North out of the broad chest of Idaho into the narrow neck, they passed through spectacular scenery. Soaring mountains, vast forests, eagles in flight.
Every encounter with Nature at her most radiant gave rise to the same thought: Humanity is a pestilence. Humanity doesn’t belong here.
He could not be counted as one of the radical environmentalists who dreamed of a day when a virulent plague could be engineered to scour every human being from the earth. He had ethical problems with the systematic extermination of an entire species, even humanity.
On the other hand, using public policy to halve the number of human beings on the planet was a laudable goal. Benign neglect of famines would delete millions. Cease the exportation of all life-extending drugs to Third World countries where AIDS raged epidemic, and additional millions would pass in a more timely fashion.
Let Nature purge the excess. Let Nature decide how many human beings she wished to tolerate. Unobstructed, she would solve the problem soon enough.
Small wars unlikely to escalate into worldwide clashes should be viewed not as horrors to be avoided, but as sensible prunings.
Indeed, where large totalitarian governments wished to expunge dissidents by the hundreds of thousands or even by the millions, no sanctions should be brought against them. Dissidents were usually people who rebelled against sensible resource management.
Besides, sanctions could lead to the foment of rebellion, to clandestine military actions, which might grow into major wars, even spiral into a nuclear conflict, damaging not just human civilization but the natural world.
No human being could do anything whatsoever to improve upon the natural world — which, without people, was perfect.
Few contributed anything positive to human civilization, either. By the tenets of utilitarian ethics, only those useful to the state or to society had a legitimate claim on life. Most people were too flawed to be of use to anyone.
Soaring mountains, vast forests, eagles flying.
Out there beyond the windshield: The splendor of nature.
In here, behind his eyes, inside where he most fully lived, waited a grandeur different from but equal to that of nature, a private landscape that he found endlessly fascinating.
Yet Preston Claudius Maddoc prided himself that he possessed the honesty and the principle to acknowledge his own shortcomings. He was as flawed as anyone, more deeply flawed than some, and he never indulged in self- delusion in this matter.
By any measure, his most serious fault must be his frequent homicidal urges. And the pleasure he took from killing.
To his credit, at an early age, he recognized that this lust for killing was an imperfection in his character and that it must not be lightly excused. Even as a young boy, he sought to channel his murderous impulses into responsible activities.
First he tortured and killed insects. Ants, beetles, spiders, flies, caterpillars…
Back then, everyone seemed to agree that bugs of all kinds were largely a scourge. Perhaps the ultimate grace is to find one’s bliss in useful work. His bliss was killing, and his useful work was the eradication of anything that creeped or crawled.
Preston hadn’t been environmentally aware in those days. His subsequent education left him mortified at the assault he had waged on nature when he’d been a boy. Bugs do enormously useful work.
To this day, he remained haunted by the possibility that he had known on some deep level that his activities were unethical. Otherwise, why had he been so secretive when pursuing his bliss?
He’d never bragged about the spiders crushed. The caterpillars dusted with salt. The beetles set afire.
And without quite thinking about it, all but unconsciously, he had escalated from insects to small animals. Mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, birds, rabbits, cats…
The family’s thirty-acre estate in Delaware provided a plenitude of wildlife that could be trapped for his purposes. In less fruitful seasons, his generous allowance permitted him to get what he needed from pet stores.
He seemed to spend his twelfth and thirteenth years in a semi-trance. So much secretive killing. Often, when he made an effort at recollection, those years blurred.
No justification existed for the wanton destruction of animals. They belonged on this world more surely than people did.
In retrospect, Preston wondered if he hadn’t been perilously close to losing control of himself in those days. That period held little nostalgic value for him. He chose to remember better times.
On the night following Preston’s fourteenth birthday, life changed for the better with the visit of Cousin Brandon, who arrived for a long weekend in the company of his parents.
A lifelong paraplegic, Brandon depended on a wheelchair.
In Preston’s inner world, where he lived far more than not, he called his cousin the Dirtbag because, for almost two years between the ages of seven and eight, Brandon had required a colostomy bag until a series of complex surgeries ultimately resolved a bowel problem.
Because the mansion boasted an elevator, all three floors were accessible to the disabled boy. He slept in Preston’s room, which had long been furnished with a second bed for friends on sleepovers.
They had a lot of fun. The Dirtbag, thirteen, possessed a singular talent for impersonation, uncannily reproducing the voices of family members and employees on the estate. Preston had never laughed so much as he had laughed that night.
The Dirtbag fell asleep around one o’clock in the morning.
At two o’clock, Preston killed him. He smothered the boy with a pillow.
Only the Dirtbag’s legs were paralyzed, but he suffered from other conditions that resulted in somewhat diminished upper-body strength. He tried to resist, but not effectively.
Having recently recovered from a protracted bout with a severe bronchial infection, the Dirtbag’s lung capacity might not have been at its peak. He died much too quickly to please Preston.
Hoping to prolong the experience, Preston had relented a few times with the pillow, giving the Dirtbag an opportunity to draw a breath but not to cry out. Nevertheless, the end came too soon.
The bedclothes had been slightly disarranged by the boy’s feeble struggle. Preston smoothed them.
He brushed his dead cousin’s hair, making him more presentable.
Because the Dirtbag died on his back, as he always slept, there was no need to reposition the body. Preston adjusted the arms and the hands to convey the impression of a quiet passing.
The mouth hung open. Preston firmly closed it, held it, waited for it to lock in place.
The eyes were wide, staring in what might have been surprise. He drew the lids shut and weighted them with quarters.
After a couple hours, he removed the coins. The lids remained closed.
Preston switched off the lamp and returned to his bed, burying his face in the same pillow with which he had smothered his cousin.
He felt that he had done a fine thing.
During the remainder of the night, he was too excited to sleep soundly, although he dozed on and off.
He was awake but pretending to oversleep when at eight o’clock, the Dirtbag’s mother, Aunt Janice — also known as the Tits — rapped softly on the bedroom door. When her second knock wasn’t answered, she entered anyway, for she was bringing her son’s morning medicines.
Planning to fake a startled awakening the instant that the Tits screamed, Preston was denied his dramatic moment when she made only a strangled sound of grief and sagged against the Dirtbag’s bed, sobbing as softly as she had knocked.
At the funeral, Preston heard numerous relatives and family friends say that perhaps this was for the best, that Brandon had gone to a better place now, that his lifelong suffering had been relieved, that perhaps the parents’ heavy grief was more than balanced by the weight of responsibility that had been lifted from their shoulders.
This confirmed his perception that he had done a fine thing.
His endeavors with insects were finished.
His misguided adventures with small animals were at an end.
