Displacement Read Online Free Page A

situation. The trickle of his expiring incontinence made harmony with his tranquility fountain. His face at last found its desired expressiveness as his severed, botox-soothed muscles contracted and relaxed.
    At last, with his wandering left eye separated from its twin by a steel blade, his gaze didn’t offend me.
    —There was nothing about a mirror in the police report.
    —Pardon?
    My body had gifted me with the memory of how it had felt to glide to Molino’s desk, to move like a breeze with ecstatic, ballet precision, and kill by way of symbol as a symbol. I knew as I crafted his wound that many people walk away with injuries more dire than what I inflicted. Molino was hurt, though not as hurt as he’d be by a windshield striking him at sixty miles per hour. He
could
have lived. He
could have
required another blow from my blade. But I’d become aware of myself as we were joined by the machete. I was aware of how I would look from the campus lawn below: a shadowy, irresistibly dark figure framed in the window of a comfortable space on a rainy night. That was the instant I’d felt Molino die, the instant that the vibration of the handle soothed with his surrender to the symbol of his wound, to the flattery of the wound’s baroque iconography. It was the instant his flesh accepted as fatal that which his Id-deep imagination had dreaded and welcomed, as if his body were a fetish doll I’d stabbed with pins.
    —The police report on Molino’s death mentioned nothing about a mirror.
    His hand rested on a file at the far left of his desk; I guessed it was the file holding the report. It was as if Doctor Johansson tested the reality of the file as its contents were proving to be untrue or incomplete. How disconcerting it must be, to face the fallibility of what on cop shows provides irrefutable plot points and exposition. I smiled as my arm twinged an echo of what it had felt through the handle of the machete.
    —That’s no surprise. The cops in that town never have to deal with anything worse than a co-ed getting her purse snatched. Place makes Stepford look like Fort Apache. Before I left Molino’s office, I spread fake evidence . . . cigarette butts with lipstick on the filters, a surgical glove, photocopies from the
Satanic Verses
for the sake of old-fashioned, pre-9/11 paranoia. I left the mirror in Molino’s office closet. Probably still there.
    —It could be.
    He lifted his hand from the offending file, put the cold, smokeless pipe back in his mouth and rubbed his palms. The lens that would allow my hypocrite brother to watch our Second Act recorded all that we said from behind the one-way glass that dominated the east wall. It will be the one-day foundation of my twin’s perhaps Stanislavsky-based performance. Even with such a complete record, transcribed from videotape by an intern from the Psychology department of the nearby state college, all the information I just presented to Doctor Johansson would have to be sorted and analyzed in new reports he’d have to file in triplicate. I’d just increased Doctor Johansson’s investment in our drama. My hypocrite twin will use the drama of this one-room setting to craft further drama. Aristotle taught us that drama cleanses. But at a price: participation. Investment. I craved, I
earned
, the full catharsis of this theatre. I needed such cleansing to complete my pauper’s grave escape. I increased my investment to match that of Johansson’s.
    —It’s from Dante, I told him . . . in hard and shadowed words.
    The air trembled in the gel of my eyes, as if from the heat of a furnace.
    —Pardon me?
    I found, even as the shaking air took the aura of a late summer field about to know a hail-bringing storm, that I felt a certain loneliness. Doctor Johansson’s judgment-free questions, so short and uninvolved, made me miss his more active conversation. The catharsis of this theatre brought a kind of isolation. I might isolate myself further as I added detail to