Haunted

  Something dashed past, other people said, something low to the ground, too fast to be an animal. Or it was a maniac run amok with a fifty-pound sledgehammer. One witness, she said we were being “smote” by God from the Old Testament. Swatted by something with a huge paw. Black as the black night. Silent and invisible. Everyone saw something different.

  “What matters,” Sister Vigilante says, “is, people need a monster they can believe in.”

  A true and horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it's just us versus us.

  Working the tip of the knife blade under another nail, she says, What's important is, the crime rate went down.

  In times like that, every man is a suspect. Every woman, a potential victim.

  Public attention went this same way during the White Chapel Murders. During Jack the Ripper. For that hundred days, the murder rate dropped 94 percent, to just five prostitutes. Their throats slashed. A kidney half eaten. Guts hung around the room on picture hooks. The sex organs and a fetus taken for a souvenir. Burglaries dropped by 85 percent. Assault by 70 percent.

  Sister Vigilante, she says how nobody wanted to be the next victim of the Ripper. People locked their windows. More important, nobody wanted to be accused of being the killer. People didn't walk out at night.

  During the Atlanta Child Murders, while thirty kids were strangled, tied to trees, and stabbed, beaten, and shot, most of the city lived in security and safety they'd never known.

  During the Cleveland Torso Murders. The Boston Strangler. The Chicago Ripper. The Tulsa Bludgeoner. The Los Angeles Slasher . . .

  During these waves of murder, all crime dropped in each city. Except for the showoffy handful of victims, their arms hacked away and their heads found elsewhere, except for these spectacular sacrifices, each city enjoyed the safest period in its history.

  During the New Orleans Ax Man Murders, the killer wrote the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune. On the night of March 19, the killer promised to kill no one in a house where he could hear jazz music. That night, New Orleans was roaring with music, and no one was killed.

  “In a city with a limited police budget,” Sister Vigilante says, “a high-profile serial killer is an effective means of behavior modification.”

  With the shadow of this horrible bogeyman, with it stalking the streets downtown, nobody beefed about the unemployment rate. The water shortage. The traffic.

  With the angel of death going door to door, people stayed together. They quit bitching and behaved.

  At this point in Sister Vigilante's story, Director Denial walks by, calling and sobbing for Cora Reynolds.

  It's one thing, the Sister says, a person getting killed, somebody with a crushed ribcage trying to catch another breath before they die, they heave and moan, their lips stretched wide, mouthing the air. Somebody with a crushed-in ribcage, she says, you can kneel next to them in the dark street with nobody around to watch. You can see their eyes glaze over. But killing an animal, well, that's different. Animals, she says, a dog, it makes us human. Proof of our humanity. Other people, they just make us redundant. A dog or cat, a bird or a lizard, it makes us God.

  All day long, she says, our biggest enemy is other people. It's people packed around us in traffic. People ahead of us in line at the supermarket. It's the supermarket checkers who hate us for keeping them so busy. No, people didn't want this killer to be another human being. But they wanted people to die.

  In ancient Rome, Sister Vigilante says, at the Colosseum, the “editor” was the man who organized the bloody games at the heart of keeping people peaceful and united. That's where the word “editor” really comes from. Today, our editor plans the menu of murder, rape, arson, and assault on the front page of the day's newspaper.

  Of course, there was a hero. By accident, August 2, sunset at 8:34, a twenty-seven-year-old named Maria Alvarez was leaving a hotel where she worked as the night auditor. She stood on the curb, stopped to light a cigarette when a man pulled her back. That same instant, the monster rushed past. This man had saved her life. The city applauded on television, but in their hearts, they hated him.

  A hero, this messiah, they didn't want. The idiot bastard who saved a life that wasn't their own. What people wanted was a sacrifice every few days, something to throw in the volcano. Our regular offering to random fate.

  How it ended is, one night the monster got a dog. A hairy rag of a little dog on the end of a leash, tied to a parking meter on Porter Street, it stood and barked as the pounding came closer. The closer the sound came, the more the dog barked.

  A store window webbed into a puzzle of broken glass. A fire hydrant clanked to one side, cracked cast iron, hissing a white curtain of water. The edge of a windowsill explodes in a spray of gravel and concrete dust. A smacked parking meter, jiggling in place, rattling the coins inside. A steel “No Parking” sign flaps down, torn from its metal post. The metal post still humming from some invisible impact.

  One more stomp and the barking stopped.

  The monster seemed to disappear after that night. A week went by, and the streets were still empty after dark. A month went by, and the editors found some new horror to put on the front page of the newspaper. A war somewhere else. Some new kind of cancer.

  On September 10, sunset was at 8:02. Curtis Hammond was leaving a group-therapy session he attended every week at 257 West Mill Street. He was pulling down the knot of his tie when it happened. He'd just opened his collar button. It was when he'd just turned to look up the street. He smiled at the warm air on his face, shut his eyes, and breathed in through his nose. A month before, everyone in town knew him from the front page of the paper. From the television news. He'd pulled a night auditor away from getting killed by the monster. From getting smote by God.

  He was the hero we didn't want.

  On September 10, civil twilight was at 8:34, and a moment later, Curtis Hammond turned toward a noise. His tie loose, he squinted into the dark. Smiling, his teeth shining, he said, “Hello?”

  14

  We find Comrade Snarky collapsed on the carpet in front of a tapestry sofa in the second-balcony foyer. Her face, blue-white, framed by the pillow of her crusty, gray wigs. The wigs piled and pinned together. None of her moving. Her hands are bones beaded together with tendon inside the flesh of her black velvet gloves. The cords of her thin neck look webbed with skin. Her cheeks and each closed eye look caved in, sunken and hollow.

  She's dead.

  Her eyes, the pupils stay the same pinhole size when the Earl of Slander thumbs her eyelids up. We check her arms for rigor mortis, her skin for stippling and settled blood, but she's still fresh meat.

  Our royalties only have to split fourteen ways now.

  The Earl of Slander thumbs the eyes shut.

  Thirteen ways, if Miss Sneezy keeps coughing. Twelve ways, if the Matchmaker gets the courage to chop off his dick.

  Now Comrade Snarky's a permanent member of the supporting cast. A tragedy the rest of us get to tell. How she was so brave and kind, now that she's dead. Just a prop in our story.

  “If she's dead—she's food,” Miss America says. She stands at the top of the lobby stairs, one hand holding the golden railing. Her other hand holds her belly. “You know she'd eat you,” she says. Clutching the railing, supported by fat cupids painted gold, Miss America says, “She'd want us to.”

  And the Earl of Slander says, “Roll her over, if that makes it easier. So you can't see her face.”

  So we roll her over, and Chef Assassin kneels on the carpet and digs the layers of skirts and petticoats, muslin and crinoline, up around her waist to show yellow cotton panties sagged across her flat, pale ass. He says, “You sure she's dead?”

  Miss America leans down and slips two fingers against the side of Comrade Snarky's webbed neck, inside the high lace collar, pressing the blue-white skin. Chef Assassin watches this, kneeling there, holding his boning knife, one finger-long blade of steel. His free hand holds back the drift of white
and gray lace, yellow muslin, the pile of petticoats and skirts. He looks at the blade and says, “Think we should sterilize this?”

  “You're not taking out her appendix,” Miss America says, her two fingers still tight against the side of the blue-white neck. “If you're worried,” she says, “we can just cook the meat longer . . .”

  In a way, the Donner Party was lucky, says the Earl of Slander, still scribbling in his notepad. So was the plane full of South American rugby players who crash-landed in the Andes in 1972. They were luckier than us. They had the cold weather on their side. Refrigeration. When somebody died, they had time to debate the finer points of acceptable human behavior. You just buried anybody dead in the snow until everyone was so hungry it didn't matter.

  Here, even in the basement, even in the subbasement with Lady Baglady's and Mr. Whittier's and the Duke of Vandals' velvet-wrapped bodies, it's not freezing cold. If we don't eat now, before the bacteria inside Comrade Snarky begin their own chow-down, she'll be wasted. Swollen and putrefied. Poisoned so much no amount of turning around and around in the microwave oven will ever make her into food again.

  No, unless we do this—butcher her, here and now, on these gold-and-flower carpets beside the tapestry sofas and crystal light-sconces of the second-balcony lobby, it will be one of us here, dead, tomorrow. Or the next day. Chef Assassin with his boning knife will be cutting our underwear up the back to show our withered-flat, blue-white butt and little-stick thighs. The back of each knee turned gray.

  One of us, just meat about to go bad.

  On one flat ass cheek, the panty fabric peels back to show a tattoo, a rose in full bloom. Just like she said.

  Those rugby players lost in the Andes, it's from reading their book that Chef Assassin knows to carve up the buttocks first.

  Miss America pulls her two fingers back from the cold neck, and she stands up. She blows on the fingers, warm breath, then rubs her hands together fast and stuffs them in the folds of her skirt. “Snarky's dead,” she says.

  Behind her, Baroness Frostbite turns toward the stairs that lead down to the lobby. Her skirts rustling and dragging, her voice trailing away, she says, “I'll get a plate or a dish you can use.” She says, “How you present food is so important,” and she's gone.

  “Here,” Chef Assassin says, “somebody hold this shit back off me.” And he elbows the pile of skirts and stiff fabric that wants to fall where he has to work.

  The Earl of Slander steps over the body, straddling it at the waist, looking at its feet. The legs disappear inside white socks rolled to halfway up each stringy calf bone wiggling with veins, the feet in red high heels. The Earl of Slander gathers the skirts in both arms and crouches down, holding them back. With a sigh, he sits down, his butt settling on Comrade Snarky's dead shoulder blades, his knees pointed up at the ceiling, his arms lost in the drift of her skirts and lace. The little-mesh microphone sticking out of his shirt pocket. The little RECORD light, glowing red.

  And with one hand, the fingers spread, Chef Assassin holds the skin on one buttock tight. And with his other hand, he drags the knife down. As if he's drawing a straight line down Comrade Snarky's blue-white ass, a line that gets thicker and bolder the longer he draws it. Pulling the knife parallel with the crack of her ass. The line looks black against the blue-white skin, red-black until it drips, red, onto the skirts under her. Red on the blade of the boning knife. The red, steaming. Chef Assassin's hands red and steaming, he says, “Is a dead person supposed to bleed this much?”

  Nobody says anything.

  One, two, three, four, somewhere else, Saint Gut-Free whispers, “Help us!”

  Chef Assassin's elbow is bobbing up and down as he saws, sawing the little blade in and out of the red mess. His original straight line lost in the red stew. The steam rising with the blood smell of Tampax, that women's-bathroom smell in the cold air. His sawing stops, and one hand lifts a scrap of something red. His eyes don't follow it. His eyes stay on the mess, red in the center of this snowdrift of petticoats. This big steaming flower, here on the carpet of the second-balcony foyer. Chef Assassin shakes the red scrap in his raised hand. What he can't look at, dripping and running with dark red. And he says, “Take it. Somebody . . .”

  Nobody's hand reaches out.

  Her rose tattoo, there, in the center of the scrap.

  And, still not looking at it, Chef Assassin shouts, “Take it!”

  A rustle of fairy-tale satin and brocade skirts, and Baroness Frostbite is back among us. She says, “Oh my God . . .”

  A paper plate hovers under the dripping red scrap, and Chef Assassin drops it. On the plate, it's meat. A thin steak. The way a cutlet looks. Or those long scraps of meat labeled “strip steaks” in the butcher's case.

  Chef Assassin's elbow is bobbing again, sawing. His other hand lifts scrap after dripping scrap out of the steaming red center of that huge white flower. The paper plate is piled high and starting to fold in half from the weight. Red juice spilling off one edge. The Baroness goes to get another plate. Chef Assassin fills that, too.

  The Earl of Slander, still sitting on the back of the body, he shifts his weight, pulling his face away from the steaming mess. Not the nothing smell of cold, clean meat from the supermarket. This is the smell of animals half run-over and smearing a path of shit and blood as they drag their shattered back legs off a hot summer highway. Here's the messy smell of a baby the moment after it's born.

  Then the body, Comrade Snarky, lets out a little moan.

  It's the soft groan of someone dreaming in her sleep.

  And Chef Assassin falls backward, both hands dripping. The knife left behind, jutting straight up from the flower's red center—until the dropped skirts flutter, lower, sift down to hide the mess. The Baroness drops the first paper plate, burdened with meat. The flower closing. The Earl of Slander springs to his feet, and he's off her. We, we're all standing back. Staring. Listening.

  Something needs to happen.

  Something needs to happen.

  Then, one, two, three, four, somewhere else, Saint Gut-Free whispers, “Help us!”

  The soft, regular foghorn of his voice.

  From somewhere else, you hear Director Denial calling, “Here . . . kitty, kitty, kitty . . .” Her words stretched long and then broken by sobs, she says, “Come . . . to Mama . . . my baby . . .”

  His hands webbed with gummy red, Chef Assassin flexes his fingers, not touching anything, just staring at the body, he says, “You told me . . .”

  And Miss America crouching forward, her leather boots creak. She slides two fingers into the lace collar and presses the side of the blue-white neck. She says, “Snarky's dead.” She nods at the Earl of Slander and says, “You must've forced some air out of her lungs.” She nods at the meat spilled off the plate, now breaded with dust and lint on the foyer carpet, and Miss America says, “Pick that up . . .”

  The Earl of Slander rewinds his tape, and Comrade Snarky's voice moans and moans the same moan. Our parrot. Comrade Snarky's death taped over the Duke of Vandals' taped over Mr. Whittier's taped over Lady Baglady's death.

  How Comrade Snarky died was probably a heart attack. Mrs. Clark says it's from a shortage of thiamine, what we call vitamin B1. Or it could've been a shortage of potassium in her bloodstream, causing muscle weakness and, again, a heart attack. That was how Karen Carpenter died in 1983, after years of anorexia nervosa. Fainted dead on the floor like this. Mrs. Clark says it was no doubt a heart attack.

  Nobody really dies of starvation, Mrs. Clark says. They die of pneumonia brought on by malnutrition. They die of kidney failure brought on by low potassium. They die of shock caused by bones broken by osteoporosis. They die of seizures caused by lack of salt.

  However she died, Mrs. Clark says, that's how most of us will. Unless we eat.

  At last, our devil commands us. We're so proud of her.

  “Easy as skinning a chicken breast,” Chef Assassin says, and he drops another lump of meat on the dripping pap
er plate. He says, “Christ Almighty, I do love these knives . . .”

  Plan B

  A Poem About Chef Assassin

  “To become a household word,” says Chef Assassin, “all you need is a rifle.”

  This he learned early, watching the news. Reading the paper.

  Chef Assassin standing onstage, he wears those black-and-white-checkered pants

  that only professional cooks get to wear.

  Billowing big, but still stretched tight to cover his ass.

  His hands, his fingers, a patchwork of scabs and scars. Shiny old burns.

  His white shirtsleeves rolled up,

  and all the hair singed off the muscle of his forearms.

  His thick arms and legs that don't bend

  so much as they fold at the knee and elbow.

  Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment flickers:

  where two close-up hands, the fingernails clean and the palms perfect

  as a pair of pink gloves,

  they skin a chicken breast.

  His face, a round screen, lost under a layer of fat, his mouth lost under the pastry brush

  of a little mustache,

  Chef Assassin says, “That's my backup plan.”

  The Chef says, “If my garage band never gets a record contract—”

  if his book never finds a publisher—

  if his screenplay never gets a green light—

  if no network picks up his pilot episode—

  The Chef, his face worms and twitches with those perfect hands:

  skinning and boning,

  pounding and seasoning,

  breading and frying and garnishing,

  until that piece of dead flesh looks too pretty to eat.