Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  So, here they were aloft, nailed to the board. One police took his stand at Shame’s window, the other sat still in the driver’s seat of the unmarked squad car. Blue and red lights moved in the grill. Shame knew that the driver in the driver’s seat was a very bad sign. Shame realized that he hadn’t answered the question only when the police near his window repeated it.

  –I said, “Who’s the blonde?”

  –Blonde? I don’t know.

  –Two blocks back. You stopped at the light, the blonde walked up, you rolled down your window. She leaned in, kissed you on your mouth, took something from her purse, and reached into the vehicle.

  Of course, none of this had happened, which was also the whole point. Shame stared blankly, or tried to. But his stare wasn’t blank. He was scared. He turned to Ndiya.

  –Did you see any of that?

  The police craned his neck to watch her answer. Ndiya shook her head. From her silence Shame immediately realized that asking her was a serious mistake. The very best she could do at this moment was to cease being there at all.

  –No.

  The officer’s eyes drilled Shame’s face. He asked for no ID. He took no further notice of Ndiya. That was a bad sign and also a very good sign. The sky closed its eyes. The night was an empty black room. Shame felt like a wooden match that had just been struck awake.

  –OK, listen up. Do not drive away. Do nothing until you’re told to do something, then do exactly what I tell you to do. I’m not giving instructions. I’m describing results. Clear?

  Shame nodded.

  –I’m going back to the car. Leave your window down. We’ll tell you what to do. You do exactly what we say.

  Shame stared straight ahead. Nodded again at the steering wheel.

  –What’s that?

  Shame, in his best effort at neutrality, failed.

  –Yes. Officer.

  Ndiya could hear Shame’s voice shake. When she was afraid, Ndiya got very calm, very impersonal.

  –Just do what they say.

  –OK.

  –OK?

  –OK. But you’re not here.

  –What’s going on, Shame?

  –I don’t know. But you’re not here. Understand?

  –No—What’s going on?

  –I don’t know. I love you.

  –I lov—

  –Listen to me. If—wherever they take us, when we stop. When they tell me to get out, you get out. Don’t pause, don’t look back, just get out and walk away, whichever direction is away, go that way. Then, when you’re out of sight, go back to Colleen’s. If it’s too far, go to a business street and hail a cab. But go back to Colleen’s.

  –Shame, I’m not—

  –Listen. Go there and wait. Sleep, whatever. But don’t leave her place and don’t call anyone. Don’t say anything about this and make sure she doesn’t call anyone about it, either. OK? And, listen, if you two are real friends, lie to her. Tell her anything you want, but do not tell her about this.

  They stared at each other. Ndiya didn’t move. She agreed with her eyes. The blue and red from behind them flashed into her hair. Shame stared forward with both hands on the wheel. She reached her arm toward him—

  –Ah. You’re not here. I love you. Don’t do anything they can see. Don’t give them any ideas. Just sit. Wait. When we stop, you go. I’ll get in touch. I love you.

  A voice from behind them:

  –Drive.

  Shame signaled left, pulled out into traffic. The squad car appeared behind him, the lights in the grill disappeared. He knew they were trying to make him panic so he’d do something overt. He suddenly realized that he had no idea what the speed limit actually was. It had never crossed his mind. He tried to relax and not think about driving, though he knew they weren’t waiting for him to make some kind of traffic error. There were waiting for a big mistake. He was being dared to remember when he was alive. Under his breath, as if they could hear him talk, as if his words would make them notice her, he said,

  –Try to pay attention to where we’re going, so you’ll know.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. For the next hour Shame drove, the police followed. Every so often, an instruction: turn right, pull over, drive, turn right, change lanes. Maybe they were going in circles, maybe not. He wasn’t paying attention. He was following the car behind him. He was beginning to understand.

  It was the “you-don’t-exist” parade. It was a tour of the world, the familiar world, that familiar world without him in it. It was a tour of decisions he thought were his. Nothing he saw on the parade applied, or referred, to him. The message was: if he thought what he saw meant anything to him, he had been wrong. It was only traffic, the world could only watch or turn away. Nothing that looked at him could touch what it saw. People he knew, the person next to him, his brother, a wife, a mother; none of them have anything to do with him. They never did. That was the message of the parade.

  Shame felt it working. Small waves of panic rippled in his fingers, up his arms. If it got worse, if he began to fear his fear, he might have lost control of the truck, or himself. He might have made a run for it no matter what he meant to do. Shame had heard of this happening. He’d heard it called suicide by police. He’d always doubted the term, but just then he felt its gears engage. He heard its mechanism as if it had been wound up and set on his shoulder. It bore many rhythms at once. Shame tasted danger. If the fear of fear took over he’d be liable to do anything. He thought of an article about suicide by police he’d read. The officer had said, “As soon as we arrived, I knew we were going to have to kill him.” As if that time folded backward and became his past, or as if this time vaulted forward and became his future, he felt his arms begin to shake. Ndiya saw that too. She didn’t move.

  Shame remembered those first rooms on the road after I died, that technique. Ndiya rode along. Afraid to look at Shame, afraid the police would see her seeing what she saw, she kept track of where they were. She thought she could smell Shame sweat. She smelled distant smoke. Her brain whirled. She thought of her father, his distance, dead stars in his eyes. She remembered Shame’s sunspot eyes. They seemed light-years away. She knew she had always been afraid to really look at her brothers’ eyes. She stopped that train of thought and resumed keeping track of the route: turns, stops, starts. The police told Shame to turn right from the left lane, across traffic; they instructed him to drive through a red light.

  The instructions to break traffic rules signaled the second part of the parade: the laws don’t apply to the law. Shame understood this very clearly and he no longer gave a fuck. In his mind, Ndiya was already at Colleen’s. In his mind, I was dead and he was in those first rooms on the road, alone, a kid, really, forcing himself to be identical with what was around him. So just then his mind was steering wheel, dash, turn indicator. The word was terminus, an end: a finite list of discrete objects at hand. The mind. Objects separated from him. Objects he identified himself to; objects he separated from each other. He’d known people who’d been on this parade and never came back. Many others who had come back and still never came back.

  He knew, somewhere, his brain was at the movies. Films of encounters with police. Some he’d heard about, some witnessed, others in the first person. He refused to watch. He wouldn’t even look. He knew that nothing he knew made any difference. The next instruction told him to turn right the wrong way down a one-way side street, both sides lined with parked cars. He drove down the center of the street. Up ahead to the right, the curb was open. He was told to pull over and park. He parked nose to nose with a black Nissan Altima that faced the right way up the street. Without looking, he said, “OK,” to Ndiya. He heard her door open and she got out. He guessed she closed the door but he didn’t hear anything. He guessed she walked away but he didn’t see that either.

  He sat there. He was told to turn off the vehicle and to leave the keys. He was told: “Leave. The. Win-dow. Down.” Then a voice sounded from right behind his left ear:


  –Get out.

  Parade part three: meet the new “not you.” He was cuffed. A hand gripped his left bicep and led him forward.

  –Not bad. You lift?

  –No, I work.

  –Me too, motherfucker, me too.

  They paused on the steps of the precinct. He was led through an open space, amid barbed and blurry voices. He saw no faces but knew there were faces. He was blind. Movies screened in his head and he wouldn’t look. He was not booked. No prints. No photos. This was more bad news. They already had all that or had no use for any of it. He was not there. His sight came back when a police cuffed him to a metal chair in a yellow, paneled room and left him alone. Another police entered, removed Shame’s wallet from his pocket and dropped it, unopened, on the table. He left. Shame was left alone again. He started to feel cold and felt himself shaking on the inside. The air was humid and warm on his skin. But he was freezing inside.

  He knew the shaking was fear, the cold was panic. But he couldn’t feel that. He felt his brain screen visions. He didn’t look but he knew someone in him watched. He began to fear the fear again and realized that his mind was still in the cab of the truck. He needed to be the room. He couldn’t afford to let his eyes reel. The room: steel table, yellow air, chair, cuffs. The wound from King Drive opened again on his wrist. It was clockwork, punctuation. Drops of blood from his wrist. Maybe it was sweat? Now he couldn’t remember which wrist was cut. A clock dropped through his body. That’s all it was. It wasn’t even time. He thought, “Let it fall like snow.”

  The door opened and two men entered. They removed guns from their holsters and put them on the table. That particular sound, dead metal, like when slow-crushed teeth finally gave. Something collapsed into an instant like powder poured into the mold of the moment. Man One sat down. Man Two stood. Shame felt like he was dangling from a balcony, in his mind. The movie screened far off in the distance. Man One said,

  –Who’s the blonde?

  Man Two laughed at the back of the room.

  –Oh shit, this?

  –I don’t know.

  –She walked up. You rolled down the window. She leaned in, kissed you on the mouth, took something from her purse, and reached into the vehicle.

  –Maybe she was helping him roll down the window?

  It sounded as if Man One read from a script, but he held no paper.

  –You didn’t know her?

  –No.

  –Ah. So, you didn’t know her.

  –No. There was no one.

  –You said you didn’t know her.

  –No. You said that. I said, “There was no one.” What you describe, I didn’t see any of that happen.

  –What happened then? That you did see? Tell us.

  –Nothing. I was driving, I was pulled over by police.

  –When has nothing ever happened? You said you didn’t know her. What if we know her?

  That wasn’t a question. It was a threat. So Shame didn’t answer. They sat for a minute. That minute autopsied the sound in the room. Man One stood. Man Two picked up his gun and they left Man One’s pistol on the table. The gun stared directly at Shame. The wound on his wrist had clotted again. The door opened and both men reentered. Maybe it wasn’t the same men. Shame wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. He put his mind back in the truck: wheel, dash, shift.

  One police sat down, he held a sheet of paper. It stole all the white from the light in the room. The air dimmed from dirty yellow to stained amber. The page glowed brighter. Man Two leaned against the wall, lighted a cigarette. Man One placed his hand on his gun and stared at Shame. Man One to Man Two:

  –You can’t smoke in here.

  –Fuck you.

  Neither man reacted to the other. Man One placed the sheet of paper on the table. This called Shame’s mind back from the truck. The paper was either facedown, blank, or the intensity of its whiteness obscured the print. Blank or not, a piece of paper was yet another bad sign. Lying flat on the table, it was the door to a storm cellar, a pressure chamber. Man One sat in front of him.

  –Now, soliciting. That’s probable cause.

  –Nothing happened.

  –Got any witnesses? We do, don’t we?

  –You want to bet we do?

  Shame didn’t move, he stared at the blaring whiteness of the page on the tabletop. Then Man One:

  –What it’s going to be, slick? A blank page or an open book? What did we find in the truck?

  –I don’t know. A bag. Work clothes. A few tools in a case …

  –What else? Probable cause, my man. What did we probably find? Think about it.

  –It’s better if you tell us, believe me.

  –Or maybe you want a lawyer?

  Both men laughed at this.

  Shame shook his head. Paranoid movies rose like floodwater behind his eyes. He refused to look. Someone else watched. Someone he hated, who hated him. The police knew all about this. They didn’t hate the men they destroyed. By the time they were on this detail, it was mechanical. It was like “Wet mop in aisle three.”

  –We searched the truck. What did we find?

  –I told you all I remember being in there. Tire jack … nothing.

  –I’m almost through fucking around, you know? We searched the truck. Tell us what we found in the truck or you’re going away for ten years. Do not make me tell you what we found in the truck. You tell me what we found.

  Shame was afraid to close his eyes. He tried not to blink. He held his eyes open, tried to focus on something a hundred miles away. If he shut his eyes, even for an instant, vision screened the movie in his brain. He tried to see how close he could get to seeing nothing with his eyes open. The men left. Man One placed his gun back on the table. The gun didn’t blink either. The white page glowed like an escape hatch. That was bait in the trap. Shame didn’t look. The room dimmed. Maybe he fell asleep with his eyes open. The sheet on the table became the screen for the movie behind his eyes. His eyes reeled the table on which the screen shone. The two men came back in the room. Man One slapped a pen down diagonally across the sheet of paper, walked behind Shame, and uncuffed his right hand. Then he came around and punched Shame in the face. Shame thought the gun had blinked. Maybe he grabbed the gun and Man Two shot him? He couldn’t breathe. Man One picked up the pen. He slashed a quick blue line near the bottom of the blank page.

  –Sign on the line. Then, we’ll type up what we found in the truck. The witness already signed one just like this one. Want to see it?

  Man Two:

  –So did the blonde.

  –Sign. Then you can go. Otherwise, we’re going to put you away.

  Shame caught a breath and then had to force himself to swallow a laugh. That scared him fully awake because he knew the laugh was panic. He felt nothing. That was the point of parade part three: force all the people you’re not into view. Evidence collects on what people aren’t like the structure of rime, the undoing we come from, the power of the city, the movie reeling on the brain’s screen, the power of a face down page, the unblinking Glock on the table. That page was always face down, and it was never blank. That was its power.

  –I told you what was in the truck.

  Man One snatched the sheet and sprang to his feet. The back of his knees kicked his chair violently across the room. The chair slid into the wall. Shame expected the room to go black. His eyes reeled nothing. Nothing happened.

  –Man, fuck this sad-sack motherfucker. Let’s go.

  Shame’s right arm was cuffed back to the chair. Both men left. They returned immediately, before the door could fully close. They stopped just inside the door. Man One:

  –And what about your friend?

  – …

  –Friend, trick, whatever. What about her?

  – …

  –I thought so. Man, fuck him. Let’s send his ass up.

  Man One left. Man Two, on his way out, smiled. But his smile didn’t smile. As if from somewhere very far away, the undoing that Man
Two came from appeared in his smile. Then, in a whisper:

  –Your elevator girl.

  Shame had no idea what that comment was about but he felt exactly what it meant. It was a threat. It was meant to divide and, as far as the police could know, it would have to work. And Man Two closed the door. Shame felt a bead of sweat inch down the groove of his spine. A thread-thin path of pain unwound from his wrist up his arm. His mind split and followed the thread of pain and the bead of sweat; if they met, somewhere down below his shoulder blades, they’d produce some noxious reaction, a kind of gaseous acid. “The crosshairs body,” Shame thought. This was the hateful thing that wasn’t him, that watched him from a distance. This was the evidence, the undoing that hated him, and this was exactly how all that could become him. This was parade part three.

  If you travel, you go nowhere until something won’t work. Then something breaks and when you try to fix it, you move. When you travel, you meet no one till something gets lost. When you look to find it, you arrive. It doesn’t matter if you ever find it; all arrivals are found while searching for something else, something lost. And people appear. People appear who could never have been searched for. If you arrive where you set out to go, you’ve traveled nowhere.

  Kima, the magician, put Shame up his sleeve. On the plane, in that spaceless tube, all he could think was that Kima should work with Pearlie’s twins. All beautician-magicians needed a bass player, everyone knew that. He certainly knew people went to beauticians when they really needed magicians. He thought Ahrrisse could have dealt with the smashed puzzle of his life; he knew, from watching that prodigy of reassembly, half the trick was not to look at the whole of any one piece; whole shapes were always illusions. Things were made, and moved, by aligning pieces of pieces: a corresponding edge, a shared blur of mixed color or quick texture across a border. Ahrrisse had taught him that. And Melvin.

  Shame and Kima sat at a corner table in Earlie’s. Kima texted his sister in Kenya who called him back—as Kima informed, “It’s nearly free!”—He chatted brightly for a few minutes, then a scowling thirty-minute argument ensued. Something about their mother and sister—Kima punctuated his Kiswahili with English words, a thread of crumbs Shame followed, a controversy about fees and his nephew’s placement in boarding school. Something-something in Kiswahili and then, in English, “No one gives a fuck about internet porn, he’s fifteen! He’s just massively horny. It’s not fatal.” Kima made big, can-you-believe-this eyes at Shame. This went on and on and on. Then, at the end of the call, he set up Shame’s transit in less than a minute, kissed the phone, and hung up. Still shaking his head and laughing about his nephew, Kima jotted two phone numbers on a business card and handed it to Shame.