Murderer

Stalker stands in the bathroom of his motel room. He tears off his shirt and wipes the sweat from his brow. He leans forward on the sink, staring at his wretched face in the mirror. “It’s done…” he repeats to himself. “It’s done.”

Voices, images flicker through his racing mind. He hears a man speaking, a man whose voice cracks at intervals and changes into his own voice, then back again. “The task has fallen to you.” It says. “You are the one who must destroy this world. You have to show these people that’s it’s not okay to be alive. Love does not conquer anything, and causes more problems than it solves. Humanity is a plague, some abomination that has no solid reason to exist. Humans are worthless, and their collective lives amount to nothing. You must show these people that truth. You must offend them. You must ridicule them, and mock everything that they stand for. You must take away every excuse they have for delaying death. You must rip their world apart. Destroy all concept of acceptability. Destroy everything. Rip their whole fucking world, and their understanding of it, apart. Tear down everything that has gone before, and scorch this dead earth to prevent anything from coming after.”

Stalker quivers with an inner angst. “You know what must be done.” He closes his eyes and imagines a computer screen in an empty dorm room. A lonely instant message waits to be read. “You looked nice today,” it says. A nice, creepy message waiting for some female about to become very paranoid.

Stalker turns his head, and thinks of some sappy love song that could easily be interpreted as something sinister. After all, unreciprocated affection is condemned. Flirting is sexual harassment to a woman who doesn’t want to hear it. A man who courts an unresponsive woman can be called a stalker. He recalls the first time he watched young Jennifer, wondering if he had any intention of confronting her, and make some dramatic plea for her love.

“Sometimes I remember it one way…” he recalls someone say. Memory is a tricky thing. What makes memories any different from fantasies? Or dreams, for that matter?

“How I long to escape,” he mutters.

“From life?”

“From my memories.”

“You have become very adept at talking to yourself, haven’t you son?”

Stalker imagines shards of glass covering the bathroom floor. He imagines confronting a girl he once loved. He imagines standing in the rain, shouting “You can’t get rid of me that easily.” Where do you draw the line between a romantic and a creep?

“Do you remember me? No? All those fucking promises you made… All those hopeful words, all those fucking lies!”

Stalker winces at the memory. He remembers the preparation. Dressing himself in dark clothes. Looking in the mirror on that horrible night, trying to rationalize it all. “I am a twisted and deformed state of humanity,” he said to himself. “I can no longer exist as I once did. I am foul. I am stained. Nothing can bring me back.”

Stalker imagines Jennifer talking with her friend about her day. They have their dialogue in her cozy, overtly feminine room. Jennifer talks about her new boyfriend in an idealized sense (it is a new relationship after all), and goes on to discuss the workload that her classes have thrust upon her. Stalker does not pretend to know how two females would speak to one another, and imagining a feminine mind, and how a conversation would flow from one, is beyond him. But he visualizes it, like some introductory scene from a horror movie, where two college females rope in the audience with witty banter, and lull them into a state of complacency. He’s sure that they share laughs, maybe some discussion of homework, maybe a recall of previous shared experiences, and maybe even a hint of remorse at past transgressions that didn’t quite pan out they way they expected. Who knows?

Jennifer leaves the room, pouring over the encounter, the conversation, in her mind, chuckling to herself about the lighter moments, and considering whatever advice she received. Maybe she even considers herself lucky for who she is, and where her love life, if that’s an appropriate term for it, has taken her. But just when she and the audience are caught up in her thoughts, the tone changes, and a heavily scarred man, who has the look and stink of death and desperate obsession on him, grasps her face and presses her against the wall of the building. Jennifer inadvertently took a different route back to her room and found herself confronted by this sorry excuse for a man, this thing that lives in memories, and lives to hate the mockery that his memories are to him. The man is ugly, in such a way that he was once handsome, but scarring and an absence of grooming have turned him into a disheveled mess. Jennifer is the contrast, a beauty with flawless skin. Her beauty contrasts with his faded glory, and the more beautiful she is, the more ugly his mind becomes. This man, this stalker, this abomination is her killer.

“My thoughts always rush back to you. I can’t let go,” he tells her. Stalker takes her from her soft life, and he drags her down into his sorry pit of depression and constant loathing. Stalker hates all things, but hates himself the most. But in this girl, in this beauty, he has found a scapegoat. He has a target to surpass all others. Every point of obsession, every previous target, every other female that preceded this one was never obtained. Loved but never secured. This one, this beauty, this college girl, this FUCKING CUNT, was the only one to reciprocate his love.

She loved him first. And she stopped loving him first. Oh, sure there was that other one, right? But that reached a meaningful and satisfactory conclusion. This one, this last one, this was the one that left him alone. This was the one that returned him to that dark place, that place that he always returned to, no matter how beautiful life seemed, this place, this misery was always waiting for him. Stalker lives in shadows. He knows them well. He constantly walks the corridors of imagined pain, the pain that comes from extended introversion, the pain that is entirely self-inflicted, and always inescapable. It’s the kind of pain that never heals. It’s a mental wound that opens wide with each new pleasant experience that inevitably goes horribly wrong. Life equals pain, for men such as these. And to him, pleasure is something to be feared. Because pleasure invariably begets pain. And so this man looks to his past, looks at the pleasure he once knew, and is mocked by it. He has nothing. He wants everything. But now, he can only think of her, the perfect symbol of every beautiful and disgusting part of living. She is at once the symbol of his perfect love, and of his sublime hatred. She is the key to everything that tortures him.

So the Stalker finds her. He captures her. He renders her unconscious with chemicals and an old T-shirt. Moments jump, and time is inconsistent. Seconds confuse themselves with minutes, and minutes with hours. Stalker is in the driver seat of his black SUV, glancing periodically at the unconscious female in the back seat. He drives slowly, and the rain that falls from the black sky justifies it. He remembers how he became accustomed to driving with one hand on the wheel, and the other holding hers. He remembers looking at Jennifer in the passenger seat, as she would softly caress his palm with her delicate fingers. Stalker shakes the memory as he looks at the campus before him. This is it, he thinks. The destination. This is where it all started.

Stalker considers it oddly appropriate that it’s raining, just as it had on the night of their first kiss. He parks in front of the dorm he once lived in, and pulls her limp body from the back seat. “Inevitable,” he thinks. “We will coexist in such a perfect way. I will make you so beautiful, listing through your perfect qualities. I am yours, you are mine. I’ll never let you go. We’re together forever. We’re in this together until nothingness. I love you so much, you perfect piece of ass. I will love you as no one ever could. I will envy no man. I will rule. I will dominate your life, and nothing will ever be as it was before me. I am your man, and that will never change. Nothing will take you from me, not distance, not loss of affection, not college life… nothing will tear us apart.” Change a few words, change the circumstances, and his thoughts could easily be considered romantic.

Stalker rests her down on the bare mattress of a lost dorm room in the attic of the old building. He calmly brushes her hair out of her face. “We could have been so perfect together… And we will be again… I can make it so we’ll never be apart again. I can fix it all. I have the tools for the job.” He takes a syringe out of his coat. “I have the means. I have the motive. Oh yes, I have everything I need to make her need me forever. I love you, Jennifer. I love you forever. I will be your end. I will make you perfect in every fucking way. More perfect then you ever thought possible… I am your man. Forever. And ever. Always.”

Jennifer’s eyes flutter, but never open. She moans softly, like a child fighting to stay asleep on a school morning. Tears form in Graham/Stalker’s eyes as he fills the syringe with air. He imagines himself as the agent of a higher power. He imagines himself as a hitman. A murderer. Is he doing this? Has he already done this?

Stalker inserts the needle into her neck, and hesitates. Jennifer’s eyes snap open, and suddenly, Stalker is reliving a bad memory in the bathroom of his motel. Did he kill her? When was the last time he spoke to her? Stalker imagines himself writing some pathetic love note, pouring out his useless emotions in some ill-conceived attempt at winning her back.

“No. It’s too late for her. They… he got to her.” Like it was all a movie plot… with some rich villain manipulating the protagonist, relieving him of his guilt. "You wish it could be that dramatic, don't you?”

“…And when I seek help, I find myself miserably alone. In these times of need, I realize who my true friends are… I really don’t have any. My life feels directionless and empty. I don’t really know who I am. I don’t know who I’d like to be. I wish someone could help me. I wish someone would listen to me. I wish I could find someone worth talking to. I wish I wasn’t so alone so frequently. I wish I had an external self to talk to.”

Something dark inside of him mutters in his ear: “I want to gut her vagina with a twelve-inch blade. I want her uterus to bleed out. I want to bathe in her blood and put a bullet through her skull. I want to destroy everything she believes in. I want her to hate living as much as I do.”

“I’m not a well-adjusted human being,” he says. “It’s all falling apart. I’ve lost everything that ever meant anything to me. I have nothing.” He looks up at the mirror, and his heart skips a beat when he sees a shadow in the corner of the room. For a brief moment, he imagines himself covered in her blood.

“You knew something like this would happen, son. You were about to start something that would only serve to chip away at you, and lead to your eventual destruction. You have to understand one very key concept: Relationships serve to lasting purpose. You must differentiate two basic concepts in your mind, those being what you want in life, and what you need in life. Never confuse the two, because that will only lead to suffering that’s near impossible to escape.”

“How often I contemplate death,” he responds. “I am a sorry soul, a sorry excuse for man. I hate everything that I once loved. I have no natural state of evolution. I am a prisoner of my own mind. I fear my life will be a sorry excuse for who I am, and that my creative energy will find no outlet, and that I will kill myself out of frustration and eternal despair. I am a prisoner of my thoughts. I wish I could let things go. I wish I wasn’t so fucking sensitive. But I am. And I have to live with that. For now.” He glances at the window behind him. “Does anybody identify with me? Is there anybody out there who can tell me that I deserve to live, for more than any stereotypical reason? I’ve loved in vain. That hurts to the core of me. I’ve done it so often, but this last one, it almost seemed like a worthy cause. Damn it. I wish I was more optimistic. Not too much more, but just enough so that I could make it through one day without considering death as a viable option for my future. Damn it, Jennifer. Why did you do this to me? I can’t blame you completely, but it sure is easy to. I have nowhere to go. I feel so lost. I feel so weak. Maybe I am.”

The memories splinter, and Stalker’s reading a love note that Jennifer once wrote. The words are sweet, but he only sees the mockery they’ve become. Her signature is a death threat, a promise of destruction from the inside out. Love. Only a memory now. A memory… a fantasy? If a person leaves your life, how is that any different than their death?

Hate. It burns inside of him like a hunger that he can never rid himself of. “I hate optimists.” He looks at the man in the mirror. “I hate everything you are. I hate everything I am, and everything I’m not. I hate everything that reminds me of what I once had. But more than anything else, I hate who I am. I hate everyone because all I see in others is a twisted reflection of what I hate about myself. I hate looking in the mirror. I look at your face, and I feel a swell of contempt. I spend all my time listening to your lies and half-assed excuses. Maybe I wouldn’t hate you so much if you weren’t so goddamned ugly. Although, I don’t think there’s a face nice enough to cover your shit-stain of a personality.

“I hate everyone because all I see in others is a twisted reflection of what I hate about myself. No one will ever know me. I hate all that I don’t love. I destroy everything I don’t protect. I’m a narcissist who can’t stand his reflection. I’m too sensitive by far, and inflict all the pain that I feel. I look at all the beautiful people, and I feel an anger boil inside of me. I hate them for being everything that I can't be. All those people who don't suffer from deformities of the body and mind that I deal with on a daily basis. I try to be romantic, but they call me a creep. I don't blame them; I look the part. I can’t look at her face without feeling a swell of contempt. I hate everything that she is. I hate everything she has made me become. I hate. Fuck it all you fuck. I hate everything you are. I hate. I hate it all. Fucker.”

He quells the sickening anger and angst. “I hate her,” he whispers. “I love her. I want to watch her die. I want to spend the rest of my life with her. I want to tear out her eyes with my teeth. I want to pet her gently and until she falls asleep. I want to bathe in her blood. I want her to feel the way I feel. I want vengeance. I want her to be happy. I want to let her go. I want her to be with me forever. I want her! I HATE HER. I LOVE HER SO MUCH. I WANT THIS TO END. I’M SO TIRED. So tired. So tired… so tired… so tired…”

Lose the memories. Let go.

Stalker slams his face into the mirror in front of him. The mirror turns into a spider web of broken glass, and the blood pours out of his forehead. He catches his splintered reflection, and for an instant, imagines that the blood forms a red X across his face. “I don’t even recognize my face in the mirror any more. I am a stranger to everyone,” he mutters in a daze. Memories escape him as he becomes light-headed. He collapses on the bathroom floor, cracking some of the white tiles.

Thoughts flicker and fade. “My mind bleeds,” he thinks. Darkness envelops him. Memories escape him. Stalker opens his mouth, “I still love you.”

“All of us are potential villains. In spite of ethics, morals, codes of conduct, and a general respect for laws, if we are pushed far enough, pressured beyond our breaking point, our self-preservation system takes over and we are capable of terrible villainy.”

—Ollie Johnston & Frank Thomas

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