White Tears

by Hari Kunzru

  Through the kicks and punches, I dimly realize they are setting a scene, erecting a legal framework within which I can be killed.

  —Stop going for our guns!

  It will be quick, a justifiable homicide. Brave officers acting in self-defense. I flinch from the next thing, the bullet. When it comes, I am going to go through that doorway into the dark. I will push my way to the front of the crowd.

  Excuse me. Excuse me.

  But instead of shooting me, they just hit me some more with their nightsticks and then bounce my head off a concrete parking divider.

  After that they drive me downtown.

  Leonie, oh Leonie. I remember the car in motion, an intermittent orange flare against my eyelids. I remember getting to the precinct, half-supported by two uniforms into an office where they took my prints and wiped my cuts and bruises with a greasy cloth fished out of some sink. They cleaned me up that much for my mug shot; after it was taken I waited as the arresting officers were seen by a doctor, who took more pictures, documenting their not immediately obvious bruises and contusions. I was told there would be assault charges, resisting arrest. I sat there, hunched on the bench. The entire night shift stopped what it was doing to give me the hard stare.

  It was a relief to be put in an interview room, a solid door shut behind me. Cuffed to a table, I waited and stared at the peeling green paint on the walls, the scuff marks at the foot of the door, suggesting that it was frequently kicked open or shut. Slowly the room began to contract, to compress itself around me. I could feel the pressure on my eardrums. Against my will, I began to tune in to what was there, just at the limit of perception. I tried not to hear it, the static sorting itself, separating out into syllables. No conversation held in that room had ever stopped happening. The interrogations just carried on.

  Why did you. Where is. Don’t give me that. Captain, have mercy.

  She was dead. It was the only possibility. They would only behave like this towards me if she were dead.

  Murder.

  I’d left to get a bottle. A bottle of tequila and a bottle of Sprite. I’d left her alive, watching television.

  Don’t get mad at me woman if I kicks in my sleep

  I may dream things cause your heart to weep.

  I had left her alive.

  Through the crowd, through the door, into the darkness. What was in the room? Leonie was in the room. All of them, staring at her, so cold, so fair.

  Murder.

  What was it they wanted so very much to see?

  A detective came in, carrying a phone directory and a cup of coffee. Lacking a free hand, he kicked the door shut with his heel. He was a bulky man in his forties or fifties, with a broad blunt face and thinning sandy hair. He registered nothing much as he looked at me. A man eyeing his inbox. He put the coffee and the fat book down on the table, scraped a chair across the floor and flopped down on it, wearily loosening a button on his suit jacket. He smiled to show a mouthful of widely separated teeth, then the smile faltered, to be replaced by a look of consternation.

  —I forgot my notebook and pen. I need my notebook and pen, right?

  He waited for a response. The pause lengthened. He raised his eyebrows and nodded encouragingly.

  —I guess, I said.

  —Right. Because you’re going to make it easy and write out what happened. College guy like you, am I right?

  A telephone directory.

  —But you haven’t told me anything. What happened to Leonie?

  —Aw, shucks. Really? Don’t be like that.

  —Like what?

  —All what happened boss what happened. Trust me, things will go quicker if you write it out.

  When did I last see a telephone directory?

  —I need to know what’s happened to Leonie. Is she OK? Is she in the hospital? Please, what’s going on?

  —So you don’t know what’s going on?

  —I keep telling you.

  —That’s all you want to say to me? That you don’t know what’s going on?

  —That’s right.

  —Are you fucking kidding me?

  He put his coffee cup down, eased himself out of his chair and picked up the telephone directory. He swung it a couple of times in one hand, and decided to use a double-handed grip to hit me, bouncing it off the side of my head so hard that I jerked sideways, upending my chair and crashing to the floor. My arm, still cuffed to the desk, was jerked violently in its socket. My shaken brain hazily registered him crouching down behind me. Then he pulled a hood over my head.

  I know the things you are supposed to say, the things you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to ask for a lawyer. I didn’t say or do those things. I didn’t ask for a lawyer. I was hyperventilating into burlap that stank of vomit and something I’d never smelled before but recognized on an animal level: the smell of other people’s fear. All I could hear in my left ear, where he’d hit me, was a blast of static. The smell. The fear smell. The pit of my stomach was knotted tight, but everything else in my body was loose, not under my control. I needed to piss and I tried hard to hold it in, but somehow I couldn’t and urine began to leak out into my shorts. I pleaded with the detective to uncuff me so I could go to the bathroom, whimpering promises into the hood. I kept on and on, but there was no response. Gradually I accepted that I must be alone, and at some point he had left the room.

  In one ear nothing but the roaring, in the other office sounds, somewhere nearby. Phones ringing, someone laughing. I knelt there, my forehead on the cool wet tile. When they came back, a long time later, I did not hear their footsteps.

  I was crouching down by the desk in my urine-soaked pants, fishing for the chair with my uncuffed hand, when the hood was suddenly taken off. Blinking in the light, I found that the chair was lying on its side, just out of my reach. The sandy-haired detective was accompanied by another man, taller, thinner, with small features clustered at the center of a round flat face like a dirty white plate. They folded their arms and looked at me, approvingly.

  —Now we’re making progress.

  —I don’t know about that. Take a look at him. Looks like the stubborn type.

  —Be careful what you wish for, son. You want to be a rebel, here’s where you end up.

  —You’re in our house now.

  —Where the fun ain’t got no end.

  They uncuffed me and lifted me to my feet.

  —Don’t you dare get piss on me, boy.

  The sandy-haired detective examined his pants. The other one propped the chair back up on its legs and shoved it against mine. Sit down, he said. I sat down.

  —Now stand up.

  I stood up.

  —Sit down.

  I sat down.

  —Now stand up. Sit down!

  —Stand up!

  —Sit down! Stand up!

  —Sit down!

  I half-crouched, braced in position, hesitating between sitting and standing. The thin detective swept my legs out from under me and I fell sprawling on the floor, hitting my head against the side of the desk as I went down. It was the surprise as much as the pain. It robbed me of my power to act. As I tried to collect myself, they hooded me again, shoved me down on the chair and began to shout. What filth I was. They knew what I’d done. They knew because they’d seen with their own eyes. What I’d done to that girl. I wasn’t human. I did not deserve the name. I was refuse, offal.

  So cold, so sweet, so fair.

  Was she dead? Leonie couldn’t be dead. I begged them to tell me what had happened.

  —Because you don’t know?

  —Stand up.

  I tried to stand up. I could hear one of them moving round to my side of the desk. I flinched. No one touched me.

  I AM SITTING AT THE DESK. THE HOOD IS OFF. My eye has swollen up. There is a roaring in my left ear. The detective opens a folder and starts placing photos on the desk like a tarot reader laying down cards. Black-and-white eight-by-tens of a woman, a female corpse. Lying on her back,
the arms flung out. The skirt is lifted up over her face. Her old-fashioned underwear has been pulled down around the thighs. A second photo. The skirt down. Just her torso. Black everywhere. Black on the bedsheets, filling the great hole, the cavern of her chest. A third picture. Two feet, one bare, dirty or bloody, on the other a vintage shoe with a strap and a rounded toe. None of these are her clothes.

  —What is all this, I ask.

  —I got to show you her face? You need me to show you a picture of what you did to her fucking face?

  This is not. They aren’t her photos. This is not her. This is not Leonie.

  —These are old pictures. This all happened a long time ago.

  —Can’t you cut the crap for a single minute?

  He flips another photo onto the desk. We have always been here, sitting at the desk. We had always been here. He showed me another photo. Until then, I had not known what obscenity was. Not really.

  That was what they had been looking at. All the cops clustered round the door, jabbing each other with their elbows to catch a glimpse, getting hard inside their uniform pants. All gathering round to take their turn with the real.

  They told me it was time to confess, and when I would not, they cuffed my hands behind my back and walked me to the corner of the room, where they hooded me and ordered me to turn and face the wall. One of them hit me with something heavy, a sap or a nightstick. As I stumbled, they pushed me down on the floor. My mouth began to fill with blood. It felt as if I had bitten through my tongue. I coughed and spat into the filthy hood. They switched out the light and left the room.

  It could not have been Leonie. Those were not pictures of her. Her face was still beautiful, to me, but the hair, the clothes, the wallpaper in the background, all of it was wrong. Rose pattern wallpaper. The motel’s walls had been plain magnolia. She was dead in an old room with rose pattern wallpaper. The clothes were not the same. It was impossible. Leonie, dead in another room, years before she was born.

  They left me alone for a long time. They had forgotten whatever string or tie they used to secure the hood and I was able to worm it partway off my head. I lay and looked at the world on its side. Table legs jutting from the wall. A tin mug, coffee spilling up towards the door in the ceiling. The cop had been carrying a paper cup, with a plastic lid. This was an enameled tin mug. A chipped white tin mug with a blue rim. I was lying on a floor covered in white hex tiles. At another time the room had a concrete floor, sealed with some kind of rubbery paint. All the voices whispered in the darkness, all the confessions that had ever been made there.

  A tiled floor. The shoes came down from the ceiling and walked around me. Two pairs of wingtip oxfords, highly polished, prodding me with their toes. Argyle socks, wide cuffs on suit pants.

  —Make them shine, boy.

  The leather toecap, knocking against my mouth and nose.

  —Lay off, Gene. You’ll just get blood on them.

  They walked around me. They turned out the light. They turned it on again. They asked questions, suggested various things that I must have thought, things I must have done. I stood up, I sat down. They sat and smoked, told me how bored they were. One of them put out his cigarette on my hand.

  I screamed.

  —Jack, he can’t handle it no more. Look at him.

  —See, we know you’re a good boy. Deep down.

  —But you’re the type thinks he’s a sport. Hanging round outside the general store.

  —Drinking liquor, throwing dice.

  —Just sign the paper.

  —If you don’t know how to read, we’ll read it to you.

  Propped up at the table, the light in my eyes.

  —I thought you were one of the good ones. Not like them city niggers.

  —They think they’re so slick.

  —Please.

  —See that, Jack, he can’t handle it no more. Wants to go back to his momma.

  I told them I didn’t do it, but my tongue was swollen in my mouth.

  —What you say, nigger?

  Please not that word. I did not hear that. I am not that.

  I looked down at my hands. I have always been looking down at my hands, but as in a dream when you find yourself unable to read text or tell the time, they are vague. Though I see them, though I know they’re there, I can’t concentrate on them to extract the single piece of information I need.

  —There’s been a mistake, I say.

  I pull up my shirt. The same thing. I can’t tell. I look at my stomach but I can’t tell what color it is. I can’t tell what color I am.

  I may dream things cause your heart to weep

  —You sick little bastard.

  Hood on. And they dragged me downstairs, down into the red maw, into the entrails, and I tried to keep my head up off the concrete steps but I couldn’t and it was slammed again and again, each concussion doubling the roar, the red raging in my ears. I had disappeared. No one knew where I was. No one knew and no one would come to get me.

  A clip attached to my fingers, another up under my hood, its metal teeth biting down on my ear. The sound of a handle being cranked, then the electricity, sending my muscles into spasm. I screamed until I was just a mouth. Electricity, the past of the future, primitive and brutal. Screaming, sucking. The clips were pulled off. A high white sound. A high whine.

  —Why did you do it?

  Hands tugging at my pants, tugging down my filthy underwear.

  —Now look at you.

  Oh death spare me over.

  After a while I lost consciousness.

  Then I was back at the desk, cuffed to its leg. A wooden desk, pitted and scratched, my face very close to its surface. A wheedling voice in my ear saying boy let me give you a helping hand. You can talk to me. I know how it is.

  I felt so grateful.

  —You know what pain is now, am I right?

  —Yes.

  —You want to be cool? Outside of society? Be careful less you get what you wish for.

  —But it wasn’t me. I never wanted this. Carter was the one. The one who wanted to be cool.

  —I don’t even know what you’re whining about, boy. Let me tell you how it was. You wanted to have one of those sweet little girls. You wanted to break yourself off a little something something.

  —Please don’t talk about her.

  —But she wasn’t interested. She told you no. But you went ahead and took some anyway. Those rich fancypants white girls. They got it all. Their parties and tennis lessons. But you deserve something in this life too, am I right?

  I can’t see his face.

  —Don’t talk about her.

  —What you say?

  Cranking the handle. The whirring electrical sound. No hands no arms no fingers no feet no cock no guts no teeth or eyes or ears or hair. Just a screaming voice, just panic. Juddering behind the desk. The smell of charred skin, my rigid body a vibrating membrane. No mouth, no tongue, no teeth, no belly, no anus, just a tympanum, amplifying the pain and passing it on.

  Back at the desk. The polish pitted and scratched, my head yanked back.

  —We’ll try again. You wanted her. You wanted to fuck her so bad. But she’s way out of your league, right?

  —Yes.

  —Yes what?

  —Yes sir.

  —Yes sir what?

  —Yes sir she’s out of my league.

  —That’s right. Say it one more time for the Captain.

  —She’s out of my league.

  —Yet you wanted to fuck her all the same.

  —Yes.

  —Yes what, you little punk?

  —Yes sir, Captain, I wanted to fuck her all the same.

  —You piece of shit. They are going to turn you out on the farm, you know that? You are going to take it from everybody. Say to me, I wanted some.

  —I wanted some.

  —Say, I wanted to stick it in her. I wanted to do that rich white girl in her every hole.

  —I wanted.

  —That�
�s right. And it’s what you did.

  —I wanted to stick it in her.

  —And?

  —And she wouldn’t let me.

  —Now we’re getting somewhere.

  —So you’re in the room with this fancy piece of heiress pussy and what do you do?

  —I stick it in her.

  —That’s right.

  —I fuck her.

  —That’s right, boy. You fucked her. Oh, you did. You fucked her good.

  FOR A LONG TIME I WAS ALONE IN THE DARK. I am alone in the dark. I have always been here, now, all those years ago, alone in the dark. But around me the darkness was shifting, is shifting, subtly altering its disposition. I can feel a Formica surface, slick against my sweating cheek. I open my eyes a sliver and see a pair of gleaming white tennis shoes shuffling over the floor. Men are gathered outside in the corridor, muttering. Someone’s ringtone: a little snatch of a country rock song. The door opens and I squeeze my eyes tight, anticipating pain, but a meaty hand claps me on the back and I open my eyes to find them all around me, the detectives, in attitudes of tiredness and dejection, wiping their faces with handkerchiefs, free hands jammed in their pockets.

  —That you, son?

  On the table in front of me is a fax. A mug shot on a curling piece of paper. A pair of eyes is just about discernible in the black dot-matrix field of the face. It’s absurd. It would be impossible to recognize any human being from an image which is no more than a shape, a smudge. My mind is forming unwanted associations. My mind was forming associations, long ago. I was thinking, you communicate with other law enforcement agencies by fax? What year is this?

  Blank. Say something.

  —No sir.

  —Looks like you.

  Freeze.

  Ha ha ha ha!

  Ha ha ha ha!

  Ha ha ha ha!

  Ha ha ha ha!

  How they all fell about. Good old boys. I looked down at my hands, turned them over. My skin was white. I touched my ear, my white fingers came away wet. Clear fluid was coming from my ear.

  Cop’s finger jabbing at the mug shot.