The Convulsion Factory

something inherently noble.”

“Keep thinking that, if it helps.” He chuckled. “Do you think pharmaceutical companies want to cure cancer? Not in a million years. They won’t wipe it out because of economics. Get rid of a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry? All they want is to cure some individual patients … and keep the hope alive in everyone else.” He settled back in his chair with a grin. “So save the self-righteousness. I may disgust you, and you may hate me. But your job would never be the same without me.”

“And how do you feel about the continuing cycle of murder? By now you must know about the copycat killer who started imitating you last month.”

Darryl’s forehead creased. “I feel honored,” he said slowly. “I influenced a stranger’s destiny.” A broad, dawning grin. “For once, I was the inspiration. The growth cycle continues.”

Fifty minutes later, once the interview was concluded, Sandra hurried to the nearest bathroom and hung over the toilet with dry heaves. She’d eaten nothing all day, but the rejection reaction was the same.

The following week — after editing, rearranging, splicing, and redubbing — the five-part series on Darryl Hiller was shown on the eleven o’clock news.

And drew the largest audience in ActioNews 8’s history.

*

November is the cruelest month, but ActioNews 8 weathers it well. They’re top of the heap in a nine-station market, no small thanks due to Sandra Riley and her considerable drawing power. She’s now a weeknight anchor with a hefty salary kicked up into six figures, and management’s only cause for fretting is that her agent would contract her new position for no more than a year. She has to be free to jump when those inevitable network offers start to materialize.

The copycat Tapeworm gives them a body every few weeks. It’s not the original rapist-murderer; the DNA evidence he leaves behind proves that. Of the original, no one knows. But Tapeworm is as Tapeworm does, and the public tunes fearfully in, dreading another dose of reality, enthralled when they get it. Sandra anchors the footage shot in the field by a younger protegee who idolizes her, and every time, Sandra dies a little more inside. Remembering her role. But her makeup never runs.

The package arrives via courier one afternoon, brown paper wrapper, neatly handlettered and marked to her attention at ActioNews 8 studios. No return address, but the paperwork was done across the country on the west coast.

She pops it into the VCR in her office — a larger one now, with windows — when she gets a free moment on this blustery November afternoon. She presses PLAY and sits.

The amateur filmmaker has rigged up a cheerful title card, reading Sex, Death, and Videotape 2. Sandra sits straighter and bites down on a knuckle as her eyes widen

and there he is, Darryl Hiller seated on a stool with nothing in the background but stark white. Medium close-up, chest and head and shoulders. The camera doesn’t move, as if tripod- mounted.

“There was so much I wanted to tell you before I left last June.” He gazes directly at her without blinking. “But you understand the situation. I know you do. You always do.

“There was a lot I didn’t understand when we did our interview. Not that I was wrong, I haven’t been wrong in years, I was just … incomplete. When I told you I had to go beyond to the next level, I had no idea. No idea. Remember how you asked me how I felt about inspiring someone to follow in my footsteps and I said it felt good? I found out it meant more than that. It meant there’d been a change in me. I wasn’t just a rat anymore, because I’d created something in my own image. He wouldn’t have existed without me. And that meant I’d just been upgraded to cancer.” He starts to grin, the only one who gets the joke. “That’s how I got away at the sentencing. They escorted me right out of that bathroom and took the cuffs off me themselves. Poor, poor Reggie Blaine. Innocent bystander. All I had to do was break one guy’s face and tell one lie.”

Sandra forgets to breathe, begins to comprehend. Recalling the footage of Reggie Blaine, Victim, forced to wear jailhouse orange. Except there was only one set of clothes all along, she knows this now. Knows it as surely as she knows she was a midwife for an entirely new aberration. She dies inside all the more for it. But her blank- faced shell sits, watching

as Darryl Hiller’s face contorts ripples rearranges. Pudgy cheeks, red hair, she has seen it before, weeping for the cameras along marble corridors. And then it’s gone, replaced by a new face that could easily belong to the boy next door. But the voice continues:

“You see, I became the cancer —”

new faces, leering at the lens

“— and I’ll be back to see you very very soon —”

a rogue’s gallery of anonymity

“— but you won’t see me —”

lifting a roll of vinyl tape to the camera eye and peeling a strip free to lick its sticky underside

“— because I’ve learned the one fundamental trick of cancer:”

his last word on flashcut repeat, a different face speaking with every flick of the editing console

“Mutation/Mutation/Mutation/Mutation/Mutation.”

Fade to black.

Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt

I was a couple years adrift out of school, thinking yes, today is probably the day I’ll kill myself, when the weatherman went and upstaged anything I could’ve done.

They say he was distraught over a woman, a restraining order, negative publicity. Family problems too, you have to figure. I hadn’t heard a word of any of it. He had a pilot’s license and his own plane, and what he did was, he aired one final weather report on the early evening news, smiled at the city one last time, then drove out to his plane, got cleared for takeoff, climbed 500 feet into the blue summer sky, then turned flaps down and did a full- throttle nosedive straight into the runway. This while rush-hour traffic was still clogging Chicago’s paved arteries. They say the fireball was a thing of beauty, although not so for the pieces they finally pulled from the wreckage.

And I ask you: Now how can you follow something like that?

Megan, one of my housemates, taped the later re-broadcast of his final weather report, and we’d watch it over and over, running it back and back again. We were looking for clues. Anything. But the weatherman gave up nothing. Not one thing.

“I just realized something,” she finally said, days after the burial. “He didn’t even fly around for one last look. Just got the plane up and did it.” Then she grew very reflective. “I couldn’t have done it that way. I’d have to fly around, make some goodbyes, see everything from above. Make one final bid for a little genuine pathos. The way he did it … that’s so cold.”

Megan was right. It had been a very singular-minded devotion to purpose. No wonder he’d been a success in his career.

*

The summer I was ten I played Little League baseball with a number of other boys who were either too lanky or too pudgy, and who spent every spare moment of every game with one fearful eye turned to the stands, where our fathers sat, expectant and often quite rabid. I was not a star player.

I can’t remember if it was my idea, or the coach’s, but every time we took the field, I dangled my glove from a loose arm and went trudging out into right field, as if it were my own personal Siberia. Whether my own altruism,