Guilt or Grief
Grissom does more than a little soul searching when he is forced to contemplate whether or not to make public the gruesome discovery he made in Natalie's cell.
Part Three of the Metamorphosis series. Follows "Stasis," "The Rest is Silence" and "Revisited" and takes place during and after episode 907, "Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda," circa late November 2008.
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With special thanks to the writers, cast and crew of CSI who never cease to make life interesting.
Remind me to send you my therapy bills for the month.
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An Abbreviated Exercise in Existentialism
Eight twenty-two.
It seems that the digital clock is stuck at 8:22.
For no matter how many times I check it, the numbers resolutely remain the same.
Eight twenty-two finds me in a nondescript parking lot, in front of what would be an equally nondescript building complex if not for the high rise of chain link fence topped by curls of razor wire, still sitting in my car, waiting.
Waiting for the minutes to creep by until it is time for me to keep an appointment I am not exactly certain why I have agreed to make in the first place.
More than eighteen months have passed since the last and only time I have spoken with Natalie Davis. Those eighteen months have been full of so many changes that I am not sure that it hasn't been more like a whole lifetime ago.
In the end, all those months in their passing have left me more bereft than I can remember. Bereft of you -- of us -- of myself.
For I know I haven't been myself lately. I haven't been for a long time now.
Who I have been, I am not sure, nor am I certain of whom I really am anymore.
Heather's recent reassurance of you are still you fails to ring true.
But it is those words of Natalie that really cut me to the quick.
I feel like I used to. Normal.
For the truth is, I don't. I don't feel like I used to. I don't feel normal, no matter how much I may long for it and for that normality to return, for me to possess even a vague hint or semblance of it.
As the days pass, it becomes harder and harder to keep on display that persona everyone expects from me, including myself. But as the real Gil Grissom behind the mask is not someone even I can quite face right now, I am rather loath to leave that pretense behind.
Honestly, I don't want to have to accept the overwhelming sense of finality that seems to hang over every act, every moment of every day. I don't want to acknowledge how lost and alone I truly feel. I don't want to live with the reality that more and more I find myself distracted and unable to focus to the point that dealing with the details has become problematic. I don't want to constantly vacillate between numbness and listlessness. I don't want the weariness and exhaustion to be my life. I don't want to live in fear and in not knowing. I don't want to keep replaying all the woulda, coulda, shoulda of my life in search of every mistake and misstep in some futile attempt to figure out some way to fix them. I don't.
But no matter what I do, I cannot seem to end the unquiet of my mind; I cannot seem to find stillness, peace, a moment, even just a single moment to breathe, to be.
I can barely concentrate long enough to get through a couple of pages in a book. The daily crosswords have become more like a chore than a distraction. I cannot even sit still long enough to watch TV. Or perhaps I just don't have the patience for illusions at the moment.
All I do know is that I want just one quiet moment to breathe and think, or at least attempt to, so that I can somehow collect myself before surrendering to what I have come to do.
Another futile endeavor, or so it seems to prove, as I can neither seem to catch my breath nor still the unending whirl of thoughts.
The pretense will have to do.
I try to wipe the tiredness from my face, as last night, like most nights - or afternoons - of late, had been made up of long stretches of sleeplessness punctuated not by intervals of actual rest, but of just more nightmares that I cannot seem to shake.
I find myself so often now, both awake and dreaming, in a place where there is nothing but locked doors and the sound of rain beating mercilessly down. My eyes itch with both the tears I know I still cannot let myself cry and the blowing sand. An almost gritty bitter taste fills my mouth and renders me unable to speak. No matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to get the dirt out from under my fingernails, in the same way I cannot seem to banish the memory and phantom of the blood on my hands that haunts me so often that I honestly wonder if my hands will ever be clean. Or shall I, like Lady Macbeth, ever be condemned to find the smell of it still upon them, where nothing, not even all the perfumes of Arabia, can sweeten or all the wash of time come and gone carry it away?
These same hands give me pause now. For I find that for the first time in a long time, I am not so sure what to do with them. That question of what exactly I should do with my hands has troubled me ever since yesterday when she passed me in the hall and turned and gave me once again that look, the one that worries me even now.
I am still trying to wrap my head around the uncanny and frankly discomforting notion that Natalie Davis may indeed know certain things about me that I neither know myself nor realize that I am telling.
It seems that I was expected. For there was no surprise on her face in that hearing room, only recognition and realization.
Somehow she knew. She knew even before I did that I would come.
I don't know what precisely prompted me upon receiving the letter from the district attorney's office about Natalie Davis's transfer hearing to practically bolt from my office. It was happenstance that I had even read it in time as it, not being a piece of correspondence related to a current investigation, had been relegated to the read later pile that over the last few months has become a much less daunting stack as I have been spending more, if not most, of my time behind my desk working – well more like hiding, if truth be told.
But the moment I opened that official notice and my eyes fell on her name, it flashed and flooded over me: the memories of those miniatures that were in some ways far more menacing than the crimes they depicted, of those rooms I had become so intimate with, the ones I had spent more time inhabiting than the real ones of my own life.
The moment though that the thoughts of Natalie and her miniatures turn to you, I find I could not -- cannot -- divorce the model from the real; nor repress that image of you - the real you - the living and breathing and being you - trapped out in the driving rain out under that car.
Strange as it may seem, there is some comfort at least in that as the moment I most imagine, and not that breathless one when we found you so still and silent under the blaring hot sun. That bruised and battered and broken you seemed so lifeless that I really did fear -- think...
All before I even realized it, before I even knew what I was doing, let alone knew why, I found myself in my own car and on the way to the hearing. Only to discover when I arrived that an overwhelming heaviness had settled upon me, so much so that each step forward became more an act of will than it already has been of late. The nearer and nearer I got, the certainty seemed to leave me all the more.
It certainly hadn't failed Natalie. I was barely seated, when she turned to look at me with the piercing sort of gaze of someone so sure and knowing. It was as if she knew in that one instant all of my secrets, that she really could see that something I have only just come to realize myself and only with the utmost reticence: that my life as I know it, understand it, is gone. That no matter how hard I try to dissemble or pretend, there is no longer any peace, just pieces. That no matter what I do, I cannot seem to make them all fit, until I am left to wonder if perhaps it is just too late to solve this puzzle, to piece together all the fragments into something, someone, whole again.
At this, I shiver in my seat. After having shut off the car and the heat almost ten minutes previously, most of the warmth has bled out through the windows. I am not sure why I feel the need to run the heat far more often these days, as November mornings in Vegas are not exactly known for their coolness.
It is more the memory of that hint of a smile that played on Natalie's lips than the actual temperature that chills me now.
Yes, with that grin - that almost involuntary and yet utterly unrepentant and almost self-satisfied tug at the corner of her mouth - the same cold descends, the one all too reminiscent of that breathless moment when I first realized it was a figure of you that she had positioned under that car. It is a numbness I have found that only your voice, your touch, your presence can ever seem to banish.
So I have been cold for a long time now. Too long and I am weary of it.
Tired, so very tired.
Eight thirty. The time has come.
And I wonder as I begin to go, is it guilt or grief that has really brought me here?