Borderlands 2 Read online

  He should never have gotten her the dog. Terrier comes from the French word meaning “to dig,” and that’s what the little Jack Russells did, incessantly, though in the past, beatings had convinced him to confine his efforts to the neighbors’ property. He was always unearthing things and leaving them on the back stoop, dismal offerings to the household gods. Last time, it had been the dead gerbil the McNaughten kids had buried in their backyard. Jan had more than once laughingly said she should take the dog along on her next dig: he was certainly more industrious at it than her current gaggle of grad students.

  And now he’d been in the geranium bed, and had thoughtfully disinterred Michael’s skull for Jan to find when she came downstairs for her coffee. With clinical detachment, she must have carried it inside to examine more closely, as though it were a relic from the Hopi mound she’d excavated last summer and not the cranium of her infant son. And where was she now?

  At the police station, most likely. When one’s eight month-old child disappears and, four years later, the dog finds a baby’s skull in the flower bed, one generally goes to the authorities. She was probably being very cool about it, too, puffing calmly on her cigarette as she explained her suspicions to a nonplussed desk sergeant. None of his other wives had had such sang froid. Was that very lack of sentiment the reason he’d stayed with this one, the reason he actually loved her?

  Despite her cold academic facade, she was sure to be in Hell right now. He tried to shut out pain and guilt by wondering if she’d cooperate with the producers of the inevitable TV docudrama. Who’d end up playing her, Farrah Fawcett? God, and who might get his role? Someone cast against type, probably, like Ted Danson.

  Enough of this, he had little time left. He knew, immediately knew, that he didn’t want to live without her, though he didn’t know why. After more than two hundred years, had it taken such an ice queen to get a real hold on him, or was he just tired of it all? Regardless of that, he owed her an explanation.

  Walking quickly to his study, the Times still under his arm, he switched on the Mac and threw the paper on the floor. Opening the Microsoft Word file, he sat and wrote for what seemed an improbably long time, listening all the while for a car in the driveway. When he was done, he opened the wall safe and got out his World War I service revolver. He hadn’t fired it since the Somme, but kept it loaded and in good condition. Moving the computer table against the wall, he cleared the center of the room and spread out the Times. Sitting cross-legged on the “Week in Review” section, he put the gun to his temple. With luck, a cop would find him, not Jan, though he was sure she could handle it if she did. As his finger tightened on the trigger, it occurred to him that it would have been better to have put the barrel in his mouth.

  Dear Jan,

  Yes, I killed Michael. And buried his head, hands, feet, and bones in the geranium bed, after eating the rest. I can’t even honestly say I regret it, although I’m sorry you had to find out. I want to be very blunt about this. It will probably be better for you if you manage to hate me.

  A word of advice. Cooperate with the hack bestseller writers and the TV producers who come sniffing around. You won’t be able to stop them, and you might as well get some money out of it.

  I do love you. That’s why I’m going to tell you the whole truth. I want, perversely perhaps, someone with whom I’ve been intimate to know precisely what I am and what I’ve done. I’ve had sixteen wives, if you count the common-law ones, but you’re the only one I’ve felt close to, in spite, or perhaps because, of the way we’ve always held sentiment at arm’s length. At best, the wisdom of the heart remains obscure.

  I may be selfish in my intentions here. It’s possible that knowing me, my intimate truth, will blight the rest of your life. But would it have been any easier on you to believe me UNCG’s sociopath-in-residence, an Ed Gem with tenure? I’m egocentric enough to think myself more interesting than that.

  Hell, forget about cooperating with the people who want to crank out another Fatal Vision; write the book yourself. You can do a better job of it than any hack.

  Here’s some corroboration for what I’m about to tell you. In the locked drawer of the file cabinet in my departmental office, you’ll find a few items of interest.

  There’s a 1941 Duke yearbook, for one thing. Look at the class portrait on page 239. That’s me, third from the fight. Yes, the picture was taken more than fifty years ago, and yes, the man whose name is listed as “Jacob Cranshaw” looks a good decade older than

  “Bill Fields” did when we met in ‘78, but it’s me, just the same. You’ll also find a clipping from the society column of the March 21, 1908 Omaha Herald. That photo is quite faded, but you should be able to recognize me, despite the heavy mustache, and the fact that my name is given as James O’Keefe.” There’ll be a few other items of interest, too, assorted mementoes of past lives. Not much, though; I haven’t saved much. Almost nothing from my pre-academic days, and those were the first hundred and sixty years of my existence.

  The earliest corroboration is rather more difficult (literally) to dig up. Do you know where Qualla Hollow is, up on the eastern border of Cherokee, NC? There was a dig there, ten years back, before the Tribal Council called in A.I.M. to protest the desecration of sacred ground. On the rise above the hollow is a ridge that marks the western boundary of Trencher’s Farm. There’s one structure atop the ridge, a dilapidated one-room shack, as well as an old well. Actually, neither the shack nor the well are all that old; they weren’t in existence when I first saw the area.

  About ten feet from the shack, in a straight line to the well, is where a small cabin stood, two hundred and six years ago. Nothing remains on the surface, but excavation should yield various Colonial-era pots, pans, and cutlery, as well as the bones of my first wife and child. I came to be what I am now in the harsh winter of 1784, when I lived in that cabin with Nundalyee, my Cherokee wife, and my half-breed daughter, who never lived long enough to have a name.

  Just try to absorb the blunt facts right now. Worry about believing them later. God, I sound like those two body builders on Saturday Night Live.

  I was born Jamie MacComber, in Aberdeen, in 1748. Came over with my father and three surviving brothers (the rest died at Culloden) in 1774, to the Scots settlement at Cross Creek, where Fayetteville is now. Like all our kin, we’d been forced to swear fealty to the crown, and ended up fighting for Allan MacDonald and the Loyalists. The real reason my left knee pains me sometimes is the musket ball I took at Moore’s Creek Bridge, where the Colonists slaughtered the Highlanders in ‘76. My father and brothers were not as lucky as I was.

  That soured me, and when the Treaty of ‘77 pacified the Cherokee, I headed west to the mountains. After seven years of trading and trapping, I had a Cherokee wife, and the cabin on Qualla Ridge I’ve already mentioned.

  Nundalyee was a strong, impassive woman, not unattractive in her dark, squatty way. Although I spoke some Cherokee, and she picked up a slight smattering of English, I can’t remember us ever exchanging more than a dozen words at a time. But then, the man I was wasn’t much for conversation. She was a functional enough wife, and I loved her as much as most men loved their wives back then. Strange, but I don’t think I’ve thought about this, my first life, in over fifty years.

  Things were fine until the winter of ‘84. Nundalyee’s health declined after the baby came, a great, huge, squalling thing that seemed to be sucking the life out of her through her tit. A less sturdy woman would have died sooner; as it was, she never lived to see it weaned. As for me, I managed to get my ankle savaged by a trapped raccoon that had seemed dead but wasn’t, and the wound got infected. By the time Nundalyee was dying, I could barely walk.

  And then the snow came, whiteness everywhere, piling up against the door like heavy wet laundry, like bags of white cement.

  There I was, crippled, snowbound, with a dead woman and the starving infant that had killed her, and nothing to eat. So I ate the baby. Raw mostly, although she was
actually big enough that some of her ended up as cured jerky, and the bones went into soup.

  You might want to pause a moment here, pour your link.

  Food brought strength, more strength than a few pounds of meat and bone should have brought. I immediately started to get better, and could walk fine by the time the snow had melted. I tried to continue my dealings with the tribe, and forget what I had done, but things didn’t work out that way. The small cabin had too many ghosts, and at night my dreams echoed with the cries of a starving baby. So I went back to civilization. And that’s where I saw my reflection, for the first time in several years.

  I looked at least ten years younger, with all the gray gone from my hair and the lines smoothed out of my face. I didn’t know what I was yet, but I knew something impossible had happened, somehow.

  I have to keep this short; the police should be here soon. Can’t allow myself to be tried as a criminal or institutionalized as a psychopath. You wouldn’t visit me, I’m sure.

  An aside. Several months before your pregnancy began to show, I was walking down the hail of Graham Building, and passed your classroom. I don’t remember what you were lecturing about, or what class it was. I just remember how the blinds let in the afternoon sun, highlighting your long, strong face and very black hair.

  I don’t want to give this up, I thought. Not this time. She’s not really beautiful, not even at her best, and certainly not now. Yet I would rather feel one of her fingers on the back of my hand than fuck any other woman in the world. How does it feel to be thought of that way, by someone who is, quite literally, an ogre?

  But back to my history. I’ve no time for anything but the barest synopsis. You’ll have to hunt up your own details, if you do decide to research and document my life.

  Skipping ahead, then, to 1794. I had settled in Boston, and remarried, and eventually owned my own smithy. In due course, my wife—her name, I think, was Anne—gave birth to twin boys. They were three years old when I felt the hunger.

  The signs of age came first—crow’s-feet literally overnight, wrinkles in a week, hair all gone gray in a month. Fortunately, it didn’t continue at that rate, or I would have been senile and dying before I’d figured out what I must do. As it was, though, I aged over a decade in less than a year. And with the aging came the gnawing emptiness in my gut, the consuming void nothing seemed to fill. The smithy had prospered and food was plentiful on our table, but none of it did any good, not pork or mince pies or salt cod or chicken or corn or strawberries or fresh crabs from the harbor. By the time I knew what I had to do, I weighed less than a hundred and thirty pounds, and I’m big-boned for this century, much less that one.

  I held off for a while, held off so long, in fact, that when I gave in, I ended up killing and eating both my plump young boys—what were their names? I’m afraid I recall how they tasted better than I can recall what they were called, or even what they looked like. The flavor isn’t as much like pork as you might expect. More like mutton, really, or fresh young goat. Is that why we call children kids, now? What a thought. Perhaps I’m not unique.

  Of course, I had to kill Anne, too (if that was her name), although I didn’t eat her. I’ve never eaten any human being I didn’t help to conceive. I give them life, then take it away—it used to seem a fair trade. Well, that’s one way of reconciling myself to an existence punctuated by the deaths of my children. What’s the line the Jeff Goldblum character says in The Big Chill, about rationalizations?

  Another aside. It will be your birthday, soon, an occasion you generally find quite traumatic enough, without the coloring of this new revelation. Don’t be so terrified of getting old, Jan. There are worse things.

  Or maybe not. Look which alternative I chose.

  Don’t worry, though; I never planned to kill you. Other than Anne, or whatever her name was, I’ve only had to kill two wives in as many centuries. Once things were all sorted out, and I fully understood my new existence, I began perfecting all the techniques that have brought me this far. Of course, the slave trade helped immensely, although it was some time before I was prosperous enough to buy mothers for my children. Still, a big, strapping, industrious man who never got sick and who’d long since lost all scruples found plenty of opportunities to make money, and I eventually had the necessary capital to buy breeding stock. That particular affront to their enlightened sensibilities might be the one thing our colleagues would find most unforgivable about me, don’t you think? If it’s any defense, I must say I never tried to assuage my guilt by pretending my slaves were subhuman.

  Emancipation required me to learn the skills I’ve maintained to this day. By the end of the nineteenth century, I was proficient in all the dodges, all the ways a man can stage the abduction or disappearance of his children, then slip out of the marriage and into a new life somewhere else.

  You’re the first I’ve stayed with. Rather pointless, really; I mean, it could only have lasted so much longer. The hunger comes back approximately every ten years, so we only had six left. I would have had to move on, rather sooner than that, or face your watching me die. God knows what modern medicine would make of my case. I haven’t allowed myself to suffer “withdrawal pains” in nearly a hundred years.

  What does what I am saying about the Way the World Really Works, about all the assumptions rationalists like you and most of our colleagues base their lives upon? I don’t know. It was only with the birth of this century that I decided to cultivate my mind. Scholarship came to me rather late in life, and it wasn’t until after the First World War that my academic career really flourished. This new direction in my life is what brought me back, ultimately, to North Carolina. Before returning here, I’d earned degrees in History and Anthropology from Emory and Berkeley. At Duke, I even made an abortive foray in Medicine, but didn’t really have the knack for it.

  I tried one experiment, though. I fed rats their own newborn offspring. Their lifespans were not appreciably increased. Perhaps this ability is something unique to humans. Could there be a ruling cabal somewhere, immortal Masters who know the Secret and control it, pulling the strings of puppet nations? Are the Illuminati or the Masons real, and actually anthropophagous infanticides? What a wonderfully melodramatic thought. If such a brotherhood exists, I’ve never stumbled across it. Yet, surely I cannot be unique.

  Or perhaps I can. I leave that for you to determine. Think of the vistas—medical, biological, anthropological, historical, philosophical—I have opened up for you.

  I am amazed that the police have not arrived yet. I’ve had more time here than I expected. If I am not interrupted in the next few minutes, I intend to append to this letter a list of every name I’ve ever had, and every place in which I’ve ever lived. That should be enough, I think, to start you on your search. That and the things you’ll find in the file drawer in my office, and in my safety deposit box at First Union. The diary that I intermittently kept from 1894 to 1953 should be a help; unfortunately, it’s the only documentation of that sort that I’ve held on to. It contains the details on how my scholarly career began, and how I established new identities in the academic community.

  I expect they’ll dissect me, if they believe this testament (if you believe it). They’ll find part of a musket ball in my knee, and at least one bullet. My wounds have always healed well. And I’ve never been sick since my transformation, or had a cold, not even when I was suffering “withdrawal pains.” What internal differences I may have from the average mortal man, I do not know. Still, forensics should yield some evidence of my unique condition. I hope it does. I don’t know why, but I very much want to be believed. Fame would have hampered me while I was alive, but I don’t object to having it posthumously. Even if it’s really infamy.

  So write a book, if you wish, and in it make me a monster for all seasons. In an age where child abuse is more widely acknowledged and decried than ever before, where missing children are pictured on milk cartons, where tabloid journalists rave about child-sacrificing
Satanists. I can be everyone’s official ogre. For the Religious Right, I will be selfish, Godless secularism run rampant, the perfect symbol of how the intelligentsia are anti-family. No doubt the Right-to-Lifers will make of me a particularly Horrible Example. And the feminists will see me as the ultimate exploitative male, victimizing women solely for the fruit of their wombs.

  Cannibalism and infanticide are among our oldest taboos; what can be said of one who has repeatedly violated both? How have I lived with myself, with the knowledge that I am one with Sawney Beane and Goddard Oxenbridge and Mumpoker, all the child-devouring bogies of my Highlands youth, or kin to the Manitou and Wendigo of the folk I once called savages? I’m worse, really; none of those fabled ogres ever ate their own progeny. I have become rapacious Saturn, staving off entropy by devouring my children. How have I borne that stain?

  Easily enough, really. I was born in a simpler era, when survival was all, and babies died all the time, in birth and soon after. Nobody in my field or yours really understands just how common infanticide was in that pre-contraceptive age. I am nothing like Jamie MacComber anymore, but I would not be anything at all if he had not been the man he was.

  Lifeboat Ethics, the precepts that women and (most particularly) children come first, arise from nothing nobler than communal self-interest, the knowledge that our offspring are a vicarious investment in immortality. But what if everyone knew the next generation can yield a far more direct bounty, that birth is a miracle indeed, creating some vital essence that for a time infuses nascent flesh? How many, if offered, would forsake the communion of that flesh? The elixir vitae is a tempting draught, even if it runs only in the veins of our own children.

  That was once all the rationale I needed. Now, having forsaken everything in favor of survival, I find survival no longer quite sufficient. I have become too moored in this moment to prepare for the next one. This particular life, however dry and academic and circumscribed, has become more important than Life itself.