American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  “I think cancer is smarter than me. I stood a better chance of winning a few this way. You?”

  “I said the same twenty years ago.”

  “Not anymore?”

  “I thought I wanted to fight crime. Now that I’m older I realize that it’s injustice that bothers me. Fighting the first one doesn’t always solve for the other,” she says.

  “I can’t believe you’re not American,” Melinda says. “You talk better than almost anyone I know.”

  “I have a vocabulary for work. Not for other things.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “It means I can talk about police work in English, but I can’t talk about love.”

  “Who can?” Melinda says. “Must be so cool to speak a second language. I can’t really imagine it.”

  “That’s because you speak English. You’re all terrible at second languages. You, the British, the Australians, the New Zealanders. The Canadians pretend to speak French for national unity, but they’re not good either. Do you share your apartment?” Sigrid asks, as though it is not a non sequitur.

  “No. It’s my own. It’s right in town off Main Street by a laundromat. Two bedrooms, one bath, on-street parking. It’s nothing special but it’s in my budget and it’s mine. You know that store called Ikea?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have that in Europe?”

  “It’s European.”

  The flip-flop boys with the hydration issues have started tossing an American football back and forth. Sigrid, watching them, can’t understand why the Americans call it football.

  “It is?”

  “It’s Swedish. You might have noticed the blue and yellow on everything.”

  “I thought that was just the color scheme.”

  “Those are the colors of the Swedish flag. It’s why they sell frozen meatballs and everything’s in Swedish.”

  “Never gave it much thought. And Legos are from Denmark, right?”

  “You have two bedrooms?”

  “Yup. Mine and yours. We’re roomies now.”

  “I’d like to go back and take a nap.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Central European Time is plus six hours from now. It’s past ten at night and I’ve already had a long day. I need an hour or two of rest before going for another stretch. It’s a smart choice. It doesn’t mean I’m weak.”

  “I’m on the clock no matter where we are. So . . . I guess. But while we’re here, shouldn’t we talk to Lydia Jones’s people?”

  Sigrid stands and brushes herself off.

  “There’s no one here. We’ll talk to Lydia’s friends later. Right now I need to rest.”

  The Death of Jeffrey Simmons

  Thirty minutes later Sigrid is alone behind a closed bedroom door in Melinda’s apartment. The bed is unusually high off the ground due to what Melinda called a “box spring” under a mattress as thick as her forearm is long. There is also a wardrobe and a desk. Everything smells like the inside of a box. The bedspread is a handmade quilt that Melinda’s grandmother had made and presented to her grandfather as a wedding gift and there was more to the story but Sigrid had switched off by then.

  “Mi casa es su casa,” Melinda told her.

  At the desk Sigrid unpacks a Korean laptop, boots it up, and for fifteen minutes she has to stubbornly refuse to join anything, update anything, or connect to anything. She fights past legal agreements that are in no way a “meeting of the minds” but ultimately has to capitulate; otherwise she can’t use the computer she allegedly owns.

  Her first order of business is to plug in the orange hard drive to the USB port. She listens to it spin to life as Melinda turns on some music in the other room—some teenage girl singing about herself.

  Sigrid inserts a USB key into the right side of the laptop.

  The condition of his home notwithstanding, Marcus has historically been tidy and organized, and the hard drive shows that he hasn’t changed. It contains four folders marked in English rather than Norwegian. It would be interesting to know whether he’s dreaming in English now, after twenty years here.

  The files are marked: DEPRESSION, POLICE, JEFFREY, IDEAS. They are sized 103MB, 127MB, 57MB, and 3K respectively. Sigrid immediately copies all four to the USB stick she names Ferdinand for no particular reason. Ejecting the hard drive, she opens the files directly from the USB key so the original files will remain untouched and the casual investigator will not see changes to the dates they were modified.

  This way, no one will know where she’s looked, what she’s looked at, or in what order. This all feels more criminal than investigative, but there’s no law against taking precautions.

  The DEPRESSION folder consists mainly of PDF files or screen shots from medical and quasi-medical websites, including blogs and letters from people with depression or some related psychological concern. Listing the files from largest to smallest shows that the file sizes are mostly small—500K to 1.5MB. A few exceed 4MB and these are generally short movies he has downloaded. She watches two—each a documentary-style interview about living with depression.

  In the other room, Melinda has changed the music to something that reminds Sigrid of the Bangles, though it is unlikely Melinda is old enough to have heard of the Bangles.

  She should have been more thorough at Marcus’s house and checked the cabinet for medication, but she knows not to castigate herself too much. No one can see everything the first time. The source of the guilt, though, is the misuse of the term “evidence”; it confuses too many investigators. As Sigrid has discussed with her colleague Petter on more than one occasion—especially when attending conferences conducted in English—the English term evidence isn’t used in Norwegian, or more to the point it was only lately introduced but not in relationship to crime and law. In Norway, the term is bevis, derived from the German beweiss, for proof. Still, though, the term doesn’t quite translate. It is not proof as the Americans or British mean it. As you search a home or other crime site, an English-speaking investigator does not look for “proof,” because proof is that which proves a theory to be true. But when an investigator is wandering around a crime scene the first time, it’s imperative not to have a theory in mind and be looking for ways to prove it. Proof is the last thing a professional should be looking for. He or she should be collecting information that might eventually allow a defensible claim to be made—both logically and legally.

  It takes time, and effort, and the application of reason to the range of facts to craft a plausible explanation—to craft a story. How can one possibly get it right on the first pass? That bloodied knife sticking out of the butler is likely to be important. But what about that piece of half-eaten toast? Or that the dishwasher is full? Or that it’s empty?

  The trouble is that few of the youngsters want to hear it. It’s dull. They develop a far-away look when she explains that investigation is an iterative process of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. That it isn’t magic. That it isn’t easy, or sexy, or based on their unique intuition, and that building a reasoned argument isn’t for amateurs. “Facts are not evidence,” she says. “Facts become evidence when they are mobilized in support of an argument.”

  Those who survive the lecture might survive the career.

  It is the Bangles. Melinda is playing “Manic Monday.” How can she possibly know that song?

  The POLICE folder contains more complicated and varied documents than the DEPRESSION folder—not that she has read it all. This has images, videos, legal documents, policies, articles from newspapers and magazines, reports from nonprofit organizations and hospitals as well as church, civic, and youth groups. Photos of dead children; a black man with a thick neck and little hair with bruises all over his face and neck and shoulders; statements by police insisting that they had to protect themselves; statements from communities saying the police showed up pumped and ready to kill; gun ownership debates and arguments about the need for black men to defend themselves against the police beca
use of a culture-wide presumption about guilt and violence that makes them all marked men.

  Marcus had collected newspaper accounts from across the nation as well as academic studies and policy documents. How any of this relates to Marcus, though, is still eluding her.

  The JEFFREY folder is all about the boy: a twelve-year-old boy named Jeffrey Simmons who was a sixth-grader at Lincoln Middle School in nearby Cofield, New York. Jeffrey’s mother was a secretary for the regional office of an industrial chemical company that primarily served the timber industry, and his father was a manager at a large do-it-yourself supply store. Jeffrey was in the school band and played the drums, and he was mad for Harry Potter. He’d spend hours, his mother explained, sketching descriptions from the books or copying images from the movies that resulted in extraordinary worlds with castles and clouds, dragons and wizards. He and other children would meet up on weekends and compare one another’s creations. He once told his father he wanted to be an engineer or an architect or a writer.

  Jeffrey’s mother reportedly told the children to stop playing inside and get outside into the sunshine. With Harry Potter still on their minds, Jeffrey and two friends were running around his house with cap guns for the Muggles and wands for the wizards. At 1:26 p.m., a white police officer name Roy Carman pulled up to their house rapidly, removed a Glock 17 nine-millimeter pistol, and shot Jeffrey twice in the chest and once in the head. The other two children, Peter Macintyre and Buddy Sandler, were uninjured. Peter ran away. Buddy stood and screamed for twenty minutes no matter what the second officer tried. News reports following the case explained that both boys were in psychological counseling and suffering from “severe trauma.” Their parents all said both children now wet their beds, were afraid to go outside, could no longer sleep alone, were terrified of death and authority, and were no longer able to focus at school.

  Peter and Buddy were white. Jeffrey was black. He is survived by his parents and two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Marjorie, and they too are broken.

  This was two months ago, in June. It was two weeks ago that Marcus disappeared after writing his cryptic letter, and two weeks ago that Lydia died. That is also, Sigrid learns, when the grand jury concluded there were no grounds for Roy Carman to stand trial for Jeffrey’s death.

  The final folder is IDEAS. There is a single text file called “The Future.” She opens it and finds it empty.

  American Horror

  After an hour with the material Sigrid sensed she was losing her focus and capacity to reason so decided to take a short nap.

  Now, on waking, she is surrounded by a pitch darkness. The disco beats from the living room have become muffled TV voices punctuated by atmospheric music. She raises her left arm into a defensive position to see her wristwatch, but the toxic glow from the hands refuses to arrange them into readable lines and she gives up, deciding it doesn’t much matter how long it’s been anyway.

  Usually, after a power nap, Sigrid experiences a moment of grogginess that makes way for strength and mental acuity.

  This time is not like the other times.

  The skin on her face feels as though it has slid off her skull and collected into pink and tacky puddles around the pillow she has fallen through on her way to China. No hangover, no regret, no bitter memory has left her this exhausted. No soldier she has ever listened to over the years; no parent of triplets; no caveman awakened from a block of ice has ever felt this tired.

  At the corner of her eye, Sigrid can almost make out a thin line of blue light through the curtains proving that there is, still, a world beyond her headache. A land where there might be perambulating life with motive and will.

  Sigrid tries to make a deliberate noise. What emerges from her chest, like a breath from an awakened Egyptian mummy, is a minor groan in the key of B.

  She’ll try again in a minute.

  She had dreamed of her mother and can’t think of why. Her mother, Astrid, was outside the farmhouse wearing rubber boots with images of Paddington Bear painted on their sides. She was washing the family car with Marcus. They were each using massive sponges dipped into warm and soapy water and splashing them onto the glimmering paint that sparkled a navy blue in the sun. Sigrid must have been about five in the dream and Marcus the same age as Jeffrey Simmons. He was barefoot and his jeans rolled to his knees. After working the side of the car he kneeled by the fender and lathered the chrome around the headlights until they shined as though from an inner happiness only made warmer by the sun. Marcus smiled at his mother and she smiled at him. Astrid’s hair was in a ponytail, tied with a green band. She was slender—more slender than Sigrid would ever become except in her late teens—and her cheekbones were more pronounced. She had a look that others might have considered very beautiful had she been worked on by teams of makeup artists and fashion consultants and colorists. But here, in their village, she was plain and blond and familiar.

  Astrid had been scrubbing a fender when she stopped washing and turned still and grave. She looked at Sigrid with a neediness parents do not expose to their children. In a growled whisper she said, “My son. Is he OK?”

  Sigrid looked for Marcus by the car and could no longer see him. All trace of him—the bucket, the sponge, the water that had collected into a puddle at his feet—was gone.

  “I don’t know, Mommy,” she answered.

  That’s when she woke up. She remembers this now and wishes she hadn’t.

  The distress it causes her, however, releases a minute drip of adrenaline that permits her to lean over to the bedside table, work her right hand up the tapered base of the lamp, around the harp holder, and find the switch on the socket.

  She turns it twice with a click click, hoping the room will come into view, but it doesn’t because her eyelashes have been sutured together with barnacle glue.

  Into this comes a banging sound like a troll hammering at the door of a farmhouse.

  “What!” groans Sigrid.

  Melinda sticks her head in. “You’re up?”

  “What time is it?”

  “About eight thirty.”

  “Why’s it so dark?”

  “It’s nighttime. It’s usually dark.”

  “What do you mean, nighttime?”

  “You’ve been sleeping for four hours. It’s eighty thirty. At night. Wednesday. August 13. 2008. Third rock from the sun.”

  “Oh dear God.”

  Melinda crosses her arms and ankles and falls like timber against the door frame with a smirk on her face. “You’ve got jet lag. I’ve heard about this. I don’t travel much myself, but I went to Paris once when I was eleven, and when I came home, me and my sister would fall asleep around five in the afternoon and wake up at three in the morning and go downstairs to watch TV. But there was nothing on except these scary B movies from the 1950s; which I guess is how we shook the jet lag, because after a few days of that we simply refused to go to sleep at all and that put us right back on schedule.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to work for me,” Sigrid says, wiping slobber from the corner of her mouth.

  “Have you tried Ambien?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Ambien.”

  “I know some scary movies, though. Have you seen Twenty-Eight Days Later? I almost pissed myself. Or Aliens Two? That was awesome. Blair Witch Project? I couldn’t sleep. That final scene? Frankly, I don’t know why I do it to myself. Why do any of us? Especially zombie movies. They freak me out and I have an actual gun in the house. I don’t think a country with so many guns should make so many horror movies.”

  “It’s the other way around,” Sigrid says, using her fingers to unstitch her eyelashes.

  “How do you mean?” Melinda asks.

  Rubbing her face, Sigrid blinks fast and often to try to jump-start her face in the hopes it will remember how to do this by itself. “We have a lot of new immigrants in Norway. We have to take these classes on culture. Our instructor was an American with questionable taste in movies. She said Americ
an culture is all about individualism. It’s not just an idea. It’s what she called a performance. The way you perform individualism is through self-reliance. But acting self-reliant usually means acting alone. And being alone is a weaker position than working together. That’s America’s paradox—your individualism is a strong cultural trait that weakens you as a community and you just can’t see it. You worry that working together undermines your myth of self-reliance, so you hyperexaggerate its value to mask the fear. If you don’t do this, you lose your sense of being American. You’re basically doomed.”

  “What does this have to do with jet lag?”

  “Nothing. We’re talking about horror movies. You’re the one who linked the two.”

  “OK,” says Melinda. “Explain the horror movies.”

  “Every horror movie ends with someone being self-reliant and overcoming her own fear or else failing to do that and dying. I can’t think of a single one where the horror was overcome through strategy, cooperation, teamwork, or planning. It’s a terrible machine you’ve created. It’s why you all buy guns rather than build institutions. None of it makes you safer, but it does make you more American.”

  Melinda doesn’t move from the wall. “I was issued my gun.”

  “Try not to shoot anybody.”

  “You don’t talk like a cop. You talk like . . .” Melinda looks to the ceiling, where the answer is usually plastered. “Some kind of college professor who used to sit around thinking about this stuff all the time but now doesn’t care anymore because he knows too much about it and doesn’t have any questions left.”

  “That’s a pretty good description.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Catching bad guys means outsmarting them,” Sigrid says. “Knowing how people think, and why, gives you insight into what they might do. Or not. I need some coffee,” Sigrid adds.

  “You’re gonna need to open your eyes at some point too.”

  Melinda’s apartment—when it comes into focus—proves itself to have been tastefully decorated in inexpensive but stylish furniture. Sigrid sees how Melinda has leaned toward the modernist and Swedish side of the spectrum rather than the country cottage style, thereby brightening the small space. Further, she’s accented the sofa, tables and chairs with vibrant colors. It creates a sense of being settled and present in her life that Sigrid reads as an unexpected maturity.