Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

I looked out the picture window at the bare dogwood trees flanking the bench. I stretched. Dr. Koenig stared down at his notepad, decorated with scribblings from our last session.

“Speaking of Allie,” he said.

I tensed.

“Where is she?”

I sighed. “She didn’t want to come.”

“Why not?”

“Burlington Women’s Club is serving dinner to the homeless at Loaves and Fishes tonight. She’s helping set up. You know, peel potatoes, boil potatoes, boil pasta. Chop up cabbage. I asked her to come meet with you and she said she’s too busy. She asked me to help her feed the homeless and I said I’m too busy. Guess we’re even.”

Bullshit. Allie would indeed help out at Loaves and Fishes this evening, but not until four this afternoon. I simply hadn’t asked her. The idea of seeing her in here with Dr. Koenig bothered me, and it wasn’t just a reluctance to show her too much of my vulnerability. Things, I had realized, were getting worse for me, not better. I didn’t want him getting under her hood, too; he hadn’t helped me worth a dime.

Yet here you are, Bobby observed.

Because I’m a narcissistic prick , I replied, and all we do in here is talk about me.

“I find your fixation on getting my wife in here a little misplaced,” I said. “There’s a lot going on with me that I think we need to focus on. Especially now.”

“Such as?”

“Pinnix and Ramseur. And that guy I whacked the other day, the one who tried to mug me.”

“Yes. When you suddenly transformed into Kevin the Ninja Lawyer.”

“Right. Notice I don’t know his name.”

Dr. Koenig nodded once.

“I don’t know his name because the police don’t know his name. No record, nobody recognizes the guy. I can understand that, now, but you know what else? Nobody knows who Pinnix and Ramseur are, either. We’ve got these names for them, but nobody in the police department could tell Craig exactly how they figured out those names. Because the only ID either one of them carried were membership cards to some adult video store in Durham. And those cards have only numbers, no names.”

I leaned forward.

“So help me out here, Doc. How did the cops ID them? Where did those names come from?”

“Fingerprints. The state’s DNA database.”

“Negative and double-negative,” I said, shaking my head. “No entries for either man on either the fingerprint or DNA database. These guys busted into my house, tried to kill me, had it in their heads to rape my family, but they’d never been arrested. They’d never set foot in a jail or anywhere else they could have been fingerprinted. Isn’t that strange?”

“It is,” he agreed. His face remained impassive, unintrigued. I wondered if he, too, might be a golem.

“So I’ve got this crazy idea,” I said.

I licked my lips. This was harder than it sounds, with my tongue all dry and tacky.

“You ever heard of a golem?”

He blinked at me.

“I have.” His gaze felt, his voice sounded, as flat as old Coke.

I took a deep breath.

“This is just an idea, now,” I said, “just me thinking out loud. But what if… what if these guys were sent ?”

“Sent by who? By someone out to get you?”

“Yes.”

“Who would that be?”

“I don’t know, but he calls himself the Bald Man.”

He looked down at the paper, scribbled. His lips pursed, and his goatee twitched. I noticed that his beard stubble continued only to a point on his cheeks where it suddenly disappeared, giving way there to older but smooth-shaven skin. He had shaved his beard stubble to accentuate the angles of his face, making him look thinner than he perhaps was. Even kale-eating psychotherapists, I observed, aren’t above a touch of baloney.

“Why would the Bald Man be out to get you? Why would anyone want to send golems after you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I thought of Angela then, her catatonic voice, her stumbling walk. “Why do bad things happen to anybody? How does God pick the ones who make the rest of us feel lucky and flock to Him for protection? Can’t say I understand how that works. Just that I’m blessed.”

“You’re blessed.”

I nodded. “Oh, yeah. On so many levels. All you have to do is look at what happened in my house last February and you’re like, somebody upstairs loves this asshole. And He took care of me again just this past Tuesday. Think about it: how many chairborne commando lilly-white lawyers stab muggers? How often does the mouse eat the cat? That’s God, man. Looking out for me.”

I’d been smiling, but it faded now.

“And I just wonder if maybe the Bald Man knows that. And maybe this whole thing is bigger than any of us really understand. Maybe I’m caught in a grudge match between this guy, this thing , whatever you want to call him, and a much higher power.”

“You’re Job,” he said. “From the Bible.”

I stared at him.

“No,” I said, after some thought. “Job got ass-fucked. I got a writeup in Southern Rifleman. ”

He pursed his lips again. Another glance down at that notepad.

“What’re you thinking?” I asked.

“I think we need to go back to February,” he answered. “And discuss this whack to your head.”

Once again, I left my therapist’s office feeling decidedly worse than I had when I walked in. Fortunately, I had some gears I could shift.

An hour before I met with Dr. Koenig, the Clerk of Court appointed me as guardian ad litem to an incompetency proceeding involving the Department of Social Services and a young man named Brandon Cross. With an interim hearing only two days away, I had to visit him as soon as possible to advise him of his rights. I had decided that I would do this after seeing Dr. Koenig this afternoon, partly for efficiency’s sake—my shrink’s office stood at the halfway point between my office and Brandon’s facility—and partly because I needed to see someone more miserable than Yours Truly.

Because Brandon Cross was worse off than me. Much, much worse off. He showed me what crazy meant, assuring me that I had a ways to go before I ever caught up with him.

Brandon ended up in a lockdown unit at Magnolia Plantation in northeast Burlington. While the name of this place evoked images of Tara from Gone with the Wind , the reality consisted of something entirely different. Magnolia Plantation was an ugly girl with a pretty name, a squat, flat-roofed facility of mildewy brick that looked suspiciously like a converted elementary school. Four long halls shot out of a central hub that had probably once housed a library, gymnasium or cafeteria but now contained the administrative and physical therapy offices. Down the corridors, the patients lived two to a room in pods that someone had carved from old classrooms. Industrial tile floors and cinderblock walls amplified every hoot, holler and footfall to create a discordant sonic background that made me wonder how any of these guys slept.

And the smell. I couldn’t figure out which of Magnolia Plantation’s features sucked the worst; the drab walls and floors, the Department of Corrections-esque soundtrack or the assaultive bleached air that tried and failed to cover the scents of mildew, body odor and urine. If insanity had its own scent, this was it: poor moisture controls, armpits, feet and pee sandwiched in between Clorox and Pine-Sol. Bon appetit.

I introduced myself to the duty nurse as Brandon Cross’s court-appointed attorney and she directed me to Room 408. She buzzed me into the men’s lockdown wing, where psychiatric patients of all ages wandered a Linoleum hallway. In the second pod on the right, I found my client.