Shooting in the Dark

Derrida and Lacan, he daily focused his trained gaze on the stream of patients visiting his clinical practice. JD was torn about labelling the character with bisexuality. He preferred to keep his murderers well within the confines of the white heterosexual community, practising a kind of literary positive discrimination. But he had been unable to resist the echoes of a post-modern killer’s bisexuality. A character who spends his time questioning the traditional boundaries between the categories that we assume to be distinct could not be enslaved within those boundaries. The critics would complain that JD was politically incorrect again, but he didn’t write for them.
    A secondary problem with the character was technical. JD wanted his psychoanalyst to be understood in human terms. He didn’t want the reader to write him off as a monster. The murders had to be seen, of course, as the brutal and destructive acts they were, but JD was concerned that the entire blame for the violence didn’t fall on the individual. He wanted to show the substantial contribution of the environment in which the individual lived and worked. JD was a political animal and he didn’t want to write a novel in which the individual’s failure was condemned while the institutionalized violence of the state was ignored.
    Most fictional murderers were presented in stereotypical terms, described as having the puffy eyes and absorbent skin of a boozer, perhaps, or as a burned-out schizophrenic with shaking and trembling hands. They smoked cigarettes continually. When JD described his psychoanalyst’s thin, grey, Presbyterian conscience, his instinct was to cut the two adjectives. He highlighted them in the text and pushed the delete key, watched the computer do its magic.
    He shook his head, read the sentence over and over again. Finally he reached for the undo key and pressed it quickly. As the two adjectives reappeared JD felt the ghost of a First World War ambulance driver move closer to his right shoulder.
    He was at that stage in the writing of the novel where it would be good if he could bring in a man with a gun. He could introduce another murder, but it seemed facile, somehow, upping the body count just to keep a reader’s eyes glued to the page. He felt something for all of his characters in different ways, sympathized with their individual plights and could not justify bumping one of them off without a good reason. The only reason that would suffice would be if the death somehow furthered the development of the plot.
    But the idea of furthering the development of the plot brought a smile to JD’s lips. There was little or no plot to the novel anyway, only a main theme supported by tributaries and echoes, by humour and ideas and dialogue. His novel, like the case of Isabel and Angeles Falco, was at an impasse. All the groundwork and the research had been done, the usual suspects had been identified and the witnesses primed. Now the miracle had to happen. JD waited; and someone on the street outside rang the doorbell.
     
    Pancake make-up. Huge virtual eyes. The gap between jacket and skirt and the flash of silver and quartz from a navel ring. Christine Moxey had gone blonde since the last time he saw her but the make-up and schmuck with which she adorned her body couldn’t hide the underlying brash vulnerability.
    ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘You must be freezing.’
    ‘Thought you’d never ask.’ She brushed past him and marched down the hall and up the three steps to JD’s workroom. He followed, trying to put together the monstrous Reeboks, which reminded him of Minnie Mouse, and the skirt that was so short he could see right up to the maker’s name.
    ‘I’ve seen my bike,’ she said.
    He could have kissed her. JD took a moment out to consider if he’d rather have heard her say anything else. But he couldn’t think of a thing. It was as if she’d lived out her fifteen years with only this one utterance as the objective.
    ‘Tell me,’ he said. She was blue, goose pimples colonizing her midriff. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, wrap her in a blanket of warmth.
    ‘It’s at work. This café on Pavement. I work there weekends. All the girls leave their bikes in the back.’
    ‘It was there?’ said JD, dismayed. ‘You’d left it there. Forgot about it?’
    ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I told you, it was stolen. But it turned up again this morning, back of the café. One of the other girls must’ve left it