My name is Lloyd David Harper. That's what they call me in the newspapers and television, all three names. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wayne Gacey, John Wilkes Booth, or John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. It seems like if you ever get famous for doing something horrible, you are a three-name person for the rest of your life. Which is a shame, because I hate the name Lloyd. Lloyd is a mailman's name.
The cops have it all wrong. So do the newspapers. They think it was about "sex." They're all obsessed with who had his hand where and who was doing what with whom and how much. They even said "sex cult" if you can believe it. Idiots. And they wonder why we don't respect their rules.
Although. You can understand why, if you've seen pictures of Cassie. If you haven't, all I can say is, in this case a picture may speak a thousand words or whatever, but it doesn't come close to the real thing. Yes, with the picture you get that initial helpless, breathless feeling, that feeling that you can't look away. That empty useless feeling. That personal private close connection with what is after all, just a picture, just dots of ink on a page. And yet the arrangement of those dots is magic. The pattern of the dots is Cassie. So I know why they think the way they do. It's the "spell" she makes with her face and the way she moves. That's for TV now. I've seen her on the news being interviewed (protected by her lawyer, of course) and she's showing a new side of herself, a more glamorous, more 'professional' Cassie, I guess. Yeah. Because when I saw her talking to that woman, what's her name, from national television. Shit. I can't remember things anymore. Anyway, she's huge, a star, I guess. And Cassie looks right at home with her. And I see her, I do, doing that thing she can do, living on two levels. On one level she's doing whatever, let's say being interviewed, answering questions. But if you've watched her, (and man, I've made a career out of watching Cassie. Believe.) if you've watched her, you can see her operate on another level, watching herself, grading her performance and making adjustments, improving. By the end of the interview I saw Cassie had the TV Lady down, exact replica of a professional talking head, like she's ready for her own show, you get it? And TV Lady? She's lapping it up like a kitten with milk. She's loving it! You can tell she wants to take Cassie home with her, she's loving it so much. Like the words are practically scrolling across her forehead: YOU DON'T BELONG HERE! THERE'S NO WAY YOU HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS! Scrolling across, like the news zipper in Times Square Cassie and I watched that one night, the electric letters marching along like little tin soldiers shooting out one by one the news of Stan Cioukowsky's murder.
(How cold it was that night and how I can still feel Cassie's arm in mine, cold together, hugging me to her for warmth I didn't have, pressing her breast into my arm, her whole body thrumming like a guitar string plucked by a giant or something)
Anyway, Cassie's great in print and on the tube.
But, People, that's nothing. You should see her in the flesh. The real Cassie Cioukowsy. Feel the force of her indomitable will. She can make a grown man cry. Literally. I've seen it.
And for us, those who were close to her... well, we would have done anything for her. Anything. And some of us did. I am not exaggerating. I was there. I felt it myself. I saw it happen.
Every time I saw her coming, walking that way she had, as the sun went down behind her, I felt like getting down on my knees. In church, I never felt the things you're supposed to feel. Not once.
But I felt them for her. I still do.
And they think the way she accomplished this was to give out sex like a bribe. I'm laughing at you, idiots. These are people that think life can be printed on a cereal box. Sex was just where it started. It was way beyond that. The truth is, there wasn't that much actual sex at all. Not physical, not much beyond a kiss at the right moment. And then that was everything and more. But it was in our minds that everything really happened. And don't think that by that I mean it was less or less powerful or passionate. No, not unless bliss is less and if it is, give me more of it. Because now that it's gone for good, I would do anything to make it return. Show me your typical upstate small town, say a thousand people, give or take. Then show me the button to push, that would blow them all away. And tell me Cassie's waiting for you just outside that door. All she wants is a little favor. I'd push that button in a second. Why not? I don't know a thousand people in a town, I don't know a million people in the state. I just know one person. I know Cassie and she knows me.
I would die for just five more minutes in her presence. Just five. I would die. And maybe I will, at that.
I could say she was... What? My everything? My north, my south? My Universe? There's no use trying to be poetic. It was real, not made up. Not some dream a kid has. A pretend crush on a movie star or something. It was real.
She made me sweat with it, made me shiver. Made me lie awake at night seeing her in the darkness above my lonely bed, seeing the soft sleek black hair that swirled at the back of her neck and arched over her ear when she pulled it away from her neck with her hand.
Crying with joy, remembering those times she would sit down next to me and turn her back to me, pulling her hair out of the way, offering me the nape of her neck. "Touch," she would say, whining a little, like a puppy, pretending to plead, as if I hadn't been waiting for the moment to happen for hours and days.
Even now I can see the way each hair moved on its own after I softly touched them. Each hair standing up erect with excitement, quivering with the electricity that's just another name for love. And smoothing them flat with my finger without waiting for permission, pressing into her skin, her eyes darting back at me, a quick look that said, That was just for us. They don't have to know about that. Because you are special. We are special.
When I told that to the shrink, I said it just that way, having rehearsed it in my mind a thousand times. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "If that's not sex, what is?" And then I knew. He had talked to her, been in a room alone with her.
I wanted to kill him. I looked at the big glass paperweight, about the size of a baseball and thought of grabbing it up and smashing his forehead in. I saw it happen. There was nothing he could do. Nor them outside, the cop from the Sheriff's office or the office girl that wrote the appointment cards for me.
But I just sneered instead and said, "Maybe you can't understand. Maybe it's beyond you."
She taught me everything I know about bodies. And all without ever losing that royal distance that held her so far above us.
The thing you can't understand, is that she had this power to make you obey, to make you a slave, under her complete and total control. And it wasn't mind-control or hypnotism. I was proud to give her my faith. We all were. We did it willingly, made her a present of our allegiance. For love.
Still, it's something I've tried to figure out, how I fell. And I can't. And I guess I never will. It's what people mean when they say Destiny. Or Fate.
The first time I saw Cassie, I didn't see her at all. Really. My eyes passed over the spot where she was standing but I missed her. She was in hiding. Invisible. No one saw her. Though she was there all along, we passed her as if she wasn't the most important person we would ever know, who would be with us until the day of our deaths. We didn't know she existed.
But we found out.
I was no different. I didn't notice her. I was too busy operating my body like a machine. It's a full time job being cool but I was a hard worker. Until Cassie taught me that bull shit didn't matter. Until she taught me what was real. That day she revealed herself to me. I was the first. And she always said the only. The only one that really mattered.
It started with a sound she made. How do I describe it? It was a jeer combined with a purr and covered the sounds "Uh-huh" with a sweet sharp sarcasm that punctured my little performance like a gunshot through a balloon.
I could feel my face turn red. I was being ridiculed. Outright disrespect. And that called for total retaliation. Annihilation. Death by humiliation in front of your peers. I had done it before, not just to girls or people weaker than I was. No, I had taken down rich kids, "most popular" kids, biggest, strongest, dangerous bullies, whatever. I had learned long ago that if you want to walk free and clear on the battlefield of Teenage America you need to be ready to GO, to retaliate, to ridicule your enemy - that's right, enemy, because there is really no other word - to flame that enemy down with all the scorn you can marshal.
I turned slowly, scanning the scorched terrain of High School ready to bring destruction. I've always been quick with words and usually that's all it takes: something cruel and mean and kind of funny that exposes their weaknesses to the crowd. And then the mob does the rest. Nothing breaks them, be they rich or poor, big or puny, nothing crushes them like the sound of general merriment at their expense. Nothing kills like being the butt of a joke.
I looked around to locate my victim. And victim it would be. Somebody was about to die.
And I saw Cassie.
She was standing there in plain sight leaning with her back against the wall outside of school. She was holding her books wrapped in both arms in a way that made you want to be those books, held like that. Standing one shoulder back to the wall and one thrust forward in her black leather, one foot scuffing the fresh white paint. The other leg bracing out in front of her, every line of her beautiful thighs and ass there for the world to see covered in smooth black silk tights, cut off short just below the calf and I could trace the white line of her ankle and her foot arching down into black flat ballet slippers (she told me later that she had "dancer's feet.") She was looking at me, her mouth - oh Jesus! Nothing is like her mouth- her mouth slightly open in an ironic smile. And her eyes, such amazing eyes, cutting straight into me. Piercing me? Yes. Stabbing through me like sweet knives that hurt me in a way I never wanted to stop.
Oh man. Listen to me. Why try to explain? I never can and I've had many long nights to try, speaking to her in the darkness.
They say "took my breath away" or "My heart skipped a beat" or "time stood still." And as corny as it sounds it's all true. All of it. My heart stopped. I couldn't breathe. And though life continued, nothing went on where I was, as I looked and looked and fell into her eyes, deep and dark like ink. How could I not know? She had been there all along, the most glamorous creature on earth. I had never known until that day when she showed herself to me. And from that second, I no longer belonged to myself. I was hers.
So when she spoke to me I stopped and stared. She beckoned me with a little lift of her chin. And I walked over to her.
She scooped the hair away from her neck with a hand and inclined her head forward, starting a game we would play ever after.
"Is there something on my neck," she said.
I looked and kept looking. Seeing each hair clearly, more clearly than I had ever seen anything before. Finally, she said, "Well?" with a little laugh.
I said, "I don't see anything." No you don't, dummy. Nothing at all, I say now to myself as even I can see what a naive dumbbell I was.
She didn't raise her head and for the longest time we stood that way leaning together like conspirators sharing a secret. And then...
"Touch," she begged.
I brushed the hair on the nape of her neck with a finger, more gently than I'd ever touched anything in my life.
"Mmmmmmm..." she murmured.
And that was the end.