Private Midnight

by Kris Saknussemm

  There was a scream in the dark and I jumped. She began twirling—slowly at first—and then faster, the flames rippling off the stuffed pig as she picked up speed, the ghost images flashing and stretching.

  “Before you met your car thief friend Frank, you had another buddy—who did confess his feelings about you. He worshipped you and longed to touch you. To give you what he knew of love. One night he did—and you found it repugnant beyond words. He was trying to please you. But all your frustrated rage, all your accumulated darkness rose up inside you!”

  Her spinning had extinguished the pink burning—the room, if it really was a room we were in, went black. Her voice sunk to a whisper, syncopated like the rattling can.

  “You went on to thrash that boy. You defiled him. You made him want to die. And die he did. Murder? You know how many ways there are to kill someone.”

  “No!” I yelled, my voice seeming both muffled and unbearably loud in the closed-in space. Then there came the sound of Maniacal Laughter.

  Suddenly a white light blazed and a figure appeared, suspended from the noose, chin slumped on one shoulder, eyes bulging. The face bore an impossible resemblance to Grier Woodley. It couldn’t be him and wasn’t him—but I croaked audibly.

  “Beware the Hanged Man, Sunny. Or should I say, the Hanged Boy. Grier Woodley. All men whose heads end up in nooses are boys. But this one is special—because you put him there. Not your father or Jake—or Frank, who was, as you know, as heterosexual and virile as they come. He didn’t have any trouble getting it up at the Mexican whorehouse, did he?”

  “I didn’t!” I wailed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—or how you’re doing this—but it’s all a fake. A lie! I never killed anyone—let alone …!”

  “No?” she scoffed—and her sensual features became a mesh of contempt. Her clothing morphed into the black robes of an Inquisitor and her head seemed to sit upon the draped body with a planetary vastness, like an oversized mask of mealworms. I wanted to faint.

  “Your due process is overdue,” she announced. “Now, you have the right to remain silent. You may invoke your right to have an attorney present, in which case your best advocate is Truth. You have the right to face your accuser, in which case you should examine the face of the boy who strangled to death in a tow rope, kicking when it all became real and final for him.”

  The Inquisitor’s mask shook its terrible, bulbous distortion. Another spotlight came on, sickly green. Fixed in its glare on the floor was a lawn mower.

  “It was in his family’s garage that Grier was found. The carnival had moved on, but the Haunted House had given him an idea. A way out—after what you’d done.”

  “Stop it!” I shouted.

  “You gave him the motive. Didn’t you? You tricked him into being alone with you and then you beat him. You demeaned him. You took his dignity and made him swallow it.”

  “I didn’t do it! He killed himself!”

  “The guilty always protest their innocence, Sunny. Isn’t that the rule you lived by as a police officer? Well, perhaps it’s time to seek some other opinions. You know about Juries of the Dead. You’ve seen them in school plays and on television. I summon now the Jury of Your Dead.”

  A row of spotlights came on—a roll of sheet tumbled down to the floor—and then a strange black blob like a smudged fingerprint began to form.

  “You may have heard of the Rorschach test, Sunny. Patients are shown a set of cards with inkblots on them and asked to describe what they see. A foxlike face, two figures embracing—a sexual organ. But in your case, we already know what you see in every random pattern. You see your own Shadow. And this is the place where the shadows come to life.”

  As she said this, the blurred shape that had formed on the sheet lifted off and moved toward me, as if a figure had stepped through the white membrane, although the fabric remained flat and unbroken. It was someone dressed in a black silk bodysuit. It took up a position facing me, legs spread, hands on hips, its faceless head raised—like some lost letter of the alphabet or an unknown punctuation mark.

  “Behold your father, said to have died falling from scaffolding.”

  “You’re insane …” I choked.

  Another blot formed and a smaller figure emerged the same way. “Your sister Serena, who died mysteriously, falling from a tree house. Or a tree fort as you called it—always defending your terrain. Isn’t it suspicious that she died only a few days before you savaged Grier?”

  “This is a … lie … these …”

  “Silence!” the mask commanded. And another black silk shadow took form out of the sheet. “Your old buddy Frank. The one you wanted in the front seat of a hot car on a back road in Mexico three years after Grier died. To see if what you feared about yourself was true. But you didn’t have the guts and so you stayed afraid, wondering about his death—whether he was really running from the police … or someone else.”

  Two more black inkblot phantoms took form and joined the line. One noticeably female with a full contoured figure.

  “Raven, Freddy Valdez’s favorite whore. And Lenny Bhat—the dealer known as the Mongoose. Did Raven know you shot her because you were jealous of her relationship with Jack McInnes? That you hated her wanting him—but that you wanted him more?”

  “You’re mad!” I cried. Who had she hired to put on this charade?

  “And did Lenny know that you gunned him down because he knew you killed Raven? That it had nothing to do with your partner’s drug money?”

  “Where is Jack?” I demanded. “What have you done with him?”

  “Oh, so concerned. About your partner. Remember those threesomes with you and Raven. An excuse to be with Jack? Three is a crowd in the end. And now, since you think I do things to men, rather than showing them what they’ve done to themselves and others … let’s consider Mervyn Stoakes and Deems Whitney.”

  Two more figures osmosed through the blotted sheet, this time wearing black and red.

  “Here are two men whose deaths you think I somehow caused. And maybe I indirectly did. Maybe they couldn’t handle the instruction I provided. Maybe I am guilty in some way. Do you confront me? Do you officially investigate me? No. You bury your responsibilities. You think letting the matters pass as suicides will please me and will free you to be more open with me. Like every investigation, you hunt when it suits you. And when it doesn’t, you manipulate the evidence and the reports.”

  “That’s a complete lie! I’ve closed more cases—”

  “Enough!” the misshapen mask spat. “There are three more shadows from your past to come forward.”

  The figures that stepped into the light now, one by one, were of different colors, and their suits seemed to change hue as they moved. Two had female outlines. One was missing a leg. I swallowed down a clump of bile and tears.

  “First, your old friend Jimmie. You called him a friend. Did you ever call him a doctor—or offer to drive him to one? For at least a year you worried about his health, but did nothing to help him overcome his fear. To be with him when he needed someone. His business partner did what he could—but he’s not as smart or forceful as you. The truth is he’s slow. You don’t think of yourself as slow. Just slow to help a friend.”

  I did cry then. I should’ve done more for Jimmie. I was the only one who could’ve, maybe even when Camille was alive.

  “And the lovely, lost Briannon,” the Inquisitor’s mask announced. “The girl who shot you because she was in love with you, and who used the speedball you’d given her at the end—to make things end. She couldn’t bring herself to kill you—but she wanted to hurt you—because of the way you’d hurt her. She knew it was never really her that you entered. Never really her when you held her. It was this other … shapely shadow.”

  The other female form stepped forward, the sheer suit shimmering.

  “You don’t think I killed Briannon and … St—?”

  “Where is wayward Stacy now? Where did she go?”

&n
bsp; “You’re way off … I didn’t … I couldn’t …” I stammered. Then I noticed that there was something in Genevieve’s black robed arms. A tiny figure in a pure white stocking suit. Like a perfect little snowman.

  “And this is the son you threw away. Or what he might’ve been if born. He’d be ready to join the wrestling team soon.”

  “Stop this nightmare!” I pleaded. “Please, this isn’t …”

  “You know the cards they use to test ESP, Sunny?” she continued without remorse. “Can you read the minds of the dead?”

  All of the standing figures produced from behind their backs a white card with a black square on it. The white shape she held at her bosom, she threw on the floor. It plopped with an all-too-human sound. And then the body in the noose spoke. The stage make-up was intense. The eyes opaque. The voice clear and actorly.

  “I’m the twelfth in the jury, Birch. I get to cast the deciding vote.”

  I hadn’t heard my real first name in a while. It shocked me back to alertness.

  “I find you innocent. You didn’t kill me. Because you didn’t have the balls. After you’d beaten me—after you made me do what I’d wanted to do—tried to do before—you beat me some more. You had to get the violence out of you. You couldn’t bring it off in my mouth, so you broke my jaw. If you could’ve killed me in that moment and gotten away with it, you would’ve. But no one gets away with anything, and there’s no statute of limitations on disgrace. I did what I had to do after what you did to me. But I get to cast the deciding vote. You’re acquitted.”

  The bodysuited figures turned to look at each other, as in some stylized dance.

  “I forgive you, Birch,” the performer in the noose said, as the rope lowered to the ground and the dangling legs found the floor. “I died in a hot September garage with the smell of blood meal and lawn mower gas in the air. It felt so thick at the end. But you—you’ve been dying every day since. Now all I ask is a kiss. And I forgive you. Just kiss my dead bloated face once.”

  The corpse made up to look like Grier removed the noose and pushed the lawn mower out of the spotlight … inching slowly toward me.

  “Go back!” I shouted. “Or I’ll beat you again!”

  “Just as I thought,” Genevieve sighed, appearing now as she had the first time I saw her. The ashes of rose lounge suit. Brunette-auburn hair.

  “This is—you’re—sick!” I rasped.

  She gave me an armor-piercing stare.

  “But I also heal,” she said. “I’ve opened an old wound, and let you walk around inside. That odor? That’s the smell of the cremation of your boyhood friend, Grier. His parents were too horrified by the effects of the hanging to consent to a burial. And that damp, cold, earthy hint of putrefaction you sense now? That’s what your sister smelled like, the slow, inevitable rot in the decomposing wood of the coffin. Her bones can still be found. But her ghost and Grier’s are alive and unwell inside you. I think you should thank me for sharing them with you, so that you might at last leave them behind.”

  “I’d rather put my head in that noose. This is all lies, except for Jimmie!”

  “Sunny, you’ve had your head in a noose for years. It’s time for you to go home and get some sleep. Come back Monday at exactly 2 PM and we will look to your future. But you must bring me something again. Something you’ve stolen. Now pick up your dead son at least.”

  I stooped to retrieve the white figure from the floor, more entranced by the question of what it actually felt like than because she’d instructed me. I squeezed it and a pink cloud of gas erupted—I felt my legs wobble. The spotlights and the faceless figures all blurred like one big inkblot and I fell over, just the way my sister Serena used to do.

  When I woke up, I was naked and alone in my own bed with Pico. Looking out the window, I saw my car parked outside. There was a text message on my cell. It said, “Monday, 2 PM. Bring me something you have stolen or never, ever return.” I straggled back to the sack, my head whirling, my heart caved in, like a hammer hurled at a sheetrock wall.

  ENEVIEVE IN A STARFISH BLUE SUMMER DRESS AND A French girl’s wide brimmed straw hat. We were strolling hand in hand through Funland, a warm slow purple dusk with the lights of the rides twinkling. Young soldiers in uniform hugging their narrow-waisted girlfriends … heaving baseballs at towers of iron milk bottles or flinging darts at a wall of breast-like balloons. Swing music from the dance hall … the scent of hot pretzels.

  The couples and the peppermint ice-cream faced children wavered like silver gelatin ghosts. Their voices and laughter continued but it seemed to come from a distance. Gradually they began to fade, receding like sweaty handprints on stainless steel.

  She led me behind the skating rink to what appeared to be an old bath-house, built out over the rocks where the seawall would later be. I heard the sad faint harmony of the Andrew Sisters singing “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time” dwindling away with the ping and clank of the rides. Then we were inside the dank smelling baths.

  The only illumination came from candles in hurricane lanterns. There were long copper troughs of trickling water, and a maze of square stone pools with steps cut into the side. Around the edges and all across the slate floor, ancient naked men lounged like reptiles—and real reptiles skittered—frill-necked things and iguanas—while rusted ladders descended into saltwater smelling darkness and iron catwalks extended out of sight, their railings embellished with ultraviolet salamanders.

  From hidden chambers and platforms, and from the depths of the cement pits, there came sighs as in an opium parlor. Genevieve’s dress was gone. She was nude now except for black glass stiletto heels, and as she stepped between the withered reptile men, the more deformed the figures became. Skin scaled … limbs contracting … gills forming. Misshapen heads of bass and sea turtles.

  Water flowed through bars in the wall into a series of pools. Chameleons dotted the stone floor. Faces hung like damp masks from hooks in the wall in the shape of hands—and in the center of the room was what looked like an operating table positioned beneath a skylight.

  “Take off your clothes,” she commanded, and I found myself doing as she directed.

  “Now lie down on the table on your back.”

  I was seized with fear. The sheeted bench beside the operating table was laid out with glinting scalpels and surgical implements—and a single luxuriant peacock feather.

  “What are you going to do to me?” I demanded.

  “Trust me, it’s part of the healing,” she said cryptically. “It’s the most intimate thing that’s ever happened to you.”

  I couldn’t help myself. Intimacy with her was all I wanted. I lay down and looked up. The skylight was shaped like a human figure, radiant, like the reverse of a silhouette. An angel. I felt myself drawn up toward it, as if it were my own outline suspended from the ceiling. My voice was lost in anxiousness as I saw her hands move across the bench of blades. What was she going to do? The terror and the yearning to know was more than I could take. Instead of one of the scalpels, she picked up the peacock feather.

  “Now lie very still,” she whispered. “I don’t want to hurt you. Yet.”

  I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I had to withdraw into my mind. Then I smelled her flesh draw near. I thought maybe she’d exchanged the feather for one of the scalpels because I felt a ripping pain, deeper than anything I’d ever experienced—and yet somehow pleasurable. Beyond pleasure. Like some ecstasy massage. But when I snuck a peek, I saw that the sensation was achieved with the peacock feather alone. Where for a second I thought she was going to castrate me, suddenly I craved the touch of the soft vanes … the simulation of slicing, an incision more extreme for being imaginary. She teased me with the soft feather and I felt every millimeter of skin tingle and wrinkle with the gorgeous agony. She whispered something I didn’t understand—I thought she said, “Now it’s time to cut out the past.”

  The feather stroked the scar where Briannon had shot me, a livid weal. The ridges
of plume triggered a fire of nerve ache and then release. I felt my body go into seizure—the tremor starting deep inside the bullet hole and spreading in vibration after vibration up my spine … into the dead wings of my shoulder blades … and down my legs … burning my toes. The sheet beneath me was soaked, sweat pouring—and something else—a viscous substance like ectoplasm … and out came things I’d had inside in a mess of crystal scales.

  She opened up the old wound and removed a handful of plastic Apaches that I’d once buried in our back yard … and then an Illya Kuryakin Palm Pistol from The Man from U.N.C.L.E show. She pulled out Pabst Blue Ribbon beer bottle caps that used to have little rebus puzzles inside … condoms, cigarette butts and a half-pint of Vat 69. And then she said, “Hold very still, this is going to really hurt.”

  And it did. More than I could believe. It hurt so much I cried out like a baby slapped into breathing air, and then she held up a .25 caliber slug. From a Beretta Bobcat 21.

  “That can’t be!” I moaned. “They pulled it out!”

  “They didn’t remove your sorrow,” she said as she took the slug in her mouth and swallowed it like a Communion wafer. “I have. The memory wound is clean now.”

  I was naked, soaked and limp. She helped me to rise from the table, psychoplasm and sweat shining like a film of respiring algae.

  “Approach the water,” she said, pointing to the pools.

  I stepped … between the chameleons and the lost time trinkets she’d extracted … into the water, as she held my head under. Beneath the surface, I could hear the ticking of the antique French clock that had sat on the mantel in Eyrie Street … and I remembered back to days long ago in the valley … to times before my father died … when we were happy.

  Late August nights, my friends and me, we’d scale the fence and dive in the public pool, the light beneath the springboard undulating like a submarine moon. We’d become shapes, gliding and frogging in the pale green water luminously pleated against the tiles. Tadpoles and torsos jack-knifed, hoarding air to tunnel toward the drain where potato bugs unwrinkled—clawing up through thick bubbles back into the warm air that smelled of chlorine and the trampled weeds in the field that bleed milk when you squeeze them.