Recently I’ve developed a compulsion to walk outside my house, get in my minivan, drive to the house of every single person reading one of my essays online, and murder them. The Compulsion came out of nowhere (I thought) and took me by surprise in its level of violence, specificity of directions to accomplish the violence, and the confusing victim criteria. People reading my essays online? I’m not told why, though, just how.
Here’s the scenario it compels me to create. One of my readers is sitting at a table or desk in front of their computer or laptop reading my writing. It is nighttime. Suddenly, I burst in through the front door, grab them from behind, pull their head back, gouge their eyes out, and drag them, screaming and bleeding to my 2006 Toyota Sienna. On the road, I put on “I Took A Pill In Ibiza” by Mike Posner (the Seeb Remix) at 100 decibels – roughly the level of a Dave Matthews concert – and drive my minivan and passenger to a specific public access parking lot in Virginia Beach, where I lived when I was a teenager.
Once parked, I turn the music off, slide open the door, yank the reader out, and frog-march them across the parking lot to the ocean’s edge. Accompanied by the sound of the surf, I shove them to their knees, then sideways-kick them between their shoulder blades onto their stomach, climb on top of their prone body, and using both hands, full of violent strength, grind their faces into the cold, wet sand until they die.
This is pretty horrifying, right? I don’t recognize myself in any of this.
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. And, no, I don’t have alternative transportation for the field trip(s). I replaced the Sienna with a 2017 Lexus RX 350 SUV, blue with tan leather seats. It’s the newest car I’ve ever owned. It has a backup camera, perfect temperature control, and it can both warm up and cool down the seats. I’m not shoving a bleeding person into my pearl-blue perfection; I can’t imagine how hard it is to get blood out of perforated leather.
I literally haven’t even left my house yet and the plan’s already fallen apart. Look, I’m happy to kill people, but I’m not happy look like an idiot. This plan is guaranteed to find me on YouTube in a police interrogation room trying to explain a decibel reader on my dash, twenty witnesses who saw me dragging someone across the beach-access parking lot where, coincidentally — I swear! — that same person is found dead by the water’s edge. Then, they play a video from a neighbor’s Ring camera of my tattered minivan — that includes my license plate with the perfectly anonymous license plate IMISMOM. “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” is playing so loudly an impromptu rave has sprung up in the street. Imagine the shit I’d take in prison for this bullshit.
Yet, all of that is not the stupidest part of the plan, despite its contortion of unrealistic (How do I find these people, how do I know when they are reading something, what about readers in Texas – am I flying? With a real ID?) and an amalgam of cliched true crime blunders. No, not those things, but this: nothing I have written is online. I’ve written most of my adult life, mainly essays, but there is no book, no collection, no Amazon self-published Kindle book, no web site (until now), no Substack, no nothing. Who am I going go kill? You?
There are a lot of reasons nothing I’ve written is online or in print, but one is the cringe and fear-inducing thought that I’ve had since I wrote my first words, that people read it, they are going to wantto talk to me about it. I loved to write in high school and would have loved to be published, but I knew if I did publish and my writing did, there would come a time when there would be attention and expectations of chattiness. This was all before the Internet, so the only real face time I risked was a local morning news show or maybe Phil Donahue, but I was still worried about it, better stay under the radar. Rather than give up on the idea of publishing, I developed a plan.
I had a friend in high school named Doug Heller. Doug had been kicked out of his house when his father found out he was gay. He was taken in by a family with a deranged matriarch with a skin condition that left her face covered with strange bumps mixed with jagged pockmarks. I realize now she must have been getting a check from the city for her generosity in taking Doug in, but I had not yet been a foster parent and seen real-world examples of scary, greedy people circling the foster care system like perverts in vans.
This wonder of maternal love gave Doug the nickname Fag Pop. When she was pissed at him, she called him a faggot, but Fag Pop was a term of affection for her and don’t you tell her different. The scary-faced woman had a daughter named Nancy was also a senior in high school. Whenever Nancy used Doug’s nickname, she would end by using her finger in her mouth to make a popping sound.
Nancy was comically and unashamedly stupid. After school every day she did bong hits in her room while she watched a small color tv. But there was a problem in paradise. A basic algebra class stood between Nancy and graduation. She’d tried many times, but now it was a real threat. Unfortunately, Nancy’s mom found out I was good at math. She told me I was going to teach Nancy algebra she could graduate. Failure (both Nancy’s and mine) was not an option. I was scared. I don’t know why I didn’t just stop going to Nancy’s house, but it was like being on the Jerry Springer show and it wasn’t like I could sit at my parents’ house and do bong hits after school. Nancy passed. Years later I would see her mom on the actual Jerry Springer Show, she looked and acted exactly the same.
In the middle of all this insanity, Doug was shining light of fun, trouble-seeking, and a willingness to do anything. Doug and I made a pact. When the time came to publish my writing, I would do it under his name. My dislike of attention was matched and multiplied a million times by his love of it. We were both thrilled at the prospect and couldn’t wait for it to happen. Honestly, forty years later, I might solve all this by a quick Facebook search.
I was in my mid-thirties before anyone I didn’t know read my work. I was living in New York City, was working at the medical examiner’s office in Manhattan on the dual project of getting families of the victims death certificates without remains and trying to identify the 20,000 human remains that came to our office from Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island where debris from the site was brought and sifted through trays to make sure nothing human was tossed out with the wreckage.
This was, of course, something of a fool’s errand, but how could you not try? Do you want part of your child on a heap of destruction at a landfill named “Fresh Kills?” The name came from the Dutch word for waterway and the fresh part mean freshwater. Fresh Kills estuary was and title wetland on Staten Island. Knowing that did not help me, or anyone I worked with or any family member I met. When remains were identified through DNA, we knew whether they came from Ground Zero or the landfill. Most people wanted to know as much as possible about the smallest fragment of tissue we identified. I had to tell them. I always left out the name.
Maybe a year-and-a-half in, I followed a life-long dream and took a non-fiction writing class at The New School. I was so excited. It was a dream. The professor was a long-established writer you might have heard of and an intimidating, judgmental bitch. I loved her. Each student had a chance to bring in their writing and she would stand at the head of the two conference tables pushed together that we sat around in a ring, and read the writing out loud, anonymously. When she was done, every week after every essay, she would look up and ask “Were you there?” as a way to start the discussion.
When it was my turn, she read 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; I don’t know how she knew it was mine. When she finished, she asked everyone, “Were you there?” But they weren’t. They were somewhere else answering a different question: “Where were you on 9/11?” They told stories about where they were, what they were doing, any connection they had to the World Trade Center. Looking back, I think they did answer the first question and it was yes, but I got lost in the journey. No one saw me. No one was there with me.
This experience was prescient for what I would experience, years later, when trying to find a therapist to help with the crashing case of PTSD and depression that fell on me when I left New York at the end of the identification project in 2005. Sitting with a new person, I would start to talk about something that happened at work and they were gone, lost in their own version of 9/11, and feeling something good being so close to it all by listening to someone who had been there.
They would inevitably become curious about what I had seen and done, greedy to know more, putting me on a pedestal – I can’t imagine how you did that. It must have been horrible. I could have never done it. What a gift you gave those families. – while concurrently trying to peer over my shoulder in their push to know more details. I wonder how many “slips” of confidentiality there were by these women and one douchebag man. I was right in high school: it wasn’t enough for people to know what I had done, they wanted to talk to me about it.
I did not feel that way in the class at the New School at all. These were people who were in New York on 9/11 and the whole world was traumatized and basically the towers fell and then life moved on. Getting an idea of what came after, that there was a narrative on the other side, was helpful for them I did not feel grossed out, like I would later; none of them wanted to know more about what I was doing.
In the end, there was different problem. In the next essay read out loud, a woman beautifully wrote about her experience of being raped by her grandfather during her childhood. He took her to the basement to do it, and her dog stood at the top of the stairs whimpering and letting out stifled barks. I was there. We were all there. I still hear that dog. I never went back.
After I left New York for Richmond, my hometown, I continued to write. I signed up for a writing class at the Virginia Museum called “Writing the Shadow,” taught by a different, lesser Doug than my friend who wanted to be a star. During the class, we would bring in copies of our work for the class (eight people, maybe), read our work out loud, and then we’d talk about it as a group. I think that’s how it worked. Who knows.
There are two things that I remember about the class. The instructor was the most neurotic person I had ever met, and he still hasn’t lost that title in the decade plus since. He was greasy with self-doubt, with his concurrent belief that he was fucking awesome stirred in for fun. The other thing I remember is a woman named Farrah. When it came her turn to read and essay out loud, she used the suggestion our sticky teacher made for when you get stuck writing: stop and type, “What I really want to say is…” Farrah did this, and I think we all wished she hadn’t.
What she really wanted to say was that her husband, who had gone to someplace like Thailand a few years before, had slept with a prostitute. He came home and told her; I imagine him crying like a baby. I can’t remember much, but I know he became obsessed with the idea he had gotten AIDS or another STD or disease. Obsessed. He fretted and moaned about it all the time. She was putting up with it; I can’t remember why. I do remember thinking at the time: 1) This woman is batshit, and 2) Her husband needs to be shot.
After the eight weeks of the class, some of us decided to continue on as a group and hired the bad Doug to continue as our leader. We met for years and years. We met at my parents’ house for part of it — they had a dining room where everyone could be seated comfortably. My mom loved us being there. I don’t remember much about our meetings in Richmond. I was drenched in trauma and not laying down normal memories. I can see us in a room, but it’s a movie with no sound. It doesn’t help that I did three rounds of ECT during that time, and that can affect your memory, but I don’t remember if it affected mine or not. One thing I do remember is when I finished reading, the rest of the group looked like they had been hit by a baseball bat. Stunned.
I remember that feeling so good, like yeah, they were there, and by sharing the horror I had helped dilute it just a bit. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I attended the Tinker Mountain Writer’s Workshop twice and again, it felt good to say things that felt unsayable. It just occurred to me that, unlike the therapists, no one in any group ever made me feel like they wanted more. The lack of voyeuristic probing made the writing feel contained, which is what I needed and wanted.
When I moved to Leesburg from Richmon in 2019, the group stopped meeting and I stopped writing. Deadline and commitment matter. At that point, all the essays I’d written were strewn across different hard drives, cloud drives, and zip files. There were endless copies of the same document, drafts of essays and files that looked like they had an essay in them but were empty. I tried multiple times to collect and organize, but it just made it worse. And so, it all sat until about a year ago.
Recently Mike and I started meeting again, monthly on Google Meet. With the deadline back, I started to write again, even if it was in a frenzy make the day before our time together. What started the idea of publishing online, the decision that eventually led to the murder plan, was an essay I wrote on the plane crash no one remembers and the similarities between the response to the crash and ICE raids. Mike brought up the idea of publishing it, and I thought maybe I should.
Two months after 9/11, a third plane crashed in New York City. It was American Airlines Flight 587, headed to the Dominican Republic. Just minutes after takeoff, it dove into the ground in a neighborhood in Queens. Two hundred and eighty-seven people died. I was part of the response of the medical examiner’s office to the Jacob Javits Center where families of the victims were instructed to gather. The vast space was full of light and crystal windows. It was still not big enough to contain the grief and horror. One of the reasons you don’t remember this crash is the same thing that made the pain so unbearable: everything was happening in Spanish.
I don’t know about other people who worked on the response to 9/11 at the medical examiner’s office, but I tend to blank out Flight 587. There just isn’t room for another plane crash in the story of what we did. It was haunting and horrible. I only thought about Flight 587 when I realized my PTSD had gone into overdrive and finally figured out it was seeing the ICE raids – anguished families. Horror. People taken out of nowhere. All in Spanish.
Maybe my work could help somehow, I thought. I could be, as John Irving wrote, of use. I recently read a Facebook post about how to cope with the horrible world we’re living in right now: focus your efforts where your position to help is unique. As a father, you are in a unique position to help your son or daughter. A teacher and her students. One partner to the other. Maybe my words to a stranger. A reader. Online.
Another step towards ending up here came from Claude, the AI. I recently spent dozens and dozens of hours with Claude while researching my family’s history for another project. It helped me with research, and it made connections I would never have found. It also helped me keep everything organized. I knew to use it carefully. I always keep the slogan, “God grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man,” when I’m doing work with it. Those connections it makes? Sometimes their bullshit. But you can learn to know when its just making shit up.
So, when I finished the project on my family history, I used it to take all those essays I’ve written from all the folders, drives, online storage, and zip files and organize them. This is something I’ve been wanting to do forever. One early benefit: it made it possible for me to find the essay from The New School with only remembering the last line. Part of the problem I’ve had with organizing it over the years has been not wanting to read it. Maybe I’m the reader I want to kill. They contain a lot of trauma and really hard stuff I’ve seen and done. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Working with Claude, though, I didn’t have to read any of it. He told me to first collect all the files into one folder from all the scattered shadows they’d been living in. There were 3,000 of them. Claude told me to run a duplicate program, telling me how to tell it to look for exact duplicates while also ignoring the name of the document. That eliminated 1800 files. After that, he taught me how to use Python scripts. He would create them and I would run them. Doing this, took the contents any file with less than 500 words, put those words in one big document and delete the individual files. and put them in one big Word document. Then he wrote a Python script that looked in each document and read the first forty lines. Things that weren’t essays were removed. Unique essays were put in a folder. Essays with multiple drafts were collected in a folder with the name of the folder being the name of the essay. It took hours. Days. This is the final list of folders with multiple drafts.
Here are the 64 unique documents.
There are 257 Word documents all together. When I’m done getting it all figured out, which I can’t do right now because it’s all radioactive, I’m guessing there will be around thirty complete essays. Maybe more. I hope it’s not more. All of my writing being pared down to these files and folders changed my relationship to it. There is relief that these thousands of files are no longer spread out everywhere, that there is some order. Maybe I can do something with it now. But the order creates my first capability to actually see it all in one place. It feels like a cabinet full of condensed horror. At the same time, maybe I can be of use to myself by putting things online. Maybe if other people read them, it will help dilute their horror and their sadness.
Another barrier that came down, bringing you closer to your own death, was figuring out how do it. I’ve struggled with this forever. Substack seemed like an idea, trying to get things actually published? But all of these thoughts brought me back to my high school dilemma: if people read it, they are going to wantto talk to me about it. I don’t want to talk about it. At all. With anyone. And there’s a lot more than morning news shows and Phil Donahue now. I can see myself on TV with someone leaning in asking, “Tell us about something that happened that has really stuck with you.”
That’s a made-up problem, though. I’m not likely to become famous enough for a bad podcast, much less one of Oprah’s fireside chats. A real problem is not chatting or probing for trauma porn, it’s telling me stories. People hear hard things and it often frees them to say there own hard thing out loud. I cannot risk people telling me sad things, I’ve heard, seen and done too many sad things; I don’t have room. I can’t hear any more dogs.
Eventually I realized I could just put it on a web site. Like this one. I don’t have to do anything but that, and that I can do without allowing comments or access to me. I already owned this domain for something else I’m working on, and so I made up my mind to do it. So, I started writing this and I made a promise to Mike to have it up by our next meeting, which is, of course, tomorrow.
The final push was Lisa, my infusion nurse. I have Central Nervous System Lupus and I’ve had home infusions for over a year. Lisa came, every Monday, for at least four hours. There’s whole book about The Insanity of Lisa in me, but the important part is that she died. Well, it’s how she died. Lisa and I were the same age, both educated both liberals (but she was also a TERF?). Lisa was one of the loneliest people I’ve ever met, despite her marriage and four children. I was her best (only) friend. She looked forward to coming every Monday. She told me everything, including a lot of things no one else knew.
Lisa started to get heart palpitations, finally went to the ER, they ruled out anything acute and told her to follow up with her primary care doctor. She did not have a primary care doctor, and she would not get one or go to any doctor at all. I tried to get her to go to Patient First, but she wouldn’t do it. I tried to get her to find a primary care doctor near her house, but she wouldn’t. Here are the main reasons: 1) I had three babies on my own with no medical intervention, and I’m not going to be a big baby myself; 2) if I go in and they find something, I’ll be swept up into the medical world and forced to do things I don’t want to; 3) my mom was a hypochondriac; 4) they won’t be able to find anything wrong; 5) it will go away on its own.
I bitched at her every week. I made her promise. I told her she was a fucking idiot (she liked that). Then she was struck down by fatigue. I know about fatigue. I have Lupus. It is not being tired; it is too much gravity being poured on top of you so you can’t lift your arm. She missed a week, letting me know beforehand. Then she missed two more weeks; this time it was her supervisor who let me know. Then she came again. She was so clearly wiped out. I told her she needed to go home; she told me she wanted to see me and she wanted me to have my medicine. I talked to her during the entire infusion. I pulled up a primary care doctor by her home that had an appointment that afternoon. She wouldn’t do it. I told her if she didn’t see one she couldn’t come anymore. “Really?” “Yes, really.”
The next Monday she did not come and did not text ahead of time. I knew she was dead. I kept texting her supervisor asking about her, and she kept putting me off, then wanting to talk by phone. Finally, the supervisor and some corporate guy called me. They said, yes, she had died, and it was just so surprising, out of nowhere. Hearing she was really dead was a breaking point for me. Who knows why it was this. Bizarre, deadly, high-trauma events are so common in my life, it’s boring.
But this time, my brain started screaming: ENOUGH. ENOUGH. ENOUGH. STOP. STOP. STOP. I was standing in my gravel driveway, next to my Lexus and near my dead minivan filled with rage. I hated her. I told her she was going to die, I saw her dying, and then she died. What do I do with that? Where do I put it? It’s not like I can talk about it with a therapist.
Coincidentally this week I started to look for a new therapist for other reasons. I found this woman on Psychology Today. She met the most basic criteria I have in a therapist in Virginia: she did not go to Liberty University. I emailed her and made an appointment for the following week. She sent me a link to her portal, where I was to fill out paperwork. Normally, like all of us, I just scroll through and “sign” everything, and I did that, too. I noticed something about AI but blew past it. Then another thing about AI. I signed it, much less confidently.
The I looked at them. You can look at them too! Turns out I signed a Consent to Record Audio and a Consent for Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools in Your Therapy. This woman records your session, has AI transcribe it and then deletes the recording within an hour (for some reason the deleted recording is really import for me to understand). THEN, she uses AI for, among other things, “Analyzing data to identify therapy trends and track progress, which is always reviewed by your therapist.” What? Has this woman met AI? She isn’t even smart enough to change the AI generated approval forms in her stupid portal.
I did some research on this process and apparently it’s a thing now. It’s marketed to client’s as “your therapist can be more present in your conversation because she’s not worried about taking notes.” First of all, no human being is “more present” in any situation when an iPad is on the coffee table between you on record. Also, it’s your fucking job to listen and remember and find connections. No good therapist even takes notes, except at a minimum level after you’re gone. Session notes are vague bullshit that justifies the diagnosis to an insurance company, they are against The Man, not in bed with him. Notes can be subpoenaed! What kind of snitch is going to put your shit in the streets?
This is 100% my track record with therapists and the world in general. How many times can you stand there looking at something and say “What in the literal fuck is going on?” at something happening in your own life without going crazy? So, in the end, I don’t have any “professional” to talk about even my dead nurse with, much less a crashed plane headed for the Dominican Republic, or my impotent rage at our own fucking government doing the same Devil’s Work of horribleness, but this time on purpose.
So, here I am with my unfettered rage at both individual people and the world in general. I have trunks full of essays about trauma and sorrow and traumatic and sad things keep happening, so I could do this forever. Maybe my writing will help you, maybe it will help me, maybe no one will read it (the best-case scenario). We’ll see. I will start with the essay about Flight 587. It may take me a year to get it up, but I’m on the move now.
It was in my driveway raging about Lisa that the Compulsion first arose. I wanted to take her dead face and grind it into my gravel driveway until she died again. Then I thought about the work I was getting ready to put online. I wanted to kill everyone who would even thing of reading it. It’s absurd, but so’s my life. Here we are. I’m not going actually kill anyone (right?), but if you’re going to stay, you might want to get a Ring.
Katie