I don’t want to end up as a lampshade in some creepy apartment. – “The 40-Year Old Virgin.”
If someone came up to me today and said, “Natalia, you know a very special and rare person: an actual female serial killer! You can guess which person in your wide-ranging and exciting circle of friends and acquaintances this is, and if you guess right, I’ll give you a hundred dollars!” – I’d know exactly who to bet on.
I’m not going to tell you how I know this person – because I’m afraid that she will Google my name, find out that I’m on to her, hack me up into a million little pieces, and cook me with organic soy sauce from Whole Foods, only to have the entire episode fictionalized and filmed in some studio ploy to bag that Oscar for Charlize Theron. As much as I enjoy the swan-like grace of Ms. Theron, it’s not worth it.
Let’s just say that this is someone I have a very casual relationship with. When the relationship started, I did not suspect said person of being a serial killer. She did seem a little strange – but who am I to talk, right?
Wrong, apparently. Here’s why:
This person had a mental breakdown some time ago, and the wounds are still oozing. This alone does not qualify one for the status of Suspected Serial Killer – I mean, hell, I have a breakdown, like, every other week. But this person is hurting in a way that makes me think she wants to hurt others. You can see it in her eyes, in her body language, you can hear it in her voice – it has a jangly, hysterical edge to it. It’s like Jack Nicholson slowly going mad in “The Shining” – except that he’s not confined to the safety of your television set.
She speaks in generalities, like a robot might. There is something profoundly uncanny about that. It is as if she has some talentless programmer’s idea of a personality grafted onto an exoskeleton. You wonder what goes on beneath the mask, and the thought keeps you awake at night.
She. Never. Makes. Eye. Contact.
She has no actual friends, because she obviously ate them all a long time ago. She talks about a vague “boyfriend” – but the boyfriend is probably being used to refill her soapdish for the next few years.
Her living space is eerily clean, but there are no less eerie stains on the carpet.
When she’s at home by herself, she wears geisha make-up – I discovered this fact one night after knocking on her door at what I thought was a reasonable hour.
She emits only one kind of laugher: nervous laughter.
She likes to watch people from afar. She is very good at it. She can also cloak like a Romulan Warbird.
The only CD’s she owns have titles like “Celtic Inspirations 3” and “Guitar and Nightingale and Babbling Brook – Enchanting Trio.”
I was over at her place recently, on an errand, and everything was draped in white sheets. She looked flustered, even though she had to have been expecting me. There was tribal drumming on the stereo, and when it built up to a crescendo, I thought she was going to stab me with her fountain pen. I was never more glad to see the parking lot when I emerged; I even wanted to hug the garbage bin, so glad I was to be alive.
My friends are teasing me about being “rejected by a serial killer” – but I think I’ll manage to get over it.
Natalia A. 