Beyond the Sea Ch. 02

"It's always a woman, isn't it? Always a male killer and a female victim. It's the woman whose entrails are scattered into crazy bullshit patterns they make up, the woman who is eaten, raped, humiliated, depersonalized. When you watch a fucking movie, it's always a beautiful woman dumped in the lake, or the buried in the lime pit. And you don't feel sorry for them. You feel sorry for him. You want to help him. You want to talk to him, right? Have a big man-to-man chat. Find out where he keeps it? Find out how he does it? Don't you, Graham? And you know why, too. Because there but for the grace of God-"

The table is in the air, then on the floor by the wall. Instinctively she closes her eyes and lowers her chin, and hates herself for it. He is heaving now, hands in talons, eyes so bright he could see in the dark. In her mind is the rustling of birds, carrying pretty salvage, clicking tiny treasures in powerful claws.

Backing away, he slides silently to the door, but does not leave. Beats pass. She opens her eyes and her thin eyes are full of interest. He knows she wants to study him, to know him. His arms are heavy with rage, and he cannot trust himself to stay and talk. He was just waiting to see her look, and it is not full of pity, or avarice – just a mirror shard of her own self, reflecting in his possibility, and pushing down what she recognizes. Her spine curves down like a brandy glass. She has swallowed too much guilt, and it ruins her posture.

His hands ache and he cracks them. The briefcase remains on the floor when he leaves.

*

Arkady toys with her pen, wanting to write the couplets again, to try to break the code. Graham has made fantastic progress, and she is satisfied with him. Of the hundred lines they salvaged from the apartment, he has identified exactly half, all stolen from songs, Shakespeare, and popular novels. One is a caption from a photo album; they found the album, but nothing in it save magazine clippings of different colours, arranged into wheels and tagged with adjectives: happy, fearful, horny. Graham is beginning to think she may have been trying to invent another way to speak.

"Synesthesiacs have been known to use colour as a metaphor for emotion, flavour, sound – you might feel blue, but the person with synesthesia knows what it tastes like. If her failure as a writer was because she couldn't describe feelings, locations – everything, accurately…it could be a Rosetta stone, a different form of concordance."

"Concordance? A guide?"

"Yes. Like a daytimer, almost. When a character is happy, she relates it to how, say, yellow feels, or to what sound it has. It's brilliant, actually. It would make a wonderful science fair project." Graham was tired, and hungry. Ruled by his stomach in all ways, he fought the tendency to run to fat between cases. During difficult thinking, he did not eat at all, enjoying the lightheadedness of a fast and the speed it lent his thoughts.