Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man—EM Cioran
In the morning, I walk in on Anna speaking to Kimmie in a weird way. Her throaty whisper is aimed at Kimmie's ear and I can't hear what she's saying.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm confusion inducting her into believing that she's going to have a peaceful death, and not resist."
"That's nice."
I lean in to Kimmie.
"While you're at it, why don't you confusion induct her to believe that she's a worthless cunt. You know the only value you have to the world is your pussy, right? Is this going into her subconscious?"
"Please," Anna says. "I'm trying to do something here."
"Sorry," I say. "I'll make breakfast. Good job doing a confusion induction. That's..awesome."
"Thanks, teach."
I shake my head as I walk away.
I have morning wood and this is normally the part where I would rape Kimmie but I can't bring myself to interrupt Anna's process—confusion inducting the girl to embrace her own death.
How come I never thought of that?
After breakfast I end up jerking off to video of me shooting a five year old in the head. I shot cum all over Anna's side of the bed, leaving it there for her to find, like an animal marking its territory.
I wake to the sound of a drill, then Anna coming into the bedroom almost in tears.
"I think I hurt Kimmie."
"Are you fucking her with a drill?"
Anna nods.
"Then wasn't your intention to hurt her?"
Anna says, "I think I hurt her too much."
I pull Anna down to the bed and bite her lower lip.
"Make her cum. Orgasm increases pain threshold in women."
"It does?"
I nod, looking at my beautiful girl.
"What about men?"
"Well, for some reason, when people do studies on pain threshold and orgasm, they always do them on women."
Anna bites my lip.
"Fucking perverts."
She leaves, and I lie there listening to one girl using the flat-head vibrator on another, licking the vibrator's surface to get it wet, and I can hear the squishing sounds of somebody's finger in somebody's pussy.
I go into the crate.
The finger doing the fucking is Anna's and the pussy it's fucking is also Anna's.
Anna makes Kimmie cum again, and again, and again.
She holds the vibrator to Kimmie's vulva and rubs it slowly up and down, that same motion over and over.
And while she does this, she has a finger down her own panties, and she leans back and fucks herself until she cums.
I whip my dick out and masturbate to the sight of this.
Anna looks at me, surprised.
I say, "We're all friends here, right?"
Anna's finger is moving so fast, fucking herself faster than I ever could with my cock.
I'm the last to cum.
I grab the spray nozzle from above Kimmie's chair and wash my ejaculate toward the edge of the crate.
"Anna. Can you step into my office?"
"I thought this was your office."
"Ok, can you step outside my office?"
We go into the bedroom and sit cross-legged facing each other and she sits right on my cum spot without a word and we both reach across and touch each other's genitals while we talk. That's a classic couples therapy thing, by the way—it's hard to argue with someone while you're touching their genitals and they're touching yours. Unfortunately, in practice, people are too squeamish to try this so they just keep on arguing and getting divorced and blowing each other's heads off with shotguns and things like that.
But Anna and I touch each other while we talk.
"I have to move soon," I say. "We can't be killing here forever."
"But how long have you lived here?" Anna says. "Why leave now?"
"Do you know what missing white girl syndrome is?"
"No."
"Well, it's catching up with us, given my preferences. So enjoy Kimmie, 'cause we might have to wrap up this little dog and pony show and move to like Uruguay or something."
"I want you to stop."
"I can't."
"Ok, well, I want to come with you anyway."
"You want to come with me anyway?"
"Yes. Is that so hard to believe?"
"No, it's great. Come."
"You're not gonna try to talk me out of it?"
"No. I want you with me. I want the same thing as you."
"Good. Now fuck my ass. I want you to cum in my ass, ok?"
"Ok."
And Anna lies face down in the middle of the bed.
I must have fallen asleep after I came (typical) because when I woke up Anna was asleep beside me, naked, and Kimmie was talking to us from the crate—her volume was such that it was clear she was speaking so Anna and I could hear her.
I went in there.
Kimmie was giving us her résumé.
"I do yoga. I used to play soccer when I was a kid—I was goalie. I can ice skate. I have a dog named Fluffy."
"Thank you! You can stop with the résumé. I know what you're trying to do. Where did you learn that technique?"
"The Silence of the Lambs."
"Oh, yeah," I say. "If he sees Catherine as a person and not just an object—"
Kimmie says, "—it's harder to tear her up."
"Right. Well that's not going to work. We're still going to kill you."
"Oh fuck me. Fuck me."
Kimmie shakes her head.
"You have a dog named Fluffy?"
"Yeah."
"That's a stupid name for a dog. Here's a résumé in reverse: You are a below-average intelligence, fashion-obsessed, faux-hippie bitch with an ugly pussy who doesn't know how to fuck worth shit. You're not supposed to just lie there. You're supposed to make it interesting—even if you are my slave. I barely enjoy fucking you and do you know how hard it is to make me barely enjoy fucking a 17-year-old pussy? It's pretty fucking hard. But you are dumb enough to make it possible. Instead of telling me about your dog, why don't you tell me what you're doing to make the world a better place? Do you volunteer anywhere? Teach math to the developmentally disabled? Feed the homeless? Have you ever even given a sandwich or a bagel to someone sleeping on a sidewalk? Or do you just walk by? I bet you have rich parents, don't you?"
"What do you mean by rich?"
"That's a yes."
"What does me having rich parents have to do with anything?"
"It just makes me hate you more. You must be familiar with that concept—the middle class hating the rich?"
"How do you know I'm rich?"
" 'Cause you were wearing Fendi sunglasses when we picked you up. Sari pants, hemp sandals, and Fendi sunglasses. That's a rich girl trying to hide but you prob'ly don't even realize not everyone wears $500 prescription sunglasses. That would never even cross your mind, would it."
Kimmie says nothing.
"I know, it's ok. It's who you are, it's where you're from—it just happens to disgust me. So you wanna tell me why I shouldn't kill you now? Tell me about Fluffy? Did you mention you're an ice skater?"
Kimmie nods.
I yell, "Anna, can you ice skate?"
Anna yells back, sleepily, "Yes."
"So can I," I say. "Look at that. What other unique traits do you have to offer up? Are you an artist? Do you play an instrument? Do you think I care the answer to any of these questions?"
Kimmie shakes her head.
"That's right: no."
"What if we work out a ransom-type situation?"
"No chance. A) There's no way to collect a ransom without revealing yourself. B) I don't care about money. C) I don't need the money—I have money, bitch! That I earned—I wasn't born with it like you. And D) Refer to C, B, and A!"
Kimmie turns her head to the side—the only refuge she can get from me.
"When you die, your ugly pussy is gonna die with you."
A few tears stream out of the dead girl's eyes.
"When you die, your ugly face is gonna die with you."
She closes her eyes, trying to block the tears.
"When you die, your ugly, simple little soul is gonna die with you."
She blurts out a sob, then cries full on, but without making a sound.
"And somewhere in a yard in Eugene, a dog named Fluffy is going to be running around, happy as a fucking helium balloon, having no idea you're dead, and he's never even going to mourn you. He'll just forget about you and go on being a dog."
I realize Anna is standing in the doorway to the crate, holding onto the corrugated metal with both hands, looking at the situation. She makes a come here motion with her finger and I realize she isn't judging me, she isn't mad at me—she's trying to save me.
I should have been hanging out with my girlfriend—cumming in her ass and whatnot—but instead I sat in the crate late into the night with Kimmie.
Kimmie asks me how many people I've killed.
"One-hundred? Five-hundred?"
"A serial killer with 500 victims? It's only happened a handful of times in human history—and they were all either doctors or nurses. Anyway they weren't—and I'm not—a serial killer. Serial killers have a cool-down period. They kill out of compulsion to satisfy a desire. Killing satisfies the desire. Then they stop killing while the desire remains satisfied. Then the desire returns. Then they kill again."
"So what are you?"
"I don't know that there's a name for it, but I would call those doctors and nurses who just started killing patients one day and after that never missed a day until they were caught or died—and me—I would call us process killers. A serial killer's MO isn't killing people..it's satisfying the desire—whatever that is. Like Edmund Kemper—have you heard of him?"
"Of course. I watch Investigation Discovery."
"Of course you do. Who did Kemper kill last?"
"His mother's friend."
"And next to last?"
"His mother."
"Right. What was his relationship like with his mother?"
"I don't remember."
"They didn't get along. At all. She was an alcoholic. She critiqued him constantly—in her eyes, he couldn't do anything right. She made him live in the basement from the time he was 10 because she thought he might hurt his sisters if he was allowed near them. After he killed his mother (and her friend) he turned himself in. That tells me his desire was satisfied, and all those girls he killed first we're misdirected anger at his mother. None of those girls was ever going to satisfy his desire because his desire was to get back at his mother. One he got back at his mother—boom!—no more killing. He scratched his itch. But those doctors and nurses who killed hundreds and hundreds of people—and look, I'm no criminologist, this is just my theory—I don't think they had an itch. They didn't start out with a problem which murder attempted to fix. They murdered first—probably by accident—and found that they enjoyed the process. (I'm using the word enjoy loosely here.) But they began to enjoy or perhaps just become familiar with the process of killing."
Kimmie is rapt.
"Here's a question for you," I say. "Which comes first? Planning or liking?"
"I don't get it."
"Do you first make a plan to do something which you've never done before or do you like something first and then plan to do it?"
"I guess..you like something and then you do it."
"See I would argue the opposite. The only way to know if you like something is to do it—without first knowing how it will strike you."
"Ok, that makes sense."
"See, you can plan without liking but you can't like without having first executed a plan. You can plan to try a new flavor of ice cream without liking or disliking being part of the plan. But you can't like a certain kind of ice cream without having planned, at some point in the past, to try it."
"What does this have to do with process killers? You lost me somewhere back there."
"All I'm saying is I think this theory of planning and liking supports the theory that process killers execute their first killing through being in a circumstance where that killing would happen naturally—"
"That's the plan."
"—Yes. And by executing that plan they discover they like the result of killing or something about the process itself and since there's no itch to scratch, we keep going and going and going with no cool-off period. We're not trying to solve a problem. So the killing never ends. We're obsessed with the process. And that's dangerous. It's like being in it for the journey, not the destination—if you've ever heard that paradigm."
"Yeah, in Sunday school."
I laugh.
"Do you believe in God?" I ask.
"Yes," Kimmie says.
"So? Are you in it for the journey..or the destination?"
"We're supposed to be in it for both."
"Is that what your Sunday school teacher told you?"
Kimmie nods.
"I guess it doesn't matter," I say.
"Why doesn't it matter?"
"Well, I mean, if you're in it for the journey, your journey's almost over. And if you're in it for the destination..then..you're almost there."
Kimmie lies there quiet a long time, her scarred, naked body stretched out, open to anything I wanted to do to it.
She finally speaks, and what she says is:
"Do you really think my pussy is ugly?"
"Look me in the face."
She does.
"In a few days I'm gonna shoot you in the head with a Glock. It's not gonna matter how pretty your pussy is then."
She looks at me without blinking.
"Will you please give me a straight answer to something?"
"Sure."
"How many girls."
I think about bullshitting her but I decide she deserves her straight answer.
"A thousand as part of my work. But they were rush jobs, batch jobs, so I don't really count them. Just a thousand tiny little learning experiences, one a day, on average, over a period of four years. Since then, two-hundred fifty, that I've been able to take my time with."
"Take your time being a month."
"Give or take a few weeks, yes. I hope I can do another hundred before I retire."
"And you'd retire because you got bored of doing this..or?"
"Because my physical strength would wane, and..65 is the typical retirement age, isn't it? After that I would move into a 'living community for active seniors,' go fishing, play chess, catch up on my reading..stuff like that."
"Do you believe you'll be judged for what you do?"
"No. But if I'm wrong I'm'onna have a lot of 'splainin' to do!"
I smile but Kimmie does not smile back.
When I slip into bed that night Anna's back is to me. I feel I need to apologize for ignoring her.
"You probably wonder what I'm doing in there so much lately."
"Oh I know what you're doing."
"What is that?"
"Saying goodbye."