Trust No One

by Paul Cleave

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  To Miss Roberts—my favorite teacher. Bees?

  “The devil is in the details,” Jerry says, and back then the devil was him, and these days those details are hard to hang on to. He can remember the woman’s face, the way her mouth opened when all she could manage was an oh. Of course people never know what they’re going to say when their time is up. Oscar Wilde said something about curtains when he was on his deathbed, about how ugly they were and either they must go or he would. But Jerry also remembers reading that nobody knows for sure if Wilde really said that. Certainly he wouldn’t have said something pithy if Jerry had snuck into his house and used a knife to pin him to the wall. Maybe a hurts more than I’d thought, but nothing to go down in the history books.

  His mind is wandering, it’s doing that thing it does that he hates, that he oh so hates.

  The policewoman staring at him has a look on her face one would reserve for a wounded cat. In her midtwenties, she has features that make him think he’d like to be the devil around her too. Nice long legs, blond hair down to her shoulders, athletic curves and tones. She has a set of blue eyes that keep pulling him in. She’s in a tight, black skirt and a snug-fitting dark blue top that he’d like to see on the floor. She keeps rubbing her thumb against the pad of her ring finger, where she’s sporting the type of callus he’s seen on guitar players. Leaning against the wall with his thick forearms folded is a policeman in uniform, an 80s, TV-cop moustache on his lip and a utility belt full of citizen-restraining tools around his waist. He looks bored.

  Jerry carries on with the interview. “The woman was thirty, give or take a year, and her name was Susan, only she spelled it with a z. People spell things all sorts of weird ways these days. I blame cell phones,” he says, and he waits for her to nod and agree, but she doesn’t, nor does the cop holding up the wall. He realizes his mind has once again gone wandering.

  He takes a deep breath and tightens his grip on the arms of the chair and repositions himself to try and get more comfortable. He closes his eyes and he focuses, focuses, and he takes himself back to Suzan with a z, Suzan with her black hair tied into a ponytail, Suzan with a sexy smile and a great tan and an unlocked door at three in the morning. That’s the kind of neighborhood Jerry lived in back then. A lot has changed in thirty years. Hell, he’s changed. But back before texting and the Internet butchered the English language, people weren’t as suspicious. Or perhaps they were just lazier. He doesn’t know. What he does know is he was surprised to find her house so easy to get into. He was nineteen years old and Suzan was the girl of his dreams.

  “I can still feel the moment,” Jerry says. “I mean, nobody is ever going to forget the first time they take a life. But before that I stood in her backyard and I held my arms out wide as if I could embrace the moon. It was a few days before Christmas. In fact it was the longest day of the year. I remember the clear sky and the way the stars from a million miles away made the night feel timeless.” He closes his eyes and takes himself back to the moment. He can almost taste the air. “I remember thinking on this night people would be born and people would die,” he says, his eyes still closed, “and that the stars didn’t care, that even the stars weren’t forever and life was fleeting. I was feeling pretty damn philosophical. I also remember the urgent need to take a piss, and taking one behind her garage.”

  He opens his eyes. His throat is getting a little sore from all the talking and his arm keeps itching. There’s a glass of water in front of him. He sips at it, and looks at the man against the wall, the man who is staring at Jerry impassively, as if he’d rather be getting shot in the line of duty than listening to a man telling his tales. Jerry has always known this day was coming, the day of confession. He just hopes it comes with absolution. After all, that’s why he’s here. Absolution will lead to a cure.

  “Do you know who I am?” the woman asks, and suddenly he gets the idea she’s about to tell him she’s not a cop at all, but the daughter of one of his victims. Or a sister. His eyes are undressing her, they’re putting her into a home-alone scenario, an alone-in-a-parking-garage scenario, a deserted-street-at-night scenario. “Jerry?”

  He could strangle her with her own hair. He could shape her long legs in all directions.

  “Jerry, do you know who I am?”

  “Of course I know,” he says, staring at her. “Now would you kindly let me finish? That is why you’re here, isn’t it? For the details?”

  “I’m here because—”

  He puts his hand up. “Enough,” he tells her, the word forceful, and she sighs and slumps back into her chair as if she’s heard that word a hundred times already. “Let the monster have a voice,” he says. He has forgotten her name. Detective . . . somebody, he thinks, then decides to settle on Detective Scenario. “Who knows what I will remember tomorrow?” He taps the side of his head as he asks the question, almost expecting it to make a wooden sound, like the table his parents used to have that was thick wood around the edges but hollow in the middle. He’d tap it, expecting one sound and getting another. He wonders where that table is and wonders if his father sold it so he could buy a few more beers.

  “Please, you need to calm down,” Detective Scenario says, and she’s wrong. He doesn’t need to calm down. If anything he might have to start yelling just to get his point across.

  “I am calm,” he tells her, and he taps the side of his head and it reminds him of a table his parents used to have. “What is wrong with you?” he asks. “Are you stupid? This case will make your career,” he tells her, “and you sit there like a useless whore.”

  Her face turns red. Tears form in her eyes, but don’t fall. He takes another sip of water. It’s cool and helps his throat. The room is silent. The officer against the wall shifts his position by crossing his arms the other way. Jerry thinks about what he just said and figures out where he went wrong. “Look, I’m sorry I said that. Sometimes I say things I shouldn’t.”

  She wipes the palms of her hands at her eyes, removing the tears before they fall.

  “Can I carry on now?” he asks.

  “If that will make you happy,” she says.

  Happy? No. He’s not doing this to be happy. He’s doing this so he can get better. He thinks back to that night thirty years ago. “I thought I was going to have to pick the lock. I’d been practicing on the one at home. I still lived with my parents back then. When they were out I’d practice picking the lock on the back door. I’d been shown how by a friend from university. He said knowing how to pick a lock is like having a key to the world. It made me think about Suzan. It took me two months to figure out how to do it, and I was nervous because I knew once I got to her house the lock might be all kinds of different. It was all for nothing, because when I got there her door was unlocked. It was a product of the day, I guess, though that day really was just as violent as this day.”

  He takes a sip of water. Nobody says anything. He carries on.

  “I never even had doubts. The door being unlocked, that was a sign and I took it. I had a small flashlight with me so I wouldn’t bump into any walls. Suzan used to live with her boyfriend, but he’d moved out a few months earlier. They used to fight all the time. I could hear it from my house almost opposite, so I was pretty sure no matter what happened to Suzan with a z, he would be blamed for it. I used to think about her all the time. I imagined how she would look naked. I just had to know, you know? I had to know how her skin w
ould feel, how her hair would smell, how her mouth would taste. It was like an itch. That’s about the best way to describe it. An itch that was driving me insane,” he says, scratching at the itch on his arm that is also driving him insane. An insect bite, maybe a mosquito or a spider. “So that night on the longest day of the year I went into her house at three o’clock in the morning with a knife so I could scratch it.”

  Which is exactly what he did. He walked down her hallway and found her bedroom, and then stood in the doorway the same way he’d stood outside, but this time instead of embracing the stars he was embracing the darkness. He’s been embracing the darkness ever since.

  “She didn’t even wake up. I mean, not right away. My eyes were adjusting to the dark. Part of the room was lit up by an alarm clock, part was lit up because the curtains were thin and there was a streetlamp outside. I moved over to her bed and I crouched next to it and I just waited. I’d always had this theory that if you did that, the person would wake up, and that’s what happened. It took thirty seconds. I put the knife against her throat,” he tells them, and Detective Scenario flinches a little and looks ready to cry again, and the officer still looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. “I could feel her breath on my hand, and her eyes . . . her eyes were wide and terrified and made me feel—”

  “I know all about Suzan with a z,” Detective Scenario says.

  Jerry can’t help it, but he feels embarrassed. That’s one of the cruel side effects—he’s told her all this before and can’t remember. It’s the details—those damn details that are hard to hang on to.

  “It’s okay, Jerry,” she says.

  “What do you mean it’s okay? I killed that woman and now I’m being punished for what I did to her, to all of them, because she was the first of many, and the monster needs to confess, the monster needs to find redemption because if he can, then the Universe will stop punishing him and he can get better.”

  The detective lifts a handbag off the floor and rests it on her lap. She pulls out a book. She hands it to him. “Do you recognize it?”

  “Should I?”

  “Read the back cover.”

  The book is called A Christmas Murder. He turns it over. The first line is “Suzan with a z was going to change his life.”

  “What in the hell is this?”

  “You don’t recognize me, do you,” she says.

  “I—” he says, but adds nothing more. There is something there—something coming to the surface. He looks at the way her thumb rubs against the callus on her finger, and there’s something familiar about that. Somebody he knows used to do that. “Should I?” he asks, and the answer is yes, he should.

  “I’m Eva. Your daughter.”

  “I don’t have a daughter. You’re a cop, and you’re trying to trick me,” he says, doing his best not to sound angry.

  “I’m not a cop, Jerry.”

  “No! No, if I had a daughter I would know about it!” he says, and he slams his hand down on the table. The officer leaning against the wall takes a few steps forward until Eva looks at him and asks him to wait.

  “Jerry, please, look at the book.”

  He doesn’t look at the book. He doesn’t do anything but stare at her, and then he closes his eyes and he wonders how life has gotten this way. Eighteen months ago things were fine, weren’t they? What is real and what isn’t?

  “Jerry?”

  “Eva?”

  “That’s right, Jerry. It’s Eva.”

  He opens his eyes and looks at the book. He’s seen this cover before, but if he’s read this book he doesn’t remember. He looks at the name of the author. It’s familiar. It’s . . . but he can’t get there.

  “Henry Cutter,” he says, reading the name out loud.

  “It’s a pen name,” his daughter says, his beautiful daughter, his lovely daughter with a monster of a father, a disgusting old man who moments ago wondered how she would feel beneath him. He feels sick.

  “I don’t . . . is this . . . is this you? Did you write this?” he asks. “Did you write this after I told you what happened?”

  She looks concerned. Patient but concerned. “It’s you,” she tells him. “This is your pen name.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You wrote this book, and a dozen more just like it. You started writing when you were a teenager. You always used the name Henry Cutter.”

  He’s confused. “What do you mean I wrote this? Why would I confess to the world what I had done?” Then it comes to him, something he’s forgotten. “Did I go to jail? Did I write this when I came out? But then . . . how would . . . the timeline doesn’t . . . I don’t get it. Are you really my daughter?” he asks, and he thinks about his daughter, his Eva, but now that he’s thinking about it, Eva is ten years old, not twentysomething, and his daughter would be calling him Dad, not Jerry.

  “You’re a crime writer,” she says.

  He doesn’t believe her—why would he? She’s just a stranger. Still . . . the crime writer label seems to fit, like putting on a comfortable glove, and he knows what she’s saying is true. Of course it’s true. He wrote thirteen books. An unlucky number—at least if you believe in that kind of thing, and he has been very unlucky, hasn’t he? He’s writing another book too. A diary. No, not a diary, a journal. His Madness Journal. He looks around, but it’s not here with him. Maybe he lost it. He flicks through the pages of the book Eva handed him, but not looking at any of the words. “This was one of the early ones.”

  “Your first,” she says.

  “You were only twelve when it came out,” he tells her, but hang on now, how can that be if Eva is only ten?

  “I was at school,” she says.

  He looks at her hand and sees there’s a wedding ring, then looks at his own. There’s one on his hand too. He wants to ask about his wife, but doesn’t want to look a bigger fool for doing so. Dignity is only one of the things the Alzheimer’s has been taking away from him. “Do I always forget you?”

  “You have good days and bad,” she says, in the way of an answer.

  He looks around the room. “Where are we? Am I here because of what I did to Suzan?”

  “There is no Suzan,” the officer says. “We found you in town. You were lost and confused. We called your daughter.”

  “There is no Suzan?”

  “No Suzan,” Eva says, reaching back into her handbag. She pulls out a photograph. “That’s us,” she says. “It was taken just over a year ago.”

  He looks at the picture. The woman in the photograph is the same woman talking to him. In the photograph she’s sitting on a couch holding a guitar, a big smile on her face, and the man in the photograph sitting next to her is Jerry, it’s Jerry a year ago, back when all he was forgetting were his keys and the occasional name, back when he was writing books and living life. The last year has been stolen from him. His personality stolen. His thoughts and memories twisted and decayed. He turns the photograph over. Written on the back is Proudest dad in the world.

  “It was taken the day I told you I’d sold my first song,” she says.

  “I remember it,” he tells her, but he doesn’t.

  “Good,” she says, and smiles, and in that smile is a lot of sadness and it breaks his heart that his daughter has to see him like this.

  “I really want to go home now,” he says.

  She looks at the officer. “Is that okay?” she asks, and the officer tells them that it is.

  “You’ll need to speak to the nursing home,” the officer says, “tell them this kind of thing can’t keep happening.”

  “Nursing home?” Jerry asks.

  Eva looks at him. “That’s where you live now.”

  “I thought we were going home?”

  “That is your home,” she says.

  He starts to cry, because he remembers it then—his room, the nurses, the gardens, sitting in the sun with only his sense of loss as company. He’s not aware he’s crying until his tears hit the top of the table, eno
ugh of them to make the officer look away and to make his daughter come around and put her arms around him.

  “It’s going to be okay, Jerry. I promise.”

  But he’s still thinking about Suzan with a z, about how it felt back when he killed her, back before he wrote about it. Back when he embraced the darkness.

  DAY ONE

  Some basic facts. Today is a Friday. Today you are sane, albeit somewhat in shock. Your name is Jerry Grey, and you are scared. You’re sitting in your study writing this while your wife, Sandra, is on the phone with her sister, no doubt in tears because this future of yours, well, buddy, nobody saw it coming. Sandra will look after you—that’s what she’s promised, but these are the promises of a woman who has known for only eight hours that the man you are is going to fade away, to be replaced by a stranger. She hasn’t processed it, and right now she’ll be telling Katie that it’s going to be hard, all too terribly hard, but she’ll hang in there, of course she will, because she loves you—but you don’t want that from her. At least that’s what you’re thinking now. Your wife is forty-eight years old and even though you don’t have a future, she still does. So maybe over the next few months if the disease doesn’t push her away, you should push her away. The thing to focus on is that this isn’t about me, you, us—it’s about family. Your family. We have to do what’s best for them. Of course you know that’s a gut reaction, and you may very well, and probably will, feel differently tomorrow.

  At the moment you are very much in control. Yes, it’s true you lost your phone yesterday, and last week you lost your car, and recently you forgot Sandra’s name, and yes, the diagnosis means it’s true the best years are now behind you and there will not be too many good ones ahead, but at the moment you know exactly who you are. You know you have an amazing wife named Sandra and an incredible daughter called Eva.

  This journal is for you, Jerry of the future, Future Jerry. At the time of this writing, you have hope there’s a cure on its way. The rate medical technology is advancing . . . well, at some point there will be a pill, won’t there? A pill to make the Alzheimer’s go away. A pill to bring the memories back, and this journal is to help you if those memories tend to have fuzzy edges. If there is no pill, you will still be able to look back through these pages and know who you were before the early onset dementia, before the Big A came along and took away the good things.