Joe Victim

Chapter Two

“You passed the test,” he says, and it’s just more bullshit that I’ve heard for the last twelve months, and to be honest I’ve stopped listening to it. It seems people have made up their minds. Somehow this topsy-turvy world has taken upon itself to convict me without even getting to know me.

I look up from the table I was staring at to the guy doing all the talking. He’s got more hair on his face than on his head, and I start wondering how flammable it is, starting with the comb-over. He seems to be waiting for an answer, but I’m not sure what he’s going on about. My short-term memory since being in jail has packed its bags and left-but my long-term goals are still the same.

“What test?” I ask, and I ask not because it interests me, but because at the very least it relieves the boredom. If only for a moment. “Joe isn’t not remembering test,” I add, just for fun, and the words sound a little over the top, even to me, and I regret them.

The man’s name, Benson Barlow, sounds pretentious, and in case you weren’t quite sure he even has leather elbow patches on his jacket to drive home the point. His thin smile looks obnoxious. In other times, better times, I’d cut that smile off his face and show him how it looked hanging all bloody in his fingers. Unfortunately these aren’t the best of times. They’re the worst.

“The test,” he repeats. He looks smug. He has that annoying look people get when there’s something they know that you don’t, and they’re dying to tell you and trying to stretch it out for as long as they can because they like being the only one to know. I hate people like that almost as much as I hate people who say Open mouth, insert foot. But, to be fair, I hate other people too. I’m an equal-rights kind of guy. “The test you took. Half an hour ago.”

“Joe took a test?” I ask, but of course I remember the test. It’s like he said-it was only half an hour ago. My short-term memory may not be that great these days when every day is the same as the last, but I’m not an idiot.

The psychiatrist leans forward an interlocks his fingers. He must have seen other psychiatrists doing that on TV or maybe they taught it in psych 101 just before they taught him how to sew on the leather patches. Wherever he learned it, he doesn’t look as good doing it as he must think. This whole thing is a big deal for him. It’s a big deal for everybody. He’s interviewing the Christchurch Carver for the people who want to lock me away, and he’s trying to find out just how insane the Carver really is, and he’s learning that I’m a big bowl of retard.

“You took a test,” he says. “It was thirty minutes ago. In this very room.”

This very room is an interview room that is an awful room by anybody’s standards, particularly by Benson Barlow’s, I imagine, yet is nicer than the cell I currently live in. It has cinder block walls and a concrete floor and a concrete ceiling. It’s like a bomb shelter, only one that would collapse in on you if a bomb actually hit it, which, to be honest, would actually be a relief. It has a table and three chairs and nothing else, and right now one of those chairs is empty. My chair is bolted to the floor and I have one hand cuffed to it. I don’t know why. They think I’m a threat, but I’m not. I’m a nice guy. I keep telling everybody. Nobody believes me.

“Here?” I ask, looking around at the different concrete views. “I don’t remember.”

His smile widens, he’s trying to give me the look that suggests he knew what my response would be, and I get the idea that maybe he did. “See, Joe, the problem is this. You want the world to think you’re mentally challenged, but you’re not. You’re a sick, twisted man, nobody will ever question that, but this test?” he says, holding up a five-sheet questionnaire that I filled out earlier, “this test proves you’re not insane.”

I don’t answer him. I get the bad feeling he’s leading somewhere with this. And the smirk on his face tells me it’s not somewhere I want to go.

“This question here,” he says, and his voice rises and makes it sound like a question. He points to one that was pretty easy for me to answer. Some of the questions were multi-choice, some of them I had to fill in. He reads it out. “It says What color is this dog? And what did you tick? You ticked yellow. The dog is red, Joe, yet you ticked yellow.”

“It’s yellowish,” I tell him.

“This one here? If Bob is taller than Greg, and Greg is taller than Alice, who is the tallest? You wrote Steve, and then you said that Steve is a fag,” he says, and the way he says it is enough to make me laugh, but the prospect of where he’s going is enough to keep me worried, so everything balances out and I stare impassively at him.

“Steve is tallish,” I tell him.

“There is no Steve,” he says.

“What have you got against Steve?” I ask.

“This test has sixty questions in it. You got every single one of them wrong. Now that takes some real effort, Joe. Forty of them are multiple choice. Statistically you should have gotten a quarter of those right. At the least, a couple. But you got none. Only way you could get none right would be if you knew the right answers and chose the wrong ones.”

I don’t answer him.

“That actually proves you’re not dumb at all, Joe,” he says, carrying on, and he’s really warming up now, really hitting his stride. He even unlocks his fingers. “Actually proves the opposite. That you’re smart. That’s what this test was designed to do. That’s why it’s full of stupid questions.” His smirk turns into a full-blown smile. “You’re smart, Joe, not brilliant, but smart enough to stand trial.”

He opens his briefcase and puts the questionnaire inside. I wonder what else is in there. It’s a nicer briefcase than the one I used to own.

“Joe is smart,” I say, and I put my big goofy smile on, where all my teeth show and my face lights up. Only these days it doesn’t light up as much. The scar running down the side of it tightens and my eye droops a little.

“You can cut that bullshit now, Joe. The test proves you’re not as smart as you like to think you are.”

My smile drops away. “What?”

The shrink’s smile widens and I think that’s because he thinks I’m not getting his point, and I’m not, and that’s because he’s not making it. “It was a time test. It helps weed out the guys not smart enough to pretend they really are that dumb.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s the only genuine thing you have told me,” he says. He stands up and walks to the door.

I turn in my seat, but don’t stand up. I can’t, because of the cuff.

He reaches out to knock on the door, but holds back. Instead he turns toward me. I must look pretty confused, because he goes ahead and explains it. “It was a time test, Joe. Sixty questions. It took you fifteen minutes. That’s four questions a minute. Each one of them you got wrong.”

“I still don’t follow,” I tell him. Surely it’s a good thing that I can be that dumb that quickly.

“You got them wrong too quickly, Joe. If you were as dumb as you wanted us to think, you’d still be doing the test now. You’d be drooling over it or licking the pages. You’d be thinking really hard searching for the answers. You didn’t search at all. You just answered each one in quick fire succession and that’s where you went wrong. You’re no idiot, Joe, but you were too dumb to figure out what was going on. I’ll see you in court.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles again. His thousand-dollar smile that he’ll practice before being called up to speak in front of a jury, the thousand-dollar smile that won’t be worth a cent after I get out of here and learn where he lives and take that nice-looking briefcase off him. “That’s the Joe everybody is going to see,” he says, and then he knocks on the door and is escorted outside.