Displacement (11 page)

I rested my book-bag by the fortified door, opened the top zipper a fraction of an inch, followed her to the kitchen as I heard the faucet shut off.

“I wanted to call you earlier,” she said as she set the kettle on the stove.

“Why?” I asked, when what I wanted to ask was, “
Why didn’t you? And why bring it up, now?
”

“I wanted to see if you wanted dinner tonight.”

“I have to watch what I eat.”

“Oh.”

A pause of a second or two as I smelled fresh coffee, turned and saw the lone espresso she’d made for herself, the still-life with demitasse, book, and lemon rind she’d placed on her fine table to
show
me that I was not worthy of her making a second cup. I glanced to her espresso maker. It had been cleaned and wiped and shoved into the corner by the fridge where she stored it; the coffee grinder was not to be seen, and the counter was still damp and streaked from the sponge that had erased any trace of spilled grounds. Even the paring knife used to cut the lemon rind rested washed and shiny in the drainer by the sink. Her offer of coffee had been a mistake, a loss of her sacred control to fill the silence by the entryway, just as her asking me to light the candle had been a blurted loss of control. I stared at the espresso, at the demitasse that bore no mark of her lip on the rim, the perfect twist of rind that would be the envy of any barista, the book that had been so carefully placed. I felt Catherine’s eyes on me, touching my back as they had while I stared at the melted red candle.

I waited for her slight.

“I crossed out your number in my book. That’s why I couldn’t call.”

“I’m
listed
, Catherine.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I turned as she laughed a pretty little laugh, her almost translucent hand covering her mouth like a geisha’s. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Before, this coffee tableau and verbal exchange would have set my teeth grinding and flurried my guts into self-digestion. Her little attack, her reduction of me to nothing more than an inky smear in her address book . . . a new and living ink, changing color as the red cells within lost oxygen, would be a justified blot to give in return.

We spoke blithering small talk a few moments as the kettle heated, then, in mid-sentence, she walked toward me and took my hand . . . her fingers gently, sensually, caressing my palm. She kissed my lips. Her left hand touched my cheek as she said, “It’s really nice to see you again, Dean.”

“It’s nice to see you, too.”

And then she went to her cupboard, to take down the vacuum-sealed bags of tea.

I know her too well.

This whiff of erotic interlude is bait. I smell it. She wants me to want to sleep with her. She wants me in the whining role of the ex-lover, back for one last meaningful night, so she can have the control of saying, ‘No, Dean. We shouldn’t ruin this.’ While we were lovers, she’d told me about the others she’d turned away like that. It would be her way of having the last word. Before I die.

I know her too well.

Her teakettle is glass. With a rubber fixture on top like a stopper. A hole in the fixture whistles when the water boils.

The water started to boil, a corona of bubbles forming where flame kissed the glass.

It was time. I became what I had to be in that moment. I let it glow out from my bones, with the taste of the cigarette painting my mouth, and the taste of her kiss on my lips.

“Catherine, I have medications in my bag I should be taking now. I need to go get them.”

She smiled sweetly. “All right.”

I went to the door and fetched my clanking book-bag, which smelled of formaldehyde from the place I’d gotten its contents. As I walked to the kitchen, my path knifing through the lies of her home, I pulled the shades of her living room windows. People from the building opposite could see into the kitchen at an angle if a flash of metal or spray of red caught their eyes.

I went to the kitchen doorway and unzipped the bag. The kettle started to whistle.

Now
, God-dammit,
now
, while she faced the stove to turn down the heat.

The rest you know.

—Dean, I believe that just as you outgrew Piggy, you outgrew the need to murder. We should consider the possibility that you didn’t kill Sarah because your need to kill was weakened.

So did he begin to end our Second Act, with a revelation he thought would have a profound impact, the sort of shift intended to make audience members eager to get back to the Third Act after lavatory breaks and smokes under the marquee. A new iteration of
Stop me, before I kill again
. He insulted me by saying my
choice
to kill was a gauche and animalistic
need
.

—If that’s your professional opinion, it should help my lawyer. Will you be paid a stipend, by the way? I’d hate to think you’d waste a day in court for nothing.

—Dean, part of you wanted to be caught.

I had this coming . . . cloaking myself as an archetype, I subjected myself to clichés culled from the fictions that shaped the myths I used.
Part of me wanted to get caught?
A way to give me, a monster, a dusting of pathos. Too bad no beautiful and pure-hearted girl who could have been my salvation had been in my life at the time of my capture, to give my tale a hand-wringing whiff of the tragic. Even if such a Tess Trueheart had been in my life, the hard little stones of rogue cells in my testicles would have made our requisite night of tenderness awkward. And painful.

—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.