Killing Time

by Thomas Berger

  “Do you recall your answer?”

  “I can’t say I do.”

  “It was ‘no.’”

  “Well, there you are,” Detweiler said. “I can’t improve on it.”

  “What interests me,” said Dr. Brixton, “is that you couldn’t remember.”

  “Since I saw you last, Doctor, so many things have happened that others slip my mind. It all comes back to me now. It may interest you to know I never did succeed in getting an amputation. I suppose it was fate. Jail has done the job better and with no pain If I can’t remember past answers, it goes to demonstrate how much we lose to Time. For all I know, I might have been a raving homosexual at some past time and have forgotten about it.”

  “You might have been? Why do you say that?”

  “I purposely picked the most unlikely situation I could think of,” said Detweiler, “to demonstrate my point.”

  “I find that significant.”

  “I hoped you would. Anything is possible, Doctor. You are interested in what is probable, according to your interpretation of what a person remembers, but memory is faulty and partial at best.”

  “Granted,” replied Brixton. “But what we remember and what we forget is most meaningful.”

  Detweiler agreed, but he said: “Think if we could Realize exactly what happened, without distortion of wish and will and the other filters of time lost, relive the event itself, see back over the centuries, focusing in on a chosen moment. For example, I will relate an occurrence that took place some years back that should be of especial interest to you if you are a homosexual.”

  Brixton suddenly lost his grayness. His features took form in a curious way.

  “Wait a minute, Joe. I am not homosexual, if that’s what you are saying. I seem to have touched a nerve, to make you strike back that way. Let’s get this straight. I am a physician. Because a policeman investigates a murder, does that make him a murderer?”

  Detweiler said: “You are the one who insists that any personal reaction is significant, Doctor. Why does a man become a policeman if he does not have an attraction to crime? You see, you cannot stand apart that way if you are human. You must take responsibility for your interests.”

  “I find it absurd that you, who are sick, should instruct me as to reality,” said the doctor, who sank slowly back into his dispassion.

  “That’s what I mean,” Detweiler said. “Your profession is illness, Tierney’s is crime, and Mr. Melrose’s is injustice. You would all have a hard time proving you are not absolutely dependent on the negative phenomena, not simply passively waiting around for something to go wrong. If, that is, proof were necessary. It isn’t for me.

  “But I don’t want to dwell on that subject. I am not the advocate of anything. It’s perfectly all right with me if you are a homosexual. There is this incident I wanted to tell you about. I was in one of those lunch-counter bars eating a knackwurst on rye and drinking a glass of beer, and a girl came up alongside me and asked if I’d like to have a good time with her, and I said just a minute till I finish my sandwich, so I did, and then we went to her room around the corner and I said I should warn you I don’t have much money and she said just give me what you can afford and I did, and I thought it was funny she didn’t take off anything but her skirt and underpants and lay down with her behind towards me, and since I don’t care for anything strange I asked her to turn over, and you won’t believe this, but she was a man!”

  “What did you do then?” asked Dr. Brixton. “Beat him up?”

  “I just gave an embarrassed laugh and got out of there fast,” Detweiler said. “But not before one more thing occurred which makes me feel bad, which is probably why I forgot the whole incident for a long time. As I was getting back into my pants, he said: ‘Can’t you give me just one little kiss?’”

  “Why does that make you feel bad?”

  “Because maybe I should have tried to overcome my repugnance and grant his plea,” said Detweiler. “He was, after all, a human being in need. What did his perversion matter, in view of that misery?”

  Brixton’s mouth appeared in the aridity of his lower face, a widening crack, slowly upturning at the corners, as he showed a bleak, regretful amusement. “You seem to feel more contrition for rejecting an invert’s indecent advances than you do for murdering three persons.”

  “Because I did not turn away from them. It is better to kill than to ignore.”

  “You should have submitted to his desires?”

  “Definitely not. I try to answer needs, not cater to boundless appetites. Desires are treacherous and insatiable, and any attempt to satisfy them increases their intensity. It is a marvelous experience to be useful to somebody, but lending oneself to certain pseudo uses is to be finally absolutely useless.”

  “You should have embraced him then, at least?”

  “I should have killed him,” said Detweiler. “Put him out of Time, given him a new start.”

  “As you did later with the Starr women?”

  “Yes,” Detweiler said. “They didn’t want me, personally. They would have settled for a dummy, except that any person has as much power over a dummy as the next. Life makes all the difference: to claim the attention, the energy of a living being. Attract him, divert him, distract him. I suppose I could have filled their void in a mechanical fashion, but it would not have helped. Betty protected me, while she lived there. She was interested in my work, and that interest was my armor—because it wasn’t always easy to resist temptation.

  “Billie was gorgeous, the kind of girl you see on garage calendars, and Mrs. Starr, though in her forties, was still a good-looking woman: in fact, the kind I have often preferred, with a light in her skin and a body full to the ultimate but not spilling over. She could look like a queen but still feminine. She wore a perfume that made my head spin. It was hardest to avoid her. Billie was a little unreal, and the kind that maybe prefers to have you look rather than touch. She always gave a show if you wanted one. At one time or another I saw every part of her without trying, since she was always in the bathroom or sitting on the bed, doors open, taking the hair off her legs or whatnot, always grooming.

  “But Mrs. Starr was fully dressed at all times. I never saw her leg above the knee. Even when she came to my room in her nightclothes—she slept on the living-room sofa and listened late to the radio after everybody else had gone to bed, and at least once it blew a tube and she thought it was a fuse and asked me to look in the box—her robe was frilly but decent and you could see only the collar of the lace nightgown. I saw this when I switched on my bedside lamp—so obviously the main fuse hadn’t blown, and I looked in the box on the kitchen wall and they were all O.K. Then I went into the living room to tend to the radio, and she asked if I would just use the flashlight and not put on the lamp because the sofa made up like a bed was an eyesore.

  “I found a tube that was almost entirely out of the socket, like somebody had been fiddling with it, and I put it back in. Sitting side by side on the couch, our knees bumped together; that perfume was overpowering. I almost lost control, but managed to get out of the room and in the hall, where the light was on. I ran into Betty, who looked as always pure as a child in her light-green pajamas. I guess she was on her way to or from the bathroom. She was like an angel, come to save me; because I might have gone back even yet. I know she was still suspicious after I told her the truth about the radio. Betty always understood me: she knew I was still a long way from organizing my energy. The next day was the first time I tried to have my organ removed.”

  “And at the clinic they referred you to me.”

  “No,” Detweiler said, “that was at least the third time.”

  “You had tried twice before?”

  “At least. I was really serious about it…. I’ll tell you an interesting thing: Mrs. Starr, who looked soft and voluptuous, was actually very strong and rather hard when it came to killing her. Billie, on the other hand, was the yielding one.”

  “Were yo
u punishing them for having attracted you, tormented you?”

  “Certainly not. By killing them I was at last giving them a use.”

  “That’s funny,” said Dr. Brixton. “I believe you told Mr. Melrose that you strangled Mrs. Starr because she was making noise, and then Billie out of compassion, not wishing her to find her mother’s body.”

  “And I told Tierney I went there to kill Betty, and I told the district attorney’s detectives the killings were premeditated. I have said a lot of things to a lot of people.”

  “Which is the truth?”

  “All, and none. The act is the truth, really. Everything else is language. You can’t ever expect to Realize an act in words: what you are talking about is talk. The medium of action is Time, and what can you say about that?”

  “Well, Joe,” said the doctor, “I wish you had continued to come to me for treatment. I believe this tragedy could have been avoided. Not only have three innocent, decent persons lost their lives, but you are in danger of losing yours. Legal procedure in this state is antiquated, really medieval. Its test for criminal responsibility is criminally inadequate. The district attorney is out to get your head. He has political ambitions. He would like to be the next governor. The yellow press is trying to corrupt the minds of potential jurors by printing analyses of your character by bogus ‘experts’ who have never seen you—all of course concluding you are legally sane.

  “I’m not sure that even Mr. Melrose clearly understands the situation. Society has a responsibility to people like you. It is a social problem, not a legal one or not even medical in the narrow sense. The first time you came into a public clinic with your request to be emasculated, you should have been given adequate psychiatric treatment. You were sick, Joe, and you are sick now. You should be in a hospital, not in a jail. It is we who are guilty of the crimes of which you are accused.”

  Dr. Brixton had developed some spirit while making this comment. He stayed gray all over, but his voice had force, an almost brutal authority that frightened Detweiler.

  “Oh no!” Detweiler cried in terror. “Oh no, you don’t, Doctor. Don’t try to take my killings away from me!”

  Detweiler had not suspected that Dr. Brixton would try to swindle him. When he had talked with the psychiatrist some years before, he had believed him a harmless sort of man in whom the energizing currents ran slowly, a person of no ambition, else why would he practice a profession the subject of which was unreality. But that was before the killings. Now he recognized Brixton as potentially his most dangerous enemy, much more ruthless than Mr. Melrose and with an additional malice of which the lawyer was innocent, having, as Brixton had not, the structure of law to check him. Detweiler was aware that in psychiatry there were no rules at all.

  He had a number of subsequent sessions with Brixton, but he was careful to restrain himself when it came to philosophical speculation, which the psychiatrist would only use against him.

  Finally the day came when the doctor said he had enough data from which to write up a report for Mr. Melrose, and he shook Detweiler’s hand and said: “Goodbye for now, Joe. I’ll see you in court.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll be a witness for the defense.”

  Detweiler was staggered by the implications of this. “You don’t mean to say you will tell the judge and jury about the operation I was trying to have done?”

  Brixton said: “Now calm yourself, Joe. You are in terrible danger. We must do what is necessary to save your life. Surely you can endure a little embarrassment with that end in view.”

  “It isn’t embarrassment, Doctor. I can stand the facts of life. But have you no decency? There will be women in that courtroom.” The jail barber was overdue, and Detweiler’s hair was too long for his taste. In his agitation now, a fine lock swung down over his left eye. He tried to rip it from his scalp, but that proved too painful to accomplish. He said: “You keep mentioning my ‘terrible danger.’ The only danger I am in is from your obsession with filth.”

  Then Mr. Melrose said he would bring still another psychiatrist, and Detweiler put his foot down.

  “I really must protest, Mr. Melrose. Why in the world must these people be brought into the case to establish a plea of legal insanity? You have explained the difference to me between that and medical insanity; apparently there are maniacs by medical definition who could be judged liable at law. Therefore what is essential here is the legal aspect, not the psychiatric. So why can’t we deal with lawyers instead of doctors?”

  “As usual, Joe, you ask good questions, but the trouble is that you are too rational. You do not allow for the perversity of civilized institutions: you do not consider the tendency of any one discipline to encroach upon another, perhaps merely out of envy.”

  “Now, don’t be cynical, Mr. Melrose.”

  “Sorry, Joe. I was just temporizing while endeavoring to think up a feasible answer; killing time, you might say.”

  Detweiler grinned appreciatively. Then he said: “Please don’t worry. Everything will come out all right. You’ll see.” He sighed. “I’ll even talk to your next psychiatrist.”

  Melrose brightened. “That might help, Joe. You see, it is more persuasive to have several witnesses give similar testimony.”

  “I understand that,” said Detweiler, “but I could conceive of a situation in which one man told the truth in opposition to fifteen liars, imperfect observers, or whatnot.”

  “I could cite illustrative examples,” Melrose responded in agreement. “And as often as not, the perjurers were my own defense witnesses.”

  “Come now. You are being too hard on yourself.”

  “I have never asked a witness to commit perjury,” Melrose said reflectively. “Or implied that I would welcome it. Nor has a potential witness come to me with such an offer. It is curious, perhaps, but we both pretend, even in private, and without a suggestion of irony, that he is telling the truth. I say ‘pretend,’ but maybe I am pretending now that it is pretense. At the appropriate moment I believe.”

  Detweiler was impressed. “I suppose you can be permitted some cynicism, then, in your off-moments. Everybody needs a certain amount of relaxation.”

  Melrose said: “But of course perjury seldom plays a role in the testimony of so-called expert witnesses. It is only too easy for both defense and prosecution to find honest authorities who oppose each other diametrically in regard to the same phenomenon, even in such a supposedly exact science as ballistics. And when the human element enters, consistency goes right out the window. Dr. Brixton, for example, believes that a man who has tried to get himself mutilated can be held responsible for no subsequent act however criminal. I wager that the prosecution psychiatrists will find the same fact utterly negligible.”

  “Yes,” said Detweiler, “there is only one area in which all men agree, willy-nilly; one constant factor; one dimension in which we all have the same measurement: Time. Have you ever thought that only in Time are all men equal? Every sixty seconds all living things grow one minute older. There is no exception and no appeal. In that regard everybody is an expert, a professional.”

  Melrose shot the dazzling linen cuffs that emerged from his gray, chalk-striped jacket. He was a lawyer, trained not to show his feelings except as a device. Detweiler could not say what influence, if any, he was exerting on Melrose: but he had hope. He worried more about the lawyer than any of the others. Tierney could take care of himself. Dr. Brixton was nourished by the shameful reminiscences of his patients. But poor Melrose had nothing but his pleas. He went eternally through the world speaking on behalf of the accused. To Detweiler that seemed most unhealthy. He saw now that he had been wrong to try to kill Melrose; had he been successful, another Melrose would have taken the job, and the first would have died, his misapprehensions intact.

  The Starr women had expected nothing better of him than death. If he would not love them, he would at least strangle them. Women crave some form of intimate attention—which is also why Betty got marr
ied behind his back.

  But Melrose was a man, manifestly incapable to act for himself. Forever pleading in the name of another, defending killers, unable himself to kill.

  “I once heard,” Detweiler said diplomatically, “that all lawyers want to become judges.”

  Melrose’s defenses came up. He said: “Don’t try to run my life, Joe.”

  “I was just thinking, you have saved a lot of people from punishment. Maybe you should take your turn at punishing.”

  “Once, early in my career,” Melrose said, “I witnessed an execution. I had not defended the man. His counsel was one of the senior partners of the law firm for whom I worked. I went out of what I told myself was a serious, professional curiosity: I should know precisely what it was to lose a capital case. Notice the ‘I.’ A trial is always a competition between lawyers, for which the alleged crime provides an excuse. The ‘defendant,’ the ‘state,’ are assumptions, and interchangeable. But the man who is strapped into the electric chair is real, so actual, palpable, that when the current goes through him he turns red, then blue; smoke rises from him; he stinks of burning flesh. He writhes. Were it not for his bonds, his convulsing muscles would hurl him across the chamber.

  “The judge who sentences a man to this is a homicidal maniac.”

  “Then,” Detweiler said, “he must be found not guilty, according to the M’Naghten Rule. I begin to understand that principle now. Without it there would be total anarchy.”

  Chapter 18

  TIERNEY’S affair with Betty was still underway as spring dried off into summer. It was by now starkly genital. She never heard from him during the curse, but he always appeared the day after it ended, when they could make love without protection and with impunity. He was very conventional, deplored stunts, special positions, and was troubled if any article belonging to Arthur was visible to him as he prepared to enter her. Yet he insisted on using the bedroom, the bed of the conjugal house. Once they had gone to a city hotel in a deteriorating neighborhood and obviously used by streetwalkers, but the proprietor knew Tierney from the days when Tierney put the bite on him as a precinct detective and gave them the best accommodations, gratis, discreetly. But Tierney could not perform. It seemed he preferred to violate the sanctity of the home.