Watch Your Mouth (19 page)

The sheet went down. “Why don’t
you
tell
us?
” Bad Cop said.

I swallowed, my throat empty and wet. “Do you think
I
—”

Good Cop leaned next to me. “We need your help,” he said simply, gesturing around the room with an unstained hand. “We don’t know what to make of this, and you’re the closest thing we have right now to talking to Stephen.”

I looked around the room again, the overturned equipment, the garbage bag. I swallowed. The mud, the sheet. “I’m not very close,” I said.

“Close enough.”
Bad Cop walked over to me so I was between

Good and Bad. “I understand the same exact thing happened to your girlfriend.
His
sister.”

“What?”

“We’ve been on the phone with your rabbi,” Good Cop said plainly.

What? “What?” I said.

“Your—”

“I don’t
have
a rabbi,” I said.

Good Cop sighed and opened his notepad. “In Pittsburgh,” he said. “
Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh. Rabbi Sour—Soar—Rabbi T-S-O-U-R-I-S.”

“Tsouris,”
I said. One quick lesson. “He’s not my rabbi.” Bad Cop looked like he wanted to
make
him be my rabbi.

Good Cop looked like he didn’t care
whose
rabbi he was. He glanced at his notepad again. “He told us what happened at the funeral.”

“What happened to your
girlfriend
,” Bad Cop sneered.

I started to put my face in my hands, except one of them was smeared with mud.
“Nobody,”
I said quietly, “
nobody
knows what happened at the funeral.”

“Cynthia Glass was killed,” Good Cop said quietly. “We know that.”

“And?”
I said.

“And Tsouris isn’t entirely sure you didn’t do it.” “That
I
—?”

“That you attacked her.” Good Cop shrugged slightly. “Look, that’s a closed book. It was raining, and nobody seems to have seen anything clearly. The Pittsburgh police said that Miss Glass was hit too hard for it to have been you. They told you that. You know that. Nobody’s accusing you of anything.”

“I have a theory, though,” Bad Cop said in a kindly tone that was mean around the edges. “That hit-too-hard thing doesn’t mean anything. People have superhuman strength in stressful situations. Strength they didn’t know they had. Like that baby- sitter who dug herself out of the muddy house.”

“What do you mean?”

“You must have read about it,” Bad Cop said tiredly. “The big mudslide, while the parents were at the opera? The baby- sitter, a skinny little thing, dug herself out of a ton and a half of mud, all because of a panic reaction or something. She saved herself when nobody else could.”

“So she’s
alive?
” I said. All my dreams of that girl dying. Don’t

they fact-check the
Bee?

“You could have killed her,” Bad Cop said. “You probably did. I mean, now there’s her brother, dead of the same thing, it looks like. And you just
happen
to live in town. Look, we’re checking out your alibi now, but why don’t you just give it up? There have only been two deaths like this in the universe, and you were poking around both of them!”

“What—” I said.
“What—”
My hand moved on the lab table

and brushed up against something hairy which turned out to be tinsel—some Christmas decoration lost in the fray. I couldn’t choose a question. “What—what alibi? There’s no—I haven’t given you an
alibi
.”

“Lauren did,” Good Cop said. “Bindings.” Sometime, while skipping ahead, I’d picked up a girlfriend along with my job: one-stop shopping. “Like my partner said, you’re in the clear. We just want to ask you a few questions.”

“
You
want to ask
me—
?”

“Down at the station,” he said, and held out a hand to me like we were going to walk hand-in-hand, the end of a romance movie.

“I swear to you,” I said, my mouth dry and crinkled, “I
swear

to you I had nothing to do with all this.”

Bad Cop turned to me, furious. The white-coated mutterers stopped. “You just
happened
to move to his town,” he said, “you just
happened
to live almost across the
street
from where he worked. He just
happens
to die in the
exact same circumstances
as the ones his
sister
just
happened
to die. And when we find you, you just
happen
to be holding a book written by his
fucking father
. Sure, you have
nothing
to do with it.”

It was true. The book was muddied, like everything in the room, but I could see it on the back cover. “A former orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Glass now lives in the Pacific Northwest where he explores issues relating to both our personal and political psyches.” And next to it, the muddied and smiling face of Ben Glass: the
fucking father
.

“God,” I said.

“Only He can help you now,” Bad Cop snarled in perfect character. “Why don’t you tell me again that you have nothing

to do with this, you
shit
? Why don’t you tell me who else did? Why don’t you tell me, if it wasn’t you, what kind of monster could have done such a thing?

“What kind of
monster
?” I repeated, and to my raw and dim horror I heard I was laughing. “What kind of
monster
?” A car- toon pantheon marched in front of my eyes like a Halloween parade, all the monsters: “Wolfman?” I said, and howled like one. My eyes were tearing up, my shoulders shaking. “The Mummy?” I guessed again. “What kind of
monster?
How about
Frankenstein?”

Bad Cop uttered one loud syllable and slapped me on the face just as my tongue was finding the
D
in “Dracula.” My fangs snapped down and I felt my mouth burst into something wet like a red and copper orgasm. I uttered some syllable myself, and spat blood onto Ben’s smile.
“What?”
I said, as Bad Cop stopped his second slap midflight.
“What?”

“You’re
under arrest!
” he said, all biblical thunder. I was still laughing when the sobs came. I had loved Cyn;
loved her
, and now everything was wrecked, raw, wrong. Where could I go?

“Let’s go down to the station,” Good Cop said, gently, and held out his hand to me. I felt my mind splinter at all wrong angles, like a stuck drawer, or a shattered jaw. What was hap- pening here? Could I skip this part, too? What plot twists were encircling me, wringing me out like a rag? The sheet fell back on Stephen’s corpse and I felt, all in a red rush, that I had done these things and then cast myself in an opera where everything was different. How could it be otherwise, with just me, a blot in this perfect universe, like a Christmas decoration up at the wrong time, and another muddy death? What else could have happened? When I opened my eyes Good Cop’s hand was still

waiting for me and I took it after all, grasping his fingers in mine and the book—the one from the bookstore near where Stephen worked, the one written by Stephen’s father, this book which had been there all along, lurking on the horizon like a well-placed prop—in the other. I had nothing else. I let him take me back down the grungy hallways into the squinty day. I got back in the dirty car because there was nowhere else to go. I let the cops take me to the station like it’d been circled on the map all along. And it had. It was the second step:
I had come to believe that only a power greater than me could restore me to sanity
. I knew there were only two things in the world, and I was going with the book. If you didn’t choose semantics there was only nothing. If you didn’t choose semantics there was nothing left.

Step 3

They’d locked me, I think, in a room with a mirror I was pretty sure was one-way. I tried to frame myself in the glass, unconcerned and ready to help. Name:
Joseph Last Name Changed
. Age: Too old to be living in suburbia as a kid and too young to live there as an adult. Address: Stopped chewing on the pen as I wrote it in. Eyes:
brown,
and untrustworthy. Hair: just
brown
. Official Statement: state in your own words what happened, officially. This is for the official record. Already re- dundant, already, and I hadn’t started.

The last time I had written an Official Statement it was for the Mather Undergraduate Application, earnest and extracur- ricular so I could get there and have sex without any parents walking in. I couldn’t imagine what they wanted now.
I met Cynthia Glass in the fall of several years ago. We had a relation-

ship for the duration of the school year. In June we drove to Pitts- burgh
—I went back and added in
Pennsylvania—where we were both to work at Camp Shalom, a Jewish day camp. We both lived at her parents’ house on Byron Circle. I had only been there a few days when I began to suspect

What next? I paused and locked eyes with my reflection, probably with a growling Bad Cop, too, sipping from a Sty- rofoam cup all frayed at the rim with his impatience. How come I could imagine each tiny piece, sprinkled on a worn wooden table like stage snow, and not finish the sentence in front of me?

—that the family was having a lot of problems. I tried to tell

myself it was all in my imagination, and maybe it was. Then Mimi, Cynthia’s mother, got very sick, and that only added to the troubles between everybody. Then she died. At her funeral,

At her funeral what?
Breaking the SPELL
had taught me that regardless of how I felt about myself, I was a strong, creative individual. But if the figure lumbering out of the riverbank was my creativity, that meant that Stephen’s gaping jaw, accordi- oned arms—
that
was my strength. What had happened at the funeral? What was happening now?

“How we coming?” Good Cop said, opening the door and leaning in. Wasn’t locked.

I looked down at the Statement. Rows of blank lines lay there like bleachers, waiting for me to finish. “I’m having difficulty.” Good Cop sat down beside me, plunking his Styrofoam cup down next to the empty ashtray that would soon be brimming with butts, lit by the interrogating bulb, if this had been written by the man who invented two guys coming through the door with guns. “Then why don’t you just talk to me, instead of

writing all this out?” he asked. “Just tell me the story any way you feel like it.”

“I don’t,” I said quietly, “feel like telling it at all.”

He sighed, and his eyes flickered from me to the mirror, be- hind which I could picture Bad Cop draining his coffee in frus- tration: “
He
doesn’t
feel
like telling it!”

“I know you don’t,” he said, “but you gotta understand, Jo- seph. Pittsburg’s pretty quiet. We don’t usually have murders here at all. Somebody holds up a gas station maybe, or kids and graffiti. Somebody gets drunk and kills their husband. I’ve never seen anything like this, though. A guy with his body all twisted and covered with mud in the middle of some science lab— nobody has. Nobody except, guess who, the police in the other Pittsburgh. And that turns out to be the
sister
. Now nobody saw what happened to your girlfriend except a rabbi who seems— well, a rabbi, and her father, who’s holed up in the Eureka woods somewhere, we’re trying to find out. And
you
. And look at you—you’re living in the same town as the brother and you’re reading the father’s book, now you can understand that we need to ask you some questions.”

“I know how it looks,” I said, “but I—”

“And I know you have an alibi with the bookstore and every- thing, but from what we hear this Lauren girl is also your girl- friend, so it’s not exactly an airtight alibi, all right? She might be covering for you.”

“But I
swear
to you I—”

“—was doing inventory, I know, but
look.
I have to tell you that anything you say may be used in a court of law, you know, but you have to help me here. I look at you and I can’t picture

you barging into the Morrison Lab, late at night, with a ton of clay, and ripping that boy apart, even if your girlfriend would agree to swear, by penalty of perjury, that you were really doing inventory. It doesn’t make sense. And a big college boy like you could get a lawyer who would make everybody
see
it doesn’t make sense. That’s why you’re not in jail, and why you’re tech- nically free to leave whenever you want. But tell me what’s—
what’s going on
. What
is
this?”

“What did the rabbi say it was?” “You don’t want to know.”

“A monster, right?” I said quietly. I looked down at the Of- ficial Statement and saw that it had blurred, the ink smearing beneath my palms. “Isn’t that what he said?”

“He said he wasn’t sure.” “But a monster, right?” “He said he wasn’t sure.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Of course not. You can’t be
sure

about—”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened that summer? From the beginning. Or however you want.”

“I met Cynthia Glass,”
I read,
“in the fall of—”

“Just tell me about the
summer,
” he said, “when you were living there. What happened? I mean, she died, the mother, right, but what
happened?
”

“An opera,” I said, “a melodrama.” And now, I didn’t add, it was a monster movie:
You gotta believe me, Sheriff! Big and clay and coming this way!
“The Glasses—they—everybody was sleep- ing together. I think. I’m pretty sure. I mean, it doesn’t really mat- ter, does it? Whether they were or I just
thought
they were—”

“It matters a
lot,
” Good Cop said. “Where’d you get the idea it doesn’t
matter,
for chrissakes?”

“A book,” I said, and then I remembered. Sheepishly. “From the father. Dr. Glass.
Ben.
”