“I’m sure you’re a saint, Randy. As I said, it’s really not the issue.”
“What then? You can’t kill me for no reason.”
Rory had left Randy’s briefs on out of courtesy. He didn’t want the man getting the wrong idea. But keeping him fully clothed would have made it that much harder to gauge where to swing the axe exactly.
As Rory brought the axe down on the man’s foot at the ankle, there was no denying he’d made the right choice.
Randy screamed, hitting an entirely new octave to any he’d hit earlier. He was still screaming, though the octaves were dropping fast as his vocal chords were in no shape for this king of punishment. Rory took the foot and dropped it into one of the empty aquariums filled with bubbling transparent smart-water. The smart element was entirely proprietary, and represented one of Rory’s many breakthroughs in cellular repair and regeneration at room temperatures. The solution would also keep the foot from losing blood unnecessarily.
“You have any preference for how I proceed?” Rory asked, returning to Randy’s side. “Would you rather I go all the way up the one leg first before starting on the other? Or would you rather I keep it even on both sides as I go along?”
“Help!” Randy screamed. “He’s killing me!”
“That’s a bit on the nose, Randy. There’s no point relaying information by the way of expository writing that has already been shown through action. I took this writing class once, and got that drilled into my head.”
“What are you, some kind of frustrated author?”
“I was once. But you pen enough unsold crime stories,” he gasped, “and it ceases to be an outlet for those kinds of energies. And, well, after getting inside that many serial killers’ heads,” he gasped some more, “I guess it does something to you. The mix of endorphins and neurochemicals floating around your brain sort of gets locked in. They start to feed one another, like in some fusion reaction.” His chest heaved some more. “That’s the theory anyway. Who the hell really knows?” He realized he was breathing raggedly and compulsively between wielding the axe and trying to keep up his end of the conversation.
He swung the axe and took off Randy’s other foot. Randy, becoming a little too predictable for his tastes, screamed to within a millimeter’s breadth of high heaven. As before, Rory took the foot and plopped it into another one of the tanks. There was no shortage of tanks, all bubbling away soothingly. The floating bubbles were more than enough to cancel out Randy’s screaming, though, to be fair, that part hadn’t been planned; it was just a perk. He could have saved Randy the screaming by conveying as much, but taking away the man’s one outlet seemed unnecessarily cruel.
“Please, please, stop this. I’ll give you anything you want,” Randy said.
“Well, what I want,” he paused to take a panting breath, “is more titillating conversation,” he took another forced breath, “but I appreciate you doing your best under the circumstances.” Randy gasped some more, still fighting to catch his breath. He’d been fighting to breathe and talk in a coordinated fashion since he stepped back inside the barn. Maybe he’d gotten carried away with the pre-workout regimen and the wood chopping.
Rory surveyed his handiwork. “Yeah, I think this is the way to go, maintaining symmetry on both sides as we go along. I think it’s aesthetically more satisfying, don’t you?”
“I don’t give a shit, you fucking psychopath!”
“Randy, language!” His lungs continued to heave. “Did you know, when I wrote, I wrote Christian lit? That’s right, very G-rated, family-friendly mysteries, thrillers, and assorted crime stories. I was always very proud of that. There’s never any need for swearing even when writing about the most wretched scumbags. All those who want to scream artistic license are full of it.”
“Listen to me, you fucking scum bag, my family will never stop hunting you, until the ends of the earth. They have more money than God and they can afford to send an army after you.”
Rory nodded. “Point taken. Maybe that’s why I never made it as a writer. Inadequate research on my subjects continually contributing to a sufficient lack of realism.”
“Please, man, I’m begging you…!”
That exclamation mark at the end hadn’t been intended; it came in response to the axe falling at Randy’s knee. Into the next tank the piece of leg went.
Rory bent over to examine the blood oozing out from the latest cut. “Yeah, my formula is working great, or trust me, you’d be dead already, from the loss of blood.”
“You ever consider that your lack of success as a writer,” Randy spit breathlessly, struggling with breathing and talking like Rory was, though for different reasons, “is that you were just writing in the wrong sub-genres? Maybe if you’d just stuck with psycho-thrillers!” Randy let go another scream as the axe fell on his other knee.
Rory put this segment in yet another tank, noticing what a botched job he was doing; he wasn’t cleanly severing the limbs at the joints. Instead he kept missing the mark. Maybe the axe was the wrong tool. Do more research, Randy, prior to cutting up the next body, as to the best way to do it.
He glanced up at the giant spiders lining the balcony up top, pounding at the cage walls every time they heard the thwack of the axe hitting the table. The smell of the blood hitting them moments later just drove them all the more crazy. B. F. Skinner was right; animals could be taught to provide a conditioned response to a noise. In this case, the falling of the axe. Randy wondered if Skinner knew just how right he was; if he’d extended his experiments to include insects. Though he wasn’t sure if arachnids were considered insects or not.
Randy’s chest was heaving on the table.
“Between the moaning and the heavy breathing, Randy, you’re making my dick hard. Could you please stop it? I assure you, I’m not gay, and I’m totally ashamed by my body betraying me like this. But like my spiders up there that pounce at the sound of the axe, anything that sounds like a porn movie in progress, considering how many I’ve watched…” He wiped his forehead of sweat with the back of his hand again. “I’m sorry, is all.”
“Shit, man, I’ve got bigger problems right now,” Randy half-whined, half-cried.
“I take your point.”
“Who’s this guy whose attention you’re trying to get, if it’s not me?”
“One Adrian Maslow. Cheeky name, if you ask me. He clearly stole it from the famous psychologist who came up with what’s known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.”
“What?” Randy asked the question like “What the fuck are you going on about now?” Rory politely ignored the insolence, trying to cut the guy a break, no pun intended.
“According to Maslow, people go through life attending to needs that have to be addressed in order to get to the next level. First the person addresses their physiological needs: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion.” Rory managed to get another swing of the axe in there, taking the leg off at the waist, though he was fatiguing badly.
Randy managed to get out another heartfelt scream, though he was going hoarse.
“At the next level are the safety needs,” Rory explained. “Security of: body, employment, resources, morality, the family, health, property.”
Rory worked his way around to the other side of the table. “Love and belonging comes next: friendship, family, sexual intimacy.”
“Let me guess, you didn’t spend too long at this level.”
Trying his best to ignore the man’s disrespect—he had a right to be angry, in all fairness—Rory pushed on with the dissertation. “Esteem is the next rung up on the pyramid: self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others. These are the needs that become all-important to fulfill once the lower order needs on the pyramid have been fulfilled.”
Rory swung the axe and took off the other leg at the hip, took it and the one he’d forgotten to drop in the tank earlier, thanks to the multitasking of the lecture with the dismembering, and put the pieces in t
he two separate tanks.
“You sure as hell aren’t getting any respect from me, pal!”
“Randy, stop the damn whining and take your medicine like a man. If you couldn’t master non-attachment—that’s Zen by the way—before, I’d say now’s your chance.”
“What’s the uppermost layer of the pyramid?” Randy asked, shaking and sputtering his words out like a stutterer. He was likely going into shock, or becoming hypothermic in the cold of the barn. Rory, overheating himself from the activity, hadn’t thought about the fact that Randy lying there might be getting cold in the Spring morning.
Rory went over to the counter, filled another hypodermic, and returned to Randy’s side forthwith to give him the latest injection. Randy was already settling down. “Bet you wish your doctor’s potions kicked in half as quickly as mine, eh?”
“Where was I?” Rory said, drifting off for a second. He was getting light-headed from the workout. Never again would he do a murder like this. Nerds weren’t cut out to get this physical.
“The top of the evolutionary pyramid,” Randy coached. “Something tells me you aren’t quite there yet.”
“That’s right! At the top of the pyramid is self-actualization. Morality. Creativity. Spontaneity. Problem Solving. Lack of Prejudice. Acceptance of facts.”
“I suppose that’s why you want me to accept the fact of my situation,” Randy said.
“That would be nice, yes. But it’s Adrian Maslow, my Adrian Maslow, the futurist at the FBI, who I want to accept the truth about himself so he can be self-actualized. I’m doing God’s work here, helping consciousness to evolve with each kill, and do I get any credit for it? No!”
There went Randy’s hand, chopped off at the wrist.
Randy barely managed a whimper. At least Randy was coming along nicely when it came to being quietly resigned to his fate. Adrian Maslow, the FBI Futurist, not quite so much.
“What’s a futurist?” Randy asked, speaking almost normally, though his tone suggested he was a long way from not feeling sorry for himself.
“It’s someone who tries to predict what technological breakthrough is coming next, and how it can be used in the hands of mad people to topple civilization, cause mass unrest, genocide, collapse the economy, things like that. At least that’s what it means as far as Adrian and the FBI are concerned.”
Rory cleaved the hand off the second arm and dropped it too in its own tank. When he looked back at Randy, he noticed Randy was spending more time staring at the mirror hanging high above him, situated there to give him a progress report on how he was doing, than he was looking at Rory anymore. Rory was beginning to rethink the whole dangling-mirror-overhead idea.
A short while later, Rory had the last of the limbs removed and stowed in the tanks. There was just the torso now and the head—still attached. “If you’d like to dictate any last words into a recorder, I’d be happy to accommodate you, Randy. Some loved ones you’d like to say some final words to, perhaps. Like I said, my intention all along was never to be cruel.”
“No, just tell me more about Adrian. Maybe I will haunt both of you from beyond the grave.”
“I suspect he’s using Adrian Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to profile his subjects, help him get inside their heads and figure out what they’re going to do next, and why. Me, for instance, I’m clearly stuck on self-actualization, along with Adrian, both of us trying to make the most of our lives, and make sure we have the most meaningful impact on the world we can before passing on.”
Rory made an incision straight up Randy’s midline with a scalpel. Then he took a pruning shears—one he used in the garden—to cut his ribs up the middle so he could more readily get at Randy’s organs. As he evacuated the intestines into one of the tanks to make room to get to the kidneys, he continued chatting with Randy.
“No offence, but this guy sounds pretty self-actualized to me.”
Rory lost it, pounding the table with the back of the head of the axe instead of the blade end. “No! No! No! That’s just it, Randy. I don’t think he’s doing what he’s meant to be doing at all. He’s an artist! He’s not an investigator! That’s the thing with smart people who’re brilliant at so many things. It’s easy for them to get lost. Most people are just gifted in one area, so it’s not terribly hard to figure out what they were put on this earth to do. And without people like me, people like Adrian would be forever lost.”
“For what it’s worth, I applaud your ability to connect with another human to this degree. It sounds a little obsessive, what you got going on with this guy, but hey, love is love, and love is what matters.”
“Thanks for that, Randy. It means a lot. You have no idea the ends to which I go to show my love for someone.”
“I think I’m getting an idea.”
Rory had been right to go with that second injection and the extra pain killers. Randy was talking almost normally, which was a boon to the repartee, and to his hearing. He wasn’t sure he could suffer any more screams. “I’m sorry, Randy, but I suspect the talking part of our relationship is coming to an end.” He let the panting breaths come how they may. “I’m running out of organs to yank from your body not entirely crucial to your breathing, speaking, and living. I’m even sorrier you have to be alive until the bitter end without being able to speak.” A couple more gasps. “I guess it takes a frustrated writer to know just how important free speech is, and how important it is to be heard and understood.”
“Forget about it, pal. You did me a solid. This is the first time I’ve truly ever felt close to anybody.”
“Thanks, Randy.” Rory was trying to contain the sweat as much as the heavy breathing by this point, aggravated that each time he had to raise his hand to sponge the water off his face, he was making the arm all the more tired.
“People suck. I kept a distance my whole life. And I can’t say you’ve disproven my theory.” Randy laughed feebly. “But getting inside someone’s head like this, I underestimated how powerful of an experience it is.”
Randy smiled ruefully, teared up. “I hope Adrian will come to appreciate me like you do, Randy, I really do.”
With a swing of the axe he took off Randy’s head, set it on the table so he could watch the last of Rory’s handiwork. Then he tossed the last of Randy’s organs and midsection into separate tanks. Finally, Rory threw the head in its own aquarium like all the other body parts.
THIRTEEN
Rory glanced down at his bare chest, realized he had a fair amount of Randy’s blood on him. He needed to hose off. He padded out of the barn, stood on the cement slab once reserved for hosing down horses and grooming them, and washed the red off him. He glanced in all directions as he did so, thinking, this is the real value of privacy. If anyone were snooping from the woods in the distance, they’d think he was just another mad painter. The country outside the city was filled with rich, whacked out artists.
Picking up the long-handled grooming brush meant for horses that had been left in a bucket, he attended the few spots of blood on his jeans, his one piece of clothing he’d bothered to keep on. It didn’t take him long to realize he was going to have to burn the jeans, so he stopped trying to make himself any more sore than he already was with unnecessary exertion.
The job of rinsing himself, so at least he wasn’t feeling all sticky, finished, he reentered the barn. He paced over to the counter on the far wall to his left. Still dripping wet, he studied the monitors with the playback feeds of Klepsky doing his snoop-dog interviews for Adrian, first of the twenty-one-year-old former child prodigy, Adam Clancy, then of Cray Willis at the sanitarium.
Rory lost it worse than he’d lost it with Randy. He pounded his fists into the counter, shouting, “No! No! No! You’re just not getting it, Adrian! How can you be so smart and so stupid at the same time?!”
Waiting until he’d calmed down enough, he picked up the cell phone, dialed Adrian’s number.
***
Walking into Dion’s flat was like walking into
a Victorian home, or perhaps something out of the Louis XIV era. There was so much to catch the eye, each item, ornate, hand-carved or hand-made, rich in detail and texture and pattern. And densely overlaid: the patterns in the Persian carpets thrown over the hardwood floor contrasting with the patterns in the furniture pieces, the ceramics… It was simply impossible to take it all in in one visit, in a hundred visits. And so her place was like her, fathomless, and more than a bit overwhelming. Even time and space didn’t exactly sit still in here; at times, Adrian would swear the place was warm and cozy and the apartment not very big at all; at other times, it seemed vast. A trick played on the eye as much as the mind.
Was this what real people were like? The more you tried to touch them, the closer you tried to get, the more they morphed into something else entirely? As if their purpose in life was to show how humanity gave testament to the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, a theory, mind you, meant to be applied to the quantum realm, not the human realm.
No wonder she bored so readily shining the light of her mind on other people’s neurotic psyches. A neurotic, owing to their fixations, was a person of few character traits. So, for however strikingly dramatic they might seem to some people, they were in the final analysis, quite limited. Maybe her practice was an effort to return these folks, frozen in time, to their inherent state of timelessness. To tear past the scab of shallowness to reveal the incomparable depths beneath. In which case it must have felt like missionary work to her; it felt like that to him.
He’d come here to get lost in her, to let his mind evaporate entirely, not to contemplate the true nature of the human condition and of time and space. So he blindly followed her into her bedroom and into that insane, ornate, hand-carved French bed that looked more expensive than most people’s homes.
If Veronica was muscular and athletic, Monique, sleek and supermodel-like, Celine’s face and figure unassuming, Dion was voluptuous, with plenty of curves, in the Marilyn Monroe sense.
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