The Nobody

by Tom Piccirilli

  His ten-year-old daughter found him a half hour later and performed CPR on her father as she’d been taught during health class during a training session out on the football field. All these kids moaning and groaning covered in bandages stained with red dye, pretending to be victims of a terrorist act, his daughter pumping their sternums with the palms of her hands and performing mouth to mouth with the cute boys.

  She was a very mature kid, and had even once Googled "auto-erotic asphyxiation" after hearing about it in a Cinemax film she’d caught after she thought her parents were asleep. Officer Bliss found her frowning at the 27-inch screen, images reflecting off the kid’s glasses in the dark. He decided not to confront her at the time, but looking back on it now, he figured his daughter had decided her kinky father had probably botched the procedure in the closet. He wasn’t sure if that embarrassed him more than the idea that he’d fucked up trying to ice himself.

  All of this Cryer found out while seated in a rocking chair, doing nothing every day except squeezing the hard rubber balls and staring at the illegal Mexican day laborers who cut the lawns, fed the screeching wood chippers, and kept the grounds immaculate.

  Right at that moment they were raking leaves and trimming hedges, shouting to each other in Spanish, making maybe five bucks an hour. The director of the hospital was pocketing the state allotted funds and spending the money on his mistress, who was one of the nurses, Bliss told Cryer. The one with the really fat ass.

  "You’re a cryer," Bliss said, his voice slightly damaged by the botched suicide attempt. Bliss hardly looked any worse for wear after his own hanging. Just some faint mottled scars ringed his throat. He hadn’t used a very thick rope to hang himself, looked more like it had been a bungee cord. "I hear you crying in your sleep sometimes. Sobbing. What else are you?"

  Cryer wanted to say, I don’t know what I am.

  "If you don’t know what you are," Bliss said, "it means you’ve still got choices. Options. Chances. Possibilities. You can reform your purpose, understand? Your intentions and function. You have one, even if you don’t know what it is."

  Cryer didn’t know what the hell Bliss meant and wanted to say, What the hell do you mean?

  "Let me explain what I mean."

  For a guy who’d tried to off himself, Bliss seemed to have a pretty sunny disposition.

  "I’ve read up on you," Bliss told him. "The security they’ve got attached to their computer filing system can be hacked by any kid who owns an X-Box. They’ve got hundreds of pages of documentation on you. Your medical records, your mental faculty test results, transcriptions, notes. And not any of it is worth a shit except for a couple of pages right in the middle. That’s where your whole story is. In there was all the shared files on the police investigation into the murders of your wife and daughter. Do you remember them?"

  Since Cryer did nothing, Bliss had to repeat the question.

  This time Cryer shook his head, because he wasn’t sure if he did remember them. He pressed at the contours of his memory, trying to move among the ramps of his identity, where he saw faces and heard voices and was buzzed by images, but couldn’t put any of it into an understandable framework.

  "Do you want me to tell you what happened?"

  Cryer nodded.

  Bliss must’ve been a big smoker back in the real world. He was always reaching for a pack of cigarettes, forever tapping his pockets, going for the rolled cuff of his shirt.

  "Okay, you came home one night and found them dying in your home. Your daughter gutted, your wife with her throat cut. You were stabbed in the forebrain with a small three-inch blade. The perp left it in you. The cops recovered it but never learned anything important about the weapon. It’s the kind of knife they sell by the thousands all over the city."

  Cryer had to wonder, What’s everybody else doing with their three-inch knives?

  "He had cased your house long in advance. He’d been watching you, knew your pattern. He wanted time alone with your family. Forensics say your wife was kept tied up in the bathroom for an hour or more while the perp was with your daughter. They can tell that from the bruising and chaffing on her wrists from the duct tape. Your girl wasn’t molested, and blood spatter evidence shows that the gutting wounds that killed her must’ve been made ten or fifteen minutes before you walked in. You know what that means?"

  Why the fuck, Cryer wanted to say, do you keep stopping and asking me? Of course I don’t know what it means.

  So he shook his head.

  Bliss went on. "Means he was talking to her. In my precinct we used to call these guys Chatty Kathys. You found them everywhere. Some bank heister who winds up in hostage situation and starts talking to his captives. Spills his whole fucking life out to them. Forgets about the money, his demands, the helicopter he wants to escape in, the S.W.A.T. teams about to bust in, the gun he’s holding, everything, because all he really wanted was to open up to an audience."

  My wife and daughter were murdered by a Chatty Kathy, Cryer thought. The man I used to be was stabbed in the head by someone who just wanted to talk about his life.

  "Perp escaped via the second story bathroom window. You probably got a good look at his face. You might have recognized him. Do you remember that?"

  Strange that this should be the easiest question so far, because Cryer, while he didn’t remember the guy’s face, did clearly recall the feeling that the killer had been familiar to him. Cryer stared into Bliss’s eyes and tried to beseech him, but to what end even he didn’t understand.

  Continuing, Bliss said, "There were a number of burglaries in your area before the night of your incident. Maybe your wife tumbled onto the thief, but the nature of the attack suggests it was much more personal in nature. This was a man of rage, of quiet cruelty and explosive violence. Still, it’s possible your home had been scoped out by a cat burglar. The police rousted several known thieves, but that turned out to be a waste. And anyway, nothing was stolen."

  So it might have or might not have been a homicidal cat burglar. Cryer waited for Bliss to clarify.

  "Okay, as I mentioned, the vicious nature of the wounds and the fact that he watched your family for so long almost definitely proves that the crime was fueled by a personal grievance or a presumed personal grievance. This was almost certainly someone you knew or at least had some slight interaction with. They interviewed hundreds and came up with nothing concrete. No definitive suspects."

  Hundreds? And no suspects? Cryer wondered if the cops broke a lot of other pinkies, or if they only tried that hard with Cryer.

  Bliss was enjoying himself, his insanity set aside in the face of his own newfound purpose. "This perp, he’s a psychopath. That’s an easy word to throw around, especially in here, but this guy, he’s the real thing. Shrinks have been trying to understand the ways of these kinds of people for years and they’ll never get anywhere. It’s beyond them. It’s beyond everyone except the psycho himself. The reason for what he does, the bad trigger that gets pulled inside of him, even he might not know what it is or what it’s all about. You can go back to when he was a kid, and maybe you find abuse and maybe you don’t, and maybe there’s serious disturbances and maybe there isn’t. None of it matters. You don’t need to understand him. You don’t want his life story. You know what you want, don’t you?"

  In the center of his skull, one ringing word–a word without any emotion attached to it. For reasons that had nothing to do with love or hate, because he couldn’t even remember his family, couldn’t even recall the names of his wife or daughter. Or himself. But still, thankfully, there remained a desperate wanting. A need full of meaning and context.

  Cryer nodded.

  "You want revenge. You want to smoke this prick. Ice him. Ace him. Snuff him. Crush him. That’s all that matters. Right?"

  With no understanding of himself–the man he once was or the man he now is, this Cryer–incapable of remembering anything, but acknowledging his desire, Cryer sat there and thought, Right.

 
"Okay then. You have to get out of here. Either get better, or fake the doctors into thinking you’ve recovered. Or just bust out. Whatever it takes. That’s what you do. That’s all that you do. Concentrate. Focus."

  Concentrate. Focus.

  "Then, once you’re on the outside, you dig. You dig like a fucking dog. You go through the life you had, the one you don’t recall anymore. You find out about yourself. You go talk to your old friends, your neighbors, the women in your wife’s sewing circle or whatever the fuck she did. You find out if your daughter was dating any boys, if she made contact with some perv on the Internet. You search through it all piece by piece, incident by incident. You find out how he found you, and then you can find him."

  Find him.

  "That’s all that there is to you. It’s what defines you. You’re crying again."

  Bliss reached over and touched Cryer’s face and thumbed away tears.

  "Well, your pain still inside you, or you wouldn’t be sobbing, now would you? Maybe you’ll find your love again. Reach for it, maybe you’ll touch it, even if it’s just in your dreams. Love leads to vengeance. The mission is all that matters. You hold onto it. When you cry, you cry for that. When you bleed, you bleed for that."

  8

  You’d expect that after a speech like that, the suicidal cop would trundle off and finally manage to kill himself.

  Pass the torch on to Cryer and then go drink a bottle of drain cleaner, throw himself off the roof, OD on a year’s worth of secretly hidden tranquilizers.

  Instead, the next day Bliss was released. His daughter, who was nineteen or twenty now, and a real looker, who knew all about CPR and auto-erotic asphyxiation, showed up and took her father’s blue valise and led him outside to new SUV and drove him away past the illegal immigrant laborers and the screaming wood chippers.

  9

  It took over seven more months before Cryer spoke aloud again.

  His first words weren’t meaningful or significant. He was standing in the rec room while Johnny G., the depressed fifteen-year-old, was ranting about his father who expected Johnny to get better grades and hit more home runs and stop acting like such a little fruit. Johnny G. had first tried to off himself after striking out while his team was losing three-to-two. He clubbed himself in the face with the bat at home plate, shattered his nose and given himself a concussion and hairline fracture of the occipital lobe.

  Cryer sometimes couldn’t see the world in front of him because of the blood-soaked scenes inside his mind, and he’d begin to shake his head trying to rattle the images away. It wasn’t happening this time.

  Johnny liked to hurt himself. Other kids, they might cut themselves on the arm, give themselves a nice neat row of slash marks. But Johnny, he liked blunt instruments. The whole ward had to be careful not to leave anything around that Johnny might bash himself in the head with.

  Ten minutes ago Johnny had found a clay ashtray somebody’d made during a crafts workshop and the kid had pummeled himself with it. Now he appeared to have been partially scalped. A wedge of skin on his forehead was drawn forward in a raw-looking wound. A hank of his hair had been pulled back exposing bloody flesh beneath.

  Cryer said to him, "Wash your face, it’s dripping red."

  Over his long months of silence Cryer’s voice had withered to a dust-choked croak. He thought, right at that moment, that someone else was speaking, and he turned to look over his shoulder at whoever it might be.

  It sounded a little like the suicidal cop. His next word was, "Bliss?"

  Johnny was still so wrapped up in his story that he didn’t even realize Cryer had said anything.

  The floor nurse, though, stepped over with a puzzled expression and looked intently into Cryer’s eyes. She asked, "What did you say?"

  Cryer stared around himself and noticed, as if for the first time, that he was in a glaring white day room full of noise, sitting next to a kid who was bleeding like hell. Why wasn’t the nurse helping the boy? He walked to the window which was covered with a barred shutter that locked on the inside. He looked down at himself and barely recognized the body. He was still holding a hard red rubber ball. He let it slip from his hand and watched it bounce away.

  He drank a cup of water and massaged his throat, turned back to the nurse and said, "Okay, so what do I have to do to get out of here?"

  10

  Turned out that Cryer had fallen through the cracks in the system and nobody had really known what to do with him beforehand or knew what to do with him now. His insurance had run out and the private hospital he’d been in for the first six weeks of his recovery had purged him into a state run facility.

  The psychiatrists, nurses, guards, and administrators conferred and discussed Cryer and his situation.

  They said he suffered from situation-specific amnesia rather than global or fugue or dissociative. The trauma had most probably been physiological and not psychological, but could now be helped by further therapy. They talked about retrograde amnesia and how most patients lost their personal identities leading up to the traumatic incident, but were able to learn new information and in some cases even form new personalities.

  They put him in group therapy, primal scream therapy, regression therapy, and making clay ashtrays which he had to hide whenever Johnny was around. They actually did have classes on wicker basket weaving but Cryer thought even that was too crazy for him. He made a hell of an ashtray though.

  He found that after he’d come back from wherever he’d gone he had to prove to the doctors that he deserved to get out. At first the rage took over and argued and shouted, but that only lost him points. With a frosty terror working through his chest, he realized they wanted to keep him in here forever because they thought he was somehow faking his return to sanity.

  Proving you weren’t crazy was a whole lot tougher than it sounded. He had to mask his true feelings but make them sound reasonable at any given time, unless the docs expected him to have unreasonable feelings, as they sometimes did. He couldn’t beat them at the game, but he could learn to play it pretty well.

  The scar on his forehead wasn’t as noticeable as one might think. The blade had gone in between his eyebrows, where a frown wrinkle folded his flesh and made him look constantly angry or puzzled. The surgery where they’d cut a window into his skull and burrowed inside somehow hadn’t left much of a mark. The metal plate under his skin didn’t bulge, didn’t go clang when he knocked against it with his knuckles. The only oddity was that a sharp path of white now cut through his dark hair, pointed and sort of shaped like a blade.

  But all in all, you could barely tell that anybody had stabbed him in the head.

  One guy in charge started coming around more than the rest. Young, wore a well-trimmed beard, always with a tie knotted loosely around his collar, his sleeves rolled up to the forearms. The doctor in charge of his case? His personal psychiatrist? Nobody told him, or if they did, he couldn’t remember. Cryer supposed it didn’t matter at all so long as he continued doing everything he was told to do.

  Eventually they started to talk about his release. The main doc smiled more and more in Cryer’s presence and asked if there was anything else he could do.

  "Belongings," Cryer said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "My personal belongings, where are they? Whatever I owned before I came here."

  "Gone. Your wife’s family came and took a great many personal effects, and the remainder was sold to help defer hospital costs."

  "Photos."

  "I wouldn’t know about that."

  "The house? My house?"

  "I believe it’s been sold. Or perhaps taken over by the bank." He nervously flipped pages of a file. He scanned line after line but who knew what he was reading.

  "Anything left?" Cryer asked. "In storage? My wallet? What I came in with?" He looked at his hands. "I was married. Shouldn’t I be wearing a wedding ring?"

  The doc checked a couple more folders, got on his computer and typed for ten minute
s, scanning, searching, perhaps a little afraid now because he realized how easy it was for things to go missing–not just objects, but identities, whole lives–murmuring to himself in agitation but unable to find anything at all.

  "I’m sorry," Doc said.

  "Don’t be." Cryer couldn’t cry or bleed over that.

  He had to save his tears and blood.

  11

  The cops who busted his pinkies showed up again. This time they were good cop-good cop. Who knew why? Some new evidence that proved he didn’t fall down on the knife? That he hadn’t disemboweled his own daughter? Maybe they’d found shoe prints in the back yard, maybe they’d tracked him to his workplace and the fast food joint and realized he couldn’t have tied his wife up and left her in the bathtub for an hour.

  They asked him questions about that night and he told them everything that he could still remember, which wasn’t much. They said they were sorry for his loss. They expressed great respect and sorrow for him. They said they would devote their lives to catching this crazed killer. They said they had no definite leads.

  "What happened to it?" Cryer asked.

  "To what?"

  "The three-inch blade they took out of my brain."

  "It’s in evidence."

  "What kind was it?"

  "You want to know what kind of knife it was?"

  "Yes."

  They searched their little notebooks but neither of them could tell him.

  "I suppose it doesn’t matter."

  He held out both his hands to shake goodbye.

  The cops looked puzzled but each shook with him. Cryer gripped their hands and tightened his hold, exerting more and more pressure second by second until both cops were gasping and struggling. He continued to grip their fists harder and harder even after the cops started to kick him in the shins and slug him in the face with their free hands. He didn’t stop until he felt their fingers breaking.