Personae (18 page)

The issue recurred with a frequency that would’ve startled the layman. Her first case in fact was a straightforward, obvious suicide that wasn’t. She had gone from Police Academy straight to Homicide which ascension without precedent led to many vitriolic memos and snide less-than-fully-exhaled asides, a situation not helped by her steadfast refusal to classify the fifteen-year-old hanging in his bedroom near a suicide note a self-immolation. Tame spent two uninterrupted days in the boy’s room before ultimately declaring the note unpersuasive. Six weeks later and the boy’s headmaster, yes that crowd, is now undeniably the true author of the note and Tame is ensuring his head doesn’t bang her car, all those cameras watching, and certain people can’t believe their good fortune when they connect the compelling dots and also can’t fast enough seek to promote her insane backstory to the front but without even minimal cooperation from Helen Tame who when she is shortly thereafter called into a room with that year’s version of Furillo and he says something along the lines of
natural
police
with her as referent shoots a terminal look the speaker’s way along with unmistakable verbal invitations that are more like commands to never do that again, that compliment thing, the inescapable conclusion then properly drawn that a new but central tenet had emerged whose force would echo unabated thereafter: you do not condescend to Helen Tame.

So if not suicide what then? Tame reviewed every Manhattan DOA that came through and she couldn’t fully shake the notion that Doe was the culmination or worse
continuation
of a pattern but this was in reality a rare mental misstep threatening to form because what Tame was actually sensing was the sameness all humanity reduced to.

Now of course Helen Tame was free to do as she wished. Meaning free to say:
very
little
mystery
attaches
to
a
centenarian’s
death
and
this
case
is
not
The
or
even
an
exception
. Could even have added:
I
am
still
technically
employed
by
a
police
department
ostensibly
to
engage
in
what
I
chose
to
make
my
life’s
work,
namely
the
investigation
and
subsequent
solution
of
any
ambiguous
appearance
of
manmade
Death
and
any
time
I
devote
to
the
unambiguous
and
inhuman
is
of
necessity
subtracted
from
that
work
with
a
resulting
potential
increase
in
the
kind
of
undetected
malfeasance
that
so
offends
me.
She did not say that.

Because of course that same freedom entailed the opposite right. So she was entitled to say:
I
want
to
know
Everything
before
I
die.
So
when
coincidence
connects
me
with
a
question
of
even
the
slightest
interest
that
is
not
readily
answerable
that,
standing
alone,
is
ample
justification
for
an
obsessive
pursuit
of
a
satisfactory
resolution
with
the
concept
satisfactory
determined
only
by
me
and
also
these
two
matters,
the
great
offense
at
undetected
malfeasance
and
the
know-everything
want,
are
related
in
that
both
stem
from
a
great
fear,
some
would
say
realization,
that
we
are
all
there
is
which
puts
us
in
the
position
of
something
like
God,
which
is
not
some
great
thing
despite
how
it
sounds
at
first
blush
because
of
the
obscene
demands
it
places
on
human
justice
and
knowledge.

Something like that was really what she said and the reasons for that were manifold. First, far as any concern over an increase in the volume of bloodshed due to Tame’s distraction went, the discovery of John Doe dovetailed nicely with a perhaps disheartening discovery that Helen had only recently conceded. And this discovery will likely seem obvious if you forget we are talking about Helen Tame being the discoverer because it amounts to the realization that her work possessed no actual deterrent value. So even though she had raised her art to a height not seen before or since, this raising in fact very rarely prevented anything and the number of lifeless bodies requiring explanatory thought was, it seemed, a feature of the universe that only appeared to vary when looked at from the micro level and the macro truth was an equational constant translatable into prose thusly: people will kill people.

Although there was a more encouraging corollary stating that when the above happened the identity of the person actively contributing to the constant was almost always easily discernible from the identity of the less-willing contributor. So what was overwhelmingly required was very little logical deduction or artistic imaginative leaps. Instead you simply let it be amorphously known that you wished to know more then registered surprise at how many wanted you to know more although not for attribution until you knew what needed knowing so picked up the appropriate people then watched them go on the record for their own self-interest until the star of the show inevitably confesses with predictable results. In essence the badge and the sentencing statutes did the work for you.

A monkey could do it, Helen wishfully thought, and most of her colleagues were at least slightly above monkey. She was free to leave in other words. And even though to an objective observer her internal state appeared to be one of extreme emotional distress brought on by performance pressure, in fact, everything being famously relative, Helen did feel something like freedom and moreover understood intuitively that this feeling, decades in waiting, would swell even further once she had solved John Doe.

Truth is Tame mentally engaged in all the preceding because she was in trouble. If something you
need
is dependent on a process you engage in regularly, almost instinctively, then you might find that this process has suddenly become complicated by hesitation and overthought where reflex once predominated. Of course you wouldn’t be able to tell if that’s what was occurring or if in fact the latest was a special problem that was taxing you more not because of attendant circumstances but because of greater inherent difficulty. And it was that kind of thing she found herself debating internally instead of progressing on the ultimate question. So that it was not enough she was having trouble solving John Doe she now also had to face the very real possibility that there was no genuine difficulty to the matter only a kind of self-sabotagey reluctance to complete something she’d denoted as conclusory where truth is Helen, almost since birth, had a real problem with endings and their causal anxiety and contributing to that to make the self-sabotage possibility very real was that she’d recently caught herself doing just that once or twice.

Trouble was trouble whatever the source and it occurred to Helen that either way the breakthrough and subsequent solution were going to come whenever they chose and a form of disinterested expectation was maybe called for. Then she remembered it was precisely that line of thinking she’d committed herself to rejecting whenever it threatened to form and also that the self-realization of one’s underlying motives remained the truest most effective means of mental progress
[6]
^fn
so that if in fact she was conflicted about solving Doe then establishing that and becoming unconflicted was the quickest path to the solution; only that kind of self-realization was a form of work and like all work had to be affirmatively undertaken and struggled with, there being no such thing as the passive reception of quality workproduct. So Helen ratcheted up the concentration even more although the only outward proof of that was her eyes closing.

Three hours later Helen Tame rose from where she’d lain and almost mournfully walked out of that office and eventually out onto the surreal street. There, as if moving through a painting, she gravitated back to the apartment; only now she thought of it not as the apartment where more than a century of life had culminated in a sightless stare from a kitchen floor but rather the place where a recovering woman had led her daughter by the hand to make a final delivery.

When she arrived she saw that the splatter of the blood was as she remembered. Everything was as she remembered but what had then been mysterious now seemed almost mandatory. It is mandatory for example that all flesh deteriorate. That all reflexes slow and all breathing grow more laborious. It is mandatory that the deterioration one day cease entirely but not in a rehabilitative way. What about in a palliative way? Doesn’t the deterioration constitute such a special kind of hurt that its cessation becomes a positive development? Only if it truly is a development and that concept requires persistence through time.