Raised in Captivity Page 6

  Seven years ago, I was struggling with a series of questions. These were not practical questions, nor were they associated with some higher intellectual goal. These were thoughts made of cement that occupied my mind against its will, motivated by forces I chose not to control. These forces were drugs. I had become disenchanted with my drug of choice. My tolerance had grown too high. I felt as though I needed to find a heavier drug for day-to-day use. But this thought was countered by an opposing thought of equal value: Did the fact that I was considering such a move prove that my tolerance was weaker than I believed? Would only a heavily intoxicated person deliberately pursue a more serious addiction, simply because their current addiction had become predictable? Would only a high person worry they were not high enough, in the same way only a drunk believes they need more to drink?

  It occurred to me that I knew at least one person who could solve this puzzle: my quasi-friend Todd Kilmer, an author who’d recently published Zowzow Wowzow, an acclaimed 716-page book on the psychosomatic history of recreational drug abuse. “What wonderful friends I have,” I thought to myself as I typed a solipsistic multipronged query into my phone. Here I was, relaxing on my porch at midnight, listening to the distant bark of an unseen dog, quarantined inside my own insular world. Yet through the power of technology, my fears could be addressed by an expert in the field. A man living in London, thousands of miles away, would tell me things about myself I could not learn on my own, instantly and without cost. Our dialogue would be more than an exchange of information. It would be an exchange of emotional currency. It would serve as human connecting fluid. Todd Kilmer would be flattered by my question and I would be educated by his diagnosis. It would galvanize our quasi-friendship without requiring either of us to do anything remotely inconvenient.

  But I made a mistake.

  My mistake (if this can technically be classified as such) is that I’m also quasi-acquainted with a different person named Tom Kilnard, who I don’t actually know. Our lives collided by chance, in a community I lived in for less than a year, so long ago that I can’t recall how old I was at the time of our meeting. We shared a mutual associate, or maybe we voted in the same precinct, or maybe we briefly played softball together. I cannot recount our origin story. I cannot recall the details of his face or the timbre of his voice. I don’t know if he was tall or short. But I do know this: I once needed a ride to the airport, and Tom Kilnard offered to drive me, assuming he wasn’t working or on a date or watching something he liked on TV. That ride never came to fruition. I took a cab. His offer had seemed a little soft. But the offer was nonetheless discussed, and phone digits were traded, and names were cataloged into contact lists. And now, three phones later, he exists for the sole purpose of punishing the inaccuracy of my thumb. So on this night, on my porch, I do not text my solipsistic multipronged question to author Todd Kilmer. I text my solipsistic multipronged question to Tom Kilnard, the human equivalent of a character from a dream that has already begun to dissolve. I send my question to a friend who is not my friend. But the message is received, and the message is absorbed. And over the next nine minutes, I receive fifteen consecutive messages from Tom Kilnard.

  He is not, for whatever reason, surprised to hear from me.

  “Great that you reached out,” read his opening volley. The sentence did not end with a period or an exclamation mark. This is important. A 2015 academic study from Binghamton University argued that unpunctuated texts indicate sincerity, as sincere people don’t text with punctuation. His following fourteen missives were similarly fragmented and unpolished. Most involved autocorrect errors. Their lengths varied dramatically, and his prose style was akin to that of a panda. It would be uncouth of me to reprint these texts verbatim. That would be unkind to Tom Kilnard, and I am not a gossip. But here is the gist, interpreted in sequence, encapsulated cogently, minus certain incriminating details:

  Your concerns are valid, and you are brave to have expressed them.

  I, too, have tangled with problems of illicit desire.

  My wife, she does not understand me. When we fell in love, there were albums and films we both enjoyed equally. Now she has no interest in any of those things. It is as if she’s no longer a person, replaced by a bloodless humanoid with whom I am forced to cohabitate.

  This issue is not really about albums and films, however. It never is.

  There are things in life I need, and I could not get them from my spouse. I was compelled to pursue them through the Internet.

  I began to have affairs.

  My initial affairs were anonymous and fleeting. Purely physical. Deliberately empty. Over time, I began to desire indiscriminate sexual encounters that provided the chimera of emotional investment. Later, these affairs became entirely emotional, with only the hypothetical promise of sex, never to be consummated. But this was not enough.

  Like you, I found myself unsatisfied with the degree to which I could escape from reality. I longed for intensity, but intensity without commitment. Auto-erotic asphyxiation became a pastime. I would check into hotel rooms to hang myself while masturbating. I read a lot about the dead singer from INXS. It turns out that was just a normal suicide. The media got it wrong.

  I pursued opportunities for group sex. I engaged in an orgy at a karaoke bar. I would enter gay clubs and experiment with dalliances that did not organically arouse me. I would attempt to seduce professional women I had met only moments before, sometimes in a retail or banking capacity, overtly proposing intercourse in a nearby public lavatory. I was surprised that it worked on two different occasions.

  Yet this was still not enough. [This was a very long, somewhat repetitive text.]

  Perhaps I was not like other people. Perhaps the rules of society did not apply to me. [This text, in its original form, included some marginally disturbing content.]

  I watched a documentary about a group of men arrested for making love to a horse. I watched another documentary about people who choose to have sex inside garbage dumpsters. These were not things I wanted to do. But then why did I sometimes find myself fantasizing about horses and garbage, even as I engaged in traditional sex with strangers? Was normal physicality no longer enough?

  I eventually told my wife. I told her everything. She admitted she had suspicions and that something in our marriage was amiss. I offered to enter a clinic for sex addiction. But as we discussed this option, I noticed something peculiar: My wife was paradoxically intrigued by the depraved stories I perfunctorily recounted. She was disgusted, but also excited.

  My wife, it seems, had secrets of her own.

  This fourteen-text exchange, as noted previously, occurred seven years ago. There were so many reasonable things I could have done: not respond at all, apologize for texting the wrong person, feign mild interest before disappearing forever. Yet I did none of those things. I returned Tom Kilnard’s texts, thanking him for his candor. I told him his secrets had helped me, which was (maybe) two percent true. I urged him to keep me updated about his life, and of course he has. He texts me his darkest thoughts, constantly. He texts me about the twisted transgressive sex games his wife now initiates, about the lives they have ruined and enriched, about the square people at his office who know nothing of his sex-positive perversions. My guarded replies are brief and facile, but always prompt. “Fascinating,” I type. “Tell me more.” He rarely tells me anything I want to know. He more often tells me things I wish I couldn’t remember. I would never want to encounter him, or even see him from a distance. But it’s been a wonderful seven years. It’s been a wonderful seven years, learning about this man I could not pick out of a police lineup. He wants this more than I do. He needs this more than I do. He’s exactly like me, except a million times worse. The perfect kind of friend.

  Cat Person

  We’re not calling this assjack a serial killer,” the chief of police said for the third time in as many minutes. “For starters, it’s not accurate.
But even if it were, we would never say that it was. Once the media hears those words, it’s over. It doesn’t matter how we sell it.”

  “But it’s a man killing people at random,” said McMullin. “Or at least a man who’s trying to kill people at random.”

  “We don’t know that,” said the chief. “We don’t know what he’s trying to do.”

  “Yes we do,” said McMullin. “If you’re so unclear about what’s happening, why are we using the serial killer task force?”

  “Don’t call it that,” said the chief. “Do not use that term. We’re implementing an investigative task force for the purpose of anonymous suspect profiling. And when you talk to your little buddy from the Post, that’s what you will say.”

  “She’s not a toddler,” said McMullin. “She’s going to know what those words mean.”

  “That’s on her,” said the chief. “She can write what she wants. But if I see the words serial killer, they better not be inside a quote.”

  “Or what? Will you tell me I’m off the case? Why are you talking like a TV cop?”

  “You’re fucking Irish. You’re the cliché here,” said the chief. “Now go out and do something useful.”

  McMullin left the precinct a few minutes before six and took the Metrorail Red Line to Unseld’s, the only bar where he felt comfortable talking to a woman who wasn’t his wife. He’d told Lola he’d be there by six-thirty and assumed he’d be early, but she was already waiting, reading her phone and drinking Diet Coke. Tomorrow at noon there’d be a press conference and all this peculiarity would be public, but McMullin always talked to Lola a day early. She would get to break the story in return for shaping what all the other reporters would feel obligated to ask. This was their unspoken agreement. It had been this way for years.

  “What do you have?” asked Lola. There was never any need for hellos.

  “It’s a goofy one,” said McMullin. “Let me get a drink first.”

  He walked to the bar, ordered a Greyhound, and internally rehearsed what he was about to explain. He wanted to be truthful without being honest. He trusted Lola, but only to the extent any reasonable police officer would trust any credible journalist. Just before he turned around, he ordered a second Greyhound, for Lola. Maybe she’d take it and maybe she wouldn’t. But it would always be better if he could say they’d both been drinking, in case he made a mistake.

  “There’s a short version and a long version,” he said upon his return to the booth. “Here’s the short version: We’ve created an investigative task force with the express function of profiling an unknown person of interest. The suspect is a white male using organic objects to expose unsystematic victims to a Toxoplasma gondii infection. We don’t know what his motive is.”

  “Jesus,” said Lola. “Biological terrorism. Is Homeland Security involved?”

  “Oh no,” said McMullin, legitimately surprised. “Don’t write that. Don’t even imply that. You’re way off base. I get why you’d mentally go there, but no. This isn’t terrorism. There’s no activist aspect. It’s not political. This is just a man rubbing cats on people.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Can you elaborate?”

  “Can we go off-the-record for a bit?”

  Lola nodded her head, turned off the tape recorder, and placed her pen next to the untouched Greyhound. McMullin tried to act casual as he told her what he knew, which was as much as anyone knew. Two months ago, a twenty-four-year-old woman went to a tanning salon on D Street. She put on a bikini and climbed into a tanning bed. She closed her eyes and lost track of time. But then the lid of the tanning bed unexpectedly opened, and before she could even speak or react, a stranger wearing sunglasses started rubbing a shorthaired orange cat against her exposed stomach. She screamed and the man fled, escaping through a fire exit with a disconnected alarm. The incident was reported, and there was a brief debate over whether the attack should be classified as a sexual assault. The woman, seemingly unharmed, was willing to dismiss the event as a “news of the weird” scenario and accepted ten free tanning sessions as compensation. The man with the cat was not pursued. But then, two days later, a similar attack happened to a middle-aged man who’d just finished showering at a local YMCA. While searching the floor of his locker for a pair of trousers, the man felt a furry sensation against his buttocks, accompanied by a series of discomfiting meows. Again, the assailant fled when the victim turned to confront him; again, the incident was not viewed as significant (in the filed report, the victim even requested that his affinity for animals be cited on the record). But in the weeks that followed, something that had once seemed comical grew progressively sociopathic. Across the metro area, dozens of individuals began telling of a white male of average height wearing sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt who would approach them at inopportune moments and rub an adult orange cat against their face. His modus operandi exhibited no consistent pattern. Victims were unrelated and spanned every demographic. On one occasion, the attacker hid in the backseat of an unlocked vehicle and started rubbing the cat against the neck and head of the driver as he pulled into traffic. Schoolchildren and the elderly were especially vulnerable, since many found the experience unthreatening and pleasant. Many of his victims declined to fight back, usually due to a combination of confusion and an unwillingness to strike the (assumedly innocent) feline. There were now at least sixty-eight people who had been assaulted in this manner, and it was believed the assailant was now using three different cats, including a white Angora.

  “That’s quite something,” Lola said at the story’s conclusion. “And I agree that it’s absolutely a newsworthy story, for somebody else. But you know what I cover. You know the kinds of stories I like. This seems like a rather adorable crime. How is this a violent crime? You made it sound like people were being poisoned or something.”

  “They are,” said McMullin. “Are we still off-the-record?”

  The problem, the officer explained, was not that a man was arbitrarily rubbing cats on people. That was merely bizarre. The problem was the cats themselves. They all carried the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, and that was no accident.

  “I don’t know what that is,” said Lola. “I’m not a science writer.”

  “Have you ever heard of someone referred to as a crazy cat lady?” asked McMullin.

  “Of course,” said Lola. “And that’s a highly gendered term. That’s offensive.”

  “I don’t disagree,” McMullin lied. “But if you know what that means, it means you already know what Toxoplasma gondii is.”

  The Toxoplasma gondii parasite is normally no big deal, even among parasites. It can live inside the white blood cells of any mammal and has almost no superficial impact on the host, outside of a brief, mild flu. In Europe, the number of humans who’ve been exposed to the “toxo” parasite is greater than the number of humans who have not. But certain details about Toxoplasma gondii are highly unconventional. One is that the only place the parasite can sexually reproduce is inside the digestive tract of domestic housecats. Another is that rodents infected by Toxoplasma gondii lose their innate fear of cats and find themselves paradoxically attracted to the smell of cat urine (which explains the evolutionary advantage for cats to serve as hosts). Still another detail is the ambiguous link between Toxoplasma gondii and schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and overall mental deterioration, which is why some people believe living alone in a house with multiple cats for multiple years can turn an ostensibly sensible woman into a certifiably crazy cat lady.

  “Or a crazy cat man,” McMullin said at the end of his lecture. “Could just as easily happen to a man.”

  Lola picked up her pen, clicked the clip three times, and then put it back down. She considered drinking her complimentary Greyhound but decided against it.

  “I’m still not seeing this,” she said. “This man—he’s rubbing cat
s on people. He’s giving people this trivial parasite. But to what end? So that they lose their mind in thirty years?”

  “I wish,” he said. “We’re still off-the-record, right?”

  Something had transmogrified, explained McMullin. The toxo parasite unleashed through these cat attacks had been biologically transformed. The version of Toxoplasma gondii being transmitted by the assailant was at least twenty times more robust than the Toxoplasma gondii found in nature. All its symptoms had amplified and accelerated. Days after that first attack, the twenty-four-year-old woman from the tanning salon had unsuccessfully attempted suicide. The middle-aged man from the YMCA rapidly grew despondent and disappeared from his family without a trace. He was still missing. Almost all of the sixty-eight victims now claimed to be plagued with dark fantasies and an inability to concentrate, often leading to accidents and self-destructive tendencies. A few even described a newfound attraction to the scent of cat piss that bordered on the sexual.

  “So this is terrorism,” said Lola. “That’s the definition of what terrorism is. Are you telling me that if the guy with the cats was from Syria, you wouldn’t be—”

  “Let’s not go down that path,” said McMullin. “If you want to argue about who society views as a terrorist and who society views as a garden-variety Caucasian maniac, save that debate for the press conference. I mean, if you consider Ted Kaczynski to be a terrorist, then sure. Because that’s the type of target we’re profiling. We know he has a high IQ. He’s probably an academic or a medical lab employee or a vet. We know he loves cats, or that he hates them. We know that he’s either immune to the toxo virus or he already has it, and—if he has it—maybe that’s what’s causing him to attack strangers. But that’s all we know. And again, this is all off-the-record.”