His defence attorney wanted to bring up details from Edward’s childhood during the trial in order to elicit sympathy or to come up with an excuse for what had happened. Edward didn’t see the relevance. He didn’t see how anyone could bother saying that they had so little power over themselves that they would let nonsense that had happened to them when they were children dominate them now.
He, of course, wanted to take full responsibility for his actions.
Anyway, he had started sermonizing when he was in the group home. He said that these ideas all started coming to him. Whether it was God, or maybe some sort of divine common sense, he couldn’t rightly say. He thought that we were all part of a big family. He did not believe that biological ties were the true basis of what constituted a family. You had to treat everyone you met as if they were your child and you were responsible for them.
The kids who had their television privileges taken away and had nothing to do would listen to him philosophize. He had this captivating way of saying things too. Even if he didn’t have a powerful message, you may have just ended up listening to this guy shoot the breeze.
Jimmy came in one night to the ice cream parlour and never left. Jimmy was just about the clingiest person in the universe, he was impossible to shake. He was the same age as us. He had had a bit part in a made-for-television movie when he was fifteen years old and it had driven him insane. I never met anybody who was as proud of his looks as Jimmy was. He had been raised by a single mom who would leave him alone for weeks while she was off with her boyfriends.
He used to spend all his time picking up girls in bars. In the morning he would tell them that he didn’t want to have anything to do with them. Of course, this would make them cry. It sort of made him feel powerful and successful.
As soon as he met Edward he decided to change his path in life. He wanted to be Edward. He was crazy about how everybody would hang off Edward’s every word. Jimmy also wanted to be able to say things that might change the world and how people think. People were always quoting Edward, so Jimmy wanted people to repeat all the dumb stuff he said too. There wasn’t a chance in hell this was going to happen, though.
He was always looking for approval. If he was going to throw a crumpled up piece of paper into a wastepaper basket, he had to make sure that everybody was looking at him. He liked to talk about how popular he was in high school for like half an hour straight. And he was always mimicking the way Edward spoke. And he started wearing shabby old suits like Edward.
I told Edward that I sometimes thought Jimmy was missing a personality. Edward said that if someone looked at Jimmy, he could see everything he needed to know about himself. Jimmy was different things to different people. If you were a thief, you thought that he was stealing from you. If you were full of grace, then when you looked at Jimmy, you saw a saint.
“I guess that means I’m a dick,” I said, and we both laughed.
At the trial, Jimmy had all sorts of lawyers and experts coming up with a million different reasons to explain away why he did what he did. Jimmy didn’t have any shame whatsoever. He didn’t care what happened to the rest of us. He only wanted to get out of having to go to prison.
Edward said that that was Jimmy’s prerogative. He said that it was in Jimmy’s nature to try every which way to get out of a trap and that we couldn’t do anything but stand back and let him act out his performance. He said that Jimmy was by nature an entertainer, so his trial was going to be more of a circus than anyone else’s. Although Edward did also say that Jimmy was a lot like an insect stuck in a spider’s web.
Jimmy’s court-appointed lawyer tried to say that he had a personality disorder and that he had fallen under Edward’s spell. He said that he believed that Edward was Jesus Christ.
This was sort of funny because once Jimmy said that the only thing that he remembered from Sunday school was Jesus giving everybody chores and giving everybody advice that they had never asked for. So even if it was true that Jimmy thought Edward was Jesus, this didn’t seem to mean very much, seeing as how Jimmy didn’t think very much about Jesus.
A girl named Nikki ended up living with us not long after Jimmy. Nikki went into the same group home as Edward when she was twelve, after her father had been molesting her for seven years. She was three months younger than Edward. She always liked the things that Edward used to lecture about in the common room. When she got out, she came looking for him.
Sometimes that girl was too much for me. Once we were at a restaurant together and she was acting wild. She was wearing these busted up shoes with butterflies made out of sequins at the toe. She kept crossing and uncrossing her legs neurotically.
She took the flower that was in a little vase on the table and stuck it behind her ear. She said that when she was eleven years old, she used to rob gas stations all the time. When she started talking about how bad she was as a kid, you couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
Finally, a perfectly ordinary waitress came up to serve us.
“Will you bring me some ribs, please?” Nikki asked. “And don’t skimp out on the portion because I’m a girl and you think that I can’t finish it. Bring me a portion as if I was a big fat fucking dude with a giant moustache who likes to eat pussy.”
The waitress blushed and walked away.
“Now you’ve gone and made her think that we’re weird and creepy,” I said.
Nikki held up the napkin dispenser and started applying her lipstick while looking at her reflection in it.
“Oh, sweetie. There’s nothing wrong with being weird and creepy whatsoever. Don’t let anybody tell you any different. You were raised in a box, all coddled and shit. I always forget.”
Nikki used to fight with Edward all the time. Once he wouldn’t loan her twenty dollars and she lost it. She went and pushed all the doorbells that were outside the building and screamed, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” into the speaker when people answered.
Once she was jumping up and down on the sidewalk in her knee-high boots, calling Edward every name in the book. “You low-life, skinny-butted self-destructive, drug-addicted asshole.” I can’t even remember why. The police came over to see what was wrong, because from the outside Nikki and Edward seemed like a prostitute and a pimp arguing.
When I complained about Nikki, Edward said that she was another version of himself. He said that he could just as easily have turned out to be Nikki.
Edward said that Nikki went around reminding people that their pasts were going to haunt them, reminding them that they couldn’t only look out for themselves. And that the whole city had to deal with the sound of her crying now because no one had bothered to come when she was in her crib.
There was testimony about Nikki’s murderous tendencies for days and days. The prosecution wanted to prove that Nikki was not under the hypnotic influence of a charismatic leader. She was a ticking time bomb. She was a crazy bitch on the loose. One of these women who is bound to go from one abusive boyfriend to the next until she finally stabs one in the chest.
Why did we stay with Edward? the papers always asked. They always came up with these ugly reasons. They said that we were brainwashed and that we had been programmed by thought control. You will have heard about this theory, no doubt, because any book now that is written about cults has a chapter that mentions Edward. You will find Edward in all sorts of textbooks where he does not belong, sort of like a pressed flower in a car engine manual.