My father taught me how to tell when you’re being swindled, and I think about that now, in my cell with this doctor.
My father used to gamble at the greyhound races. He said he would never set foot in a casino because the other players cheated and the dealers dealt dirty. He liked the races because it was just him and the dogs, nobody to cheat him out of his hard-earned pay. He’d take me sometimes, always at night when the smell of yellow beer could grow right inside my skull, the aluminum seat freezing my rear. Lacy flocks of white moths clustered around the gargantuan lightbulbs along the track, beating one another to get closer to the bulb.
“Why are they trying so hard to get to the light?” I asked my father once.
“They think it’s the sun,” he replied. “They can’t tell the difference.”
It was here that he taught me how to detect when a person’s lying. They got eyes too needy, like they’re desperate for you to believe the lie, and their stories are always too good to be true. Later, I remembered the signs, though I never mentioned them. They all sounded too much like the Prophet.
“So, what’s your goal in all this?” I ask Dr. Wilson.
“Helping you,” he says. “Just helping you. You don’t have to believe me, though.”
“Good,” I say. “I don’t believe you. The FBI’s goal isn’t helping me.”
“What’s our goal then?”
“Figuring out who killed the Prophet.”
His eyebrows rise. “What makes you think there was a killer?” he asks. “What makes you think the Prophet is even dead?”
I make my face go still, but even so, I can tell that he sees it within me now, the lies unwinding like smoke.
“You were nowhere near the Community when the fire started,” he continues. “That’s what you said in your statement to the police after you were booked.”
“Well, if that’s what my statement said, it must be the truth,” I say, leaning my head to the side. The muscles in my neck hurt from propping up a mouth so full of lies.
I cross my arms and wince.
He points his pen at me. “Do those hurt you? Your arms?”
“Sometimes,” I say.
“Maybe someday you’ll get a pair of those bionic hands they’re developing,” he says. “The technology for prosthetics is getting better every day.”
“Oh, yeah, that’d be great,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, that would fix everything.”
He frowns and tucks his chin, scribbling something on his yellow paper. I try to read it, but I can’t shift the letters into words. I shut my eyes and wonder how I will ever beat people like this man, with his pen and his badge and his words. All I’ve got is a mouth and nothing to say.
When I open my eyes, he’s still writing.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“Washington, DC.” The name means next to nothing to me, beyond the sense that it’s far away from here.
“You came up here just for me?”
He nods.
“You must’ve been thrilled to get that call. Middle of winter, travel for miles to interrogate some criminal girl.”
“Firstly, I won’t be interrogating you. My assignment is what I said already, to get to know you. And, actually, I volunteered.”
“Really?”
“I believed I could help you. I wanted to try.”
“Please,” I say, holding up an arm. “Don’t say that again.”
There’s a long pause. He sighs.
“Do you know what I do every day?” he asks. “For my job? I spend most of my time sitting this close to the vilest people on the surface of this planet. I sort out whether they’re lying, what questions I can ask that’ll produce a confession, what part of their minds can be turned against them. I do puzzles all day. That’s what my job has become. Turning these reprehensible people into puzzles because I can’t stand to think of them as human.”
“Why do you keep doing it?”
“I still love it, in a way, breaking someone down to their most basic building blocks, combing through it all and finding that one shining lie that puts them away. It’s a thrill. But, I don’t know, it’s nothing a really good computer couldn’t do. I never get to talk to people anymore. I never help anyone.”
“So, what, I’m your vacation?”
He smiles. “You might say that.”
“Huh,” I say.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just, you might be sitting across from someone a lot worse than any of those people.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“That’s all right,” I say, leaning back. “No one ever believes me.”
He surveys me for a moment, weighing something behind his eyes. “You were right earlier,” he says. “The Prophet is dead. How’s that make you feel?”