Killer Song

"It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics."

 ― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

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Dear Kate,

Here's the book, Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winner about an American killer, one who killed in America and got killed in an American way.  (Click the link above to know more about it; there's an excerpt too.)

I don't travel a lot.  I don't travel at all.  I know your land, part of the topography of this heart.

Over a thousand pages of war and not much peace, I read it years ago when I was young, young as a father, a boy, disillusioned with church that I would always go to the library before walking back to the school where we met for Sunday service, cleanse my palate with the sacrament of words, ready to receive the unpalatable to come.

The time I carried this book, a brick, to church, a man younger came to greet me, a greeter he was that day but he greeted me personal.  We knew each other; I him since he was a kid.  Years before that I put on a big drama (not metaphorically) in another church and he complained to his mom about my behavior as a writer-director: on the day of the show I used a wrong color pen to write my name on the sticker tag.  I thought I was Ingmar Bergman.  I meant to call out colorful demons.

The man saw the book and asked me about it.  I asked him to sit down and read him a passage.  He said that's the kind of book he wants to read, asked why he'd never heard of it before.  It's not the kind of book he wants to read, and he would go on living never hearing from it again.

"The terrible, exasperating thing about humans is how goodness and gentleness, and utter depravity and disregard for human life, can be contained within the same person, and in terrifyingly close proximity."  I don't know if that's the passage I read him, if he still remembers the taste of that broken piece I laid on his tongue.

Yours, Alex