Private Midnight

by Kris Saknussemm

  My earnest host took an openly deep breath at this, crossing and uncrossing his legs.

  “That must have been … a very difficult thing … to witness.”

  Witness. Another name for spying. He wouldn’t have lasted one day on the job.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, stroking my hair in time with him. “It was even more difficult because my Dad wore a hard hat to work. He could sink a nail faster than you can log onto your computer. I knew what I was doing—but I didn’t know anything. I was a kid.”

  “Did he … ever …”

  “No! He was a good dad. He never touched me that way ever. He kept that all bottled up and ready to shoot out for others.”

  “But you carry the scars.”

  “You don’t carry scars,” I said. “You wear them—like clothes that always fit, whether you want them to or not. I’m sorry he died. I loved him, even though he lied and lived a lie. He tried his best to make it true. And I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies over the years. I don’t like to think what his must’ve looked like. That I didn’t look at. But I know that what happened would’ve happened whether I was there or not.”

  “And how did it affect you? Did other people know?”

  “About him screwing younger guys up the rear? My mother knew, well before my little offering, I’m sure. My sister, sort of. I always thought other people did too.”

  “Did you worry what they would think of you?”

  “I later beat a sissy from my school who’d come onto me. Soon after, he hanged himself in his parents’ garage.”

  Shit, he wasn’t sure how to take this, and I thought maybe I’d swamped him. But he recovered.

  “Tell me about your sister.”

  “She was two years older than me. She died three days before my attack on the other kid. She was an epileptic. It made her shy and sort of immature.”

  “How did she die?”

  “I invited her up to the tree fort. Dad had built it for us back when we were little. When Mom got remarried, we rediscovered it. My friends and I went up there to hang out and read Playboys. Then one day a girl came along—and her brother. A couple more kids.”

  “And you included your sister?”

  “We had a complicated relationship. I was jealous of her because she got special treatment, and she didn’t always treat me nice.”

  “So …” he struggled. “W-was there some kind of game? A sex game maybe—with others—your friends involved? And it went wrong?”

  “That’s one way to put it,” I replied. Maybe he had some cop in him after all.

  “Is it the right way to put it?”

  “Don’t know. Didn’t know then. Less sure now. I was just trying to lose my cherry—to bust my nut like a guy should do. I’d like to think it was something innocent that happened to Serena—and she just had a seizure and fell. But we all want to be innocent, don’t we?”

  “No, Mr. Ritter,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s strangely not true. And I’d actually think you’d know that. Some people—in fact all of us at some point in our lives—want to be guilty. We want to be judged. And we want to be punished.”

  Damn me, I was starting to like him a bit. He was on a roll.

  “Oh, there are lots of times—maybe most times—where we try to get away with things. But sooner or later a situation comes up where we judge ourselves, for whatever reason. We find ourselves guilty and we want the larger world to reach the same verdict. We’re all quite capable of sentencing ourselves much more punitively than any court or parent—or even God, if your belief inclines that way.”

  “You may be right,” I sighed. Then I paused, letting him savor that little speech before I started in on the real issues. What was the point of talking to him, if I didn’t fuck him up?

  “How much would you say I weigh?” I asked at last.

  “Oh,” he pondered. “Maybe 170 pounds.”

  “What would you say if I told you only a few days ago I weighed 230?”

  “I’d be very much surprised,” he snipped, looking quite a bit surprised. I could tell he felt the conversation slipping into new territory. “That’s a dramatic and disturbing weight loss in such a short period—and for someone apparently reasonably healthy.”

  You’re telling me, I thought. Then I stood up and asked, “How tall am I?”

  “5’ 9”. Maybe a hair less.” He smoothed his hair again.

  “What if I said I was a good 6’ 3”? Or I used to be—just a little while ago.”

  He hesitated at this, and then responded carefully, “I’d get out a tape measure and show you otherwise. But let me be clear, are you saying your body has changed size—that in a matter of days you believe you’ve lost more than 50 pounds? And that you also believe you were recently several inches taller?”

  “Yeah,” I said, sitting back down. “And it’s continuing.”

  He wasn’t so detached now. He was starting to think he had a live one. Maybe he’d get some sort of case study he could write up.

  “You feel like … you’re shrinking in size?”

  “I don’t feel like it, I am,” I replied. “I’m changing. I’m becoming something else. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Not that some drug slut tried to shoot my balls off or that my old man was a fag.”

  Suddenly all his grad school theories about childhood traumas and self-punishment didn’t add up to so much. But he kept his superficial cool. I’ve always admired that.

  “I see,” he said. “That must be very concerning to you. What do your friends say?”

  “I don’t have any friends left,” I answered, but I saw the tack he was taking.

  “What about your co-workers?”

  “A few comments got made a couple of days ago. Since then I haven’t been in to work. The changes have accelerated hard.”

  “And now you’re afraid of going back. Because you think they’ll notice?”

  “Believe me, they’d notice!”

  He didn’t smile at this. He swiveled around to examine the photos of his family and a funny, distant expression crossed his face.

  The real trick is always to let people interrogate themselves. Beating the pulp out of them only works on some—and I’ve actually never had much luck that way with women.

  “You know …” he muttered. “This is a little odd, and I don’t mean to digress, but you’ve reminded me of something—from my past.

  “When I was in college, I worked part-time as a night janitor, cleaning office buildings. And sometimes for a laugh, the guy who worked with me—I can’t remember his name—we’d rearrange the employees’ personal photos. Once we did an experiment—my first psychological experiment I realize. We gathered up some of our old personal photos and put them in this one fellow’s office. He worked in accounts for a mutual company. Jacob Betz. I don’t know why we chose him, other than that he didn’t have any pictures up. But when we went back on that floor a week later, I noticed he hadn’t taken them down. When we came back in that building a month later, the photos were still there on his shelf. An unrelated group of complete strangers looking out at him every day.”

  “Some people go through their whole lives asleep,” I said blandly. Why is that strangers are always complete or total, and the rest of us are only trying? What the hell.

  “True,” Turcell nodded, still lost in his memory. “But this case was unusual. One night a few weeks after that we went back again to clean and found that his office had been emptied. Our photos were gone. I got curious and made a fake call the next day. Mr. Betz no longer worked there. I pressed a bit harder and learned that he’d just passed away. Sudden heart attack. I found out a couple of his workmates were holding a service for him. There were four other people there beside us. We made up some story about how we knew him—the guy I worked with. Poor Mr. Betz had no family, no friends really, other than a few fellow employees. At the service, the photos we’d slipped into his office were prominently displayed. The woman who worked next door to him had
wondered about their appearance out of the blue—but she hadn’t wanted to pry. She’d even tried reaching the people—my aunt and uncle from Muncie no less—to let them know about Mr. Betz.”

  “That’s sad,” I said.

  You know if it’s sad, it’s probably true—or tells a truth.

  “I think that might’ve been the defining incident that led me to pursue psychology,” he acknowledged, as if I’d asked. “I’m sorry to have gone off on a tangent. But you got me thinking about photos—what’s actually there versus what we want to see—and what conclusions we draw from what we end up seeing.”

  “I always like other people’s stories more than my own,” I answered.

  “I guess I mean that we could examine some old photos of you. And we could take a photo of you right now to compare—to have as reference for your next visit. I think that would allay some of your anxieties.”

  My anxieties.

  “You don’t believe me?” I asked pointedly.

  “I’m not saying that,” he returned. “All I mean is that any physical changes you’ve undergone, or are undergoing, can be documented. Analyzed. We can look at old and recent photos. We can weigh you, stand you against a wall and mark your height with a pencil. Scans, X-rays and blood tests can be done.”

  I was sorely tempted to pull out my ace card right then. But then I thought, why do his job for him? I was still hoping he’d have something to tell me. Something I hadn’t thought of. Something that might—save me. More fool me.

  “So …” he continued, looking nothing like he had at the start of the interview. He was fully engaged now. Animated. Wracking his brain. “What other changes are you aware of? You said you were becoming someone else …”

  “Some thing else,” I corrected.

  He started a bit at this. Then I let him have it.

  “At first I thought I was changing—into a woman. Now … I think I’m turning into … some kind of creature. A female creature.”

  The office went dead still at that.

  “I … see …” he said, and I could see him gripping the edge of the desk. The Formica, the leatherette, the family photos, the textbook cases and the recollections of every deranged thing people had said inside that office—it all was opening into a hole before him. He had to grab on to something.

  “I must tell you,” he said softly, and with effort. “That you don’t look like some sort of creature—or female—to me.”

  “Not just now,” I agreed. “But I can transform. The episodes are like seizures.”

  “Trances?”

  “Attacks. And they’re happening more frequently. More fully. When I change back, I’m not changing all the way back. Look at my hands for instance. Each time I become less myself and more … I don’t know what.”

  I held out what used to be massive knuckledusters with digits that had been broken repeatedly. They were slender and shapely now. Smooth. Feminine. Like the hands a lot of men imagine stroking them.

  “You do have very delicate hands,” he admitted. “But some men do.”

  Case in point.

  “I’ve lost body hair,” I continued. “And my butt is rounder. I’m developing breasts. My dick has shrunk. And when the transformation takes place, it disappears entirely and a cavity opens up. A … vagina …”

  I let that last word really sink in.

  “Mr. Ritter,” he tried, finding his voice again. “I know that what you’re telling me is difficult and disturbing for you. It’s concerning for me to hear. But believe me, as—as frightening as it may seem, these are not entirely uncommon delusions. Men frequently have been known—”

  “Delusions?”

  “Distortion of perceptions. Unwanted fantasies.”

  “This isn’t about some distortion in my head—it’s about one in my crotch,” I simmered. “I’m not talking about bad dreams I’m having. I’m talking about a nightmare I’m living.”

  He sprung up from his chair as if he was charging the net in tennis and reached for one of the many volumes on his fake teak shelves. I hoped to hell it wasn’t going to be DSM.

  It turned out to be a much thinner book with a blue spine. He fanned the pages and then found what he was looking for. I was afraid he was going to tell me something about male rats under stress. Instead he read aloud, “He described seeing and hearing a voice from another head, that was set on his own shoulders, attached to his body and trying to dominate his own head. He believed the other head was that of his wife’s gynecologist whom he believed to be having an affair with her.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s an extreme case of autoscopy, the self-shooting of a phantom head reported by a clinician named Ames. The patient was suffering from schizophrenia.”

  “So,” I almost yawned. “You think I’m nutso and you can’t help me.”

  “I think you’re suffering from a powerful delusion,” he answered soberly. “And in looking at this book, I’m reminded that its author, Andrew Sims, defines delusions as ‘abnormal knowledge,’ which is how I should’ve characterized them. It’s precisely because of this that I think I can help you. If you were to undergo some molecular or cellular transformation before my eyes, I’d be much less certain of being able to assist.”

  I half snickered. It’s always when vaginas suddenly appear that men stop feeling so confident. Then the coin that had been in the slot since I sat down dropped with a ring.

  “Let me tell you something else,” I said, getting more comfortable in the foam-back chair. “You spoke about judging earlier. Well, I’ll let you be the judge of whether this is abnormal knowledge or not. A part of the change that’s happening to me is that I can read men better now. For instance, I know there’s another woman who’s caught your eye. Maybe where you play tennis. It hasn’t gone anywhere yet—and it probably won’t—because she’s just a symptom of a deeper problem. A deeper problem you have.”

  “Really?” he said, not quite sneering, but close.

  “You’re frustrated with your wife. You wish she’d be both more assertive and submissive in bed. You feel like you should know how to talk to her because you’re a shrink, but it’s tough for a barber to cut his own hair.”

  He opened his hands. “Those sorts of generalizations apply to the majority of middle-aged married men.”

  “You’d like to engage in some light S&M,” I replied, and his forehead wrinkled up beautifully.

  “A bit of spanking and some role playing. You’ve never been involved in a threesome—you’re worried about how you’d perform with another woman with your wife there. Although you’d like to try. But what you’d really like is to introduce another man.”

  His face had tightened up and I could hear his breathing. There was an alkaline sweat scent under his Yves St. Laurent cologne now.

  “You’re afraid of what your wife would think if you suggested this. But you think about it a lot. In fact, it’s why you’re attracted to this other woman. Something in her makes you think she’d be more open to that sort of thing. You haven’t been aware that that’s what appeals to you about her, but now you’ll see it plain.”

  “How do you think—you know this?” he asked, and he sounded genuinely curious now.

  “Call it feminine intuition,” I said. “But here’s the most important point. You’ve only lied to me and to yourself once since I’ve been here. And as you probably know, lies tell more truth than truth.”

  “What—have I lied about?” he coughed.

  “The name of the guy you worked with cleaning offices,” I told him. “You remember his name all right—and for the simple reason that you had sex with him. On more than one occasion. Probably during those late nights in other people’s offices. It meant something to you, and you’ve never been able to deal with it. Now all these years later, bored and disappointed with the sex that you occasionally do have with your wife, you’ve been thinking of him again. You’ve thought of him at various points in your marriage. But in the last
year he’s come back strongly in your mind.”

  “Mr. Ritter, this is the most extraordinary thing you’ve said yet.”

  “Let me go one better. What would you say if I could tell you his name?”

  He blanched openly at this.

  “Are you afraid? I’m sorry,” I said, getting to my feet. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Really.”

  “No!” he gasped. “Tell … me … the name …”

  “Andrew Pollock.”

  The effect this had on the good psychologist was even more than I’d reckoned. He exhaled so deeply, he had to burp back air to remain balanced in his chair. His face seemed to crack and reform, and I thought he’d either break into tears or go into cardiac arrest.

  “How … in hell … do you know that!” he cried finally.

  I let him hang. He’d forgotten that I’d probably conducted a lot more interviews, and a lot more serious ones than he had. Despite what was happening to me, I was still a cop somewhere inside, and a shrewd one if not always a respectable one. He could’ve stonewalled—but when the crunch came, he gave himself away. Just the way he’d wanted to, without even knowing.

  When I was good and ready, I went on. “As I told you, something’s happening to me. Something much weirder than what’s just brought you unglued. But part of what’s happening to me is that I’ve woken up. I’m more attentive than I’ve been—maybe more than is natural.”

  “But how …?” he wheezed.

  “Consider it a party trick,” I answered. “You’re an open book. Your clothes, your cologne, the décor of this office. Then there are the family photos, placed behind you so that you don’t have to look at them—they look out. Notice the center one, the family shot. I can see from here that the kids are holding up name cards, only the cards are wrong. Andrew is holding up Cynthia’s card—Cynthia has Sean’s and young Sean can’t seem to decide which of the three he is. It’s a family joke about how much time you spend outside the home—remember us kids? The two pictures that include your wife flank the children, which says a lot. Yet the children are smiling. You’re probably as good a dad as you know how to be given how busy you are—and who you are.