A peaceful evening, alone in my home, sitting on my comfortable old sofa under a warm throw. I unfolded a single sheet of paper, read the short note written in a cramped script and I remembered something.
About three decades before, in the summer of 1990, when I was working in Child Protective Services, the agency mandated my participation in the S.C.A.R.symposium in Eugene, Oregon. I drove there south on 101, to 26 and onto I-5. At dusk on the longest hill along 26 there was a man wearing all white standing in the middle of the highway waving, summoning someone to stop. He didn’t look hurt. There were no cars stopped on the shoulder and he was far from any of the hamlets that frequently arose along the rural road. I didn’t stop. A woman alone can’t be too safe. Someone else will stop for him, maybe one of those pickup trucks guys with the gun rack in the back window of the cab.
I attended a seminar given by Kenneth Hanley PhD to increase my understanding of how aberrant adult behaviors develop. Dr. Hanley lectured about the predictable behaviors of adult criminals whose childhood development had been disrupted by trauma.
The “Incorporators” experienced trauma during the first three months of life. They become the Jeff Dahlmers, the cannibals. They are the Ed Geins who cloak themselves in the flayed flesh of females in order to feel engulfed in nurturance. Their infantile emotions persist into adult life. They desire to assimilate into themselves their victim’s entire being, not only their bodies, but their souls. They devour. It’s the most effective way to own another person. They “need” all because alone they are incomplete. They know who they are. Their acts are deliberate. Dr. Hanley offered insights from their own words:
For I am particles of possible
Selves or of whole men or giants
Or wide armed encompassing
Taker of her, and them, and it all.”
– Henry, age 66
“I climb up out of my slavery. I severed only the fat, waste and unessential organs – vanity, false humility, the love of a mother spider, the reflections of goodness in others’ eyes. I spat useless tendon and bone. I am nothing. I am all.”
– Harold, age 29
“She took one’s manhood to her breast. But like a delicate, angular lady mantis she dug the crush and snap, the intestinal knot as she expertly extracted my testicles.”
– Keith, age 26
“Hail mealy-mouthed phantoms, pulling your sleeve, then ducking behind a cathedral pillar, watch for Animals On Road, domestic, wild, fabulous, monstrous, your-self.”
– Dave, age 31
“He felt like a toddler away from his mother. Experiencing a moment of pure aloneness and didn’t like it. He hurried back to her and ate her heart.”
– John, age 34
Dr. Hanley said the victim’s gender is irrelevant. To them, all are females. “Mother” is the only object capable of fulfilling their specific needs.
The Incorporators never successfully transitioned from the completely sated fetus into the neonate who is shocked and enraged when he feels hunger for the first time. In their minds, their survival is totally dependent upon owning the lives of others. Unlike infants, though, they can act upon their anger and that is where their danger to innocents begins. They have learned unfettered rage used to immediately overpower and seize a victim makes them vulnerable to intervention by the law which would impede fulfillment.
They try another tack and present a silent, sweet affectation to attract the supply they crave. They are ambush predators lying in wait within limited, familiar boundaries that they find comforting because, in their infantile state, they hate change and the unfamiliar terrifies them. They love routine and familiar settings.
They often surround themselves with elaborate scenes and decorate themselves with shiny, alluring trinkets. They feign a passive persona, a harmless smile to lure and mesmerize. Every victim was the perfect one for whom they had been waiting all of their lives. Soon after a target shows interest, they throw impotent tantrums to increase attention and to disarm with confusion. They are getting ready to strike.
Sometimes they wait motionless. They blend in. They are strangely silent or they make small talk. Their minds are racing. When an opportunity ensures success, they pounce to overpower quickly. And then, As Dr. Hanley lectured, they “feed.”
And, on that evening, with a knowledge I did not truly want, I read the folded, hand-written note that I had recently found between the pages of an old psychology textbook stored in my basement for decades. The book belonged to my older brother. The note was written by my big brother’s best friend. Twenty-five years earlier my brother introduced me to his kind friend with a sweet smile.
“To ‘little girl’: dare to turn your back on me and dance your sweet ass against me with the hard Chicago blues beat and I want the front of you against me, too. Your soft sweet skin comes undone and folds around me like a dancing shroud and finally meets all my needs at once, once and for all, for me and my dreams and droopy, bug-eyed fantasies and I finally have had it all, all of you, all of y’all – the women of my life.”
I could not sleep that night. And then, I remembered the ludicrous story in the Daily A, when a woman called the cops after she saw a guy dressed in white on 26 waving for her to pull over. At night he summons. Sometimes he jumps into the back of a pick-up only to have vanished upon arriving at the destination, leaving behind the stench of rotting flesh. The police never find anyone matching his description. Everyone knows “Bandage Man,” the dead logger from 1898.
I blocked the door with a chair even though it was locked.
~ Martha Ellen Johnson