Sergio De La Pava - Personae

“So you are leaning homicide.”

“You’re off tomorrow, when you get back it’ll be black.”

This thing where Detective Helen Tame casually said something like you’re off tomorrow even though Furillo had only an hour before even formed the intent to take the next day off and where he was certain he had not yet conveyed that information to another living being, that thing, Furillo had learned to ignore. When he didn’t, before he learned, it always ended with him feeling less than human even though Helen argued that one was never more fully human than when conforming perfectly with the highly predictable actions of humanity. Still the first few times someone looks at the position of your shoulders or the contents of your desk and extrapolatorily tells you some seemingly wildly unrelated truth it’s at least highly disconcerting.

“Well then,” he said. “It doesn’t seem right to end on such an easy case, maybe you should reconsider.”

“No, it feels conclusory. And far from easy. But I will stay here until it’s black and when you return the report will be on this desk explaining how it darkened and although it will be fairly voluminous it will be true , understand?”

“Not doubting you but how can you be so sure?”

“Because I already have everything I need save for time to sit in the dark and stew on it.”

“Look if this really is your last case then I have no doubt I’ll never see you again.”

“True.”

“So I have to know what you mean when you say something like that, how you can claim to have no doubt about something’s truth when it results from only thought or deduction or what you call artistic leaps. Because the truth I value comes from reports, scientific analyses, confessions, get it?”

“I didn’t hear you complaining about my artistic method on all those television programs with the fancy re-enactments.”

“I begged you to let me mention your name and credit you.”

“Please, this is our last interaction, don’t insult me during it.”

“Okay keep your methods to yourself, I doubt I could understand anyway, but keep employing them whatever you do. If you need more concessions we’ll work with you, whatever you need.”

“No.”

“No? Just no?” He hoped the desperation he was feeling, a desperation that stemmed from more than just the immeasurable loss to a unit whose function it was to identify and seize those who’d killed their fellow man or woman, wasn’t showing but how could it not? For example, one time it had seemed to be only the men of the unit in the break room which necessitated that the subject of various known women’s attractiveness arise and when it did, somehow, despite everyone’s palpable fear of her, Helen Tame came up. That Helen Tame was one of the most beautiful women in the world had long seemed obvious but that served not in the slightest to reduce the shock of hearing that fact spoken aloud then received with universal assent. It seemed unreal, truly, that this same woman was also undisputedly the highest-level practitioner of their craft and the oddness of this situation was meager in comparison with the experience of actually knowing and interacting with her. For further example that very break room discussion culminated in the single strangest sight Furillo had ever seen: Helen Tame standing in said room, where she’d apparently been all along, making no apparent effort to disguise or conceal herself yet clearly invisible to all, and here was the unsettling almost haunting part — looking so utterly almost mythically bored that Furillo didn’t even feel compelled to apologetically address her or otherwise interrupt the conversation in any way. Just saying that when a person like that tells you you’re seeing them for the last time it can give rise to a form of desperation.

But it was their last interaction and Furillo’s eventual exit meant Tame alone in his office, others milling about but never daring to interrupt her, as she ruminated on what she’d recently learned and the possible ways it could interact with everything everyone had learned to date about everything and everyone.

John Doe was a writer.

A writer is someone who writes, Tame had patiently [5] fn Being taken here is a narrative liberty. Helen Tame did not do this explaining patiently; Helen Tame did nothing patiently because now picture the least patient person you know and realize that Tame would make that person seem saintly were a comparison made. explained to Furillo when he objected that no agent, no prizes, no editor, no book deal, meant no writer. Similarly, see if you can follow, an artist creates art.

Of the three works attributable to Doe it was the last of these, ENERGEIAS, that was most susceptible to mystery and because Tame had been deprived of the mysterious for so long she could be said to have fixated on it. Her fixation really was on the subject of unfinished work and in particular those abated by death:

No less than The Aeneid was an unfinished work, one that Vergil wanted destroyed once he was gone.

Raphael, who was born on a Good Friday, incredibly died exactly thirty-seven years later on another Good Friday necessitating that his student finish The Transfiguration .

Mozart’s Requiem and Mahler’s Tenth Symphony but more relevant to Doe, Schubert’s Eighth Symphony and the continuing debate over whether it actually is unfinished.

To set the world aright. The work of Helen Tame would almost certainly remain unfinished.

Helen Tame, at moments like these, did not lead a well-rounded existence. Instead it could be said she attained a kind of fugue state in which, as a product, something like the life of John Doe, in particular his final moments, was revealed to her in exponentially increasing detail until it was as vivid and true as a G. E. Moorean hand in front of her face. It was a process she could only partially explain but one that had produced only success in its lifetime so she objected strenuously to even attempts at that partial explanation.

Here’s the partial explanation: To best arrive at something True one needn’t always limit oneself to intervening steps that are unproblematically so; instead a better process is one wherein probabilities are temporarily given almost as much weight as certainties until their cumulative effect creates a provisional truth that can not only harden into the real thing but then retroactively raise the level of what came before.

For example what a cat will do when it has a mouse.

An observer will see what’s come to be called play but if so the cruelest form of it ever devised during which a small living thing confronted by its much larger natural predator will periodically be allowed to believe that everything will be fine after all, that it will escape the violent end that seemed inevitable and resume its uncomplicated existence, only to suddenly receive a furiously sharp swat that extinguishes all hope and that in its constant repetition only prolongs the despair; and if you object with a fact, that the situation involves no actual malice but is instead more like an impassive demonstration of nature, you still have to ask yourself what kind of universe abides this as natural.

Helen Tame asked herself. John Doe had not admitted a visitor of any kind in over six weeks. During that time he had not left his apartment. His vision, so keen throughout the majority of his life that he’d only recently required even reading glasses, had been reduced to intermittent clarity from within a spreading opacity. He should not have been alone.

Such a person could have determined that an intentional death had many benefits, not the least of which would be the abrupt end of all anticipatory dread. Could have, true, but Tame didn’t think so: the state of his belongings, the textual evidence, even the position of the bankrupt.