I don’t answer him.
“That actually proves you’re not dumb at all, Joe,” he says, carrying on, and he’s really warming up now, really hitting his stride. He even unlocks his fingers. “Actually proves the opposite. That you’re smart. That’s what this test was designed to do. That’s why it’s full of stupid questions.” His smirk turns into a full-blown smile. “You’re smart, Joe, not brilliant, but smart enough to stand trial.”
He opens his briefcase and puts the questionnaire inside. I wonder what else is in there. It’s a nicer briefcase than the one I used to own.
“Joe is smart,” I say, and I put my big goofy smile on, where all my teeth show and my face lights up. Only these days it doesn’t light up as much. The scar running down the side of it tightens and my eye droops a little.
“You can cut that bullshit now, Joe. The test proves you’re not as smart as you like to think you are.”
My smile drops away. “What?”
The shrink’s smile widens and I think that’s because he thinks I’m not getting his point, and I’m not, and that’s because he’s not making it. “It was a time test. It helps weed out the guys not smart enough to pretend they really are that dumb.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s the only genuine thing you have told me,” he says. He stands up and walks to the door.
I turn in my seat, but don’t stand up. I can’t, because of the cuff.
He reaches out to knock on the door, but holds back. Instead he turns toward me. I must look pretty confused, because he goes ahead and explains it. “It was a time test, Joe. Sixty questions. It took you fifteen minutes. That’s four questions a minute. Each one of them you got wrong.”
“I still don’t follow,” I tell him. Surely it’s a good thing that I can be that dumb that quickly.
“You got them wrong too quickly, Joe. If you were as dumb as you wanted us to think, you’d still be doing the test now. You’d be drooling over it or licking the pages. You’d be thinking really hard searching for the answers. You didn’t search at all. You just answered each one in quick fire succession and that’s where you went wrong. You’re no idiot, Joe, but you were too dumb to figure out what was going on. I’ll see you in court.”
“Fuck you.”
He smiles again. His thousand-dollar smile that he’ll practice before being called up to speak in front of a jury, the thousand-dollar smile that won’t be worth a cent after I get out of here and learn where he lives and take that nice-looking briefcase off him. “That’s the Joe everybody is going to see,” he says, and then he knocks on the door and is escorted outside.
Chapter Three
It’s almost been a year since I was arrested. It’s felt longer. Every day for about a month I was the headline news. There were photos of me on every front page across the country. I even made some front pages around the world. Some were my ID photo from work; some were pictures of me younger, provided by schools I had gone to; and many were of me being arrested and many more were of me coming out of the hospital. Those of me being arrested were all snapped on cell phones. Those at the hospital were taken by reporters who arrived while I was still in surgery. Of course I was on TV a lot too. Footage from the same two events.
There were requests for interviews that I wasn’t given the chance to accept or turn down. One week after the surgery I stood up in court and pled not guilty and was denied bail and was told a trial date would be set. Photos and footage were taken of me there too. My face was red and puffy, the eyelid purple, there were stitches and patches of ointment and I could hardly recognize myself.
Then I started making the news only once a week. Other killers came and other killers went, taking up the headlines as more blood was spilled in the city. Then I was yesterday’s news, a mention of me perhaps once a month—if that.
Now the trial is less than a week away, and I’m the headlining act once again.
My arrest set a chain of events into motion. Actually, those events started two days before my arrest when the police figured out who they were looking for. Of course you could even say that chain of events was put into motion the night I met Melissa. I met her in a bar. We got on well. I was walking her home thinking how nice it’d be to see her naked and perhaps with a few twisted limbs and definitely some blood too, only she was thinking how nice it’d be to tie me up and rip apart my testicle with a pair of pliers. She was the one who got her wish because in the bar she had figured out who I was. She tied me up to a tree in a park and while she clamped the pliers on my testicle and squeezed, I could do nothing but wish for death. Her death, at first, and then my death.
Only it didn’t work out that way. Instead she tried to blackmail me for money, then I filmed her killing Detective Calhoun, and then we fell in love. Opposites attract—but so do people who enjoy hurting others.
I made my way home, and that week Melissa kept showing up at my apartment to help me. At least I thought it was her who had come to help me. I was out of it most of that week, delirious. Half the time my head was full of bad dreams and the other half even worse dreams. It turned out I was wrong about who was helping me. It was Sally that had come to my apartment, not Melissa. Fat Sally. Simple Sally. And in the process of helping me, Simply Fat Sally, or, The Sally as I now think of her, had seen some things she shouldn’t have. The Sally had touched a parking ticket I had hidden away, a parking ticket I had hoped to use to frame Detective Calhoun for murder. Only the card had her prints on it too, so the police came to her house, and the rest, as they say, is one fucking annoying history.
So the chain of events was started. The police went to my apartment on a Friday night, only I wasn’t there. I was with Melissa. They searched it and found a whole bunch of stuff that wasn’t too helpful for my cause. Then they waited for me, and I didn’t show up, and then they decided that I had run. Only I hadn’t. I came home on the Sunday morning and there was one police unit waiting for me. They radioed in, a minute or two later there were a dozen. I pulled a gun. I tried to shoot myself. The Sally stopped that from happening. She jumped on me and pulled the gun away.
From there I was taken to the hospital. I started making the news. Then I began to experience loss. I lost my freedom. I lost my job. I lost my cat. It was a cat I had found weeks earlier that had been hit by a car. When I made the news, the vet who had taken care of that cat recognized me, and they came and picked it up. I lost my apartment. My mom started getting interview requests, and my mom would say all sorts of weird shit. Life moves on for everybody on the outside, but inside these walls life feels like it’s come to a standstill. If anybody ever wants to know how twelve months can feel like twelve years, all they have to do is get arrested for murder.
My prison cell makes my apartment look like a hotel. Makes my mom’s house look like a palace. Makes the interrogation room look like an interrogation room. It makes me miss all of those places. It’s one room that’s about twice as wide as the bed and not much longer, and the bed I have isn’t that big to begin with. A real estate agent would call it cozy. A funeral director would call it roomy. I got four concrete block walls, one of them with a metal door stamped into the middle of it. No real view to talk of, just a small slot in the door that looks out to more concrete and metal and other cell doors if you can get the angle right. It’s a neighborly kind of place because there are people in cells to my left and right, people that won’t shut up, people who have been in here a lot longer than I have and who will continue to be in here long after I’ve been found not guilty.