He's Got All Kinds Of Time

by Goren R O

This is the same story as "Paperweight", but as seen from Goren's point of view. Rated K for profanity.

This is exactly the same scene as previously seen in my story "Paperweight", except it is seen from Goren's point of view.

Originally written from the prompt "What Are You Passionate About?"

I look up at the clock on the Helmsley Building and reflexively look at my watch as well. It's Thursday morning, nine forty-five. I hate to be late. So I quicken my pace, going fast enough now to draw some attention from passers-by and make my jacket flap in the breeze. It's sunny today but there's a brisk wind. I'm not cold.

Walking is good. It saves me money. It keeps me - literally - on my toes; there's a different set of rules for walking in New York City than there is for driving. When I'm walking the world rolls past me like a movie in slow-motion, allowing me plenty of time to take it all in. I never was a beat cop, but I think I'd have been good at it, in my own way. I see everything. Like that time recently when I was walking and I saw the homeless guy I know from two blocks down - that day was different; he had a "We Are Happy To Serve You" cup just like always, which he was shaking at people, but this time in his other hand he had a house brick.

I gave him twenty dollars for that brick. Sure, I'd have made a good beat cop. But I'd have been permanently broke.

Walking helps burn up my excess energies. Above all, it uses up time. I have lots and lots of time at the moment. It's driving me crazy.

So, maybe it's just as well that I am on my way to see a shrink.

We've had two sessions already and I'm coasting. She seems smart enough, and not too biased. I suspect that she has to prepare a report for the brass on my mental state. I have no intention of making it easy for her, though. In some ways I almost don't care what she writes - the Chief of D's will read into it whatever the hell he likes, anyway. He's the man who labelled me as The Whack Job, after all. Man's a jerk.

I go in. I smile politely. I sit down. It's all choreographed, like a ballet or something. We do this little dance - she makes a big thing out of pouring me a fresh glass of water and I make a big thing about not drinking it. We don't bother with small talk or even pleasantries - we're both here to work, not chew the fat. I'm good with that, too. Just because I have time to kill right now doesn't mean I want to be wasting it.

There's a strange cast in her eye this morning, though. Something feels different. It'll take me a minute or two to figure out what it is.

"What are you passionate about, Detective?"

There's my cue! I jump up and start mooching around the room - in point of fact, it's a fascinating room. It's like a study and a living room and an office and a library all rolled into one. Actually, with the addition of basic amenities and a 24" LCD television, I could live here in this one room pretty happily.

The books I already checked out on a previous visit, but I cast another glance over the shelves anyway to see if there have been any additions or anything removed. It looks pretty much the same - oh, wait; there's a book of Thurber's writings and drawings that I hadn't seen before. I move over to the desk.

"What, you mean like ... cars?" I say. "Women? Regional Chinese cuisine? Vintage comic books?" I'm passionate about one or two of these things, but I won't tell her which ones. Let her figure it out.

"No. Deeper than that. Real passions, not just interests."

Oh, I see where she's at today. She wants to 'dig a little deeper'. I snort, and look at her with what I hope is a querulous expression. I'm not sure I pull it off.

I'm not answering that question. It'd give her too much ammunition to use against me. I'm not ready. I play for time, and pick up the picture I chose for this part of the proceedings when I was here last week. It's her kids, I presume ... they both have cleft chins, as does she. It's a genetic trait, see ... well, hell, they just LOOK like her. It's interesting that this picture is here at all - Liz told me a long time ago that head doctors, because of the unusually intimate nature of the relationships they develop with their patients, are professionally encouraged not to divulge anything at all about their private lives. When I fist spotted this picture I rifled through a stack of memories of Olivet's and Skoda's offices and couldn't remember anything so private in their environments. So, I grab the photograph, but I deliberately don't study it (did that last week). I want to see how she reacts. I wave the picture at her idly, unconcernedly, looking for a stress response.

Yup - it's there, but it's subtle. This lady is good at hiding how she feels.

"These your kids?" I ask. No point in revealing how much I already know. Not yet, anyway.

"Yes,"

"Nice looking. Private school? Their ties ... it looks like Xavier High. Is it?"

Hah. As if I didn't know.

She doesn't say anything else, just stares at me with a very blank expression on her face. It's like looking at a new canvas - I could paint any emotion I liked onto it right now, and still not really be sure it was the 'right' one. OK. Let's see if I can get her to show me a bit more. I'll wander round. Invade some more of her space. There's plenty to see here: Stacks of magazines in an Ikea rack - all kids of periodicals. Either this woman has very eclectic tastes or she has a lot of friends deliberately saving their reading material for her; vaguely ethnic ornaments placed to look casual ("Oh, yah - I'm an ethno-anthropologist but I don't think you're a primitive"); nice framed prints on the walls.

I can feel her looking at me while I fiddle around. I double-check my findings from last week - nope, no pictures of her old man. I thought not.

"I don't see any pictures of your husband anywhere," I say, breaking the uneasy silence. "You divorced?"

"Widowed, actually."

"Ah."

Even though I already knew that, I pause for a moment to make my reaction look spontaneous. I often play a weird version of word association inside my head - say a word to me and I get an image first, word second. If you say the word "widowed" to me the first thing I see is a red hour-glass and the second thing I see is always Eames.

"You were widowed ..." I say slowly. "Recently. But it's too soon. For pictures, I mean. I get that. My partner's a widow, too. Actually."

"And do you feel passionate about that?"

"Well. I expect she does."

I turn back to the desk and pick up the globular glass paperweight. It's ugly, and old-fashioned. Completely out of place here, amongst the generally high standard of modern decor. This must also be here for personal, sentimental reasons. I pretend to lavish loving care and attention on the thing, turning it over and over in the sunlight before making sure I wipe my fingerprints off it.

"Italian?" I ask.

"Muran'ese."

"It's beautiful."

I'm such a good liar. I think I might be getting close to the part of the session where my skills are really put to the test.

I can almost hear the cogs in the woman's head turning over. I glance surreptitiously at her and am struck suddenly and unhappily by a memory of interrogating Nicole Wallace. Something in her expression at one point in the proceedings - I had a kind of realisation, that we had to play give-and-take. Truth or Dare. Cat and Mouse. Spin the Bottle. Russian Roulette. I don't want to be thinking about this NOW.

"My husband died of an aneurysm," she says. Her eyes are carefully looking at the backs of her hands. "He was on business in Venezia-Lido. The paperweight was in with his effects. I think he had bought it as a gift for me."

Bing! Here it comes.

"Really?" I ask sincerely.

"Yes. You know, detective, I think I may have just answered my own question. Of what you're passionate about."

I do mortal battle with the compulsion to smile triumphantly. Now at last things are starting to get really interesting. I go and sit back down again, letting her know I'm back in her game. For now, anyway.

"And what might that be ....?" I use her first name. You don't need to know what it is. It's quite a powerful thing to do. I'd even invited her to call me Bobby at the end of last session, but it doesn't look like she's going to fall for that one. We're still distant.

"I think you are passionate about being curious, Detective Goren. Nosey, even. You're passionate about your 'quest'. To acquire knowledge. About people. To know things."

OK. I'll give her that one. I admit, I'm beginning to enjoy this.

"Knowledge is the basis of everything I do," I admit.

"Do? As a police officer? Or as a man?"

"The two are not mutually exclusive."

She looks at me intently. I see her pupils dilate just a fraction, and I realise that she, too, is excited by this game. I'm almost beginning to like her.

"So, how would you define your own passions, Detective?"

I think she thinks that she is reeling me in, that's why she's trying this question again. But I'm a very big fish.

"I thought it was your job to define them for me, Doctor," I say. Bored almost to tears I walked into the AMC Empire the other day and bought a ticket to a movie without paying any attention to what it was I was going to see. Turned out to be yet another in the seemingly endless succession of Star Wars films. I'm suddenly reminded of a young Obi-Wan Kenobi deflecting laser shots with a flick of his light-saber. My head's full of this kind of shit.

"No. You think wrong, I'm afraid," she says. I think the game's in danger of being over. "It's my job to listen, and to make sure I understand what you're saying to me. But in order for me to do that work, I need you to talk to me. Really talk to me."

This suddenly makes me feel irritable. I was having fun twenty seconds ago, and now she reminds me starkly what it is I'm here for. I'm mad, because I'd been enjoying the diversion, the stimulation, the game. But now she's reminding me that's not why I'm here. There's no escaping it.

"What, so you can retire to a little room and write some kind of report on me?" I say. I know I sound petulant. "On my ... my 'fitness for purpose'?"

"How do you feel about that idea?" she asks me. Typical shrink's question. I try and swat that one away, too.

"I guess you're right," I say, reluctantly giving her an inch or so of line. "I'm passionate about finding out what people do, and how."

"And 'why'?"

"Oh, no. The 'why' is the simplest part." And, it is. I think about that a lot.

"Can you do that for yourself, too?" she asks. I admit it, she catches me off-guard. I'm distracted, thinking about the idea that the 'why' of any crime is always the easiest part for me to work out. Apart from the 'how', of course. The evidence is always there on the body, or in the room. The ME or CSU can always tell me the 'how', though sometimes I end up telling THEM. I've been doing this twenty years now - people forget that about me ...

"What?" I say.

"Figure out the 'why'?"

I think about this for a little while. She gets impatient and asks, "I mean how is it you have such a keen understanding of the criminal mind? Do you understand your own as well?"

"Experience, I guess. I've been doing this job a long time."

"You're passionate about your job, then."

"Most of it, yes." I could do without some of the paperwork, and people looking over my shoulder, and people believing only what is most convenient for them. But yes, I'd say I'm passionate about my job.

"Tell me about the first murder victim you encountered," she says, and suddenly I am wide awake again and firing on all cylinders. This, I realise, is the moment I've been waiting for. The game is on again.

"I was eight," I tell her.

"Eight?"

"Yeah. It was a corpse. Washed up on the beach at Rockaway. I found it, and I went and fetched Frank. I hate the beach, you know? Frank - he's - Frank's my older brother. This guy - this dead guy - he'd lost an eye ... well, most of one side of his skull, actually. Frank dared me to touch his other eyeball."

Not all of this story it a complete lie. The corpse was actually that of a dog. Frank had killed it with a BB gun. It was disgusting.

"Did you do it?" she asks quietly. "Did you touch the corpse?"

"God, no!"

"Who was it? The corpse - did you ever find out?"

Two decades' worth of experience of lying to suspects and witnesses swings smoothly into service at this point. I look her straight in the eye and say, "Oh, he was some big-shot New York realtor. Wealthy guy. I saw a report in the papers about a week later when I was in the library with my mom. He'd been missing for quite a while. His wife ... she said he'd been on a fishing trip and hadn't ever come back. Single gunshot wound to the head."

I watch her carefully. Anything yet?

See, a little bell had gone off as soon as I'd received the letter giving me details of my first appointment with this doctor. Her name was familiar. It had taken me a few minutes, but then I remembered where I knew it from. Her husband was lost, presumed murdered.

For a moment I stall. I'm suddenly confused. Why am I playing this game with her, exactly? This is her husband we're talking about for chrissake. I can hear Eames's voice ... "This isn't another one of your little games, Goren. This is my life!"

"Tell me more about what it is fuels your passion." she says after a moment. I'm relieved, actually.

"Nothing more to tell. My work defines my passions. I need to be back at work." And I do. The fact that I am getting gratification from messing with this poor woman's head - she who has done nothing to me other than what NYPD are paying her to do - is evidence of that. I wish I could just tell her that.

"'Need'?" she asks.

"Yes, I'd say so."

"Why do you think you are here?"

"I'm here because .. because my 'passion' is acutely embarrassing to my superiors. And a lot of my peers, too. I make them look ineffectual."

I have to reign in here. I'm tired. I could easily lose control. I'm resentful and embittered about having been suspended, and the stupidity showed by my own Captain that led to the actions that got me suspended in the first place. I'm guilty about what it did to Eames, and her standing in departmental eyes. I shut my mouth.

"Anything you say here is confidential," the doctor says gently. Oh, God. Does she seriously expect me to believe that? Does she think me that naive?

How fucking dare she?

"But your report on my fitness for duty won't be confidential, will it Doctor? It'll get passed around like a two dollar stripper on a stag night."

I stand up and point - I'm gesturing at her handful of standard, shrink-specific items. It's all a joke, a cliche. It's all fake, two-dimensional. I see through it. The box of Kleenex on the table. The stack of magazines. The glass pitcher of water and tumbler. The artful furniture, the comforting hand-knit throw over the back of the chair. It's all a stage set. I'm supposed to be in here, in the spot light, playing my part ... speaking the lines she's written for me, ages ago, based on what she's no doubt seen in my jacket and on whatever the Employee Relations guy told her.

"Go on!" I practically yell. "Write it down! Write - 'Paranoid'!"