=21=

“I’m not Neena,” Neena says, and tell me, who among us didn’t see that coming? Really, it was so obviously expected that if she’d waited any longer to make such a preposterous claim to innocence, we’d have been forced to slap it out of her instead. “I know,” she continues, breathless, hoarse, “who am I then, if not Neena? What am I doing here, after all? Why was I summoned? Was it a mistake? A case of mistaken identity? Oh, god, what identity? No, I can see by the expression on your face that even if I’m not Neena it was no mistake, no mistake at all.”

“Expression on your face?”

(!)

Egads, could there possibly be a more meaningless phrase? The sheer audacity of the notion is almost enough, all by itself, to set a precedent for absurdity, to serve the function of a self-fulfilling prophecy, to elicit the impossible—in other words, to put an expression on the otherwise corpse-like placidity that is the blank canvas of his face.

We stress, however, the use of the hypothetical “almost.”

Be that all as it may…her interlocutor, silent up to now, and, indeed, given no lines to speak until this juncture, maintains unbroken until this next juncture what might be mistaken, even by the most sensible person in the room, as the therapeutic silence of a psychotherapist, except that he sits forward, expectantly, his stubby cop hands folded on the scarred interrogation table. He is wearing a wrinkled sports jacket unbuttoned over what seems to be a pajama top still warmed by sleep. Neena can’t help but take a tiny, smug satisfaction in thinking that the Inspector, or whatever he is, must have been summoned here from bed (does he sleep alone?), told that she’d been broken and was ready to talk. He’s come to listen to the following confession, which, no doubt, when all is said and done, will comprise a statement of what is of no practical use to him (or anyone) anyway. But, then, how is Neena to know what will be of use to him inasmuch as she has no clue what the man wants from her, nor, for that matter, who he is (or even who she is!)

(I am who I am. Ha-ha.)

For all she knows, he may have come from no further than the adjoining room, having quarters in this very facility, if this is anything that might be described as “a facility.” He might be on-call, on some form of “emergency-stand-by-alert,” a routine procedure during the interrogations of subjects such as herself. But this is all mere conjecture, wandering speculation, following blind theories such as these will get neither us, nor her, anywhere. They are like the labyrinthine halls of the underground mansion itself—a place where each step one takes to find one’s way only serves to get one further lost, but gives us the illusion of getting somewhere all the same. This kind of blind-stumbling in the dark is almost impossible to resist, for it is impossible not to take those continued missteps, if only to keep from falling.

So, then, why not finally fall?

It is the question of suicide, in fact, all over again. To keep walking is to live; to fall is to die.

The Inspector draws a deep breath, opens his mouth to speak, and presses the play-back button on a small tape-recorder instead. It may be that the peroration that follows is not coming from the tape-recorder at all, but that the Inspector, a skilled ventriloquist, speaks these words:

“The question of identity is a bugbear and we both know it. For, in the end, identity depends entirely on memory, as does the truth, for that matter, whatever that is. For, as we well we know, memories can be false, falsified, petrified, or implanted. How can I be certain that I remember what really happened to me? There are gaps, lacunae in attention. This is where fiction comes in. How can I be sure that I wasn’t another person entirely when what I remember (or think I remember) actually happened? It’s pointless to elaborate this point in the here and now. We both know that. The tyranny you experience, if you decide to experience it as such, depends on this principle of perpetual uncertainty.

My lack of papers notwithstanding, for papers can be supplied easily enough for any purpose, I’d be no more assured, nor should you, of your true identity even if I were fully supplied with the appropriate documentation. Would a certificate, duly and authoritatively stamped, stating the time, the place, the details of your birth, its indisputable fact in time and space, be any more definitively attached to your person in the here-and-now than what might be explained by coincidence, chance, or crime? Obviously, papers can be faked, purchased, stolen—their simple reproduction could produce a thousand Neenas, each one just as real as you.

Are you I, her or me? Who is here or her? Can the genetic testing you pretend to worship with such blind faith be any more certain—it’s protocol beyond human error and/or corruption, either yours or mine, or that of some third or fourth party unknown to both of us? And the genetic principle itself, is it not likewise riddled with unforeseen flaws and inconsistencies that render it far less than 100% true?  

All this granted, of course, only if you’ve conclusively allied identity with the scraps and traces of material to be found in the fluids and excretions, the flakings and smears left behind by our bodies, as opposed, for instance, to the wavering and changeable configurations of electrochemical or whatever-you-might-call-it patterns emitted—and only measured, let us not forget, by machines that are the product and design of those very brains, flawed as they are, dependent on expectations, unable to answer the questions they invent the machines themselves to answer, and, therefore, ultimately inexact, forever suspect, open to interpretation—by our brains again, alas, in which, hoping to locate it somewhere because we can find it nowhere, is the closest thing we have to a soul. Is “soul” even the word we really want?

We hypothesize when we say ‘I’, or ‘you’, or ‘him’, or ‘her’, never mind when we say ‘them’ or ‘they’. But, of course, you know all this already, it’s old news, it’s in the literature, not to mention the history, of the last century, which is singularly extensive on the subject, and this whole experience might be modeled on the nightmare of a Kafka, a variation of his nightmares which are legion, remember Kafka?…why can’t you just admit it, all these elaborate games are just a Gothic-bureaucratic excuse, a rationalization to justify…”

His silence, his cobra-like tensile position of expectation, his utter absence, like an empty hallway monitored by unseen cameras, raises goose pimples on Neena’s forearms. He could be a cadaver himself, bloodless, heartless, filled with cool and noxious chemicals, eyes limpid as carbon monoxide. He nods, as if to say “go on” and then goes on, ostensibly talking to himself, through the tape recorder, from which issues a voice that is, dare we say it, not the ventriloquist-Inspector’s at all, unless he is a skilled impersonator as well, which he may well be. The voice is Neena’s.

“Of course there is no expression on your face, is there? So my saying ‘I can see the expression on your face’ must seem quite the amusing oxymoron, well, perhaps not exactly an oxymoron, but it might be one in an alternate universe with its own alternate language—one in which the elements of the sentence ‘I can see the expression on your face’ is indeed a contradiction in terms, but at the same time, perfectly descriptive.  

Of what? Well…well… Let’s just say that, as it is, the sentence reflects a naïve confusion reminiscent of the primitive who mistakes a mirror-image for another person; for just as the perfect neutrality of your face reveals nothing more to me than the expression of my own, unrecognized, such as a face I might come upon in a mirror as I walk through an empty house with whose layout I am unfamiliar, coming around a corner and seeing myself as I see myself in the glass in the moment before I am startled, it is nothing else, it is nothing more than that.

Neena pauses, lips pressed tightly together, bloodless, like stretched worms. (Has she started to decay, then?) It’s as if an enormous black train filled with the survivors of war atrocities thunders through her skull. Such is her rage, her frustration, her despair. She must pause to let this train rumble past as she stands at the crossing, the ground shaking beneath her feet, beneath her very world. My God how she would, how she could…throw herself, that is, across the vast wooden expanse, the inquisitorial tundra that separates them—this table, in other words—and rip that paper mask apart with her hands, her mangling fingers, to hold it up, macabre origami of organic tissue, dripping, eyeless, against her own.

This is exactly the kind of reaction that he wants, no doubt, half expects, no, fully expects, depends upon, has guaranteed to his superiors, the one he has been trying to elicit with his subtle interrogatory technique, as if this reaction were an orgasm he sought to trigger, not for her pleasure, not at all, but for his own, the affirmation of his skill as a seducer, which is the secret perverse delight of all interrogators: the ability to make her lose control at will, his will. The capacity and skill he has to make her “spill the beans.”

Ah, just my luck, Neena thinks, a sentimental rapist!

The floor settles and quiets once again beneath her bare feet, the concrete slab foundation filling her spine with cold, one vertebrae at a time as the black tremors of the horror train fade away into the distance, like 1943, and she wonders, if perhaps, there really were a train running beneath the mansion, if this place were, in fact, a kind of massive underground transportation terminal for the Atlantean equivalent of a gulag archiplego of death, a Stygian hub of arrivals and departures—connecting what and what and/or who and who?—and she has simply been stranded here, and had somehow managed to forget where she’d been going. The ridiculous things you think of when you’re dead and in situations like this!

“You brought me here to torture and abuse. This is how you amuse yourself. All without reason or accountability, under the guise of unimpeachable legality, and without any qualms or quivers of moral conscience. By which I mean to say, you’ve invented me. This role I play, these stupid words I say, ‘oh master what a big cock you have,’ ‘oh daddy fuck your naughty slut, your dirty little girl’—I’m only a figment of your perverted imagination, a meat puppet, a masturbatory cipher, you sick fucking bastard. God, this is how you get off, isn’t it? How pitiful! It’s because you are incapable of real love, real tenderness. It’s because you are impotent and sick, afraid of women, of me. I’m just a trick of light and shadows to make you cum. Is that what you want me to admit? Is that my so-called crime? My cue? To confess, that is. My prepared lines. And now that I’ve admitted it, now that you’ve put the words into my mouth—what now—will you execute me at last?”

And, having delivered herself of this speech, a real mouthful, Neena falls silent, but not because she has nothing more to say, or because her interlocutor interrupts, or answers her, or adds, or subtracts, not because he encourages or forbids, or participates in any way in the communication whatsoever. No, he remains as silent as ever, as silent as Neena has fallen, and, why…what is that? Perhaps, Neena thinks, with a visceral shock of convulsive disgust, it is because he is sharing with her, like a parfait, the same thought. And this sugary sweet desert with its cherry on top, this confectionary brain-slush laced with strychnine syrup into which they each dip their elegantly tapered, long-handled spoons, tastes, if a thought had flavor, something like this:

If, as Neena claims, she is not Neena, if the whole affair has been a frame-up, an impure invention from the get-go, to justify, rationalize, or otherwise disguise what, for instance, might be nothing more than a tawdry abduction for the purposes of torture, rape, and murder, then who, aside from this psychosexual voodoo doll, a.k.a. Neena, through which a hundred pins are being driven in order to effect who knows what black magic, then who, if anyone at all, can she claim to be?

Furthermore, if she opened herself up and looked inside, or watched, impassively, from the side as a coroner undid her torso with a scalpel, would she find anything more than excelsior, a few beans, and the desiccated corpse of a common mouse? No, she is not about to try, to start cutting herself with a razor, for instance, using for the purpose the blade they purposely “mislaid” in her cell (or caused her to hallucinate had been left there)—a clumsy and obvious trap; they might as well have pretended to leave her cell-key. No, it won’t work. She simply won’t play along. There is nothing sharp at hand and she is not insane.