2.
Opened
THREE DAYS LATER they outfitted her with the bracelets. They met in the dean’s personal office, a starting template of Whistler’s Peacock Room, conflicted with a corporate gallery of large geometric figures in various states of decomposition. Sad circles, welled up and spilling over. A forlorn square. A complex, labyrinthine carpet tried to hold the room together, two wood frame chairs, a glass coffee table, a black desk and a blue leather chair beaded with golden rivets. Four sturdy lamps marked the corners. There were bookshelves of crushed volumes along the walls, topped with display cases of colonial conquest.
Doc was busy arranging the dentistry gear they had finally received in total, splaying picks, chisels, probes, forceps, excavators and elevators, scalars, hoes and hatchets, and his assistant’s pliers and vise grip that he had brought from home. These were displayed on the glass table. Veronica sat in one of the deep window sills. The assistant stood before her with a copper ring in each hand, holding the bracelets in front of him to show that he came in peace. She looked at him and shrugged her assent, and at his approach she smirked a little, pumped an eyebrow, dared him. She sat up and bared her wrists. There were falling oak leaves and sprays of heather lightly tattooed along the inside of her arm. He had to lean a little against her crossed ankles to slip the bracelets over her hands, squeezing the circumference, making sure by close inspection that the sensors covered the shoots of her ulnar artery. He wondered if they were tight enough, or too tight, and he looked up at her. She lifted her eyes from the bracelets. The specks and grains of her iris he knew already from the reading room of the library, but he noticed this time a stroke of black pigment that seemed to spill from her pupil. He nodded, businesslike. “Veronica Samir,” he said.
“Samir,” she corrected. “Rhymes with ‘come here.’”
He backed up. Doc was checking her skin surface temperature, diastolic blood pressure, and pulse rate. He recorded these for a baseline.
Stuart stood solemn and silent, as befitting the staging of a difficult operation. It was as still as a vault.
“Bah!” she screamed. The assistant nearly fell over. His nervous laughter, for embarrassment, had to follow.
Doc waited a full couple minutes for the somber spirit of the occasion to return.
“Veronica,” he said in a low, grave voice.
“Doctor Thomas Hock and his trusty assistant Stuart,” she replied in a low, theatrical voice.
He stared at her. She had the recollected sense that she had just gotten in trouble for talking in class. This was it. The beginning of the session.
“In the next room there is a man named Howard West. He was an adjunct here eight years ago — taught a statics engineering class. He would stay late always, rethinking the day’s lesson. He was odd. Obsessive over events that had already happened.
“Friday came one week and he metroed home and walked the half mile to his old family house in Alexandria. It was the middle of March and one of those early spring nights that presage the possibility of summer. He always tripped a security light at the Redeemed Church of Christ, and every time he thought, Someone’s watching, but this time something caught his eye. Two white stones up near the hedge, oblong and standing upright against each other. He took a few steps back. Lady’s thighs. Knees pushed into each other ball in socket, out of which shins departed and spread. From this angle he could see one bare foot just beyond the part of her hair, the base of her foreshortened head swallowed by grass.
“She was supine, one arm across her chest and the other reaching for the roots of the hedge. He stepped carefully backwards along the walk, but did not unlatch his stare. He treaded towards the church along the slate rock entrance and took two stairs, holding himself at the iron rail like it was a cordon at a historical preservation. The light remained on with always someone watching, and he found himself looking into a still image.
“He was part of that image, on the edge of the frame, a carefully arranged mise en scene of profane, sublime iconography. He slid off the railing and moved towards her — something about the stillness and a vision’s complete obliteration of every other physical sense told him he didn’t have to rush anything.
“Her dress was scrunched up above her navel. He circled up the slope to approach from a higher angle, and walked around her for a reverse inspection. He knelt at her feet, in genuflection, a solemn pose. He reached out and curled one hand around an ankle, and then slowly pulled the cold foot to the outside of his knees. He did the same with the other foot, her legs now flat and open before him in the grass. He bent forward, reaching the clump of her dress that gathered like a shade across the frame of her ribs, and from that hovering position he looked up to see that she was all this time looking down at him.
“He was shaking uncontrollably. But he tried to steady his hand and he leaned further, heavy and hovering with a long strained reach for her neck, up over her chin and the tip of her cold nose, and he pressed his fingertips into the soft tissue of her eyelids to shut her eyes. But someone’s always watching, and besides the church security cameras a neighbor across the street was capturing the whole sordid business on video.
“He had just closed her eyes when the police arrived, and at their approach he sat back into the hedge. He surrendered peacefully. The coroner testified that he had arrived well after she had been dumped into the yard by her murderer, but still he was charged with tampering, interfering with a crime scene, and violating a whole slew of state laws codifying basic human decency.
“He served his time, lost his job, and now, just down the hall, he waits in a room. He has consented to help us out today. With a history revealed of other deviant behavior, a long and nearly apologetic psychological profile drawn up by teams of well-meaning therapists, he will be the variable for the session today. He will be the one holding these utensils over your face today.”
“This for real?” Veronica asked, still smiling in the suspension of disbelief. She looked from the professor to his assistant, standing next to him. Stuart raised his eyebrows, and looked to the floor.
“Stuart?” said the professor, handing him two short ropes. Stuart scowled and then dragged over one of the chairs to face the door. “Take a seat, please,” said Doc.
She narrowed her eyes upon him as she did, searching his face for some suggestion of play. She placed her arms on the rests and curled her fingers over the sculpted paws at the end. Stuart tied her wrists just behind the bracelets. He pulled back the floor lamps to the corners of the room and dimmed their bulbs by two clicks. The door opened. Two girls and a boy entered carrying backpacks low in front of them. They took up positions behind her and she could hear zippers being drawn down.
Dr. Hock disappeared down the corridor. The assistant stood behind her. It was quiet enough to hear the breathing through their squeaky noses until a door closed hard down the hall. When the knob of the office door slowly turned, Veronica laughed a little — This is dumb. The man slowly ducked through the doorway. He was grotesquely tall.
He stood just inside the threshold, and they stared at each for a long minute. Veronica blinked twice. She could hear the deliberate, slow stealth of movement behind her, a shifting of positions. The assistant leaned a little against the back of the chair. The man looked down at the coffee table and the attractive array of shiny things. He teetered forward. His spine was so long that when he stooped over the table to pass his large hands over the picks and chisels, his back seemed to buckle on the hinge of some extra joint. One of the girls was standing at the edge of Veronica’s periphery. There was a whisper, short and hurried, an exhortation to do something. The man had made his selection: a hooked pick. He opened his back and stood motionless again before her, a still frame, his long arms hanging sideways, holding the pick just above his knee. He held the stare as he moved one step toward her. The boy appeared on the other side. There was another sharp whisper. The assistant’s hip pressed a little on Veronica’s shoulder.
The man stopped just in front of her, leaned a little forward, one foot in front of the other, poised as a runner before the gun, and raised the trembling pick. In the soft light with the hushed voices, it was as quiet as a funeral parlor or a celebrity crime scene — not for some junkie or prostitute stepped over and photographed in the glare of morning but of a self-inflicted grand dame of Hollywood found dead in the middle of the night, or a slain judge discovered indiscreetly with another in his chambers.
The man must have seen something in the way that Veronica was looking at him, her eyes open and watching, that tapped a memory and triggered an impulse.
“Take him from the side,” she heard. The man hovered over her, holding still in the throe of a wet stare. Another urgent whisper: “Get his hand.”
“Reverse shot.”
“Not yet.”
“Get up on the chair.”
This time there was a discernible click.
The trembling of the man’s hand spread to his arm, and his whole body began to shake.
“Over the shoulder.”
“Reverse.”
“Get a P.O.V.”
The boy rounded to the side, tilted a lamp shade to spill more light into the center, took up a position in the doorway, and snapped another shot.
The man had to stand erect again. He stretched his back, twisted on his hips, and then sat down in a chair. He was depleted.
The boy with the big lens took a couple steps closer. An optical point-of-view. Veronica lowered her head, and slowly looked up at him — she gave him her best Norman Bates.
Doc walked in. He asked the art students if they had gotten enough footage. Stuart untied the ropes, and Doc came over to check the bracelets. “Steady as a drum,” he said.
“That’s it?” she asked.
“That’s it.”
Veronica stood up, turned and beamed at the art students, stretched, and didn’t know what to do with herself. They snapped more shots. Closeups of the props. They posed, they made goofy killer and slain faces. Veronica stood with Dr. Hock and Howard West, grabbed the tall man’s throat, kicked her leg back, crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out to the side.
When they were returning the furniture, Veronica smiled and asked again, “That’s it?”
“That’s what?”
“That’s the first experiment?”
“That,” said Doc, “was a photo shoot. The first experiment is next week. We are going to throw you off the side of a building.”