This essay by Willem Doherty was the grand prize winner of the Futurist Letters Oneshotted competition, selected by EIC
and guest judge .This piece is free to read without a subscription.
This past summer I hitchhiked across America. In Pennsylvania, I rode with a truck driver from Long Island. He drove a Mack that still had a stick shift. These are the trucks with the giant jutting engine bay and the two exhaust pipes that spit black smoke into the sky above the cab. They are not very common anymore. You have to get a “manual transmission endorsement” on your CDL to drive them. He had a blue one.
“What I like about these,” he said, tapping the knob of the stick shift as we sat in the cab, the engine roaring around us, “Is that you’re not limited. Those trucks”—he pointed to one of the normal, automatic eighteen-wheelers we were passing in the other lane—“have speed limiters. They cap themselves at seventy. But I can go as fast as I want.”
“That’s cool,” I said, nodding. Most of hitchhiking is letting your ride talk.
“You can lose a car under this hood,” he said. “That’s another thing I like about it.” Then he started talking about being a contract killer for the Hell’s Angels.
When I tell people that I hitchhiked, they always ask why. I often answer in a platitude. I wanted to see friends, I say noncommittally, as if hopping into a stranger’s car was the only way to do so. I wanted to travel on the cheap, I say. I wanted to ‘see the country’ in a ‘new way.’
All of these reasons, though, are smokescreens. I wanted to hitchhike because I’m an American, and hitchhiking is an American tradition. I had read the novels and watched the movies and now I wanted to go and live the real life. I wanted to go somewhere weird with someone weird. I wanted to see my nation how it was meant to be seen. I felt, in some strange way, that it was my birthright.
America has other traditions too. Other birthrights. We are a uniquely violent country. America contains less than 5% of the world’s population but houses more than 60% of its serial killers. Mass shootings, too, are our invention. Our murder rates are far higher than our international peers. We kill each other. We kill people we know and people we don’t know. We kill them with cars and guns and with our bare hands. And, because we kill so much, we are also a uniquely paranoid country, a nation of shadowed eyes peeking furtively through window shades to dark and dangerous roads.
While I was traveling, I began to feel that blood was baked into the land, that we do these things to each other because we live in this place and absorb through osmosis its terrible history. I got stuck for hours in towns called names like Checote and Neosho, Indian names, and I couldn’t help but feeling that, by participating in our country’s original sin, my ancestors had performed a blood ritual that they could not fathom the consequences of, and now here we were, looking at each other, all our hands on our guns.
In Arkansas I met a guy named Jesse. He was a big man, bald with patchy traces of a beard in the periphery of his face. When I told him I used to live in New York City, he said that he had always wanted to visit, but never would, because their gun laws wouldn’t let him open carry. He said he always carried. I debated asking him where his gun was. I imagined him popping down the glovebox in front of me and a black pistol sliding out onto my lap. Instead, I asked him about his custom Dragon Ball Z seat covers.
When you imagine an American you imagine them with a gun. You imagine John Wayne killing Indians. You imagine Americans standing in lines and killing each other in fields in Pennsylvania and Virginia and Kentucky, fighting over our other original sin. You imagine Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walking into the library at Columbine on grainy security camera footage.
When I started hitchhiking I promised my mom and my girlfriend that I would send them pictures of the license plate of every car I stepped inside. This made them feel better, but I questioned its usefulness. What were either of them going to do with a license plate? Bring my killer to justice? Find my body? Asking for a VIN felt awkward, and hitchhiking is all about making the other person feel comfortable, so I started to do it only when the driver seemed creepy or weird or whacked out on something. I figured that if somebody wanted to hurt me, they were going to do it. A picture wouldn’t make a difference.
In Plainfield, Illinois, outside Chicago, a guy in a beat-up pickup stopped for me on a highway onramp. The sky was gray; it felt like it was about to rain. He asked me how long I’d been waiting (an hour and a half), then pissed on the tire of an abandoned tractor that was parked on the shoulder. I turned away and watched 55. He wore a bandanna and a fluorescent yellow work shirt. He seemed strange to me, maybe high on meth, so I asked him if I could take a picture of his license plate.
“Buddy, if you want a ride,” he said, “just get in. No pictures.”
I didn’t get in. He drove away. I waited another half hour before a Ukrainian truck driver took me to St. Louis.
Part of the reason I turned that guy down is because I thought I saw a bulge in the back of his jeans. I have a fear of guns. When I was nine, my town suffered one of the worst mass shootings in American history. I went to a different elementary school, so I was spared, unlike some childhood friends of mine, from hearing the gunshots and being made to evacuate past the bodies of children. I remember locking down in music class and staring at the green and white linoleum tiles. I think they were green and white.
I regularly browse the r/MassKillers subreddit. There are three main categories of posts on r/MassKillers:
1. mugshots,
2. tribute posts to the heroes of mass shootings (police officers, good guys with guns, teachers who hid their students, students who held doors open),
3. crime scene photos.
To avoid tripping Reddit’s anti-gore algorithms, these photos are tastefully edited so that the actual bodies are a series of oblong black rectangles. Black rectangles sitting upright against a shelf of library books. Candy red blood sloshing in all directions from black rectangles. A series of black rectangles laid out on green linoleum.
I discovered r/MassKillers because I wanted to see photos of the mass shooting that had happened in my town. I found those pretty quick, and more; photos of my perpetrator staring gauntly into space, photos of his absurdly messy room, memorial posts for victims whose deaths Redditors thought were uniquely tragic. Under every post about my perpetrator are hundreds of comments condemning him, calling him disgusting and inhuman. This, I think, is the pinnacle of virtue signaling: making sure everybody knows that you personally find a mass killer’s actions to be beyond the pale. We know he’s a monster, u/PureHauntings. He killed twenty-six people.
Serial killers and mass shooters are American boogeymen. We have given up on rehabilitating them. They are monsters wearing the flesh of men; strangers that hunt the night. When the parents of mass shooters talk about their children, they often claim not to recognize them. The father of the shooter from my town said, if given the opportunity to see his son again, he “wouldn’t recognize the person I saw. All I could picture is there’d be nothing there, there’d be nothing. Almost, like, ‘Who are you, stranger?’”
When I was hitchhiking, the first question many of my rides would ask me was, “you’re not a serial killer, are you?” I wear gold-rimmed glasses, and I was told more than once I looked like Jeffrey Dahmer. Eventually, I realized that, of the hundreds of people who were passing by me each day, a not-insignificant portion kept going because they imagined me staring into the mugshot camera. I tried to counteract this by smiling and dancing, or falling to my knees in mock-distress when an apologetic-looking car passed me by. Hitchhiking is a highwire social act, where you’re trying to convince a total stranger that you’re trustworthy in three seconds or less. I did it twenty-two times, and it felt like a miracle every single time.
I knew why they were wary. America is a nation of victims. 6.95% of American adults have been at the site of a mass shooting. 21% say they have been threatened with a gun. 17% have witnessed someone being shot. This creates a country of over-the-shoulder-lookers, a citizenry of twitching hands and narrow eyes. When I mentioned to a couple in Pennsylvania that I was going to Chicago, the husband said, with a sharp, pitying laugh, “You know they shoot people there, right?”
Not everybody was so negative. Many people who drove me were excited to hear where I had been and what I had seen. A few of them said that they had always wanted to, gesturing widely to my backpack and my rumpled traveling clothes, “do something like this.” They thought America was a vast and varied place, and that I was going to see it all. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that as a nation we have contrived to flatten this beauty by making every rest stop and highway exit as similar as possible to each other. When I walked into a Love’s after a long ride on the interstate with a trucker, it was always the same Love’s. The soda machine and Five Hour Energies were in the same place. The same hotdogs were spinning on the same rack. The landscape out the window was not a concern; inside, it was always 65 degrees, and a shower was always $15.
Everything looks the same on r/MassKillers, too. Blood’s only referent is time; red when fresh, brown when dried. Even the pre-shooting photos of the killers, which are often posted so that commenters can gawk (“I can hardly believe such a normal-looking guy could be so evil on the inside!”), blend together. Our schools, it seems, were all built according to one master plan, with the same linoleum floors and cinder-brick walls. In my town, they razed the school where the shooting happened and put up a new, state-of-the-art one, complete with so-called “safety features,” like hallways with inbuilt alcoves that first-graders can duck into to avoid automatic rifle fire. In seventh grade, a science teacher at my middle school was arrested for bringing a pistol into the classroom. I remember wondering, in the idle, stupid way kids do, whether he had brought it to shoot us or protect us.
I don’t know if people in other countries worry about serial killers, or if they obsessively check the entrances and exits of their movie theaters, as I do. To me, it feels like a uniquely American tradition, like the Super Bowl. Imagining everybody in your path as a demon in a person’s body. Black pits of eyes behind sunglasses. In Missouri I was picked up by a man with hollow eyes. His car had driven past me ten minutes ago, which meant he had come back for me. I felt a prickle of fear run through my spine and down the backs of my legs. People don’t come back for you unless they have some sort of obsession. I took a picture of his license plate.
He was a nice guy. He told me that God had driven his car onto the rumble strip of the highway after he had passed me, and that he couldn’t ignore that kind of sign, so he took the next exit and came back the other way. Of the reasons people gave for picking me up, a sign from God was a common one.
The farther I went, the less people I saw, and the more I was alone on the side of the road for long stretches of time. In general, you’re not allowed to walk on interstate highways, so often I was stuck on an on-ramp, listening to the traffic dopplering a quarter mile away, pissed as hell that I wasn’t on the road. After the first week, the highway began to sound less like traffic and more like water. I imagined the interstate as a great river that I was throwing myself into every morning. I fell asleep each night in a tent listening to the sound of the river. I did not get much sleep.
One popular historiography of serial killing in the United States is that the phenomenon is a result of the interstate highway system. Previously, disturbed individuals were kept in check by small-town social dynamics: in a town of five hundred, there are only a few true suspects for random killings, and they’re the same weirdos that are already causing problems for the sheriff. But a highway is a portal to a thousand towns where nobody knows your name; towns where people are always going and leaving; towns full of people that federal law enforcement doesn’t care about.
In 2009, the FBI established the Highway Serial Killer Initiative to stem the flow of random killings that occur along our nation’s freeways. The Initiative began after a spate of killings along I-40, in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi. On the map released by law enforcement, these killings blob around Oklahoma, a straight line of victims stretching from Fort Smith in the east to Amarillo in the west.
It was in this stretch of the country, from Fort Smith to Amarillo, that I began to get tired of hitchhiking. It pushed ninety-five degrees each day with no cloud cover. My ears, which I always forgot to put sunblock on, burned and then bubbled with pockets of yellow pus which ran down the sides of my head. I walked through towns whose amenity was a truck stop, where unsmiling children rode in the back of pickups past me. All these towns were the same; all their children had the same face. I did not know then that this stretch of highway had inspired the feds to begin investigating the phenomenon of highway serial killing. I knew only that it was bad country to travel through. Mako sica.
Serial killing seems almost quaint these days, a product of a bygone era. Get your soda the old fashioned way at the fountain, drive up to the local lover’s lane, and get hacked to death. American media has, pushing past the protests of concerned citizens, even commercialized the phenomenon, packaging serial murder into thriller novels and limited series on HBO. We have not narrativized mass shootings in the same way. The egregore that started to emerge after Columbine—deranged teenagers, metal music, video games—has all withered under successive waves of bizarre and motiveless killings which defy all logic and explanation. Our country’s most famous mass murder, the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, was so famously unmotivated that a small internet subculture has become devoted to spreading a copypasta that questions the plausibility of the attack. Mass shootings have become acts of nature; they happen, we wrap blankets around the shoulders of the survivors, and we move on.
I began writing this essay because I thought I could construct a grand theory of American violence, starting from the genocide of the Indians and ending with the mass shooting that happened in my town when I was nine. This, I thought, would provide some understanding of my life so far and my life to come, a scaffolding so that I would not come undone. I looked at the photos of the shooting and I tried to find a poetics to apply to them, some way of making sense of it.
But violence is the end of intent, the end of narrative, the end of consciousness. It is the moment when the psychic turns kinetic. It is viscera on the floor and brains on the whiteboard. It is a math problem. You can predict how blood will spurt if you know the caliber of the weapon the body was shot with. There is nothing interesting about it.
When the trucker in Pennsylvania told me that he used to kill people for a living, I did not react with my face. I stared straight ahead at the road. It was a cloudy day and the sky blended with the highway at the horizon. I looked at the grey matter in front of me and said oh, really, that’s crazy. And after he had finished telling me all the details, I said that I was glad he was out of that life now. It was very important, I thought, that I did not move suddenly, or anger him accidentally by expressing disapproval about his lifestyle. He let me off thirty minutes down the road, near Harrisburg, at a truck stop that he bemoaned used to be full of lot lizards, but was now totally barren. He opened the door for me, because the latch was broken, and told me to be careful, because there were dangerous people out there.
I will never see anybody who gave me a ride again. Often I have dreams where I am back in the passenger’s seat, talking to them, looking out the window, fumbling for the door handle. There are dreams I have where I’m jumping out of a still-moving car into a bank of tall roadside grass, or hiding from headlights in a dead and leafless forest, the light cutting through the bare trunks, the grass like green linoleum. Sometimes I wake up in my bed and in the half-sleep think I have been traveling, that I am in my tent and somewhere else.
But I am nowhere else. I am an American. My family has been here so long we do not know our own ethnicity. I am an American. This country of interchangeable killing floors is mine. This is my birthright. I am an American. There is just one classroom. There is just one movie theater. There is just one road. And I am on the road, and I am asking for a ride.
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