Book II
Dionysus [is] the Master of Illusions, who could make a vine grow out of a ship's plank, and in general enable his votaries to see the world as the world's not.
– E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational
Chapter 6
Just for the record, I do not consider myself an evil person (though how like a killer that makes me sound!). Whenever I read about murders in the news I am struck by the dogged, almost touching assurance with which interstate stranglers, needle-happy pediatricians, the depraved and guilty of all descriptions fail to recognize the evil in themselves; feel compelled, even, to assert a kind of spurious decency. 'Basically I am a very good person.' This from the latest serial killer – destined for the chair, they say – who, with incarnadine axe, recently dispatched half a dozen registered nurses in Texas. I have followed his case with interest in the papers.
But while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am a spectacularly bad one. Perhaps it's simply impossible to think of oneself in such a way, our Texan friend being a case in point. What we did was terrible, but still I don't think any of us were bad, exactly; chalk it up to weakness on my part, hubris on Henry's, too much Greek prose composition – whatever you like.
I don't know. I suppose I should have had a better idea of what I was letting myself in for. Still, the first murder – the farmer – seemed to have been so simple, a dropped stone falling to the lakebed with scarcely a ripple. The second one was also easy, at least at first, but I had no inkling how different it would be. What we took for a docile, ordinary weight (gentle plunk, swift rush to the bottom, dark waters closing over it without a trace) was in fact a depth charge, one that exploded quite without warning beneath the glassy surface, and the repercussions of which may not be entirely over, even now.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei did a variety of experiments on the nature of falling bodies, dropping objects (so they say) from the Tower of Pisa in order to measure the rate of acceleration as they fell. His findings were as follows: That falling bodies acquire speed as they fall. That the farther a body falls, the faster it moves. That the velocity of a falling body equals the acceleration due to gravity multiplied by the time of the fall in seconds. In short, that given the variables in our case, our particular falling body was traveling at a speed greater than thirty-two feet per second when it hit the rocks below.
You see, then, how quick it was. And it is impossible to slow down this film, to examine individual frames. I see now what I saw then, flashing by with the swift, deceptive ease of an accident: shower of gravel, windmilling arms, a hand that claws at a branch and misses. A barrage of frightened crows explodes from the underbrush, cawing and dark against the sky. Cut to Henry, stepping back from the edge. Then the film flaps up in the projector and the screen goes black. Consummation est.
If, lying in my bed at night, I find myself unwilling audience to this objectionable little documentary (it goes away when I open my eyes but always, when I close them, it resumes tirelessly at the very beginning), I marvel at how detached it is in viewpoint, eccentric in detail, largely devoid of emotional power. In that way it mirrors the remembered experience more closely than one might imagine. Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. I watched it all happen quite calmly – without fear, without pity, without anything but a kind of stunned curiosity – so that the impression of the event is burned indelibly upon my optic nerves, but oddly absent from my heart.
It was many hours before I was cognizant of what we'd done; days (months? years?) before I began to comprehend the magnitude of it. I suppose we'd simply thought about it too much, talked of it too often, until the scheme ceased to be a thing of the imagination and took on a horrible life of its own…
Never, never once in any immediate sense, did it occur to me that any of this was anything but a game. An air of unreality suffused even the most workaday details, as if we were plotting not the death of a friend but the itinerary of a fabulous trip that I, for one, never quite believed we'd ever really take.
What is unthinkable is undoable. That is something that Julian used to say in our Greek class, and while I believe he said it in order to encourage us to be more rigorous in our mental habits, it has a certain perverse bearing on the matter at hand. The idea of murdering Bunny was horrific, impossible; nonetheless we dwelt on it incessantly, convinced ourselves there was no alternative, devised plans which seemed slightly improbable and ridiculous but which actually worked quite well when put to the test… I don't know. A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.
This part, for some reason, is difficult for me to write, largely because the topic is inextricably associated with too many nights like this one (sour stomach, wretched nerves, clock inching tediously from four to five). It is also discouraging, because I recognize attempts at analysis are largely useless. I don't know why we did it. I'm not entirely sure that, circumstances demanding, we wouldn't do it again. And if I'm sorry, in a way, that probably doesn't make much difference.
I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story. I have noticed that even the most garrulous and shameless of murderers are shy about recounting their crimes. A few months ago, in an airport bookstore, I picked up the autobiography of a notorious 3ii thrill killer and was disheartened to find it entirely bereft of lurid detail. At the points of greatest suspense (rainy night; deserted street; fingers closing around the lovely neck of Victim Number Four) it would suddenly, and not without some coyness, switch to some entirely unrelated matter. (Was the reader aware that an IQ test had been given him in prison? That his score had been gauged as being close to that of Jonas Salk?) By far the major portion of the book was devoted to spinsterish discourses on prison life – bad food, hijinks in the exercise yard, tedious little jailbird hobbies. It was a waste of five dollars.
In a certain way, though, I know how my colleague feels. Not that everything 'went black,' nothing of the sort; only that the event itself is cloudy because of some primitive, numbing effect that obscured it at the time; the same effect, I suppose, that enables panicked mothers to swim icy rivers, or rush into burning houses, for a child; the effect that occasionally allows a deeply bereaved person to make it through a funeral without a single tear. Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things – naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror – are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself- quite to one's surprise – in an entirely different world.
When we got back to the car it had not yet begun to snow, but already the woods shrank beneath the sky, hushed and waiting, as if they could sense the weight of the ice that would be on them by nightfall.
'Christ, look at this mud,' said Francis as we bounced through yet another pothole, brown spray striking the window with a thick rataplan.