Cancer Cells

FROM FILE CALLED A CARRIED A SUITCASE AND

I carried a suitcase and two red plastic five-gallon jugs. The suitcase contained found clothing, usually taken from clothing stores, which I would usually wear until they were torn  or dirty and then discard them. The jugs contained gasoline and water respectively. When I traveled with Sarah, she taught me to hotwire cars. She had grown up on a farm with a rusted squadron of trucks always in need of repair. But she didn't like speeding, so we were incompatible travelers. I needed speed, it was my reason. The highways were trafficless though by no means wide open, so it was risky pushing 100 when the roadway might be unexpectedly cracked or blocked by a jackknifed semi. But speed was what I did. There were a few stretches that I often returned to-such as the former highway 80 through the Alleghany mountains -but for the most part I liked to drive too fast on highways I had never been on, leaning forward to see what curves and obstacles were up ahead. I wrecked a couple of cars or more, but sustained no major injuries luckily, just cuts and bruises. I wore seatbelts.

I had dropped Sarah off in Reno, I think she was just desperate to get away from me. I told her I would be back and eventually was. Well, I missed her, even though we didn't get along. But I drove around Reno honking every few blocks, and found no sign of her. On one intersection I found a message in red paint on the pavement: gone to California. I looked around and realized it must have been the intersection where I dropped her off. There was a discarded red five-gallon jug there, she must have adopted my habits.

California was not a place I liked driving. The earthquakes and flooding had made a dangerous mess of the highways. It was unsafe for driving at the speeds I was accustomed to. But there I went, heading West at 120 through the desert. I scraped between two abandoned cars so closely a rear-view mirror was sheared off. I also ran over a coyote family crossing the road, their bones made quite a crunching percussion on the metal frame of the car. A plane flew overhead, which I did not understand, but ignored it. I suspected it was following me but just kept my speed high and there was no sign of it when I stopped that night at a desert gas station. I slept and ate in the car, becoming a sort of metal shellfish. Night scared me, and I just had to wait it out, in the reclined passenger seat, sleeping it fitful bouts, trying to  ignore the sounds of night: animals walking around the car or scampering over the roof, howling, sometimes low voices speaking, though I suspect it was my imagination. I kept my eyes screwed tight, if there were any people they would have to make their presence obvious before I would believe in them.

When I opened my eyes at the slanting dawnlight, there was a coyote curled on the hood, apparently for the heat. When I yelled and knocked on the windshield it did not move. I yelled and knocked on the glass for a many minutes, until I was out of breath. I didn't want to step outside, though I needed to pee, so I tried to start the car, but the starter had died and the twisted key issued only clicks,.

FROM FILE CALLED A BLIND MAN's CANE 2

a blind man's cane tapping down tenement stairs. The jingling of the collar of a dog attacking a fleaspot with a rear leg. A cracked vase of dried crysanthemum. The purl of cars on a bridge as heard from underneath.

I remember the dirty chaotic old world and miss it. After the plague people lost their animal edge. Murder used to be quite challenging, not the killing but the covering of ones traces. A surprisingly effective police force stood in for thou shalt not kill, it forced one to keep moving. You kill too many people in one jurisdiction, they were sure to catch up with you. You couldn't keep your day job and kill when you wanted, you had to earn a living at it in order to keep paying for hotel rooms and gasoline, auto repair.

Now there were no police, and much fewer people to choose from, living in isolated knots usually connected to farms or fishing waters. They knew no violence, they couldn't defend themselves, and they wouldn't chase you.

For years I would be taken in by these strangers, and live among them as a guest, eating their food, even helping in the fields, until the night I would kill them and move on. So this was the challenge, in the absence of the challenge of hiding from police, to kill an entire farmhouse of people in one night before any of them could  get away.

I found this farm by accident, driving by and seeing people working in the field, who waved with half-smiles. There was a wide-spread taboo againstt the automobile, a lingering superstition that its use would lead back to the old ways. And they were pretty hard to keep going. I routinely stopped at automotive places, breaking in and fiilling my trunk with spare parts and tools. The tools were often given as gifts to my host communities, gaining me great favor, until I would take them back. So I pulled in to the farmhouse, my car surrounded by barking dogs and a few curious strangers trying to pull them away and shush them.

"Hello?" said a thin man, bending toward the window. I told him that I was travelling, taking logs of ciommunities, a sort of census bureau. I was invited for dinner, though they seems uncomfortable around me. They asked questions about other communities and became silent when I told them about a nearby farm where I had recently visited. There followed a long silence, until somebody said that those people had all been killed  in their sleep. Pretending not to hear, I asked for more coffee. The thin man went to get the pot but from the kitchen there came a crash and curse, and he reappeared saying he had accidentally broken the pitcher, apologizing, offering tea, which I accepted, though it tasted weird and chalky and I wondered what it was brewed from.

I was given a bedroom and I lay awake listening to the house, wondering how many days to wait to make my move. There were only about ten people here, and I thought it might be best of I just killed them that night, perhaps keeping one of the younger women alive to take my time with. But somehow I fell asleep and when I awoke I was surrounded by them. I smiled and realized my wrists were tied to the bedframe. I felt gelatinous and wondered if I had been drugged.

Most of the people hung back out of the lantern light, but the thin man sat on the edge of the bed and said that he believed I had killed the neighbors. I tried to look incredulous and protest but was too sleepy to feign surprise. Then he put a shotgun on my lap, and I saw that it was mine. These crafty fuckers had drugged me and opened the trunk of my car, finding my weapons. I tried to struggle and discovered my feet were also tied to the bed. This was a bad situation to be in, but I wasn't worried. I knew these people couldn't hurt me. Sooner or later they would have to let me go, and then I would come back on foot and finish the job.

They failed to extract a confession and went outside the room to have a conference. I fell asleep thinking of ways I could mutilate them, and interesting places to leave their bodies: on the roof, in the yert.

The next morning I shouted for water until eventually someone brought me a glass. A young girl. I smiled at her, and she poured the glass on my face. Some of it went in my mouth, though I choked and sputtered and protested this inhuman treatment. People were so soft now, I was sure they would relent and untie me, but I stayed there all day with no food.

Then at dusk I was spoonfed chalky soup by the thin man, with his straw hat, sitting on the side of my bed. I told him that he was being unreasonable, barbaric, and tried to push his buttons with words like "community," "human rights," and "due process." He smiled at this last one, which I had to admit was a bit outdated, but for the most part he seemed seriously to consider it. And then I must have fainted. I was dimly conscious of being untied, placed on a plank of wood-perhaps a door removed from its hinges-tied down again, and stretchered out of the house and into the woods. I think I asked them where they were taking me more than once, but my drugged mind seemed unable to absorb whatever answer they gave. I fought to wake up but more water was poured into my mouth, making me choke, belch, and pass out to the sound of my own howling.

This time I woke up feeling bad. My arms were numb and tied behind me, I was outdoors, looking into a barn door, and when I leaned my head back I realized I was tied to a tree. I wanted to struggle with the ropes, but I couldn't feel my hands.

Due process, I heard the thin man say somewhere behind me. He asked me to confess to killing people, I shouted a string of insults at him, referring to my rights and other notions I thought would melt the buttery hearts of these do-gooder communitarians. I couldn't tell if he was still back there. Awhile later I heard arguing. Someone was being told to do something he didn't want to do.

The last farm had done wonders with renewable resources, and most of the people who lived there had ended up in the composting toilet, in pieces, but I was starting to regret not having hidden the other bodies. That farm had had a wimpy consensus-based, non-hierarchical, job rotation, and all decisions had to be made unanimously as a group. As soon as I learned that I realised I could get away with anything, because it would take them forever to agree on how to punish me.

This farm, I noted, has a hierarchy. The thin man was obviously the leader. That didn't bode as well, but the thin man was obviously a pacifist and incapable of violence. But I didn't feel completely good about it. My misgivings multiplied when I discovered that they had incarcerated a prisoner before. A murderer, I discovered, a jealous alcoholic trashed on some homemade potato wine had killed his lover, for sleeping with the thin man. The culprit had been tied up. They spoke of him in the past tense, but would not answer my questions about what had happened to him. It seemed unlikely that they had executed him, more likely he had been exiled. If I was able to convince them to untie me, I might consider just fleeing.

But they were still discussing what to do with me. In the meantime they fed me and kept me alive, tied to the tree. I tried to push their buttons, calling them fascists, referring to a police state, and all manner of criticisms I remembered liberals had held for the government before the collapse, but it didn't seem to help my cause. I confessed nothing, and doubted they would be able to find evidence.

But the Thin Man disappeared along with his wife and I was told thhey had gone to the other farm, in my car, to see if they could find evidence. I did my best to look plaintive but inside I was rejoicing. If they were really going to try to be fair about this, then I knew there was no way they would be able to kill me or even seriously harm me.

I used to hate them all. All people, really, but especially crybabies, do-gooders, liberals, PC faggots. Now I had license to weed them, there was no police to stop me, and they were incapable of killing people. In many cases, these farms were strictly vegetarian, and even the cattle would die peacefully of old age. There was nothing to fear. Eventually they would release me, humbly and with great shame, and I would behave like a deeply wounded and traumatized child. Until midnight.

But for now I was being made to suffer, though in the end it would only increase my power over their sniveling guilty consciences. Though I was a bit dizzy, I thought through the worst possible contingencies. These people certainly couldn't dust for fingerprints, or compare tire tracks, or do any sophisticated forensics. There would have been no security cameras, no photographic record. I could have left the murder weapon behind, even a gun that had been registered in my name, and there would be no way these hippies could prove a thing. I nodded off smiling.

But when I awoke there were two children before me. "Please untie me," I pleaded, but they continued to appraise me coldly. It began to dawn on me that I hadn't seen any children at dinner the first night, but these two looked somehow familiar. Then one of them screamed and ran away, the other pointed at me, his lip blossoming in a sort of pout. The thin man stepped from behind me, and hefted the child onto his hip. "Is this the man?" he asked. The child brought his fist down repeatedly on the thin man's chest, weirdly robotic, and I realized it was a stabbing gesture, and then I understood that these were children from the other farm, and I did not remember killling them.

The thin man put down the child and it ran away, shouting the same thing over and over, a word I did not understand.

The thin man crouched before me and ran his hand through my hair. "Water?" I choked, trying to look more piteous than I felt. He stood up and walked away.

It was dawn and I had not really slept. I heard footsteps and murmuring and before me stepped the thin man, with a teenaged boy. The thin man held a shotgun and handed it to the boy.

I don't remember what sugary righteous bullshit he said exactly, but it was clear he was instructing the kid to shoot me. Fuck this, I thought angrily. The kid took the gun uncertainly, and the man advised him that this would be an important experience, and that he was never to kill without the thin man's permission, but that someday the thin man would not be around and then the teenaged boy would have to assume the responsibility.

I began screaming. What kind of way to raise a child is that, I demanded. I demanded a fair trial, I called them murderers, racists, capitalists, and everything that came to mind that I thought might trigger their guilt. I made a self-description of how I had come to help them, how I was a guest, how I used to be a social worker. I may even have accused them of murdering the other farm and trying to pin it on me. I think I mentioned child abuse as well, accusing them of raping the young children's mother in the barn before executing her, but then I realized I had said too much. Because her body was in the barn, and there would have been no way I could have known that.

The boy raised the shotgun and I feel silent, straining against the ropes to turn my head away.

But he couldn't do it. He started to cry. The man put one hand on the rifle barrel and cuffed the boy with his other hand, knocking him to his ass. He raised the gun and cocked it and pointed at me. I yelled. He didn't fire, he had just raised it in demonstration.

The thin man was black. The boy was a girl.

I was yelling, the child was protesting, and the man was screaming at both of us to shut up, and finally discharged the rifle into the air, bringing a rain of leaves from the sassafras above and silence. A woman ran across the lawn at the sound of this, but, seeing I was still alive, seemed disappointed and wandered away. "Murderer," I whispered as spitefully as I could at the man, who returned a look so intense I had to look away. Apparently he wouldn't settle to execute me, it had to be a lesson for the young one. He shook his head and walked away, shotgun over his shoulder. The kid refused to look at me and went into the barn presumably to sulk in the hayloft.

I didn't believe they'd go through with it, they were just trying to get a confession from me.

There was a birdfeeder near the tree and all day I watched sparrows, cardinals, bluejays, and titmice, and a few other species I couldn't identify land, gobble seeds, and fly away. The cardinals seemed dominant, and came in male/female pairs. The bright red males with their corowns of peaked feathers seemed unintimidatable. The sparrows travelled in groups, and the other birds seemed to hang back until the group had moved on, except for the cardinals who were unfazed by their presence. The titmice would appear very briefly, to natch a seed and wing away to a treetop to devour them.

At one point some squirrels came, climbed the pole, and began to eat. This made me smile, I hated birds. But to my surprise the cardinals attacked the squirrel, two males and a female fluttered about it, and drove it down the pole. The squirrel chattered angrily from the bottom of the pole while the cardinals took turns at the feeder. Eventually the squirrel began to inch its way back up the pole. This time the cardinals descended more forcefully. The squirrel took position atop the birdfeeder and tried to attack them, but the cardinals hovered about it and raked it with their talons, as it turned around and around, shrieking, trying to bite them. Finally one of the largest youngest males seemed to drop straight down from the sky and the squirrel rolled over and fell to the grass. I was stunned; it was dead, its neck snapped. I wouldn't have thought it possible. I began to work at sawing the rope that bound my wrists against the tree trunk.

That night they forgot to bring me food. I tried to shout but found that without the evening water I was voiceless, so I slumped there, arms behind me, shoulders burning, forearms numb, and tried to work through my confused thoughts, without much luck. Escape, kill them, were the two main ideas, but I didn't know what order they came in. I couldn't uproot the tree, working out of the rope was hopeless I thought, since I could neither see nor feel my arms. I could try to talk them into releasing me but I wasn't sure how to do that. Threatening them didn't seem wise. Offering to run away and never return? I thought I had already played that card to no effect. Acting piteous to invoke sympathy also seemed like a dead end, since by this point I was quite weak, prone to crying fits I barely managed to contain, and sick all over, shivering, crossing my legs for warmth. Confession? I didn't see how that would work. It seemed that I would just have to be patient. Their consciences wouldn't let me die by starvation or any other means. I wasn't sure they had established my guilt. As if it would help, I tried to walk back through how I had come to this to see what mistakes I had made. Should I have not introduced myself, but just hidden until night? But they would have heard the car, and I didn't know there were people here until I had arrived. I should not have allowed those children to escape, and reminded myself to take note of how many were there so I could be sure to get them all when I had my chance. The thought of killing them was the only one I could fix on, so I tried to remember how many people I had seen here, at first counting them on my numb and unseen hands, finally kicking off my shoes and using my toes to keep track. I had trouble but it seemed there were nine, including the escaped children, who might be especially hard to catch this time. I must have fallen asleep, or sort of. I culd hear a discussion at the farmhouse, raised voices carried over to me. I imagined words like killing, justice, but was weak and unsure. Clearly the timbres were those of a painful disagreement about something, almost certainly me, which I took as a good sign. I had never doubted and that gave me perfect strength as a killer. Nobody came close to me and I stayed hard, firing the steel of my soul with cigarettes and sometimes carving curlicues on my own skin with razors, just to remain in control of my feelings, to numb myself to my pain or anybody else's. Finally dawn approached. I heard creatures crashing through the underbrush behind me but tried to ignore them. As dawn broke through the mist a family of deer walked past me. I hissed at them and they bounded off into the woods. I drifted off again and when I came to, I heard an intermittent scraping behind the barn. It was a regular sound, as of someone working, and I thought it might be a grave being dug for me.