Killing Time

by Thomas Berger

  On the stage his situation was noteworthy. Because of the lights he seemed utterly alone, that is, though he knew the room was thronged he could see no one. The joke was on him, who during one phase had experimented with processes for making himself invisible, which he had proved was impossible unless everyone else was blinded, but of course here was the secret: concentrated light. If one could travel within an incandescence….

  The man on the platform read aloud a brief account of how Detweiler happened to be there, and then he said, kindly: “Turn around, Joe.” Detweiler did so and studied the horizontal lines on the wall, which demarcated certain heights, and then the man said: “O.K., Joe, you can face front again.”

  Detweiler came around, smiling at the thought of his super-visibility in the brilliant lights, against a white wall graduated like a laboratory vessel. The police certainly did a thorough job; they were specialists in recognition and identification; in their hands one felt established, on record, in place.

  “Think this is funny, do you, Joe? Joe strangles women, but when the boys come to play, little Joey runs away,” said the platform man.

  Detweiler had no idea why this man was perverting the facts, but since his voice was kind, malice was out of the question. “No,” he said, “I also killed Appleton, though he was neither a boy nor came out to play, exactly.”

  “And you are proud of it, right, Joe? Is your face somewhat bruised, Joe? Look over this way. How’d that happen?”

  “A fellow in a bar, a couple of nights ago, hit me.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the platform man. “How have you been treated in police custody?”

  “Fine,” said Detweiler. “Swell.”

  “No complaints, huh Joe? Nobody gave you a bad time?”

  “Certainly not.” Detweiler saw no reason to get those fellows who succeeded Tierney in trouble, though they had struck him a few times, but in the middle of the body and not the face, and probably through misunderstanding; and besides, his questioner, being a policeman, would know of this and not have to ask him.

  “Joe has made a statement to the district attorney,” said his questioner to the invisible audience. “All right, Joe. That’s all.”

  “Thank you,” said Detweiler.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Next Detweiler was taken to be arraigned, which was to say, formally charged with having committed certain actions which were criminal according to the laws of the state. Everything having to do with Law was carefully managed, he could see. After experiencing this at close hand, Detweiler doubted that justice often miscarried. He had by now repeated several times an admission of responsibility for the three deaths, but apparently his obligations were not yet discharged. The newspaper, the police, the district attorney, and Homicide Court, where he was at present, with the grand jury, he had been told, yet to come. In the house of exterior reality were many mansions to occupy, categories to satisfy, persons with a job to do. Man had made a remarkable structure of mechanical morality. Detweiler however could not let himself get too involved in these matters. Thus he was happy to meet the square-built, well-dressed individual who approached him in a hallway of the court.

  “Are you Joseph Detweiler? My name is Melrose.”

  “Really delighted to meet you,” Detweiler said, eagerly lifting his right hand but, inhibited by the quick restraint of the handcuff around that wrist joined to Tierney, who as the arresting officer was obliged to accompany Detweiler on all formal occasions, dropped it and put out the other. Melrose made no attempt to take it, from which Detweiler could see immediately that he was a man of propriety and spurned the unnatural: he would not shake a left hand, unless perhaps his vis-á-vis were one-armed, perhaps not even then! Detweiler liked such classic ways. He also noticed that Melrose failed to acknowledge Tierney at all.

  Detweiler said no more to the attorney until Tierney unlocked him from the cuff and left him and Melrose in a little interrogation-cell behind the courtroom.

  Detweiler said: “The newspaper publisher told me you were the best defense counsel in the country. Would you mind telling me how old you are?”

  “I’ll be fifty in June.”

  “You may think this is an impertinent question,” said Detweiler, “but I wonder if you’d mind telling me how long you think you’ll live, until what age, I mean.”

  “I don’t mind the question,” Melrose answered, “but I don’t have a response to it, because I have never thought about the matter—no, that’s not precisely true. Of course I have, but not in that way.”

  “Then I guess you and I will get along all right, because neither have I,” said Detweiler. “Frankly, I wouldn’t trust you if you got statistical on me.”

  “Frankly,” said Melrose, “I don’t care whether you trust me or not.”

  Detweiler had difficulty in ascertaining the spirit in which the lawyer had made the statement, Melrose’s expression being impenetrable.

  He said: “Could you clarify that?”

  “Surely. I am your counsel. I am not you. I will speak for you and not of you. I am accused of no crime, and I will not be on trial. You are, and will be. That is the difference between us, and it is important to remember at all times. If I take the case—as I am apparently doing, because I am here—we will share a common interest: you want to live and I want to win. Neither of us can do damage to the other without harming his own cause. Trust plays no part at all.”

  Detweiler listened carefully to this, but he was also observing Melrose’s person and attire. The lawyer wore a medium-gray suit, pin-striped in a darker gray. On sitting down he had unfastened the middle button of his jacket and plucked up his trousers at both knees. His cufflinks were large, flat ovals of silver, engraved in an exotic design; his collar pin a narrow silver bar. His pocket handkerchief was a cloudlike puff of linen. The vest was a surprise: dove-gray, unstriped, with opalescent buttons, and of a fabric somewhere between felt and velvet. A tie of silver grillwork over an intense blue, rising to a huge knot at the white collar of the silken shirt whose body was, however, pink, an effect which Detweiler could see on closer inspection was due to the tight intermixture of red threads with white.

  “Is there egg on my vest?” asked Melrose.

  “I was just interested in your shirt,” said Detweiler. “I imagine it was special-made, for you alone.”

  “That is true.” Melrose slowly lowered the eyebrow he had raised. “O.K.? Do I pass?”

  “Sorry,” said Detweiler. “I did not mean to imply I was giving you a test. I admire your taste in clothing as well as your brilliance in argument. I am beginning to appreciate your gifts.”

  Melrose showed the saddest smile Detweiler had even seen. He said: “I haven’t finished on the subject of trust.”

  “Quite all right,” Detweiler said. “I know that in your profession you have to protect yourself with cynicism, being the middleman between crime and punishment. Your clients are by definition morally inferior to the rest of humanity, and are on trial for doing things that you, yourself, would never even be suspected of. To speak for them requires great irony on your part, but there must be an even greater irony that nobody understands but yourself. I mean, I suppose people tend to think of you as something of a criminal if you defend criminals, and those you defend think of you as being ultimately on the side of the law. As for yourself, you must wonder whether you chose the profession because of compassion or cruelty.”

  Melrose stayed sad. He said: “You have not retained me to study my motives, Joseph, however more valuable that may be than any jurisprudence. My sole importance to you is that perhaps I can save your life.”

  Detweiler was astonished that even such a man as Melrose could be utterly naive.

  “But I don’t want to save my life!” he exclaimed. “That’s not the point at all. I have killed three persons, and I must pay for the crime.”

  An unprecedented animation showed in Melrose, whom, until this moment, Detweiler would have described as merely bland,
impeccable. Now his face began to take on the hue of his rosy shirt.

  “Pay whom?” he cried.

  “I don’t know!” Detweiler shouted back. “You tell me. You’re a lawyer.”

  “I’m your lawyer.”

  Melrose shrugged in an odd way, and Detweiler sensed he had hurt him somehow and had a feeling that to apologize would make it worse.

  “Listen here,” he said, “I don’t mean to diminish your role in my trial. I just wanted to be honest and let you know that I don’t have any quarrel with the Law. If you can find any legal justification for my having killed those people, more power to you. I can’t see any, but then I am not a lawyer.”

  Melrose said: “Will you let me worry about that? Now we must go into court for your arraignment, and a statement of charges against you will be read, and then you must plead either one way or the other.”

  “Guilty or not? Which do you think I am, Mr. Melrose?”

  The attorney shook his heavy head. “Joe, what you are is not relevant. What concerns us is what you can be proved to be in a court of law. That is a highly technical matter in application, though in essence it is very simple: in bringing a charge against you, your accuser takes on the burden of proof. You may accept this silently and make no defense whatever—which is in itself a defense.”

  “I have considered doing just that,” said Detweiler, “but it doesn’t seem right. I don’t think the State would spend all their time and money and the energy of their employes if there wasn’t a good reason. And in this case, we know the accusation is justified. I certainly killed three people. The only doubt is whether it was murder. I think I should explain it was not, from my point of view, because the difference between killing and murder is that malice is present in the latter. I have previously spoken of ‘gain,’ in the sense that I got none from these killings, having in mind robbery, vengeance, and so on. But I have to admit I was being deceitful, even to myself, when I made that assertion.”

  Melrose leaned forward, apparently fascinated, though Detweiler could not have said what if anything in his counsel’s attitudes was genuine and what was lawyerly craft. To be another man’s advocate required a peculiar type of personality. He had been amazed by Melrose’s professed lack of interest in the real, as opposed to the legal, issues in the killings, yet now, only a moment later, the lawyer seemed intent. Detweiler had been much more at ease with Tierney.

  “Do you really want to hear this?” he asked.

  “Of course,” said Melrose.

  “Your mention of silence—how the accused can defend himself silently—suggested this new interpretation, and the more I think about it, the more likely it sounds. You see, Mrs. Starr was making noise. The shouting did not bother me because at least it was personal. She wanted me to leave and not to wait for Betty to arrive. She made that clear. I tried to explain, but she wouldn’t listen. She went into the kitchen and began to stack plates, banging them together with that special sound of crockery, unlike any other in the world, piercing, jagged, white, searing, the noise of almost-breakage, never-quite, a cold sound, icy, ice sheets pounding together in the Bering Sea—”

  “Joe,” said Melrose. “We must get into court.”

  “I went into the kitchen and begged her to put those plates down. She was banging them so loudly she could not hear me. Those plates were driving her crazy; they were getting their chance at long last to get revenge for years of abuse. Don’t kid yourself,” Detweiler told Melrose as if confidentially, “material objects are aware of us at all times, rocks and stumps as well as sophisticated devices, but luckily they are all at odds with one another or people would long since be overwhelmed.”

  Melrose said: “Come on, Joe. Your ideas are not terribly original. The revolt of the machines against their human masters is one of the oldest clichés in science-fiction writing.”

  “That’s not exactly what I am saying, is it?” said Detweiler. “Anyway, I’m not trying to be creative, I’m telling you what happened. I expect most of it will be an old story to a man in your job, defending killers as you do.”

  “You killed Mrs. Starr to stop the noise?”

  “Yes, so you see, I did gain. I gained silence.”

  “Joe, it takes a while to strangle a person. She would have stopped making noise as soon as your hands closed around her neck. Yet you continued to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, did you not? Once your hands were at her throat you could not control yourself, isn’t that so? You forgot all about Mrs. Starr as a person, a living human being of flesh and blood. She was now not she, but it. It opposed you, you must remove it from your path—”

  “Oh no!” cried Detweiler. “What you are describing is a confusion of persons and things, namely murder: removal of the person who obstructs you from a desired end, as if he were a piece of furniture. When I said that material objects have an awareness, I don’t mean they are not to be distinguished from living organisms. Certainly she stopped making noise. I had gained that, without killing her. Thus far it was like shutting off a radio, and I was about to take my hands away when I saw it. I was startled, to see it there, to recognize it!

  “Mr. Melrose, you don’t know what this moment meant to me after my years of searching. Sculpture, a reproduction of the form of life. Taxidermy, closer insofar as it used that which remained after life had gone: something at least that had once contained life, unlike art. I had wondered what came next: embalming? I thought about taking a course in an undertakers’ school.

  “All the same, I knew it was one absurdity after another, for life is not form but Time. A dummy could no doubt be constructed to meet every chemical and physical test, plastic skin, eye-lenses ground to specification, vacuum tubes and wires conducting electrical impulses the equivalent of human energy. As to the moral qualities, they would be easiest of all to establish: you merely arrange the switches according to a scheme furnished by such a person as my friend Tierney, who being a policeman is an authority on right and wrong.

  “But though you’ll have something fine, you won’t have life, because the one thing that cannot be simulated is time. And time is what I saw in Mrs. Starr’s eyes, behind the superficial pain and fear—genuine but superficial because pain and fear, no matter how intense, pass away in time. And if Time is stopped—well, you cannot do it by holding back the hands of a watch with a needle—I have done that—any more than you can alter spatial measurements by cutting an inch off the end of a yardstick.

  “So I squeezed her throat and as I did so I looked into her eyes, which were hazel and beautiful and sympathetic though the rest of her face showed anguish, for it is terrible to be killed, but at least she was not alone. I could hardly bear her pain at second hand. I know I could not have strangled myself while looking in a mirror: I hadn’t had the courage even to emasculate myself.

  “So in her eyes I watched Time move, flow, continue, and it did not slow down or speed up, because in real time there are no intervals as in the running of a watch, no tick-tock, and it is not like a river with here and there a ripple, a floating leaf or twig, a random current. It was, and then suddenly, it was not. Time had gone out of her and thus life. I had not caught it, arrested it as a policeman apprehends a lawbreaker, locks him up and can at will go to see him, feed him, consult him, beat him or whatnot—”

  Melrose quickened and asked: “Did the police beat you?”

  “It was nothing personal,” Detweiler said impatiently. “Never mind about that. I’ve been treated a lot better than I expected I released my hands and her body sank to the floor. I was depressed. So I have failed, I thought. I have brought pain and terror and taken a life. Tierney had pointed out that I have been a flop at various endeavors, and in general the police tend to emphasize that two of my victims were women and suggest that I was trying to rape the Starr ladies or something, which is ironic when you consider that Billie, at least, begged me to. She was naked, you see, having come from the shower…. But at the moment—I use the terminology because though I
had watched Time stop in Mrs. Starr, it continued in me.

  “I heard a noise at the door, not loud but penetrating because metallic: a key probing the lock. I picked up Mrs. Starr, carried her down the hall to the girls’ room, now Billie’s alone since Betty had left, as it turned out: there was only one bed. At the end of the hall was the closed door of what used to be my room, light showing in a half-inch strip along the threshold, the violent sound of a radio within: a boarder. There was always one, though I had not seen him. Back there, because of this radio I could not hear what happened out front, but I assumed someone was entering the apartment. Betty, could it be Betty? The dresser lamp was lighted. Hastily I put Mrs. Starr under the bed and extinguished the lamp. I stood in the middle of the room. I had no plan. All was now dark, and I could hear nothing but the radio behind the boarder’s door, music, a Christmas carol, oddly enough ‘Silent Night,’ loud as could be. This served to remind me of two things: one, that no Christmas decorations had been put around the apartment. Mrs. Starr always did that on Christmas Eve with the help of the girls: a small, artificial tree, Santa Claus beneath it, made of colored cotton, riding a sleigh along a strip of white cotton; wreaths. The other thing that was in my quick glance at Billie’s dresser, I did not see the mounted squirrel I had given her for Christmas the year before. Had she destroyed it? I wondered about that, and it was an important consideration owing to the fact that I had brought along with me this year another very much like it, for Betty; in case Betty showed up; I did not intend to leave it there for her. I had carried it under my arm while hauling Mrs. Starr’s body into the bedroom. I was still holding it: I certainly took care of that squirrel.