Topping From Below (48 page)
He sighs, and I say it again: “Please. Give me another chance,” and this time he raises one arm and puts it lightly on the small of my back, a very fragile embrace, and I think that perhaps, after all we’ve been through, it isn’t necessary to stand alone.
BEFORE I BEGIN
…
This is not an easy story to tell. I dedicate it, in memoriam, to my sister, who, only ten months ago, was found in her Davis apartment in the spring of last year, on a lazy day of squawking scrub jays and warm sunshine and tender, budding trees in first bloom. It was a glorious day, the kind of spring day that holds out a promise of pure innocence and new beginnings, the kind of day in which the sunlight, like a thousand popping flashbulbs, brightens the town; and on that day, while spring was making itself known, inside the apartment, with duct tape across her mouth and wound around her bare ankles and wrists, lay my dear sister, brutalized and tortured, her body—unnoticed for two weeks—rotting in the heat of a room in which the thermostat had been set at seventy-two. This is her story, and the story of Michael M., a music professor at the university, still living in the city of Davis, whom I believe to be her murderer.
My name is Nora Tibbs, and my sister, Frances, was twenty-four when she died. We grew up in Davis, a small college town just fifteen miles west of Sacramento. Death is not new to me. I had a younger brother, Billy, who died in a hiking accident when he was only twelve. It was a difficult time for us all, Billy’s absence so painful, his memory still present in every room of the house. My mother and father took Franny and moved to Montana, desperate for a change. I was ten years older than my sister, and I stayed behind, moved to Sacramento, where I’d just begun a new job as a journalist. But within a year, my parents had been killed in a car crash and Franny, only fourteen, came to Sacramento to live with me.
She and I were not at all similar. Like my father, I’m athletic, tall, assertive when the occasion demands it. Franny was soft and plump and pale, her skin as delicate as a baby’s, and there was a lived-in, rumpled look about her: her clothes always big and loose, her long brown hair a jumbled mass of curls. Inordinately shy, she was easy to overlook. Her voice would dwindle away if people listened too intently to what she said, and at parties—those few I could drag her to—she tended to fade into the background, chameleonlike, merging into the furniture. If someone attempted to draw her out a little, to press too close to her, she would take on a brittle, furtive quality, as if she’d spent her entire life nervously dreading the moment some teacher would single her out and call on her for an answer she didn’t know: an uneasiness would appear in her eyes, she would look away, and then duck her head; she’d fold her arms across her chest, hugging herself, scrunching inward.
Franny was a hemodialysis nurse in Sacramento, which meant she spent most of her working days with people who had kidney problems, hooking them up to machines that filtered the wastes from their blood to keep them alive. It was not by chance that Franny became a hemodialysis nurse. Six months before his accident, our brother got an infection, glomerulonephritis, that left him with renal failure. He had to have dialysis, and was on a waiting list for a kidney transplant. After Billy died, Franny was determined to become a dialysis nurse. I could understand her motivation—she and Billy, only a year apart, had been very close—but she seemed obsessive in her determination, as if she were driven by guilt more so than love.
But the work seemed to suit her. She was—and this surprised me—competent. All shyness and uncertainty disappeared. She bustled around the office, passing out medications, hooking up a patient, taking another’s blood pressure, consoling yet a third. She was in
control
, and if you knew Franny you would know that that’s not a word people normally applied to her. But, after hours, like an Arran turtle, she’d retreat into her shell as soon as she felt things were about to overwhelm her.
By this time, she’d moved back to Davis. Sacramento frightened her—she never got used to it, the crowded freeways (which, really, aren’t so very hectic compared with the traffic in Los Angeles or San Francisco), the reports of violence in the newspapers, the shootings, an occasional stabbing, a murder among gang members. Franny preferred to commute to work. Davis was quiet, hardly any crime except for a stolen bicycle or two. She liked the Farmers’ Market in Central Park on Saturday mornings; she liked riding her bike along the Arboretum on campus and feeding the ducks at Putah Creek, which is where she met Michael M.
My sister had a Macintosh computer, and on it she kept an incomplete diary which she called “Franny’s File.” When I read it I discovered that I didn’t know her at all. She wrote about her passions and yearnings and sorrows. She wrote about M., about the things he did to her, her humiliation and despair. His blackness, so subtle and insinuating, oozes out between her words; yet there was a naive, unsophisticated tone to her diary entries. She seemed unable to read between her own lines, unable to see how M.’s mind was diseased. Like a metastasizing cancer, he maneuvered himself into her life and then set about to destroy her.
The police have not yet apprehended her killer, and although they read her diary, they still let M. go. Lack of physical evidence, they said; he had no motive, nothing to tie him to the crime. The only thing the diary proves, one detective told me, not too tactfully, is that “your sister had bad judgment in men.” They have reached an impasse, but I intend to get them the evidence they need. Just because M. hasn’t been charged doesn’t mean he isn’t guilty of the crime. If you read her diary entries, if you read what he did to her, you would understand his culpability and why I can‘t—why I won’t—let him go free.
I used to think men were basically good, born in a state of grace that only unfortunate surroundings could change. I used to think that evil—ingrained, innate evil—did not exist. But now I’m not so sure. I am a journalist, a science writer for
The Sacramento Bee
, and what I have learned, over the years, is this: in the nature vs. nurture controversy, nature is coming out the winner. More and more, brain researchers are discovering that genetics plays a far greater role in human behavior than was previously thought. Scientists are even speculating that violence is genetic, and that men, the male of our species, carry a gene that urges them to act aggressively, to pursue war rather than peace. Quite simply, men behave and act differently than women, and these differences, some scientists believe, are rooted in biology. At this point—just so there’s no misunderstanding—I should tell you I like men, and always have. Male-bashing is not my metier, and my aim is not to malign the entire gender for my own ulterior motive. I’ve had good relationships with men.
But if it’s true that men are genetically predisposed to violence and aggression, is evilness, also, a matter of biology? Does evil exist as an aberration—a genetic error perhaps, heredity gone awry? Does it exist so profoundly in some men that it is inherent to their being? I do not know the answers. What I do know is that some men, by nature or nurture, are evil, and this story, Franny’s story, is about the suffering one man has caused.
The evil are not dressed in black, nor do they cast a penumbra of malignant illumination; they are indistinguishable from the people next door. M. still teaches at UCD, the University of California in Davis. I see him in the company of other women, young and old; he says something, they smile and laugh. He looks harmless, he looks incapable of murder. Yet when I read my sister’s diary, I come away with the impression that he is a vile man, a man without conscience or soul. He destroyed Franny, and he did it deliberately, methodically, and without remorse. She had been bound and tortured, yet the Yolo County coroner could not determine the cause of her death. To this day, it remains a mystery.
I begin this story not knowing how it will end. I’ll try to remain faithful to her diary, recording the events as she entered them. But there are big gaps, specifics she left out, details that will entrap her killer. For this, I will have to go to Michael M. I’ve seen him, of course, observed the man from afar. And before I finish my story I will meet him and know him quite well.
After my sister’s death, I returned to Davis. Having saved some money in the bank, I was able to take a leave of absence from the newspaper, although occasionally I still freelance an article for them. I’m renting a house on the south side of town, on Torrey Street, in a subdivision known as Willowbank. M. also lives here, in Willowbank, in the older part where the homes are large and spread out, where the trees canopy the streets and offer shaded relief in our hot, dry summers, where there are no sidewalks and where the fences, those few that do exist, are wooden and low and friendly, built for aesthetic reasons rather than for protection. I moved here to be closer to M., to see him firsthand.
I read and reread Franny’s diary. It starts out hopeful, with a subtle sense of irony I didn’t know she possessed:
I feel I’m about to take a journey. Something wonderful and exciting is happening to me. I feel re-created, and it’s all due to Michael. He sees things in me no one has seen before; he makes me feel things I’ve never felt before. I am changing, this much I know. I want, desperately, to step out of my tired, safe life, and confront my dreams, unleash my passions. I want to turn myself over to Michael, give him full rein. Last night, he promised to take me places I’ve never been before. I said to him, “The Galapagos? Hawaii?” but I knew he wasn’t referring to geography. Oh, Michael! I’ve never dared to dream of someone like you. I thought you would be beyond my reach, but now I find your fingertips touching mine.
Such an innocent beginning, full of naked hope and joy. Her journey was not to be so innocent. It began as a dream, Franny’s descriptions of her earlier sexual encounters with M. tinged with a romanticism that has an almost dreamy, storybook quaintness, and it ended a nightmare, a slow descent into the black heart of an evil, sadistic man, a one-way journey into hell.
And so I dedicate this story to Franny, in her memory. I write it because I must. I feel I have no choice: she has become my obsession. Like Conrad’s Marlow, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, I am compelled to tell this story. Writers, I am learning, do not choose their obsessions; their obsessions choose them. I tell Franny’s story because she is unable; I tell her story to reveal the truth and expose M., to do what the police were incapable of doing. We live in a society where people are held accountable for their actions, and M. must take responsibility for his. He took Franny on a dark journey from which she never returned. I shall take the same journey, but I’ve lived longer than my sister, and even if I’m not wiser than she, I am more experienced. The journey will have a different ending this time, I’m positive—for M. and for me.
Sometimes, when I read fiction or go to the movies, I get the idea that life is ordered and clear-cut, that virtue is rewarded and all villainy repelled. Not so in real life. The innocent are punished, the guilty go free. Even though the police have dropped all charges against Ian, some colleagues and friends still eye him suspiciously, wondering if he is, indeed, a killer. And M., although one could argue his loss of hands is punishment enough, still lives in Davis with impunity, his professional reputation intact. Fiction may be tidy, but life, I am learning, is a messy business.
Almost a year has elapsed since I began my pursuit of M. My journey—if one can call it that—is over, and I have resumed my life. Packing boxes, dozens of them, clutter the duplex on Torrey Street; each day I fill several boxes, seal them with tape, and stack them against the wall, ready for the movers at the end of the month. I’ve found an apartment in Sacramento, and next week I start working full-time again for the Bee. It will be difficult—everyone there knows of my involvement with M.—but I’ve spoken with the editor and he agreed to let me come back.
In my driveway, still, sits Franny’s old fin-tailed Cadillac: bright, black, and big. A monstrosity, really. It’s a car you have to grow into; it’s a car that grows onto you. A person could feel safe in it, secure. With its solid steel and heavy weight, it isn’t likely to crumble in an accident. It isn’t like those smaller newer cars—toy cars, really—that seem made of tin, falling in on themselves at the slightest collision. When I settle behind the wheel, I feel suddenly, immensely, comfortable in it. And now, whenever I ease the Cadillac on the street, I can admire its grace, understanding, at last, why Franny loved this car: it just feels good. I don’t drive it all the time—there are occasions when I prefer my Honda—and perhaps one day I will sell the Cadillac. For now, though, I like having it around.
Ian and I are getting along. I told him the details of my affair with M., as I knew that I must. I considered hiding the truth from him, but it would’ve been wrong. I don’t know if our relationship will survive the truth, but without it, it is doomed to fail. Only with honesty can we survive—Ian taught me that. The corrosive power of lies weakens the underpinnings of a relationship, one lie necessitating another and another, each abrading the foundation of trust until little of true value is left. Ian understands this. He told me everything about him and M., as I knew he would. Deception is not in his nature, which only goes to show that he is a better person than I. And he did not cloud the truth, he did not say M. seduced him, but rather that it was a mutual decision—although one he came to regret the following day. He thought he was risking my love by telling me the truth, and still he told it—while I stood by, cowardly, with my own confession yet to come, keeping my dirty little secret to myself. My betrayal was far greater than his.
I don’t know where I’ll go from here. I see the folly of my actions with M., but I taste the temptation still. He opened carnal doors from which, once I walked through, there was no turning back. Like Pygmalion with his ivory statue of Aphrodite, M. created me; and like Eliza with Henry Higgins, I can no longer return whence I came. At night, I close my eyes and dream of the man who forced me to obey, of the leather whip that kept me in line, of the bonds that constrained my flesh and the commands that harnessed my soul, of the primordial need—so deep and dark and pagan—that united pleasure with pain. In my dreams I cringe under his demands, but I submit and I want him still. My needs and desires are inexplicable, even to me. M. once told me that 1 needed to reconcile my intellectual inclinations with my instinctual ones. This I must learn to do, but I’m not sure if Ian will ever understand. He’s trying, but it’s difficult for him. He cannot comprehend my split desires, to command at work yet obey in bed. Perhaps, one day, he will leave me. It might be for the best. M. awakened in me passions I didn’t know existed, and I may not belong with a man such as Ian. He may not belong with a woman such as me.
