How can it not be true? How can memories as vivid as these be made up by my mind without my even realizing it? There is a syndrome, a false memory syndrome, where people remember horrific, ritual abuse even though there was none. But which is worse, to have endured these torments, or to have invented them and believed them and fantasized about them?
Herbert Mullins. I’d been reading about others like me. He believed he was offering human sacrifices to nature to prevent California from falling into the ocean. He believed he did an otherwise heinous act for a divinely justified reason. And when describing the murder of an entire family, he told police that they had asked him to kill them, that they had volunteered to be sacrifices for the good of the world.
I’m no angel, but another Herbert Mullins. How strange, after all this time, to be realizing this only now. How strange, just before punishment is meted out, to become at last convinced of my own crimes and penitent of them, to become suddenly a different creature than the one who had committed the crimes. Donna didn’t say a word as Azra flipped through the photocopies of his life. He didn’t even seem to know she was there, even though she sat beside him and held his hand and hoped against hope that he would remember who he was. He did. He remembered. She could see it in his eyes. Where once there was only delusion, now there was a pit of grief.
Donna began to cry. What a cold comfort, to remember a life worth forgetting.
DEFENSE MAKES MAN OF MONSTER
AP International
Photo and Story by Blake Gaines
“I am human today, for the first time,” claimed alleged serial killer John Doe, a.k.a., William Bruce Dance, a.k.a., Son of Samael.
The comment followed Wednesday’s trial session. Doe’s claim was supported by testimony Friday from surprise witness Peter James Dance, purported to be Doe’s brother. Dance indicated that his brother’s homosexuality made their stepfather try to kill Doe. According to Dance, their stepfather was a Klansman. Dance said their real mother had died in giving birth to Doe, whom he called Billy. Public Defender Lynda Barnett emphasized the suffering the alleged killer endured in his early years. Barnett summed the last two weeks’ testimony, “[Doe has] serious reality issues. He has been wronged and abandoned habitually from his earliest days.”
The public defender went on to say, “[Doe is] an American patriot, returning wounded from the Gulf War fifteen years late.”
EIGHTEEN
It was the first day in over two months that Donna had been home by five o’clock, what with prison visits, NCIC searches, and meetings with the VFW and mental health advocacy groups. Even today, she came home only due to the undeniable call of nature – her septic holding tank had been full for three weeks, and it had finally backed up. Instead of crouching at her computer and impatiently coaxing piece after piece of William Dance from scattered, incomplete and damaged documents, Donna had spent the evening on hands and knees, scrubbing urine water from her bathroom floor. She called for the pump truck and said it was an emergency and said she’d pay for it. Just after that was done, she thought to call the power company and leave a message assuring them a check would be posted tomorrow. At one time, she would have panicked over a single late notice. Now, after three, she recognized the lapse only dully.
She was hungry. The refrigerator was bare except for a moldy loaf of bread, the desiccated remains of a quarter pounder and fries, a flat bottle of Diet Rite, ketchup, a bag of withered apples, and a jar of three year-old pickles. The cabinet was not much more promising -
Jiffy mix, stale cereal, five boxes of Jell-O, a can of beets, a bag of dried lentils, a bag of popcorn. Donna drew out the popcorn bag, unfolded it, and lay it on the dusty carousel of the microwave. She hit the “Popcorn” button. The disused machine lit up. Its fan began to blow, and the bag rotated hypnotically. Donna leaned against the counter and stared for a while at the wall behind the stove, noted the grease-and-dust choked spider webs that clung to the hood vent. The smell of hot oil and corn swept over her. She breathed placidly. It felt as though she hadn’t breathed in months.
How long has it been since I had a life of my own?
How long since I could sit in that love seat and watch a movie?
As the first kernels exploded, little suicide bombers that shook the whole bag, Donna turned away and wandered toward the front door. Three plastic bags slumped there, one filled with hate-mail sent to her at the station house, another with notebooks from the psych sessions, and a third with -
“Ah ha!” she said, triumphantly lifting the DVD case from the bag. Its black-and-white case showed a dark garden where a boy and girl lingered beside an imploring statue of an angel. Their hands probed together at the base of the statue, where lay the inscription “Eternity.” The title at the top of the tape read, “Tennessee Williams – Summer and Smoke.” She had ordered the DVD before Azra’s arrest, but Amazon had had to search high and low for a used copy. It arrived a week ago, but there had been no time to watch it – until tonight. Inside the microwave, the popcorn bag was shuddering and convulsing like an epileptic guinea pig. The fit slackened into a few hiccups, and the bag lay still and smoking.
“Damn it,” Donna said, racing from the front door to jab the “Open” button. The door popped wide and the acrid smell of burnt popcorn billowed out over her. The smoke detector went off. “Mother of God!” She tore down the detector and wrenched loose its battery. It seemed her life was all alarms and last-minute saves. Outside, the pump truck growled and wheezed, a fat hose sucking up her septic.
A few minutes later, all was placid again. Donna sat before the TV, half a bag of chips before her, Summer and Smoke beginning on the screen, and sad thoughts of Azra haunting the seat beside her.
She dozed. In her dreams, he was there. It all was as it had been before.
The DVD was almost over when she awoke. A young doctor and a young woman were in the doctor’s office, he calm and professional, she trembling and distraught. She was pleading with him, drawing nearer, reaching toward him as the girl on the DVD case had reached toward the angel. She told him that the girl who once rejected him was gone, dead – asphyxiated by the fire burning within her. She said that she had given up her pride, that pride only prevented people from having what they needed.
The doctor gently pulled her hands away, and the woman seemed crushed. He explained that she had won the argument between them. He pointed to a diagram of vivisected human anatomy and said that the insides of humans weren’t rose leaves but ugly organs, packed so tightly there wasn’t room for anything spiritual. “But I’ve come around to your way of thinking, that something else is in there, an immaterial something – as thin as smoke – which all of those ugly machines combine to produce and that’s their whole reason for being.”