Personae (17 page)

CLARISSA: No!

(
Feverishly
pointing
the
gun
at
Linda
)

Get away from him!

LINDA: Shoot and quick! If I repent before the shot rings out I may receive credit for it. Mitigation that will unleaven my sin when what I want is to leave at my basest moment. Shoot!

(
Clarissa
doesn’t,
Linda
dies.
)

CLARISSA: No!

(
She
falls
to
her
knees
in
grief.
)

Is there no way to stem this? Is this a breathing organ that sacrifices its component parts the way a boy discards last year’s toys? Or is it his reckless overuse that pits us against each other until only vestigial rust remains?

Adam. Linda. Empty bodies that recriminate against Nature’s negligent incompetence like abandoned storefronts. Come Nestor, let’s bury our dead and remove this blight that there might be a possibility of renewal.

NESTOR: No. The dead will keep. Reload your gun then come remove this spear, that I may re-plant it in whatever walks through that door.

CLARISSA: No Nestor. The medically proper move is to keep it in. If I pull it out the wound will gasp to suck death in quicker.

NESTOR: Don’t pull it out then. Push it all the way through and out the other end. I want to witness my body expel it anyway.

CLARISSA: Keep it in baby, I’ll get help.

NESTOR: We both know there is none, only more strife. I need a weapon to face it.

CLARISSA: Here then, take the gun. But the spear? You have to stay speared baby, I’m sorry.

NESTOR: Listen Clarissa.

CLARISSA: Yes?

NESTOR: We’ve had our disagreements.

CLARISSA: Uh-huh?

NESTOR: That’s it, just we’ve had our disagreements.

(
they
chuckle
)

CLARISSA: Okay.

NESTOR: You’re not going to believe this but it’s surprisingly hard to breathe with a spear in your back.

(
Drums
)

CLARISSA: Hang in there son. We still have that machine breathed for Charles.

NESTOR: No.

CLARISSA: It kept Charles alive.

NESTOR: But won’t work on Nestor, he won’t let it.

(
He
gasps.
)

CLARISSA: Lungs won’t fill on pride Nestor. You need air.

(
Drums
)

NESTOR: No, air needs me! I assert that the world needs me, the air breathes me, more than the other way around. Do I have experience of a world without me? Inconceivable, at least by that me. Me without the world? That I conceive of with ease. Yet you ask me to connect to the finite that me might be debased in the process?

(
gasps
)

I. Will. Not.

(
Drums
)

Let the world rain its ugliest flames on me. The resulting conflagration will be testament to this unalterable fact: I breathe through spear, without help, or not at all.

(
Nestor
puts
his
head
in
Clarissa’s
lap.
She
puts
her
hand
on
it,
runs
her
fingers
through
his
matted
hair
)

CLARISSA: I know baby.

(
Nestor
dies.
The
drums
stop.
)

No, oh. Oh no. Is there greater gap we feel than between living and dead? Take an orderly century’s progression through life. From bulbous infant to vital adult until ravaged ersatz corpse. The subject may marvel at what he sees in the mirror, the family may gather in secret wish for the release that comes with resolution, but when the wholly expected comes it still shocks in its finality doesn’t it? That so much can instantly devolve into a nullity.

That gap again. Try bridging it but how? Memory’s a poor substitute for presence and though I may chant their names into eternity their eyes won’t alight, their lips won’t curl.

Then am I damned to be both reflective chanter and sole recipient?

A long, thick rope unfurls from above into the center of the room. Clarissa gently lays what was Nestor’s head on the floor and walks over to the rope. She strokes it with her hand and looks up at the invisible source. She raises the end of the rope to eye level and forms a circle out of it. She looks up again and tugs on the rope. Now she takes hold of the rope at its highest point possible and pulls herself up. Her bare feet lift off the ground until she drops herself back down. She walks away from the rope running her fingers through her hair. After some deliberation she returns to the rope with purpose. She takes it and pulls on it gently. The rope comes loose and its entire length comes down around her. She absentmindedly wraps herself in rope until it looks as if a giant serpent has come up out of the ground to coil itself around our Clarissa.

Clarissa sits down. The Drums resume; the pattern, if there even be one, difficult to divine.

CURTAIN

 VII

 Anothe
r
Enquir
y
Concernin
g
Huma
n
Understanding

Do I need, at this late a stage, to even cursorily paint a word picture that seeks to implant in you the sight of a New York City police precinct with phones ringing and mostly weary people shuffling in response? If I don’t and you’ve never actually been in one ask yourself why I don’t and whether this is really a legitimate process. Regardless, in such a place Detective Helen Tame walked through a louder than usual gathering that immediately became quieter than usual to enter a room that looked almost nothing like the representations just referenced to to speak with Captain Frank Furillo but not that one.

“Whatever it is you wish to see me about,” she said. “You’re wrong. Wrong to my right.”

“I wonder if this Officer Avery might not qualify as Grade A numbskull, calling you on that DOA.”

“Maybe worry about your own classification, he done good. Most suggestive call I’ve gotten in years.” Then she said
interesting
but with minimal breath.

“Interesting? I’m sorry but the fancy letters you passed on the way in still spell homicide. An ancient man lying on his kitchen floor having travelled the full course of all flesh? Think I’ll go ahead and suspect fair play.”

“Fairly foul and causes unnatural.”

“Helen no. Don’t do this.”

“I’ll not
do
anything, other than inform you of reality. I don’t shape, however. To shape reality you need a Callahan or a Diggens.”

“They’re good detectives first of all and I’m not asking you to shape anything. I am asking you to be at least slightly conventional for once.”

“Asked and answered.”

“I’m serious, all that red on the board out there and you want to paint it with more?”

“Your belatedness is showing, it’s up there.”

“You put a ninety something —

“Hundred-eleven.”

— year-old John Doe on my board? Who gave you access to the red marker anyway?”

“It’s a red marker Franklin, if you crave exclusivity you might want to rethink the procedure.”

Furillo’s life, and this is not even a criticism, was readily reducible to an almost epochal conflict between two deceptively simple colors: anxious, hateful Red and accomplished, finality-infused Black. Red—didn’t escape him the color of blood—spread on that board like a spill. Every red addition meant human tears. He knew this but sometimes failed to make relevant others understand it. He had twenty of these others and they needed to understand that every red name once denoted an actual human being. A human being that cried when it first saw light, cried that it couldn’t return, when its desires weren’t met then later at the realization that it was nothing but unmet desire, at physical decay and mental torment day after relentless day and when it stopped crying, because it had stopped only everything, passed those tears on like a baton to those left behind. And whenever someone he needed to understand this—that the responsibility was not to the dead but to the living—would object something like the red name had it coming or that there was no one left behind who cared about the red name Furillo would employ various stratagems he had honed over a quarter century with the inevitable result that the speaker would soon not be one of his twenty so that just then he was eighteen out of twenty and hard at work on reaching a hundred percent.

Helen Tame was not one of his twenty. So sui generis the phrase seemed almost criminally inadequate, Tame was
of
no one and belonged to no group and that final case she had been threatening him with he now realized was written in red on the board.

“But where it’ll remain red the briefest of whiles,” she said. “Enough of this night’s black will bleed onto the board to conclusively resolve the matter.”

“But why? Why do we even temporarily need a centenarian John Doe?”

“Do you even listen to yourself when you speak? A man lives more than a century, is discovered dead in what is clearly his home, said home is located in twenty-first century America, yet we’re unable to name him? So, yes, in large part
because
he’s a centenarian John Doe is why.”

“Why he interests you, fine, but does that warrant such indiscriminate use of the red marker?”

“Bottom line is not natural, his end lacks nature, so it reds on the board. Possible suicides go up red as well you know.”

“How’s it not natural? You spoke to the medical examiner?”

“Did I speak to an M.E. before deciding unnatural? Do you consult with your cat before deciding whether to refinance your mortgage? Helen Tame, nice to meet you.”

“Fine not natural but what are you saying, homicide? A hundred-year-old suicide? Be real.”

“Reality? For real?”

“Serious, tell me where you are with this.”

“No. Far as suicide there’s a missing pet cat, as in given away just before death, but what I really want to do is at the end kind of gather every possible suspect then dramatically declare the killer’s identity followed by a painstaking rendition of how I came to that conclusion.”

“So you
are
leaning homicide.”

“You’re off tomorrow, when you get back it’ll be black.”

This thing where Detective Helen Tame casually said something like
you’re
off
tomorrow
even though Furillo had only an hour before even formed the intent to take the next day off and where he was certain he had not yet conveyed that information to another living being, that thing, Furillo had learned to ignore. When he didn’t, before he learned, it always ended with him feeling less than human even though Helen argued that one was never more fully human than when conforming perfectly with the highly predictable actions of humanity. Still the first few times someone looks at the position of your shoulders or the contents of your desk and extrapolatorily tells you some seemingly wildly unrelated truth it’s at least highly disconcerting.

“Well then,” he said. “It doesn’t seem right to end on such an easy case, maybe you should reconsider.”

“No, it feels conclusory. And far from easy. But I will stay here until it’s black and when you return the report will be on this desk explaining how it darkened and although it will be fairly voluminous it will be
true
, understand?”

“Not doubting you but how can you be so sure?”

“Because I already have everything I need save for time to sit in the dark and stew on it.”

“Look if this really is your last case then I have no doubt I’ll never see you again.”

“True.”

“So I have to know what you mean when you say something like that, how you can claim to have no doubt about something’s truth when it results from only thought or deduction or what you call artistic leaps. Because the truth I value comes from reports, scientific analyses, confessions, get it?”

“I didn’t hear you complaining about my artistic method on all those television programs with the fancy re-enactments.”

“I begged you to let me mention your name and credit you.”

“Please, this is our last interaction, don’t insult me during it.”

“Okay keep your methods to yourself, I doubt I could understand anyway, but keep employing them whatever you do. If you need more concessions we’ll work with you, whatever you need.”

“No.”

“No? Just no?” He hoped the desperation he was feeling, a desperation that stemmed from more than just the immeasurable loss to a unit whose function it was to identify and seize those who’d killed their fellow man or woman, wasn’t showing but how could it not? For example, one time it had seemed to be only the men of the unit in the break room which necessitated that the subject of various known women’s attractiveness arise and when it did, somehow, despite everyone’s palpable fear of her, Helen Tame came up. That Helen Tame was one of the most beautiful women in the world had long seemed obvious but that served not in the slightest to reduce the shock of hearing that fact spoken aloud then received with universal assent. It seemed unreal, truly, that this same woman was also undisputedly the highest-level practitioner of their craft and the oddness of this situation was meager in comparison with the experience of actually knowing and interacting with her. For further example that very break room discussion culminated in the single strangest sight Furillo had ever seen: Helen Tame standing in said room, where she’d apparently been all along, making no apparent effort to disguise or conceal herself yet clearly invisible to all, and here was the unsettling almost haunting part—looking so utterly almost mythically bored that Furillo didn’t even feel compelled to apologetically address her or otherwise interrupt the conversation in any way. Just saying that when a person like that tells you you’re seeing them for the last time it can give rise to a form of desperation.

But it
was
their last interaction and Furillo’s eventual exit meant Tame alone in his office, others milling about but never daring to interrupt her, as she ruminated on what she’d recently learned and the possible ways it could interact with everything everyone had learned to date about everything and everyone.

John Doe was a writer.

A writer is someone who writes, Tame had patiently
[5]
^fn
explained to Furillo when he objected that no agent, no prizes, no editor, no book deal, meant no writer. Similarly, see if you can follow, an artist creates art.

Of the three works attributable to Doe it was the last of these, ENERGEIAS, that was most susceptible to mystery and because Tame had been deprived of the mysterious for so long she could be said to have fixated on it. Her fixation really was on the subject of unfinished work and in particular those abated by death:

No less than
The
Aeneid
was an unfinished work, one that Vergil wanted destroyed once he was gone.

Raphael, who was born on a Good Friday, incredibly died exactly thirty-seven years later on another Good Friday necessitating that his student finish
The
Transfiguration
.

Mozart’s
Requiem
and Mahler’s
Tenth
Symphony
but more relevant to Doe, Schubert’s
Eighth
Symphony
and the continuing debate over whether it actually is unfinished.

To set the world aright. The work of Helen Tame would almost certainly remain unfinished.

Helen Tame, at moments like these, did not lead a well-rounded existence. Instead it could be said she attained a kind of fugue state in which, as a product, something like the life of John Doe, in particular his final moments, was revealed to her in exponentially increasing detail until it was as vivid and true as a G. E. Moorean hand in front of her face. It was a process she could only partially explain but one that had produced only success in its lifetime so she objected strenuously to even attempts at that partial explanation.

Here’s the partial explanation: To best arrive at something True one needn’t always limit oneself to intervening steps that are unproblematically so; instead a better process is one wherein probabilities are temporarily given almost as much weight as certainties until their cumulative effect creates a provisional truth that can not only harden into the real thing but then retroactively raise the level of what came before.

For example what a cat will do when it has a mouse.

An observer will see what’s come to be called play but if so the cruelest form of it ever devised during which a small living thing confronted by its much larger natural predator will periodically be allowed to believe that everything will be fine after all, that it will escape the violent end that seemed inevitable and resume its uncomplicated existence, only to suddenly receive a furiously sharp swat that extinguishes all hope and that in its constant repetition only prolongs the despair; and if you object with a fact, that the situation involves no actual malice but is instead more like an impassive demonstration of nature, you still have to ask yourself what kind of universe abides this as natural.

Helen Tame asked herself. John Doe had not admitted a visitor of any kind in over six weeks. During that time he had not left his apartment. His vision, so keen throughout the majority of his life that he’d only recently required even reading glasses, had been reduced to intermittent clarity from within a spreading opacity. He should not have been alone.

Such a person could have determined that an intentional death had many benefits, not the least of which would be the abrupt end of all anticipatory dread. Could have, true, but Tame didn’t think so: the state of his belongings, the textual evidence, even the position of the bankrupt.