CIRCLE

Part IV

..--..

People were either unbelievably naïve or perhaps… I was.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt that I didn’t comprehend this thing that people called ‘love’. What was it exactly? An emotion, a feeling, a biochemical reaction that assured the prolonged existence of our species? Or is love just an excuse for us to cling to one another because our biggest fear is ending up alone?

I’d seen my share of nude bodies littered across opulent bedrooms where the rugs probably lasted longer than their owners. I’d seen my share of crimes committed from ‘passion’ and ‘jealousy’. The world was filled with Desdemona’s and Othello’s; people eluded by the notion of love and lust but hardly knew the difference between the two.

But that was the thing. I couldn’t imagine him falling into the same league of stupid people. No, not him. Not my own reflection. Not my betenoire. Not the man that I had looked upto for so long. And watched him, I have… as discreetly as I could.

I remembered one particular day those years ago.

It was the end of the last senior grad exams. He was in the middle of a whole group of laughing, boisterous people, comparing notes and debating about a case study.

Yards away, I was sitting alone on the lawn, my arms supporting the weight of my crooked spine, a book of Criminal Justice and Law on my lap but my eyes fixed on him. Back then, I tricked myself into believing it was just a curious interest in a man whose intelligence startled me, the freshman.

It became slowly apparent that my interest in Dan wasn’t as simple as that.

Funny enough, it never would be.

It wasn’t just about the breakthroughs he was making. It wasn’t just about the pile of forgotten cases that he’d dusted and solved single-handedly. And it certainly wasn’t about his newfound fame, which made all kinds of clients flock to him.

It was about that faint smile on his face… that uncanny mix of a grin and a smirk. It was always there on his surreptitious pale lips, almost as if he knew a secret no one else did. In a way, that lone smile had seemed utterly childish and so unadulterated. And yet it unnerved me to heck.

Watching him had turned into an unconscious habit of mine, something I wasn’t proud of, I daresay. But that day, while I sat on the lush stretches of the green lawn, chewing the pen cap in my own soliloquy, I could see his eyes flicker towards me once. Just a mere passing glance. Daring, observant and in its own way, teasing.

Maybe that was the first time he realized I was watching him. Or maybe… just maybe… he’d known all along.

I knew because that small hint of a smile turned into a laugh, a genuine one but, of course, his glance didn’t linger for long. He soon turned his attention to the ‘four-eyed’ senior friend of his.

But now, years later, we were sitting in his car like two strangers sharing the same bench in a subway train. Ever since we’d left the hotel, nether of us had said a word.

I stared at Dan as he looked out of the window at the cloudy sky above. His eyes were dark and hollow, like he was searching for an answer. It piqued me. Because I knew deep down that I wasn’t that answer.

This inadequacy left me more inferior than I’d ever felt before.

I wanted to do something. Anything. Anything to distract him. Distract him from ‘her’. I wanted to hear that laugh again. The real one. Not the phony ones he always used to mask his thoughts.

And this sudden urge drove me to lean over, bury my hands in his hair and pull him towards me.

I kissed him, nipping hard on that lower lip, trying to persuade him out of his silence.

His hands circled around mine but didn’t put up any resistance. He didn’t do anything for a long moment, letting me bruise his lips while his fingers left ghostly impressions on my wrists. When I tugged at his belt, he frowned and bit me through clenched teeth.

I drew back with a scowl and panted breathlessly, wiping away the trickle of blood from my lower lip.

“What was that for?” I asked, more than just annoyed.

“No.”

“No, chief?” I asked with an ironic laugh, reaching forward to trace a finger along his cheek.

He flinched and pushed me back forcibly. “Not until you answer one question.”

I looked at him with raised eyebrows and ceded to his request impatiently.

I leaned forward and took off his belt while he stared, watching me with a scrutiny that was driving me insane.

“What do you want to ask me?”

“It’s been on my mind ever since I met you.”

I looked at him, waiting.

“And what would that be?”

“Physiological need or self actualization?”

His question hung in the air like a death sentence in a court room.

“Why do we keep coming back to that?”

“I don’t know why… You tell me, James. What’s really your motive?”

I drew back and scowled at him, staring in disbelief.

“God, you’re so screwed up.”

He looked away, not a trace of regret in those eyes.

“Well, that makes the two of us.”

..--..

Back in college, strangers had this habit of striding up to me and asking me a riddle. It was a simulation exercise and since I topped logical analytics, they were always trying to find a way to undermine ‘that so-called smart kid in class’. Unfortunately for them, their brainteasers were hardly worth a dime of trouble.

The only true challenge I remember having faced was this complex Rubik cube that a professor once gifted to me in passing. It wasn’t an ordinary one with colors. Instead, it had numbers from 1 to 9. And the trick was to solve it like it was a Rubik cube and a Sudoku puzzle.

I used to carry it around with me all the time… in the second pocket of my blazer. It became close to an obsession. I was one of those simple fellows who couldn’t stay away from a puzzle, a game… or any challenge, for that matter. But after a month of fiddling around with the thing, I got frustrated one day and tossed it aside in the reading library. Strange enough, when I returned to my table, it was missing.

Surprisingly, I don’t remember being upset. I think I was actually relieved to get it off my hands. Losing it seemed like a good excuse. Losing it meant that I hadn’t lost. Maybe, that way, I would never have to admit to the fact that I was defeated.

I guess that’s where Dan and I parted ways. He was persistent and he always arrived at the right answer. This ability of his had piqued me for years. But then again, I’d always wondered. I’d always wondered what he’d do when a case popped up where the answer wasn’t as simple as a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Because there were some questions which had whole shades of gray between them.

I never gave him my answer because I didn’t have one… not at that moment.

Despite the fact that we had very little faith in each other, we’d somehow ended up in my crummy apartment. On my creaking bed. Shivering naked in the other’s presence.

It was strange in a way. We could actually trust each other this way rather than with our clothes on. Strange and a little fucked up. Maybe, it was this vulnerability that made us more ambient and culpable on the bed. But despite the nudity and the sex, it was like laying all our poker cards on the table and yet keeping the ace hidden up one sleeve.

In the end, whose game was it really?

I wrapped my arms around his shoulders with my head resting in the crook of his shoulder. He was leaner than me, but I could trace the tightened muscles in those thin arms, proof of the long practice sessions spent hitting paper targets at the range.

His breathing was jagged and raspy, his hands instinctively reaching for the comfort of his cigarette despite the warmth in the room.

“Do you feel guilty? About this?” I asked, sharing his smoke. It was a question I asked just to get rid of the uncomfortable silence between us.

I felt his toes curl.

“What’s ‘this’ anyway?” he trailed with a rueful smile.

“Apparently, nothing as you’ve led me to believe.”

“It’s not nothing. It’s something at the bare minimum.”

“And what’s that?” I enquired, feeling curious. “Comfort sex?”

“We’re not really gentle with each other to classify it as that.”

I laughed into his hair, pulling him closer.

A long moment of silence passed.

“Do you feel guilty?” I asked again.

He tapped the remains of the cigarette into the ash tray.

“No. She’s dead and I can’t bring a dead woman back. There’s not much I can do for her,” was his simple reply.

Yet despite his words, I could still see her standing over his shoulder. Long black hair, turquoise skirt and those red polished nails. Watching as we fucked each other raw.

..--..

It was funny how it always rained on the day of a funeral. Almost as if the heavens knew when to cry. I didn’t like it. It felt way too orchestrated. It’d rained just like this even when she passed away. My mother. It hadn’t been something unforeseen because she’d been bedridden for days. I used to get nightmares when I was a child. Of her falling off a building and I’d be running forward, in hope of saving her. I would manage to catch her in my arms but her heart would have already stopped beating. And one morning, she actually slipped away like that.

It’s still strange when you realize that you’re never going to see that person smile again. That you’d never again be able to feel the warmth of their embrace. Love was a bitch. Always ended in hurt.

What was I even doing here? At Elaine’s funeral. I didn’t belong among these tides of people, a clutter of loved ones, relatives, friends and family alike. Strangers with the same faces. I was the last person she’d have wanted to see at her grave.

Decked up in a black suit that I’d just borrowed from the dry cleaners and eyes masked behind dark shades I’d bought for a dollar off the street, I stood afar in the shadow of an oak tree and watched them lower the casket, the priest mumbling something about eternal happiness even after death.

Happiness after death.

Really?

I felt like laughing.

I didn’t believe in any of that crap.

Once you’re dead, you’re dead. You’re not coming back. One measly existence reduced to a premature end. Nice meeting you. Thank you for your company. Goodbye. Sayonara. Au revoir.

Reincarnation and ‘life after death’ was just mumbo-jumbo fed to keep little children from the truth. That, yes, they were never going to see Woofers again and no, he wasn’t in a better place, but probably a decomposed canine under layers of earth.

My eyes remained fixed on him. He stood alone, separated from members of her rich, affluent family. They blamed him no doubt. The whole world blamed him, suspected him and hated him for his nonchalance, his indifference and the fact that he couldn’t shed even one tear.

And yet…

I loved him.

Unabashedly.

..--..

I was sorting through newspaper clippings, when she appeared next to me.

“James, do you have the report ready on The Bay Malibu Homicide?” Sarah asked, tapping my shoulder.

“Mm,” I trailed. “I’m still waiting for the lab results on the drink. Arsenic poisoning ruled out. The last time I checked, they think it could have been LSD.”

“LSD… Doesn’t give us much to go on since that stuff is the hardest to track.”

“One of the new age drugs,” Randall muttered over the rim of the file he was busy reading. “Once ingested, dissolves with the bile and disappears into the bloodstream. Almost as if it’d never been there. First in, first out.”

“Like Randall’s luck with women,” I piped with an amused smile.

“Hey, I heard that. I have a fantastic sex life, thank you very much.”

Sarah rolled her eyes, picked up a bulky folder and thwacked the side of his head with it.

“Just get the report on my desk by 2 pm,” she said, walking past us.

Something bothered me. I swiveled in my chair and called. “Sarah?”

She paused in her tracks and turned to look at me.

“Wouldn’t… the chief want to have a look at it first? Isn’t that the usual protocol?” I asked, eyebrows furrowing into a thin crease.

She hesitated.

“That… won’t be necessary this time,” she said in a solemn voice.

“Why?” Randall asked, suddenly looking very interested.

“The chief… is on temporary suspension. Until the Elaine case is cleared.”

Silence hung in the air.

“Whose decision was it? Does the department suspect him?”

“Can you blame them? He’s not been very cooperative.”

“And he’s got no alibi,” Randall mumbled, turning sour.

Sarah nodded awkwardly and left the room.

..--..

That night, I returned home later than usual. I wasn’t really a workaholic but just that one night, I didn’t feel like going home to an empty bed. I hadn’t spoken to him since the funeral. Every time I called him, I was politely transferred to the answering machine and asked to leave a message. For all I knew, he was out there somewhere, getting drunk and probably passed out. Or maybe, he was listening but didn’t want to pick up the call. Did the guilt of ‘us’ catch up with him?

That thought alone unsettled me.

In the course of one mistake, he’d lost his fiancée, his reputation, his job and if proven guilty, maybe even his own life.

All in a single blow.

I wondered how that felt.

When I shuffled in through the door and locked it behind me, I was surprised to find the apartment lights on and the pungent smell of nicotine in the air. I walked into the dingy living room and was startled to find him sitting on the couch, reading one of my old thesis books. His hair was disheveled and eyes dark. With his shoulders hunched and a lone cigarette hanging from his lips, he was reading my book with a curiosity unrivalled by anything I had seen before.

“Hey chief,” I called, hesitantly. “How… how did you even get in?”

He held up a set of keys… the spare set I thought I had hidden in my closet.

I bit back a smile. “I see,” I mumbled, wondering whether I should even be surprised that he’d gone through my stuff.

I took off my watch, tossed it onto the table and took my place beside him.

“I haven’t seen you in days. No offence but you look like shit. You… okay?”

Dan paused to look at me, studying my features. And suddenly, he reached forward to place something in my hand.

An old, familiar Rubik cube. Each side was a perfect matrix of 1 to 9.

I stared at it, turning it over in my hand.

Speechless.

“This… So… you were the one?”

He didn’t answer but smiled.

“And you solved it?”

“Yes,” he mumbled, taking another drag of his cigarette. “It was trying at first but in the end, I figured it out,” he said, meeting my eyes with a ghost of a smile.

..--..

I woke up in the middle of the night to find the space next to me empty. I wasn’t alarmed but worried- yes. His cigarette was a beacon of ember that assisted me in finding him... no matter how lost he was in the constrictive space of my apartment. I wrapped my arms around his thin waist and held him. It was almost as if I found his inability to be human attractive. It was the second time I had loved someone so possessively, wanting to consume every part of this person- his beauty, his intelligence, his wretchedness, his sorrows and his sublime defeat. Although he’d never admit to it. And perhaps, I adored him for all that. The tangled web of complexity that he was.

“Aren’t you afraid of me anymore?” he asked.

“I don’t really give a damn.”

“I see.”

He turned me around and pinned me against the wall. One arm snaking around my neck, he held me there gasping for air.

“So, how does it feel?” he asked, breathing heavily against my ear. He grinded against me, eyes never leaving mine. “To have so much power over me? Does it feel good?”

I hissed sharply.

“Yes. Very good.”

..--..

There were things you never expect to wake up to. To find yourself facing the wrong end of a .22 mm pistol, for example, was probably the worst of those scenarios.

I sat up hesitantly, eyes not leaving the gun or the man holding it.

“I told you... I didn’t kill her,” I insisted, looking him in the eye.

“I know.”

“Then, why’re you pointing that thing at me, chief?”

“In my world, what you did still counts as homicide.”

I stared at him passively before reaching for a cigarette pack on the table with a quivering hand.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumbled, annoyed to find no smokes.

His face was expressionless and yet there was a strange look in his eyes.

He lurched forward and gripped my hair, nerves cold as steel.

“So… How long does it take?”

“For… what?” I hissed painfully in his grip.

“To delude yourself into believing you didn’t do it.”

I scowled at him and wrenched myself free, scuttling backwards until I hit the headboard. “It wasn’t murder.”

“You might have kept your hands clean but you drove her to it. Elaine was a manic depressive. I knew. Her folks knew. But no one else ever noticed it… but you’re good with psychology. You found out, didn’t you?”

I stared at him.

“So, tell me, James. I’m curious. What did you say to her that drove her over the edge?”

I scoffed although somewhere deep, I could feel a tingling in the senses.

In reply, he tossed something on the bed. It was a train ticket.

“Room service. 9:30 pm. It was you, wasn’t it?” he asked, eyes unwavering.

I picked up the discarded ticket, scrunched it up into a ball and threw it aside.

“Maybe I went to watch a late night opera. It doesn’t stand valid in a court of law.”

“What was it all for?”

I swallowed the tight knot in my throat. I could see a spectre of her standing over his shoulder even now. But she wasn’t looking at me with those naïve eyes of hers. She was smiling and it unnerved me.

I pressed my eyes, trying to stop the hallucinations.

“What was it all for?” Dan asked again.

I scoffed.

“I wanted to see you lose and I wanted to prove Maslow wrong.”

“Maslow?”

I removed my hands and looked at him, straight in the eye.

“Self-actualization,” I breathed in answer.

I found myself staring at the barrel of his revolver again. He lowered it onto my chest and I finally recognized that expression of his.

Pity.

The shot rang through the stillness of a seemingly innocent morning.

I felt the blood trickle down to the sheets. I gasped at the wound and laid back down on the bed.

“Why… did you still take me under your wing?” I choked out.

“You were the best. I picked the best. Period.”

I smiled, my vision faltering.

“I see.”

[fin]