Psycho Killer - Pt. II

(For the first part of "How Our Intrepid Heroine Came To Live With a Self-Proclaimed Serial Killer, see Part I.)

I know what you're thinking. "My parents never would’ve let me move across the country to live with a man I'd just met! Online! Who claimed to have killed people!"

Guess what? My parents wouldn't have, either.

Their path to parenthood was long and hard-won. Your illustrious narrator, their first, arrived only after a decade of marriage, several years of fruitless "trying" and a few miracles of modern medicine. Although my sisters were born in rapid succession, my parents never lost their sense of awe and gratitude. As a result, they were deeply loving but also quite protective.

We watched PBS.

We drank 100% juice.

We didn't bike too far from home.

And we certainly didn't move to Georgia to cohabitate with self-proclaimed psychopaths.

---

Unfortunately for my parents (and their best intentions), I was an astonishingly willful child. From earliest toddlerhood, I ripped through life with white-knuckled determinism. Teenage narcissism intensified this trait; love-bordering-on-religious-fanaticism exploded it. Seventeen Year-Old Jul was not "challenging" or "difficult". Seventeen Year-Old Jul was a Category-5 hurricane: one did not attempt to control it or contain it so much as survive it.

My parents were painfully aware of how any attempts to divert my southbound trajectory would end. Using brute force would be tantamount to hugging an eel. The harder their embrace, the more likely I would be to squirm free, decamp to the nearest Greyhound station and vanish in a cloud of exhaust. Unwilling to risk losing all ties with their child, they were forced to assume the unenviable role of prisoners currying favor with their captor. The overall situation was wretched and unalterable. Via grudging cooperation, they hoped to maintain a small sliver of influence in their daughter’s life.

Of course, they were entirely unaware of David's scary little secret. Had they known, I have no doubt they would've liquidated their assets, hired a squad of deprogrammers and developed a sudden, uncharacteristic faith in an interventionist god.

---

In early January, with my parents' grudging consent, David traveled to Philadelphia to claim his intended bride. I still remember my first glimpse of him as he ascended the stairs at 30th Street Station. He was lithe and blonde, with bright, penetrating eyes… a cherub grown up and grown dark. We locked eyes, lit up, collided in a fervent embrace. I half-expected the entire cavernous structure to disintegrate around our shoulders, shaken apart to marble-dust and cigarette butts.

For years, I couldn't walk past that building without my breath catching and my eyes watering. The next time I form an intense, architecture-linked memory, I'll make damned sure it's with a yurt in Tibet.

We spent the car ride back to my parents' house gently entwining our fingers, staring at one another before grinning and looking away.

We spent that afternoon clumsily rolling around on my futon, marinating in cigarette smoke and sweat. It was here, less than eight hours after we'd met, that the first tiny chink appeared in a previously armor-clad illusion of love.

"Um, baby?” he said, running his fingers over my bare back, "Do you think that next time, you could maybe TRY to keep the same rhythm as me?"

Tears welled up in my eyes. The first seeds of what would become a veritable bumper crop of self-loathing began to sprout in my head. I'd disappointed my soulmate. I was a lousy lay. I wasn't worthy. "Uh... yeah. I'm sorry," I stammered, "I just haven't... y'know... done this a whole lot."

I'd done it so little, in fact, that I was still keeping a mental tally.

It was my ninth time.

If I'd known that the next three months of my life would make that unpleasant little exchange look like "She Walks in Beauty", would I have still gone? You know, I believe I would've. A flotilla of seizure-inducing warning signs wouldn't have altered my course. As is typical of the cocksure, the love-drunk, the inexperienced, I walked in idiocy.

---

Three days, eight hundred miles and a few dozen uppercuts to my self-worth later, we arrived Home: David's parents' finished basement. While I'd been aware that he still lived at home ("keeps the overhead low", he'd explained inscrutably), my first glimpse of the 15'x25' room where my beloved hung his hat was rather disheartening. It was a dim, low-ceilinged cell with Taco Bell wrappers and Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia scattered over every free surface. The cheeriest touch was the scuffed checkerboard linoleum. "This?” I thought, as that first tiny chink began to grow, "THIS is where all the amoral adventures and shadowy plans for world domination take place? This glorified dorm room is where David the Mastermind spends his time?"

It certainly was. It was where I'd be spending 99% of mine, too.

---

Many women's first few weeks of motherhood are characterized by unimaginable exhaustion, slow-motion panic and a profound sense of isolation. There ceases to be any appreciable difference between 1:00 AM and 1:00 PM. The blinds stay perpetually drawn. A sharp delineation appears between Out There and In Here. The latter arena is so all-consuming - life measured in twenty-minute naps, number of diapers wet and dirtied, frantic calls to the pediatrician - that Out There might as well cease to exist.

I've been there. I've sobbed into a passport-sized diaper. I've lost twenty pounds in under a month because my sudden, graduate-level crash-course in Keeping Infant Alive simply didn't allow for meal breaks.

Georgia was worse.

David worked from home (read: did ten minutes' worth of maintenance on his father's website each month). As a result, he was able to set his own schedule. Ever the iconoclast, he chose the Circadian-altering, crazy-making third shift. We rose mid-afternoon and spent all night concocting impassioned plans to conquer the world, the e-commerce sector or the mall frogurt-stand clerk who skimped on toppings. While unskilled in almost every other area, David was phenomenally charismatic, Anton LaVey crossed with Tony Robbins. It was this slick, sinister enthusiasm which held everything together. Of course our midnight machinations were nothing more than a house of cards. Under dim incandescents, though, the illusion was just too dazzling to doubt.

In addition to being nocturnal, my betrothed was also something of an agoraphobic. Well, that's not strictly true. There were the bimonthly cigarette-replenishment trips, occasional forays to Waffle House for coffee and waitress-derision. There was one action-packed trip to Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Georgia which featured extensive firearm practice, Skoal-sampling and my first tattoo (a malformed mass of squiggles, applied by a burly gent who drank a Bud and told homophobic jokes the entire time). The majority of the time, however, David preferred to stay tucked away in our wood-paneled oubliette, orchestrating mayhem... or, as was more often the case, playing "Metal Gear: Solid" for 48 hours in a row.

"When did he find time to systematically slay thirteen Atlanta-area individuals?” I'd briefly ponder before chastising myself for lack of loyalty, "We haven't left this room in four days..."

After a month of subterranean cohabitation, tiny flaws had enlarged to gaping cracks. The mystique had gone musty. Little, needling jabs had escalated to full-on harpoonings, delivered at rapid clip... "Honey, your design is just way too amateurish for my new website." "We both need work before we can pitch this project to the local paper... my project-management skills aren't that great, and you're just not a very good writer." "Yeah, my parents... they don't really, you know, like you that much."

Cruel barb aside, I wouldn't have liked me very much, either. I was a shadowy, puffy-eyed presence, scurrying into the kitchen under cover of darkness to make David sandwiches. Of course I wasn't terribly conversational. The fantasy for which I'd abandoned my family, my schooling and my rationality was crumbling to bits in front of me. Small talk was for those not attempting to hold an entire world together with trembling hands and unevenly-sliced tomatoes. My feeble, oversudsed and undercooked stabs at domesticity made me resemble a smudged-eyeliner version of the Myra Gale character in "Great Balls of Fire!”… young, desperate to please and prone to dissolving in tears and wailing, "I don't know HOW to be a good wife, Jerry Lee!"

In the movie, Jerry Lee comforted his poor, distraught, underage sweetheart. In real life, David snapped, "Well, I guess next time you'll know that barbecue sauce doesn't go too well with cream cheese", while ordering a pizza.

---

Three months in, the facade had more or less disintegrated. "Tell me more about what it's like," I'd whisper in bed, desperately trying to push him back into an intriguing but ill-fitting mold. "Maybe later... tired... too intense," he'd mutter, drifting off. If David really was the ringleader of a nefarious, multi-state crime syndicate, he apparently performed his duties during the twenty minutes a day I was in the shower. If he’d killed anyone, the deed must’ve been done in the BP, the Waffle House or his own driveway, because he certainly didn’t venture anywhere else. The driveway did feature a large, discolored stain. I was pretty sure it was motor oil rather than the blood of an enemy, an inferior, a sheep righteously culled.

In less than ninety days, the contract was irrevocably breached. The bloom was off the rose. The rosebush had been weed-whacked down to a stump. I was unwilling to face the truth and incapable of stomping out, slamming the door and stepping into the daylight. This was my one and only future. I’d sold my morality and my soul for this vacation, and I was damned if it was going to be rained out.

"I am you," I'd whisper to myself during my protracted shower-cries, tracing our initials on steam-fogged glass, "I am you, I am you, I am you."

I'd lie beside him at night, tracing my fingers over his skin, trying to memorize his scent. Tears trickling down my face, sobbing silently so I didn’t wake him.

---

It ended abruptly. Just-like-that. In retrospect, it’s a wonder my sojourn lasted as long as it did. David was constantly in search of the new, the neuron-tickling, the Next Big Thing. He’d exhausted the possibilities of a fragile, fawning live-in acolyte well before April reared its blossom-bedecked head.

It was six AM. We’d stayed up all night, drinking warmish Jack ‘n Dew, alternately pawing one another and retreating to our separate computer chairs, damp and restless, tapping out our mutual dissatisfaction.

“I’m sending you home.” David turned to me, lapis eyes vivid. “First thing tomorrow.”

So this is shock, I thought as my face went cold and my hair prickled.

“You’re kidding,” I said, more accusation than question.

“This isn’t fun any more- ,” he began.

“I know, I know, babe,” I pleaded, “But I’m trying so hard, every day…”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” said David. “I never really loved you. This was a game… a test to see how much you’d believe, how far you’d go. I gotta say, I'm proud... you took it all the way. And you were twisted enough to actually LIKE it. But you’re not me. You’re nothing like me, not even after three months of trying to be a fucking chameleon. It’s getting old.”

“Was ANY of it true?” I blurted, still glued in the same position, my eyes dry, wide and terrified.
“I’m not going to tell you. Maybe the whole thing was a game. Maybe it was all true, and because part of me does love you, I’m protecting you from me and my life. You’re never going to know. Ever.”

Just as I’d kept a 4” Gerber in my boot, David kept a loaded .22 on his desk. I looked at it, sitting under a burrito wrapper. My hands twitched ineffectually in my lap.

“Don’t even fucking think about it,” said David. “First, a .22 round would only piss me off, and then I’d have to kick your ass. Second… that’s not you. Can’t you tell that by now?”

“No,” I blubbered, tears finally coursing down my chilly face, “You can’t… I won’t… there’s no one else in the world like me…”

“There are PLENTY of people like you,” he said, the last word brimming with happy disgust. “Here’s the phone. Call your parents and tell them you’re flying home tomorrow morning.”

“No,” I blurted, inching my chair away, “Can’t…”

“Well, do whatever the fuck you’d like. I’ll call them. You’re still going home.”

I was free. I was catatonic. I was a 120-amp fuse, overloaded with emotional agony, waiting to break, waiting to blow, and yet inexplicably still sitting here, staring at a stranger with a thin smile and a United Airlines envelope in his hand.

---

The next few days are a pile of blurry snapshots. I remember sleeping with David twice that evening, trying to hold on to just a little of his sweat, his spit, him. Oddly, it wasn’t the worst sex I’ve ever had. I remember packing my beloved stuffed giraffe and birth certificate, leaving my platform sneakers and copy of “ANSWER Me!”. I remember being handed a twenty to buy a snack while in transit (unnecessary; I didn’t eat for nearly a week). I remember David’s father briskly shaking my hand, an impersonal farewell to an impersonal acquaintance. I remember stepping off the plane and seeing my father, remember how he walked up and held me tightly for what seemed like hours, didn’t say a word as I sobbed into his flannel shirt.

---

My sister Sarah claims that my capacity for emotional recovery is much like Wolverine’s healing factor. “Dude,” she’s marveled, “You get pistol-whipped by some totally awful trauma, and thirty seconds later, you’re peeling yourself off the ground, spitting out gravel and yelling, ‘Was that shit really necessary?’!”

This is not strictly accurate.

My first days home from Georgia were quite educational. I learned that while it’s possible to live on diet Coke, it’s not a great idea for your teeth or your psyche. I learned that crying yourself to sleep, crying intermittently through the night and crying before you open your eyes in the morning doesn’t leave a person particularly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I learned that no matter how much you wish it would, a broken heart won’t kill you.

Most importantly, however, I learned how to fake it.

I didn’t want to wake up in the morning. I faked it.
I didn’t want to be conscious. Ever. I faked it.
I didn’t want to interact with my family. I faked it.
I didn’t want to eat or smile or put on a snappy little suit and interview for secretarial jobs. I faked it.

The only thing I really wanted to do was sit in front of the computer, chatting with David, eagerly lapping up my daily ration of emotional abuse, frantically trying to wheedle my way back into his heart. It would be another six months before his grip on my mind and spirit would begin to grow slack.

In the interim, I dated men I couldn’t stand. I saw silly, explosion-laden movies. I went to Friendly’s at three in the morning, scalded my innards with Buffalo wings and coffee, wrote bad, lovesick poems on napkins. I got my second tattoo, a stylized outline of David’s beloved silver ring, a heavy, hand-formed knot which had briefly served as my engagement ring.

And I faked it.

Living – no matter how forced and arbitrary and tiresome – is still not grieving. If you do enough of the former, it’ll eventually start to seem more pleasant and endurable than the latter. Eventually, despite yourself, you’ll utter one genuine laugh, enjoy a plate of homemade spaghetti, nod your head awkwardly to a good, bassy song.

At which point you’ll promptly burst into tears. But it’ll happen again… soon.

You don’t fake it ‘til you make it, exactly. You fake it until time inches forward, the world changes shape and the disingenuous existence you fashioned becomes Velveteen Rabbit-real.

You fake it ‘til it’s made FOR you.

---

It’s been seven years, five months and some-odd days since I returned home. Some very odd days, indeed, as well as some tremendously happy and fulfilling ones. I’ve never had that second tattoo removed; the memory, like the ink, is indelible. I no longer grieve for David. I harbor no delusions of finding the “one other person in the entire world” who shares my snarled strand of emotional DNA. It’s all mine and one-of-a-kind. But that experience – the scary, the sad, the humiliating – is part of it, too. I never want to forget.

I was seventeen. It doesn’t excuse, it doesn’t explain and it doesn’t change.

When I was seventeen, I let a dark, not-entirely-normal part of myself rage out of control. I fed it, nurtured it, flaunted it, and lured a monster to my doorstep. Not a psycho-killer, but someone capable of showing me what my worst, most hateful tendencies would look like in a few years unless I tried very, very hard keep them pinned beneath my boot heel. Who’s sicker – someone falsely claiming to be a killer, or someone genuinely drawn to that person?

The fault lies with me… because it is me. One doesn’t annihilate the dark half so much as work each day to keep it in remission.

I’m as kind and loving to my family, my friends and my son as I can possibly be. I devote myself fully to living a good, moral life because I know it’s a choice. I fight for it with every particle of my being. I surround that dark blotch on my soul with compassion, understanding, sympathetic words and helpful works. I fake like it doesn’t exist… and pretend - or hope - that someday, maybe it won’t.