Arcane Desires

3500 words
(This draft is only ten seconds less raw than the one that was scrawled in my notebook over the course of eight hours. I am aware that it needs a lot of work and that there is no action. Thanks.)


The fact that Tommy Wayne Bachman killed hundreds of people by turning them into Skittles cannot be denied, but I found resisting his childlike insanity nearly impossible. When I met him, he was in his cell at the Andrew Sheehan Memorial Mental Institution, naked except for his gloves. When he moved his fingers, the lining of the gloves crunched and crackled. The candies that lined them had long since disintegrated into crystals. Despite all of the security gates, retinal-scan locks and stainless steel, those gloves were the true force keeping the world from horrible, crayon-colored death.

“Do you know the last thing I touched?” he asked the first time we met. No small talk, just that question. He wasn’t looking into the security camera that allowed me to watch his every move. He was staring, smiling at the wall.

“Officer Patrick Calhoun, Devil’s Point Police Department,” I said. “He was four years away from retirement, had two kids in college and a grandson on the way. He thought he was on a routine hold-up call.”

“Wrong,” he said, his face dissolving into a dreamy smile. “The skin of the human face. Don’t take that for granted, Ms. Petrie. Think about that. The texture of the human face.”

Involuntarily, my hand drifted to my cheek. It was warm and smooth except for one leftover pock mark near my jawline. I tore my hand away. Bachman grinned.

“What magazine do you write for, again?” he asked.

“This piece is freelance,” I said. “But there’s been a lot of interest from some major markets.

“Well, it’s not going to be very good,” he smirked. “The article, I mean. So far, I’ve been asking all the questions.”

I wrote that down. “The questions one asks may say a lot about one.”

He shifted into a cross-legged position on the floor, his fingers clasped. “And it’s not like I’m so interesting,” he said. “I just turn everything I touch into Skittles. What’s so interesting about that?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” I checked my recorder to make sure it was on. I’d missed too many quick quotes because of low batteries, and I knew I couldn’t write fast enough to catch everything.

“Not many people go on rampages. Devil’s Point is a ghost town now. I even dissolved the tumbleweeds.”

“Tell me about Devil’s Point.”

“No thanks,” he said with a smile. “Have you ever played Ation?”

“What is that?” I looked at Bachman inquisitively over my glasses, imagining some element of serial killer culture that would make a great introductory hook.

“A word game. You’re supposed to play with a big group of people, but you don’t have to. You go around in a circle, naming all the words you can think of that end with A-T-I-O-N. You’ll be amazed at how many you can think of. You’ll even keep thinking of them when the game is done. Try it.”

“I have work to do, Mr. Bachman. Tell me about Devil’s Point.”

“No? I’ll start, then. Inclination.”

“When did you find out about your curse?”

“Trepidation.

“What was your childhood like?”

“Amalgamation.”

“Do you feel any remorse for your actions?”

“Elimination.”

“What comes to mind when I say the word ‘crustacean’?”

He started, but laughed instead. “You almost got me there. But that’s an A-C-E-A-N. No good.”

“This will go much easier if you cooperate.” I glared at him, even though I knew he couldn’t see me.

“Cooperation, that’s a good one. But not an option, I’m afraid. Chaos, Ms. Petrie. Chaos.”

I’d read in my extended research that “Chaos” was a mantra for him, what he’d shouted in gleeful tones as he’d skipped through the tiny town of Devil’s Point, New Mexico, stopping only to shake the hands of unsuspecting strangers. Rumor had it, the breezes that blew through what was left of Devil’s Point were chemically fruity and sickly sweet.

Aching with frustration, I rose from my chair in the visitor’s room. “I’ve had enough of this conversation, Mr. Bachman. We’ll have to continue this visitation at a different time.”

“Fair enough,” he said, shrugging. “Ask them if I can have a Nintendo in here. Or an old Sega. I haven’t played Sonic in years.”

I rolled my eyes and left in anticipation of a long few weeks to come. I knew there was a story and a sympathetic character in his ramblings, but I’d have to dig for it with a razor-tipped shovel.


When I returned to the Institution, I was armed with a new tactic. Clearly, interviewing Bachman wasn’t going to work. The piece would be largely observational. My view of the subject through the video feed was as clear as video would allow, but not as detailed as it would be if I was looking through glass. Bachman’s cell had no glass or windows of any kind, in case he got his gloves off and tried to escape. Instead, it was wallpapered with yellow Skittles which, paired with the ceiling fluorescents, gave the room an alien quality of light and made Bachman appear jaundiced, his waist-length hair looking blonder than hair should. My research reported that he was a giant of a man, six foot three and solidly built, but on video he was dwarfed by the empty expanse of his cell. The room was furnished only with a low, hard cot, a bench set in the wall, and a toilet. The furnishings were not made of Skittles because dissolving them wouldn’t do Bachman any good.

This time, like the other, Bachman was folded in a crouch in the center of the room. When he heard my rustling over the intercom, though, he unfolded his long limbs and stood. “Hello, disembodied lady,” he said. “I still don’t make any sense.”

“I know,” I answered, making my presence known for certain.

“I have more word games for you,” he said, looking away from the camera.

“All right.” My tactic this time wasn’t reverse psychology, exactly, but rather an acknowledgment of the classical villain’s tendency to explain his plans. The best quotes come from attempts to fill empty conversational space.

“Aren’t you going to ask me some more questions?” he asked, his face impish.

“I thought you wanted to ask the questions,” I replied.

“Don’t feel like it.”

Another long silence.

“Turning everything I touch into Skittles isn’t my ideal superpower,” he remarked offhand. His voice was always tinged with a dark playfulness, but this comment was overflowing with it.

“Oh?” I tried to sound nonchalant, as if discussing his preference for sausage over bacon.

“Yep. I would rather be able to turn people’s brain cells into confetti with my mind.”

I scribbled “Brain cells = confetti?” in my notebook.

“It wouldn’t be painful for them,” he said. “It would be instantaneous. One minute you’re being annoying, and the next, bang. The millions of confetti pieces build enough pressure to explode your head off. No blood or gore, just lots and lots of confetti. It would make people happy.”

“Except the friends and families of people you’ve killed.”

He scoffed. “I wouldn’t do it to just anyone. Only the truly annoying. Truly annoying people don’t have friends.”

I was about to wholeheartedly disagree when he changed the subject. “Did you know the average person needs sixty-three minutes of peace and quiet per day? I get a lot more than that. But then, I need a lot more than that.” His face creased, then. It was the first expression I’d seen him have that was less than jovial.

“Do you?”

“People are annoying.” Pause. “Always talking about nothing. All the time.” Another long pause. “You learned not to, though. I like that. Adaptation. I saw a special on the Discovery Channel about a certain kind of monkey, I don’t remember which, that learned how to use tools and even siege tactics for defense. Most monkeys have a relatively advanced language system, but not those monkeys. They were doers, not talkers. Sometimes I think those monkeys are more evolved than humans.”

Throughout this monologue, Bachman tapped his foot on the floor in a constant fast rhythm. I wrote in my notebook, “Introverted – typical s. killer profile? Interested in trivia, wildlife. NtS: Look up antisocial monkeys. Possible anecdote for lead?”

“I can hear you writing up there. Are you writing that I’m a sociopath? I’m not, really. I like some people.”

“Like who?”

“I dunno,” he said, shrugging in a now-familiar gesture. “People. I’d rather not talk about this right now.”

“Okay,” I said. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I dunno.” Bachman walked to the cot and lay on his back, gloved hands at his sides. He stayed that way, silent, long enough for me to realize that the day’s interview was over.

When I got back to my apartment after the second session, I unpacked my research. The reverse psychology had worked, but not well enough. At this rate, I’d have enough information to write a well-informed piece somewhere in the next three decades.

My experiences with Bachman clearly weren’t unique; out of all the extensive coverage on the Bachman phenomenon, all of the articles consisted of hard facts only. Not even the bigwigs in profile journalism had been able to get into his head. My contacts, even my friends, unanimously agreed that I was insane for trying but I considered it my duty. I was far from being a major member of the journalistic community; most of my printed work had been freelance for small magazines, but my profile on San Diego’s Egg Timer Slasher had been picked up by a few high-profile blogs and suddenly I was a sought-after investigator of the pathological. It also helped that I had connections in various prisons and psych wards. My cousin Barry held some secretive position at Sheehan Memorial, so I was able to take advantage of more lenient visiting policies than some other profilers had. Turning down the chance to dissect the Rainbow Candy Killer, as he had been dubbed in the press, would have been unwise at best and career suicide at worst.

Most of the articles on the Rainbow Candy Killer told the same story. Bachman was twenty five when he started dissolving people, relatively young for a serial killer. He worked full time at Suncrest, a middling Denver web development firm, as a programmer; Suncrest had hired him immediately after his graduation from nearby Sunderland College. There, he had studied computer science, kept a 3.1 grade-point average, and was treasurer on the executive board of one of the quieter, less notorious fraternities. When his curse descended, he lived alone in an apartment. He didn’t have many friends and his family mostly lived down South. His landlord said that Bachman kept his place neat, his rent up-to-date and rarely caused problems except for occasional loud music. A few days after he moved in, goldfish started appearing in some tenants’ toilets, but there was no proof that Bachman was involved.

On November 14, 2007, Bachman first failed to appear for work, and authorities believe that was the day he acquired his powers. On November 16, he returned to Suncrest, where he turned a stapler, a phone, a computer keyboard, his desk, and regional manager Skip Hartley into Skittles. He escaped undetected. Coworkers had heard the sound of the candies scattering to the floor, but had thought nothing of it until they went on lunch break and saw the mess that had once been the cubicle. At first, authorities thought Skip Hartley had simply disappeared and they were stymied by the thousands of Skittles in his office, but as events escated they managed to tie his death to Tommy Wayne Bachman.

Bachman himself was not sighted again until he dissolved an unidentified vagrant on a Greyhound bus on November 20. The resulting commotion left several dissolved, including the driver, and the bus careened offroad where it finally stopped in some dense underbrush shortly outside Devil’s Point, New Mexico. By November 21, the town was decimated into a saccharine wasteland. Few witnesses survived; most survivors escaped to bomb shelters and never saw Bachman.

The witnesses were highly traumatized by the events and left only muddled accounts of what they saw. One witness, administrative assistant Marianne Jenkins, could only say “Dissolved them. He dissolved them.” Her husband, Tim, had been a police officer on the scene and a subsequent victim. Mrs. Jenkins was thought to be the originator of the term “dissolve” to describe Bachman’s actions, a term that Bachman himself embraced.

The killer was next spotted, and eventually apprehended, outside of Albuquerque. The police caught him with his gloves on, a state in which he was powerless. Tabloid newspapers relished the manner in which Bachman was caught, and dozens of headlines the next day screamed in 2-inch letters ,”Rainbow Candy Killer Caught Red-Handed!!” The gloves were made of cherry Skittles.

The trial was short and uneventful. Bachman pleaded insanity, which no one could dispute. In custody, Bachman never started trouble or tried to escape. Besides, his eccentric conversational style and penchant for word games, he was a model inmate and patient.

In short, the facts gave me no insight into Bachman’s mindset, only a few pages of expositional padding for my piece. The institution’s employees were no help, as Bachman rarely spoke and spent most of his time supine in bed or crouched on the floor. Even the psychiatrists were unable to produce a reliable profile or link him to serial killer behaviors. I would have to do all the investigative work myself. In my apartment, I sat on the corner of my plush red sofa and flicked through my notes again and again. My eye rested on a column of scribbles from earlier that night. “63 minutes of peace and quiet.” “Look up antisocial monkeys.” Bachman was a student of trivia. Maybe I could gain some insight by playing his game instead of initiating one of my own.


The next session was three days later. I spent those three days researching frantically, seeking a bit of minutiae that Bachman would be willing to latch onto. I finally picked one and threw out the bait at the start of the session, knowing that any hesitation could give Bachman the illusion of control. “Have you ever heard of
something called ‘Dark Flow?’” I asked.

“I’ve been here for over a year. Any thing that happens is new to me.”

“Scientists recently discovered,” I said, “that distant galaxies are drifting towards an unseen supermassive object outside the far reaches of the universe. They call it ‘dark flow.’ It’s unprecedented.”

Bachman hummed under his breath. “Chaos,” he said. “What does that have to do with me?”

I wrote “Narcissism?” in my notebook. “We’re all drifting towards a set point outside of known space. How is that chaotic?”

“Consternation,” he replied. “A species of spider evolved from being a victim to a con artist in under a year. Traditionally, the females of the species ate the males after mating, but the males discovered that if they brought insects wrapped in webbing to the mating sessions, the females were distracted and ate the insect instead. And after that, when the males came to mate, the females unwrapped the webbing and found that it was empty.”

I wrote “Spiders. Gift-giving. Evolution” in my notebook. “What’s your point,” I said.

“Supermassive objects can be black holes.”

I wasn’t sure if any of this was true. In fact, I doubted it. But this spate of facts had to mean something. Serial killers, the narcissists at least, love giving clues.

“Guam eats more SPAM per capita than any other territory,” he added. I knew that one was true. I read it in the February entry in the SPAM Fun Facts calendear I received for Christmas from my cousin Barry in 2006.

“How’s the food here?” I asked. That was a dumb question.

“It’s food,” he said. “There could be more pie. I ate a lot of pie on the outside.”

The silence that followed was comfortable. Bachman flexed his hands, spreading his fingers apart and bringing them back together. I tried to remember more fun facts.

“You’re not writing anything,” he said after a few minutes.

“You haven’t given me anything to write,” I replied, crossing my legs under my chair.

“Write about spiders and expectations,” he said, with that exuberant expression that announced he was playing a game. “Write about swimming through a black hole. Write about how it feels to hold a pen, and read that one back to me.”

A thought sparked in my mind. “I can. With preconditions, of course.”

“Of course.” Bargaining. A game.

“I will discuss the texture of anything. But only if you answer my questions.” Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Why hadn’t Susan Orlean?

“Perhaps,” he said, stroking his chin with a gloved hand. “Throw in a nose-scratching.”

“Excuse me?”

“My nose has been itching since last November,” he said. “These things,” he lifted his gloved hands towards the camera. “These don’t do the trick. Scratch my nose, and I’ll tell you everything.”

I coughed. “They’ll never let me in there. Certainly not tonight.”

“Next time, then. You have connections, I’m sure. Make it happen. This itch is unbearable.”

“And if I can’t make it happen?”

“You will. You need this. But I’ll be willing to negotiate. First, tell me the story of holding a pen.”

I felt uncertain at first but figured that mollifying him once couldn’t hurt. “It’s a thick pen, a rollerball. I’m bracing it between my thumb and forefinger, with support from my middle finger.”

“The texture, Ms. Petrie, the texture.”

I closed my eyes for a second and felt. “There’s a rubber grip around the tip of the pen,” I said. “It’s slightly sticky from sweat.”

“More.”

“The grip is cushioned. When I squeeze it, there’s a tiny amount of give,
but holding too tight rubs against a callus on my forefinger. The shaft is smooth and cool, and I feel tiny indentations where the brand is imprinted there. And the end is dimpled with toothprints, which are sctchy when I rub my fingertips against them.”

I felt it difficult to articulate the exact experience of feeling, but Bachman seemed satisfied by my efforts. His eyes were closed and he wore a sideways grin.

“Adequate,” he said. “You may go.”

I did.


Convincing the staff of the Institution to let me into Bachman’s cell was far from easy. My cousin talked to a guy who talked to a guy, and even that guy paid a significant bribe. The process took ka week before the Institute finally let me go in with three armed guards, my own tazer, and a hazmat suit covered with Skittles. I wrote a list of important questions, the questions I had been wondering since I first saw Devil’s Point on the news all those months ago. How did he get his power? What had sent him on his dissolving spree? What did he think of me? What did dissolving someone feel like? How did he feel about the whole thing?

When the cell door slammed behind me and the guards, my heart could have stopped. Bachman was indeed a giant, dwarfing me by nearly a vertical foot. He smelled antiseptic and vaguely tangy.

“I thought you’d be a redhead,” he said, chuckling. “You talk like a redhead.”

“Sorry,” I said. I’d dyed my hair brown in graduate school because I thought it would make people take me seriously. “Shall we begin?”

“Nose scratch, first. Questions, after.”

I looked into his eyes earnestly. They were blue. The video feed sucked the color out of them, and the fluorescent lighting painted them yellow, but they were blue. “How can I be sure you’ll tell me anything?” I put my hands on my hips.

“I’ll give you a teaser.”

“A teaser?”

Bachman dipped his head down until his stubble touched my ear. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the guards start toward us, but I waved him off. I heard Bachman suck into a breath, and then he whispered in my ear: “The hobo was an accident.” I would have asked for clarification, but my lungs were empty. “I’m sure you read about the hobo on the Greyhound bus to Albuquerque. It was an accident. He tried to steal my gloves, there was a scuffle, my finger grazed his. The woman in the next aisle started a commotion that I couldn’t stop.”

A tear wanted to roll down my cheek but decided not to. “Thank you,” I choked.

“Now do what you came for.”

Slowly, like I was moving my arm through sugar syrup, I lifted my right hand near Bachman’s face, where it hung for seconds an inch away.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“It’s my nose,” he said with a smirk. “Stop stalling.”

In a millisecond, my finger fell. His nose was warm and soft, for a millisecond. In the next instant, his nose was hard, cold, and dense. I heard a short wave of muffled crackling and opened the eyes I didn’t know I’d closed.

I was standing in a sea of Skittles, a vibrant, unsettling blue.

Love of my life,
Nader voter,
you left me
for a Catholic

You waited until
I befriended
your cat, your alcoholic
father and your city?

Nine hours on
a Greyhound bus
during winter finals
the most wonderful time

of the year in Minnesota.
The low winds froze my toes off
through tape-plugged shoe holes.
Your frozen weather iced my flash bulb

In October you are not suited
to Western Illinois.
Too much corn, too many dead
redneck poets you never read.

Too much cowfaced
bitter and unstable Jewess
here to suit you.
They say long distance never works, but now I can
reboot you.

So this is Kanye's new album art. Does it remind you of anything in particular?



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