Chapter 6 – Frozen

Doors clank shut like they do in the movies, and I am frozen in time and space.

The ageless stench of sweat, fear, and stale time hovers around me, permeating the very air that I breathe, flooding my lungs with each inhalation, twisting within me until my head is light and full of fluff.

The rhymes have left me. They have no space in my head, in this cold, hard place.

The police have left me as well, at least the ones that picked me up. They said something about, ‘flight risk,’ as if I were flighty. Or maybe I had grown wings in the time in the back of the car. God knows I wish I could have. My brain, full of fluff, is not working properly. I have gone through the dream world of Dr Seuss and out the other side into ‘just plain hell.’

Hell is cold, not hot.

Hell is full of cold, smooth surfaces. Steel, concrete, utilitarian worn wood.

Hell is full of hot anger, burbling tension, bad attitude, and barely contained violence.

I can feel myself folding inwards, looking for safety, and finding none. For when I shift in my seat in the corner of this cage, I am only reminded of impenetrable surfaces and locked doors. This is my new home, where I will rest my head, and live, forever more.

I have no hope of escape. I heard the policemen and women joking with each other as they checked me in, took my fingerprints, and told me to strip.

Blood soaked clothes were quickly funnelled away into plastic bags to be tested, and verified, as the blood of the murdered couple.

Murdered couple. Has innocence truly met its end in my Hotel? On my watch? But how?

And they will find it is so; the blood of the murdered couple. Murdered couple. Echoes in my mind as reality settles in for the long dark night of my soul. I can see/feel it coming. This is going to be a rough ride. And even as I settle in to acceptance, still a part of me fights for justice, against injustice.

Not fair! It cries, as if fairness ever mattered. Not fair! Not I! I was not the one! I did not do this!
But neither the concrete floor, nor the metal gates, nor even the steel-faced guards, are listening to my internal protest. Guilt is written across my face and still-bloodied hands. My hands.

I look down at my blood-crusted fingers and wonder why they have not let me wash my hands. Then I notice the cracked porcelain basin in the corner, beside the piss bucket, and realise this is something I must do. The beginning of cleansing myself.

But what if they are watching? What if washing my hands is a sure sign of guilt? What if there are cameras?

My eyes search all corners and crevasses of the room and come up empty. There is nowhere to hide a camera that I can see. And I should know.

Oh god. The cameras. And the tapes.

Oh god.

The police must have surely found my little cupboard at the top of the stairs by now.

And soon enough they will find the cameras in the room.

And the cupboard full of tape recordings. Rows of digital tapes, showing what went on in The Hotel. Why did I keep them at all?

I never looked at them after the recording, unless I needed to check a memory I wasn’t sure of. Would they see that it was all just research for my life-time project, my book of books, to tell the world what human beings really were like?

I was writing it in my mind all the time, when the rhyming sewage didn’t leak in and take over, making me feel a little less than sane.

And still the thoughts drip in, one terrifying, Chinese-drip-torture piece at a time.

The tapes.

The cameras.

Last night’s recording of the young couple arriving.

My fingerprints all over the room. All over the cameras. All over the tapes.

All over the cupboard full of tapes.

And the catalogue. Oh god. Why did I keep the catalogue?

But I knew the answer.

I was always organised. I needed the organisation to keep the Cat at bay, to keep my sane.

But still, I could have done it differently. I could have kept the tapes in the usual 3D mess in my room, layering every surface, and used my sixth sense of directional location-based memory to find them. But my OCD wouldn’t let me be, so I had to put them away, you see?

Ah. The Cat is back. That means I am going to be fine. I am relaxing past the stress beyond the rhymes, back through the rhymes, and in due time, will be back to non-rhyming fine. I smile, then realise how crazy I must look, staring at my hands, blood-encrusted murderous hands, grinning like a maniac.

And like that, the rhymes are gone. When will this ever end?

Time blurs and I sit on a hard bench, surrounded by hard faces, hard thoughts, hard judgement. Focusing on any of this is hard, more difficult than I have ever experienced. Pay attention. I know it is important, yet still my mind wanders, drawing doodles in the air, playing patty-cake with the stenographer, happily dancing down her nearly-visible cleavage as she readjusts her seat parallel to the judge’s highchair. I fight back a guffaw as I imagine the judge in a bib, before realising that he is wearing one, a white one, and that is when the evil smile breaks across my face, just when the prosecution let loose his opening statement.

“He was caught red-handed, your honour. Quite literally. His hands and body were covered in the blood of the deceased; the man and woman he murdered.”

“Objection, your honour. The only blood on his hands and body was that of the woman he was trying to save when the paramedics arrived. No evidence of the man’s blood was found on the accused.”

“Sustained. Stick to the facts, counsellor.”

“Yes your honour. He was caught red-handed, at the scene of the crime, and has, since then, never denied murdering the two in the Hotel where he worked as a handyman.”

I could feel myself floating up out of my body as the proceedings developed, taking notes of what was going while watching my life being flushed down the toilet of bad luck and circumstance.

I could see the whole court-case played out. My legal defence pointing out the fact that all of the prosecution’s evidence is circumstantial, pushing for a dismissal of the case entirely, me protesting my innocence, while the prosecution pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his hat, describing first my depravity, my loneliness, my wandering the streets at night, before working his way slowly to the ace up his sleeve, the tape recordings and cameras. For isn’t the peeping Tom only a half-step away from the murdering maniac?

I watch bemused as the evidence of my soullessness is presented to the court. Witnesses called to the stand from all sides talking about my behaviour, even a guard from the police station who remembers me sitting and staring at my unwashed bloody hands in the holding cell, smiling as if happily remembering the murder, the blood, and their dying faces. All supposition, but still oh so real.

How did I get here?

The days blur by, with that one question buzzing around my head like a nightmare.

Evidence piles up of all of my misdemeanours. Every accident or strange behaviour. Each individual piece of malfeasance, picked up and turned over, inspected, pondered, chewed by all and sundry, until my dirty laundry felt almost clean in the light.

Is this all it takes to be free of the guilt? To air one’s dirty laundry in public, at court, for the judge and jury to see? Wow! If I had known it would be this easy, I would have turned myself in much earlier. For what? For anything. For everything. For breathing, eating, sleeping, fucking, not fucking, fighting, not fighting, drinking, not drinking. Just for being. For cleansing.

So this is why people get religion. It felt like the weight of my lifetime was being lifted the further into my dirty soul they dug. Every new scummy fact unearthed making me that much lighter, until it felt like I was in danger of floating out of the witness box, and into the ancient wood rafters holding up the courtroom roof.
I wanted to shout out, Thank you, for catching me, and freeing me in capture! But I kept it to myself, desperately losing the fight to stop my face from breaking into a full grin, then realising the grimace of joy, of excitement, of near-erotic pleasure was worse than any grin, and so I let it go. Just as the prosecution rounded on me with an onslaught summary of my life of evil-doings, I grinned out loud, as if I were proud of the evil that he was accusing me of. As if this were the height of my life, the pinnacle of my success; to be seen by all of these strangers, to be judged by a group of my peers, as evil, sick, dirty, wrong, worth jailing. Worth murdering. My grin drops off as I imagine the lethal injection.

I can feel the needle pricking my skin. The slow deadening of my muscles and mind as the soporific drug takes over my body. Then the slightest pinch of the second needle, the deadly one, pushing terminal poison into my vein, to be pumped throughout my body in no time at all even with the drug-deadened pulse.

I scream, and fight, and push, but the needle punctures my wish-steeled skin and enters my un-protesting vein, pushing its poison deep into my soul. This is the end.

I come back to the room as the jury returns, to return a standing verdict. No standing ovation for you, Mr Bad Guy.

“We find the defendant guilty on all charges.”

That’s it. I’m done. I want to laugh out loud. I want to celebrate, to cavort, and dance, and sing. To stand up, and strip my clothes off to the raunchy music running back and forth between my ears.

But instead I sit stock still, with a ghastly grin plastered across my face, staring off into space, wondering how I will ever get out of this place.

And I know I am doomed, from the moment I came into this room, my life is over now, over and done with, over and gone, overdone, and far-gone.

The end.