Every Dead Thing

“We’re goin’ to hell is where we’re goin’. These people are like bacteria spreading and this country is just one big petri dish to them. The Bureau reckons we could be losing a couple of thousand victims a year to them. The folks watching Oprah and Jerry Springer, or subscribin’ to Jerry Falwell, they don’t wanna know that. They read about them in the crime mags or see them on the TV, but that’s only when we catch one of them. The rest of the time, they don’t have the least idea what’s goin’ on around them.”

He took a deep swig of Jax. “There are at least two hundred of these killers operating at the present time. At least two hundred.” He was reeling off the numbers now, emphasizing each statistic with a stab of the beer bottle. “Nine out of ten are male, eight out of ten are white, and one in five is never goin’ to be found. Never.

“And you know what the strangest thing is? We’ve got more of them than anywhere else. The good old U.S. of A. is breedin’ these fuckers like fuckin’ Elmo dolls. Three-quarters of them live and work in this country. We’re the world’s leading producer of serial killers. It’s a sign of sickness, is what it is. We’re sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.

“And you know, the more of us there are, the more distant from each other we become. We’re practically livin’ on top of each other but we’re further away from each other in every other way than we’ve ever been before. And then these guys come in, with their knives and their ropes, and they’re even further removed than the rest of us. Some of them even have cop’s instincts. They can sniff each other out. We found a guy in Angola in February who was communicating with a suspected killer in Seattle using biblical codes. I don’t know how these two freaks found each other, but they did.

“Strange thing is, most of them are even worse off than the rest of humanity. They’re inadequate-sexually, emotionally, physically, whatever-and they’re taking it out on those they see around them. They have no”-he shook his hands in the air, searching for the word-“no vision. They have no larger vision of what they’re doing. There’s no purpose to it. It’s just an expression of some kind of fatal flaw.

“And the people they’re killing, they’re so dumb that they can’t understand what’s happening around them. These killers should be a wake-up call, but nobody’s listening, and that widens the gap even more. All they see is the distance, and they reach across it and pick us off, one by one. All we can do is hope that, if they do it often enough, we’ll spot the pattern and put together a link between us and them, a bridge across the distance.” He finished his beer and raised the bottle up, calling for another.

“It’s the distance,” he said, his eyes on the street but his gaze beyond it, “the distance between life and death, Heaven and Hell, us and them. They have to cross it to get close enough to us to take us but it’s all a matter of distance. They love the distance.”

And it seemed to me, as rain poured down on the window, that Adelaide Modine, the Traveling Man, and the others like them who roamed the country were all united by this distance from the common crowd of humanity. They were like small boys who torture animals or take fish from tanks to watch them squirm and gasp in their death throes.

Yet Adelaide Modine seemed even worse than so many of the others, for she was a woman and to do what she had done not only went against law and morality and whatever other titles we give to the common bonds that hold us together and prevent us from tearing each other apart; it went against nature, too. A woman who kills a child seems to bring out something in us that exceeds revulsion or horror. It brings a kind of despair, a lack of faith in the foundations upon which we have built our lives. For we believe that women should not take the life of a child. Just as Lady Macbeth begged to be unsexed so as to kill the old king, so also a woman who killed a child appeared to be denatured, a being divorced from her sex. Adelaide Modine was like Milton ’s night hag, “lured with the smell of infant blood.”

I cannot countenance the death of children. The killing of a child seems to bring with it the death of hope, the death of the future. I recall how I used to listen to Jennifer breathe, how I used to watch the rise and fall of my infant daughter’s chest, how I felt a sense of gratitude, of relief, with every inhalation and exhalation. When she cried, I would lull her to sleep in my arms, waiting for the sobs to fade into the soft rhythms of rest. And when she was at last quiet, I would bend down slowly, carefully, my back aching from the strain of the position, and lay her in her crib. When she was taken from me it was like the death of a world, an infinite number of futures coming to an end.