The light was burning in my head, and it was all I needed. I reached into my pants and pulled out the gun. I could have anointed any one of them, but the woman was first. I bent to her where she lay on the unyielding concrete of the steps and touched that snub-nose to her ear as tenderly as any man of healing. The noise of it shut down Jesus, shut him down cold. Into the silence, and it was the hardware man next. Then I swung round on Mr. Beard.
It was easy. It was nothing. Just like killing babies.
Captured by the Indians
At the lecture that night they learned that human life was expendable. Melanie had sat there in shocked silence — the silence of guilt, mortification and paranoia (what if someone should see her there in the crowd?) — while Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider, the Stanford bioethicist, had informed them that humans, like pigs, chickens and guppies, were replaceable. In the doctor’s view, the infirm, the mentally impaired, criminals, premature infants and the like were non-persons, whose burden society could no longer be expected to support, especially in light of our breeding success. “We’re hardly an endangered species,” she said with a grim laugh. “Did you know, all of you good and earnest people sitting here tonight, that we’ve just reached the population threshold of six billion?” She was cocked back from the lectern in a combative pose, her penurious little silver-rimmed reading glasses flinging fragments of light out into the audience. “Do any of you really want more condominiums, more shantytowns and favelas, more cars on the freeway, more group homes for the physically handicapped right around the corner from you? On your street? Next door?” She leveled her flashing gaze on them. “Well, do you?”
People shifted in their seats, a muted moist surge of sound that was like the timid lapping of waves on a distant shore. No one responded — this was a polite crowd, a liberal crowd dedicated to free expression, a university crowd, and besides, the question had been posed for effect only. They’d have their chance to draw blood during the Q&A.
Sean sat at attention beside Melanie, his face shining and smug. He was midway through the Ph.D. program in literary theory, and the theoreticians had hardened his heart: Dr. Brinsley-Schneider was merely confirming what he already knew. Melanie took his hand, but it wasn’t a warm hand, a hand expressive of comfort and love — it was more like something dug frozen from the earth. She hadn’t yet told him what she’d learned at two thirty-three that afternoon, special knowledge, a secret as magical and expansive as a loaf of bread rising in a pan. Another sort of doctor had brought her the news, a doctor very different from the pinched and angry-looking middle-aged woman at the podium, a young dark-haired sylph of a woman, almost a girl, with a wide beatific face and congratulatory eyes, dressed all in white like a figure out of a dream.
They walked to the car in silence, the mist off the ocean redrawing the silhouettes of the trees, the streetlights softly glowing. Sean wanted a burger — and maybe a beer — so they stopped off at a local bar and grill the students hadn’t discovered yet and she watched him eat and drink while the television over the bar replayed images of atrocities in the Balkans, the routine bombing of Iraq and the itinerary of the railroad killer. In between commercials for trucks that were apparently capable of scaling cliffs and fording rivers, they showed the killer’s face, a mug shot of a slightly built Latino with an interrupted mustache and two dead eyes buried like artifacts in his head. “You see that?” Sean said, nodding at the screen, the half-eaten burger clenched in one hand, the beer in the other. “That’s what Brinsley-Schneider and these people are talking about. You think this guy worries much about the sanctity of human life?”
Can we afford compassion? Melanie could hear the lecturer’s droning thin voice in the back of her head, and she saw the dour pale muffin of a face frozen in the spotlight when somebody in back shouted Nazi! “I don’t know why we have to go to these lectures, anyway,” she said. “Last year’s series was so much more — do I want to say ‘uplifting’ here? Remember the woman who’d written that book about beekeeping? And the old professor — what was his name? — who talked about Yeats and Maud Gonne?”
“Stevenson Elliot Turner. He’s emeritus in the English Department.”
“Yeah,” she said, “that’s right, and why can’t we have more of that sort of thing? Tonight — I don’t know, she was so depressing. And so wrong.”
“Are you kidding me? Turner’s like the mummy’s ghost — that talk was stupefying. He was probably giving the same lecture in English 101 thirty years ago. At least Brinsley-Schneider’s controversial. At least she keeps you awake.”
Melanie wasn’t listening, and she didn’t want to argue — or debate, or discuss. She wanted to tell Sean — who wasn’t her husband, not yet, because they had to wait till he got his degree — that she was pregnant. But she couldn’t. She already knew what he would say, and it was right on the same page with Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider.
She watched his eyes settle on the screen a moment, then drift down to the burger in his hand. He drew back his lips and took a bite, nostrils open wide, the iron muscles working in his jaw. “We live by the railroad tracks,” Melanie said, by way of shifting the subject. “You think we have anything to worry about?”
“What do you mean?”
“The train killer.”
Sean gave her a look. He was in his debating mode, his put-down mode, and she could see it in his eyes. “He doesn’t kill trains, Mel,” he said, “—he kills people. And yes, everybody has something to worry about, everybody on this planet. And if you were listening to half of what Brinsley-Schneider was saying tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised if every third person out there on the street was a serial killer. There’s too many of us, Mel, let’s face it. You think things are going to get better? You think things are better now than when we were kids? When our parents were kids? It’s over. Face it.”
Something corny and ancient was on the jukebox — Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, somebody like that — because the place smacked of the kind of authenticity people were looking for, the kind of authenticity that cried out from the fallen arches, ravaged faces and sclerotic livers of the regulars, to whom she and Sean — at twenty-nine and thirty respectively — were as inauthentic as newborns.
At home, she changed into a cotton nightgown and got into bed with a book. She wasn’t feeling anything, not elation or pain or disappointment, only the symptoms of a headache coming on. The book was something she’d discovered at a yardsale two days earlier—Captured by the Indians: 15 Firsthand Accounts, 1750–1870— and the minute she opened it she was swept up into a voyeuristic world of pain and savagery that trumped any horror she could conceive of. It wasn’t a good thing to be captured by the Indians, as Sean had snidely observed on seeing her poised behind the cover the night before last, not good at all. There were no notions here of the politically correct, of revisionist history or the ethics of one people forcibly displacing another: no, it was the hot flash of murder and reprisal, the thump of the musket ball hitting home, the operation of knife and tomahawk on unresisting flesh. To die, to be murdered, to be robbed of your life and consciousness and being, that was the stuff of morbid fascination, and she couldn’t get enough of it.
Sean was in his underwear, the briefs he preferred over boxers, the sort of thing she’d always associated with boys — little boys, children, that is — and as she watched him pad across the carpet on his way to the bathroom and his nightly ritual of cleansing, clipping, flossing, brushing, tweezering and shaving, it struck her that she’d never in her life been in an intimate situation with a man — or boy — in boxers. “The last they heard,” Sean was saying, and he paused now to gaze at her over the mound of the bedspread and her tented knees, “he was in the Midwest someplace — after leaving Texas, I mean. That’s a long ways from California, Mel, and besides, his whole thing is so random—”