The postcard lay in the exact center of my desk, wrapped in plastic. The plastic was clear except for a wide red stripe that obscured the artwork on the card. Yellow letters across the stripe read: DANGER. It was a well-heeded warning. The card had already killed three people that day.
The small metal box on the corner of my desk squawked. "Single mother, two children," said Turner through the tiny wire grille. "She put dry-cleaning bags over their heads while they slept. Then she slit her wrists. No prior history, of course, but the psyche team put together as much of a profile as they could. It's all in the folder."
I nodded, knowing that the cameras would pick it up even if the intercom would not. The folder lay next to — but not too close to — the postcard, opposite the intercom. It was thick, but I knew it would not be thick enough even before I opened it. I paged through testimonials from friends and family, old medical reports, employment records, dietary habits, the contents of her medicine cabinet. I scribbled notes for the psyche team to follow up on where I saw holes in the anamnesis. We would not be able to determine why she had gone insane, because she had not gone insane. But with enough information we could perhaps locate a few of the seams in her inner world, and see how the postcard had wriggled in to do its work.
I had put it off, I supposed, for as long as was feasible. I slit the seal with my thumbnail and slipped the card out of its plastic, careful to keep it flat and inside the taped rectangle in the middle of the desk, where it would not accidentally enter the frame of any of the cameras placed around the room. This always made me nervous. The postcard was in every practical respect an infectious agent. By looking at it, I was exposing myself to the same pathogen that had killed the woman in the folder — and her two daughters.
Would this be the one? Would this one be aimed at me? I wondered what it would make me do. I wondered if some part of my mind would continue to struggle, or would it seem the most natural thing in the world as I went for my own throat?
I took a deep breath, and opened my eyes.
The traffic suicides came first. Everyone heard of them eventually. For weeks there were only the news reports. Then came the editorials, the just-what-is-our-world-coming-to questions, so earnestly asked. Much was made of the city's terrible traffic conditions; the crushing bureaucracy of urban life; the crushing banality of suburban life; the disconnectedness of modern society; the essential absurdity of man's existence. After a while the outcry dwindled. People swapped driving safety tips over e-mail and pulled their seatbelts a bit tighter before leaving the driveway, and little else was said about it. What can you continue to say, after all, about the latest commuter who takes his hands off the wheel in the midst of a fast-moving interchange, covers his eyes, and puts his foot down on the gas? What can you say after the third, fourth, fifth, or fiftieth time it happens? You shake your head, perhaps, and you say, "How terrible. How absurd. What a terrible, terrible accident."
What you don't do is start looking for a human agency behind it all. You don't start calling it murder.
Even after they brought me up to speed, I've never been clear on how the police managed to figure it out. How did they finally make the connection?
I like to imagine some low-ranking beat cop, perhaps assigned to cleanup duty at the scene of the latest accident. He is tired, baffled, and jaded. And for no particular reason at all, he looks up. He sees the strange, painted billboard standing over the scene, the wreckage practically at its feet. Its disjointed, surrealistic images are somehow unsettling. He realizes, suddenly, that he has seen many of these billboards around town in the past few months — each one unique, but each one unmistakably painted by the same hand.
How it must have nagged at him. I wonder how long before he thought to check the locations of the other billboards against the locations of the previous suicides. I wonder how long before he managed to convince his superiors that his theory was more than raving paranoia.
You can hardly fault the police for taking so long to act. I understand how hard it must have been to accept the idea. I understand this because I know something about this killer, and I understand something of his art, and I understand the truth.
The truth is, we are never going to catch him.
"This is what we would consider 'normal,'" said the analyst. She pointed to a bold line, tracing a complex curve across the graph paper. "Baseline for your Bernstein-Hake behavioral profile, as we measured it when you first started working for us."
I nodded. I knew all this, but the explanation was more for Turner's benefit than for mine.
"And this," she went on, moving her finger to indicate a thinner line just above and nearly parallel to the first, "is where you are now."
"It's getting stronger," I said.
Turner, leaning against the wall on the other side of the room, snapped, "What's getting stronger?"
"An implanted suggestion," said the analyst. "To do what, exactly, and when, we can't be sure."
"Shit, dammit. How long has this been going on?"
I turned to him and said, "Since the very first piece of evidence I handled, sir. And every new piece I look at just reinforces it."
"Shit, dammit."
Turner chewed on his lip.
"So when can he get back to work?"
The postcards came shortly after the police became aware of the nature of the problem. The killer sent them to families though the mail. There was no way to track them. There was no way to know who had received one until it was too late. No one ever just threw them away. Everyone always died.
It seems inevitable, in retrospect, that the images would start affecting not only the victims for whom they were intended, but also the police who investigated the deaths afterward. When it became clear that the psychosis could potentially spread to anyone who got a good look at the evidence, the nature of the investigation changed drastically. Crime scenes became quarantine zones. Forensic teams fumbled around like blind men, afraid to look at anything. Not only postcards, but pamphlets, coupons, catalogs, magazines, brochures, takeout menus — virtually anything that came through the mail and had a picture on it — were stuffed in opaque plastic bags and sealed away under the tightest security.
Word began to leak out. Paranoia spread.
When the detective in charge of the investigation — a Sergeant Lambert — killed himself, Turner stepped in. He formed a special task force. He held regular meetings with the press ("weekly reassurances," he called them) to allay the fears of the public. And he hired me.
Only I am allowed to look at the artist's work. Only I voluntarily expose myself to the contagion. It is my job to create a profile of the killer, to determine who he is by studying what he creates. And if I go mad or die trying . . . that's a risk Turner is willing to take. We have to catch him. It is Turner's constant refrain. We have to catch him.
Sergeant Lambert was discovered on the floor of the precinct's evidence locker with his own service revolver jammed into his mouth. In his left hand was a postcard. On the postcard was a picture of orange blossoms.
I think Lambert must have understood.
We are never going to catch him.
I averted my eyes while stepping around a lake of blood in the front hallway. I don't like being at the crime scene. The gore makes me queasy.
Turner stood in what remained of the living room, staring off into the middle distance. He barely acknowledged me as I entered. "The driver wouldn't tell me anything on the way over," I said. "What's going on, sir?"
"Wanted you to see this for yourself."
A stretcher went by the doorway. The body on it made me want to shut my eyes again. "Frankly, sir, I don't want to be here. I don't understand, if this is our guy, what you want me to see that couldn't as easily be bagged and sent down to —" I realized suddenly that Turner wasn't staring over my shoulder just to annoy me; he was looking at something. I turned.
And blinked.
"It's him, all right," I heard him say. "He didn't send a postcard this time, though."
No, he damned well didn't, I thought. He just came in and painted the whole fucking wall, instead.
"He used ordinary house paint from the garage," Turner continued, as I went to get a closer look. "Near as we can tell, he did it yesterday afternoon while the kids were at school and the parents at work. Husband got home and took one look at it, and pow. Only thing we're still trying to ascertain is the killer's mode of entry."
I brushed my fingers across it, feeling the minute texture of the brush strokes. "You shouldn't be looking at this," I whispered. "You're putting yourself in danger."
"I'll be debriefed. Shit, do you realize what a break this is? This is the first time he's ever been at the scene. Not twelve hours ago, the son of a bitch was right here. I've got a forensics team turning over every last goddam molecule of this place, and they won't stop until they find something. They have to find something. We have to catch him." He turned to go. "You take as long as you need here. When you're done the photographers will —"
"It wasn't him."
Ten full seconds passed before Turner responded. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"He didn't paint this."
"The fuck you say."
I touched the wall again. "It's not his technique. The strokes are all . . . wrong. It's not his, uh, 'handwriting,' if that makes any sense, sir."
"Shit, dammit. Well, if he didn't paint this, then who the hell did?"
A thought occurred to me, and the thought turned my stomach. But my voice barely shook as I said, "Let me see the bodies."
There had been paint under the woman's nails. Underneath all the blood, there had been paint.
After a renewed search, we found fourteen plain envelopes, addressed to the woman and postmarked at intervals over the last three months. The envelopes were clean, but the stamps on them were hand painted. She had collected them all, each fascinating miniature carrying a single piece of the message, until it was finally assembled and the message took over. But this message didn't instruct her to kill anyone. This message instructed her to create a new message, one of more conventional wording . . . and directed at her husband.
I couldn't make sense of it. The madness was spreading farther afield. What is the statute of limitations, I wondered, on degrees of separation from the actual crime?
Hell, we were still trying to figure out how he'd managed to mail a letter with hand-painted stamps.
I switched on the television. Turner's weekly reassurance was coming up. I felt like I needed it.
"I would like to address the rumors that have been circulating among the press recently about the so-called 'insanity virus.' These rumors are unfounded and irresponsible, and they grossly misrepresent the true nature of these crimes. Let me repeat that last bit: these are indeed crimes. These tragic deaths are not natural events, striking at random. They are deliberate acts, performed with criminal intent. There is a person committing them. He is a criminal. There is a purpose to what he does. He chooses his victims, and he is responsible for what happens to them."
I felt like I was missing something. If the implications of this last case were true, then there could be no conceivable end to it. A picture could compel the viewer to create a picture to compel its viewer to create a picture, which would compel the next viewer to create a picture, and so on down the line.
"Of course citizens are urged to be cautious. But there are no 'madness germs' just floating around in the air, waiting to be picked up." continued Turner, gesturing. "These are highly specific attacks. They have a highly specific vector. The postcards arrive through the mail. They have a very distinctive style, which can often be recognized at a distance, at a glance, without the need to look closely enough to be affected. And that is the only way you can be affected — by looking closely at the picture on the postcard."
Even more baffling was the awful unpredictability of it. There was, apparently, no limit to the depth or specificity of the instructions.
"You cannot — and I want the public to know, I really want to stress this — you cannot be affected by any other means."
There seemed to be no pattern to the form those instructions took. Billboards, postcards, postage stamps, a few random swipes of paint on the living room wall.
"You cannot 'contract' madness from another person, or by touching one of the postcards, or by hearing a verbal description of a postcard." Turner gestured again, dismissively. "Let me say this again . . . "
It was as though the message could be embedded anywhere . . .
" . . . the only way to be exposed . . . "
. . . in any medium . . .
" . . . is through these pictures."
My chair hit the floor before I knew I'd stood up.
He made the gesture again.
And again.
In five minutes I was trying to jam a tape into the VCR and scream into the telephone at the same time.
Turner's not been seen for days. When the analysts finally made him understand what had been happening, he simply gave up. He might even be dead. The machinery of the investigation lurches on without his guidance, but no one's heart is in it anymore. We don't bother with the plastic bags. We don't bother not to look.
We had been blind from the start. The obsession with pictures was a red herring. It is not the vessel that matters. Only the Message is important, and the Message may be anywhere — in a peculiar arrangement of furniture, in a sound, in a page of text, in a casual gesture. The Message came to me through the killer's postcards. The Message came to Turner through the wording of the reports that I wrote and sent to him. And Turner had been broadcasting the Message back to the world since the very first day, through the gestures and inflections in his televised weekly reassurances.
In every case, the Message was the same:
Make more Message.
There is no way to determine where and when the spiral began, or if there even is any beginning. Perhaps the loop has always existed, and our killer has always been compelled to paint his pictures by the weekly broadcasts made necessary by the pictures he paints.
It makes no sense. It does not need to make sense. We are never going to catch him. I believe this because he does not exist. No one painted the pictures. They precipitated spontaneously from an existence already noisome and overcrowded with message, millions of viral messages combining and propagating, an endless pattern of ripples and intersecting wave fronts. It is folly to believe that one person, however genius, could cause this. It is madness to assume a human agency behind it all. Everywhere I look, I see orange blossoms. There is nothing my eyes can fall on that has not been prearranged by art or by circumstance. My thoughts are not my own. Everything I do is dictated by what I see. Perhaps, in this very testimony, I am passing along more instructions — to kill, to die, to spread it further and further.
I am very afraid that I might soon commit suicide. I may not be the only one.
What will you say, the third, fourth, fifth, or fiftieth time it happens?
What can you say?
"How terrible. How absurd. What a terrible, terrible accident."
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