Andrew Klavan - The last thing I remember

The fluorescent light crackled and flickered. The cold smile played at the detective’s lips again. “Yeah, you keep telling me,” he said. “You told me when we first brought you in. He was your friend. Except he threatened you, didn’t he? You were going out with his girl and he didn’t like it, and him and a couple of his boys threatened to bounce you around for it.”

“Oh yeah, but that was…”

“And then you took a drive together and you fought with him.”

“We didn’t fight, exactly, we…”

“Witnesses saw it, Charlie. They heard you yelling.”

I looked away from that cool stare. I remembered that much. I remembered Alex and I yelling at each other and the lady with the dog turning at the sound of our loud, angry voices.

“Then you followed him into the park,” said Detective Rose. “And you stabbed him to death.”

“No!” I shook my right fist so that my handcuff rattled against the rail. The words came tearing out of my mouth in a shout. “I didn’t.”

“How do you know? I thought you couldn’t remember anything.”

“I remember that!”

“Oh, that’s convenient. You just forgot everything else, everything but your innocence.”

“I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. I’m not a killer!”

The fluorescent light went out for half a second, and when it came back on the detective’s face had changed. The cool smile was gone and an angry sneer had taken its place beneath the thin mustache.

“You want to know something funny, Charlie?” he said. “I been a cop a long time. Worked the big city before I came to Spring Hill. I’ve arrested a lot of people, a lot of bad people, some really bad. But I never had any feelings about them one way or the other. They did what they did, I did what I did, we all knew the rules of the game. But you, Charlie…” He stood up, pushing the chair away from him so it scraped against the floor. “With you it was different.” He sneered down at me. His mouth worked as if he wanted to spit out a bad taste. “I don’t like you, Charlie. And I’ll tell you why. It’s not ’cause you lied to me. All you murdering punks lie, that’s nothing. But you lied to me and I believed you. That’s what it is. You looked me in the eye with that all-American face of yours, and I believed you were just who you said you were, just who everybody said you were. The decent kid. The kid who gets it. The kid who works hard and does right. The kid who walks like a man-like a man oughta walk, anyway. I believed you were that kid, Charlie. You fooled me. And I don’t know, but somehow I can’t forgive you for that. And I’ll never let it happen again.”

“Look at me,” I said to him. I pleaded with him. I lifted my hands so the handcuff on my right wrist pulled tight. “Please, Detective Rose, look at me. I’m scarred, bruised, beaten up. There are burns on me… look!” I tried to twist my handcuffed arm to show him. “Right there. Burns. Something happened to me. You can see that! I was captured. There were people… in the woods. A whole compound. They called themselves Homelanders. They hurt me. They tried to kill me. Why would I make it up?”

He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “You’ve been making things up since the first time I talked to you. Everything you say is made up. Far as I can tell, your whole life is a lie.”

“If you could just… call my parents. Really-they’ll tell you…”

With a loud snap, the fluorescent light flashed off and on. In that split second of darkness, Detective Rose leapt forward so that the next time I saw him, he was right up against the table, looming over me. At the same moment, he slapped his hand angrily down on the table.

“Your parents aren’t gonna help you,” he said through his teeth. “You were tried as an adult, convicted as an adult. You got twenty-five years to life for murder, and they’re sure to tack on more ’cause you ran away.”

“I didn’t do anything!” I cried up at him. “I don’t remember anything! I don’t know what’s happening! Please! Please!”

Despair flooded up through me. The fluorescent light flickered and snapped. The handcuffs rattled as I leaned my elbows on the table and buried my face in my hands.

“Please,” I said again. “Somebody’s gotta believe me.”

But when I looked up, Detective Rose had moved away from me to the door. He was still sneering. Shaking his head as if he was disgusted by what a low creature I was.

“It’s going to be a pleasure to take you back to prison, Charlie,” he said. “And I plan to make personally certain that you don’t get out again until you’re an old, old man.”

A Voice in the Crowd The granite-faced deputy came and took me back to my cell. He brought me a breakfast of hash and coffee. I was hungry enough to eat it. It lay on my stomach like lead.

When I was done, I sat on the edge of the cot. I stared down at the cell’s stone floor.

It’s a funny thing when despair gets to you. It doesn’t even feel like despair. You don’t think to yourself: Oh, I have no hope. Oh, I give up. Oh, there’s nothing I can do. That’s just everyday complaining. That’s just feeling sorry for yourself.

Real despair is different. It creeps up on you in disguise. It comes as a kind of sleepiness, a kind of heavy sadness that weighs you down. It makes you lazy. It makes you just want to go along, drift with the current of events, drift and drift as if you were lying on a raft floating down a river on a sweet summer day. Whatever happens, you don’t fight it. You just go where events take you and then sit and wait for the next event to take you on.

That’s what I did. I sat and waited. I didn’t say to myself: Don’t give up. I didn’t say: Remember the Churchill Card. Never give in. I didn’t really say much of anything to myself anymore. I was just too tired. I was just waiting for the next thing. They were coming to take me to prison. I was going to be behind bars for the next twenty-five years, maybe more. What was the use in fighting it? No one would believe me. No one would help me. Nothing to do but just drift along.

After a while, I lay back on the cot and dozed.

I don’t know if I had another nightmare. Maybe I did. All I’m sure of is that suddenly my eyes were wide open and my heart was hammering in my chest and there was a clammy sweat on my face. I swallowed hard, staring up at the stone ceiling. A weird and terrible thought began to work its way into my mind.

Everything you say is made up. Your whole life is a lie.

The thought was kind of like a whisper, as if someone invisible were crouching next to me with his lips to my ear, whispering very low. The whisper was so low I didn’t really even hear the words at first. Slowly, they just sort of worked their way into my consciousness until I was aware of them.

Your whole life is a lie. That’s what Detective Rose had said to me.

And now the whisper was saying to me, What if he’s right? What if it’s true?

It was a good question, wasn’t it? What if Detective Rose was right? What if everything I thought was true was a lie and everything I thought was a lie was really true? I mean, what if I did kill Alex? What if I was a phony, just pretending to be a good guy when really I was the worst, the lowest, a killer? What if everything I believed about myself, everything I remembered about my life, was false? It was possible, wasn’t it? I mean, I couldn’t remember a whole year. How could I tell whether the things I did remember had actually happened?

Everything you say is made up. Your whole life…

I rolled up into a sitting position. I held my head in my hands and groaned.

It was then that the despair rose up inside me with its true face. That laziness, that heavy sadness, that sleepy passivity, waiting for the next thing to happen: the hopelessness had crept up on me like that-had worked its way inside me like a spy, like one of those spies that gets into a city and opens the gates for the enemy army to come charging in.