In the last few weeks I’ve developed a concerning compulsion to walk outside my house, get in my minivan, drive to the house of every single person reading one of my essays on their computer and murder them. The plan, I’m told by the compulsion, is to burst through their front door, yank their heads back, gouge their eyes out and drag them, screaming and bleeding, across their lawn to my car.
Now on the move, I blast “I Took A Pill In Ibiza” by Mike Posner (Seeb Remix) and drive like a bat out of hell to the beach. I drag them out of the van, frog march them to the oceans edge, push them to their knees, kick them between their shoulders to the ground, get on their back and, using both hands, full of strength, grind their faces into the cold, wet sand until they die.
This is bad, right? I don’t even recognize myself in this scenario. Other than the music, none of it makes sense. It doesn’t sound like me at all.
For one thing, I’m not getting in my minivan and going anywhere – it hasn’t worked in years. It’s been parked next to my house so long it feels like the seed car for a yard-full of dead vehicles. The air conditioner died for the second time three years ago, then something else car-ish happened, and I wasn’t going to pay the $3,000 repair estimate which was more than a 2006 Sienna with more than 280,000 miles was worth. So, the minivan is a no-go unless someone wants to pay me to get it up and running.
And, no, I don’t have alternate transportation for the field trip. I replaced the Sienna with a 2017 Lexus RX 350 SUV, blue with tan leather seats. It has a backup camera, perfect temperature control and it can both warm up and cool down the seats. I’m not shoving a bunch of bleeding people into my pearl blue perfection, I can’t imagine how hard it is to get blood out of leather.
You know, talking about cars and blood reminds me of two questions I used to ponder when riding around in the back of my parents’ cars. The great idling time of childhood. The first was about music. My father loved a kind of music called 1,001 strings, which I just learned is really 101 strings, which I don’t believe. As I got older I started to wonder when I was going to start liking soaring strings playing The Theme From Dr. Zhivago? I thought it was part of adulthood, like a job or only stopping at McDonald’s when it was on the same side of the road you were driving.
My other ruination was the dull colors of cars and houses. Where was the art? Why have these huge canvases and do nothing with them? I mentally designed the beautiful murals I would paint on my future house and car. I didn’t realize, of course, by the time you get a car or buy a house, the color is drained out of you. But I love my dead soul and my stupid car and I won’t be disturbing either on a fan-based murder spree.
Transportation is not the only problem for this journey. How do I know who is reading what when? What if other people are in the house who try to stop me? Won’t my potential-fans be screaming on their way to the van? I’m pretty sure they won’t all be within driving distance. Am I going to fly to Kansas to kill someone? There isn’t even a beach there.
I recently watched the trial of a man who murdered his wife and disposed of her body parts in a secluded area about forty-five minutes from their home in Georgia. The neon trail the police followed to him was a deer processing kit purchased from a Bass Pro Shop near his home with his own credit card. His car was also on camera driving back and forth from the woods where he left her.
Does my compulsion know you cannot go anywhere in any vehicle without ending up on camera? That part of the plan is as stupid as buying a machete and contractor bags from Wal-Mart, where they start filming you when you leave the house. I appreciate that the compulsion is not thinking beyond the death on the sand, but I am and I don’t want to sit in a police interrogation room watching videos of me driving around, jetting about, murdering and returning to my non-existent van.
My first experience with people hearing my van-worthy words happened when I was in New York City. I’d moved there from Oregon in my mid-thirties and took a non-fiction writing class at The New School. I was so excited. The professor was a long-established writer you might have heard of and a judgmental bitch. I loved her.
Each of us had a chance to bring in our work. She would read it out loud anonymously to the class and then open up a discussion with the question “Were you there?” At the time, I was working at the medical examiner’s office on the response to 9/11. It was almost two years later and we didn’t know it, but we had almost another two years to go.
Thousands of human remains were brought to the medical examiner’s office over the six months of recovery and they are still finding remains now. DNA was the only vector to identification certainly two years after, and honestly it started earlier. The towers were rendered to dust, human bodies did not fare well.
The essay I wrote for the class, a passage, really, was this:
After Hours
Thirtieth Street was closed to the public between First Avenue and the FDR. Security staff from the medical examiner’s office demanded identification from anyone trying to enter. On First Avenue, double-decker tour buses passed by, filled with tourists struggling to glimpse Memorial Park, the massive white tent at the end of the block. Over the traffic, you could sometimes hear the words “World Trade Center,” as the tour guide explained what they were seeing.
On the East end of Thirtieth, just inside the barricade, was an ugly, dirt-brown trailer on cinder blocks. This was where my office moved after leaving the conference room. Officially, the trailer housed the Incident Command Center, World Trade Center Operations, Office of Chief Medical Examiner, City of New York. It was a shabby, smelly hut with an overblown name.
The night Hurricane Isabel was moving across North Carolina, I was working alone in the trailer. I could hear the wind outside, but inside it was calm as the room and I recovered from the chaos of the day. I was staring at my computer screen, surrounded by piles of sky-blue folders, when the phone rang unexpectedly. We’re closed, don’t answer, I thought, as my hand reached for the receiver.
“Medical examiner’s office, this is Katie.”
“Hello? My husband died on 9/11. I’d like to make an appointment to visit Memorial Park. Can I still do that?”
“Of course,” I said, and we scheduled a time for the following Friday.
“Is there anything else you need?” I asked, and as she replied I noticed her accent for the first time. “My friend called and told me you were done with your work. That means you’ll never identify my husband? I cried when she told me. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Oh no,” I said. “We’re not done. We have at least another year to go. And when we finish, we’ll let you know. I promise we won’t just go away. We identify a few new people each month and we hope to identify at least a hundred more before we’re done.” She told me where her husband worked, what floor he was on. I told her we had identified people from his company, from his floor, even from the impact site of the building he was in. “You have to be realistic,” I said, “but there is hope.”
She started to cry again. “Thank you. Thank you. I was so scared you had stopped trying.” She told me that each night when she prays the rosary, one bead is for the people at the medical examiner’s office. She prayed we would have the courage to continue working. I thanked her. I told her we needed her prayers. She asked to meet me when she came on Friday. I had to spell my name twice, she had trouble writing it down. We said goodbye, and I went back to work, both of us relieved I had answered the phone.
I remember the professor looking up at me while she stood at the end of the table reading. When she finished she asked the usual “Were you there?” No one talked about my writing, though, they were responding to a question she didn’t ask: “Where were you on 9/11?” These were the stories they told. I felt upset at the time, but I realize now they were answering the first question and the answer was yes.
The next essay she read out loud was the last one I heard. A woman told the story of grandfather raping her in the basement of her childhood home with her dog standing at the top of the stairs whimpering, crying and letting out stifled barks. I don’t remember any more of the essay or the discussion afterward. I do remember knowing I couldn’t watch anyone else burning in the emptiness and horror of the world. I never went back.
Now that I’m on the other side of what I did in New York, what I saw, what I said and (some of) the aftermath of the work after I left, I feel the same way about my own words. I can’t look at myself burning in the emptiness and horror of the world. I was able to find the essay I posted above because I remembered the last line well enough to search for it. I didn’t read it, though. I opened the file, copied the text, pasted it above, all without looking.