own words. Killing a person is traumatic, Joseph. I’m sure it’s vividly in your memory. Tell me precisely what you see when you look back on that event.’
A pause. ‘You’re sure this isn’t just a little bit sick, you wanting me to relive all that? You get some twisted pleasure in the gory details?’
She doesn’t reply. The question isn’t really a question.
‘I remember her eyes,’ Joseph finally says. ‘They were alive, just like always. Mad at me, upset maybe. Not sure what was going on, but they definitely weren’t peaceful and loving like they sometimes were. I don’t know. The way eyes look on the face of someone who knows they’re going to die.’
‘She knew she was going to die?’ Pauline asks.
Joseph doesn’t directly answer the question. ‘Then I remember them when I was done. Her eyes. They weren’t alive any more. They just stared at me. They didn’t blink. They were finished.’
She allows some time for them both to reflect on this statement.
‘You said, “when you were done”, just now,’ she eventually says. ‘What did you mean by that?’
‘Sometimes I think you just aren’t listening to me at all,’ the man’s voice answers, sighing with frustration. ‘Done killing the bitch. I thought that was obvious.’
‘Joseph, I need you to try to be more specific. What, precisely, do you remember doing to her?’
Pauline recalls, now, the mounting frustration she’d felt at this point in the conversation. He was so close, so very close.
‘I told you last time. I smothered her with a pillow. Held it over her face until she couldn’t breathe. Until she stopped moving.’
‘No, Joseph,’ Pauline’s voice counters. ‘There was no pillow.’
‘Ah! You admit it!’ Another fist on the table. Joseph’s voice is energetically animated. Vindicated. ‘Your word games have caught you out! You admit I killed her. You admit I had a wife! See, you can’t lie to me. Not about this kind of stuff.’
‘No, Joseph. You’ve never been married.’
‘You just acknowledged the murder! You can’t say I got the details of the killing wrong – “there wasn’t a pillow, Joseph”,’ he squeaks out the words in mocking, mimicking tones, ‘and then tell me there wasn’t a killing!’
Another silence. Twelve and a half seconds.
‘Joseph, there was no pillow. There was no wife. But you’re right, there was a murder.’
The longest silence on cassette #021C. Forty-one seconds. Each one of them had been agonizing. Pauline’s skin had been pinpricks of expectation. She’d watched Joseph’s face contort from surprise, to anger, to confusion, and finally to a muddled, confounded blankness.
‘I don’t understand,’ he finally answers.
‘Joseph, please listen carefully to my next question. Can you do that? Can you promise me you’ll listen to what I’m going to ask you, and think before you respond?’
He shuffles. ‘Whatever. I’ll listen.’
‘Thank you, Joseph. I appreciate that. Now, I’m going to need to ask you what you remember about the boy.’
Damn, if I’m not sick and tired of poetry. I can’t think of how many years I’ve been writing it; there are at least forty notebooks full on my shelves at home – but for what? How many times can ‘dancing sunlight crest the hills’ or ‘artful emotion hug the embrace of day’? I’ve done all the metaphors. I’ve called love everything it can be called, and only on days like today do I start to realize that I haven’t come close to saying anything at all about it. Saying what it really is. Not that I would know; but I know enough to be certain that no stanza ever written has done it the tiniest fleck of justice.
I fling my black Moleskine down in disgust. Margaret’s bench receives it silently. It’s taken this angry assault before. Every so often I go through a poet’s tizzy, convinced momentarily of the senseless uselessness of it all and avowing never again to waste the earth’s depleted paper supply with more vulgar verse. The fit is generally accompanied, like today, with the flinging away of the notebook in disgust. Twice my pencil has even been tossed into the foliage as an extra act of rebellious defeatism.
But I always go back for the notebook, if not for the pencil. It’s far easier to rebel for a moment than for a lifetime. I long ago figured out that the reason the hippie movement died out was because it just takes so much bloody energy constantly to protest everything, no matter how much pot and free love might be involved. When it comes to my own literary rebellions, the weaker but more practical half of my brain always figures that I’d better not actually leave my scraps behind, lest, at the most basic of levels, I find myself in my next fit of disillusionment without anything to fling away in disgust.
For the moment, though, screw it. I’ve been sitting here for the past twenty minutes, trying to wrest a few good lines out of the bowing branches and larger than usual flock of waterfowl on the pond this lunchtime, but it isn’t working. Today the Black Princess water lilies just look like aquatic weeds and the ducks like pond rodents with their butts up in the air as they poke their bills beneath the surface for some revolting, muck-smeared bug.
For an instant I realize that this is nonsense, that the difference between poetry and pessimism rests entirely in the state of wonder with which a person looks at the world around them. But I’m not feeling any wonder today. Today, I’m just seeing the duck butts.
I’d feel wonder, I’m sure, if I knew what had happened two days ago. Then I’m sure my life would feel normal and I’d be able to operate in my usual style, all my emotions appropriately intact. Instead, I have the sinking feeling in the pit of my belly that I might not feel anything at all until I know what’s come of my boy.
My boy.
I’m too much a poet not to notice the shift into the personal possessive.
I gaze out over the pond. One of my pencils is down there, below my perch, somewhere in the greenery, rotting away.
Beyond, on the far shore, I see the spot where the boy ought to be standing. He isn’t, of course. He wouldn’t be. But his stick is lying in the mud, its point touching the water.
And for just an instant, I think that this is wrong. That I’m sure I took that stick with me when I ran after him. That it shouldn’t be there at all.
Memories are strange beasts, impossible to control. I am not sure what keys one into place now, at this precise moment. Maybe it’s the abnormality of the situation, evoking a normalcy from the depths of my mind to try to counterbalance it, to set things into their customary equilibrium – but for just an instant both stick and circumstance disappear. It’s no longer today. The spot is the same, vaguely, but the day is different. I am back in the midst of wonderful moments.
