Chapter Text
Jean’s latest crisis is precipitated by a conversation he wasn’t meant to hear.
At the time he was kneeling on the floor of the Precinct garage, searching for his keys. He dropped them that morning without noticing. He’s dropped them on many other mornings. That’s one of the many fun aspects of his “condition”: when he wakes up trapped in a ten-ton mech suit with faulty wiring and no pilot’s manual. Having to push fifteen fucking levers just to lift his foot. Sensation phasing in and out of his fingertips, the sides of his face.
“—heading back after this?”
That’s Harry, thinks Jean. A pool of motor oil reaches out, touches his bad knee, which steadily leaks out ache.
The voice that responds is calm, near-monotonous: “No, I have to talk to the Captain. I’ll be in until 1900. 1830 at the earliest.”
“Hm. See you then.”
“Alright. Would you get carrots?”
If the man who was once his partner responds, Jean doesn’t hear it. The word “carrots” is bashing around his brain, causing massive internal bleeding. His arm goes numb, elbow to shoulder. Roll under this motor carriage, Vicquemare, lie down. Evening is coming down fast. Engine roar, fireball. Forget about your keys. You’re never making it home.
()
Jean has no carrots in his fridge. He has nothing in his fridge, because there is no one to fill it. His wife used to do that, but then she divorced him. Is divorcing him. Half the house in boxes.
He descends into the couch, a slum of sheets and pillows. Not that Helene will be staying here. That was one of the first laws she’d established for him, the new physics of the universe to which she’d driven and abandoned him, like a kitten in a cardboard rocketship, no fuel, no rations, oxygen low:
“I’ll stay at his place from now on.”
Jean looks at the cardboard walls. Cardboard ceiling, cardboard floor. The lights flicker and flicker. He closes his eyes.
The couch is hell on his back but he’ll stay there because that’s the place for him.
The bed is empty but it’s emptier with him in it.
()
Here’s how shit was supposed to play out:
Ingerlund ditches Du Bois. Du Bois tanks. Du Bois meets Vicquemare. Vicquemare tanks. Vicquemare ditches Du Bois. Vicquemare gets better. Du Bois heals, or doesn’t, or moves to Graad, or paints an exterior with his interior, some Saturday evening, when the wind smells of ice. Anyway it’s not Jean’s problem.
Instead, here’s how it’s gone:
Harry, one month sober. Harry’s hundred days. Harry’s brand-new optimism. Harry’s brand-new partner.
()
“No, there’s no way.”
“I think he is one.”
“But he doesn’t act like a woman.”
“Not all of ‘em do, though. It’s tricky.”
“Could the kiddies kindly shut the fuck up?” Jean says, rubbing his forehead. His leg woke him up at three in the morning, his pulse shivering through it like a melody or a sword. His knee is a ten-car pileup. Discreetly he checks the clock on the wall. Four-point-five hours until he can take another dose.
Decapitate yourself. Saw through your throat with the point of your pen.
“C’mon, Jean, what d’you think?”
“Think about what?”
“Kitsuragi,” McLaine says, like it should be obvious. He slams his locker door shut and Jean’s head unscrews a quarter-inch off his neck. “You think he’s a fag?”
()
Last month, Harry put in a change of address. At first Jean didn’t notice that the new apartment was on the same street as Kitsuragi’s, that it had the same cross-streets, that the two buildings faced each other, nose-to-nose across the tarmac like a kiss. Because Jean was a busy guy, the (recently promoted) commander of C-wing, and not, like, a fucking psycho about his (ex) partner.
Tapping a pen on his desk, he stares at the change-of-information form, filled out in a familiar scrawl. The extra-long stem of the ‘y’s stabbing into the space of the lines below, like a good manspread on a subway. Maybe he’s a little psycho.
Jean used to take dictation for Harry. When he got bad he couldn’t write, because his hands would tremor too much.
Maybe Kitsuragi fills in his blank spaces for him, now.
()
Harry has never fagged out on Jean.
Jean’s seen him forget his address, his birthday, his name and face, Jean’s name and face. But he has never forgotten Ingerlund and he has never mistaken Jean for her, although he has mistaken many women, groping at witnesses, chasing grandmothers. Once he even mistook Judit. But Jean, he only ever threw glass at.
It therefore seems to Jean very unlikely that Harry has confused Ingerlund for a short, skinny, bespectacled Seolite with thin hair and a thinner moustache. In the locker rooms Kitsuragi’s body is angular and uninviting. He does not look like someone comfortable to hold. Doesn’t have breasts, either.
Through his office door, he glimpses Kitsuragi extract a yardstick somewhere from the junkyard of his and Harry’s desk and use it to scrape the encroaching crust of his partner’s belongings back like a snowplow. He sees Kitsuragi do this no less than twice a week. Jean used to throw away Harry’s things when he got too fed up. They would fight about it.
“Captain Construction Cone,” he hears Harry grumble.
“Excuse me?”
“Laying down boundaries. And because of your jacket.”
Kitsuragi frowns. “I’m not a captain,” is all he says.
()
He and Harry used to call one another Captain. They’d pause at the yellow fence—the edge of a crime scene, where the tape flapped in the wind, marking the border between speakable and un-, thinkable and un-. Bearable, un-. DO NOT CROSS DO NOT CROSS DO NOT.
Standing on the threshold, they’d bow to one another, an imitation of Pryce’s princely manners:
“After you, Captain Heron.”
“Captain Hound-dog.”
“Captain Shit-from-a-bird.”
“Captain Immolation.”
“What’s immolation?”
“Seriously, Du Bois? Get an education.”
“Get a promotion, dickface.”
“I thought that was your job.” A joke that’s not a joke. Satellite, definition: an object that revolves around another. One who orbits. When Harry puts on his gloves, Jean does too. When you commute into evil on Mondays, it helps to have someone riding by your side.
Opening the door to indescribable stench, Jean says, “It means death by fire.”
()
Blank spaces are Jean’s enemy. He battles them at every turn. Dusty rooms, dead air. The television in his house hasn’t been turned off for three weeks, emits heat like a supernova.
Last week Helene took away the rattan papasan chair. It had sat in the same corner ever since they moved in, fabric fading, overlooked by a stuttering succession of spider plants which died despite Helene’s best efforts—egged on, perhaps, by Jean’s vicious neglect. Once he poured a half-glass of whiskey into the soil. They were in the middle of a fight.
They agreed to meet at 2000, but Helene is always fucking early, so he’s forced to get up at 1930. He only has to straighten up the area within arm’s reach of the couch, since arm’s reach neatly defines the boundaries of his movement since the previous day. Circle of waste, circle of blight. Don’t think about it. On the television, a woman laughs, swaying her tits gently. He turns it off, thinks of walking into traffic. Turns it back on.
At 1955, a knock on the door.
“Ça va, Jean?”
She kisses the air near his cheek and he stands stock-still, a statue waiting for bird shit.
Six days of the week he is Officer Vicquemare, a detective of the RCM, commander of four dozen men and women. His uniform molds him into the shape of a man. The seventh, he never gets dressed anymore; he’s shapeless, flows into gutters.
In the meantime, Helene has taken the remote out of his hand (he was holding it?) and lowered the volume.
Shit, has he replied yet?
Tell her you’re good.
You’re not good. You’ve been so fucking unwell.
Just say it, asshole. She’s just asking to be polite. It’s not her job to care about you anymore.
“Jean.”
“Yeah. Fine, I’m—yeah.”
“Are you taking your meds?”
No. “Yes.”
“Okay. Only because it doesn’t seem like—”
“For fuck’s sake, Helene.”
“Okay, okay.” Her hands up. Her fingernails are a new color. Plum-like. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
She crosses her arms tightly across her body, like buckling yourself into a seatbelt. The light of the television flickers over the down on her forearm. He crosses his arms too. Thinking, You can touch me, if you’d like.
“I’ve been taking them,” he says lamely. “I am.”
Helene only sighs. “Come on,” she says, not ungently. “Let’s get Monsieur Papasan out of here.”
()
“Good evening, Monsieur Entry-Mat, Monsieur Clock. Good evening, Mademoiselle Coat-Rack.”
“Ahem.”
“Mother of god, no one move. Someone has let a dirty policeman into my home.”
“I’m afraid I have to place you under arrest.”
“And he’s smoking inside, like he’s been told not to. What charges? There’s nothing to arrest me for.”
“You’ve committed the crime of dressing licentiously.”
“You’ve committed the crime of looking. Where’s your warrant, lawman?”
“As a matter of fact I have one here. I’m authorized to search your person—”
“I want to see a warrant. I demand to see—”
“—here, and here, and here—”
()
Jean is never granted a moment when he wakes to forget that his wife has left him. Every morning, the truth like headlights; every morning, struck by steel. You feel the impact in your sternum. Monday morning. Time for work.
He lies there until the need to piss animates him, and then he gets up and goes into the bathroom. His penis looks shrunken in his hand. Every part of him looks shrunken. His urine doesn’t smell. His breath doesn’t fog the mirror.
Somebody start an autopsy.
Somebody bring this shit into processing.
Jean looks away from the thing in the mirror. “You should be dead,” he says.