Your partner is standing over you. Detective Mike Burdick. He is at least fifteen years younger than you. And like every other detective in Special Victims, he sees this assignment as a stepping stone on his way to Homicide. That’s generally the way it goes. Nobody wants to make a career out of sex crimes. Except you. Other officers and detectives tend to keep their distance from you. Even Burdick. He’s friendly, but he keeps it strictly professional. You do too.
“I think I’ve got something on that kiddie porn.”
“Child abuse images,” you say. A gentle reminder.
“Right.”
“Which do you mean? Narrow it down for me.”
“Small-time stuff that’s been showing up in Cabbagetown. Real young kids.”
“Right. Is it someone in town? One of the local perverts?”
“Remember the guy in Vine City with all the VHS tapes and Polaroids? The old-timey stuff?”
“The one that molested three boys in his scout troop? But it was all just a misunderstanding and the parents of two of the boys even testified in the guy’s defense? That guy? The one who, because of the hearing loss in his left ear, didn’t understand his rights, and all those nostalgic tapes and pictures couldn’t be entered into evidence? That guy?”
“‘Be prepared.’ Well I’ve had one of the patrol units grabbing the guy’s trash. About once a month or so they’ll take a bag from curbside and I go through it. Why not? It’s legal. Anyway, three different times now I’ve found padded mailers with no return address and a Stockmar County postmark.”
“And?”
“And I got an up-to-date list from the GBI. Guess which of your favorite sexual predators is now registered in Stockmar County? John Chandler Norris.”
“The Polaroid King. Chandler Norris is in Central State lockup.”
“Well, he was. For a while. There were some ‘psychiatric symptoms’ that came to light in the Corrective Thinking program, and in the name of liability he was shipped up to Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.”
“You’re shitting me. I’m guessing they didn’t transfer him up there for death row.”
“Not quite. He was diagnosed with depression and catatonia. Electroconvulsive therapy was administered and deemed successful.”
“You are fucking kidding me. They zapped the evil right out of him. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Like one of those bug lights. Zzzzzzpt.”
“This world is completely fucked. So they cured him?”
“I don’t know, Joe. All I know is that they released him. He registered himself with the local authorities as a sex offender and got himself set up on top of a mountain somewhere. It’s all Grizzly Adams and shit.”
“And you think he’s running some kind of mail-order child pornography business out of Stockmar County?”
“I think it’s worth a visit.”
“I do too.”
The picture of the little girl freaks you out. She is there every time you fuck her mother. Right there on the bedside table, watching you slam Mrs. Lovejoy. She looks to be about seven, with blue eyes and wispy blond hair. She looks fragile. Like a flower in a vase right before the petals start to drop off. One time you were fucking Mrs. Lovejoy so hard with the headboard banging the wall and the mattress rocking the bedside table that the little girl’s picture fell over and when you were done fucking her mother you propped the picture back up because you did not want the little girl to be face down in the dark.
Crisium. Her name is Crisium. You know that much only because Mrs. Lovejoy has mentioned her in passing, talking on her cell phone, making doctors’ appointments, talking to her husband, arranging times to meet with you based on her obligations to Crisium. But Mrs. Lovejoy does not talk about Crisium. Not to you. And you have fucked her seven times now (twice on three different days and just the one time on that first day), and you still call her Mrs. Lovejoy.
She rolls off of you (Mrs. Lovejoy likes to finish on top) and starts puffing on a Nicotrol inhaler. She only smokes cigarettes outside. Never in the house. You ask her why she doesn’t just open the window and smoke a real cigarette. You figure she will say her husband might smell it, but what she says surprises you.
“If I smoked in the house, it could kill Cris.”
This is the first time Mrs. Lovejoy has spoken her daughter’s name directly to you.
“Does she have asthma?”
Mrs. Lovejoy puffs on the stubby little nicotine inhaler.
“She’s in the hospital. She has MCS.”
“What’s that?”
“Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. That’s why we moved here, away from the city.”
“To get away from chemicals?”
“She . . . You can’t get away from chemicals. That’s no longer possible in this world. Chemicals, fumes, exhausts, reagents, fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, synthetic fabrics, petroleum products, paints. Second-hand smoke. The list goes on forever. You can’t escape those things. Not anymore. Not in this world. But you can lessen your exposure.”
“We cut down the rainforests, and a little girl gets sick.”
Mrs. Lovejoy looks at you with a peculiar expression on her face and you realize that she is trying to figure out if you are being serious or if you are making fun of her or, worse, making fun of Crisium. And her face softens as she decides that you mean exactly what you say.
“Yes!” she says, holding your eyes with hers. “That is exactly right. That is the world we have created. That is the world we are living in.”
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
“Her immune system is haywire. Some people call it Environmental Illness. It amounts to the same thing. The world makes Cris sick.”
“A little girl!” Chandler gushes like a little girl himself. “Well, friends and neighbors, that right there is a game changer.”
Frank is in the kitchen. Cleaning his plastic leg with alcohol pads and Windex. He has been scrubbing and rubbing at it for two days now. Trying to get it just right.
“And she wants you to drive them to the hospital for the what-was-it treatments?” Chandler asks.
“Interferon,” you say. “Mrs. Lovejoy wants to help me make more money. For my education.”
“Bessie’ll educate her. Rich cunt.”
“It could be done,” Frank says and rubs a little harder at the stubborn spot that only he can see. It just won’t go away.
Frank sits there, dressed only in gray underwear—worn-out jockey shorts, the elastic shot. And the tattoos cover every inch of his body—arms, neck, sporadically to his face, even peeking out from his scalp, densely inked torso, disappearing to his groin, down his legs, between his toes—and the funny thing is that his artificial leg is the only part of him that is unblemished, still pure. And yet he thinks it’s dirty. The only time you have seen Frank stop rubbing and polishing that leg is when he goes to the bathroom, and you’re pretty sure that what he does in the bathroom is work on that zit on his face. There isn’t much else he could be doing in there because you never see him eat or drink anything, but every time he comes out of the john, that zit is redder. Inflamed. You know he’s been squeezing it, working it. And you want to tell him to maybe just use some soap and water because his face is so oily and he smells kind of bad, but you could never say something like that to Frank.
And it occurs to you that there was another Ray Bradbury book you saw in the school library. But you never read that other book. You only read Fahrenheit 451, over and over again. But you wish now you had read the other one, too. It was called The Illustrated Man. And just like Ray Bradbury had written the book about burning just for you, he had written The Illustrated Man just for Frank, and you wish you had read it.
“Of course it can be done,” Chandler says. “We just have to wait. Bide our time. An opportunity will present itself. They always do.”
“Take Cris?” you ask even though you know damn well that’s what they’re saying. “Fr
ank, that’s crazy.”
“Boy, you don’t know what crazy is. Wait’ll they hook your head up to a car battery, then maybe you’ll know what crazy is.”
Frank says, “I thought you wanted to go to Canada.”
And of course you want to go Canada where the birds sing and the snow falls in white wet whispers and you don’t have to get your head hooked up to car batteries. “I do,” you say.
“We have to have money,” Frank says, and his tone is so reasonable. He fastens the prosthesis to his thigh, cupping it to the fissured stump. The canvas straps are still sweat-stained and filthy. “This is the perfect way. No one will get hurt.”
“All we do is hold the girl right here. For three days she watches cartoons and eats Pop Tarts. It’ll be like summer camp. An adventure.”
“Chandler’s good with kids,” Frank says.
But you look at the deadbolted door to Chandler’s bedroom and you think about watching Midnight Cowboy and choking on stale Pop Tarts. Then you look at Frank and you’ve always been with Frank and he will protect Cris. You know that in your heart. Frank will protect Cris. And you will do what you have to do to get Frank and yourself to Canada.
“She said I could stay in a room over the garage until school starts back up. If I wanted.”
“Your own place, huh?” Chandler asks. “That’s good, boy. In fact, that’s great.”
“So I can save for college.” So you can fuck her whenever she wants.
“Right,” Chandler says, like he can read your mind. “Whatever. She wants in your pants. If she hasn’t already got in ’em.” Chandler puts his arm around you, pulls you close in a grandfatherly hug. “Cougar found herself a cub. But that’s good. Just remember why you’re there. And remember this. When she visits you one night—and she will—just remember, hell hath no fury like a woman denied oral gratification.” Chandler cackles with glee and looks you in the eye. “You gotta eat dat tang!”
Chandler does a crazy dance around the room, a herky-jerky strut that makes the entire trailer shake. And you watch him. And it occurs to you that the hole in the ozone layer is spreading. Expanding over Canada. And you better hurry. You better hurry before it’s too late. Before Canada burns up. Before the glaciers melt and black oil fills the oceans and they boil down to a toxic sludge.
The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.
The sun feels good on your face and neck. Maybe the UV rays will dry up your skin a little bit.
You hold your arms out, hike up your sleeves, and look at the blue and black jailhouse tattoos that flourish there like old-man liver spots.
You hate the tattoos. The Frank that once wanted those tattoos is gone now. The tattoos were necessary once. They told the world you were not to be fucked with. The limp and the artificial leg made you a target in prison. A good choice for natural selection. Weak. It was a weakness that the strong would see and then seek you out as easy prey. So you covered yourself in prison ink. Of course you had to back it up with action. So you became an animal. A violent animal. And you changed your outside to reflect what you became inside. Ink made from urine and soot, ashes and shampoo, etched onto your body with paper clips, staples, electric toothbrushes, and guitar strings. Spider webs and ornate crosses. Album covers. Barbed wire and serpents. A crying woman and half a swastika. Your parole came through before your cellmate could finish the swastika. You are not a skinhead. Not an Aryan. Except you are because in prison you have to be a part of something bigger or that bigger something will swallow you. In prison, you submitted. And later, you made others submit.
The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.
You hate the tattoos. You are ready to change back. You are ready to change both your outside and your inside. Because inside you still feel like a child, and outside you look like a threat. A dangerous violent man. And of course you really are a dangerous violent man. But inside, the boy who needed protecting, the boy who needed love and safety is still alive. Barely.
The sing-song nursery rhyme lilts through the air. Chandler is playing his music on the Cutlass’s tape deck. The music calms him. The music makes you sick. You can’t close your ears, so you tilt your face so that you are looking directly into the sun, hoping that by concentrating on the pain in your eyes you’ll no longer hear the music. You can feel the solar radiation burning your retinas. And maybe God can see your tattooed tears. Maybe He will notice.
“That, and beating off, will make you go blind, Frankie.”
The Cutlass is angled onto the shoulder of the road. The hood is up, the hazard lights blinking.
The horn on the bus goes beep beep beep, beep beep beep, beep beep beep.
“I swear, I’ve never known you to be such a worrywart.” Chandler scans the road ahead with a dented pair of binoculars.
“I don’t think I’ve got the heart for this kind of stuff anymore,” you hear yourself saying from inside the white-hot blindness. You’ve closed your eyes to the sun, but it bleeds like phosphorus through your eyelids. Inked on the lids are the words Don’t Wake. It’s a Russian thing. It was once a message to other cons, now it’s a message to God.
“Heart? Why, I didn’t know you had a heart, Frankie.”
“It’s Billy, you know?” And you think, Who is this man who speaks from the white-hot light? He is not a violent convict smeared with prison ink. Who is he? Does he really exist?
“Know? Do I know? You don’t know what caring for someone is. I know what caring is. I care for my children. I love them. I show them more love than they’ve ever known before. I took care of you.”
“Yeah, you took care of me. And maybe I don’t know what caring for someone is. But I’m learning.”
“Why, I declare, Frank, I believe you’ve got a little sugar in your britches. ‘The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish; swish, swish, swish; swish, swish, swish.’ All this emotion. It doesn’t suit you. You need a bump.”
And you do. A good bump up each nostril. Plastic elastic. Billion-year-old carbon.
“Billy wants to go to Canada. Build a cabin in the woods. Me and him. Just live out there. In nature. I mean, I like that.”
It is very quiet after you speak. Chandler’s tape has ended. Then you hear him snicker. And giggle. He says, “And God bless Ma and Pa and little Billy and all the Waltons on Walton’s Mountain and all the Whos down in Whoville and my fucking God Frank what has happened to you?”
You do another bump off your thumbnail. Chandler rewinds his tape and once again the wheels on the bus are going round and round, round and round.
“What time is it, Frankie?”
“Skin-thirty. How the fuck should I know? I don’t have a watch.”
“Well excuse the hell outta me.” Chandler puts down the binoculars long enough to glance at his watch. “It’s eleven-forty five. He said eleven-thirty. Maybe he decided to take the cunt and go build a little house on the prairie with her.”
“He’ll be—”
“Okay! Okay! I think . . . That’s them! That’s the car! Get your mask. Battle stations! Battle stations!”
And a surge of adrenaline is pumped into your body by your adrenal glands. It squirts out the glands and instantly your heart beats even faster, your blood vessels constrict even tighter, but you don’t feel it. You are far too tweaked to feel anything biological. You only feel synthetic. Plastic. Billion-year-old carbon. Nonetheless, the synergy of the adrenaline and the crank creates a momentary window of reason. For one brief instant, you can see unaltered reality. Your thought process returns to that of a normal, rational man. And you realize that you and Chandler have not planned this thing at all. No thought or care or consideration has gone into it. All of the gaps in logic and common sense have been filled in with crystal. With carbon. With stardust. So that on the surface it appears smooth and reasonable. And you now see what you are about to do for what it really is. Stupid. The stupid callous dangerous foolhardy act of two co
mmon criminals. Everything will go wrong. You will be caught.
But then the window of clarity slams shut and once again irrational self-confidence floods your brain. You are a criminal mastermind. This is the perfect plan. No one will get hurt.
Once again, you are stardust.
. . . Uncontrollable urges to kill and have sex with the dead bodies. Unsubstantiated reports claim that Williams preserved the heads of his victims in glass jars filled with a homemade concoction of—
Mrs. Lovejoy leans forward and switches the radio off.
“Jesus Christ, what is this world coming to? The oceans are poisoned with bubbling oil. It’s like Jed Clampett shot his rifle into the sea, except this time he used a nuclear warhead, and now some crazy is killing people and preserving their heads in jars. My dear God.”
“I know,” you say, because you don’t know what else to say. There is nothing else to say. You just look forward and drive.
“I’m glad Cris didn’t hear that.”
You glance in the rearview mirror and see Cris sleeping. She is pale, her eyelids a bruised peach color. When you picked her up from the hospital, they rolled her out in a little wheelchair, but before they could put her into the Escalade, the nurse got some kind of emergency call, so you picked Cris up and placed her in the backseat yourself. When you had her cradled in your arms, Mrs. Lovejoy said, “Hey,” and you looked up and smiled while she took your picture with her iPhone. And when you buckled Cris in her seat, she woke up. The Saint Christopher medal that Frank gave you was swinging free from your neck as you reached over her. Cris reached out and grabbed the medal, so you took it off your neck and put it around hers.
“What do you think would cause someone to do something like that?” you ask, keeping your eyes on the road ahead.
“Something like what? You mean exploding a bomb at the bottom of the ocean and cracking the world just about in half? Or preserving people’s heads in jars?”
Abnormal Man: A Novel Page 8
