Books dress me in the origin story of a super-hero, as if there is algebra to the human heart: at the age of eleven [A] happened to a boy, thusly a poison emoliates, so that the age of twenty-four is maturity replete with title and mode of killing full sprung and sailing, and it equals [B]. This is fundamental misunderstanding of the development of an artist: an artist, before he knows what he is, records everything he sees to the DVR in his brain, taking the world home with him, and with pen, brush, processor, reshapes all he has recorded to what version he deems proper. This is how he thinks, and no Fed profiler gets this because no matter their schooling they possess cop brains; they are zealots to puzzle pieces fitting together -- block stackers. Many times and often a boy with an artist's brain does not develop properly hands nor voice; he is clumsy; he is not afforded the raw materials to build his hands, or the time to pubesce a writer's voice -- but the brain records, it overflows with vision, and it cannot be beaten, loved, or hypnotized from it's nature; with no method of releasing this energy it cools to a rage and drip-drops inside until it grows to a stalactite icicle of the stuff; and testing whether destruction can supplant creation, if the engine runs as effectively on this new fuel, he will thumbnail sketch his ideas on the deaths of animals; upon schoolgirls he frames apprentice designs. Adolescence will exasperate it. There are a thousand variations: you can't script it with some cop's brick truth. Take my lady cop: reading the profile of the Betty Lindell case, she came to a funeral to catch a killer in a crowd. Sure, I was there. She didn't see me. But I saw her, and painted her stern portrait in my head. A black lady cop, the same one down on that cold two lanes of country highway, the first to arrive and find the naked body of Betty Lindell, and after my others, with that ennui I described earlier settling on me like a flu, I pulled my own profile up on Detective Cheryl, and she seemed a genius draft pick. This will kick me into gear, was the thought.
When I got her outside her house early in the morning, post shift, coming out of her Mercury, I could see the pistol on her belt as I got up off the side lawn, and I remember already rehearsing what I would say to her when she woke up back at the camp: You know who I am; you have seen what I do; those feds gave you a stack of information; I will show you how it is wrong. Did their notes guess I'd change from young blondes to a black lady cop?
I didn't get the chance to say all this: as I came back down into the cellar, and walked in on those pale brown smiling eyes, I did not see the duplex nails she had gripped in her fist, until six of the bundle were sticking out of my thigh. The rest she jabbed up into my gut with all the force she had, (I forgot I left the nails down here).
I stumbled back, and fell through the open doorway. As Detective Cheryl passed over me she put the heel of her boot down on the bridge of my nose. Then she was gone, running up the stairs. A decision to make: chase her, and save my work, or failsafe the cabin, and escape into the forest -- and retire. Sublime woman. Imagining her escape to safety, and how the rest of her life she would go to sleep at night and wake every morning with the thought of me; might go on and achieve more in her career for the experience of this night that no profiler could learn her -- I would be the catalytic converter of her origin -- the second and third trimesters of her life, I would be her maker; parents, school, academy: dust. A dream while lying in the cellar where my craft was perfected, with a new paradigm evolving as quickly as that drawing of monkey to monkey to monkey to man; page after page of the sketchbook that was my brain filled faster than consciousness could count. My laugh. My laughing. I heard it. I don't have to kill them! I'll take them, do them up, and let them go! And watch them forever paired to me!
I didn't get the chance to say all this: as I came back down into the cellar, and walked in on those pale brown smiling eyes, I did not see the duplex nails she had gripped in her fist, until six of the bundle were sticking out of my thigh. The rest she jabbed up into my gut with all the force she had, (I forgot I left the nails down here).
I stumbled back, and fell through the open doorway. As Detective Cheryl passed over me she put the heel of her boot down on the bridge of my nose. Then she was gone, running up the stairs. A decision to make: chase her, and save my work, or failsafe the cabin, and escape into the forest -- and retire. Sublime woman. Imagining her escape to safety, and how the rest of her life she would go to sleep at night and wake every morning with the thought of me; might go on and achieve more in her career for the experience of this night that no profiler could learn her -- I would be the catalytic converter of her origin -- the second and third trimesters of her life, I would be her maker; parents, school, academy: dust. A dream while lying in the cellar where my craft was perfected, with a new paradigm evolving as quickly as that drawing of monkey to monkey to monkey to man; page after page of the sketchbook that was my brain filled faster than consciousness could count. My laugh. My laughing. I heard it. I don't have to kill them! I'll take them, do them up, and let them go! And watch them forever paired to me!
Then Detective Cheryl was over me. She had my 22 ounce Estwing. Her eyes were not smiling. My fingers touched the wet nails in my gut. She raised the mallet over her head -hauled it back like a blacksmith - my hammer!; my nails!
I said to her: Me and my friggin carpentry.
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