Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

Jesse towers over me by about twenty centimeters but looks thin enough to slip under a door. He looks the same in some ways since I last saw him, but vitally different in many others. When he was seventeen he was diagnosed with depression, at nineteen he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, at twenty his parents made an urgent call to the police for help. We got to the family house to find his father pinning Jesse against the floor, and his mother cradling his dead sister. He’s thirty-five now, and in the years between he’s been medicated and something must have worked, because now he’s clean-shaven with his hair neatly combed and, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t tried to eat anybody since his release. His clothes are tidy with his sleeves rolled up revealing darkly tanned forearms. He turns off the hose and turns toward me when he senses somebody staring.

“I know you from somewhere,” he says, “you’re either a doctor or a cop.”

“I’m not a doctor,” I tell him.

“You were there when I was arrested,” he says, and I’m impressed with his memory. “Officer somebody, right?” he says, smiling, and for a creepy moment I think he’s about to offer his hand, the same hand that dug into his sister to pull out the soft meat. He doesn’t.

“It’s detective now,” I tell him, figuring if I’m going to lie, I may as well give myself a promotion at the same time. “How you doing, Jesse?” I ask.

“Good. Things are good now,” he says, and they seem to be. The darkness that was in his eyes when we arrested him is gone, replaced by a light that the magic pills are giving him. “You know, the meds keep me in shape. Problem is the better they make me feel, the worse I feel about what I did to my sister, and that makes me want to stop taking them.”

Before I can say anything, he holds up his hand, full of calluses with dirt packed into the wrinkles in his palms. “Don’t worry, I know how that sounds, and I owe it to her to keep taking them. I owe it to my whole family to feel bad about what I done. Back then things were so different. There were so many voices and I could never sleep because they always kept me awake, so many I could never focus on them. Now the only voice I hear is my own. So why are you here? My therapist ask you to check up on me? I only missed the appointment because it was my sister’s birthday and I had to, you know, spend the day out at her grave.”

“I’m here to talk to you about Grover Hills.”

“Why?” he asks, for the first time sounding defensive.

“You recognize this guy?” I ask, holding up the sketch from the newspaper.

He nods. “That’s my dad,” he says. “He died a few years ago. Why do you have his picture?”

“It’s not your dad,” I tell him. “It’s a sketch of a man I’m looking for.”

“No, it’s definitely my dad. I recognize him.”

I fold the sketch back into my pocket. “Jesse, I want you to tell me what happened at Grover Hills.”

“I was sick when I was sent there. The doctors made me better.”

“What about the basement?”

He turns the hose back on and starts watering some of the plants. Water splashes off the ferns back toward him. It soaks into the plants and the soil and a string of water runs back down from the tip of the hose onto his hand and down his arm. Cartman tries whistling but he can’t do it, can only blow air hard through pursed lips. I fold the newspaper page into my pocket, then I pick up a section of the hose and bend it in half to kill the flow. He turns toward me and looks defeated, his eyes cast downward.

“The basement, Jesse.”

“What. . what basement?” he asks. “I don’t remember the basement.”

“It had a cell in it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says, refusing to look up.

“Is that where you got locked away when you couldn’t be controlled?”

“That’s. . that’s not what the basement was for.”

“What then?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You remember talking to Cooper Riley?”

He nods. “He wanted me to tell him about my sister and why I hurt her. He wanted to know what it was like for me growing up. He had lots of questions about my parents, the kind of questions that told me he thought part of my problem was them. I didn’t like him much.”

“You ever tell him about the basement?”

“Of course not. Nobody was allowed to mention it. Nobody would have believed me anyway, and if I had told him I would have been sent down there.”

I keep pressing him. “What went on in that room? You were forced to sleep in there, right?”

“Sometimes, but only a couple of times for me.” He wipes at some tears hanging on the edges of his eyes then sniffs loudly.

“Were you beaten down there?”

“In a sense.”

“What else happened?”

“What do you think?” he asks. “Some of us deserved it, I guess, for what we did. What happened down there, they were the kind of things we’d done to other people.”

“Please, Jesse, it’s important you tell me everything.”

“I’ve been reading the news and I know what you want. You’re looking for Cooper Riley and he never knew anything about the Scream Room,” he says, “and. .” He stops talking, realizing what he’s said. “Shit,” he says. “Please, please don’t tell anybody I told you.”

“The Scream Room?”

“I have to get back to work,” he says.

“Jesse, this is important. If you’ve been reading the newspapers, then you’ll know I’m looking for a missing girl.”

“I know,” he says. “That’s what we called it. That room. We called it the Scream Room.”

“You were sent down there and tortured?”

“Sometimes we were sent down there just as punishment. The room was to keep us in line. But other times the Twins would take us down there.”

“The Twins?”

“They were a pair of orderlies. They were identical in the way they liked to make people hurt,” he says. “A place like that, there were lots of people, you know? And the room wasn’t always a Scream Room, it’s like you said, it was used mostly to control people. The Twins used to charge people. They’d find relatives of those the patients had hurt and they’d offer them the chance for revenge. They’d make money on our pain. Other times they’d just take us down there for. . for what I think passed as fun. At least for them.”

“How often did this happen?” I ask.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t need to. I can see it in you.”

He’s right. I don’t believe him-but I do think he believes himself. Going out and finding family members and charging them for the thrill of revenge just doesn’t work in any kind of reality. Too many people would have to be pretty bloody fantastic at keeping such a big secret. None of this is getting me closer to finding Emma Green.

“Convince me,” I tell him. “How often did this happen?”

He shrugs. “All the time. People were always dying down there. A patient would be taken down there for an hour and come out dead on a stretcher.”

“And nobody knew?”

“Of course people knew, but nobody cared. It’s not hard to believe,” he says, but he’s wrong-it is hard to believe. “If it was your sister I’d killed and you had the chance to make me hurt for a hundred bucks or whatever it is they charged, wouldn’t you jump at it?”

I don’t know. It would depend on whether the person had faked their illness to get away with murder, or if they really were sick. That’s how I look at it now. Under the circumstances, who knows? Others would call the police or the health-care system. A story like that couldn’t get shut down no matter how hard everybody worked to contain it. It would spill out into the media, and a story like this would have been pure gold. It would have made all the papers across the country and been picked up internationally. It would have been big headlines.