Andrew Klavan - The truth of the matter

The circle grew bigger… bigger… It was coming toward me… and now…

I stepped through it…

At first, I only heard voices:

“So you did see Alex last night?”

“Yes. Like I said.”

“And you argued with him?”

“Yeah. I guess you could call it that. He argued with me anyway.”

Then I saw. I was standing at the edge of a small room with dingy white soundproofing on the walls. There was a video camera hanging in one corner. It stared down at three people sitting at a small table and…

Weirder and weirder and weirder. Weird to the point of super-weirdness. Because now, to my amazement, I saw that one of those people sitting at the table was me. Right: I was standing at the edge of the room watching- and what I was watching was myself sitting at the small table. And if that sounds bizarre, believe me, it was.

The person sitting next to me at the table was my dad. Sitting across from us was none other than Detective Rose.

So now I knew where I was-where and when. This was the interrogation room of the police station in my hometown of Spring Hill. It was the day after Alex’s murder, the first day I couldn’t remember. Only I was remembering it. Or at least I was seeing it-seeing it happen right there in front of me.

As soon as I’d heard about Alex’s murder, I had told my dad about how I’d seen him the night before and how we’d gone for a drive together. Alex had been angry because he’d heard I was getting friendly with Beth and he and Beth had had sort of a thing for a while. He was angry about that and about a lot of other things too.

Anyway, my dad had taken me to the police station to see Detective Rose, who was investigating the murder.

All this was stuff Beth had told me. But now I was remembering for myself. Not just remembering, but actually seeing what happened right in front of my eyes.

“What did you argue about?” Rose said, talking to the me who was at the table. His voice wasn’t friendly or unfriendly. The flat features of his face weren’t mean or nice. His eyes were watchful, that’s all. He seemed to be studying my face as I answered him, searching it for any signs that would reveal whether I was lying or telling the truth.

I watched me too. It was strange to see myself from a distance like that-to see myself as I was a year ago. I was about six feet tall, thin but with broad shoulders and a lot of muscle def from all the karate and workouts I did. My face was lean and serious with moppy brown hair falling over the forehead. My eyes looked innocent, open, honest, direct, and unafraid. I wondered if they looked the same today.

I-the me in the past-shrugged at Rose’s question. “We argued about… stuff, you know. Alex was feeling bad about his folks getting divorced. He and his mom were having money problems and things. He was having all kinds of doubts about… you know, life, his faith, the things he believed in. He said he had some new friends who were telling him that everything he’d learned in the past was all untrue. I guess we argued about that too.”

“He said he had new friends?” said Rose. “Did he tell you who these new friends were?”

I shook my head. Back then, I had no idea what Alex was talking about. Now I knew that one of his “friends” was Mr. Sherman, the history teacher. I knew that Sherman had taken advantage of Alex’s unhappiness and uncertainty and used them to recruit him into the Home-landers. But our conversation that night had convinced Alex that he’d been making a mistake. He tried to pull out of the Homelanders-and Sherman stabbed him to death so he couldn’t reveal the organization’s existence.

As I say, I knew all that now, but the scene I was watching took place a year ago, and the Charlie I was watching had no clue what was going on.

“All right, so you argued,” Rose said to him-said to me, I mean, “and then Alex ran into the park.”

“Yeah,” I told him. “I tried to stop him…”

“But you didn’t follow him?”

“No. I knew he didn’t want to talk to me anymore. I just went home.”

“So you’re telling me you weren’t even aware he was murdered in the park just a few minutes after he walked away from you?”

“Of course I wasn’t aware of it. I didn’t hear about it until this morning. Believe me, if I was aware of it, I wouldn’t have kept it secret.”

“And you don’t know why he was whispering your name when he died?”

“No. No. I wish I did.”

Well, just in case things weren’t weird enough-what with me watching from the sidelines and the younger me sitting at the table-things now got even weirder. Because now, while I was still in two places at once, suddenly, I could actually feel what the younger me was feeling, experience what he was experiencing. I felt his sorrow-my sorrow-at Alex’s death. I felt his guilt-my guilt-about fighting with Alex the last time we’d been together. I felt confusion about what had happened afterward. Now it was as if I was watching the scene and living it at the same time.

I saw my younger self turn to my father. I saw my father give me a small smile, a small wink. “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “Don’t worry about anything. Just tell the truth and you’ll be fine.”

Again, it was as if I was living through two experiences at once. I felt my younger self reassured by my dad’s presence. I knew my dad would protect me, that he’d make sure the police didn’t make any mistakes. And at the same time, I wished I could reach out from where I was and touch his shoulder, get him to turn to me, get him to see that I was still there, still alive. I missed him. I missed my mom too. I wanted to tell them that, tell them that I missed my life so much and was trying so hard to find my way back to them.

“Would you be willing to give us a DNA sample…?” Detective Rose was saying at the table.

But as he spoke, I felt myself being pulled away from him, pulled back into the darkness beyond the edge of the scene, back and back…

Then, suddenly, horribly, there was nothing but pain again, nothing but the coiling, fiery snake of pain lashing and thrashing and biting inside me. For a single, agonized instant, I was in the chair again in the Panic Room…

And then, again, I-the soul I-was drifting free…

I was standing on a sidewalk, outside a movie theater. It was nighttime. The show must’ve just been over. People were coming out the doors, back into the street. I could hear the murmur of their voices as they talked about the show.

I looked around me. I knew this place. It was a dingy old theater out near the airport. They played older films here, films that had left the first-run theaters closer to the center of town. Kids only came to this theater when they wanted to get away from the usual crowd, like when they wanted to go on a date and not run into any of their friends.

I watched the people coming out of the movie. I knew what I was going to see a second before I saw it-I knew who I was going to see too: me. Me and Beth-we were about to come out onto the sidewalk together.

We had been seeing each other for a while now, meeting out by the river to walk together and talk. Because of Alex’s murder, it somehow didn’t feel right for us to go out on an ordinary date. But finally we had. We had come here. We had come to see the movie-or at least to be alone together in the dark theater.

And now I saw us, trailing out behind the rest of the people.

Beth had told me about this too. But she hadn’t told me about how nervous I was. She couldn’t have because she hadn’t known. But just like in the interrogation room, I could feel the scene inside me even as I witnessed it outside me. And the nervousness was huge. Unbelievable. I was practically terrified about what I was going to say.