Like most mornings during the past six years, you awake from a lovely, deep sleep suffused with the thoughts that you would molest your own children, kill strangers, harm any life that came across your path.
You breathe in, knowing you are a serial killer, Jack-the-Ripper reincarnated. You’ve read about him, seen the movie set in dark, foggy Victorian England, felt his breath coming out of your mouth. You remember when Jeffrey Dahmer was caught, the severed heads in the refrigerator. He was human; you are human. You must be like him Aren’t all humans the same, really? We all breathe, hunt down what we want. Don’t we all want love? Don’t we all hate? Don’t we all have violence tucked in us for surprise visits? So it’s in you, too. To be like that. To kill. You are like that. That’s you. One-hundred percent you.
No.
The morning light soft on your body, you imagine yourself arising, moving into the kitchen—no, going to get a heavy river rock from the front yard. In your imaginings, you hold the stone tight in your hand and walk quietly to your boys’ rooms where you lean over their small, sleeping bodies and then raise your hand. You smash and smash their heads until they are dead. They go so silently. Bloody, but silent. Messy, but still. And then you walk into your own room and do the same thing to your husband, the walls spattered red.
Stop! No! You bury yourself deep in the blankets, but the thoughts still come, a flume of images carried through your brain in your own voice. You can’t find a way out of the twists of logic, the synapses still firing, the thoughts pounding and pounding, the scenario like a photo you can’t stop looking at.
You fling back the blankets, trying to forget what you’ve just created.
The hardwood is cold, jolting you out of your thoughts for a second, but as the bottoms of your feet warm on the kitchen floor you feel the ideas well up again. You make the coffee, your hands shaking, trying to ignore the rattle of knives in the drawer just under the countertop. Even though it makes you want to vomit, you sharpen the knives after every use—after quick metal slides through raw chicken and beef. It would be so quick, so easy, to dispatch your entire family, just like you dispatch the bodies of hens and cows, the tops of carrots, the round lumps of tomatoes. A sharp knife is better than a rock. And anyway, there is so much that can kill in the kitchen—heavy cast iron pots and pans, sharp serving forks, ice picks. Maybe you would start with the cats. One cat at a time. Practice.
Stop!
Your hands still shaking, you take the blue pill that seems to make some days bearable and that has made you fat. You wish you didn’t have to take it; you wish it would work better. What you want is a total lobotomy. A brain resurrection. All you know is that maybe the thoughts keep coming, but the depression has lifted a bit. Your horrible thoughts don’t make you as sad as they used to. You can hold on, just enough, because of the chemicals.
You don’t go out to the driveway and get the paper because anything on the front page might set you off. Of course, your therapist has told you to read the paper, especially the articles about murder and rape and violence.
“Read them on purpose,” she says. “Go to scary movies and watch the entire thing. Rent them all and view them at home. Don’t ever pick out anything that’s not in the horror section.”
Sometimes you do what she says. But not today. No paper today. Too much already in your head, too much blood.
By the time you exercise to the workout video in your living room, you’ve moved past murder. You’ve already killed them all, over and over, your lungs aching from trying not to breathe into the next idea. Now you have another chore. You push away sexual fantasies about men and women and sometimes children. Actually, they aren’t fantasies, but fears of fantasies, the horrifying pictures floating through your mind as you bend, lunge, repeat. All those exposed body parts you shouldn’t touch—stop!
Lift that weight. Kick that leg.
All those young lives you could ruin with just one, quick touch. You’d like it, wouldn’t you? You are sick. You are just like those serial killers who kill what they cannot own, the man who dressed like a clown and kept the bodies of his victims under his house. Boys. Young boys. The clown loved the bodies so much he couldn’t part with them, even when they started to smell. Also, don’t forget Dahmer’s severed heads.
No. Not you, you think, as you move faster and faster on the hardwood floor. But maybe. You are human. Anything sexual is sexual. Would you be turned on? Maybe you would. Young, hairless bodies. You are sick and deviant and cruel. You want to take all these people into your mouth and fuck them.
No!
You are done exercising, and now you mediate because your therapist thought it might help. You’ve been going to a therapist for six years. You write in a journal, detailing all the sordid, awful thoughts you’ve had just minutes ago. It is terrifying to see them on the page, but at least they can live there for a while and not in your brain. For a moment—no, maybe for minutes—you feel better.
Before anyone else has even awakened (not dead yet, still alive in their beds), you go outside and walk in nature because a writer you admire says that might help, too. Commune with nature, he says. But all the while your body is shaking. You touch the soft, feathered heads of lavender plants, finger the smooth lemon tree leaves, smell the old roses that someone planted in the 20s, the fragrance like sugar.
The stories begin to lift.
And then, some time in the morning, you manage to forget the gore and destruction, the knives and the rocks and the sex and the clown and the bodies and the severed heads. You get dressed for work, put on your eye makeup, bag lunches, and drive your children to school. You kiss your husband goodbye at the door. Maybe you volunteer as room mother, sitting with first graders, reading a story. Maybe you stop off at your mother’s house and help her move a heavy chair. And later you stand in front of classrooms full of people who think you are wise and smart and kind. You go to meetings with colleagues, none of whom know that just hours ago you were thinking about where you would bury the dead.
Then, in the afternoon, a bit tired, you pick up your children and begin the afternoon driving. Math tutor, Aikido, ceramics. You don’t have time to think, but because you are tired, you manage to let a stray thought creep in: mass murders, knives, blood. The clown. The heads. The people who are just like you killing and killing and killing.
As you sit in front of the dojo waiting for your son, you think that if you think these things, they must be true. They must be lurking inside you. Your thoughts must be you. After all, who else could they be? Why would you have those thoughts if they weren’t actions just waiting to happen? Are you like that? You are. You must be. You are sick and weird and twisted and should be put away right now, right now, right now—Stop!
At home, after all the driving and waiting, you make dinner and help the kids with homework. You grade some papers, focusing on sentence structure and comma splices, ideas you can see. Your husband comes home, but you can’t burden him with yet another tale of weirdness. He’s heard them all, and part of your problem is that you think that if he knows all the horrible tales and doesn’t cart you off, you must be okay. He thinks you are fine, so you must be fine. You are fine, right? Just ask him one thing. Just say, “I had a thought about murder.” Say it. Say it!
But you don’t. You know this behavior is called checking. You avoid it because you’ve learned it reinforces the thoughts and then the checking, the thoughts and the checking.
Sometimes you might say, “I’m having a hard day.”
He nods, but he really doesn’t know what a hard day means. Intellectually, he knows you have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but he’s not in your brain. Can’t be in your brain. No one but you has ever been there, and you know if someone could really come in, they’d rush out, gasping.
Your husband can’t see the horror show that starts each morning. Images worse than any movie you’ve ever seen. He doesn’t know how long it takes each day for the thoughts to quiet.
Push, push, push. You push the thoughts away, until it is bedtime and you can pull your husband close and imagine that his sane, warm, lovely skin will make you normal. If his normal self is here, next to you, you must be normal, right? You have to be normal, right? Right? Right? You can’t be what you think, can you? Right? You are okay, not a murderer, a child molester, a horrible, awful, terrible, nasty person.
I’m not, you think. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.
______
Photo credit: Samantha Sekula / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)