Anna is nodding. She asks if I shared any of these reflections with Benton. I say no. She wants to know why I didn’t feel inclined to share what seem like harmless perceptions with him, my lover, and I tell her I need to think about this for a minute. I am not sure of the answer.
“No.” She prods me. “Do not think. Feel it.”
I ponder.
“No. Feel it, Kay. Feel it.” She touches her hand over her heart.
“I have to think. I’ve gotten where I am in life by thinking,” I reply defensively, snapping to, coming out of uncommon space I have just been in. I am back in her living room now and understand everything that has happened to me.
“You have gotten where you are in life by knowing,” she says. “And knowing is perceiving. Thinking is how we process what we perceive, and thinking often masks the truth. Why did you not wish to share your more poetic side with Benton?”
“Because I don’t really acknowledge that side. It’s a useless side. To compare the brain to a mushroom in court would get you nowhere, for example,” I reply.
“Ah.” Anna nods again. “You make analogies in court all the time. That is why you are such an effective witness. You evoke images so the common person can understand. Why did you not tell Benton the associations you are just now telling me?”
I stop rocking and reposition my broken arm, resting the cast in my lap. I turn away from Anna and look out at the river, feeling suddenly evasive like Buford Righter. Dozens of Canada geese have congregated around an old sycamore tree. They sit in the grass like dark, long-necked gourds, and puff and flap and peck for food. “I don’t want to go through that looking glass,” I tell her. “It isn’t just that I didn’t want to tell Benton. I don’t want to tell anyone. I don’t want to tell it at all. And by not repeating involuntary images and associations, I don’t, well, I don’t…”
Anna nods again, deeply this time. “By not acknowledging them, you don’t invite your imagination into your work,” she finishes my thought.
“I have to be clinical, objective. You of all people should understand.”
She studies me before replying. “Is it that? Or might it be that you are avoiding the unbearable suffering you most certainly would invite if you allowed your imagination to get involved in your cases?” She leans closer, resting her elbows on her knees, gesturing. “What if, for example”she pauses dramatically”you could take the facts of science and medicine and use your imagination to reconstruct in detail the last minutes of Diane Bray’s life? What if you could conjure it up like the footage of a film and watchwatch her being attacked, watch her hemorrhage, watch her being bitten and beaten? Watch her die?”
“That would be unspeakably awful,” I barely reply.
“How powerful if a jury could see a film like that,” she says.
Nervous impulses boil beneath my skin like thousands of minnows.
“But if you went through that looking glass, as you refer to it,” she goes on, “then where might it end?” She throws her hands up. “Ah. Maybe it would not end, and you would be forced to watch the footage of Benton’s murder.”
I shut my eyes. I resist her. No. Please, Lord, don’t make me see that. A flash of Benton in the dark, a gun trained on him and the ratcheting sound, the snap of steel as they handcuff him. Taunts. They would taunt him, Mister FBI, you ‘re so smart, what are we gonna do next. Mister Profiler? Can you read our minds, figure us out, predict? Huh? He wouldn’t answer them. He would ask them nothing as they forced him into a small neighborhood grocery store on the western fringes of the University of Pennsylvania that had closed at five in the afternoon. Benton was going to die. They would torment and torture him, and that was the part he would center onhow to short-circuit the pain and degradation he knew they would inflict if they had time. Darkness and the spurt of a match. His face wavering in the light of a small flame that trembles with each stir of air as those two psychopathic assholes move about in the plenum of a shitty little Pakistani grocery store they torched after he was dead.