Robert Coover - Gerald's Party

‘He actually cut them out and ate the bloody things!’ As though finding it distasteful, the Inspector took the cold pipe out of his mouth. ‘The point was, I couldn’t pin down the exact moment when it happened. I could not even imagine it! One moment the knife was outside the flesh’ — he demonstrated this, using his pipestem against his stomach — ‘and then it was inside: but what was that moment in between when it was neither? ’ I too could not imagine this. I could not even make the effort. Ros was wholly on my mind again, and I could only recall the poignancy of her hugs, the taut silkiness of the flesh around her own navel, the rich juicy flow that filled my mouth as her clitoris stabbed my tongue, and now (in another version, of course, it was not a clock, but —) — ‘ Stabbed! ’ he cried. ‘What does it mean? If we say, he, the murderer, is stabbing her, there are at least twenty ways of verifying it, but if we say he …’ I had started violently with his first word, thinking I must have been talking out loud, and now he watched me intently. ‘Is something—?’

‘No! Sorry, I … I was just thinking about your idea of time …’ Trying to anyway. I couldn’t seem to concentrate. The two policemen were putting Howard’s shoes back on. His crushed spectacles stared up at me from the carpet beside a roadmap of Provence and a torn zipper. ‘A stage, you said, a kind of space — like a fourth dimension—’

‘Not fourth — first! ’

‘Yes, well, I mean the idea of events just being there, waiting for us, like stations we keep pulling into—’

‘That’s correct. Crimes, for example …’ He peered up at me over his handlebar moustache and white silk scarf, his pate gleaming in the subdued light. He had returned his pipe to the ashtray and seemed to be shuffling watches like cards. We were alone, his two assistants having hauled Howard from the room, feet first, like an old sack. ‘ Murders …’

‘And — and their solutions.’ It was very quiet. Fred’s soup bubbled. Roger, fallen on his neck, stared at us vacantly. I lowered my voice. ‘Or not: the failure to solve them. Also there waiting. Which would make us just passive observers, and you seem, well … more willful than that …’

‘On the contrary. Will, free or otherwise, is just as much a hallucination as flowing time is, or change or meaning. Detectives, like criminals, are born, not made, for even the social forces that might be said to shape them are also part of their birthright. When we in the trade speak, for example, of the “perpetrator” of a crime, we are really speaking not of this or that actor like some character in a play, but rather of certain innate traits and tendencies borne by various individuals like seed, like wavelengths, like the properties of theorems — my curiosity, for instance, or your solicitude and hedonism.’

‘I don’t think that’s—’

‘Don’t take offense. I’m merely trying to say that I am swept along by the seeming restlessness of matter like everyone else. My investigative labors may define me, but they do not account for my success. Indeed, my most famous solutions to crimes have come to me quite unexpectedly, like gifts. Visions. I use science as a discipline, but only to prepare myself as a vessel for intuition. This is the secret of all great detective work, I might say, and the most important clues, therefore, are not facts, but rather what you might call ‘impressions of radiance’ — like my rather luminous apprehension here tonight of some unspeakable crime-within-a-crime, some dalliance, as it were — or so I feel — with oblivion itself! ’ He watched me with that same close intensity as before, and I felt my mouth twitch involuntarily into a half-smile.

‘But then—’

He looked away as though dismissing me, concentrating instead on his watches, enlarging upon his diagram: he was crossing his arrow now with a perpendicular row. ‘I don’t know what it is that perceives these things. I don’t feel any personal identity — any “I” or “me” — I feel simply that I stand at a crossroads on this map of time — that I am a crossroads, that we all are — do you follow?’ He glanced up, transfixing me with the vehemence of his gaze. ‘I realize that it is not easy, that it takes an exceptional mind …’ I chose not to contradict him, but as he returned to his display, sliding the watches from the arrow’s leading edge into the middle, adding others to form a kind of field, fretted with straps and chains and buckles, I recalled a history teacher we once had who accused us of ‘attending to the head of the arrow to the neglect of its tail’ — which at the time we all took as a dirty joke. ‘What I want — all I want, really — is to see time! ’ He hovered tensely above the field of watches, his hands outspread as though to scoop them all up, seeming almost to tremble with greed — and indeed they did give an illusion, all ticking, clicking, or pulsing away, of a plenitude. ‘Yes …’ He concentrated on them, his eyes narrowing. ‘Now …’ Beads of perspiration appeared on his brow and the top of his head. I, too, concentrated, afraid to move. ‘Eeny,’ he intoned gravely, his hands quivering rigidly in fiercely contested restraint, ‘meeny, miny …’ He reached, as though through some dense magnetic storm, for a watch. ‘ Mo! ’ My wife’s.

‘Hey, look, Leonard! It’s our old buddy Nigel!’ Soapie shouted from the doorway, blowing in like a sudden gale: the Inspector stiffened momentarily as though buffeted, then sat back, folding his arms. Fred and Bob, who had dragged Howard out, now dragged him in again: ‘Excuse us, Chief — they wanta restage this guy’s examination so as to get some photos.’ Pardew, his brow damp, nodded his permission, watching Soapie warily as the reporter kicked through the papers on the floor in his tattered sneakers, picked up a Mexican rattle — a dried gourd that looked like a tattooed testicle — and shook it, peered into Bob’s microscope, and sniffed specimen bottles, the two policemen meanwhile hauling Howard, his feet trailing behind him, over to the work area and opening him up again. Soapie tested a magnet out on a row of needles and probes, then on Leonard’s crotch — Leonard rolled his eyes, still firing away, his feet seeming to lift off the floor and fall back again — finally on the display of watches on the desk between Pardew and me. ‘What’s old shortcake trying to palm off on you here, Ger?’ Soapie laughed as a watch jumped to his magnet. He pocketed the watch and magnet and, admiring the photos hanging from the line, lit up a cigarette, Leonard’s flashgun popping away the while like magnesium bubbles. ‘So whaddaya got, Nige? Who done it?’

‘We have several leads,’ replied the Inspector frostily, ‘but we are still pursuing our inquiries.’

‘Yeah? Well, what about fatty here with the red tie and inky dingdong?’

‘What about him?’

‘You know, abusing the habeas corpus like that, like maybe he was returning to what you might call the scene of the crime — and then, he’s obviously banged to the bung—’

Inspector Pardew leaped to his feet. ‘We are not jumping to any half-baked conclusions! We are not peddling headlines here — we are seeking the truth! ’

‘Awright, awright, calm down—!’

‘Holistic criminalistics rejects these narrow localized cause-and-effect fictions popularized by the media! Do you think that poor child in there died because of some arbitrary indeterminate and random act? Oh no, nothing in the world happens that way! It is just by such simple atavistic thinking that we fill our morgues and prisons, missing the point, solving nothing!’ Pardew stormed about the room, waving his arms. Soapie whipped out his notebook. ‘Murder, like laughter, is a muscular solution of conflict, biologically substantial and inevitable, a psychologically imperative and, in the case of murder, death-dealing act that must be related to the total ontological reality! ’