Joe Victim: A Thriller

“Ma’am?” he says.

She looks at the guard. “False alarm,” she says, and she moves back to the table. The guard manages to multitask a shrug with an eye-roll while closing the door.

“Do you want to see more of me or not, Joe?”

Ideally, I’d like to see as much of her as I can. If it weren’t for the handcuffs and the guard outside I would make the effort to see every inch of her.

“Of course.”

“Then play it straight with me, okay?” She sits back down. She leans forward in her chair and to her credit she doesn’t interlock her fingers—at least not immediately, not until after she asks “Are you going to stop playing games with me, Joe?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go back to your childhood.”

“There isn’t much to tell. My mom and dad were normal.”

“Your father killed himself,” she says. “That’s not normal, Joe.”

“I know that. I meant, you know, the family dynamic was normal. Dad would go to work and mom would stay at home and I would go to school. The only thing that changed was we all got older.”

“How’d you feel about him killing himself?”

I shake my head. This isn’t a subject I really want to talk about. “Are you serious? How do you think I felt?”

“Are you checking for answers, Joe?”

“No. Of course not. I was angry. Upset. Confused. I mean, the guy was my dad. He was always supposed to be there. He was meant to protect me. And he just, you know, just thought fuck it and ended things. It was pretty selfish.”

“Did you get any counseling at the time?”

“Why would I get counseling?”

“Did your father leave a note?”

“No.”

“Do you know why he did it?”

“Not really,” I say, but that’s not entirely true. I have this dream sometimes, which, sometimes, I think might actually be a memory rather than a dream. It was the Uncle Billy factor. I came home to find Dad and Uncle Billy in the shower together nine years ago. I don’t know if my father would have killed himself if I’d given him the time to really think about it. I think he would have. Better that than living with mom’s anger. His suicide was less a suicide and more of his only son nudging him a little closer to heaven. I think that’s where he wanted to go since I heard him saying oh God, oh God over and over before I opened the bathroom door. It was the less painful solution for everybody involved. And not painful for me at all. Of course, that might just be a dream. . . .

“You sure? You look like you’re remembering something.”

“I’m just remembering my dad. I miss him. I always miss him.”

“Some professionals would call what your father did a trigger.”

“What?”

“A trigger. It means an act that forces you to behave differently. A triggering event.”

“Oh. I understand,” I say, not so sure I do. I didn’t shoot him. I tied him up and stuffed him into his car and put a hose running from the exhaust and through a gap in the window. At least that’s what Dream Joe does sometimes.

“I want to talk more about your childhood.”

“Because you think there are more triggers?”

“Possibly. Your story about the kitten—”

“John,” I interrupt.

“John,” she says. “Your story about John makes me think there are going to be other triggers. Tell me, Joe, do you like women?”

“Joe likes everybody,” I say.

She looks at me for a few seconds, saying nothing, and I’m sure she’s about to tell me off for referring to myself in the third person. I used to do that when I was a janitor and it worked well. Here, I’m not so sure.

“What’s your earliest traumatic memory?” she asks.

“I don’t have any.”

“Something to do with women,” she says. “Your mother, possibly. Or an aunt. A neighbor. Tell me something.”

“Why? Because that’s what the psychiatric textbooks say?” I say, a little too quickly, but I say it that way to stop my mind from traveling back to when I was a teenager.

“Yes, Joe. That’s why. I know what I need to hear from you, and I get the strong impression you also know what you need to say. I’m going to give you sixty seconds to tell me something that happened to you when you were young. Trust me, I’ll know if you’re making it up. But something happened and I want to know what.”

“There’s nothing,” I say, leaning back. I start drumming my fingers on the table.

“Then we’re done here,” she says, and she starts to put the tape recorder back into her bag.

“Fine,” I tell her.

She finishes packing up. “I won’t be back,” she says.

“Whatever,” I tell her.

She makes it to the door. Then she turns back. “I know it’s hard, Joe, but if you want me to help you, you have to tell me.”

“There’s nothing.”

“There’s obviously something.”

“Nope. Nothing,” I tell her.

She knocks on the door. The guard opens it up. She doesn’t look back. She takes one step, then another step, and then I call out to her. “Wait,” I tell her.