Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe

Author:Rachel Monroe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2019-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

Courtesy Lindsay Souvannarath

THE KILLER

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

—Clarice Lispector

It was an extremely online romance, as many were in 2014: they followed each other on Tumblr, then they became Facebook friends, then they started chatting. Lindsay sent the first message, “Huzzah,” and then a little poker-faced emoticon: (‘-’). It was four days before Christmas, and she was bored in her room. She could hear her parents downstairs, talking to the dogs, laughing at some inane sitcom. James wrote back right away: “hey!” They messaged back and forth for a few hours that first night, tentatively at first, trying to suss each other out.

Lindsay did most of the talking. She apologized for being hyper; she was all hopped up on coffee and half an energy drink. In person she hardly spoke, but online she could just go and go. “Feel free to tell me to shut up if I’m getting too boring/weird here,” she wrote.

“I don’t mind,” James replied.

It wasn’t obvious at first that they would be a match. Lindsay casually mentioned her trips around the world, her family’s horse. She lived in the suburbs of Chicago and was working on a novel; in her spare time, she painted (“mostly pale dudes with weapons”) and read Nietzsche. James was a stoner who lived in Nova Scotia and hung out at metal shows. “I don’t read much,” he admitted, and “I can’t write for shit.” He couldn’t draw, either. He was basically terrible at anything that involved a pen and paper. “Plus I have roughly zero motivation.” He was nineteen, aimless and unemployed. She was twenty-two, with a newly minted degree from a small liberal arts school in Iowa and vague plans to join the Peace Corps.

Over the next seven weeks, Lindsay and James would come to feel that their meeting was part of some great cosmic plan. They were in similar places in their lives: young adults still living with their parents, socially awkward, virgins. They didn’t spend much time talking about the mundane building blocks of adulthood—school, family, work—in part because those parts of life had felt hostile to both of them for a long time. Instead they discussed the other things they had in common—how they both walked stiffly and too fast, how as soon as they entered a room, other people could sense that something about them didn’t quite fit. How they could tell that strangers were afraid of them. How they had grown to like it, in a way, the perverse kind of power that came from being the kind of person everyone else wanted to stay away from.

* * *

In 1928, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring writer began taking notes for a novel she hoped to write. It would be called The Little Street, she decided, and it would center on a man a few years younger than her, a bright and misunderstood striver born into poverty. “A perfectly straight being, unbending and uncompromising,” the woman wrote in her journal.

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