Chapter 22
We’re driving through the Midwest with the radio on some AM station, and a man’s voice says how Dr. Sara Lowenstein was a beacon of hope and morality in the wasteland of modern life. Dr. Sara was a noble, hard-line moralist who refused to accept anything but steadfast righteous conduct. She was a bastion of upright standards, a lamp that shone its light to reveal the evil of this world. Dr. Sara, the man says, will always be in our hearts and souls because her own soul was so strong and so un——
The voice stops.
And Mona hits the back of the front seat, hits right behind my kidneys, and says, “Not again.” She says, “Quit venting your personal issues on innocent people.”
And I say for her to stop accusing. Maybe it’s just sunspots.
These talk-oholics. These listen-ophobics.
The culling song’s spun through my head so fast I didn’t even notice. I was half asleep. It’s that far out of control. I can kill in my sleep.
After a few miles of silence, what radio journalists call dead air, another man’s voice comes on the radio, saying how Dr. Sara Lowenstein was the moral yardstick against which millions of radio listeners measured their own lives. She was the flaming sword of God, sent down to route the misdeeds and evildoers from the temple of——
And this new man’s voice cuts off.
Mona hits the back of my seat, hard, saying, “That’s not funny. Those radio preachers are real people!”
And I say, I didn’t do anything.
And Helen and Oyster giggle.
Mona crosses her arms over her chest and throws herself back against the rear seat. She says, “You have no respect. None. This is a million years of power you’re screwing around with.”
Mona puts both hands against Oyster and shoves him away, hard, so he hits the door. She says, “You, too.” She says, “A radio personality is just as important as a cow or a pig.”
Now dance music comes on the radio. Helen’s cell phone starts to ring, and she flips it open and presses it into her hair. She nods at the radio and mouths the words Turn it down.
Into the phone, she says, “Yes.” She says, “Uh-huh, yes, I know who he is. Tell me where he’s at right now, as close as you can pinpoint it.”
I turn down the radio.
Helen listens and says, “No.” She says, “I want a seventy-five-carat fancy-cut blue-white diamond. Call Mr. Drescher in Geneva, he knows the exact one I want.”
Mona pulls her knapsack up from the floor of the backseat, and she takes out a pack of colored felt-tip pens and a thick book, bound in dark green brocade. She opens the book across her lap and starts scribbling in it with a blue pen. She caps the blue pen and starts with a yellow one.
And Helen says, “How much security doesn’t matter. It’ll be done inside the hour.” She flips the phone shut and drops it on the seat beside her.
On the front seat, between us, is her daily planner, and she flips it open and writes a name and today’s date inside.
The book in Mona’s lap is her Mirror Book. All real witches, she says, keep Mirror Books. It’s a kind of diary and cookbook where you collect what you learn about magic and rituals.
“For instance,” she says, reading from her Mirror Book, “Democritus says that burning the head of a chameleon on an oak fire will cause a thunderstorm.”
She leans forward and says right into my ear, “You know, Democritus,” she says, “like in the inventor of democracy.”
And I’m counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 . . .
To shut someone up, Mona says, to make them stop talking, take a fish and sew its mouth shut.
To cure an earache, Mona says, you need to use the semen of a boar as it drips from a sow’s vagina.
According to the Jewish Sepher ha-Razim collection of spells, you have to kill a black puppy before it sees the light of day. Then write your curse on a tablet and put the tablet inside the dog’s head. Then seal the mouth with wax and hide the head behind someone’s house, and that person will never fall asleep.
“According to Theophrastus,” Mona reads, “you should only dig up a peony at night because if a woodpecker sees you doing it, you’ll go blind. If the woodpecker sees you cutting the plant’s roots, your anus will prolapse.”
And Helen says, “I wish I had a fish . . .”
According to Mona, you shouldn’t kill people, because that drives you away from humanity. In order to justify killing, you have to make the victim your enemy. To justify any crime, you have to make the victim your enemy.
After long enough, everyone in the world will be your enemy.
With every crime, Mona says, you’re more and more alienated from the world. More and more, you imagine the whole world is against you.
“Dr. Sara Lowenstein didn’t start out by attacking and berating everybody who called her radio show,” Mona says. “She used to have a little time slot and a little audience, and she seemed to really care about helping people.”
And maybe it was after years and years of getting the same calls about unwanted pregnancies, about divorces, about family squabbles. Maybe it was because her audience grew and her show moved to prime time. Maybe it was the more money she earned. Maybe power corrupts, but she wasn’t always a bitch.
The only way out, Mona says, will be to surrender and let the world kill Helen and me for our crimes. Or we can kill ourselves.
I ask if this is more Wiccan nonsense.
And Mona says, “No, actually, it’s Karl Marx.”
She says, “After killing someone, those are the only ways back to connect with humanity.” Still drawing in her book, she says, “That’s the only way you can get back to a place where the world isn’t your nemesis. Where you’re not totally alone.”
“A fish,” Helen says, “and a needle and thread.”
And I’m not alone.
I have Helen.
Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It’s nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies. It’s no wonder Waltraud Wagner, the Austrian Angel of Death, convinced her friends to kill with her.
It just seems natural.
You and me against the world . . .
Gary Lewingdon had his brother, Thaddeus. Kenneth Bianchi had Angelo Buono. Larry Bittaker had Roy Norris. Doug Clark had Carol Bundy. David Gore had Fred Waterfield. Gwen Graham had Cathy Wood. Doug Gretzler had Bill Steelman. Joe Kallinger had his son, Mike. Pat Kearney had Dave Hill. Andy Kokoraleis had his brother, Tom. Leo Lake had Charles Ng. Henry Lucas had Ottis Toole. Albert Anselmi had John Scalise. Allen Michael had Cleamon Johnson. Clyde Barrow had Bonnie Parker. Doug Bemore had Keith Cosby. Ian Brady had Myra Hindley Tom Braun had Leo Maine. Ben Brooks had Fred Treesh. John Brown had Sam Coetzee. Bill Burke had Bill Hare. Erskine Burrows had Larry Tacklyn. Jose Bux had Mariano Macu. Bruce Childs had Henry McKenny Alton Coleman had Debbie Brown. Ann French had her son, Bill. Frank Gusenberg had his brother, Peter. Delfina Gonzalez had her sister, Maria. Dr. Teet Haerm had Dr. Tom Allgen. Amelia Sachs had Annie Walters.
Thirteen percent of all reported serial killers worked in teams.
On death row in San Quentin, Randy “the Scorecard Killer” Kraft played bridge with Doug “Sunset Slayer” Clark, Larry “Pliers” Bittaker, and Freeway Killer Bill Bonin. An estimated 126 victims between the four of them.
Helen Hoover Boyle has me.
“I couldn’t stop killing,” Bonin once told a reporter. “It got easier with each one . . .”
I have to agree. It does get to be a bad habit.
On the radio, it says how Dr. Sara Lowenstein was an angel of unparalleled power and impact, a glorious hand of God, a conscience for the world around her, a world of sin and cruel intent, a world of hidd——
The more people die, the more things stay the same.
“Go ahead, prove yourself,” Oyster says, and nods at the radio. He says, “Kill this fucker, too.”
I’m counting 37, counting 38, counting 39 . . .
&n
bsp; We’ve disarmed seven copies of the poems book since leaving home. The original press run was 500. That makes it 306 copies down, 194 copies to go.
In the newspaper, it says how the man in the black leather trench coat, the one who shoved past me at the crosswalk, he was a monthly blood donor. He spent three years overseas with the Peace Corps, digging wells for lepers. He gave up a chunk of his liver to a girl in Botswana who ate a poison mushroom. He answered phones during pledge drives against some crippling disease, I forget what.
Still, he deserved to die. He called me an asshole.
He pushed me!
In the newspaper, it shows the mother and father crying over the coffin of my upstairs neighbor.
Still, his stereo was too damn loud.
In the newspaper, it says a cover girl fashion model named Denni D’Testro was found dead in her downtown loft apartment this morning.
And for whatever reason, I hope Nash didn’t get the call to pick up the body.
Oyster points at the radio and says, “Kill him, Dad, or you’re full of shit.”
Really, this whole world is nothing but assholes.
Helen flips open her cell phone and calls ahead to libraries in Oklahoma and Florida. She finds another copy of the poems book in Orlando.
Mona reads to us how the ancient Greeks made curse tablets they called defixiones.
The Greeks used kolossi, dolls made of bronze or wax or clay, and they stabbed them with nails or twisted and mutilated them, cutting off the head or hands. They put hair from the victim inside the doll or sealed a curse, written on papyrus and rolled, inside the doll.
In the Louvre Museum is an Egyptian figure from the second century A.D. It’s a naked woman, hog-tied, with nails stuck in her eyes, her ears, her mouth, breasts, hands, feet, vagina, and anus. Scribbling in her book with an orange felt-tip pen, Mona says, “Whoever made that doll, they’d probably love you and Helen.”
The curse tablets were thin sheets of lead or copper, sometimes clay. You wrote your curse on them with the nail from a shipwreck, then you rolled the sheet and stuck the nail through it. When writing, you wrote the first line left to right, the next line right to left, the third left to right, and so on. If you could, you folded the curse around some of the victim’s hair or a scrap of their clothing. You threw the curse into a lake or a well or the sea, anything that would convey it to the underworld where demons would read it and fill your order.
Still talking on her phone, Helen puts it against her chest for a moment and says, “That sounds like ordering stuff over the Internet.”
I’m counting 346, counting 347, counting 348 . . .
In the Greco-Roman literary tradition, Mona says, there are night witches and day witches. Day witches are good and nurturing. Night witches are secretive and bent on destroying all civilization.
Mona says, “You two are definitely night witches.”
These people who gave us democracy and architecture, Mona says magic was an everyday part of their lives. Businessmen put curses on each other. Neighbors cursed neighbors. Near the site of the original Olympic Games, archaeologists have found old wells full of curses placed by athletes on other athletes.
Mona says, “I’m not making this stuff up.”
Spells to attract a lover were called agogai in ancient Greek.
Curses to ruin a relationship were called diakopoi.
Helen talks louder into her cell phone, saying, “Blood running down your kitchen walls? Well, of course you shouldn’t have to live with that.”
And into his phone, Oyster says, “I need the retail advertising number for the Miami Telegraph-Observer.”
And the radio interrupts everything with a chorus of French horns. A man’s deep voice comes on with a Teletype clattering in the background.
“The suspected leader of South America’s largest drug cartel has been found dead in his Miami penthouse,” the voice says. “Gustave Brennan, aged thirty-nine, is believed to be the point man for almost three billion dollars in annual cocaine sales. Police do not have a cause of death, but plan to autopsy the body . . .”
And Helen looks at the radio and says, “Are you hearing this? This is ridiculous.” She says, “Listen,” and turns up the radio.
“. . . Brennan,” the voice says, “who lived inside a fortress of armed bodyguards, has also been under constant FBI surveillance . . .”
And to me, Helen says, “Do they even use Teletypes anymore?”
The call she just got—the blue-white diamond—the name she wrote in her daily planner, it was Gustave Brennan.
Chapter 23
Centuries ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they’d leave a pair of goats. Either way on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. These islands, they were pristine. These were home to breeds of birds with no natural predators. Breeds of birds that lived nowhere else on earth. The plants there, without enemies they evolved without thorns or poisons. Without predators and enemies, these islands, they were paradise.
The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs.
Oyster is telling this story.
The sailors called this “seeding meat.”
Oyster says, “Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol’ Adam and Eve story?”
Looking out the car window, he says, “You ever wonder when God’s coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?”
Outside is some Great Lake, water stretched to the horizon, nothing but zebra mussels and lamprey eels, Oyster says. The air stinks with rotting fish.
Mona has a pillow of barley and lavender pressed over her face with both hands. The red henna designs on the back of her hands spread down the length of each finger. Red snakes and vines twisted together.
His cell phone rings, and Oyster pulls out the antenna. He puts it to his head and says, “Deemer, Davis and Hope, Attorneys-at-Law.”
He twists a finger in his nose, then takes it out and looks at the finger. Into his phone, Oyster says, “How long after eating there did the diarrhea manifest itself?” He sees me looking and flicks the finger at me.
Helen, with her own cell phone, says, “The people who lived there before were very happy. It’s a beautiful house.”
In the local newspaper, the Erie Register-Sentinel, an ad in the Entertainment section says:
Attention Patrons of the Country House Golf Club
The ad says: “Have you contracted a medication-resistant staph infection from the swimming pool or locker room facilities? If so, please call the following number to be part of a class-action lawsuit.”
You know the number is Oyster’s cell phone.
In the 1870s, Oyster says, a man named Spencer Baird decided to play God. He decided the cheapest form of protein for Americans was the European carp. For twenty years, he shipped baby carp to every part of the country. He convinced a hundred different railroads to carry his baby carp and release them in every body of water their trains passed. He even outfitted special railroad tanker cars that carried nine-ton shipments of baby carp to every watershed in North America.
Helen’s phone rings and she flips it open. Her daily planner open on the seat next to her, she says, “And where exactly is His Royal Highness at this time?” and she writes a name under today’s date in the book. Into her phone, Helen says, “Ask Mr. Drescher to get me the pair of citron and emerald clips.”
In another newspaper, the Cleveland Herald-Monitor, in the Lifestyles section is an ad that says:
Attention Patrons of the Apparel-Design Chain of Clothing Stores
The ad says: “If you’ve contracted genital herpes while trying on clothing, please call the following number to be part of a class-action lawsuit.”
And, again, the same number. Oyster’s number.
In 1890, Oyster says, another man decided to play God. Eugene Schieffelin released sixty Sturnus vulgaris, the European starling, in New Yo
rk’s Central Park. Fifty years later, the birds had spread to San Francisco. Today, there are more than 200 million starlings in America. All this because Schieffelin wanted the New World to include every bird mentioned by Shakespeare.
And into his cell phone, Oyster says, “No, sir, your name will be held in strictest confidence.”
Helen flips her phone shut, and she cups a gloved hand over her nose and mouth, saying, “What is that awful smell?”
And Oyster puts his cell phone against his shirt and says, “Alewife die-off.”
Ever since they reengineered the Welland Canal in 1921 to allow more shipping around Niagara Falls, he says, the sea lamprey has infested all the Great Lakes. These parasites suck the blood of the larger fish, the trout and salmon, killing them. Then the smaller fish are left with no predators and their population explodes. Then they run out of plankton to eat, and starve by the millions.
“Stupid greedy alewives,” Oyster says. “Remind you of any other species?”
He says, “Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.”
Mona’s muffled voice through her pillow, she says, “Don’t tell them. They won’t understand.”
And Helen opens her purse on the seat beside her. She opens it with one hand and takes out a polished cylinder. With the air-conditioning on high, she sprays breath freshener on a handkerchief and holds it over her nose. She sprays breath freshener into the air-conditioning vents, and says, “Is this about the culling poem?”
And without turning around, I say, “You’d use the poem for population control?”
And Oyster laughs and says, “Kind of.”
Mona lowers the pillow to her lap and says, “This is about the grimoire.”
And punching another number into his cell phone, Oyster says, “If we find it, we all have to share it.”
And I say, we’re destroying it.
“After we read it,” Helen says.
And into his phone, Oyster says, “Yes, I’ll hold.” And to us, he says, “This is so typical. We have the entire power structure of Western society in this one car.”