Bright Shards of Someplace Else Page 9

  The alleged victim in this case—raped, bound, left for dead in the brush along the accused’s jogging route—was still open on the autopsy table, ten miles from where the accused now sat. That woman—Jillian—was his former student. Ten years earlier she had been in his poetry class. She had sat in the back row and rolled her eyes at nearly everything he said. Her short, red hair was cropped close to her skull and her hair line flamed with acne. One of her ears dripped with jewelry—hoops and turquoise bobbles—while the other was always naked. Sometimes he would fix his eyes on that bare ear while she spoke. She argued with him in workshop in a fast, pushed-out voice, as if there were a gun at her back and she were being made to speak. Mostly, she defended the worst student poets in the class. If he gently criticized another student’s too-easy resolution or tired imagery, Jillian would pipe up in defense. She would claim the bland imagery was refreshingly spare, the facile ending crystalline. Her own work was impenetrable, seeing as it primarily consisted of strings of gerunds, lacking both subjects and objects.

  Had he ever seen her on his runs? He had. She always trailed behind a little dog that looked like mop head spread over a football. That dog was found a few days after Jillian went missing—speckled with blood, rooting in a fast food bag—a few blocks from where her body was found. Patches of the dog’s fur were then shaved off and put in an evidence bag. Had he ever talked to her? A few times. She had stayed in town after she graduated, and for several years they were in the comfortable habit of looking past one another, an agreed-upon invisibility, since nothing could come of speaking again.

  One afternoon he thought he’d spring out of the scenery, out of the backdrop of near-forgotten acquaintances he had no doubt become for her. He imagined she’d look startled or guilty when he spoke to her, but she simply looked bored and moved her lip ring (that was new) around with her tongue from the inside as he spoke. He was sweaty from running but noticed a smell coming off of her, a kind of stems-melting-in-the-flower-vase scent. He ran his hands through his hair, feeling a sudden urge to impress her. “I’m still teaching,” he said, which made him sound old, “the students are fabulous. So many promising young poets, so invested in the books I assign, so willing to look to the established forms for guidance yet still so able to genuinely subvert—”

  She cut him off. “I renounced poetry. I don’t need that falsity in my world. I’m a journalist now.” She bent down and rubbed the mutt at her feet. Its small jaws opened and it panted and drooled, sucking at its chops. Later, he researched and found that her “journalism” consisted of a few letters to the editor at the local rag. “Preserving the Dog Park for Living Art’s Sake”—a screed about the beauty of running dogs as opposed to the corruption and greed of local lawmakers. “Signage Should Be Azure”—a passionate and rambling plea for the city to lighten the street signs by a shade or two. He printed off these letters and read them while drinking a single-malt scotch. The phrasing had an evocative kind of incoherence that left him wondering if there was some meaning he was missing, some subterranean brilliance that he, with all his background, should be able to pick up. When his glass was drained he threw the letters away and turned to his students’ work.

  Could he retrace his activities from March fifth? The accused turned a clear eye on the investigators. He knew he should have his “counsel” with him—a lawyer who would hold up a hand and stop him from speaking. Counsel was like the muse, a quietly authoritative presence that slowed and directed the flow of expression. The accused thought of his own work. The muse had not been with him lately, maybe never. He still churned out books of poems with lovely matte covers and abstract cover splashings at regular intervals. Lately his poems consisted of short, erratic lines spread over the white page like scattershot. The words had started existing in isolation for him. The poetry, it seemed to him, was in the word itself, surrounded by white. Why tart it up? Critics (the few that bothered to consider the work of a vaguely noted academic poet) described his latest efforts as “laundry lists.” When the cops had showed up at his door he’d been playing with that notion: Cling. Short Cycle. Press, Permanent.

  He’d taken off his reading glasses and rose, with effort, to get the door. Everything lately was with effort. He seemed to sigh and grunt as part of his normal breath now. The accused assumed his ex-wife would be at the door, bringing him cookies left over from some volunteer function at the animal shelter. Theirs was a comfortable relationship of light mutual contempt that drummed on them bracingly like a light rain when they were together. The old demons of their relationship were soggy but still smelled alluringly like hellfire. As he walked toward the door he looked forward to seeing her, to possibly offending her, to maybe arguing a bit about their son (a psychology student who avoided seeing both of them, except on holidays).

  Instead, it was two uniformed officers. They wanted to talk to him about a woman named Jillian. Would he come to the station? Jillian, he thought. How exotic of her to appear at the door, in this guise, in the mouths of these two strange men. He could hear his heartbeat for a moment, the blood rushing in his ears. The two men watched him and he nodded, keeping his lips tight over his teeth. Trouble was, he was getting a light, heady feeling, a bubble of euphoria that would break over his face in a weird short laugh or some out-of-line comment. He climbed into the cop car like a five-year-old being driven around in a cruiser as a wish fulfilled. Did he bounce a bit on the seat? Run his hands over the cage that separated him from the officers? He may have.

  The scenes of his town—the gas station where he filled up, the coffee shop where he read the Sunday Times, the park where he jogged—all seemed transformed through the windows of the cruiser. He felt like a posthumous version of himself taking a tour of his old earth-bound life. When they stopped at a red light by a corner bakery where he often ate a midmorning cinnamon roll, he looked in the window and could have sworn he saw himself, staidly working toward the center of the pastry (for he was like that—taking his pleasures in careful increments). He laughed as the cruiser thrummed forward and took him farther away from his daily circuit.

  He sat in his recliner with a pile of poems and thought back to the station. It had been fascinating. The way they looped their questions around, asking him the same thing two or three times from different angles. How long have you known Jillian? When did you last see her? You last saw her on Friday? So after seeing her Friday, you did what again? Three days after that you got the Sunday Times? Where did you go Saturday? He liked the repetitive tattoo of the questions, how each one would pick up a theme from the last and give it a little twist. The two officers traded off so smoothly, and their voices and faces registering nothing the whole time. That flat affect combined with the inherent urgency in their long line of questioning struck him. “Hold back here,” he wrote in the margin of one overheated student poem. “Try repeating this,” he wrote on another. “Put this part behind a mask,” he scribbled at the bottom of a long stanza. These were better comments than he usually gave.

  What is your relationship with Jillian? That seemed to be the cops’ favorite question, and he found it was one he liked considering. For what was his relationship with this troubled former student? They were both citizens of existence (that phrase being the name of his first slim volume of poems), their physical selves made circles around the same city park; they walked over each other’s tracks, they were hit by the same sunlight, slightly altered by the curve of the earth. When he saw her that evening she was staring at a new sign in the park by the pond—No Dogs Allowed in Pond Area. She was wearing a beige shirt and pants and evening was falling, so from behind her figure curved in a hand-worn way, like a bone letter opener eroded at the middle from a frequent grip. For some reason, that evening, he decided he’d talk to her again. Everyone needs some shaking up. The poems blinking on his screen at home could use it. This mopey girl could use it. In fact, he thought, the night itself could use it. He used to love walking around alone in the park in the evenings, thinking of
his poetry or his lovers (hadn’t had one of those in a while), breathing in that sense of promise. Now the nights just seemed like a time when life went subterranean and damp, a plunge into black that left the next day dingier.

  He walked up behind her just as she reeled her head back to spit. She was a good aim. The street light caught the saliva as it slid into the grooves of the sign. When she turned to him he could see, in the light, a froth of spittle on her lower lip. She smiled, widely, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Bullshit,” she said, “All those dirty Canadian geese get the red-carpet welcome, but my dog can’t walk ten feet from the thing? Ah yes, it’s just so pristine.”

  He recognized in her voice the sound of someone off the rails, a sound he occasionally heard in other students over the years. There was so much variety, he thought, in how people veered off the path. The mumbling student of today who writes only about vegetation is the bipolar addict of tomorrow. The young man who always breaks in without raising a hand now collects bottles and plasters the town with political ads for a long-shot independent. The chubby girl with the immutable stanza length grows up to be a cloying and obsessive mother to a brilliant child-songstress who leaves the earth a thief and runaway. He had heard updates like these, along with updates of book deals and teaching gigs and happy scribblers and the like. He laughed at the goose comment warmly. He’d like to hear her keep going, watch her bounce off one irrational thought to the next. Prose-poem wild.

  Had she ever visited his home? He drew a breath before answering, liking the effect. They walked through the dark park together, sort of. Jillian and the dog followed him as if it were happenstance. He looked behind him several times to confirm they were coming. “How is the journalism coming?” he called out in a rich, loud voice. Sometimes he enjoyed being loud around his more gossamer students; he liked to let his voice rip through them and leave their delicate sensibilities flapping in the breeze. She just laughed, and baby-talked to the dog. They left the park, wove through the neighborhoods with their little jockeys on the lawn and eagles above the garages. When he unlocked his door and turned around he expected her to be gone, but she and the dog bounded up the stairs and past him. He sat on an old wood rocker and she on the couch. He produced a drink and she sipped it and looked up.

  The two cops leaned forward, almost imperceptibly. He could feel them becoming especially alert, as if someone were slowly turning a tuning peg on them and drawing them taut. This was a feeling he longed to produce in his readers, longed to produce in students, and longed to produce in himself. When had he really paid attention? He had when Jillian was there. He wanted to split through the muck of her hyper-private mental ills and have her listen to him.

  This had been a bit of an obsession with him over the years. Once, visiting New York City on a self-funded book tour years ago, he engaged a street performer (a man spray painted in white posing to match a variety of statuary—Michelangelo’s David, The Thinker, The Discus Thrower, even the Venus de Milo, which he recreated by clever contortions of the shoulder and elbow). He dropped a ten in the coffee can at the man’s feet and then started talking to him. The man was happy to take a break and have a willing ear, and he told the accused all about the symbols inscribed inside every statue all over the world (yes, marble statues, despite the heft, are hollow), the scattered code that foretold of stock market secrets and the end of the world or some such thing. The man coughed a white cloud of dust and wiped his mouth, exposing a lushly pink inch of lip. Then he talked about the cops, how he performed only in their blind spot, the one part of the city where their surveillance fell short.

  He had tried to engage the performer in some other kind of talk, something other than street-person raving. It wasn’t that he wanted to talk sense into him—he didn’t care—but he wanted to break through what seemed to him the man’s disturbing sovereignty. The performer spoke as if he were reciting a poem pulled from memory. It was as if the accused wasn’t even there. He argued with the performer at first, tried to anger him, then agreed with everything he said, attempting to shock him with sudden empathy. But nothing could faze him. Eventually the accused’s now ex-wife grabbed him roughly by the shoulder and made him leave.

  He envied crazy people, he realized, as he watched Jillian sip her drink. They really bought themselves. They bought their own logic, their own readings of the world, their own selves, regardless of how damaged they might seem to outsiders. “So,” he began, unsure of what to say, “do you ever consider going back to poetry?” This wasn’t the question he wanted to ask—he had no idea what to ask—and he hated his professorial tone. Jillian said nothing. She hummed to herself and wiggled her left hand at the dog. It was then he decided he would not say another word to her. Surely she expected him to speak, to do the work of the encounter. She probably thought he would talk poetry, or try to seduce her, or mentor her, or some wretched combo. All his actions, in her mind, were a foregone conclusion. He hated the thought of it. What could he do that would tip the picture?

  Without a word he left her in the living room and walked into his office to think. The books of poems on the walls were no help. No stanza would be of use. There was an old-fashioned heavy iron used as a doorstop on the corner of his desk. Certainly, in the moment before one dies, her true face is shown. Who knows what insights might be glimpsed? That’s probably what drove killers as much as the power or thrill or money or anything else. That ability to see into someone at the moment of supreme vulnerability. But he hadn’t touched the iron—a goofy kitsch thing his ex-wife had gotten him. Janice liked to give him a gift on every anniversary of their divorce, usually something that had to do with a woman’s woeful role in a marriage. She tied a bow on the iron and left it outside his office door at work, where he tripped over it while talking about the risks of frequent line breaks to a student with a long blond braid who had followed him so he could finish his thought.

  But here in his home office, he could think of no next move. He kept scanning his shelves and noticed the Scrabble box, nearly obscured underneath a stack of files. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d played—perhaps it was when he and Janice were still together and Henry still lived at home. Theirs was not a game-playing family, though, at least not in the wholesome sense, and he could hardly recall a time when the three of them sat facing one another. He grabbed the box and walked back to the living room. Jillian was still there, drinking and looking serene. In the indoor light he noticed a spray of moles across her cheekbones, like paint flicked off a brush.

  “Back already?” she asked, and he simply nodded. The vow of silence felt good. He opened the box and laid out the Scrabble board at her feet. He divvied out her letters and his. Inexplicably she left the chair and dropped to the floor on her side of the board. The dog settled into the carpeting as if readying himself for a long night. When she touched the first letter—an I—their DNA mingled on her skin. And when he began telling the cops about the silent game of Scrabble, he could feel the exchange of glances between them, like a ripple of heat off summer pavement. So the two of you just played Scrabble and didn’t speak? the boyish one asked, in a peevish and doubting tone. The sergeant tempered the question with a sotto voce request: Tell us about the game.

  The accused shifted his feet. His shirt felt sweaty against the plastic chair, and the overhead lamp, while not as glaring as in the movies, still shed a stark bluish light that made his head hurt. Yet he didn’t want to give up the chance to explain the game, its languid oddity, and its right-note-ness. He began the game with a weak word—something like tea—and Jillian crossed it with taille, an archaic tax, and he laid down lathe and she egret. He kept watching the words, feeling a pattern was about to emerge, some message or something. It felt like he was watching the pointer move around a Ouija board. At any moment he would be struck with some shocking reference. Jillian chuckled lightly to herself and ran her hands through the dog’s fur over and over, so that her fingers disappeared and resurfaced like twin bot
tlenoses at the base of the dog’s tail. Alright, Mr. Gelt, you’re telling me you said nothing? I tell you what, you can’t play a silent Scrabble game. What happens when you need to argue that something is really a word? You’re telling me that didn’t happen this game?

  No, they just played. The tiles clicked. The words built. He kept score on a little pad of paper in her sight. He filled her drink once. He filled his twice. When the game was over (she won) she made a smooching noise at the dog, who sprang up as if he had long awaited the cue. She waved goodbye and walked out like nothing happened. And then? “I went to bed,” the accused said, his face suddenly hot, the room suddenly small.

  When Jillian left, he had packed up the game and surprised Janice at her apartment. She was three sheets to the wind and cussing someone out on the phone when she answered the door. “And that’s the end of that shit,” she said, hanging up. “Scrabble! Honey, you didn’t!” She always acted as if everything was a surprise when she was drunk. The two of them played a raucous game, shouting archaic words at each other until they both lost track of the points. At one point he grabbed her ponytail and made as if to kiss her. The closer he got the more he felt ill; getting close to her was as grotesquely intimate and satisfying as digging out an ingrown hair. She was a part of him, not in a romantic sense, but in the sense that being with her was a variation on being alone.

  “I heard.” Janice called him when she found out. “How could they …” He heard her voice on the phone, sounding strange in its sincerity. Even when the marriage ended she was exhilarated in the courthouse, as if the divorce was a stage she had been pulled up onto by a crowd-pleasing magician. Her ceaseless levity wore him out, and his poems got heavier over the years simply to keep his mind from floating off into her particular toxic ether. So to hear her concern—the real fear—was a tonic. “Surely you told them about the Scrabble game? Where you were?” He assured her he told them about that night’s Scrabble. The game was in a Ziploc somewhere. On some of those tiles the fingerprints overlapped like the same field tilled three times over, starting from different points.