But it was their last interaction and Furillo’s eventual exit meant Tame alone in his office, others milling about but never daring to interrupt her, as she ruminated on what she’d recently learned and the possible ways it could interact with everything everyone had learned to date about everything and everyone.
John Doe was a writer.
A writer is someone who writes, Tame had patiently[5] explained to Furillo when he objected that no agent, no prizes, no editor, no book deal, meant no writer. Similarly, see if you can follow, an artist creates art.
Of the three works attributable to Doe it was the last of these, ENERGEIAS, that was most susceptible to mystery and because Tame had been deprived of the mysterious for so long she could be said to have fixated on it. Her fixation really was on the subject of unfinished work and in particular those abated by death:
No less than The Aeneid was an unfinished work, one that Vergil wanted destroyed once he was gone.
Raphael, who was born on a Good Friday, incredibly died exactly thirty-seven years later on another Good Friday necessitating that his student finish The Transfiguration.
Mozart’s Requiem and Mahler’s Tenth Symphony but more relevant to Doe, Schubert’s Eighth Symphony and the continuing debate over whether it actually is unfinished.
To set the world aright. The work of Helen Tame would almost certainly remain unfinished.
Helen Tame, at moments like these, did not lead a well-rounded existence. Instead it could be said she attained a kind of fugue state in which, as a product, something like the life of John Doe, in particular his final moments, was revealed to her in exponentially increasing detail until it was as vivid and true as a G. E. Moorean hand in front of her face. It was a process she could only partially explain but one that had produced only success in its lifetime so she objected strenuously to even attempts at that partial explanation.
Here’s the partial explanation: To best arrive at something True one needn’t always limit oneself to intervening steps that are unproblematically so; instead a better process is one wherein probabilities are temporarily given almost as much weight as certainties until their cumulative effect creates a provisional truth that can not only harden into the real thing but then retroactively raise the level of what came before.
For example what a cat will do when it has a mouse.
An observer will see what’s come to be called play but if so the cruelest form of it ever devised during which a small living thing confronted by its much larger natural predator will periodically be allowed to believe that everything will be fine after all, that it will escape the violent end that seemed inevitable and resume its uncomplicated existence, only to suddenly receive a furiously sharp swat that extinguishes all hope and that in its constant repetition only prolongs the despair; and if you object with a fact, that the situation involves no actual malice but is instead more like an impassive demonstration of nature, you still have to ask yourself what kind of universe abides this as natural.
Helen Tame asked herself. John Doe had not admitted a visitor of any kind in over six weeks. During that time he had not left his apartment. His vision, so keen throughout the majority of his life that he’d only recently required even reading glasses, had been reduced to intermittent clarity from within a spreading opacity. He should not have been alone.
Such a person could have determined that an intentional death had many benefits, not the least of which would be the abrupt end of all anticipatory dread. Could have, true, but Tame didn’t think so: the state of his belongings, the textual evidence, even the position of the bankrupt.
The issue recurred with a frequency that would’ve startled the layman. Her first case in fact was a straightforward, obvious suicide that wasn’t. She had gone from Police Academy straight to Homicide which ascension without precedent led to many vitriolic memos and snide less-than-fully-exhaled asides, a situation not helped by her steadfast refusal to classify the fifteen-year-old hanging in his bedroom near a suicide note a self-immolation. Tame spent two uninterrupted days in the boy’s room before ultimately declaring the note unpersuasive. Six weeks later and the boy’s headmaster, yes that crowd, is now undeniably the true author of the note and Tame is ensuring his head doesn’t bang her car, all those cameras watching, and certain people can’t believe their good fortune when they connect the compelling dots and also can’t fast enough seek to promote her insane backstory to the front but without even minimal cooperation from Helen Tame who when she is shortly thereafter called into a room with that year’s version of Furillo and he says something along the lines of natural police with her as referent shoots a terminal look the speaker’s way along with unmistakable verbal invitations that are more like commands to never do that again, that compliment thing, the inescapable conclusion then properly drawn that a new but central tenet had emerged whose force would echo unabated thereafter: you do not condescend to Helen Tame.
So if not suicide what then? Tame reviewed every Manhattan DOA that came through and she couldn’t fully shake the notion that Doe was the culmination or worse continuation of a pattern but this was in reality a rare mental misstep threatening to form because what Tame was actually sensing was the sameness all humanity reduced to.
Now of course Helen Tame was free to do as she wished. Meaning free to say: very little mystery attaches to a centenarian’s death and this case is not The or even an exception. Could even have added: I am still technically employed by a police department ostensibly to engage in what I chose to make my life’s work, namely the investigation and subsequent solution of any ambiguous appearance of manmade Death and any time I devote to the unambiguous and inhuman is of necessity subtracted from that work with a resulting potential increase in the kind of undetected malfeasance that so offends me. She did not say that.
Because of course that same freedom entailed the opposite right. So she was entitled to say: I want to know Everything before I die. So when coincidence connects me with a question of even the slightest interest that is not readily answerable that, standing alone, is ample justification for an obsessive pursuit of a satisfactory resolution with the concept satisfactory determined only by me and also these two matters, the great offense at undetected malfeasance and the know-everything want, are related in that both stem from a great fear, some would say realization, that we are all there is which puts us in the position of something like God, which is not some great thing despite how it sounds at first blush because of the obscene demands it places on human justice and knowledge.
Something like that was really what she said and the reasons for that were manifold. First, far as any concern over an increase in the volume of bloodshed due to Tame’s distraction went, the discovery of John Doe dovetailed nicely with a perhaps disheartening discovery that Helen had only recently conceded. And this discovery will likely seem obvious if you forget we are talking about Helen Tame being the discoverer because it amounts to the realization that her work possessed no actual deterrent value. So even though she had raised her art to a height not seen before or since, this raising in fact very rarely prevented anything and the number of lifeless bodies requiring explanatory thought was, it seemed, a feature of the universe that only appeared to vary when looked at from the micro level and the macro truth was an equational constant translatable into prose thusly: people will kill people.
5
fn Being taken here is a narrative liberty. Helen Tame did not do this explaining patiently; Helen Tame did nothing patiently because now picture the least patient person you know and realize that Tame would make that person seem saintly were a comparison made.