Lisa Gardner - Say Goodbye

Couldn’t rest, couldn’t relax, couldn’t stop staring at the door. Waiting for the knock to come. Waiting for the door to swing open and reveal the Burgerman, looming in the hallway with his bloody, caved-in skull.

“Boy,” he shouted in my dreams. “Did you really think you could kill a monster like me?” And then he’d laugh and laugh and laugh until I woke up drenched in cold sweat, screaming, absurdly, for my mother.

I played a lot of video games those first few weeks.

By week three, the manager was watching me every time I appeared for free breakfast bagels. One morning, he asked me if he could see ID. I panicked, stuttering like an idiot, then pulled it together long enough to tell him I had to get it from my room.

I ran all the way to the store for three heavy-duty duffel bags. Back in the hotel room, I packed up everything, including Henrietta. Minute it was dark, we were outta there. Fuckin’ manager.

I found a youth hostel, figured I’d be less conspicuous surrounded by other lone teens. The place wasn’t much. Spartan room, no community TV. First night, someone stole my bike. Second night, someone stole my video console.

Henrietta and I took off again. Running from place to place, little sleep, little food, little time to rest. Have to keep moving. Burgerman is coming.

I’d wanted a better life. Thought I’d live in a clean apartment in a nice section of town. I’d thought, having finally slayed the dragon, that I could be normal again.

I ended up right back on the same streets Burgerman had used as his hunting grounds, smoking crack cocaine and doing my best never to come back down to earth.

Then the money ran out. I crashed. Woke up in a pool of vomit, everything stolen but the bag Henrietta lived in.

And it occurred to me for the first time that the Burgerman really was gone. No more running back to a seedy apartment. No more demanding ten bucks because I’d earned it. No more Hostess Twinkies magically appearing in the cupboards.

The Burgerman was dead and I was alone.

I cried like an idiot for hours. Blubbered inconsolably, curled up next to a Dumpster, terrified of my aloneness, hating the uselessness of my tears. I took Henrietta out of the duffel bag and placed her on my bare collarbone. Begged her to bite me, to put me out of my misery. Begged her to do her worst.

She just sat there, stroking my neck with one hairy leg, until finally I calmed, shuddered, and fell asleep. When I woke again, Henrietta was sitting three inches from me, devouring a cockroach. I watched her for a bit, admiring her dainty precision as she ripped off the roach’s head, sucked out the juicy insides, started mashing the entire carcass into a buggy pulp.

Another cockroach went scampering by. I grabbed its fat body between my forefinger and thumb and popped it into my mouth. First bite, a terrible warm, salty liquid gushed over my tongue. I spit the bug out, gagging, swiping at my lips with the back of my hand. I’d leave roaches to Henrietta. I wanted a Twinkie.

Except I didn’t have any money, a street address, or valid photo ID. I’d gone from being the Burgerman’s plaything to a homeless punk. So I did the logical thing. I propositioned the next six men that happened by. Soon enough I had room money for the night.

Was this all there was for me? Endless days of dropping my pants for fat, hairy men who could only get it up by screwing kids? Maybe on a good day getting a free joint or acid hit to make it all less real, more manageable?

Henrietta was the one who lived in the cage, yet I was the one who couldn’t get free.

And then I remembered-I still had Burgerman’s movies, tucked safely and securely beneath Henrietta’s watchful eyes in that last duffel bag. Hours and hours of videotape. These men loved that kind of shit.

I sold the first tape for fifty bucks. Guy liked it so much, he was back in four hours, offering me a thousand dollars for the whole lot, his eyes overbright, the saliva pooling over his lower lip. In that moment, I knew I was onto something. I sold him one more tape for five hundred, then marched down to the nearest electronic store to invest in my newfound business.

Store manager was very helpful, especially once he realized they were “home movies.” Suddenly, he had a back room he needed to show me. Except this time, he was the one on his knees and I was the one with the power. I liked it. I really, really liked it.

Bob taught me things. How to edit, slice and dice, and scramble three hours of video into eight different home videos, all available to resell. He bought me my first computer. He introduced me in the right chat rooms, where online users identified as Fuckemdead and Justwantpussy educated me in the finer points of setting up my new home-based business-kiddie porn.

I learned how to tap the larger international market, where commercial websites such as mine could store valuable images on a variety of servers, making it difficult to trace. Or, as law enforcement officials grew smarter, how to break a single image into component parts, with each fragment hidden in a different corner of the world. The digital age, making life easier all the time.

Child porn is a spectrum. The low-end “cheap users” will settle for a sexed-up photo of a young child fully clothed, but perhaps provocatively posed. Then there’s the hard-core addicts. The serious buyers. They want the kids under the age of twelve, female, and screaming.

Like all businesses, porn follows the money. There are over ten thousand websites out there. And ninety-one percent of them feature prepubescent kids, screaming.

Bob, it turned out, liked that. And when he found out nothing could shock me, Bob was a very happy guy. Happy enough that he started to really piss me off.

So one day, I went to his apartment and beat him to death with a Louisville Slugger. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe because it was spring, and everywhere I went I could smell freshly turned earth. Or maybe because it had rained the night before and that made me want to kill someone.

I took his computer and recording equipment, plus the fake ID he’d graciously supplied. Henrietta and I once more hit the road.

We wandered. I was older now, less conspicuous. I bought a car, found a cheap apartment, one where the neighbors never noticed anything. I spent my days on the Internet, surfing chat rooms, YouTube, MySpace. I learned there are a lot of lonely kids out there who think I honestly want to be their friend. And I learned there are a lot of parents out there even more naive than my own.

I slept an hour or two at a time during the day, then prowled the Internet at night. I made a lot of money and used it to stock up on tequila, so when the bad spells hit, and the darkness descended for days at a time, and all I could hear was kids screaming, or the Burgerman grunting, or the scrape of a shovel carving out hard-packed earth, I could pour tequila down my throat a bottle at a time. I offered the worms to Henrietta, but she wouldn’t eat them.

One night, half a bottle into it, trying to explain to Henrietta how much I needed to sleep, I was hit by a great idea. Henrietta had been there. Henrietta had helped kill the Burgerman. And Henrietta slept all the time. Why? Because she had eight eyes, she could see in all directions.

So I marched down to the nearest tattoo parlor, Henrietta sitting on my shoulder, playing with my hair. I told the guy exactly what I wanted. And when he blanched and tried to talk me out of it, I plopped down five thousand dollars in cash and took a seat, bottle of tequila still in hand. I screamed for the next five hours, till he got the job done. It hurt like a son of a bitch for another month, my forehead swollen and hot to the touch.