Mr. X Read Online Free PDF Page B

His teeth glint. “Baby Lisa doesn’t like bears,” he says. “Does she, Lisa?”
    Baby Lisa shakes her head.
    “Do anything you like to me,” the woman says. “Just don’t hurt my baby. No matter who you are, she doesn’t have anything to do with why you’re here. Please.”
    “Oh,” he says with what sounds like real curiosity, “why am I here?”
    She leaps toward him, and he whirls out of her path and knocks her to the floor. He bends down, grabs her hair, haulsher to her feet, and throws her back against the wall. “Was there an answer to that question?” he asks.
    Then the terrible thing happens again. A giant hand seizes me and rips me from my body. I am nothing but a shadow-space that looks out through his eyes. In panic and terror I fight to escape but cannot. This always happened. The clamps knew me, they held me in a knowing accommodation. Through his eyes I see more than I can through my own—it’s true, she is almost as pretty as a movie star, but her face, chipped by too much experience, would look bitter on the screen. An unhappy knowledge moves into her eyes.
    She says, “So I guess this is what happened to the Bookers.”
    I gather and flex myself, and the restraints drop away. With no transition, I am back in my body, looking across the bed where the baby named Lisa kneels on the covers.
    “Should I know that name?” asks Mr. X. “By the way, isn’t there a little boy in the Anscombe family?”
    “He’s gone,” she says.
    He says nothing.
    “I don’t know where,” she says. “You don’t have to hurt my baby.”
    “I wouldn’t hurt an innocent child.” He summons the girl. She creeps across the blanket, and he scoops her up. “But I often wonder why the very people who should know better think that this is a benign universe.” He anchors the child in the crook of his elbow, grips the top of her head, and twists. There is an audible snap, and the child sags.
    I don’t want to go on, it’s all wrong anyhow, I kept mixing up the details because the actual memory was too painful. That time, the name wasn’t Anscombe. Anscombe came in later.
8Mr.X
    It took me an absurdly long time to understand who and what I was. You, my Masters, had it easy by comparison, and I beg You to understand the nature of my struggle.
    Until I reached that cataclysm known as adolescence, my impersonation of an ordinary child met with passable success. That in the course of a schoolyard brawl I was sufficiently provoked by a fellow second-grader named Lenny Beech as to batter his blond head against the cement was put down to his remark that I was a piece of dog poo-poo. That I was obliged to repeat the third grade was explained by what the administration described as my “daydreaming,” my “inability to pay attention during class,” and the like, a reference to my habit of completing assignments any old way I felt like, so that when asked to write about My Favorite Christmas I might hand in a page filled with question marks, or in answer to a sheet of subtraction problems, submit a drawing of a monster eating a dog. The word
creative
came in handy, although it failed to appease the parents of Maureen Orth, a scrawny nonentity with overlapping front teeth whom I talked into letting me strip naked and tie to a birch tree in Johnson’s Woods when we were in the eighth grade. Maureen had been grateful for my attentions until I reminded her that wild Indians, one of which I was pretending to be, customarily tortured their captives, one of which she was pretending to be. The pathetic screams induced by the sight of my penknife led me to untie her, and she would not listen to my avowals that I never intended to cause her any actual harm.
    In the end, my father wrote Mr. Orth a check for a thousand dollars, and that was that, apart from the grumbling.
    My father cut my allowance in half, “for,” as he put it, “encouraging that creature’s attentions,” and my mother wiped her eyes and forbade me