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Might the killer joy this spectacle if he could watch it on TV? He may be a destroyer of women, but his victims were regular, human-style women: a concerned mother trying to connect with her daughter on a road trip in nature — the trip that delivered them into the hands of the killer. You picture her readingen Reviving Ophelia the night before they left, frowning slightly as she thinks of the teenage boy years ago who
fucked her bottom and then took her to dinner at Pizza Hut, thinks also of her daughter's coed sleepover last week. Getting out of bed to use the bathroom with only the hall light on, peeing in gentle darkness, remembering: grown-up pee used to smell so bad to her, and now the smell is just another welcome personal issue of her hardworking body, tough and fleshy in middle-age, safe under her old flowered gown. The daughter is awake too, and reading Wuthering Heights. She is thirteen, and she is irritated that the author has such sympathy for Heathcliff, who abuses his wife and child. What does it mean that he is capable of such passionate love? Is this realistic, or were people just dumber and more romantic back then? She doesn't think that the mean people she knows are the most passionate; they just want to laugh at everything. But then she remembers that she laughed when a boy in class played a joke on an ugly girl and made her cry. Sighing, she puts the book down and lies on her back, her arm thrown luxuriantly over her head. On the ceiling, there are the beautiful shadows of slim branches and leaves. She does not really want to take this trip with her mother. Her mother tries so hard to help her and to protect her, and she finds this embarrassing. It makes her want to protect her mother, and that feeling is uncomfortable too. She rolls on her side and picks up the book again.
Thought and feeling, flesh and electricity, ordinary yet complex personalities, the like of which the killer had found impossible to maintain inside himself from the moment of his birth — and yet which he could erase with the strange, compulsive pleasure of an autistic child banging his head on the wall. You picture him as a little boy alone in an empty room, head subtly inclined as if he is listening intently for a special sound. In the top drawer of his dresser, there are rows of embalmed mice stacked neatly atop one another. At age twelve, he has killed many animals besides mice, but he only embalms the mice because uniformity satisfies him. He likes embalming because it is clean, methodical and permanent. He likes his mind to be uniform and inflexible as a grid. Below the grid is like the life of animals: sensate and unbearably deep.
There are people who believe that serial killers are a "fundamental force of nature," a belief that would be very appealing to the killer. Yes, he would say to himself, that is me. I am fundamental!
But the marathon woman on TV would be fundamental too. She would not show her personality, and even if she did, nobody would see it; they would be too distracted by the thought of a mechanical cunt, endlessly absorbing discharge. However, with her lamé bathing suit and her campy ring-walk, appealing to everyone's sense of fun, she would be the fundamental female as comedy: the killer could sit comfortably in the audience and laugh, enjoying this appearance of his feminine colleague. Maybe he would feel such comfort that he would stand and come forward, unbuckling his pants with the flushed air of a modest person finally coming up to give testimony. Safe in her sweating, loose and very wet embrace, surrounded by the dense energy of many men, his penis could tell her the secret story of murder right in front of everyone. Her worn vagina would hold the killer like it had held the husband and the lover and the sharpie and the father and the nitwit and every other man, his terrible story a tiny, burning star in the rightful firmament of her female vastness.
Hell, yes, she would "show what women can do!"
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©2000 Mary Gaitskill and Nerve.com, Inc.
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