really don’t remember.”

  “Had you taken any sort of medication?”

  “Just Tylenol for a headache.”

  “No antihistamines or anything else that would make you drowsy?”

  “Nothing. I just . . . fell asleep.” She whispered: “It must have woken me up—I found myself on the floor, my legs . . . the dream was still in my head, reverberating. Right in the middle of the office! God!”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Not physically. But the humiliation—everyone thinks I’m crazy!”

  “Were there a lot of people around when you fell?”

  “Not when I fell, but right after. It was lunchtime; a whole crowd was coming back and saw me on the floor! I ran to the ladies’ room to straighten up. When I got back, my boss was there. He never comes into the staff area. The look on his face—like what kind of nutcase do I have working for me!”

  “If he’s worried about anything, Lucy, it’s probably that you’ll file a worker’s comp suit.”

  “No, no, I’m sure he thinks I’m some kind of bizarro. Falling asleep in the middle of the day—I excused myself to the bathroom again, went down to the lobby, and called you.”

  “Come over, let’s talk.”

  “I—I guess I’d better. I’m sure not in any shape to go back up there.”

  I called a neurologist in Santa Monica named Phil Austerlitz and told him I had a possible referral. When I recounted what had happened, he said, “You’re thinking narcolepsy?”

  “She’s got a troubled sleep pattern. Some childhood enuresis.”

  “But nothing chronic in adulthood.”

  “It just started five months ago. While she was a juror on the Bogeyman trial.”

  “Sounds more like stress.”

  “That’s what I think, but I want to cover all bases.”

  “Sure, I’ll see her. Thanks for the referral. Sounds like a fun one. I’ve been dealing with brain tumors all week. People our age or younger. Must be something in the air.”

  She rang the gate bell just after five. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and her face was drawn. When I took her hand it was limp and damp.

  I gave her a glass of water and sat her down. She took a sip and put her face in her hands.

  “What’s happening to me, Dr. Delaware?”

  I touched her hand. “We’ll find out, Lucy.”

  She tightened her mouth. “It was different this time. This time I saw more.”

  Taking a deep breath. And another. Sliding her hand out from under mine. I sat back.

  It took a few more minutes for her to compose herself. “Remember the grating noise I told you about? What I thought might be sex? It had nothing to do with sex.”

  She leaned forward. “I saw it. They were digging a grave—burying her. The grating was their shovels hitting the rocks. This time, I was closer. Everything was clearer. It’s never felt this real before. It was . . .”

  She put a hand over her eyes and shook her head.

  “I was close enough to touch them—right behind them. It felt so real.”

  “The same men.”

  “Yes. Three of them.”

  “Including your—including Lowell.”

  She bared her eyes and licked her lips and stared at the floor. “He was one of the diggers. Working hard—huffing and puffing. They all were. And cursing. I could hear their breathing—harsh, like runners. Then they put her in, and . . .”

  Her shoulders started to shake.

  “I started to feel myself transforming—my soul leaving my body. I actually saw it, fluttering like this thin white feather. Then it entered her body.”

  She stood suddenly.

  “I need to walk around.”

  Pacing the room, she covered the width of the glass doors, then retraced her steps. Repeated it twice more before returning to her seat.

  She remained standing, both hands on the chair back. “I could taste the dirt, Dr. Delaware. It felt as if I was in that grave. . . . I tried to shake the dirt off of me but I couldn’t move. It kept coming down on me—stuffing me. I thought: This is what death is like, this is terrible; what did I do to deserve this, why are they doing this to me?”

  Her eyes closed and she swayed so low I jumped up and caught her shoulder. Her body tightened but she didn’t seem to notice me.

  The sound of the tide rose up from the beach, like a swell of applause. Suddenly, her breathing quickened.

  “Lucy,” I said.

  As if her name were a posthypnotic suggestion, she opened her eyes and
blinked hard.

  “What happened then, Lucy?”

  “I woke up. Found myself on the floor . . . again. My legs . . .” Wincing.

  “What about your legs?”

  “They were . . .” Spots of color appeared on her cheeks. “Spread—spread wide, in front of everybody. It made me feel so sluttish.”

  “People understand accidents, Lucy.”

  She looked at my hand on her shoulder. I removed it and she sat down.

  “God,” she said. “This is crazy—am I going off the deep end?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “You’re obviously reacting to some kind of stress, and we’re going to find out what it is. I also want you to see a neurologist to rule out anything organic.”

  She caught her breath and looked at me, terrified. “Like what? A brain tumor?”

  “No, nothing like that, I didn’t mean to alarm you. We just need to rule out a sleep disorder that responds to medication. It’s unlikely, but I want to be careful, so our road’s clear.”

  “Our road. Sounds like some kind of journey.”

  “In a way it is, Lucy.”

  She turned away from me. “I don’t know any neurologists.”

  I gave her Phil’s name and number. “It won’t be intrusive or painful.”

  “I hope so. I hate to be pawed. I’ll call him tomorrow, okay? I’d better get home now.”

  “Why don’t you stay here and relax before you set out?”

  “I appreciate the offer, but no, thanks. I’m really tired, just want to crawl into bed.”

  “Want some coffee?”

  “No, I’ll be fine—it’s more emotional fatigue than sleepiness.”

  “You’re sure you want to go right now?”

  “Yes, please. Sorry for the hassle.”

  “It’s no hassle at all, Lucy.”

  “Thanks for your time—we’ll figure it out.” Looking to me for confirmation.