You hear these stories about people who take a gun and kill, kill, kill, and it’s horrible. “What kind of monster would do that?” “We knew he was troubled, but we had no idea—” But really? To think that other people aren’t really people, not on the same level you are, is something we do every day. Stuck in traffic? Are you cursing the people around you for being inferior drivers, or are you patient as a saint? Bureaucracy getting you down? “What idiot designed this government, anyway? I’d like to blow those fools away.”
Me? I do it all the time. But, like all creative types, I have a healthy outlet.
It’s true, I saw Chris Demoulin a few months before he destroyed Las Vegas.
He found me on Facebook. Usually, the way you find people is via a friend of a friend, but he wasn’t friends with anyone I was friends with, so I’m not sure how he found me. He didn’t have actual friends on his friends list, just political figures and celebrities. Did he look me up on purpose? At first I was shocked that he was on Facebook at all. Then I read his wall and realized that to him, it was just another soapbox with no one listening.
I had both hoped and feared that I would run into him. We all have our heroes, no matter how naïvely we choose them.
When I first met him, in high school, he was an infamous bad boy. He was the leader of a gang of smart boys, boys that were sarcastic and witty and lived outside the box. They wore different clothes; they listened to different bands. They doodled brightly-colored skulls on their arms because they were too young to get tattoos.
He wrote poetry.
I wrote poetry.
He got a girl pregnant.
I stayed a virgin.
If I’d been a boy, I would have been in his gang of smart boys. But I was a girl, so there you go: subhuman. I could barely talk. I was friends with people who were kind but not terribly—sorry—interesting. Solid people, people at the bottom of the pecking order, but good people.
But oh, how I wanted to get into that gang of smart boys.
Years went by, and I switched from writing poetry to creating small worlds. At first they were only in my head on a little shelf, like collectable ornaments. But then I put to paper some really bad short stories and a novel that was even worse. I kept at it: I created characters and killed them off; I damned them; I redeemed them. I got better.
And then I got his friend request.
So we talked on Facebook, and I still wanted his approval for some reason. We talked about how time had passed. I’m a writer now, not making much money, but making some. Mostly living off my husband and my credit cards. You know, the kind of thing where you can say, “Oh, I’m a writer,” but it feels hollow. I’m a mother, too; it takes up a lot of my life and most of my conversations. My life looks pretty ordinary, except for those rows and rows of small worlds in my head.
His life turned out to be more banal than I could have anticipated. Many things are like that; I find it reassuring that my bugaboo demigods have put on weight, have bad knees, and are losing their hair. At thirty, he was still managing apartment complexes. He was still married to the same woman, that gorgeous blonde. She’d put on weight, and he complained about it. I asked him how much she weighed now, expecting her to be three hundred pounds from the way he talked, but she was only one-fifty. Okay, she was short, but still. I was glad he couldn’t see how hard I laughed, on the other side of the screen. I weigh a lot more than one-fifty, I told him. He asked me if that meant my breasts had gotten larger. Ugh.
It was hard, talking to him again. But it was a revelation of sorts. This? This is what you tried to live up to for so long? Every word he typed was a disillusionment for me.
Then I had a book signing in Santa Fe, and he met me there.
The book signing was for a beautifully ridiculous book meant for young adults that I had been hired to write for a very small press. People liked it. I liked it. I was lucky to get the signing. I was lucky to have twenty people buy books—twenty people who didn’t know me showed up and wanted my autograph. Come on. It wasn’t just lucky, it was a freakin’ miracle.
He drove up from Las Vegas. He didn’t go to the book signing. He certainly didn’t buy a copy of the book.
I meet him at the Jackalope. It’s touristy. I like it. I never buy anything, just wander around in circles and try to imagine what on earth I would do with that stuff. I put some of their dancing skeleton statues in a book once. I walk along the gravel between buildings and think of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths.” It’s my equivalent of a spiritual labyrinth: what if, what if. Maybe one day I’ll buy one of the statues of men with their pants hanging open, and I’ll plant a cactus in it. A votive cactus to cheesy weirdness.
So there I am, walking along the paths, waiting for my phone to ring, when he taps me on the shoulder. It’s cold, well, cold for Santa Fe, and he has a jacket on, so I can’t tell if he ever got his arm tattooed with that skull. He’s even more balding than he was in his Facebook pictures. He smells the same, like fabric softener.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hey, Andrea.”
He looks me over, and I wonder how I’m being judged. I wonder what’s in his head that he’s judging against. Maybe he drove all this way just for a free book. The sun is out, but it’s dim, November at four o’clock in the afternoon dim. But he’s still squinting at me. I’m just a silhouette. I reach into my bag, which contains a couple of spare copies, some pens rubber-banded together, a receipt book, postcards with the book cover—the kind of stuff that extremely minor writers carry. He flips open the cover. I’ve already signed it to him; I mean, I know how to spell his name.
“You should have signed it in blood,” he says, closing it again. “Now that would be something I could use. I could just cut out the signature and tape it to whatever I wanted.”
I stammer something and blush, which at least should remind him of the way I acted in high school. As if I hadn’t changed at all.
People have asked me exactly what he said. I remember some of it, but keep in mind that I’m a writer. We make things up; we rearrange words; we twist things to suit our ends. So take it with a grain of salt.
“I’ve given up on writing,” he says.
“Yeah?” I say. I’m not surprised. He’d been brilliant in high school, but he hadn’t wanted to work at it. The people who don’t want to work at it eventually give it up, one way or the other, even if they start out as geniuses the way he did.
“It was pointless. Writing is pointless.” He looks at me, hoping I’m offended; I remember that from high school, too. “I want to make a real change in the world.”
“What change?” I ask.
“I want to wake people up.”
You know how people sign yearbooks, “Don’t ever change”? He seems frozen in time. I want to roll my eyes and laugh or say something like, “You want to make a change, try giving a shit about something besides yourself.” I don’t.
“How?” I ask, because this is what you do, when you’re a writer: listen. Prompt people to tell you their stories, so you can steal them and turn them into something wonderful and strange.
“I’m going to do something they can’t ignore. That they’ll never forget.” I’m sure he says that even more grandiloquently than what I’m typing here, but that’s what I remember now.
“Like what?”
“You’ll see,” he says.
“You still going to let me live?” I ask. In high school, he’d told me once that he liked me enough that I would be the last person he killed when he destroyed the world and rebuilt it. I can’t imagine why.
He snorts. “You still remember that?”
“Of course,” I say.
He looks up at the sky, which is one of those autumn skies that are almost pale white in places, cloudless and pure. We’re standing next to a couple of those dancing skeletons. The male skeleton wears a short jacket and a straw hat (well, cement) and has one arm back; the female wears a bright purple dress with deep cleavage as he dips her. How a skeleton could have breasts, well, they were dancing skeletons, for Christ’s sake. Why not give her boobs? She grits her bare teeth around a stubby red rose.
“Death,” he says. “A celebration of death. A good day to meet you here, even if you’re only writing crap now. What happened to you?”
“It’s life, not death,” I say. “We all have those skeletons dancing under our skin. That’s just us, with our skin off. So what if we die? We can still dance. That’s what I’m doing. Dancing.”
“You’re an idiot. I should have known.”
I stick my hands in my pockets and try to stop myself from vibrating. Just being that close to him is a thrill, if a somewhat disgusting one. “Don’t ever change, huh?”
“You used to be interesting.”
“I used to be suicidal. Or at least rock-bottom depressed.” I had been, too. The only thing that had saved me was thinking, You can always do it later. And then I’d go read a book.
“I’ve never been suicidal. I’m here to change the world.”
“Changing the world” is like a prayer to him, not that I dare say that out loud. I’m not sure why. Instead I start walking down the paths again and say, “You’re the idiot.”
We all make up these stories in our heads about people. Despite the fact that they’re stories about real people, they’re still just stories. Here he is, here I am, and this is all we are. We’re mutually horrified at each other. I still don’t know what made him contact me or why I agreed to meet him.
“I’m going to open a portal to another dimension,” he says. “It will destroy the world.”
We’re walking by the glass-blower’s shop, and I’m getting cold, so I stop. I pull my hands out of my pockets and hold them toward the heat.
“How?” I say.
He doesn’t say anything; when I look at him, he shakes his head. I don’t for a moment think he’s joking. Insane, but not joking.
“Stay away from Las Vegas, all right?” he says.
I smile. “That won’t be a problem.”
“And don’t warn anyone, or I’ll have you killed.”
I roll my eyes. We watch pretty trinkets being made, one at a time. That is, he watches the ovens. I watch the blowing, the turning, the sharp tap that frees the glass. I have to admit that I judge him for it, knowing that he only loves the destruction of the stock in the fire, not the making of the glass or even the final product.
“I’m going to open them up to the possibilities,” he says. “It’s going to mean something. It’s going to be like bringing a horror story into the real world. Not that crap that you write.”
I want to defend myself for a moment. But you know what? I’m proud of my nonsense. I don’t need to change anyone’s mind. I’m proud of my book, damn it, and it’s fun to read. That’s enough, then.
I say the thing that sets it all in motion: “If you destroy the world, who’s going to be left to worship you? It’s not like a book, where there’s someone reading it who will be admire or enjoy what you’ve done.”
“Me,” he says. “I’ll be the one who’s proud. Are you trying to say I need a god to be proud of me? Something outside myself? I don’t need worshippers. I need—”
He storms off almost before I realize he’s angry. I don’t follow him. Maybe if I had, things would be different. I could have talked him out of it. But at the moment I’m thinking, Here’s a guy who thinks he has the power to destroy the world. He manages apartment complexes. He has no friends, a wife who should leave him, and no money. What the fuck does he know?
After a few minutes, I feel bad. I mean, there I am, taking the image of him in my head and beating him up. I should have mocked the real guy if I’d wanted to take it out on someone. I’m abusing a clockwork doll inside my mind, for what?
I apologize to the image of him in my mind as I leave the Jackalope. My trunk is full of groceries from Trader Joe’s, and I’ve sold twenty books, so it hasn’t been a wasted trip.
I let it go.
***
I find out over Twitter. New Years’ Eve, the last day of a decade. At first I’m horrified, just like everyone else. I send money and bottled water and wonder whether I should drive down and help. I mean, I’m just a writer. It’s not like, on a day-to-day basis, I can’t just pack up and go somewhere. What I do isn’t important. But then I find out who did it, and I know it’s my fault they’re dead.
I collapse, and my family doesn’t understand what’s going on. What kind of world is this, where you can casually make a comment to a psycho and destroy hundreds of thousands of lives? I’m so angry at everyone around me that I feel like spitting blood. For some reason, I don’t feel bad so much as I hate. Why didn’t anyone notice? It can’t be all my fault. Why didn’t anyone else listen? Why should I have to bear the whole burden? Aren’t we in this all together? Doesn’t that make this everyone’s fault?
I’m not rational. And, inside it all, I can see the stories.
I go inside my head and look at those pretty, pretty rows, and I pick one up and I smash it. A cute story about two people who fall in love over a book. Another one. A mystery involving cake. A third. A cute story about a girl and a pony. I sweep my arm along the whole row of them and they crash to the ground and shatter. I thought they were universes, but it turns out they were only glass. To this day, I can’t remember what they were about, not unless I read them again.
Chris might not have changed the world, but he sure made me change my worlds. And with each one I shatter, I start to think, It would be so easy. So easy to reach outside my head and do the same thing to the whole universe.
A short crash, and it would be all over. I’m a lot worse than Chris ever was.
Why do people break things? Because it feels good.
I reach out and hold the universe, and when it’s in my hand, the universe looks small, just as small as anything I’ve made. Smaller.
What good do my stories do? What good are those small worlds? Small entertainments. A way to pass the time. Why not break them all, so we can move on to bigger and better things?
I look at it, shake it a little, and put it up on the shelf. Later, I think. A couple of stories I want to finish first. But I never seem to have the time.
***
The press tried to cover up what he’d actually done by claiming that he’d set bombs under the casinos. But they couldn’t shut up everyone who’d survived, and they couldn’t explain all the meat. I bought a piece of it, dried, on eBay. When I opened the box, my whole body vibrated like he was in the room with me. I don’t know whether that means anything. The meat smelled like fabric softener.
I write different things now, and some of my fans are his, er, fans too, I guess you could say. They tell me that he had had the power to do much worse than what he did. Who knows? Maybe I saved the world when I reminded him that if he wanted to be worshipped, he had to let somebody live.
Meanwhile, on the shelf next to the stories I’ve written since then and the story that was telling itself, I put a new image of him. It’s changed. It couldn’t help but change. Instead of a writing muse he became a pot-bellied, balding angel of death, his legs ending in tentacles, slithering toward the lights of Las Vegas across the desert, looking to make it big, to win the prize of godhead. A half-enlightened jackass trying to force his drug of choice on the world. I’m sure he’ll show up in a story sometime.
I won’t be merciful when I shake up his little world, but I’ll try to be kind.
***