What great camouflage age is: Add a few crow’s-feet and deepen the jowls, put in a touch of gray against the temples, wear glasses to make it seem as if the eyes are weakening-and memory deceives us.
Context, too, was important. The doctor who had betrayed him once when he was young wasn’t able to recognize that the nice adult thirty years later holding the store’s door wide for him as he struggled with his purchases was the man who was going to kill him.
Because he never considered that I would be right there at that moment.
Sometimes the best mask is no mask at all.
A sudden curiosity overcame him, and Student #5 started to rummage around in his desk drawers, until he came across a small, red-leather-embossed picture album. He flipped it open. There he was, graduating from high school, and then a similar shot-arm in arm with his parents-when he completed college. Grins of accomplishment and black academic robes. Innocence and optimism. These were followed by a couple of bare-chested beach pictures, some candid snapshots of Student #5 with girls whose names he couldn’t recall or friends that had faded from his life completely.
He felt a momentary twinge of anger.
Everyone is happy when you are normal.
Everyone hates you when you are not.
Really, they fear you, when it is you that has everything to fear. People don’t understand: As you lose your mind, you can also lose your hope.
He took a deep breath. Memory blended with sadness, which re-formed into rage, and he gripped the edge of the desk, steadying himself. He knew that when he allowed the past to intrude on what he was planning-even when it was the past that had created the need-it muddied things.
No one ever came to visit me in the hospital. It was like I was contagious.
No friends.
No family.
No one.
My madness belonged solely to me.
There were no pictures from those hospital months, and none taken after he was released. Then he flipped the pages to the picture he knew was the last in the album, but the most important. It had been taken in the quadrangle outside the building that housed the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry. Five smiling faces. Everyone wearing the same uniform: white lab coat and dark slacks or jeans. They had linked arms around each other.
He was in the center of the photo.
Were they already planning to ruin my career?
Did they know what they were doing to my future?
Where was understanding? Sympathy?
His hair was unkempt, tangled, a long mess, his look furtive behind the smile. He could see how little sleep he’d had, how many meals he’d skipped. He could see how stress was pulling him across hot coals and plunging him into freezing waters. His shoulders slumped. His chest was sunken. He looked slight, weak-almost as if he’d been beaten up or lost a fight. Madness could do that, just as effectively as cancer or heart disease.
Why did I smile?
He stared at the look on his face. He could see hurt and uncertainty behind his eyes.
This pain was truth.
Their embrace, friendly looks, wide, happy smiles, and camaraderie-those were all lies.
Student #5 removed the photo from the glassine sheaf that held it. He reached out and seized a red marker from his desktop. Holding the marker in his hand like a knife, he rapidly drew an X through each face-including his own.
He stared at the defaced snapshot, then walked swiftly into the kitchen. He found a box of wooden matches in a drawer and went to the sink and struck a light. He let the flame curl over the edge of the picture, holding it sideways, bending it so that the flame would envelop the image before he dropped it into the stainless steel basin. He watched the photo crinkle, blacken, and melt. Now, all the people in that picture are dead, he thought.
Killing is making me normal.
Then he waved his hands above the sink.
He didn’t want the smoke to set off an alarm.
15
Unsettling dreams and night sweats filled Andy Candy’s sleep.
Her waking hours-the ones spent apart from Moth-were riven with doubts. She was suddenly immersed in doing things that might be very wrong, and might be very right; it was hard for her to tell. Complicating matters for her was a residual fury that would overcome her at odd moments, when least expected, during which she would find herself picturing what had happened, trying to ascertain the exact moment when she could have changed everything.
There were times when she thought:
I died that night.
The music had been loud. Brutally loud.
Unrecognizable tunes. Incomprehensible rap lyrics that were about pimps, whores, and guns. Bass heavy, hard-driving, throbbing. Ear-splitting. So loud she had to shout to be heard even an inch or two away and her throat had become raw almost instantly. The frat house had been jam-packed. Even moving a few feet one way or the other had been difficult. The heat had been overwhelming. Sweat, slurred words, gyrating bodies, lights that flickered on and off, red lamps that glowed. Plastic glasses filled with beer or wine being passed overhead. The air was thick with cigarette and marijuana smoke, which mingled with body odors. Occasional shouts, roars of laughter like waves, even screams that might have been joy and might have been panic blended with the relentless music. Hard liquor was swigged from dozens of bottles, shared right and left, guzzled like water.
Not knowing where her date was, she’d fought her way to a side room, hoping to find a little space amidst the press of bodies so she could breathe, all the time telling herself, Get out of here now because the cops will surely be here soon, but not listening to her own good advice. The side room was also packed, but the students were jammed back against the walls, creating a small empty space in the center-like a gladiatorial arena. She’d craned her neck to see what everyone was looking at, and as she did this, she heard a wild and unrestrained moan, which was absorbed by cheers, like at a sporting contest.
In the center, a completely naked, heavily muscled boy was sitting on a steel folding chair. His legs were spread wide. She remembered he had a tattoo on one arm-the clichéd Tribal Armband favored by the kids lacking imagination, or else too stoned or too drunk to consider something original when they stumbled into the tattoo artist’s parlor. She had stared at the tattoo for a moment, before focusing on the boy’s erect organ. It was impressive, and he held it like a sword.
In front of him was a naked girl.
She was dancing, twisting her body provocatively, inches away from the boy who’d moaned.
Andy Candy hadn’t recognized her.
As muscular as the boy was, the girl-no more than nineteen or twenty-was statuesque. Flat stomach, large breasts, long legs, and a great mane of dark hair that she shook in time to some inner rhythm. She waved a bottle of Scotch in one hand, poured some of the booze down her chest, licked it from her fingers, then thrust her hips forward as if asking everyone watching to admire her sex, her shaved pubic region. The crowd cheered as she filled her mouth with liquor, then dropped to her knees in front of the boy-gracefully, Andy Candy had thought then, maybe even athletically. She lowered her mouth, letting Scotch dribble from her lips, then pulled back, teasing. The boy had moaned again, straining with his erection toward her. The girl, playing to the crowd, pointed to the erection, then to her lips, as if asking a question. A cheer went up. Cries of Yes! and Do it! thickened the air. Another frat member circled around the couple, handheld video camera in his hand, getting a close-up as she waved to the crowd like a politician acknowledging a cheering mob, then pitched forward and seemed to swallow the boy whole. This went on for a few seconds, her head moving up and down rhythmically as she fellated him, before she leapt up. She faced the crowd-about two-thirds boys, but a number of young women, too-and bowed. A performance artist. With a flourish, cupping her arms behind her head to display her coordination and strength, she abruptly turned around, and slowly lowered herself onto him.