Sergio De La Pava - Personae

The issue recurred with a frequency that would’ve startled the layman. Her first case in fact was a straightforward, obvious suicide that wasn’t. She had gone from Police Academy straight to Homicide which ascension without precedent led to many vitriolic memos and snide less-than-fully-exhaled asides, a situation not helped by her steadfast refusal to classify the fifteen-year-old hanging in his bedroom near a suicide note a self-immolation. Tame spent two uninterrupted days in the boy’s room before ultimately declaring the note unpersuasive. Six weeks later and the boy’s headmaster, yes that crowd, is now undeniably the true author of the note and Tame is ensuring his head doesn’t bang her car, all those cameras watching, and certain people can’t believe their good fortune when they connect the compelling dots and also can’t fast enough seek to promote her insane backstory to the front but without even minimal cooperation from Helen Tame who when she is shortly thereafter called into a room with that year’s version of Furillo and he says something along the lines of natural police with her as referent shoots a terminal look the speaker’s way along with unmistakable verbal invitations that are more like commands to never do that again, that compliment thing, the inescapable conclusion then properly drawn that a new but central tenet had emerged whose force would echo unabated thereafter: you do not condescend to Helen Tame.

So if not suicide what then? Tame reviewed every Manhattan DOA that came through and she couldn’t fully shake the notion that Doe was the culmination or worse continuation of a pattern but this was in reality a rare mental misstep threatening to form because what Tame was actually sensing was the sameness all humanity reduced to.

Now of course Helen Tame was free to do as she wished. Meaning free to say: very little mystery attaches to a centenarian’s death and this case is not The or even an exception . Could even have added: I am still technically employed by a police department ostensibly to engage in what I chose to make my life’s work, namely the investigation and subsequent solution of any ambiguous appearance of manmade Death and any time I devote to the unambiguous and inhuman is of necessity subtracted from that work with a resulting potential increase in the kind of undetected malfeasance that so offends me. She did not say that.

Because of course that same freedom entailed the opposite right. So she was entitled to say: I want to know Everything before I die. So when coincidence connects me with a question of even the slightest interest that is not readily answerable that, standing alone, is ample justification for an obsessive pursuit of a satisfactory resolution with the concept satisfactory determined only by me and also these two matters, the great offense at undetected malfeasance and the know-everything want, are related in that both stem from a great fear, some would say realization, that we are all there is which puts us in the position of something like God, which is not some great thing despite how it sounds at first blush because of the obscene demands it places on human justice and knowledge.

Something like that was really what she said and the reasons for that were manifold. First, far as any concern over an increase in the volume of bloodshed due to Tame’s distraction went, the discovery of John Doe dovetailed nicely with a perhaps disheartening discovery that Helen had only recently conceded. And this discovery will likely seem obvious if you forget we are talking about Helen Tame being the discoverer because it amounts to the realization that her work possessed no actual deterrent value. So even though she had raised her art to a height not seen before or since, this raising in fact very rarely prevented anything and the number of lifeless bodies requiring explanatory thought was, it seemed, a feature of the universe that only appeared to vary when looked at from the micro level and the macro truth was an equational constant translatable into prose thusly: people will kill people.

Although there was a more encouraging corollary stating that when the above happened the identity of the person actively contributing to the constant was almost always easily discernible from the identity of the less-willing contributor. So what was overwhelmingly required was very little logical deduction or artistic imaginative leaps. Instead you simply let it be amorphously known that you wished to know more then registered surprise at how many wanted you to know more although not for attribution until you knew what needed knowing so picked up the appropriate people then watched them go on the record for their own self-interest until the star of the show inevitably confesses with predictable results. In essence the badge and the sentencing statutes did the work for you.

A monkey could do it, Helen wishfully thought, and most of her colleagues were at least slightly above monkey. She was free to leave in other words. And even though to an objective observer her internal state appeared to be one of extreme emotional distress brought on by performance pressure, in fact, everything being famously relative, Helen did feel something like freedom and moreover understood intuitively that this feeling, decades in waiting, would swell even further once she had solved John Doe.

Truth is Tame mentally engaged in all the preceding because she was in trouble. If something you need is dependent on a process you engage in regularly, almost instinctively, then you might find that this process has suddenly become complicated by hesitation and overthought where reflex once predominated. Of course you wouldn’t be able to tell if that’s what was occurring or if in fact the latest was a special problem that was taxing you more not because of attendant circumstances but because of greater inherent difficulty. And it was that kind of thing she found herself debating internally instead of progressing on the ultimate question. So that it was not enough she was having trouble solving John Doe she now also had to face the very real possibility that there was no genuine difficulty to the matter only a kind of self-sabotagey reluctance to complete something she’d denoted as conclusory where truth is Helen, almost since birth, had a real problem with endings and their causal anxiety and contributing to that to make the self-sabotage possibility very real was that she’d recently caught herself doing just that once or twice.

Trouble was trouble whatever the source and it occurred to Helen that either way the breakthrough and subsequent solution were going to come whenever they chose and a form of disinterested expectation was maybe called for. Then she remembered it was precisely that line of thinking she’d committed herself to rejecting whenever it threatened to form and also that the self-realization of one’s underlying motives remained the truest most effective means of mental progress [6] fn Helen Tame understood this on an intellectual level as well as something like that could be understood. However, this understanding had never yet resolved itself into an explanation of her uncommon interiority, why she never felt stillness. so that if in fact she was conflicted about solving Doe then establishing that and becoming unconflicted was the quickest path to the solution; only that kind of self-realization was a form of work and like all work had to be affirmatively undertaken and struggled with, there being no such thing as the passive reception of quality workproduct. So Helen ratcheted up the concentration even more although the only outward proof of that was her eyes closing.

Three hours later Helen Tame rose from where she’d lain and almost mournfully walked out of that office and eventually out onto the surreal street. There, as if moving through a painting, she gravitated back to the apartment; only now she thought of it not as the apartment where more than a century of life had culminated in a sightless stare from a kitchen floor but rather the place where a recovering woman had led her daughter by the hand to make a final delivery.