Martin Amis - Night Train

We have been in here for fifty-five minutes. His head is down. As evidence, a confession will tend to lose its power in step with the length of the interrogation. Yes, your honor—after a couple of weeks in there, he came clean. But I am mentally ready to go on for six hours, for eight, for ten. For fifteen.

Say it, Trader. Just say it...Okay, I’m going to ask you to submit to a neutron-activation test. This will establish if you have recently used a firearm. Will you sit the polygraph? The lie-detector? Because I think you ought to know what the next stage is in all this. Trader, you’re going before a grand jury. Know what that is? Yes, I’m going to grand-jury you, Trader. Yes I am... Okay. Let’s start from the beginning. We’re going to go through all this a few more times.

He looks up slowly. And his face is clear. His expression is clear. Complicated, but clear. And suddenly I know two things. First, that he’s innocent. Second, that if he wants to, he can prove it.

As it happens, Detective Hoolihan, I do know what a grand jury is. It’s a hearing to establish whether a case is strong enough to go to trial. That’s all. You probably think I think it’s the Supreme Court. Same as all the other befuddled bastards that come through here. This is so... pathetic. Oh, Mike, you poor bitch. Listen to you. But it’s not Mike Hoolihan talking. It’s Tom Rockwell. And the poor sap ought to blush for what he’s just put you through. It’s also kind of great—I mean, this whole thing is also kind of great. Last week I sat down with maybe ten or twelve people, one after the other. My mother, my brothers. My friends. Her friends. I kept opening my mouth and nothing happened. Not a word. But I’m talking now and let’s please go on talking. I don’t know how much you’ve told me is just plain bullshit. I’m assuming the ballistics document is not a hoax or a forgery and I’ll have to live with what it says. Maybe you’ll be good enough to tell me now what’s true and what isn’t. Mike, you’ve tied yourself up into all kinds of knots trying to make a mystery of this thing. It’s garbage, as you know. Some little mystery, all neat and cute. But there’s a real mystery here. An enormous mystery. When I say I feel homicidal, I’m not lying. On the night she died my feelings were what they always were. Devoted, and secure. But now...Mike, this is what happened: A woman fell out of a clear blue sky. And you know something? I wish I had killed her. I want to say: Book me. Take me away. Chop my head off. I wish I had killed her. Open and shut. And no holes. Because that’s better than what I’m looking at.

If you peered in now, through the meshed glass, it wouldn’t seem such a strange way for things to end, in this room. Glimpsing this scene, a murder police would nod his head, and sigh, and move on.

Suspect and interrogator have joined hands on the table. Both are shedding tears.

I shed tears for him and tears for her. And also tears for myself I shed. Because of the things I’ve done to other people in this room. And because of the things this room has done to me. It’s pulled me into every kind of funny shape and size. It has left a coating on my body, everywhere, even inside, like the coating I used to expect to see, some mornings, all over my tongue.

I slept late and was woken around noon by another delivery from Colonel Tom. A dozen red roses—”with thanks, apologies, and love.” Also a sealed binder. Expedited, and very probably edited, by Colonel Tom, this was the autopsy report. I’d seen the movie. Now I had to read the review.

It took a couple of pots of coffee and half a package of cigarettes before I could swim free of the liver haze that had come down on me during the night, like gruel. I showered also. And it must have been close to two before I sat myself down on the couch in my terrycloth bathrobe. I have this tape I like that Tobe made up for me: Eight different versions of “Night Train.” Oscar Peterson, Georgie Fame, Mose Allison, James Brown. We think of it as a kind of hymn to the low rent. The rent’s nothing: I mean, you don’t notice it. You notice the night train but you don’t notice the rent. So I had that playing, softly, in the corner, as I wrenched at the red tape. Spend ten years fucked up, spend ten years blowing on your ice cream, and you’re going to have a ten-year hangover (with another twenty-some waiting in line). Which is not to say that I wasn’t feeling all the extra from the day before. I felt fat and butter-colored, and already sweaty or still damp from the bathroom haze.

Haec est corpus. This is the body:

Jennifer, your height was five-ten, your weight 141.

Your stomach contained a fully digested meal of scrambled eggs, lox, and bagels, and another meal, only partly digested, of lasagne.

Lividity was only where it ought to have been. No one moved your body. No one arranged you.

Blowback. On your right hand and forearm were found microscopic particles of blood and tissue. We call this blowback.

Too, your right hand had undergone cadaveric spasm. Or spontaneous, and temporary, rigor mortis. The curve of the trigger and the patterning of the butt were embedded in your flesh. That’s how tight you gripped.

Jennifer, you killed yourself.

It’s down.

At CID, people aren’t talking about it. Like we took a beating on this one. But everyone now knows for sure that Jennifer Rockwell committed a crime on the night of March fourth.

If she’d slid into the car and driven a hundred miles due south to the state line, then she could have died innocent. In our city, though, what she did was a crime. It’s a crime. The perfect crime, as always, in a way. She didn’t escape detection. But she escaped all punishment.

And she escaped public disgrace. If disgrace is what you want to call it. Ask the coroner, who absolved her.

Go far enough back, and a coroner was just a tax collector. To stay with the Latin of death: Coronae custodium regis. Keeper of the king’s pleas. He taxed the dead. And suicides lost all they had. Like other felons.

These days, in this city, the coroner works out of the Chief Medical Examiner’s office. His name is Jeff Bright and he’s a pal of Tom Rockwell’s.

Bright returned a finding of Undetermined. Colonel Tom, I know, pushed for Accidental. But he settled for Undetermined, as we all did.

I said I never felt judged by her, even when I was defenseless against all censure. And, as of this writing, I feel no need to judge Jennifer Rockwell. With suicide, as with all the great collapses, exits, desertions, surrenders, it gets so there isn’t any choice.

And there’s always enough pain. I keep thinking back to that time when I was holed up at the Rockwells’ house, sweating out my soul into the bedding. She too had her troubles. At nineteen—slimmer, gawkier, wider-eyed—she too was under siege. I remember now. One of those late-adolescent convulsions, with the parents pacing. There was a spurned boyfriend who wouldn’t or couldn’t let go. Yes, and a girlfriend too (what was it—drugs?), a housemate of hers, who’d also flipped out. Jennifer would give a jolt every time the phone or the doorbell rang. But yet, as sad and scared as she was, she would come and read to me and tend to me.

She didn’t judge me. And I don’t judge her.

Here’s what happened. A woman fell out of a clear blue sky.

Yes. Well. I know all about these clear blue skies.

At the funeral, then, no color guard, no twenty-one-gun salute, no bagpipes. A couple of white hats, some gold braid and chest candy, and the full church service, with the little gray guy in his vestments whose language was saying: We take over now. Commit her to us, to this—the green fields and the church in the middle distance, its spire pointing heavenward. No, this wasn’t a police occasion. We were outnumbered. There we all stood, with our dropped eyes and our shared defeat, surrounded by an army of civilians: It seemed like the whole campus was in attendance. And I had never seen so many youthful and well-proportioned faces made hideous by grief. Trader was there, close to the family group. His brothers stood beside Jennifer’s brothers. Tom and Miriam faced the grave, motionless, like painted wood.