Aphrodite

18

Gordon Touay liked killing things.
There were other things he enjoyed; he did not consider himself one-dimensional in any way. He got great pleasure, for instance, out of looking in the full-length mirror that hung in the hallway. He had to concede he never really tired of that. Especially when he was wearing nothing but his beige bikini underwear, the one with the little blue stripes on the front, which was what he was wearing now. He loved looking at his washboard stomach, at the ripples, the flatness. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on his sides, either. At thirty-one years old, there wasn’t even the slightest hint of love handles. And his chest was perfectly formed. Not like a bodybuilder’s, more like a swimmer’s. Thin and tight and hard. Like Charles Bronson’s used to be in those early Westerns. Gordon liked to turn sideways and flex his arms, too; liked the way the muscles on his back and shoulders and even his neck bunched up and bulged and made him look so powerful. He particularly admired his hair, so very blond and straight, cut short on the sides, medium on top, a tiny lock tilting forward over his forehead. He often thought he was as handsome as Brad Pitt or DiCaprio or any of those guys. He’d practice smiling into the mirror, looking cocky, and he’d think: I should have been a movie star. I’ve got what it takes. I would look magnificent up there on a giant screen, looking down on an adoring audience.
Then he’d think: We both would.
Wendell, his younger brother, was just as handsome. Gordon liked looking at his brother’s body, too. The same hard stomach, the perfect buttocks and powerful back. Long legs, but not too long. The short blond hair. In the eyes of the world, they were identical. No one could tell the difference between them. But Gordon could, of course. He knew the small mole on Wendell’s shoulder. Could see that Wendell used just a touch more mousse in his hair, that the forehead lock was slightly stiffer and shinier. Gordon was seven minutes older than his twin, and he was convinced that Wendell looked younger, that the skin under his eyes was smoother, that his forehead had one less crease. He wasn’t jealous. It was fine with him. He loved his brother. There was no one on earth he loved more. And he was happy to be the elder. The mentor. The decision maker.
Staring at himself in the mirror, Gordon smiled. He loved his smile. He thought it made him look elegant and mysterious. Relaxed but deep. He decided he should show it more often. Then he went back to thinking about all the things that could keep the smile on his face.
That show on Fox about animals that turned violent and attacked their owners. He liked that a lot. War movies. He loved war movies. Black Hawk Down was a great one. Very gory. Private Ryan was good. At least the first part, the battle. After that it was pretty sappy. Of the old ones, he liked The Dirty Dozen, particularly the part where the Spanish guy parachutes out of the plane and breaks his neck, and Paths of Glory, where everybody gets marched off to the slaughter. He had a collection of filmed disasters that he watched over and over again. The Challenger exploding, he never got tired of that. The Hindenburg going down. Various assassinations. He had that L.A. robbery, where the guys in masks kept firing their automatic weapons on the street and finally got cut down by the cops. He paid a lot of money over the Internet for several home movies of fiery plane crashes. And he owned several bona fide porno snuff films, which cost him a fortune. All those things were satisfying diversions. But nothing was as good as actually killing something.
Although he couldn’t really take credit for it, he liked to think that his first victim was his mother. She died in childbirth, right after he and Wendell came out of her womb. Gordon never forgave her for leaving them so unexpectedly because when their father remarried it was to a woman who wanted her own children, who resented the two boys as unpleasant reminders of a past that had nothing to do with her. She didn’t bother to hide her distaste for the twins; in fact, she reveled in it. And that distaste was soon championed by her husband, their own father. He saw his sons as two beings who had destroyed his first marriage and whose sole reason for existence was to interfere with his new one. The first time Gordon remembered their father beating them was when they were five years old. It was with a ruler he’d picked up off the desk. He made both boys lie down on the floor while he struck the backs of their legs over and over again. After that the beatings never stopped. Sometimes he used the ruler, sometimes his fists, occasionally a belt. Once he used a broomstick. But he gave Wendell a concussion and social service workers got suspicious when the boy was rushed to the hospital, so good old Dad went back to less obvious tools and body parts.
Gordon was seven years old when he killed his first animal. It was a squirrel. In their backyard in the small house in New Jersey. He watched it scamper down the trunk of a tree, perch on a patch of grass, and nibble on something, a nut maybe. The squirrel’s head was cocked as he ate, and the boy thought it looked cute. While he was watching, Gordon saw a rake propped up against the back of the house, had an image in his mind of the handle cracking against his brother’s skull, and the next thing he knew, the squirrel was on its back, its head smashed in, its eyes still and lifeless. Gordon was surprised how good it made him feel.
Three weeks later he killed another squirrel. A month after that he killed a cat, a stray that was always coming into their yard looking for scraps of food. He fed it for several weeks, won its trust, then strangled it. After that, he killed on a regular basis, at least every two weeks or so. More squirrels, cats, dogs, birds. He preferred strangling, although poison was also acceptable. Stabbing was fine, too, as was fire. Methodology and type of victim didn’t much matter to him. He just liked the moment when he could actually see life disappear, when movement stopped and something warm turned cold and colorless.
When the twins turned eight, Gordon told Wendell about the animals. Wendell’s eyes lit up and he smiled. He said he wanted to try it too.
A few days later, their father took them into town to go shopping. They asked if they could go into the diner and have a soda. He agreed, told them to wait there for him until he came to pick them up. The boys sipped their Cokes at the counter until Gordon looked at Wendell and nodded. In the corner of the diner, by the cashier, there was a myna bird. A big black one that talked all the time. His name was Randy and he was always saying, “Randy wants a coffee and a Danish,” which everyone thought was hilarious. The diner was pretty empty and no one was minding the cash register, so when Gordon gave the signal, Wendell walked by the myna’s cage, quickly stuck his hand in, and broke the bird’s neck. Then he continued on his way to the bathroom. When he returned, the cashier and the waitress were standing by the cage, distraught. Wendell walked up to them, asked what had happened. They told him it was something terrible, that their bird had died. They told him not to look, that he was too young to see a dead thing. Wendell nodded, said he was sorry about Randy, he seemed like a nice bird, then went back to sit beside his brother and order another Coke.
Their stepmother had a baby girl soon after the twins’ ninth birthday. When the baby was three weeks old, she died in the middle of the night. Just stopped breathing. The doctor said it was a case of sudden infant death syndrome, a tragedy to be sure but surprisingly common. He said that the parents should go out and have another baby as soon as possible to help deal with their sadness.
They didn’t. They both suspected that Wendell and Gordon had murdered their child, but they never had any proof. Their father beat them more regularly and more fiercely than ever. But he never asked about the baby. And he and his wife never tried to have another. They knew that it wasn’t a smart thing to do to bring another child into their household.
They were right. Dogs and rodents had become mundane victims. So in the middle of the night, the boys had gone into their stepsister’s room. Wendell held the baby down while Gordon smothered her with a pillow. They watched the baby thrash around and listened as she tried to cry. When the girl stopped moving, they put the pillow back under her head, went into the room they shared, read comic books for half an hour or so, then went back to a calm and dreamless sleep.
Over the next several years, they killed two more children. One boy they didn’t know. They saw him on a street corner, lured him to an empty lot, and smashed his head in with a brick. Their second victim was a girl who had made fun of Wendell’s handwriting in school. They waited for three whole months, until the dead of winter. Then they went ice-skating with her. Gordon found the patch of thin ice, Wendell dragged her there and pushed her through. They both watched her drown, went back home, and had dinner.
When they were in high school, Gordon asked a girl to their junior prom. She turned him down. It was quite a nice rejection; she said she already had a date but perhaps they could go to the movies or something. Gordon nodded, met up with Wendell, and told him what had happened. The next day, Wendell walked the girl home from school. He let her think that he was Gordon, the first time he’d ever pulled that trick on his own. They walked past a barn and he asked if she wanted to see the horse he kept inside. She did. When they got in, he waited until she realized that there was no horse, then he stabbed her to death with a knife he’d stolen from the school cafeteria.
The police interviewed both twins. They were suspicious by this time, as was everyone else who knew them. But once again there was no proof. No arrest was made in the girl’s murder. For several months afterward, one cop, Sergeant Joe Dankowski, followed them, hounded them, convinced he could make them crack and confess. He couldn’t. Eventually his superiors ordered him to leave the boys alone. He did, but not before he promised them both that he would, at some point, put them where they belonged. “Where do we belong?” Wendell had asked in all seriousness. Sergeant Dankowski had answered, “In prison. And then in hell.”
Gordon and Wendell joined the army soon after they graduated from high school. They liked the physicality of the training process. They were tireless and responded well to the army’s discipline. They both went off to serve in the Gulf War, and they liked that a lot. The fighting didn’t frighten either of them; in fact, they found it energizing. But there was a surprising amount of downtime. Bored when they weren’t fighting, they discovered that movie studios sent VCRs and cassettes to the men in uniform overseas. Gordon and Wendell began watching any movie they could. It kept them entertained. They found their entire war experience so entertaining that they barely felt the need to kill anyone just for fun. Their only extracurricular activity in Iraq was when, during a brief skirmish in the desert, they decided to get rid of a Hispanic private who played his salsa music too loud and too late at night. The brothers waited until the Hispanic charged ahead of them; then they both aimed their rifles and shot him in the back. He was later extolled as a hero and a tragic victim of friendly fire.
When they got out of the army, they returned to their hometown. But it was a brief stopover. One day only. During that twenty-four-hour period, they robbed a 7-Eleven, getting away with $364.27 and a case of beef jerky, and they murdered Sergeant Joe Dankowski. They followed him home, forced him into his own house, and carved him up the way an experienced hunter would skin a deer. It took the sergeant several hours to die, and the twins agreed that those were some of the best hours of their entire lives.
The next day, they went to Los Angeles. Their love of movies motivated them to try to become actors. They had the looks for it, they decided. And how hard could it be? Six months later, they had learned that it was a lot harder than they’d thought. They had landed several jobs as extras on feature films and one other job, with no lines, on the TV show Friends. Jennifer Aniston was going on a date with a doltish guy and before she left she spotted the two handsome twins sitting at a table in the coffee shop. All she had to do was raise an eyebrow to show she was considering the possibilities. It got a laugh, but it didn’t get any more jobs for either Wendell or Gordon. What they did get was hired by a producer to scare the shit out of a bookie to whom he owed $260,000. During the moment of the big scare they went a little too far and the bookie died. Wendell and Gordon decided to take advantage of the situation so they moved into the dead man’s apartment, found his records, and began to book bets. This arrangement lasted for several months before they got bored. They didn’t really care about bookmaking. They didn’t care about money. They cared about fun. And what was fun for them—they knew this now; it was inescapable—was killing people.
They’d been in Los Angeles nearly two years when they got the phone call that changed their lives. It was from a man named Newberg. He had talked to people in the army, he said. And to the producer who’d hired them to take care of the bookie. He’d even talked to people in their hometown. He said he would be in L.A. in a couple of days and he’d like to get together with them. Two days later they met in Newberg’s suite at the Four Seasons Hotel. He asked them very specific questions for almost two hours; the session was very similar to a psychological test his company gave every potential employee. At the end of the test, he told them he wanted to review their answers and that he’d call them by the end of the week. He did. And when he called, he offered them permanent employment. Good money. A substantial relocation fee back East. And lots and lots of fun.
As Gordon Touay stood in front of the mirror now, flexing his arms, admiring his body, he saw his brother walk into the room. Wendell was wearing jeans but no shirt or shoes. The two of them stood in front of the mirror, posing, a joyous Kodak family moment. When the phone rang, Gordon answered it. He listened to Newberg explain what they were supposed to do next. When Gordon hung up the phone, he went back to the mirror and stood next to his twin brother.
“Good news?” Wendell asked, twisting his left arm a bit to the side so the muscles in his triceps would pop even more.
Gordon nodded. “We get to finish the job.”
“The girl and the kid too?” the younger twin said.
The older brother nodded again. They both flexed one last time, lingered in front of the glass, admiring their reflections, then went off to get dressed and pack an overnight bag. On their drive to the airport, to catch a flight to Albany, the city nearest to the Leger Retirement Home, they decided exactly how best to kill three people, satisfy their employer, and get the greatest amount of joy out of their work.