LITMIR.BIZ

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odd, maybe I really am off my gourd). I’ve balanced the ledger from my last two shifts. I’ve moved a respectable amount of stock. The day has, despite it all, become normal.

      I must simply tuck down and ignore the one glaring, horrible abnormality. I was at my bench again for lunch. I had a coffee (back to black; it’s the new orange). I had my notebook with me, though I didn’t crack the cover. No verses since before …

      But the boy didn’t appear. Of course. Why would he? The boy is gone. And I’m the only one who seems to know.

       12

       Taped Recording Cassette #021C Interviewer: P. Lavrentis

      The recording begins with a fluster of clicks and the scrape of the plastic recorder being slid across a table top. Five seconds in, a rustling of papers, then a sustained silence.

      ‘I’m glad you’ve finally agreed to talk to me again.’ The voice that breaks the silence is Pauline’s. Her tone is, as in the previous recordings, the practised, soft monotone of unreadable openness.

      ‘Only because they told me I had to.’

      ‘You don’t have to talk to me, Joseph. Not if you don’t want to.’

      ‘That’s not what the others say.’

      ‘You have to meet with me, that’s different. That’s part of the sentence. But Officer Ramirez told me you said you had something you wanted to tell me. That you wanted actually to speak.’

      A pause, seven seconds.

      ‘I don’t want to tell you anything.’

      Pauline doesn’t answer.

      ‘But,’ Joseph’s voice carries on a moment later, ‘I don’t think you’re going to leave me alone if I don’t.’

      ‘You can speak openly with me, you know that.’ An innocuous statement; a practised non-response to a provocation.

      ‘I don’t like what you said to me last time we met,’ Joseph says in return. ‘I don’t like being lied to. Not when things are this serious.’

      ‘Why do you think I lied to you?’

      ‘Don’t mess with me about this, bitch!’ The words are a flash of shouted rage. There is a clanking and thunder on the small cassette – a fist smashing into a metal table sending it rattling. Pauline recalls vividly the ferocity that had overtaken him, the way it shook his whole body. She’d forced herself not to react, to take bracing breaths of her own, culling the adrenalin down. She’d repositioned the recorder equidistant between them on the table. A few seconds later silence returns to the cassette, then her own voice. In repetition.

      ‘What makes you think I lied to you, Joseph?’

      ‘You know what. You know full well. It’s insulting for you to treat me like an idiot. To tell me I wasn’t married.’

      ‘More insulting than the thought of killing your wife?’

      ‘Don’t twist my words. I’m admitting I killed her. I know it was a bad thing. Wrong. But you’re twisting reality.’

      ‘Joseph, I’ve studied your file. Other people have studied your file. Your whole life was examined at the trial. You’ve never been married.’

      A long silence. Sixteen seconds.

      ‘Things get left out of files.’

      ‘Not things like this. Not things like marriage, which can be verified so easily. And certainly not in a murder trial.’

      ‘Everything about that trial was stacked,’ the man protests. ‘It was a farce. You know it, I know it. Nothing there had any bearing on reality.’

      ‘You’ve said that to me before,’ Pauline answers, committing herself to nothing. ‘But …’ she hesitates. Through the tape, she can almost hear herself shifting tack.

      ‘Let’s go this route,’ she prompts. ‘Tell me why, precisely, you think you killed your wife.’

      ‘I don’t think, I—’

      ‘I know. You’re sure. But I want you to tell me why you’re so sure. What specific memories do you have?’

      Joseph’s voice is vaguely distant when it comes back, as if he is searching his memory while he forms his words.

      ‘Her cheating had got to be too much. I couldn’t take it any more. I felt betrayed. All a guy ever wants is a woman to stand by his side, and if she can’t do that …’

      ‘How did you know she was cheating?’

      ‘It’s hard to pinpoint how a man knows these things. You just do. The good times were good, but a wife is supposed to be there for you. Not just for the picnics and the nights out on the town, but all the time. Even when you’re down, when life’s hard.’

      ‘And she wasn’t always there for you?’

      ‘It was like she’d be gone when I needed her most. Consistently. When I really needed her. The treats and kisses and tendernesses didn’t make up for that. I’d hit tough times and she’d be nowhere to be seen. Evaporated.’

      ‘Almost like she wasn’t—’

      Pauline had so hoped he would finish the sentence, the way it needed to be finished. Instead, he’d simply cut her off, continuing his rant.

      ‘On the rare occasions she would actually stick around for the tough moments, she’d go all silent.’ His tone grows more resentful. ‘Cutesy quiet and noncommittal. She wouldn’t stand by me when I needed her.’

      ‘That … that can’t have been easy, Joseph.’

      ‘I guess I was fine for the romantic trysts and jaunts, but I wasn’t enough to satisfy her all the time. When things were difficult, she didn’t want a damned thing to do with me.’ He hesitates. ‘That’s how I knew there was someone else. Someone she was more attached to. And, well, after a while you reach a point where you’ve had enough.’

      The recording captures the long lull that Pauline had permitted in their conversation. Finally, in more subdued tones, she speaks. ‘Let’s talk in more concrete terms, just for the moment. The actual killing, Joseph. Tell me what you remember about it.’

      ‘More than’s in all your precious court transcripts?’ he mocks. It’s clear he has no respect for whatever is in the court documentation.

      ‘Yes, more than what they contain. Tell me in your 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

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