Underworld
His father’s eyes get that drifty look. Cotter sees a kind of panic building, an intimate guilt that he has brought about by mentioning money, the ancient subject of being broke. His father is in retreat, his eyes treading inward, escaping the place he has just built for them both, the world of responsible things. This is a terrible moment, one of those times when Cotter realizes he has won a struggle he didn’t know was taking place. He has beat his father into surrender, into awful withdrawal.
He says, “And anyway the ticket stub doesn’t say what section you’re sitting unless it’s reserve seat or box seat. So the ticket’s no good for anything. People pick up tickets off the street.”
His father says, “We sleep on it. How’s that?” Grimly getting to his feet. “Nothing we can do tonight so let’s just get some sleep.”
Cotter doesn’t mention the letter his father is supposed to write, the excuse for missing school. Maybe in the morning it will be all right. And maybe he’ll change his mind about selling the baseball. Or forget the whole thing. Cotter knows if he can delay any action on the matter for a day, a day and a half, his father will completely forget. This is one of the things they count on in this house, unspokenly—they sit around and wait for him to forget.
He stands by the window and looks down at the street. In school they tell him sometimes to stop looking out the window. This teacher or that teacher. The answer is not out there, they tell him. And he always wants to say that’s exactly where the answer is. Some people look out the window, others eat their books.
He gets undressed and goes to bed. He sleeps in his shorts and polo shirt. His mother comes in and says good night. Good night’s fine as long as she doesn’t want to know what he and his father talked about. That’s another trap that opens out of nowhere. She tells him she has to get up extra early to go to work, which is a long trip by subway down to 21st Street, she’s a seamstress in a noisy loft with tall fans going—he worked there four hours a week last summer sweeping fabric off the floor and rolling those cardboard barrels in and out and they joked and teased him, forty or fifty women, and said some very direct things.
“Rosie will get you up.”
“I don’t need any help,” he says.
“If anybody in this world needs help getting up, you’re the one.”
“She throws things at me.”
“Catch them and throw them back.”
“Then I’ll never get dressed. Because she throws my clothes.”
His mother leans into the bunk and kisses him, which she hasn’t done in a long time, and then she rubs his head roughly, sort of knuckle-rubbing, and squeezes his cheeks so it hurts, twisting sizable sums of flesh, and he hears his father pass by on his way to the kitchen and hopes he missed the damn kiss.
In the dark he thinks about the game. The game comes rolling over him in a great warm wave of contented sleep. The game was lost and then they won. The game could not be won but then they won it and it’s won forever. This is the thing they can never take away. It is the first thing he will think of in the morning and one part of him is already there even as he falls asleep, waking up to think about the game.
Manx Martin stands at the refrigerator. He’s looking in at the meat loaf. She saved him some meat loaf that’s sitting in a plate like the last meal of Prisoner X. He takes it out and sits at the table, eating slowly. His mind is in the throes of this and that. He sees the food in the plate and has to remind himself what it’s there for.
He puts the plate in the sink when he’s finished and then decides to wash it and dry it and he does this fastidiously, plus utensils. He knows he ought to fix the drip in the faucet but we can save that for a day when there’s a little free time. He puts the plate in the cabinet, whisper soft.
Ivie comes in and does not look at him. She has a way of not looking at him that ought to be studied by science. That’s how good she is at doing it, sweeping the room with her look but missing him completely—a thing science ought to investigate for military use.
She says, “You were talking to him.”
“Whose business is it?”
She says, “What for?”
“I don’t need any what for.”
She says, “Talking an awful long time.”
“He’s my son. Whose business is it?”
“Leave him alone. My business,” she says. “That’s what he wants. Left alone to grow up without advice from you. Only he won’t say it himself.”
“Let him tell me.”
She says, “I’m telling you.”
She’s moving through the kitchen doing things.
She says, “I’m leaving early in the morning. They have a rush order, which they’re paying time and a half.”
He hears the radio playing faintly in their bedroom.
“So I’m giving you fair warning. That alarm’s going off well before six.”
“Before six,” he says, and checks his watch, which doesn’t work, and what’s the difference anyway, and he says the words in a voice unconnected to the facts.
She’s in her housecoat and house slippers moving through the kitchen like a sleepwalker and a sleeptalker, not giving him the barest glance. But she’s connected to the facts all right. And he is not. He is drifting out of range of the whole damn thing, the morning chill, the working wife, the harsh alarm that’s getting ready, even as he stands here, to populate his meager sleep.
She finds the pills she’s looking for and goes back down the hall. He stands and waits. He turns off the overhead light and stands in the dim glow of the lamp in the corner.
He stands there for fifteen minutes. A lifetime of thinking into a thing, trying to straighten out the mental involvements.
Okay. He goes and stands in the doorway of Cotter’s room. He is looking into the room, getting accustomed to the dark. The boy is sleeping dead away. Manx steps into the room and sees the baseball almost at once. It is sitting in the open on the unused bed. This is what gets him every time. They obtain a valuable thing and don’t even bother to hide it. Trust fairies to watch over their valuables. He told them how many times? Protect what’s yours. Because the way things are changing, you have to live defensive.
He tries to recall which son slept in which bed when Cotter was a little kid in the top bunk. They came and went so damn fast.
He stands in the dark room. He is arguing out the thought should he do it or not. Then he does it. He takes the baseball. He does it before the argument ends. He does it to end the argument. He takes the ball and walks quietly through the kitchen to the door. The ball fits nice and easy in the roomy pocket of his windbreaker, his oldest son’s windbreaker. He opens the door, squinching his face to draw off the noise. Need to oil the hinges when our mind’s all clear and we have a little free time at our disposal. He eases the door shut and goes down the stairs and out onto the stoop, wondering how it happened that they’re not wearing his hand-me-down jacket—he’s wearing theirs.
He looks both ways because he always looks both ways. Then he walks down the steps and into the street.
PART 2
ELEGY FOR LEFT HAND ALONE
MID-1980S—EARLY 1990S
1
* * *
It shows a man driving a car. It is the simplest sort of family video. You see a man at the wheel of a medium Dodge.
It is just a kid aiming her camera through the rear window of the family car at the windshield of the car behind her.
You know about families and their video cameras. You know how kids get involved, how the camera shows them that every subject is potentially charged, a million things they never see with the unaided eye. They investigate the meaning of inert objects and dumb pets and they poke at family privacy. They learn to see things twice.
It is the kid’s own privacy that is being protected here. She is twelve years old and her name is being withheld even though she is neither the victim nor the perpetrator of the crime but only the means of recording it.
It shows a man in a
sport shirt at the wheel of his car. There is nothing else to see. The car approaches briefly, then falls back.
You know how children with cameras learn to work the exposed moments that define the family cluster. They break every trust, spy out the undefended space, catching mom coming out of the bathroom in her cumbrous robe and turbaned towel, looking bloodless and plucked. It is not a joke. They will shoot you sitting on the pot if they can manage a suitable vantage.
The tape has the jostled sort of noneventness that marks the family product. Of course the man in this case is not a member of the family but a stranger in a car, a random figure, someone who has happened along in the slow lane.
It shows a man in his forties wearing a pale shirt open at the throat, the image washed by reflections and sunglint, with many jostled moments.
It is not just another video homicide. It is a homicide recorded by a child who thought she was doing something simple and maybe halfway clever, shooting some tape of a man in a car.
He sees the girl and waves briefly, wagging a hand without taking it off the wheel—an underplayed reaction that makes you like him.
It is unrelenting footage that rolls on and on. It has an aimless determination, a persistence that lives outside the subject matter. You are looking into the mind of home video. It is innocent, it is aimless, it is determined, it is real.
He is bald up the middle of his head, a nice guy in his forties whose whole life seems open to the hand-held camera.
But there is also an element of suspense. You keep on looking not because you know something is going to happen—of course you do know something is going to happen and you do look for that reason but you might also keep on looking if you came across this footage for the first time without knowing the outcome. There is a crude power operating here. You keep on looking because things combine to hold you fast—a sense of the random, the amateurish, the accidental, the impending. You don’t think of the tape as boring or interesting. It is crude, it is blunt, it is relentless. It is the jostled part of your mind, the film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you’re thinking.
The world is lurking in the camera, already framed, waiting for the boy or girl who will come along and take up the device, learn the instrument, shooting old granddad at breakfast, all stroked out so his nostrils gape, the cereal spoon baby-gripped in his pale fist.
It shows a man alone in a medium Dodge. It seems to go on forever.
There’s something about the nature of the tape, the grain of the image, the sputtering black-and-white tones, the starkness—you think this is more real, truer-to-life than anything around you. The things around you have a rehearsed and layered and cosmetic look. The tape is superreal, or maybe underreal is the way you want to put it. It is what lies at the scraped bottom of all the layers you have added. And this is another reason why you keep on looking. The tape has a searing realness.
It shows him giving an abbreviated wave, stiff-palmed, like a signal flag at a siding.
You know how families make up games. This is just another game in which the child invents the rules as she goes along. She likes the idea of videotaping a man in his car. She has probably never done it before and she sees no reason to vary the format or terminate early or pan to another car. This is her game and she is learning it and playing it at the same time. She feels halfway clever and inventive and maybe slightly intrusive as well, a little bit of brazenness that spices any game.
And you keep on looking. You look because this is the nature of the footage, to make a channeled path through time, to give things a shape and a destiny.
Of course if she had panned to another car, the right car at the precise time, she would have caught the gunman as he fired.
The chance quality of the encounter. The victim, the killer and the child with a camera. Random energies that approach a common point. There’s something here that speaks to you directly, saying terrible things about forces beyond your control, lines of intersection that cut through history and logic and every reasonable layer of human expectation.
She wandered into it. The girl got lost and wandered clear-eyed into horror. This is a children’s story about straying too far from home. But it isn’t the family car that serves as the instrument of the child’s curiosity, her inclination to explore. It is the camera that puts her in the tale.
You know about holidays and family celebrations and how somebody shows up with a camcorder and the relatives stand around and barely react because they’re numbingly accustomed to the process of being taped and decked and shown on the VCR with the coffee and cake.
He is hit soon after. If you’ve seen the tape many times you know from the hand wave exactly when he will be hit. It is something, naturally, that you wait for. You say to your wife, if you’re at home and she is there, Now here is where he gets it. You say, Janet, hurry up, this is where it happens.
Now here is where he gets it. You see him jolted, sort of wire-shocked—then he seizes up and falls toward the door or maybe leans or slides into the door is the proper way to put it. It is awful and unremarkable at the same time. The car stays in the slow lane. It approaches briefly, then falls back.
You don’t usually call your wife over to the TV set. She has her programs, you have yours. But there’s a certain urgency here. You want her to see how it looks. The tape has been running forever and now the thing is finally going to happen and you want her to be here when he’s shot.
Here it comes all right. He is shot, head-shot, and the camera reacts, the child reacts—there is a jolting movement but she keeps on taping, there is a sympathetic response, a nerve response, her heart is beating faster but she keeps the camera trained on the subject as he slides into the door and even as you see him die you’re thinking of the girl. At some level the girl has to be present here, watching what you’re watching, unprepared—the girl is seeing this cold and you have to marvel at the fact that she keeps the tape rolling.
It shows something awful and unaccompanied. You want your wife to see it because it is real this time, not fancy movie violence—the realness beneath the layers of cosmetic perception. Hurry up, Janet, here it comes. He dies so fast. There is no accompaniment of any kind. It is very stripped. You want to tell her it is realer than real but then she will ask what that means.
The way the camera reacts to the gunshot—a startle reaction that brings pity and terror into the frame, the girl’s own shock, the girl’s identification with the victim.
You don’t see the blood, which is probably trickling behind his ear and down the back of his neck. The way his head is twisted away from the door, the twist of the head gives you only a partial profile and it’s the wrong side, it’s not the side where he was hit.
And maybe you’re being a little aggressive here, practically forcing your wife to watch. Why? What are you telling her? Are you making a little statement? Like I’m going to ruin your day out of ordinary spite. Or a big statement? Like this is the risk of existing. Either way you’re rubbing her face in this tape and you don’t know why.
It shows the car drifting toward the guardrail and then there’s a jostling sense of two other lanes and part of another car, a split-second blur, and the tape ends here, either because the girl stopped shooting or because some central authority, the police or the district attorney or the TV station, decided there was nothing else you had to see.
This is either the tenth or eleventh homicide committed by the Texas Highway Killer. The number is uncertain because the police believe that one of the shootings may have been a copycat crime.
And there is something about videotape, isn’t there, and this particular kind of serial crime? This is a crime designed for random taping and immediate playing. You sit there and wonder if this kind of crime became more possible when the means of taping an event and playing it immediately, without a neutral interval, a balancing space and time, became widely available. Taping-and-playing intensifies and compresses the event. It dangles a need
to do it again. You sit there thinking that the serial murder has found its medium, or vice versa—an act of shadow technology, of compressed time and repeated images, stark and glary and unremarkable.
It shows very little in the end. It is a famous murder because it is on tape and because the murderer has done it many times and because the crime was recorded by a child. So the child is involved, the Video Kid as she is sometimes called because they have to call her something. The tape is famous and so is she. She is famous in the modern manner of people whose names are strategically withheld. They are famous without names or faces, spirits living apart from their bodies, the victims and witnesses, the underage criminals, out there somewhere at the edges of perception.
Seeing someone at the moment he dies, dying unexpectedly. This is reason alone to stay fixed to the screen. It is instructional, watching a man shot dead as he drives along on a sunny day. It demonstrates an elemental truth, that every breath you take has two possible endings. And that’s another thing. There’s a joke locked away here, a note of cruel slapstick that you are willing to appreciate even if it makes you feel a little guilty. Maybe the victim’s a chump, a sort of silent-movie dupe, classically unlucky. He had it coming in a sense, for letting himself be caught on camera. Because once the tape starts rolling it can only end one way. This is what the context requires.
You don’t want Janet to give you any crap about it’s on all the time, they show it a thousand times a day. They show it because it exists, because they have to show it, because this is why they’re out there, to provide our entertainment.
The more you watch the tape, the deader and colder and more relentless it becomes. The tape sucks the air right out of your chest but you watch it every time.
2
* * *
Marian Shay drove up to Prescott on business, allowing herself one cigarette for the two-hour trip, which she managed not to smoke until she was ten miles from town, where the mobile homes began to gather and the fast food blazed, and she felt good about this, controlled and disciplined and clean deep through.