The Admirer Read online

  “No. They don’t. They have to follow college procedure. You have to follow college procedure.”

  Wilson stepped so close that Helen could see the sheen of perspiration on her neck and smell her cologne.

  “There is no procedure for this.” Wilson’s voice was choked.

  A shingle broke free from a nearby roof and clattered down the slope, landing in the underbrush. Helen jumped.

  Wilson nodded toward the asylum. “No one knows what goes on in there. People say there’s still a whole network of passageways underneath the asylum. You can get anywhere you want if you know the way, even onto Pittock campus, into our buildings. But we don’t know the way. Certainly the police don’t. We don’t know who has a map or remembers the ways, or who’s figured them out. It’s like a black hole. You go in there and never come out.”

  Helen felt rough bark against her back and Wilson’s breath on her face.

  “Dr. Wilson.” Helen put up her hand to push Wilson away but stopped short of touching her skin. “I need you…”

  She was about to tell Wilson to move. That she shouldn’t need a policy manual to know that leading students into the woods to look for half a human body was not procedural. She was about to appeal to common sense. But on the other end of the search line a ghostly cry had gone up.

  It took Helen a moment to realize it was a human voice. One of the students had started singing. Another voice joined the first. Then students from both ends of the line picked up the song, their voices echoing off the brick walls.

  “If this comes off looking like some sort of field trip…” The song was so sad that she couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “They’re looking for their classmate,” Wilson said softly.

  “You can’t say that. We don’t know that.”

  On the other side of the clearing, the reporters tromped through the brush with the students.

  “I know it, and I need to talk to you about a student named Carrie Brown and a woman named Anat Al–Fulani. We don’t have a lot of time, and you can’t talk to Drummond. Not Drummond, not the police.” Wilson held her with her stare. When Helen looked away, Wilson put her hand on the tree trunk behind Helen’s head, blocking her in. “Helen, I’m going to say this quickly. You have to listen, and you need to believe me.”

  “If you have information, you must go to the police.”

  This time Helen did push Wilson away, but it was Helen who staggered as she broke free. The heat had grown oppressive. The humidity hung close to the ground. Helen’s head pounded.

  “Are you okay?”

  Before Helen realized what was happening, Wilson’s arm encircled her waist. For a moment, Helen sagged against her, feeling Wilson’s body as warm and solid as the sunlit boulders that marked the forest floor. Unshakeable. A landmark. A place to rest. Then she pulled away. It was too close, too intimate.

  “Sit down,” Wilson said. “You’re not all right. I’ll call someone.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Then we need to talk.”

  The young female reporter who had asked Helen if she regretted coming to Pittock stood nearby.

  “No,” Helen hissed. “They’re listening. Watching us.”

  She hurried away from Wilson until she broke the twenty–foot rule and found herself alone at the far end of the asylum. Cautiously, feeling like a trespasser, she walked up to one of the windows. Through the dirty glass, she spied a large counter, like the front desk at a hotel. Hallways extended in either direction.

  A chill traveled down her spine as Helen remembered her first walking tour of campus that winter, the brief foray through the snowy woods up to Hospital Hill. “A possible site for renovation and dormitory expansion,” Drummond had called it, “A remarkable tribute to the history of mental health care and American architectural innovation.” To Helen, it looked like a prison.

  Staring into the building, Helen noticed a stain spreading across the floor. Blood! Helen’s breath came in a shallow gasp. The students were still singing. She heard their voices reverberating in the bowl of her skull. She reeled backward, caught by the fear that someone might appear in the window and try to pull her inside. Then she felt a wave of lightheadedness. The air was hot. The blood rushed to her head. For a second everything went orange.

  Heart pounding, she leaned against the warm, brick wall. Slowly, she turned back to the window, cupping her hands around her eyes. Inside the building, water stains bubbled the plaster ceiling. Copper–green streaks dripped from the windowsill. Every metal fixture, right down to the nails beneath the plaster, had rusted. All that had once been white was discolored. The marks on the floor were just pools of rust, nothing more. Then a movement. Out of the corner of her eye. Something detached itself from the wall. Someone disappeared into the corridor.

  Chapter Ten

  He made his first amputee the year the asylum closed. He had gotten the idea—the passion—several years earlier while still in college. He made friends with a boy whose family was in the international hotel business and other “businesses” that catered to the tastes of American tourists. He began traveling, using the money Father gave him, to visit countries where girls like Polina Petrova were plentiful. The girls were poor and thin as reeds. None of their amputations compared to Carla’s stumps. Most could not afford wheelchairs. Instead, their pimps and madams dressed them in long gowns that draped far below their limbs. They were cheap. He could not complain about that, but ultimately they were boring. Too pathetic, too pliable. The rush he felt when he mounted them grew less and less potent. The travel and the hassle of concealing his habits grew burdensome. The amputee prostitutes did not satisfy his need.

  Then one day he was drinking beer at a café in a small village outside Battambang, Cambodia. He watched a girl walk by with a basket of palm leaves balanced on her head when, out of nowhere, a moped raced by, scattering chickens and children. The girl leapt out of the way but tripped and tumbled on the dusty ground. Her leaves scattered. She was in the process of collecting them when another, much larger motorcycle, roared into sight, clearly pursuing the first.

  It was gone by the time anyone realized what had happened. The girl was screaming. Her right leg lay crushed in a widening pool of blood. A few of the café patrons looked away. Three women from a nearby hut came out and knelt over the girl to wrap a length of fabric around her thigh. One of the woman dabbed at the girl’s forehead with a scarf. The other two lifted her onto a mat. By the time they disappeared back into the hut, the girl had gone into shock and stopped screaming. The pedestrians on the road had moved on, and the men at the café had resumed their conversation.

  He could not go back to his warm beer. He felt the same merciless desire from the first time he saw the picture of Polina Petrova. He knew now what he needed. He did not need to find amputees; he had to make them. He was a god cutting angels out of clay.

  ****

  So on his return, he went hunting. Carefully. Father had taught him an important lesson. People like Carla were disposable. No one missed them because no one wanted them. But there were still procedures he must follow, techniques, precautions. Even in the asylum, where the doctors had bound their patients, drugged them into rigor mortis–like rigidity, and electrocuted them until their eyes screamed, there were still precautions.

  He made his selection judiciously. One evening, when he was out walking, a homeless woman—probably a former asylum patient—lurched out of an alleyway in downtown Pittock.

  “Can you spare some change?” she asked, exposing blackened teeth. “A dollar? Can I have a dollar?” She looked like something from a Nazi concentration camp but without the victims’ empty humility. “You can give me a dollar. I know you have it.”

  “I could give you more than that,” he said.

  “What do you want?” She pressed her bony chest forward. “Do you like me?”

  She was clearly on or coming off drugs. Her teeth chattered, and she scratched at the sores on her arms. She w
as like Carla Braff. In fact, she was less than Carla. At least Carla had belonged to a family that felt some grudging responsibility. This woman had no one, and even if she did, they would have given up on her long ago.

  “I do,” he said. “How much?”

  “Forty dollars.”

  He nodded. “But I don’t want anyone to see us, and I’m not paying for a hotel.”

  “I know,” she said. “We can go to the asylum. I have my own room.”

  “That’s just what I was thinking.”

  The woman led him through dark halls until they arrived at a tiny room set apart from the hallway by a narrow corridor. He tried to remember what this had been. A nurse’s room? A seclusion chamber? The asylum had not been long abandoned. Yet it had fallen into ruin. It didn’t matter. He had picked up a length of rope left in one of the main hallways. He promised the woman an extra hundred dollars if he could tie her up. She agreed.

  “Just do it fast,” she said. Her face contorted with anticipation. She was already thinking about her next fix.

  “I’ll be fast,” he said.

  Once he had bound her to the metal cot, he pulled a wad of pink insulation out of a hole in the wall and stuffed it inside her mouth. Then he left the room and the woman’s muffled protests to find the proper instrument.

  While he searched, the need grew stronger, suffusing his groin with warmth. By the time he found his tool, a rusty ax propped next to the boiler, his body was on fire. Father had stopped him for so long, but Father could not stop him forever.

  When the woman saw him, her eyes grew wide and her body arched off the bed. He raised the ax. She screamed through the insulation. Then the ax fell. Twice. She expired with the first blow. He didn’t care. He leaned over, reached into the tangle of bloody veins and muscle and touched the jagged bone. He pressed the tip of one index finger into the marrow. For a second, his vision flashed white. He felt like his body had been vaporized. The abandoned asylum disappeared. Then it was over.

  Trembling from the release and a sudden fear of discovery, he returned to the foyer of the asylum, where he had seen a homeless camp set up near the door. He took an empty sleeping bag and wrapped the woman’s body in it. Then he dragged it to the deepest well on the grounds, filled the sleeping bag with rocks, cinched it shut and pushed it in. The body splashed. The water crashed against stone walls, lapped, then stilled to a flat mirror reflecting the sky. A single, golden maple leaf drifted onto dark water, and the woman had never existed.

  ****

  It went on like that until the day he met Carrie Brown, the day he made Anat Al–Fulani.

  It was winter. Anat Al–Fulani was an immigrant janitor who worked at Pittock. Every afternoon he passed her hurrying across campus, her burka an anachronism among the students’ ski jackets and stocking caps. He had not given her a second thought until one ferocious, winter day he caught sight of her walking, bent against the gale. For a moment, the wind dislodged her headscarf, revealing black hair so glossy it shone. Quickly, she fixed the scarf. Meanwhile, he had decided.

  He grew tired of the homeless women with their loose breasts and gray teeth. Anat was a mule like them. Her English was a stutter. Her burka made her an object of ridicule for some, pity for others. But she was healthy, gorgeous, full–figured under her robes, and so proud.

  Making her was a joy. It was the first time he used the train. He laid her on the tracks, threw the green sheet over her body and watched the orgasmic moment when the train hit. She was barely breathing when he emerged from the shadowed woods and the darkness of the gathering snowstorm. He stared at her stumps. She was his.

  He was just leaning over to touch the bone where it protruded from the muscle when a voice stopped him.

  “I see you.”

  He whirled. A woman emerged from the nearby darkness. She stood, watching him, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Despite the cold wind, she held her head high, looking right at him. He knew she had seen the making. She had watched him drag Anat to the tracks and secure the ties. Her eyes dropped below his belt. She saw his fly open.

  Without thinking, he picked up a rock. She had seen it; she had to die.

  “Wait. Don’t!” she called from the edge of the clearing. “I’m not going to tell. I just want to know…” Her voice was breathless. “Can you do it to me?”

  “What?”

  He took a step toward her, expecting her to run. She stood still, letting him move into her orbit. She had dark blonde hair cut in a angular bob and slashes of eye shadow over her eyes. She looked about twenty–five. He thought he had seen her on campus. She put her arms around him.

  “I’ve been watching you,” she said.

  He had never shared a making with anyone but those he made. He ran his hands down her jeans, transferring Anat’s blood to her clothes.

  “They don’t understand you, do they?” she whispered. She was wearing a leather jacket and the leather creaked as she moved. “They don’t understand us. They don’t know how much we need it.”

  We need it. That became their mantra. In bed at the cheap hotel he rented, he tied the bands around her thighs so she could feel her cells dying. He took her in her wheelchair, a prop they bought together. She leaned back in the camel pose, her feet tucked under her thighs, so he could experience what they wanted to make real.

  He barely noticed the investigation into Anat’s death. When he did, it was easy to convince the police chief, Robert Hornsby, that he could serve the greater good by not stirring up a scandal. That cost him a donation to the police cruiser fund and a promise to talk to the city council about the police department’s woeful benefit package. He forgot the promise as soon as it left his lips.

  Then one day he went to the Cozzzy Inn where he’d met Carrie so many times. This time, he brought a bottle of champagne. Everything was settled, finally. This was to be the last time they met like children playacting. In his jacket pocket, he carried a roundtrip ticket to Bhisho, South Africa.

  The procedure to remove her legs would take three hours. Then Carrie would convalesce in a beautiful villa surrounded by orange trees and armed guards. It was where “political men,” as Dr. Mobuzi described them, recovered from stab wounds and venereal disease.

  “It is the safest place in South Africa,” the doctor had assured him.

  “How long before I can have her?” he had asked. He needed her. He needed to feel her stumps, hot and meaty, yet helpless.

  “One fortnight to fornicate without the possibility of hemorrhage, but a month would be more appropriate for courtly relations.” Mobuzi spoke good English. He had learned from a Catholic textbook. “Of course, for this procedure of great magnitude it will be of significant expense.” He bowed.

  “Money is not an issue.”

  “Then everything is established and will be completed to meet your desire.”

  But it wasn’t.

  ****

  He had walked in expecting to find Carrie naked in the wheelchair. Instead, she’d sat cross–legged on the bed, wearing a turquoise sundress instead of her usual black. She was fiddling with something in her lap.

  “What are you doing?” he had asked, although he could see she was knitting, an idiotic hobby that all the girls at the college had taken up that summer.

  “It’s a cap.” Carrie smiled. Her skin looked radiant. She was putting on weight. She hung her head, but her voice was cheerful. She was excited about something. “Oh, honey, I’ve changed my mind. I can’t go.”

  “It’s all settled.” He spoke gently. “Carrie, you want this. Don’t be scared. You’ve always wanted this.”

  Carrie squeezed her knitting. “Do you know what Body Integrity Identity Disorder is? BIID?”

  He didn’t.

  “It’s a disease, and I have it.” She sat up like an eager student reciting her lesson. “BIID. It’s when the map in the brain doesn’t match the body, like the men who want to be women. The map inside their brain is for a woman’s body, but they’re
born a man. It’s called a dysphoria. It’s a body dysphoria. I was born into a body with two legs, but my mind–map is an amputee. It doesn’t have lower legs. That’s why I hate them so much.” She stroked the familiar place on her thigh, the nexus of all her violent attentions. “Here. This is where the mind–map ends.”

  He was getting angry. He wanted her in the wheelchair, and then he wanted her on the plane. The need was growing.

  “You don’t understand what this means,” Carrie went on. Her eyes were bright beneath dark eye shadow. “It means I’m not a freak. I’m sick, and there are treatments, psychologists, even drugs. There might even be a cure. I don’t know. But I don’t have to cut off my legs.”

  “What?” He clenched his fists. Rage swelled in his groin. He had made women, but he had never gotten to keep them. Not for more than a few minutes. Carrie was supposed to be his. He would own her forever. “I risked everything to get the money for this trip. I put my career on the line for you.”

  “Don’t you understand how wonderful this is? If there’s a cure for me, there might be a cure for you. We could have a real life, a real relationship.”

  He didn’t want a real relationship. He wanted Carrie secluded in a rental apartment far from campus but close enough to serve his need. His mind raced as Carrie kept talking.

  “I know we’re not what people expect, but fuck them. I want to walk hand in hand. I want to run in the surf. I want to chase after my kids. We could do that. We could get married.”

  “No one can know about us. Not with you at the college.”

  “I know, so I’ve transferred to UMass.”

  “You are getting on that plane.”

  “I love you.” She gazed up at him. “We deserve more than this. There are other people like us, who feel the way I do and the way you do. And they’re normal people. I’ve been going to a web forum.”

  “Who did you tell? No one can know about us! If you told…”