by Martin Rose
The scene elapsed as though from the far end of a telescope. Everything a film reel, a movie in which I was an audience member, unable to move from my seat. McSneer sank to the floor to his knees, then collapsed farther still. He twitched on the concrete, his hands curled and his spine hooked and his mouth open. Small moans escaped his twisted lips.
I forgot Elvedina, forgot about the case, forgot about Niko and Lafferty and Lionel. All of reality reduced to this room with this prone and ruined body and the shadow rising from the chair before me. Goliath-sized. Immense.
Elvedina stepped over McSneer and into my vision. I started at her shoes, tracking up the stained folds of her black jeans to her knees to her thighs and then to the wide open V of her pants. She hadn’t bothered to zip up. I could not look away. Her presence commanded my audience and held me under a ferocious spell.
From that open flap of fabric where human flesh should be, a nest of wires stood revealed. Input and output jacks. A rat-king of electronic trappings that made what should have been tender female sex no more than the back of a television set.
She leaned down to rip the duct tape off my face. It stung like I’d tongue-kissed a hornets nest but I said nothing, staring at her while she stared at me until I believed I could see my face in the reflection of her eyes, diminished and small and going on forever in that smallness. Like convex television screens instead of eyes.
“What are you?” I whispered.
She let the flap of tape fall to the concrete and left me there.
*
All the world around me revolved as though the room itself spun on the head of a pin. Corners swapping with corners. The gray concrete blocks fading into their fellows as though this were not a prison but a maze that went on into infinity.
And here I was, at the center of it.
A uniformed officer cuffed me with the new and improved version of handcuffs—yellow zip ties. Lionel could pull his government favors to expunge my record all he wanted, but there were no magic tricks to fool the prison guards into forgetting my face. My status as an ex-con, coupled with my poor interactions with McSneer during my stay there, lead them to restrain me until they could figure out my level of involvement in the homicide and finish questioning the staff and thereupon either arrest or let me go. They left me in the chair where I’d watched Elvedina blind and damage McSneer, whom they picked up and loaded onto a gurney and wheeled away, his pained mewling diminishing and then disappearing from my sight. I floated on the outer edges of my Atroxipine high and clung to the last vestiges of euphoria against the final image of Elvedina blinding McSneer.
Blood stains on the floor formed curlicues and semicolons. An officer reported into his mic every small detail in a buzzing drone. A janitor appeared, moving a mop and bucket across the floor, pushing around dirty water and looking at me, from time to time, with weary eyes.
It gave me all the time in the world to think of how miserably I’d failed so many people and hurt them with no thought to their future or even mine. The manner in which I left Niko, and in the state I left her, when the right conduct had been obvious—I should have stayed in the circle of her arms. Surrendered my newfound life to love and happiness. Instead, I turned away from Niko to pursue vengeance in the blind killing of my own brother. In this way, I’d likewise given no thought to his wife. All these women, littered in my wake, as though their lives were spent engaging in damage control for every dumb-fuck decision I made. Had Highsmith even considered Polly’s heart, her feelings, when he decided to kill Dietrich?
Had I considered anyone’s when I cut Jamie down?
A set of brown trousers appeared before me. An old and trembling hand leaned down to take my wrists up by the yellow zip tie. In his other, a pair of scissors. It should have frightened me—should have worried me that such an old and frail gentleman be sent into the maw of dirty secrets—but Lionel paused with the jaws of the scissors balanced over my wrist. Great will gathered within him, amassing force until his trembling leveled out and became steady. His breathing changed, every breath like a slow-turning clockwork. He cut, and the yellow zip tie fell to my feet in a curl of ribbon.
I stared at the blood spots on the belly of my shirt. Pain roiled all through me like bursting bubbles of champagne and I could not bring myself to look up. I kept rerunning Elvedina through my head with obsessive compulsion—watching the unfolded flap of her jeans, the seductive fold of human skin, opening up into… wires. Loops and snarls of unknowable circuitry.
A robot.
Lionel leaned his cane against my chair. The janitor left with a nod, shuffling down the hall with his bucket. We were alone with the four institutional walls.
“What happened here, Vitus?”
“Did you know?” I asked thickly. “Did you know what she was?”
The old man frowned, stooped over to put a hand on my arm. It beat out a metronome tremor against my skin. Owlish eyes. With a beard, he might have been an ancient Merlin figure, stuffed full of secrets and wisdom in his hideous polyester suit.
“Vitus,” Lionel said, “I am not your father. I am merely an old soldier, boy. They send me out with company and tell me not to ask questions. Now tell me everything that happened. Tell me what you discovered. And let’s see if we can’t untangle this monstrosity on our own, eh?”
Deep within me nestled and birthed the fear that all of this was by someone’s design. If not my father, then Lionel, or even Lafferty. Everyone in my sphere became a suspect, but that logic too would only destroy any chance I had of survival.
“I’m tired of being the one always putting up the collateral in every relationship,” I snapped. “You want me to trust you, you have to earn it, old man.”
Lionel nodded as though this did not surprise him. He collected himself and spoke with resignation.
“Elvedina intercepted me in DC, where I confirmed her assignment. I was told her function was to investigate Jamie’s death and your involvement in it, as an overseer, an objective observer. Do I seem a fool to you, Vitus? Do you think I believe every lie I am told? I was told she was to be a part of my contingent and I was not to question her presence among us. It makes it hard, you understand, for me to figure out what I can and cannot trust her with. But these were not decisions I had control of.”
“My father,” I whispered.
Lionel gave affirmation, his head glowing white like a halo. The overhanging bulb, creaking as it swung, lit each hair in filaments of fire.
“Do not read too much conspiracy into it, lest you be swallowed whole by it,” Lionel said.“If your father had not sent me and Elvedina to investigate your brother’s projects, it would have been someone else making the order. The machine is bigger than all of us.”
“Crimes,” I said.
“What?”
“Not projects. What my brother conducted were not projects. They were crimes. And so what if I believe you? You haven’t told me anything I couldn’t have surmised on my own.”
“Let us leave off your troubling legal judgments. After your murder, your credibility is lacking, Vitus. But for this one thing,” he said, and held up one finger, trembling with each beat of his old and weary and stubborn heart. “There was another part of this mission. I am to observe you, Vitus. Did you not think there would be grave consequences to your newfound humanity? You may not know it, Vitus, but your case is being studied in the halls of power where only the few are allowed to walk. And there is more than one file on you. The file of the man you were when you went into the service, when you were not much more than a young and brash boy playing soldier. A file of you when you became a zombie, and now—”
“A file for now,” I finished for him and looked up, gripping the arms of the chair with my hands in fists. The lines where the zip tie held me burned red in the light. “And what have you decided about me now?”
“Before, you were a psychopath. Despicable, heartless, a ruthless shadow of a human being. And this was not your fault. This was the side eff
ect of your disintegrating brain. How were you to know? All Atroxipine could do was restore a mere shadow of the boy you were—and really, the boy you were was not much better. You may not know this, Vitus—but the human mammal does not come with a manual on kindness and compassion. It’s a thing that must be taught.”
“A philosopher, how nice,” I said.
“I won’t lie, Vitus. They want you put down if you cannot be brought back from the brink.”
Shocked. I reeled and felt as though the floor itself buckled until the room became straight again.
I wanted another dose. To taste the Atroxipine melting under my tongue. Wanted to know what it would be like to cook it inside the silver lining of a spoon and tap the fount of my vein.
“Who was going to pull the trigger? It was Elvedina, wasn’t it?”
“What do you think, Vitus?”
“Elvedina’s the red button. But you’re here to reform me.”
Lionel nodded with long suffering eyes, the flaps of his eyelids like the weather-worn saddles of old western cowboys. Forgotten Americana.
“I have been your kind and caring ghost these days. I think your father thought an old man might be the order of the day, to bring you from the brink. You’re not a soldier anymore. You can retire, you know. The government will pay it. You won’t be rich, but there’s a place, down in Venezuela, where I live. The Margarita Islands. The sun is forever, there by the equator. You can have a life where no one knows who you are. You’re just another drunk gringo, lazing in the sun. You can forget your father, for though he is my friend, I can’t say he has always made me proud.”
“He cheated on my mother,” I said suddenly.
Lionel’s eyebrows lifted.
I looked away. “My mother ran abroad. It was the thing that broke us all apart. It took us all the way to Sarajevo.”
“I saw the file,” he said.
“It’s incomplete.”
“Your name wasn’t in it.”
“I was too young,” I said, my throat gone dry. “I was sixteen, and Jamie and I got caught in Sarajevo.”
“The siege?” I could see Lionel doing the calculation of years in his head and his mouth pulled back into a half circle, a cup of pain. “The siege, boy? They brought you to the siege?”
Lionel could not summon the words to describe his horror. But I had been there. I had been there for the Siege of Sarajevo, where the army surrounded the city and the people inside were dying from mortar blasts and sniper shots while Jamie and I hunted for Mother, our father killing some poor scoundrel in an alley. No running water. No food. Every tree in the city taken down and burned for fuel and the smell of winter coming. No way to get out. Learning a foreign language on the fly while our parents had their lovers’ tiff inside a post-apocalyptic city.
A place where names like Elvedina were part of the local landscape. Embedded into it. So much so that the very sound of her name in my mouth brought it all brimming back to the surface, all the blood running in the gutters of Sarajevo, and the smell of bodies decomposing on concrete roads where they lay. Their lovers and friends and family screamed for them because if they went to bury their dead, the snipers would fire.
“Who is Elvedina?” I whispered.
“You must believe me, I cannot answer that. I told you the rest of my mission at great risk to myself. Will you trust me at last?”
“You think I can be reformed?” I asked. “Because the thing you never elucidated was what you’re supposed to do if I’m still a coldhearted monster on the inside.”
“I haven’t answered that,” Lionel said, “because it’s not going to happen.”
I blinked.
“You may be very good at hiding from others, but your tears when I first came for you, at the sight of your father’s letter—was the only proof I needed that you were in possession of a heart worth saving. As long as somewhere inside, you feel—you will recover. And I would point out that the many difficulties you’ve been experiencing up to now are all the effects of someone wrestling with his conscience. If you had not been, you would have shut this case down by now and killed the perpetrator of the crime, whether it’s Highsmith or someone else undiscovered. But your feelings, Vitus—your emotional heart—muddies the waters of your logic. Fogs your reason.
“Now,” Lionel sighed, and put his hand out, “now will you trust me?”
What choice did I have?
*
They brought Highsmith shuffling in his bright orange. Guards escorted him at either side. Clean shaven and bright-eyed as though they just woke him up to take him for a stroll around the country club. Comb tracks still in his damp hair. Staring with greedy curiosity and a sneer plucking at the corners of his lips. A strange familiarity swept in as though every dream up to now had forged our understanding of each other—the bravado and arrogance nothing more than a playact, an empty shell. Maybe the Highsmith I dreamt of had been the real man inside. But how could I know?
“I wondered when I would see you again. Dreaming well?”
A twinge of pain deep within my gutted abdomen. He looked well in contrast to my sullen and jaundiced figure—thinner than before.
Lionel played the consummate gentleman. He approached the table, set his cane to lean against it, and sat down wearily. With every motion he dragged out the seconds and the hours. Time moved at turtle speed. Lionel leveraged his condition to increase Highsmith’s anxiety. Highsmith fidgeted as he waited for the old man to settle into place, carefully sliding his feet under the table, bracing his hands on the surface, and then at last looking up to stare at Highsmith.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Highsmith,” Lionel said in an amiable tremolo. “I wish to you ask you a series of questions, which I hope you will answer honestly. We could so use your help, Mr. Highsmith.”
Lionel’s hands trembled as they always did. Was it me, or did it seem that their trembling increased, giving the impression of greater fragility?
Highsmith’s shoulders relaxed and then eased as though he were a windup toy, his clock wound down. A revelation opened up within me—Highsmith trusted Lionel. He trusted Lionel because he thought him weak and ineffectual and of no consequence.
And Lionel was doing everything in his power to encourage it.
A long hiss unfolded from my Id. This was just Lionel doing his job, was it not? And doing it very well. What cared I if the old man was capable of subterfuge and obfuscation and disguise? Had that not encapsulated the whole of his career? And who could blame him for the deception when it was how he made his living?
You don’t like to think that he could be doing the same to you, my Id pointed out.
I brushed it aside. The side effects of Atroxipine included paranoia. I chased shadows of my own making.
“Sure,” Highsmith said, rendered docile before Lionel’s performance. The predatory light in his eyes winked out and left nothing but a mild-mannered, bewildered man.
“You may call me Lionel. I understand you were associated for a time with a Dr. Adamson. Recently deceased. Did you know this man?”
Highsmith hesitated. His space of silence filled with debates and concerns that went unvoiced before he came to terms with himself and answered.
“I didn’t kill him.”
“We know. We’re concerned for your well-being, Mr. Highsmith.”
Lionel inserted a smile. Every wrinkle in his face expanded and turned him into a quintessential kindly grandfather before fading away once more. “We have been examining your case file. Just a part of our auditing process, closing out old paperwork. Very routine and all rather boring, I assure you. Perhaps you could tell us the nature of your relationship with Mr. Adamson. Our notes on that seem to be misplaced.”
Highsmith opened his mouth and then closed it.
“I see,” Lionel said. “We also wondered how your dreams have been, lately.”
“They’re nothing special.”
“We think they might be special. Did you ever dream of killing y
our victims before they died?”
Highsmith reached up to lodge a set of fingers between his neck and his collar and loosen it. A ring of sweat around his throat, his forehead varnished in perspiration.
“I don’t think my dreams have any bearing on that,” Highsmith countered.
I rolled my eyes. Lionel was carefully constructing a trap but I’d lost patience. Sweat itched at my stitches in the damp room. Hungry, tired, and suffering, I hit the tipping point, putting me in mind of my halcyon zombie days when I’d miss my medication and crash out.
Was I in withdrawal? A quick dose could turn me around. Suppress the hunger and lift me out of the fog. I’d be whip-smart and lightning quick. No more of this wasted time, every hour dragging upon infinite, painful hour imagining the pills as they hit my tongue, the long swallow; those seconds between their disintegration and passing through into my bloodstream. That clearheaded euphoria married to invincibility.
I wanted it again and groped for the pill bottle.
Lionel teased answers out of Highsmith with the aplomb of a master hunter. If I waited, we could be here for hours in this claustrophobic room where the ceiling dropped down and the sweat continued to run and itch down every corner of my crawling skin.
Unless the interview came to an end.
“Highsmith,” I cut in.
Lionel turned with a feeble head shake to look at me. Highsmith roused as though hypnotized, eyes glassy. I panted like a summer dog.
“Kill him. Now. With your mind bullets.”
Highsmith blinked. “What?”
“You heard me. We don’t have time for your bullshit. You think it’s just so great to be a fucking serial killer, right? Prove it. Because I think you’re full of shit. You’re a fraud. You didn’t kill a single person. We know all about Jamie’s extracurricular activities with you. What’d he do? Strap a cape on you and tell you to fly? And then you landed on your face?”
“I killed them!” Highsmith snarled. He lunged over the table with surprising force until he caught on his own chain like a junkyard dog, pressing the limits of it, his teeth bared. “It was real.”