Christopher Conlon - Savaging the Dark

But I can’t let him.

Connor’s green eyes watch me. He’s handcuffed to the bed, arms raised above him. I’ve used one of his white T-shirts to make a gag I’ve tied around his mouth. We’ve been like this for nearly two days. When I checked into this motel by the sea I paid for several days in advance, asked that we not be bothered, placed the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside doorknob. We haven’t been disturbed. The maid leaves towels outside the room.

I don’t know where we are except that we’ve arrived at the ocean. Oregon? California? Everything blurs. I can hear the sea close by when I turn down the volume on the TV, but mostly I leave it up so that Connor can watch. I try to keep him as comfortable as I can. I know the handcuffs must be awkward. I locked his wrists into them when he was asleep, locked the cuffs onto the heavy metal bedposts. He woke as I wrapped the gag around him. He tried to scream, shook the bed violently, again and again, for hours. “Sweetheart,” I kept telling him, “this will really be easier if you just calm down.” I brought the gun from my bag, held it at my side. “It’s not like you can get away. You don’t want to anyway, do you? I know you don’t. I know you love me. I know you’re just scared now, that’s all. Shh. Settle down, Connor. Quiet down.” I don’t like it but it was the only way. I could see in his eyes that he was going to run, he was going to leave me.

It does create practical problems. There’s no way for Connor to go to the bathroom. I tried to use a towel, to put it under him, and it worked somewhat but not really. Now there are yellow streams on his shorts, which is all he’s wearing. There are yellow streaks all over the bed. I still sleep with him, I don’t mind. But I’m afraid he hasn’t eaten anything in a long time, or had anything to drink. He’ll start screaming if I loosen the gag, I know. My only option is to let him weaken to the point that he can’t scream, then I’ll take off the gag and feed him, give him water, nurse him back to health and strength and by doing that he’ll realize again how much I love him, how I’ll never stop loving him.

We’ve been in this room forever, but we’re not in this room at all. Nothing is real now. I wander around as in a dream, as if I were in a film, both of us. The other life wasn’t my life, but this room with Connor is just as fantastical now. Once upon a time we were in love, once upon a time Connor didn’t think it dirty and it wasn’t. Once upon a time it was the two of us against the world and it can be again, I know it can, if only I can prove to him my love.

In my endless pacing in the room I occasionally get a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror and this reinforces the idea that this isn’t my life, this isn’t me. The person looking back at me is clearly mad, her hair every which way, her eyes skittish and wild, black pockets under them. Her expression is somehow different than the old Mona Straw, from that other unreal life, somehow lopsided, unbalanced. Feral. Her movements are sudden, graceless, erratic. Her skin is greasy. Her clothes are soiled. Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Day collides with night and then suddenly it’s day again. Once or twice someone knocks on the door and I tell them thank you, we’re sleeping, just leave the towels and sheets outside the door. They do. We’re paid up, after all, we’re not bothering anyone. The Sea Breeze Inn, that’s the name of this place. Ocean outside but no beach, nothing but rocks and gray skies. Salt air. A four-lane road a short distance down the hill, surprisingly busy day and night. The traffic makes me feel nervous, vulnerable, but there’s no changing now. No going back.

I used to have fantasies about a life I’d lived. I was a teacher, a wife, a mother. I remember names: Bill. Gracie. Cutts. All those children. None of them existed, I’m sure. They were a dream I had. But this doesn’t exist either, this room, this boy in the pink handcuffs on the urine-stained bed. How could it? This can’t be my life.

It’s night again.

“I’m not dirty, Connor,” I say, my voice strange in my throat, hoarse, husky. “We’re not dirty. Nothing we did was dirty.”

To prove it to him I slip the pistol into my belt, sit next to him on the bed. I take one of his feet. Initially he resists but then I say, “Relax, sweetheart, I’m not going to hurt you, Mona would never hurt you,” and I look at it. He had been walking barefoot outside not long before he came in to sleep and there are bits of grass between his toes, even some dark substance, oil or grease. I go to the bathroom, wet a towel, bring it to the bed.

“Sweetheart? Let me wash your feet. They’re not clean. Come on. Don’t be shy. You’re dirty.”

I hold his foot carefully, nuzzle it with my cheek, wash it with the cloth. Then I pick up the other. Yet he still looks suspicious, frightened.

“Clean,” I whisper. “Clean, clean, clean, clean, clean.”

Then I begin licking his foot. I will lick his foot clean, his entire body, and when he is completely clean he’ll see that all I ever offered him was clean. I consider biting down on his foot, tearing it in half, eating it, eating him, making us part of each other forever, but no. That wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be clean.

I suddenly realize that there are red and blue lights flashing outside the window. I jump up, my breath shallow. I hear footsteps, boots on the gravel outside. I take the gun in my hands. I lean close to Connor, sidle up next to him. I let him see me switch off the safety. I let him watch me cock it. I feel light, even blissful. None of this is happening, not to me. This is not my life.

I hold the barrel close to his eye so he can peer down into its darkness. He’s shaking his head, quivering, trying to scream through the gag.

Then I move the barrel to my own temple.

I hold eye contact with him as I slowly squeeze the trigger.

Snap.

His eyes widen and I hear myself laughing. I’ve never laughed like this. It’s a high-pitched sound, very different from my usual laugh. As I laugh, or someone who looks like me does, there’s a knock at the door. It’s a strong, masculine knock.

“Police. Open the door, please.”

My laughter settles for a moment. I point the gun straight at Connor, cock it again and again. Snap, snap, snap, snap, snap.

“The movie’s over now, sweetheart,” I say, or someone does. “I’m sorry it didn’t have a better ending.”

I stand then. The knock comes again, louder this time. I hear my laughter reverberating throughout the room, echoing off the walls, bouncing through my brain, laughter that once started can never stop, will never stop until the end of the world, the end of time. Gun in hand, laughing, shrieking, screaming, I move to the door. I unlock it.

I pull it open.

Some of what I’ve written here is true.

But in fact, there are great swaths I don’t remember, and even more I never knew. I was only eleven, after all.

I’ve tried to portray Mona as I remember her. It’s difficult, nearly fifteen years later. Much of what happened between us has remained unvisited territory in my memory, dark and unwanted, and so I’ve lost a lot of it over the years.

The facts are accurate, to the best of my knowledge. Some of them come not from my own remembrance but from news articles of the time as well as a book or two that was written about the case. A few bits and pieces I learned from her husband Bill not long before he moved with Gracie away from the Silver Spring area and vanished from my life.

What I don’t know, of course, what I’ve imagined here, is what it was like to be Mona Straw. Her thoughts, her perceptions. And yet that seemed the only way to record this, the only way to make it worth recording. To, in a sense, become her. To try to understand what perhaps defies understanding.