We Are the Light(62)

In our early group-therapy sessions, many people theorized that Jacob wanted to make the people left alive suffer even more than he wanted to kill our loved ones. Through discussions with various mental health professionals we also learned that the extreme violence combined with the disorienting darkness of the movie theater froze some people in their seats while others ran for the emergency exit, which Jacob had barricaded with his car minutes before. It was easy for Jacob to execute the movie patrons frozen in their seats. The mass of bodies pressing forward into the blocked emergency exit—with their backs turned toward the killer—were even easier prey.

I’m not one hundred percent certain, but I believe Darcy was Jacob’s first kill, as I don’t remember hearing any gunshots or screaming before Jacob ended my wife’s life. Like many others, Darcy always loved sitting with her feet stretched out into the aisle that separated the front block of floor seats from the back. We got there a little later than usual that night and had to settle for the last two center aisle seats closest to the entrance hallway leading to the lobby, from which Jacob first emerged.

Just when I thought my mind was disintegrating—back during the early December tragedy, as Darcy’s soul was first leaving her body—that strong and sure version of me rose up and took the wheel. I ran toward the muzzle flashes and the POP! POP! POP! Then I was flying through the air, driving the entire weight of my body through the young killer’s spine. When we both hit the floor, I grabbed a fistful of his hair and began slamming his face into the concrete below us—over and over and over—feeling his skull caving in a little more with each downward thrust of my right hand. It was like I was outside my body watching a man possessed by demons, because that Other Lucas couldn’t stop and didn’t until—ten or so minutes later—Bobby the cop finally pulled me off of Jacob’s limp, blood-soaked body.

Somehow back on the night of our monster movie premiere, as I was kneeling alone on the stage in my tuxedo, screaming and punching myself and reliving the trauma in front of a sold-out crowd, I was also looking through the various first-floor windows of your house, Karl.

It’s three or so nights before Christmas. All the funerals are over. Maybe it’s right after the last one. And then I’m seeing your body suspended in midair. Your dining room table has been pushed to the side. A single chair below you has been knocked over. And when I make my eyes travel up the length of your limp torso, I can see the orange extension cord wrapped multiple times around your neck and anchored to the chandelier above. And then I’m kicking in your back door and the neighbors are calling the police and I’m trying to get you down, but it’s a two-man job, so the best I can do is sort of hold up your stiff, cold body so that there’s no more tension on your windpipe as I scream for help. I supported your weight until my back and leg muscles cramped and gave out. I yelled until I had no more voice. I really did try to save you, Karl, because I loved you more than you probably realized.

Phineas says it’s okay to love your analyst and that maybe it’s even a sign that the alchemical process—the reparenting of one’s self—is succeeding. I know you didn’t do what you did to punish me, but because you most likely couldn’t live without Leandra or deal with the aftermath of what all of us who were in the Majestic Theater that night suffered. As someone who has had an extreme and largely involuntary response to the tragedy, allow me to say, I understand how the mind can break. I won’t ever judge you for it. But I wish I had looked in your window a little earlier that day. Maybe I would have seen what you were about to do.

In my fantasies, I always catch you in the act, usually while you’re wrapping the cord around the chandelier base. When I rush into your dining room, you fall ashamedly into my arms. I pat your back and tell you it’s okay and that we can get you help.

Maybe even Phineas could have helped you make it through, who knows?

After my very public breakdown at the movie premiere, the EMTs took me to a mental health facility, where—against my will—I was shot up with enough drugs to make me sleep like the dead. Just before I lost consciousness, I distinctly remember realizing that the wind-rushing-through-barren-trees noise hidden deep inside me was the sound of my soul screaming. The last thing I remember before I blacked out was knowing with great certainty that I never wanted to hear the life-sapping sound of my soul screaming ever again.

For this reason, I took all the pills that the medical staff offered me while I was staying at the mental health facility. The meds put me into a stupor that made me drool and fall asleep sitting up in the TV room, where I first began to see the TV ads for Sandra Coyle’s political campaign. She’s the governor of Pennsylvania now, so I’ve become used to seeing her talking head on the television and her face on billboards. But back then it felt like I had been transported to an alternate universe. And I remember wondering how Sandra had been able to so quickly transform the screaming of her soul into political gold, while I had ended up unable to lift my body from a plastic couch in a lockdown unit.

There were many people locked up with me, but I was unable to engage with any of them. To be fair, most were also unable to engage with me. The few who seemed relatively normal were given special privileges and spent a lot of time in the open-air square of grass that anchored the common room, which was kind of like a box comprised of four large panes of glass designed to keep the less sane from entering the atrium’s cube of sun without permission. I’d see the normal people in there all lit up like gods about to be beamed up to the heavens. I kept thinking, If only I could enter the gleaming cube, this would all be over, but the drugs made it virtually impossible to stand, let alone navigate the hierarchy of this new mental health ecosystem.