Collecting Cooper

chapter two

The thumb is inside the jar, suspended in liquid murky with age. The lid is sealed tight and the jar safely cuddled by bubble wrap. The whole thing is packed inside a cardboard box the size of a football, the corners crushed in slightly, the contents surrounded by hundreds of pieces of jelly bean-shaped polystyrene packaging, each about the same size as the very thumb they’re protecting. The box is in the hands of a courier driver with an untucked shirt with the bottom two buttons open. He looks impatient. He looks frustrated by the heat. His eagerness to leave is evident in the way he thrusts his electronic signature pad into Cooper’s hands. The pad is the size of a paperback and Cooper awkwardly scrawls his name onto it. The driver gives him the box and tells him to have a good day, and a few seconds later he’s reversing from the driveway, the wheels spinning up small pieces of tar-coated shingle from the road that plink against the undercarriage. Cooper stands there watching him, holding on to the box that feels very light. He plays his fingernail along the side of the stamps-there are a dozen of them, slapped onto the side along with a declaration form that lies. The stickers and stamps give it an exotic look, as though it has traveled from faraway places, routed through distant lands, that the contents could be anything-just not that of the severed thumb. None of the seals have been broken. If they had, it would have been the police coming to his door, not a courier driver.

He locks his front door against the heat of the morning sun. Headlining the news all week has been the heat wave. It arrived in Christchurch six days ago and set up camp. It’s started a death toll that’s still in the single figures but expected to hit double digits by the weekend. It’s melting the tar seal in roads and burning tussock and trees and killing farm stock. Drownings and road rage are up and every day the sky somewhere in the city is clouded with smoke from a burning house or factory. He makes his way along the air-conditioned hallway to his air-conditioned study on the second floor, where diplomas line the walls, each of them perfectly level and equidistant to the next, the glass covering them clean, each of them small windows to his past achievements. He rests the package on his desk. He can only imagine what other people in his field would be saying right now.

He runs a knife blade along the tape. He’d like to know where the other thumb was posted, whether the recipient ripped into their box like a Christmas present. The cardboard edges spring upward on their folded creases. The jelly bean polystyrene whispers against his hands as he searches inside. His fingers close around the lumpy exterior of bubble wrap.

This is it.

The thumb looks fresh. The reality, however, is different. The thumb hasn’t been attached to its owner for over a year. In an ideal world he’d be looking at the whole set. Thumbs and fingers all attached to the hands, but they were all separated soon after death and the thumb was all he could afford. Other parts, bigger parts, all went to higher bidders. He licks his lips, his mouth so dry he can’t swallow. He drops the bubble wrap and moves to the first of his two bookcases. He sits the jar on the top shelf into the gap he made the day he won the auction. In a world of collectors, in a world of addicts, collecting the works of serial killers or saving the weapons they use, or the words they have written and the clothes they wore, or the paper their original confession was written on or the handcuffs they were arrested in is no different from collecting stamps or bobble-head action figures. Eighty percent of his own collection is made up of books. The rest is made up of a few knives, a few articles of clothing; he has some private police reports too which he shouldn’t have. Until now the most unique piece he owned was a pillowcase that was used by a bellboy in an Australian hotel to cover the faces of three different women he killed. He turns the jar, studying the thumb, aware of how creepy it is, and also how creepy it is that he bought it. He won it online through a private auction, one he was invited to bid on through contacts he’s nurtured through previous auctions. He’s still not entirely sure why he wanted it. He didn’t, not in the beginning. He saw it and thought it was crazy to own a body part, but the more he thought about it, the more he wanted it. He must have been crazy. What was he thinking? That he could put it on display and show people the next time he threw a dinner party? The shelves of his study are full of the other memorabilia he’s won over the years, both from killers and victims. It is for others to debate whether the collecting of these items creates a market for death. His focus is purely educational. If he is to learn, if he is to teach others about methods and a killer’s drive, then he must surround himself with these objects. It isn’t a hobby, it’s a job. And the thumb is more of an. . he isn’t sure. Indulgence is the wrong word. Curiosity works better. Yet it’s more simple than that-it came down to him wanting it.

The arrival of the package has left him running late. His criminal psychology students will soon be staring at a whiteboard and no lecturer. The thumb has pushed him enough off schedule that he’s going to have to skip breakfast and head straight into getting caught in traffic. He swallows a couple of vitamin pills and heads through to the garage and backs out the car.

The sun is climbing steadily into the sky, shortening the shadows from the trees and making the floating strands of spiderweb glint in the light. The radio is on and he’s listening to a talk-back station, the current debate one that’s been raging in the news lately-whether or not New Zealand should bring back the death penalty. It started as a flippant remark, the prime minister making a bad joke when asked what they were going to do to try and curb the country’s growing crime rate and growing prison population, but it snowballed into other people backing the statement and asking why the government can’t really consider it. After all, if death was good enough for the victims, why not give that same courtesy to their killers?

Cooper isn’t sure where he stands on the issue. He isn’t sure a first-world country should be practicing third-world punishments.

He puts the gear stick in park and climbs out to close the garage door because the damn automatic opener broke about two months ago and the service agent is still waiting on parts that were supposed to arrive back then. He can feel the warmth from the ground through the soles of his shoes. He breaks into a sweat a few paces from the door. The breeze is light and feels hot enough to ignite. All week people have been walking around with short sleeves and shortened nerves. He can smell marijuana from the goddamn surfer across the road who likes to spend his mornings and evenings and the hours in between using his lotto money to get as high as a kite. His shirt dampens with each stride. He’s so distracted by the thumb and the heat that he suddenly realizes he’s picked his briefcase back up and is carrying it with him.

“Weird,” he says, and when he turns back to the car it gets even weirder. A man he’s never seen before is standing next to it.

“Excuse me,” the man says, and even though he’s in his midthirties there’s something about him that makes Cooper think of him as a kid, it could be the floppy hair hanging across his forehead, or it could be the corduroy pants twenty years out of date. “Have you got the time?”

“Sure,” Cooper says, and he looks down at his watch, and when he does a sharp cramp explodes in his chest. He jerks the briefcase into his body with enough force to pop it open. The contents spill onto the driveway and a moment later he collapses next to them, every muscle and limb well beyond his control. The pain extends to his stomach and legs and groin, but mostly it’s his chest that hurts. The man lowers the gun and crouches down next to him, brushing his hair out of his eyes.

“It’s going to be okay,” the kid says, at least that’s what Cooper thinks he says, he can’t really tell, because at the same time a chemical smell wafts over him and something is pushed into his face and he can’t do a thing to fight it. It’s at that moment the darkness rushes in and takes him from his collection.