Stories From the Plague Years (13 page)

—Which part wanted to be caught? The part with cancer, or the healthy part?

—The part that orchestrated your capture.

There are moments in theatre, like that in which Macduff states that he was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped, when a wave of silence spreads from the stage over the audience. Such a moment should have washed over my senses in that moment. Instead, I glimpsed a silence in my sight, as all traces of Doctor Johansson’s phantom pipe smoke refracted out of visibility.

—Have
you
considered therapy, Doctor?

—You ensured you’d be seen killing Catherine, and that the police could get to you.

I had a violent insight to what Keene must have felt as broken glass arced into his neck: the imposition of a fiction that I didn’t write over my reality.

Doctor Johansson read the doubt in my face, reached for a file, opened it. If he did so for the sake of having another prop to hold along with his pipe, I can’t say.

—It’s here, Dean. About the cat and the dog you killed, the window you. . .

—
What
cat and
what
dog?!
I’d never kill an animal
!

I’d crashed back down when the inches of slack on my chains pulled taught before I realized I’d shot up my chair. The glass-sharp geometry of Doctor Johansson’s clinical reality snapped, and the room took an iron solidity, so harsh and unyielding that my sight cracked on it.

Doctor Johansson went on, looking to the police file . . . the talisman of papal infallibility, of unimpeachable expositional fact that challenged me to throw my sanity against it.

—There are the shades you left up so you’d be seen killing Catherine, the door you cracked open so the police could get in easily. I can use all this to your advantage, Dean, if you’ll admit doing these things.

My twin’s gaze pressed on me, as if I stood on stage (playing the role that would one day be his) and had forgotten my lines. The urge to ask him for prompts from the wings twitched in my throat, even as the lens that was his surrogate eye fed on me.

—I’ve admitted
murder
to you. What I’ve told you will get me lethal injections in most states. If what you say made any sense, I’d admit it.

—The police were in the building when you killed Catherine. You brought them there by killing the pets of the couple in apartment 103. You left a kitchen knife with your prints on it. . . .

My lungs felt full of wet sand.

—Why would I waltz into a building to kill someone while there’s a cop car in front?

—You wanted to be caught. And even if the sight of the car would have driven you away, the car could have, should have, pulled up while you were in Catherine’s apartment. The police were a few blocks behind you. You timed it that way. You knew when that couple would come home and find their pets. You knew their routine. The building manager recognized your mug shots. He’s certain you’d been casing the building.

—That’s not what happened. Not that way.

My simple statement was like a small verse in a whirlwind. I’ve been telling the truth to this man and now he tries to entrap me? With a facile twist on the good cop/bad cop treatment? Or was I mad? Were the
fictions
that defined Doctor Johansson’s world corrupting my existence and my mind? In their training, forensic shrinks and profilers such as he use novels and drek thrillers as textbooks. Men who look for the
leakage
of sadistic fantasies in the behaviour of those whom they hunt and treat themselves have intellects shaped by fantasy. Were Doctor Johansson’s fantasies, the ways in which he read them, the ways in which they sculpted his mind, crushing the reality I’d crafted out of the same stone?

—It’s the only way you could have been caught. Police in three states had no idea that one person had done what you’ve done. You surrendered yourself. You knew you’d be seen with Catherine through the window. You knew once the call to the police was made, the dispatcher would put the officers in 103 in direct contact with the person making the call.

—I made sure the door was bolted, that the shades were drawn. I had three escape routes worked out, I had . . .

No
. . . this will stop, now. To control a fiction, one can stop reading it. I’m not going to act crazy, prodded like an ant in one of my chalk-circle arenas to participate in its own destruction. I won’t deny these things like a character in a horror comic, blithering to his shrink:
But, ya gotta BELIEVE ME, Doc!
I willed my body slack, took a deep breath, forced clean air where wet sand had been. The gaze of my twin (whose face I’d never see, even as he lifted a mask of my face to his own in order to play me) watched me with sight that had changed over the span of the last few heartbeats. It felt cold as winter runoff in a gutter.

—I have no recollection of the things you say I’ve done. What you’re saying is fantastic to me. I don’t believe the circumstances of my arrest were as you say they were.

He wasn’t buying it. I wouldn’t have, either.

—I believe that’s what you believe.

—That’s all I can ask of you. You’ve given me something to talk over with my lawyer.

—How?

—If he thought me in control of my faculties, he’d have told me what you have just now. That disappoints me. I thought he and I had an understanding.

—Would you kill him for such a betrayal?

—No. It was a professional decision on his part, I’m sure. There was no malice behind it. And his betrayal could only have occurred after my getting cancer. He couldn’t have contributed to my death if I was already dying. You can take that as a diminishment of my need to kill if you wish, Doctor.

I sighed, glanced to the barred window high on the western wall. I saw a bird fly past the beginnings of an October sunset, and ached to be outside, walking the countryside near the facility, feeling leaves crunch underfoot, sipping autumn air. I was aware of a weight behind me, as if I sat near a great spur of granite. All that had been a
stage
in my perceptions dimmed to shadow cloaked by shadow. My twin left us. The biting gaze of the lens numbed itself. This Second Act wound down yet further to blackout. I suddenly missed my twin . . . he who would one day place me into the mythology I’d tapped by playing me on film. His companionship had blunted what I’d felt rising like floodwater behind me . . . the madness of this institution.

—Do you want to stop, Dean?

Lord, I’m so very tired, exorcising a lifetime of demons . . .

My mind felt like a sore muscle, from the strain of carrying so long and brutal a performance this day, and from bearing the level of erudition Doctor Johansson had foisted upon me. My catharsis was a labour for me, as an actor and as an audience. Doctor Johansson had entered my fictions, and in so doing, had set aside his professional decorum at the threshold of my realm the same way that knights had once set down their weapons on the thresholds of cathedrals. I had determined the determining course of his questions. He’d placed on my shoulders the task of being the sophisticated killer, since monsters such as I must be dark and fascinating mirrors. It is that dark otherness that flatters those to whom I speak.

Because who wishes to speak to a common killer? To a thug with a tire iron, or a semi-literate shit with a gun? Or a bastard who beats his wife? To be an adequate mirror, even for a bureaucratically commissioned shrink, I had to be brilliant in the way that Doctor Johansson wished me to be, even if he was unaware of that wish. The wish is born of the same vanity that drove him to steer our sessions the informal way they have gone, and it is the same vanity of which my victims partook. I flattered them in death, and thus did they participate in their murders. Only a person of great worth and importance can be killed in such Gothic ways by a brilliant fiend such as I have become . . . such as they conscripted me to be. Vanity has been my prime weapon, more lethal than any machete or gun. I completed their desired reflected images of grandeur by killing them. The strain of being a mythic thing of brilliant darkness for a man as intelligent as Doctor Johansson has left me hollow. To be a mirror requires a kind of silence past speech that is exhausting to maintain. Yet the catharsis of our theatre was so very worth this exhaustion.

—I would very much like to stop, please.

Doctor Johansson pressed a button on his desk intercom. After a moment I heard the door behind me open. He collected his files into one stack, drawing our curtain closed and drawing his mind closed, making it pedestrian and small before my eyes with visible relief. This day had been hard for him, too. The mask of the clinician/priest can be heavy as a crown.

—Will we continue tomorrow, Doctor?

The guards, some subset of County Deputies, to be precise, tended to the padlocks on the chains that hung off me. Doctor Johansson and I paid them no mind, as we would bus boys clearing salad plates.

—Tomorrow I’d like you to have a physical. The judge will want to know what your medical needs are.

My chair was surrounded by walls of flesh in grey and blue uniforms. My feet and hands were still chained in an X formation, bound by another chain around my waist. It amused me, the precautions they took. As if I were some kind of transcendently superhuman fiend. Dangerous for them to think so. Maybe their belief in my monstrosity would allow me to snap the chains and overpower them.

I groaned as I stood up, icy pinpoints boiled in my legs, and a charley horse clenched my left hip.

As the Deputies positioned themselves to herd me to my cell, I asked, —Doctor, in light of all I’ve told you, and the grief I’ve spared the taxpayers by being up front, would it be possible for me to have a bath tonight? Not a shower, but a long soak?

—I’ll see what I can do.

—Thank you.

I turned and let the Deputies usher me offstage. The mirror did not applaud, which may have been rude, or reverently polite. It was disorienting to walk again, as if I’d just snapped from a troubling dream. Fog pressed the corners of my vision.

A draft eddied around me as I clanked to the hall, whispering against the base of my skull, the exposed parts of my wrists, even my ankles. I realized I’d worked up a clammy sweat in Doctor Johansson’s office. Maybe the cold was the absent gaze of my twin, which, like the warmth of a hand placed on a wrist for a long while, leaves its ghost wrought under the skin.

The steps of the Deputies were soothing on the linoleum floor. Their silence was a testimonial to their fear of me, more than were the chains. They joke with others as they shuffle them to their cells, so they’ll be well thought of in the event of a hostage taking. Killers they find vile they are overly civil with, like the finest of British butlers: a way to mask their urge to kill them as they would mad dogs. I think they said nothing to me out of fear I’d walk into their minds and wreak havoc there.

The quiet, defining itself by my escorts’ heavy treads, made what screamed in my mind seem all the louder: the inverse of an echo. A ghost of a sound that strengthened to become what had first been echoed. It built to something like the shriek of a pavement saw. Yet layered, verbalizing the gibberish of shattered minds, taking knotted cadences as my escorts walked me through checkpoints of steel mesh and sliding iron doors. I’ve tread the deepest dreams of my victims; the clawing thoughts of madmen are audible to me. I feel how they can make their own invisible yet unyielding walls. They press against the walls of this prison, as if trying to crack the cinder block from within.

From the final checkpoint we entered the purest expression of Hell I’d ever know, beyond the imaginings of Goya or Bosch, because it was so mundane. We entered a world of unspeakable ugliness (unspeakable, in that it does not allow itself to be expressed, like the desperation in the eyes of people on city streets) where footsteps on concrete thunder through the corridors, where the fear-scented shouts of the damned and the criminally insane hang like smoke from a fire of damp leaves and coat your mouth with the stink of zoo animals and of psycho-pharmaceuticals sweated through the pores of lunatics. These are men enslaved by their fantasies, too cowed by them to master and use them. These are men twice-maddened: upon being locked here, they snap again for want of a way out such as I carried in me, a malignant key that grew more cells by the hour.

The hallway of cells that do not liberate is long and very tall, a lampoon of a cathedral in industrial drab.

My fellow inmates are psychopaths who’ve taken axes to families as they slept, child molesters who’ve taken rusty knives to their victims’ genitals, compulsive cop killers and other throwbacks whose minds have never risen above the reptilian. I enter their fever-wakened dreams as I walk the corridors with my escorts.

Some men hoot and call from their cells, not out of malice toward or even interest in me, but to make desperate sounds of defiance, to shake the world awake from the dreams that have made them brutal. Theirs is the brutality many can smugly glimpse through psychology texts, the reports of social workers watered down in newspapers, and in grainy films shown in the grey-shadowed altars of sociology seminars.

Many here resent me. Media coverage has made me a celebrity. They know I’ll leave a mark on the fictions I have harnessed. Killers based on me, invented by writers I’ll never meet, will be my sons for years to come. My fellow inmates will leave no such legacy.

They yell, their voices booming then fading as I pass.

—HEY! Garrison!!

—Hey!! We got a
superstar
, here!

—Say, Dean old buddy!! Can I play you when they make a TV docu-drama aboutcha?

I feel oddly close to my father as I hear them. For they, barking their derisions at me, whistle up from the dust the derisions of their own parents, who had so lovingly crafted the sadisms that defined the crimes of their sons.

They’re crazy fucks. Every one of them. Animals. Even the ones who don’t shout still yell with their deadly silences. Their voices are quiet, yet their eyes are glassy with fury so deep and black your own mind can become lost in their shattered gazes.