The Best American Noir of the Century

“Yes, Rudy, I’m what you knew probably existed somewhere. Another one. A shrike.” He paused. “I see you call it ‘jaunting in the landscape.’ I just called myself a shrike. A butcherbird. One name’s as good as another. Strange, isn’t it; all these years; and we never met anyone else? There must be others, but I think—now I can’t prove this, I have no real data, it’s just a wild idea I’ve had for years and years—I think they don’t know they can do it.”

He stared at me across the landscape, those wonderful blue eyes of his, the ones Ally had fallen in love with, hardly blinking.

“Why didn’t you let me know before this?”

He smiled sadly. “Ah, Rudy. Rudy, Rudy, Rudy; you poor benighted pickaninny.

“Because I needed to suck you in, kid. I needed to put out a bear trap, and let it snap closed on your scrawny leg, and send you over. Here, let me clear the atmosphere in here…” And he wiped away all the manipulation he had worked on me, way back a year ago, when he had so easily covered his own true thoughts, his past, his life, the real panorama of what went on inside his landscape—like bypassing a surveillance camera with a continuous-loop tape that continues to show a placid scene while the joint is being actively burgled—and when he convinced me not only that he was innocent, but that the real killer was someone who had blocked the hideous slaughters from his conscious mind and had lived an otherwise exemplary life. He wandered around my landscape—and all of this in a second or two, because time has no duration in the landscape, like the hours you can spend in a dream that are just thirty seconds long in the real world, just before you wake up—and he swept away all the false memories and suggestions, the logical structure of sequential events that he had planted that would dovetail with my actual existence, my true memories, altered and warped and rearranged so I would believe that I had done all seventy of those ghastly murders…so that I’d believe, in a moment of horrible realization, that I was the demented psychopath who had ranged state to state to state, leaving piles of ripped flesh at every stop. Blocked it all, submerged it all, sublimated it all, me. Good old Rudy Pairis, who never killed anybody. I’d been the patsy he was waiting for.

“There, now, kiddo. See what it’s really like?

“You didn’t do a thing.

“Pure as the driven snow, nigger. That’s the truth. And what a find you were. Never even suspected there was another like me, till Ally came to interview me after Decatur. But there you were, big and black as a Great White Hope, right there in her mind. Isn’t she fine, Pairis? Isn’t she something to take a knife to? Something to split open like a nice piece of fruit warmed in a summer sunshine field, let all the steam rise off her…maybe have a picnic…”

He stopped.

“I wanted her right from the first moment I saw her.

“Now, you know, I could’ve done it sloppy, just been a shrike to Ally that first time she came to the holding cell to interview me; just jump into her, that was my plan. But what a noise that Spanning in the cell would’ve made, yelling it wasn’t a man, it was a woman, not Spanning, but Deputy D.A. Allison Roche…too much noise, too many complications. But I could have done it, jumped into her. Or a guard, and then slice her at my leisure, stalk her, find her, let her steam…

“You look distressed, Mr. Rudy Pairis. Why’s that? Because you’re going to die in my place? Because I could have taken you over at any time, and didn’t? Because after all this time of your miserable, wasted, lousy life you finally find someone like you, and we don’t even have the convenience of a chat? Well, that’s sad, that’s really sad, kiddo. But you didn’t have a chance.”

“You’re stronger than me, you kept me out,” I said.

He chuckled.

“Stronger? Is that all you think it is? Stronger? You still don’t get it, do you?” His face, then, grew terrible. “You don’t even understand now, right now that I’ve cleaned it all away and you can see what I did to you, do you?

“Do you think I stayed in a jail cell, and went through that trial, all of that, because I couldn’t do anything about it? You poor jig slob. I could have jumped like a shrike any time I wanted to. But the first time I met your Ally I saw you.”

I cringed. “And you waited…? For me, you spent all that time in prison, just to get to me…?”

“At the moment when you couldn’t do anything about it, at the moment you couldn’t shout ‘I’ve been taken over by someone else, I’m Rudy Pairis here inside this Henry Lake Spanning body, help me, help me!’ Why stir up noise when all I had to do was bide my time, wait a bit, wait for Ally, and let Ally go for you.”

I felt like a drowning turkey, standing idiotically in the rain, head tilted up, mouth open, water pouring in. “You can…leave the mind…leave the body…go out…jaunt, jump permanently…”

Spanning sniggered like a schoolyard bully.

“You stayed in jail three years just to get me?”

He smirked. Smarter than thou.