Joe Victim: A Thriller

I’m dripping with sweat and the ski mask is making my face itch. Ski masks are a strange invention. I’ve never seen people on TV, at the Olympics, or in movies wearing ski masks covering their faces when they ski. They have woolen hats and thick jackets and gogglelike sunglasses, but they don’t look like bank robbers. Really they should be renamed robbery masks. Or rapists’ masks. But I’m wearing one at the moment, and it’s getting damper with sweat by the minute. It’s a sunny day, a non–ski-mask-wearing kind of day for most people, with blue skies and, like all sunny days, it makes me feel good. There are shapes in the few clouds up there, I see a knife, I see a woman, I see bad things happening among those clouds. I don’t need to pick the lock to the front door of the house because I have a key, and I use it to make my way inside. I make friends with the cold air spilling out of the fridge, and I make closer friends with an ice-cold beer. Not Coke, but beer, because Coke isn’t on sale. I sit down at the table and I can hear sounds coming from the bedroom, snoring mostly, the occasional creak of bedsprings as weight is shifted. Then I realize it’s no longer daytime, there are no blue skies, and it’s midnight. Time has jumped forward and I’m not sure how, that’s just the way time works when you’re dreaming. I scratch at the mask and readjust it, then I open up my briefcase and touch the blades that are in there.

I stay in the kitchen, and after a while the snoring stops, there are footsteps, a light comes on from further up the hallway, then two minutes later a toilet is flushed. Then more footsteps and my mother comes into the kitchen where I’m still sitting.

“Who are you?” Mom asks.

“I’m not Joe,” I tell her, because the last thing I need is my mother thinking I’m a bad person. From there on I let my knife do the talking. It speaks to her over and over until her and me and the kitchen are all on the same page. It’s messy. It always is.

“And that’s how it always goes?” she asks, and the she in question is sitting opposite me.

I’m back in the interview room and back to reality. It’s Friday morning and the day started with high hopes when I looked at the books from Melissa and read her message again and again. Then there was breakfast and some eye contact with Caleb Cole before the guards came and got me. It’s interview time with my psychiatrist. My psychiatrist leans forward and steeples her fingers. It must be something they all do. Must be something that on day one in psychiatry school, the teacher shows them some grainy, black-and-white footage from the forties and makes all the students practice how to sit in a way that makes them look smart. Kind of ironic for people in this particular field not to recognize how dumb they look. Good part about my psychiatrist is she looks a lot of other things too. She looks attractive. And as good as that is, it’s also bad. It’s distracting. It’s making Joe think the kind of things that got Joe here in the first place. There’s a small recorder in front of her, storing each word to memory.

“It doesn’t always go like that,” I tell her. “Mostly. I don’t know. I didn’t used to dream. But now I’m not so sure, because the dream feels so familiar. Like I’ve been having it my entire life. Sometimes I wake up from it certain that’s what I’ve done, that my mother is dead and that’s why I’m in here. Once I was so convinced of it I wanted to call her to make sure she was okay,” I say, though that last bit about calling isn’t true. “Sometimes I’ve poisoned her. Once I even snuck into her house dressed as a burglar and frightened her to death. The dreams always feel real.”

I don’t add anything more, though I could. I’m not really sure what the correct answer is. The psychiatrist’s name is Alice and I’ve already forgotten her last name. Truth is I’ve kind of forgotten her first name too. It may not be Alice. It may be Ellen. Or Alison. Or even Ali-ellen. I try to keep my eyes on Ali’s face, on those smooth cheek bones, that jawline, those big beautiful blue eyes of hers. I try to stop my eyes from roaming over her body, the curves like a treasure map to a whole lot of places I’d like to uncover and plunder and carve an X into. She’s dressed in a pair of black trousers and a cream blouse that must be a bitch to get blood out of. It’s not low-cut and the trousers aren’t tight.

There’s no need to ask her if the answer I gave her was the correct one, because she’s already told me there are no correct answers, which we all know is bullshit. She told me it wasn’t her job to say what was right or wrong, that it was her job to evaluate me and then share that information with the courts. Of course she was lying when she said that. If I told her I could remember every detail of every victim and that the reason I killed them was because I enjoyed it, that would be considered a wrong answer. There are a bunch of right answers, which will make her rubber-stamp my insanity case—I just have to figure out what they are.

She unsteeples her fingers. “Have you always had bad thoughts about your mother?” she asks, and she wouldn’t be asking that question if she’d met my mother.

“It depends on what you mean by bad thoughts,” I say. “We all have bad thoughts.”

“But we all don’t dream about killing our mothers.”

“We don’t?”

Her eyes widen a little, and something I said must have shocked her, but I’m not sure what. “It’s not common, Joe, to have those dreams. Not at all.”

“Oh,” I say, genuinely surprised, and it registers with her. I must act more genuinely surprised as the conversation goes on. “But they can’t be considered bad thoughts if you’re asleep, right? Nobody can control their dreams.”

“This is true,” she says. “The women you’ve killed,” she says, and I put my hand up—the one that isn’t cuffed to the chair—and interrupt her.

“I don’t remember any of it,” I say.

“Yes. I know. You’ve said already. But you didn’t kill your mother and yet you dream that you did. You don’t have dreams of other people?”