It’s not like you wake up in the morning and decide you’re going to kill someone. Consciously, you don’t have much say- if you ever have any say at all. Probably, your first thought waking up is whether you should have toast or cereal for breakfast, and whether there is any milk. You wonder, still halfway lost in the dreams of the previous night, what you should wear that day, and whether you will need a coat. The killing never occurs to you, you see.
You eat your bowl of cereal in front of the T.V. as you watch the daily forecast and the monotonous talking heads. When you are dressed and ready, you walk out the door, locking it behind you as any responsible adult would do. The air is chilly, and you are glad you brought a coat, even though you know you probably won’t need it by lunchtime. You start your car and notice that it doesn’t sound so great; you make a mental note to take it for an oil change over the weekend.
On the way to work, your mother calls. She hasn’t heard from you in a while, she says, how are things? You tell her about work, maybe you even bring up the car, but in general you tell her that everything is “fine” because when it comes down to it, there’s nothing more to say. You don’t tell her how you’re feeling unfulfilled, like you’re constantly waiting for something but can’t figure out what it is. The waiting depresses you, but you can’t tell her that because you know she’ll worry. You check the call time- less than five minutes- but already you’re anxious to hang-up, and so you make up an excuse and promise to call her back before the end of the week. She probably knows that you won’t call, and you know it too, but you tell the lie anyway. You finish your drive in silence.
When you get to work, you feel like you’ve been sucked into your own personalized version of hell. The mundane tasks of your career repeat themselves daily and the same old people bitch about the same old problems; you have a flashback to high school when you learned about Tantalus in Greek mythology. You have an important meeting with your boss, who looks right through you, and at lunch you sit at a table with some close friends who know almost nothing about you and whom you never see outside of work. You waste away a large portion of your afternoon shopping on EBay, and as soon as the clock strikes 5 PM, you’re out the door.
It’s on your way home from work that you see the face of the person you’re going to kill. Maybe it’s the woman who runs the dry cleaning shop, or maybe it’s the guy who delivers your pizza; maybe it’s the man waiting next to you for an elevator, or the woman in the car next to you on the street. And killing isn’t even on your mind, but when you see their face you just know, somehow, that whoever it is will change your life someday.
The face stays with you for the rest of the evening as you watch more T.V., as you clean the kitchen and scrub the sinks, as you look over that report you brought home from work and finally as you brush your teeth before bed. And you see it in your dreams that night, though you might not even remember who it is, or where you saw them or why you remember. Your dreams aren’t anything revealing or life-changing, and probably, you won’t remember them at all when you wake up.
The next day passes in much the same manner, except you don’t talk to your mother this time. The stack of paperwork on your desk has grown impossibly tall in the fifteen hours you spent at home. For awhile, you might sit there, watching it, willing it to grow smaller with your mind. Perhaps you look furtively around, to see whether your co-workers are busily at work, and perhaps you feel comforted that the man whose desk sits closest to yours is currently engaged in a game of Solitaire. You consider starting your own game, but don’t because it would mean turning on your very slow computer. At this point, you might sigh, even yawn, as you pull the papers nearer. Sign on the dotted line, turn the page. Sign on the dotted line, turn the page. Sign on the dotted line, turn the page.
You don’t see the face again for the whole day, or if you do, maybe you don’t consciously recognize it. Your boss tells you that he’s noticed a slight decrease in your work ethic lately, and he wants to know whether everything is okay. And you tell him that you’re “fine”, just like you tell everyone else, and that you’ve just been stressed out lately but you’re going to work really hard from now on. You could tell him that you’re just not getting that sense of satisfaction you expected from your career or that you feel his management style is repressing, but you don’t, because he probably wouldn’t care anyway. As soon as you can escape from his office, you do, and you turn on your computer and go back to EBay, where you’ve lost the bid you’ve been watching for three days. You might feel frustrated, but you don’t say anything because you really weren’t supposed to be on EBay anyway.
That night, you have the dreams again, and the face swirls endlessly through your mind amidst towering stacks of papers that need to be signed. You toss and turn all night, trying to forget, or at least to understand, but every time you wake up the face looses focus in your mind. You are dreaming about it right before your alarm goes off the next morning: you dream that you are running, and that the face is chasing you, pen and paper in hand, like a rabid dog. Any friendliness or gentle recognition is now gone. The alarm terrifies you when it goes off, and you feel like maybe you should write the dream down before you can forget it. Probably though, by the time you’ve found that pen and paper stashed away in your night stand, the opportunity has already gone. Later that day, you will tell your friends that you didn’t sleep well last night because you were having a bad dream about something, but you can’t remember what it is.
On your way home that night, you see the face walking past you down the street. The setting is unfamiliar; the person you see is a stranger, and you would have thought nothing of him if not for the terror that suddenly seized you, the adrenaline that coursed through your blood and set fire to your veins. The fear shames you: not the same, not the same one, you try to tell yourself. And perhaps for the time, it will be enough. You will regain your motor skills; the lump will disappear from your throat; you will go home, to where you are safe, until the face finds you in your dreams.
When you get home, you lock your door, and even check to make sure that the windows are shut up tight. There are leftovers in the fridge for dinner, but you can’t settle yourself enough to take them out, so you order a pizza instead. It’s getting late, almost too late to eat but you’ve already placed the order, and probably your credit card has already been charged. As you wait for the pizza, you think of the face, but then your attention turns to something else, and soon you start having the great big thoughts that you know would make you famous if you could only express them. You start coming up with titles for the book that you could write in your head, and you imagine the millions rolling in.
The pizza comes later than they said it would be, almost a half hour later. You’re probably frustrated, and starting to feel tired, and thinking that you should just give up and go to bed. You take your wallet, which you’ve been holding ready for the last twenty minutes in your hand, and slam it onto the kitchen table, at the same time as the doorbell rings. You leave the wallet there, determined to waste the delivery man’s time, and you answer the door.
It’s him. Is it him? He looks so familiar and the fear is there, but you suddenly aren’t sure. Is this the same man? His brother- a twin, maybe? He is probably apologizing for being late, offering a discount of some kind. You can’t hear a word he’s saying as you take the pizza box into your hands.
He’s holding out a little slip of paper, and a pen. Will you sign this, he is asking, I just need your signature. Your dream last night is like a memory: it’s so real as it flashes through your mind. The face, the same face is chasing you, pen and paper in hand through stacks of papers just waiting to be signed. You are trying hard to think, to hold onto his words; did he ask if he could see your card? You tell him to hold on, and you walk back to the kitchen, you set the pizza box down. Next to a knife.
There’s a knife on the counter. You left it out- why? Perhaps you had meant to put it away, and just forgot. You take the handle into your hand and then lift it, as if to test the weight. It’s a big knife, but it’s so light. You might not even remember why you had it out in the first place.
Setting the knife down, you go back to the door, credit card in hand and apologetic smile on your face. You could say that you’re sorry for making him wait, but you probably don’t, because he was a half hour late in the first place. He thanks you, turns away; you think of your knife as he leaves. Before he is even into his car, you are struggling into your shoes, pulling on a jacket. The pizza is still on the counter, growing colder; you grab the knife instead. Before he has even started the car, has even pulled away, you are racing toward your own and hoping, praying that he doesn’t see. And you don’t think that he does: he just drives away, perhaps a little faster than you usually drive, but you start your own car, start following.
You follow him through your neighborhood; probably, you have no idea what you intend to do, or why you brought the knife along. He’s threatening, you think you feel threatened; you want to sort him out, convince him not to do it again. You are probably thinking that you just want to talk to him, find out what his problem is with you, what the problem is. You turn the corner, still following. You drive for a while, through darker neighborhoods, neighborhoods that are not as safe, neighborhoods that you would have never walked into by yourself at night. You drive through them and out of them, relieved but still thinking of turning around toward home. You might reason with yourself: you’ve already come so far. Haven’t you? You think that if you could just talk to him, everything would be okay.
You drive into a ritzy neighborhood, on the other side of town from where you live. His car stops; you drive past him, turn the corner, park out of sight. You turn off your car, ease the door open so it doesn’t make a sound. It’s a good neighborhood, right on the edge of the city limits. It’s dark and there’s no one outside, not in a neighborhood like this, not at this hour. You walk back around the corner quietly, casually glancing around you, trying to see through the darkness behind the windows of the four, five, six houses now in your view. You might be amazed at how peaceful everything seems; your neighborhood is nice, but never so quiet as this. Still, you probably don’t feel entirely safe. Crazy things happen all the time, you think. You never know who the killer is until after you’re dead.
As you get closer, he is just walking away from a still-dark house, lighting up a cigarette as he moves. He’s facing you, maybe even watching you as you start to walk toward him through the dark. His gaze throws you off guard and you lose control of yourself: your body starts to freeze and your heart all but stops and it’s like you’re having an out of body experience, you see everything so clearly. You’re getting closer and maybe you’re slowing down, but you’re close enough now to look for recognition in his eyes. You see none, and you’re suddenly afraid that you’re dreaming again.
It seems impossible that the dreams started only days ago; it doesn’t occur to you. He terrifies you, this stranger, but you won’t wait for him to defeat you: you attack; you take out the threat before it’s ever there. Many years later, you will probably wish that you had taken it more slowly, taken your time. You will probably wish that you could remember how the knife felt as it cut through skin and soft tissue, mortally damaging his stomach, his lung, his heart. You will probably wish that you could remember the warmth of the first blood your hands ever felt, and how quickly it started to flow as you stab him again, again, again. You will probably wish that you could remember the terror in his eyes, but you don’t. All you remember is the fulfillment, the sense of purpose you had been missing that is suddenly washing over you in waves.
When you control yourself enough to finally stop, you will probably stab him one more time, just in case. You know enough from watching T.V. not to throw the knife away; you wipe it on his pant leg and then you take it back to your car; you walk away. Your eyes probably search the windows of the houses again as you leave, waiting for someone to run out to you, to stop you, but no one comes. You are careful as you get into your car, careful as you start the engine, careful as you drive away.
Your mind is unusually blank, something you will register only after that night, when the moment has long passed. There is fear, aggression, vindictiveness, confidence, fulfillment- but you are not thinking any of this: they are just there. It isn’t until later, when you’re washing the blood off your hands, that anything becomes real. You scrub your skin raw, and tear the clothes off your body like it was acid that you spilled, instead of blood. Screaming rings passionately in your ears for hours after you’ve returned home, and it alarms you. He hadn’t screamed when you killed him; there wasn’t time; he had made almost no sound at all. But the screaming is what makes you realize exactly what it is that you’ve done.
Probably, you run out of soap long before your hands start feeling clean. You think about the bottle of bleach that you have stored under the kitchen sink, wondering if it will wash your hands of the stain. They already look so red though, from the scrubbing- your hands look red like blood. So you stop scrubbing and you turn your attention to the pile of bloody clothes that are lying ominously on the floor. Walking into your bedroom, you throw on some sweats and then walk out to the kitchen trash, which is about half full. You throw the bloodied clothes on top of a banana peel and a stale loaf of bread; you open the fridge and add the leftovers on top of the pile. As you tie the top of the bag together tight, you will probably count the days in your head, hoping that the garbage collection is soon. And then you take it out, and once it’s gone, you can almost pretend that it wasn’t real.
You don’t sleep that night. You try to watch some T.V. but nothing catches your interest. Maybe you decide to take a long shower to loosen up those muscles that won’t un-tense in your back. But it doesn’t work, and for the larger part of the night, you just sit on your bed with your back against the wall, rubbing your hands together self-consciously and humming to yourself. You don’t want your neighbors to think that anything is wrong or different in some way, so you sit there alone, and everything is dark. When the sun comes into the sky again, you eat the pizza for breakfast.
In your head, you probably try to make sense of everything that has happened, but the only thing racing through your mind is fear. You’re not afraid of being caught, of being punished, or anything like that. People commit crimes all the time, you think. Many of them go unsolved. Right? Yes, you tell yourself. The only thing that scares you, the thought keeping you awake, is that you don’t feel scared, guilty, at all. The adrenaline is still rushing through your veins; you’ve replayed the night in your head about a thousand times. And still, you feel nothing. How effortless it is to become a killer- that is what keeps you awake all night.
You call in sick to work the next day, and spend a considerable amount of time worrying that everyone knows what is wrong. You never take sick days. You never take vacations. Surely, you think, everyone at work will know what you’ve done. You check the paper thoroughly: Yes, it’s there. A small piece. Police were investigating his last stop of the evening, but no suspects had been identified, you read; the family is baffled; they ask for anyone with information to come forward. They don’t know why anyone would want to hurt him; the president of the home owners association is dismayed that something so tragic could happen on her side of town.
You order take-out- Chinese, not pizza today- and you sit on your couch watching movies that you’ve already seen about a million times before. There’s a knock on your front door, which you don’t answer until you’re sure that whoever it was is long gone. Just a delivery man, probably Fed-Ex, dropping off a package that you’ve been expecting for weeks now. A couple of books that you ordered online- but nothing that you feel like reading right now. After the sun sets, you decide that you want to go for a walk to clear your head.
You probably aren’t surprised when you end up at the scene of the crime. Not that you intentionally walked back that way, because it’s a long walk, out of the way, really; not that you gave any thought to it at all, but it seems fitting, poetic somehow. You stand at the corner, less than twenty feet away from where you left the body. There’s yellow police tape. Caution, it says. Do not enter. Caution. No one else is around, and so you allow yourself to laugh a little, maybe to sneer. Caution, the sign says. Wouldn’t it be more fitting if the tape was around you?
Not that you mean to dishonor the man you killed. It’s this that stops the laughter in your throat. Because he wasn’t stupid, and it wasn’t meaningless. The police will never find you; if you are arrested, it will be many years from now, when you’ve turned yourself in. The man you killed will go unavenged, and for this reason you spend a few silent moments at the scene of the crime. To honor him. He is your first victim- your only victim. Until, that is, you kill again.
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