John Doe

Chapter One

"I'd like to say that it was all down to my childhood;" The man paused and an unfamiliar grunt tried to escaped his throat. A cough? No. A stifled laugh. He continued, the broken sentence forming back on itself at the edge and upper corners of his skin-picked lips in a cruel and curled grin. "My poor and lonely..." A slow search in the recess of a killer's mind played out like a bad movie as it tore across his face before a single, final twitch signaled a decent into a neutral state as the right word had just been found. "...desolate childhood. Yes, my poor and lonely desolate childhood. That's what I blame. I blame my sin - against your God and the governing forces - all on the shoulders of a little twelve-year-old me and how they, those shoulders - scarred and bruised - just simply couldn't hold the weight of what I had to bare." He hunched his shoulders slightly, grimacing in metaphorical pain. "I blame it all on Daddy, who beat me half to death every other week - no, day - in his drunken stupor, his breath hot and sticky against my neck and sweating brow as he whispered in my ear how he'd love nothing more than to kill me right there and then. "  The silhouette shrunk deeper into the shadow of a single flickering light that rested on the ceiling of the FBI's 'official' therapy room as he curled, almost to a ball, mocking both his father's gravely voice and a crying, little child begging for nothing short of mercy. He stopped. His bland eyes that seemed to sink deep into their sockets, as if trying to escape from the confines of his skull inwards, now sparkled with a certain unseen iridescent life. "Hey, here's an idea!" An overly happy sounding shout like that of a giggly child on Christmas day rose up from himself to the air vents across the room. "I could blame it all on my darling mother, on the Mommy who was never there, never protecting her own son. I could blame it on how she'd rather spend her time running away - to far off lands with her new two best friends, Heroin and Marlboro. Oh, yes I could blame it on her instead; on how she never cooked or cleaned because she was too busy being passed out on the living room couch, pregnant with yet another already dying kid. I could blame it on their partners: the ones each parent thought they were successful at sneaking into the house on late Sunday afternoons, and how poor baby me couldn't handle all the screaming and the arguments. Oh! The arguments! How they still haunt me." The laugh once caught in the back of his throat now escaped in a cold and shriveled self-sufficient cackle. "I could blame it on a lot of things." He shifted slightly in his seat. "Or I could tell the truth." Where was he going?

"Clarice. Why you see my dear sweet Clarice, truth be told I had a very happy childhood with plenty of food to eat and toys to play with; where Santy Clause seemed to visit my house every day to fuck my mother into the happiest of moods wherein she would cook what seemed like no less than a feast for me when I came home, from a school life full of friendship and good grades.  I was a very fat child. There was no beating or alcohol; Christ, you know more than anyone that my father was a detective here and a bloody good one at that. But Clarice, oh Clarice," My name; my identity; and all I stood for, escaped his mouth through a gap in whitened teeth and dripped from his lips onto the ground with a slight hissing sound. "Wouldn't you just love for all else to be the truth? Wouldn't it be wonderful? To think that I never had a sense of the law, that I was always a rebel at my black little heart? That the twelve-year-old me who stayed up late with a flashlight and the detective's handbook until the sun rose never existed. Wouldn't you wish it so? To pin all these past few events on a simple web of happy coincidences that I, the spider, had spun? Just to label me as one of your psycho's and be done with me, to ship me away to Alcatraz or Bedlam, like a sick dog in an old duffel bag on an abandoned road and have no one see me. You'd love it, wouldn't you?" A silence like a bad smell on a hot day filled the air. He sat as he first had when he came to me a good few hours ago: blinking and nothing more. He sat blinking and the soliloquy was over and a question had been asked and now it was my turn to speak and it was my turn in the mental game of Chess where I had only pawns and he Queens. A game of cat and mouse determined only by who left the most silence and the least speech between the little spaces that separated us and 'real' conversation. He was winning.

"Answer me!"
"Ye..yes." I stammered. He was winning. "Yes." I pushed the monosyllable through my own throat and up passed the rock-sized lump that had seemed to form within it. I almost sounded cocky. "That would make my job somewhat easier." His turn.

"Well, you can't! And you know why, Clarice? Guess, guess why Clarice." My turn.
"Because you –"
"Because," He interrupted. The game now ran on his rules; the ones that state that I had to wait my turn and he did not his. "Because the fact is that when you look outside that window at the telephones ringing with all the News Crews and killer enthusiasts; conspiracy theorists; paparazzi, you can see each and every agent in his suit bought from money gained by putting away the 'good people' and he is sweating, sweating through the pores of his insufficient story with its plot holes and continuity errors and it's all lacking evidence. And you can see, just as well as I, Clarice, that I am the sanest person here!"

Checkmate.