I’m putting this down for an official record, because I think that it’s important. To remember it accurately, I mean. In the age of deep fakes and AI images, there’s going to come a time when people claim that none of this really happened or that it happened so differently, but it did happen just like this. The first body came just before 10:30 on a Friday. The corner of Wash and Armstead The streets were busy with people looking for fun after a long week. What they got was a human body plummeting to the earth.
At first, people noticed the crash, most of them not even sure what had fallen. Then they saw a single red balloon drift away from the body. Then they all looked at the body. It was crumpled from the long fall, but you could pretty quickly recognize two things. First, it was a real body. Second, the person had been costumed to look like a clown. The face had been disfigured. The mouth had been sliced and then stretched into a terrible grin. You could still see the various slices and some blisters. The eyes had been taken out, seemingly caved in from force. What would come out later was that the body had also been castrated.
The actual identity was impossible to tell, so of course the rumors started immediately. Some were at least reasonable. Like the claim that one birthday clown kept stealing gigs from other party clowns, and this was an act of revenge. Others were ridiculous, like the theory that the government was trying to create super soldiers whose natural appearance would tap into people’s natural fear of clowns. In the end, the dead clown would turn out to be a priest or preacher of some kind. Not long after that much was announced, people started to come forward. Apparently, the clown was not a good man. He had taken advantage of people under his charge. You know the deal. After the accusations, there was some blowback, people telling the accusers to lay off. Don’t “cancel” the dead. Again, you know the deal.
But what was interesting was that, this time, the accusers seemed to have a bubble of protection. Instead of being doxed and harassed, they had confirmation of their stories, affirmation of their bravery, and offers of help. It was pleasantly bizarre, like a miracle.
Meanwhile, the search for the clown’s killer was fruitless. The cops tried to see what roof the clown would’ve been thrown from, but a variety of experts studied the body’s trajectory, and they all concluded the same thing; the body had fallen straight down from a very high spot. Like it had been thrown down from heaven or dropped from a cloud. This led to more conspiracy theories (“angels are real, and they’re wreaking vengeance”) but no leads. Nobody knew what to do.
The whole thing might have gone away except for the fact that another body dropped. Again, shortly before ten thirty. Again in a busy enough area that there were plenty of witnesses. This time, the body was dressed in a suit. It was also decapitated. The wound seemed to have been cauterized right after it had been made. Like it was cut with something sharp but hot. Maybe something on fire. Some people claimed that they could smell brimstone when they got near the body, but that wasn’t actually confirmed in a consistent way. Where the human head should have been, there was a snake head. The coroner took the head out to examine it. The weird thing was that there was no tail. Not just that the tail had been cut off, but it had never been there. It’s like it has always only been a head.
Although there was no head, the body did have both hands, so the authorities were able to run the prints. While the clown costume was just a costume, the business suit apparently, really belonged to the body. When the body had a head and was a person, he had been like a clown, a bad person. He’d been part of a variety of schemes that had, while not quite breaking the law, left people financially devastated. In many ways, it was typical business, but when you read his biography, it was easy to think, “Maybe people like this really should beheaded.”
The discourse on this body was different. Rather than individual revelations about an otherwise beloved figure, this time, people really came together to shit on the deceased. It was almost like whoever was doing it had tried to pick a target that would be more popular. Of course, the cops still tried to conduct an investigation, but again, it was a straight fall from up high. No clues, and no real pressure from anyone to find the killer.
The next body was a cop. He fell down in the middle of an intersection. Literally in the middle. Oddly, all lights had turned red for a little bit before the impact. People sometimes claim that’s a lie, but the traffic cameras have been checked and rechecked. And even if you don’t believe that, consider the fact that the body hit the street and not any car. Its impact didn’t even cause a fender bender. Someone cared about public safety.
The body itself actually was split cleanly down the middle. It’s guts had spilled out a little when it hit the ground. Underneath the guts and gore, each side of the cut had an almost imperceptible blue streak along it. You can imagine how that hit the news. People immediately began speculating that the cop had been crooked. That he was taking money from drug lords and letting them infiltrate the city. It actually took a long time and a lot of digging to uncover the truth. He wasn’t working with the criminals. His sin was a subtle but steady steam of abuse and exploitation. A black man hassled here, a young woman aggressively frisked there. Nothing that would stand out as particularly evil other than the fact that we’d all come to see these actions as normal and tolerable.
By the time that this all came to light, the rumors were pervasive. Some folks firmly believed that it was a serial killer hiding in law enforcement a la Dexter. Others thought that it was an alien trying to subdue humanity enough to prepare them for invasion. The truth didn’t seem to matter, and that’s why this testimonial is so important. That, whatever the judgment, the reader at least grounds that judgment in facts.
After the third body came, a new category of rumor took off. This one posited that the bodies correlated to the various horsemen of the apocalypse, and, when the forth body came, the apocalypse would as well. Never mind that there wasn’t a clear mapping of who was war, who was death, as so on. All public officials were in a very weird space where they wanted to say that the best people were working on it, and the killer or killers would soon be caught, but they also must have suspected that this was a supernatural issue, making it far outside of their jurisdiction and capabilities.
Perhaps it was good that the forth and fifth bodies came so closely together. There was no time for the apocalypse. The forth was a landlord. He was different from the first three bodies in a number of ways. First, there was no symbolic mutilation. He’d just been clubbed in the back of the head. Second, he actually has been thrown off a roof. Third, the killer had left forensic evidence on the body (he was arrested about a week later, and while plenty of people did support him, he did go to jail). Finally, he was different because his body was almost immediately crushed by the fifth body, which landed directly on top of the fourth body.
The fifth body turned out to be an internet crack pot. Someone who spread a mixture of conspiracy theories and dog whistles. While he had his bones and muscle and most of his organs, an autopsy revealed that his heart and brain had both been removed. How they’d been removed and where they ended up was never discovered.
The two overlapping bodies is, in a way, when all hell broke loose. The clear presence of a human murderer, and the way that the human’s victims was so absurdly different was what led to even more end times hand waving. That was annoying but not immediately dangerous. What was dangerous were the proclamations that these murders were divinely sanctioned and, therefore, a good model to follow. It was like a terrible version of What Would Jesus do. Terrible because it led to, on the one hand folks who’d been pushed to the margins talking about very brutal and very literal vengeance, and on the other hand, the people in power to become an extra level of paranoid.
There was actual violence on both sides. A boss who forced women to let him indulge his fantasies was tied up and dropped from the top of a hotel. A group of workers trying to sneak into another boss’s house were shot to death by independent contractors who had been hired on as extra security. A teacher who’d been verbally abusive to queer students showed up on the school rooftop, not thrown, but still dead. A cop shot dead a civilian, citing concerns of “intent.”
This all came to a halt when a final body fell. It was not disfigured, at least not like the others. It has on only shorts, and, written on its chest was the very simple message, “It was me.” There was no speculation on what this message meant. Everyone understood that this was the killer, but there was still plenty of questions. The thing was, the body had no fingerprints. I don’t mean that there were no fingerprints on the body; I mean that the fingertips didn’t have any prints. No whorls that could identify this person as a person. The DNA and dental records didn’t match any person who’d ever lived.
That got a lot of speculation going. The “person” was an alien. Or a robot. Or an angel. Everyone had an opinion even if nobody had an actual fact. Either way, the authorities closed the central cases. They named the killer “John Doe.” Some people criticized them, saying that it was too close to the movie Seven, but any other name might have either implied sympathy or taken a stance on the killings, so there probably was no choice.
That was a few years ago, and, by now, we’ve all seen the fallout, so speak. Social media profiles honoring “the work.” Some even claiming to have been involved. Shitty movie and TV adaptations. Scholarly and trashy articles and books about it. Hopefully this is neither of those. The point of this account is not to analyze the ethics or the metaphysics of all this. The main goal is to filter that out and focus mainly on the facts. But there is one piece of the commentary that’s important enough to include.
You could certainly be forgiven for not remembering this, but during the height of the speculation, just after the third body. Several media outlets were doing “person on the street” interviews, getting different viewpoints. Once of them got a comment from an older woman. She looked tired and like she was giving a comment to be polite and not because she had a strong opinion. The reporter asked her, “Do you think they’re moral, these murders?” The old woman gave a long sigh. Then she said, “Is this the rain moral?” You can hear the reporter laugh a little before asking, “The rain?”
The old lady shrugged, “People say ‘Right as rain,’ but is the rain right?” The reporter asked, “What does that have to do with all the bodies though?”
The old lady said, “Do you know what the rain is?” The reporter laughed again, “The rain?” he said, “I mean, doesn’t everybody know what the rain is?”
It’s easy to miss, but a little bit of sparkle came into the old lady’s eye. She said, “Everybody can see when it’s raining, but that doesn’t mean that they know what the rain is. You see, the rain is what happens when there’s too much water in the air. It builds and builds until the world can’t take it anymore, so the sky has to toss it back down on us. And you know what happens to everyone then?” The reporter asked, “What happens?” The lady leaned in, “We all get wet,” and then she just walked off. The interview didn’t necessarily make a huge splash, but it did seem to capture something about the moment. It was refreshing in a way. Almost enough to make you say, “Hallelujah.”//
About the Author
Zeke Jarvis is a Professor of English at Eureka College. His work has appeared in Moon City Review, Posit, and KNOCK, among other places. His books include, So Anyway…, In A Family Way, The Three of Them, and Antisocial Norms. His website is zekedotjarvis.wordpress.com
About the Author
