One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living—EM Cioran
She hallucinated on and off for three days, and I sat beside her the whole time. She would wake up and try to lean over far enough to see the heart monitor.
"What does it say?"
"You're completely fine, Anna; your heart is fine."
She had developed a delusion under the crystal meth that her heart was beating too fast. It was a perfect 88 beats per minute. A tiny bit high, but perfectly safe.
"What is it?"
"You're having a delusion that it's too high so if I tell you what it is, you're going to think it's too high no matter what I say."
"Just please tell me what it is."
"Do you even know what a normal resting heart rate is? Besides, have you ever heard of biofeedback? Every time you ask me what your heart rate is your heart rate goes up—so the best thing for you to do, trust me, is find something else to think about."
"I didn't know crystal meth was a hallucinogen."
"That's 'cause you don't know your drugs. Did you know ecstasy was a hallucinogen? Did you know cocaine was a hallucinogen? Lots of drugs have hallucinogenic properties but you never experience them in the low doses people usually take them in."
"Cocaine is a hallucinogen?"
"Yes."
"What do you see?"
"Well you have to take a lot of it—and it helps if you shoot it. But if you shoot enough cocaine you'll see flickering points of light like a white firework, kind of—it's different for every person, but it's a very abstract type of hallucinogen. People think that to be a hallucinogen, a drug has to be psychedelic, whatever that means. You know, hallucinating doesn't just mean seeing patterns on LSD."
"I've never been through an experience like the one I just had."
"I imagine you haven't."
"I mean those were hallucinations like people were chasing me and setting up guns to shoot me—"
"But they never actually shot you, did they?"
"No."
"Tell me what else you saw."
"The police were arresting me, but they moved in slow motion, like the process of putting on a handcuff took an hour."
"That sounds difficult."
"It was difficult, because I had an hour to think about my guilt—why they were arresting me—and that was for each handcuff."
"But you escaped, 'cause you're here with me now."
I put a hand on her knee.
"That's so fucked up," she says, and she's crying.
"What is?"
"I do feel better being back here with you," she says.
She's sobbing.
"The drug is just breaking you down. You'll be ok," I say.
"Until you kill me," she says.
"You know what one of the keys to a happy life is?" I say.
"What," she says.
"You live it one day at a time. I'm not going to kill you today. I promise. So don't worry about it today. It's a waste of time."
She laughs uncontrollably. Unstoppably. For a second I think she's going to choke. When she manages to stop long enough to speak, what she says is:
"You're a zen master."
Then she goes back to cracking herself up, laughing like I've hardly ever seen anyone laugh—that uncomfortable, yet completely letting go kind of laugh. Like she didn't care anymore.
"I'm not a zen master. I just happen to be 30 years older than you and in that time I've picked up a few things. I'm the same lost human being I was at your age—at 24—at 10, at five."
"What's the youngest girl you've killed?"
I consider bullshitting her but think better of it.
"Five."
"Oh!"
She crunches her eyebrows down over reproaching eyes, tries to move as far away from me in the chair as possible.
"What?! What you just learned is the tip of the iceberg, young lady."
"Do tell!"
"Why, so you can think about what an evil guy I am?"
"No, because apparently we've got time on our hands!!"
"Ok! You wanna know??"
"Yeah!!"
"You wanna know? You wanna know? There used to be a sign above the TV—engraved—that said You will see such pretty things. So that every day the girl woke up including the first time she woke up she had that little phrase to tease her, but of all the things I did in this crate, that was the thing that unnerved them the most—and I mean unnerved them more than brainwashing tapes I borrowed from the..Agency. They couldn't stand that phrase. They said they dreamed about it. And you would think I would like being that under their skin but it was getting in the way of everything else I wanted to do!
"I forced girls to masturbate while I killed them—cutting their heads off with a bow saw—at the threat of death, telling them to make themselves cum or I'd kill them—with a gun to their head, in their mouth, in their pussy, in their ass. Girls who had never cum before..trying to get them to cum right at the moment of death. 'Did you cum?'—(She nods.)—I shoot her in the head.
"Or putting them on ecstasy and other drugs to increase the sexual intensity for them as they die, they feel amazing and horrible at the same time. And usually it wasn't ecstasy, it was crystal meth. I want to create conflicting feelings in them—that's a type of torture that gives me joy."
"Did you want to kill me last night, while I was on crystal meth?"
"No I'm not done with you yet!"
"Lucky me."
"How about forcing little girls to use vibrators on themselves, jamming too-large dildos into their tiny little cunts, tearing their pussies so hard they bled—"
"Stop! Stop!"
"No you asked. You wanna know what I do? How about making a little girl cut her own clitoris off with a razor blade at gunpoint and then making her eat it. She bleeds and cries and cries while she chews and swallows her own clit."
"How old?"
"Four."
"You said five was the youngest!!"
"I forgot about this one. She was four. And the whole thing was done in the way that an adult would talk to a four year old to make her understand."
"You can stop telling me stories now 'cause I'm not your fuckin' therapist," Anna says.
But I continue.
"Making little girls suck off grown men at gunpoint, shooting them in the arms and making them keep going until the guy ejaculates in her mouth, then shooting her in the head and she falls over, falls off his cock, strings of his cum still connecting them.
"Bringing in a little boy and getting his dick hard and making him fuck a little girl and taking pictures, telling the boy if he ever tells anyone I'll show the pictures to his parents and they won't love him anymore. Making him fuck her harder and harder and getting myself off watching them, then telling the boy to get the fuck out and go back to town or I'll kill him.
"Pissing in and on girls' mouths/vaginas/butts/faces to get myself hard.
"Staple gun and nail gunning a little girl to death."
"Please. Stop."
"Stoning a bitch to death while reading to her from the Christian Bible about stoning whores..the rocks hitting her face and just destroying her skull, brains hanging out and she's still alive."
Anna stops trying to hide from my stories, and she turns her head and looks me directly in the eyes as I talk.
"Forcing girls to kill each other..with electricity, guns, saws—and other things that I'm omitting because you seem to be a little squeamish—that becomes a real enjoyment, making someone innocent into a killer, destroying her innocence without ever touching her.
"You should listen closely to this next part. I had a favorite girl that I corrupted this way, making her into someone who would do anything I said, even without a gun to her head. I think it would be fair to say that I played a major part in destroying her mind. This was a girl I kept for years, from age five to age 16. In the end she tried to kill me—which I should have seen coming—but it doesn't work (as you can clearly see I'm still alive), and I betray all her loyalty over all those years by ending her, and that also ended my spree..I just didn't have it in me after that, so I fucked her dead body until it was decomposing, professing my love for her, until finally I was fucking maggots and bones. Then I left Montana. And I never went back."
"What was her name?"
"Don't worry about what her name was."
"What happened next?"
"What happened next is I took a step way back. I spent a bunch of time in the woods, got my head straight, then I retooled and came here to Pain, South Dakota, and I've been doing my thing ever since."
"What are you into now?"
"Aside from what you've seen, sedating a girl to unconsciousness and raping her. I enjoy looking at her almost-dead face and controlling her completely..fucking her clean little red ass..cumming inside her mouth..filling her pussy with cum so full it spills out around the edges of my cock.
"I want to be as close to them as possible, to know what their experience is while dying. That is my form of intimacy, to escort someone out of their life, forcing them to describe what and how they feel as they die—and recording it, asking them questions..what do you see?..what does your pain feel like? And I can live forever with the girls' dead/poetic descriptions of their agony, their torture.."
"What's the worst thing you ever did?"
"I put a dog in a cage and shot it."
"Those files, of what the girls said while they were dying.."
I look at my slave.
"..will you show them to me sometime?"
"Why? You wanna torture yourself about what you have coming?"
"It wouldn't be torture for me. But. I want to know."