Fortunately, the pistol is in the trunk of the rented Ford. He has left the gun in the car precisely to avoid a temptation like this, when he feels compelled toward violence.
As often as two or three times a day, he is gripped by a desire to destroy anyone who happens to be near him—men, women, children, it makes no difference. In the thrall of these dark seizures, he hates every last human being on the face of the earth—whether they are beautiful or ugly, rich or poor, smart or stupid, young or old.
Perhaps, in part, his hatred arises from the knowledge that he is different from them. He must always live as an outsider.
But simple alienation is not the primary reason he frequently contemplates random slaughter. He needs something from other people which they are unwilling to provide, and, because they withhold it, he hates them with such passion that he is capable of any atrocity—even though he has no idea what he expects to receive from them.
This mysterious need is sometimes so intense that it becomes painful. It is a hunger akin to starvation—but not a hunger for food. Often he finds himself on the trembling edge of a revelation; he realizes that the answer is astonishingly simple if only he can open himself to it, but enlightenment always eludes him.
The killer takes a long pull on the bottle of Beck’s. He wants the beer, but he does not need it. Want is not need.
On the elevated stage, the blonde slips off her halter, exposing pale upswept breasts.
If he retrieves the pistol and expanded magazines of ammo from the trunk of the car, he will have ninety rounds. When the arrogant blonde is dead, he can kill the other dancer. Then the three muscle-bound bartenders with three headshots. He is well trained in the use of firearms—though he has no recollection of who trained him. With those five dead, he can target the fleeing crowd. Many who don’t die from gunfire will perish when trampled in the panic to escape.
The prospect of slaughter excites him, and he knows that blood can make him forget, at least for a short while, the aching need that plagues him. He has experienced the pattern before. Need fosters frustration; frustration grows into anger; anger leads to hatred; hatred generates violence—and violence sometimes soothes.
He drinks more beer and wonders if he is insane.
He remembers a movie in which a psychiatrist assures the hero that only sane people question their sanity. Genuine madmen are always firmly convinced of their rationality. Therefore, he must be sane even to be able to doubt himself.
Marty leaned against the door frame and watched while the girls took turns sitting on their bedroom vanity bench to let Paige brush their hair. Fifty strokes each.
Perhaps it was the easy rhythmic motion of the hairbrush or the tranquilizing domesticity of the scene that soothed Marty’s headache. Whatever the reason, the pain faded.
Charlotte’s hair was golden, just like her mother’s, and Emily’s was so dark brown that it was almost black, like Marty’s. Charlotte chatted nonstop with Paige throughout her brushing; but Emily kept silent, arched her back, closed her eyes, and took an almost catlike pleasure in the grooming.
The contrasting halves of their shared room attested to other differences between the sisters. Charlotte liked posters full of motion: colorful hot-air balloons against a desert twilight; a ballet dancer in mid-entrechat; sprinting gazelles. Emily preferred posters of autumn leaves, evergreens hung with heavy snow, and moonlight-silvered surf breaking on a pale beach. Charlotte’s bedspread was green, red, and yellow; Emily’s was a beige chenille. Disorder ruled in Charlotte’s domain, while Emily prized neatness.
Then there was the matter of pets. On Charlotte’s side of the room, built-in bookshelves housed the terrarium that was home to Fred the Turtle, the wide-mouthed gallon jar where Bob the Bug made his home in dead leaves and grass, the cage that housed Wayne the Gerbil, another terrarium in which Sheldon the Snake was the tenant, a second cage in which Whiskers the Mouse spent a lot of time keeping an eye on Sheldon in spite of the glass and wire that separated them, and a final terrarium occupied by Loretta the Chameleon. Charlotte had rejected the suggestion that a kitten or puppy was a more appropriate pet. “Dogs and cats run around loose all the time, you can’t keep them in a nice safe little home and protect them,” she explained.
Emily had only one pet. Its name was Peepers. It was a stone the size of a small lemon, smoothed by decades of running water in the Sierra creek from which she had retrieved it during their summer vacation a year ago. She had painted two soulful eyes on it, and insisted, “Peepers is the best pet of all. I don’t have to feed him or clean up after him. He’s been around forever, so he’s real smart and real wise, and when I’m sad or maybe mad, I just tell him what I’m hurting about, and he takes it all in and worries about it so I don’t have to think about it any more and can be happy.”
Emily was capable of expressing ideas that were, on the surface, entirely childlike but, on reflection, seemed deeper and more mature than anything expected from a seven-year-old. Sometimes, when he looked into her dark eyes, Marty felt she was seven going on four hundred, and he could hardly wait to see just how interesting and complex she was going to be when she was all grown up.
After their hair was brushed, the girls climbed into the twin beds, and their mother tucked the covers around them, kissed them, and wished them sweet dreams. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she warned Emily because the line always elicited a giggle.
As Paige retreated to the doorway, Marty moved a straight-backed chair from its usual place against the wall and positioned it at the foot of—and exactly between—the two beds. Except for a miniature battery-powered reading lamp clipped to his open notebook and a low-wattage Mickey Mouse luminaria plugged into a wall socket near the floor, he switched off all the lights. He sat in the chair, held the notebook at reading distance, and waited until the silence had acquired that same quality of pleasurable expectation that filled a theater in the moment when the curtain started to rise.
The mood was set.
This was the happiest part of Marty’s day. Story time. No matter what else might happen after rising to meet the morning, he could always look forward to story time.
He wrote the tales himself in a notebook labeled
Tonight marked the beginning of a special treat, a story in verse, which would continue through Christmas Day. Maybe it would go well enough to help him forget the unsettling events in his office.
“It rhymes!” Charlotte said with delight.
“Sssshhhhh!” Emily admonished her sister.
The rules of story time were few but important, and one of them was that the two-girl audience could not interrupt mid-sentence or, in the case of a poem, mid-stanza. Their feedback was valued, their reactions cherished, but a storyteller must receive his due respect.
He began again:
The girls were giggling just where he wanted them to giggle, and Marty could barely restrain himself from turning around in his chair to see how Paige liked it so far, as she had heard none of it until this moment. But no one would respond to a storyteller who couldn’t wait until the end for his plaudits; an unshakable air of confidence, whether faked or genuinely felt, was essential to success.
“It’s Christmas!” Charlotte and Emily answered in unison, and their immediate response confirmed that he had them in his spell.
