“What happened to them?”
“We lived there in Chicago two years, and then we moved here to Oregon. I let them live for quite a while, and I let them pretend to love me. Why not? They enjoyed their delusions so much. But then, after I graduated from college, I was twenty years old and needed more money than I had, so there had to be another dreadful accident, another fire in the night. But it was eleven long years since the fire that took my real mom and dad, and half a continent away. No social workers had seen me in years, and there were no files about my horrible mistake with Grandma, so no connections were ever made.”
They sat in silence.
After a while he tapped the plate in front of her. “Eat, eat,” he cajoled. “I’ll be eating at a diner myself. Sorry I can’t keep you company.”
“I believe you,” she said.
“What?”
“That you were never abused.”
“Though that runs against everything you’ve been taught. Good girl, Chyna. You know the truth when you hear it. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”
“There’s no understanding you,” she said, though she was talking more to herself than to him.
“Of course there is. I’m just in touch with my reptilian nature, Chyna. It’s in all of us. We all evolved from that slimy, legged fish that first crawled out of the sea. The reptile consciousness… it’s still in all of us, but most of you struggle so hard to hide it from yourselves, to convince yourselves that you’re something cleaner and better than what you really are. The irony is, if you’d just for once acknowledge your reptile nature, you’d find the freedom and the happiness that you’re all so frantic to achieve and never do.”
He tapped the plate again, and then the glass of water. He got up and tucked his chair under the table.
“That conversation wasn’t quite as you expected, was it, Chyna?”
“No.”
“You were expecting me to equivocate, to whine on about being a victim, to indulge in elaborately structured self-delusions, to spit up some tale of warping incest. You wanted to believe your clever probing might expose a secret religious fanaticism, bring revelations that I hear godly voices in my head. You didn’t expect it to be this straightforward. This honest.”
He went to the door between the kitchen and the living room, and then turned to look at her. “I’m not unique, Chyna. The world is filled with the likes of me—most are just less free. You know where I think a lot of my type wind up?”
In spite of herself, she asked, “Where?”
“In politics. Imagine having the power to start wars, Chyna. How gratifying that would be. Of course, in public life, one would generally have to forgo the pleasure of getting right down in the wet of it, hands dirty with all the wonderful fluids. One would have to be satisfied with the thrill of sending thousands to their deaths, remote destruction. But I believe I could adapt to that. And there would always be photos from the war zone, reports, all as graphic as one requested. And never a danger of apprehension. More amazing—they build monuments to you. You can bomb a small country into oblivion, and dinners are given in your honor. You can kill thirty-four children in a religious community, crush them with tanks, burn them alive, claim they were dangerous cultists—then sit back to the sound of applause. Such power. Intensity.”
He glanced at the clock.
A few minutes past five.
He said, “I’ll finish dressing and be gone. Back as soon after midnight as I can be.” He shook his head as if saddened by the sight of her. “Untouched and alive. What kind of existence is that, Chyna? Not one worth having. Get in touch with your reptile consciousness. Embrace the cold and the dark. That’s what we are.”
He left her in chains as twilight entered the world and the light withdrew.
8
Mr. Vess steps onto the porch, locks the front door, and then whistles for the dogs.
The day is growing cooler as it wanes, and the air is bracing. He zips up his jacket.