Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Twenty

At Sara’s instruction, they formed a great semicircle in front of him, sitting with their legs folded or stretched out full-length. He sat by the side of the fire, waiting. At a nod from Sara he got to his feet and faced them.

He said, “My name is Mark. Sara says I’m supposed to tell you my story. I’m a killer. In the past eight years I’ve murdered a hundred women.” There was a collective intake of breath. “A hundred and one women,” he said, and turned toward Sara. “I don’t know where to start.”

“With the first woman.”

“She was a prostitute in Kansas City. I went with her to a motel. I hadn’t intended to kill her. She said something that made me angry and I hit her and knocked her out. Then I thought of killing her to protect myself, and I did, and it was very exciting. I enjoyed it, I loved it.”

“Tell us how you did it, Mark.”

“I strangled her. With her blouse.” His eyes were closed. He couldn’t meet their gaze. “Now what?” he asked.

“Tell us about each of them, Mark.”

“I can’t remember everything.”

“Yes you can. No one ever forgets a thing. It’s all in there somewhere, every book you ever read, every person you ever met. I’ll help you remember.”

He took a breath. “The second woman,” he said, and he felt Sara walking around in his mind, opening cupboards in his memory. “The second woman,” he said, and her image came into his mind, “was a student at KU. That’s the University of Kansas, that’s in Lawrence. She was hitchhiking. I asked her to get something from the glove compartment, and when she leaned forward I grabbed her head and slammed it against the dashboard until she was unconscious. I took her into an unplowed field and killed her the minute she regained consciousness.” He could smell the tall grass and hear the chirping of crickets. He could feel her fear and resignation as she saw death coming. “I strangled her. I used my hands. At first I couldn’t kill her, but then I got the right grip and, and I killed her.”

“And the third woman?”

“I don’t remember.” A nudge within his mind, a shift, a clearing. “She was working late in an office. I was in the building to see somebody and he had forgotten the appointment, his office was closed. I was on my way out and I saw her at her desk. She looked very scholarly, she had aviator glasses and a short haircut, and she was bent over a deskful of papers. I went in and asked her if she had a key to the men’s washroom, and when she turned to get it I picked up a letter opener from the desk…”

And the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth. And the twenty-sixth. And the fortieth.

And on and on and on.

Early in his recitation, a woman named Ardith sprang to her feet and cried out that she could not listen to this. She made her way out of the semicircle and headed off through the trees. Bud and Martha caught up with her and got her to lie down and breathe.

As Mark continued telling his story, more people went into hyperventilation. Sometimes this was preceded by an emotional outburst. One woman said she had been a rapist’s victim, another that her father had abused her sexually. In each case, the person wound up on the edge of the semicircle, lying down, breathing, with someone on hand to monitor the process.

Women were not alone in reacting in this fashion. Men, too, found themselves launched into emotional upset by Mark’s story, and it didn’t much matter whether they were newcomers or veteran walkers. Dingo, the outlaw biker, stalked from the circle while Mark was telling about a schoolteacher he had killed with a hammer; moments later he was lying on the ground at the foot of a tall tree, his whole body rigid, his breath locked in his throat, while Kimberley sat on her haunches beside him and stroked his forehead and soothed him and made sure he continued to breathe without interruption.

Sometimes, when something dramatic occurred in his audience, Mark would stop talking. But when the drama subsided and the person involved was off to one side breathing, he would pick up his narrative precisely where he had left off. The memory he needed was always available to him. As he finished reporting each act of murder, the memory of the next was immediately at hand, sometimes with a little mental nudge from Sara. He described some women at length and others not at all, told the manner of killing in a few words or a paragraph. Often he found himself recalling things of which he’d had no conscious awareness at the time, and once in a while he would fall silent, struck by something he’d just heard himself say. No one interrupted those silences, and after a time he would resume speaking.

It was fully dark by the time he finished. He told of how he’d decided not to kill T.J. and had had to struggle with himself to keep from murdering her anyway. And he told about the woman at the gas station, and how he’d driven the kitchen knife clear through her body. And then he was done.

The fire was a heap of glowing coals. Guthrie approached, put some more wood on it. Flames sprang up. Guthrie went back and sat down again. Mark was still standing, facing them.

Sara said, “Well, what are we going to do with Mark? Shall we turn him in to the police?”

“No,” someone said.

“Why not? Look at all the crimes he committed.”

“What can the police do with him? Lock him up?”

“If he’s locked up he can’t commit any more crimes,” Sara said. “Mark, are you dangerous? Will you kill again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could you kill now? Look around you. Is there anyone here you could stab or strangle?”

He shuddered. “It makes me sick to think of it,” he said. “But I did it before. I did it over a hundred times.”

“You’re not that person now.”

“But where did that person go? Isn’t he still inside me?”

“Yes, indeed he is. Well, what could we do with you if we don’t turn you in to the police? Earlier you said you wanted to die. What does everyone think? Should we kill Mark?”

“No.”

“No, we don’t kill people.”

“No, Mark is our brother.”

His throat knotted at that last remark. He felt an ache at the back of his throat, fierce pressure behind his eyes.

“Should Mark kill himself?”

“Mark is done with killing. He’s killed himself a hundred and one times, isn’t that enough?”

Sara sighed. “They won’t let you die,” she said. “And it’s just as well. You didn’t come here to die. You came here to be healed, the same as everybody else.”

“To be healed from killing?”

“To be healed of all that’s ill within you. That’s the real reason everybody does everything. Why do you think you killed those women?”

“Because I enjoyed it. Because it thrilled me, because it brought me pleasure.”

“And why do you think that was so?”

“Because—” He looked at her. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe because I’m a monster.”

“You’re not a monster. You’ve done monstrous things, but that doesn’t make you a monster. You killed to heal your hurt and anger, you killed to mend the tears in your spirit. And it felt good. But it didn’t really work, and when the good feeling wore off you hurt more than ever, and so you had to kill more and more. And finally it didn’t work at all and it didn’t even feel good, and you couldn’t stop. And you had to stop, and you knew that, and you came here. Because you knew you would find the space here to heal yourself.”

“How?”

“By doing what you’ve already done, coming in touch with the parts of you that were always sickened by what you’ve done. And by standing in front of us and telling us who you are and what acts you’ve performed. You’ve already had a powerful healing experience tonight, Mark, and we’ve all been healed for sharing in it. Look at all the people who had to lie down and breathe. You touched something in each of them, something they needed to process in order to be whole themselves. Their own bottled-up pain, their hurt and fear and anger. Their death urges. And the killer inside them, the killer they couldn’t know about until you revealed your own killer self. You’ve played a great part in helping all of us grow, Mark. That’s why we’re so grateful to you.”

“Grateful,” he said.

“Oh, yes. You’ve given us a great gift. You’ll give us another when we manage to forgive you.”

“How can anyone forgive me?”

“How can we dare to do otherwise? We don’t do anything for you by forgiving you. And we don’t hurt you by withholding our forgiveness. We only hurt ourselves. There’s a woman here who lost most of her family in Nazi concentration camps. She spent two days last week forgiving Hitler. Do you think it had any effect on Hitler? The son of a bitch has been dead for over forty years, and I don’t suppose it makes much difference to him whether or not Ida Marcum forgives him. But she had angina so bad they wanted to do bypass surgery, except they didn’t think she’d survive it. And now she’s fine.”

He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate. It seemed very simple to him. He had done bad things. Now he should be punished. Instead she talked about healing, and he didn’t know what he had that had to be healed.

As if reading his mind, she said, “Of course you’d rather be punished. That would be much easier than going through what you haven’t gone through in forty years. Who do you think you’ve been trying to kill all your life, Mark?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“When I was with Kimberley,” he said, “a voice told me she was my sister. And ever since then, whenever I’ve looked at one of the women here, I had the same thought. That she was my sister.”

“So?”

“Maybe all along I’ve been trying to kill my sister.” He considered it, then shook his head decisively. “But that doesn’t make sense. I was an only child, I never had a sister.”

“You wanted to kill all kinds of women, didn’t you, Mark?”

“Yes.”

“They weren’t all of a physical type.”

“No. I once had the thought—”

“Yes?”

“I hate to say it. All right. I had the thought that I wished all the women in the world had a single throat, and I had my hands around it.”

Three women who had sat through everything up to this point rose as one, made their way through the crowd, and stretched out and began breathing. Sara didn’t pay any attention to them. She said, “When someone’s angry at all the women in the world, it usually means there’s one woman he’s really angry at.”

“Who?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“Not my mother.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “It’s always your parents, isn’t that the message of psychology? But it can’t be true this time. I never knew my mother. She died when I was born.”

“So you couldn’t possibly have any feelings about her.”

“How could I? I never laid eyes on her. I have no memory of her. And how could I be trying to kill somebody who’s been dead as long as I’ve been alive?”

“Do you remember your birth, Mark?”

“Of course not. Nobody does.”

“Everybody does, but not everybody allows the memory to surface. Do you know anything at all about your birth?”

“Just that I lived and she died.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

“I’m not surprised. I could tell you things, but you have to look at them yourself. You’re going to have to lie down and breathe, Mark. Everybody here will be supporting you with their breath. You’re going to have to go to a very frightening place, but you were there once before and you survived it the last time. You’ll survive it now.”

“I…”

“Yes, Mark?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Good,” she said.

The semicircle was a full circle now, and he was in the middle of it. He was lying on his back with his arms at his sides and his eyes closed. Someone’s long-sleeved shirt, rolled into a ball, was under his neck for a pillow. Sara sat on one side of him, Richard’s mother Ellie on the other.

He did as he was told, drawing full breaths into his upper chest, beginning to exhale as soon as he had completed inhaling, then letting the next breath flow out of the first one. Sara held his hand and Ellie guided his breathing, telling him when to breathe faster or slower, more shallowly or more deeply, to see his chest filling with light when he inhaled, to let the exhale flow effortlessly out of him.

Almost immediately something started to happen. He felt a light tingling, first in his hands and feet, then deepening there and spreading gradually throughout his body. His arms were rigid at his sides, and the volume of energy flowing through his hands was so great that he could not flex his fingers. He no longer knew if Sara was still holding his hand. He couldn’t even feel the ground beneath his palms.

Thoughts tumbled through his mind, vanishing from view before he could identify them. He was bathed in feelings, one after another. He would snatch at an idea and try to follow along after it, and evidently it led him away from consciousness, because Ellie would be shaking him, urging him to breathe, and it would seem to him that he had never stopped breathing, but at her command he would rouse himself from his reverie and fill his lungs with air.

And then there was a point where he felt cramped, confined. He was warm, too, impossibly warm, roasting, and furious with whoever had decided to build up the fire. He was going to suffocate or die of the heat, and he couldn’t understand why nobody would do anything, and his fury mounted and he pounded at the earth with his rigid hands and vented his anger in a wordless roar.

Then more things happened, and it seemed they happened very quickly. His breathing accelerated, so that he was gulping air as quickly as he could. But he could not get enough air, and his throat locked and he couldn’t breathe. Sara was bending over him and Ellie was cradling his head in her arms, shouting at him to breathe, telling him he could do it, but he couldn’t do it, his throat was locked shut, he couldn’t get any air in or out, he was going to die like this, he was going to suffocate, the light within him would go out, and all these fucking women could think to do was tell him to breathe breathe breathe, what was the matter with the bitches, why didn’t she do something, why couldn’t she help him, what fucking good was she, she might as well be a corpse for all the goddamned good she was doing him—

And then he got the breath release. Whatever had been holding on let go, and he drew air into his lungs, and the breath flowed in and out of him now as if it were breathing him. His lungs filled and emptied, filled and emptied, keeping time to some unheard metronome. He had never breathed so deeply before, his lungs had never filled themselves so completely, and air had never had such a sweet richness to it. You could live on air like this, you could nourish yourself with it, and it was so good, everything was so good, the world was so good and all the people in it. And he felt their presence now, all of them, circling him, breathing with him, supporting his breathing with theirs, and his heart filled up and overflowed, it felt too big for his chest, and he wept, God, how he wept, he couldn’t help it, he couldn’t stop crying.

“Mark? How do you feel?”

How did he feel? “Strange. Different. Wonderful.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“I breathed and I couldn’t breathe and then I could.”

“Yes.”

“It was very hot and I felt…trapped. I couldn’t get out. Oh!”

“You know what was happening?”

“It didn’t feel like a memory. It felt as though I was reliving it. I was there, I was going through it.”

“You were in the birth canal.”

“Nobody would help me. She wouldn’t help me. She just quit.” His eyes widened. “Is that when she died?”

“Yes.”

“I was so angry. I wanted to kill her. And she died.”

“Yes.”

“And then I couldn’t get out. And I couldn’t breathe! My neck, I was strangling, I couldn’t get any air.”

Her hand settled onto his. She said, “Mark, your mother died giving birth to you. I get that her heart gave out, but it’s not too important exactly what happened.”

“That’s what it was, she had a weak heart. Someone told me that. How did you know?”

“I picked it up, but it’s not too important exactly what happened to her. What happened to you is that she stopped helping you, and you had a tough time being born. And you came out with the cord wrapped twice around your neck. You couldn’t breathe. You came fairly close to dying.”

“But she was the one who died.”

“Yes, she was the one who died and you were the one who lived. And you had been angry at her, you wanted her to die, you were mad enough to kill her. So you grew up thinking you had killed her.”

“That’s crazy. I didn’t know her, I didn’t remember her. I didn’t remember any of this.”

“If you didn’t remember it, what was it doing in your memory just now? How could you relive it if you didn’t have the memory tucked away in there?”

“But I never knew I remembered it.”

“You knew enough to suppress the memory. If you didn’t know that much you couldn’t have forgotten what happened. Because you picked up some powerful false information about yourself on the way through the birth canal. You were a killer. Your aliveness killed the woman you cared most about. In order for you to be fully alive, a woman had to die.”

“God.”

“You kept all of this hidden from yourself, but it was always there. For years you killed women in your fantasies. They died and you were alive. Then, when you began to succeed in the business world, you expressed more of your aliveness in the real world. And, if you were going to be alive, women were going to have to die.”

“It’s so crazy.”

“But so logical. They died and you drew life from them. The light went out of their eyes and came into yours. Some of them you stabbed in the heart and they died as she did. But more often they died the way you almost died, gasping for air with the cord around your neck. A cord, a piece of clothing, a length of wire, they were all stand-ins for the umbilical cord. For nine months you drew life through it, and at the end it almost took your life back.”

“I didn’t strangle all of them.”

“No. But you just went through the list for us, Mark, and most of the deaths were of that type. Some died of broken necks, and that’s pretty close. And there were the ones you drowned and smothered, the one with her lips and nostrils glued shut. They all died for lack of air. And you liked to look at their eyes when they were dying. You wanted to see what had almost happened to you.”

“I killed in other ways.”

“Because you became addicted to it. Once an addiction is established it doesn’t matter what initiated the behavior. By the time a person has become an alcoholic, it’s immaterial what led him to drink. From that point on, the habit causes itself. It works the same way with killing.”

He thought about it, then nodded. She couldn’t see him nod, but it didn’t seem to matter what she could or couldn’t see.

He said, “What happens now?”

“Everybody goes to sleep. It’s pretty late, and we get up when the sun gets us up.”

“After that. What happens to me?”

“What do you want to happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“You won’t let me get away with a thing, will you?”

“Only murder. What do you want to happen?”

“It’s crazy. I’m afraid to say it.”

“Say it anyway.”

“I want to stay here.”

“Here? Here in De Smet Forest? Here in South Dakota?”

“I want to stay with all of you.”

“We’re not staying here, you know. We’re walking across the country.”

“I know that. I want to walk with you.”

“Why were you afraid to say that?”

“I’m still afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That you won’t want me to come.”

She nodded slowly. “Well, that’s understandable,” she said. “And I can’t really answer for the group.” She extended a hand to them. “What do you all say? What should Mark do?”

And they answered her:

“Come with us, Mark.”

“You have to come.”

“He’s part of it now. He can’t quit.”

“Mark is our brother.”

“Mark, you couldn’t leave us even if you wanted to.”

“Mark, we love you.”

“You belong with us, Mark. You’re one of us.”

He was crying again. He couldn’t help it.

Through his tears he said, “How…how can you all want me?”

“Look at the show you put on for us,” Sara said. “We don’t have television out here, you know. We’re starved for entertainment.”

“But I’m a murderer.”

“A murderer kills people. You used to kill people. You used to be a murderer. But you don’t do that anymore.”

“But—”

“That was then and this is now.”

“Is it that easy?”

“Do you want it to be harder?”

“I don’t understand,” he said. “How can you forgive me after what I’ve done?”

“That’s the easy part. How can you forgive yourself?”

“I can’t.”

“You will, if you stay with us. It won’t be easy, but you’ll find out how. Can you forgive your mother?”

He stared at her. “Forgive her? There’s nothing to forgive!”

“There must be. You’ve been trying to kill her for the past eight years. And what do you mean there’s nothing to forgive? That bitch quit on you. She almost smothered you and then she almost strangled you. Can you forgive her?”

“Of course.”

“It’s not that easy. You have to find the part of you that hasn’t forgiven her and let go of it. You’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“What kind of work?”

“The kind you did tonight. Breathing. Sharing yourself. Opening the doors to all the sealed-off chambers. Seeing everything you don’t want to see. Facing everything you’re afraid of. But all you really have to do is walk. If you do that, everything else you have to do will reveal itself to you.”

He thought about what she’d said. “I don’t have much choice,” he said. “Do I?”

“Not a whole lot.”

“I can’t go back to Kansas, can I?”

“Not without a pair of silver shoes.”

“I mean—”

“To your family. No, I’m afraid you can’t, Mark. Maybe someday you’ll run into them on the road somewhere. But you can’t ever go back.”

“And the police—”

“Won’t bother you while you’re walking. You’re safe as long as you’re with us.”

“It makes the choice easy, doesn’t it?” He drew a breath. “The only thing is it seems as though I’m getting off too easy.”

“Too easy?”

“Yes. I killed over a hundred women, and all I have to do—”

“Is spend the rest of your life healing yourself and the planet. You’re right, Mark. You’re getting off much too easy. It would be ever so much harder for you to have to spend three minutes in an electric chair. And it would do so much more for you and the world.” She touched his hand. “Go to sleep now,” she said. “Things will make more sense in the morning.”