Something Terrible

by Wrath James White

  Can I ask one question before you get into the rest of your story? It will help give me the proper perspective, I believe, as I listen. ( He slid a newspaper over to me. The headline read THIRTEEN INFANTS KILLED IN HOSPITAL NURSERY RAMPAGE.) Why murder? Why did you murder all those innocent people? Men, women, children? Why?

  When most parents look at their children, all they see is perfection. They don’t see the asymmetries and abnormalities. All they see is beauty, no matter how ugly their child truly is. Not my father. All he saw when he looked at me was something imperfect, something that needed to be fixed. There are at least a billion parents who would have looked at me and seen a perfect, beautiful child, but not my father. After he had changed me, I began seeing things through his eyes. When I looked at the rest of humanity, I saw all the flaws and imperfections.

  Do you know the first thing a male lion does when he takes over a pride and becomes the new alpha male? He kills all the cubs sired by the former head of the pride. Do you suppose that when Homo sapiens supplanted Neanderthal man as the new dominant human species, Neanderthals simply took their inferior genes and shuffled off quietly? Or do you imagine there was wholesale warfare, an epic slaughter? Do you imagine Homo sapiens completely wiped out their inferior brothers, a mass genocide of Neanderthals on a scale that would have made the Holocaust look like a post office shooting? You see, in order for my genetic line to survive and flourish, your flawed, imperfect genetic line must end. You all must die. But again, we are jumping ahead. Let me tell you about my father.

  My father was not a perfect man. His imperfections were his own personal obsession that he’d spent a lifetime trying to overcome. From track to gymnastics to boxing and wrestling, he’d tried and failed to excel in athletics even as he made a name for himself in science and academics, winning awards and research grants over scientists decades his senior. But this was not enough. He threw himself into art and music with the same zeal with which he’d attacked athletics, with similar results. He spent more than a decade laboring at the piano and the violin and nearly as much time smearing oils and watercolors over a canvas. He even wrote several dozen abysmal poems before conceding defeat somewhere in my tenth or eleventh year of life. I can still recall the joy I felt at no longer having to watch him curse and swear over some hideous mockery of a landscape or having to cover my ears as he drudged his way through Beethoven or Mozart, making a soulless cacophony on the piano. That was, until he refocused his obsession with perfection on me.

  My father could not accept his limitations. He could not accept the idea of limitations as a human condition. He believed deep in his soul that anything could be achieved with hard work, that a man’s will could bend and shape time and space. He believed in the limitless potential of the human spirit. In that sense, he was an idealist, a romantic, you might say. His perfect human was intellectually, creatively, physically, and aesthetically gifted, Nietzsche’s the Übermensch. It tortured him that he had only mastered the intellectual, but I believe his greatest disappointment was his appearance, his eyes.

  My father had been brought up on westerns. His childhood heroes were hard, chiseled cowboys with piercing eyes and square jaws. Then he looked in the mirror and saw a round-faced boy with sad, puppy-dog eyes that seemed to predict the worst possible fate, instead of the fierce, confident eyes of a warrior. That was the first thing he changed about me. My appearance.

  Isolating the precise strand of DNA that controls such things as symmetry, hair color, eye color and shape, and even height, weight, and bone structure, that was brilliant. Do you have any idea how difficult that is? There are more than twenty thousand genes in the human genome. In order to identify those genes specifically associated with something like bone structure or height you need to compare genetic differences among individuals. Then, once you have found the gene that makes one person tall and another short, one with high cheekbones and a strong jaw and another with a weak chin, you need to isolate it. Do you know what years of study have determined to be the perfect face? An oval face. Why? Because it is symmetrical. Humans are drawn to symmetry. An oval face will have wider cheekbones and then narrow down to the jaw line and chin. Oval faces will narrow up toward the forehead. There are ten hallmarks of physical beauty across all times and cultures. Big eyes, small nose, tall and lean, well-defined muscles or an hourglass figure with breasts proportional to the hips and a small waist if you are a female, symmetrical face and body, thick hair, large hands, smooth, glowing, blemish-free skin, full lips, light skin with dark eyes, or light eyes with tan skin. In other words, me.

  You are quite handsome. Are you claiming your father did all this? You mean to say he changed your face and body?

  You don’t understand. I am not merely handsome. My features are perfectly symmetrical. Look at my eyes. The vertical distance between them and my mouth is approximately 36 percent of my face’s length, and the horizontal distance between my eyes is approximately 46 percent of my face’s width. My head is exactly five-and-a-half inches from ear to ear and seven inches long from hairline to chin. There are two-and-a-half inches between my eyes and another two-and-a-half inches between my mouth and my pupils. It is what they call “the golden ratio.” That ratio represents the ideal human facial proportions across all cultures.

  Why was that so important to your father? Something like beauty would seem to be beneath someone of your father’s genius. It seems trivial, even a bit shallow.

  That’s because you buy into all that liberal bullshit about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, of social and cultural biases that are forced upon us rather than an inherent part of our nature. Everything in our culture is determined by beauty, from the car you drive, the house you buy, your clothes, and even your job prospects. How many beautiful homeless people do you know? The economic, social, romantic, and even political opportunities are exponentially higher for more attractive people.

  Those who are born with all the universal hallmarks of beauty—tall, lean, muscular, perfectly symmetrical faces and bodies—are inherently adored. They are trusted and admired. We elect them to rule us. We pay for them to entertain us. We idolize them and try to emulate them. They are our leaders, our gods. Did you know there were two studies conducted in the mid-1980s that independently demonstrated that infants as young as two- and three-months old stared longer at symmetrical faces, faces you and I would consider the most attractive? More recent experiments with newborns less than one week old show significantly greater preference for faces with a higher degree of symmetry. Another study showed that twelve-month-old infants exhibited more observable pleasure, smiling, giggling, a higher degree of attentiveness and involvement, less distress, and less withdrawal when interacting with strangers wearing attractive masks than when interacting with strangers wearing unattractive masks. They also play significantly longer with facially attractive dolls than with facially unattractive dolls. No matter how much we may want to believe beauty is subjective, studies have shown again and again than it can be reduced to a simple matter of mathematical symmetry. Newborns and infants have not had time to learn and internalize cultural or media-created standards of beauty. What these studies suggest is a human genetic predisposition to beauty, to symmetry. We worship and adore it because we are instinctively programmed to do so. In that case, the perfect man must be beautiful as well as intelligent and powerful.

  Okay, so how did he do it? How did he get these genes into your system to change your physical appearance?

  He injected them. He isolated the genes he wanted and injected the DNA directly into my skin cells, bone marrow, intramuscularly. He even injected DNA into my brain cells.

  You’re talking about naked DNA?

  Yes.

  You are aware there are no studies that show direct injections of naked DNA into a fully formed, mature adult as having any significant effect whatsoever? There has been some minimal success with treating cancer with naked DNA, but even this is highly controversial. As far as altering the D
NA of mature cells, there has been no proof that injecting DNA leads to this type of gene expression.

  I am the evidence.

  How so? How else do you believe these treatments changed you?

  How didn’t it? I am stronger, faster, smarter than a normal human. I told you about the brain injections?

  Yes.

  Well, the day after he began the injections, I could already feel myself changing. I could read a book and retain everything. I understood things more clearly and I could read people’s minds.

  What? Did you say—

  Telepathy. Yes. I could hear what people were thinking.

  Can you still? (Smirking)

  Yes.

  What am I thinking?

  You are thinking about your pregnant wife. You’re wondering if you will be a good father. If it will be a boy or a girl. You are concerned about your marriage and what will happen to your child if you were to ever get divorced. You can’t wait to get this interview over with so you can go be with her right now. I believe you have an ultrasound appointment.

  Wrong. (Squirms uncomfortably in his chair and begins gathering his things.)

  Am I?

  Yes. (Turns recorder off.)

  ***

  Testing. Testing. Second interview with Adam Horrowitz, convicted serial murderer. The date is July 10, 2014. The time is 4:10pm. We are at the Bush Maximum Security Correctional Facility.

  How are you today, Adam?

  Fine.

  Yesterday we were talking about the injections your father gave you.

  Yes.

  Can we talk some more about those?

  What would you like to hear?

  The injections must have been painful.

  Yes. Very.

  But you never protested?

  No.

  How old were you when the experiments began?

  I must have been twelve. Maybe thirteen.

  Twelve?

  Maybe. Maybe thirteen.

  That must have been hard, being subjected to these painful treatments at such a young age.

  It was necessary. I won’t say it was for the good of humanity. My father did it for me.

  Tell me about your first murder?

  You mean murders? Or do you mean what I experienced in the minutes between when I murdered that first inferior creature and the second, third, fourth, and fifth? They were all pretty much the same, part and parcel of the same holistic experience.

  Your first murders were at the fertility clinic?

  Yes.

  Why there?

  Because they were reproducing, spreading their inferior genes.

  How do you know they were inferior?

  Because they weren’t me. I am the only perfect human. I am the alpha male.

  And these men were challenging you?

  No. They couldn’t possibly have challenged me. They were spreading their genes. I wanted to spread mine. They were in the way so I removed them.

  How old were you at this time?

  I had just turned twenty-one.

  How did you kill them?

  I was at the fertility clinic—

  To donate sperm?

  Yes. To donate sperm. There were five other guys there. The room was very clean and formal. That’s what struck me. It looked like a furniture showroom. The couches and chairs were new. There was a tall fern in the corner, two high-def TVs on the walls at both ends of the room, one playing sports and the other playing soap operas, a coffee maker that also made espresso, and the usual coffee tables, of course. There were pamphlets on in vitro fertilization and the freezing of sperm and ovum for later use, right next to maternity and gardening magazines. There were a few sports magazines for us guys and a Wall Street Journal. The carpet was plush with thick padding. That place must have made millions.

  I looked around at the guys there waiting to donate sperm. They had us in a different waiting room than the one for the women and couples who came there for fertilization services. That would have been awkward otherwise, don’t you think?

  I’d imagine.

  I could hear their thoughts.

  Whose thoughts?

  The other guys there to donate. I could hear everything that went through their silly, untidy, disordered minds. Two of them were graduate students, donating sperm to make a little extra beer money. One was a lawyer who just liked the idea of dozens of little “hims” running around. It was an ego boost and yes, I am aware of the irony. One was a guy donating sperm for a lesbian couple who wanted to have a child, and the other was a serial donator who came in three times a week. He was a recent high school graduate and first-year psychology student who was convincing himself that he was doing it as research for some future thesis, but he was really just sick of eating Ramen noodles and frozen pizza and saw this as a way to combat the usual student poverty.

  As was to be expected, they were all taller than six feet and relatively attractive. All but one was white. The other was an Asian man. They all came close to the idealized standard of beauty—tall, lean, and relatively proportionate. But they all had flaws. One had a nose that was too large for his face. The Asian had one eye that opened wider than the other. The blond, the lawyer, had ears that were too large for his head. Another had unusually small hands for a man, women’s hands. These flaws alone didn’t mark them as inferior. It was their vain, petty, selfish, and immature thoughts. None of them had ambitions that went beyond buying a smartphone, HD TV, or sports car, the best way to cheat on the next midterm exam, or what job or client would make them the most money. Do you think any of them would contribute in any significant way to the advancement of humanity? Do you think the cure for cancer was sitting in one of their heads? The end of world hunger? The solution for world peace? Do you think any of them even cared about any of that? They were all pathetic.

  I watched all five of them, studying their mannerisms, listening to their conversation, sizing them up. Obviously I couldn’t kill them right there, but I had already decided they had to be eliminated. I could not allow their ridiculous gene lines to survive and flourish. First I had to kill them, and then I had to return and destroy all of their “donations.”

  I engaged them all in conversation. You may not know this, but before my father’s treatments, I was painfully shy. Since the improvements, I was a master conversationalist. These guys were easy and our shared experiences made finding common ground simple. I plucked the one thought going through all their minds.

  “I hope they have good porn in there.”

  That’s all I needed; they took it from there.

  “Hell yeah!” the two graduate students said.

  “I heard it was all pretty vanilla,” the lawyer said.

  “Really? Shit. I was hoping for something a bit more hardcore,” the freshman said.

  “Hey, ever seen those bukakke videos?” the Asian guy whispered, looking around as if afraid his mom would overhear him.

  “Hell yeah! Like German Goo Girls? That shit is crazy! That would do it for me.”

  “I bring my own,” the frequent flyer said, holding up a DVD with the title 2013 Cum Shots.

  “Are there really 2,013 cum shots?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “How the fuck would I know? I never make it past the first twenty or thirty.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “What’s your name, man? My name’s Adam.”

  “I’m Kent.”

  “Brad. Pleased to meet you, Adam.”

  “Name’s Roger.”

  “Charles. Good to meet you, Adam.”

  “My name’s Henry,” the lawyer said, holding out his hand for everyone to shake.

  I obliged him, putting on the warmest smile I could fake. “So what brings you all here,” I asked, and then listened to them all lie.

  All except the guy who was here donating his sperm for the lesbian couple. He was the only one who told the truth.

  I invited them all out for a drink afterward. To celebrate our im
maculate conceptions. They all laughed and pretty soon I had talked them into meeting me at a bar around the corner.

  One by one we were called up and ushered into different rooms for a physical, a blood test, a semen sample (to make sure we had swimmers), and then into the little room with the TV, the stack of porn DVDs, and the wet wipes. The porn was as vanilla as the lawyer had said and it took me quite a while to get in the mood staring at women with fake tits, letting out fake moans, as they faked orgasms. Finally I filled my specimen jar and left. You want to know what finally did it for me?

  What?

  Imagining killing those assholes. Of course, the things I imagined doing to them were far too extravagant for me to ever really do, but it was all fantasy. Just to help me fill the cup.

  When I was done, I raced out to the lobby. I thought about driving somewhere, to a gun store or even a cutlery store. See, I didn’t exactly carry lethal weapons around with me. Not back then anyway. All I had was my genetically enhanced strength, and I decided that would have to do. There was no time to buy a weapon. I was afraid some of them, or all of them, would leave.

  The bar was only three blocks away. I walked there. I didn’t want anyone to get my license plate and connect me to the place where I was planning my minor massacre. If I needed to make a quick getaway, I would simply take one of my victims’ car keys.

  When I arrived, three of the guys were already there. They cheered as I entered and asked me what kind of beer I wanted. I ordered a martini that I sipped for most of the night. Alcohol muddles the mind. I wanted mine clear. The lawyer kept buying everyone rounds, and when the two grad students arrived, he started ordering shots of tequila for everyone, showing off, flaunting his money, trying to purchase our friendship the way he’d purchased his $2,000 watch or the $300 jeans he wore. But he was making my job easier. By the time the Asian guy, Brad, left, he could barely stand. He was my first kill.