Jonathan Santlofer - Anatomy of Fear

“Stay with me, Laurie.”

“Yes,” she said, “yes. The hat-it was one of those knit caps, you know, that you just pull on. It covered the top of his head, and-” Her eyes were tight slits of concentration. “It just covered the tops of his ears.”

I sketched it in and turned the pad around.

“Jesus,” she whispered, blinking, as if she wanted to look and not look at the same time. “It’s…him.”

“Is there anything else you can remember about his face, anything that I should change?”

She shook her head no, holding her breath.

I touched her hand again. “He’s on paper now, remember? Not in your head.”

She looked at me, good eye narrowed to match the bruised one. “He’ll always be in my head.”

“Try closing your eyes.”

“What’s the point?”

“Maybe he won’t be there.”

I could see she was scared to try.

“C’mon,” I said, without pushing too hard.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I still see him.”

“But he’s fading, right?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe he is.”

“And soon he’ll be gone.” I hoped my face was not betraying the lie. No way he’d ever leave her. Certain pictures remain etched on the brain. I knew that to be a fact, but I didn’t say it. I told her she’d done a great job, that she’d be okay.

When she left I stayed behind, got lost in the drawing for a while, added shading, blending areas with soft cardboard stumps or my fingertips, attempting to give the face more dimension and life, then I sat back and assessed it.

It wasn’t bad, not exactly art with a capital A. Not science, either. It was sort of like me: not quite a cop, not quite an artist, more like I was swimming around the periphery of each.

I took the sketch into a hallway, sprayed it with fixative so it wouldn’t smudge, and dropped it onto Detective Schmid’s desk.

Afterward, I stopped into the men’s room, washed the graphite off my hands, splashed my face with cold water, and felt a chill. It was one of those bad feelings you can’t explain until the bad thing happens and then you think: Was that it?

The room, a windowless cell of his own design, is like his mind, focused to the point of obsession, shut down to everything and anything other than this moment, the only sound his pencil scratching against paper hard and fast, flecks of graphite catching in the fine blond hairs of his muscled forearms, until lines become forms and imagery takes shape-the bodies everywhere, strewn across the pavement like broken marionettes, arms and legs at impossible angles.

But how to depict cries and groans?

He stops to consider the question.

Shattered bodies, cracked sidewalks, exploding cars he can replicate. But cries? He doesn’t think so. Of course the sound track always comes later. True Dolby surround-sound. The real thing.

He stares at the drawing, pale blue eyes riveted.

No, he is getting ahead of himself. This one is for later.

He exchanges the drawing for a folder, puffs at imaginary specks of dust, begins to skim notes of timed entrances and exits until his visual memory is triggered and he sees the man coming out of the brownstone in split-second fragments.

Yes, this is what he is after, what he needs to do now.

He swipes his gloved fingers across a clean page in the sketch pad and sets to work.

One fragment. Then another.

But the picture is incomplete, the rest of it stuck in a synapse.

Damn.

He paces across the room, drops to the floor, does a quick set of push ups, and now, now, with his heart pumping fast and breath coming in one tiny explosion after another, he sees more of it, bits and pieces that he hurries to get down on paper before they are lost.

But still they remain fragments.

Why can’t it ever be born in its entirety?

Must he always get lost to find his way? He tries to locate the part of himself that knows this is simply how it is, that his mind works like some fucked-up computer gathering bits of data that will eventually coalesce.

He takes a deep breath and flips to a clean page, draws and redraws, each time a bit more information added.

Yes, that’s it, there it is.

The one picture is finished; the relic no longer headless, he sets it aside. He is halfway there, one part of the process complete.

But another image is already pressing against his frontal lobe demanding attention.

Pencils sharpened quickly, electric impulses from his brain telegraphing tiny muscles in his hand to make specific and nonspecific strokes, another enigmatic drawing begins.

But what is it?

His cognitive power to recognize has not yet caught up to his hand.

Trust it. You have been here before.

The pencil starts up again like an extension of his hand, a simple repetitive mark-making machine, stroke after stroke until finally…there it is.

He sits back, gloves stained with graphite, adrenaline pumping in his veins, and surveys his work.

The drawings have made sense of it.

Now he knows what to do and how he will do it.

For Christ’s sake, keep those people back.”