Taking Lives - Hardcover

Pye, Michael

 
9780375402609: Taking Lives
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375402608 ISBN 13: 9780375402609
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

The author of The Drowning Room presents a chilling psychological portrait of a young serial killer who takes on the identities of his victims after he has killed them in the belief that he can live their lives better than they do. 50,000 first printing. Tour.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Pye writes for a living -- as novelist, journalist, historian and sometimes broadcaster. He is English by birth, but civilized by study in Italy and a newspaper apprenticeship in Scotland. For twenty years he commuted between New York and Europe as a political and cultural columnist for British newspapers. He now lives with his partner John Holm in a tiny village in the forests of rural Portugal.<br><br>He grew up in the English countryside and, in the classic English manner, was sent abroad to grow up: to the Universita per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy. He returned to study history at Oxford, won various prizes and was about to become an academic when he realized that writing, and writing often, was the only thing he knew how to do. He joined <i>The Scotsman</i> newspaper in Edinburgh during the headiest day

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sychological novel about a young serial killer who takes on the identities of his victims.<br><br>The first one he didn't really have to kill. The yound college-bound kid had been hit by a car. He was almost, if not already dead when Martin Arkenhout smashed his head with a stone.<br><br>With this chilling opening scene, Michael Pye begins a brilliantly daring and suspenseful novel about the fragile borders that define who we are and the hidden desire in each of us to reinvent ourselves. When Arkenhout can no longer maintain the identity of his first victim, he takes another. Then another. He thinks he can live their lives better than they do, and he continues the pattern until he happens to choose the wrong victim and his secret begins to unravel.<br><br>We are taken from New York to the Bahamas to Amsterdam, and finally to Portugal, where Arkenhout (now living the life of one Professor Christopher Hart) is eventually tracked down by the story's narrator, John Costa, who is in pursu

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Two boys ride the bus through Florida. One of them won't be alive much longer.

This is summer, 1987. Hot skies going basalt, boiled air. A road straight and bone-colored through grass and marsh.

Neither of the boys belongs here, you can tell. They stare out of the windows, but they don't want to be caught doing it.

The highway leads only on. They see towns that repeat one another like puzzle pictures: spot the eight differences in oceans of crabgrass and civic pink oleanders.

The first boy is Martin Arkenhout. Seventeen. Doesn't talk to people much; he doesn't have the habit. Besides, he's foreign--Dutch, blond, tall, white, lanky--and he can't stop himself feeling scared and superior all at once. He sees the crackers on the bus, and he thinks they're potato eaters out of some beach-party van Gogh. There are Hispanics, too, with the dark skin that looks rich to him, but he won't reach out. He's a careful boy.

He works out kilometers and miles to judge the speed. He slouches back to the bathroom and pisses into the lurching tank of liquid, then weaves back to his seat. He gets to wondering, eyes glazed, whether he truly wants to be here: a kid, going to be just a foreign kid at some American high school for a year, expected somehow to grow up.

Each stop, he gets off the bus and buys more Pepsi. By eleven in the morning, he has a fair caffeine buzz, his eyes very open on the world but with not much to see.

"I don't know why I did this," someone says.

Arkenhout looks up.

"I thought this was a really cool idea," the second boy says. "See America."

"Where are you going?"

"College. The way hard way."

"Oh," Arkenhout says. "So am I."

"You're not American?"

"I'm Dutch."

"Cool." The word sounds like absolution for being foreign. After a while, the boy says, "You have those marijuana cafes, don't you?"

Arkenhout says, "And Rembrandt."

"Yeah, yeah. Sorry."

This second boy is tall, blond, and white, like a snapshot of Arkenhout that's been retouched: hair seriously cut, more worked out, less tired and more brown.

"Seth Goodman," the second boy says.

Arkenhout thinks the name sounds like a fiction; he remembers nineteenth-century novels in English class.

"Christ!" Goodman said. "The bus--"

The doors are already shut. A parting signal of blue-black exhaust. The boys run and hammer on the doors and after a false start and a moment, the driver opens up.

"You didn't hear me shouting?" he says.

They both apologize, remembering the same lessons: nice boys.

They sit apart for the next hour and a half. At the next stop they buy chili dogs and coffee.

"I'm going to New York University," Goodman says.

"I'm in America for a year abroad. Before university." But Goodman doesn't seem to mind the canyon gap in status. They're both on the road, after all.

"Where are you from?" Arkenhout asks, politely.

"Jackson, Michigan. In the Midwest. Famous for its giant waterfall with colored lights."

"This is my first time in America."

"Really. You play baseball in Holland?"

In the next few hours, Goodman starts explaining. He starts in slogans: how he takes the bus for environmental reasons, how he wants to see America. He pulls up a bit of personal information: he will major in journalism. So far, he's an entry in a yearbook, concise and shiny. But after many more miles, he tries really hard to think of Arkenhout as this guy in the locker room he's known forever: so he mentions Tracy, the girlfriend in the hometown, who's a gymnast and dark, and how they get it on in the bleachers at the giant waterfall with colored lights.

He deserves a whole lifestory in return, so he thinks, but he'd be appalled if it turned out to be too foreign.

Arkenhout just says he's going to some Tampa suburb to be a schoolkid, which he's obviously done already. He doesn't have anything easy to say about home or parents. He particularly doesn't say out loud that he will learn America like a lesson because he is good at languages--not just neat sounds from a clever mouth, but the ability to listen to how people don't say a thing straight and then repeat it.

Goodman says he'd like to stop off before Tampa, pick up a bus the next morning. Arkenhout reckons he'll do the same. Just this once, it's not what everyone expects him to do; that's the whole attraction.

The bus draws into a station dressed up with bits of white column and brick siding. The boys pull their bags out of the belly of the bus. They talk a bit about that green flash in the sky you get in Florida, so they've both heard.


Technicolor evening. Cracker eyes. Small motel, old pink, two double beds, TV with the colors shifted like a very old 3-D movie. Bathroom with crumbling mosaic and a barrier like a police line: this side sanitized for your protection, the rest at your own risk. Palm trees in a very little motion, a shine more than a move.

Goodman talks about New York. "You meet people who matter," he says, which must be his father's phrase. He'll work out where the career paths run, get invited, although he's not sure to what.

Arkenhout starts to think he's carrying his own name--Martin, Arkenhout--like a too-big case your mother packs, which he'll sooner or later have to lug home to Holland.

He remembers to call his new American family in Tampa to say he's missed the bus, been delayed.

He pays serious attention now. Goodman doesn't bite his nails. Arkenhout does; better stop. Americans have such glamorous, managed teeth, but Arkenhout's are good, too. Goodman doesn't say much about his hometown because he's leaving it. While he's in the shower, Arkenhout thumbs through his diary, finds an orderly list of emergency numbers: home, relations, doctor. The credit card that paid for the motel room is in his father's name. So that's how Americans do it, Arkenhout thinks.

Goodman comes out of the shower in white socks. He lies down on the bed, brown and naked, and he smiles. Arkenhout notices the sharp side of his belly muscles.

Since they've only just met, since they have nothing in common except not knowing each other's stories, it is natural to ask about parents, brothers, sisters. Goodman's are all in one house in a clean, small, distant town, not unlike Arkenhout's small town, except the Dutch are by the dunes and the sea. "My father's a doctor," Arkenhout says, as though that meant much more than a profession. Goodman has a brother and a sister, but he says they're "way heartland."

Arkenhout is curious about everything. He learns the motel first. Outdoor flamingos, paint bruised. An old apple of a woman, brown and soft, running the office; she has a gun just showing in a desk drawer. Rooms like boxes. No questions asked, or even contemplated, once the credit card runs through the machine.

Once, in the night, he thinks Goodman is watching him. He pretends to be asleep.

The next morning is smotheringly hot.

Arkenhout can barely hold his list of questions, and Goodman now wants to tell: or at least to brag a bit, to instruct the foreigner.

They eat grits for breakfast with eggs. Arkenhout manages. Goodman starts laughing. "I never ate this"--and he catches the waitress's judgmental eye--"stuff before," he says.

The bus seats stick to bare thighs. Goodman explains New York like a tabloid and a guidebook. Arkenhout listens, but he also watches the light show of sun and tangled branches through the windows.

Goodman is suddenly...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375402608
ISBN 13 
9780375402609
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
295
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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