Reborn and shivering
Spat out on new terrain
Unsure unconvincing
This faint and shaky hour
Day one day one start over again
Step one step one
I'm barely making sense for now
I'm faking it I'm pseudo making it
-"Not as We", ALANIS MORISSETTE
I've been staring at this mostly blank page for at least two weeks. I keep getting up the courage to start writing what I have to say, but as soon as I go to do it, the anxiety, guilt, fear, all flood in and I back away from the task as fast as I can. It's not a matter of whether or not I'm ready to address this. I know I am and have been for a while, but... no, maybe that is what the issue is. I can easily tell you how my life has become unmanageable because that's just a simple act of recounting facts, but with that is the knowledge of starting on a path that's wrought with pain. It's all about voluntarily exposing myself to the flames that have been licking at my back for months. I don't know if I'm together enough to be able to face it yet. The funny thing is, I thought I got out of purgatory, when in reality, I'm still there. I'm stuck between wanting to move forward and being unable to move backward. It's a state of nothingness, a non-existence.
My life became unmanageable almost two years ago through a landslide of traumas, one following on the heels of the last. First, there was Jo Gage. Her father was my mentor. He taught me everything I know about profiling. Over the course of his career, he neglected his daughter much like my father did to me, but he did it in favor of serial killers. He'd go visit them in jail and quiz her with their mutilation techniques over dinner. What he didn't see was how starved for his attention she was and how this would lead her to something drastic. She was unconsciously competing with me for his attention. She killed three women and mimicked one of her father's cases, his white whale, while setting it up to frame him. And then her fourth victim was my partner. Jo had me convinced her father was responsible for the lives of these women, and because of this, I lost all trust and faith I had in him. And in myself.
Our next case immediately following the aftermath of Jo Gage was one where I found myself staring down the barrel of a gun. It isn't every day that you're the negotiator caught between a suicide and being the victim of a homicide. Wiznewsky was determined to kill me because it was my fault his gun was taken away from him a second time. It had started out with me just trying to talk him out of suicide-- which at this point in my life, seems almost ironic-- and then he turned the gun on Eames and myself. I convinced him to let my partner go tend to his wife and daughter, but not before he made her take my gun. I told him about my mother, how she had lymphoma, in an effort to sympathize with him. I remember Eames looking at me because this was the first she'd heard of it. I remember the look in his eyes and I remember thinking there was no way this would end well. At one point, I made a grab for his gun, but to no avail. After that, there was only one option. I called to his daughter and Eames, asking them to come into the room. I knew he wouldn't do anything in front of his kid. Or at least I hoped he wouldn't. This trick worked and he was arrested. As Eames and I walked back to the car, Wiznewsky steals the arresting officers gun, tucks it under his chin, and blows his head open in his front yard.
Thanksgiving rolls around and my mother is really sick at this point. As I mentioned, she had lymphoma. I should also point out that she had suffered from Schizophrenia since I was seven. I was trying to deal with the possibility of losing my mother, and as anyone can tell you, a relative with cancer is one of the most stressful periods in life. On top of this, we were called in on the holiday because the first deputy commissioner's daughter, who is on leave from Iraq, went missing. I can't focus, I'm on edge, I'm snapping at everyone including the deputy commissioner. I ended up walking out more than once and I didn't care if I was fired or not. I was rapidly nearing my breaking point and the people I work with kept getting in my way. I'm one of those people who is exceptionally closed off and keeps everything to himself. I let my problems pile up and because of this, they keep wounding me. My mother repeatedly makes it clear to me that she favors my brother, is unhappy with her doctors for various reasons only some of which make sense, and that it's all my fault she's having to go through this.
Reading back over everything I've written so far, I feel like highlighting it all and hitting the backspace key. I ramble and it's exactly what I said it would be-- a list of events that emotionally fucked me over. But it's not helping me. I don't feel like I'm addressing any of my issues. I don't feel like I'm making any progress forwards, which is the entire purpose of starting on this path. It's supposed to hurt, like opening unhealed wounds. Instead, each time I return to this document, I treat it like an essay-- How My Life Became Unmanageable by Robert Goren. I'm writing this with relative ease, most likely because there's no emotion involved and this has me wondering why there isn't any emotion. Have I simply become so used to the pain that I've become numb? Is it akin to raw nerves ceasing to register pain after they've been subjected to it for so long, like submerging your hand in a bucket of ice water? Or is it a more technical reason. Is it because the medication I'm taking, the one that finally helps me reach a sense of enjoyment with my life again, is so powerful it's limiting my emotional responses? One of the treatments for Bi Polar Disorder is to prescribe lithium, but this has become an increasingly less popular choice because often, people feel like their emotional pulse has flatlined. Have I reached this point? I don't know. At the same time, I feel like I can't stop here. I feel obligated to myself to keep going, regardless of how pointless this exercise is becoming. And so, I'll keep pressing on.
I ran into my estranged brother one day while in the middle of talking to witnesses. He was homeless, living off the kindness of the church. He didn't know about Mom. I gave him some money as well as my coat and went back to my job. Later, I would get a call to the morgue because some guy came in, wearing my coat with my business card in the pocket. I needed to I.D. the body, to see if it was Frank. Luckily it wasn't, but this is something I'd only up until then been a witness to, never a participant in. It's something I never want to have to do again. This particular incident is merely a bump in my road to alcoholism, but it should be mentioned because when he showed up again a few months later, it would be a death knell in many ways.
By the time Mother's Day came around, my mother had decided that she wasn't going to go through with any more chemotherapy. She was done. Her doctors gave her about two weeks to live. She went back to Carmel Ridge, where she had been for the last 15 years, and waited it out. My brother Frank had the decency to be there for her, but she continued to make it clear to me that she preferred him out of the two of us. She didn't know the truth about Frank and I didn't think she needed to know. This same time, a case lands in my lap involving an inmate who's on death row. He's been convicted of a couple rape/homicides, but he's taunting us with more in an effort to get a stay of execution. The case came to us by way of an inmate I keep in touch with.
Up until this point, I was still barely functioning, but my drinking was under control. I was limiting myself to a double scotch at night, telling myself it was to help me sleep. I wasn't drunk by any means, but I wasn't sleeping much either. What I didn't know was that the events unfolding around Mother's Day would forever change things.
Mark Ford Brady had a book of photographs from the 60's and 70's. He claimed each girl in the photos had been one of his victims, but he was toying with us in giving us the names and locations of the girls' bodies. He was playing a game that only he knew the rules to. He would drop cryptic clues that only led us to the photo albums. At the same time, I'm spending as much of my time with my dying mother as I could. She and I were also looking at old photos, ones of her from before my brother and I were born. When Brady gave us the location of the book from the 60's, we worked through it, identifying most of the girls in it, until one photo caught my eye. I had seen it before. Only the day before, I had been listening to my mother tell me it was one of her favorite photos of her. Hearing her words while looking at the photo in a book belonging to a serial killer made my stomach churn.
After the meeting with Brady involving my mother's photo, I asked Frank about Brady. Frank, of course, remembered him well, and in fact, referred to him as "Uncle Mark". I felt like I'd been kicked in the chest. Frank then recounts snippets of stories about "Uncle Mark" brining me toys and visiting when dad was away and you don't remember, Bobby? "Uncle Mark", this serial killer, turned out to be a family friend. But only when dad was away. Frank told me about the time Brady and Ma went to a cabin in the woods, after a car accident. Or that's what she had told my brother. She came home, broken and bruised and completely different from when she had left. I needed to know the whole story, since my brother was little at the time. I confronted my mother about it. We argued, she refused to talk about it, mixed up her stories, and ignored me, but eventually, she volunteered the information. She confirmed what I had suspected; Brady could be my father.
The next thing I did was confront Brady about it, but I never got beyond wanting to kill him. He knew from the beginning that he could possibly be my father. That's why he asked specifically for me. He had been taunting me and playing me, enjoying watching the truth unfold in front of me. I was at the brink, with my hands around his throat, wanting desperately to rid my life of him, but killing him wouldn't do that. I would only make me like him. He had infected my life, long before our meeting at the beginning of this case, and killing him now wouldn't erase that fact. I couldn't even stand being in my own skin.
That night, Brady was executed and my mother succumbed to her cancer. I was completely alone, I was disgusted with myself, I was in emotional agony. In just the span of a few weeks, my life had completely fallen apart. It had finally become completely unmanageable. The only way I could get through even one day was by spending most of it drunk.