How Bizarre, How Random, How.....

Chapter III- Subordinates, Stranger

The next day saw Mallory being more preoccupied with the dead girl than he had been. He was also coming around to the view that what Hermann had told him might just have been a bluff after all and that it was possible that he was some kind of nut. More and more, over the course of his sleepless night, he had come to view that as the possible explanation. The part about him being watched, especially, was sticking into him more and more with the force of comedy, and at one point he’d been so tickled that he burst out laughing.

At the police station, all was well. A few calls were made for minor reasons, and he sent his deputies on the way. For the most part, they were left alone, and they talked a lot about the dead girl. No one seemed to have a real idea of what was going on, but they all offered their opinions.

Mallory’s head was in turmoil. Honestly, he didn’t want to be where he was, he’d rather be out. But where? He wanted to go somewhere, but he didn’t know where that would be. And the girl was calling for her murder to be solved. But the body had been sent to another forensic lab, for more tests, and until that came, they could do nothing. Really, it was strange how they hadn’t built a case at all so far. Where were the clues they were supposed to be finding?

Okay, they had a few, but they’d followed them and got nothing. So it was on Mallory’s recommendation that they were sitting around doing nothing. He’d been taught that method a long time ago. A guy named George Michael who was dead now, but who in life had been the smartest man he’d ever known. And that’s what Michaels had told him, to ponder over things, not to continuously go after them. According to Michaels, relentlessly hunting for clues would often result in the wrong ones being followed. The thing was to let the mind sort it out, let it absorb, slowly. Mallory had seen that technique work.

But Officer Flaherty was bored. He didn’t believe in this sitting around and doing nothing stuff. He believed in going after things, right away, and sticking through to the end. In fact, he was rather annoyed by people who believed that by their not thinking about something, they were somehow seeing to it that they were getting it done. Officer Flaherty was so bored he was playing with a rubber band.

He was holding it between his two thumbs, and pulling his thumbs apart and thus applying some force on the rubber. Mallory gave him a look from the corner of his eye that was as sharp as any he’d given, sharper than knitting needles by far. Of all the people in the force that made him uneasy these days, Flaherty definitely took the honors, now that Hermann had gone.

“Hey Irish,” he said with barely more than a whisper, “cut it out.”

Flaherty had been an O’Flaherty five years earlier, and why he’d decided to cull the glorious O and make himself plain old Flaherty no one had figured out. The Irish, as Mallory was found of pointing out, had stopped being persecuted about a century ago. So why the refusal to acknowledge his ties to the old country? Of course, it wasn’t always that Flaherty didn’t celebrate his Irish-ity, as he called it. Come St. Patrick’s Day, Flaherty was often to be found wandering the streets in a state of drunken stupor, a huge mug of beer in his hand and a smile on his ruddy Irish face, proclaiming his great patriotism, war on English Dogs, the benefits of living on County Mayo with its endless and gentle flow of hill and plain.

“O, Glorious Emerald Isle, I shall come to thy rescue even if nobody else does,” was what he could often be heard saying.

But now he was far from imagining himself an Irish Patriot; he was far from being drunk, in any case, and upon being told by Mallory to stop his fiddling with the rubber band, he did nothing of the sort, but went on for a minute or two playing with it.

That was the way he was. If he was told to stop doing something, he’d generally take a few minutes before coming to rest. He believed in gradual descents, not hurried attempts at crash-landing. Crash landings disturbed the equilibrium, threatened the peace, in a way. Gradual descents were much better.

He slipped while trying to pull it, and the rubber band flew out of his hands with him watching it as model airplane enthusiasts watch their toys fly, in a sort of eternal wonder, and it went and hit Mallory straight on the nose, and a very sharp sting it must have been, for Mallory was momentarily too stunned to do anything. Then he found his voice.

“Damn it Flaherty, I told you, and I was in a meditative state of mind, I was using my latent powers of whatever to go deep into the case, and now look what you’ve done, you’ve ruined my concentration…” and he stopped right there, seeing the guilty look on Flaherty’s face. But guilt seldom remained on Flaherty’s face for long.

“Sorry, but look, sir, I was just too damned tired sitting around on my butt and doing nothing. I mean, you enjoy doing all this meditation stuff, all this yoga and whatever, but I don’t. I’m an old-fashioned, a good old-fashioned, Irish-American cop, and I resent having all these new-fangled ways imposed on me. Someone told you that it works, well let me tell you sir, I’ve tried it on me, and I’ve never had a single instance, not a single one, in which it works. I swear on the head of my grandfather who almost drowned on his way from the old world to the new, not to mention who saw his grandfather he respected so much succumb to the potato famine, that its all a bunch of B.S.”

Flaherty’s verbal hyperactivity may or may not have owed anything to his Irish ancestors, but because whenever he was theatrical he was always inserting bits and pieces of Irish history in it, Mallory couldn’t held imagining that he’d had at least a great-grandfather or two who’d also been equally verbose. DNA, modern science called it, DNA which linked irretrievably the young to the old, DNA was supposedly going to give them clues as to the girl’s murder, DNA, DNA, it was everywhere these days.

The third person in the room, Officer Graham, was least like Flaherty as could be imagined. He was the quiet sort, never complaining unless things were really bad, he was industrious, though not, Mallory thought, particularly bright, and he was always on time, and always made sure that those things that were requested of him he did so perfectly as to never stand out. In that sense, he was Flaherty’s antithesis; that he never did things that would make him stand out. He was, for instance, rarely drunk, and even if it was, never to the extent that he’d make a public spectacle out of himself. As a policeman, he considered it his utmost duty above all to set a good example on others. That meant having a very stable family life, attending to his children as much as he could, talking to other women only as was needed, and then too, taking care never to give the impression that he was in any way attracted to them at all.

If ever he called attention to himself, it was only due to his sheer ability not to attract attention to himself. Mallory thought such people were rare, rarer than even Officer Flaherty’s boisterous type.

Officer Graham too thought Mallory’s newfangled ideas were useless, but given his disposition as someone who never called attention to himself, he made that known not as Flaherty did by loud denunciations, but by subtler methods, of which more later.

The three were interrupted by a loud pounding at the door, which each of them took to be a sign of bad manners with Officer Flaherty looking particularly aggrieved and looking ready to teach the tasteless offender a thing or two about civilized norms. Mallory announced that the door was open, and a lad of about seventeen burst in.

“You the local cops,” he asked, short of breath.

“Yes,” replied Flaherty as if he was boss.

“The chick, the dead chick, I knew her….”

Which caused all of them to straighten up and Flaherty was so excited he displayed that both by the flushed redness of his cheeks and by the ping-pong balls of his eyes.

“Come here, come here, boy,” said someone, and another removed a sheaf of papers from the desk.

The boy was given a seat and told to sit down and everybody turned to face him on the other side, and they made an arc shape. Flaherty, who generally played bad cop on such occasions, was looking through his shelf of faces, wondering which one he should use on a boy who didn’t seem like he needed much frightening to make him piss yellow all over the floor. He selected a moderately scary one, thereby turning his eyebrows upward in the manner of certain night-owls.

Well, the boy didn’t seem very frightened, not frightened at all, so he made himself look fiercer, and this also the boy didn’t respond to, and he was about to make a really frightening face but for the weak kick on his shin from Mallory, who, apparently wanted the scene to himself.

In any case, he beckoned to Flaherty to sit down. Flaherty was rather hurt by this snubbing. He was the power behind the operations, and perhaps the brains too, and yet, he was being relieved. But that’s what Mallory wanted, and Mallory was boss, and one had to respect the boss’s command in society, even if one disagreed with his positions on various matters, and so Flaherty went back to his chair, but not before showing his displeasure with the whole scene by giving it a little kick.

The boy was given to stammering, to too much stammering, in Flaherty’s opinion, who certainly didn’t see why a little tap on his head shouldn’t cure that. But all he could do was sit down and stare and angrily shake his head at the sheer lack of professional judgment shown by Mallory. The more Mallory cajoled, Flaherty thought, the more the boy stammered. Flaherty had old fashioned Irish ideas about rewarding children, and patting them on the head when they just messed up royally was not one of them. He set his mouth tight and stared.

The interrogation was even more slow-paced and unnerving than sitting around and thinking and using fancy yogic techniques to solve real-life murder mysteries, so he sought to alleviate his boredom by some method or the other, and to his aid once more came the rubber band, which he saw was lying near the boy’s chair after apparently having struck his boss on the nose and being deflected there. He went up to it and was about to pick it up, but for Mallory’s loud voice.

“Flaherty, what are you doing?”

“Picking up the rubber band to play with it, seeing that I have nothing else to do with my time.”

“Just sit down, goddamn it, and watch.”

“Okay, okay, as long you cut out all the blasphemy. You’ve been blaspheming too much for your own good. A hundred years ago, I’d have earned the right to arrest you for your profane language.”

Graham the silent one couldn’t help himself then, and as often happen when quiet ones take to laughter, he burst out uncontrollably, as if all of his latent energies were going on to fuel it, and upon seeing this, Flaherty took it upon himself, caring not whether he received orders from the top or not, to grab the man by his hands and put a big palm across his face. A while later, the inside of his hands turned white with spit, and some of it even came flowing over and to the other side.

“Goddamn it,” yelled Mallory, the only one among the three who looked serious about the task of interrogating, “we’ve got a murder to solve, and if you both go on that way, it never will be, so I’m asking you now, the both of you, go, go, get your goddamn asses out of here right now, Flaherty, you can take that rubber band with you on the way out and play with it as much as you want to, Graham, you can laugh as much as you like, you can burst your goddamn sides open if you want to, while I, I’m actually going to get something done, the one murder case that doesn’t involve drugs we’re likely to get in a long, long time, and the two of you go and mess it up. Leave, now.”

Alone with the kid, for what he hoped would be a long, long time, he heaved a sigh. Of cautious relief. He had a fair amount of confidence in his two subordinates barging in on him again and messing everything up. So….

He went and closed the door. Latched it, and then believing that not to be enough to keep the doddering duo away, he dragged two chairs and pasted them to the door. Then he went and sat down on his table, and continued the interrogation.

“Okay, lets start all over again, and don’t mind my subordinates. Start all over again, tell me exactly how you picked her up. Repeat everything you’ve told me, don’t worry about me being bored. Everything, I want everything.”

The boy nodded in assent. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I’ll give you everything sir, I won’t leave out any detail, not a thing. When I’ve finished, you’ll see the whole story…”

“Okay, okay, never you mind all that, just go on with the story. I don’t have all the time in the world, you know.”

The boy nodded, and was about to say something further, but restrained himself.

“Go on then,” said Mallory, wondering why the boy had stopped.

“I….I can’t sir,” replied the kid sheepishly.

“And why can’t you?,” asked the policeman in an enraged tone. “And why can’t you when its only me around? You could when those two were with me. Now, when its just me, you suddenly find you can’t. I demand you to tell it.”

“B-but, I can’t sir, I just can’t. It stuck in me, like I’ve got stones in my throat. I wish I could tell you all, I really wish, but sometimes things happen that you don’t understand, and certainly this feeling of having stones in my throat when I’m dying to tell you what happened with that dead girl is one of them, and they aren’t just little pebbles sir, no, its more like I’ve had good sized rocks pushed into me by someone….”

“Fellow, better tell all, or those rocks I will crush. You know how I’ll crush them? I’ll put my hands around your throat and squeeze, and then those rocks will be crushed. I’m not a violent fellow, but there are times when we’re all seized with violent impulses. I can be as unpredictably violent as that fellow Graham, you saw him, can be unpredictably funny. I mean it. When I’m violent, I have the Devil’s rage in me.”

“Pardon me sir. I don’t have it in me to understand your fancy expressions, but this I’ll say for myself. I just can’t get it out of me at all. Its like my story is trapped in me, and will only come out of its own accord. Can’t you understand a situation like that? I’m sure its happened to you sometime in your life. C’mon, sir, let me go. I’m useless for your purposes now. When I feel the story coming to me again, I’ll give you a phone call, and let you know, and then you can conduct your interrogation by phone. Because we all have cell-phones these days, you’re never likely to be out of touch with me.”

“Oh, yes, it’s the modern age,” said Mallory.

And so it was that with him who he should have been asking pointed questions regarding the various aspects of his associations with the pre-murdered teenager, the two actually began to discuss the nice-tees and vice-tees of the modern age. It turned out that the kid was no run of the mill guy who merely spent his time picking up hot chicks, one of whom ended up strangled and buried in a shallow ditch, but was actually quite a remarkable fellow with a sharper than most intellect.

It turned out that both of them had rather similar philosophies when it came to the usual matters of life. For both of them were pessimistic about the fate of humankind, and both of them saw in the advent of the all too rapid modernization of life, in the filling of every living space by the beep-beeps of electronic pulses, by the reduction of every modern problem to a computerization process, that man’s basic self, his all too human capacities were being consistently eroded.

“Man once had a pristine state,” the boy said, “but now that’s gone. Gone,” and Mallory nodded in assent.

“Yes, you’re right,” he added, “there was a time when man was unshackled, when he was free, with a natural will, and where are those days now? There’re gone, as you say, gone with the wind.”

“No sir, not with the wind. How I wish it was the wind that had taken us away, how I wish it was that it was such a primal, pure force of nature as the wind that was blowing us away, but its not, and that’s the tragedy, and that’s the double tragedy, because, for one, we’re gently being taken away, and two, what’s taking us away, the agent of our destruction, is none other than our own artificial self. We have created this electronic monster, whose very breath is the pulse and the beep, to take us away. Have you ever been to Utah, officer?”

“No, can’t say that I have,” answered Mallory.

“Then you ought to go there. You ought to go to Arches. You’ll see what I mean. Oh, but Arches is an ode to wind sublimation. That is to say, solids going directly to the gaseous, to unseen, here and there states. And you know what officer, it’s a joy to see that. Of course, you can’t see the actual process of sublimation happening, but you can feel it, and you can feel it move ever so slowly, picking out each and every atom, blowing it away, rendering it to nothingness as we perceive it. That’s the greatness of a place like Arches. You’re allowed to realize, for the first time, perhaps, that you don’t have to see a thing to feel it happening. And its called Arches for a reason, of course, because all around you see them.”

“When you’re in a place like Arches, you’ve got no desire to come back to this world. I mean, pulses, blips, motorcars, whatever, what does it mean, once you’re out there? What does it mean, our silly notion of time, when you’re out there? What’s a year, what’s ten years, what’s a hundred, when you’re there? Things are being blown away with the wind there, but that process takes thousands, millions of years, and here we are, here we are, like idiots, trying to divide the little bit of time we’re entitled to even further. We’re dealing in seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, these days, imagine how ridiculous that sounds in a place like Arches. When you see the sweep of a an arch, when you stand under it, you’re lost to imagining how long, how long before that gap was formed, and how long before the whole thing is blown away forever, and the mind fails to come to an answer. We can try to grasp at it, but frankly, its of no use, because the answer will always slip away, as its bound to. We’re not worthy of it, not us, we who’ve divided everything we’ve known into further mess, we’re not to find those answers. That’s why I keep going back to those old philosophers. They were the ones who had the answer, because they were unencumbered by all this crap, this wholly, rotten, stinking, garbage, this offal, this gagging, nauseating pile of shit we call modern living. I mean, just think how crappy our lives would have seemed to those people. All those fucking billboards, those vulgar signs that we’ve posted all over this landscape to announce our own fundamental misplaced-ness with the world, whenever I’m driving and I come across those billboards, I literally want to do something. What I don’t know, but the sheer disgust it fills me with, to see our earth polluted by that garbage, and who’s to blame? Who’s to blame for how crass we’ve made ourselves? I’ll tell you one group, fucking businessmen. Who are these people who care about nothing but the bottom line, who’ll rape and unearth the earth to stick into it their vulgar drivel, who are these people whose imaginations are so rotten that they’d rather bathe themselves in oil than in water? Who are these people, I’d like to know.”

“Well, you’ve got a lot of rage in you for a young lad, that I’ll tell you. Cheer up. The world’s not so bad as all that.”

“No, I don’t want to cheer up. As long as I have to drive….”

“There you are. Don’t drive. You’re contributing to everything you hate if you drive.”

“You’re right. I shouldn’t. But what choice do I have? I have to go from place to place. I’ve got to look for work. I’ve got to feed myself.”

“You’re not in school?”

“I look that young to you? I’m in college. Or was, until I found out what a load of crap it was and left. I want to do my own thing.”

“And what’s that?”

“I don’t know. Still looking to find that out.”

“Well……”

But the kid was not done venting his spleen. Oh, no, one could say he was only getting started…..

“The thing is, we’ve got these two twin scourges of our age. One group controls the blips and pulses, and what they want to do to the world is to adorn it with blips and pulses, the other group is the old-fashioned robber baron crowd, what they want to do is to bathe you in oil, as they do to themselves, and charge you for it, and yeah, you might say, but they seem to have different agendas, and I’ll say right but…..”

“But….”

“But essentially, they have a symbiotic relation, reciprocal agreements with one another, so that one’s to take care of the mind, the other’s to take care of your other needs. Sooner or later, I see a world in which one side loses, because the robber barons will find out that they’re getting progressively weaker in relation to the blips and pulses group. You can see that happening all around you, you know for a fact that the oilmen and the tobacco guys and all similar folks are already dinosaurs, they’re already feeling hopelessly outdated in a world in which bits and pulses are superseding their wares as most traded articles of commerce.”

“The oil and tobacco guys are relentless, but they’re trading in essentially nonessentials. More so the oil guys, because now with in our electronic age, we can go wherever we want without getting out from bed. The oilmen are scared of that, but not so scared, because they’ve never had any real faith in science, they are fossils, just like their wares, they’re not smart enough to realize that at one point, the blips and pulses crowd who’re moving ever so fast will decide that they’ve had enough with these old dinosaurs, these laggards and just dump them. But that’s still into the future.”

“You seem to have a particular anger towards the oil industry.”

“Yes, it is very particular. It’s a unique anger, because oilmen are uniquely evil. They’re also uniquely stupid. They’ll be the ruin of this country. Oil’s running out, everybody knows that, but these fellows perpetually want to keep hanging on to it. They’re uniquely stupid in believing that something that will go away is still the country’s, and the world’s salvation. Tobacco guys were much cleverer, look at how quickly they readjusted their theme. They made smoking seem to be less of a cool thing and more something that you pick out of choice. So now smoking is not necessarily cool for everybody, but its still cool for those who pick it up, because they’re doing it out of choice, and choice is still cool.”

“Well, these uniquely stupid people are also, it seems to me, uniquely rich.”

“They’re uniquely lucky, but their luck’s running out. I may have my problems with there being too much technology, but one thing I’ll be happy about is when it drives these dinosaurs finally to extinction. Then indeed, goodbye, and good riddance. But anyway, because they’re eventually doomed, I’m not worried about them. The quintessential sign of American decadence and vulgarity, and they’ll be the ones dragging America down to third-world status, you can take it from me. That is, of course, if their hold on the country is still as strong as it is right now, and I don’t think that will be for a long time. After a little while, I foresee people simply getting tired of filling gas in their cars every morning to drive to work fifty miles away. I’m really surprised it hasn’t happened yet. But I believe its coming, people simply tired of driving and driving and driving, as if that was life’s greatest joy….”

“ I don’t mind driving a little myself.”

“I don’t mind driving a little myself. But it’s the day by day, mile after mile, mile after weary mile, I should say, trips to nowhere that piss me off. And what do we have for the scenery? Garbage. Advertising everywhere. And not only advertising, but the same signs everywhere. How much more vulgarity can someone take?”

At which point they were interrupted by the prodigious banging from outside, banging that must have been going on for some time, if only they’d heard it, and Mallory left the kid sitting and went to open the doo