Private Midnight

by Kris Saknussemm

  “On the surface you’ve got a happy family. But look a little deeper—or from a different angle. The two pics that show your wife are your wedding photo taken ages ago, and a group gathering at your tennis club, and from the looks of you and the budding trees in the background, I’d guess it was taken very recently. Your wife is part of the other doubles team—and is on the other side of the net. The sandy blonde woman right next to you is the one you’ve been thinking about.”

  “That’s remarkable,” Turcell blurted. “I swear to you nothing has happened.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” I confessed. “But it gets better—and simpler. Look around this office. Everything has its place. It’s excessively organized. Yet there is one thing obviously askew. I’ll come back to it. I noticed it the moment I sat down. Let me go on.

  “Someone comes to see you. A male. You freshen your cologne. You know he’s a cop who was shot under tawdry circumstances—an appointment arranged by a concerned colleague of his. You find out, not surprisingly, that there’s been a lot wrong in his life. Sadness. Violence. Rawness. Then he tells you something that really is surprising: he’s changing shape. He’s lost significant weight—and more improbably, height. What does that do? It triggers a memory in you. In this overly neat, professional office, you suddenly interject a very personal story. Why? Because you hear something in him that resonates with you, even without realizing it.

  “So, what of the story you told? You acknowledge that it involved a crucial incident in your life—it influenced your career choice. Hadn’t thought of it in years, huh? Then you claim you don’t remember the name of your fellow janitor—but you talk of pranks and mischief—not merely on an isolated occasion—but a pattern of behavior. What’s more, you went together to Betz’s funeral—as a couple. You didn’t see it then, but you may now—what you described is conspiratorial behavior. People remember who they engage in conspiracies with. Believe me. They choose those kinds of accomplices more carefully than marriage partners. That’s why most marriages fail. They aren’t conspiratorial enough. I knew the second you said you couldn’t remember his name—a dismissal within an admission, the first rule of interrogation—that you were hiding something—and because of your occupation and training, I reasoned you were trying to hide it as much from yourself as from me.”

  The expression on his face was priceless.

  “Our interview progresses—I relate to you even more outlandish things. So you go to open up a book. But which one? Look at how many you have to choose from. Literally hundreds—and many, many of them filled with more outrageous and more relevant anecdotes than the one you presented. If men, as you claimed, frequently have the kind of abnormal fantasies you attribute to me, then why didn’t you cite one of those? No, you selected a case about a phantom head. I didn’t see the connection to my problems, so I considered there must’ve been some other factor at work in your selection—an underlying struggle or debate you’ve been having with yourself. The first name of the author of that book is the same as your first son: Andrew. It’s not an uncommon name, but its appearance twice in the midst of an uncommon discussion said something—and when I put it together with the other factor, and all the other sense data that had been coming in, I had my hunch.”

  “But what—what was the other factor?” he asked, almost pleading.

  “Look at your desk calendar,” I said. “The featured artist is Jackson Pollock.”

  “He’s a famous artist. Or was.”

  “Everyone in that calendar is I’d bet,” I countered. “The trouble is it’s almost June now, and his month is February.”

  “Well, I probably went back to check some meeting date,” he insisted.

  “Of course,” I nodded. “And you have a calf-hide datebook right beside your phone. Plus you have a computer, which I know has a spreadsheet calendar—and you have a new secretary, who looks just like a younger version of your tennis friend, to keep you up to date. That’s exactly why the calendar is all the more revealing. Pollock isn’t such a common name.”

  I didn’t think he was going to stop shaking his head. I was glad I’d laid it out for him, because he’d have thought I’d been stalking him otherwise. I rose from the chair, listening to the subtle hiss of the foam regaining its usual shape and enjoying the silky panties’ texture.

  “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “Confidentiality runs both ways.”

  “He killed himself!” Turcell ejaculated. “Over the last Christmas holiday. I only found out in February. I’d seen him just once or twice in the last few years. Nothing ever happened. But I knew he was troubled. I didn’t know what to say. Then he called and I—I ignored him.”

  “Maybe there wasn’t anything to say,” I said, feeling sorry I hadn’t left faster.

  “I’m a psychologist!” he warbled, and I could see he wanted to wipe every book off every shelf. “We’d had—a bit—of an affair—after I’d gotten married. I couldn’t open all those old doors again. He was an illustrator. He’d moved to New York, and whenever he was in town, we’d catch up for a drink. Nothing—sexual—after the affair. It was all in the past.”

  “Almost everything is,” I said, and let him weep, elbows planted on the Formica, the ghostly faces of his happy kids looking on. I didn’t think it was square to leave until he’d gotten a hold of himself. When he finally did, he gazed up at me plaintively.

  “I’m so sorry about this. I could—and would be happy to give you a referral, although I doubt you’d want that. If it’s any consolation, I think I’ll be much less certain I can help anyone in the future.”

  I tried to smile at him and I think I did. Jesus lord, the scams we try to run.

  “Don’t judge yourself too harshly,” I said at last. “Maybe this is just the old detective in me talking … but you might want to do some more investigating into what kind of crime was actually committed. An obstruction or even an abetting charge is very different from pulling the trigger. People end their lives for lots of reasons. You owed him courtesy not salvation.”

  I turned toward the fake teak door.

  “Mr. Ritter,” he called gently. “Maybe … this is just the foolish tennis playing closet homosexual psychologist in me talking … but perhaps you shouldn’t think of what’s happening to you—whatever it is—as all bad.”

  “No,” I conceded, with my hand on the door knob. “You’re absolutely right. And that’s the most worrisome part of all.”

  When I was alone in the elevator going down, I pulled out the strip of photos I was going to show him. Up until but a few hours ago my world had been full of witness statements, ballistic reports, bulletin boards, mug shots, blood stains on sidewalks and fattening food in unmarked vans. Now, like Mr. Betz, I saw a stranger more complete than myself.

  EEP DOWN, I KNEW THE MOMENT I’D ENTERED Turcell’s office that there was nothing he could do for me. It had helped to talk about it though—to release the secret into the light. I only hoped I hadn’t broken him completely. The look on his face as I was leaving told me he’d be a long time thinking about that session.

  The trouble was, I was back to where I’d started, but feeling worse. My skin was sore all over, like I’d been hit repeatedly with a paintball gun, and the pressure in my head felt like my skull was pressed in a diamond anvil. My voice and gait were changing. I felt distinctly smaller, younger, leaner but rounder. Badunkadunk. I always was an ass man and Stacy had an ass that drove me wild.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look into a mirror. I was still outwardly male, but I could feel another spell coming. I had to get home and safe, in privacy. Maybe if I could remain conscious, I could watch it happening. I felt a wave of dizziness as I got in the car. From what Genevieve had said, there was more to come. The only consolation in the whole warped thing was that I knew now I wasn’t losing my mind. The changes that were taking place were real.

  Of course this meant that I was on my own. No medical treatment could save me. Mine was a relationship with some spe
cies of monster or alien being. And I was becoming a monster or alien being as a result. Doctors and psychiatrists offered no solutions. Something unnatural had befallen me, and the only answer I could think of lay with some kind of supernatural remedy. Or combat.

  When that thought really hit home, the next thing I was going to do came clear. It was the only thing I could think of. There was just one person I was aware of who dealt in things supernatural. The only person like that I’d ever met. Zandra the Seer.

  Her real name was Adele Bixley. I’d collared her years before when I was coming up. She was running some spirit bunco thing. Someone blew the whistle and I drew the straw to shut her down. The thing was though, when I was reading her the riot act, she said some X-File things. She said she “sensed” that there was a tree house that figured tragically in my life. And she knew some very detailed facts about a murder investigation that had stumped the department—which later proved to be right on target. Down to the shallow gravesite.

  One rainy night about a year later, in my first rail ‘n’ bail phase, I went to try to find her. I don’t know why. I needed some different kind of company.

  She’d gone “legit” but was still pretty woo-woo—working out of her house doing tarot readings and telling fortunes—a cottage on Spritzer Street, over behind the freight yard on the other side of town. I found her all right. And I got my fortune told. Big things were in store for me. Happiness. Success. Of course I knew she was just trying to tell me what I wanted to hear—especially me being a cop who’d busted her balls earlier. But it was raining hard and I couldn’t face driving over those railroad tracks alone and sitting in a bar watching Matlock or NBA Highlights. I knew if I got in the car El Miedo would come, so I brought out one of the bottles of Beam I carried. She dragged out a bottle of cognac and lit some candles. She was the first older woman I’d been with since Mazatlán—and I didn’t have any trouble at all. Just the opposite. I pounded her like a racehorse the whole damn night long. Come early morning when the switching yard was grinding to life and I was rolling over to get dressed, she took my arm and said, “If I were you, I’d be very careful.”

  I remember yawning at the time and saying something like, “How can I be careful? I’m a cop.” Or “I’m always careful, sweetheart.” Some throw-away line. As a grown man, until I met Genevieve, there was only one thing I’d ever been afraid of.

  Then she said, “I mean with women.”

  “You got some disease?” I jabbed. She seemed like such a wallflower I didn’t think she’d had much action—although she lubed up like a damn waterfall.

  She shook her head and said real serious, “I see shadows in your love life.”

  “Babe, everyone’s got shadows in their love life,” I told her. What did she know of shadows?

  “I see them repeat like omens. Premonitions.”

  “Premonitions of what?” I wanted to know. “Death by heartache. Or heart attack? You’re freaking me out here.”

  She said, “It’s not death I see for you. But something stranger.”

  “What could be stranger than death?” I asked.

  She didn’t have an answer. I figured she was just tired or trying to give me the brush-off. But now when I think back on it, maybe I’d freaked her out. Maybe she had seen something in my future. I’d gotten my answer at last in any case. What’s stranger than death? Feeling your loins and maybe your soul threaded through the needle of a love outside all bounds—becoming something you can’t be—and yet perhaps have always been—in dreams and nightmares, and premonitions in the rain.

  I drove home to find a package had arrived from Genevieve. It contained more female clothing, including a forget-me-not blue summer dress and a pair of white strap sandals. There was also a box of Dilley’s Chocolates. Delectables. I threw it in the waste can—and then retrieved it. They were pretty good.

  I took off all my clothes and tried to rest. About 15 minutes later it happened. I cradled Pico in my arms until the shaking started, when she leapt away in fright. I wet the bed—but not with urine. It was that phosphorescent gel-plasm again. Prisms of skin and a pheromone odor in the room like ozone and teenage period. Only it was me.

  Images of Genevieve’s body swept through my head. Earwigs and metal crutches. Men trapped in hourglasses in the shape of women, suffocating in red sand.

  Then the visions passed and I was calm again. The form held steady. I could feel the new body relaxing into itself. My skin was so smooth. I had curves but no visible cellulite. I took the shaving mirror from the bathroom and inspected myself.

  God, it was hypnotic. Revolting and beautiful. Me.

  The sensation in the end was more intense and yet softer and more dissolving. More complete in body. For a moment I did feel blessed to have experienced that on my own.

  Then I made the mistake of looking at my face in the mirror and the horror of what was happening hit me again. I’d become some kind of mutation. Not a female—but a living ghost in female form—with an unnatural hunger. I sensed it without being able to locate it. Nymphomania of the spirit. I wanted protein and lightning. Every nerve and secretion. Whole strangers. Their damp glistening minds and armored hearts. Every dream. Every indecency. Every innocence. I wanted them splayed open for me. To encompass bodies and beings like an amoeboid thing and absorb them into me. So I touched myself again.

  Oh, the sugared almond. The little bald man in a boat.

  I fondled and mashed myself again and again—until the bed was soaked and the room smelled of orchids and oysters. It was only exhaustion that brought me back to clarity. The form was holding.

  Dressing myself as a woman—as Sunny—I understood the name Genevieve had given me in a new way. It seemed to suit my personality and body shape. My bearing. I was girlie in figure and snap, but sassy and brittle. Stacy. But not.

  The black miracle kept hitting home. Yet I found I knew exactly what I was doing. Everything came naturally. Underwear, make-up, clothes, shoes, earrings. It was as if I’d done it every day for years. I had to keep going. I had to see the Seer. There was no one else left to consult. I only hoped she was still living in her house on Spritzer Street.

  She wasn’t. By the time I’d driven over to that side of town, I’d checked myself out in the rearview mirror about twenty times and had come close to committing gross vehicular manslaughter. The realization just kept arriving with new force.

  Zandra’s, or rather Adele’s house, was still there but was now part of a game park of old charm amidst two square blocks of new apartments and townhouses, and a shopping plaza. No one answered the door when I knocked and I noticed an electric guitar in the hallway through the curtain. There was a pair of size 12 Nikes on the porch and a petite set of floral Birkenstocks, too small for what I remembered of Adele. When I peeked in the mailbox I found envelopes with other names on them, a male and a female.

  Just like people, parts of a city change when you’re not watching. I didn’t know what to do, so I hit a Yellow Pages in the plaza. Maybe she was still working the fortune telling angle somewhere else. I realized how foolish I’d been. I’d moved three times in the intervening years, maybe she had too. But I still thought she might be doing the Ouija thing. Leopards don’t change their spots—normally.

  There were a lot of ads for fortune tellers. Psychics. Clairvoyants. Spiritual Advisers. No sign of Zandra. I figured it was a long shot that she’d change her moniker and still be in the game. And even if she had, I couldn’t wade through the whole list trying to find her. I was filled with despair. I really was alone—not the kind of woman who would be alone for long—but on my own against Genevieve.

  I loved her and wanted to kill her … with all my wayward heart.

  Suddenly I craved the noise of the phones ringing at the Precinct. The bullshit of the job. Anything to get me out of my head.

  Then I got the idea to drive back past Adele’s old house one more time. I thought I’d seen the woman next door checking me out as I was leaving. She
looked to be about Adele’s age. Maybe she knew where the Seer had slipped off to. I didn’t have any other ideas. I was all out. The woman was out in her flower garden when I pulled back around.

  “Excuse me,” I said, sounding like a babe who smokes menthol cigarettes. “I don’t suppose you know an Adele Bixley. She used to own the house next door.”

  The woman looked me over good. I was glad I had a nice dress on.

  “She still does,” she answered finally. “Rents it to my son and his girlfriend. Why?”

  “I’m trying to locate her, and this was the only address I know of.”

  “I have every Titus Logan book,” the woman announced proudly.

  I didn’t know what she meant by that. Maybe she was a bit loopy.

  “Do you know—do you have any idea where I could find Adele?”

  “I’d try her store,” came the reply.

  “What—store?” I asked, taken aback.

  The woman peered at me a little suspiciously then, but gave in when I smiled.

  “Why The Third Eye. Over on Haveman. Do you live in the city?”

  “I know where Haveman is,” I said.

  “I think 16th is the cross street. Tell her I have every Titus Logan book!”

  I promised I would, wondering if maybe Adele had gotten lucky with some author. I’ve never been much of a reader so I hadn’t kept up with things.

  The Third Eye proved to be an old hostelry that had been refurbished and was now devoted to books about superstition, self-help and sexy women riding big lizards. A darkish looking woman in a bright orange sari worked the cash register while a queen-of-the-night type dusted shelves and Celtic music played in the background. You could get Viking runes and solar energy pyramids—but the principal stock was books and more books.

  There was a selection dealing with all manner of New Age hoo-haw—from harmonic convergences to the Sacred Symbols of Mu. The primary emphasis, however, was on horror and fantasy, and a prominent display table was devoted to the works of none other than Titus Logan. A Blood Moon Watches … My Name is Yesterday.