The Detective
A white card pinned to his chest read, or spoke, or what was written on the card was “you are unlikely to find me here” read by the detective who for the first time looked about the floor for anything that the forensic team hadn’t already labelled as if she had some other insight that could only be discovered by what the others, who as trained forensic specialists, would, because of their training, she imagined, miss, or not, forensically speaking, deem ‘important’ to notice but they had labelled a good god damn lot, almost everything and that, in its labelling, bothered her because by their labelling it corroded or obfuscated or tainted her potential for pure observation, or indeed any observation other than counting and naming in the mind these elements, that is, instead of seeing she simply saw what was already catalogued, and all of that could be read in the case file by any idiot who wanted to pursue this case or, in future times, if the lawyers deemed a retrial necessary or to save a human life from capital punishment, could read exactly the same words as she would now read even while the blood was still warm in the body and that by their labelling process had disabled any human faculty and so, given those constraints, she must now ignore, put those elements out of mind and try and live in the room, try and breathe and see, with her own eyes, what there was to see: what do lovers want but a small chance to be free, a moment to express their love regardless or despite of or because moments are brief, so they press together hard, in the early moments of their infatuation, they take every possible moment to make love as urgent, they can not do otherwise, there is a force urging them to do it, not urging, propelling? there is but one purpose and there is only that purpose, every window in the apartment looks out over a dreamscape filled with endless apartments where people are idly boiling water to make tea or doing sit-ups or sleeping or watching television or living their otherwise lives, the vast normal majority of literally every living breathing soul, that there are these moments of love that blossom up every now and then should be and are treated as rare, the thrust with which we, sorry, they, in the crime scene, pursued them is exactly accurate, a blindness, albeit ecstatic in the moment that is thoroughly engaged in the one chance out of a grey normality of living, shopping cooking working eating walking etc., this moment was the heightened extra moment where one cannot, or is unable to in the face of true ecstasy do otherwise…the view from the dead man’s apartment is minimally spectacular, a moderate mid-level view out over a typical representation of a living city that is mostly alive, built perhaps fifty years ago mostly to seduce humans who were not born here and so has no soul or purpose other than to both exclude locals and marginally include outlanders which by it’s distasteful endeavour has succeeding in achieving neither, but it, from the window, appears, by the simple equation that lights on equals life, seems to be a successfully breathing city…she rereads, “you are unlikely to find me here” because what is here, a dead person, sure, but in place of this dummy, this placeholder, this decoy is the ‘anyone’, this dead man is the embodiment of nothing, so the killer says, that you will not find them here living such a life, condemning this blandness, you will not catch me dying this bland empty death, you shall instead imagine me as being one of the free, free to kill anonymously, free to dip in to this most forbidden of possibilities and get away with it, that I may never even kill again and, she imagines in her detective mind, that if the killer does kill again the motive may be identical, perhaps another place that will again assert that “you are unlikely to find me here”; knocking on the door of a random house and as soon as the door opens sinking a sharp axe purchased second hand through a street car boot sale into the centre of the forehead of the man or woman who happened to open the door and leaving the very same card on the ground and turning and walking away having done it again with the message or meaning or importance of the act left to be puzzled or reasoned or explained by another detective or anyone indeed who ponders over the meaning of life and death and that random chance, that element that exists in the cosmos, whether the flow of elements set in motion eons ago could only be performed or carried out precisely like this, where every occurrence is predetermined by the ongoing unfolding of the universal elements as they continue their interplay while we as observers given senses that have weak abilities to take in sensorium of the magnitude that our faculties require in order to fathom these manifestations of permutation in reality as, say a moment of a droplet of water is both sustained by our vision but will ultimately continue falling and become lost in the river, so that this card, to the detective in her sense of guilt about forgiving acts of violence as non-moral, is outside of the realm of morality we would ascribe to an action, shares or imagines she agrees with this murderer who by dropping cards has inadvertently chosen as their captor the precise detective that will by her method of reasoning eventually and soon capture them and if there is any method or roll or wheel like motion to the unfolding events then you can imagine how precious it is that they have both found their fulfilment in their roles, one being the yin and one being the yang, how they searched for each other and through a little bit of luck found each other, one may have gone on killing without end, an endless stream of meaningless random deaths that no one could surmise the true motive for and the other a lost detective never understanding why human beings behave the way they do, their brutality without purpose or reason or grand concurrence of Saturn, the gods who birthed us creating opponents for us to battle and resolve our equal and valid natures against, like love, like friendship like every important balance that exists between the forces of good and evil, she imagined envisioning a murder streak, a serial killer leaving card after card and the particular message that includes the word ‘find’ sufficient to heighten the claim that this was about to become serial in nature, so she surmised, that there was an endgame and the first piece was just played, the terminology was too sweet, as in, deliberately enticing and that there was much more to do, what, if any, of her insights she would wish to share and whether the method of murder, a slow letting of blood into a pan by at first asphyxiating the victim then draining their blood out through the artery using the final slow pumping of the heart to do the heavy lifting wasn’t indeed a medical student or at least a person who was familiar with animals, and, given the note, makes no distinction, and so, down to the end, where we have felt love and discovered one another, where we have seen the face of god as she has told us, or shown us a glimpse of heaven as she watches us down below in purgatory enacting out scenarios, living to learn, how we come to embrace our devil self, and they embrace us, your ancient evil eyes soften when you are ensconced by your earth mother’s bosom so that even though you sink your blade up under my ribs and my warm blood flows out over your knuckles and in your mind you have escaped my weight as I sink down onto you you will never forget even though you pushed that body off shook the blood off your hand and ran a mere fifty steps into a car and shot off into a new valley where people live in repetition, but it was not this kind of murder: here, small tickets lay strewn about, over used, crime scene photographs flashed and burned the decay of a still dead room, crept about with great care by human beings who burned to be a part of this world, studied and languidly took steps so that they could be in this room and serve some purpose, to catalogue, to help, to assist, they say, to make sure there is no funny business, to hold us meaning corruptible humans accountable so that evidence can be preserved, the evidence of death and the end of a life, the evidence of, they say, evil, an act has occurred in this room they say gravely, something bad has happened and so gleeful go home have dinner wash and iron shirts – we will have helped, we will have done actions that are on the side of good and light and the general salvation of the world, steps in the right direction, endless reams of material stored in hard drives, a murderer sitting now shivering or sleeping or masturbating or showering, this person alive who knows what you are doing, knows you are recording their deed and this too perhaps gives them pleasure, and sickness, and distress – there are so many of us but so few of us are remembered, buried or cremated, uncles cousins great grandfathers all gone, barely recorded save for birth, rank (if they were military), and death, but this killer, our detective is imagining them now naked doused in hot water feeling somewhat free, deciding that this was the last one and taking some pleasure in thinking that if in fact this was the last one then there would really be no more cause for concern or worry, that is, if they were really able to not do this anymore than it would be unlikely that they would be captured, the preceding murders being so random and strange and uncomplicated that, now that they think about it, is almost completely like a dream, that is, incoherent, strange and phantom-like as if they never happened at all, that sometimes people die, it is already beginning to feel like that for this person who, after a shower sits down on a chair just like any person sits down on a chair and begins to think about things or what they will do tomorrow, meetings, obligations and the detritus of living, soothed to sleep by the general peace of both having accomplished a wish that is potentially the gravest and most significant action their mind can want and that they have a serenity now and can finally go on living a bit longer like jesus christ I’ve got that significant problem off my back, imagine if it was as simple as when we notice that horribly addicted cigarette smoker lurch out of a train car and light up instantly because they were forbade smoking for forty five minutes, there are similar urges that exists inside humans, there is a map of this, there are other signs that impossible urges must be filled in order to avoid rage, break down, hideous enactments of hulking incoherence occurring now daily as society is forced to shift to a new version of the world that through decades of rape and brutal devastation of the fundament of human life results in shortages or disease or restriction or the general loss of a future many believed would continue unaffected, the loss of magic, or, dreams, the detective remembers is the exact recipe that produces murderers, those who once believed in fantasy, hoped for fantasy and had the power to enact fantasy here on earth, it is the Eden project misinterpreted for eons, that the message of all religions is that heaven is already here, but they wanted to include death as a part of morality, that control was more important than experience, so here we are surrounded by death, this blood here in the pan is exhibit 22, the blood stain in the edge of the chair that the body lay slumped over while it drained exhibit 17, the order is inconsequential, the forensic scientist’s job is to catalogue not order, the footsteps recorded on the carpet aren’t one two or three, they are any number, the object of cataloguing is not to import meaning, it is to record, and they do that job clinically and exactingly, these agents of low revelation (resolution), these innocent bystanders, guiltless, flawless, empty and vacant, mere perfect robots who hold instruments way better than any other lifeform we may use for this purpose of blatant evidence collection, as the light begins to brighten, she begins to appreciate a new scene; this man, this drained dead man, is not unlike her uncle, he is of a similar age, similar life position that is alone, tending a cat, works in a position he has held for decades, has his small pleasures, his routine, a handmade tapestry of a famous Degas ballet painting, a black and white framed photograph of Paris in the early 1900s, a man who has chosen solitude and an inner world of pain and discomfort, yearning over actualisation, hope over achievement, aligning his ethos with a sense that nothing is possible and that cherishing what one has is worthwhile enough, and a person who wishes them dead would be one who hates this forgiving bland satisfaction, a person who would wish that this person be relieved from their delusion or their simple satisfaction with this bare minimum of understanding what French philosophers would call “a useless passion”, that we die “nonetheless” or that Camus imbued an endless pointless life with some sympathy by penning his Sisyphus essay that if one doesn’t quickly imbibe, process and compact in their teenage years may find themselves revisiting endlessly with a cat and a well cooked meal and find themselves watching the same hand-full of existential continuance that we now recognise as French new-wave, say, or that despair exists and can be noticed and examined and is no longer a thing that merely defines a person or that one only “lacks information”, or, more accurately, it was correct at the time and now lacks depth, this once strong force has been replaced with an arguably more rapacious philosophy but looking about the room of this drained man he had not escaped the erstwhile point that being is nothingness, that smoking is romantic “la petite mort” because we know our limitations and we wait for death and that death is our ultimate end so why not hasten her lovely vacant embrace and all the other, lovely, sure, messages we once thought during that beautiful heyday of, what we now consider, clichéd French café think, or, teenage anguish, and in this home, surrounded by the encapsulations and exhalations of this era, one begins to imagine the type of killer who perhaps thought, alleviated or granted or gifted, these words: this man this end, a gentle peaceful perhaps even matched, as in, equivalent to his expectation or wish, has a murderer for a friend, a close ally either imagined or real, someone who witnessed a human who would not be overly against the prospect of being dead, that they couldn’t do it for themselves even though they wanted it and so in this case it’s not a murder or a homicide, it is a euthanasia, depending on which side of the fence you wish to sit, but what kind of serial killer would you call that, because indeed they are seeing as they left that god damned card that reads “you are unlikely to find me here”, the detective now tired hangs her head over the scene, the card is gone she only has the photograph of the card which is now in a plastic bag and stored in some box she will have to request formally with a letter to see, waiting for the next card that may give some other idea as to what this death-bringer is or wants but for now there is nothing much else to do but close the door and like a person who has just left a friends house and stayed too long and is only beginning to sober up walk down the street to the main road and wait for a bus because there is nothing better to clear your head from dipping beneath the surface of pleasant life than early morning public transport.
