Abreaction

Abreaction

"Doctor, the signature of murder is everywhere: but there is no stink of death. Should be. But there isin't. It's the worst stink of all. The worse sense of all. And you want to know about my first brush with death?”

“Yes.” Says Doctor Fringe. She’s the Department Psychiatrist. I don’t deny that I have issues. “Go ahead. Relax.” She says, “I’ve given you a mild sedative: 5% solution of sodium amytal to ease you in and counter another reaction. Play it back in your mind, like a video. We’re going deeper today. Get to the root and see if you can keep your badge.”

“What reaction?”

“An abreaction. It’s the repression of a memory that is too traumatic. The subconscious suppresses the conscious knowledge of an intolerable awareness. If you come to terms, well, there’s a cathartic dump. Inappropriate behaviors and emotional excesses will subside.”

I don’t answer. Her face - dour. She’s gotten bored by her own explanation. She doesn’t notice I’m looking at her, looking at herself. She’s looking at her swollen lips. Two tumid hairless caterpillars. If her lips were green…I blurt out, “tomato worms.”

“Tomato worms? Well, go on. “She rolls her lips: Two cleaved tomato worms pumped full of Botox. She smacks her lips. They pucker. She tugs tissue from a box. Removes excess gloss. “Was Don the first to die? In your arms?”

…

Fungi spit out a cloudburst of spores. I swallow a slimy turpentine substance. I sneeze into my armpit. Airborne dander floats in shafts of daylight streaming through motheaten blankets strung over the windows.

“You okay, detective?”

“Sure.” I eyeball the black mold colonizing the ceilings, corners, shower curtain… and the vegetable rack inside the Frost Freeze Refrigerator. Rusty blisters vigorously mutate beneath the chrome-plated handle. There are no odors. No bodies. Otherwise, it has all the earmarks of murder. Detective Rosa Garcia says, ‘Ay Chihuahua, you smell that?” We three detectives nod to each other. But my gesture is a lie. I sense no ‘greasy mechanical smell.’ Nor ‘putrid blood.’ Rising from the seams of tongue and grove pinewood flooring, blotched with gangrene. If there is a greasy smell, I suspect it wafts from the halo figure ingrained in the course green fabric of a chair facing the window framing the playland of Gilroy Community Park. From the top right corner of the windowpane, the tip of a sheet of one-way ‘gray-lite plastic’ hangs like a serpent’s tongue in a slow, lethargic peel.

Rorschach Inkblots tell a story of draconian brutality. Residue evil oppresses the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. I suck for air. The usual red flush of my cheeks drains away. I feel gray, sad, and empty. Outside the living room bay window, children in a scrum chase a punctured ball. A child on the outer ring of the fray looks toward me. I wave. But he only sees the mirrored reflection of himself. He sprints to catch up with the others who tussle through the playland of swings, slides, horizontal bars, and monkey rings.

“Whitt, look at this.”

“Blunt force splatter.”

Luminol glows phosphorescence, indicating a fatal loss of blood: soaked into the walls, ceiling, and floor of the kitchen. A drag smear trails off into the bathroom. More blood. A striated draggle crisscrossed and whirled into the linoleum floor. It’s a single sheet, patterned black against green, repeating at regular intervals. Cheep.

“I can’t quite place it. You smell that smell, detective Whitt?”

I nod then shrug, “smells like a blend to me.” I lie.

“Me too. Mostly sewer and grease. A greasy mechanic, old potato salad.”

“I rub my nose. Got a head cold…”

“Going round. Yeah.”

“Got into my sinus… infection.”

“Town and Country Drug down the street. Grab some Mucinex.”

“Rosa, you smell egg salad?

“Rotten eggs.”

“What you think. Happened?”

“Brutal, there’s a connection here I think the killer lived here. Lived in this chair. This room. Up to the time of the killing. Killed because he got caught.”

“You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Rosa, I got thoughts colliding in my brain.”

“Has to do with little Johnny Price.”

“Went missing some time back, few miles from here.”

“Well, look at the aluminum foil.”

"Covers this entire wall."

…

They say when you lose your sense of smell, you’re about to die. Tumor traumatic brain injury, spawns anosmia. That's me.

Old Mrs. Stew. I went to her burial – on police business. I was the only one there. I feel bad that she was alone with a person with secrets. They say as women age, they make new friends, old men only watch faces fade away, no replacements to the platoon. I know this for me. For Mrs. Stew, she too had no one.

“Think I’ll get meds. Call it a day.”

“Eyes looking yellow.”

The diabetic jaundice is getting worse. It’s a nasty shade of yellow. I'm tired. I don’t sleep well. Spilled blood wakes me, calling out from the grave. I don’t get meds. I go to Jhonny Price's. He’s still a missing persons case. Bad juju to mix squads - interfer. The Chief says I’ll get busted if I don’t stay in my lane. No latitude. It could mean my badge. Regardless, I watch from the sidewalk. A curtain shutters.

Both herself and her home are anorexic. The house leans, and she tilts. Yet she looks good in clothes. Her dress – a wildflower print ruffles in the slight afternoon breeze and continues to sway as she leads me to a tan leather recliner that her cat -Tom Boy- has used for a scratch pad. She lumbers to a sleeper couch; I move close to help her chamber the fold-out-bed of her sleeper couch. She motions for me to stay put. Heaves the mechanical contraption back into its recessed cavity. It clanks. Thuds. “Been sleeping out here. Don’t care to fold it in.” She shifts the cockeyed cushion, calming the ruffles of her dress. The print of wildflower upon her worn shift looks comfortable. She looks like Twiggy. Perfect.

I say, Ms. Price, I’m detective…Whitt.”

“Call me Lena.” A somber, intrusive eulogy hangs like garlic wreaths in Transylvania. I don’t tell her I’m from homicide.

I’d forgotten to shake her hand. Awkward. Though it’s committed to muscle memory, I shake her hand. Her skin feels smooth, ceramic-like, like the stones and bones I find in the desert at the edge of dunes where blasting winds blow in a turbulent whirl and laminar ghosts caress the exposed; either way, the nature of the wind garnished with the grains of time whittle and polish stones and bones of the Pleistocene seabed, in the nearby desert, where sometimes I recover polished jasper, agates… Apache tears or leg bones of sand cranes. I feel the lumpy passage of her knuckle. The blueish tent of her eyes bleeds into rings of a black titration - isles of grave colors pooling under her eyes.

Light cascades from an array of naked candles. Some flames housed in painted mayo jars cast flickers into smears of sooty patina.

“You paint these?”“

“Yes, with glass paint.”

“I’ve read the reports. But sometimes speaking gives greater meaning to written words. Briefly, without thinking tell me about Johnny, and his going missing.”

She fiddles, spins rings on her finger, two thin wedding bands. thin as thread. “Johnny was born into a fatherless world. I tried my best. Unordered. No responsible caring father.” Her sobbing draws my hand forward. I pull back midway. She doesn’t notice. Her ache lingers. It gets caught up in the garden of candles. They sputter. Smoke – thins as it drifts to the ceiling and disappears, getting homogenized into the wake of denial, anger, and grief.

“Detective. I got called in for a split shift. Lila was to watch Johnny, he’s old enough, alone. But he’s a momma boy. Lila … well feeble. Between the two, thought all okay. When I got home Lila, and my boy were gone. I found her at home her home. She didn’t know how or when she got home or where Johnny went…

I adjust my posture. She motions. Her hands fan her face and beckons me close like she will confess or tell me a secret.

“Tell me, detective.”

“Ms. Wilkes?”

“Tell me to wake up.”

…

I stop at the ''Shoreline.' A standalone bar hunched over in the doldrums of slow-moving light caught up in slow-moving fog. I pollute the corner at the gloomy end of the wet bar where I take the weight off my broken arches and rests the soles of my weary, flat feet. The maple-eyed veneer looks up at me. I wink. What a waste, and it happened so quickly. My mind slips a cog, and I think of Twiggy Price and wildflowers, old men whittled away. Then guilt. It’s my job to find the boy. Not to think about skin smooth as ceramic, knuckles pink with tension, eyes closed thinking she’s asleep, but she’s wide awake. Another cog I find my first girlfriend, her jumper dress clingy, falls perfectly. My locker door conceals us from Junior High Admin.

…

I wake from a dream within a dream. The phone doesn’t wake Mrs. Price, and neither can I. It’s been two weeks since I talked to her. “Hello.”

“Detective Whitt?”

“Yes."

“We found a boy. Part of him.”

“Where?

“Afloat, out at the canals. Boonies - not hard to drive, too. Need some highwaters to get to him. Tulles -  high, thick cat tails.”

“How’s it look?”

“Bad. How soon will you be here?”

“Call Mrs. Garcia.”

“Rosa… is … already here. She’s asking for you.”

“Won’t be there.”

“Why?”

“Can’t.”

“Why. Can’t?”

“I’m retired.”

“Since when? why.?”

"Since now and, medical." Haven’t the stomach. They know I’m in a bad way. But they don’t know it all. The secrets. I’d lost the tools of a detective can’t lose anything, wherewithal, intuition, humanity, and the senses; smell gone, taste gone, hearing – going – heart not in it.

…

Retirement doesn’t help, and the boy in the tulles isn’t Jhonny Price. Consequently, abdication is only a glitch in my career.

I see Mrs. Price again.’ I fess up that I was out of my lane. She forgives me but wants the truth. “Why are you here?”

“It’ll be hard on you if I tell.”

“Do it.”

I haven’t any sodium amytal. I shake and mumble. She places her hand on my shoulder. I say, “When I was eight, my friend and I were fishing. Friends for four years, that’s half our lives. We became friends when early youth began, and intuitively, little minds understand mysteries so profound they fade away once one enters the gravity of the world. Sometimes, this awe reappears when you’re suddenly old, and parts of you fade. Yet compassion and humanity rails against injustice. You touch a hand that’s warm and smooth. No one touches you anymore; you find yourself alone, losing your senses. It is here I return to my first brush with friendship and death. My friend died in my arms. I lifted his face out of the floor drain. The concrete is cold and heavy, with the smell of disinfectant. On his broken neck, the imprint of a boot. Tears drop from my cheek to his, and I lean in. I kiss the puddle; it’s salty. I smile. “he says, “Let’s go fishing.” I sob. He lets out a low rattle-like sound, his eyes pinch shut.”