Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  —It’s the only way you could have been caught. Police in three states had no idea that one person had done what you’ve done. You surrendered yourself. You knew you’d be seen with Catherine through the window. You knew once the call to the police was made, the dispatcher would put the officers in 103 in direct contact with the person making the call.

  —I made sure the door was bolted, that the shades were drawn. I had three escape routes worked out, I had . . .

  No . . . this will stop, now. To control a fiction, one can stop reading it. I’m not going to act crazy, prodded like an ant in one of my chalk-circle arenas to participate in its own destruction. I won’t deny these things like a character in a horror comic, blithering to his shrink: But, ya gotta BELIEVE ME, Doc! I willed my body slack, took a deep breath, forced clean air where wet sand had been. The gaze of my twin (whose face I’d never see, even as he lifted a mask of my face to his own in order to play me) watched me with sight that had changed over the span of the last few heartbeats. It felt cold as winter runoff in a gutter.

  —I have no recollection of the things you say I’ve done. What you’re saying is fantastic to me. I don’t believe the circumstances of my arrest were as you say they were.

  He wasn’t buying it. I wouldn’t have, either.

  —I believe that’s what you believe.

  —That’s all I can ask of you. You’ve given me something to talk over with my lawyer.

  —How?

  —If he thought me in control of my faculties, he’d have told me what you have just now. That disappoints me. I thought he and I had an understanding.

  —Would you kill him for such a betrayal?

  —No. It was a professional decision on his part, I’m sure. There was no malice behind it. And his betrayal could only have occurred after my getting cancer. He couldn’t have contributed to my death if I was already dying. You can take that as a diminishment of my need to kill if you wish, Doctor.

  I sighed, glanced to the barred window high on the western wall. I saw a bird fly past the beginnings of an October sunset, and ached to be outside, walking the countryside near the facility, feeling leaves crunch underfoot, sipping autumn air. I was aware of a weight behind me, as if I sat near a great spur of granite. All that had been a stage in my perceptions dimmed to shadow cloaked by shadow. My twin left us. The biting gaze of the lens numbed itself. This Second Act wound down yet further to blackout. I suddenly missed my twin . . . he who would one day place me into the mythology I’d tapped by playing me on film. His companionship had blunted what I’d felt rising like floodwater behind me . . . the madness of this institution.

  —Do you want to stop, Dean?

  Lord, I’m so very tired, exorcising a lifetime of demons . . .

  My mind felt like a sore muscle, from the strain of carrying so long and brutal a performance this day, and from bearing the level of erudition Doctor Johansson had foisted upon me. My catharsis was a labour for me, as an actor and as an audience. Doctor Johansson had entered my fictions, and in so doing, had set aside his professional decorum at the threshold of my realm the same way that knights had once set down their weapons on the thresholds of cathedrals. I had determined the determining course of his questions. He’d placed on my shoulders the task of being the sophisticated killer, since monsters such as I must be dark and fascinating mirrors. It is that dark otherness that flatters those to whom I speak.

  Because who wishes to speak to a common killer? To a thug with a tire iron, or a semi-literate shit with a gun? Or a bastard who beats his wife? To be an adequate mirror, even for a bureaucratically commissioned shrink, I had to be brilliant in the way that Doctor Johansson wished me to be, even if he was unaware of that wish. The wish is born of the same vanity that drove him to steer our sessions the informal way they have gone, and it is the same vanity of which my victims partook. I flattered them in death, and thus did they participate in their murders. Only a person of great worth and importance can be killed in such Gothic ways by a brilliant fiend such as I have become . . . such as they conscripted me to be. Vanity has been my prime weapon, more lethal than any machete or gun. I completed their desired reflected images of grandeur by killing them. The strain of being a mythic thing of brilliant darkness for a man as intelligent as Doctor Johansson has left me hollow. To be a mirror requires a kind of silence past speech that is exhausting to maintain. Yet the catharsis of our theatre was so very worth this exhaustion.

  —I would very much like to stop, please.

  Doctor Johansson pressed a button on his desk intercom. After a moment I heard the door behind me open. He collected his files into one stack, drawing our curtain closed and drawing his mind closed, making it pedestrian and small before my eyes with visible relief. This day had been hard for him, too. The mask of the clinician/priest can be heavy as a crown.

  —Will we continue tomorrow, Doctor?

  The guards, some subset of County Deputies, to be precise, tended to the padlocks on the chains that hung off me. Doctor Johansson and I paid them no mind, as we would bus boys clearing salad plates.

  —Tomorrow I’d like you to have a physical. The judge will want to know what your medical needs are.

  My chair was surrounded by walls of flesh in grey and blue uniforms. My feet and hands were still chained in an X formation, bound by another chain around my waist. It amused me, the precautions they took. As if I were some kind of transcendently superhuman fiend. Dangerous for them to think so. Maybe their belief in my monstrosity would allow me to snap the chains and overpower them.

  I groaned as I stood up, icy pinpoints boiled in my legs, and a charley horse clenched my left hip.

  As the Deputies positioned themselves to herd me to my cell, I asked, —Doctor, in light of all I’ve told you, and the grief I’ve spared the taxpayers by being up front, would it be possible for me to have a bath tonight? Not a shower, but a long soak?

  —I’ll see what I can do.

  —Thank you.

  I turned and let the Deputies usher me offstage. The mirror did not applaud, which may have been rude, or reverently polite. It was disorienting to walk again, as if I’d just snapped from a troubling dream. Fog pressed the corners of my vision.

  A draft eddied around me as I clanked to the hall, whispering against the base of my skull, the exposed parts of my wrists, even my ankles. I realized I’d worked up a clammy sweat in Doctor Johansson’s office. Maybe the cold was the absent gaze of my twin, which, like the warmth of a hand placed on a wrist for a long while, leaves its ghost wrought under the skin.

  The steps of the Deputies were soothing on the linoleum floor. Their silence was a testimonial to their fear of me, more than were the chains. They joke with others as they shuffle them to their cells, so they’ll be well thought of in the event of a hostage taking. Killers they find vile they are overly civil with, like the finest of British butlers: a way to mask their urge to kill them as they would mad dogs. I think they said nothing to me out of fear I’d walk into their minds and wreak havoc there.

  The quiet, defining itself by my escorts’ heavy treads, made what screamed in my mind seem all the louder: the inverse of an echo. A ghost of a sound that strengthened to become what had first been echoed. It built to something like the shriek of a pavement saw. Yet layered, verbalizing the gibberish of shattered minds, taking knotted cadences as my escorts walked me through checkpoints of steel mesh and sliding iron doors. I’ve tread the deepest dreams of my victims; the clawing thoughts of madmen are audible to me. I feel how they can make their own invisible yet unyielding walls. They press against the walls of this prison, as if trying to crack the cinder block from within.

  From the final checkpoint we entered the purest expression of Hell I’d ever know, beyond the imaginings of Goya or Bosch, because it was so mundane. We entered a world of unspeakable ugliness (unspeakable, in that it does not allow itself to be expressed, like the desperation in the eyes of people on city streets) whe
re footsteps on concrete thunder through the corridors, where the fear-scented shouts of the damned and the criminally insane hang like smoke from a fire of damp leaves and coat your mouth with the stink of zoo animals and of psycho-pharmaceuticals sweated through the pores of lunatics. These are men enslaved by their fantasies, too cowed by them to master and use them. These are men twice-maddened: upon being locked here, they snap again for want of a way out such as I carried in me, a malignant key that grew more cells by the hour.

  The hallway of cells that do not liberate is long and very tall, a lampoon of a cathedral in industrial drab.

  My fellow inmates are psychopaths who’ve taken axes to families as they slept, child molesters who’ve taken rusty knives to their victims’ genitals, compulsive cop killers and other throwbacks whose minds have never risen above the reptilian. I enter their fever-wakened dreams as I walk the corridors with my escorts.

  Some men hoot and call from their cells, not out of malice toward or even interest in me, but to make desperate sounds of defiance, to shake the world awake from the dreams that have made them brutal. Theirs is the brutality many can smugly glimpse through psychology texts, the reports of social workers watered down in newspapers, and in grainy films shown in the grey-shadowed altars of sociology seminars.

  Many here resent me. Media coverage has made me a celebrity. They know I’ll leave a mark on the fictions I have harnessed. Killers based on me, invented by writers I’ll never meet, will be my sons for years to come. My fellow inmates will leave no such legacy.

  They yell, their voices booming then fading as I pass.

  —HEY! Garrison!!

  —Hey!! We got a superstar, here!

  —Say, Dean old buddy!! Can I play you when they make a TV docu-drama aboutcha?

  I feel oddly close to my father as I hear them. For they, barking their derisions at me, whistle up from the dust the derisions of their own parents, who had so lovingly crafted the sadisms that defined the crimes of their sons.

  They’re crazy fucks. Every one of them. Animals. Even the ones who don’t shout still yell with their deadly silences. Their voices are quiet, yet their eyes are glassy with fury so deep and black your own mind can become lost in their shattered gazes.

  I’ve read about psychologists posing as patients in places like this, to find out what conditions were like. They often went crazy themselves. Madness is deadly because it’s so tempting to touch, the way fire is to a child.

  The idea of going mad terrifies me, because as one who has lived and killed as an idea, my madness would be complete. Especially in this God-forsaken place. Here, where the winds blow constantly, whistling through the corridors of cement and steel . . . here I wouldn’t just lose my mind. My spirit would die. It would wither in a depression that could never be broken. Ennui would devour me a nibble at a time, breaking my soul with the slowness of an earwig biting the tissues of my brain. I have offered myself to this danger. In becoming a spirit, I’ve made myself permeable, as vulnerable as a shaman in a deep trance.

  Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

  Yet for me there’s light at the end of the tunnel, an earthen darkness comforting in its finality.

  Soon I’ll be shipped to another facility. This place can’t care for me, not while a rosary of tumours stalks up my innards like ivy crawling up a trellis. Soon I’ll be taken to the security wing of a hospital. Cuffed to a comfortable bed, with decent food and quiet. To not provide me with adequate care would be cruel and unusual.

  Despite the awful pain I’ll be in at the time, I look forward to my last breath.

  In my dream, I was aware of October. I can’t remember the substance of the dream, and I know there is a mercy to that. But I recall the impression of standing beneath a fantastically big sky, under trees so tall, they loomed in my sight as they’d seem to a toddler. I breathed air full of the smokeless burning of leaves rotting into the rich soil they blanketed. October died in my dream, made dim by those un-breathing shadows unique to corners of grey cinder block. Still sleeping, I knew on some deep level that this was Halloween morning, just as I once could know before waking that snow had fallen in the night.

  My sleep was ripped like the skin of Keene’s throat, by a scream that woke me and threw me from my cot with the violence of a seizure.

  Tuttle, in the cell opposite, crouched atop the steel sink in his cell. He screamed with all the strength of his lungs, all the volume of his barrel chest. His features twisted, as if his grimace would pull the corners of his mouth below his jaw. His powder-blue eyes bulged, and when my gaze touched his through the bars, the man wailed like an infant as he dropped to the cement floor with a sickening thud, more lifeless when he struck than was Catherine’s body.

  The attendants rushed to Tuttle in less than a minute, along with the head psychiatric nurse, an ex-Marine named Richard who weighed two-hundred and eighty pounds. One held a strait-jacket, another had a hypo at the ready. But as they neared him, Tuttle rolled on the floor like an autistic child on the verge of exhaustion, mumbling or praying in a language of his own.

  Tuttle’s monstrosity is unique, even here. Six foot three, with arms like logs, an IQ of about fifty, and the inability to come unless he snaps the neck of the prostitute he fucks. He had been a bogeyman of my youth, a monster culled out of newspapers into schoolyard folklore. A bogeyman I’d feared as a kid now lived close enough for me to smell the stink of his morning shit.

  They had Tuttle upright now. The nightmare being of my youth was still bawling, pointing toward the door of his cell and saying, Kitty, kitty. Or maybe it was Kiddie, I couldn’t tell. His face was the color of turned wine and his mouth spilled frothy spit that mixed with the tears that leaked from his idiot child’s eyes.

  Madness collects here, as if in a great battery or dynamo, and it arcs now and then in the minds of people like Tuttle. The bars hum with the threat of a discharge.

  The wind surges. Over Tuttle’s quieting sobs, I hear dead leaves flying against the outside wall through the slot-like window of my cell. And although the window can’t be opened, I feel a draft coalesce around me and drift like river fog out of my cell. The tumours in my lower guts twitch like hatchlings.

  Tuttle screams again, and covers his face with his blanket.

  Three hours later, I sit in Doctor Johansson’s office, chained to my usual seat. For days now, in short sessions of less than an hour, we’ve gone over the particulars of my ten avengings . . . details that won’t help my twin in his portrait of me as a fascinating monster, but that will help the police, and perhaps the Anne Rule wannabes who’ll make meager advances dashing off my story for paperback houses.

  Doctor Johansson has his files placed before him. I think I’ve partly figured out his system. The placement of files is like a series of Japanese fans, spread in semi-circles, slightly overlapping. His mind operates on many levels. He’s not the sort to impose phenomena into the linear formations that are the delight of the arrogant and stupid. He’s not afraid to use a maze-like model, or a model like a house of cards. I wish I had time to know him better.

  He looks at a new file, not like the others: it’s stapled and has several differently coloured pages, white, pink, goldenrod, and blue. The folder seems unstable in my sight, as if made of television static.

  —How do you feel, Dean? he asked, puffing on his cold and empty pipe.

  —Fine. For the time being.

  The draft came again, making me uneasy, bringing thoughts of Tuttle and his shrieking tirade. The eyes of my twin from behind the silvered glass seemed a fleshy, oppressive presence. The light of the last October morning I’ll ever see streamed from the window. Dust motes didn’t churn in the light, but seemed to stay almost suspended, despite the draft.

  —From the time you killed Molino to the time you killed Catherine, how had you been handling stress?

  He massaged his right temple as he spoke, the pipe nearly touching his wrist. Had it been lit, it w
ould have burned him. Looking at the bowl, I felt the anticipation of it burning him, the involuntary flinch of seeing someone about to suffer pain. My spine compressed, my shoulders hunched, until a pulling changed the tilt of my vertebrae, so that the cartilage between them felt packed with shaved ice.

  —What do you mean?

  —Were you having sweats? Grinding your teeth? Stomach-aches? Shaky hands?

  —Not as much as before.

  The anticipation of seeing him burned personified itself, brought itself into being.

  —And you felt better about the people you killed?

  I tried to not pay heed to the tugging I felt on the chain around my waist, like a child trying to get my attention. It was very hard to stay focused.

  —I’ve told you that.

  The tugging stopped, and I heard the quick click-click like dog’s paws on the tile by my feet, receding as if the paws walked toward the door.

  My shoulders fell.

  —And better about yourself, too?

  The paws ran towards my back, wide long steps like a high jumper going towards his mark. A weight thudded against my shoulders and a wet mouth pressed to the nape of my neck. Fever-hot hands gripped my collarbones. The warmth of moist palms bled through my jumpsuit.

  Don’t scream. Don’t scream. Don’t . . .

  —Yes, I felt better about myself.

  I trembled like a man freezing from blood loss.

  Ignore it. Ignore the little shit. He’s nothing without attention. Ignore him . . .

  —Your cancer has gone into remission, Dean. Whatever internalized stress that fueled it is gone. The cancer has stopped.

  Within a heartbeat, all I’d ever been and felt and tasted and done crowded through the doors of my consciousness. Blinders of perception ripped, awareness of everything sluiced into my mind, the inverse of what I’d felt as Evan died: an inward awareness, abrasive, wounding. Each thread and seam of my clothing itched. I smelled the oily links of my chains, the dust baking atop the buzzing fluorescent lights, the residue of nicotine in the long-dormant air filter. I felt the vibrations of the heating pipes, each nail of the fingers digging into my flesh, each tooth of the mouth, each nodule of the sliding tongue, each crease of the lips.