The Inquisitor: A Novel

by Smith, Mark Allen

  “Harry, how much did we make last year?”

  “A million and change.”

  “Twenty-five percent of that is…?”

  “Two hundred fifty.”

  “And that’s how much if you paid taxes?”

  “Four hundred and twenty thousand. Okay, okay.”

  Geiger held his coffee cup against his chin. In an asap scenario the Jones is more of an X factor and the clock is ticking. Ordinarily Geiger didn’t like to count on luck, but when the client was in a hurry he had no choice: he was forced to hope that the Jones would slip up. Sooner rather than later, the Jones would have to show something—a weakness, a phobia, a demon—and then Geiger would play it for all it was worth. Asaps were always tricky, but they did provide their own kind of challenge.

  Geiger put his cup down. It didn’t make a sound.

  “Tell Hall it’s a go,” he said.

  Harry’s lips sprang up at the corners in a hallelujah smile.

  “Have him snatch Matheson now,” Geiger said. “Make the session for midnight, Ludlow Street.”

  * * *

  Geiger had an appointment with Corley coming up that afternoon, but first he wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art because Harry had said there were some de Koonings there. Geiger had never been in a museum. Carmine had taken him to a gallery in SoHo once—Carmine was a serious collector—but Geiger had been unmoved. Paintings, sculpture, photographs—they weren’t like music. They were unchanging images, and staring at them was a static event for him. But having an appreciation of a Jones’s passion is a valuable asset in IR, so he was going to see what it was that David Matheson craved.

  He walked through Central Park. The sun was a yellow decal stuck onto the sky, and softball teams were out in full regalia. The park was where he had first started studying squirrels. They were marvels of psychic economy, each reflex and movement ruled by fear. Geiger sometimes watched a squirrel stop in mid-step and freeze with its paw raised for thirty seconds as it weighed a potential threat.

  Soon after he’d moved into his house, he’d started an experiment to see if he could change and control their behavior. For a week, he put a pile of sunflower seeds by the birch tree in the backyard and watched from the stoop as the squirrels ate them. Then one morning he sat down by the tree, hand open in his lap and filled with seeds. He stayed absolutely still for an hour. For three mornings, a squirrel would venture within five or six feet of him, freeze, and then sprint away. Geiger realized that as the squirrels came closer, his heightened anticipation caused changes in him—pulse rate, gaze, breathing pattern—that set off their internal alarms. He would have to change his behavior to control theirs.

  The next morning he sat by the tree with his eyes shut, playing a symphony in his head, denying his senses all knowledge of the external. In two days they were picking seeds from his hand; after four days they were eating while perched on his calf or thigh.

  Geiger brought that experience into the session room—the ability to change his behavior to suit a scenario and to create a state of dread in the Jones while he could still function and make choices. If a squirrel’s hardwiring allows a respite from fear only when it is up a tree, Geiger’s goal was not to make the Jones fear that he’d never get back to the tree, but to make him forget that trees existed at all.

  Recently he had told the story of the squirrels to Corley. It was one of the few times he had volunteered information about a contemporary event, and Corley had responded by asking if he felt “disconnected from people.”

  Geiger answered, “Martin, if you’ve never been plugged in, you can’t be disconnected.”

  Geiger was aware of his differentness. Of the one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week, he spent approximately five with Harry, one with Corley, and, on average, fifteen with the Joneses. Living the rest of his life alone was not a choice. It was his organic state. The parts of himself that Geiger knew, he knew very well. The parts he didn’t know, he knew not at all. Life before New York was without definition—a black room—and when he peered into it, the darkness offered faint answers. But when the dream started, it was as if a flash of lightning filled the room, and he could see that the space was endless, without borders. The dream gave him half a second’s glimpse of the room’s contents: countless faces, bodies, trees, unrecognizable shapes. That is where Corley came in. Geiger told him about the dream and its variations, and he used Corley’s eyes to help him see into the black room and discover who he was and what he had been. Geiger did this because the more he knew about himself, the more he could bring to the job. It was all about IR.

  The dream had come to him again, last night, and the aftermath had been the same. He woke up at four A.M. and saw the flashes of lights announcing the powerful migraine that was already moving like a storm front into the left side of his brain. The dream’s details changed but the structure was always the same: Geiger, as a preteen boy, would rush out of someplace and try to get to a destination that was never clear. On his journey, which was filled with obstacles, he would sooner or later start to literally come apart: first his digits and then his limbs would drop off. When his head was about to fall off he would wake up.

  When Corley first heard about the migraines, he wrote a prescription for Imitrex, but Geiger declined to accept it. He didn’t take pills for his pain; in his mind, that would be attacking it from the outside. He dealt with pain from the inside, and like most of the mundane processes in his daily life, his method was uncomplicated and ritualistic.

  When a migraine moved in, Geiger would put on some music, always rich and textured, and curl up on the floor of the closet. He would close the door, strap on the Sennheisers, and give himself to the blackness and sound. Then he would reach down deep and wrap his arms around the pain, and when it became all he felt, the only thing he felt, he became as strong as the pain. And that’s when he would grab the pain by its throat and kill it.

  Lodged in some crevice of his brain was the knowledge that there was more than one way to deal with pain. Geiger had spent much of his life traveling this road—as beast, as rider—and what few understood about pain was its dual potential. It could be used not only by the inflictor but by the receiver, and as a primal sensation it could be tapped as a source of strength. The more intense the pain, the stronger its power—he knew this. He also understood, somehow, that pain had made him who he was.

  7

  “I had the dream again,” said Geiger, his fingers tapping at the couch.

  Corley scribbled Increasd freq of dream on his pad. The dream was a treasure map teeming with details; it was also a potential ingress to the inner self. Except for scattered, random images, Geiger had no memory of his life before he came to New York, but it was in the retelling of the dream and its variations that shadows of past catastrophes peeked into the light for Corley to see. The dreams were maelstroms of ambivalence in which Geiger’s critical need to act battled his desperate need not to. The opposing urges created such a furious storm within Geiger that, in the dream, it literally pulled him apart. In his notes, Corley had dubbed it the “Endgame” dream, and though he still didn’t fully understand it, he had become certain of one of its meanings: as a child, Geiger had desperately sought to escape from some kind of intolerable scenario, but doing so had brought on psychological disintegration, or at least the death of that part of him capable of rejoicing in his freedom.

  “It’s coming more often now—the dream,” said Corley. “Three in the last five weeks.”

  “Four,” said Geiger.

  Corley felt a slight, queasy shift in his chest. “Four? The station wagon, the bike, the motorcycle…”

  “And the skateboard.”

  Corley squelched a mutter, and put pen to pad.

  “I can hear the pen, Martin. What’re you writing?”

  “That I forgot one of your dreams. How do you feel about that?” Corley asked.

  “Meaning what? Do I see you as less imperfect than anyone else?”


  “Well, I think there’s a certain reliance on the patient’s part that I’ll remember what is talked about in this room. It goes to trust.”

  “Trust,” Geiger repeated. “Do you trust me, Martin?”

  The quintessential Geiger tone—smooth as a mirror, devoid of affect—forcing the listener to deconstruct the statement to try to discover the attitude within it or the intent behind it. Do you trust me, Martin? Do you trust me, Martin? Do you trust me, Martin?

  Corley put his pad on the carpet and settled back in his chair. “Tell me about the dream,” he said.

  Geiger’s fingers came to rest, his hands on his stomach. “I’m running in a dark tunnel—old, wooden beams like an abandoned mine. There’s a light ahead of me.”

  “You’re ten, eleven?”

  “Yes. I hear the roar of a cave-in behind me. It sounds alive, like an angry beast. I burst into the light as the entrance collapses—and I’ve got that sense of purpose, even though I don’t know where I’m going. Then I’m on a sidewalk—in New Orleans, I think—but I can’t cross the street because a funeral procession is going by, hundreds of people clapping and shouting, ‘Hallelujah!’ while a band is playing Dixieland music. The coffin comes by, small and black, on a cart pulled by four toy horses.”

  “You mean Shetland ponies?”

  “No, toy horses—wooden hobbyhorses on wheels. Beautifully crafted. I have to get across the street, so I hurdle the coffin, but my feet clip it, and as I sprawl to the ground the coffin tips over and this boy rolls out. My age, blue suit, polished shoes. He doesn’t look like me, but I know immediately that it is me. The dead me looks so peaceful that I just want to lie there with him, but the need to get where I’m going is stronger, so I get up and run.”

  Corley picked up his pad again and wrote, Mourning for who—or what?

  “Soon I get to a river and there’s a motorboat at a dock. I grab the starter cord and pull and pull. The motor turns over but won’t catch. As always, my overalls are full of tools and I pull a wrench out to unscrew the engine’s hood. I’m turning the bolts but the wrench won’t grab hold, and then my fingers start falling off, followed by my feet and legs. My head starts to come loose … and then I wake up.”

  Corley made another note. “You said the cave-in sounded ‘like an angry beast.’ What’s it angry about?”

  “I guess it’s angry about being buried in the cave-in.”

  “All right. Could it be angry about anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe it’s angry at you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you were getting out of the cave.”

  “So—maybe I’m not just running out of the cave, I’m running away from the beast?”

  A now-familiar heat ignited Corley’s insides, the urge to soothe and comfort, to protect the little boy always trapped somewhere—in a burning building, a dark room with a knobless door, now a cave. He chafed at the nearly absurd therapeutic truth: that to free the child, he had to unlock his torment and have him live through it all over again.

  Corley knew time was almost up, but he didn’t want to stop.

  “One thing that always strikes me about the dream is the absence of fear. You never talk about the past, but you must have experienced fear. In the dream, you go through harrowing events, but never feel afraid. You ever wonder why?”

  “Because there’s no longer anything to be scared of.”

  “In the dream?”

  “In the dream—in real life. Whichever. Both.”

  “You said, ‘no longer anything to be scared of.’”

  Geiger’s fingers skittered across the soft leather. “We’re running over—aren’t we, Martin?”

  Corley jotted down a final note. What happened to Dad?

  * * *

  Since Corley’s divorce, weekends had acquired the feel of time in abeyance, as if impish gods had shoved wrenches in the gears of the universal clock. These two days had always been earmarked for his marriage, a chance for Sara and him to reconvene, talk, dally. Now, hours were ninety minutes and red lights took forever to go green.

  He was lying on the patients’ couch, reading through his notes on Geiger, which he kept in a leather portfolio. He turned on a lamp; the sun had set already, but he’d been slow to notice the darkness crowding in. He spent most of his time in this room now. The living room and bedroom, still adorned with the acquired relics of a dead union, were places he rarely visited. When Sara had announced she was leaving, she’d said he could keep everything. The declaration had been spirit-shattering—she’d made it plain that the only thing she wanted was to be gone.

  Corley spent part of every weekend reading his session notes, but lately he’d become especially absorbed by his notes about Geiger. He spent hours sifting through what little information about the man he’d been able to piece together, poring over a mystery whose denouement and revelations had not yet been written. As the notes revealed, he had often gone against accepted wisdom—but not his instincts—as the therapy proceeded, largely because Geiger kept so much out of bounds. Corley didn’t know where his patient came from, or where he lived, or even what he did for a living.

  Outside, a shrill, nasty sound was gathering. Corley rose and stepped onto the terrace just as a big squadron of black birds rose up from the rooftops and went into a steep dive. They were twirling and spinning, their formation changing like a kaleidoscope’s fractals, perfectly conjoined. They made Corley think of Geiger. He was a crippled man-child, his psyche the handiwork of immeasurable cruelty. By sheer will, he somehow kept all his parts moving in sync. For weeks, Corely had sensed a shifting of emotional plates in Geiger, and an approaching event. He didn’t think the man had an inkling that the dream was proof of defended structures giving way within him. The demon was knocking on the door, and it would not be denied entry.

  Corley watched the flock of birds disappear into the leaves of the sidewalk trees. He was weary of routine, of the inexorable drift from passion to ritual, of wisdom gained at the sacrifice of optimism. He was weary of the penitents, the guiltmongers, the un-Geigers who lay on his couch addicted to their imperfections. And he was equally weary of his abetment, the fifty-minute doses of attention and patience dispensed to help them share a wan smile or shed a few tears before he sent them back out into the world.

  Inside, he walked into the kitchen and flipped the lights on. The pale blue tiles above the counters still reminded him of Sara’s eyes. Too many of his thoughts were prompted by memories, and the knowledge that his future would be little different from his life now weighed him down.

  Corley poured himself a mug of coffee and sat down at the breakfast nook. The New York Times lay before him, and the headlines read like recycled slogans. “Mass Grave Unearthed Near Kabul.” “Suicide Bomber Kills 56 in Chechnya.” “Bodies Discovered in Cairo Factory—Evidence of Torture Reported.” The story about Egypt was accompanied by a photograph of a windowless bunker. The floor was covered with dark blotches, and the walls were spattered with dots and arching squiggles—clearly they were the canvases of a brutal painter. Corley sipped his coffee and tried to decide whether the world had become more barbaric or if cable television, round-the-clock bloggers, and websites dedicated to whistle-blowers simply meant that less remained hidden.

  I could just quit, he thought. Pack it up. He pictured the house up in Cold Spring. Of all the possessions he and Sara had accumulated, it was the only thing he’d really wanted. Since the divorce, his trips to Cold Spring had become more and more infrequent, but though he was deaf to selling, he was unwilling to consider why. Maybe he should take the rest of the summer off and spend every day in the hammock with a case of Guinness and a pack of Camels, reading novels while his gut grew and his liver and lungs went to ruin.

  Corley snorted at himself. He wouldn’t leave—it was foolish even to imagine otherwise. He would sit in his office with Geiger until the breakthrough came, until the psychic walls collapsed and the horror came
spilling out and he tried mightily to pull the little boy from the muck and wash him clean.

  A sudden, rising, angry chorus made Corley turn to the window. It was the black birds. They were leaving.

  8

  Harry stared out the windshield of the van at a large flock of noisy birds moving south from uptown. They tilted over the East River like a single giant wing, so black that it stood out against the evening sky, and then the flock came apart and melted into the lattice of the Brooklyn Bridge that stretched out around him.

  Hours ago, when he’d left the diner, Harry had returned to Brooklyn and picked up the rental van. Richard Hall would be delivering the Jones tonight, but it was Geiger’s SOP that Harry have a vehicle on hand at all sessions—another example of crossing of t’s and dotting of i’s as a way to keep the outside world’s powers of chaos in check. Then Harry had stopped back home, given Melissa a dozen of Lily’s favorite CDs, and spent a few hours on the couch watching his sister while she sat cross-legged in a chair, fingering a button on her blouse. He had tried a few questions—“Lily, do you want something to eat?” and “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” and “Do you remember my name, sis?”—but she responded only once, to his last query, saying:

  “I remember all the names. I know them.”

  Harry took the bridge off-ramp and headed crosstown toward Ludlow Street. He loved the feel of the city at this end. The air smelled different than uptown—spicier, more exotic. The song of the street had a sweeter pitch, the light seemed softer, and when a job was finished he could walk just two blocks to the tiny dim sum place on Division Street and sit down to a feast for twenty bucks. Best deal in town.

  Last week he’d received an e-mail informing him that Lily’s nut would go up to one hundred and ten thousand a year, so tonight’s asap was a godsend. He had also negotiated top dollar with Richard Hall—thirty-five grand. Geiger always left that part of the business to him and he’d gotten good at it. Who could have guessed?