by Paul Cleave
“See, this girl we were asking you about earlier, Belinda Murray,” Mayor says, “her murder is still unsolved. So somebody pretty clever got away with it, don’t you think?”
“Maybe they were just lucky,” Jerry says.
“You ever have characters who commit a crime and then can’t remember doing it?”
“I don’t want to talk anymore,” Jerry tells him. It’s what Nurse Hamilton said to do—say nothing. He’s already said too much as it is.
“Come on, we’re just getting warmed up here.”
“Making barbecue talk,” Jerry says, and he knows he shouldn’t even have said that. But there is something inside him that knows if he can just talk to these people, if he can get them to relate to him and see he’s not a bad person, then all of this can get cleared up. They’ll know he’s not a killer.
“Exactly. Barbecue talk. I like that. You should use that in one of your books,” Mayor says. “Let’s say you’ve got a character who says he can’t remember killing somebody. How does that go?” he asks, and when Jerry doesn’t answer, Mayor answers for him. “They’re usually lying, right?”
“I didn’t kill that girl,” Jerry says.
“But two days ago you said you did.”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“Let me ask you this,” Mayor says.
“No more questions.”
“Last one,” Mayor says. “If you had killed her, would you know? Would you feel it? I don’t mean remember it, but feel it . . . in your bones somehow?”
Jerry thinks about it, and it doesn’t take long to come up with an answer. “Of course I would. I might not remember it, but I would know it, and that’s how I know I didn’t hurt that woman.”
Mayor twists around a little further. There’s a look on his face, something between a smirk and a smile. “That’s interesting. Really interesting. You want to know why?”
“You said no more questions.”
“But you’re a curious guy, right? All authors must be. So let’s carry on, for the sake of learning. You ever killed anybody, Jerry? I don’t mean in the books, I mean in real life.”
Jerry doesn’t answer.
“I’ll take that as a no, because you’d remember it, right? And if you didn’t remember, you’d feel it in your bones.”
“I don’t want to talk anymore until my lawyer arrives.”
“What about your wife?” Mayor asks.
“I’ll wait until she arrives too,” Jerry says.
Mayor shakes his head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean do you remember killing your wife?”
The question is confusing, and makes Jerry feel like he’s just missed part of the conversation. Did he zone out? Is his memory retreating? Then he gets it. “You’re talking about one of my books.”
“No, Jerry, in real life.”
Jerry shakes his head. “Of course not. How could I? She’s still alive.”
“She’s dead, Jerry,” Mayor says. “You killed her.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You shot her.”
“I said don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true.”
“That’s not funny,” Jerry says, and it’s not funny, not funny, not funny, and it’s not true either, not true, and the silt is shifting, it’s shifting, and it can’t be true because he doesn’t even own a gun, and it’s like he’s been saying—he would feel it.
“It was almost a year ago. You murdered your own wife,” Mayor says, that smug look on his face, that all-knowing, I’m smarter than you look that is making Jerry start to shake with anger. If he did own a gun, and if he had it on him, he would shoot Mayor for saying what he’s saying. “You know you did,” Mayor says, carrying on, ignoring his partner who has taken his eyes off the road to frown at him. “After all, you would feel it, right? That’s what you’re saying. That’s what I would call a plot hole, Jerry. You can’t say you didn’t kill Belinda Murray because you’d have felt it if you did, then say you can’t remember shooting your wife when we know for a fact that you did.”
“My wife isn’t dead.”
“Dennis . . .” his partner says.
“What? It’s true,” Mayor says, looking at his partner before focusing his attention back on Jerry. “She’s dead thanks to you, Jerry. That’s why you’re in a nursing home. If it’d been up to me, I’d have put you in jail, but you were deemed non compos mentis.”
“Don’t say that,” he says, and he starts slapping the sides of his face, gently, not enough to hurt, not in the beginning, then just a little harder, and a little harder again. “She’s not dead, she’s not dead,” he says, and he knows that right now he must look like the very mental patient they think he’s been pretending to be, but he doesn’t care.
“I think that’s enough, Mayor,” Chris says.
“Sandra isn’t dead,” Jerry says, still slapping himself.
“You shot her,” Mayor says, speaking louder to be heard over Jerry, and he points his top two fingers at Jerry and cocks his thumb back, turning his hand into a gun. He reaches into the backseat and points it to within an inch of Jerry’s chest. “Bang. Right in the heart.”
“Take that back! You take that back!”
“Bang.”
His name is Jerry Henry Grey Cutter and he is an author and he makes things up and he’s making this up. This isn’t real. These people aren’t real.
“Bang,” Mayor says.
Jerry grabs that finger gun and twists the barrel backwards until both of the fingers snap. Mayor starts to yell, and Jerry lets go and grabs two fistfuls of Mayor’s hair and start pulling.
“Get off me, you crazy prick,” Mayor screams, and buries the fingers of his good hand into Jerry’s forearms, but Jerry keeps a tight hold, all while Chris swerves the car to the side of the road and brings it to a stop.
“My wife isn’t dead,” Jerry says, and the thought of it is overwhelming. “Say she isn’t dead! Say it!”
Chris leans over and tries to get Jerry to let go, then Mayor lashes out with a fist and gets Jerry in the side of the face. The blow pushes him back into his seat, but a handful of Mayor’s hair goes with him.
“You crazy son of a bitch,” Mayor says, and he starts to lean over to get another shot in when his partner pulls him back.
“Don’t,” Chris says.
He doesn’t need to say it again. Mayor stops coming for him, and instead reaches to the fresh bald spot where there are patches of blood too. “You asshole,” he says, then starts cradling his broken fingers.
Jerry opens his hand and lets the hair fall onto the seat next to him. “Say she isn’t dead,” he says, much quieter now.
“We’re going to have to cuff you now, Jerry, okay?” Chris says, keeping his voice calm while his partner sucks in deep lungfuls of air.
“He said Sandra is dead.”
“He shouldn’t have said that,” Chris says.
“No, he shouldn’t have. It’s not funny.”
Chris gets out of the car. He opens the back door and tells Jerry to climb out. When he’s out, Chris tells him to turn around, then he slips a pair of handcuffs on him. Jerry has the feeling he’s been handcuffed before.
“Is she though?” he asks.
“Is she what?” Chris says.
“Dead.”
Silence for a few seconds, then Chris starts nodding. “She is, Jerry. I’m sorry,” he says, and Jerry can’t even make it back into the car. Instead he falls down on the side of the road, his knees banging heavily into it, his hands cuffed behind him, and he tips onto his side and starts sobbing into the asphalt.
DAY FIFTY
You actually started the Day Fifty entry earlier today, got two paragraphs into it and tore those pages out and tossed them into the trash because your thoughts were too jumbled, your spelling too messy, you couldn’t figure out what you were trying to say because you were too upset. Tearing out the pages and starting from scratch seemed the way to go, as if by doin
g so, you could delete the events of the day. If only it were so simple (yet in a way it is. If I don’t write it down, it will become easy for you to forget. Not now, but when the Dark Tomorrow comes). There are, it turns out, some speed bumps. You were, it turns out, premature in your decision to part ways with the Madness Journal. You need the journal to help remember who you are, because this disease you’re pretending you don’t have, well, you have it. You can’t kid yourself anymore.
The speed bumps.
Let’s start with Nicholas, the lawyer you came up with for the novel number unlucky for some. Nicholas—the no-good son of a bitch who you trusted, who you gave life to, who let you down because Mandy, your editor, didn’t like him. What happened? Why didn’t she like him?
Mandy said that for the first time you’ve taken an edit backwards. They were hard words to hear. Bloody hard. So for the last week you’ve been taking Nicholas back out of the story. Mandy said to take your time, but doesn’t she get there is no time? If Captain A has his way, you won’t be able to write your own goddamn name let alone rewrite a novel. Captain A, by the way, is the new name you’ve given the disease, because when that Dark Tomorrow arrives, it’ll be Captain A steering the ship. You’re really all at sea with this manuscript, partner. You sent the revised manuscript to Mandy two days ago, and she rang this morning and said maybe it was time to look at getting a ghostwriter. A ghostwriter! One more thing to add to the I can’t believe it list.
That’s Nicholas and Mandy for you. You do know that Mandy is looking out for your best interests. You know that. It just, well, it’s just the entire thing. You’ve let her down, and you’ve let yourself down.
Mrs. Smith, on the other hand, is a different story. Mrs. Smith isn’t just your neighbor, but also the mayor of Batshit County. She has her own Captain A steering her own ship. A while ago she complained about your garden (though good ol’ Hip-Hop Rick did spend a day in the yard a week ago, mowing and weeding and pruning and making things look nice before Sandra’s upcoming surprise birthday party), and now she seems to think you tore the roses out of her garden, but come on, you’re a forty-nine-year-old crime writer who has better things to drink than rip out her damn roses. Ha—not drink. Do. Better things to do. Yesterday, however, the police got involved, and now Sandra is angry because she took You Know Who’s side of the argument.
Basically here’s what happened—yesterday you all woke up to see the word CUNT had been spray-painted onto the front wall of Mrs. Smith’s house, the C on the front wall, the U covering the width of the door, the N on the wall next to that, and the T on the window. Nobody saw anything happen because it probably happened at night, and Mrs. Smith didn’t hear a thing because years of nagging her husband to death have perforated her eardrums. Naturally she came over and banged on your door. Of course she did. You’re the go-to guy when people have had obscenities painted on their walls. Somebody spray-painted the word asshole on your door? Go see Jerry. Fucktard on your letterbox? Go see Jerry. Shitburger on the car? Go see Jerry. So she came and saw Jerry while Sandra was at work, and Jerry told her he had no idea what in the hell she was talking about, and she pointed out that Jerry had the same goddamn color spray-paint on his fingers, which Jerry pointed out wasn’t paint, but ink, because he’d written one hundred and ten goddamn names on one hundred and ten goddamn place cards the previous night for the wedding, and he’d been using a felt, so stop accusing him of spray-painting on her wall when, obviously, she was a cunt and everybody in the street knew it, giving everybody in the street a motive.
The words were barely out of your mouth before you regretted them. Mrs. Smith, though she is nosy and annoying, didn’t deserve to be spoken to like that, especially after what was done to her house. There was a time when you were very neighborly with her. In fact, back in the day of book tours, when your family would go with you, it was Mrs. Smith who would look after your house and fetch your mail and feed the cat while you were gone. You and Sandra went to her husband’s funeral, and she always popped over with muffins on Sandra’s birthday. So of course you regretted saying those things, you regretted that somebody had done this mean thing to her, and most of all you regretted that Captain A had changed you into the type of person who could be blamed for anything wrong on the street.
You slammed the door on her.
It was an hour later when the police arrived. They asked to look at your fingers, but by then you’d cleaned up, of course you had—you do shower, you try to stay clean, and hygiene isn’t a crime. They asked if they could look around. Of course by then you had phoned Sandra, and she had come home, and she told them no. She said she wouldn’t allow them to treat you as suspect, but if there was evidence to suggest otherwise, then she would gladly allow them to search the house once they obtained a warrant. They asked if they provided you with a can of spray-paint, if you could paint the same word that appeared on the neighbor’s house so they could see if there was a match in technique. You actually thought they were kidding, and laughed, but they actually did want a handwriting sample on a scale where the letters were five feet high. Sandra told them no. She told them she was sorry for what had happened to Mrs. Smith’s house, but that neither her nor you had anything to do with it.
Is it possible you did this without being aware of it? one of the officers asked.
No, you said. And it wasn’t possible. You’d know if you had done it.
They said they would talk to others in the neighborhood, and would get back to you. As soon as they were gone Sandra asked if you had done it. You said no.
Are you sure?
Of course I’m sure.
Show me the hiding place, she said.
What hiding place?
The one beneath the desk.
How the hell do you know about that?
Just show me.
So you showed her. After all, you had nothing to hide. You hadn’t spray-painted Mrs. Smith’s house. You pushed the desk aside and got out the screwdriver and pried up the loose floorboard.
Want to take a guess as to what was under there?
Nothing. That’s right. Nothing.
You found the spray can later that night. It was where you hide the writing backups, next to the gin and the gun.
They drive to the hospital without any more barbecue conversation. Mayor sits cradling his hand and Jerry stares out the window, his mind tense, his anger hot, his pain deep. His face is wet with tears. Being told you’ve done something and having no memory is like being told black is white and up is down. They’ve told him Sandra is dead, but she can’t be dead because he’d know it. Even if he doesn’t remember killing her, he would at least sense her absence from the world. They have been married twenty-five years. He can clearly remember his conversation with Eva last week on the beach. She said Sandra had left him. Things had gotten too difficult. Sandra wasn’t dead—the weight of Jerry’s sickness had been too much for her, and she had left rather than let it crush her.
At the hospital Mayor gets out of the car and throws angry looks at Jerry as he makes his way inside, and Jerry guesses he can’t blame him. He walks with his hand held against his chest, protecting it as if it were a small bird. Then it’s just Jerry and Chris, and Jerry says nothing as they make the five-minute drive from the hospital to the police station parking lot. They take an elevator up to the fourth floor. It all looks vaguely familiar, and Jerry suspects he’s been here before, that at some point in his career he must have been curious enough about the police station to ask for a tour. Write what you know, and fake the rest. He wonders how many books he faked this place in, then he remembers he was here last week, that it’s from here Eva came and picked him up. He’s led to an interrogation room. Chris undoes the handcuffs and Jerry starts massaging his wrists.
“You want something to drink?” Chris asks.
“A gin and tonic would be great.”
“Sure thing, Jerry. I’ll bring you one right away. Would you like anything else? You want a small umbrella in
it?”
Jerry thinks about it. “Sure, if you’ve got them.”
Chris places the photograph of Belinda Murray on the table, then leaves the room. Jerry knows what’s going on—he’s put enough fictional people into this situation before to know they’ll let him sweat in here for a while, before hitting him with a round of good cop, bad cop. Fifteen minutes later he’s still alone and sitting down. Maybe they’re waiting for Mayor to have his fingers set. Maybe they’re going to wait for the bone to knit back together and for Easter to roll around. His lawyer hasn’t arrived. His gin and tonic hasn’t arrived. He tries the door and finds that it’s locked. He paces the room a few times then sits back down and stares at the photograph of a woman he’s never seen before until today, and he wonders why it is they think he killed her, and if she was involved with his daughter’s wedding then of course he wouldn’t know her—all that stuff was taken care of by Sandra and Eva.
Then the door opens up and a man Jerry has never seen before comes in and sits opposite and says his name is Tim Anderson and that he’s his lawyer. They shake hands. Tim is in his midfifties with silver hair slicked back on the sides and flattened on top. He’s wearing glasses that make his eyes look smaller, like looking backwards though a pair of binoculars, and has a summer tan even though it’s spring, which means it’s either paid for or he’s just back from an overseas holiday. He has a nice suit and a nice watch, and Jerry figures that means he gets paid well, and that probably means he’s good at his job.
“What happened to your eye?” Tim asks.
“I was hoping for my usual lawyer.”
Tim has his briefcase open and is pulling out a pad when Jerry says that. He stops in midmovement and stares at him. He looks concerned. “I am your usual lawyer,” he says. “That answers my question as to whether you recognize me.”
Jerry shrugs. “Don’t take it personally.”
Tim puts the pad on the table. He puts a pen next to it. Then he puts the briefcase on the floor and interlocks his fingers and leans his elbows on the desk and his chin on his knuckles. “I’ve been your lawyer for fifteen years.”
