The Joy of Killing (14 page)

The Professor grasped that. If you want to be free you can't draw a circle around yourself and declare all else out of bounds. He understood that if he didn't take care of his wife the feeling of impotence would effectively neuter him for the rest of his days. Certainly the feeling of killing her caused him some discomfort—he still loved her—but it would leave him in a place where he could live in peace whatever the circumstances. He could have been wrong; the crime could have left him wracked with guilt and remorse, even self-loathing; in which case, his choice would have been a mistake. But he wasn't wrong. The rest of his life was a circus, and he was a spectator as well as the ringmaster, and he loved it. Of course his happiness earned him the sobriquet of sociopath, even psychopath, but he believed, and I agree with him, he had made the right choice, being who he was. The cut he made on her nerve through which electricity flowed to her heart was not made in anger, or a desire for revenge, or punishment, or to cause her pain. It was made out of an obligation to his own peace of mind, his own happiness. His lack of remorse stirred up hate in others, to be sure, but that was to be expected.

If Willie is not to be blamed, neither is the person who took his life. Willie had lived his life the way he was meant to live it, and the person who ended it for him was acting in his own interest, according to his own immutable design. I doubt the harmless old man seriously objected, other than perhaps about the manner of his
dying. He bled to the last drop, you could see that from the size of the stain.

The window cracks open, and a breeze slips in. I walk over and let the night air caress my face. The last traces of the squall have fled. The moon has gone white as chalk. Even the leaves are quiet. No fluttering of bat wings or shaking of baby rattles. The solitude is creased by the lonely wail of a loon at the far end of the lake.

I close the window. Clarity will bring peace, you think. You hope. But what if it doesn't? There is no going back now. Even to the small town down the road. The world will be catching up to me soon. But the night is still mine, and I will make of it what I will.

The briefcase now sitting alone on the chair by the window was my identity in my teaching days; the more battered it got, the more wisdom it carried within it. In my little plays in the classroom, it had sometimes served as the child on the floor. Never repaired once, I think, over all the years. The splotch on the handle, however, was disconcerting. I reach for the case and lift it by the edge. It's heavier than I thought, and I have to grasp it firmly. I set it on my lap. I rub a finger on the handle, hold it under the lamp, and it comes up dark crimson. I turn my palm over; the streak on it matches the handle. I unsnap the brass clasp. My hand is a little shaky. A book sits in the front slot. In the next slot is a sheaf of papers. In the last one, a small calendar and a newspaper article. The book, I see, is the Professor's memoir,
The Joy of Killing
. I can't help but smile.

After the success of my novel, the Professor undertook to write the story of the killing and the consequences from inside his head. The very personal memoir takes the reader right up to the moment
of his execution. It did quite well posthumously and still has quite a following. People respect honesty in others, even if they don't live it themselves.

Since the Professor was dead, I was frequently asked to read from and talk about the book. One campus presentation had drawn over one hundred students. When I was finished reading, there was utter silence, then muted but sustained applause.

I slipped the book from the briefcase. On the back cover is a split screen of the elegant, educated face of the author and a wooden electric chair with straps and a metal cap. That some people took the book literally was not the author's fault. Even the title was criticized for being too provocative. The book was banned from the campus bookstore, suffered a feminist boycott, which only helped its sales.

The Professor understood that he had a choice in killing his wife, and he insisted that he had made the right choice. He was willing to accept the consequences of his action. He had gone happily to his death. He wrote that he looked forward to the experience, and you believed it. But still he wanted to stay conscious as long as possible, to live fully every last second of his dying. I wrote the afterward to the memoir, since I was one of the witnesses to the execution. His eyes slid open after the first jolt. He was saying something; I took it to be “Nothing really matters,” although no one else heard this. I wanted that to be the title of the book, but the publisher insisted on
The Joy of Killing
, since the Professor described in such compelling detail the deep satisfaction the severing of his wife's spinal cord brought him. Page after page, and it was this that brought the most
objections. You needn't read it, I said. But they had to. I'd heard that people got sick before they could put it down.

T
HE BELL ON
the Underwood bings loudly. It's the first time I've heard the sound all night. I push the lever on the carriage and slide it back along the track, until it catches. I push a key that releases it, and it tears back along the track and bangs to a stop; the bell rings, more loudly this time it seems, as if objecting to the foolishness. I see that I've been writing about the girl on the train. I'm pleased, because I believe even more than before that the story of that night is my road to salvation. I've come some distance as it is. And I believe that the boy need not suffer from it. He can stay as he is, which right now is pretty happy with the way things are going. Whatever shadow hangs over him is unseen and unfelt, which is the way it should be.

I'
VE LOCKED EYES
with the girl in the mirror. Her head rocks with each push into her, but her eyes don't leave me. Her hands are grasping the sink. My hands hold her hips, my thumbs imprinting brightly, and I want to look down at the sight, but I'm scared to leave her eyes, fearful that I might lose her if I do.

F
OR ALL OF
his physical dominance—he's a good three inches taller than the girl—the boy understands he's not in control, but it doesn't bother him. In fact, I suspect he's rather grateful. He's beginning to trust the girl. As for her, she's a mystery, isn't she? She's kind to the boy, as if she sees something to love in him, even knowing this night is the end of it. There is a slight air of urgency
about her.
She needs something from him
. For a moment I'm distracted by the sounds of our coupling. It's a powerful rhythm, and it seems disconnected from me. My thighs are shaking.

“Slowly,” she says.

In the midst of all the sensations, I feel a faint ache. I look away from the mirror. Lights are flashing by outside. We are next to a highway. People in cars going the same way could see us. She rocks her hips gently, and I hold perfectly still. It feels like she's pulling me inside her, all of me. My hands float off her hips and lift her skirt up. I tilt my head back. Burning the image for all time in my brain. Even the red marks from my hands, which now fold the edge of her skirt up over her waist. I lower my head to see what I can see, but sweat creeps into my eyes and stings and blurs. I'm more outside than in, and I freeze on the edge of laughter.

The girl stops moving. “I can't feel you,” she says.

I slip almost out, hesitate; I can barely make out the conjunction of our flesh. I hold for a long second, and bang in, thinking let's see if you feel this. She lets out a sharp cry of pleasure and pushes back into me hard, and I get it then—who can take the most, inflict the most, hurt the most. I'm slicked all over and breathing hard. And so it goes. I slam into her, she cries out, then pushes hard back into me, at which point I must hold straight and solid as a post. And back and forth we go, until the rhythm is consuming, and the train rocks and click-clacks in time with us, and it seems like we could roll on like this through the night.

I wonder if in that moment some healing began. There was no thinking, or observing, no separation. The energy flowed back and
forth between them, like a powerful, releasing balm. Finally, he lets go. Tears slide down his cheeks, land on her bottom.

B
ING
!
THE BELL
goes. A half page has gone by. I nod my head. The kid was doing all right, for a beginner. He's a natural. At least this night. I push the carriage to the right. I close my eyes, to play out the rest of the scene, my fingers skipping over the keys.

M
Y EYES SWING
over to
The Joy of Killing
. Bright red letters on white. The Professor's memoir was quite remarkably stitched together, a compellingly told story from inside the mind of a remorseless killer. Hard to believe he was an academic. In my novel, he had earned a second PhD in anthropology, and his study in this area greatly affected his philosophy. His initial area of focus had been the early crop civilizations in the Fertile Crescent, when man had learned to plant wheat and rye, which meant that he could store them and take the winter off. It allowed him to settle down and not spend all of his time hunting for his next meal. He had time for art and music and community. He began painting and writing stories and composing music, which gave him memory and hope and capacities beyond simple survival. It also gave him time to develop a broader range of emotional strategies beyond reduction of fear and procreation. He began to possess a woman, rather than just breed her out of instinct. He had his own home, his own plot of land, and now he had the time and energy to fight to protect them. The freedom to act from pure instinct had been lost by this shift. Emotional strategies were woven into all behavior now;
anger became the critical feeling, for it drove the various forms of violence, retaliation, and retribution. Theft. Assault. Murder. Rape. The primitive mind began evolving into a process of weaving instincts into emotional landscapes. It had to. If a neighbor began sleeping with your wife, you were more effective if you responded with anger; you would do a better job of making him pay in a way that would discourage him or anyone else from doing it again. Even better if you could make him feel guilty over what he did. If his wife and children shamed him for it. If he felt remorse over it. Instinct, while critical, was no longer the linchpin. And if you slept with his wife, you predicted—and here was the key element of the Professor's doctoral thesis and subsequent scholarly efforts—you predicted that you would not feel bad for having done it; or rather, that the joy you felt while and after screwing her would far outweigh any negative feelings, such as guilt at having used the woman to get even with the man. Predicting correctly is the definition of wisdom.

Under the Professor's theory, the reason I failed to stick an ice pick in the back of my first wife was because I understood that the momentary joy arising from having committed the most forbidden of all acts would not hold up; it would be ruined by feelings of guilt and self-loathing and eventually the worst of them all—regret. So I didn't do it, but not because I'm some moral human being, superior to the sociopathic killer, but because I know myself. We are both acting true to our nature.

I would have to agree with the Professor in most respects. I never felt tempted to take violent action against Willie, or David,
for that matter, because I could not envision myself receiving much joy from it. Perhaps relief, a sense of closure, even a somewhat transient sense of contentment. Certainly nothing even close to overcoming the consequential feelings, nothing to stand up to the judgment of others—my friends and family, the world. I would pass the remaining days in misery, of this I was sure. Does this make me a sociopath? To refrain from violence because I sense my incapability to deal with the emotional aftermath? To find peace from the act? To maintain a sliver of joy for what would remain of my life? To me it is utterly rational.

The difficulty I encountered was that so many people assumed that I was like the Professor. Because I wrote a novel based on his story, and then supported the publication of his memoir and stood up and explained—I did not defend it, exactly—the Professor's theory of violence, people assumed that I agreed with and supported the killing of his wife. I understand it, I would say, which is a far piece from saying
I agree with what he did
. The dean insisted that I condemn the murder as wrong or amoral or evil, which, for the reasons I've set forth above, I could not in good conscience do. Nature versus nurture is in essence a specious argument. Others have written that the biology of the brain is involved in the wiring of criminal minds—to what extent we are not sure—and environmental factors make up the rest of the story. What else is there?

When I taught a course on
The Joy of Killing
, I struggled to set out the simplest concepts of the Professor's theory free and clear of emotional entanglements or ideology. Without much success, I must confess. I would ask the students: What difference does it
make if the behavior of the brutal killer results from an inferior amygdala or being sexually assaulted in his childhood? It's all nature, is it not? Human behavior stems from the same source as animal behavior, I pointed out. I would tell the story of the ape who tore a woman's face off in the laboratory. I would note that the ape, like the brutal killer, is responsible for neither the design of his brain nor the confluence of the social factors beating in on the formation of it. You cannot judge the killer any more than you can judge the ape. The dean agreed in principle, but he refused to back down from his insistence that I stop teaching the theory and condemn the Professor for the good of the college, which by now was in a total uproar. You simply can't say that there's nothing wrong with murdering your wife for sleeping with your neighbor, he insisted. What I saw in the dean's eyes was the possibility that I myself was like the Professor, that I myself might have no difficulty in murdering my wife if I caught her fucking someone. (Which I hadn't done, of course, but I couldn't tell him that.) That's what scared him, and the others, that evil lurked behind my very eyes, and perhaps theirs as well.