Joe Victim

Chapter Twenty-Three

I’m dripping with sweat and the ski mask is making my face itch. Ski masks are a strange invention. I’ve never seen people on TV, at the Olympics, or in movies wearing ski masks covering their faces when they ski. They have woolen hats and thick jackets and gogglelike sunglasses, but they don’t look like bank robbers. Really they should be renamed robbery masks. Or rapists’ masks. But I’m wearing one at the moment, and it’s getting damper with sweat by the minute. It’s a sunny day, a non-ski-mask-wearing kind of day for most people, with blue skies and, like all sunny days, it makes me feel good. There are shapes in the few clouds up there, I see a knife, I see a woman, I see bad things happening among those clouds. I don’t need to pick the lock to the front door of the house because I have a key, and I use it to make my way inside. I make friends with the cold air spilling out of the fridge, and I make closer friends with an ice-cold beer. Not Coke, but beer, because Coke isn’t on sale. I sit down at the table and I can hear sounds coming from the bedroom, snoring mostly, the occasional creak of bedsprings as weight is shifted. Then I realize it’s no longer daytime, there are no blue skies, and it’s midnight. Time has jumped forward and I’m not sure how, that’s just the way time works when you’re dreaming. I scratch at the mask and readjust it, then I open up my briefcase and touch the blades that are in there.

I stay in the kitchen, and after a while the snoring stops, there are footsteps, a light comes on from further up the hallway, then two minutes later a toilet is flushed. Then more footsteps and my mother comes into the kitchen where I’m still sitting.

“Who are you?” Mom asks.

“I’m not Joe,” I tell her, because the last thing I need is my mother thinking I’m a bad person. From there on I let my knife do the talking. It speaks to her over and over until her and me and the kitchen are all on the same page. It’s messy. It always is.

“And that’s how it always goes?” she asks, and the she in question is sitting opposite me.

I’m back in the interview room and back to reality. It’s Friday morning and the day started with high hopes when I looked at the books from Melissa and read her message again and again. Then there was breakfast and some eye contact with Caleb Cole before the guards came and got me. It’s interview time with my psychiatrist. My psychiatrist leans forward and steeples her fingers. It must be something they all do. Must be something that on day one in psychiatry school, the teacher shows them some grainy, black-and-white footage from the forties and makes all the students practice how to sit in a way that makes them look smart. Kind of ironic for people in this particular field not to recognize how dumb they look. Good part about my psychiatrist is she looks a lot of other things too. She looks attractive. And as good as that is, it’s also bad. It’s distracting. It’s making Joe think the kind of things that got Joe here in the first place. There’s a small recorder in front of her, storing each word to memory.

“It doesn’t always go like that,” I tell her. “Mostly. I don’t know. I didn’t used to dream. But now I’m not so sure, because the dream feels so familiar. Like I’ve been having it my entire life. Sometimes I wake up from it certain that’s what I’ve done, that my mother is dead and that’s why I’m in here. Once I was so convinced of it I wanted to call her to make sure she was okay,” I say, though that last bit about calling isn’t true. “Sometimes I’ve poisoned her. Once I even snuck into her house dressed as a burglar and frightened her to death. The dreams always feel real.”

I don’t add anything more, though I could. I’m not really sure what the correct answer is. The psychiatrist’s name is Alice and I’ve already forgotten her last name. Truth is I’ve kind of forgotten her first name too. It may not be Alice. It may be Ellen. Or Alison. Or even Ali-ellen. I try to keep my eyes on Ali’s face, on those smooth cheek bones, that jawline, those big beautiful blue eyes of hers. I try to stop my eyes from roaming over her body, the curves like a treasure map to a whole lot of places I’d like to uncover and plunder and carve an X into. She’s dressed in a pair of black trousers and a cream blouse that must be a bitch to get blood out of. It’s not low-cut and the trousers aren’t tight.

There’s no need to ask her if the answer I gave her was the correct one, because she’s already told me there are no correct answers, which we all know is bullshit. She told me it wasn’t her job to say what was right or wrong, that it was her job to evaluate me and then share that information with the courts. Of course she was lying when she said that. If I told her I could remember every detail of every victim and that the reason I killed them was because I enjoyed it, that would be considered a wrong answer. There are a bunch of right answers, which will make her rubber-stamp my insanity case-I just have to figure out what they are.

She unsteeples her fingers. “Have you always had bad thoughts about your mother?” she asks, and she wouldn’t be asking that question if she’d met my mother.

“It depends on what you mean by bad thoughts,” I say. “We all have bad thoughts.”

“But we all don’t dream about killing our mothers.”

“We don’t?”

Her eyes widen a little, and something I said must have shocked her, but I’m not sure what. “It’s not common, Joe, to have those dreams. Not at all.”

“Oh,” I say, genuinely surprised, and it registers with her. I must act more genuinely surprised as the conversation goes on. “But they can’t be considered bad thoughts if you’re asleep, right? Nobody can control their dreams.”

“This is true,” she says. “The women you’ve killed,” she says, and I put my hand up-the one that isn’t cuffed to the chair-and interrupt her.

“I don’t remember any of it,” I say.

“Yes. I know. You’ve said already. But you didn’t kill your mother and yet you dream that you did. You don’t have dreams of other people?”

I shake my head. “No. Never.”

She nods. And I know what she’s thinking. She’s forming a connection between my mother and these people. She’s trying to figure out if each of these women I killed was a way for me to kill my mother without killing her, that these people were surrogate victims.

“Tell me about your mother,” Abby-Ali says, and her voice is seductive, sultry, and I can’t figure out why they’d have sent a woman into a place like this to interview a guy like me, then realize she must have a bad-boy complex. Then I realize that isn’t it at all-a woman testifying in my defense is going to play well with the jury. They’re going to see that she spent time with me and in that process the percentage of rape and murdering that went on between us was an absolute zero. My approval rating is going to go through the roof.

“She’s getting married,” I tell her.

“How does that make you feel?”

I bet asking that question was the next thing she mastered right after the hand steeple and before they learned how to sew leather elbow patches onto jackets. Remember, students, if all else fails, fall back on “How does that make you feel?” That’s what psychiatry seems to be. An if all else fails routine. Psychiatrists not comfortable with their own opinions, and having to solicit answers from their patients first.

“Feel? It doesn’t make me feel anything,” I say.

“It doesn’t make you feel angry?”

“Why the hell would it make me feel angry?” I say, feeling angry, not just at Ellen, but also at my mother.

“It might make you feel abandoned,” she says. “It could make you think that your mother is forgetting about you and your situation and moving on to a new man in her life, whereas you’ve been the only man in her life since your father died. When’s the wedding?”

“On Monday,” I tell her.

She nods, as if that confirms it then. “The day the trial begins.”

“I don’t feel any of that stuff you just said,” I say, more angry than ever about my mother. Already she has moved on. Already she has proven the only person she cares about other than herself is Walt. “I just don’t understand why she chose now to get engaged, now, of all times, and if they are getting engaged now, why get married next week? Why not give it a few years first?”

“You want them to put their lives on hold?” she asks, and she asks it in a way that I can’t tell whether she’s judging me or not.

“On hold? Yeah, I want them to consider it. I mean, what harm could that do? Put it on hold at least until the trial is over.”

“Maybe they think you’re never getting out of here.”

I shake my head. I don’t think anybody can really be thinking that. “They’re wrong.”

“Because you didn’t kill anybody?”

It’s an important question, and one she no doubt rehearsed a few times on the drive out here.

“I know I killed them,” I say. “That’s what everybody keeps telling me. In the beginning it was hard to believe, but if you have a thousand people all telling you the sky is going to fall, then it’s going to fall,” I say. Then I look glum. My Joe is sad look. Tried and perfected on others. “I guess if that’s true, then I don’t deserve to be let out of here. I guess I do. .” I say, then add the slight theatrical pause, count off one beat, off another, “I guess I do deserve to die. That’s what. .” pause, one beat, two beats, “that’s what they’re going to do. They’re going to kill me, you know. They’re going to pass this bill everybody on TV is talking about and I’m going to be number one on the hanging list.”

She doesn’t answer. I don’t mean any of what I said, and I’m not sure whether she believes it either. The silence grows and I feel the need to fill it with something that makes me sound retarded, but not too retarded.

“I mean, the things they say I did-that just isn’t me. I’m not that person. Ask anybody. Ask my mom, or the cops I used to work with,” I say, and a series of events starts running through my mind-previous women, previous victims, eggs jammed in mouths and the groans of the dying. I shift a little in my chair, thankful the table is in the way of her seeing my growing erection. It’s one of the few times I’ve hated something being between it and a woman like Ali.

“You don’t remember any of it?”

“I know it sounds like a cliché. I know it’s probably what you expected to hear, and the fact you’re hearing it proves I’m making it up. Bad people always remember what they do. It’s why they do it, so they can remember. I guess. All I want is to be better,” I say, “and if I did do the things they say I did, then I want to be made to never do that kind of thing again. Maybe this is a waste of time. Maybe they should just keep me here and lock away the key.”

“Throw away the key.”

“Huh?”

“The expression is throw away the key.”

“What key?”

Amanda goes back to interlocking her fingers. She touches her two forefingers to her lips. “Not many people would say what you just said,” she says, “about deserving to be locked away. It sounds very honest.”

“It is.”

“The problem, Joe, is that it also sounds very manipulative, which is something the prosecution psychiatrist is claiming you to be.”

I don’t say anything. I know she’s on the cusp of a very important decision. I know I could easily overdo it right now. Best to say nothing. Best to trust that I’ve already done an awesome job in convincing her.

“It’s one of those two things,” she says, “but I don’t know which.”

I don’t know what the correct response is, either in words or in emotion. I don’t know what to start faking next. Should I thank her, say something insightful, or should I start flopping around on the floor like a fish?

“The problem is you acted like you were mentally challenged,” she says.

“I didn’t act retarded,” I say. “That’s just how they saw me.”

“The problem was with them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it was with me. They all looked down on me, though. They pitied me for some reason. I always knew that, I just never knew why. Maybe they look down on all janitors the same way because we aren’t as cool as them.”

“Why didn’t you ask?”

“How would that have gone? Excuse me, Detective, but why do you think I’m a moron? That wasn’t going to happen. They always made me feel inferior around them all,” I say, and Slow Joe is gone now, and Fast Joe is here, Smart Joe, and Smart Joe is on a roll. “Maybe that’s why they saw me like that.”

“That’s another big insightful take on things,” Ali says.

I don’t answer. The problem with Smart Joe is that sometimes he can be too smart for his own good.

“I want to learn more about you,” she says. “We have the weekend. Everything you say to me is confidential. I’m working for you and your lawyer, not for the prosecution.”

“Okay.”

“But if you say something that makes me believe you’re lying, then the session ends and I don’t come back, and I get up in court and I tell the jury exactly that. So basically, Joe, though I’m working for you, I’m also working for the truth. You have three days in which to be honest.”

Three days in which to not get caught out lying. I can manage that. Or, if things go to plan with Melissa, I won’t need it. “Okay,” I tell her, knowing as far as honesty goes, we’re not really off to a great start. “So where do we begin?”

“I want to talk about your past.”

“My past? Why?”

“In this dream you have, do you ever take off the mask? Does your mother ever recognize you?”

I think about it. In the dream sometimes I’m drinking beer or sometimes Coke, sometimes I’m driving a blue car or a red car, other times the house is different too, my house or her house or one of many other houses I’ve been in. My mom can be wearing a nightgown or a dress. Sometimes my goldfish are there and I’m sprinkling crumbs of meat loaf into the water for them. The ways I kill her are different. Only thing that never changes is me. I always wear the mask. Even when I put rat poison into her coffee I’m still wearing the mask.

“No,” I tell her.

“Are you sure?”

“Not really. I mean, I don’t think so.”

“And your mother? Does she know who you are?”

I think about it. Then half nod, then half shake my head. “She might do. She looks shocked. She’s wearing her Christmas look.”

“Her Christmas look?”

“Yeah. That’s what I call it. Her look of surprise. It’s a long story.”

“Well, we need to start somewhere,” Ali says. “How about we start with that?”

And that’s what we do.