The Killer (Part 1)

Note: This story contains a graphic depiction of a deed that some readers may find upsetting or alarming. The story is an attempt to explain the motivation of the mass murderer and what the meaning of “suicide by cop” might be. In no way is it intended to glorify, condone or serve as an apologia for the act the protagonist commits.

Emerging from the john with her coat draped over her arm and carrying her overnight bag, Sharon tossed a gift-wrapped box onto the living room couch where I was reclining and half-asleep.

“I would have given you this tonight,” she said. “Happy fucking birthday, Steve. You’ve traveled around the sun thirty-five times now and you still haven’t seen the fucking light. Enjoy the rest of the fucking weekend.”

And then, slamming the apartment door behind her with a force that knocked a picture from the wall, she was gone.

For minutes afterwards I stayed put on the couch, processing my reaction to what was clearly her permanent departure. Yes, it disturbed me that her decampment had come on the afternoon of this particular birthday. And I did experience an uneasiness about the void her absence from my life would leave. (Although we’d maintained separate Greenwich Village residences, she’d been my steady girlfriend for nearly six months and slept at my bigger place a lot.) But these concerns were quickly dissolved in a wash of relief; a relief succeeded by apathy.

Not to say that I’d stopped liking Sharon. I still had an affection for her. The issue was that I couldn’t fully love her. And her persistent demands, especially in the last weeks, to move in, to marry, to have a baby, had become oppressive. (She was just months younger than me and the alarm on her biological clock had been sounding long before our hookup.) Of course, the strain I’d been made to feel in this period wasn’t all about Sharon specifically. It was rooted in the fact that the depth of emotion required to respond to such entreaties had always been off my spectrum. I was more than capable of lust and, occasionally, of infatuation. But love, certainly of the kind she wanted, was something alien to me.

Indeed, what transpired with Sharon had merely perpetuated a lifelong pattern. It had happened, in one manner or another, with every woman with whom I’d had a “serious” relationship.

The pattern I’m referring to would invariably begin in the early stages of routine intimacy. And it didn’t take much to trigger it. I’d hear the sounds they made in the bathroom, or suddenly notice a simple mole or dimpled hollow on a breast, and instantly suffer a spasm of revulsion that was accompanied by a heart jolt of fear — it was as though I’d caught a glimpse of the Grim Reaper himself. If the intensity of that reflex passed quickly there was an insidious after effect. An emotional distancing would be left in its wake, a distancing which was beyond me to repair. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake my perception of women’s bodies as things that decayed and ultimately vanished. They were, their bodies, an atrocious and ephemeral concoction of pipes, wiring and nasty liquids that nature had fiendishly devised and then camouflaged by, at best, a pretty face or figure. Any ardor I may initially have felt would fade, and sex would become merely obligatory and mechanical. In the aftermath of the ensuing split-up, that could take place anywhere from weeks to months later, I would feel only a listlessness in the company of any new women I met. My torpor would last until my libido necessarily reawakened — it represented, after all, a biological imperative. Then, not counting one-nighters that were over too fast for me to find cause to recoil, I would once again enter a familiar scenario.

Sharon had attributed my resistance to her wishes to what she called “commitment phobia” and I should acknowledge that I’d given her mixed signals, which undoubtedly shaped her reading of me. But if I’d led her on a little it was because I was afflicted with an ambivalence that hadn’t been a problem in previous failing liaisons. I was approaching middle age with no significant couplings to show for it, and given that she was comely, personable and intelligent, I thought I ought to want her. As a result, I couldn’t bring myself to thoroughly discourage her aspirations. Despite her constant complaints about the noise that extended into the early morning hours from the nightclub across the street and just four floors below — I barely noticed it myself — she’d remained adamant about taking occupancy (with getting hitched and becoming a mother to quickly follow). And I had intimated that, when I turned thirty-five, I might be ready. If, all along, I knew that my readiness wasn’t very likely in the cards, I did live with the hope that something would at one point rescue me from my condition. But when the time came that something hadn’t materialized.

“So, are you prepared to take the next steps?” She’d asked me in bed that morning, snuggling behind me.

“Shit,” I grunted. “I can’t.”

Sharon’s parting critique of me, let it be said, had been off by 180 degrees. My dilemma wasn’t that I hadn’t seen the light, but that I’d seen too clearly what it exposed.

My mother told me once that when I was born the obstetrician had remarked that I was “high-strung.” Since no further details were recalled by her, I can only imagine that I evacuated the womb trembling with terror. When I think of this, I’m reminded of another ghastly aspect of women’s bodies. This one involves nature’s design of the female anatomy and it makes perfect sense of my trepidation. A freshman at Pratt, for Christ’s sake, would know better than to locate the portal to the world in such close proximity to the anus. This ungodly configuration made the moment of one’s birth comparable to exiting a subway station in pre-gentrified Jersey City.

Now that’s not just a joke. As it occurred to me later, the doctor’s comment had predicted a handicap to which I’d been sentenced. If my innocence as an infant hadn’t shielded me from too much clarity, as an adult, the crucial repression and denial mechanisms that mute too keen an awareness of the uglier realities of existence — and belonging, it appeared, to most everyone else — would be glaringly absent.

And the consequences of missing insulation were hardly confined to my inability to deeply connect with the women in my life. In fact, that was only a piece of it. I was also, and to an even greater degree, consigned to a chronic anxiety about my own physical composition and fate, which, I suppose, the women mirrored. The sinister underside of nature being so evident to me, I lived with a dread that would fluctuate from low to high, but which was unremittingly there. The horror of the inevitability and agony of death that I knew their beauty disguised and distracted us from, a bright spring day or magnificent landscape were not, for example, phenomena to rejoice in, but ominous and disquieting.

My state of mind, however, was a secret that, with one exception back in my twenties, I never revealed, not to the women it affected or to anyone else. More than a little embarrassed by it, and my socializing being minimal anyway (I had friends but none with whom I was particularly tight), I was loathe to discuss it. And inasmuch as I was functional, decent looking, educated and with a well-paying, if unrewarding, job, no one I came into contact with would suspect that something might be wrong. To my knowledge, the most negative thing ever expressed about me (apart from “commitment phobia,” whatever the hell that actually is) was that I tended to be “sullen.”

“Sullen.” I could summon no argument against that description. Veiled as my inner wretchedness may have been by a determination to appear as together as possible, I was still, and much too often, visibly tense and morose.

That exception I mentioned above was a psychiatrist who I saw once a week for the better part of a year. I told him my story and he diagnosed the symptoms I presented as depression; a condition he defined as a chemical imbalance. In the course of my treatment, I went through an array of psychotropics, none of which had any effect whatsoever on my thoughts or moods. (The street drugs I’d tried, like cocaine and speed, had worked to appreciably lift my spirits, but as good as they’d made me feel, the gratifications they afforded would dissipate rapidly and leave me worse off than I was before.) My depression, this shrink said finally, was “refractory,” impervious, that is, to medication, and he was talking about alternatives like electric shock therapy when I upped and left. What this man didn’t grasp was that my “depression” was caused by seeing the world as it is. Bringing my chemicals into balance (which  —  who knows? —  he may’ve already accomplished) wasn’t going to change that.

I understood, at this juncture, that nothing short of the miraculous figured to release me from my hyperconsciousness and fear of the evil that nature embodied. The cruelty of nature (watch those shows on the animal channels for a demonstration of how it doesn’t give an antelope’s ass about the sanctity of innocent life, but just makes more of it) was too starkly discernible to me. As I’ve said, the mechanisms — I mean the illusions and mental manipulations — other people were able to employ in order to live with some measure of interior peace in respect to the unacceptable reality nature posed were not available to me. I’m speaking of, say, religion and the immortality it promised (or the justification for suffering it provided). I’m also speaking of an immersion in social or political missions to absorb the attention. And, to be sure, I’m speaking of profound romantic love which, from what I’ve observed, is a method subconsciously used to transform the body from a source of apprehension into something quite the opposite — a vessel of transcendent pleasure. (This is probably the fundamental reason the termination of romantic attachments seems to be so shattering for many people.)

As I’ve said, I lived with the hope that something would happen to free me from my situation. Well one day, and out of nowhere, something did happen; something at once trivial and seismic, and that I could not have foreseen.

A bitterly cold midwinter month of dragging myself through the rounds of my days had passed since Sharon took off and I was walking into the laundry room of my building’s basement when I felt a hard crunch under my foot. Looking down I saw that I’d stepped on a large water bug and that its crushed remains were oozing from under my shoe. In the same instant I also saw a second bug right next to my shoe. Apparently in reaction to the event, it jumped at least six inches straight up and, upon landing, scurried away. I felt no guilt or remorse about what I’d done. But I wasn’t indifferent either. No, what I felt was something like a thrill that made me want to repeat the experience. Compelled to chase after the companion bug, I cornered it behind a trash can where I dug my heel into it and watched it break apart, its lifeless tentacles still gently waving. With this action I felt another thrill akin to the high from a line or two of blow. But this one was joined by a revelation that had the impact of an epiphany. 

I could end my difficulty with nature by becoming one with it!

Before I was back upstairs, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

CONTINUED IN PART 2 https://www.abctales.com/story/robert-levin/killer-part-2