Butterfly Skin (24 page)

I think someone with my tastes has no right to judge others.

People wonder what’s inside my head, thinks Ksenia, but no one’s asked me about that in an interview yet. I guess all that’s still ahead of me. Look, today I got a letter from Maya Lvova, the woman to whom I owe so much, asking for an interview. She says she’s interested in talking to me. It would be interesting for me to meet her, I think, and I answer yes, by all means, let’s have a talk, it could be tomorrow, or Friday, whatever suits you best. She used to like doing sensational interviews, she might ask what’s inside my head. I wonder what I’ll tell her?

I wonder what’s inside the head of the man I chat with every day on ICQ. I should ask why he called himself “alien,” what he meant by that. I wonder if he really doesn’t know who I am – although, to be quite honest, I shouldn’t exaggerate my own fame, he might not listen to the radio or read the internet newspapers, and even if he does read them, I can’t be the only girl in the world called Ksenia Ionova, why should he remember that name in particular?

Every day Ksenia reads the forums on her site. She’s curious about what people talk about after they visit the site to find out about the Moscow Psycho. When she invented the site, she thought all she would do was give people information, put them on their guard, and counter the spread of rumors. But now she’s not sure anymore that people visit the site for information – they come for something else.

We really admire you, Ksenia reads. You’re a cool dude. I think these babes deserve to be carved up, because they don’t put out for us, heh-heh, it’s signed Beavis and Butthead. Heh-heh, that really is interesting, thinks Ksenia, and reads the next thread. We’d like to meet you, because WE HATE this world too. WE’RE SATANISTS! Just recently we went to a graveyard, turned the crosses upside down and hanged a black cat. We were going to burn it, but max wouldn’t let us, because he’s a wimp and a tosser. It’s signed “666” and there’s an answer under it: why don’t you lads go and have a drink instead of bothering with this sick f***ing rubbish? It’s signed “777” and the asterisks are there because Ksenia installed an obscenity filter on her computer and it replaces all obscene words with asterisks.

I wonder, thinks Ksenia, what these people have inside their heads? Why do clueless teenagers, smart-ass jokers and pimply-faced wankers all come flocking to the smell of blood? She remembers that after one of the murders committed by Chikatilo, the mother of the victim received a note: “To the parents of the missing girl. Hello, parents. Do not grieve. Yours isn’t the first and she’s not the last. We need ten of them by the New Year. If you want to bury her – look in the leaves of the Darovsky Plantation. Black Cat the Sadist.” They didn’t find anything in the leaves of the Darovsky Plantation, the body was hidden somewhere completely different, when Chikatilo was caught he said he never wrote this note, but he really did kill another ten people before the New Year. Who was this joker, this black cat the sadist, this distant relative of the black cat that was hanged, but not burned and – she would like to hope – never even existed.

I was on my way home yesterday, Ksenia reads in the “Suspicions” forum, and this young guy tagged along behind me! I spotted him in the subway, on the escalator. He was giving me this strange kind of stare (OMG), but then I forgot about him, only later, in the passage on the way to my line, I saw him again, it was like he’d tracked me down! He was walking in front of me and then he turned straight onto my platform without even hesitating! I was shit scared, so I let the train go and pretended I was waiting for someone, and I stood there in the middle of the station for a while and then got into a different car from my usual one. There was no one there, so I stopped worrying, but when I got out at my stop (I don’t want to say where I live, in case this psycho reads your stupid forum), he was standing there (OMG!) like he was waiting for me (OMG!) I took out my cell phone and called my boyfriend and said real loud someone was following me and I wanted him to meet me. Then my boyfriend came and this psycho must have got scared and he disappeared. So it was all right in the end. But tell me, everyone, what should I do, because I’m afraid he might be stalking me? And it’s signed “Fluffy.”

I wonder, thinks Ksenia, why she didn’t approach a cop? Even if she was afraid, I wonder why she didn’t go to a cop afterward? Why didn’t she give him a description? Why doesn’t she even give one here? What if this man really was the serial killer they’ve been trying to catch for the last six months? I wonder what she has inside her head? How old is she? What does her boyfriend look like? Is all this true, or did she make up the entire story so she could get her boyfriend to come to the subway station, and then wrote it down, because she started believing it herself? I wonder how this psycho could tell which station she was going to? Ksenia knows that killers often stalk their victims for months, she knows that many of them can get inside their quarry’s head and guess in advance where she will go, what she will do and what words she’ll respond to. Ksenia knows about this, but she’s still curious.

I wonder, thinks Ksenia, why she wrote in? Maybe the answer she wanted to read is:
Dear Fluffy, I felt so frightened for you when I read your story. I can imagine how frightened you were!
But what she feels like writing is something quite different.
Why, oh why, Dear Fluffy, didn’t you give us his description? Why, oh why, you hysterical idiot, don’t you go to the police? Don’t you care?
is what Ksenia wants to write,
or are you just stringing us along, you infantile little fool?
But she doesn’t write anything and moves on to the next forum.

You girls who like to hang out on this site, Ksenia reads, how would you like to be given a real slamming? How would you like to be had by a real man? Write to me at
sadist_cruel_ [email protected]
, and we’ll get together in my cozy little basement. First I’ll give you a good flogging on your bouncy little backsides, then I’ll make you lick my huge great dong, while my dog stretches your tight wet little holes for you. You’ll be begging me to give you a good screwing but first I’ll hang weights on your tits that’ll stretch your nipples down to the floor, or tear them right off, ha-ha, and then the lads and I will shaft you so hard that when you leave in the morning you’ll be crawling on all fours, and even the celebrated Moscow psycho would be disgusted by your huge tattered holes!

You are a sick creep, Ksenia reads, children visit this site, clear out. What’s the moderator up to, Ksenia reads, get this filth out of the forum! People, come to your senses, think what you’re writing, Ksenia reads, the dead girls’ families could see this. What abominable filth, Ksenia reads, what kind of scum writes in to this forum? Yes, Ksenia reads, we’re scum, we’re here for a laugh.

All this, Ksenia reads, is because people have forgotten Christ and sunk into depravity. All this, Ksenia reads, is because the most important things in Russia now are money and financial gain. All this, Ksenia reads, is because the Russian people have forgotten their pride.

All this is becos its those little Russian bitches own folt. No one will raip a desent girl, she WON’T GO with a man she doesn’t know. My sister always dresses desent, she doesn’t go rownd with her bra showing like all these sluts.

Do the victims’ families read this, Ksenia wonders, do they visit the site? Do the people who write in remember about them? I always used to think it was immoral to pester someone in mourning with questions, but now I think maybe I was wrong. Maybe people need to read about what kind of girls they were – Maria Z., age twenty-three, Dasha A., age sixteen, Julia B, age twenty-fIve? So they’ll stop being dismembered bodies and just for a moment at least become girls who loved and wanted to be loved, who dreamed of having children and meeting
their
man, who hoped for happiness, looked out the window in the evening and thought about what they were going to do tomorrow, laughed at jokes, sobbed at funerals and expected to die when they were old, surrounded by loving grandchildren. When I look at their photographs, Ksenia thinks, I want to cry, but deep in my heart I know there’s a strange truth in everything that has happened. That our future is made of dreams and daydreams, that it bursts like a shimmering rainbow soap-bubble, like a toy balloon pricked with a knife, a scalpel or a piece of a mirror broken in the bathroom. That I, a young interesting girl, a successful professional, the senior editor of a news department, only five minutes away from stardom, can feel a deadly horror pulsating beneath the thin soap-bubble membrane of my rainbow-bright future, like a heart beneath skin that has been slit open. Maybe, thinks Ksenia, that is why I made a site like this, because I’m curious about this horror.

But I really must write something to this Fluffy, Ksenia thinks, or she’ll never wise up. Only I wonder just why she annoys me so much? I guess it’s because I would have acted differently in her place.

I think, Ksenia reads, that sooner or later they’ll catch you. And now let me tell you what they do with your kind on the inside. Everyone’ll have your ass, you’ll be licking the ***t out of the slop buckets, and when you get out, we’ll find you anyway and kill you, but not straight away.

I think, Ksenia reads, that when they catch him, he should be interrogated properly. They should bring our special agents who interrogate the Chechen killers back from Chechnya and let them interrogate this psycho, and then he’ll tell them everything.

I think, Ksenia reads, that capital punishment is too good for subhuman monsters like this. They should be tortured, to make them realize what they’ve done. I think, Ksenia reads, that first they ought to strip his skin off, but not all of it, or he’ll die too soon. And then stick a pointed stake up his anus and attach electrodes to his nipples so that he twitches like a frog. And they ought to hang him upside down, because I’ve been told they stay conscious longer like that.

I wonder, thinks Ksenia, what’s inside these people’s heads?
I’ve been told they stay conscious longer like that
. Who told him that? How did they test it? Sometimes I don’t believe they hate this psycho. Sometimes it seems to me they can feel the killer inside themselves. Sometimes it seems to me that he’s been living inside me for a long time, swelling up like an embryo in the darkness of the womb and one day he’ll come bursting out, break his way through my ribcage, burst out and say:
Hi
.

“Hi,” Ksenia says into the phone, “how are you getting on? I’m fine too. I visited a forum and what’s going on in there made my hair stand on end! Maybe we should get a moderator? Figure out how much it will cost, this is really getting embarrassing, take a look and read it for yourself. Or maybe we could have coffee together at lunch time,” says Ksenia, “we haven’t seen each other since last week and I miss you.”

“No,” says Olya, “I’m sorry, I can’t today, I have to see the doctor.”

“Is something wrong?” asks Ksenia.

“No,” Olya replies, “everything’s fine, I’ve just decided not to keep the baby.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” asks Ksenia.

“No, there’s no need,” Olya replies, “I’ll call you if I need anything.”

Dear Lyusya
, Ksenia reads mechanically,
I know you still visit this forum. So I’m telling you, for what you did last Friday I’m going to catch you and cut your womb out, and all your guts with it.

Dear Fluffy
, Ksenia writes,
I was so frightened for you when I read your story. I can imagine how frightened you were! I hope the psycho won’t follow you anymore. Hang in there, and if anything happens, write in again, all of us here are very concerned about you.

IN MOSCOW IN SUMMER YOU LEARN TO MOVE IN SHORT
bursts, as if the street is a sea in which you have to swim from one island to another. Air conditioning in the bedroom at home, air conditioning in the car, at work, at the club. In the gaps between, your shirt instantly becomes soaked under the armpits, you’re the first to find the smell of your own sweat disgusting – and no deodorant will save you. Islands in the sea, yes, I’d prefer the Cote d’Azur or at least Greece, or even, if it comes to that, Turkey, where my friend Mike’s wife is on vacation right now with their seven-year-old son. Mike tells me Lyuba calls him and complains, says it’s tough for her on her own, and threatens that next year she won’t go anywhere without him.

Mike would be glad to go, the beach is better every way than a stuffy night club, where the air conditioning can’t handle the vapors exuded by hundreds of bodies, most of them appealingly young. If you think of this club as an island and the heat as water, then the place is about to suffer the same fate as Atlantis. Not much of an island, in other words.

I used to differentiate between the Moscow clubs, I used to think that was important. I used to think one was fashionable and another was outmoded. Now they’ve all fused into a single dance floor ablaze with lights where the young things dance – the new clubbing generation that has come on the scene. They skip around to music that I have no more clue about nowadays than I do about the clubs; they skip about like puppies having fun in a dog park.

Mike wipes the sweat off his face. Good old Mike, endowed with a figure that allowed him to impersonate his own “protection” during the post-Soviet capitalist frenzy of the early nineties: he put on a fierce expression, crossed his arms on his chest and sat there at negotiations without saying a word. “I don’t really look like a gangster, do I?” He used to say to me. “I’m just a regular Moscow boy.” Ever since those days he still has the habit of wearing a gold bracelet and signet ring.

We’re sitting right beside the dance floor, and I spot you straight away: skin-tight pants down to just below your knees, glittering shoes with high heels, a short top, already wet with sweat. Hair dyed in streaks, ginger on light yellow – straw color, almost white. So far I can’t see your face, but the hemispheres of your buttocks are twitching rhythmically, sending me greetings. I pretend I haven’t noticed you, we order two beers and I sit there half-turned away, still following you out of the corner of my eye.