by Jess Walter
“Oh, sure,” Caroline says. “Let’s talk generally about homicide. Generally I’m against it. How about you, Mr.—”
He ignores her attempt to get his name. “Please. This is hard enough. I don’t quite know how to start.”
“Well,” she says, “it is customary with this sort of thing to start with a body.”
“No,” he says. “I can’t. It’s not…it’s not like that.”
“No body?” Of course, she thinks. He’s committed his crime on some astral plane. He’s murdered someone’s soul.
“No, I mean…it just…this isn’t an unsolved case from the newspaper or something. It’s nothing that you know about.” And he adds, “Yet.”
“Okay. You tell me. Where should we start?”
“I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to do here,” he says.
“I’m trying to understand, Mr.—”
He catches her gaze. His one eye goes back and forth between hers, as if trying to choose the friendlier of the two. “Are you religious, Caroline?”
She is surprised he has remembered her first name, but she lets it go and thinks about the question, the angle. If she says yes, she is religious, does the Loon experience a moment of epiphany and give up the whole thing? Or does he shy away, thinking she’ll be judgmental? If she says no, does he close up because she is a heathen? Or does he feel liberated, able to talk freely? She decides to go with God.
“I have my faith,” she says, and has to look away because that’s an even bigger lie than the one about going off the record.
“I wish I did,” says the Loon, and rubs his face.
Caroline leans across the table and puts her hands out, palms up, and thinks of the last car she bought and the salesman who struck this pose: What’s it going to take for you to drive this car off the lot today? “There’s something you want to get off your chest.”
“Yes,” the Loon says.
“You told the sergeant you wanted to confess.”
“Yes.”
“Then you need to tell me what you did. And who you did it to.”
“Why?” he asks.
“Because that’s what a confession is.”
“I don’t think so,” he says, and cocks his head. “Isn’t the confession separate from the thing being confessed? There’s the crime, the action, which is crude and violent and without context. And then there is the confession of the crime, which is all context, all motivation and—” He looks at the ceiling. “I don’t know. Cleansing.
“I mean, there must be millions of crimes every day. But a confession? A real confession? I’d guess those are pretty rare.”
She stares at him, drawn in by his extravagant Loon logic and that nagging familiarity. Who is he? She mentally shaves him, trims the hair. Who does she know with an eye patch? “Look,” she says, “you can’t confess without naming a crime and a victim.”
For the first time, he is engaged. “Of course you can,” he says. “The victim is just a shadow, an expression of the idea of a specific crime. The crime is the real thing, the actual, the ideal, the light behind the shadow.”
“Are we still talking about a confession?” Caroline asks.
“Yes,” says the Loon. “A priest doesn’t want to know whom you lusted after or what you stole; he wants to know whether you are sorry. God doesn’t want names.”
“Then maybe you should’ve turned yourself in to a priest,” she says. “Maybe you should confess to God.”
“I don’t believe in God,” he says. “I believe in the police.”
This whole thing is getting away from her. They stare across the small table at each other and she thinks of college, of sitting up late at night after bottles of wine, in conversations just like this one, usually involving some horny sophomore poet or philosopher, just before he changed his major to business and got engaged to someone else. A couple of times, she found herself seduced by a young man’s boozy rationalization of the shortness of life and the subjective nature of morality. She’s always had three weaknesses when it comes to men: dark eyes, big pecs, faulty logic.
She considers the Loon and loses herself in his one dark eye, which seems to compensate for its missing partner by exuding twice the emotion. The eye floats in its socket like a deep blue Life Saver. “I’m just not sure what I can do with a confession that doesn’t admit to a crime,” she says quietly.
“I’m not asking you to do anything, Caroline. Just listen.”
She checks her watch: 9:40 P.M. Maybe the desk sergeant is right. Cut this nut loose and she’s home in an hour and twenty minutes watching TV. Still, this could keep her from filling the last of her shift with paperwork.
Apparently he sees her indecision. “Look,” he says, “you probably get people admitting crimes all the time. But what are you getting, really? You know what the guy did or you wouldn’t have brought him in. And he knows you know. He’s not confessing. He weighs his options and tells you only as much as you already know, as much as he can get away with. You trick him into telling more, but you both know the rules. It’s a formality…confirmation of what everyone already knows.
“But this thing”—he scratches at the table—“this thing I want to tell you…nobody knows about it. Nobody knows what I’ve done.”
The quiet in the room is different from normal quiet between cop and suspect or even cop and loon, and Caroline shifts uncomfortably.
“Tell me this,” he says. “When was the last genuine confession you heard? I don’t mean excuses or plea bargains or justifications or extenuating circumstances or coerced testimony or the half-truths of confidential informants.” His chin rests on the table and his arms are spread out. “When was the last time a man came in and opened himself up, unburdened his soul, when nothing was compelling him to do so? When was the last time someone gave you the truth?”
“I don’t…” She feels flushed. “You want a confession without consequences?”
“If you mean prison, I know that’s a possibility.” He pulls back a bit, smiles sadly, and Caroline begins to think that maybe this Loon really did something, maybe there’s more to this than delusions and skipped meds. “But this thing that happened,” he says carefully, “was the result of a lifetime of harassment. Betrayals and pressures. It will never happen…it could never happen again. It was a radiator boiling over.
“Consequences?” He squeezes his eyes shut. “All I have left is consequences.”
It is quiet for a moment. “Okay,” Caroline says. “You want to…confess.” She’s used that word a hundred times and it never sounded like this. “You want to confess without incriminating yourself. And then what? Go home?”
He doesn’t answer, just looks down.
“Well,” she says, “that would certainly speed up the criminal justice system.”
It is Friday night. There are no other detectives in these back offices. It is one of the idiocies of police work: the criminals work nights and weekends, while the detectives are home for the six o’clock news. The office behind her is dark. What harm can there be in indulging this Loon for an hour?
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll do it. I’ll hear your…confession.”
“Thank you.” He looks around the room. “Okay.”
They stare at each other for a few seconds more and he takes a series of deep breaths. Finally, he leans forward. “Do I start or—”
“There are a number of—”
“It’s just, I’ve never…how do you go about this?”
“Well, usually we just talk. We can tape confessions. We can do it on video.”
He looks uncomfortable with all of these options.
“Sometimes we have the suspect write out his version of events and sign it.”
The Loon perks up. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s it. I’d like to write it. Yes. It should be written down. With context and meaning. That’s the only way.”
“I’ll get you a pad and a pen,” she says.
“And some more cof
fee?”
She grabs his cup and exits the interview room. She leaves the door unlocked; he’s not under arrest. All around her, the Major Crimes office registers its indifference to the semantic games of Caroline and this crank. After all, she thinks, a confession is a confession is…Dark computer screens track her across the room, colleagues’ family pictures watch from their perches on the soft cubicle walls. At her desk—no pictures—Caroline pulls a legal pad from the top drawer and grabs a pen. She walks out front and nods to the sergeant as she fills the Loon’s cup with stale patrol coffee.
“So was I right?” The sergeant looks up from a snowboarding magazine. “He a fuckin’ wack job?”
“A shithouse rat,” she says.
“Yeah, I figured.” He returns to his report. “You gonna cut him loose?”
“In a minute.”
When she comes back the Loon looks uncertain, as if he’s having second thoughts. She sets his coffee down and he takes it gratefully.
“Can I ask you something?” he says.
She waits.
“Have you ever been responsible for someone’s death?”
She notes the timidity of the words. Not Have you ever killed someone but Have you ever been responsible for someone’s death. “Yes,” she answers, to both questions.
“What was it like? For you?”
“Better than for the dead guy,” she says. But he doesn’t respond to the joke and she remembers the feeling, the smell, the gun in her hand, the man no longer moving toward her, finished. “It was bad,” she says, more quietly.
“Afterward, it was hard…personally?”
She doesn’t answer.
“I just wonder if it’s possible to live with something like that,” he says.
No sleep, shallow breathing, hand vibrating, the flash when she closed her eyes. Caroline looks down.
“I’ve been having these dreams,” he says, “where I did something wrong. Something terrible? But it’s almost like I’ve done it in another world. Like no one around me knows. But when I wake up…” He swallows. “Do you ever have dreams like that?”
She thinks, Fuck you, but says simply, “No,” and slides the legal pad to him.
The Loon picks up the pen and writes across the top of the page: Confession. His handwriting is precise and practiced. He considers his one word, then crosses it out and writes Statement of Fact. He exhales, as if that were it. Then he shakes his arms, cricks his neck, and looks around the room. “Could I be alone to do this? It won’t take long.”
“Okay.” She stands to leave. Statement of Fact. This guy’s a lawyer, she thinks.
“One more question, Caroline,” he says as she’s on her way out.
She turns back from the door. His hair has fallen over his eye patch and he looks like a kid all of a sudden. That’s the thing about men, even crazy ones; after a while, they all turn into boys.
“Why’d you become a police officer?” he asks.
Caroline doesn’t hesitate as she reaches for the door. “I like the snow.”
Not every kind of madness is a calamity.
—Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
II
Statement of Fact
1 | ELI BOYLE’S DANDRUFF
Eli Boyle’s dandruff was more than enough indignity for one child. In fact, the word “dandruff” barely did it justice. He was like a snow globe turned upside down, drifting flakes on the Empire State Building or the St. Louis Arch or the Golden Gate. Our classmates made sudden noises—clapping their hands or dropping books—just to see Eli’s head snap around and the snow dislodge and cascade from his head, drift onto his desk and settle on the floor of the classroom. When he sneezed, teachers would stop lecturing until the ash settled. It was hard to believe a human head could flake so much without losing actual mass, and the glacial till of Eli Boyle’s scalp was discussed with some seriousness as a potential science project. Walking down the hall, the dead, flaking snow covered his shoulders like two lesser peaks beneath Boyle’s Everest of a head. So, as I say, at least the way I remember it, Eli Boyle’s dandruff would have been enough humiliation for one kid to bear, enough embarrassment to ruin his life the way lives are ruined in elementary school, before they actually begin.
But dandruff was only the first of Eli’s afflictions. I will list them here, but please don’t think me cruel, or blame me for piling these horrors upon him. I was not his Maker; Someone Else visited these burdens upon Eli Boyle, Someone Far Crueler Than I. Or just more indifferent. And don’t think for a moment that I take anything but the most humble responsibility in relating these difficulties. When I am finished with this confession, this affidavit, this statement of fact, it will come as no surprise that Eli Boyle turned out to be a better man than I, and nothing would make me happier than to report now that the adolescent version of that good man started life with a clean slate, or at least a clean scalp. But I cannot. So I offer this accounting with no great joy, but with a fidelity to truth and a desire to re-create for those who care, for the record, I suppose, an Eli Boyle whole and pristine, just as he was then, all the more amazing when you consider the list of ruined parts that comprised him:
He had bad breath, like he’d eaten sour cream from a cat box. He wore braces on his teeth and his legs; had acne and a unique bacon-flavored body odor; picked his nose and ate what he mined; exhibited a zest for epic, untimely flatulence (the Social Studies Incident of 1976; the Great 1980 Pep Assembly Blowout…); wore black-framed, Coke-bottle glasses; had thin red hair, skid marks in his underwear, and allergies to pollen, cotton, peanuts, and soap. He had a limp, a lisp, a twitch, waxy ears, gently crossed eyes, and was—how to put this—afflicted by the random popping of inappropriate erections, boners as we would say then, as we did say then, through his gray, standard-issue PE shorts.
His overprotective mother dressed him like a janitor in Dickey overalls and flannel shirts at a time—the mid-1970s—when everyone else wore designer jeans and varsity T’s. He was the oldest kid I ever knew to wet his pants at school, to cry, to sit in the front of the school bus, to call out for his mommy. He rode a three-wheeled bike with a flag on the back because of “balance” problems; ate a special lunch with no milk or cheese or whole grains; and had grand mal seizures, blackouts, muscle spasms, and fits of gagging. He had to wear corrective shoes because of a deformed foot. He had scoliosis, skin lesions, and scabies, and the nurse was always hauling him off for impetigo or indigestion or impacted turds or any of the other nasty bugs that he carried around like his only friends. The fact that he lived in a trailer wasn’t awful in itself, because the great, prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale also lived in a trailer, but Eli Boyle lived alone with his mother in the worst park in the worst trailer, an old gray can with a dirt lawn and stained sheets for curtains.
He was what we called then “a B-Flat SpEd,” which meant that while he was in special education, there was nothing really wrong with him. He was brighter than the other SpEds and was able to pull B’s and C’s in regular classes, with the occasional A, although he was a miserable failure in that rigid and unforgiving society that is really the only society. It occurs to me now that he may have been mildly autistic, but we didn’t know that word and so we felt accurate then in calling him a spaz, a loop, a ’tard, a dork, a dweeb, a dick, a freak. It was said that even the other ’tards in special ed made fun of Eli.
So that’s him, as complete and flawed and tragic and sad, as wonderful as I can remember him, as pure and imperfect, as unforgettable as anyone I’ve ever known. Eli Boyle. The man who saved my life.
And the man whose life I have taken.
2 | YOU MUST FORGIVE
You must forgive the formal informality of this tract or report or confession, this statement of fact. Even before this trouble I was told that I write like a disgraced lawyer (so is that irony or premonition?) and since my ambitions and insecurities pulled me toward a political career that anyone with a local newspaper would know flamed out brillian
tly and prematurely—here I go offering the obvious as proof of the obvious—I have developed that unique, self-serving, solipsistic style of intellect that arises among attorneys, politicians, and strip-club dancers (I plead guilty to two of the three) and that is why I might now and then lapse into the kind of writing that we lawyers are trained to commit, using language to obscure and obfuscate rather than clarify and communicate.
So, when I say that it is Eli Boyle’s life that I have taken, you may ask yourself, Is he simply being metaphoric? Yes and no. But let me say, there is nothing metaphoric about this confession, nothing metaphoric in my hatred and rage and my thirst for revenge, nothing metaphoric about the person I set out to kill, the handgun I held in my hand, the blood that crept across the floor beneath my feet.
But that is all ending, and before I tell the ending I must tell the beginning:
Start by picturing my neighborhood in the mid-1970s: poor and uneducated and ignorant of even those facts, a strip of sorry homes three blocks wide and a mile long, a thin cut of plywood shacks, trailers, and single-story war-era baby boomer starters that kids at school called the “white ghetto,” weeds and falling shingles and axle-rusted pickup trucks parked on gray yards next to vacant lots where kids smoked pot and cigarettes; a grocery store on the near end, the gravel pits of an excavation company on the far, a long street of houses pinched like an ant farm between the dirty plate glass of the Spokane River and our rutted, potholed road, after which my neighborhood was named:
Empire.
Life on Empire Road began at the bus stop. I have heard that our first conscious memories occur at four or maybe three, but my first sense of myself was in the socialization of later elementary school, fourth and fifth grade, and it was as a fifth grader, a short, insecure eleven-year-old, that I first remember seeing Eli Boyle.
He had decided to walk down the long row of dreary houses to our bus stop because the torture at his own stop had become unbearable. Once again, I ask you to imagine a neighborhood stretched like a rubber band until it is too long and too thin and strained in the center. Picture six bus stops along this strip of despair, mine second in line. My family was typical of the Empire neighborhood: poor and white, father a night custodian, mother what was called then a housewife. There were four of us kids. My sister Meg was five and in kindergarten, so Mom drove her to and from school. Shawna was four and didn’t go to school yet.