The Benevolence of Silence

The first thing you ought to know is that I did not choose you.

People find that difficult to believe. They want a reason. They want to hear that they cut me off in traffic, or laughed at my shoes, or looked like a woman who once broke my heart. They want to believe the world is a machine and every terrible thing that happens is the result of somebody putting a hand in the wrong place. I don't blame them. A reason would make this easier.

I was eating a peach when I saw you. That is how ordinary it was.

The peach came from a roadside stand outside a town whose name I have already forgotten. The woman selling them had a wedding ring and a little boy with a bandage on his knee. She told me the fruit was sweeter this year because of the heat. I thanked her and paid cash. We discussed the weather for perhaps three minutes. I could have killed her. I didn't.

Her little boy asked whether I had grandchildren. I told him I wasn't blessed that way, and his mother gave me the sympathetic smile people reserve for old men who have failed to reproduce. I waved goodbye.

An hour later I saw you at the fuel pumps. You were wiping something from your windshield with the sleeve of your shirt. Your car was blue, though I imagine you know that. I remember the little dent above the wheel and the cardboard coffee cup on your roof. You were alive in that uncomplicated way people are alive before they know anything about me.

I finished the peach and threw the pit into the trash. Then I got back into my car. You see? Nothing about the morning announced itself as important.

My name is Titus. That is the name I use now. Before Titus there was another name, and before that another. A man who intends to keep moving ought not become sentimental about the sound people make to get his attention.

I don't drink. I don't gamble. I have no debts. I am, by most ordinary measures, a responsible man.

My parents were dull and reasonably kind. My father sold farm equipment. My mother made excellent bread. Nobody locked me in a cellar. Nobody struck me with a belt. I was fed, clothed, vaccinated, and occasionally praised.

I learned early that the sight of another person's fear pleased me. I also learned not to mention it.

When I was nine, a neighbor's dog disappeared. Everybody assumed I had cried because I loved the animal. In fact, I had cried because the search ended before I was ready for it to end.

I won't tell you what happened to the dog. You would start looking for an explanation, and that would spoil the point.

The radio was playing Mozart as I drove out of town. A piano concerto, bright and nimble, the notes tumbling over one another as though somebody had opened a drawer full of silverware. I don't know enough about music to tell you which concerto. I know only that the pianist sounded pleased with himself. There is something indecent about beautiful music. It goes on being beautiful no matter what else is happening.

At the next intersection, I turned left instead of right. You had gone left.

This is the part where you want to imagine I had selected you for some vulnerability. You were alone. You were distracted. Perhaps you were tired. But you were no more vulnerable than the woman with the peaches. I happened to follow you.

There have been others, of course. I don't know how many. I stopped counting when I realized that numbers were another kind of souvenir. People who count want a record. They want to look backward and admire themselves. I don't look backward.

One winter I stayed with a retired schoolteacher who had mistaken my quietness for loneliness. She made soup and insisted I take the good bedroom. She asked about my family, and I invented a sister in Nebraska. She believed every word. When I left, she thanked me for being such agreeable company. Not because I hurt her. I didn't. Because I could have.

The schoolteacher had locked her doors every night for 30 years. She unlocked one for me because I carried her groceries. She lived. A man who refused to make eye contact with me in a diner did not.

There is no lesson in that. I wish people would stop looking for one. I liked the phrase enough to keep it.

At the fuel station, you had a passenger. I didn't see them at first. They were sitting low in the seat, perhaps asleep. When you pulled onto the highway, a small hand rose to the window and made a loose circle in the air. A child.

For several miles, I considered turning around. Children complicate things. Not morally. Logistically. They remember odd details. They ask questions at the wrong moments. And they possess a faith in adults that makes me feel, not guilty exactly, but bored.

Then the small hand vanished. I continued driving.

You may find that detail important. You may decide the child was the reason I followed you, or the reason I should have stopped. It wasn't. It simply happened.

The Mozart ended. A presenter announced another piece. I switched the radio off and listened to the tires. When I got out of the car and walked inside, the middle-aged man made eye contact with me.

He had invited me into his home after we met at a hardware store. I never saw him again. Not because I killed him. I simply left.

I do not believe I am performing a service. I do not believe my victims deserve what happens. That is the mistake people keep making about monsters. They assume we need permission from some imaginary authority. I don't need permission.

You stopped at a rest area shortly after noon. I pulled into a space well away from your car and watched you get out.

The passenger was not a child. It was a woman, small and stooped, wearing a pale cardigan. From a distance, her hand had looked young. You helped her stand. She put her fingers on your arm, and the two of you walked slowly toward the building.

Your mother, I guessed. Or an aunt. I liked the care you took with her. I liked that you waited while she adjusted her shoes. It made absolutely no difference.

I used the restroom, washed my hands, and bought a bottle of water from a vending machine. When you came back outside, I was sitting on a bench beneath a tree.

Your companion looked at me.

“Lovely day,” I said.

She smiled. “It certainly is.”

You didn't look at me at all. For a moment I felt the familiar little excitement, the anticipation that arrives when the world presents itself without a plan. I could speak to you. I could leave. I could do any number of things.

Then your companion said she needed to sit down. You helped her onto the bench beside me.

“Long trip?” I asked.

“Long enough,” you said.

Your voice was friendly. You seemed the sort of person who returned shopping carts and called people on their birthdays.

Your companion told me you were taking her to see the ocean. She had never been. You had promised her years ago, and now you had finally found the time. I congratulated you. I meant it. It is good to keep promises.

I thought about the ocean for a while. I have seen both coasts. The Atlantic looks angrier to me. The Pacific has a way of making a person feel forgiven, though I couldn't tell you why.

Your companion asked my name.

“Titus,” I said.

She repeated it carefully. ”That's a strong name”'

“It'll do.”

We sat in companionable silence while a truck idled across the lot. You asked whether I was headed west.

“For now,” I said.

Your companion laughed. “That's the way to live.”

She was wrong about that, as people often are. But she was happy, and I saw no reason to correct her.

When you finally stood, you offered me a handshake. I took it. Your palm was warm. I remember that more clearly than I remember your face.

You and the woman drove away. I watched until the blue car disappeared behind a bend. Then I stayed on the bench. I let 20 minutes pass. I went in the opposite direction.

I have no idea whether you reached the ocean. Perhaps you are there now. Perhaps your companion has a photograph of herself with her shoes in the surf. Perhaps she is telling everyone how beautiful it was.

You may be wondering why I have spent so much time telling you about people I did not hurt. Because the others are dead. And because you keep asking what separates you from them. I wish I could tell you.

A few nights later, I stayed in a motel beside a highway. The television worked only when the cord was held at a particular angle. There was a Bible in the drawer, a stain on the ceiling, and a little card asking guests to conserve water. I ate crackers for dinner.

In the next room, a man was arguing with someone over the telephone. He kept saying he was sorry. The person on the other end apparently didn't believe him. I lay on the bed and listened.

His apologies grew softer. Eventually he began to cry. I wondered whether the person he was speaking to knew how frightened he sounded. At 11:40pm, I knocked on his door.

He opened it a few inches. He was perhaps 30, wearing a wrinkled shirt and one sock. His face was red. He looked embarrassed to be seen.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “My television's gone out. Is yours working?”

He blinked, then nodded.

“Mine's fine.”

“Would you mind if I checked the connection? I think the fellow at the desk gave me the wrong remote.”

He hesitated. Then he opened the door. People think hesitation is a warning system. Sometimes it is simply the last ordinary thing a person does.

I won't describe the next few minutes. You already know what happened, and I am not interested in making a spectacle of it.

What I remember is that the man apologized to me. He apologized while I was hurting him. He said, “I'm sorry,” over and over, as though the correct arrangement of words might restore the world to the way it had been 60 seconds earlier.

Afterward, I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the television. A game show audience was applauding. The host sounded delighted.

On the bedside table was a birthday card addressed to someone named Evelyn. I didn't open it. That was his life, not mine. I left before dawn.

In the parking lot, a woman was loading suitcases into a minivan. Her husband was wrestling with a stroller. Two children argued over which one would sit by the window. The woman asked whether I knew the fastest way to the interstate. I gave her directions. She thanked me. I wished them a safe trip.

And that is the whole terrible business. No pattern. No grand design. Nothing linking the man in the motel to the people I have encountered elsewhere, except that at some point each stood close enough to me for the world to change.

The newspapers sometimes give people like me names. The Highway Butcher. The Traveling Devil. The Man Without a Face. I have never been given a name.

I doubt the police know that the deaths belong together. Why should they? The circumstances vary. The places are far apart. Some of the people have never been found. There is no symbol, no message, no special kind of victim. I don't keep their belongings. I don't revisit the places. I don't read about them afterward.

When I wake in the morning, I think about breakfast. There are days when I go weeks without harming anyone. I buy groceries, wash my clothes, admire a sunset. I help strangers lift heavy boxes. Once I spent an afternoon searching for a missing cat with half a neighborhood. We found it under a porch. A little girl hugged me. I felt nothing except the pressure of her arms.

You want that to be a clue too. You want me to confess that the emptiness inside me is painful, that I suffer from the absence of love, that somewhere in my mind a wounded child is waiting to be rescued.

But I am not lonely. I don't want to be loved. I don't even particularly want to be understood.

What I want, from time to time, is to see the instant when another person understands that all the things they believed protected them were inventions. It is a small moment. Then it is over.

That night at the motel, the man had asked me why. I had no answer. He looked more frightened by my silence than by anything else.

I think about that sometimes, not with regret but with a kind of professional curiosity. If I had invented a reason, would it have comforted him? If I had told him he resembled my father, or that God had ordered it, would he have died believing the universe still made sense? Perhaps that would have been merciful. I couldn't bring myself to lie.

Yesterday I sat in a laundromat while my shirts turned in a dryer. Across from me, an elderly woman folded a stack of children's pajamas. She was humming softly, out of tune. The machines shook. Rain tapped the windows. She asked if I was married.

“Never found the right woman,” I said.

She told me her husband had died last spring. They had been together 46 years. She showed me a photograph of him holding a fish. I said he looked like a fine man. She agreed.

When her basket slipped from her lap, I picked it up.

“You're a good soul,” she said.

I thanked her. The phrase stayed with me for the rest of the afternoon. A good soul. As though she had looked inside me and seen something shining.

I considered telling her about the motel. Not because I wanted to frighten her. I wanted to see whether she would believe me. I suspect she would have laughed. People are very committed to the versions of strangers they invent.

At dusk I drove out of town. The road narrowed, and the trees pressed close on either side. There was no traffic for several miles. A deer stood beside the shoulder. I slowed. It looked at me with the expression animals always have: Alert, unreadable, completely uninterested in what a human being might call evil. I let it cross. Then I continued.

This morning I stopped at another fuel station. I bought coffee, a newspaper, and a packet of crackers. The clerk was a young man with a silver ring through his eyebrow. He asked whether I wanted a receipt.

“Not necessary,” I said.

He wished me a good day. I wished him one too.

Outside, the air smelled of wet pavement. There was a blue car parked beside the building. For a moment I thought of you. Then I noticed the dent above the wheel. The cardboard cup was gone, but the car was yours. I stood beside my door with the coffee warming my hand.

You came out of the store carrying two bottles of water. You looked tired. You looked older than you had at the rest area. This time a child was in tow. A small boy; perhaps 10 years old. You saw me. Recognition crossed your face.

“Titus, right?”

“That's right.”

You smiled. “Small world.”

“Smaller than people think.”

You told me the ocean had been wonderful. Your mother had cried when she saw it. You showed me a photograph on your telephone: an old woman standing ankle-deep in the surf, laughing. I told you it was a beautiful picture. I meant that too.

You asked where I was going.

“Nowhere in particular.”

You nodded as though that were a reasonable destination. Then you said something I have been thinking about ever since.

“You know, my mother said you were the nicest stranger we met on the whole trip.”

I thanked you. You laughed, tucked the bottles under your arm, and walked back toward your car. I watched you and the child go.

I could have followed. I didn't. I got into my own car and started the engine. Mozart was playing again. I drove away.

And I know what you are feeling now. Relief.

You think this is the ending. You think that because I spared you twice, there must be some rule inside me after all. Some invisible boundary. Something you did correctly. You think you are safe.

That is why I wanted to tell you the story. Not because I have chosen you. Not because I am coming back.

But because the next time someone holds a door, helps carry your groceries, or sits beside your mother on a bench, you will remember me. You will look into an ordinary face and wonder. And you will never be able to tell.

I have never needed you to die to take something from you. You gave it to me when you shook my hand.

And you better keep a close eye on that child of yours…