Amongst Giants

Eliot, sit down. I need to tell you something. Yes, over there, that’s good, on the sofa. Have a glass of wine, and let me turn the stereo off. It’s been a long day. No, this isn’t about my sister. This is important. I’m related to a monster, and if you stay associated with me, then you will be, too. That monster’s name is Maxwell.

I know what you must be thinking. This is a shock. I suppose the media skated over me, to some extent. I’ve managed to live in anonymity. Some people are vaguely aware that there was a James involved in the Maxwell Silverstein incident, but after all, it’s a common name, and…

Listen, it’s okay. I don’t think he’s coming after me. He wouldn’t. This is what I was afraid of, why I put off telling you until I was sure that you needed to know, but you do. We’ve been together a month. I wouldn’t feel honest if I went on this way, without you knowing.

Anyway, you will have heard the stories. You’re too young to have read the newspapers back in those days, but you know what I’m talking about. Fourteen gay men abducted, thirteen murders, human heads and other parts found stashed in oil drums, left to dissolve in acid. Despicable things. You might even know he had a history of convictions, sex offences relating to young men and boys, mostly– the kinds of offences that have gotten him beaten in jail, from time to time.

It’s all true. I swore it under oath when I made my affidavit for the police, and I don’t deny it now. There simply comes a time when I can’t ask you to live a lie with me. You need to know the truth.

I was the James who would have been his fourteenth victim, perhaps. No, I’m not being callous about it. I’m just speaking with the benefit of distance. Cold, hard facts are brutal, and there’s much more to this story than that. Steady, now, don’t drop that. Do you need a lighter? Here, I’ll hold it. Like that, it will calm you down.

I first met Maxwell when I was in high school. I was sixteen, a few years younger than him, and perhaps because of this I was willing to approach him when everyone his own age had cut him off. Boys in my year mostly knew him as the weird kid. He would have been eighteen then, and graduated, but he never went to college.

He lived with his grandmother, and as far as I could tell, she wasn’t capable of living on her own. Nobody ever saw her. She needed him to look after the house, which was this rustic shingled structure of what was then modern design.

Two storeys tall, it squatted on the side of a steep hill crowded with pine trees. One side of the block was a river of pine needles, but there were no fences. The whole house was camouflaged. The only part you could see from the round, which wound up around that hill, was the driveway. Isolation kept intruders out. The Silverstein residence was girt and swallowed by woodland.

I used to live on a neighbouring property, at the very top of the hill. Mine must have been the only house in town more isolated than Maxwell’s. I was on the athletics team –a distance runner, even back then, I could never give it up after what happened– and used to jog up the hill every day. Suffice to say, I must have gone past his window at some point. Half-hidden as it was in branches, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all, but he noticed me.

There, there. Have another drink. A good, stiff one– let me pour it. There you go. You should feel better in a moment.

It’s not what you think. I know, it sounds horrible, to think that I knew the man who would go on to commit all those crimes, but it’s really not like that at all. Those are the cold, hard facts speaking again. Reality is different. No more pleasant, perhaps, but written in shades of grey. I didn’t fear for my life back in in those days.

Well, except for once.

I was on my morning run, on the very last leg of my journey. I used to really burn going up that hill, even though it was the middle of winter, and my breath swirled as fog around me. I had very short shorts on, and I was starting to get dizzy from elevation. The windows in town that shrunk to miniature below me still had lights on. There was so much mist around the hilltop that it might have been made from ghosts. It very nearly was.

He came out of nowhere, headlights blazing in a blanket of white, lighting up the whole road. I was very nearly blinded, and could have sworn he was trying to run me down. The car was old and rattling, with panels of imitation wood peeling in strips down its sides. He rolled his window down.

‘Do you need a lift?’ he asked.

He sounded friendly enough, but I was wary. I clearly looked like a jogger. He must have followed my train of thought.

‘You look puffed,’ he said. ‘You’ll catch your death of cold.’

It was a surprisingly old-timey thing to say, for somebody still in their teens. I said I recognised him. That made me feel safer, and more justified for accepting the lift. I said I knew him as Max from school, and that he’d graduated the year before. He only laughed, and said that all his friends had gone away. It was a small town, after all, with nothing in the way of jobs or college. He was the last one left.

When I asked him what he did with all his time, he replied that he had no work, but that he was hoping to study a chemist the following fall. He had some interesting experiments set up in his grandmother’s shed, and asked me if I wanted to see them.

At first, I said no. Then the car windows rolled back up, and I caught a whiff of something the cold air was no longer stealing away.

‘You’ve been drinking,’ I said, startled, probably. The stink was on his breath, but it also seeped out of every fibre in the car seats, the lining of the doors and the mats underneath them. I shuffled, and a can crunched beneath one of my sneakers.

‘It’s lonely,’ he replied, ‘being me.’ I saw that he had huge, magnifying glasses on, but there was also something else, something deeper in his eyes. They weren’t glazed, like my teenaged mind thought an alcoholic’s should have been.

There was a jerking and grating of gears as the car stopped in the middle of nowhere, on a vacant stretch of pine-walled road between our houses. Maxwell apologised. He wouldn’t look at me. He seemed to be bracing himself.

‘You’d better get out,’ he said. I glanced outside, but it was still cold, with drifts of snow banked up along the edges of the road. I tried the door, but my hand hesitated. I couldn’t do it.

‘Why are you lonely?’ I pried. I couldn’t help that, either.

The truth was that we were both lonely. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could admit to a kid your own age, back in those days. Maybe it never is. Oh, sure, there are some things you can share– parents splitting up, liking a girl, maybe even liking a boy, in your day, but not in mine.

That wasn’t the half of it, anyway. I was sixteen, and I’d just had a brother die. Nobody in class could relate to that. Maybe an older person, I thought, with an older person’s problems, but someone still young enough for me to make sense, but who wasn’t a parent or a teacher, with an adult’s prejudices. He looked at me in a way that suggested we already had one other thing in common.

Now, Eliot, please! This was thirty years ago, maybe two decades before you had your first fling. Please calm down and I’ll explain. Yes, yes. I know he was put in prison more than ten years ago. What did I tell you about facts? If you just cling to a few aspects of a story, you can skew things out of perspective. Trust me? Of course you can trust me. Nobody knows more about trauma than I do. You can’t be forgetting what happened to Ben!

Are you quite alright for the time being? Good. I know it’s a lot at once. Just, please. Trust me. I’ll make this as painless as possible.

Now, as I was saying, I sensed we had something in common. This was the 70s, and being a gay teenager wasn’t something you could explore in school. I decided to give him a chance. I said I was interested in his experiments after all. He smiled then, and with some spluttering, the car started back up. We continued in the direction we had always been going– towards Maxwell’s house, not mine.

I got nerves again, and sensed that something was amiss, when I first stepped out of that car and felt the gravel crunch beneath my feet. It was overgrown with weeds, like everything there. From the look of it, the house had no other occupant but Maxwell, and was in a terrible state of neglect. Shingles were loose and sitting askew on the roof. The few windows were clouded, and rust had eaten holes in all the drainpipes.

The redwoods that grew around the house and marched off into the fathomless woods were monolithic. I got the sense, for the first time then, that I, a speedy but weak young man, was truly walking among giants.

Maxwell had his glasses on still, and they reflected the misty morning in a cryptic kind of way, flashing so that it was impossible to see what kind of expression was behind them.

He showed me through the house, which was ordinary, but filthy. Hall runner carpets coughed up dust when we trod on them. The paintings on the walls were idyllic panoramas of the surrounding valley, but they were all grimy, sometimes sporting circular patches where the dirt had been rubbed away from landmarks. The kitchen counter was cluttered with dishes. Pizza boxes were piled up there, too, along with a collection of empty beer bottles no grandmother could have tolerated.

Maxwell explained that his only relative lived upstairs. He said to be quiet, and that she needed her rest. Without another word, we passed through the kitchen and out the back door.

The shed in the yard was more interesting. It was made from boards of rotting wood, perpetually damp and clotted with moss. The door to the shed creaked on its hinges, and I recall wondering if anyone around would be able to hear that creaking. Inside were rowed shelves of jars, paint tins and petrol cans, full of foul smells. I peered closer, and, seeing that they were also full of dead things, screamed.

Maxwell looked hurt.

My heart beat in my throat, and I wanted to run away, but for the second time, I couldn’t. I asked him why on God’s earth he did it. To my even greater surprise, he began to cry!

I watched as he divulged his pockets, falling over himself in apology yet again, and a knife came tumbling out. The damp handkerchief that followed it was surely doused in chloroform. I caught a whiff of it as it fell harmlessly to the floor.

I wondered how he could possibly have acquired these things, but then remembered that his father was a chemist, or had been. There used to be a Dr. Silverstein in town– surely this, then, was his son.

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, again and again. I don’t know how much time passed when all there was between us was those words. A moment later, however, there was nothing between us. I was hearing it all, perhaps the first person he had talked to in a year. Perhaps the first person he had really talked to ever.

You must brace yourself, Eliot, for this next part isn’t easy. I’m sure a bright young scholar like you can already guess. He confessed that he intended to kill me. In the midst of his tears, he tried to send me away, and bruised me badly shoving me out the door of his filthy shack into daylight.

He said it was a compulsion he had been nursing for a while. He got these urges, to see dead things, to touch them. It was revolting, and yet, it wasn’t his fault. I knew all too well how difficult it was, as a child in that era, discovering homosexuality.

That was only on the brink of social acceptance, and I had carried my burdens with me because of it. I could only imagine what it might be like to be saddled with something worse, to lie awake all night, imaging things which you knew to be horrible, things that were dangerous– things that were wrong.

I felt truly sorry for him, slumped there so conflicted, on an upturned milk crate that must have been filched or stolen from the bakery in town. The knife he discarded in his torment had sliced up his hands. He was clumsy, he said. He drank to ease the pain. He just wanted to be numb, to be rid of it, to feel no sexual urges. He didn’t want to be the person he was, but he had to be something like it, if he was to stay alive.

He had a desire for corpses. What a horrible thing to acquire, unwished for!

He couldn’t say what caused it. He only lived in a zombie state, shambling around without work or friends, alone with the voices that told him to do heinous things. He had always loved dissecting things, and had an insatiable desire to find out what was inside them. He was fascinated by dead animals, as if he couldn’t work out the metaphysical difference between a live body and a corpse from which life had flown.

He killed vermin and even dogs occasionally– Eliot, are you okay? Dear Jesus, you’re turning green. Lie down. No, you must hear me out on the rest, I beg of you.

Maxwell killed dogs, squirrels, raccoons… I’ll put it simply. Those were the things in the jars, either pickled or dissolving.

He reminded me of nothing so much as a vampire, a literal monster with a real thirst, forced into a life of seclusion, slave to a periods of lost control followed by intense regret. I knew what it was like to be a teenager, of course, and to have desires society condemned. I thought that, perhaps, I could ease his pain. He had liked the look of me reimagined as a corpse, after all.

You must think me sick, but I liked him all the better for desiring me. I wanted to be a monster, too, a giant instead of a weak man. I wanted to do monstrous things with him. Not killing, of course, but loving him for his morbid fascinations.

I know, it should have been against instinct. I should have thought of my safety first, but I simply couldn’t fear him in that state. I told him instead, that I wanted to know. I wanted to know what it was like to be Maxwell, to live all alone in the forest, trying to resist the urge to kill small things, and looking at handsome boys and thinking of them as corpses.

He told me there was no point, and motioned again, half-heartedly, for me to leave. He tried to wave me away, but he had waved away his will long before. Now that his secret was out, he uncapped a bottle of something strong and potent that had been tucked inside the pocket of a denim jacket, and took a swig. There was brown paper around the bottle, but it was a useless disguise, just like his glasses and his expression, in that moment.

I said I thought, maybe, that I understood. I expected to be admonished again, but I suppose he was too far gone to stop me talking. It was bizarre, to think that I was sitting there, in a stranger’s shed, still in my trainers, but it didn’t stop the words from pouring out.

I had been looking for a friend for a long time, too. Or, rather, I had been looking for a damaged friend, a friend whose home life wasn’t a patchwork of scenes from the Brady Bunch, and whose troubles were real troubles –not homework and crushes– the kind that couldn’t ever go away.

My brother didn’t die, I told him. He was murdered. The surgeons did it, and nobody else saw things the same way I did. They called those doctors heroes. I couldn’t focus on school anymore. It seemed so trivial, eclipsed by his loss. I couldn’t focus on anything. My whole life was interrupted by the cataclysm, the tragedy that should never have been.

I just couldn’t get over how wrong it was that they had done those things to him. They had rendered him unconscious, powerless and sterile. They had made him worse than a corpse, the way they had treated him like meat rather than with funeral tact. He had been butchered, while we were promised things and kept in away from him, a room that was lazily furnished and smelled of disinfectant. He never woke up.

And yet, nobody saw the inherent horror of what had happened. They saw it as necessary. They called it a mistake, the thing that had taken his life and ruined mine. Nobody was punished. Everybody was sympathetic to the men in the white coats, whose job was dehumanisation– a concept I didn’t even have a word for until I found myself a young anthropologist, like you.

Poor Ben!

I couldn’t run away from the past, but I ran anyway. I ran my way onto the school team, and into the regionals, and finally the state championships. I could run forever. It was the only thing that gave me purpose, my only distraction.

I admitted to Maxwell that it wasn’t quite the same as alcohol, which I had heard about and smelled but never tried. I didn’t want to be numb. I couldn’t bear the thought of being anaesthetised. I wanted to be fully me, to never sleep again, lest the nightmares come.

While he wanted to lie still, I wanted to be full of such motion, and flying at such speeds, that my outside layers were stripped away.

Maxwell nodded as I spoke. I was unaware, at first, of the way my whole, skinny body was shaking. I was an easily agitated kid. I said that, yes, Maxwell’s fascination, being dissection, was the source my horror. He liked to cut things up, to find out what they looked like inside. I rejected the thought of ever letting a surgeon touch me. I would not be laid out on a slab, regarded with calculation. The thought of such practice made me shiver.

Likewise, I did not want to see dead things, for the same reason Maxwell truly wanted to. We were both unclear on the subtle differences between living and gone, but whereas I abhorred knowledge on these points, he hungered for it.

At last, I said, I knew what it was like, to have a load to carry. I knew what it was like to feel a real, incurable pain. I knew what it was like to be unable to voice that pain, for fear of being trivialised or ostracised, because nobody agreed with me.

It was far worse than being the nerdy kid, who read H P Lovecraft and longed for an era before inhumane technology, or the gay kid who had no friends. It was worse than anything.

Drunk and three years my senior, Maxwell smiled.

From that day, we were friends. I was the younger brother he had never had. He was the older brother who had been taken from me. We were also both, and yet, for I cannot omit this part, something else to one another.

Eventually, I learned that there was little I could do to simulate death for my friend. Instead, I bore his burden with him, and wracked my sober brain for ways to help him out of his predicament. He could aspire, I suggested, to take a job at a mortuary. I winced to think of this, but it was preferable to the urge to kill. A corpse found dead was better than one taken alive.

I stress at this point that I had no idea of his crimes. I know the forensic scientists made a timeline. I know also, now, that at the times I visited his house, there was every likelihood that the first bodies, hitchhikers brought in off the highway, were in the basement. Yet, I swore to the police that I knew nothing about it until the day I escaped.

That day was terrible. I called on Maxwell’s house after school, as usual. I was seventeen then, close to graduation, and still his only friend. His grandmother had moved away. She reportedly said that she hated the town, and only asked Max to mind the house until it was sold.

He had nothing much to look forward to, I suppose. Maybe that was why he was so miserable. Or, perhaps, in hindsight, he resented a recent kill, a loss of control over himself.

He was further along than I had ever seen him, falling sideways off the fetid sofa stained with beer and pizza sauce. There was a wine cask as well as an empty regiment of beer bottles on the crunchy carpet. Yet, his expression was stony, emotionless, and the things he said even more so. He had this deep-eyed stare, designed to drink all the suffering from the universe.

‘Unfair,’ he muttered, and shook his head. ‘S’injustice.’

‘There’s a lot of injustice in the world,’ I agreed, rather nervously. As soon as I did, however, he had a moment of clarity.

‘In it?’ He seemed to find great amusement in this. ‘Injustice is the world.

‘You don’t believe that,’ I told him. ‘Not fully. If it was the whole world, then why would you be talking to me?’

Only then did I notice the object he had half-concealed in his jacket, which was zipped up but oddly bulky. It was this object that was keeping him upright like a pole for a scarecrow, the metal end of its long barrel wedged close to his throat.

Maxwell had a gun.

My first fear was not for myself. To begin with, I thought he planned to blow his skull apart then and there, but my initial assumption was quickly displaced by the hideous odour that wafted through the living room. It was a smell of rotting meat so powerful that I wondered why it didn’t seem to bother him.

Perhaps he was used to it. Perhaps it merely signified something different to each of us, for certainly I was still afraid where he was bravely resigned. My second fear, therefore, was redundant– the person I feared for, whoever he was, was well beyond my help, or even God’s. I told the police I didn’t see the body, but I always suspected, I knew in my sinking heart he must have done it.

‘Oh, Max,’ I whispered. It was the first time I had been in the house with one of the dead men, as far as I knew then. Strangely, I thought of it as just that– a first, rather than a never-should-have-been.

My third fear, like my first, was for my friend. I couldn’t deny the evil thing he had done. I didn’t when they charged him with all those crimes, and I never will. It was and still is a terrible thing, yet, my mind flew to the police. What if they found him? They wouldn’t understand. Nobody would. I was convinced that I was the only person capable of sympathy, let alone a sliver of empathy, in that situation.

Worst of all, if police psychologists discovered my friend, they would surely take him to that other place… the place I feared more than any other, which nobody else seemed to find a repulsive solution for cases like Maxwell’s. I alone, perceiving this, could see the full horror of the scene.

I would later tell police investigators that Maxwell lunged at me, and that I was too scared to come forward about it. Both statements are true. My fears were not for myself, but they were legitimate nonetheless. There was no point in feeling guilt or shame merely because they were inexplicable to simple men in blue uniforms who did not realise that they walked amongst giants.

Max did lunge at me, the way I must now appear lunge to gag you, poor, muttering young man, barely more than a boy and already half-delirious.

The one branded even then as a killer, who still had a gun, stood up uneasily. The one remaining beer in his hand rocked and splashed. It was the last scrap of dousing alcohol in the house. I knew what that meant.

The effects of the stupor, which he used to suppress his urges to the extent that he could be satisfied with me as a pretend corpse, was about to wear off. He was like a werewolf pending full moon. The deep craters in his face warned me to get out.

Hound like, he sniffed the air. ‘They’ll get on with it,’ he said, meaning the families of his victims. ‘They will grieve, but they can never be as torn up as I am every time I succumb. They’ll keep on going. Of course they will. They’re perfectly normal.’

Vehemently, he spat into the matted carpet.

‘They’ll catch me, too,’ he said. ‘Not now, but one day. I can’t stay clever forever.’ Raising the can, he slung it into the air, flinging it from his long arm like a catapult. It slammed into the television and ricocheted onto the floor, where it lay bleeding pungently. Its hurler swayed on his feet. He didn’t need to say anything else. I knew what he wanted me to do– what I must do.

I ran outside, taking refuge in the sprawling acres of redwood trees. I ran until I fell, collapsing in a heap of needles. Those wooden giants, with their ladder-like trunks and lofty crowns, spun around me. There, I lay and hugged myself. It had been a close call, but it still wasn’t for my own sake that I was afraid.

I felt lonely, curled up there, like one half of something broken that couldn’t be mended.

It was a close call, for him as well as for me. I didn’t go near the house for two weeks. When I eventually wandered back up there, I found it empty. The windows were blocked up with cardboard, and the driveway was empty. The letterbox, a hike for any postman as it was, was crammed with junk mail.

When nobody answered my knocking, I let myself into the backyard, the garden gate groaning protest at my entry. Even the shed was gone, purged of all specimens, although some puddles near a neglected hedge hinted at what might have become of them.

I found out later that Max had relocated here, to Boston. He had gone to college, after all, and had acquired large quantities of chemicals there, in addition to a slightly enhanced understanding of how to use them. I moved, too, and so I never heard from him again, until fifteen years later when he was arrested.

My family received odd letters addressed to me, but my mother confessed upon Max’s arrest that she always burned them. She had never liked that Maxwell Silverstein character.

On the day the news broke, however, she couldn’t bear to destroy evidence. This fragment arrived, and was finally handed over to me when the detectives had finished with it. It’s very old, but I’ve brought it as proof that all I say isn’t lies.

Here, read–

Mr and Mrs Edison,

I know what they say I am, but you must know this. I never meant any harm to your child. I want children to understand, as I never had a brother and nor will I ever have a child of my own. I enjoy teaching responsive minds. It is easier to connect with a child than a hardened adult. They must understand that there is more to life than the recorded facts.

-Maxwell

Another letter finally found me, in my residential college, as a young professor of anthropological theory. You will recall the scholarly world was revolutionised by my theses criticising clinical psychology and criminology for their biased pathologisation of violent acts.

At any rate, I was surprised to hear from my former friend, and would have kept the letters secret, had my parents not already come forward to aid the ‘case’. Predictably, my correspondence was demanded, too.

All but this page has been retained for police files. Mind the fold at the edge. It’s very fragile, and your hands are shaking. If you don’t mind, I’ll just hold it here and read it aloud for you.

‘I’m not a monster, James, but history will make me one.’

There is a little more to the message around that fold, but come, Eliot, you look faint. I don’t want to overburden you. Please lie down properly, and we’ll see what you have in your coat and bag… What’s this? Today’s newspaper? I thought I told you not to go into the office! How did you get this?

Ah, well, I guess it’s too late. I see the headline– Maxwell Silverstein, Convicted Murderer of Thirteen, Escaped from Prison.

In the end, now that it is the end, what harm can it do? I suppose you may know, in this final moment, why I moved to this specific city as a postgraduate, so far away from my family. Naturally, I came here in pursuit of the only person who had ever sympathised with me, and thus, in a twisted way, to some, the only man who ever inspired my loyalty.

I kept his secret for many years, and he kept my correspondence through imprisonment in a code we shared by our love of ancient linguistics. He had some theories of his own, to bounce off mine when I told him about my doctoral thesis.

Maxwell thinks it is not death, but peace, that should be pathologised. Where there is restlessness, violence may actually be the cure. I am partial to this theory, although I’ve always been one for experiment. I like to see anything tested before I believe it. Though I haven’t the heart to put you to rest in entropy, he thinks it will desensitise me to dehumanisation, to see it actually done.

I hate to do this to you, to whom I’ve grown attached against my will, but I need my humanity back. I need my sanity, and to be free of demons that have plagued me longer than you’ve been alive. I hope you understand.

At last, now that the poison has made a blithering idiot of you, I guess it won’t hurt to show you what is on the other side of this final piece of letter paper.

Here, read for yourself, if you still can–

I’m not a monster, James, but history will make me one. I’m fine with that.

I never lied to the police, Eliot. I told them I was scared, and I was. I still am. Even seeing the froth at your mouth, and the way you lie limply, scares me. I know you can’t go anywhere anymore, but your mistake was that you were too trusting, and you must pay for that. You underestimated the importance of being able to run.

It isn’t fair. Nothing is. We are but mortal men, and the world is a cruel, incalculable place, measured by those who are greater legends than we will ever be. We truly walk amongst giants. We live in their very era.

Now, if you will excuse me, I hope you care to meet a celebrity. I think I hear a knock at the door.