2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  “Counterfeit”: “You don’t understand,” says Father Jones to Benson. There are dark curves under his eyes, sacs the color of bruised apples. He is wearing a terrycloth bathrobe that says “Susan” in machine-stitched cursive letters on the breast pocket. “I can’t help you. I’m having a crisis of faith.” Benson puts her hand on the door. “I’m having a crisis of function,” she says. “Tell me. What do you know about ghosts?”

  “Execution”: The medical examiner pulls back the sheet from the dead girl’s face. “Raped and strangled,” she says, her voice hollow. “Your murderer pressed their thumbs into the girl’s windpipe until she died. No prints, though.” Stabler thinks that the girl looks a little like his wife’s high school photo. Benson is certain she can see the jelly of the girl’s eyes receding beneath their closed lids, certain she can hear the sound of bells. In the car, they are both quiet.

  “Popular”: They question everyone they can think of: her friends and enemies. The girls she bullied, the boys who loved her and hated her, the parents who thought she was wonderful and the parents who thought she was bad news. Benson stumbles into the precinct late, bleary-eyed. “My theory,” she says, drinking her coffee slowly, with shaking hands, “my theory is that it was her coach, and my theory is that the missing underwear will be found in his office.” The search warrant is issued so quickly that they find the underwear in his top desk drawer, still damp with blood.

  “Surveillance”: Benson doesn’t know how to explain to Stabler the heartbeat beneath the ground. She is certain that she can hear it all the time now, deep and low. The girls-with-bells-for-eyes have taken to knocking before coming in. Sometimes. Benson takes taxis to far-away neighborhoods, gets down on her hands and knees on the street and the sidewalk and once, in a woman’s vegetable garden that took up her entire postage-stamp lawn. She can hear it everywhere. The drumming, echoing, echoing in the deep.

  “Guilt”: Benson can translate the bells well, now. She pulls her pillow over her head until she can barely breathe. Give us voices. Give us voices. Give us voices. Tell him. Tell him. Tell him. Find us. Find us. Find us. Please. Please. Please.

  “Justice”: Benson gets a pack of small children. Their bells are especially tiny, the ring higher than most. Benson is drunk. She holds her bed, which feels like an amusement park ride, pitching and rolling. We will never ride the Tilt-a-Whirl again, ever. Get up! Get up! they command her. She puts her head on her cell phone and uses speed-dial. “My theory,” she says to Stabler, “my theory is that I have a theory.” Stabler offers to come over. “My theory,” she says, “my theory is that there is no God.” The children’s bells ring so furiously that Benson can’t even hear Stabler’s reply over the din. When Stabler comes over and lets himself in with the spare key, he finds Benson bent over the toilet, heaving, crying.

  “Freed”: “It’s the whole city,” Benson says to herself as she drives. She imagines Stabler in the seat next to her. “I’ve been all over. It’s the whole fucking city. The heartbeats. The girls.” She clears her throat and tries again. “I know it sounds crazy. I just have a feeling.” She pauses, then says, “Stabler, do you believe in ghosts?” Then, “Stabler, do you trust me?”

  “Denial”: Stabler finds the police report for his wife’s rape. It’s so old that he has to call in a favor from a guy in the records department. The sound of the paper scraping against the thin manila envelope slows Stabler’s heart.

  “Competence”: Stabler and Benson respond to a report of a rape in Central Park. When they get there, the mutilated body has already been taken to the medical examiner’s office. A confused junior cop is busy rolling yellow crime scene tape from tree to tree. “Weren’t you just here?” he asks them.

  “Silence”: Benson and Stabler grab beers at a pub down the street from the station. They hold the frosted mugs in their hands, leave handprints on the glass that look like angels. They say nothing.

  Season 4

  “Chameleon”: Abler and Henson respond to a report of a rape in Central Park. They examine the mutilated body. “Cult,” says Abler. “Occultists,” says Henson. “A cult of occultists,” they say in unison. “Take the body away.”

  “Deception”: Henson sleeps through every night. She awakes refreshed. She eats a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast, and with it a mug of green tea. Abler tucks in his kids and spoons his wife, who laughs in her sleep. When she wakes, she relates to him the very funny joke from her dream, and he laughs, too. The children make pancakes. The hardwood floors are flooded with pools of light.

  “Vulnerable”: For three days in a row, there is not a single victim in the entire precinct. No rapes. No murders. No rape-murders. No kidnappings. No child pornography made, bought, or sold. No molestations. No sexual assaults. No sexual harassments. No forced prostitution. No human trafficking. No subway gropings. No incest. No indecent exposures. No stalking. Not even an unwanted dirty phone call. Then, in the gloaming of a Wednesday, a man wolf-whistles at a woman on her way to an AA meeting. The whole city releases its held breath, and everything returns to normal.

  “Lust”: Abler and Henson are sleeping together, but no one knows. Henson is the best lay that Abler’s ever had. Henson’s had better.

  “Disappearing Acts”: “What are you doing here again?” the victim’s grandmother asks them. Benson looks at Stabler, and Stabler at Benson, and they turn, confused, back to her. “I already told you everything I know,” the old woman says, waving a gnarled hand at them dismissively. She slams the door so hard a flowerpot jumps off the porch railing and lands in the lawn. “Did you come and see her?” Benson asks Stabler. He shakes his head. “You?” he asks her. Inside, a Mills Brothers record starts up with pops and scratches. Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer. “No,” Benson says. “Never.”

  “Angels”: Abler’s sons bring home perfect grades and don’t even need braces. Henson’s many lovers bring her to increasingly ascending levels of ecstatic transcendence vis-a-vis the clitoris, vis-a-vis asking her what she wants, yes, what she, yes, what, yes yes yes fuck yes.

  “Dolls”: The bells ring, ring, ring through the night, the peals stripping skin from Benson’s body, or that’s how it feels, anyway. Faster, faster, go faster. “I need to sleep,” Benson says. “I need to sleep to go faster.” That makes no sense. We never get to sleep. We never sleep. We tirelessly pursue justice at all hours. “Don’t you remember needing sleep?” Benson asks wearily from her unwashed sheets. “You were human, once.” No no no no no no no no.

  “Waste”: There are so many notches in Benson’s headboard—so many successes, so many failures, maybe she should have kept them apart?—the wood looks like it’s been chewed away by termites. When the two-tone beat sounds, the chips and shavings tremble on her carpet and nightstand.

  “Juvenile”: “Five-year-olds murder six-year-olds,” Benson says dully, the skin beneath her eyes dusky ash from lack of sleep. “People are monsters, and we are all lambs just waiting to be killed. We are monsters and victims at the same time, and only experience will tip the scale one way or the other. This is the world we live in, Stabler.” She sips noisily on her Diet Coke. She tries to look away from Stabler’s wet eyes.

  “Resilience”: Benson watches a lot of TV on her days off. She gets an idea. She spreads a line of salt along her threshold, on the windowsills. That night, for the first time in months, the bell-children stay away.

  “Damaged”: Stabler rubs his wife’s shoulders. “Can we talk?” She shakes her head. “You don’t want to talk?” She nods. “You want to talk?” She shakes her head. “You don’t want to talk?” She nods. Stabler kisses her hair. “Later. We’ll talk later.”

  “Risk”: Abler and Henson solve their ninth case in a row, and their captain takes them out for celebratory steaks and cocktails. Abler gnaws down hunks of steak too big for his gullet, Henson polishes off one dirty martini after another. Ten of them. Eleven. A man on the opposite side of the restaurant, who has been nibbling bird-like on a
Caesar salad, begins to choke. He turns blue. A stranger delivers the Heimlich, and a half-chewed wad of meat lands on the table of a lifelong teetotaler who is starting to feel a little strange. “I feel like I’ve had twelve drinks,” she says, giggling, hiccupping. She has. Henson drives Abler home, and they laugh. Thirteen blocks from the restaurant, they grope at each other, kissing as they stumble out of the car. Henson puts Abler’s hand on her breast, and her nipple tightens.

  “Rotten”: Some crazy person keeps leaving sacks of perfectly good produce in a trashcan. Henson frequently finds herself pulling it out, taking it home, scrubbing the beets good and hard. How crazy. What a weird thing to go to waste.

  “Mercy”: The gunman lets all of the hostages go, including himself.

  “Pandora”: Benson is lonely without the bells. Her apartment is so quiet. She stands in her doorway, staring down at the white line. She takes her big toe and probes it. She remembers being at the beach with her mother when she was a child and burning her feet on the hot, smooth sand. She pushes her toe, breaking the line, and says, “Oops,” but doesn’t really mean it. The children come rushing at her like a flash flood rolling through a narrow gorge. Their bells ring chaotic, gleeful and rapturous and angry, like a swarm of euphoric bees. They tickle her skin with their desperation. She has never felt so loved.

  “Tortured”: You are the only one we trust, the bell-children say to Benson. Not that other one. Benson assumes they mean Stabler.

  “Privilege”: Abler and Henson notice the bullet casing buried in the dirt. They notice the smear of blood near the doorframe, the orientation of the street. They look at each other and know that they’re each calculating the sunlight on this avenue at the time of the crime. By the time they get inside, they know to arrest the wife. They don’t even have to ask her any questions.

  “Desperate”: “If you are dead, you can see everything,” Benson says to the bell-children. “Tell me who the doppelgängers are. Why are they so much better at everything than me and Stabler? Tell me, please.” The bells ring and ring and ring.

  “Appearances”: Benson sees Henson coming out of the precinct. Her stomach gnarls. The same face, but prettier. The same hair, but bouncier, somehow. She must find out what kind of product she uses. Before she kills her.

  “Dominance”: “You’re a lunatic,” Henson says, struggling against the handcuffs, and ropes, and chair, and chains. Benson leaves Stabler another message. “My partner is going to come and get me, you’ll see,” Henson says. “He’ll come for me.”

  “Fallacy”: “Stabler will come and back me up. He knows what you’ve been doing. Stealing our cases. Pretending to be us.”

  “Futility”: Stabler pulls out his cell phone as the ringtone dies. 14 New Voicemails. He can’t do it, he can’t. The phone buzzes in his hand like an insect. 15. He turns it off.

  “Grief”: Abler comes for Henson. Of course he does. He loves her. Benson watches as he gently unties the ropes, unwraps the chains, unlocks the handcuffs, and lets her stand up from the chair on her own. Benson is holding her gun in her hand. She unloads three bullets into each of them, not expecting much. They keep moving as if nothing is happening except the funny foxtrot of their feet.

  “Perfect”: “Detective, how can you not account for bullets missing from your gun? What are you listening to? Benson! [… ] No, I can’t hear it. [… ]There’s no sound, what are you talking about?”

  “Soulless”: “Father Jones,” Benson says, her forehead pressing into the rough carpet in his foyer, “something is really wrong with me.”

  Season 5

  “Tragedy”: Miles away from the precinct, a teenage boy and his seven-year-old sister drop dead in the middle of their walk home from school. When they are autopsied, bullets are pulled from the purple meat of their organs, though there are no entrance wounds on either of their bodies. The medical examiner is baffled. The bullets clink clink clink clink clink clink in the metal dish.

  “Manic”: The DA laughs and laughs. She laughs so hard she coughs. She laughs so hard she pees a little. She falls down onto the floor and does a little half-roll, still laughing. There is a knock on the bathroom door, and Benson pushes open the door uncertainly. “Are you all right? The jury has come back. Are you… are you okay?”

  “Mother”: “Your mother has called five times in the last two days,” Stabler’s wife says to him. “Please call her back so I can stop making excuses for you.” Stabler looks up from his desk, where the manila envelope is resting, so anemically thin he wants to scream. He looks over at the mother of his children, the hollow at the base of her throat, the fine fringe of her eyelashes, the fat zit on her chin that she is probably minutes from popping. “I need to talk to you,” he says.

  “Loss”: “You have to understand,” says Father Jones. “I loved her. I loved her more than I have loved everything. But she was sad, so sad. She couldn’t bear to be here anymore. She saw too much.”

  “Serendipity”: Father Jones shows Benson how to pray. She clasps her hands together like a child, because that is the last time she’s tried it. He talks about opening her mind. She pulls her knees up to her chest. “If I open my mind any further, they’ll crowd out everything.” When he asks her what she means, she just shakes her head.

  “Coerced”: “I made it up,” the woman says dully. Benson looks up from her yellow legal pad. “Are you certain?” she asks. “Yes,” the woman says. “Start to finish. I certainly made it up from start to finish.”

  “Choice”: Outside of the courtroom, protesters shove and shout, the wooden dowels of their signs knocking noisily against one another. It sounds like percussion. The worst percussion. Benson and Stabler use their bodies to shield the woman, who sobs and shuffles. Benson looks left, looks right. Shots. The woman crumples. Her blood runs down a storm drain, and she dies with her eyes half-open, an interrupted eclipse. Benson and Stabler feel the beat at the same time, down beneath the pavement, beneath the screaming and the panicked crowd and the signs and the woman dead, dead, there it is, the one-two, and they look at each other. “You can hear it, too,” Stabler says hoarsely, but before Benson can answer, the shooter takes out a protester. Her sign falls facedown in the blood.

  “Abomination”: The DA rolls down the hill in her dreams, stumbling, tumbling, rumbling down, down in the deep. In her dream, there is thunder, but the thunder is the color of rhubarb and it comes in twin booms. Every time the thunder sounds, the grass blades change shape. Then, beneath her body, the DA sees Benson, lying on her back, touching herself, laughing. The DA dreams her clothes off, and dreams herself rolling her body against Benson’s, and the thunder rolls, too, except not really, it’s more walking. Dum-dum. Dum-dum. Dum-dum. The DA comes, and wakes. Or maybe wakes, then comes. In the afterburn of the dream, she is alone in her bed, and the window is open, the curtains fluttering in the breeze.

  “Control”: “Why did you look it up?” Stabler’s wife asks. “Why? All I wanted was to bury it. I want it to be hidden. Why did you do it? Why?” She cries. She pummels her fists into a giant, overstuffed throw pillow. She begins to walk from one end of the room to the other, holding her arms so tightly to her torso that Stabler is reminded of a man who once came to the precinct, covered in blood. He held his arms like this, too, and when he let them drop, his wounded abdomen opened up and his stomach and intestines peeked out, like they were ready to be born.

  “Shaken”: “Hey,” Benson says to the DA, smiling. The DA’s hands squeeze tightly into themselves. “Hi,” she says quickly before spinning on her heel and walk-running in the opposite direction.

  “Escape”: The girl staggers into the precinct with nothing on her body but a burlap sack. She tries to talk, but the words that come out are nonsense. Stabler gives her a cup of water. She drinks it in a single gulp, and then vomits onto his desk. The contents: said water, four nails, splinters of plywood, and a laminated slip of paper with a code on the side that seems to indicate it came from a library book. She keeps t
alking. Words tumble out, but in an order that makes no sense. The words are long, and real, Stabler discovers, flipping through a dictionary. But the sentences make no sense. None at all.

  “Brotherhood”: Stabler only ever wanted daughters when he first married his wife. He’d had a brother. He knew. Now, he is paralyzed with fear for them. He wishes they were never born. He wishes they were still floating safely in the unborn space, which he imagines to be grayish-blue, like the Atlantic, studded with star-like points of light, and thick, like corn syrup.

  “Hate”: Stabler’s wife has not spoken to him since the manila folder. She chops vegetables with a large knife, and he would rather she stick it in his gut than continue the sparking silence. “I love you,” he says to her. “Forgive me.” But she keeps chopping. She puts clean slits in the stippled plastic cutting board. She lops off the heads of carrots. She undoes the cucumbers.

  “Ritual”: Benson goes to a New Age shop in the Village. “I need a spell,” she says to the proprietor, “to find what I am seeking.” He taps a pen against his chin for a few moments, and then sells her: four dried beans of unknown origin, a small white disk that proves to be a sliver of rabbit bone, a tiny vial that appears empty—“the memory of a young woman losing her virginity,” he says—a granite basin, a wedge of dried red clay from the banks of the Hudson.