Disclaimer: Anything recognisable belongs to CBS, and probably Billy Peterson, too.
In Front Of My Eyes
Ten years ago the world was different.
He misses the blank anti-scent of a clean hospital, misses the feel of disinfectant soap stinging his hands, the rough pull of scrubs over his head. He misses the constant background hum of white walls and artificial air, of monitors beeping a quiet rhythm, the blood-rush of MET calls. Vegas is like nothing he's ever known before; the colour and the garish lights, the sex and money and greed so palpable, pulsing around him, just beyond a comfortable reach.
Five years ago was the beginning of the end, reality somehow fracturing right before his eyes, all the inescapable truths and passionately sworn oaths to which he held proven suddenly false. Death had laid before him every day; plain and coolly stark, and never, not once had he seen the mystery, the deeper meaning, the hidden truth. He'd measured and weighed and calculated; his educated guesses always veering toward the safe and the uncomplicated, because Occam's razor is the first thing you learn in medical school. Death deceived him, and when the truth came tumbling down he'd hidden away, locked in his study under the easy pretence of academic purpose. Eleven months he wrote, in the dark, studiously ignoring the sounds of his wife falling apart in the empty limbs of the house outside his tiny room. Nothing else mattered, except documenting the truth and his failure and the lies; and eventually she'd stopped knocking on his door.
Three years ago he'd watched, utterly numb, as Rachel's body was offered like some pagan sacrifice to the earth, under a bitingly blue sky, on a day so beautiful that once again it seemed reality itself was mocking him. Because, surely, funerals did not happen on bright blue, sunlit summer days? Rachel had always shone in the summer, her gold-spun hair flying, green eyes lit with joy as she'd dragged him from class or the library or the lab, and then it was from the hospital and the morgue, and she had always been there. He'd simply never thought to imagine the day she wouldn't, but there he stood, under the blue sky. One more victim of the quicksand depression he'd studied from books but never acknowledged, her moods and fantastical imagination always dismissed, first by her family and then, treacherously, by himself. She was high-spirited, creative, passionate. He'd loved her for her perspective on the world; the way she could see each individual sunbeam in a ray of light, the way she crafted like a masterpiece the entire life story, complete with tragedies and ecstasies, of the man who served lunch in the hospital cafeteria. Even when she was sunk in darkness she was beautiful; tears flowing over her pale hands running across piano keys, great sprawling compositions spread like water over the music room floor. Depression made her brilliant in shades of black and blue, and in the end he chose to look away in annoyance as she sobbed, the weight of her own pain dragging her further and further away. He was grateful, that bright day, to be free, finally. It was a sick, perverse release, when the police had appeared at his door, and he seized his freedom by the wrist and ran with it. One book tour after another, then speaking engagements, then a month in Northern England guest lecturing with the forensic psychology faculty of an ancient, beautiful university. He'd devoured the discipline like a salve; as if reading about damaged minds could quiet the guilty, turbulent tide pulling in his stomach.
Six months ago the Strip had risen from the desert in his windscreen; bizarre and eerie in the quiet daylight, and a modest hotel room had welcomed him home every evening. The university was modern, his students mostly bright and some quite promising, and as his book had done the rounds his class sizes had swelled. By the last week of semester he was running a double lecture; dissolving himself in murder and evil and ignoring his guilt along with the messages from Rachel's family. Over the term break he spent a chunk of the royalties from his former life on a sprawling, modern villa in an expensive suburb, and filled it with elegant, impersonal furnishings. Enrolments for the new semester were through the roof, and he'd almost begun to feel calm, when Nate Haskell's devastating wake had torn through his carefully constructed life.
A month ago he'd completed the LVPD Criminalistics fast-track training course, and dressed carefully for his first day on the job. His first day had inexorably morphed into his first case, then someone else committed another atrocious act, and evidence and motive and lies had risen up around him in intricate, intoxicating little puzzles for him to solve. Somehow in the centre of this his new colleagues became allies and perhaps friends, and amongst them, Catherine. Catherine, with her disarming beauty and easy, languid grace; her warmth somehow distracting his attention from the sadness in her eyes, blue as that summer sky. He learnt, in broken bits and pieces, of her past career, her divorced, dead husband, her infamous, dead father and her fallen, dead friend. She shines, amongst a history of loss and a lab of dead bodies, and he finds himself thinking of her in the most inopportune moments. For the first time in years he feels the true weight of the silver band on his left hand; a magnetising force pulling him down toward the earth when he wants, so desperately, to walk free. He practices taking it off, a few hours at a time, until some lilting melody, or the colours of the city skyline remind him that he is supposed to be a broken man.