What’s it feel like? To have that pick in you?
“Can you describe to me what it feels like to be chemically castrated, then to see attractive women, or to be around them?”
At this point the soft drinks arrived and Colesceau went into that strange state in which he both observed and participated. He watched himself sitting there, as if he were looking in from the other side of the window. He saw the top of Kaufman’s head, as if he were a bird perched in the fake fern above them. He heard himself chattering away now, laying it on thick for Kaufman, being as humble and misunderstood and innocently wronged as possible.
“... and you can understand the great disappointment of my mother. Without her love and attention, without her support, I truly think I might die.”
He was careful to use the word support because Americans loved to use it so much, as if friends and family were actual structural elements that held them in place, as if they were so physically fat and mentally weak they’d collapse without support.
“We’ve been very close since the murder of my father by fascist state police in 1979.”
“You were actually forced to watch as trained attack dogs mauled your father to death, Moros?”
“No. He was shot by fascist police. The dogs attacked me when I ran to him after.”
I actually enjoyed every second of it, Seth. The man was a drunken pig except when he was asleep. I was the one who made it possible. I listened to his conversations. I made reports by a secret phone in the cooperative leader’s barn. I spoke creatively, as a child would. I added more subversive material when I needed impact. I stole his letters and put them back before he knew they were gone. I put die guns in our barn. When they finally murdered him it meant more coffee for me in the morning and nothing more. Stupid to rush to his side as if I cared. That was to throw my mother off my trail. She knew he had no guns. But what are a few hundred stitches compared to living years on end with that cruel, stupid hog?
“Do you relive that moment still? Do you ever see what they did to him, or what the dogs did to you?”
“Yes. Every morning in the mirror I see what the dogs did to me. What the police did to my father is a thing I can’t remember without tears. For a boy, some horrors never die. The scars on my body are nothing compared to the scars on my heart.”
“Amazing.”
The lawyer was staring at him now like one of Pratt’s or Lydia’s friends, friends who were trying to act like they knew nothing about him. He had seen the same expression on hundreds of TV audience members during the daytime talk shows he sometimes viewed when work was slow at the auto parts store. Of course Lydia was constantly tuned in. It was a look that made him think of hungry cows. Purposeful. Intent. But lacking any means to satisfy themselves except for the passive ingestion of whatever the host or guest would say next. Such insatiable appetites for accounts of calamity, misfortune, ruination, perversion, violence, death.
For them it was just entertainment.
“Is it true, as it states in the protocol here, that your breasts have swollen?”
“I already told you that they did.”
Kaufman pursed his lips and shook his head. He made a note in his book and sighed.
“Well, here comes dinner. After we eat, would you mind talking about your rape convictions? I’ll need to know about them. I’m interested particularly in your state of mind during the acts. Anger, sexual drive, your thoughts and feelings. What was going through your head. Why you chose older women. It might help us toward an overrule at some point. I’m thinking of the Circuit Courts of Appeal.”
Colesceau looked at the lawyer. Then he explained briefly that he needed to be loved and in his confusion he thought he could force his victims to love him. He said, in a confession that surprised him, that his penis felt like an extension of his heart, which was actually quite true.
Seth looked slack-jawed at this.
“But those events are past. My punishment was supposed to end Wednesday, so long as I obeyed the rules. I obeyed every rule. I allowed myself to be poisoned and polluted with unnatural substances. Every week, into my veins, with needles. Now I have crowds outside my door. I have been evicted. I will probably lose my job. A drastic injustice has been done.”
“That’s why I’m here. But my ammunition has to come from you.”
“So, I will talk about these things if you need to know. Even though they shame me.”
“It’s going to help us, Moros. Everything you can tell me is going to help us.”
Nineteen
Less than twenty-four hours later, on Saturday, Colesceau was shocked to see Seth Kaufman again.
But this time Seth was on the TV that Colesceau was idly watching while the crowd chanted outside his apartment home. And this time his name was Grant Major, of County News Bureau.
He was in his studio, telling a fellow TV reporter about his exclusive interview with the castrated rapist Matamoros Colesceau. He looked even prettier than he’d looked in the family-style restaurant. The other reporter, whom Colesceau recognized, said that this seven o’clock “special report” from CNB’s “newest investigative star” would be “bone chilling.”
Next, on CNB.
He saw himself on the screen, leaving the apartment home wrapped in Seth Kaufman’s long coat, leaning forward through the crowd of reporters and neighbors.
Then he was sitting in the restaurant, talking to the man he had genuinely believed was a lawyer from the ACLU.
Colesceau could tell that the camera had been hidden in the tray of dirty dishes.
He understood why the waitresses had been expecting them.
He felt his heart growing hard and cold again, but it beat fast, like a good machine.
He watched himself explain what went through his mind as he tried to rape the two old women — the anger, the confusion, the feelings of helplessness in the world, especially with women his own age.
He listened to his tales of hormone treatment — the swelling breasts and shrinking genitals. On TV it sounded like he was whining, ready to weep.
He sat and watched in helplessness as he explained the death of his father at the hands of the police. He couldn’t understand why Grant had edited out the part where he told how difficult it still was for him, how he still thought about his father, how the scars on his heart were worse than the scars on his body.
He made me look bad, Colesceau thought. And through his rage all he could think about was hurting Grant Major in a terrible way.
A chorus of boos erupted outside. He went to the window and cracked the blinds.
Trudy Powers stood at the forefront of the mob, her hair lifted away from her face by the breeze. Her brow furrowed as she glanced up at the sky. In that moment she looked like a saint in stained glass, Colesceau thought, or one of those Agony of St. Somebody paintings, maybe the one with all the arrows in him.
He let go of the blind string, stepped to his front door and opened it. The voices hit him like a gust of wind. Without the glass between them Colesceau could feel the heft of their presence, and sense that their forward thrust was held in check only by the restraining hand of human law. Without that, they’d hang him Western style, then drag his body through the streets of Irvine behind a Saab convertible.
Then the crowd hushed. He looked at Trudy Powers and the happy, shiny suburbanites and the news people scurrying toward him with all manner of cameras and contraptions. They came to a stop not ten feet away and knelt as if he was shooting at them. It was one of the strangest sensations he’d felt in a life of strange sensations — the world before him and at his feet as he stood firm as the pope and looked them over. He glanced down at the Bloody Mary still fresh in his hand, then back out to the mob.