{death and other disappointments} christina bergling

{death and other disappointments}
christina bergling

I did not meet his needs. I was not scared enough, so I died quickly. He wanted to feed off my fear, drink in my terror. He wanted me to submit to his power and become his. Instead, I became nothing, a depersonalized shell far away from all he was doing to me. He got bored and frustrated with me, blinded with rage, so I died quickly.

The rest, unfortunately, were not so lucky.

It is amazing what you learn about a person when they kill you. They tell you such things because they know you’ll never be alive to repeat them. Then there is that wretched transference when you die, when all of them imprints onto you. You see every miserable thing.

He kept calling me Alice. Hold still, Alice. Don’t be scared, Alice. Didn’t you miss me, Alice? But it wasn’t until my heart stopped beating that I knew she was his first, that I saw her terrified face writhing. I saw her through his horrible, excited eyes. She was scared enough, so he took his time with her.

I kept thinking, Markus won’t be home to feed Murphy for hours. Such a mundane thought to repeat in your mind as someone is bashing your head against a cement wall and wringing you by your neck. I didn’t think, I’ll never see Markus again; I didn’t think, Murphy will never lick my face again; I didn’t think, I’m going to die. No, I just thought about when Markus would get home from work to an empty house with a hungry dog waiting for him.

Thank God or whoever for depersonalization. I never thought I would appreciate my talent for it, even if it only proved useful in my death.

He cut the tendons in his victims’ wrists and ankles as only a medical school dropout could, disabling us while keeping us from bleeding to death too quickly. This was his thing, his signature, though it was nearly impossible to see after he chopped up our bodies. He liked us to flail desperately in vain; he liked to hear the screams of pain and frustration as we tried to use our mutilated limbs to defend ourselves. A sickening smile of self-satisfaction stretched across his face as a limp hand thrashed uselessly at the end of a panicked arm.

When he cut into my wrists, I screamed for the first time since he placed me in that room. The pain was as sharp as his scalpel. I felt it race up the inside of my arm and drown everything in my mind out; there was only the pain. My fingers twitched and flexed, but the binding was too tight. They only made contorted shadow puppets on the wall. He cut slowly and methodically and let out one solid breath of concentration anytime I managed to thrash enough to move my arm. He was too used to cutting cadavers.

A mortician serial killer, what a sad cliché. Could I have been offed by anyone more unoriginal or pathetic? I wish I could say he had mother issues; that would just round out the tragic stereotype perfectly. However, it was not that simple.

When he brought the blade across the thick scar tissue that stood out pink and shiny along my wrist, I felt an unnerving wave of suicidal nostalgia. I was back in that dank motel bathroom. Yes, I slit my wrists like every other pathetic bitch who didn’t really want to die, just thought she did. I checked into that desperate little motel, kidding myself. Wouldn’t want to leave such a mess at home for my broken mother to clean. I should have killed myself then if I had only lived to be murdered seven years later.

By the time he incapacitated both my hands, I was gone. My fingers no long writhed pointlessly; they curled in lifeless and defeated. I barely felt him dissect my Achilles tendons; I barely noticed my feet slumping. I was fading deeper and deeper back into myself, back into my mind. The world outside was only flashing like a TV left on in another room.

To him, when I checked out, it was like I was already dead. There was no exhilarating terror in my eyes; they were vacant. My body wasn’t thrashing to excite him; it was collapsed lifelessly. He didn’t want me dead. Yet. He dealt with dead bodies all day. He wanted to suck out every last screaming, kicking, fighting breath of life. Yet all he had was me, the breathing, depersonalized, might as well be dead.

I am glad I saw his frustration rather than his enjoyment. Deep down, I took some primal satisfaction as he grabbed my shoulders and tried to shake me to reaction. His eyes bulged as he stabbed me randomly in the chest. He started to sweat, the drops snaking down his reddening face, as he studied me. I was smirking on the inside. Outside, nothing. My chest rose and fell mundanely, and I stared blankly right through him.

He began throwing things, screaming incoherently. He brought his face close to mine, held his breath, then contorted in disappointment. Over and over, as if it would change.

Alice! Alice! Look at me, Alice! He shrieked her name over and over. ALICE!

I wasn’t fucking Alice.

He stormed out. The door slammed. I could hear him on the other side, and then he was gone. Even alone, I didn’t move. Even though I could have done little to escape with my sliced tendons, I didn’t even try. I didn’t even think about it. I wonder if failed suicides have that basic survival instinct they were able to bypass at least once. Maybe mine died that day in a roadside motel instead of me.

I was supposed to be lucky number 13 for him. How does someone really get away with killing 12 people? He studied enough or watched enough bullshit TV or remained nameless and forgettable. He fell into the right crack in the system. Most people avoid people who work with the dead anyway. They all thought he was obsessed with death, assumed he was shy and lonely. Quite the unfortunate opposite. He was obsessed with life, obsessed to the point that he only found peace when he was stealing one.

The failure in my murder haunted him. My vacant eyes tormented him. He didn’t get to happily relive my anguish or masturbate to the flashes of my torture. My emptiness filled him and infected his every thought.

I saw him take this frustration out on number 14, number 15. By number 16, he was nearly feeling himself, and I was almost faded free. When number 14 screamed so hard her body trembled against him, he could feel the electricity in her fear. He was never harder than when he raped her pathetically fighting body. Things I missed out on.

I was still alive when he started dismembering me. Technically. It was his solution. If I wasn’t alive enough, he might as well kill me and get it over with, forget the whole failed endeavor. Again, he put his face to mine, closer still. His warm breath puffed against my cheek. He was eye to eye with me, trying to stare in; I didn’t stare back.

Alice, he whispered, actually pressing his face into mine. ALICE!

Nothing.

He let out one final infuriated shriek, and that was the last sound he made. He covered my face with a bloody towel to hide my vacant eyes, and that was it. I breathed in my last breaths tasting metallic decay and listening to his breathing grow farther away.

When the saw first sank into my flesh and its teeth rippled against my bone, blinding red pain sliced through my dark little corner. Every nerve in my body lit up; every muscle clenched horribly. I’m sure my body reacted. It may have even tried to fight. I might have screamed. I lost track of my body as an eerie calm wrapped around me. I finally thought, I’m going to die, peacefully and in acceptance.

It was over.

There is a disgusting intimacy in murder, something base and fundamental that can’t just end with the victim’s life. As I died, at the moment I became completely free of my bodily shell, it became a blur—flashes of him, flashes of me.

I saw Markus’ lips against my collarbone for the first time, felt that particular warmth to his skin. I saw my murderer holding the hand of a wrinkled and grieving widow, gently passing her a tissue in his funeral home. I saw the tears on my mother’s face when I was brought home by the police for drinking in high school. I saw him starting at Alice from the back of the med school classroom, fawning over the way her dark hair hooked around her jaw bone.

There was no more feeling. No more nerves, no more chemicals, no more emotions—all of that was dead in the bloody pieces of my body. I didn’t react anymore, just saw.

I saw myself standing in that damned bathroom, watching myself like a stranger pick up my father’s folding razor. I saw his father meticulously teaching him how to dress a deer, scolding him to take his time and separate the pieces perfectly. I saw myself standing in my own bathroom, with a negative pregnancy test on the counter, staring at my flat stomach in the mirror. I saw him painting in the corner of his mother’s nursing home room, capturing the way the light hugged her frail form. All the random bullshit glimpses that make up a life and mean nothing.

The shrieking grew louder as my light grew dimmer. Nerves snapped away from my consciousness like tethers popping off an ascending balloon. Sensation went dark; there was only the base piece of me left. Of course I would end up here. Of course I would see her first. His Alice. He considered her murder the pinnacle of his life. Every murder after it, including mine, was a desperate attempt to relive it.

“Oh darling, I love when you play coy with me.” That voice. His fucking voice. He cooed in her ear as he pinned her down with his body.

If I was still connected to my emotions, I would have been appalled; I would have been horrified. I would have raged and rallied for her. Yet I could only watch in cold observation, noting what I had shared and what I had been spared in her fate.

He licked along her ear, the stubble on his chin grating her face. She struggled, writhed as her eyes threatened to bulge from her sockets. Her desperation was visible in every tensed muscle. He was so excited he was vibrating. Trapped entangled in his wretched consciousness, I read him so clearly. He finally had her, and he couldn’t believe it was as good as he imagined. Her body felt just as good as in his fantasies.

He leaned back to unzip his pants, and opportunity flashed in her eyes. She did not breathe as she reeled back and smashed her fist against the side of his head. His disgusting smile was temporarily contorted into shock. As he toppled backwards, she kicked him as hard as she could between the legs. His face twisted further as he crumpled onto the ground. She leapt over him, but he caught her by the ankle, bringing her down hard onto her face.

I knew what happened next. Here is when he learned to hobble his victims, make them helpless. Her failed escape attempt cost all of us to follow the chance. Once he had her wrangled back onto the bed, he cut her tendons. For those of us privileged enough to follow her, he did this first.

You wouldn’t think that the use of all of your limbs depended on your hands and feet, yet they are all rendered useless when you negate their ends. You can’t stand on feet with sliced tendons; you can’t open a door with lifeless fingers. The use of the legs and arms is merely a tease, a mockery. By that point, we were all dead anyway; I was just the only one who chose not to fight it.

Alice’s wounds were leaving puddles of blood on the bedspread when he climbed back on top of her. He pushed her limp hand down his pants. She moaned as the wound tore and stretched while he rubbed himself against her palm. She strained and frantically willed her hand to claw at his penis and testicles, to rip them from his horrible body, but her hand hung as futile as a puppet on a string.

“Do you see how hard you make me, Alice? Do you see how much I love you?” He nuzzled against her as he grinded against her hand. “All of you feels so good.”

She whimpered as tears started to stream down her face. He undressed her so slowly, so carefully, patiently waiting out her resistance. She kicked her legs and screamed at the pain of her dead feet flopping around. She tried to strike him with her forearms or elbows. She could barely wiggle across the bed. He just smiled down at her affectionately. She was full of so much life, and it was all his.

“I love you so much,” he said as he pushed himself hard inside of her.

She made a primal sound, and her body tensed. She did not breathe; she did not move.

“I have loved you for so long.”

He pushed his hand through her hair and kissed at her neck. She kicked and thrashed. He was all over her, completely covering her. She threw up violently beside them. The wretching movement of her body only inspired him more.

“Yes, yes,” he grunted as he thrust harder into her. “I knew you loved me. I knew you would like it.”

It went on forever. He relished every second of it, and she fought with every fraction of her life. No wonder I disappointed him. Alive, I would have wished I could have been sick at the sight; I would have covered my eyes and been physically disgusted. I would have felt for her—if I could feel. All of that was as dead as my body. I was trapped in tethered apathy. Maybe it was better that I could not feel an end so much more tragic than my own.

After this, every death looked the same. Through his experience, to which I was unfortunately attached, they were all Alice anyway. All, except for me.