I Must Have Forgotten

(Before reading, trigger warning for mentions of homicide and criminal investigation)

“Sir, I don’t think you are understanding the severity of this situation,” the police officer said to the man with ragged, stained clothes and blonde hair that looked like it had been cut with kitchen shears.

“And I don’t think YOU are listening to what I am saying, I have killed no one. End of story. Now let me go home,” The man once again tried to get out of his seat, forgetting he still had handcuffs chained to the table and jerked backward back down onto the seat, a loud thud echoing through the interrogation room from the metal slamming down onto the concrete floor. He obviously could go nowhere, not until he talked. Which he wasn’t. Deny, deny, deny. 6 hours of the police officer’s interrogation, and it still had gotten nowhere. She’s seen this kind of play before, this little act. He was intelligent, the officer would give him that. She knew he must have ulterior motives behind this innocent facade. But this Raskolnikov try-hard needed more than intelligence to get out of her hands, she would not give up until she got her answers.

The man sighed and turned his head to stare at the wall, as if in thought. His eyes were still bloodshot from tears after his previous temper tantrum trying to convince the officer of his innocence. These back and forth episodes he’d throw at random were beginning to exhaust the officer just as much as she thought it must himself, but he still refused to comply to any of her methods regardless.

They sat there for a good five minutes in complete silence, the man still staring at the wall with a blank and distant expression.

“If I were to ask you, officer, who exactly am I, how would you answer?”

What? The hell kind of question did that conjure up from? Whatever. The officer didn’t have the time nor energy to care anymore. So she gave a very straightforward answer to his insanely vague question.

“You are Mark Twinsbourgh, and you are currently a suspect in multiple accounts of homicide,”

“And why is that, and why accuse me?”

The officer scoffed,

“Why is t- You must be joking! All evidence leads back to YOU, Twinsbourgh. Each body had a similar theme, a similar pattern. We were able to track you down by location, the bodies deliberately lead to your residence as if you were playing a game; as if you wanted us to find you. Each body left with your signature marking, a carved cross drawn to the cheek of the victims. So you tell me, Twinsbourgh, why is that? What were you hoping to achieve? Why set yourself up the way that you have?”

Mark suddenly turned to face the officer again, looking her straight in the eyes with a rather amused grin on his face. It was a complete switch from that doe-eyed, dazed expression he previously had. The expression he now had made the officer nothing more than sick with absolute rage.

“I was bored, officer. You understand, don’t you? Boredom is quite a troublesome feeling. But please, you have to admit half of those civilians did nothing to aid society and you know it. They needed to perish to the land of the dead, and I was given the assignment to do so. I needed to cleanse this world from such disgusting and useless existences,”

The officer felt as though everything in the room came to a complete stop. She couldn’t speak, only stare in horror at the man sitting in front of her only a couple of feet away. He admitted it. He just admitted it. Mark Twinsbourgh was The Carver of 98th street. She should be feeling a wave of relief, finally…finally this grueling integration was getting somewhere! She has him right in her grasp, she might as well send him to his cell without a second thought! But something was wrong…something was throwing her off.

His tone…his demeanor…it's different. Too different. Not too long ago he was defending his innocence to the grave, completely terrified, like a deer trapped in a wired fence, then all of a sudden he was sitting in complete silence not caving in no matter how much I pushed, it felt as though he was in a completely different world almost. He was a brick wall unable to be moved. But now…he just admitted it. He admitted to the crime we've been trying so hard to get him to, as though it was nothing. As though now, he took PRIDE in it.

The officer was at a loss for words. She felt ill from how much her head was spinning. She couldn’t grasp a single thing from this situation, not one. Nothing was connecting. None of his words were making any sense. His entire being didn't make sense. First, he desperately deemed himself innocent from any hint of a crime, then shifted calmly and went to ask, now confusedly, who he was as if not aware of his own existence anymore, and now he was this cocky and confident bastard who admitted to murdering people, leading the murders to his own house deliberately, simply because he was bored? He couldn’t have cared less.

 So why act as if he did? The officer couldn’t keep up. She couldn’t wrap her head around any of it. The officer was certain she was going to be sick all over the floor. She swallowed, took a deep breath, and tried to hide as much shakiness in her voice as possible.

“Sir…do you realize what you have j-”

She came to a stop, as she saw Mark’s eyes turn glossy, almost clouded looking. The grin on his face was gone.

“Um…excuse me…s-sorry, but who are you? What’s going on?” says the voice of a little boy.

Oh God…the officer thought to herself. Oh God…oh God…no this can’t be happening-

The realization hit like a sudden jolt of lightning. The interrogation once again being flipped upside down, left open to be discovered. Because Mark Twinsbourgh wasn’t one person; he was several. 

Author’s note: I want to make it absolutely clear that I have no intention of using Dissociative identity disorder as a way to villainize a character or use it to blame criminal activity when writing a crime story. DID is highly stigmatized in media and I in no way want this to be taken as further stigma. I’m a psychology student who’s also very interested in criminal psychology, and the actions done by the character in this story are not be blamed by their psychiatric disorder but instead is an element only to create further psychological complexity to the story. I hope this comes off the way I intended, and thank you for reading!