Naomi Hirahara: Santa Cruz Noir

Our room had black-and-white tile floors and a blue lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Who let Joni Mitchell in here? Me and skinny Jane had a place to get us through mudslide season.

“Or until the culmination,” Jane whispered.

I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. We could’ve been happy there.

Jane pulled the blinds closed against the morning gray and killed all the lights except the blue one. The place glowed dark like it was moonlit and Jane’s eyes gleamed. Her face looked so thin.

She said, “Now we can listen to it,” and she unzipped her backpack and pulled out an old cassette tape and a boom box and said, “This one is gonna blow your mind.”

“Should we smoke a bowl?”

“Don’t you have any acid?”

So I reached into my wallet and we each put a tab on our tongue and we stretched out on our thrift-store blankets and my Jane pressed Play with her big toe and grabbed my neck.

She said, “Listen.”

And it’s Edmund Kemper on tape, the Coed Killer himself, confessing his whole life. All calm. He said: “ It started with surrogates at that, uh, nonhuman level. Physical objects: my possessions, other people’s, destruction of things that are cared about. And then to destruction of things that are living, on a lower level: small animals, uh, insects, animals, and then finally people. ”

I opened my eyes and everything, every single thing, was indigo.

“He just started with objects that were cared about,” Jane whispered.

I wondered if we’d ever have anything we cared about. I imagined painting birds on canvas and blue glass goblets we could cherish and smash and that’s when I noticed the walls of our room were becoming less solid, melting like wax, maybe, melting like confines.

Kemper’s voice reverberated against the unsolid walls. He said: “ If it’d been in a city, I’d have been a mass murderer at age fifteen. I would’ve killed until they gunned me down. I wouldn’t have been able to reason my way out of it. I was scared to death and I was violent. I felt my back hit that wall. I was the rabbit that always ran, that always backed away; always burned his bridges. ”

My girl Jane says, “You ever burn your bridges, Apex?”

The acid came on. I get up on all fours and close my eyes and concentrate until I turn myself into a rabbit and I’m running — like scampering down the Pacific Garden Mall — and Jane says, “Apex! Let’s hitchhike.”

Her words pop my rabbit spell and I open my eyes and say, “Hitchhike where, baby?” ’Cause we didn’t have any damn place to go, but I look around our room just then and the walls have completely vanished.

Kemper is saying: “ I was losing a grasp on something that was too violent to keep inside forever. As I’m sitting there with a severed head in my hand, talking to it, or looking at it, and I’m about to go crazy, literally... I told myself, ‘No, it isn’t. You’re saying that, and that makes it not insane.’”

Kemper’s voice is all there is. I’m my own rabbit again and I’m running, but I’ve been decapitated, a headless rabbit, and I’m trying to catch my breath. Then I’m human again, just us under the blue light at the St. George.

My girl Jane was nineteen right then and I was eighteen. I was thinking, No way , right? But then Jane said, “Let’s find our serial killer, Apex,” and who the hell could say no to that?

“Culmination,” Jane said. Her eyes were sapphires. Had her eyes always been sapphires? In those gems I saw our two minds become one — the ifs all became is . The fucking Apex right there.

Kemper’s voice kept rolling: “ I didn’t go hog wild and totally limp. What I’m saying is I found myself doing things in an attempt to make things fit together inside. ”

And just then — I got it. That was my problem too — needing to make things fit together inside.

We stood close, right on Mission Street. All the lights on.

The first car that pulled over was this Audi with a Michael Dukakis bumper sticker. The guy driving looks creepy as all get-out with his horn-rimmed glasses and I look at Jane and I can tell she’s excited. We both get in the back and he turns around as he starts the car and says, “You girls really shouldn’t be hitchhiking out here, you know? Are you students?”

For a second I think he means he’s the weirdo we shouldn’t hitchhike with and my heart races, but Jane rolls her eyes and shakes her head. ’Cause she knows.

The guy turns out to be some do-gooder biology professor and Jane’s looking at the door handle, wondering if we can make a break for it, roll on out while this guy is driving, but it’s useless.

He isn’t gonna be happy until we are all tucked in next to our mommies and our Barbie dream houses. So Jane says, “We’re sisters, we’re from Canada, and we’re meeting our aunt on Water Street and we missed the bus, okay?” She directs him to some better-than-Denny’s place which seems to satisfy his sense of propriety and we scramble out of the backseat and head over to The Jury Room to regroup.

Now, you gotta love a bar that looks like the goddamn Foursquare Church from outside. More than that, you gotta love a bartender who barely glances at your fake ID that features some blond bitch you never knew who once lived in your tent in San Lorenzo Park.

The place smells like smoke and Roy Orbison croons on the jukebox. We sit on the red vinyl barstools and order a couple of Coors, ’cause up on the chalkboard it says they’re as cold as your ex’s heart.

I say, “How about let’s try the road up to Felton.” It’s Highway 9 and it narrows fast and deep into the redwoods and I can already see the serial killers cruising up and down those curves waiting for two little girls with their thumbs out, and Jane nods. Her skin flickers red in the bar light.

Outside, the asphalt’s wet, but it isn’t raining.

First car that stops is some old sedan and the woman driving it cranes her neck toward us and says, “Where’re you headed?”

And I say, “Felton?”

I glance at my girl Jane, like, Can we trust a woman to murder us? Jane gets my question telepathically and she nods, so we climb into the back and it smells of patchouli. The woman starts talking, chattery-chat, and there’s graham cracker crumbs between the seats and I’m just shaking my head because where’s a goddamn serial killer when your girl wants one?

Little Miss Chatty-Chat, mother of graham-cracker eaters, says, “Where in Felton?”

My girl Jane looks like she’s gonna cry and I’m really about to lose it. I say, “Any goddamn place.”

The woman driver startles, offended, and pulls over at the first stop sign in town. “You girls be careful out there.”

I can feel all the blood moving in my veins and Jane takes my arm, like everything’s gonna be all right. We cross the street as the sedan rolls away and we stick out our thumbs again and skinny Jane winks at me and she says, “Third time’s a charm.”

Maybe she’s right. We’re waiting out there a long time. Hardly any cars. It’s getting cold and I whisper to my girl Jane, “Are you cold?”

She smiles at me sad, sad blue smile light, and that’s when the VW van rolls up and the front door flies open and I climb up into the front seat and Jane takes the back. The driver has long, greasy hair, and he says, “You wanna do some coke?”

Hell yeah.

He gets out this cracked old mirror and cuts three lines on it. Powder feels like power. I snort it and pocket the razor.

You ever sever a whole fuckin’ head with a razor?

It’s not easy. All the skin and tendon and throat and bone. I gotta be honest with you: I blame Jane.