As for Esmé Symes, one week later she hangs herself with an extension cord. She was brought in twice for questioning, so I think she knew she was the closest thing we had to a suspect, that she was in the department’s sights. The DA’s screaming for blood. And her apartment, it’s fucking wallpapered with sketches of that goddamned jade atrocity, right? Dozens and dozens of sketches, from all different angles. But she doesn’t leave a note, not unless you’re gonna call all those drawings a suicide note. You ask me—and I know you didn’t—but you ask me whether she was involved or not, and all I got to say is Miss Esmé Symes got off easy. She got off scot-fucking-free.
4.: Creature → Feature ← Comforts
(Arbor Hill, Albany, New York, June 7, 2028)
There’s a game that they play, Ellison Nicodemo and the psychiatrist. She tells him a lie, and he patiently makes like he doesn’t know that she’s lying, no matter how outrageously, how egregiously the lie contradicts some previous lie that she’s already passed off as the truth. They have arrived at the simple rules of the game by a silent, unspoken gentleman’s agreement. It’s true no one will ever win, at least not fair and square, but—she tells herself, whenever she feels up to pretending there’s a bright side—the most she’ll ever lose is one hour every two weeks, and, after all, she’s got time to burn. If time were money, Ellison Nicodemo would be Scrooge McDuck. She can afford the pantomime.
Exempli gratia:
It’s five past two on a Monday afternoon and Ellison sits on the wide, slightly threadbare corduroy sofa in the psychiatrist’s office, wishing, just like always, that she could get by without the charity of the agency’s stingy pension. If she could only manage that trick somehow, then she’d be free to tell the psychiatrist enough was enough and his services were no longer required, thank you very goddamn much. That he could take his kindly, knowing looks and patronizing nods and go fuck himself. Game, set, match. Checkmate. She could stand up and walk out the door for the last and final time and catch a bus back across town. She could score and fix and, as she nodded off in a velvety heroin fog, she could congratulate herself on finally finding the backbone to do what she should have done a long damn time ago. Of course, she knows she won’t. She was never a particularly brave woman, even at her best, and at forty-one Ellison knows that her best is far behind her. Her best is dead and buried. Still, there are days when the fantasy that she might is the only thing that gets her from one excruciating side of these sessions to the other.
The clock ticks. Here we go again.
“How are you doing today?”
The psychiatrist stops staring at the screen of his pad and stares at Ellison instead. The man is at least old enough to be her father. He has great bushy eyebrows that remind her of Gandalf or Walt Whitman. She’s wondered if maybe he’s one of the shrinks who worked on MK-Ultra or the Stargate Project or some other long-ago covert psychofuck operation or if maybe he has no idea whatsoever who actually writes his checks. Maybe he’s exactly who the diplomas on the wall say he is and no more. Maybe he’s no one much at all. Possibly, he’s the single least interesting man Ellison Nicodemo has ever met and the most subversive thing the psychiatrist ever did was vote for Goldwater in 1972. But it’s got to be one or the other. Either he’s an agency man following a carefully prepared script, minding protocol to the letter, or he’s a patsy who really does believe she isn’t anything more exciting than a junkie and a profoundly delusional schizophrenic who only thinks she used to be some sort of top-secret occult assassin for a shadow government and he only plays the game because the checks don’t bounce.
He can’t be both or anything in between. Albany has never been one for half measures. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Last time,” he says, “you told me that today maybe we could talk about Atlanta and the scars. Are you still up for that? I understand it’s a big step.”
Ellison shuts her eyes a moment and tries to recall if she really did say that two weeks back or if he’s just banking on there being so little left of her short-term memory that she’s not in a position to argue the point.
“Did I?” she asks, opening her eyes again. On the wall behind the psychiatrist there’s a cheaply framed print, a copy of an oil painting of a rocky seashore someplace like Rhode Island or Maine or Massachusetts. Or Wales, she thinks, and not for the first time. “Well, if I did—if I did tell you that—I shouldn’t have. If I did say that, I’ve changed my mind.”
The psychiatrist frowns his consternation and rubs at his bushy white eyebrows. “Are you sure?” he asks her, and she tells him yeah, she’s sure. In fact, she’s very, very sure. “All right, then what would you prefer we talk about today?” he asks. “What about your sister? We never did quite finish with that, did we?”
Ellison almost asks which story about her sister he means, which fabricated version of the truth is it that the psychiatrist would like her to continue with—and, by the way, for the record, she never actually had a sister (and the psychiatrist knows that), only an older brother whom she never even met because he died of a fever when he was just a baby. But she doesn’t ask. Asking would almost certainly violate the rules of the game, whatever those might be.
“When I was a kid, I got a pet monster,” Ellison says, before she can think better of it, before it occurs to her this is the worst imaginable way of cheating, because, as it happens, she’s telling the truth.
The psychiatrist stops rubbing his eyebrows and clears his throat.
“A monster,” he says—not in a way that dares to sound as if he doubts what she’s told him, but only as if to suggest that maybe he wasn’t paying close attention or perhaps the noise of a delivery truck rattling past down on Livingston Avenue made it hard for him to hear what she said.
“Yeah,” she says, astounded at her own audacity and wishing she had a cigarette, wishing the psychiatrist would let her smoke in his office. “Well, I didn’t really think of it as a monster, not when I was little.”
The psychiatrist opens the bottle of water on his desk and takes a swallow. Then he clears his throat again. “You mean like an imaginary friend?” he asks her, and to Ellison it almost seems as if he’s asking hopefully.
“No, I mean like a monster,” she says. “It wasn’t imaginary, and I never thought of it as especially friendly, either. Though, every now and then, it was sort of helpful.”
“Sort of helpful,” says the psychiatrist, and then he taps at his pad before screwing the cap back on the water bottle and setting it aside. “Helpful how, exactly?”
“Like, sometimes it would show up when I was in trouble.”
“If it was helpful, why do you call it a monster?” the psychiatrist wants to know.
Ellison sits up a little straighter, and she glances at the window and the dingy beige drapes hiding the view of the world outside. Her mouth has gone a little cottony, and right now she wouldn’t mind if the psychiatrist deigned to offer her a sip of his water. She says, “It seems to me that the world is full of helpful monsters. I don’t necessarily see a contradiction between monstrosity and usefulness. Some of the most terrible things, the most hideous things, we let them into our lives—knowing full well that they’re monsters—because they’re helpful.” She expects the psychiatrist to ask her to pony up an example, but he doesn’t. If he had she might have said nuclear fission, or she might have said religion, or she might have said something else altogether. She might even have said psychiatry, only she isn’t so sure it’s of much use to anyone.