LITMIR.BIZ

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your mother died, then I should be told.’

      Alexandra pushed her hair back. It needed cutting. It had been years since she’d had a manicure. Years since she’d bought herself anything frilly or impractical.

      ‘All right, Dad, fine. I won’t hide things from you anymore. Everything out in the open.’

      

      Most of the time, he didn’t bother with the paper. The only reason he bought a Herald that morning was because he wanted to see if the reporters had discovered the poses yet.

      They hadn’t, the idiots. Or else they were cooperating with the police. You never knew for sure anymore. Nowadays, you couldn’t trust the stuff in the paper and you couldn’t even trust the stuff that wasn’t in it.

      Taking an early lunch, he sat in a booth at Denny’s on Biscayne, with the traffic pouring past, and he read the article slowly and listened to his waitress talking to another waitress about the latest dead woman. His waitress had black dried-out hair and was thick-waisted and tall. She wore her makeup heavy and had bangles on both wrists. The hair on her arm was dark and longer than normal, and he looked at it carefully as she poured him more coffee.

      ‘It’s terrible, isn’t it? That young woman, with everything to live for.’

      ‘What’re you talking about?’

      ‘Right there, that article you’re reading,’ the waitress said.

      He looked up into her eyes and said nothing. He kept his mouth dead, and in a few seconds she gave a confused little shake of her head and took her pot of coffee and her chirpy bullshit off to another customer.

      Rapists and killers in the movies were always flamboyant madmen. They lived in rooms with outlandish insects flying around or with the walls papered with ten thousand creepy newspaper clippings. They were losers who wore polka dots and plaids together and their glasses were thick and greasy. The movie rapists slunk around at night with whores and go-go dancers. But he was none of those things. He was well-informed, well-read, but without intellectual pretensions. He was handsome, but not strikingly so. He could be intense, but he could also laugh. He had good taste in clothes and furnishings, a sense of style that floated between contemporary and classic, and he was bright and had friends, male and female. He made good money. He drove a two-year-old Honda, the most common car on the streets of Miami. He was a good singer, could find the harmony in almost any song he’d ever heard, and he could tell a joke well. He voted in every election and made contributions to environmental causes. He went to church now and then, but he wasn’t a zealot. He was polite to people in grocery stores and movie theaters and he was a good driver. He liked to eat and drink but was no glutton. He enjoyed fast food as well as four-star restaurants. He kept himself in excellent shape with weights and running. He played chess and darts in an Irish bar he went to now and then. People knew his name and liked him and called him up sometimes to cry on his shoulder or ask him over to watch a heavyweight fight or a play-off game on the tube. He could go anywhere and not be noticed. He was comfortable and secure in nearly any environment.

      He didn’t have a creepy bone in his body. Not one.

      He watched the traffic go by on Biscayne Boulevard and sipped his coffee. He hated newspapers and he hated television even more. He hated journalists. Their superior, cynical attitude, assuming the worst of everyone. Like they’d seen it all, crime and grime, and nothing surprised them. Calling him ‘the Bloody Rapist,’ making a joke out of it.

      He shifted around on the bench seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. He was exhausted and his joints ached like he might be coming down with the flu. The bitch probably gave him some germ, all that kissing on the couch, her tongue down his throat like she was starved for something he had inside him and was trying to scoop it out.

      He was drained and vaguely depressed. These things took a lot out of him, more all the time. The recovery could take a full week. That long before he even started thinking about it again, looking for another woman, starting to get the prickling in his blood. He wasn’t a horny guy by nature – ready to go all the time, like some men his age. He’d never been that way. Slow to rouse, actually.

      He hated those television experts with their sound-bite explanations of rape. The so-called authorities claimed rape was about violence, not sex. Saying the act sprang from a man’s need to dominate a woman, or his hatred of her, or some other bullshit. But it wasn’t like that. If it was about hate and violence, then the guy wouldn’t rape the woman; he’d beat the shit out of her, strangle her, and leave her lying on the floor.

      No, it was about sex. Sex, sex, sex. It was about the prickle in his blood, that tingle deep in the axons of his cortex. It was about neurons and dopamine and dendrites, all the thousand itchy creatures in his brain. It was about Pavlov and his dog. It was about chemicals that had been stewing for a million years, ever since one of his ancestors, something white and slippery, wriggled ashore and took cover under a rock. Rape was about crinkly folds of skin and the smell of flesh, and it was about hardness and softness, squirming and biting, prying inside the hot, tight sphincter of female tissue, deep inside her blood.

      He drank the rest of his coffee and raised his cup high in the air without looking for the waitress. And even after his arm began to hurt, he kept it up in the air until she returned with the pot.

      ‘It’s terrible,’ he said, smiling at her, winning her back. ‘That young woman. Gruesome and sad.’

      ‘Yeah,’ said the waitress, pouring him another cup. ‘Myself, I’m getting the heck out of Miami. It’s not worth all you have to put up with just for some good weather. I was telling Doris –’

      ‘You’re a very good waitress,’ he said, turning his head to stare out the window. ‘You’re excellent at what you do.’

      ‘Thank you,’ she said.

      ‘I’m happy and privileged to be served by you.’

      ‘Well, thanks.’

      She stood there a few seconds more, then swiveled on her squeaky tennis shoes and marched away.

      Rape was about wanting a woman you couldn’t have. One woman. An image in your mind that was bright and clear and never wavered or varied. Her face, her body, her voice, the way she swayed and stood. One woman above all others. The craving gnawed at you, a longing, a pang, a slow burn hidden so deep inside your body, there wasn’t a name for the place where it resided.

      Rape was about having to settle for another woman, a lesser version of the one you truly wanted. Rape was about walking up the steps of that woman’s Coconut Grove apartment, a woman smiling in her doorway, her hip cocked, making herself available to you, letting you inside, letting you come into her intimate quarters. It was about walking up those steps, legs weak, the blood leaving them, the twist in the stomach, the heart scudding. Walking up those steps, watching her open the door and stand aside, admitting you to the intimate place that was hers, that dark, small space where she lived, and it was about what happened next, the next hour, those thousand little winks and wiggles and obscene softenings in the voice and flutters of lashes and come-hither gestures and smiles and how she was dressed, her face made up, all of it planned for your benefit, to create the seductive effect, to transmit her sexual willingness. To lure you.

      It was about sex. It was about the need to pour yourself out of yourself. It was about the urge to replicate, duplicate, repeat and repeat and repeat until everything got quiet. Until there was relief. Sweet satiation. Everything was still and empty and perfect. The gong in the heart no longer ringing. The shimmer gone. Everything flat and quiet and serene.

      That’s when he killed them – when the static was silent. He looked down at them and he could see it in their eyes: they hated him because he was stronger and took what he wanted, and that hate was so ferocious that he knew if he didn’t kill them, they would kill him. So he did it to save himself, so he could go on. So he could live.

      Murdering them wasn’t crazy; it wasn’t sick or illogical or sociopathic or any of that psychoanalytical bullshit. It was simple baseline self-preservation. It was one animal

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