Self-Defense (7 page)

When recontacted and asked how he could
term that kind of thing “greatness,” Trafficant replied, “It’s all a matter of
context, friend,” and hung up.

A storm of outraged letters ensued.
Several religious leaders condemned Lowell in their Sunday sermons. Lowell and
Trafficant refused further interviews, and after a week or so the fuss died
down. In May,
From Hunger to Rage
was published to uniformly strong
reviews, went into a second printing, and made it to Number 10 on
The New
York Times
best-seller list. A scheduled book tour for Trafficant was
canceled, however, when the author didn’t show up for an interview on a
national morning talk show.

When questioned about Trafficant’s
whereabouts, Buck Lowell said, “Terry walked out on us a couple of weeks ago.
Right after all the
sturmdrang
idiocy about Kurten. Words mean different things to a
man like that. He was wounded deeply.”

A sensitive soul? asked the reporter.

“It’s all a matter of context,” said
Lowell.

Over the next two decades, coverage of
Lowell diminished steadily, and by the end of the period nothing was left but a
few doctoral theses, inflicting upon him that peculiar gleeful viciousness that
passes for wit in the academic world.
Command: Shed the Light
went out
of print, and no further books or paintings materialized. No mention at all of
Terry Trafficant, though
his
book did go into paperback.

Checking out the gray volume, I drove
home. When I passed Topanga Canyon, I wondered if the great man was still
living there.

At Las Flores Canyon, static wiped out the
music on my radio. I fooled with the tuner and caught the word
Shwandt
at the tail end of a news broadcast. Then the disk jockey said, “And
now back to more music.”

I couldn’t find a newscast and switched to
AM. Both all-news stations were doing the sports scores, and everything else
was chatter and music and people trying to sell things.

I gave up and concentrated on the beauty
of the highway, open and clean as it ribboned past true-blue water. Even the
commercial strip near the Malibu pier didn’t look half bad in the afternoon
sun. Bikini shops, diving schools, clam stands, real estate companies
pretending they still had something to do during the slump.

Once home, I took a beer and Lowell’s
poetry onto the deck. It soon became clear this wouldn’t be reading for fun.

Nasty stuff. Nothing like the luxuriant
verse and lust-for-life stories Lowell had put out during the forties and
fifties. Nearly all the poems dealt explicitly with violence, and many seemed
to glorify it.

The first, entitled “Home-icide,” was
almost a haiku:

He walks in the door

briefcase-appendaged. And

Finds

She’s shot the kids.

But the dog’s still alive.

Time to feed it.

Another proclaimed:

Over the meadows and through the woods to:

Clarity

Chastity

Priapisty

Buggery

Butchery

Prepared perfectly for truncation:

Hone the bone. Toss the I Ching,

then toss the rules out the window.

The title poem was an empty black page.
Several other pieces seemed no more than random collections of words, and a
six-page poem entitled
Shaht-up
consisted of four four-line verses in a language that
a footnote explained was “Finnish, stupid.”

The final piece was printed in letters so
tiny I had to strain to read them:

Slung and arrowed, she begs for it.

Shitsmear idiocy—who does she think she
is?

Snap.

To give up!

Snap.

Just like that—

LIKE THAT

Easy to see why the book hadn’t worked—and
why it had enchanted Trafficant.

I pictured him poring over it in his cell,
then rushing to Lowell’s defense.

His motive would have been more than
shared literary taste. With a few supportive words, he’d bought himself early
parole.

I reread the final poem.

A woman begging for it, then scorned for
giving up.

Classic male rape fantasy?

Lucy’s incubus...

The abduction imagery in the dream.

Had she come across this dreadful little
book, perhaps as part of her brother’s “roots” research?

Reading it and identifying with the
victim?

Or what if the dream represented something
more personal—being molested herself?

At the voir dire, she’d denied ever having
been a crime victim. But if it had happened long ago and she’d repressed it,
she wouldn’t have remembered.

The dream had started right after she’d
listened to Milo testify about Carrie.

Identifying with a child victim.

Abused in childhood, not by her father—he
hadn’t been around to do it—but by a father surrogate? A teacher or some other
trusted adult?

Other men in the dream—melding with her
father because he had hurt her in another way?

I thought of her waking up on the kitchen
floor.

The helplessness of the position.

Victimization.

Or maybe none of the above.

I wrestled with it a while longer, got no
further, and went back inside. Remembering the radio broadcast I’d heard in the
car, I flipped TV channels till I found a news show. Something about Eastern
Europe; then Shwandt’s face appeared, leering, over the anchor’s left shoulder.

“Police in Santa Ana are investigating the
mutilation slaying of a young woman, still unidentified, whose body was found,
stuffed in a trash bag, by the side of the Santa Ana Freeway early this morning
near the Main Street exit. Sources close to the investigation say the slaying
bears striking similarities to the serial murders for which the Bogeyman, Jobe
Shwandt, was recently sentenced to death, and the possibility of a copycat
killer operating out of Orange County is being considered. More on this
breaking story as details emerge.”

Too much bad stuff, time to sweat it out
of my system. Pretending my knees were eighteen years old, I took a hard jog on
the beach. When I got back, the phone was ringing. My service with Lucy, again.

“Dr. Delaware? I’m... calling from work. I
had a... bit of a problem.” Her voice dropped so low I could barely hear it.
Noise in the background didn’t help.

“What happened, Lucy?”

“The dream. I... had it again.”

“Since this morning’s session?”

“Yes.” Her voice shook. “Here. At work, at
my desk.... God, this is so—I have to talk softly; I’m at a pay phone in the
lobby and people are staring. Can you hear me?”

“I hear you fine.”

She caught her breath. “I feel so
stupid
! Falling asleep at my
desk
!”

“When did this happen?”

“Lunch hour. I was brown-bagging, trying
to catch up. I guess I nodded off, I don’t know, I really don’t remember.”

“Had you taken any sort of medication?”

“Just Tylenol for a headache.”

“No antihistamines or anything else that
would make you drowsy?”

“Nothing. I just... fell asleep.” She
whispered: “It must have woken me up—I found myself on the floor, my legs...
the dream was still in my head, reverberating. Right in the middle of the
office
!
God
!”

“Are you hurt?”

“Not physically. But the
humiliation—everyone thinks I’m crazy!”

“Were there a lot of people around when
you fell?”

“Not when I fell, but right after. It was
lunchtime; a whole crowd was coming back and saw me on the floor! I ran to the
ladies’ room to straighten up. When I got back, my
boss
was there. He
never
comes into the staff area. The look on his face—like what kind of
nutcase
do I have working for me!”

“If he’s worried about anything, Lucy,
it’s probably that you’ll file a worker’s comp suit.”

“No, no, I’m sure he thinks I’m some kind
of bizarro. Falling asleep in the middle of the day—I excused myself to the
bathroom again, went down to the lobby, and called you.”

“Come over, let’s talk.”

“I—I guess I’d better. I’m sure not in any
shape to go back up there.”

I called a neurologist in Santa Monica
named Phil Austerlitz and told him I had a possible referral. When I recounted
what had happened, he said, “You’re thinking narcolepsy?”

“She’s got a troubled sleep pattern. Some
childhood enuresis.”

“But nothing chronic in adulthood.”

“It just started five months ago. While
she was a juror on the Bogeyman trial.”

“Sounds more like stress.”

“That’s what I think, but I want to cover
all bases.”

“Sure, I’ll see her. Thanks for the
referral. Sounds like a fun one. I’ve been dealing with brain tumors all week.
People our age or younger. Must be something in the air.”

She rang the gate bell just after five.
Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and her face was drawn. When I took her
hand it was limp and damp.

I gave her a glass of water and sat her
down. She took a sip and put her face in her hands.

“What’s happening to me, Dr. Delaware?”

I touched her hand. “We’ll find out,
Lucy.”

She tightened her mouth. “It was different
this time. This time I
saw
more.”

Taking a deep breath. And another. Sliding
her hand out from under mine. I sat back.

It took a few more minutes for her to
compose herself. “Remember the grating noise I told you about? What I thought
might be sex? It had nothing to
do
with sex.”

She leaned forward. “I saw it. They were
digging a grave—burying her. The grating was their shovels hitting the rocks.
This time, I was closer. Everything was clearer. It’s never felt this
real
before. It was...”

She put a hand over her eyes and shook her
head.

“I was close enough to touch them—right
behind them. It felt so
real
.”

“The same men.”

“Yes. Three of them.”

“Including your—including Lowell.”

She bared her eyes and licked her lips and
stared at the floor. “He was one of the diggers. Working hard—huffing and
puffing. They all were. And cursing. I could hear their breathing—harsh, like
runners. Then they put her in, and...”

Her shoulders started to shake.

“I started to feel myself
transforming—
my soul leaving my body. I actually saw it, fluttering like this thin white feather.
Then it entered
her
body.”

She stood suddenly.

“I need to walk around.”

Pacing the room, she covered the width of
the glass doors, then retraced her steps. Repeated it twice more before
returning to her seat.

She remained standing, both hands on the
chair back. “I could taste the dirt, Dr. Delaware. It felt as if I was in that
grave.... I tried to shake the dirt off of me but I couldn’t move. It kept
coming
down
on me
—stuffing
me. I thought:
This
is what
death is like, this is
terrible;
what did I do to
deserve
this,
why are they
doing
this to me?”

Her eyes closed and she swayed so low I
jumped up and caught her shoulder. Her body tightened but she didn’t seem to
notice me.

The sound of the tide rose up from the
beach, like a swell of applause. Suddenly, her breathing quickened.

“Lucy,” I said.

As if her name were a posthypnotic
suggestion, she opened her eyes and blinked hard.

“What happened then, Lucy?”

“I woke up. Found myself on the floor...
again. My legs...” Wincing.

“What about your legs?”

“They were...” Spots of color appeared on
her cheeks. “Spread—spread wide, in front of everybody. It made me feel so
sluttish.”

“People understand accidents, Lucy.”

She looked at my hand on her shoulder. I
removed it and she sat down.

“God,” she said. “This is crazy—am I going
off the deep end?”

“No,” I said firmly. “You’re obviously
reacting to some kind of stress, and we’re going to find out what it is. I also
want you to see a neurologist to rule out anything organic.”

She caught her breath and looked at me,
terrified. “Like what? A brain tumor?”