Voices.
Hey killer what you got in that bag is it my true love’s head?
I don’t listen. I maintain a straight face. I keep my expression straight and true, like a well-groomed garden. I want to get out of here and I need to look right.
The guard is silent.
A security check-point and we wait to be buzzed through. Something stinks of sweat and vomit and I have a pretty good idea it’s me. Now I catch a muddy glimpse of myself in a bank of plexiglass and baby I’m a fright. Bruises and black streaks on my face and scarecrow hair. I touch my face and remember lying in the street, bloated and damp and I have to say my hat’s off to that bouncer. He bounced me good.
The guard deposits me in another small, windowless room. He tells me to shut up and wait, as if I have a choice. I sit at a scarred wooden table and flash back to the interrogation room back at the Denver P.D., not to mention a thousand and one poorly drawn rooms from the movies and television. I have been on both sides of the table and I know that interrogation is a pretty simple game of rhetorical hide and seek. The results are written in advance, like the streaming threads of fate, but however you arrive there the scene is bound to be ugly, and numbingly tedious, poorly designed and self-consciously acted.
Even so. I didn’t kill anyone and I want to see the sun today. I want a cigarette. There are right answers and wrong answers. The right answers will get me out of here. The right answers will put me on the street with the other humans. The wrong answers will get me a shot of Thorazine. I think of my neighbor, the one tormented by Jeremiah and I wonder if I should present myself as a paranoid Christian. A lot of good it’s done my neighbor.
The first cop is a short white guy, heavy and morose, with a bad mustache. It droops down over his lip and his tongue darts in and out as if to taste it. He adjusts his belt and gun and crotch and belly and heaves himself into the chair across from me, sighing. The second cop is small and pale. He doesn’t look like he weighs more than 140 or so and his hair and skin are the same pale beige color and basically he has a lot to overcompensate for and I have a feeling he’s as mean as he can be. He stands against the back wall, silent and staring.
Name? says the first cop.
Phineas Poe.
Middle initial?
None.
Interesting.
Is it?
Phineas Poe, he says. Formerly of the Denver P.D., Internal Affairs Division. He spits out these last eight syllables like bad meat.
Long time ago, I say. Hell of a long time.
Do you know why you’re here?
What’s your name? I say.
He stares at me. He stares at me for a while and I wonder if he’s counting to ten. His tongue darts out again, pink and terrible. That mustache truly bothers me and I try not to look at it. I realize that I have made a mistake. Questions will only make these guys angry. Your lines are already written so just spit them out in the proper order and everything will be fine. I tell myself to sit up straight. I try to indicate by my expression that I’m an okay guy. I’m intelligent and cooperative and respectful and all that shit but I don’t really think my face can handle so much at once. I glance at his pale little partner and he’s licking his lips, as if he just can’t wait for me to say the wrong thing.
Where are my manners, says the first cop. My name is Captain Kangaroo.
I tell myself to shut up, shut the fuck up. Don’t breathe.
But it’s like I have a manic little butterfly in my mouth, dying to get out. I shoot a glance at the pale little cop and I say it. I just say it.
I guess that makes you Mr. Green Jeans, I say.
He smiles at me and his teeth are the same shade of beige as his hair and skin.
Again, says Captain Kangaroo. Why are you here?
Because of a misunderstanding?
A misunderstanding.
That’s right.
I see. What did you do tonight?
Nothing interesting, I say.
He yawns. Tell us anyway.
I had a couple of drinks at a place called Mao’s. Then I wandered down the street and immediately got my ass handed to me by a very unfriendly bouncer. Then I woke up here.
I guess you’re harmless, says Captain Kangaroo. I guess we should let you go.
The two of them stare at me and I just feel weary.
I know that I have a role to play here, I say. But I just can’t do it.
What? he says.
Why do we have to dance around this fucking bush? I say. The guard told me I’m charged with murder. Why don’t we talk about that?
Are you suicidal? says the pale cop.
I don’t think so.
Do you ever entertain suicidal thoughts?
Of course.
How often?
I entertain such thoughts every day. Don’t you?
No.
I think it’s normal.
It’s not normal.
Define normal, I say.
The pale little cop begins to whistle tunelessly. His partner sighs and looks at his watch. The pale cop sits down for a moment and takes off his left boot, which is an imitation leather Teddy boy boot that zips up over the ankle. He comes around the table, still whistling and walking funny because he only has the one shoe on. He smiles and shows me the boot, like a salesman. I look at it politely. Then he bashes me in the head with the heel of the boot and I feel something in my neck pop.
Normal, he says. There’s no such thing.
No such thing, says the Captain. He speaks in a numbing monotone.
That’s why we have crime in this country, says the pale cop. Because nobody feels normal and nobody wants to be normal.
There’s blood in my mouth. I swallow it.
Philosophy, I say. To be normal is to be dead.
Exactly, he says. And you’re about one smart answer away from another bump on the head.
You call that a bump?
Okay, says the Captain. This is boring the shit out of me.
He tosses an envelope on the table. The envelope contains crime scene photographs. I look at them one by one and they’re pretty bad. There’s so much blood I don’t recognize the girl at first. But it’s the yellow-faced girl I saw shitting on the street. Dead from every angle. Her skirt up around her waist and her pretty legs spread wide. It looks like her head was just about cut off. The last photo is a grim shot of her blackened fingers clutching what looks like a bloody five-dollar bill. I stare at her fingers until the scratches she left on my wrist begin to throb. There is something different about her and I realize it’s her hair. The girl shitting in the street had stringy brown hair like she was already dead, but in these photos she’s wearing a frizzy black wig.
That’s odd, I say. It sounds terrible as soon as it comes out of my mouth.
Odd? says the pale cop. I take it you’ve seen her before?
She’s wearing a wig, I say.
The pale cop shrugs. Her natural hair was falling out.
Captain Kangaroo tosses another photo on the table, a Polaroid. I reach for it, then pull my hand back. I can see from where I’m sitting it’s a picture of a Japanese fighting knife that’s been dipped in blood and looks a lot like mine. I look at the Captain. He yawns and his tongue flicks out to taste the mustache.
I guess I want a lawyer, I say.
The pale cop flashes his brown teeth. I’m sure one will be provided for you, he says.
Another guard comes to take me back to my cell. He informs me that I can see my lawyer in the morning, before I’m arraigned. His words sound so strange. I wonder exactly how many courtroom movies and television dramas I have seen in my lifetime. I sit on my rubber mat and watch the water rise around me. I wonder if anyone has ever died by drowning in jail. My neighbors have become moody and silent, which makes me lonely. I contemplate my situation and it seems pretty clear to me that I’m fucked. The girl in the street was apparently killed with my knife. The medical examiner will find bits of me under her fingernails. The black wig she was wearing will turn out to be Veronica’s, the whore from the Paradise Spa, and even though I never came, the wig will no doubt have traces of my semen in it. What else. That’s enough, isn’t it. They don’t need much else.