by Saul Black
K: Have you read Sophie’s Choice? Seen the movie?
Valerie started, slightly, at the sound of Katherine’s voice after the tape’s long pause.
V: I saw the movie, yes.
K: The Nazi officer tells Sophie she must choose one of her children to die, and that if she doesn’t make the choice both children will die.
V: Yes, I know.
K: Do you think the Nazi lacked empathy?
V: What?
K: Empathy is the ability to understand and share in another person’s feelings. Do you think the Nazi understood and shared in Sophie’s feelings?
V: Of course not.
K: Oh, Valerie, it would be so comforting if that were true. But it isn’t. Of course he had empathy. Empathy was essential.
V: Okay. We’re drifting a little here.
K: Listen, Valerie, this is important. I’m telling you something that will deepen your understanding. It’s what you’re afraid of in me, but it’s a fear you’re ashamed of, so I’m going to help you past it. Empathy is supposed to be the antidote to cruelty. But it’s just the opposite. Cruelty depends on empathy. You have to empathize with the victim in order to know—to really know—that their suffering is guaranteed. The fairy tale says that if you really knew how much something would hurt someone, you wouldn’t do it. But the fairy tale underestimates cruelty. It has to; otherwise it wouldn’t be a fairy tale. Inflicting suffering on someone without understanding isn’t cruelty, it’s mere brutality. It’s only the understanding that makes it cruel. Cruelty is a passenger on the train that slows down for the empathy stop, waves, then goes on past it. Empathy simply isn’t the last stop, however much you’d like it to be. Don’t you see? The Nazi probably had children of his own.
V: You might be right, but let’s move on. Let’s go back to the first victim, Alicia Hooper—
K: Is that enough for you? Do you think I’ve answered the question?
V: You said in your earlier statement that you picked her up in a car on Folsom Street—
K: No, I said that he’d watched her on Folsom Street. He didn’t pick her up there. He made contact with her somewhere else.
V: Where?
K: I don’t know. The answer, by the way, is because it’s the most natural thing about me. The discovery was immediate and intuitive. I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. At that stage when kids have always got their hands down their pants. Abstractedly, most of the time. I wasn’t often abstracted. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t masturbate. I thought of it to myself as “the good feeling.” Getting the good feeling. Irony’s there from the start, like the Devil. Anyway, one day I heard my father shouting at my mother in their bathroom. He shouted at her a lot. I knew she was afraid of him. There was that energy that came off him sometimes. I crept to the door and looked through the gap. He had her by the hair and was twisting her neck and forcing her to her knees. She was crying. I never knew her to fight back in any way. I just knew the vague sound of her pleading. It was the depressing little weather system in the lovely home, absorbed by the white countertops and state-of-the-art gadgets. I wasn’t close to her. I wasn’t close to either of them, particularly, but my father never did anything to me. There was a strange pause between them. Her on her knees, him standing with his fist wrapped in her hair, breathing through his nose. She was just saying, please, please. I was curious. My father held her hair and stared down at her. Then he looked away, as if he were concentrating on something on the floor. He stayed like that for what seemed a long time. Then he unzipped his pants and his cock sprang out. It was the first time I’d ever seen it. It looked huge. It looked the size of my arm. He pushed it toward her face, and her face seemed to crumple. When I remember her face now it’s like the Tragedy mask, that perfect inversion of a smile. It was extraordinary. But I knew what was going to happen. She opened her mouth and in it went. I watched. It went on for a long time. It was so odd to hear her gagging and watch his hand moving her head. She banged her head, actually, on the side of the bathtub, but he just kept going. I heard him say, very quietly, but focused, like a carefully held scalpel, You swallow it. Swallow it. He shuddered. It was strange and ugly seeing his hairy legs because his pants had slipped down. Afterward my mother wiped her mouth and he just stood there, looking ill. His face was different, swollen. I crept away. And later that night, when I masturbated, there it was. The good feeling, but better than ever before. You see, I knew she didn’t like it. I knew she liked it less than if he’d just hit her. But I liked that she didn’t like it, and that was that. So do you think I’m a different species? Do you think I had the wrong reaction because I have the wrong wiring? Or because the Devil had marked my card from the moment of conception?
Another long pause.
V: You know what? It’s not my job to answer that question. That’s why I’m not interested. My job is to stop you from doing what you do. Why you do it is for other people to decide. I can see that it’s important to you that I care, but I’m sorry, I really don’t. Believe me, there are plenty of people who do care. But the fact is I’m not one of them.
K: And yet you listened. Not entirely strategically, I think. Why do you think Nick’s stopped sitting in on our conversations? I miss him.
V: Interview terminated at 7:18 P.M.
22
Four days later Valerie got an e-mail from Susanna Arden.
Detective Hart, please see below from Katherine Glass:
Dear Valerie,
I haven’t cracked all of it yet, but I’m close. I’m sorry it’s going so slowly. Ironically, so far I’ve spent more time on the map of Mesopotamia than on anything else. Ironically because the cipher it reveals is a version of my annoyingly common name. I could kick myself for being so dim. The map shows the whole of the ancient territory now covered by modern Iraq, but the relevant area is in the south, where the Tigris and Euphrates run into the sea. Relevant because since St. Augustine that’s been one of the most popular choices among the demented and the credulous for the original geographical location of—don’t laugh—the Garden of Eden. I doubt I would have worked that out, but the “East” point on the map’s compass is circled. With risible belatedness it clicked: East of Eden, which is, of course, a novel by Steinbeck. The novel’s antiheroine (and gal after my own heart) is named Cathy Ames. According to our friend, one of my many fictional avatars. Well, let me be truthful: according to our friend and me. Cathy is, after all, blond and beautiful, with small but manifestly seductive breasts, and, in Steinbeck’s own words, a “pearly light” which makes her irresistible to men. Naturally, she’s also a monster (a common criticism of the novel is that in its biblical schema “Cathy” is Satan, a being of pure evil with a psychological narrative insufficient to support or explain it), and equally naturally she doesn’t end well, crippled with arthritis, a “sick ghost” in a brothel, eventually a murderer and ultimately a suicide. Charming. But there you are: Cathy Ames it is, whether I like it or not.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was much easier, since we talked once (memorably) about the concept of Room 101, where poor Winston, like all the room’s unfortunate visitors, is forced to confront his greatest fear. In his case it’s rats. Our friend’s was drowning. Mine (ha-ha) is burial alive, which I’m all but living through even as I write this, courtesy of God’s insatiable and perverse sense of humor. I’m working through permutations using both “drowning” and “burial/burial alive” as ciphers, since it could be either, but as you can imagine, that doubles the work.
Scarlett Johansson mystifies me, as yet, and I’m racking my brains for the significance of the magnified picture of the needle (I don’t know if I’m looking for numbers or words), but please bear with me. I am devoted to this. Not, obviously, out of some lately developed conscience, but because it remains the most fun I’ve had in six years.
I would ask how the “police procedure” is going, but since I assume you’re in the thick of it I know you’ll have better things to do with
your time than hammer out an update e-mail to me. But don’t let me forget the other thing I want to discuss with you, next time we meet. You will come and see me again, won’t you?
Okay. Enough. Back to the coal face for poor, exhausted—but diligent—Ms. Glass!
K
23
“Natalie Dormer,” Eugene said.
“Who’s Natalie Dormer?” Nick asked.
“The girl from Game of Thrones with the turned-up nose. Margaery Tyrell. She has the thing.”
They were back in the locker room at the Bay Club. Nick, naked but for his underwear, was sitting on the bench massaging his left knee. He’d crashed into the side wall chasing down one of Eugene’s drop shots. Nothing broken, but pain enough to draw a slight wince with his weight on it. He wondered if the bone was chipped. They’d had to abort their third game, having won one each. Eugene, naturally, had claimed the tide was turning back in his favor.
“Cersei ought to have the thing,” Eugene said. “And Melisandre half has it. Daenerys Targaryen has got that fabulous body wasted because she absolutely does not have it. But Margaery’s got it. She’s got all of it.”
Nick picked up his jeans and began easing them on. “I realize you’re speaking English,” he said. “But I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t know Game of Thrones? The TV show?”
“I’ve heard of it, I think.”
“You’ve heard of it? Jesus. Do you own a television?”
“Yeah, but I don’t watch it much.”
“Holy mother of God. What do you watch?”
“We don’t get the time to watch much of anything,” Nick said. “The news. The occasional ball game. I was following the English Premier League for a while, but I’ve lost touch. We start watching a movie, but I fall asleep.”
“Well, you need to watch this show. It’s like X-rated Tolkien. Genius.”
“That’s the Lord of the Rings guy, right?”
“For God’s sake,” Eugene said. “Never mind do you have a television. Do you live on Earth?”
“I don’t care for fairies and wizards and whatnot.”
“Okay. Mad Men? Breaking Bad? Jesus, The Wire?”
“Yeah, I saw The Wire once. I don’t need it. I might as well stay at work.”
Eugene made a gesture of impatience with his hands. “Look, never mind any of that. Just give me your top five.”
“My top five what?”
“Breakfast cereals,” Eugene said. “Women, you dolt. Your top five members of the female species.”
“What, any women?”
Eugene closed his eyes. Sighed. Opened them. A theatrical performance of patience. “The five women—famous women, you understand, not your girlfriend—that you’d have sex with if you could. No strings, no consequences, no pregnancies or STDs—and you have your lady’s full and complete permission. Are you following this? It’s a thought experiment. It’s a hypothetical.”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” Nick said.
“What do you mean you haven’t thought about it? Everyone thinks about it.”
“Well, you’re going to have to give me a minute. Actresses, right?”
Eugene pulled his T-shirt over his head. “Look, you don’t know anything. You’re in bad shape. What you’re aiming for is top fives in every category. ‘Actresses’ is way too broad. You want movie actresses, yes, but that’s a separate category from TV actresses. And we’ve got to divide U.S. and non-U.S. talent. Porn actresses, obviously, are a whole different animal. Then you’ve got pop stars, athletes, news anchors, weather girls, politicians, writers.… Actually, even I struggle with writers. But I’ve got most of my categories divided into decades. I mean, you want Brigitte Bardot, right, but not the way she looks now.”
“Do you actually do anything for a living?” Nick said. Eugene worked as a freelance business consultant (for which read: the guy who goes in and tells them who to fire, he’d said) off the back of a Harvard MBA and was, in spite of all evidence of congenital idleness, doing pretty well. The car in the Bay Club lot was a Mercedes AMG GT S. Not much change from a hundred and fifty grand. The Rolex was a Rolex. The women, when Eugene wasn’t grappling with them, were dined at Saison, Jardinière, Gary Danko. No one wants the responsibility for making some poor schmuck unemployed, Eugene had explained. They feel so shitty about it they’d rather recruit someone to shoulder the blame. I’m a white-collar prostitute. No—I’m a white-collar hit man. That should be the name of a band. White-Collar Hit Man. See how many ideas I have? I’m like a goddamned idea factory. I usually have ten ideas before breakfast. I just don’t have the energy to follow them through. My suntan suits, for example. These are like weightless microfiber cooling bodysuits with cut-outs, like a body stocking. You put it on when you’re getting a tan, and thanks to the cut-out bits you end up with tiger stripes or leopard spots or whatever. You could tan your lover’s name on your ass. And unlike tattoos, if you break up, it’s no big deal. It fades. Tell me there’s not a market for that.
“I don’t think about this stuff when I’m working,” Eugene said. “I think about it on the squash court. Because I have so much time, while you’re floundering around and crashing into the walls, courtesy of my satanic drop shots.”
They went to the bar and settled in for their ritual two beers. Nick’s knee was throbbing rhythmically, but he felt, as always after the blur of combat, usefully purged. Eugene was, as per usual, slightly flushed. He had a gym-worked body and an alert face, lively blue eyes, and dark-gold hair in a buzz cut. I’m going for Celtic Arthurian meets soulful marine, he said. Not many people can get away with this cut without looking like a thug. But I’ve got my supermodel cheekbones and a very nicely shaped head. The whole effect is one of an elegant jewel. Masculine, yes, but with a little sensitive mystery. I carry myself as if I know I’m worth knowing, but I’m trying to hide it.
“Debbie Harry,” Nick said. “In the ‘Heart of Glass’ video.”
“You’re combining categories there,” Eugene said. “She’s a pop star and an actress. But you’re a novice, so I’ll let it go. What number?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where in the top five?”
“I don’t know. Give me a chance.”
“Debbie doesn’t have the thing,” Eugene said. “There’s too much kindness and self-mockery there. The vamping was always ironic. What you’re after is cynical filth. That’s the thing.”
“There’s something truly wrong with you.”
“That’s what you have to tell yourself because you’re in denial. Whereas I … I am standing, looking fearlessly into the heart of the light.”
“You need to cut down on your porn.”
“Don’t get me started on porn. Do you know who Chanel Preston is?”
“No.”
“Google her. If I were going to marry anyone, I’d marry her. Porn models come and go for me, but Chanel is constant as the Northern Star. We were made for each other. We’d get along. It hurts my heart that I’m never going to meet her. That’s how I feel about Chanel. How’s the knee?”
“Painful.”
“You want Tylenol? I’ve got some in my bag.”
“It’s fine. I’ve had worse.”
“You say that, but I’m wondering how long you’re going to string this out as an excuse.”
“So, Chanel whatsername’s not on the horizon. Any other business to report?”
Eugene exhaled, smiling. “Michelle,” he said. “Thirty-five, brunette. Still with the hyperditziness she should’ve outgrown ten years ago. Cute rather than sexy, and truth be told a little thick in the wrists and ankles. Certainly not my usual racehorse. Third date last week. We had sex. I think I only had sex with her because she’d made it so obvious that she was a two-dates-before-sex kind of girl.”
“I’m already sorry I asked.”
“Well, surprisingly, it was quite nice. Kind of a gentle jackpot. She had s
ome skills, albeit you could tell she’d acquired them with a sort of sadness. She had a resigned, docile enthusiasm. If it hadn’t been for what she said I might have seen her again.”
“What did she say?”
“It was when we were lying there in bed together afterward. You know, standard postcoital arrangement: my arm around her, her head on my chest, the scene in the movie where the girl trails her fingertips over him and asks how he got the little scar or whatever.… Anyway, we’re lying there, just chatting, and eventually the pauses get longer and I can feel myself drifting off to sleep. Just as I’m about to, she squeezes me with her leg and says, in my ear: ‘I like it here with you.’”
