Panzram’s Double

Emma’s yapping about some school shooting that happened last year in Connecticut that I hadn’t heard about. She’s a little older than me and has our dad’s baggy eyes. He says we’re best friends, like sisters should be. I hate her fucking guts. She’s my only friend and the only person I can make eye contact with for more than four seconds.

She’s scrolling through Wikipedia on her phone and critically examining Adam Lanza’s motives, or lack thereof, comparing and contrasting him with Dylan and Eric. Emma runs a Tumblr dedicated mostly to Columbine with some minor detours into select serial killers, who I’m more interested in. This is pretty much the only point our interests intersect, especially since she stopped playing Roblox with me as soon she turned sixteen.

I’m staring down at a piece of pizza I don’t feel like eating when I mumble something about Carl Panzram, hoping to steer the conversation away from Lanza’s apparent obsession with a chimp that ripped some lady’s face off and ate it.

“Y’know,” I murmur, rocking back and forth a little. “I’m pretty sure Panzram was the only serial killer that murdered people on two different continents…” She ignores me.

“I mean, Dylan and Eric, they had like, reasons, and it’s actually super tragic. Molly, this guy, he was just…”

She lowers her voice. “Oh my God. I hate wacky ties,” she says, putting emphasis on the word wacky and sneering. I twist my head to look and he’s sitting alone at a booth in the corner. The tie: Porky Pig in golf clothes swinging a nine iron.

“Probably polyester,” she notes. “I swear, you forget how to dress as soon as you turn, like, thirty.”

He’s shoveling cheesy fries into his mouth, thumb idly flicking upward on his phone. I think about our next-door neighbor, a gym teacher. They’re both balding, but that’s where the similarities stop. He’s a dead-ringer for Panzram (minus the stupid coke bottle glasses) and the fact that she doesn’t seem to notice makes me dig my fingernails into my thigh.

“He looks like Mr. Starski,” I say. Emma clicks her tongue.

“I guess there’s some resemblance… I mean, he looks less creepy than that. Oh my God, I wonder if he’s a bodybuilder, too.”

“He’s wearing a suit. I don’t think he’s a bodybuilder.” By the look on her face I immediately realize that she was being sarcastic.

“I’m joking. God, you’re so slow. He’s probably a teacher, or something.” She continues to berate me until we leave, calling me a retard, an idiot, the rest.

#

I come back the next day for lunch, alone, which is already terrifying. He’s there, same order, different tie. Same fat fingers scooping fried food into his mouth. The tie: jack-o-lanterns and silhouettes of witches, black and orange with a sheen to it.

I smile when I notice the ring on his finger and wonder if his wife is nice to him, or if she’s dead, something that excites me. He glances up at me, looks back down, then looks back up when he realizes I’m staring at him, a concerned look materializing on his face.

I start thinking about the fastest way to kill myself. I need to look away, fast, but somehow make it seem casual.

 I turn to the window and stare at the abandoned gas station across the street. My face feels like it’s been soaked in gasoline. I feel like I’m on fire. Oh God, he’s probably still staring at me…

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him leave, wiping his mouth with a napkin and inexplicably shoving it into his back pocket, before I look down at the grease-soaked pizza I bought as a pretext to sitting here.

Wait a few seconds, count to fifteen, then get up. I follow him for half-a-block, at a safe distance, before he looks down at his watch and starts sprinting. He’s late for something! He is a teacher! I powerwalk after him, grinning ear to ear, before stopping half-a-block from the campus that I now know he works at.

#

I’m homeschooled, some kinda online charter school program. So’s Emma, but Emma has friends that aren’t me, who go to real school. She pretty much goes to real school by extension and I subtly resent her for this.

Emma’s asking me if I think she’s fat and I imagine saying yes and throwing in that she’s hideous, too (she isn’t, she’s about as pretty as I am, but I want to be mean) but end up saying no, thinking about the routine I’ve been stuck in since the age of seven-and-a-half: waking up and staying inside.

Emma says my voice is too monotone. I’m pretty sure she knows I was thinking all that stuff about calling her a hideous fat-ass because now she’s nitpicking my voice and saying that I’m a stuttering retard with no friends and that I’m barely even human and et cetera et cetera.

I lie back in bed and stare at the ceiling.

I go through the school website hoping to find him and thank God, I do – there’s a black-and-white photo of him from back when he had more hair, but it’s him. Dr. Henry Fontenot, Kaufman Hall, 323.

Always choosing to spend most of the day doing what I normally do. No choice to do anything else!  I get to work on building a 1:1 recreation of my house in Minecraft. Sometimes I wonder if it’d be better to do it in Roblox and today is one of those days because I cannot for the life of me get the living room to look right, it either feels too big or too small and it’s starting to get to me.

A guy I sort of know on IRC sends me a picture of him in a handmade Star Trek uniform he’s gonna wear to some convention. He’s really into EVE Online and knows some guy who got lynched at Benghazi. I don’t eat much at dinner because beef stew reminds me of the Tiny Toons scat porn he showed me yesterday. I fantasize about Henry and say, out loud and to no one in particular, that he’s the only reason I haven’t killed myself.

#

I take a framed photo of Emma off the wall and eat it then steal dad’s keys after he passes out on the couch. “Tonight’s the night!” I mutter to myself, powerwalking down the street towards campus.

Like every other shit college in the Northeast, campus looks like an antebellum plantation sans slavery. My dad’s worked here (janitor: nothing prestigious) since before I was born but I’ve never once set foot here, I realize. On a whim I squat down outside of Kaufman Hall, which looks like a cinderblock, and tear up a handful of grass. Without thinking I put it into my mouth and start chewing, then swallow. I gag and move on, thinking about pesticide.

I start breathing funny as soon as I climb through the window (unlocked and the first one I try; tacit approval from a Mr. Christ?) and for a moment I sit there on the cold tile floor of the break room before pushing myself up and closing the window behind me. 

The room I’m in confuses me: ten microwaves line one wall near what I think is a display case for potshards from Assyria. I shake my head and start looking for his office which is out of the way and takes me twenty minutes to find.

Go through the anthropology department, through a classroom, down a hallway where half the carpeting’s been torn up, then I’m there, in front of his office. I run my hand across the nameplate on the door and then let myself inside.

In the back of my head I realize that this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to another person, something that feels exciting and horrible, like the time I stabbed myself in the hand with a fork at Thanksgiving dinner last year, or when I beat Minecraft.

I start breathing really hard and stumble over to the other end of the room, carefully avoiding the desk, and feel around for curtains, or a window. There aren’t any. I go back by the door and turn the lights on, the bulb overhead crackling a bit before finally working.

There are no windows, just row after row of shelves all the way up to the ceiling, most of them packed with books, half of them in French and the other half on ghosts, ranging from the shittiest yellowing paperbacks lifted from a thrift store to what I think are scientific journals about parapsychology. Professional ghost-hunting.

The walls are concrete, no paint or wallpaper, which I guess matches the building’s brutalist exterior. Degrees, each successively more removed from America; a Bachelor’s in French from Louisiana State, a Masters in the same from McGill, and a Doctorate from someplace in Paris.

Framed photographs, all around the world. He looks small and in every single one, he’s doing the same pose and pulling the same expression: arms crossed, one eyebrow raised, like the photographer’s intruding. But they weren’t. It’s all staged. He doesn’t mind one bit.

I take a picture of him off the wall and run a hand across it, thinking about how him or his wife must’ve framed this themselves, right? I lean against the door and slide down to the floor, my legs shaking. I’ve got this warm, glowing feeling in my belly, and I’m staring right at him. He’s in Port-au-Prince. I’m in Scranton. He’s in Scranton, too.

I throw up all over myself and onto the picture, too. I’m wearing sandals, so my feet are just soaked, and some of it’s on the floor, already soaking into the brown carpeting. Clump of grass, half-digested photo of my sister, already starting to dry up.

I grab the half-digested photo and leave in a hurry, making sure to lock the door behind me. Less than half-an-hour later, I’m back home, taking a bath. I picture him in a hospital, hooked up to a ventilator, struggling to breathe, and can’t settle on why he’s there. Lung cancer? His office smelled like cigarettes. Or maybe he was shot. Or maybe he tried killing himself. I settle on lung cancer and relax.

#

I visit him every week in April and at least twice a week in May. I don’t know how I haven’t been caught yet, but I don’t care. He knows I’m here, sort of.

In his journal, he calls the vomit I left on his floor ectoplasm, and is overjoyed but confused at the footnotes I leave in the books I take out and return from time to time.

Henry is spiritual, but not religious, and one entry is just “Kardec was right, there is life after death” underlined three times. Later, when he does a séance in his office, he’s hurt that I don’t talk back, but the next week I rearrange all the pictures on the walls. He’s overjoyed. I smear period blood all over the pages of his journal. He writes around it, ecstatic.

He says he’s researching me and I find newspaper clippings confirming as much: I’m a nineteen year old girl who killed herself in his office – back when Kaufman Hall was a dormitory – in 1972. Lisa McMasters. I cut my arms open with a razor blade and bled to death on the floor.

He has no idea who I am and it makes me want to kill myself. He thinks I’m an idiot who offed herself because she couldn’t get into some sorority. I don’t visit him as much in June.

#

Why do I love him so much? Sure, there’s a more than passing resemblance to Carl Panzram: he’s his doppelganger, physically identical in every way, but as spring turns into summer, I can find no other similarity.

Panzram hated everyone and everything, had an awful childhood, and I’m pretty sure I could’ve made him better, if I were alive in 1911. And if not, he would’ve stabbed me to death, which is exciting, too.

Panzram sodomized and murdered dozens of men and children across the United States, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Angola, escaping from prison more than a dozen times. He nursed a personal grudge against President Taft for years before finally robbing Taft’s mansion, stealing a gold-plated pistol he would then use to kill nearly a dozen sailors in New York City. He had gentle hands, a surprisingly warm smile, and was extremely well-read. His favorites were Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He campaigned for prison reform. He liked dogs. In his final days, he was insistent that dehydrated, ground-up bananas were the future of nutrition.

Henry doesn’t hate anyone. He’s so excited that ghosts are real, that he’s going to be a father, that his dad beat cancer. He’s so in love with life it makes me sick. Why can’t he be worse? Sure, there are a few things: his paranoia that he’s being sidelined, an obsession with faculty politicking, a simultaneous joy and hurt that he has the worst office on campus…

That summer, in his humid, shitty little office, I start to hate him, but only halfway. It turns my stomach that he’s so harmless but I can’t stop loving him, for some reason, which only makes me angrier. Whenever I’m not with him, I feel more alone than I did before.

#

I avoid visiting him all through October and spend the entire month indoors. In Roblox, I try building a perfect recreation of his office based completely on memory, but give up after a week.

I write and delete stories where he catches me and strangles me to death out of an anger I can’t justify before killing himself. For Halloween I try and convince dad to let me go as Aileen Wuornos but we “meet halfway” and I end up going as a cat for the fourth year in a row. 

Emma’s friends, who are all too old to be doing this, say I look adorable. Halfway through the night I tell them I’m going home, but end up getting lost because I can’t remember where I live. A policeman sees me sitting on a curb somewhere staring vacantly at the ground and asks me if I’m okay. I tell him my address, which I do remember, and he drives me home.

I go into the backyard and dig up the hamster I had in 6th grade, Yam. In his shoebox coffin, he’s all shriveled up and dry. I shove him in my back pocket and trudge through dead leaves towards campus, sneak into his office, and arrange all his books in the shape of a person on the floor. I leave Yam in his desk and write HERE I AM on a picture of him in Réunion, drawing an X over his face.

#

Lisa’s head is missing. The groundskeeper found her grave dug up yesterday and nothing else was missing, so they can’t figure out the motive, but I know why. She gets two minutes on the morning news. I realize he might not be that harmless.

#

A hot week in November. My face is cold but I’m sweating underneath my coat. I’m always nervous whenever I visit him, now. He hasn’t told anyone, not even his wife. He wants me all to himself. I think about how he’s never actually seen me, except that one time in the pizza parlor, and want to die.

I’m in a bad mood when I come to his office, take the manuscript for the book he’s been writing out of the desk, throw it onto the floor, squat down, and piss all over it. I fall backwards and hit my head against a chair and start sobbing when I realize what I just did. I try to clean it up but can’t.

Next week, he’s wondering why the pages are all stuck together and why it smells so bad. He’s devastated. “What am I doing wrong?” he writes. I tear the page out and eat it.

#

I’m at an indoor swimming pool, floating on my back. I realize that he’s going to try and decapitate me, but I don’t care. I swim to the edge and pull myself out. There’s no one else here.

#

I don’t know what day it is and I’m in his office. I don’t remember how I got here but all of my clothes are on the floor. It’s cold in here and the lights are off and I look around and I guess I broke every picture on the wall; my hands are bleeding and there’s glass everywhere.

#

It’s snowing outside. I break down crying when Emma leaves because she’s ruining the fresh snow. I’m in the tub thinking about him cutting me open and eating me. I’m in my bedroom thinking about him being crucified by the Romans. I’m in the closet, hiding behind daddy and Emma’s coats, because I think he drove by the house. I’m outside and it’s dark and I don’t have my shoes on.

#

I think it’s December. It’s still snowing and the house is decorated, so I think it might be Christmastime. daddy keeps spare razors and oxycodone for his bad back in the medicine cabinet above the sink. Snowing. I’m like his wife and mom because I’m the only person who’s ever really loved him. Everything becomes soft around the edges.

I’m sitting in his big leather chair and my eyes are half-shut feeling warmer than usual and thinking about how he sits here. I want to write something in his journal and when I open the desk drawer he keeps it in, I can’t believe what I’m looking at.

Her, my skull. must be. I can barely see. I’m crying. I think about what I’m getting for Christmas, how how much I need to do this, how I’m running out of time because it’s six in the morning already and I’m not home yet and I’ve been here for hours or years so I take the razor and go down across my right arm and Jesus Jesus Jesus that hurts, I’m bleeding all over the place so I take my skull out of the desk and start smearing my blood all over it and

#

When I wake up I want to hit myself over the head for passing out, but I can’t move my arms. They’re tied to the bed.

My right arm’s cocooned in gauze and feels like it’s being held against a grill. It hurts this bad but I didn’t even cut deep enough to bleed to death before someone, probably him, showed up. I feel like such an idiot. I feel a little more lucid than normal, less dreamy.

Someone’s moaning down the hall and I see a nurse walk past the door. By the door, there’s a TV attached to the wall, silently playing Family Guy. The subtitles are off.

I drift in and out of sleep for either a few hours or a few days. Dad visits me at some point with Emma. He’s really, really confused. Emma says I look great for someone who just tried to kill herself.

“Thanks,” I say, flat, eyes glued to the TV. Peter’s arms are being fed into a wood chipper while Quagmire and Brian Dennehy watch. Dad glances up and asks a nurse to turn it off, and she does. Emma asks me if it’s okay for her to make a post about this on Tumblr. I tell her it’s fine.

“Is it okay if I ask why, pumpkin?” Dad asks, making his voice as soft as possible, how he does when he tells me he loves me.

“Who found me?”

“One of the professors, I think.”

“Who?”

“The, uh, guy whose office you were in. Why?”

“Can you ask him to come visit? I want to, uh, thank him. For saving my life.” For what I guess is the first time, I realize that my droning, monotone voice might help with lying.

#

When I wake up the next morning I’m hyper-lucid, so I guess the antidepressants or whatever I’m on are starting to work. It dawns on me that I did something I can never, ever take back. I deleted my Minecraft save right before I left the house. My unbearable grief helps me ignore the guy screaming the n-word down the hallway at the top of his lungs. I watch Sesame Street and fantasize about puppets as a possible career.

When he shows up, he has this big, goofy grin on his face, like he’s the happiest guy in the world.

“Hey, good to see you’re doing better, uh…” His eyes shoot down to the clipboard at the foot of the bed.

“Molly. You feelin’ any better?”

“Yeah. Can you shut the door?”

“I’ll ask a nurse.” Even though they technically can’t allow it because I tried to kill myself, they let him do it anyways, because it’s my 14th birthday. It’s my 14th birthday, wow!

He sits down next to the bed, leaning forward a little bit.

“My name’s Henry. I can’t talk too long, so…”

“I found the skull in your desk,” I tell him. His eyes widen for a moment.

“What?”

“I found Lisa’s skull in your desk,” I repeat.

He scowls at me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who’s Lisa?”

“You think I’m Lisa. I’ve been going into your office at night, every week since April, doing stuff, and…”

He starts talking, then stops, lowering his voice.

“I got rid of that. No one’s going to believe you.”

I shut my eyes for a moment and fantasize about him wrapping his hands around my neck and choking me to death, crushing my windpipe with his thumbs, leaning in to kiss me… when I open them again, he’s still there, staring at the door. I can make this work, I think.

“You have nice eyes,” I say.

“Why?”

“What’s Louisiana like? Is it hot?”

“Why were you in my office? What do you want from me?”

It hits me all at once that he looks horrified. There’s something on his face, something really, really afraid. There’s no point in being covert about this, I realize, so I have to put all my cards on the table.

“I think I’m in love with you… you look just like Carl Panzram.”

“Who’s that?”

I smile really wide and start telling him.

“He was a serial killer! He murdered at least twenty people in America, Mexico, Angola, in Africa, so he killed people on two different continents, and,”

“I’m really glad you’re okay, Molly, but I think you’re, uh, not well. I have to go. Maybe we can talk about this when you’re a bit better, okay?” He starts to stand up and heads for the door. He stops, turns back, and says, “Oh, merry Christmas, by the way. Get well soon.”

Then he leaves.

He pokes his head back in. “Happy birthday, too.” And then he leaves, really. I’m alone.

I get my stitches removed the day before Christmas and get sent home. Emma says the scar will look cool, and asks if she can take a picture of my arm and post it on Tumblr. Rounding off a pretty bad year, Dad tells me Santa Claus isn’t real (framing it as a ‘you already know this, right’, which only makes me feel worse), and everyone at Grandma’s Christmas party is overly nice.

I wake up the next morning feeling surprisingly good; Emma tells me the picture of my arm is getting her a lot of notes. For Christmas, I get two new sweaters and Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas Gaddis. I’m reading through it when I come up with a great idea. His name’s in the phonebook, and I call him up.

“Hello?”