Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

The room is slightly bigger than the last cell he was in, cleaner, and much hotter. He’ll have to speak to Adrian, see what he can do about the heat. And he’s got no bucket to piss into this time and no water to drink.

When he brought the girls here he only spent time with them at night and the only heat in the room was coming from the flashlights he brought. He made Emma Green drink a bottle of water before leaving her, but that was. . what? He’s lost track of time. Three days? Four? And he left two more bottles with her. He kept her tied up, but the bottles were open and she could roll onto her side and sip them. He was going to bring her more when he returned, along with some food. He needed her to stay healthy long enough to enjoy her. The first night he was happy with keeping her tied while he cut away her clothes and took photos. The duct tape over her eyes kept her from seeing him. He liked exercising control. The following night he was going to do more. A lot more. But the duct tape would remain over the eyes. He didn’t want her seeing him. Didn’t like the disgust that would have been in her eyes.

He puts his hands against the wall. The texture is canvas, the padding beneath it thick, made up from cushions of foam. Emma Green could be in the room next to him. He tries tugging again at the material, but it’s secured too tight and all he does is hurt the tips of his fingers. He begins to pace, then gives up when he starts sweating. He tries banging on the walls but can’t make much of a sound. All he can do is wait. He sits in the corner and doesn’t have to wait long before the slide opens. The light coming through almost blinds him and he has to look away, but then it disappears when Adrian looks through the slot.

“How are you feeling?” Adrian asks.

“It’s hot in here, Adrian. Really hot.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But like you said, it’s only temporary. Only. . I kind of like it here. I didn’t, at first, but it’s. . growing on me.”

“I’d like it too if it wasn’t so hot,” Cooper says.

“Sorry about that.”

“Where are we? Is this Sunnyview?”

“Something like that.”

“Are we at Eastlake?”

“No,” Adrian answers, shaking his head.

“So it’s Sunnyview then.”

“Maybe,” Adrian repeats.

“Okay, Adrian, why don’t you let me out? I need to be in a room that’s cooler. It’s hot in here.”

“There’s nowhere else for you,” Adrian says.

“Well, then how about leaving that slot open. And I’m going to need water. Plenty of it.”

“I can do that, I guess. Also, umm, I wanted to, you know, to thank you for telling me the police would find us. That was really nice of you and, and. . and what I want to know is, is it true what they say about serial killers wanting to kill their mothers?”

Like you killed Pamela Deans? Is it possible after all his years in Grover Hills Adrian formed a connection that made him look at Nurse Deans as a mother figure? It takes him only a second to decide that yes, it’s entirely possible.

“In most cases,” he answers. “Why?”

“If you kill your mother will that make you a serial killer?” Adrian asks.

“You think you’re a serial killer?”

“No,” Adrian says, looking away. “I’m just, you know, curious.”

“I don’t know,” Cooper says. “It depends on whether you kill other people too.”

“What about your mother?” Adrian asks.

“What?”

“I’ve read heaps and heaps of books and they all say that serial killers grow up hating their mothers. They say that the one person a serial killer wants to kill more than anybody is their abusive mother, and instead they kill other women as surr. . surr-goats,” Adrian says.

“Surrogates.”

“Sir-gates. Is that why you killed all those other people?”

The answer is no. And there aren’t all those other people . There are only two. “My mother is a good person,” Cooper says, and it’s true. He loves his mother. Right now she’ll be sitting in her living room, photos of Cooper and his sister staring down from the walls. His sister probably in the middle of some long-haul flight back to New Zealand to be with their mum. Friends and other family members trying to keep her comforted, a damp handkerchief in her lap, an absolute blank stare on her face, hoping her son is alive but believing otherwise. When people go missing in this country they don’t show back up. At least not alive.

“Your mother made you who you are,” Adrian says. “She’s the reason you became a killer.”

“That’s not true.”

“But the books say. .”

“The books aren’t always accurate, Adrian. They’re a generalization.”

“A what?”

“It means the books say what works for most people, but not for all. There are always going to be exceptions.”

“The books didn’t say anything about exceptions.”

“But there are. You didn’t become fascinated with killers because of your mother, right?”

“That was different. That didn’t happen to you, which means you must hate your mother.”

“I don’t hate her. I love her.”

“Do you think she’s collectable?”

For a split second the words don’t make sense, at least he doesn’t think they do, but he knows, he knows what Adrian means. “What?”

“If you really love her, then bringing her here is the best thing I can do for you. If you hate her and want her dead, then bringing her here is also a good thing for you.”

“Don’t bring her here,” he says, his words low.

“What?”

“I said don’t bring her here,” he repeats, louder this time.

“But she’ll be perfect for the collection!” Adrian says, sounding out of breath. “Both serial killer and the woman who made him that way.”

“She didn’t make me this way.”

“We can talk about it when I come back with her.”

“Wait, wait,” Cooper says, moving toward the slot, but Adrian closes it and he returns to the darkness. “Wait!” he shouts, but it’s no use. He bangs on the padded door and can’t make much of a sound. “Adrian! Adrian!”

But Adrian is already gone.

I take a time-out to have a slice of life moment. I’ve hardly eaten all day and my body is starting to crash. I hit a drive-through and pick up a hamburger and fries and some kind of Coke substitute that consists of syrup and about four carbonated bubbles. It tastes exactly how I remember it tasting, which is a real shame. I stay in my car, parked under the shade of some large elm trees as burger juice runs down my fingers onto my wrist. There are kids playing cricket, which means that school is over for the day, which means it’s much later than I thought it was. I think about my daughter as I eat my burger. I think about her friends from school and wonder how many of them still remember her. Then I think about the blood on the steps leading down to the basement at Grover Hills and how, at the moment, the place is most likely now a crime scene. The ice in the Coke melts and makes the drink a little more bearable. I think about Jesse Cart-man and the Scream Room. If there were any truth to what Cart-man said and the room was still active and I was still a cop with my daughter in the ground, would I blow the whistle on that room and all the bad things that happened there? I finish off the hamburger. I’d want revenge the same way many others would, but seeing Jesse Cartman, seeing he was never really responsible for his past, does that change things? I don’t know. I think it should. I like to think it would have changed things enough for me not to have lost my mind, pay off a couple of orderlies, and go into a basement with a baseball bat looking for revenge.