Does Not Love

by James Tadd Adcox

  “At this stage in the process,” says the first officer, “we are simply trying to establish that this shooting followed the same MO as the previous shootings. You, as an eyewitness, can help us establish that. You look like you could use a cup of coffee. Ivan, could you please get Mr. Robert St. Clair a cup of coffee?”

  The second officer leaves and returns with a cup of coffee.

  “Alright, so this guy you say you saw,” he says, putting the coffee down in front of Robert. “Was he tall or short?”

  “Tall?” Robert says, unsure.

  “Like would you say six-foot-three? Six-foot-four? Six-foot-five?”

  “I don’t know,” Robert says.

  “You don’t know how tall he was,” the second officer says. “Man says he’s seen the guy, doesn’t even know how tall he was.”

  “There are problems of perspective to be taken into account here,” says the first officer. “Depending on the angle, of course—”

  “Was this guy white or black?”

  “It was hard to tell, it was dark… ”

  “Doesn’t even know the ethnicity! Guy’s coming in here, says he can ID our perp, doesn’t even know the ethnicity!”

  “It was dark,” Robert says. “And anyhow I never said—”

  “Of course it was dark!” says the second officer. “It was night! You think we can just decide to do our job during the day? You think taxpayers would stand for that? You think, maybe, we can ask the criminal element to hold off on all illicit activities between the hours of eight pm to six am?”

  “I’m sure he’s not suggesting that, Ivan.”

  “You know what I’d like to do?” the second officer says to Robert. “I’d like to take that coffee you’re drinking right now and throw it in your smug, law-school face. Would you like that? Would you like it if I threw that coffee in your smug law-school face?”

  “Of course he wouldn’t like that,” the first officer says. “Why would you even ask such a thing?”

  “In terms of noses would you say that the man you saw had more of an upturned or a downturned nose?”

  “I don’t know,” Robert says.

  “I’d like to bash your head into the wall!” the second officer screams. “Would you like that? Would you like it if I bashed your smug, law-school face into this concrete wall, right here?”

  “This is harassment,” Robert says. “I’m not under suspicion for committing any crime, am I?”

  “Ivan has suffered a number of disappointments in his life,” the first officer tells Robert, sitting in the chair beside him, putting a hand on Robert’s shoulder. “Chief among them being that, coming from a family of lawyers, he was expected to follow in their footsteps. His mother went to Yale, top of the class. His father and brother both went to Brown, and didn’t do so bad for themselves, either.”

  “I choked on the LSAT,” the second officer says, as if Robert were somehow at fault for this.

  “He choked on the LSAT,” the first officer says with a shrug. “Of course we’re all sure that he would’ve made an excellent lawyer, but some people just aren’t good at standardized tests.”

  “I never choked on no test before.”

  “He’s a hell of a detective,” the first officer says. “We’re glad to have him on the force, as you can imagine.”

  “I’d like to choke this fucking asshole,” shaking a fist at Robert.

  “Ivan, really, enough. We’re going to have a lawsuit on our hands.”

  “I can’t even stand looking at this guy. I need to get some air.”

  The second officer glares at Robert and leaves.

  “He has a gruff exterior, but his heart is pure,” the first officer says.

  “Look, if I’m under any suspicion, I need to call my lawyer.”

  “Who said you were under any suspicion?”

  “So I’m free to go?”

  “The world is a complicated thing,” says the officer, standing once again and beginning to pace, “full of many moving parts. You mentioned lawyers. You yourself are a lawyer, of course, and one of your firm’s clients, we happen to know, is Obadiah Birch Pharmaceuticals. And the man who was shot? A researcher, contracted to work with Obadiah Birch Pharmaceuticals. It is entirely possible that this is a coincidence, these two things coming together, a lawyer working for Birch Pharmaceuticals and a researcher, now dead, also working for Birch Pharmaceuticals. But you must understand that these are exactly the sorts of coincidences we look for, here in the force: the coming together of two such related things. We strive to put the world in some kind of order, to turn the chaos of sensation into the beauty of theory, of explanation.” He sighs pleasantly at this last phrase, a smile briefly playing across his lips; until, at the next moment, he frowns at a sudden thought, and his face bunches together, as if working it through with some difficulty.

  “On the other hand — speaking of order — it stands to reason that the guy who plugged this researcher is the same guy who plugged the other researchers. And if that’s so, and if just for the sake of argument you were our guy, why would you, our guy, call 911 after plugging this researcher, when our guy didn’t call 911 after plugging previous researchers? Calling 911 doesn’t fit our guy’s MO. Unless — oh, this is the tricky part! — unless our guy’s smart enough to change his MO from time to time, to throw us off the trail. You’re a pretty smart guy, aren’t you, Mr. St. Clair? Smart enough to change your MO, just to throw a couple of old detectives off the trail? In which case we’d have to reexamine the entire concept of MO. Meaning, in effect, reexamining the concept of causality itself. What is an MO if not an essence, the hard core underlying the varying methods of the criminal? The theme that ties act to person? The concept, in other words, of order itself?

  “I see you are trembling, Mr. St. Clair. It is a terrifying idea, living in a world without order. I understand why the idea would frighten you.

  “Of course, it’s possible that is not the reason you are trembling. You look fatigued, Mr. St. Clair. You’ve had a long day. If I had had such a day, only to end up in an interrogation room in a police station, with some mincing dwarf of a police detective talking to me about MOs and causality and science, I think I might be trembling too. I would maybe want to get something off my chest. Possibly there is something you want to get off your chest, Mr. St. Clair. But not quite yet! First — yes, first, let me show you something. It is behind this door,” hand in place, readying himself to open it, “something that, I think, will bring this night to—” A polite knocking comes from the other side of the door. The detective opens it, just a crack.

  “Ivan!” hisses the first officer. “What the hell. Where’s the other witness? How can we have the big payoff without the other witness?”

  “There was another witness?” Robert asks.

  “We never actually managed to pick up the other witness,” comes the second officer’s voice, from the other side of the door.

  “Why wasn’t I told about there being another witness?” Robert says, standing. His voice is reaching what sounds, even to his own ears, like an uncomfortably high pitch.

  “You told me they were bringing him in,” the first officer says, opening the door fully to reveal the second officer, looking sheepish. “How can we have the big payoff if they didn’t bring him in?”

  “They were going to,” says the second officer. “And then they didn’t. He disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Vanished, into the moonlight. They found this,” he holds up a tuft of what appears to be brown fake fur. “And this,” he holds up a pair of black goggles. The officers stand hunched over the interrogation table, examining the evidence.

  “Look, am I free to go or aren’t I?” Robert says, finally.

  “Yes, dammit, yes,” says the first officer. “Did anyone once say, this entire time, that you weren’t free to go?”

  ~ ~ ~

  “I’ve never seen anyone die before,” Viola tells the FBI agent. They’re sit
ting on the bed of the FBI agent’s motel room eating peanut butter crackers bought from a vending machine by the motel-room door. Viola twists each pair of crackers apart before she eats them. “You’ve seen people die before, right?”

  “Not that I’m at liberty to divulge.”

  “Oh, sure, not that you’re at liberty to divulge. Right.” Viola twists apart a pair of peanut butter crackers and leaves them sitting peanut-butter-side-up on her lap. She thinks. She says, “I would have thought it would be terrifying, but it’s more complicated than that. The man practically died in Robert’s arms, and there’s part of me that’s, like, envious. I’m trying to figure out how to articulate it.” The FBI agent sits with a patient expression on his face, while she tries to figure out how to articulate it. “It’s stupid,” Viola says. “Never mind.”

  The FBI agent drives Viola to a large concrete building on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Inside the building are other men in suits like the FBI agent’s. Every time Viola and the FBI agent come to a door he punches in a code on a keypad and puts his eye in front of a scanner for a retinal scan. Each room they enter into gets colder, until Viola can see her breath. The walls of the last room are lined with drawers. The FBI agent pulls out a drawer.

  “That’s not him,” Viola says.

  The FBI agent pulls out another drawer.

  “That’s him.”

  Viola and the FBI agent both look at the body of the dead researcher. He looks like Santa Claus.

  “What do I do?” Viola says.

  The FBI agent shrugs. He starts to put his hand between her legs. Viola slaps his hand away.

  “I mean, am I supposed to mourn him? Or am I supposed to feel some sort of, like, awe?”

  “He has a family,” the FBI agent says, looking at the man’s chart. “We’re investigating the family, though we don’t suppose that will turn up anything.”

  The FBI agent and Viola leave and get back in the car. On the radio an actress who had achieved success early in life talks about how it wasn’t easy on her, achieving success early in life. Viola suddenly feels sad and self-conscious. She wants to ask the FBI agent to turn the radio off, but she’s worried that he will intuit how sad and self-conscious she’s feeling right now. Then she asks him to turn off the radio anyway. The FBI agent says that the actress is one of his favorite actresses, but turns off the radio.

  “It’s like I’ve got a hole inside me where I should have an assurance of love,” Viola says. “I look at other people going about their day, doing the kinds of things people do, shopping for groceries, driving cars, picking up and putting down objects of various sizes, and the only way I can imagine that they can keep doing all of that is that somewhere inside them they have an assurance of love. They don’t even have to think about it, because they know it’s there. But I think about it all the time, because it’s not.”

  The FBI agent frowns at her.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Viola says. “I don’t know why I said it.”

  Then later, she says: “When I was first dating Robert, I used to steal things from him. Little things, things I was pretty sure he wouldn’t notice: pens, a tie he never wore, one or two out of about a bazillion wine glasses he had. The way I thought about it was this: He liked me then, sure, but there was absolutely no guarantee that he was going to keep liking me in the future. But if I had things of his, I knew they weren’t going anywhere.”

  “Do you still have them? The stuff you stole?”

  “One of the wine glasses, I think. I think the other stuff got lost the last time we moved.”

  In the motel parking lot Viola and the FBI agent do an awkward kind of hug, and Viola goes to her car and leaves.

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert crushes up a pill and stirs it into Viola’s coffee, then crushes up another and stirs it into his own coffee. The next day Robert crushes up a pill for Viola’s coffee, and one pill for his own coffee. It seems fairer this way. If there are any adverse unintended effects he should experience them as much as she does.

  Later, he gets the idea to crush up several pills at once and mix them in with the sugar. Provided he first measures the amount of sugar in the sugar bowl, so that two spoonfuls of sugar (the amount Viola takes in her coffee) equal one pill. The crushed-up pills, white, fit in well enough with the sugar that Robert doubts even a very close inspection would alert someone to their presence. And, as Trey told him, the pills are absolutely tasteless. There is a danger, of course, that Viola might drink more than one cup of coffee in the morning while at home. But she rarely does this. Rarely, enough, for it to be a negligible concern? Robert resolves that if Viola does drink a second cup of coffee at home, Robert will drink a second cup as well.

  ~ ~ ~

  There is a very difficult winter.

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert receives a letter in the mail. The return address reads REDACTED. Robert takes the letter to his office and sits for some time with the letter before him on his desk. He feels the presentiment of a terrible guilt. He opens it, finally, with trembling hands. “Robert St. Clair,” the letter begins,

  “Previously we would have assembled the text of this letter from words cut and pasted from magazines. It was our habit to do so, in cases similar to yours, long after the advent of the laser printer and its corresponding increase in the possibilities of anonymity. Partly, we liked the air of menace thereby created in the mind of the reader. Partly, we just liked the tradition of the thing. More than either of these reasons, however, we were attached to the way that the cut-and-paste letter allowed a new message, our message, to emerge from others’ words. Even now, although we have changed our technology of choice, the method remains the same: each word of this letter has been taken from some other text. This letter, and its message, existed long before human hands digitally cut and pasted it into the form you now see.

  “Our voice is the voice of the people, Robert. The law we represent is an emergent law.

  “We have seen what you are doing, Robert. We have observed you. We do not need to tell you what you will be charged with — are charged with, Robert, for the charges have already been filed, invisibly, and the court sits in invisible judgment. You know your guilt — and, as we are the court of the invisible, it is ultimately your knowledge, and not your actions, that must be judged.”

  Robert hides the letter in the emptiness behind the bathroom sink. More letters arrive, daily, a series of terrible, unspecified threats. For some reason, the idea of Viola finding one of these letters fills him with dread — as though she would know, already, what he was guilty of.

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert keeps a list of potential unintended adverse effects that he has experienced, or that he has noticed Viola exhibiting, since he began adding the drug that Trey gave him to their coffee each morning:

  nervousness

  fear of discovery

  moodiness, irritability (Viola)

  sudden spiraling moments of hopelessness

  distraction

  guilt

  boredom (Viola)

  lack of professional motivation

  hours spent looking at vacation destinations on

  the internet, or clicking on links for additional information about topics I don’t care about (celebrities, celebrities’ children, celebrities’ pregnancies, plane crashes)

  sweating (noticeable)

  difficulty sleeping

  sleeping too much

  difficulty dreaming, or difficulty in dreams

  directionless anger

  emptiness

  emptiness

  emptiness

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert and his friend Trey get after-work drinks at the Slippery Noodle, the oldest jazz bar in Indianapolis. “Hey,” Trey says, gesturing towards the band. “Whaddayaknow? It’s our old friends.” Antonio waves at them from the stage. Hugo nods in their direction while performing an excellent solo on his trombone.

  “Didn’t know you boys played jazz,” Trey says,
between sets.

  “They pay pretty well at these gigs,” Antonio says. “And it’s a little more dignified, I suppose, if you go for that sort of thing.”

  “Dignity?” says Trey. “I’m a salesman, and my buddy here? A lawyer. Robert. Robert! What kind of law do you practice, Robert?”

  “Corporate litigation,” Robert says, who’s already slightly drunker than he meant to be.

  “Corporate litigation, woo,” says Antonio, shaking his head. “Well, we’re going to be at the Black Box after hours, if you fellows are interested.”

  “Of course we are,” says Trey.

  “I think I’d better head home,” says Robert.

  “Robert, buddy, you are in no condition to drive,” Trey says, clapping him on the shoulder. Then, turning back to Antonio, “What’s the address? I’ll put it into my phone.”

  “No address,” Antonio says, and draws him a map on a napkin.

  The Black Box social club and bar turns out to be behind a façade painted entirely black, not far from the Greyhound station. A bouncer shines a light in Trey and Robert’s eyes before letting them enter. Inside, the walls are lined with pictures of planes in downward spirals or crumpled and smoking after a crash. Antonio and Hugo are at a low table in the corner, drinking something called a Hull Loss, the ingredients of which the bar’s owner has spent his career refusing to divulge even to the local authorities. The musicians have already bought a round for Trey and Robert. “I’m driving,” Trey insists. “You’ll have to give mine to Robert here.”

  The owner of the bar, whom Antonio says is a friend of his family from back in California, was a commercial pilot for twenty-some years. He settled down after he miraculously survived a mid-air crash over Indiana during the air traffic controllers’ strike in the eighties.

  Robert finishes his Hull Loss. Trey has disappeared. People are dancing. A woman in a too-short orange dress is dancing right by Robert’s chair, bumping him with her hip. He keeps pushing her away. He feels terrible. He tries to explain to Hugo and Antonio about the difficulty of trying to determine whether his wife is once again beginning to love him. “She did love me, once,” Robert says. “I think that just… it was a lot to deal with. For both of us. My friend Trey thinks it’s treatable. Her condition.”